Jocko Podcast 322: Sometimes the Mission Chooses You. With Tony Cowden

this is jocko podcast number 322 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening echo good evening find a new mission that right there is some advice that i have given a bunch of guys a bunch of veterans over the last decade because when you leave the military that mission that you've been on this honorable mission all of a sudden overnight it's gone and that's gonna leave a hole and the longer you serve the bigger that hole is going to be and for some of us if the only thing you ever really wanted to do was serve and execute that mission it can be a rough transition especially after you spend 20 plus years [Music] with the opportunity to do what you always wanted to do to wear the cloth of the nation to take the fight to the enemy and it's an honor to have had the opportunity to do that to work with a bunch of other people that are also dedicated to one thing in life and that is executing the mission so once that's gone like i said it can be a rough transition and you have to find a new mission and some veterans go into business some of them focus on their family some of them start non-profits [Music] those are the positive things you can do some serving other ways and some just seem to keep going and keep getting after it and keep moving forward with new missions and we're lucky enough to have people like that in our country and i know one in particular that served in special forces is green beret fought in afghanistan and iraq served as a contractor supporting the state department supporting the cia spent almost nine years all told in iraq afghanistan and syria and in a bunch of places all over the world as well but that wasn't enough needed more missions this guy is also a businessman owned crossfit gym a giant crossfit gym has a firearms range and a tactical training company and he's competed in crossfit and weightlifting and ironman and ultra running and he's coached athletes from crossfit and strongman and triathlons and on top of all that in december of 2021 just a few months ago he volunteered once again with a new mission to represent the people of north carolina by running as an elected elected member of congress this man's name is tony cowden and it's an honor to have him here with us tonight to share some of his experiences and the lessons that he's learned along the way tony thanks for coming by thanks for having me what's up with that bio take it take it easy man uh you know people always say like hey man i know you're busy you know yeah i'm busy i'm always busy i don't take naps i freaking i'm busy you know i got stuff to do and when i don't have things to do i find things to do you know the old thing like if you ain't got anything to do clean something um i'm probably not that good at that if you ever see any of my guns that's not what i'm known for um but yeah man one thing after another and you hit it on that intro how many how many of our brothers in arms got out and that hole consumed them you know they didn't find purpose they everybody wants to know well why is suicide so bad you know most veterans and across the united states in general purpose people with purpose don't commit suicide you know and when guys get out of the military like you said especially after feeling used and abused in the 20-some years war now where even the war itself guys started questioning the purpose what was the purpose and at this point we certainly don't know but uh yeah man without purpose you know guys start drinking it's a depressant it's a it's poison you know they don't stop training because you know like me i've always liked to train by myself you know i've only had one training partner in my entire life it's my girlfriend melissa yeah she's the only dude i know that can keep up no i'm kidding i actually try to keep up with her but i was just that guy that went to the gym by myself it was my time i went to run by myself i went rough by myself i swam by myself either that's safe or anything but whatever um and but you know those guys on the teams that go to the gym with their buddies you know they got their little click little two and three man team that goes to the gym you know when those guys get out of the service they stop working out you know they lose their physical fitness they drink maybe they got hurt and the va put them on an opioid you know the story you know and they don't have purpose and uh it breaks my heart um so many americans not just veterans right because you know throughout the gym and everything like that that grew so many civilian friends or whatever and i don't use that term you know negatively in any way uh some of my best friends are regular people some of my best friends are civilians our best friends are regular people right and a lot of times you know the deal we see we would use that terminology like when on the teams and stuff like regular people like it was we kind of looked at him out of the corner of eye not down adam but you know we recognized it you know we got this little team and we really think we're the most awesome ever you know like the old joke you know you want to know who the best is in special forces or special operations ask any unit they'll tell you right ask a seal seals are the best ask the ranger they're the best you know all with very different missions but yeah man um americans in general especially after this whole pandemic they're wild no people are losing that that purpose and we're losing that pride in our nation and you know now with all the containment and the mass and the mandates and stuff man suicide mental health is i mean it's it's scary you know that's of despair it's been a nightmare um let's get into all that in a little bit but let's start off just to get to know you a little bit uh let's start at the beginning um uh a little white trash redneck kid uh from very royal north carolina um you know and i that's definitely in terms of endearment my my dad 82nd airborne guy oh yeah dude um won a weekend leave from fayetteville fort bragg in wilmington met my mom azalea festival weekend that's a big thing in wilmington the festival and um apparently he was head over heels in love with my mom right and uh you know freaking they got married he got out of the army moved back to where he was from up in indiana she was from pamlico county north carolina we always use we have to use the county as a marker because there's no town in pimlico county that anyone would even have heard of unless you actually lived or visited there often right so nearest towns like new bern so it's very rural one of the biggest counties in north carolina smallest populations so anyway they went up to indiana and um are you born yet at this point not yet um my older sister is about to be on her way and he took a job with one of the companies who made parts for general motors right all that area up there indianapolis detroit everything that's all general motors ford so on and so forth and uh after three or four years of being up there he did a couple other things he got like his pilot's license and um which apparently back then you didn't actually have to have there were dudes flying airplanes were just flying airplanes while drinking liquor and stuff the stories that they used to tell us right they were small and you find these little super cubs and piper cubs around and you know he was coming out shooting you know doing aerial you know shooting foxes and stuff i'm like these crazy suckers were doing aerial sniper [ __ ] with freaking hunting rifles and shotguns you know he's like yeah you know those little super cubs will fly so slow that you could shoot you know coyotes and foxes and deal with a shotgun and i'm like oh wow drinking he's like you know i was like man you guys were nuts um so i joke that you know when we're all out you know thinking we're cool shooting out of a helicopter yeah a bunch of redneck dude's been doing it for a long time um but uh yeah so you know man some affirmative action policies uh my dad got pushed over for some promotions over those years and like he should have been in a supervisory role he was like you know people are getting promoted that have less time or less qualification got disgruntled with the whole manufacturing world we can call it corporate per se manufacturing you know and it's like all right well they moved back down to carolina where my mother was from and he took a job with a seafood company that's right on the pamlico sound so docks food seafood would come off the boats there they'd package process it sent it to the restaurants a few years later he bought that company so at this point my older sister was born i was born in this little time frame there and you know by like so i was born in 76 so by 82 the business is doing good you know so and i'm old enough to be aware of it and you know i've got an older sister and a younger sister so when my dad needed help guess guess who the laborer was you know so you know but i'll tell you you know my dad my dad wasn't like you know by today's parenting standards my dad was a horrible father right like he wasn't that nice to me um he wasn't the lovey-dovey you know hugs and kisses type but he wasn't abusive either right like you know i'd get a spanking if i deserved it and i looking back i probably deserved every one plus a few i didn't get but uh you know he was he wasn't a very good teacher right he was the type of guy like by today's standards like he was just he did it all wrong but you know my older sister is a a world renowned pediatric endocrinologist right like if you google her name you know pretty amazing woman out of one of the most role underfunded school systems in america my younger sister is a successful social worker in raleigh she helps a lot of people who does some amazing things of the three of us she's the most left um i don't know that she would even vote for me my older sister she's in the moderate my older sister's that you know that that mother in america that was in the middle and kind of got pushed into the left over the last you know four or five years um but she's she's that person i talk about we need to win them back you know she's conservative she was raised conservative hell she grew up shooting hunting and everything i did but anyway my um my dad was that guy that was like hey look you need to do this and you need to do this and you better have this done before i get home i feel like dad i don't know how to do that stuff figure it out and at the time i thought he was just an [ __ ] you know i just thought he wouldn't didn't like me i don't know and that's mean to me blah blah whatever actually i probably wasn't even aware it's just how it was because most of the fathers in my neighborhood were very similar and i grew up in one of the neighborhoods like if you were caught misbehaving down the street you might get a spanking from the neighbor right like they were all family we all went to church together you know and um and then you get another one when dad got home but you know looking back man he taught me so much he taught me to figure it out and come to find out that was the whole point he didn't care if i completed it you know at a hundred percent you know awesomeness or whatever you know he just wanted me to try and it's not like these days man someone gives you a task like i'll just youtube it you know it's right here in here i'll just watch a video step by step it'll be easy you know and uh we didn't have that growing up right so if you just had an extension cord and a freaking skill saw right good luck you know the fact that i still have all my fingers and toes because he let me handle tools that i so my employees slash interns at the range with the company and i i they have like training programs you have to go through they can't just pick up one of my chainsaws right you can chop your leg off with a chainsaw like that circular saws right my dad was like yeah man just get it done um welding i learned it well because if i broke something i better have it fixed before he got home it looked like a big pile of chewed bubble gum but you know as long as it would hold together yeah so that was kind of my childhood man and it was so many lessons learned i watched my dad build this business uh from nothing to you know took us to comfortable i wouldn't say upper middle class but you know slightly above average middle class you know especially for rural north carolina cost of living is not huge and um he at boston property developed a piece of property into a subdivision on the water down there one of the one of the really first subdivisions uh in that era in pamlico county when there was a lot of resistance for change right people don't we don't want them yankees coming down here buying up our you know riverfront property right and so he got a lot of pushback and i remember that was my probably my first exposure you know he would come home from a county commissioner's meeting and these are all people we know right there's thousand five hundred people in in pamlico county and has been for like 80 years right like the population doesn't change because the exact same amount of people that move there or are born there die or leave yeah so yeah man um it was really cool that's when i learned to run like large machinery at 12 13 years old my dad had me running a d6 bulldozer like what we were putting the culverts in for the road right we built the roads in this place you're laying layers and layers of gravel so you bought a d3 a d6 an excavator a backhoe all this stuff i can't even reach the pedals on these pieces of equipment i'm out there running them without a lot of instruction you know or any instruction just go yeah and i'll never forget you know putting the big concrete tiles into the the the ditches for the the road i'm on the backhoe steering these things in and he's in that ditch talking thousand pound concrete tiles if i make a mistake i would have killed him oh yeah looking back i would have never trusted me i wouldn't have gotten that ditch but he did and i was like wow you know either a my dad was a complete psychopath right um which you know he's one of those guys like mission man we will get it done i being in the rain in the military not a big deal because my dad was like it would there was that local little restaurant in town where everybody ate breakfast all the men you know and uh it'd be raining and they're like all right we gotta go and they're like oh working in the rain today is like i don't get to choose the weather that was his attitude man he was just a tough mofo man just hard hours upon hours of work you know and i like to say i'm a decent balance between him and my mother who was you know the the more gentle the i mean she was a she wasn't a puss by any means right like she didn't put up with none of my bs i she i probably got more spankings from her than i ever did him right you know but like you know little pops on the on the ass or whatever you got more quality from the old man but more quantity from that you know um and some people say that you know i was i was mama's baby boy right i was the only boy that was different and uh you know my older sister man she's like she's like a t-1000 she's the first version of the terminator dude she is like when people meet her they're like whoa dude i thought you were intense no my older sister's a machine i i say there's probably like five or six people on this planet i'm i'm afraid of she's one of them you know what i mean like there's a handful of guys we're all you know pretty tough dudes right you know can hold our own and all that kind of stuff but there's all of us have that handful of guys that you're like yeah that guy's kind of scary one of those guys for me is my older sister and i'm not kidding right like uh she's just oh man she is what she is and uh successful because of it but yeah man you know watching my dad build those businesses develop that piece of property really set that foundation and um you know since i was involved in so much of it because he didn't have labor you know he didn't have help so i had to be there you know i didn't get to play sports in school like i wanted to because he needed help and looking back in a lot of ways those lessons just continue to carry over whether you know like heck when we were in afghanistan or right before we were going into afghanistan we were at the fob you need equipment moved around yeah i knew how to run forklifts how do you think we moved pilots around in that seafood house uh forklifts you know even that big crazy machine that grabs the conexes i went and jacked one of those from the air force one time we just went to moving around the entire lot you know the entire all the contacts is you know like hey go get that and bring it over here next to our tent so we can pack out get ready to infill well i could do all of that when we got into afghanistan you know i i knew how to the the little local tractor that the fella had you know we needed it to move some stuff around with time i was like yeah you know i can run that so that foundation was huge but more than any of the actual stuff that i did or learned what he taught me was that i can do anything if you put your mind to it it's just like selection i don't remember selection being that difficult you know it was just like i had this mission and it just had to be done i mean i you know he he couldn't really afford all three of us going to college you know he was struggling a little bit my mother died when i was 16. i was after that i went i went to misbehaving how'd your mother die cancer yeah four year bout with it man and um ultimately it wasn't really the cancer that killed her it was a surgery complications from a surgery so it's kind of heartbreaking like yeah she had been fighting it or whatever really you know the struggle back then was chemo which it still is but you know you're talking in the early 90s man freaking chemo was rough and um so i learned a lot from watching her deal with it man she she would get up and walk and exercise and work in the yard and mow the yard you know while having to stop and throw up from chemo yeah so one of the toughest people i ever grew up with was my mother and yeah so after she passed man you know i started being that bad kid you know and you know smoking weed wound up doing a little blow whatever freaking got in trouble you know um who'd you get in trouble with like school yeah you know school the law yeah i got arrested man freaking um luckily you know it was all just minor dumb stuff right it's not like i was a you know you know dealing anything or stuff like that i wasn't you know making money off of just partying you know just doing dumb redneck stuff you know like hunting club roads you know you don't want to get on the road you get a dwi but we can ride around these hunting club dirt roads redneck stuff man you know drinking beer and you know and you know do all the dumb stuff we were doing and that was when you were still in high school yeah so yeah my senior in high school um you know just being bad and but i was still making good enough grades excuse me yeah i was you know just you know the deal man just how like everyone in software all pretty smart dudes we can get b's without really trying any course we go to you know most of us are b students in every course and of course there's always that one nerd over there that gets honor grass you know yeah whatever make fun of that guy what a nerd yeah i wasn't the nerd i was a misbehaved kid just being a jackass and you didn't play any sports because you were working too much well i did play a little bit but like uh with drew from you know the team and senior year stuff like that just just because yeah man he needed help afterwards and um so yeah man so you know also our man we were the smallest uh school system and right next door to us is like wes craven you know this this that's a school that's producing you know pro football players you know d.h conley over in greenville ecu the big schools man and we're like uh they're like we'll let pamela go play us and they would just destroy us you know they had like defense and offense and special teams we had a football team yeah you didn't leave the field man there was times we went to football games we didn't have enough dudes you know we'll play and you know so after you know a couple years of that man i wasn't even really interested you know it's like what's the point i mean you know the average dude on our team you know we had that one 220 pound guy where you go to west craven their entire lineup's 200 plus pounds it's like we would just they would mop the floor with us so i lost interest in that and just started working more and partying more and uh yeah man so good enough grades to get into nc state i look back and i'm like i still don't know how they let me in um you know not good enough grades getting kind of scholarship so you might after the second year my younger sister is only a year behind me my older sister is four years ahead of me she's entering medical school where'd she go to school she went to medical school ecu where'd you go to undergrad at unc chapel hill yeah so you know um dad's paying out of pocket plus he's still very much you know dealing with the death of my mom and he he had he had a really hard time man freaking you know um i watched him lose a lot of weight you know he didn't talk to people he kept working you know and he worked more which was already darn impossible and you know being a young dumb punk kid i couldn't recognize it because i'm selfish like kids are and looking back i was like man i could have been a better kid i could have been a better son to him but i mean we were kids we were young and looking looking back man my mom taught me the number one best lesson in my entire life and that is everyone you know is going to die right so as we entered that war i had already lost and i tried to use that terminology one of the people that was closest to me in my life and so that set me up for being able to deal with how many of our brothers got killed close friends and so on and so forth you know our partner forces you know i don't think guys always realize how tight we get with those partner forces you know i got some of my best friends on this planet are you know muslims that people don't always understand that you know my especially in iraq where i worked with the kurds for years the same team of dudes for seven eight years and um so anyway her passing taught me to appreciate why you have them and that's why i don't use that terminology you lost them i didn't lose my mother i can go show you right now where she rests i know exactly where she's at so i didn't lose them it was a gain right if someone in your life is so tight with you that when they die it breaks your heart right you didn't lose anything you gained something in life because if if when we understand that everyone we know and love they're gonna die when you start thinking like that you start appreciating them every day you know um so i can say man my mom taught me the best lesson that i've ever had and it set me up for success in the war and don't get me wrong it doesn't mean like i'm somehow callous or you know uh immune to feeling sad and upset you know there's still those anniversaries there's just thoughts you know there's memories that pop back up to make us all upset you know and tear up and you know and so on and so forth but yeah man freaking without her death i don't know that now today i would be as healthy mentally as i am you know it just laid that foundation yeah you know and i tell people that all the time and i have throughout you know once i realized that and i'll tell you really probably number one thing that really woke me up 2013 in april 2013 my best friend was gay i had a guy named ben bittner ben was better than everyone else he was that cocky little little uh that guy you know who everything he did you know he was just better than everybody else he wasn't huge or jacked but he was strong and fast and uh so anyway man i got that phone call and me and melissa hadn't been dating very long we were driving up 5 40. it was kind of early on a sunday morning and i got a phone call i was like who's this you know hey bro ben benner okay holy [ __ ] dude pulled off the side of the road and threw up because the one dude i thought that was truly immortal right just got suckered by the enemy an abated ambush right and it had not been it was i mean shoot that's 13 man we're 12 years into the war and already got plenty of memorial braces you know but for something about when ben died it was like holy crap we're not immortal you know i'd been injured blown up you know how it is as a young little trooper sometimes right those close calls they make you more arrogant and cocky right you know you start thinking that you can get away with more and more and that's probably where i was in 13 when i got born in 2009 like after my recovery i went back meaner more aggressive you know probably taking risks that i shouldn't have you know looking back taking risks with my teams and my my partner forces lives just because i was emotionally wanting some retribution you know they had killed some of my teammates and and damn near killed me and then ben died i was like holy [ __ ] but uh like i said without my mom's death i don't know that i would have dealt with any of it very well so yeah man um nc state uh i like to say that i was enrolled at nc state so your participation level was low well you know there's pelican county and there's like you know uh my graduating class is like 104 people so let's say there was you know 55 60 girls in that class right and then i get the nc state there's girls everywhere they were everywhere i was like holy crap man there's like thousands of them and uh yes i was distracted to say the least and um you know i quickly found out that classrooms where you have to be quiet and pay attention to a professor and it's not the best place to talk to these girls so why would i waste my time going to those classes and uh so anyway freaking partying wasting money you know that that we didn't have my sister's in med school now my younger sister's going to school she went it was going down at unc wilmington and um you know it was clear you know that i was wasting money i didn't have it my dad didn't have it so withdrew i joined the army you know um was your first was that your first time thinking about joining the army absolutely not i didn't want to go to college right and you know our generation we have to blame our parents for everything so my dad let me watch rambo first blood when i was 9 or 10 years old done those green berets they're real badasses you know it says it right in that movie and you know so from there on you're like let's face it right like some guys watch you know uh something that's got seals in it and they're like oh yeah or some guys will watch you know uh the recon movie with clint eastwood you know and your impression at a young point well mine was rambo first blood and freaking that you know running around above the snow line rats in the caves i was like yeah i was already playing in the woods all the time anyway and i love to hunt no it just man so from there on out yeah i just want one of those funny green hats which looking back i'm like damn that hat sucks it's made out of wool it's hot as hell right like you want me to wear this wool hat in fayetteville you know and 100 plus degrees in the summertime the samuels in north carolina right like this hat's dumb there's no bill it doesn't keep the sun out of your face there's not like a boonie cat no ballistic protection why do we even wear this dumb hat right like anyway um but yeah that's what i wanted and i i it didn't help i met a fellow named jason mckenzie at nc state and he was going green to gold and uh he started telling me was he a former greenbrier yeah he was a gb at the time and um he was getting his commission and he went on to get his commission go back to the 18 alpha course and he went over to the unit freaking stud he was a stud real smart dude still is and um yeah man i was like started talking to him he's like hey look bro i get in college sucks let me tell you about this really cool secret it's card that's called the national guard special forces groups and i was like what how's that even possible right how can you have a reserve special operations we'll come to find out most all of us have that and uh he's like it is the coolest most least known way to get into special forces i'm like what do you mean you know where do i sign up and he's like yeah man so basically you go in and it's just like an active duty group i mean they just you know less [ __ ] and that's really what it almost comes down to is like the guard gets on orders it's not like they're doing you know one week in a month two weeks a year type of thing you know they're doing weeks of training at a time if when they deploy it's you know months of work up pmt just like the group they have to check all the same boxes just in a lot less time and i'm like okay yeah he's like so how does it work he's like well you know he's got me all hooked up with 19th group the guy's up in west virginia um i had to get a waiver for my missed behaviors and arrests right what year is this so this is uh 97. and was it hard getting waivers it wasn't were you a minor when you got arrested no uh yes yes and no both okay i had just turned 18. um with one of the arrests i was still a senior in high school and uh but everything else was before that uh nah man freaking so i go and talk to these guys and colonel hoyer was the battalion commander for a second battalion of 19 special forces group and he moved on to become like the the general the tag of west virginia really smart man really smart guy and um not a not a very imposing figure um you know just an average looking guy a guy could throw a suit on and disappear you know not not the jack tattoo guys of course tattoos on the sleeves and all that weren't quite popular at a time and i remember walking in and thinking this is a special forces colonel i was expecting you know like john the colonel the colonel connor chapman from rambo right supposed to scare the [ __ ] out of me very unassuming which come to find out later yeah those are the dudes that are really the scary guys anyway well anyway conor hoyer was like um yeah so you need a waiver you gonna do this anymore and i'm like no sir done with that that was you know three years ago i'm good okay boom that easy you know and and had he in his assessment of me for whatever reason you know um because i know him to have turned down similar cases but man it was there was no interview nothing he just took me on a very first impression basis and i was just a dumb kid i didn't know i'm like scared to death all these dbs you know i'm like you know i'm trying to join this very exclusive club and i don't know what to say i don't know how to act so nothing i would have done would have been right anyway but uh yeah he gave me the waivers i withdrew from school on a tuesday morning uh you know raleigh to pimlico county to the house is about two hours i went home my dad was at home i was like yeah changed into some pts and went for a run sure enough met him on the road he like hits the brakes he's like what up are you doing why are you home you're supposed to be in college boy what's wrong with you and you know he knew at this point like oh something's up right like just saying right you know great he's probably in trouble again that was probably his first impression i'm like i'll run to the house out i'll meet you there he probably would have pulled over to the side of the road and got out and we would have had that discussion on the side of the road but my stepmother he luck good lord man luckily for my dad man he met an amazing woman after my mom died and who became one of my very best friends sad story she died of cancer too yeah my dad man god bless his heart so my stepmom's with him and i remember she kind of like patted him on the shoulder and was like let him come home and talk to us you know because my dad wasn't a little dude either right like he's you know about my size now right i was always smaller than him until i finally started lifting some weights i was actually way more of a runner dude early on i was like buck 70. you know i could run i had no real weight on me you know but he was like 2 2 