Shawn Ryan Show #009 Green Beret / Call of Duty / Rōnin Tactics (浪人) Tu Lam

[Music] [Music] so [Music] this episode of the sean ryan show is brought to you by nutrient survival mini asher said you want to be a [ __ ] commander today i had to go through eight months of training with the cia and the reason why we had to cross-train with them is because we four deployed later on into these countries where we had to work underneath the chief of station you know it was it was really funny because you and i after talking last night we were in the same country on the same project on the same hunting down the same person yeah yeah there was this fight promoter named santo he was a japanese guy and he took it underneath obviously he wanted to make money out of me and he said would you want to fight you know at japanese dojos and matches he was talking about the underground matches and the technology was used against the enemy and how we would find fix and locate and kill him he got killed uh was that 2006. i tracked down the tiger get the are you [ __ ] me yeah a tiger i tracked down a wild tiger welcome back to the sean ryan show this is episode 009 and we've brought you our most requested guest to date i want to kick things off by saying thank you to all the patrons on patreon because of you guys we're getting an entire new studio which will be done by the end of next month i want to say thank you to everybody who's left us a review on itunes if you haven't done that yet please go to itunes leave us a review even if it's just one word that's all we ask just one word on itunes and lastly please go to vigilanceelite.com subscribe to the newsletter for all of the other content that we release on all the other platforms there are hundreds of other videos to include behind the scenes footage of the sean ryan show let's get on with it number zero zero nine he was smuggled out of vietnam at an extremely young age and later found himself in the united states where he would serve a 23 year military career 20 of which as a green beret in special operations after retirement he went on to become call of duty's character ronan he co-hosted history channels forged in fire knife or death he founded ronan tactics ladies and gentlemen please welcome zero zero nine mr two lamb two welcome to tennessee man thank you it's great being here it's great having you thank you you are the number one most requested uh guest for the sean ryan show and so i'm just ecstatic to have you here we ever since episode one it's been can you get two lamb on the show can you get too lamb on the show and now you're here and um you know we had some talks before today on the phone and then uh meeting you at dinner last night and dude we got a lot to dive into absolutely so look forward to this me too man but just i mean so many accomplishments 23 years military service 20 years special operations if i'm not mistaken you have beat the game call of duty more than anyone i know uh because you're a character in it forged in fire uh you had a extremely successful uh transition out of the military and uh overcoming you know the dreaded transition and uh you know something that i think a lot of people leave out that is uh extremely commendable is you've been with your wife for 20 years and it sounds like she was with you the whole time um through all those deployments and and uh that is no easy task for for any spouse and uh you know coming from a occupation that has one of the highest divorce rates in the world that's pretty amazing thank you so yeah and uh and madener uh what an amazing woman you've got seven so appreciate that thank you yeah you're welcome but all right so every show i always start out with a gift so because your name's two we got you two gifts hey i like that yeah all right so here we go you ready one and there's the other one wow i have me some elite candy that's right this is awesome thank you so much you're welcome wow those s'more bites have been compared to crack they're so good yeah yeah well i can't wait to try this track be careful with those awesome man i appreciate this looks so great right on thank you so that hoodie we had modified you know so you're pretty fit guy so it's it's a large torso with double x arms so but yeah man i appreciate it thank you you're welcome but um just diving into it your story starts uh at birth and uh you know you were born in to war and uh so i kind of want to cover some of that but in 1973 nixon uh signed a peace agreement with north uh vietnam south vietnam in the u.s which unfortunately nobody followed and then the u.s started pulling troops out in 1973. you were born in 1974 in saigon the hospital was getting mortared yeah and um so i'd like to start right there yeah absolutely i mean let's let's put us back in that time frame you know huge unpopular american war you know it was a war of a body count you know um the americans uh that came in and fought against the uh the communist regime the north vietnamese well during that time when americans drew withdrew um you know i'm south vietnamese i was born on the the losing side of the war um on on the morning of my birth you know my mother i was born on the basement floor of the saigon hospital my mother shielded my body from incoming authority fire in the morning of my birth at three months old i lost my freedoms um to the communist regime you know like any um occupying force you know you're they're going to take the leadership out of that uh government so saigon was a capital of vietnam you know south vietnam you know the the country was dividing north south the north vietnamese surrounded uh the country uh the city of saigon mortared us uh artillery fire eventually the troops came in and um that's when the post-war genocide started happening you know our family we um the north vietnamese will go through the homes they'll look for valuables good belongings they'll push out the the civilians out on the streets and you know if you serve with the south vietnamese army then you are immediately executed all right if my my uncle who served with the uh the south vietnamese along with the americans they were immediately executed my other uncles were imprisoned in what they call re-education camps let me explain to sean you know when i these re-education camps are torture camps you know by the time i received my uncle after 15 years of imprisonment he had no skin on the bottom of his foot yeah all right so they tortured him beat him broke him as a human being so at three months old you know i we we endured that my mother held on to me as they killed her family we were facing genocide at um we lived underneath a communist occupation until i was three years old during that time there was a flux of refugees leaving vietnam was the violence happening the the entire three years leading up to oh no that initial violence and this is history me studying history that initial violence of uh occupying taking out the current regime the power in in that government system uh imprisoning people once that was established then the oppression started you know um social ideology you know you're gonna pay the government system this the oppression we started starving you know so we're facing you know them oppressing us as a human race and then eventually uh we started facing genocide you can read the history on it you know um they they looked at our lives as in um we're not even worth a bullet they'll take us out and rice paddies and they'll murder people by putting a plastic bag over their heads damn suffocating them to death you know so at three years old um my parents my my biological father and my mother and my brother um we escaped on a wooden fishing boat with hundreds hundreds of other hundreds of thousands of other fleeing refugees you know i want to put you in this scenario imagine like escaping in this country right hundreds of thousands of refugees escaping um on wooden boats well that brought in the pie tree that was going on around other countries neighboring countries like thailand philippines and other pirates the bandits that came in and basically they would uh stop our boats when we were escaping board the boats you know murdered the men raped the women and tortured the children were you just backing up for just a second on these boats who's orchestrating uh this kind of uh migration out of south people they just they're trying to leave so think about like syria or any country that's war torn they're just trying to escape that area right so after the fall of south vietnam you know we are facing the communist regime so a lot of people are just they're walking out of the country they were getting on these wooden boats smuggling themselves out it was it was not like the the communist regime let us leave yeah we had to escape you know and uh the people that um owned these boats they were like fishermen's and they're just trying to make a living too so these are like can you describe the boat a normal wind fishing boat just a motor no motor motor yeah a motorboat now this normally fits about maybe 20 people my mother said on our boat it was a hundred plus people holy [ __ ] we couldn't sleep um we had to um basically we we're in the basement area of the boat the bottom deck of the boat and we had to sleep sitting up right because they were jam-packed in there so think about the smell think about uh the the desperate you know how desperate these people were the rich were in the same boat as the poor wow you know so we are truly trying to survive and truly you know trying to escape so the pie tree was going on um my mother told me the the uh the captain of the boat he used to been ex-navy for the south vietnamese military so he employed the tactics that you needed to navigate past this pie tree and basically all he did was we escaped at night he shut off the lights and we just kind of so sailed past the pie tree by cutting off the motors right and then once we got out of seed and he cut on the motors and we went our first destination was malaysia right so you think about it man like we're escaping and all these neighboring countries they don't want they don't want to deal with you yeah they don't want your issues they don't want escaping refugees in their country where now they have to house and feed you they're third world countries themselves so we went into malaysia and uh the malaysian coast guard stopped us at gunpoint they shot at us and then they told us that we will not enter their country they anchored us um in and then they pulled us back out into the ocean they shot our motor cut the lines and left us drifting out of the oceans to die you know so my mother said we drifted you know we were out there for nearly a month at sea a month and nearly a month at sea and she said people started dying you know due to the lack of food and water people were dying and they're stealing they're fighting from each other they threw the dead bodies over the sea you know so we my mother said we were in a very desperate survival situation she she actually told me she lost hope do you remember any of this no nothing no there's flashes of like the refugee camps growing up there was a flash of like in my dreams where i see a light going through like the crevice of a boat and i'll explain that that light but those like little flashes i wouldn't i wouldn't say i remember the whole big picture i was so young how about your brother my brother remembers how old was he he's four years older than me okay he was seven at the time wow um so you know people started dying where my mother said they were throwing people off the boat lack of food water and then um you know my mother carried poison in her belongings you know it was a common practice for fleeing refugees to poison their children when the journey ends that means they know they're going to die or if the pirates enter the boat then they'll give the poison to their children so they won't die uh being tortured that they have the peaceful you know death so my mother contemplating on this poison because she knew that we're not gonna make it you know so she said a huge storm hit us you know imagine a fishing boat man out in the middle of the south china sea right and she said this huge storm she thought the boat was gonna tip over with no motor no motor and we drifted and drifted um but the the rain she said saved us because it allowed us you know uh the water source we needed in order to survive a few more days you know she said that we drifted out the the storm took his fur out into this the ocean they didn't know where the captain didn't know where we're at you know we were just out at sea had no motor we're just drifting and um a miracle happens man you know there was a russian supply boat that was exiting out of china i mean out of vietnam they were leaving vietnam and they saw refugees now i want to paint the story these are russians the the the government the the system the ideology that took me out of my country that took away my freedoms you know to murder my family you know and these russians were coming out of vietnam and they saw fleeing refugees and they um they saved us they brought us on board and um well they brought us on board one at a time it's what my mother said and they um basically they provide medical aid to us you know we were drifting out of sea for nearly a month and they anchored us on and then they told the captain and my mother said it to the t they told the captain that you're lucky because if we were going into vietnam we would have drug you back into vietnam oh man but because we're going out of vietnam we have no other choice but to take you with us right so they were a destination with singapore right so um they basically tug us along you know on their their line and uh they dropped us off at a refugee camp in indonesia you know i want to explain this you know the situation to you is that um these refugee camps are they're very dangerous man they're they're a plot of land in the middle of the jungle you know and there's maybe a control post in the middle right where people go there and check their mails and that's their communications you know uh sponsorships to get into other countries you know so um we lived on this plot of land in the middle of the jungle in a grass hut in a tropical island you know no food no water is given to you so you have to survive off the land how long were you there for a year and a half so up into four and a half or five and a half yeah four and a half four and a half years old so we were living off the land and you know my brother growing up he would tell me you know i used to gather firewood around the camp you know and i would see dead bodies all around the camp because people are getting murdered for supplies you know women were drugged into the woods and getting raped is this you said in indonesia correct indonesia is this indonesians uh this is refugees and refugees this is south vietnamese on south vietnamese not caring not taking care of each other it's about survival yeah you know at that point and um you know then you have you know bandits in these in these jungles as well you know i asked my mother i said okay so how do we survive well my mother is she's hard right she's badass and um what she told me was you know there were rich refugees and they had these you know jewelry and stuff that they would tape to them and she will go and basically bid because they need to sell their jewelry or to eat right so my mother would take this jewelry from him be the middle person make the track through the jungle where people are murdered and raped and killed daily go to the northern portion of the island and deal with these bandits wow and sell them these valuables for money and she'll track back and take her earnings and that's what kept us alive did you have to hide that from oh yeah from pretty much everybody right yeah i mean i i just think like you know a young asian lady tracking through the jungles yeah you know i mean so her children can survive damn who so who's watching you guys you know i don't i don't hear too much stories on my biological father you know it's just they did divorce when i was very young um but i'm sure he he he had a you know