10. you know he's yeah the few times we did scuff it up a little bit yeah he just wiped me off right i just covered up and uh you know like i said anyway man freaking uh yeah so i go to the house and i tell him he's just shaking his head but it's like he understood you know he understood he knew i mean of course i'm insane he knew me i'm his he joined the 82nd airborne for the same reason i wanted to go so yeah man um a few weeks later i was in basic training that quick huh yeah yeah it was like two and a half months from the time i signed up i was already in basic training because back then you know late 90s recruitment was at a pretty low there the clinton administration they had routed the military and cut so much funding but trying to get guys to sign up for combat arms you know the recruiter would be like heck yeah sign him right up come on in here you know so yeah i did that um how was boot camp i was in such good shape that it was like easy i think i got in worse shape when i got there i was already getting like a 340 on the army's pt test right and a lot of it was you know i could max a push-up in sit-ups but my run time was like i was running like 11 flat two miles you know just a little rough runner dude right and uh and skinny god bless my heart i look back at some of them pictures man i'm like wow wow boy you needed to eat did you you never ran like competitively no in high school or anything no no i didn't start running i joined the rotc at nc state because you know okay well maybe i want to join the army but you know maybe i'll be an officer yeah you know that didn't really play out that way and but that was the first time i started doing pt and running and i think like my first pt test i must have run like a 15 minute two mile but like my second one was sub 12. yeah so apparently had some decent pre-disposition genetic predisposition to running and your uh the shock of boot camp was no factor because you were just stoked to be there right yeah and and you know at this point now i'm 20 so i'm one of the oldest kids in basic training and i'm even back then i'm looking around doing looking like dude these are a bunch of [ __ ] where do these kids come from right like clearly they didn't work like you know my dad you know in my head i think every american boy is like me you know and now there's these city kids and whatever man yeah but basically it wasn't hard i remember i got like you know top pt and you know was quickly made like the stupid platoon sergeant or whatever and i was like great you know and you know there was a little click you know because i did the basic and ait back to back so it was like 14 weeks so you same drill sergeants all the way through by the end me and these couple other boys are a little bit older a little bit more mature you know we were running things we had our own little mafia going you know we had when they let us clean the drill sergeant's uh uh office we took the key snook off post made a coffee a copy of it so now we had a drill sergeant's office key which had all our personal bags in the right like so we would go in there and listen to the walkmans and cds and you know like hide out and it was funny because the drill starters had no idea we were doing it much less that we were leaving post you know you can't leave post in basic training there's no cell phone like nowadays they can make phone calls and be on the internet none of that you're on lockdown right we were sticking off post and like because we had access to the civilian clothes he was thinking i'll post going and buying beer and it's stashing it in the drill sergeant's office in the personal right and we go in there at night and house a few beers you know buy some liquor no clue so i always say like i was already running an underground auxiliary when i was in basic training like sf was just you know where i was you guys but yeah man i got out of there and um freaking immediately went to uh the little progression course or whatever pldc where you had to go from uh you know to get your promotion to e4 or whatever and it was like a couple days before i finished that little three week course so you're already in e4 after like a few months uh no i'm still in e3 i finished because i did have a little bit of college i was finished basic as an e3 and uh so now i'm in this little pldc course so i can get promoted to e4 and like hey you ready to go to selection i'm like i guess huh when they're like in two weeks man i haven't won a rucksack right and that's all our selection is is carrying a rucksack for 28 days i'm like yeah okay okay because i'm like i'm not going to say no i'm not turning down a slot at sfas looking back i could have been like hey i really could stand another month of training and they'd be like okay whatever and put me in the next course i didn't know it like that i thought just an opportunity at selection must have been a godsend you can't say no so i had a whopping two weeks to train for selection it went straight there you know and even then i look back and i'm like it wasn't really that hard but it wasn't hard because quitting wasn't an option right i couldn't have withdrawn from college all to go to special forces and then fail right that wouldn't have been a thing i could not have sold that to family members my dad right myself it couldn't happen how many people get how many people make it through the so that first selection what is it 28 days you said back then it was 28 days right it's changed a lot over the years um i think right now it's 21 days of actual course so maybe 26 days got in the admin and all that so it was 28 back then exactly four weeks um yeah there was 250 or so dudes in my class 52 finished and 40 or 41 were selected and i think a lot of folks don't know that right you can finish that course and not get picked up you know 28 day non-select yeah that's gotta hurt it's gotta hurt and uh so yeah i got picked up and most of those people are quitters or they're performance drops or medical drops you know they hurt their knees yeah you know the the number one attrition rate is voluntary withdrawals yeah you know that's probably 95 and then injury and you know it's funny i've seen some dudes and i'm sure the same at buds and everywhere else you see those guys that like they've got stress fractures broken ankle broken toes you know torn patellar tendons and they finish you know i was just young and stupid man freaking i didn't i'm so lucky i don't get blisters on my feet i never have i got some of my first blisters ever last year hunting in the mountains of idaho because i bought a pair of boots and didn't really break them in i you know warm around in north carolina working around the house and then i throw a backpack on and go hiking in the mountains of uh idaho and i call it hiking it was armed hiking because we didn't kill anything yeah it's not really hunting if you don't well you know it's just armed height really well armed hiking uh good training i guess you could talk it up as but yeah i had never even gotten a blister like you know um so i was lucky when it comes to that because that's a big thing in our selection it's like just dude's feet get turned to hamburger what do you how are you going to erupt march if you ain't got you know feet i've seen some you know blisters that start at the toes and get like the back of the heel like things that like you could lose a leg at over you know the medics are like whoa you know they have horrible you know a little medic station they had all those pictures and you think it's just some genetic thing you just don't get blisters i just for whatever reason my feet uh fit jungle boots which is weird because it's not like there you know i just did so yeah man that just worked out finished election it was funny because at the time reg said to finish it was before the 18 or the sf baby program the 18th x-ray it was before that and but the guard had the back door oh it was like the 18x because i didn't go to any other unit and um [Music] so it's graduation day i had to go to the strength and to the board a couple times because i was in e3 and they're like you can't you're not even supposed to be here much less finnish like what though they didn't know what to do with me again some dudes looked at it gave me a waiver but it was funny because you know the company commander company commander in the training sf training he's not really involved in anything he shows up he's an admin guy for the most part the enlisted boys run selection so come time you know he's handing out you know his graduation not very formal it's out at camp mccall you're just all dirty and nasty and you're walking across this little stage and he's handing out he's like staff sergeant such and such captain such and such sergeant such and such you know hey shaking hands and i get up there and he goes private he for at the first sergeant and the whole class knows we don't wear rank and stuff there but you know right after four weeks everyone knows who the cherry lieutenant is and and you know there were some guys there probably who were pissed that i was there as an e you know an e3 but most of the guys were like wow this dude's crushing it and he's a baby but i wasn't a child you know i wasn't 18. you know so the average age in there like 24 or something yeah very much so you know you average eight you know senior e4 promotables e5s and e6's made up the bulk of the class and most of the officers were you know first lieutenant and captains and um so it was kind of funny because the whole class like laughed and clapped yeah you know because the the captain or the company commander and major was like what the hell what he like talks to the first sergeant this art major and they're like he's like really and i'm like standing there on the stage like am i getting ready to get booted you know the commander gonna go nope right here and uh so anyway freaking he shakes my hand and goes all right private first class calden welcome to regiment right on so man it was kind of screwed up i i was in a race in motocross one week before i was supposed to report to the q course broke my femur a couple ribs in my arm yeah man at a race that i shouldn't have been racing are you not allowed to erase it uh no it wasn't like that you know how you know that wasn't on the list of things you can't do you know like you're not supposed to skydive no one never thought these knuckleheads are out there like don't go ride rodeo it's on the list of things that you're not supposed to do while you know in the queue course well i wasn't in the queue course yet but motocross wasn't on the list until i broke my femur they added motorcycles to the list because of me so yeah man i um i missed my q course day and i was supposed to go to the delta course i wanted to be a medic oddly enough my plan was to go be a medic and either go to pa school or medical school i wanted to be like my terminator sister i was the one that i probably want to be a doctor more than she did and but i was always in the you know i wanted to be like the you know the er doc i want to be the trauma guy so 18 delta just made sense well eight months later i'm still limping you know they put a rod in my leg and all that um you know i got my run times back down pretty good but man it hurt it just hurt because i just destroyed this leg man it was like you know it was so atrophed afterwards you know i could put my hands around my quad it was just a bone in there and it was it's nasty dude because when i basically what happened was i over jumped a a triple jump the jump got wiped up and kicked the bike forward my buds were standing over there so they could see the drain plug on the bottom of the bike the bike was pointed at the ground i was still upright when it hit the ground the front tire basically trapped this leg and then catapulted me just threw me up in the air so when you said it's not a race you should have been and it's like too advanced of a race no it was the exact opposite it was like a local outlaw race not an ama sanction it was just a fun race but there's no fun races because you still gotta win right and and i was battling for first and a funny thing was i was racing the 250 class and the 125 class um at that time so i had already erased those two and then there was this the unlimited class where it didn't matter you could erase anything you wanted in it and so i was racing six motors that night six different races that afternoon night it was a six photo i was exhausted and folks don't realize man like i'm in phenomenal shape at this time right and motocross is still one of the most physically demanding things i've ever done and you know because you just don't realize that you're you're strapped to a 230 40 pound piece of equipment that has 45 horsepower you know with the right you know they're you're trying to control that thing you know it's not like you're just relaxing on it you're standing up you're clenching it you know between your legs all that and anyway yeah man um [Music] so now my career is like okay now what so through advisement they're like hey look you lost all this time let me sign you up for the charlie course the engineer demo of course i'm like all right at this point i just want to get in the course you know i've been basically doing nothing for eight months except for rehab and uh so okay cool so i did the trolley course it was kind of funny man in the charlie course because i'm from north carolina so i know people at uncw which is a you know wilmington is a college town with a beach problem right uh nc state ecu party i have friends everywhere so i was like the tour guide on the weekend right like yeah i know people at this school let's go to this party all that kind of stuff so we're having a good time that's where i met that fellow ben bittner um our little clique man a bunch of little crazy dudes and um you know borderline you know we were misbehaving in the queue course you know because it wasn't that hard you know especially in the mos phase it wasn't very hard so we were partying and blah blah yeah did all that stuff language school wasn't hard back then because no one cared about language you really didn't have to go to language school so i went to language school but did not learn french and then of course it didn't really matter because it was like eight years later before i ever went anywhere that spoke french you know a lot of french speakers in iraq and afghanistan you know but yeah man freaking uh cool stuff i um i got lucky though because if i had done the medic course i would have missed the invasion i'd have been in language school or serious school during that time frame so because i did the shorter charlie course i was already done and on a team and doing some pretty cool stuff afghanistan kicks off and i got to go at the beginning where were you when september 11th went down so when i started doing cool stuff um my warrant he was the aso guy right the source operations guy not the door kicker guy even though he had done all that he had just matured into understanding that that's the that's the hard part right the finish is the easy part right how long does this take us to execute a target you know 30 to 90 seconds typically right we're on target everyone's zip tied or done we're done with the target now we're doing sse it's quick it's that find fixed part aso stuff right it's actually difficult it takes a brain and he was all about that and because i was that skinny college kid i didn't look like an sf guy so he got me signed up on this uh program that fifth group tenth group all the active duty groups were participating it was tenth group's year to run it and it was the red cell against the n triple c the nuclear command and control so for the four months leading up to 9 11 i'm running around the nation tracking and you know developing patterns of life of this general he's got a suitcase attached to him he's like number 12 in the chain of command of running our country in the time of nuclear war with russia and i had no idea because it was very cellular right it was broken down into little cells which is ironic right because now we're playing red against the united states nuclear command and control for those six months i didn't interact i did not see face to face it was all old school cold war tradecraft dead drops notes no text messages nothing the only time i got text messages call is when i actually called the handler who was a chief out of 10th group and he was running our cell so we were in oklahoma nebraska silos man right and this guy would go from silo facility to silo facility with these tractor trailers that in descript three tractor trailers or so um and that could change right and then a security detail that you know all plain clothes and stuff right like you're driving down the highway you would never notice this convoy of course they didn't nut to buck convoy either it was just these three tractor trailer trucks and uh and sometimes more than that sometimes the convoy was much larger when they had other pieces of equipment that i had no idea what it was i only cared about him because the ultimate goal was when we were supposed to execute we were trying to create a four second hiccup in the united states nuclear reaction to russia's attack four seconds that was what it was that's all supposedly russia needed four seconds man well come to find out man it was a worldwide effort it wasn't just my four goofballs and i knew there was some others because other teammates of mine were scattered around the country and i knew they were doing it i had no idea where they're at because the last time i saw him was a meeting in northern virginia where we all came together they briefed us and sent us on our way and it was fun man i'm this new little punk kid little sf dude man they were you know unlimited budget freaking just swiping a government credit card there was days i had two different rental cars freaking you know hotel you know and it was an amazing thing it was really cool because you know had to get interim ts which back then a little baby e6 i didn't have ts clearances so that that paved the way to getting my my clearances set up and all that um much younger than i should have probably um or at least was standard at the time so yeah man on the morning of 9 11 i would crawled through this drainage little culvert freaking i went to walmart bought some leafy gucci flies from walmart and then freaking got my little crappy walmart ghillie suit and i crawled like for four hours to get within taking a picture of this general that was going to be the shot and like i said i mean you got teams around the world taking pictures of different types of planes and tell numbers and oh this plane took off in interlude turkey and then it landed in alaska like they flew across the north pole yeah i mean these are these are some crazy assets right well yeah man so i get a text and it's like abort move to such and such and i'm like i'm not compromised i'm good right now was the text i got back aboard right now and i'm watching his security detail change what's happening and um as i'm crawling out man freaking like the local sheriff's department freaking starts pulling in dudes they've got shotguns right local redneck dudes some marines showed up i guess they were like freaking had been hovering this whole time this marine detail that i was not even aware of well luckily they weren't aware of me either so now i'm calling quickly because it's clear something is going on right because they've got mags in their guns and i'm like what the [ __ ] man get out get my car freaking call hey what's up yeah meet me at this motel it's like you know side of the road dirt motel one story old school you know 1950s built motel and there's like 40 rental cars in this motel parking lot i'm like what the hell is going on we'll come to final it's not my four-man cell and there was redundancies upon redundancies for all these cells at every location around the world man and none of us knew about each other and a couple of them you like recognize because this thing's been going on for months and i'm like i saw you in nebraska i saw you males females and this is that's a that's a good point because that was the first time in my life i realized how important females are for you know reconnaissance surveillance freaking like wow they do have a major role that that changed a lot of my career the way i saw women and how they can be an asset right like me and you yeah right how do we walk around we're not bleeding in anywhere all right we don't even blend in an average u.s freaking you know city much less throw on some a man dress and try to walk around jalalabad right no we're busted but man these ladies you know they can go and do especially when you recruit the ones that can speak arabic and you know can blend in right which we learned that lesson but this was my first time seeing females i was like holy crap come to find out one of the people on my team was a female i didn't know i'm just dead dropping letters and notes so anyway as i walk in the hotel room man yeah there's like 40 people in this little hotel room it's not i mean just cramped in sitting looking at a tv of burning towers yeah man i'm just sitting there going okay what the [ __ ] we're under attack and at this point you know it's early in the morning no one even knows pentagon hadn't been hit yet and um so it that happened while we were sitting there we're just like whoa okay so we pack up we actually went and linked up with that asset and provided a ring of security for them and escorted them so we went from playing red cell against them to helping with their security cordon we were unarmed so we pulled in outer security and escorted him to a hard location damn yeah and then got on planes and flew back to wherever we were supposed to they were unit guys there were guys from damn neck involved um everybody flew back as fast as they could but planes were grounded so they're sending c-17s from wherever they could and picking us up we drove 100 mile an hour all the way to colorado springs you know the tenth group got all got on flights wherever we could get them it was always funny because you know like the tier one guys you know the the learjets were waiting for them we're just waiting on like whatever we could get like oh can i get on that crop duster get a ride back to brag you know but i always remember that was my first impression of those guys was like how come they get learjet you know oh they're they're important we're the scrubs but um yeah man so that's how it all got started you know um i had a slot to go to mff and you know national guard young sf dude to get a slot in free fall was a big deal back then you know because back then we didn't all sf didn't all go to freefall and so that chief was like well i mean your orders are good for another year you're detailed and assigned to us and what do you want to do i was like what do you mean well you can go to free fall or you can come with us i'm like i'm with you let's go a couple weeks later man we were in afghanistan you know young dumb kid what'd that look like so that what i mean what kind of what would they do say all right here's what we're doing mm-hmm yeah a lot of people figure it out every dad used to say to you yeah yeah i mean it was like hey um you know call your family members we're going to isolation monday we're doing what what's that what's isolation like this is how like i only isolation i knew about was that robin sage i didn't completely understand right and honestly most of the guys didn't either it was like just because i was new none of the force had been to war either there was still only a handful of guys in sf because only a handful of fifth group dudes got to play in the gulf war a handful of guys from mogadishu you know no combat experience yeah i was going to say in your actual team there might have been zero the chief had stuff in south america in the 80s you know but all you know by with and through advisement stuff um but yeah man so we're like okay well here we go and um yeah man uh got to go and be in tour borah you know so there's basically a lot of because it's funny for us like we all know how it all played out but i mean there's an entire generation of americans that were born either right at or after 9 11 who don't understand right there was two parts of afghanistan there was the taliban right the horse soldiers and everybody that came down from the north and bagrun you know triple nickel you know all that team did all that and then there was tora bora pardon me and um you know al qaeda so i got lucky enough to be involved in all of that my team settled in jalalabad where'd you fly how did you get in there uh hilo yeah so you he loaded into jalal about did you guys get up um we he loaded in south of jalalabad north of turbo and then what was your what'd you do um well just supported mostly supported the jtacs and cct guys dropping bombs right and tried to mostly coordinate and keep our you know there was two main warlords in this region and one was hazard ali and the other was saman and zaman spoke english and was the agency's pick to be that nangahara warlord that nangahar leader well zaman had lived in britain for 10 or 12 years he left afghanistan hazard ali was mooji man he was he was a a farmer right you know a lot of folks don't realize man you know afghanistan of the 14 most opium producing countries in the world afghanistan was number 14 when we invaded it's number one right now that's a horrible result of this war well hazar ali who ultimately became the minister of defense of afghanistan was a farmer but also a freedom fighter moves against the taliban the taliban very much disallowed opium growth you know they they were all about they you know that was a sin so you know we changed that by getting rid of the taliban all right everybody started growing opium you know and wow what beautiful fields those pink red flowers man they're beautiful but it's just death growing out of the ground you know so anyway yeah man um how long are you on the ground for uh how long how much longer this is where my first employment this is that question is where my fairy tale of initial entry into special horses begins to end so fifth group wanted out as fast as they could so january february they're already like yeah we're going to the horn when did you get there november so november december january and fifth group is already this group is like they want out they want to get to the horn of africa right there's still no talk of iraq at this point right it's like oh horn of africa we're going to somalia everybody wanted that they're like oh okay we're gonna go get some and return that favor right that's ten year old favor we owe those somalis everybody wanted to get there well then the clear the battle plans changed and iraq became a thing well so 19th group and third group start showing up so they're like hey look we're just gonna you're gonna be continuity you're gonna help this next team rip in right so i got left it wound up staying like another six months man i was like oh no so that's where that fairy tale everything happened really cool kind of went oh [ __ ] but it wasn't bad because i wound up uh being on a team with a bunch of dudes that were good friends of mine i actually got to go be an lno for a few weeks up in tashkent uzbekistan so as a you know 24 25 year old young little buck um my first experience in a former soviet uh area it was nice nice four weeks of partying i was supposed to work at the embassy i think i went to the embassy twice i was the assistant the lno was this former 10th group dude who had retired got called back in and he had been working like the miami-dade um organized crime task force he was uh he was his name i might say his name he uh he had a very ukrainian name he was from the ukraine he came to america when he was like 12 so he spoke russian ukrainian man he had all kinds of stuff going on in ukraine or not ukraine uh uzbekistan and uh he was connected as the eleanor up there if you needed something out of his back saying he could get it i mean the second night i was up there the dude took me to a party at the uk or ukraine uzbekistani's president's daughter's house her mansion this dude knew everybody he was the quintessential sf guy right but he's like almost 60 he's kind of overweight he speaks russian and um he's he's fluent so like four days after i get up there he's like oh yeah i'm going to the states so now i'm just up there the assistant oh uh and i'm living in the sheraton which that's russian for a sheraton hotel um that's all i learned and uh and so i just partied for like four weeks and um you know basically my job was to take you know my bud my becky driver buddy and go pick up people from the airport take them to the hotel and then take them back to the airport so they could fly into the fob you know and uh so yeah man freaking pretty cool but yeah so back to afghanistan and then finally home and uh did you do any good ops like what kind of missions were you doing yeah we did a lot of cool stuff you know of course you know dropping all the bombs and and um tour board was cool of course we started and there was still a lot of you know stuff out there you know we went after some um um daggone chechens you know some of those as they were you know because were you guys already working with a partner force yeah we started the initial what became the commandos it was called the mrf the murph mobile reaction force there in jalalabad july bob wasn't a base it was just a crappy airfield every time we went to get a resupply we had to clear the airfield and clear the runway make sure they didn't put anything on it you know the mc130s would you know squeak in the middle of the night drop our junk off and um so we started building what became jalalabad's fob we built ranges out there and started training this uh hazrat ali's guys and that you know i was talking about zaman and hazrat ali they they're the reason freaking uh ubl got away they were supposed to be helping us deal with al-qaeda and they turned on each other right so zaman the cia's pick no one liked him he had no real pull he was nobody most of these kids had never heard of him and ali who's been there you know running this show he's not having it so yeah man they start fighting with each other and you got like you know half the teams over there with them and some of the other teams and then half of us are over here with zama or uh how's all these guys and they're fighting each other and we're like wait wait wait wait we're supposed to be killing those dudes so it screwed the war up for about three days as we sorted that mess out and yeah man that's when that's when he escaped that's when he got how did you guys sort that out um ultimately the agency stepped in they were running the show there right the juliet teams and you know we were basically supporting them um and um we had two masters right we had the fob in fifth groups colonel mulholland and then of course we had the the ground branch guys and they they were running the show in tor boro and um so we uh freaking sorted that mess out and basically they told zamon like hey stand down okay and once everything was hashed out settled back everybody went to jalabhad zaman actually went back to the to britain they exiled him that's what hazrat ali told everybody that he acts out him but really the agency was like hey man you just need to leave yeah yeah so it was a bad call it was you know a one of those convenient things he spoke english hazard i really didn't bad call on our part on who we decided we thought we could put in power um we didn't really understand how much influence has really really had over the past two people well at least they had the humility to recognize that and say all right cool we screwed this up let's get this guy out of here and move forward you know it's interesting that history repeats itself right like talking to the sf guys in vietnam they would have those like guys shoot each other on base between the the the hmongs and uh whatever other groups like the regular vietnamese they'd get in fights right and shoot each other yeah like well then they go on a mission with these guys that's one of our biggest problems right we for some reason as americans we have this arrogance that we think everyone's like us and likes the things we like and well you know we have this amazing experiment in america this diversity that's never been this way anywhere else on the planet ever so we can walk out on the street and go to mcdonald's and see 20 different ethnicities freaking people from all around the world right at least their ancestors are and in some cases they literally just came from that [Music] well in other countries those people will fight each other right they're like from different villages and different tribes and they don't like each other and they're never going to we think we can impose that right like americans can't grasp why the shia and the sunni absolutely hate each other and will fight each other and the only time they'll come together is to fight someone else they hate more us or israel you know um yeah you know americans and we're bad about it you know we really think we can imply uh or impose our way of doing things and it it you know the deal man you got your colonel or whoever else at the fob we're out there living with these boys you know living with them they're our team and we're trying to explain all the dynamics of it and you've got some colonel who's never done even like fidz or jset much less run an unconventional war with a partner force it was frustrating you know because it to me it's just simple you know it's like hey just be nice to all these people so you can stop treating them like crap and realize that that tribe and that tribe should not ever be put in the same unit and given loaded weapons they will shoot each other but it's us you know it's just how we do things and like you said it we just repeat it time and time again yeah sometimes i think it's it it's conceit or whatever arrogance that we think well if we tell you guys to work here they're going to work together and sometimes i think it's just arrogance people just don't realize like hey hey these these two people that you're talking to right now they don't they're not going to get along ever ever ever ever nothing you can do yeah unless for some reason as well if there's someone that they hit worse they'll go against that person but who's that person's going to be an ally for the next two days how much money are we going to get out of this you know if it like and you know that's funny i i've i've always tried to tell folks there's a huge difference between allies and friends and allies are usually pretty predictable because that means we have a a very common goal a common enemy a com we have a commonality whereas friends a lot of times friends are that's a loose relationship based mostly on emotion right and you you see it all the time who who hurts our feelings the most are friends our allies are predictable right when you go into an alliance so like business advice i've always given guys business advice one of the lessons i learned was don't start a business with a friend if you have to have a partner and you shouldn't take a partner but if you have to have a partner get this endeavor started do not do it with a friend i haven't listened to that advice like all my businesses are with all my friends i hope you've had better luck than i have good luck with it good man it's hard you know when you got especially we tend to like start businesses with guys like us and we're all so hard-headed and set in our ways and all that you know and if there's not some type of clear hierarchy and those operations agreements and that stuff that you can always go back to and be like hey buddy this is what the company says well in my case we didn't even have like an operations agreement we just started it and then it you know luckily it didn't dissolve into where we hated each other anything like that but you know i my dad always told me man it's like you don't need a partner don't have one you know and then sure enough he was right wow he was smart but yeah man the career was awesome i uh so so how so you end up going to so you end up spending this first like what is it you ended up nine months in afghanistan with a little bit of time seven and a half months seven and a half months and then what happens so went home and uh and when you're in the national guard are you you're in the national guard yeah but i'm on active duty okay so it's no different right no difference so you know the guard guys would mobe and d-mode and there'd be two months on the you know if they let's say they deployed for eight months and that was pretty typical it was two months of mobe and then two months of demo for a total of a year um deployment got it and so eight months deployment two months on the front end two months on the back end that became the standard for sf uh national guard well mine was kind of like what do i do now who do i belong to who am i working for and um so i was lucky i freaking went and did some the counter drug mission for the national guard it's advisement to law enforcement so i did that until state side yeah and it's uh it's providing surveillance training um you know it's like it's kind of what about possible skirt well you know we're unarmed most of the time you know sometimes no we're really going to go out in the middle of west virginia and surveil these meth heads with 30 out six rifles i'm probably going to carry my personal firearm and deal with the ramifications later um and i've had a couple times where meth heads like we were in snow we actually didn't think he was home he must have been sleeping it off you know because meth heads would you know they'd be up for days and then they'll sleep for days and we thought this meth trailer there was no you know they weren't cooking or whatever and we're sitting on the side of this mountain it's snow we're wearing woodland camouflage freaking we're messing about we didn't build a high site some come up we're not taking it seriously and i mean we're like 250 meters from this dude's uh it's like a cabin and a trailer up in this holler in west virginia dude he comes out and starts scanning with his hunting rifle on a scope dang and we're just sitting there trying to like get behind you know trees dude we're sticking out like sore thumbs and we're not wearing over whites or anything just dumb because like i said we weren't taking it seriously you know we've just been to afghanistan we're a bunch of tough guys what's this dumb redneck gonna do but lucky that redneck didn't see us and shoot us right cause let's face it redneck boys you know they can shoot it wouldn't been the first time he shot something with that hunting rifle you know and i was like oh good god i was running a recon course one time this is like before the war and i had this group up in the mountains and they're they're like laid up in hindsight right and i'm a land grader right so i'm i'm out there but i'm cammie'd up too because i'm all fired up so i would like sneak around and so i'm kind of sneaking up on them to kind of observe what they're doing to make sure that they're being squared away and as i'm sitting there observing them and i'm not that far away from them like 50 meters away a guy i hear like a dog right and i'm like oh these guys are gonna get you know busted this is gonna be cool i'm gonna watch the whole thing so a guy comes down he's got two freaking german shepherds with them and they look badass they look like freaking wolves and so the guys you know i'm watching this whole thing play out and you know you the guys pick up that they're coming because they it was a squared away little crew they they pick up a guy come they like fade in they're they're hunkered down guy comes walking down this path there wasn't even a road as a path and he doesn't he's none the wiser and all of a sudden the dogs bro the dogs are like they stop they start growling and all of a sudden the guy like starts scanning yeah he reaches down and pulls out a 45 bro and i'm like 50 meters away and i go excuse so the guys i just go excuse me sir you know because i'm we're in america like this guy doesn't know what the hell is going on man i'm like excuse me sir sir you know sir it's okay i said we're in the military we're on a training operation but it was uh not a good scenario to have yeah there was lots of uh things like that you know especially in the urban side um a good friend of mine they called him the sf cowboy they use his likeness in that video game and all that i don't know if you remember some of the first pictures that came out of afghanistan big dude sleeves cut off big old beard he was my roommate right well we're sitting in a little minivan right watching this house and freaking i'm like oh crap it's like two in the morning you know and freaking dude walks up oh [ __ ] revolver pointing at us and we're like whoa whoa whoa whoa freaking rolls it down most of the time we had a law enforcement guy with us but in this case it was him and i and the law enforcement dudes were in another car up the road and now it's like hey bro hey hey hey hey well he's just a concerned citizen you know what i mean and when lucky you know that could have gone so bad can you imagine the headline right like say one of us made a mistake and put him on the dirt you know american civilian yeah and you know so simpson i've done a couple of things where i'm advising law enforcement in the states minneapolis right a couple year year before last right when that whole mess kicked off and it's like hey man i don't care if you're far left i don't care if you're blm and rioting right you're an american i'm not squeezing the trigger on american right you can't wrong answer now if you're threatening me that's different but just hey man if you're robbing and looting a best buy to me that's not something i can pull the trigger on somebody for man it's just not in my in my book and it's weird you know it's weird like you have to remind guys like hey guys this is not an operation we are here in advisement only only if you have done everything you can to get out of that situation and it's defensive yourself for third party man right like it because the backlash of something like that would be huge you know there was those um there was that old the border surveillance thing oh yeah marines shot that guy like the late 90s i don't know i forgot the name of the it was it had an operational name yeah they sent all kinds of guys down yeah yeah and the marines shot that one fella and that was a big deal and they shut that program down um and we were kind of like a part of that same umbrella um but yeah we always used to you know joke and it's not really that funny now that i'm older that you know yeah pos pasi como tadas you know now i look back and i'm like should the military and the agency be allowed to advise because let's face it right like um in waco there were tier one advisors on the ground you know that that stuff that's kind of scary man you know because you know the rule of law says that our intelligence organizations and our military can't operate here of course the national guard gets around it a little bit with that state mission but it's scary right there's a reason possible exists so that military can't turn its weapons towards our population so looking back like i i'm like man we were we were kids we were joking like man possibilities now i'm like it's not funny anymore right like you know when you're when you're young and dumb you make jokes that are inappropriate because you're young and dumb and now i look back i'm like i don't know that we should be doing that right like i know law enforcement needs help but yeah there's probably shouldn't be getting it from us there's definitely a i don't know there's a positive and negative to it too because obviously if you have guys that can help law enforcement improve their what they do like that's beneficial and then there's two two sides of that coin too because guys that are in the military have a certain mindset part of that mindset is hey man we've been through this before somebody gets starts getting crazy we're not worried about it we're not freaking out like we'll de-escalate in many cases de-escalate better than someone that hasn't been in these shitty situations before but then not all military is created equal so you might get someone from the same unit that goes if somebody does that [ __ ] you gotta freaking go and you're like no actually that's not the right answer so it that there's a there can be a positive there can be a negative uh that both those situations you could have somebody from the military perform awesome you could also have someone from the military do something stupid i mean just because you're in the military doesn't mean you're it doesn't mean it doesn't it doesn't mean [ __ ] they're all over the map you know all over the map some guys tactically they were in the military for 20 years they're tactical idiots you know i've gotten that a couple times with the whole campaign like well just because you're a veteran doesn't mean you're and i'm like you're absolutely right being a veteran doesn't mean that i was even good at being a military guy right like just because you were in the service doesn't mean you're even good at whatever your job was in the service so it definitely doesn't automatically qualify you to be a politician uh in a lot of ways i feel like my experiences completely make me unqualified to be a typical politician yeah right like i'm what i'm kind of getting at here is that yeah i'm not a politician and never have been and that's what our country needs right now and my experiences in the military have set me up to where i could go do good things for our country and never become a politician i don't have that in my blood it's just not how i am yeah as i look at everything that's going on the last six months after the downfall of afghanistan and then even looking at afghanistan iraq and then you just compare all that to vietnam and you say to yourself like like those lessons every lesson that we you can look back at afghanistan and say wow you know we learned this we already knew this we already knew this stuff from vietnam and so when it comes to people being in the government that are figuring out where we're going to war i used to think yeah you know somebody should somebody should uh be in the military if they're going to serve in in the government you know if they're going to be a politician they should have they should have served in the military it's be helpful right i used to think that like oh yeah that makes sense like oh yeah okay yeah that makes sense you understand what continued service yeah continued service like oh yeah you know what it's like but now i'm we absolutely need military people that are that understand these lessons to the core that aren't just thinking with the arrogance that that the generation that just sent us to war let's fight we'll fight for american principles and but or even more who's going to fight right you say we who's the wheat oh no no not we yeah right yeah those militaries yeah those military guys it funny right you'll hear about folks who had these awesome blessed lives maybe um like tillman nfl football player you hear these crazy stories about these people who had these awesome jobs or maybe they came from this awesome family and they go and he enlisted right like it's automatically assumed because he came from a an amazing family that he should have been an officer right like that prejudice is weird so the fact that a rich well-to-do guy enlists and goes to fight for that's a story why is that a story that shouldn't be a story but it is right and i just use tillman because he's such a famous story and what what an amazing man you know freaking pro football player you know life is set for this guy quits that and listen to ranger retro right like whoa bro you really asking for it like that's some american stuff but my point is who's going to war typically it's just those young what else did you have to do with your life type of guys you know and and guys like a lot of us right let's face it you know a lot of upper middle class dudes and soft you know and you know but and feel that calling that i need to do this stuff because their dad lets them watch rambo when they're a kid right but um yeah man congress right is the only part of our government per the constitution that can declare war how is it we've been at war for 20 years what's the point what was the point right because in in jalalabad which has been considered for 10 12 years now a hot spot right but in january february march of 2002 i was walking around the market without a gun i'd hop on the atv and jump in the truck hop in the car with one of my troopers one of my afghanis run down wearing afghani garb the biggest threat to me in that market or anywhere in jalalabad or all of nangahara province was having the people hug me too tightly that was the biggest threat to me or maybe a car accident because traffic's crazy you know they loved us they loved us so what happened the conventional military showed up so all the colonels and generals can get their stars and their awards and get their promotions those politicians because let's face it right once you become a certain level whether it's enlisted or officer right your career becomes that thing and then looking out for your other you know upper senior officer senior enlisted got to get them bronze stars we got imp purple hearts our unit needs metals our unit needs combat because you know to become a general without a cib in the army in this time frame you got to go get some right and you're going to probably need a silver star at least a bronze star would be so how am i gonna do that unless i go to war so let's take these strikers and these m2 bradleys and destroy roads and run over innocent people and they weren't doing it on purpose they're just that's the conventional military they have tanks and you know i've never driven a striker before but i've sat in a hatch i'm like how can you drive this thing without running over everything you know and they're like well you do run over everything because it can well you know what man we made those enemies we made the enemies then we're now fighting the second generation we're fighting the sons of the men we killed in torah we're fighting the sons and the men we killed in the shahika and helmand and everywhere else at the beginning of that war we created that enemy and the same thing happened in iraq and you know let's face it right afghanistan was righteous you know i kind of needed to fall i looking back is it a good strategy to topple regimes that are predictable the taliban was very predictable the taliban has never met the requirement to be listed as a terrorist organization they were a sovereign nation and yes they had horrible horrible means and human rights abuses but they were a sovereign nation gaddafi sovereign nation freaking iraq sovereign nation with dictators and dictators are predictable they care about one thing first and foremost their main priority is their power so they're predictable you know in the interviews with saddam you know he talks about like i thought y'all were kidding he was like i i thought you were making it up that you thought i had weapons of mass destruction i haven't had gas in years i don't have any of that stuff in his interviews you know he's going i really didn't think y'all were going to invade so why did we i have my own theories my theory is because people say we went to war for oil i'm like have you seen the oil prices we didn't go for oil we went to war with iraq to stop its oil production the prices went up because if we pumped oil out of iraq we would have made all the oil companies would have made money right because that's a new source that we didn't they didn't have rights or access to you stop the oil all right lower the supply demand stays at or continues to increase prices go up so that's a little bit of my theory on that but whatever either way at least and that's only based off of what i have seen since right when we first invaded that right let's go you know like every other little young trooper but really you know we're talking hundreds of thousands of iraqis thousands of americans and and what did we get right if you tell me you know because war was supposed to be ex for expansion um minerals riches right throughout human history war has been to expand your empire well we suck at being an imperial power because we go to these wars and we do nothing with the spoils so why do we keep sending americans because let's face it was it really for our national defense or was it for our national interests because that's two very different things most of my work throughout my life has been for interests less about defense because once al qaeda was destroyed and eliminated and even isis and al-qaida in iraq were they ever really capable of attacking us here yeah you know they flew the planes into those towers and killed 3 000 plus people but did they ever really threaten our daily lives did they threaten america the united states probably not you know right could they ever have brought that war on a large scale to america and affected the average americans their life no they didn't have that capability and after i mean clearly right like none of that's really we haven't had any big attacks since 9 11. i think they just blew their wad they were done they didn't really i don't think they had any plan after that right he's like oh no crap now what we pissed these guys off and they're coming for us now what right they never really did anything since so my point is right like where has congress been where has our representatives in our senate been these last 20 years the military industrial complex continues to make big time money big time money when our enlisted soldiers are in barracks that are covered in mold just nastiness right they're living in poverty whereas you can go to the general's house on any post and it's a well-groomed lawn and it's basically a little mansion right so so what did we get out of these wars well it's arguable right it's very arguable but the bottom line is congress has continued to set aside its authority its duty its role its responsibility to either declare war or cut the funding they didn't cut the funding a lot of people got rich off these wars and i mean i was a contractor i guilty i i got paid for going to war now did i get paid like glock or you know northrop or raytheon or no of course not but well you got a positive outlook believe it or not from my perspective because the positive outlook would be that somebody was smart enough to figure out that if they did this stuff uh they'd be able to raise the price of oil and these other i i that's to me that's a positive outlook to think that someone was smart enough to actually craft the things that you're saying right i don't know if they actually it was playing or if it just we didn't stumble into it here's what yeah because i worry about they people are at least conspiracy theories i'm like half time they can't figure out where the bathroom is that's what makes that's what that's what disturbs me more than anything else is that it's the arrogance combined with the being naive the naive to think okay here's what's going on iraq look we know that saddam's not a good guy we can probably create some kind of a good ally there and we can probably just turn this into a democracy because we like democracy and we you know we like it and all those people must want to be free too and we've got people that came from iraq or that are in iraq that say hell yeah we want to be free so cool let's invade and in their minds it plays out hey it's going to be like the first gulf war it'll take us you know a couple weeks then we'll start to we'll get rid of the bath party we'll establish we'll start building walmarts right that i think that that's what they thought more than anything else probably and it's just it's just an arrogant it's just arrogance it's well it's not just arrogance it's arrogance and it's ignorance to think that you can go and you know there's a when it comes to the economy right when you start trying to dictate when you start having a centralized economy it's you cannot pull it off you can't do it you can't pull off a centralized economy that's why communism doesn't work you have to let the free market kind of do its thing so if you think if you if you if we know that you can't control an economy which is a finite thing and a controllable thing in some in some feasible way and we can't control it but at least you can understand what it is but now we think we're going to take a bunch of millions of people and predict how they're going to respond and predict what the secondary tertiary effects are going to be with what they think and how they're going to behave like that's completely insane to think that we we think we're going to control the future with other people we think we understand what they're doing we we can't so we have to start behaving in a way that we we utilize our power to make to attempt to influence but we can't think to ourselves that the things are gonna play out the way we think they're gonna play out because they don't they don't they couldn't even figure out these two freaking guys in afghanistan one of them's from england hey everyone's going to listen this guy meanwhile there's a local here that's been running [ __ ] for years and we think this other guy's going to fly in from england he speaks english he must be smart everyone's going to listen to him no no and then you just play that out over and over and over again in a bunch of different scenarios in iraq and in afghanistan and in iraq and that's what you end up with so that's why i'm so happy that guys like you are stepping up people that understand that we don't understand right people that understand that we can't control everything people understand that the enemy gets a vote the civilians get to vote like all those things come into play and we run around like we can figure it all out nothing is two plus two equals four right it's always an equation with hundreds if not thousands of variables and any time you change one variable to get the continued result you're gonna have to change every variable or many of them right and americans we a couple are you know that arrogance right so what is i always say arrogance is ignorance and cockiness combined and and lord knows we are a lot of ignorance and then you've got the cockiness and we think we really think that people want 5g or 4g or 3g or whatever it was 10 years ago they want that but you got this culture that no one wants to bother to understand who understands the culture of the afghanis who understands the culture of the yazidi in northern iraq or the kurds in very north iraq or the shia in southeastern who understands this stuff the guy on the ground the guy on the ground you know we were talking about you know um are you familiar with uh lieutenant colonel stuart sheller yeah the marine corps he was on the podcast yeah he was on the pockets right right yeah i haven't talked to in a couple weeks he and i went down to the border and um i told him i was like hey bro i gotta say uh he and i joke about how we met we we talked through it we were on with uh evan and jt with a black rifle and and we were talking about how we met it's a pretty funny story but um we went down there and we talked with a border patrol agent who's a very good friend of mine and uh of course off unofficial because he would get fired for even entertaining having a conversation with a congressional candidate or house of representatives candidate but he talked to us and he showed us some places we could go and look before and broke it down for us nothing in the media that i had heard was anything like the border really is at least in this section in this section of texas around roma and rio grande city and it was just nothing like i thought because we were on the ground that fellow that border patrol agent he's the guy on the ground i just went and got some info from him and then we went driving around and stuff and looked and everything he told us was exactly the way it was and i was like holy crap man but the border patrol's on basically a gag order man they talk to somebody their job's over done all right so yeah man uh colonel scheller and i the funny thing is man he i got word that he might run for house you know he went out of the marine corps yet and uh it's like and i hadn't announced yet either so a friend of ours some mutual friend a major who had worked for colonel um i reached out i was like hey he's like hey zach gave me your number says you want to talk to me like yes sir you know um our career paths may be about to collide be nice if we could just meet face to face and chat he was like okay well i'm up in emerald are you willing to come up here yep house tomorrow morning sat down and was like here you think about running in the fourth and he would because apparently at that time he had told two people the fact that i knew it blew him away he's like whoa who is this dude you know luckily my team uh my consulting team are very well connected and super smart guys or whatever so anyway we sat and chatted it was really cool conversation i'm talking about mature adult conversation because he could have easily been like you know an arrogant dick and been like whatever i'll run against whoever i want but we said hmm we're two very similar types do we really need to run against each other i live in the fourth he doesn't and now it's not the fourth anymore but we can get to that and i was just a really cool conversation a little coffee shop there in emerald island north carolina and we left it with and i just you know i gained a lot of respect for the man when he was like okay i tell you what i'm gonna think this over i don't even know if i'm gonna get out of the marine corps enough time to even you know get in the race blah blah blah i'm gonna take it over um he's like when are you gonna announce on this eight he's like okay well two days prior i'll let you know so at least then you'll know if we're running against each other i'm like roger that thanks anyway the marine corps didn't work out or whatever and it didn't work out for him i would like to think he'll run in 2024 you know um i know he's considering it a lot can happen in two years but um yeah man what a what a good guy man he's definitely a marine corps officer right like you know you guys talked with him right he is ra you know but that we need some of that man we need some of that i mean that dude threw his 17 almost 18-year career out the window to just stand up and say something which is funny because like i hear and see people on the internet like condemning for it and i'm like enlisted guys i'm like fellas we have been begging pleading wishing a colonel would stand up and now you are trying to say this this man is doing it for recognition like just sit down and talk to him for two minutes and you'll find it out not so much but yeah we we were uh we're in roma texas and uh we found out we're looking like the people aren't coming across the border in the middle of the desert they're coming across like the bridge that goes across there's the border patrol checkpoint at roma they're walking under the bridge coming up hitting the cul-de-sac and every night they get picked up by the border patrol buses and taking entertainment facility they're not stinking across in the middle of the desert walking right up into town sitting down getting picked up every night that's been going on for months right this whole shipping around the nation thing that's not new it's been going on for months i had no idea those headlines had just broke the day before i was like holy crap when did this start happening my buddy was like bro we've been shipping illegals around this country for nine months bro he's like the numbers are down well yeah he's like yeah it was 2 000 coming across the border in this little section every night he goes and then the cartels figured out and they all figured out right that the board patrol can only pick up about 200 at night so now only 200 a night come across on the other side on the mic side of the border they have warehouses or hotels and it costs to stay there but they only let 200 each night so the cartel the cost to come across the border not not being ferried not good coyote not transportation the cartels tax or fee to walk across the border to get your armband so you can walk across the border it's like armband but the cartel gives them an armband legit an armband on our side nothing but trash armbands it's like going into a