helping hand on you know how we survived them in the refugee camps as well so um so we lived off this in this plot of land now what's really unique was my aunt married a american special forces green beret and he was an officer uh his g base guy overran during one of the battles right um and he got stabbed by sks bayonette uh in the back is rip cage area and um he end up killing the the vic congo he'll make sure he'll let you know i killed him too you know but um he was evacuated out of vietnam you know and um my aunt went with him after the the fall of south vietnam and she moved over to the united states to fayetteville north carolina right so him being an officer in the united states military he was able to sponsor us to come over to america now what i want to explain you is my mother waited a year and a half for the sponsorship we got accepted to new zealand we got accepted to canada we could have been you know i mean we could have been in all these different australia it could have been all these different countries that accepted us as refugees america at that time it took a little longer you know unpopular vietnam war but because of the sponsorship we were able to get to america and i asked my mother you know later on in life i said why you know why in america she said before i left you know your grandfather who who funded the escape who funded escape made me promise that if i can if i survive this journey then you must do what you can to become an american because you need to reunite with your sister in america and that's the land of the free so my mother waited you know literally for a year and a half and then eventually we got accepted to come to america and uh we made our way to fayetteville north carolina where that was the if if you know fayetteville north carolina anybody has ever been there it's uh it's a a town right outside of the biggest military base biggest army base in america you know for special operations the home was special operation which was fort bragg north carolina and that was where i was raised before we go into uh vietnam how many of your family members made it to the u.s was it your mom your brother and you was there more yeah yeah eventually because my mother made it you know my mother has a giving heart so she she never forgot where she came from so we were able to free my uncle from um the prison camp so she brought him and her family over we brought my grandmother over you know so our uncles you know that survived the camps eventually came over how many family members did not make it over she told me like more than five damn on the boat um you spoke about bodies being thrown overboard and people dying of uh starvation thirst i'm sure probably sickness was in there too being out there for you know over a month how many uh how many and you said there was a um maybe over 100 uh people on that boat do you have any idea i don't man you know i did ask my mother one time i said out of you know the people that came on the boat can you tell me like roughly how many people died she goes a lot damn obviously she doesn't you know keep track of that but she told me like when they slept um she had to sleep with all her valuables a clothespin to her clothes right so we had layers of clothes we're escaping we didn't have luggages or anything you know we had to travel very light so she would layer us with you know two outfits and then she would take our valuables as our birth certificates photos that she had reminding her her childhood it's amazing so some of these photos that she showed me later on in life like you could tell that's that's been through escape you know so she would stuff it into a ziploc bag and she'll tape it and then she'll clothespin it to her body any jewelry that she have any any uh money that she had she'll put it into a ziploc bag and basically clothes pinner to her body and when she slept you know she had to sleep sitting up so she would sleep it uh with this stuff underneath her so nobody can steal because everybody was stealing from each other you know yeah survival situation you talk with your mom a lot about uh kind of what led up to like were there any early signs uh before the war actually kicked off of you know certain freedoms being taken away i don't know maybe like we have the second amendment here were there any freedoms that just started disappearing slowly but surely you read the history on on the vietnam war ho chi minh you know he he first came to america to ask for help because the french were trying to colonize he was fighting against that uh regime and you know americans didn't want to get involved so then he switched over to uh the russians and the russian started helping ho chi minh so that's why he took on more of that socialist ideology ho chi minh's goal was to unify all of vietnam under one rule which was because he took on the socialist ideology the communist idol he wanted to press that into the south which was more uh democracy you know i think what's really unique was there was a north and south divided you know the south vietnamese which the country i was born on was sided with americans they fought for democracy and freedom the north vietnamese fought for more of a communist ideology you know obviously the communist one in that country and um i think what's unique was like you know this the crimes that happened after that like there was no uh humanity there was no compassion you know they were trying to wipe out a whole race of people because we thought differently yeah yeah you know it's it's uh it's you don't hear a whole hell of a lot of stories where the russians are showing anybody compassion if there's uh one thing they're kind of known for it's being pretty ruthless and so the fact that you know they showed you uh that fishing boat you know at least a little bit of compassion and fed you and gave you water and and actually brought you you know to a refuge a refugee camp where you'd eventually you know get out that's uh that's i've i've never heard of the russians doing it no no but you know i think what's unique is you know now that a motor in life and you know you kind of study how the human being develops and you know the mind develops and you know from two to four that's where you develop a lot of your your code your values your ethics whatever you live by right so a lot of kids at that age they get abused they're gonna have a really hard time in life you know i mean two to four man that was yes ian aaron you know yeah i was trying to enr we're trying to survive so i think with that energy you know kind of that's what i grew up with you know i just couldn't pinpoint what that energy was i was off growing up it's just you know how you feel like you're meant for something you don't know what it is or there's an emptiness inside you just don't know what it is there was a rage definitely you know but i didn't know why you know and it was into later on as when you mature you realize that man you're escaping for your life during that age when when a normal human being is developing his code his his way you know who he is in this world you know two to four yeah i mean that's uh about as traumatic as it gets and uh i'm kind of curious you know you said you have flashes here and there but what what is if you can remember what is your first childhood memory is there estates yeah it was america um i mean dramatically you know we came in america and you know it wasn't uh a popular war vietnam was not a popular word and i want to bring us back into history and the reason why vietnam was not a popular war was because up until then right you think about like world war one war two you know korean war everything was censored through the military reporters would come in you had your military reporters and it would censor it through and then that's what the public saw you know vietnam was the first time that they allowed unprecedented covering of story so all these reporters were coming in and obviously they didn't want to capture war right the image of war and war is not beautiful so when um when they reported that american soldiers were killing you know innocent people you know um and they had this on video and they're sending it back well that's why it became a non-popular war you know so the americans didn't have the support you know and that reciprocated into the south vietnamese and we didn't have the support uh once the americans left you know so when we came over to america i am the image of a hateful war to them you know it was so fresh when we came over because it was right after the vietnam war so when we came over man my first memory was um my mother took me to a grocery store you know and i remember what i saw was uh endless food you know that doesn't mean anything to anybody when you starved right when you had nothing you know when you come from nothing you see endless rows of food you know and i remember i'm like wow you know this is amazing and i saw the joy in my mother's eyes because we're not starving you know she grabbed her groceries and um we came out and this older gentleman came up to us and he spit on my face and he flicked his fingers at my mother and uh he called us all sorts of racist name so that was my first memory you know so um growing up in the states you know obviously after the war it was uh it was very difficult time it was very racist very racist times in america i mean that has not only coming you know back to or coming not back to for you but coming to the us uh you know from vietnam but you move to fayetteville north carolina which is probably the biggest special operations base out of all branches in the u.s and special operations and a lot of times are you know the backbone of the war they generally see the most action and to have you move their uh you know and and what they were doing can you know as you know as well as i do can create a lot of hate and uh so i'm sure that was uh extremely tough to deal with and uh but before we get into that let's just take a quick break and uh when we come back we'll pick up with uh your journey in vietnam absolutely nutrient survivor feed your freedom all right two we're back from the break and you're in fayetteville north carolina you've just uh immigrated into the united states and uh your you your mother and your brother are in a town that holds more special operations commandos uh than than any other town in the united states who are all you know fresh out of the vietnam war and um so what was that what was that like growing up uh with that hatred and yeah you know when we first moved these days um we lived with my uncle and my aunt you know there my uncle's officer so you know that was the best life i ever seen like you know coming from the oppressed you know escaping vietnam i never lived in such a huge house you know so it was a huge eye-opener so we lived with my uncle for a few months until we got on our feet it was my my biological father my mother my brother and myself you know and um you know just during that time frame was trying to get acclimatized to this environment you know i was in it was so much going on there and like you say it was a home of special operations my uncle was special forces green beret so when i walked down i saw his awards you know all his war stuff i thought it was really cool really unique um eventually my my biological father and my mother we moved out and we went to um it was a very low income part of town we had nothing you know when we left vietnam we have absolutely nothing we have no country has no freedom we have nothing you know um so my father and mother would they would work on jobs because my mother always felt education was the answer to freedom you know she said if you have an education you can never be oppressed um so it means a lot to me if you concentrate on school you know so we lived in a um gosh man a really small apartment in really part a poor part of town the only furniture that we had in this apartment was one full-size mattress one used full-size mattress that we all would sleep on we had no other furniture you know we're very poor and how old are you at this time about six six see a six-year-old a ten-year-old and then two adults mom and dad right on a full size which is just a little bit bigger than a twin size bed so my mother you know she would uh we have other refugees so they would donate clothes to us and so we had like really like four hand-me-downs of clothes you know holes all over you know holes in our shoes uh but my mother appreciated them thank them for you know their donations and she would stay up at night and sew up the holes on my clothes she would fix the shoes so we can attend school do you remember your parents demeanor did you did they have a positive demeanor i mean it's a shitty situation my mother was born a year to tiger so she has that aggressive aggressive attitude you know like when you step out online she'll whip your ass kind of attitude you know my father or my stepfather was very he's a quiet professional did you know how poor you were at the time or did you just think no i just thought this was it right this was just life i mean we did go i would tell you with days without eating a few times my mother would obviously give us the food before she would eat herself you know so they went more days starving than we did but we did go you know days starving growing up along with that you know we started attending school you know and that's when you really see the uh the hate in in our culture you know the hate to the vietnamese people the um you know one of my first teachers openly discussed that she does not support the flux of refugees coming into her hometown you know and she expressed it numerous times and obviously the kids um they would pick on us because we're poor and we look different how many vietnamese kids went to this school we were the only one that was in besides my brother that i knew you know it wasn't like that much vietnamese refugees uh coming in remember getting to america was very difficult and a lot of the refugees they settled in more of california area we settle in north carolina because my uncle yeah right so you think about like the biggest military base right you have all these veterans that are fresh out of war okay then you have they some of them marry foreign women you know so you have all these people right within this small town different cultures and everything but it was a very racist time when i said that is you know i don't throw out that word lightly you know but it was because of the post-vietnam war hatred know i was told i was called by many names growing up yeah yeah i could see that uh being uh you know ex extreme racism you know and uh and uh i'm really curious that's a hot topic for today even you know their asian racism that's going on and and uh in all the other communities and but somehow you've gotten through it and uh and i kind of you know i want to talk about how you how you did get through that and i think a lot of times you know people that either feel they're being oppressed or are being oppressed they tend to go down that victim road and you know unfortunately it is going to take effort on your part to to to turn yourself other turn yourself into something other than a victim and um there's not a whole lot of people doing that these days so i really want to pick your brain on on how you kind of got over that and and and how you became you know the success story the success story that you've become today with with ronin tactics and an impeccable military career and and everything that goes with that you know there's there's evils all the world sean you know that you know traveling around as a navy seal there's evils everywhere man so it's it's uh we can dwell on what we can't change or we can work on what we can and that lesson was taught to me at a very young age by my mother you know let me let me explain this you know my mother would we were very poor but she would cook and she would deliver food to the other refugees that were in town you know there was not that much but she would go to these communities and she'll give and i remember uh i asked her i said you know why why are you doing this they don't