club you pay you get your armband you're clear to go across well and armbands are color coded from which country you come from because in those warehouses that you can see from america right over there on the mic side they're basically hotels or it's just cots and floor mats every night you stay there is a hundred dollars to walk across that borders 900 to 1200 according where you for where you come from or if you don't want to spend a couple nights in that hotel warehouse you can pay more but that's what it costs in texas alone last year 1.7 million illegal immigrants illegal crosses of our border were detained that's just how many were detained in texas just texas that's how many were detained now how many people came on across and this whole evolution of the book border patrol and customs facilitating the integration and faring throughout the country it used to be you know coyotes would continue and pick up we destroyed that business and gave it all the cartels so 1.7 million let's say a thousand bucks times a thousand dollars and we can only guess that double that we're not in detain so let's just call it an even three mil times a thousand dollars that's what we gave the cartels just in mexico when i say we gave it to them we created this marketplace for them that's what this administration did by opening the borders they created a marketplace where the cartels now they don't really even care about drugs the drugs that are coming across our border now are coming across in a backpack not truckloads there's no more marijuana coming across in truckloads that's very they're not seizing marijuana anymore it's backpacks of fentanyl and heroin because 30 pound backpack of fentanyl i can damn near kill the whole east coast stuff is so potent 30 40 pounds of black tar unprocessed opium hash bring it to the stage processing the heroin one backpack turns into freaking half a million dollars worth of heroin how do we combat that if we don't get serious about true border security and even beyond that right because the lord knows that's one of my problems with americans but republicans more so that everything's a linear solution build a wall and then what no one's asking and then what so we build this wall we're gonna do put guns on it people are like yeah okay so we're gonna shoot our southern neighbors who want to come to america okay i don't blame them for wanting to come here but there's a line in the back of it there's a line to come here so yes it's got to be multifaceted right it can't be just build a wall that's not solving the problem that's just a measure to slow part of the result of the problem the illegal immigration why are neighbors wanting to come here so badly because all our southern neighbors their countries are crap had we adhered to the monroe doctrine and quit worried about europe and quit worrying about the middle east i mean we spent billions in millions what if we had invested that in our southern neighbors instead of letting say i don't know one of the richest richest wealthiest countries in the world venezuela fault of communism right underneath our noses why why did we do that why are we not actually helping mexico oh we want to take these hard lines and look like a bunch of tough guys it's not solving the problem and it kills me that that's that's all all these solutions right when you like all my opponents across the nation if you if you talk to republican candidates for any office from city council probably to the next president they're going to have one linear solution for any problem you talk to them about because what talking points but no one's actually discussing root causes of problems so the border security a wall is a measure not a solution it's not it's not going to solve the problem you build a wall well there's these two bodies of water on each side of it right you know the deal there's not a single security measure put on this planet you whatever you build whatever security protocol you build there's guys like us that can get around it right it's just like lawyers right lawyers can write a bunch of legal documents and then some other lawyers can figure out how to screw that it's the same thing in that warfare it's like your enemy does this they set up these obstacles you figure out how to get around them well here's an idea let's address it at its root cause and i don't know maybe the demand to come here well let's say 20 years from now oh my god and that's not an american thing right 20 years from now next election cycle only four years old right americans think in four year blocks if we're lucky what if 20 years from now mexico is a thriving ally and there's no cartels we help them get rid of it we give them incentives to stop teaming up with the cartels same goes for panama costa rica nicaragua el salvador we help them with the game problems we help them and i don't mean just toss money at it and waste money when i say invest right invest means there's a implied return on that investment right americans when our congress just allocates funds they just throw money at things they don't actually follow up or have measures in place to ensure our return on investment so my point here is man that that's part of why i'm running is i'm so tired of these very linear band-aids to hemorrhaging wounds you know and the the wall is just one great example of that you know i mean name any other hot topic right now abortion ban it the same people that say banning abortion will solve that problem the same people that will tell you that banning guns won't get rid of guns where's the logic and reason here folks so like with abortion yeah man it's it's horrible right i mean even people who are pro-choice will go yeah it's bad there's very only the craziest of the crazy or like for abortion right that's that's human beings are not for killing unborn children generally speaking so why are we having abortions right let's make them illegal okay cool let's make them illegal we're done but we're not done because we haven't addressed why are we why are women wanting or feeling the need to abort their unborn child first of all the three of us will never ever be able to understand sympathize with a woman that is so desperate that she wants to abort her child right it's just first of all we have to say that out loud right so let's bring in the experts let's talk to some ladies i know that sounds crazy right let's go find the subject matter experts and figure out why this is happening well i ask people all the time what's the number one demographic in america having abortions do you guys know put you on the spot right yeah i was a little surprised too 17 to 22 year old upper middle class white women why well because their fathers have told them they need to go to college because modern feminism had told them they need to go to college they need to get careers and a child inhibits that right and and this is a very summarized version of this very very complex problem so what if we as a community as a government right it's okay for the government to do things for the community right like we can we can have some good social welfare problems right things that support the wellness of our communities and our culture and our nation so when i use welfare i don't mean just throwing money at stuff and not expecting some type of return so if we start saying okay what if we create a robust and efficient adoption program what if there's assistance for these women to carry their children to terms instead of terminating them what if and i say what if because i don't know the answer right and that's that's weird for a political candidate to tell you he doesn't know for sure what he's talking about right but we know that right we come up with courses of actions and then say okay we're going to do this and then we try to anticipate what our adversary is going to do if we do x they'll do y and then this is how well that's how we have to war game all these things right so if we sit down and say okay because here's a here's a really bad thing about the adoption process in america today memeless are not married right we see marriage as an agreement between she and i and god not the state of north carolina also she's a very pragmatic practical person and she wants to hold the whole thing that if she gets tired of me she can just boot me or walk away how long have you all been together 10 and a half years we're married in my eyes my heart my soul i'm married to that woman and she's the most precious thing on this planet to me right like precious he's the only one that's how precious she is so if she and i wanted to adopt it could take three to five years if me and you want to adopt right we could have a kid in a year or less that's how our cultures evolve now right a gay couple can adopt very quickly it doesn't make any sense it doesn't make any sense or maybe melissa could go out of the country and buy a child we could adopt from africa or china let's face it you're buying a child when you do that because it costs a lot of money but you can do it and you can do it in a matter of weeks typically speaking when someone adopts out of africa different countries different way right but you go over you visit you come back you go back to the next trip and you have your child it's efficient and it's a good thing right like these are these are parents who want children who can't have them for whatever reason and then there are these children that need parents we have so many in america but so why are americans leaving america the united states who go adopt children from other countries when we have kids right here we have an abortion problem why because it's easier you know like let's face it right i mean let's say let's say melissa couldn't have kids right that's not why we don't have kids we don't have kids because it's just kind of a choice we've been busy she's been busy with her career and i've been busy with mine and so if we wanted to it takes time right but we could go get a kid it doesn't it doesn't make any sense so my point to all that is whether it's the border or abortion or name it you've got all these candidates and these politicians right because right now a lot of politicians sitting already elected politicians they're now candidates again midterms are coming they have these one-liners these talking points and then they go back to dc and they don't really do anything it's so frustrating to me man because let's face it right we're problem solvers you know we're given problems every single day whether it's how to fit that much equipment on that one truck because that other truck is deadlined right or supply won't give us another truck you know because it's some smart major who needs that truck um for his ride to the chow hall or whatever you know we solve problems with very little and then at this point in our nation's history and future present and future you know we we need those type of people we need guys from our community and and gals from the global war on terrorism those type of veterans who are problem solvers who have seen you know the neglect and the abuse and the fraud waste and abuse that's what these wars have been you know afghanistan highlights it but people don't realize how many billions of dollars of equipment we left in iraq too that we had to destroy in syria because they isis took it drove it across the border and then fought us with it but there's still billions upon billions of dollars of equipment in iraq now we haven't abandoned iraq we have been in iraq too it was just less publicized less emotional for a lot of the servicemen and women because of just the way afghanistan happened so quickly it was really easy for the media to cover so on and so forth and then all the debacle in kabul at the airfield that was definitely the media loved it was a disastrous you know show iraq happened over a course of numerous years and they're not interested in covering that kind of stuff so anyway the uh one thing i talk about a lot when i talk about leadership i wrote about in one of my books iterative decision making process which means you don't know necessarily what's going to happen and you don't necessarily have all the information so what do you do you sit there and just do nothing no you go okay well here's a step that i think this might have an impact a positive impact let me try this one step right you try that one step then you get what the feedback is if the feedback is good you say okay well that was good let's do a little bit more in that direction okay great oh it's still working that's super oh let's try a little bit more in that direction oh wait a second now we're getting negative feedback what we thought was gonna happen isn't happening do we double down no we actually say oh let's make some adjustments to what our plan what our strategy is and that that's what was as you look at uh afghanistan and iraq and vietnam you can see inflection points along the way where the the direction we were going was not clearly giving good feedback now do you immediately abandon it no maybe press okay let's try a little bit more let's make some adjustments oh wait a second oh wait it's definitely not working right okay so what should we do we should try a different plan we should try a different strategy and we shouldn't be afraid to say you know what we were wrong about this and we are going to back out and we are going to provide a different type of effort to try and solve this problem so like you said a lot of politicians a lot of that's just politicians people human beings don't want to say hey i messed up here i was wrong about this here's my adjustments here's what we're going to do i'm open to ideas covet when it first happened all of us were like whoa okay um yeah man i started carrying some hand sanitizer i you know i put melissa a go bag together for the first time right i'm not a i'm not really a prepper i'm more of a well of chittis fan i've got enough that i'll be able to make it right i'm good right i'm mentally prepped you know um she drives back and forth to wilmington you know an hour so i was like you know what you know she she competes in three gun and she's doing some of the tactical games and all that kind of stuff and i mean she can shoot right she goes to range by herself and all that you know she's got her own m4 and all that kind of stuff so we actually packed it up through a little 72-hour go bag in her trunk right we were all like this pandemic might be something within about six weeks we were like and we all knew like these cloth mats right like we've all done sea burn right we've all done some counter proliferation of biological nuclear and those those suits and the gas masks and all this stuff right it's like that might stop a virus that might and now you're telling me this mask is what we all knew it was just horseshoes nowhere i got a handkerchief all i'm good right and and i think maybe like you said like with the right we you know i don't think they really like it it started out good in intentions yeah and like you said about afghanistan when we when we got to iraq there was there was iraqis waving american flags and welkin missed there and they wanted us to be there and even i was there in 2003 2004 2006 all the way that through that time there was the the local iraqi populace wanted us there and by the way in 2012-13 and when isis started to to flex there was there was plenty of iraqi government officials and people on the ground saying please america please come help us hey we need some help over here we weren't thinking that these guys would come back but here they are and we need some help please come help us so we can't ignore the part of the population that wants that right when you cause a problem you're kind of obligated to deal with it right we caused that problem in iraq i was all four with withdrawal and the obama administration their withdrawal but once they decided they were going to withdraw there came a point when isis rose up that we needed to halt the withdrawal deal with isis and then pick back up with the withdrawal but since they started to withdraw they couldn't say they made a mistake americans will never we just don't like to say we're wrong i told somebody the other day i was like i will kiss your white ass live on whatever social media platform you want to go live on if you can find me a politician an elected official that has said you know what i realized now i was wrong and find me one politician who has said that yeah and the the crazy thing is from an ego perspective people think if i say hey guys i was wrong about this you think everyone's gonna think you're a loser now no they actually go yeah well cool i'm glad you admitted that and we didn't know either like like you were bringing up the example of covid hey okay it looks like a bunch of people in italy are dying they're showing these pictures of people uh dying in the hospitals they're all overcrowded this looks like it's gonna suck cool oh you want us to stand down for a few weeks here cool we're gonna flatten the curve what does that mean oh we don't want our hospitals overwhelmed okay got it we need time to prepare sure sounds good okay now we need another two weeks okay hey you know what i'm american i support america i want to have people get here okay cool got it well now you want another two weeks now you want to know two months now you want another six months now you want another year and then after a year we find out that the death rates you know most of the people aren't dying from code they're dying from something else and and covet accelerated it and that's fine i get it you know but it we have now have information and data right that says all the measures that we did they didn't help we've got a vaccine that really isn't right by you know they had to change the definition of vaccine yeah right like could you imagine getting three polio vaccines and then getting polio yeah that's not right we got rid of that that vaccine got rid of that disease right this vaccine supposedly makes your symptoms less but it could kill you yeah right like that's one that's this one um one drug we haven't seen commercials for right because all those drug commercials in tv is like when they when they get into the fine print they start speaking really fast about all the the side effects it's like and it could kill you know you could have crazy diarrhea and you could bleed from your nose and maybe your anus and then you might very well die from this kidney failure you know and people were like oh okay but ask your doctor but your skin will be clearer after two weeks right could you imagine what the johnson and johnson vaccine got pulled right why shh let's not talk about that let's just talk about another accent because of that jay's vaccine killed some people american people don't even know so many people don't even know the johnson johnson vaccine was pulled and that it had killed people with strokes and you know fancier medical terms than i know huh right like we won't just step back and say hey we now have different information we're going to adjust this plan yeah and by the way on that you can say hey there are here's the fine print on the vaccine here's what it can do to hear the side effects you can have and make a choice you know as a human being if you have some compromised immune system or you're living in some situation where this covid according to all the statistics could be really bad for you maybe that vaccine is a godsend that's awesome maybe a mask is great for you yeah but if you're a person that's young and healthy and you feel like you could oh and you know a bunch of people that have had it and it didn't impact them at all and you say hey i don't think i'm going to need that vaccine it doesn't seem like it's worth the risk so that's my decision right so you let people make a decision about what they're going to do with their health that seems like a much smarter move than trying to impose things on people which i've gone off on this a bunch when you try and impose things on human beings we fight especially americans they don't like it we don't like it but all human beings don't like it all human beings don't like to have things imposed on them and the only way you can impose things effectively is to do it through force through violence or now we're recently finding out that you can also do it by by taking their money and seizing their assets before they can even know what's happening right which i never i never really thought of that before it didn't even occur to me that like what's going on in canada right now oh you're gonna protest cool we're not just gonna arrest you we're gonna seize your assets that to me is like when you come to my property and you say you're going to take my house exactly the same thing i'm right so that is a problem in canada it's just so hard to watch you got law enforcement guys who just a few years ago or not even two years ago they were being defunded and demonized you know during the whole black lives matter thing and now these same police officers are the ones that are literally trampling on on people and i was like you know please god don't let it come to that here because i have a lot of law enforcement brothers and we all know that good men follow orders and good men that need to take care of their children will follow orders could mean they have to take care of their family rely on that paycheck they're going to follow orders that is scary to me because it will be at that point when i'm like hey law dogs i love you and i've always supported you but we are now on two different sides right like when you s like what's happening in canada man they are siding with trudeau that little turd and i usually don't i try not to talk about presidents elected especially elected presidents of sovereign nations in that kind of derogatory term but wow you want to talk about someone that won't admit that he's wrong and double down on it every every step it's like i just won't lose and he's got an arsenal he's got a military he's got a national police force man the national police force scares the [ __ ] out of me dude i don't like it when i see feds wearing multicam and military stuff right like it makes me uneasy i don't like seeing local pds wearing bdus right i wanna i like some shine shoes like north carolina highway patrol still wears a police uniform they look like police officers not military members i still don't like it man even though i want my law dog friends to have every tool available to them to do law enforcement but there's some things that i definitely i'm not cool with like no knock warrants and stuff like that yeah they're not necessary and we learned that cqb is dangerous let's just knock cordon come out yeah oh you don't want to come out okay cool just turn your power off yeah we'll play some loud music maybe send a robot in with some gas you'll come out you'll get tired of this right yeah the no knock warrant thing is is definitely something that needs to stop yeah our law enforcement needs some help right yeah it really does across america law enforcement in general needs help the average law adult is a good good american yeah and even up in canada i don't think that i don't think it's going to continue in this direction the direction that's going right now i don't think it's going to continue in this direction i think it's going to yeah i think it's going to stop i think the only reason that that's is what's going to happen is that the people that are pressing like trudeau they're actually just a bunch of [ __ ] they think they want to fight but you know do they really want to fight once the bullets start flying and stuff you know and things get pressed i i think ultimately we're going to see trudeau step down i just looked at my uh watch to recognize the date so it's the 20th it's the 21st of february when we're recording this right now so it'll be interesting yeah be interesting to see how it all washes out i you know i hope that's what happened i do not want to see canadians shooting canadians no more than i want to see americans shooting americans you know even like you know americans are still mad about the whole riots and the black lives matter stuff and rightfully so because it was all perpetuated and funded you know black lives matter is that those folks on the streets rioting they were pawns of rich people and that's that's sad right because sometimes i feel like we've been a little bit of pawned out in the war so i can kind of relate i'm not mad at young black or young hispanic or whatever group or even even young antifa you know white kids who are riding and breaking stuff they're pissed are they going too far absolutely right we have the right to protest peacefully but not break [ __ ] and set it on fire it's wrong that's rioting not protesting again root cause that whole mess was perpetuated it was funded i mean there were pallets of bricks that just poof showed up and you know what's the root cause what's the root cause man what's really going on how do we reach out to even more so you know like our poor communities poor inner city communities which oftentimes are predominantly black but also latino your your poor white communities tend to be raw right well why are these things happening what what is the perpetual process that that keeps these communities in their situation well the modern welfare system and and i don't mean the good kind of welfare like wellness of society i'm talking about our the ebt and and all these things there's no there's no it it doesn't help people get out of those situation it perpetuates it it it destroys the nuclear family and it was you know we can go back to lbj you know with the modern welfare programs and there's plenty of quotes out there that they did it on purpose they knew what they actually planned that stuff right like i think back in the 50s and 60s the intelligence agency and our government they were pretty sinister and they were thoughtful they weren't just meandering right and you can go back and look at what they did and how they approached it and lyndon baines johnson nixon that whole bunch that were raised out of world war ii in a fear of socialism and communism you know that fbi hoover's fbi that cia you know i mean man it was they were proficient i feel like they knew what they were doing and so they created that welfare problem and here we are today no one's ever really came up with any decent solutions the only real welfare reform our nation has ever seen actually came from clinton he actually proposed some things that would help the inner city become more productive involved citizens and then all that expired and no one's done anything since and i think it's funny you know you got the democrats who manipulate and coerce those communities for votes and you got republicans who are just like it's not even worth it to talk to them they're just going to vote democrat and i'm like recruitment 101 folks you've got young angry people that the system's not working for let's go talk to them let's come up with a real welfare reform how do you root problems right that's another one right just cut off welfare tell them to get jobs that's the average white man in america's freaking answer to welfare and poor inner city problems cut it off tell them to get jobs yeah okay but now we're talking about decades and generations cultural change we have cultures that are based around this problem you think you can just turn off welfare and just only get jobs there's your answer that's it okay and then what okay and then what i had an awesome i met a fellow who's running for uh fayetteville's mayor fayetteville fort fayetteville fort bragg in north carolina and i had never thought about it this like this and i've only had a few days to even think about it but his proposal was this and this guy is um [Music] an immigrant he's puerto rican um which you know part of the states but not a state so still an immigrant ray's poor nine brothers and sisters right poor family anyway he said hey man what if let's say you've got a mother a single mother with four children all right and some people say well she just keeps having more children to get more welfare okay maybe that's true in some situations i don't think that's true across the board i think in a lot of cases these mothers have more and more children maybe they don't have access to birth control maybe they're not super educated on on just on sex education in general right whatever that problem is we have this person they're a reality right they exist this family of the single mother with these full children it exists they exist how do we help them how do we fix them how do we get those four children to grow up to become productive involved u.s citizens that's the question well his answer was this let's say she's getting fourteen hundred dollars a month um from all the different programs total that's about what she's getting fourteen hundred it's poverty bro but if she gets a job she loses all of it if she gets a job that only pays her a thousand dollars now she would be at twenty four hundred dollars a month now she's just barely getting by still she's still in the poverty but the second she takes a legal dollar or something that's not under the table she loses every cent of her welfare funding how does that incentivize her or her children to to go do something so here was his plan and i was like huh huh he said let's lower it let's take some welfare away i'm like i wasn't expecting you to say that but here's how i said it he said okay let's knock it down let's cut that that 1400 to 600. she doesn't get a job she gets 600 she gets a job and maybe she makes 500 a week she gets an additional 100 a week from welfare so as she makes more she actually starts getting more so let's say she goes from that 1400 now she's making 2 000 uh in addition to her own like she's making 2 000 a month at her job she's um she's gone from that 500 or whatever initial instead of the 1400 now she's at a thousand well there's a certain point in which she makes enough money to actually pay for her own welfare on tax dollars it now pays for itself the incentive is for that lady that young woman to go work harder to make money and now she will actually pay for her own welfare it's a zero-sum game for american taxpayers and i was like holy [ __ ] i've never heard that before i've never thought about it like that before i always thought about it like the more you make the less you get from welfare right like if you're making 1400 on welfare and now you're making two grand you're only gonna get seven he's like no no it's capped right it's not like she just keeps making now she's making 200 000 a year she gets 50 000 in welfare right no it's capped there's a point in which it all goes away and he even said he goes now maybe there's actually a pyramid where it goes up to a certain amount and as she continues to make more it goes down a little bit and then it's ended but it's all based off of and he's like it would take a lot of work because everywhere in the nation the cost of living is different so you would have to build it around all of that he's like but it would work and it would fix the whole problem is that you would be addressing the animosity and the resentment that tax paying hard-working americans have against welfare recipients that stigma right that whole uh just cancer welfare type well now the welfare recipient is paying for its own welfare for their unwelfare not it's right that's dehumanizing i didn't mean to do that but that person is now paying for their own welfare i was like wow bro i'm like you can't be the only person you're you know this you know puerto rican-american that's running for mayor in fayetteville you mean to tell me the only person that's ever thought of this and probably not he's just the only person that ever told me about it and i was like i've just never thought about it right it's never been in my entire life have i ever i've never had to sit down and start thinking about viable ways to end the welfare state in america it's not been a problem that i had to address in my military career or my small business right you know not a problem so now that i'm running for house of representatives it is something that i got to start looking at and i was blown away so again back to my point of problems are never two plus two equals four also ain't that easy no it's never that easy and when we have that conversation and we sit back and say hey man