really appreciate it you know it's being kind of defined at that age and she pulled the car over and she grabbed my hand and she said look at me and i looked over at her and she goes no matter how bad off we are in life if we can we must help others somehow those words kind of resonated and obviously i could talk about that day even to today so that day had a lot of impact but i want to talk about this today you know i want to explain this to you so substitute teacher days man they were the worst for me let me explain this to you my vietnamese name is pronounced imagine trying to pronounce that right i pronounce my name two lambs so you you guys don't butcher my vietnamese name you know so on substitute teacher's day they'll try to pronounce my names all right and they'll butcher my name and then that allow for all the others you know students to mock me and make fun of me and throw paper at me or whatever right because my name sounds weird and i'm different well on this specific uh substitute teacher day i had this bully you know in third grade that really hated me he hated who i was the way i looked he hated that was poor um and he wouldn't make it a daily routine to pick on me you know but on this substitute teacher day he started on me pretty early you know it was really loud and and the substitute teacher didn't want to deal with it so he told me and the bully to go down to the principal's office i don't even know how i got in trouble i was the victim right so we walked down to the principal's office and you know it was very racist times you know so uh the principal uh said sit here until your parents come when my mother don't have a car so i knew i was going to be sitting here for a while you know so the principal was sitting right here and the bully was you know across the room in the chair and i was sitting here in the chair and it was really i don't know man i was just really defeated you know and um the mueller comes in and she demanded to know what happened right and the principal stood up he goes that boy right there he looked at me he called him a [ __ ] he sat back down and continued knowing his on his day like it didn't even affected him she went over and grabbed her son and she walked up to me and she stood there so he forced me to kind of look up at her and she had this look of a of hate you know and she's told me that um that my kind don't belong here and i need to go back home to my country you know i i swear man at that point um i was probably at the lowest point of my life you know wow yeah third grade third grade i was an adult telling you that yeah i was really defeated that day i was having a bad day um and i came home and i i made a promise to myself that day that um that i'm stronger than hate you know and what's that mean what's that even look like i i i got tired of being this weak child the mindset of being defeated you know i hated that so what was really unique about this was that you know eventually my biological mother and father were divorced and my mother remarried to american special forces green beret he was a ex-drill sergeant green beret very strict military discipline so imagine going from no discipline to a life of getting up at 4 30 in the morning saluting the flag raising the flag hands over your heart saying the national anthem making your bed where he can bounce a quarter off if it's not good enough he'll rip everything back out going from zero discipline to that and then working in so he had a company a family company and we would work in the family company in between going to school and we didn't have days off it was seven days a week 4 30 in the morning up in the morning ballet the green beret i could still sing it to this day national anthem hand over your heart we had a dress code to go to school i couldn't wear jeans i had to wear slacks all right button down shirt it was that discipline going from zero to 100 right so it was a very difficult time you know even though i love my stepfather and he gave me the discipline i needed in life but man it was a hard pill to swallow at eight years old you know yeah so you know i knew he was a green beret i knew he was special forces and stuff like this and you know people always ask me now that i'm ronin you know they said you know you know you follow up half of bushido the way you know you say it what's that mean and why you're vietnamese so why why are you following a uh a japanese code of honor samurai you know so i want to bring this story to you so when my stepfather when my my father left us you know i didn't have any communications with him it was a very difficult time for me because i do love my father i love my stepfather but i did love my my father as well you know we had history he escaped us from vietnam gave us our freedoms so you know i didn't hear from him and uh my mother brought in a box one day and uh my mother said this is from your father you know i tell you sean i didn't know how to take it man you know so i put that box across the room and i remember sitting in my room and i had the doors closed i was sitting in my room looking at this cardboard box and i thought about my my father so finally i had the courage you know to go up to the box and i opened up the box and there was these uh there was four vhs tapes remember the vhs yeah all right so it was four vhs tapes and um and it was obviously dub tapes right and had vietnamese writing on these tapes so i didn't know i don't i don't read vietnamese you know so i i remember just randomly picking one of the tapes out popping in a vhs player and the first tape was the ardubudo know if don't know what budo is it's a combat skill that the samurais use the martial arts they use in war stadium periods japan right and breaking down the different martial arts but it was the combat side of being samurai it was the martial arts right and it's the way the path and i was i swear that was the first state that i saw at eight years old and it intrigued me to live a life like that wow you know you gotta understand i was defeated yeah at that point i wanted strength how old are you at this point aid yeah i wanted strength i wanted to change in my life and i didn't know how to get there you know even though my father was a you know he was a great man escaped but he wasn't the warrior right so um the the other three tapes were like fist fury you know inner drive bruce lee stuff so that's why i'm a big fan of bruce lee you know but throughout my childhood years i grew up to revisiting the art of budo over and over and over and over romanticized about being this path this way what is it right so you know during the 80s uh special forces were uh deployed by ronald reagan to go fight in the drug wars remember those days or the drug war days they would go down my my stepfather would go down in central america and south america and he would train fit ops and they would do the counter drug missions you know and you know he had his teammates over and he'll they'll talk over their their team room talks in this house and i'll be in the next room like trying to listen in like what do you mean you freedo press what's that mean right yeah and you know uh eventually i put it all together the way the path you know what is the way of the way is to to better humanity to better yourself and the warrior's path is extremely hard right so i was able to take that tape that was viewing and tied it into a higher purpose which was you know because i was indoctrinated more into a green beret lifestyle growing up i chose the green brace i knew their mission and their mission was the freedom press it was to to fight for the people that were like my mother and myself and my brother my my father is to fight for their freedoms man if i could be a force to go around the world free no press and enslave the modern day world that's the way for me that's what i want to do so i'm this weak little frail eight-year-old with this concept of the way right so you know we we you know we my father was a enlisted man you know he worked in his job we're not rich you know we're not poor like i used to been we ate every day he made sure that we're taken care of but we did work we worked very hard you know um my stepfather loved this like his own he he raised this very strict though you know but that's just the way it was when i was researching you and i don't know if i read this or heard it um but you'd talked about so it sounds like the prosciutto uh tapes were a major turning point uh for your childhood and and and to overcome some of the racism and and everything else that you had been through as well we also were talking about um and i forgive me i can't remember if it was your uncle or your father but you were driving and they were saying you know to sometimes you're going to feel down commander yep my uncle would do you want to be a [ __ ] commando and that that resonated with me you know and and i thought about that and the impact that could have on anybody let alone uh i believe you said you're 11 at the time did that have a major impact you know i love my uncle man what a great america you know to this day he would uh pick us up he would pick me up on a sunday and he would drive me to dairy queen you know it was just uncle and nephew time you know and my uncle he's he's very uh blunt he don't hold he don't hold the punches back yeah um he's driving his little volkswagen dune buggy that he reconstructs for hobbies you know and he goes to i want to tell you something you know the days that you're feeling bad the days that you want to quit you need to ask yourself just out of the blue you just told me you need to ask yourself you want to be a [ __ ] commando tonight you know when the bones hurt and you're you're aching from your injuries do you want to be a [ __ ] commando when it's raining it's wet outside and it's five o'clock in the morning you know you have to go for a run because that's the thing to do and you're feeling sorry for yourself do you want to be a commando today 11 years old can you imagine that impact can you imagine the discipline of being a commando you know it takes so much discipline right to be their commitment discipline day in and day out it's not just a way of a weapon and war it's it's the whole encompass of life right to look at life differently as a warrior you know so he he truly taught me to never quit to never give up no matter what and you know it drives home what my mother did you know no matter what no matter the circumstances it doesn't matter you know so i was taught at a young age that the conditions and circumstances doesn't define us as a human being we define ourselves by the actions we take daily do you want to be a commando today you know so 11 i i realized that you know and you know i tell you sean you know getting back to the racism i didn't get over it you don't get over uh hate like that you know i was bullied through my junior high years my my high school years i was called by racist names during training during my military career all the way to the end you know i'm not saying everybody i'm saying there's bad apples everywhere you go yeah and there's racism i hate wherever you go and racism is a mean to control a human being right you think about like some of the countries you went into the people that are oppressed and enslaved that's the meaning of controlling a human being to degrade a human being to spit on him right you're oppressing the person so that's why it was so strong for me to live this life you know as a green beret because the model is the frito oppressed you know and i knew that that was my ticket that was my ticket maybe you didn't get over it but you definitely got through it and um so after watching the vhs tapes and uh and the words of encouragement from your uncle what was kind of the next encounter like and how did how did you i know you carry a lot of that but you did get through it and so i guess kind of what i'm asking is what what was the next encounter like how did you how did you roll with the punches you know at 11 years old i knew i wanted to be a green beret at 16 it was already programmed in my training my timeline right that uh i needed to start training at 16 to start developing the cardiovascular the strength i needed in order to pass through this rigorous training that i needed to go to you know at 16 i started reading uh i read since i was 13 so i read a lot of the warrior philosophies a lot of the book i read the book of five rings when i was 13 years old wow you know i read the art of war and i did a thesis on the art award in high school so these were the subjects of interest throughout my life i knew i wanted to live a warrior's life you know and at 16 i started the training it just intensified closer to i got to the timeline which at 18 was when uh i enlisted in the military now i want to i want to tell you this story right my mother wanted me to be a doctor wanted me to be a lawyer injured anything but a soldier because gosh man right she escaped vietnam she lost her freedom she knows what war smells looks and feels like and she don't want her son to do that yeah but because i was indoctrinated into the special forces life and you know my uncle never pressured me man he never said hey when you're going to be a green beret you should be agreeing my stepfather has never uttered those words you should be a green beret one day never i felt no pressure from them but i felt a draw to that world right so at 17 i um i went down to the map center and i enlisted into the military there was no special forces contracts coming in you can't just enlist out of the street you have to be uh e5 in the army right or you have to have this amount of time in the army so either rank or a certain time in the army it's one and one of them is waveable you know so i can't go green beret but i can be an infantryman i can learn all these basic skills right so um i enlisted in an army and um i went through infantry basic training and i chose to be a 82nd paratrooper and the reason why is because that'll put me back to fort bragg north carolina where i can be around my parents right so when i came there uh to the 82nd it was a really funny story we they lined all the the new recruits up the privates right so i came there i'm spit shine boots you know starch fatigues uh i was so proud of being a soldier and um the first sergeant lined us all up and there was at least eight of us privates in this in this uh office right and you had the first sergeant out there and first are you know giannis and calling his piece of [ __ ] and whatever right and um the commander then comes in we slap to attention and he asks one question he asks one question he goes who wants to go to ranger school we're all privates you know with less than i think i had oh gosh less than a year an army right so i raised my hand and i said i want to be ranger qualified and um he looked at the first hard and then he looked at me and then he walked back in his office and closed the door first sergeant kicked everybody else out of the room he goes private lamb stay here so i stayed air slapped too you know i was at parade rest and he said uh so you want to be ranger qualified huh so there was you know the tile floors you know the the square tile floors so he uh he smoked me so smoking me means uh physical training so in starch uniforms spit shine boots you know i'm doing burpees and you know push-ups into that tile floor one of those tile floor is full of my sweat he tried to make me quit i was dehydrated and i went on for hours the hazing the yelling and and finally he you know he got me back up he said how do you feel now i said i still want to go so uh within you know i swear within four days i was at the recondol training site in outskirts of north carolina where they run the pre-ranger course i graduated with honors you know because i didn't have any bad habits i listened to what the instructor said i did it to the t yeah you know all these other senior guys they would hear what the instructor say and they'll try to war game and they'll do it their own way i didn't know anything else so i listened to what they had to say and i did it to the t you know and i