yeah this isn't working we need to adjust just like man if we're in route to a target you briefed your platoon or i believe my you know troop and isr reports back oh no there's not 15 mofos on this target man they're having some type of get together there's 40 muldoons on this target you know and trucks and what appears to be some pkms in those trucks we thought it was going to be easy target on and off right nice little fun tuesday night i saw i was reporting something different do we go yeah roger that click and hang up and we're not talking about anymore i'm not even gonna brief my my troopers no we probably come to a little tactical hall huddle up and let's discuss this if the key leaders are going to sit down and chat right is this assault force even able to take that target well probably not okay let's head back to the house we made a mistake right based off of information out we didn't make a mistake based off of information as it changed let's just hit pause you know or maybe we request more air and we first go on up and we don't hit the target we let the air force do it for us or or the navy or the marines or whoever's flying for us that night you know it's so frustrating man because it's like you know there's there's eight sf guys running for for uh us house representative there's seven seals um and like i said 25 30 global volunteerism veterans you know somebody asked me the other day well what sets you apart from these other candidates we're all conservatives we all pretty much agree on how you know we all have the same stances on everything the difference between the first difference between me and some of my opponents is spine and shoulders right and i don't mean that in a bad way like i mean like because they're good people right the folks i'm running against um sam's probably one of them are good people good people who really want to go change and if you ask them they're going to capitol hill and they're going to save the planet here's reality the reality is a freshman brand new representative in congress has zero influence and no friends lobbyists don't even knock on their office door they got a little cubbyhole and office over in that other building they're nobodies so they look for friends they make friends with lobbyists and other little groups and caucuses right and the incumbents the three four five 20 term representatives they recruit them they do them favors now we got clicks and this is politics and it's the grossness of it here's what aside from me not being willing to compromise right i've said straight up four terms if amer if america or north carolina have district 13 or whatever whichever district i want to run in four terms is all i will do period we need term limits whether or not we can get that pushed through or not if when i'm up there different story i'm still not going to i'm going to self-impose my own term limits i don't want to work in dc and i was one of my opponents recently told me i was a um ignorant wannabe and i was like yep except for the differences i i was like you're absolutely right i am pretty ignorant exactly the kind of [ __ ] you guys are doing in politics but you're wrong about the wannabe part not a wannabe i don't want to run for connors but because of people like him america needs us to run well i'm not willing to compromise that's the biggest thing i'm not you know i say this all the time right i'm not even mad at democrats i'm pissed off at republicans who have compromised our rights away they keep thinking somehow that they can negotiate or not even negotiate because i'll clarify the difference between negotiate and compromise they keep compromising with the the left and the democrats thinking they're all going to get along and come to some type of agreement democrats just take just keep taking that [ __ ] putting it out back piling it up we got some more from them we got some more from them republicans go well if we keep playing nice with them maybe one day they'll be our friends no man the democrats are hell-bent on creating a communist regime in this country they don't care what you think they don't want to be your friend they want to get rid of you they want to replace you and we see this playing out in this whole politics right now right all of a sudden you keep seeing everything like what's the what's the cure for covet midterm elections all of a sudden the mandates yeah the science says no [ __ ] and freaking ain't no there's no there was no the covenant numbers haven't changed at all the science hasn't changed at all midterms are coming and democrats know they're about to lose and across the country through boards of elections and every different means they can they're trying to protect their what they have left and we see it in north carolina with the redistricting and all this nastiness but anyway the number two thing that sets me apart is that group of veterans those green berets those seals when we show up let's say half of us right let's say there's there's 30 it's just over 30 global war on terrorism veterans young vibrant not old gray-haired crippled old man easy on the gray hair bro [Laughter] you're not old you're still vibrant you know there's uh i keep looking at it like this right we're still young if most of the 20 year old troopers the the 20 to 30 year old troopers in the teams or on the odas don't want a fist fighter the second they know that we're we're not able to you know hold our own then we're that old line that gets pushed out you know but i would say right now the average 20 to 30 year old soft trooper doesn't really want to throw down with either one of us right i mean some of them would they probably whip our old asses we're gonna be sore the next day no matter what but the difference is they know we got this old knowing we're either highly aggressive violent and smart right like you don't get through 20-something years of war just being lucky you know and i always tell them that you know i'm still in 20th group man i teach down ourself out of course and i'll pick on the youngins and i'll be like okay whatever man you know that that fun you know shooting [ __ ] [ __ ] talking whatever you want to call it and i'm like okay whatever man you want a fist fight on the outside i look like i'm ready you know ready to get after it on the inside i'm like please look god don't let this do this right don't let this kid freak out i actually want to take me up on this offer because it's going to hurt so bad but yeah man could you imagine 20. global world terrorism veterans right 12 of them special operations guys swearing oath for a second time on capitol hill the democrats shaking in their boots because they know they just lost and the republicans going uh-oh we're gonna have to ask those guys those newbies these freshmens we're gonna have to really team up with these guys and work with them that's some stuff that could change america's trajectory and that's the difference between me and some of my really good opponents good people right i mean i got a guy that's running in the district against me man he's a good old boy good old country boy we talked after meeting we hit it off and i was like man any other time you and i met we'd just be hunting fishing buddies he's a good carolina boy and i told him i was like hey man tell you what don't you just let me and my buddies go up there for a couple years i told you i'm out this is not a career for me i'll do everything in the world to help you run after i'm done you know of course he didn't take me up on that off he's still convinced he can beat me um and and maybe he can but that's the cool thing about democracy right i have to show the people in this district that i'm i'm the best candidate um i can't just say i am i have to go show them and uh so anyway man it's uh some interesting stuff not so much it's like so simple but it's not easy yeah uh so a little sidetrack right there you get you get done with afghanistan you go do some stuff working with law enforcement what not and then when do you end up going to iraq um just before the invasion um and so iraq happens all that goes down i'm up north and made more friends more current friends more friends over at the uh the agency and because we were basically doing that uh advanced prep for northern iraq with the kurds and everything so you got there before the invasion and you're up with the kurds yeah and you're prepping for what's going on the war's coming right yeah so you know evasion goes down freaking i was running around like mosul kirkuk crit all that stuff um are you with us oda team i'm actually with one of the um with one of the sad teams okay because i'm that young kid that doesn't look like an sf guy right so really cool um yeah iraq happens and then in my next trip to afghanistan i got bumped off a cliff and i broke my back how'd you get bumped off a cliff one of our partners tripped we were walking down and he was above me and he tripped 80 90 pound backpack you know nice you know freaking offset infill yeah thought how far how high was the cliff probably fell 15 feet you know enough to you know and basically when when he hit me you know i kind of like feet went out and landed basically on my ass like my feet were kind of out in front of me a little outcropping and it that rucksack just buckled me right it just split my uh l5 how much did you weigh at this point were you jacked yet cause yeah i'm starting i'm starting to put on some people talking about this yeah now we're you know three years into the end of the war four years into the war man i've been hitting the weight pile like everybody else i'm probably like a buck 85 and um yeah man it just bent me over split my vertebrae part of the vertebrae hit my spinal cord the prognosis was you might walk with crutches one day so were you like paralyzed on sight bro that whole i can't feel my legs yeah i didn't experience that because i could feel it and it hurt like hell right if you took this dude put it in a fire got it nice and orange and stuck it in the side of my spine back here that's what it felt like all the way to my toes it was it was like i was on fire did they cast a vacuum oh yeah um spent three or four months in a brace doing the wheelchair thing freaking uh got better uh really fast so within a year i'm running again well my ets date came up and i had a flight packing in i wanted to be a pilot i thought you know my ground pounding days was i had already done everything we could right how many more countries are we invading no i thought my ground pounding days was over and these apache gun ships keep flying in and just doing all our work i'm like i mean great air conditioning yeah yeah they got like they could only work a few hours a day i'm like man these these warrant officers they can fly for the rest of their lives you know because the army has a warrant officer program so i put in a packet all i had to do was get home and go to flight school it's going to be awesome well that clearly changed i thought my career was over so luckily those friends that i made at the agency i got out and i initially did you get medically retired or young and dumb man my intent i thought i was gonna go contract for a little while get better and then i would come back in the army and fly just take some time off and there's all these awesome contracting jobs out here they're paying awesome oh and this is because you're the national guard so you could say hey i i'm non-deployable for a while right i'm going to heal up yeah but you'd still be in the national guard but i got a contract because at this point the guard has figured out that they're just hemorrhaging dudes to contracting so you got all these uh battalion commanders so 0405 oh yeah this is like 1500 bucks a day yeah for contractors and stuff shutting it down and they're like nope you know you still got to be at your drills you still got to meet your commitments whereas in like 0.203 you had company commanders jumping in and they were like yeah i don't care if y'all show up or not and if you think about it right like you've got your troopers overseas doing you know at least combat ish type stuff you know it was a good thing for the guard you had guard guys that were getting exponentially more combat experience through contracting than the active duty groups were doing because they were just rotating you know so it was a good thing for the guard but it wasn't good for their numbers right it didn't look good they had guys that weren't getting their online training done you know right like you got to do your eo and your sharp string right it was killing those numbers for these commanders so they shut it down so i was like screw it i'm out i'll just come back in you know i'll go make some money whatever buy a house or something which is you know exactly what i did but as i got better you know i went became operational again and started doing cool stuff way cooler than the army ever was gonna let me do this is as a contractor yeah so i never went back in or i didn't go back into fly um and at one point it was kind of funny because i did go back in and join 20th group in like 2012 which i'm i'm still in how long so but that's a pretty big gap though you got like seven almost eight years seven eight years now and were you contracting the whole time whole time non-stop i stayed really busy with that of course i started the gym i would come home i got lucky man you know teamwork right what makes a dream work when i started my gym which i opened it in january of 2008. that that's when this gym opened yeah yeah yeah very cool right you know 2008 i was going nine months i opened a gym luckily the the team that i put in place ran it like it was their own they did an amazing job amazing job good friend of mine darren canceler man he just did it uh the young lady i was dating at the time julie they they ran the damn thing and and so i could come home and be the war hero that showed up to run the gym and take over for a minute and ruin their lives you know they had to play anyway they did things nope i'm gonna do it my way you know like no hopefully i wouldn't like that but uh you know intrinsically that'll happen but they just did an awesome job with my gym and i could i could i could stay deployed and i did and um the gym grew so that was cool it was kind of a parallel there and um the gym was great you know it was supposed to be just a little crossfit gym that you know guys like us marine recon boys and marshock dudes because we're just south of lejeune come in there take their shirts off spit on the floor throw up if they want to and we'll just thrash ourselves and then regular people started showing up right like soccer moms and stuff and you know i'm still at this point in my life i'm like hey you you know you you know stop being a puss and and you know maybe stop eating so many doughnuts fatso and you could dagon be a pt stud too well when a 33 year old 36 year old mother of two or three that drives a suburban pulls up you can't talk to her like that because she won't come back and those are also the people that have the money to pay their gym memberships those college kids that are studs that you want to train they ain't got no money right you gotta at least pay the light bill um so i quickly figured out how to talk to regular people you know you can't be like hey sally maybe cut out that bottle of wine and that box of donuts every night you might be able to do a pull-up yeah she's never got any i was real adamant about not being that uh creepy gym owner and you know who was like you know um having any type of fraternization with clients and stuff like that was a big deal and i did start that gym with a partner and it quickly figured out it wasn't going to work um not a bad separation there just like he couldn't move to wilmington and um but yeah man it was that jim taught me a lot about teaching you know just how to talk to people you couldn't hey ranger you know hey sally come here what's going on you know you um hey when you're ready if you'd like um let's sit down and maybe line out some nutrition diets and stuff you know nutrition not diet right those words mean something because if you say something to a lady who needs to drop 20 pounds you know if you say hey let's talk about getting you on a diet oh my god bro you just she's gone she hates your guts but if you're like hey look let's tune this up and go man your shoulders are starting to get really defined you're looking great and that was a cool thing about crossfit right is that when his upper body started to develop and you know you clearly can't be that creep and talk to her about her legs or any other you know lady parts or whatever you know you can't be like hey sally you know your bum is looking great that's that's inappropriate right it's not professional and uh so i really learned how to to talk to people and then motivate them and bring them into the fold and you know before we know it that was one thing my gem was so well known for i'm so proud of it is that are women monsters and i mean people would come to me like other gym owners and stuff like what are you doing to motivate and turn these women into these these monsters right we sent like uh i don't know um 18 different athletes through the crossfit games out of a a town of only 150 000 people damn and it was just i didn't even have to recruit once it started we had one of the original super strong females she just showed up she was a volleyball player powerful right she could very coordinated to her and only lift him before you knew it she was like throwing weight over her head that most of the dudes in the gym couldn't touch and um so people started hearing about her and then it grew and then her and then a handful of others and next thing you know i've got these i'm looking for dudes our thing was the team events i love the team events i don't know the individuals is cool right and a whole different level but the team was fun and i'm all about building a team so our teams did really well but there were years where [Music] you know a couple years where we didn't the team didn't go to the games because the guys on my team weren't strong enough to get us on the podium at regionals it was never the girls man um i trained one young lady she came in the gym of fino right like just this diamond in a rough fast twitch powerful she'd been a soccer player a swimmer at ecu god bless her heart she's just imagine the most hard-headed ranger young seal pup you ever dealt with this was her man but like the first time she ever deadlifted she picked up over 300 pounds i walked in was like stop stop stop what are you doing who is she why is she picking up that kind of weight she's clearly new right horrible farm which is powerful so anyway that's impressive she quite she she could have been an individual athlete she had that type of genetics um she went a different route that year i couldn't put her on my team she just wasn't ready yet she couldn't work with the team she came in a little late she had everything going for i was like hey in the interim um let's play with strong man right we just started getting strong man equipment it was getting more and more worked into the crossfit stuff and we kind of did a pure thing and some of the gym members you know i was that guy who was i was like the most anti-crossfit crossfit gym owner on the planet i was like crossfit was supposed to be to get you in shape so you can go do cool stuff you want to try a triathlon you want to try you know you want to whatever you know um i never really saw crossfit as like becoming a sport but i can't help it i like to compete you know let's get in it um so anyway this young lady kimberly lawrence she i said hey let's try strongman so she did like a local event crushed it this chick was and still is super strong well that event qualified her for the worlds at the arnold's damn she weighed 165 pounds naturally she never touched any drugs and strongman is not a tested sport right so the middleweight class and the females are the is the most competitive and it's 140 180 pounds and most of the girls cut from 200 there's you know 5 eleven six foot tall two hundred pound females and like i said not tested kimberly goes to the arnold bro and wins world her second strong man competition wins it and she didn't cut she walked on walked into the competition 165 pounds this is what she weighed at the time right i mean she's you know probably five nine five eight or nine just naturally emotional well not naturally she had been an athlete in college right but just exploding you said she swam and played volleyball and soccer okay just aggressive too man just like hostile that she should at the time there wasn't a good mma presence in wilmington that's that's where she should have gone that's where she should have gone uh as one of the gems um salter and those guys stood up mmj uh mma gym there and had that been stood up out of center over there i mean go kill people with a little bit of training this chick would have been scary right she was and she would go over there and train and play and she went through a little phase where she was doing some striking and stuff and i was just like god man anyway long story short with her she kind of got involved in the wrong people and stuff and um i didn't coach her anymore freaking but what an amazing chica and like i said man it was just so cool that our females were so well known when like every lady on the team is snatching 200 pounds deadlifting three plus like kimberly was deadlifting 500 pounds at a buck 70 and had abs you know what i mean she did not look like a power lifter and this is just the ladies we had they were just badass you know melissa went to the games um she was just the small one she was the bodyweight one um and as crossfit matured now the average crossfit female is like a buck 65 man those are those girls are big so melissa she can't compete with them she can't move the weight that they do but yeah man the ladies and melissa was instrumental in helping at once melissa realized she wasn't big enough because last time we went to the games you know dawn was you know probably at the time 160 165 a girl amanda 150 pounds another volleyball player um and um jordan probably 150 pounds and every single one of them were instead left him 400 pounds cleaning jerking over two i mean these these chicks and running sub six minute miles like what the and i mean you know luckily that last year the boys were all big boys and studs but melissa was you know an amazing amazing coach to those ladies she's once you know the deal once you realize you ain't you ain't ever going to be in the ring again right like you can either you know what is it those who can't do teach and that's just reality same for me right like as i got older i was like i don't stand a chance of being you know involved in this sport but i can damage or coach some people to it but yeah the gym was amazing man freaking it was lucky that i could run it in a parallel once me and melissa started dating i started i went through a phase where i didn't deploy a whole lot like teaching stuff stateside and uh a highway patrol friend of mine asked me to start helping uh him like teach some firearms uh his father had a nice range and stuff i'm like yeah man why not you know he was going through a divorce and needed some money um so i was like yeah you know he's like yeah i think you know with your background you know we can we can bring in some people and that's how this the whole shooting part of my business kind of started was just trying to help a buddy that needed some you know money because he was going through a divorce and um so that turned out i mean i i just don't know how to do anything half-ass right if i'm gonna do something i'm doing it you know that's why i like all the physical stuff the triathlons the ultra marathons hell i put myself in the hospital after the bigfoot 200. not after because i didn't quite finish my 177 i'm pissing blood wrapped in my laces freaking i was in bad badges how many hours into it was that probably 70 some day three yeah um you're uh familiar with the company uh softly yeah those guys yeah so bran i don't know them but i know who they are yeah so uh brent one of the the founders and owners uh marshak dude good friend of mine he joined me at mile 112 of that race and i was already in bad shape uh from like a section of the race it was a lot of downhill well first we don't have mountains where i live in north carolina so i trained uphill on a stair mill dude i would go to the gym and spend four and five hours walking on a stair mill miserable miserable stupid but i set a goal you like running at this at this point in my life i don't like running anymore right i decided i'm going to run a 200 mile race why to say i did well yeah man that race one of the sections about 11 miles all downhill and i ran the [ __ ] out of it and your muscles weren't used to that quads destroyed them destroyed them at mile 112 i was already pissing blood and that's from yeah my kidneys were hurting i could feel it felt like somebody just worked on my freaking back man and um about my 150 something at that aid station that was the last time i could even keep water down i was my tbi was definitely flared up i had a lot of damage to my brainstem and stuff when i got blown up in 2009 and yeah man i um [Music] i was in bad shape and i wanted to sleep he wouldn't let me sleep come to find out later he was like yeah i was worried you were going to die because i was having a seizure and i was laughing about it you know i had convinced myself you know you know the deal man you know how we we can be and i just took it too far at by about 177 man i'd gone you know on almost an entire night 20 some miles without any food or water no sleep just you know brent was just trying to get me to the next uh aid station because it's in the mountains of washington state around i would say helens they have no evac plan there's no way and i'm probably the biggest runner on the course right i'm doing these 200 mile race at like 215 pounds you know and i had lost weight to do it you know i think i usually walk around about you know 225 230ish or whatever and i cut some weight to go run this race and how many months did you prepare for it like a year year and a half the so we trained for about half a year for the 2007 bigfoot melissa tore her meniscus at like mile 120 and so we we stopped at mount 133 we were doing it together and i had time but during during that last trek i didn't want to leave her it was cold way colder than it was supposed to be so we didn't i mean teeth chattering we were both hypothermic and she's busted her knee can't move fast and so at like mile 132 or three that aid station we got there in time and i could have taken off with no rest or whatever and got to the next one but i probably wouldn't have finished a race right i was just now i was behind and i would have never left her on that mountain right like especially hypothermia you know she's she's never had hypothermia to where she was you know freaking disoriented or something like that and and you know just clearly i wouldn't have left a runner i didn't know in her shape much less i'm not leaving the most precious thing on this planet to me so we got to that station i'm like you know what screw it honey we started it together let's go get some breakfast together you know someone's coming up so we drove back to portland had some breakfast the next year she decided to do it but we made a deal that we wouldn't do it together no no preconceived notions her knee was still not healthy she's like i'll try it i mean that says a lot about her man she's like i got this energy i'm gonna give it a whirl she did like 77 miles and dropped only 77 on a busted knee she's she's probably worse than us but um yeah man at mile 1 176 177 whatever it was brent was like hey man i'm gonna run ahead and uh make sure the crew is ready no he was running ahead to make sure the medics and the doctors were there so they could drop my ass 205 miles man you know so i had you know whatever it was 29 miles or something left and i get there and they're like yeah here's the drop paperwork i'm like i'm not signing that i'm twitching having seizures my trachea is freaking like not working correctly you know my so some of my damage and stuff i used to be left-handed i'm right-handed now because this didn't work for a while right like i couldn't hold on to things i definitely but worse i would have a seizure well if you're holding a glock and your hand seizes probably not a good thing so i switched to being right-handed all that was happening i'm like seizing and it's a it's not a muscular seizure it's a cns seizure and it's just weird it doesn't hurt but when it happens it looks weird looking good at this point and bro the pictures of me i'm gray right that whole dehydrated my body temperature was 96.4 degrees and my heart resting heart rate was like a buck 60. oh laying down on a cot you know when you lay down your heart rate should drop your mind didn't my body's freaking out and i'm convinced i don't know it's only 29 miles i got this and luckily luckily one of those five people i chose i'm kind of scared of was helping me and he was like hey bubba you can either get your ass in that truck i'ma put your ass in there either way you are done with this race the next thing i remember i woke up in the in the hospital in portland oregon how long was the recovery from that yeah that's a that's a more fun story um three weeks after that on the last day to register for the moab 240 miler i went and got my blood work done 88 kidney function i'm like all right i'm good and i signed up for the moab 240 and how far away was that at the time as far as like how much time did you have before that two weeks oh it was only two weeks away last day to register for the moab and here's my thought process oh i gotta hear this because it hurt man rhabdo hurt a lot more i'd heard of rabdo right you know crossfit made it famous everybody you knew what rhabdo was i knew you know but we all give ourselves micro cases of it and then we take days off the reason there's no days off in a four day 200 mile race you don't get to recover you know it gets worse well three weeks after i go in i'm like okay i'm trying to figure out do i train another year because this is the first thing in my life i've dnf'd first thing i've ever did not finish you know man i've been like first time goes and every hard course they ever sent me to you know like this isn't this isn't making sense to me voluntarily withdrawing the year before because melissa was hurt i was okay with that like it didn't hurt my feelings you know i didn't feel like i had somehow compromised you know my soul your integrity is a man now but now the bigfoot all right they almost tried to kill me and i'm like okay there's this moab 240 it's all ran by the same people i'm like this no i have 240 mile race it's actually 243 miles just like the bigfoot 200 is 205 i'm like y'all need to fix your t-shirts because last time i checked a five miler that's like a race internet so give me credit i want credit so the the moab 240 243 miles in my head was okay do i train a whole another year and when you train for a 200 are you talking about going out at midnight and train until six in the morning just to get training under your headlamps and stuff like that it's miserable dude at this point in my life i'm not a runner anymore and i don't enjoy training it i [ __ ] since then i think i've ran about six miles and that was 2018 right it's all been like three different army pt tests i had to take you know um yeah i ride my bicycle now my mountain bike and stuff but anyway yeah man i'm like okay i can train a whole another year or maybe i can knock out this 240 and just check this box and say i did at 200 right it's 240 it should be good make up for this disaster silliness of the bigfoot last day of registering i was down in alabama teaching 20 groups of falcors i drove to one of those local blood work places had my labs pulled interpreted myself pretty much qualified for that um because you're going to be an 18 year old at one point so you're good to go close man i've done some nutrition counseling for people at the gym right i can yeah creating teenage levels are almost back to normal almost right i'm like all right walked out of the parking lot signed up for the 240. clearly i know it's not a good idea because i didn't tell anyone until a couple days before already had an 18 delta mine that was gonna you know crew me at the race and that just basically means drive the truck from one aid station to the next and the truck is a place to sleep and um so yeah man i got the moab 240. so i always say that you know dumb dumb ranger tony did bigfoot where i was like i'll sleep an hour a night and i'll just keep moving and i'll keep banking extra hours well the moab 240 just approached completely different i'm asleep two hours to three hours every night and i'm gonna use every second of time to make it from here to here i was trying to bank time and go fast now you build up this extra time would you know how many people remember my finish time of that moab 240 zero i don't even remember what it was all i know is i finished it and i got a picture of me walking underneath a finish line right and i do know i did have about six hours to spare six to eight hours of spare whatever it was but the point here is unlike the bigfoot where i was trying to go so hard and not sleep i walked every step of the way at last except for the last 13 miles of 243 miles i rucked it you know and you're just wearing one of them silly little vests you know it's like maybe 10 pounds enough to get you you know in between eight stations which you know are they're pretty considerable i mean you're talking about an a-station a station 20-25 miles you know like marathons it's not like a marathon where there's a station every mile this is the middle of nowhere nowhere moab you know so yeah man knocked that crazy [ __ ] out and uh freaking um we heck i was so fresh and and okay that hopped in the truck instead of staying in moab drove back to denver you know and um so yeah man freaking good experience don't necessarily recommend it to anyone but if you do get a wild hair and want to run at one of those races give me a ring or a dm and i'll i'll tell you my strategy my strategy was rook march the whole way the only reason i even ran the last 13-ish and we didn't run the whole way is that i linked up with a dude that i had met at the the bigfoot and we checked it in um and uh but i wouldn't say that we ran that whole 13. we just i picked up the pace did some jogging blah blah but yeah man um you know like i said just got to get after it you know and purpose you know like we talked about that whole having something i don't know if you get dramatic say having something to live for but that's ultimately what it is and um yeah i stay busy these days i'm over the craziness these days my pt is all about just staying healthy so i can go hunting you know that's it i just that's my only real hobby i have left as long as i'm fit enough to throw a 60 pound backpack on and go hike around the mountains and you know um that's where i'm at in life i'm i'm done you know melissa's still getting after it just crushing herself in the gym i'm in there like i think i'll do back and buy maybe maybe maybe just you know chest and tries today you know and then a nice little light leg day like my deadlifts man so i just turned 46 and i was like all right you know for fun let's put some weight on there 500 for three on a deadlift i'm like still not old yet you know what i mean i'm still kind of young but typically speaking man 400 on the deadlifts all i do and just do some reps i'm not trying to hurt me anymore because through a lot of the stuff that i did man my back hurt my you know tbi hurt always on that edge and where'd you get blown up in iraq yeah um freaking armored sedan ied meant for a striker yeah sucks man i was the only one of four in the vehicle to walk away and i didn't walk away um yeah um suck man freaking we just happened we were we were the mark car for the ranger regiment they were they were going to action a big target for us uh where was it iraq mosul and so we basically we were going to identify we were going to identify the gate that they were going to drive the strikers through just by simply pulling just past it and parking at that point by the time they got there i would already be out of the vehicle last thing i remember is buckling my helmet putting the buckle on i just put my helmet on and uh so yeah it was an um you know it was a level 7 bmw but it's you know they're bulletproof's not blastproof not definitely not efp proof efp hit um right behind the rear seat so the two boys in the back seat man they were dna'd and uh driver i guess he he died you know eight or ten hours afterwards the um a funny story man like you know talk about small world stuff a few years later i'm running one of the um training courses for the nsa for them for their security guys participating in that and it was into the class everybody got picked and this one young ranger or whatever you know throughout the class we talked about yeah i worked for these people i was in mosul blah blah you know because he's a student he didn't ask until afterwards you know everybody graduated let's go get a you know steak and some beer and he's like hey uh hey tony um did you know that that team of guys the agency team of guys or whatever um up in in mosul that you know they got blown up the whole team died i was like um i mean 2009 and he's like yeah yeah yeah we were up there man we were i was in the range raiser and we helped recover that we were on target for that we were going to do that when they threw me in their strikers they thought i was dead because the reality is right man it blew that car across three lanes it was a main highway one called it broadway we were in the right lane about to make a right turn into the neighborhood where the target was hence why i just buckled my helmet and uh that efp blew that car all the way across three lanes big medians you know the medians are there and stuff right across that across three lanes and down the alleyway yeah hitting other cars right it wasn't a small id and how i live man i can only talk that one up to god you know and um man it hurt the blast injuries hurt i came to in germany and it hurt everything hurt man like i'd say like my fingernails hurt my gut splash gut my lungs i had a demon in my lungs and you know that armored car probably you know clearly saved me blah blah blah but yeah man my whole left side was screwed up freaking just from damage to that brainstem and all that stuff and yeah and that was why you were a contractor because you ended up going back in right yeah i am i what 2012 i was like you know what you know freaking i did these you know this eight years maybe i should go back into guard i could help the next generation right you know what's that thing about good intentions i say that if you get out of the military and then go back in the military it's like taking your car driving it into a parking deck putting in it reverse and then backing over the spikes and blowing your tires on purpose that's what going back in the military is like and i joke i i do joke right so the uh i'll try and keep that in mind because you know all the time i you know those mornings when i wake up like you know i can probably you know call some people rock and roll no i um i i went and so i work for asd advanced skills attachment the group level asd so i get to teach the courses like our cqb course falc and it is worth it but the guard has its own beast right there's like all the bs that you would put up with with the active duty military and then there's the guard it has its own personality its own type of crap and because it is a part-time thing for so many people and the few full times that they full-timers that they have they're trying to manage you know on half staff all these guys who all have problems who are all the most important people in their own lives blah blah luckily i have an amazing admin staff where i work and stuff and they keep it squared away but you know it's still the military and because we're not full time we have to jump out of our asses to do stuff you know the budget blah blah hell alabama national guard sent a bunch of people to d.c after the january 16th the federal government has still not paid alabama back for that right and that's across the board there are national guards across our country that don't have funding to pay people so like some of our full-time guys in october when the fiscal year rolled around last fall lost their jobs for like three weeks it's like what um and these are people with mortgages and families and stuff you know it's their job like oh no we don't have money because you know joe biden don't want to you know send us money right of course you don't actually who signs the budgets congress so is it joe biden's fault or is it our representative's fault i don't know i mean i always go back to this right first page ranger handbook the leader is responsible for everything that does and does not happen on a mission or patrol so anyway um i digress but yeah the guard man it's good i get interact with the young guys only the up and comers share some um lessons learned and uh it's worth it but you know if i go teach stuff out for four weeks i'm back to making army money so you know you lose money doing it and sometimes you ask is it worth it i gotta go put up with this bs and you know whatever um but then i remember like hey man we now have a service full of all the combat vets got out there's no combat veterans left in special forces for the most part right same with the seals man i got some guys from virginia beach that come down and use my long range all young young pups and they're snipers i'm like i thought snipers were supposed to be like the most experienced dudes they're like we are like aren't you like 22 you're like 26. like so you mean to tell me you are one of the most experienced dudes in your platoon when you're in the team you're not 30 yet like yeah man everyone with any experience left i'm like well crap it's the same in the army same in the marine corps so i look like this man i feel a little obligated to give back you know for whatever reason i am still here with all my fingers and toes i still can shoot i still can teach and um man i get down there i can't help it i'm not the dude on the catwalk that's not how i teach i put my kid on and go and and do cqb with the teams and i'm like all right check it out guys and you're doing that as an act as a guard guy yeah and you when did you go back in the guard 2012 2012 did you go on any deployments once you hit 2012. i have it not with them got it yeah that's that doesn't pay good enough i mean you know if you so i weigh it out like this um since i've blown the asd we're not a deploying unit anyway we're training detached um to go do an eight month deployment with sf the return on investment just isn't there for me it doesn't pay well enough it's too long whereas i can do stuff you know with the agency and projects and stuff like that that are shorter and we actually get to do so you've still been contracting the whole time did you go to syria who are you with over there with your contractor yeah what was that like hm i mean it's cool because like i said we're not that would be the wrong i was going to say our roes are different the roes aren't different we have a much more efficient chain of command um i don't have to ask for permission to you know take a potty break whereas you know teams typically to move from here to here have to ask permission we are given a mission we're allowed to go execute we send up sit reps we don't have to ask for permission most of the time you know you know we always have our marketing there's something yeah you know it's not for free for all but we get a mission we go do it a lot of our stuff is you know um you know the aso type stuff the source operations and then afo you know doing the reconnaissance and and um especially with with the delay of the the ground as far as the local population and a lot of promesi type stuff um and you you told me not to do that here i am with an acronym right freaking um prometheus like that that area study of of all the equations that make up a an area whether it's you know population resources and all that sort of thing not not just like combatives right the entire area what's going on in this area so we do a lot of that um and of course we can we need action targets if we need to typically like in syria since we were working in such small elements that you know it was like hey ranger's not doing anything tonight you know you know we got is there an oda around here that can come do this you know where the seals at you know but um yeah man that that that type of work is really cool i've done stuff in haiti and you know we've got a lot of things going on that are i said more more us interest than national defense and one definitely leads to the other right like it's important if you talk to a lot of people like oh we need to withdraw from around the world well if we want to continue to be a superpower we have to continue to influence in a positive way around the world this is why ukraine is so hard to figure out right now my take on ukraine is hey man europe is full of a bunch of really well-powered modern nations it is their ao right yeah with modern militaries very modern militaries right we we help with that russia wants russian land back the parts of the ukrainian really wants i don't and maybe maybe putin i don't know what putin's thinking right like maybe he wants the whole nation but they've shown us since you know even for since 14 when they took or they didn't take crimea right crimea allowed themselves to be annexed there's a big difference the ukraine you know the south and east i mean they're native russians right and that's again americans we're too stupid to know that there is a difference between russians and ukrainians they speak two different languages right and do they a lot of them speak both of course you know it'd be no different than like the border of texas lots of people spoke speak both but there is a clear difference between americans and mexicans right and that's what's happening here in the ukraine nate russia wants it lands back does russia also want a warm water port well yeah russia has wanted a warm water port for decades a century or more now probably longer than that since navies have been navies they've wanted warm water well okay i get it are we at a point in our so we have two things right like this president who is weak clearly could stand up to russia draw a line in the sand and be the heroes and russia doesn't get to invade or we can act tough russia invades we look like a bunch of [ __ ] and now we're obligated to fight that's the wrong answer man american boys and girls don't need to go [ __ ] die in new ukraine the ukraine is one of the most corrupt nations on this planet now that is partly due to russia keeping them that way a corrupt ukraine can't get into nato all right nato's not letting them in in their current state it's just not happening so that's part of it is like oh we want them in nato well if we really wanted them in nato we'd let them join nato three five ten years ago they're not eligible so i mean come on man we gotta you know like there's a difference in messing and meddling and getting ourselves into it and you gotta you know again not a conspiracy theorist but with everything that's going wrong for this administration one can't help but to at least entertain the idea that it's a distraction from all the other crappy mistakes now all of a sudden biden wants to look strong well there's biden and there's putin and i don't think putin is ready to step back from biden i think he's calling his bluff man you know and i don't think that the biden has that hey let's sit down and hash this out type of freaking mentality you know well unfortunately in that case like i unfortunately truthfully i have a hard time thinking that that biden could carry on a logical conversation and negotiation with putin like it just doesn't seem like that's a feasible thing i mean he has a hard time he has a hard time unfortunately as we watch him he has a hard time putting together sentences right i mean putting together legitimate sentences that are prepped for him right that's just reading really really disturbing really really horrible to see and you think he's going to go in with a freaking kgb agent and and be able to carry on a conversation and not get manipulated and take taken advantage of it's very disturbing a kgb agent that for the last 20 years has not been distracted by some wars in the middle east and we have been he's been preparing and preparing for whatever he wants to do while we've been messing about in the middle east yeah and that that's you know talking earlier about iterative decision making here's another bad move when you're in a leadership position is painting yourself into a corner right you know don't paint yourself in the corner the world changes things change right things happen and don't put yourself in a situation where you can't say hey this is the direction we're going now it's a little bit different than we were heading but it's okay because i the whole time was saying i might go in a different direction that's okay and you know what let's say we have this amazing charismatic badass leader which we don't that allows us to look like we're letting russia pay us into a quarter and improve he's got a whole nother plan that would be cool but that's not what's happening that's not what happened right like that's that old what's the uh everybody likes to quote the whole um you know um what's the chinese book uh sun tzu yeah right um i always laugh i'm like whenever somebody wants to uh you know sound like and understand war they're going to quote that guy you know feudal chinese battle and you know war theory okay cool but great some of us have actually participated in war thanks for quoting that um but there is a good the whole thing of you know the ruse appear weak when you're strong you know appear strong when you're weak right like always give missed signals to your um to your enemy and adversaries yeah that's not what we're doing our adversary is clearly understand that we have a very broken leader i don't even want to say lee weak because i would say that probably a biden as goofball as he has been throughout his career you know biden in the 80s and 90s was a a definitely an intelligent person right um that guy as a president probably could have been decisive but despite we have today it's just an an old broken person um and any of that you know i talk about term limits how about a retirement age that we're not at this point yeah i mean we have 80 plus year olds running our country and i always ask people yeah would you trust your 85 year old grandma to walk your dog right like put that into perspective what would you trust your 85 year old your 80 year old grandparents with and i'm sure there are plenty of outliers right there are 100 years old out there that are brilliant outliers never prove a rule military's retirement as a retirement age every industry has a retirement age our government 65 why are our justices why are our representatives why is our president allowed what i mean it's socially acceptable to have a retirement age on these things you know and of course dark moments but it it it scares me that we are literally at a point right now where this this president and this administration could lead us into a world war and we're not ready for it i mean i'm sure don't get me wrong i mean how many weeks would it take for american soldiers and sailors to get ready yeah the military is ready for it the military's ready technically to fight of course right but are we ready to start losing people in ukraine which a lot of people couldn't even figure out where it is on a map that we don't understand we don't care about that much against russia who's russia so who's ready for that when you say who's ready i'd say we're ready to fight of course but are we ready to go and die and kill a bunch of people that we don't know and civilians that are going to die as well it's like we may want to think through that a little bit i'm all for helping our allies right that's a good thing we need a strong bunch of allies but the ukraine has known for well over a decade right that putin wanted that land back so my question is what has the ukraine what has ukraine i've been told that you're not supposed to call it the ukraine yeah do you know why because ukraine i guess it means frontier and if you say the frontier which is the ukraine that's the frontier of russia so calling it the frontier that's that's really happening okay that's where that is from somebody told me like in a comment on social media that it's not the ukraine it's just ukraine okay sorry i don't know that i'm not purposely trying to diminish that nation uh no intent implied um yeah i don't know jacob man it's it's it's so frustrating it's like we have all these problems and i again i'm not the i'm not the guy that says hey we have to completely withdraw from the rest of the world now we we have to be involved yeah that's not to maintain our status but like to just to go meddle with the ukraine when they've done very little to prepare themselves for this date which they knew was coming they've done nothing to get their allies in europe to help them they've you know like hey and again any of these situations any of these situations around the world just to say oh we're not going to get involved with any anyone anymore that's not a good move no that's not that's not a good move it's a good move to say well okay what's happening what would make sense let's try this approach let's see what happens with this approach if this approach works cool we'll continue to invest in that approach if that approach isn't working we'll say you know what we didn't realize that there's a bunch of different because ukraine's got all kinds of different factions in there oh we didn't realize that we we we looked at it a little bit too broad and we thought ukraine was ukraine it was ukraine against russia doesn't really look like it's that anymore uh we're gonna stand down right or we're gonna back away or we're gonna really support this group that we know is now come to the surface as being the the prominent power there okay instead of saying what we're saying right now like we don't understand what's happening fully and we can't predict the future so don't don't over index on things that you can't predict don't do that in anything right well and also let's influence clearly we are still a superpower with tons of influence even if our european allies don't respect our current leader he still brings to the table an immense amount of tools that he can use to sway them hey look oh hey britain you guys don't want to back us up with whatever we want to do we're going to cut such and such off oh hey germany right all those things because those eastern blot man they all love us right you know there's there are there are two allies now you've got oh you know the brits the french and germans who are kind of they've been flipping their middle finger up to us quite a bit for the last 10 years okay guys that's your stance cool we're going to continue to be friends with romania and hungary and lithuania estonia yeah we're going to back them up because they're they're on the line with russia you guys screw you guys take care of yourselves for a little while right just like trump wanted to pull funding from nato like you guys are gonna start funding this right he took a little bit hard line with our allies like hey we're gonna treat you guys like adults now we're gonna cut some of your funding you guys are gonna start contributing that's not a horrible approach right accountability uh own it right you guys want nato you like nedo don't you right you guys like that security of having us backing you up from across the pond just like we did in world war ii yeah y'all know so check it out here's some new rules we're gonna play by you know we've been funding this thing we're gonna take a step back we're gonna let you guys take the lead for a little while see how you do with it right there's nothing wrong with that no and i think trump was trying to do that i don't you know um and you know let's face it those leaders in in those countries man they they they led the way they're they are the binds ahead of biden europe america likes to think we lead the way with everything like we led away with this crazy goopy leftist presidency and all this stuff no man europe was way ahead of us on that stuff their leaders right have been crazy liberals for freaking you know five ten years now they they definitely got to jump on that for us you know not that that's a good thing so until we just take a step back and say hey guys deal with it i do think you know clearly in this case war with russia what would china man you're talking something that would affect the entire world and be so expensive for all parties right putin here's the reality putin doesn't want war with us it would destroy his country have the money for it exactly so choke them out oh that means cutting off that pipeline we told them they could have [ __ ] that's going to mean we have to freaking admit we were wrong sanctions russia can't afford and even more so right like if the rest of the world distances themselves from russia stops and then in russia standing there with a china that's kind of their ally but also trying to shove them out of the way at the same time in iran that's your friends putin the rest of the world is kind of tired of y'all's crap and they go back to behaving right and ultimately again root cause why does russia want this why does russia want it we just identify that we can cut them off at the knees it's just so frustrating man and again you know always step back and say you know what i don't know everything i don't i don't i don't get to peek behind that curtain right like clearly biden or whoever's running our country um vice president harris they know way more than i do so i'm always going to give any administration a little bit of benefit of a doubt right like you know i always i i hated growing up in the military where some key leader would be like well you just don't understand the big picture and then as i got older i realized that i don't understand the big thing they didn't understand it either dude yeah of course they didn't either right like that was their way of saying like yeah we don't really know what the hell is going on either but now that i'm older i do have an acceptance that i don't have the big picture and i never will right none of us will ever know what the president of the united states knows right like there's no security clearance out there that touches what that guy gets to know or that gal presumably one day um no so you as us as the guys who work for that commander-in-chief always have to kind of sit back and go okay they know more than us so i always try to keep that in reserve you know like that to keep me from creating assumptions and assertions that is realizing that my assumptions and my assertions are always going to be less informed right right yeah they've got massive intel networks briefing every day sources all over the world like they got some they got some information right still i like to think that they do some good stuff with it me too i'm like please god um because right now man what we've gotten ourselves into is scary and again and especially like you talking about china what if china makes a move on taiwan now like they're not sitting over there going oh well if america's clear ukraine the withdrawal from afghanistan is what set this stage right like i don't know anybody except for like some staunch left supporters of i don't even know if there's any biden supporters left but there are the the democrats right who are just never going to say that they were wrong for voting for him or that he anything they've done is wrong right this is how our system works but the reality is any objective synthetic thinker knows that this all started with our withdrawal from afghanistan and the weakness that was just you know sent out across the world worldwide so what was the or was there a straw that broke the camel's back that made you say i'm i'm gonna go and run cause i mean let's face it here you are how old you say you are just turned 46 just turned 46 you got businesses you got a cool woman in your life you got a a nice place to live or whatever yeah seems like you could be going into actual literal retirement mode yeah like instead of enjoying your life mode right and that's where i was at and i've been working towards it pretty hard you know even living in wilmington drove me insane stop lights and traffic and you know hey just i flew in yesterday because you know melissa and i bought 62 acres about an hour outside of wilmington you know it came with three donkeys and chickens and fenced in pastures and we turn our dogs loose and i mean if i want to walk around my yard naked you know what i mean it's that type of country you know it's the same way i grew up and i think you know whether that's genetic or not i've always craved it i like to be in places where it's just quiet you know growing up on the coast you know the water and then because of a dare um or someone talking smack i went to dive school wound up on a dive team i wanted to be on the mountain team i went to afghanistan and fell in love with the mountains because before afghanistan i had done some training in colorado but not really enough to fall in love with the mountains and the thin air and all that well we went to afghanistan man and i was just man you know i remember looking around like in tora bore and stuff and and you know um like wow this would be some amazing snowboarding like what are they doing here you know and at the time i didn't realize that it actually was a destination back in the 60s yeah my stepmother and her friends all went to kabul in the late 60s to smoke weed yeah my stepmother is she was uh it's so funny my mom being a north carolina girl country girl farm girl my grandfather was a farmer um and then my stepmother's from out here oh yeah she was from like uh uh oh i should say oh where was she forget her hometown but um um between here in l.a and uh so she was like a hippie a little bit in the 60s turned into i mean if she was traveling to africa smoking popular 60s but not like uh not like an anti-government hippie just like a california young girl you know whatever and so cool stories you know and i had no idea there was that part of afghanistan that it was actually very western and modern during the 60s you know kabul you look at pictures there's you know the roads are nice it's clean people are smiling you know so anyway yeah man i'm just not into the city you know that i would these days you put me behind a tractor or a combine i gotta go six mile an hour for 10 miles no stress i'm not even gonna whatever you know i don't care because living out there i'm rarely in a hurry i have days that i have work to do and clients and guys to shoot with in classes but on my days off man i'm my boss you know and don't get me wrong i can be my own kind of a pain in my ass but i'm flexible with my time so no stress you know um got out of the city everything's awesome it sucks for melissa because she drives almost an hour every day one way to her but you know she's she's chill um you know she loves to listen to her podcast and all that kind of stuff and you know she's a dentist so she works four days a week and um so friday she gets to go and do whatever she wants or whatever so you know before we did it you know i was like hey are you sure because our price is cute man and i found it by accident i just happened to be driving down that road took a different route home one day and uh saw the for sale sign pulled off the side of the road put up google maps you could kind of see the property lines i was like ooh called the realtor man we closed on it so yeah you know there are days where like my most intelligent conversation is with a couple of donkeys and some dogs i don't even see people you know my nearest neighbor well my nearest nearest neighbor is like some methods that live like i don't know half a mile through the woods um we basically have an agreement that um they set up my business and you know i started their business and their trailer doesn't burn down right um you know how meth cook houses sometimes you know catch on fire so we're good you know we're good every now and then i'll