graduated that i went to brand new training and graduate ranger school and and i was now i found out was this e4 there's ranger qualifying and if tree in it and you know it was great but i wanted to do more so i tried out for the long range reconnaissance team now it's really hard to leave the 82nd when you get in right because they lock you in they invest money into you and they need you they're you they want to grow you into a leadership position but i wanted something else you know so i tried out for the long-range reconnaissance team which is a descendant of the lerp teams in vietnam long-range patrol teams so their mission is to forward deploy i was on the amphibious team so we were four deployed on amphibious will insert in by helicasts and zodiacs and i will lay on and report what i see you know and uh we learned the uh advanced communication at the time which uh vhf um jungle and tanner so i learned all that you know at a very young age and my time came up i made e5 a year and a half in the army i was e5 i'm like that's that's a criteria to go special forces yeah that's uh that's that's that's definitely a fast track yeah yeah because nobody wanted rangers training right they didn't want to go through all this hard school and for me it was just um i had something to prove to myself i didn't want to be this weak human being anymore nutrients survival loaded with 40 essential nutrients so you know you were chasing it you know from the get-go since 11 years old you were chasing you know that lifestyle was there what conflicts were going on uh that earlier in your career if any you know my first uh phase in my career was it was just smooth selling man it was education military education after military education i was young i was fit i trained since i was 16. so i was able to pass through to really fiscally demanding schools at a very young age you know [Music] so when i made e5 i realized that that's waveable now i can apply for the special forces so i submitted my packet i applied for uh special forces selection and training out of fort bragg 21 day select and then i went through the pipeline for weapons training for the q course so then i went through the weapons training uh phase of course then we went into unconventional warfare phase you know and um i got orders to go to seventh group which is at the time located in north carolina what i found out was my stepfather was talking to the guy who worked at brian hall who runs orders and said yeah he needs to be here and i found this out because uh after unconventional warfare phase i was in the mess hall and i saw mr joe lupiak which he's a legend in special forces he he was part of the sante raid you know and now he's this retires a van who runs uh orders where they're gonna put these new candidates students you know when you graduate and he always talks like this hey my man come over here he's my man right so i came out and was like mr lupiak you know i'm he i knew him since i was a child you know and i'm coming out unconventional warfare phase and i say mr lupiak how's it going he goes hey my man come over here he sat me down he goes hey i got you in seventh group you know i know that you want to stay here with your parents and you know i love my parents i still do to this day but i had a a journey you know i wanted to go to asia i wanted to go back to affect the country that you know i was born in if i can possibly do you know it was a long shot so i said mr mr lupic i really wanted to go out to first first group he is your dad ain't gonna like that you know um but he changed my orders and uh he rerouted me to first special forces group out of okinawa japan okinawa japan that's where all the seniors are at you know like the guys that did their team time okinawa japan is a forward deployed uh battalion that affects asia you know you're in that continent so it was very hard to get out there it's the first assignment but that was my first assignment okinawa japan so here i am 21 years old went out to okinawa japan and i was assigned to a combat search and rescue team cesar team so during that time it was really heavy um reconnaissance of north korea you know they had to know down missiles that could strike uh you know u.s soil so that was a really concern for us and then you know the unstable country you know the dictator so uh we were doing a lot of reconnaissance around south korea working with the the commando force i was the csr team so when the pilots are flying over there they were to get shut down then we were the teams that come in with a two man pj packet heavy guns and we'll come in and do offsets to try to rescue these these pockets so that was my first assignment it was cool you know i went through a lot of training um but not my thing yeah you know you just know that that's not what you're destined to do going back to training you know people are always dying to know kind of what got you through it and you know i guess every once in a while you meet the guys that say that you know they just breezed right through it but i would say for 99 of us that is definitely not the case um so did you have any hiccups did you have any is there any particular point in training where you were ready to call it you know you it was you know i'm done during selection and training uh during the special forces assessment selection process i was uh so we did we stayed in these barracks right so everybody stayed in these like confined barracks and i went in february it was very cold in north carolina during that time and if one person gets six in the bay everybody else gets sick in the bay it's just that's the way it is well we had one guy get sick and i caught a flu and uh we were doing land navigation that night so we're we're doing the map and compass they're teaching us how how to dead reckon they're teaching us terrain orientation so advanced land navigation training it's not like a basic land navigation train because we had to pass through uh what's called the star exam which is one of the the hardest land navigation course in the united states army so during that time man i was coming down with the flu right i had gosh man i might i had a high temperature over a hundred and you know i was cold i was breaking out sweating i really wanted to quit i really wanted to quit that night well i tell you my uncle is uh special forces you know and he was the commander of the swick assessment selection during that time frame that went through it was his last class before he took over uh just magtai so this was his last class before he takes over a different command he was in charge of the whole thing before i went through i said hey look i don't i don't want any you know i know there were family members and you know i don't want any hand me outs you know don't don't look after me he goes oh you don't have to worry because you don't have it you don't have it yeah so i wanted to quit so at night i wanted to quit so bad man right and um i remember it was thundering out lightning outside it was raining really hard i was feeling sorry for myself it was two o'clock in the morning after 10 you know just after a got ran down to the ground during that day of you know uh assessment selection and at night is when we go into our academics you know so we're just messed up and i wanted to quit and i remember uh the ncoic say on your feet and the lights shut off so i'm like oh god you know so i got up and my uncle walked across to the stage it wasn't planned because we talked about it later you go oh i was just paying a visit right but he he walked up to the stage and the lights turned back on everybody's on their feet you know your full bird colonel standing there and he said a speech that i'll never forget man walk or die with the speech and he talked about uh cabana tuwan about when you know when we're engaged in the uh in combat against the japanese and islands of the philippines how the americans and the filipino soldiers were captured and forced to march the bataan death march and if one of the soldiers would fall back past hand touching distance then the japanese soldiers will pull them rip their id tag and shoot them where they you know where they're taking a knee the baton death march so he was talking about the baton death march and he said to the general yeah there was gosh man i would say there was at least 400 candidates out there we graduated with 70. 400 candidates he's looking across as he didn't even see me he's looking across and he said march or die when you want to quit you walk until you die right this is it's not if you want her or not if you want it you're willing to die for it you know and he talked about the baton death march and i'm like i'm gonna die here tonight i'm gonna die here because i'm not gonna quit now i'm not that that moment came let me tell you how toxic that that that is you know i'm talking to the viewers because you understand if you want to quit and you actually go through with quitting you you establish that yeah you can never ever go back from that again you quit once you're gonna quit again you quit again it becomes a norm right so i knew that at that moment if i quit i would never go through this training i would never make it you know so i was willing to die that night so that night you know after land navigation we we uh we went to go eat um our breakfast right after all the training and there was one guy who smuggled a uh a motrin 800 milligram that he had smug going in right yeah and i was part of his team and he said hey too what's going on and i said can i have that motrin please and he gave it to me all right that's like ranger candy yeah yeah dude right and it broke my flu man it broke the flu and then i was able to continue on with training and graduate you know did you ever feel any uh i mean do you think the fact that your stepdad was a green beret your uncle was a green beret sounds like he uh had a lot of inspiration and uh and uh you know do you want to be a [ __ ] commando um was there any fear of letting them down and uh even to this day even to this day even to this day i think about them all the time both of them even to this day that's part of what you know that is what got me through training is uh it got to the point where i just i didn't i didn't care about myself anymore it was just the fact that i didn't want to i just didn't want to let my old man down and uh that's kind of i i did not want to make that call saying hey dad i [ __ ] quit and uh and um so i was just curious you know there was one time in ranger school uh we had to airborne infiltration to fort benning georgia and it was a 18-mile force march when i say four smarts they're running at that running pace and you have you know combat load and weapons on you so we had the airborne infiltrate in uh in fort benning we form a road force road march uh basic formation and we start humping it for 18 miles very fast you know and you know during that time man i was i was 19 years old i don't know how to be a soldier right so i'm like what is a better way to break in a new pair of boots than to road marsh it in right didn't think yeah right so we we airborne dropped in that that morning and we we set up for um their forced road marsh and they started running guys were dropping like flies right guys were quitting and you know sometimes you know somehow i held on man you know i i basically light trot behind people and uh we we made this turn into darby right so darby was a long dirt trail road it went into darby phase of training which is small unit tactics raids ambushes and man i i'll tell you sean like i had no skin on the back of my foot right yeah in fact uh i had blisters throughout all of ranger school all the way down to florida phase you know from that road march um i was suffering from heat exhaustion like i could feel my body shutting down where i'm falling asleep walking like you know that you're heating like you're about to die and i was falling behind on the road march as soon as we turn man i only had a thousand meters left on this road march yeah and i was contemplating on quitting that's how painful it was but somehow i just put one foot in front of the other and then instructor came up behind me he said you fall one more step behind the pack i'm gonna pull you from training and there's not a lot this is what i did i punched myself in the face and i continued to punch myself is because i was falling asleep walking you know and so that was the only way that i could stay awake so i punched myself in the face my nose bleeding kept on punching my face and this is what the rain instructor said drive on [Laughter] um yeah man so obviously you know if the training is hard that that mindset is normal to want to quit it's just you know what do you do what are you doing that that moment of struggle do you want to be a commando yeah i mean that's you know that's what they're looking for they want to see who who's gonna [ __ ] switch it on when the going gets tough and and the golem gets tough real fast in those outfits and uh which is what you know there's such a high attrition rate but uh another question that i'm curious about is when you do feel pain um and i'll give you you know just one example in mind do you have a certain thing that you pinpoint all your attention on so um just like as an example for me personally going through buds i was about a buck 19 soaking wet yeah and uh and the water's you know it's [ __ ] cold there one of the one of their tools that they like to use is to uh they utilize that cold and get guys to hype out well guess what i'm 18 19 years old a buck 20 soaking wet and uh so i'm one of the first ones to hype out and cold affects me a lot faster than anyone else so you know what i would do is believe it or not i would try to accelerate the hypothermia kicking in and the only thing i would concentrate on and when we were getting surf tortured or um or whatever it is in the out in the ocean you know constantly going back and forth is i would concentrate only on making my body stop shaking to rewarm myself because i knew i was going to hype out anyways and then it in the initial stages you you feel no pain anymore and uh so i'm wondering if you had any particular thing that you focused on uh whether that be you know your your your stepdad and your uncle or the prosciutto uh code or is there anything you know you you always hear me say you know sean smile and be brave you always hear that you know when i'm scared when i'm facing it when i'm suffering my mother told me a young age smile and be brave right what's that mean you know it goes into a science because the mind is connected to the body if your mind is telling you if you're smiling you're telling your mind everything's okay and your body's gonna feel that you know so when i'm suffering i want to quit or i'm afraid i'm smile man i'm brave right because i'm tying in that neurological pathway from my mind recognizes his smile the muscles the exercising those smile the sm the muscles of a smile is connected to the brain and that's telling my brain through my body everything's okay right so when when the suffering is there you know i smile interesting well two let's take a quick break again and uh when we come back i want to talk about how you know what it's like being 21 years old on an sf team back then and uh and talking about how it came full circle from being the oppressed to freeing the oppressed yeah nutrient survival feed your freedom all right two we're back from the break again and uh you're now in an sf team you're 21 years old it's your time to free the oppressed so where are you going to take us so you know after graduating the q course and unconventional warfare phase you have to go through language training and then you have to go through uh survival escape resistance training and then i made it to the a a-team so as your pipeline in the navy i mean it takes long time to train one of us to even get out the door right yeah so um i got on the teams and um [Music] you know we got some cool stuff on the teams you know so that was my first exposure to the toys of socom oh nice the dirt bikes the atvs you know the m4s with the mod kit so i was like