wake up and like you know i can hear their music playing at like four in the morning or something but other than that they don't mess with me i don't mess with them they're just redneck meth heads and then the other neighbor man it's kind of cool she lives like 1.2 miles away and she's completely deaf so she can't hear the range other than that no one lives within two miles of us you know so we get out there and shoot and shoot no one cares so it's real cool man yeah so we were planning on moving to idaho as the costs were going up we're starting to look at montana as well because a couple years ago montana being really expensive idaho was still like all right and the cool thing about idaho for me is while the rockies aren't as high there they're not they'll have the same elevation and say colorado or wherever idaho is like 60 public land lots of hunting access and um i i like hunting but i like being on those mountains man you know just it's quiet most time it's just me and melissa but um yeah man we we'd found a couple different places we were looking at one place very seriously in idaho city just north idaho city and uh all right and then everything in america started happening because man that's where i was at you know my business is doing great i mean melissa's a dentist so like or she ready to pull chalks too yeah yeah and for her to do that's kind of a big deal like um you know clearly like i said i can i can pack a backpack and a duffel bag and move you know grab some guns out of the safe let's go um she clearly you know i mean she you know she's got 18 or 19 employees all females um now it's always fun because they've always got something going on you know i don't want to call it drama because that would be dismissing it but the dynamics in that office are always fun to listen to you know because i have team dynamic stuff and then i get to listen to melissa about her team dynamics and it's like a lot of the same stuff that we would deal with only with a a hint of you know the lady stuff you know and i'm like wow i don't envy her at all because at least like on a team man in theory you could always go out back and sort it out you know at least go in there and put the gloves on and sort that [ __ ] out right she doesn't have that option so yeah man um we were really close to pulling the trigger on moving and we had talked about it for years like our first date that we claim is our first date right we were when she and i met she and her boyfriend just broke up me and the girl i was dating had just broke up and we were real skeptical of each other we'd known each other from the gym and kind of looked at each other like i don't know who's that punk who's that punk you know both very strong personalities she's her own boss same with me i've been a boss for a while now i don't really and that dynamic was just so interesting as we came together we kind of kept it quiet that we were seeing each other so our kind of our announcement to all of our friends and you know how a gym can be everyone's friends from the gym and um we did a hike across the bob marshall wilderness out in montana right but it wasn't supposed to be a hike across it was supposed to be a loop back to the car two days 20 some miles well that night we hit our turnaround point we woke up in the morning and there was smoke everywhere largest forest fire ever in the flathead national forest and the bob marshall was inside the flathead uh oh now what so now we are running from a forest fire all the way across the bob marshall so it was like 70 or so miles and we didn't even have the food for it and right now in the console of my truck or protein bars they're not mine they're for her her favorite protein bars because the last thing anyone wants is for melissa to get hungry angry is she a hangry woman so melissa is uh melissa is half german and half japanese i live with the axis powers keeping her fed is a priority i'm telling you man and it's not like a gradual descent everything's cool and now she just wants to tear your throat and you don't know it yeah and you don't even know it's coming i'm like i'm blissfully you know like dude you know i'm not real crazy or anything about my diet anymore right like my thing is like i just you know i started getting older started not having abs as much so i just quit eating breakfast and lunch simple some people call that intermittent fasting i call it screw it less calories um no fancy diet names here and uh no dude she needs to eat so we have to keep her fed but yeah uh we run out of food running across to bob marshall so you're one day in when the forest fire hits and how many what's the total day uh we wound up doing it in uh all in in two and a half two and three quarters days and seventy something miles man we had to go across the continental device like you gotta climb like nine thousand feet in like a mile and a half it's like zig zig zig i remember going up the the um the zigzags right the switchbacks and i remember looking up the trail would go here to here and on the trail right there were three or four mule deer and i was looking up at their bellies like right there but i could still almost touch them like this anyway i blessed her hartman on that trip across the bottom marshall she learned how to read a topic map freaking was running the gps she'd never done that stuff before she didn't i mean she'd been ice climb mountain climb hiked in all kinds of national forests her and her buddy from dental school were like adventurous young ladies out in some cases they tell me stories i'm like that was dumb and dangerous you could have been one of those missing person stories and they're like yeah probably well anyway just that type of person man and um we had to cross the white river and it's in august so it's snowmelt you know and man i made a huge mistake freaking so because she's so physically fit but dude she's she's 120 maybe 125 pounds at this time and i'm like oh this is a good place to cross this river i mean it's rolling it's like knee-deep to me that's halfway her quads i gotta cross drop my pack and i could see she was struggling right and i'm pretty sure footed i've been in the woods backpacks walking stick she's got a walking stick but it's scattered we're starting to leverage her off and man i got back out there and you know the rocks under that water slick and i'm like get out there man and i put my hand on her backpack and she slipped we went in the drink all right i was lucky i got underneath her and man it was like that whole push her up get me some air go back under and then i got scuffed up my whole backside my knees this whole side just beat up she's got her pack on so she's pretty protected or whatever and luckily there's a curve in the river because a couple hundred meters on down this way is the salmon river if we'd gone in that go through those little bit of falls and into that river we would have died right luckily little curve man it washed us up on the shore and we kind of crawled out laid there warm in the afternoon but man the water was cold real cold and like cold enough to where i'm bleeding and scuffed up but i can't feel it and i'm like oh i'm gonna be sore this is gonna suck she rolls over and looks at me she's like oh you saved my life and i was like yeah we're going to go with that story because i picked that river crossing man i almost killed her almost killed that girl man and i will never yeah it it spooks me even talking about it right freaking and because who would have believed afterwards that i chose that river crossing right they'd be like oh he did that on purpose he drowned that girl but no we were new and i was like oh i'm in love with this chick and stuff and i it horrified me that i had made such a stupid decision just stupid but we were running from a forest fire whatever freaking haste all that i did learn that she's not one of us you know i still have to be careful she's smaller so on and so forth anyway man we get across there whatever freaking that was like our first date coming out of the closet as far as us dating and stuff and man it was ever since then every vacation we took was to the mountains she she wants to climb everest which clearly puts me in an interesting position because i don't give a damn about climbing everest but i can't just let my girlfriend now right i'm like i guess i'm gonna have to go up there too or i just suck it up and say hey honey i'm gonna wait for you in a base camp freaking hang out with these potheads and freaking i'll talk to you on the radio are you dead no you're good keep going right summit that thing but now so we start climbing the 14ers in colorado so we're doing that stuff man just falling in love with the mountains point being is we want to move to the mountains her best friend from dental schools in colorado or originally talking about going to colorado and then it got a little california on us um lots of public hunting land there one of two states left that you can get over the counter tags for elk no big deal um and if you leave denver boulder right go up anywhere freaking it's still dodge trucks with bumpers you know it's still diesel pickups and good old ranch boys you know so i would do collar if you want it but we kind of figured on on i know a bunch of my friends moved to idaho and probably a bunch of your friends have moved to idaho it's like the where everybody's going it's the last conservative holdout i guess well we were that close man we were getting ready to pull the trigger on moving and like i said a big deal for her with her practice and then everything started happening the pandemic the weirdness it's it got to the point where like i was like wow one year ago if you'd asked me how long it was going to take for us to get right here i would have said 20 years but somehow the u.s got put on fast forward to its you know progressive decline and every nation has it right history tells us every culture fails and we have some very distinct parallels to the last greatest culture right the last greatest um city-state rome right the roman empire you know huge debt a nation and culture founded on slavery on the backs of slaves right there are many parallels a nation who cared more about entertaining themselves than protecting their borders right it's some spooky parallels and i'm like and then i'm talking to my very good friend ellario pontano ellario if you google him he was the marine in fallujah that shot and killed two terrorist dirtbags and then was charged with their murders lieutenant type um so you know he um his platoon he had lost some boys today before so he was an enlisted guy scout sniper was working on wall street 911 happened doing great for himself and his family smart guy um real smart dude and 911 happened and he got back in and then in fallujah man you know for killing two very clearly terrorists right remember fallujah get out or fight us anybody that stays you're a bad guy and they were bad guys they had weapons in the trunk so on and so forth what got weird for uh you can look his story up but bottom line they charged him with murder two counts of it and for how many months of his life he was having to defend himself against the nation that he's so much loved and went to war for well illario ran for congress in 2010 and 2012. i bet right before then 2008 timeframe when i opened my gym so i watched and and as he was running i was still very apolitical wasn't really interested so on and so forth the primaries didn't work out for him they were fighting him and another fellow who is now the incumbent a guy named david rouser they were fighting for that area and what they were really fighting was a 30-some year democrat incumbent well between the two of them they did finally oust him and but david rouser bested illario in the primaries he just had more pool in one highly populated segment of that district and you know david came out the winner um since then you know l'oreal he became the director of veterans affairs and stuff for north carolina long story short man just you know has dedicated his life to trying to take care of service members and uh just just a great guy but last easter day we're sitting on the tailgate in my truck out of the range and we're just chatting he took a job at syracuse university and was living up in syracuse down visiting and we were just chatting about things the nation the state of it and so on and so forth and i was like hey man so [Applause] i was thinking about potentially maybe dude he hops off the tailgate and he's like he can get excited you know like when he gets inside he's really excited he's like yes if there's ever a time it's 20 22 the nation's ready for it the climate needs you it's this this he just got he didn't even let me finish he knew what i was going to say and which i thought was pretty cool because i don't necessarily think i you know broadcast something like that especially something so out of that field for me but he just had a feeling and it was funny because it's easter day and he's like you know what i was like well i'm just kicking around i'm not sure he's like it's easter day and there's it's clearly god sent me here today to tell you that you must absolutely do this and i'm sitting there going not really where i thought this was gonna go but now i'm like all right all right so if he feels this strongly about it he's the first person that i've even mentioned it to maybe this is something i should look at and at the time i'm still like i just want to move to idaho i just want to go hunting that's going to be left alone mind my own business then i realized that the reason we're where we're at is because dudes like me have been minding our own damn business while the left has rallied protested organized and executed a subversion campaign that the world like the world's never seen before right a very successful subversion campaign and uh so fast forward a little bit so that was easter day lauria puts me in contact with the folks who are now my consultant team and all that we start kind of exploring all right let's come up with some courses of action see if they're viable let's see if this works well north carolina and the census picks up an extra an additional an extra an additional seat so we had 13 now we're gonna have 14 uh representatives u.s house of representatives yeah man um so we're like okay let's just we're gonna have to wait and see because right now i live in that same district with the incumbent david rouser and by all means a pretty squared away dude um he hasn't he hasn't done anything to really upset anybody he's not a rhino i wouldn't say he's like you know the champion of all things patriotic america either but what he has then is take care of his district which is agriculture yeah i think he's probably going to become the lead on the agriculture committee at least that's what i've heard um well so we decided hey look if i'm going to run i'm going to have to wait to see the new districts because challenging rouser is probably a losing thing i'm not doing america any good challenging an opponent that can't be be that's not a good strategy right and you know especially a guy that's doing what he's supposed to do representing his district that's right i am all for challenging republican incumbents that suck they need to go right and i've said numerous times re-elect no one re-elect no one but the reality is there are still some good dudes up there who need some backup they need a qrf right so the new districts come out and the county i live in and a couple others to include cumberland county fayetteville fort bragg harnett county this little block this almost a square right in the middle of north carolina mostly rural and i live in it and it's got fed all fort bragg i'm like oh okay now we're making sense and no incumbent damn right like it's ready made it's just sitting there ready for me to go whoo i'm gonna run for congress so we announced man and um we'd already put it together we're ready right we're just waiting on those districts and it was like okay this this makes sense right i can do this and and hopefully go do some be part of positive change help correct this trajectory i joke that it's like a 308 trajectory and we're trying to make it like a like a you know a 375 enabler trajectory you know let's let's let's let's flatten this curve a little bit not the pandemic curve let's like flatten this trajectory curve that america has been placed on by crazy socialists um so yeah man it happened we said okay cool this makes sense but you asked like the straw that broke the camel's back man i'm not usually a super sentimental type person or whatever but that my father passed last summer we held his memorial service over july the fourth weekend my niece my older sister's daughter like i said motor sister is a very successful uh pediatric pediatric endocrinologist my niece has never known what it's like to miss a meal um she doesn't know suffering and in a lot of ways i'm kind of that guy's like this next generation sucks and these boys need to learn how to change the oil in their car all right i mean we all get into that sometimes we're like man this next gen is just weak but i'm looking at my knees so is this beautiful young lady lacrosse player she's almost six foot tall stud freaking a gear ahead in school super intelligent right um not only is my sister you know more aggressive than me she's a brilliant mind so her son and her daughter got some of this well anyway they come to the house my niece is playing you know she's my sister's in biotech so she lives in boston so my niece is a city kid so she's out on my you know property riding the four-wheeler playing with the dogs freaking throwing you know the dummies into the pond for the the retriever and i'm just looking at her and like she's never known what it's like to not have wi-fi that level of luxury right like that's america i mean even the poorest people in america today have it pretty good like homeless people in america you know have it pretty good you know we take care of even our poorest but i'm looking at her i'm just like huh she's never known what it's like like since she's been able to use a smartphone they've had wi-fi on airplanes i was like i don't want to i don't want her to ever know what it's like not to live in that type of luxury i don't want her to live in what western mosul looked like in 2005 2006 and then for the whole entire nineveh to be burned to the ground and crushed and the indigenous folks of nineveh city to be murdered by isis right like i don't want her to know an america at war with itself and if we keep on this trajectory that is a potential course and that scares the [ __ ] out of me and i don't know that any of us will be alive to see that type of demise of our culture but she might be right she's 16 years old and that was a day that i was like all right let's do it july the fourth weekend last year and it wasn't because it was july the fourth weekend it just happened right this is kind of a i guess a cool story and i'm not a very sentimental type person or whatever but it was about my knees it was the weekend that we memorialized my father's life and i was like okay eight years is all i'll do that that will put me at 55 years old and then i'll retire and i was hopefully if i can continue the path that i'm on i would maintain physical fitness and at 55 i'll still be fit enough to go hunt whatever crazy animal i want to chase around the mountain but i was like you know what it if not me then who i'm at a place where i can like i said me and melissa don't have children and you know as well as i do right like overseas i i had different times in my life where i wouldn't take a married guy with kids on my team i would take that young ranger because i know he wasn't distracted i built a team there for a while that was just there were some scary young men they had no distractions i have sent men home for being on the phone too often too late arguing with their spouses hey go go home sort it out i'll see you in a few weeks or bro hey man i understand if you don't want to come back go take care of your family but you don't get to be here running operations with us while you got that distraction on your on your mind so i don't have kids man i can go and go to dc and be fully invested right while another person like me who might be considering a run that has has two kids they need to go to a ballet concert or a ballet recital a concert or a band concert or a soccer game or a lacrosse game or a football game or whatever you'll be sitting at your desk i can get to work yeah you'll be making [ __ ] happen oh the whole desk image just ruined it probably can we not put me behind a desk um yeah you know i was joking i was like um i want to make c-span the most watched news network oh i like that i want people yeah i want people to like be tuning in to see it like okay what in the world has tony and so this is kind of cool right aoc in that weird bunch they call them the squad right clearly not an infantry squad so myself jay collins is a seventh grouper uh who's running in florida he's an amputee he's a stud man stud of studs and uh so he's running down in florida he's doing really well as well we were joking that hey man if they can have the squad we'll be the jtf the joint task force right and that's the thing man we're trying really hard to get off america yeah jtf america that's a caucus right the jtf caucus the veterans college whatever you want to cause right but yeah man that that is how i made that decision as like you know hey man there is an entire generation of america that that that needs to be taken care of that needs to be set up for success and i feel like it's my generation the the you know the the 40 the 60 year olds right now who have failed this last generation and allowed all this to happen because we were just hard-working conservatives that minded our own damn business and by minding our own damn business we elected these spineless cowards that went to dc and sold us out time after time again compromised our rights away right everybody's heard to say and conservatives haven't conserved a damn thing because conservatives are good people and they think dealing with the left is a is is a rational thing the problem is the left are not rational people they only want what they want and they're not going to compromise the right just keeps compromising bit by bit by bit every single right that we hold dear they let it go piece by piece by peace and that's how this nation can fall right there's clearly no nation on this planet it's going to invade us right and get anywhere you know the old there's a gun behind every blade of grass right the japanese knew they weren't hitting this mainland right china knows they can't same with russia the only way we can fall is if we allow it and we have allowed this country to get where it's at and when i say we i mean us all of us good people it's our fault i mean i made him post on social a couple weeks ago a week ago whenever it was and i i tired of um you know the biggest problem in america question one it's us right it's us not being involved i ask people who who's your representative what district do you live in who's your county commissioners are you involved in the local gop are you we're not man we're not and all the while the democrats are organized super organized we're not and that's how we lose we don't even vote the average voter in a primary on the republican conservative side it's 57 years and older young conservatives are not involved and and part of that problem is is a lot of young people in this next generation they they don't realize that posting comments and and things on social media it's not real action right and i'm not even being funny about it it used to be it used to be kind of a joke that you know like okay you think fighting on the internet it's not like a real fight no man it's like they really they have begun equating saying things on the internet as if it's a real thing that somehow influences right because we use the term influencers you're not influencing a damn thing you know even with the little bit of followers i have on instagram i ask people i beg i say i am pleading with you please go join your local gop how do we get involved tony go join your local gmp and well how do i do that okay once you get on your phone and i want you to pull up google or whatever search engine you're using these days i want you to type in your county's name and the letters gop or republican party and you will find their website and you will find out that they have monthly meetings and you'll go there and you'll find out that on average there's only 30 people there no one and they are the conservative like bras they want to be involved but they're the ones that will tell you like in north carolina they want 15 000 volunteers to watch the polls to sit at the polls 15 000 people it's not enough that's a very very low number they probably need double that because early voting two and a half weeks long oh right you gotta have people watch the polls for four hour shifts two shifts per day you need two people per shift at least right the the need is there and you know always i was joking this generation if they want something just like our generation too if we want something and we want to participate in something and it becomes our hobby man we know everything about it because we youtube it and we google it and we and we it's all right here everything you want to know everything known to mankind except for classified information and some of that is all right here it's in the phone right so if you want to know how to get involved man it's right here and when you go and you talk to those people at those meetings yeah man they're the fanatics they're the really passionate conservative republicans who really do want to change that republican party in the image of the old gop the rhinos and all that if you go to these gop meetings man they're mad at the republican party they're the republican party and they're mad at the republican party they want to get rid of the rhinos they're they're the people who want to renovate that party because you know i hear people say um you know maybe we need a third party okay that's not a viable course of action america's not ready for it it would take the democrats and the republicans getting together and deciding that the third party was a good thing deciding to surrender whatever power that does they're not gonna do power is like uh matter it never goes away it can be transferred right and we have transferred willingly power throughout our nation's history right a good example is when we gave minorities the right to vote right so we are capable of doing we gave women the right to vote right so we have transferred power willingly typically speaking throughout not american human history power's transferred because it's taken it's rarely given but that's what makes america special is that we have given power willingly in an effort to create this amazing country you know but yeah man freaking uh you know it it's going to take us getting involved the biggest problem on this planet is today is it or in america today that's going to continue to lead us down this path and not change the trajectory is us minding our own business and i get it man you got a job you got a couple kids and if you don't get involved right because what happens when you go to the gop when your 8 10 and 14 year old see you getting involved what are they going to grow up to do it's setting the example right set the example to exceed the standards all that military leadership talk it's not [ __ ] you know i know you know it's not [ __ ] you wrote an entire book about it a couple of them right you know setting the example for your children is not just making sure they're taken care of right we we have got to get involved and if we don't man well like i said our adversary they're very involved they're organized and they're scary i ask people i'm like name one thing the left has wanted in the last six years they haven't gotten one is complete reversal of the second amendment why because there's a bunch of people out there with guns that ain't gonna let it happen other than that every niche special interest they've ever wanted they've gotten it and now it's like they're just bored looking for [ __ ] you know what i mean like the transgender is freaking in college sports like all right we're just going to make up some stuff that actually goes against our whole feminist movement like it's like they're bored like we got everything we want what else can we take from them but they're going to continue to take because whether or not most lefts truly want communism there are enough folks out there that do that believe that communism is the right path well the rest of them will follow because they actually have leaders right you mean you tell me hillary clinton is not an effective leader i'm not saying she's a good leader i'm saying she's an effective leader right like putin is an effective leader he's not a good person she's definitely not a good person she's effective and one thing hillary clinton hadn't gotten that she wanted presidency and i don't know that she's done yet scary [ __ ] man well we fighted that one out soon uh i'm hopefully i got a i got a factory down in asheboro north carolina i think it's the sixth district hopefully at some point when i cut down there in the next several months we can link up definitely and hang out you gotta come check out the factory for sure i haven't been there yet but um actually we have two factories we're consolidating in the process of consolidating right now but uh hundreds of jobs for hard-working people funny thing man that district i think because we've had so many changes that is probably the district that christian castanelli is going to run in he's one of those eight gbs lieutenant colonel type seventh grouper uh you know chatted quite a bit and um it's gonna be a real tough race for him as well he had more counting and now they redistrict again and and like i said it could redistrict another time it's going to the courts this week it's frustrating uh and it's you know do you know right now which where you're running for right now okay but it could change so yeah it was that new fourth which was samson county uh johnson county a little bit of wayne county harnett county and cumberland county and now it's the new new 13th and that's duplin county sampson county johnson county a little bit of wayne county and southern wake county and it's so weird because these new districts they don't hold communities together it was like again it was a the republicans were trying to make the dems happy get some stuff pushed through that would actually work meet all the numbers because the districts have to have equal numbers right and to do that it you know you've got to get a city in here and a part of a city over there and it's not like it's like okay just pick this region you know it's more complex than that so this new district again man and like i said this goes back to republicans trying to make the democrats happy the democrats suckered him again they so we have an activist very left-leaning supreme court in north carolina and so when these new districts they ch the democrats challenged them it went to the supreme court they booted them they had to rewrite them so they rebuilt them the house did a set and i like that map pretty good this new one i don't dislike it it's just not my favorite because i lost cumberland county i want to represent fayetteville for brag yeah it's it's kind of personal so the um this week they have to go to a three panel court three judge panel in the court and that's two conservatives one liberal it will get the thumbs up there most likely the democrats will challenge it again but the the shasti like sinister part is when they were building these maps it was bipartisan in the senate and in the house both parties working together they created these maps dems gave them a thumb up it went in a vote dems all voted against it suckers now what because it's divided half and half and one republican voted with the democrats that sets the precedents for it to go to the court and then toss it out they can be like look y'all don't even agree on it it's clearly bipartisan this is supposed to be or is clearly partisan they set them up again it's like you guys are bending over backwards when are you just going to draw the line in