really really in that world right and i got assigned to cesar team and one of my first um cross so we as green berets we we cross train with different countries all the time so the tactics that we learn you know just from the q course is not just it we're learning from the malaysian commandos we're learning from the british commandos we're learning all around the world you know you're you're extracting information so truly like your tactics is very unconventional you know so one of the first uh training that i went through was a malaysian uh tracking school so the drop is in pulada malaysia where we have these malaysian commandos right so you think about the malaysians they fought the wars in the jungles and you know against british rhodesians so they have years and years of combat experience working in this type of jungle vegetation um so the the course was roughly about six weeks and uh i went through malaysian uh tracking school i want to tell you the story so we were tracking i was the lead tracker right so lead trackers you have a team of trackers behind you but you're the lead tracker so you have a tracking stick right you know what a tracking stick is you know the human body can only step so much so if you lose a track then you take the tracking stick and there can only they can only pivot their body so much then you take the normal step from one step to the next and you have this tracking stick and somewhere within that range of that tracking stick you should be able to pick up the signs again and tracking right i couldn't pick up anything right so i lost a lot of track and i couldn't pick up anything and i you know i was pretty good at tracking i my team started i just got these teams i definitely don't want to let my teams down right so i couldn't pick up anything and i saw in the distance there was a broken twig that's it that's the scent right yeah so i ran up to and i started seeing vegetation break and you know i started tracking again you know it was really weird because you know i had my backpack combat equipment and it required me to like get on all fours and start crawling around and to defines this tracking i tracked down the tiger get this are you [ __ ] me yeah a tiger i tracked down a wild tiger oh [ __ ] yeah it was in the distance i saw the track um apparently that thing uh must have ate something right because they didn't attack me it just ignored me actually and just walked off but you know what i want to explain is like a lot of the training man we die in training more than we die in combat you know you push training to that that edge yeah um after that i went into malaysian survival school hold on hold on rewind you just tracked a [ __ ] tiger down did it see you yeah it saw me were you armed or i was running around with a rubber duck no m4 no i was actually using m16 a1 rifle because uh when we went through the training the malaysians were still running uh you know m16a a1s so i had a m16a1 vietnam error um ar and um yeah that's what we're that's what we're rolling with how close were how close did you get to it oh man it was probably about 20 yards away oh [ __ ] yeah and you see wild boars yeah i mean you see wildlife out there it's just you're you're in their habitat did it see you yeah it saw me and just kind of just walked off into the jungle what'd you do oh okay i [ __ ] my pants yeah i mean the a wild tiger is just bigger in real life uh in in its natural habitat than uh what you see in the zoo like in the zoo yeah as a tiger yeah you got a huge glass cage no it's there in the in you know in the wild right so um we would sleep um high on vegetation because the at night that's when we get snatched you know the jungle comes alive at night yeah i thought i had run into some encounters in the jungle but i didn't run into any tigers that's for damn sure yeah in fact in africa we had lions track us you know we had to surround these vehicles and put you know snipers up on the uh the top of the roofs of these uh land rovers and we would look through our thermals and we'll see the the lions you know so what i'm saying is just because we're out there doing military ops i mean you can die from you know wildlife yeah so went through that and then um i graduated that i had maybe two days off on the weekends i went to kuala lumpur and hung out down there and then we went back reported back to camp and i went into malaysian survival training malaysian survival training man was just miserable it was a miserable time i just realized how horrible i am at surviving in that environment and and one of the trainings that they had us do is we just had jungle fatigues um they gave us a machete and a chicken and they drop us off at a uh at a point in the jungle and you live in that point there's leeches you're in the rain jungles there's leeches there's wildlife and everything else and all you have is a machete in this chicken right so during this this portion of training somehow i just developed a friendship with this chicken right so um i would walk the chicken it was on a noose and uh it's really lonely in the jungle so i had this companion it would remind me of that movie uh castaway yeah with well where tom hangs and he he made a friend with that uh volleyball right that was what it was you know i was in the little jungle and nothing was around me and i had this chicken right that um that kept me alive and when i said that it it would make noises when things come around you know so um i had a noose on him like you know what you put on a dog and that thing just hung around me so i survived through that without killing the chicken you would think i killed the chicken to eat the chicken right was it laying eggs no no no no joy no this it looked like it was on crack or you know it was a male nurse oh third world country malaysian chicken you know nice so um i survived through that and then um they they drove a deuce and a half remember the old old attack vehicle so deuce and half drove down and there was a malaysian commando jumped out and i had the chicken in my hand and he was helping me onto the back of the deuce in half now imagine how deprived your body is at that point right so here i am trying to climb on the back of this deuce and i handed to malaysia my chicken he grabbed the chicken broke the neck you know i'm like you know here i am you know crying on the back of a deuce in half all the way back to camp because he killed my chicken so that that was uh my survival train then you eat you know bugs and grubs and you know just learn how to live off and navigate off that that train how long were you out there in malaysia training uh for the for the uh survival training survival training was three weeks long you were out there for three weeks the survival portion with the machete was 10 days long that's a long time that was a long time and you know when i say leeches are everywhere man they're everywhere yeah everywhere there's no dry spot you know you got to build a jungle hammock because you got to get off that ground you know you had to get off the ground then there's monkeys everywhere defecating their hands and throwing at you it's just horrible adorable horrible experience what was uh what was your favorite dish you've prepared were um in malaysia or my career and survive for those 10 days is there anything that you're yeah we we ate uh there was this banana trees all through the jungle and you peel the bark away you'll see these uh maggots looking uh worms right and they're really thick they're really thick but if you eat it you gotta pop the head and you know um you gotta pop the head out and then when you eat it you eat the grub it tastes like a banana so that was my favorite so i had a sack of that you know i would i would throw it into this like a like a dump bag and a you know a sack of grubs you know what i would eat but yeah it was it was uh it makes you respect things a little bit more yeah you know when you're suffering that that much out there and you're cold and you're wet and you're hungry you make sure you respect things more you know what i want to say is so a few months later so i graduated a few months later i came back for jungle warfare training so now i know how to track i know how to survive and now it's raids ambushes hit and run tactics patrol bases you know you're doing that vietnam era jungle you know stuff you know reconnaissance all the man you know it was long days man you know hit and run jungle you know long long distance moving through triple canopy jungle and um i started feeling sorry for myself you know how you you're sweat you're hungry you're cold and and you're just miserable and you just kind of give in to man this sucks and i really i couldn't quit but i wanted to but i couldn't right so i remember this this story man we're we uh we we found this village and um the command was to move past through the village because it was a friendly village right you still have bandits out there you're training in these jungles but they're still bandits terrorists you know so you can actually get killed out there so we moved through this uh village and they had snipes on overwatch and these kids came running up to me because i was the first westerner to saw a soldier soldiered a scene and man they started singing it was raining and they were singing and this lady came out of her termite infested hooch that was getting eaten away by termites and she gave me some food some guy came up to me you know asked to help me carry my equipment i'm like no but this is where it boils down to you know i looked over and they had nothing they were living in the mud nothing their grass hut was getting eaten away by termites and this little girl smiled and the parents held her and loved her and they were happy you see where this comes full circle sean is that we over complicate our lives happiness is found anywhere it doesn't have to be success and i have to have the best car the best the best house the more money you know that's what we those are the stresses we placed on ourselves you know the reason why i felt sorry for myself because i wanted to be warm and and not hungry anymore but there was the answer you know it's it's simple as in that it's the mind it's the mindset well talking about full circle did it occur to you that that was you no you know what's really weird is like during my uh growth you know as a green beret i never really thought back to my suffering as a child never really did never once never even tied it together that's crazy man i mean to be in the ex you know the same region in the world and and and and see a small child you know living in that knowing that that's where you came from maybe subconsciously i just you know i will tell you this story that kind of tied into what my mother said you know i told you earlier my mother said education is freedom see we're doing a d mining mission in laos and um back during the vietnam war you know we drop hundreds of thousands of landmines through the rice paddies the jungle floors right so that's from the vietnam war hundreds of thousands of landmines you know kids are playing and you know not 97 kids were playing in the jungles and they're they're getting their legs blown off they're you know by these landmines that we as americans dropped so our mission one of my first mission was to before deployed into laos and do a demining mission so we were going to train the local villagers how to to isolate these landmines and how to de-mine this armed land mine and clear these landmines so the kids can go and play you know that was the mission so being a young green beret at 21 years old i came in uh initially and i had a linguist come running up to the helicopter right so helicopter spinning i'm coming off the lz i'm moving towards the village my linguist came running up we're talking he's giving me a you know introducing himself we're walking and this little girl from the village came running up to me and you know i read about it you know villagers you know give them candy give kids candy build that rapport so i i i was prepared so i dug out my candy and i gave it to the little girl and she she said no she handed back to me and um she said something in laos and the linguist looked at me and he goes she wants a pencil or pen do you have that you know like yeah so i pulled my my pen i gave it to her she grabbed my hand pulled me down kissed my cheek and ran off and um i didn't think too much of it i was more worried about the defense plan where's the mind how to do the mining missions the phase lines that we need to train them up and and um during lunch you know i was looking at the the security infrastructure at the camp and then the language stopped me and he said sir do you realize what you did this morning i said what do you mean when that little girl came running up to you do you realize what you did and i said i'm sorry if i'd done something wrong but i don't know what i did what did i do he goes sir you gave that girl education you see we don't have pins or pencils or paper we don't have a school here this is what they have wow and you know it's really weird man it was my mother's voice came in and said education is the key to freedom so we had operational funds and stuff like that and i um i wrote back to my command and asked for more operational funds so we can build a school and reroute the running water from the rivers to give them running water you know so that was one of my memories of my first my 21 year old days of being a green beret was that what was the demanding mission now turn out into giving this village an education so they can have a better life for themselves wow you know and i think about that to this day you know what i was doing i didn't think about it didn't even think about it tell you sure if i didn't the only thing was my mother's voice you know but as i got older you know you start realizing that you know in like in southern philippines the reason why they turn to terrorism because they have nothing else yeah right just think about the impact that you've had on just by making that call you know and now that school you know it's probably still there you know they definitely didn't upgrade i'm sure but uh that's awesome so during that time too man it was um so when i graduated from high school you know my mother i told you she cried all night she did not want me to join the army and i was walking across the stage so literally high school graduation right i got my diploma i walked across the stage and um at the end of the ceremony my mom had this special ceremony so she'd been cooking all day and i handed her the diploma i picked up my sister and kissed her my little sister and i hugged my mom and i said i have to go and she said why what what you mean you know and i pointed towards the the recruiter who was going to drive me to the bus station because i was leaving that night for basic training see i knew what i wanted i knew what i wanted you know in 18 when i walked across that stage i knew i needed to take that journey you know since i was 16 you know i've been training for it so uh she cried and man and i remember i thought about which the sacrifices she made for me for me to have education for me to be free so i looked at my mother uh on the day of my graduation and i told my mother that i promised you that i would graduate from college i know that means a lot to you so imagine being a green beret on a team right that travel all through the world right throughout my whole career travel all through the world but at that time was asia and you know you're going in thorough countries man you know there's no internet infrastructure yeah there's no technology like that you know so back in the old days uh we had dial up internet so uh i started college that that way so i would drive to local internet cafes so i can log on you know yeah and get my assignments so i can burst out a thesis so i can take a final exam you know so i would drive to internet academy in these countries that you know they're in some of the countries they're not so nice yeah you know so i'm driving local internet cafes and on the weekends when the team does their thing and i would go to college it's that drive man that's you have a real powerful drive thank you um you know it's a little off subject here but uh i've always wondered when you're part of the mission of being a green beret is to you know take an indigenous force lift it up train it and turn it into turn it into an effective warfighting you know asset or capability and throughout um the last 20 years all the other units started kind of doing that too to include the seal teams which we get no formal training at all um what the hell we're doing and uh when it comes to training uh indigenous forces i mean i can train somebody but i'm not i'm not gonna be that's not our mission right you know we we are we're assaulters and uh so when we did kind of take part in that the commandos or the jundies or whoever we're getting they were just handed to us you know whether whether they have any skill whether they have a lot of skills so it was always different and that moved into even uh when i moved into the agency but one thing that i never got to see is from the ground up actually you know day one in country in a village third world you don't speak the language what in the hell are you guys how do you do it what are you looking for how do you identify somebody that you think would be an effective commando uh to that you're gonna work side by side with yeah so a lot of times when we go in the country that aren't usually vetted you know depending on the mission the operation it can be vetted at the cia level you know depending on the targeting that we're going to use with this fed force so um day one ground zero it's it starts off with the human being right the individual so we put them through the tests like uh assessment selection you know we put them through the hardships and through the hardship if if you have the the commandos that is able to rise past all the misery to suffering then they actually become who i work with because now you can't teach a guy leadership yeah right i guess you could teach them leadership but you can't teach them the non-quitting attitude the mindset strong mind right either you got it or you don't so once i assess that hey he has this you know code that he lives by then i can mature that code you know uh obviously you know it's it's heavy intelligence for a green beret you know green berets are very intelligent driven intelligence driven that means if i go into country x i study that country i study history i study infrastructure i say the people the culture the religion i studied the demographics i studied the terrain i studied the environment the weather i studied everything so i know when i go in there how can i you know it's a rainy season you know that changes tactics you know and it changes your your night vision capabilities if you're running night vision so it changes a lot of that so we study study study and then when we get in we link it with that additional force i already have a general intelligence of this group right and then then you realize you know you break it down into the tribes right certain tribe because they can put certain different regions of tribes into this mosh podge group of rebels and they're fighting amongst each other because they've been at war for i don't know hundreds of years you know now you gotta separate that you know and work as a cohesive unit and they're probably educated at third third grade education note some some of them have disciplines some of them have no discipline some countries i go to they have zero discipline some of them have great discipline you know so it's about understanding the human being understanding their history their motives the enemy on on the ground you know and then training that fit force to combat whatever tactic that the enemy is deploying based off of intelligence terrain environment whatever how are they attacking that locals what are they using you know and we talked about the effectiveness of unconventional warfare you know unconventional warfare is that's the most effective means of warfare you agree with being a man of war absolutely yeah right we we got our independence we became americans because unconventional warfare you know sanju art of war talks about unconvention and united all of china so it's a very effective means and and this unconventional warfare has has been going on all around the world in fact the navy seals and the green berets were developed in vietnam by john fk to counter guerrilla tactics that's our birth that's our resistance you know and to understand that at that level you know obviously the more i mature as a green beret the more operational environments i went through so the jungle the desert you know urban to africa villages you know i mean so all that has a change because the terrain's changed the people has changed the culture's change the environment's changed you know so you have to quickly understand that and these rebels can turn on you anytime yeah i mean we saw that multiple times in afghanistan and iraq yeah so what happens if you have a six-man team training guerrilla tactics in the jungle and then you have your command group at you know when i say the command group is the captain the team sergeant and the warrant right and they're maybe at the g base what happened is something happened at the g base where they have to enr because this rebel group is turning on you yeah so how are you going to link up your friendly forces that are training out in the jungle with the command force and enr out of the country all that's planned no cons plan if the if the fed force turns against you if the government turns against you how are you going to get out of country yeah you know when when they throw us in these countries sometimes you have an exit plan with a plane coming in and you load up and sometimes you don't you know you got to figure it out on the ground can i this lz is about this why this is a survey can i get a helicopter in and evac me out or do i need to put a jungle penetrator in because i don't have that you know so it gets really complex and but every phase of operation is carefully planned you know what contingencies you were talking about you know different countries and different units that you've worked with have more discipline is there any any nation in particular that you've stood a force up that stands out as is having more drive more discipline better performance than anyone else who was your favorite to work with you know the korean selling selling's pretty badass really yeah they were they were pretty cool you know their effectiveness their speed um their rappel masters they can repel into windows they run down walls so they're you know they're truly like the martial arts commandos you know they they run around jungle tiger stripe fatigues in snow barefooted no shirt on tiger stripe camouflage in their face you know i mean like how badass is that you know so uh i really enjoy working with those guys i thought they were really cool um obviously the british 2 2 sas they're amazing um i mean we work with so many so many commando forces you know nutrient survival for when you're a survival expert and you don't catch a damn thing but i i truly feel like we we have one of the best you know seals green beret i truly feel like our country is one of the best countries because we have intelligent lawyers very smart lawyers yeah you know it's like you know obviously we have our our meat head warriors right but overall i mean our selection process to weave out you know and look for the intelligent soldier and then make him into an athlete you know so yeah man i mean i there are some forces that i don't want to work with anymore but overall like 90 i would say about 90 of the forces that i work with i'll fight alongside him and i have what is the what do you think the fastest you could stand up from from from from day one to you're comfortable enough to to take him on an op with you what what do you think the fastest you know it really depends on y'all but like in the philippines um it took us six months six months for a tier one capable when i say that is this the the sift guys which is the green braids that focus on direct action fit operations um so in the philippines right so we had to stand up this national level uh counter-terrorist capability so the the normal team guys the green berets uh come in they'll teach them unconventional warfare right so the basic land navigation physical training you know uh raids ambushes and then from there they take us they hand off the packet to us which then we take them into urban phase which is you know fit direct action counter-terrorist hostage rescue uh so it took us a good six months to get him to a good baseline you know no i mean it just really depends man you know like um like libya you know these these were rebels from uh the gaddafi you know countering the gaddafi regime so they had war experience they just really undisciplined so we had to teach them discipline and leadership you know i mean so it's it goes more than just pulling a trigger you have to teach people how to be a cohesive unit and when they're coming from different tribes and they hate each other how can you how can you have them work together that's gotta be tough and two would they start dying right if you hit atari and they start dying and they're dragging their dead buddy out of the house and they realize we all believe the same yeah and just because you're in different tribes doesn't mean anything you need to work together if you're willing to survive so you know it's just really um cultural awareness yeah you know all that it plays let's go back to malaysia because uh at dinner last night you kind of opened up about some of your extracurricular activities uh that you were doing over there yes and uh and i found that which actually wound up leading you into a an entirely new unit and and uh new career paths so i'd like to dig into that i think that is uh extremely interesting and i know the audience would love to hear that oh okay so let me paint you the picture of my status on the team i was an e5 on a special forces a team the youngest i was 21 years old everybody else is senior to me they're new they're in their 30s right with combat experience world experience and i'm this new guy so i remember my first day showing the team i show up in my starch uniform i spit shine booze i was a soldier and i came in they kicked my boots to scratch it up um they call me all sorts of names right and then um they told me that they're not gonna give me the combo to the team room because they don't trust charlie and at a time like i'm not a charlie i'm a bravo right and they're like no charlie oh okay that was a racist thing so um my thing was i take out the garbage and i had to clean the floors every day i did police up after a team i didn't even have a job i didn't have a desk so um man i was really good at cleaning those floors and taken out the garbage i buff the floors during the weekends i would come in and it's glass floor yeah and my team start was giving me all these assignments and he was like he don't get it like you know we're harassing him but he's taking it to the next level right and i would i was just um i was just very humble and you know i was grateful to be there but i was a student of the martial arts all right since i was eight i'm in training in martial arts the way the path you know okinawa was a huge experience because man that was the birthplaces okinawan karate japanese jiu jitsu you know very spiritual very so i um i participated in training uh in submission wrestling and and i got into muay thai when i deployed to muay thai i mean to thailand i went to jump master in takli thailand which is the air force base in uh in thailand and on the weekends my buddies would go to bangkok and you know they'll hang out and i went to a movie thai camp right and i would train with the the local fighters and literally uh there was a ring there was the mat that i slept on and there was bowls of rice that we would eat you know like you're sleeping on a dirt floor next to a ring you know i had a mosquito net around me and it was miserable right now and i would kick this um this pole with a rope wrapped around on you know so i got into really heavy fighting and ufc was starting to uh get more popular at that time you know when ufc first came out yeah they had the uh the divides between all of the styles right you could truly say that's a karate guy that's a judo guy that's a jiu jitsu right you could see it now it's just a mixture right but back then um i thought it was really fascinating that jiu jitsu was dominating that fight world and that muay thai was doing really well in the striking world you know so man you know i started fighting right so um it started off at tough man contests on the weekends um there was a tough man contest at a marine base called camp foster and um you can go there you can sign in your name you fight a bunch of marines so i did i did and i did very well you know so then um there was this fight promoter named santo he was a japanese guy and he took underneath obviously he wanted to make money out of me and he said would you want to fight you know at japanese dojos at matches he was talking about the underground matches so i'm like yeah all right so i went there and i fought in parking lots i found in dojos and then uh i i became really good so i got invited to this match called the buddha khan the buddha khan match is kind of like a big deal in okinawa japan it's like a no-hos bar like a ufc um but it's not as as popular as ufc it's i don't know you heard of pride oh yeah i've heard of pride okay so pride fighting was developed in mainland japan but uh the buddha khan came down to okinawa and i was selected as the main fight the main fight i was selected as the main fight so then i started training up for it right and then they um they hand me down this policy letter from uh from yusuf from a two-star general that because ufc started becoming popular and the team guys were getting hurt trying to fight in these no bars matches so there was a letter a policy letter saying that team guys would not participate in no host bar matches and i was on the final card right to fight so i'm like oh i don't know what i'm gonna do with this right so i gave it to you i remember uh talking to my team certainly my captain i was like hey i'm training for this fight i really want to fight this and my captain said absolutely not this is a policy for a star general you will not fight but i'm gonna go to the match down in the buddha con and you happen to be there and i don't know [Applause] wow all right i can fight so i started training up i started um i was that guy who runs with a stone underneath the beach right i was you know depriving my body oxygen i was really getting into uh fighting shape and then our pagers went off i was part of a counter-terrorist team and our payers went off and it was a training off so we got pushed out into malaysia we rotted our bodies in a hangar for a month because the snipers employed it was a hostage rescue situation they were building up the scenario was just training up but i was uh in this malaysian hangar and i had a fight due in less than a month right yeah so my body is rotting away and um man i got sick along with you know the whole troop got sick and we did our our training out there and redeployed and i had four days right before i fought and i had oh man i had diarrhea you know just just really bad you know i was really in a bad way because when i did the striking dude i was out of breath like within the first 30 seconds because my body was just that weak coming out of the jungles and i had a fight in four days yeah and um my medic told me to drop out he goes don't do it dude drop out they're seeing a guy from mainland japan to fight you so the fight car was this pan crazed champion coming from mainland japan to whoop my ass because i was doing good in these uh little small fights i was an up-and-comer and uh he came in from mainland champagne he was a big japanese fighter you know i was fighting at a weight of 190 and he was 210 you know in that buddha con open match so i remember the fight night man um my team shows up