the sand they could draw the line in the sand and take it to the you know u.s house or u.s supreme court that's expensive and it takes a fight and time lots of time and they're worried about the time because we've already pushed our primaries back from march to may they're probably going to get pushed back to june now that's getting closer and closer to the general election in november they could in theory move that right that you know that november election date is not a hard set date the state can choose a different day they could push it to january but that cuts off the whole next cycle that pushes into the next cycle what do you do now and we're in such uncharted territory and i just don't have faith that the republicans right now know how to deal with this fight um and the democrats almost like i said it's almost like they're just trying to see what they can get away with but they're panicking the democrats know right what's coming in this med terms so these new our new districts they are so close to any other year they would most of them be 50 50 splits they could go either way they'd all be swinging districts but because of this anticipated red wave there they set them up it looks more like they set them up on purpose to be republican very much favor the republicans and of course did they well certainly but the north carolina constitution says it is the role duty responsibility of the general assembly to set the districts so of course it's going to be partisan right because rarely if ever is your house and senate 50 50. right it just doesn't happen so there's a whole constitutional battle here and um state constitution and i think people really understand how important your state constitution is right like when our government was set up it was supposed to be you know all these states these nations of the united states and we've gotten away from that the federal government's gotten too big and that's one of my big things man like hey let's return that federal government let's put it back in its constitutionally limited box and put the lid back on it because that monster has climbed out of that box and gone all over the place and i would say like heck man if you could simply attempt let's say we got a 70 solution on getting our federal government back to its constitutional limitations we would solve over half of america's problems with the federal government just return it to what that constitution says i don't know man they i just feel like too often folks up in dc they use the constitution as toilet paper instead of reading it for exactly what it stated it's it's heartbreaking man [Applause] well like you said it's going to be a battle um it is a battle i know you mentioned about how to what to do for people to get to help out you know locally where they're at how can people i think this is probably a pretty good place to wrap up because we've been going for over four hours but if people want to support you um we got tony cowden.com right that's the main that is the campaign website the campaign website um you're on instagram you just said mm-hmm tony underscore cowden underscore four the letter four or excuse me the number four is there a letter for no number four nc and then i have two facebook pages my personal tony cotton and then um the campaign tony accountant they're both me all right and then you've got a youtube channel which i saw yeah i don't do much with it i was gonna say you have one video yeah but you know i don't wanna uh i think i've got like freaking three tony tony gets after so i don't know maybe tonight you're gonna post from 87 videos i don't know yeah i uh youtube's just never been my favorite for whatever reason um and i've had numerous youtube channels right i've got the one right now like you said it's got like a couple videos maybe on it and then like but you know youtube was a big thing when i had the gym i had lots of videos on it and just something happened where with the whole shooting gun thing instagram became my main platform and as much as i i don't really like social i don't like the whole idea of it i mean i'd much rather go back to just you know but the it seemed that at least the evolution of it all i don't know if it was even by design that yeah the instagram page was what grew and funneled me business whereas when i had the gym facebook i mean it's called facebook so local so now i'm having to get back after facebook because the campaign is very local got it but yeah man the reality is and this sucks man because i've spent my entire life being pretty independent i i've never had to ask anybody for money and it's weird the reality of this whole mess and it is a mess because there needs to be campaign finance reform the reality is if the campaign's not funded i don't get to advertise and there's no face or there's no recognition there's a name face recognition and i won't get the votes and you know strategically speaking you know we're addressing you know fundraising talking to donors and then there are voters and they're not always the same people we've done really well so far the soft bro net just like you having me on here been on a bunch of different other guys and when i launched that soft network man just started sharing it and we raised 132 grand in like 13 days over christmas and that's what got people going well wait who's this dude where's this guy coming from and you know there's always this the there's some contention that oh you're not getting your funds from the district well i don't even know where the district is you know how hard it is to get someone to donate to your campaign when they don't even know if you live in their district or not yeah you think the democrats don't know that of course they do right what they're doing is creating voter apathy where it's like whatever so they won't donate and they're not going to go vote it's a strategy it's not new i've done it before so yeah man this is where you know that's that's the asking for money thing is hard but here's the cool part that 132 000 the number one num the number one donated amount was 50 we had 1600 or 1500 individual donors from across the nation all 50 states over christmas when people don't have extra income because they're spending on their christmas presents donating this campaign that's a clear signal or it should be a clear signal to the folks up in dc and everywhere else that the american public is tired of their [ __ ] excuse my language but that's what it is and they they want normal people i don't know if i fall in that category that well or not they want real people who have never sought out politics you know uh before we got on i was joking and telling you about the um my opponent who's a state house rep and they they call him the al gore of north carolina politics because he sold out those kind of taxpayers and sent tax dollars all around the nation to invest in green energy and so on and so forth long story short he didn't like it i think i might have been with andy stump when i referred to him as the al gore of north carolina politics well the reality is that's what they call him right like he's a north carolina member of north carolina house and all of his contemporaries they all call him that right he didn't like him well the other day he charged up to me and it was you know he's like you know and ultimately i was like hey look man you know he you can say whatever you want but you sent that money out and he told me he told me i was an ignorant wannabe and i was like like i said i might be ignorant to how and why y'all do things as dirty-ass politicians i was like but i'm not a wannabe like you created me men like you are the reason why men like me are coming for your jobs we hired you you suck so now we're gonna fire you and that's what america wants right now all right it's clear america wants and like i said man we get that jtf up there dude so yeah 10 bucks right all right 100 bucks i mean if you got 2 900 that is the max contribution i can stand some of those because that that new district's more expensive but southern wake county raleigh that advertising is it's way more expensive sure that market right a tv ad in raleigh is expensive but that's what i need i need funding people ask what can i do 10 bucks right don't get your starbucks coffee today give me five bucks and it's weird man asking for people for money and then i came to the conclusion i'm not asking people to give me money this is an investment in america's future because i promise people i will not become a politician i would rather die and sell this nation as people out and i've put myself in that position before that i would have died and almost did a couple of times i feel like i have that proven track record and people are like but there's this guy and there's this guy he's this veteran and that veteran they went up there and they sold us out i'm like i'm not those guys i'm not those guys what do you want here i am stepping up help me get there and if i turn out to be some spineless dirtbag politician fire me right get involved and fire me but i promise i'm not capable of being a dirtbag politician it's not in my genetics you know it's not even close to something i could ever be you know corporations don't have things that i want i'm not a gear guy right corporations don't have things i don't want a boat i don't want a boat i don't want i don't desire money i desire experiences that's why i like hunting and you know with my girlfriend you can't sell me that i'm not i'm not for sale so yeah man if you got a few bucks tony.com oh i will tell you this man one of the cool things is when you go to the website when it pops up there is a pop-up um that has a video and stuff you can watch it it's cool videos me telling you how cool i am or some [ __ ] um just move past that right underneath it says dirt bike prize i'm not a something for nothing type of guy so last year i got this hair up my eyes that i was going to get back in the race of motocross so i went and bought a brand new kx4 f50 rocking ship i got an excavator and a uh and 63 acres and i built a motocross track in my backyard i'll let my girlfriend going what is wrong with you and uh that dirt bike it's been i got it last november so it's been whatever a year in a few months it still has a second take of gas in it i haven't had time to ride it so is it going up for auction i donated it to the campaign nice so it's a raffle not a routine it's you know a ten thousand dollar dirt bike it's never been laid over um i was cautious getting back into riding so i took it easy um boots helmet nice stuff man i didn't [ __ ] i bought some nice stuff four or five sets of riding gear oakley goggles all that stuff you can buy chances at it i'm not a something for nothing type of guy i got an ar coming on board um and a precision rifle a custom precision rifle that my buddy who makes my precision guns freaking building for us so point being is right i'm not a something for nothing type of guy so if you donate a campaign at least you're getting a chance to win some cool stuff so hell yeah all right so uh echo you got anything no we covered it awesome man um hell yeah thanks for coming on bro no thank you for having me thanks for sharing your experiences thanks for what you've done for america in the past and thanks for what you are about to do for america awesome to meet you man thank you so much thank you so much for having me this is this is how we win absolutely hell yeah thanks brother thank you and with that tony cowden has left the building heading back to north kakalaki and i failed to mention i failed to mention north kakalaki i failed to mention look i mentioned the fact that we at origin usa have a factory in asheboro north carolina which is awesome but i failed to mention and it just like these conversations you don't know where they're going i failed to mention the fact that when i went through buds and s t t seal tactical training and then got to seal team one and then i did three deployments and then i was in training cell with a with my running mate at the time who i also he was my roommate that whole time and he was from north kakalaki and he's a freaking best guy awesome guy and a total stud um across the board but he's a super good athlete like a ridiculously good athlete like we had he played this is the guy who played basketball in north carolina as a kid and then he got drafted he was 5 11. he lost he he missed a foul shot and lost like the state championship he did that you know so he had he had that but you know he was still he was in the state championship and he's obviously a key player right uh and he got he got some he got drafted or whatever recruited to some d2d3 schools because he was such a good basketball player and he ended up he's like listen i'm not gonna i'm not gonna be a pro obviously so i'm gonna focus on my education so he ended up going to university of north carolina and while he was there he grew five inches so he graduated at 6'4 this is a guy you know you go out and shoot basketball with him and he would just sit there and hit three pointers all day yeah so then then we had alton lee grizzard who was the navy quarterback and who's himself a stud that's the guy who is a great friend of mine and he ended up getting murdered in in coronado which is awful but just a stud just a stud across the board i mean he played he broke all kinds of records at the naval academy just a beast and those two guys got in a little throwing contest of who could throw a football further and my buddy from north kakalaki also played football so i'm sitting there watching because i i'm not even going to participate in this competition against these two freaking studs and so they started throwing it back and forth just backing up each time right right and uh yeah the kid from north carolina he threw a further one it was like 65 yards i'm not gonna wing yeah and just a beast man but so whenever i hear north carolina i always think north kagalaki because that's how he and you know he had this funny look he'd give people me everybody but when you said north carolina or if you said north kakalaki he'd give you a look like of the most affirming of looks you know like like that's everything you know like you know as if you just said uh you know chocolate peanut butter milk like oh that's so good you know it is one of those things so i dig it uh very cool to talk to tony and you know it's a scrap man yeah it's a scrap he's got to go he's going hard in the paint you know don't harden the paint um uh he said something that was that was interesting and maybe i don't know i don't follow public politics as much as maybe others do but he did mention something that i thought that's that that's that's good this is a good thing to be talking about and to be thinking about is the the lack of effectiveness of a linear solution yeah because man that linear solution like and that just in everyday club brah i don't know how to run a country everyone knows that you know that about me i don't know but i do think that it's going to be difficult to make decisions for what 300 million people or whatever you know what's in the best interest for 300 it's that's hard i understand but if you kind of simple it down or whatever let's say i don't know for example your kids right if you start implementing linear solutions with your kids so the kids no no crying they want a soda soda pop give them the soda that's the length of solutions right yeah they're crying they're unhappy obviously because they're crying whatever what's the linear solution exactly right give them the soda but that causes all kinds of other problems a lot of them too by the way not just one other problem it's like a bunch of other problems so i would imagine it'd be that same formula except times a million with running the country in whatever way so it's like yeah to focus on that concept where it's like okay sure this will be a linear solution or understanding okay that's a solution that's a linear solution understand what what would happen then and he kept saying and then what right just to be paying attention to that stuff i think that's a good thing it's a good move and i'm not saying no one else pays attention to that but that's not like any kind of front-running concept that people are kind of pushing you know it doesn't seem like it is yeah hang on i don't know but i liked it well if you can lend some support to tony just look you might not agree with him on every every topic that there is uh maybe see some things a little bit differently than you but the guy's character and just the fact that he's gonna go up there and live in his room and make things happen help him out if you can if you want to help out yourself a little bit too speaking of origin usa we have a factory in north carolina kind of two factories right now which we're consolidating we have factories up in maine we're building stuff in america look here's something else you can do to support america you want to help america buy american buy american you need a pair of boots buy american pair of boots you need a pair of jeans buy an american pair of jeans bro have you ever heard of jake tran okay so maybe maybe he what he does is he he kind of breaks down things that have to do with like money and power and he makes these cool youtube videos okay jake tran so um one of them one of his recent one ones were fashion like the evil fashion industry and that's what he was talking to me talk about like how basically fashion is built by slavery in other countries oh for sure so have you not been listening to me for the past freaking years i i i have and and mainly just you know you had to hear it from jake tran bro jake he did a really really good job well maybe if i had someone that i worked with that could put together videos that kind of extended the things that i was saying maybe that would have worked out better i don't know you yeah you know what you make a good point you make good points it's my fault for not finding someone that was more effective in me in social media and media and media arts like film again great point but the way he does it is he does it in terms of like like you're the evil one and he's talking to he goes all you have to do is this just get some slaves and do it like he'll talk to that's how he'll make it does he do that all the time that's his thing yeah kind of it's kind of sarcastic but kind of like like when he'll kind of coming at you a little bit yeah he's coming at your sinister side almost like in certain ones it's more heavy than others but then he'll be like what's the heaviest one uh this one was so heavy it made me considered actually doing it but at the end of the day when you stop the youtube video you're like well i'm not going to do that you know anyway uh one about charities like how charities can defraud the government or something like that and be like oh he'll say you can do this this and this with no strings attached of course and then he'll keep talking and you're like see what he did there right so you're going to start a a charity to defraud the government is that what you were saying you almost did that's not what it's about but i'm saying when you watch the video you're like that's actually not a bad idea you know it's like that kind of thoughts but it's the way he says it though i'm glad you're one youtube video away from being sinister and ripping people off there's more to it than that yeah anyway watch that one about the freaking fashion industry you're gonna be like bro yeah that's and i i get what you're saying when you're like that's what you've been saying that's what i've been saying i haven't been saying it effectively enough for you to understand apparently no no i understand it but he like uh he did a better job okay i'm gonna watch him we'll we'll get the message right i'll get the message right so people that will understand that when you buy some fashion crap that's made overseas it was made by slaves that's what's happening you remember that one building in i forget where it was but where it collapsed on all the all the workers so he starts off like with that and like just all these yeah it's crazy and then a lot of it it's all essentially like borderline free stuff like as far as how it was made yeah so so much of it just goes to the trash so much of it so they're just just yeah who cares kids whatever that's why you see sometimes those those high fashion companies will take their surplus and just burn it because they want to keep the the supply low so it demands high but they misread the next fall season or whatever yeah yeah and so they gotta burn it so let's not support that let's support freedom let's support america let's support origin usa originusa.com uh also get yourself some jocko fuel i mean let's face it you're going to have some you know whatever injuries soreness soreness for sure uh what's the difference between muscle soreness and like when you have a joint soreness well what do you call it when you're if you did let's say you did weighted dips yesterday sure hypothetically see weighted dips every time i do weighted dips i have i feel like a little bit of not just soreness in my triceps and chest but i have a little bit of what is that called in my shoulders themselves yeah like joint pain yeah a little bit but it's minor right right joint aggravation yeah it's like i think a lot of the times it'll come obviously from like certain nutritional elements and it could be past injuries as well but a lot of times it's imbalances in certain places you know so you kind of over stretch or under stretch certain things and whatever but well when you have joint aggravation sure you can take like joint warfare if you have muscle soreness you can take milk yep and these are nutritional elements that can improve that are going to improve these scenarios unfortunate scenarios and kind of fortunate because at least you were able to do them exactly you were able to get after it and it's part of the game so i learned early on and i was okay so i make my daughter do little workouts yeah sometimes it's punishment sometimes says hey this is just what we're doing and she's eight so dom's delayed onset muscle soreness is new to her so when you when you're new to doms you're like i don't like this feeling like why would i do push-ups or why would i do a bunch of squats when my legs are gonna feel like this the next day it's like it's like you feel like your body's kind of being destroyed or whatever but when you really understand what doms is you kind of invite it so i understood the value of dom's early on i think i was like 10 or 11 years old from reading about it or just understanding that like i worked out yesterday i'm sore because i'm getting stronger yes so i found out i forget how i found out this is you know whatever 1988 or whatever however older or whatever but i knew that your muscles were sore because they were triggered into like growing back big or whatever so i'm like oh shoot so if i do a bunch of push-ups and i'm not sore i'm like dang i didn't do enough push-ups or if i ran a bun like when i started when you you know the first two days of football practice you get sore like you're sore your legs are sore your abs are sore from doing sit-ups your necks are all this stuff but i knew that no that's because they're about to grow back bigger you kind of invite it so now as an adult i understand hey man that dom's life is part of the part of the game man yeah same thing but you can mitigate it you can mitigate it not by working out less or working out weaker oh no but by by eating the correct foods yeah you're facilitating the whole dom's process right there so all that stuff plus you can get the drinks at wawa which by the way we're kind of dominating at wawa if you go out and you buy stuff from wawa i am personally thanking you at this time for making us dominate wawa don't let up clear shelves go in there get after it we're working with a bunch of other companies we are i gotta put together a list of where you can buy jocko fuel but right now i can tell you you can get it at wawa the drinks and you can get it at the vitamin shop so or you can get it at joggerfield.com you ever drink kombucha i don't like it me neither and that's kind of the thing where i'm sorry you know like um drinks kombucha all the females in my family yeah they're not drinking that stuff like it's methamphetamine or something to each their own not like they're into methamphetamine but like it's a very addictive like something that they're enjoying you hear good things yeah okay anyways let me retract that my wife and daughters like kombucha for whatever reason yes i think it tastes like crap like crap yes sir and i'm not even again my father-in-law he makes his own kombucha oh so it's like dang okay obviously grape for you good enough for you there was a dude that made kombucha with chocolate white tea by the way no okay he was selling it combat kombucha i don't know what happened to it he went out there's making combat kombu kombucha kombucha kombucha kombucha either way the point okay do you have any vegetables that you just like you know okay they're good for you but problems i'm not gonna eat that because no i'm just not into it into the taste or whatever just not like um asparagus you know people like asparagus you salted up nice i think it tastes kind of junk so i'm not gonna be excited for asparagus okay so the good thing and this is why i think a lot most people like this energy drink because when you drink it and you have no guilt you know that it's actually good freeze it's not like asparagus is insane well asparagus is good for you but it tastes bad yes discipline go is good for you and it tastes and it tastes good double bonus exactly right and that's why i think people like it especially the mango one by the way i heard great things about the mango mmm check uh if you want to get some stuff from this podcast and represent you can do that too echo made a store it's called jacques store yeah 100 uh get some of that stuff shirt locker so there is a shirt coming out that i created mentally and then you have brought to fruition i think it's gonna be a classic yeah i think it's gonna be a classic it's a good one and that one is the march march shirt okay and it's pretty squared away the shirt locker is the membership did you make the adjustments you needed to make to that shirt as directed no time no time didn't have time it was already hey what do you call the ships [Music] overcome by events yeah well look we're good the spelling's good and that shirt is legit yeah it looks good that's the marked shirt yeah and the whole shirt locker is squared away anyway so it's like if you order it on march 1st 2nd or what it's all like up to date yeah see i'm saying you're good yeah you'd be good to go check uh so check out jacquardstore.com subscribe to the podcast jocko underground jockowunderground.com who knows i know we mentioned covid during this particular podcast that's the kind of thing that apparently gets people banned gets people uh in trouble that's why we have jockwinderground.com it's 8 and 18 cents a month it allows us to have a separate platform that we actually have control over we can say whatever we want we won't be censored so if you want to help out there you can do that if you can't afford it we still want you in the game just email jocko underground assistance at jockowunderground.com check out the youtube channels check out the the jocko podcast youtube channel if you want to see what tony looks like also origin usa has if you want to find out what's going on i talk about these factories and all this stuff going on check out the origin usa youtube channel that's got a bunch of good information on it too um it's true it's like a psychological warfare yep get that if you need a little little hitter yeah anyway i would say motivation it's not motivating basically you want jacqueline to help you pass your moment of weakness so i've always said it this i'm going to keep saying it because it's absolutely true and if you want dakota meyer to help you pass your moment of meat weakness he's making cool stuff flipsidecanvas.com uh written a bunch of books if you want to check them out check them out just go to check out books by jocko willink you'll find them some of them are pretty popular some of them you might like you might be able to learn something from them might be able to contact me and tell me i got something wrong i'm standing by for adjustment ashland front leadership consultancy we've got live events that we do the next big one we've got is in dallas texas march 24th and 25th so if you want to come to a live event you can go to that we also have the battlefield events coming up in gettysburg in may 10th and 12th and then gettysburg may 13th and 14th and we're doing little bighorn as well anyways go for any of this stuff or you want us to come and help your company go to echelonfront.com and check that out we also have an online training an online training platform that's an extra it's at extreme ownership.com if you if you have questions for me you can just go there and ask me a question i'll be on there yeah i'll be on there on the zoom meeting remember what zoom is covid brought us zoom one of the good things about covet right covet brought us zoom now we can everyone uses zoom now i used to try and do zoom meetings back in the day or skype right skype and people just weren't ready for it now everybody's like oh zoom call yep we're we're ready yeah and people understand the benefits of it yeah so if you want to talk to me on a zoom call i will literally be right there go to extreme extremeownership.com you can take a bunch of courses we made we make fresh courses coming out once a week leadership leadership for you not just for like oh you're the ceo of a company or you're the manager of this but if you're leading a family if you're leading your friends if you're leading yourself go to extremeownership.com also if you want to help service members you can go to mark lee's mom she's got an awesome charity that she put together helps out veterans so much go to americasmightywarriors.org for that and also check out heroes and horses which is a outstanding charity run by micah fink up there montana getting it and if you want to support tony cowden go to like like he said earlier go to tony cowden.com and he's also on instagram which is sounds like that's his primary mode of communication with the crew it's tony underscore cowden underscore four the number four and then nc for north carolina he's also on twitter tony cowden nc and facebook youtube tony galden as far as echo and i go we're both on twitter we're we're both on the gram we're both on the facebook echo echo charles i'm at jacqueline of course be advised come to check it out real quick also you get sucked in by the algorithm don't let that happen that's the devil's play thing right there the algorithm and watch out for that one thanks once again for tony to tony for coming on tonight thanks for everything that he's done you know we barely even you you can't spend what is it eight or nine years in afghanistan iraq and syria the amount of stuff that that he's been through that he's done the amount of risk he's taken to serve our country you're not going to cover it in a four-hour podcast or a 20-hour podcast or 100 hour podcast but that's the kind of person that's been out there laying his life on the line for the country now he's stepping up again so support him if you can and thanks for coming tony and the rest of our american military out there and the veterans thank you all for what you've done and continue to do to serve our great nation and to our police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service all first responders thank you for keeping us safe on the home front [Music] and to everyone else how much can you do i actually know the answer that question more that's how much you can do you can do more and a guy like tony makes that obvious but it isn't going to knock on your door you have to kick that door in you have to make things happen you have to initiate action and you do that by going out there every day and getting after it until next time this is echo and jocko

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 86,751

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: QAQC1l2cq4o

Length: 277min 5sec (16625 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 28 2022