right so i poke my head out from the the back dressing room where i'm doing my strikes my team is there the command is there i'm like oh so i poked my head back in i'm like oh god i got to win this fight but i'm really sick you know i'm throwing up in the uh bathroom literally right before the fight and then santo comes in he goes you can't fight like this and then that walk or die speech kidding through my uncle do you want to be a commando today yeah and i said yes i want to be a commando sorry so i put on my fighting clothes and i i walk out right i wasn't champ so he he walked out left so i came on the ring you know the music's playing i'm all amped up this is my first like semi-professional fight and then this japanese guy comes in and he was like one of the biggest japanese dudes i ever seen long story short he whipped my ass like bad bad um but uh yeah man i fought in those matches and um so fast forward it i was in thailand and um i was suiting up for a muay thai fight right so these thai fighters man they can kick they're like lightning fast you know and i i went into the ring and um while i was in the dressing room i was prepping to go to the ring and one of my friends come back he goes hey man hey there's a guy here i want to say his name because he still does classified stuff but uh he was the command certain measure of a tier one unit that he was gonna go back and take that command and uh he wanted uh it just they wanted to let me know that he's there so i'm freaking out i'm like what's that mean should i be fighting and they're like hey dude i don't know you do what you do so i'm like oh i'll go fight right so i went down there and um the fight didn't last long to move tie fighters they can kick but they can't they can't take a punch right so um that that cross man you know he got hit i took the kick and i came in and i exploded with my hands and he went down and i wanted to fight and i went back in that dressing room and my medic friend comes in did you know that he was here that guy and i'm like yeah her and then my buddy came he dropped the business card and he said hey just letting you know he uh he saw the fight and he wants you to call him i was like for what you know i thought it's in trouble he goes you know where he's going he wants to talk to you about something i don't know so i called him right and um he he he said it straight he goes i want to hire you on and and kag is the compatis you're gonna work in selection and training that's insane dude right so you know at that time um i was gearing up to go to the philippines so i i was doing that off in thailand that was closed off i went back to okinawa japan i compensate on it you know i thought about what his offer was you know i knew like the timeline when he was going to go back and take the unit and um i deployed with my team into the philippines um let me tell you something about a tier one unit man they can do whatever they want there was a dirt trail road in zamboanga and um i had to go through the direct support selection process which was road mars physical train uh phys pt psychological evaluation academics you know so you have to pass all that and then you get accepted into that role so it's a three-day process the interview and the physical fitness so i had to fly to north carolina to do that i'm in zamawanga philippines right now they they had a dirt trail road where i had to put these little lights up and they landed this plane and they flew me to north carolina to uh to go through you know i was kag's uh direct support you know selection and um i made it got hired on as a as a combatives guy and what was that entitled i was working in selection and training and i was training under uh these guys called team rock who were qualified during hoist gracie i was trained with voice gracie i would travel around america and train with all these prize fighters i would bring that knowledge back i would fight all day long and work out all day long what a life right then there was a sergeant major from a sea squatter and he came in and he was a big jiu jitsu guy and he asked me um to go with him on a combat op so they were uh the squadron was fixing to rotate in for their rotation of iraq and we were hunting down you know sarcastic at that time so you know a combat is kind of right so um i got together my my team gear i got the intel brief from the intel guys got attached to uh c squadron came in and you know i was i did a lot of stuff they didn't need me to do like you know um i was a gunner on i was a attack vehicle driver so i infield the teams in and then eventually i was containment for the assault you know so near-term containment but you know during that time frame man i saw some capabilities in that unit i'll bet you did and uh for for those listening that don't know who zarqawi is i believe he was the number two most wanted uh high value target and uh in the war yeah that he got killed uh was that 2006 yep yeah yeah so you know obviously he was and you were after him well was one of the the unit was after him yeah and i worked within an organization i wouldn't say i was you know besides the intel gathering and everything else that everybody was trying to it was a unit effort i didn't mean i meant yeah yes absolutely you were part of the effort yes so during that time you know we were hitting gosh man they were that was the height of the war you know think about iraq back in that yeah so it's a higher war um you know gunfights happen on a daily every day you know so i saw some uh special um capabilities within that organization that set it apart from anything else you know anything else is their intelligence gathering capabilities working with the cia you know and i gave them that like lethality like that piece where you can find fix and and strategically hit a target man that's that's it right so you know during that time uh we were doing a lot of the infrastructure exploitation i don't want to get into it too much but that's how we find somebody you know and the the technology was used against the enemy and how we would find fix and locate and kill them uh and so i started seeing the birth of that working with nsa you know starting to see uh the special reconnaissance piece rise up and i saw the capability i wasn't part of it but i saw it you know so um being in gunfights every day you know i i came back i was put in for a valor award and i was really happy you know by the unit and i went to back to selection and training and the the started major selection and training so hey you got put in for a valley award good job you know you did great heard great things about you but you're fired and i'm like whoa what what's that mean they're like look look nothing personal you did a great job but you're fired from the the combatives program because he goes son you're taking up a sergeant major position in selection and training we just gotta you know have that career progression for the operators to take that position so they can get promoted and you're e7 right and i'm like okay god he goes look i you know we have a lot of other positions that i think you're going to be good at like dog handlers or breachers were brought up um go down ops and you know find that assignment apply for that assignment and then you know put your fire from here yeah because you're taking up a sergeant major position you know i'll tell you man i didn't know what to do right i'm like okay so i walked down to ops and i was walking down and there's a very classified wing within that that original i want to get into it but there was there was a very classified area and it had reconnaissance on there right special reconnaissance so i'm like those are the guys that i saw that special capabilities from when i was a combatives guy right and uh i really liked that so i knocked on their door like banging on their door and then this camera turns on i was looking at them and they're like who are you the the doors are speaking who are you oh my name is two lamb and i i wanna i wanna i wanna come inside talk to uh the troop commander you know and they're like we don't know you what's your business here i'm like i want i need to talk to him because i want to apply for you know possible job no i'm talking this door right and uh the door unlatches and i came in i saw the uh the troop sergeant mayor i sat down you say who are you you know when i was out first special forces group i did a lot of the low vis stuff i was part of a project called a trojan trojan lancer which they recruit from native lawyers like guys that can blend in into the indigenous areas and we would do black dax you know i don't want to get into the black decks but we would do that stuff working with uh the handlers up in the embassy you know the little viz handlers so you know i i told them about my background i did a little bit of that and you know i tried out for their uh their interview process i got hired on and i started learning and man i tell you so you're talking about sean you're talking about a fish out of water right because up until then i kicked indoors i was a commando i tracked down human beings in the jungle so mine was very direct action commando stuff right and the first day of reconnaissance training was this is how a cell phone works and this is how the towers work and this is how a uranium phone works and this is how a global star satellite this is where it orbits around the world and this is where the direction you need to point towards if you need to latch onto this satellite in this settle so they're really teaching me covert means of communication you really think about it yeah i used to see it at that time and like it was really long hours man it was you know long training long training i didn't think that i was going to make it through some of the training because this is really technical very technical so then i i started deploying um started doing a special reconnaissance piece and they stood up another capability within the unit to work with the cia i was part of the technical reconnaissance piece for that and i had to go through eight months of training with the cia now it's not all cia certain certain portions of it were especially the trade crowd the street crap portion and the reason why we had to cross train windows because we four deployed later on into these countries where we had to work underneath the chief of station you know it was it was really funny because you and i after talking last night we were in the same country on the same project on the same hunting down the same person yeah yeah so it's it's it never ceases to amaze me on how small the special operations community actually is and you know it won't be the first time that's happened it's it won't be the last time that's happened but yeah when you you know unfortunately can't really go into any details but when you started when we started kind of shooting the [ __ ] and i was like wait a s hold on what year was that and uh and you heard about what we did there oh yeah yeah well i mean yeah we were in both locations too on the north and the south and and uh yeah that's i had no idea that i was uh you know working with two lanes nutrient survival spec ops grade nutrition sean you know it's funny as i was going to college at that time too like you know we had our cia safe houses out in town and you know when when the ops were low i would log on and do my college so it was a continuous yeah continuous process you know but um getting back to when i was fired you know uh and then i got accepted on to that but you know what you know sometimes what we think is a curse is a blessing right me there's no way i would have saw that capability unless i was invited to go to that combat rotation and there was no way that i could have gone there unless i was fired from selection and training i wouldn't say i was fired i just took it sorry major position you know but um i did eight years there you know i travel all around the world how did you like uh that kind of that change of pace when you went into kind of an advanced surveillance and and all of that stuff we did we did a course similar to that not at that level uh when i was in when i was in the seal teams and uh at that time we were i was jumping into a team that was going to go to bosnia uh long story short we were running down uh war criminals you know from back in the day and then um and then i wound up going to afghanistan and said but we did a course with the mi6 that the end we had contracted out to the mi6 to come to virginia beach and put us through that course and we didn't fire one shot we didn't blow anything up we didn't jump out any planes we didn't do any of that [ __ ] uh totally new change of pace and instead what we're doing is running around on the 20th floor of the bank of american building in richmond virginia and nobody knows who the hell we are what we're doing and it was all about to blend in and then the area of operation started in you know virginia beach in a in in a mall and then it was downtown norfolk and then it was you know the whole eastern seaboard in virginia and it just kept it it's some of the coolest training i've ever done uh today and i and and definitely some of the most practical and uh and i loved it you know even though i wasn't blowing [ __ ] up all the time and shooting things and did how was your experience with that yeah you know like with the certain reports you know that we had to write after surveillance um the casing reports right it was just man brutal because um you know you had to write like six pages of of this describing in detail you know you have to be able to map out certain areas you know so it was very very outside my realm very i mean you're flying on non-commercial aircrafts you know civilian aircrafts trying to pinpoint a we call it a dumb beacon which is pulses you know how do you find just a dumb beacon you know something that just pulls a frequency you know how can you triangulate it down to a pinpoint location where i could put the kill capability there you know what i mean so flying in commercial aircrafts hell so it was totally out of my room you know i would tell you it took me a good year to kind of really like get over that hump because dude i was just treading water yeah you know i mean i felt like i was totally out of my realm you know totally out of my room but once i got that training right and i graduated from that training i got some real world ops behind me it was really cool because people think like a commando right tell me what's more dangerous a seal team coming in and hitting a pinpoint target where you know what the bad guys are in that house you know the exact location right and you're coming in with a wholesale team or a singleton driving around country x doing reconnaissance where you shouldn't be doing that if you get caught you don't know if your head's going to get lobbed off you're going to be on the news you have no xfield plan your weaponry is only a pistol if even that if you can diplomatic pouch that in you know for me well that's i would say that's more dangerous uh or at least has the potential to be but for me in that environment when it's when it's only you i mean it's like the best and the worst feeling in the world and uh and then and then to fast forward and we were talking about this last night too when you fast forward 10 years and you're like holy [ __ ] i was one guy you know and i'm a white guy you know and uh one guy running around you know yemen by myself or with one other dude and then you know doing these sort of things then you fast forward and it's like holy [ __ ] like that really is some jason [ __ ] you know you know it's what's really unique is you know you asked me last night you're like when you're doing it did you know like this is some dangerous [ __ ] you're doing and i told you like i never knew i knew it's dangerous obviously right you you know you go to the funerals of your friends you know how real this war is you know but when i was doing it i wasn't nervous it was a thing you know it was a thing and i knew surveillance was on me i knew they were on me yeah but you have to go about your daily routine even though you're being followed right and they're trying to draw intelligence from you you know yeah your training kicks in but what's really unique is when you're doing it it was i'm not saying i'm brave i'm you know it was just a thing it was just work it doesn't feel the same because the bullets aren't flying that's right explosions aren't happening you don't have a tens over top apaches you know you don't have any of that it's it's you that means you're doing it right because none of that is happening and in the middle of it it can almost it can get to the point where it seems boring but you make one wrong move you know and you know what i want to say too is like you know in war we have layers and layers and layers and layers and layers of support right the pred the imagery the intelligence packet you know you have your half your gaff you have all these packets man those are war assets you go into like you said yemen it's not a declared war zone yeah so you're not going to have everything from the war you're not going to have pred fees you're not going to have certain sickening platforms you're not going to have any of that because they can't even fly into the location you can't get resupplies in because it's not a part of the the country agreement yeah so you can't get weapons in you know so when i think about that man when when people think like oh you know spec ops is about door kicking and that's yeah we do that but there's a lot of guys like you that are out there as singletons that's living in it you're living in it i mean how many stories have we heard about guys like us getting their heads lopped off they end up on the news they get kidnapped they go up missing you know it happens so it gets really real when you think about it and when i think back to now sometimes i get anxieties right i think back i'm like oh my god i did that like that's really crazy you know now is hitting me more than when i was actually doing it yeah the same same here you know but it really rounds it really it it turns you into an extremely well-rounded and uh and and and talk about learning how to adapt yeah that you have no choice you know so but you know during that that you know special missions unit assignment i mean i cross-trained with 2-2 sas so i was able to get their um their tactics when they're fighting you know uh ireland you know i mean they're fighting the terrorists out there i was able to cross-train with israelis i got to cross-train with all these high-level units in the art of surveillance and reconnaissance in intelligence you know the israelis man they're one of the leading companies in their intelligence gathering capabilities yeah you know i mean they have to be based off their geographic location i never got to work with them around there they're amazing their technology and the way they do stuff their intelligence gathering is amazing so what i'm saying is you know that that assignment allowed me to cross-train all these different entities and even within our country you know the nsa and you know the cia and i got to work with the um the marshals you know because the marshals are great at tracking human beings down you know we just had to change it to how we do that overseas you know and you know um working in like countries like yemen uh is is a non-permissive environment semi non-permissive environment so you know you being a white guy you're not going to get killed driving down the street but you're going to get looked at and if you go into the wrong part of town you're going to get killed yeah you're right and if you're looking for bad guys in that part of town then that country can either snag you up because well you shouldn't be doing that or or um is a terrorist that snags you up in some of these fake checkpoints that we have to go through whether there could be a terrorist trap or it can be the government you know trying to see what you're doing so what i'm saying it was very complex in that arena and they're tracking your your cell phones and everything else so they they triangulate where you're at so you have to understand that level there's so much to think about when you're operating in that kind of an environment in that capacity because it's it's it's the bad guys that we're tracking but not only that it's also all the other spy games that are happening over there with the chinese the russians the iranians the israelis you know and and and and and running into them you know and they know who you are you know who they are and it's it just gets real weird yeah and uh and uh yeah you know being a 210 pound asian guy walking around in some of these mid eastern countries i mean you stand out man yeah you know even though i'm asian i look like a westerner now you know i stand out i am a prime target for kidnapping prime yeah you know in some of the ops that we go out and man you're a singleton one up in a car you're sitting out in you know a bumper position somewhere you know that somebody can roll up on you and take you out you know they know where your safe house is at you know yeah and uh and like you said it's not just the bad guys it's not just the terrorists it's the the host nation they want to know what you're doing in their country and then it's the chinese they want to know what you're doing in their country or in in that area right and then you know you got all these different embassies right and you got to work you got to work in that silent mode throughout all of them and you got to find fix and locate whoever you're you're there to find you know it takes a lot of work and but i found out like you know we can't do that physical reconnaissance right physical surveillance that's you can't do it because i'm a 210 pound asian guy i don't blend in yeah so that's where you know the the agency training came in the infrastructure you know i can track a human being without even being a country yeah right so and that's why i learned from that that journey you know i mean it was so funny because like you said it started off as combatives right and then uh it went to me getting fired in that position but um it was a blessing because it made me like you said well-rounded so when i came out of um working in that organization for roughly eight years um libya fell during that time when i say libya numbered attacks on libya the annex the cia headquarters you know the americans were drug out in the street killed you know and um we didn't responded right away remember that incident i remember yeah we didn't respond right away and so that was the need for uh a special operations africa command right they needed a strike capability within africa in case something like that happens so um you know i i requested from jsoc to to go there and take that apply for that assignment you know it was the uh the sith teams you know the commander extremist forces so crif crisis responses force is what they changed it to and there was a continent in africa so we became the action arm of africa you know and the thing about what people tell me is like what makes green berets you so unique right it's yeah we got that fed capability and force multiplying but we're there that means that i have a capability to go in and train indigenous force my presence there because the country team allows it but i can quickly react to a hostage situation i can go border crossings so i need to recover a human being you know i mean so being in that continent i knew i needed to be in that continent because that's where all the heavy fighting was and the unit was kind of pushing me that way anyways but i wanted more of instead of doing the surveillance piece now i wanted to go back to direct action so that's what made me switched over again so doing the low vis piece i mean gosh man i did for so long and then i'm like okay i want to go back to kicking in a door again right i want that direct action piece again so i left um the unit and um i got offered a troop sergeant major position in that unit to stay during that time i picked up ea as in the special forces and we had to go back to special forces uh group and do our team certain timing and that's when i'll go back to to the unit and take my troops army time so that was the agreement um i decided that um i fell in love with colorado it's beautiful out there just come visit me out there i was so beautiful and i found somewhat of my piece when when i was off work but i deployed into africa i did the libya piece um that was long you know we were training a fit for us we're finding a uh a strike capability within that unit it was a very hard assignment because a lot of these guys were um some were crooked you know they were vetted by the cia but some were were bad guys you know um our area operation didn't allowed us you know the freedom movement of a war zone where we could just strike right we had it was more intelligence gathering no lie 100 percent they're here and then we do a truly strategic strike because if you ruin rapport that country then you get kicked out of country and you lose your footing within that continent right so that's what people don't understand you strike the wrong target you're going to get kicked out of the country and you lost your mission so it was really heavy heavy heavy intelligence and standing up a fighting force so you know i was part of rotation we stood up the fighting force we started doing some uh some confidence targets and um my rotation was over and then i got pulled out and i got sent into south africa where i protected uh our former president um obama you know barack obama and he was there to attend mandela's funeral so that was one of my last missions you know with with that organization but this is where it came to head with me you know roughly around that time i was at 14 and a half years of war and combat seven years of that was heavy heavy war and in combat in conflict areas within a tier one organization you know so you're thrown out there so after seven years and then before that was the first group you know i mean so i was it was compounding on me and i didn't see it you know um [Music] you know you hear about uh post-traumatic stress you hear about ptsd you hear about all of it it can't happen to me yeah i'm breaded to do this but it was and um i started getting numb to the world i started losing focus at work just didn't care and that's dangerous in a in a dangerous man game right that's a dangerous mindset when you don't care in that world so i just realized that um you know i just need to to move on with my life and um how long do you think you were just kind of going through the motions before before it finally clicked it's time to hang it up two years two years did it gradually get worse yeah did you start getting complacent yes yeah didn't care get complacent you know and um hey man everybody makes their mistakes right mm-hmm right so i i just i'm just letting you know that it was a hard time in my life and um i had to reflect back on my life and and i realized that maybe i'm just not made for this anymore you know even though i was i had all this experience i was top of my game it's just i wasn't feeling anymore you know it bothers me um seeing women and children get killed you know and you're in that environment and it bothers me it bothered me that i couldn't affect certain areas and people and free those people so it bothered me so at that time i had a lot of guilt i had a lot of um pain so i started hiding that pain right um i was hurt i've been shot i've been blown up you know so uh they give us uh obviously painkillers you know to keep you you're you're you're an nfl team right so they're going to give you whatever you need to stay on the battlefield and um i self-medicated myself a lot during that time to hide that pain what were you self-medicating with opiates opiates oxy and you know as well as i do that's a normal that's a normal thing on the team like a normal issue yeah team guys hide their uh their pain through that you know so i started um just losing my way and um i was out in africa one day and um i was drinking some chai tea and we're ready to uh to go out and do our patrols and the counter potion wars in africa and um the sun was coming up you ever found your piece man you ever like had a moment where you're like wow that's beautiful yes and you're there in that present moment well that was that present moment i was there in africa right so at that time i was at uh 19 years in the military you know majority but with special operations so i was really messed up you know and i found my piece there and i i said to my i wrote i carry a notebook everywhere i go like a samurai i'll write stuff down and um i wrote the word peace because that was my new journey you know so born in war fought racism fought you know the oppressed and freed enslaved and now is you know i'm really messed up and i needed to find my my peace in life myself again you've got to do you yeah you know they lou zhu was a uh the founder of thousand and he said the journey of a thousand miles began with a single step and i read that when i was 12 years old you know that same and i wrote down the piece and i i started my first steps towards peace and that means to um so i got off the teams i put in my retirement packet and i was off on my new journey to find myself again well it's pretty huge of you you know and uh you know a lot of guys it's just it's just you know one more deployment one more one more one more and uh you know just like a drug it's just never gonna be enough you're just gonna have to cut it eventually you know i mean we're all addicts if you're on a team you're an addict you're addicted to adrenaline yeah you're addicted to that fast-paced life you're addicted to it that's why we stay in so long you just don't know when to call it well at that moment you know peace was more important than anything in my life well i think we're getting ready to start transition so let's take a quick break and uh when we come back we'll get into how bad it got and and how you dug yourself out of that hole and yeah get into some ronin tactics nutrient survival feed your freedom all right so just covered some of your military career went pretty in depth with that and um we're wrapping it up and now you're getting ready to go back into civilian life for the uh dreaded transition yeah yeah well first i want to start off with you know um my mission in cameroon um doing the counter poaching campaigns i actually graduated from college then so i fulfilled that promise to my mother you know i promised my mother when i graduated from high school that i would finish college and throughout my whole military career still fighting and employing i was going to college and i was on a cameroon commando camp and i took my final exam and i graduated with honors by fighting counter poaching campaigns wow but i was facing depression during that time frame um but that was a promise i made to my mother you know and that i kept so here i am you know i i knew i was really messed up you know and i i didn't want to admit it to anybody it was a personal pride thing for me but i knew i wasn't there anymore mentally i wasn't there i was um i just lost man you know i mean i was just lost and i wanted to find my path again you know so um i decided that 23 years 23 years was was good enough and and i had a lot of unfinished business in the military but it was at a point where i had to find my my peace yeah you know i had to find out and that journey was it's you know as a veteran that journey is very difficult it's very difficult in a lot of ways and um i don't know what the first thing that hit you was um but one of the major things that hit me before uh or that i kind of came to the realization of before i realized everything else that was going on um you know in my head from you know being in combat that long is is one of the hardest things to do is leave the team and watch the team go on to the next stop and you're not there anymore and um what what was the first thing that kind of hit you you know i i wanted to retire so i moved over to more to operation side of house and i wasn't very well put together back then you know it was just really dealing with some internal issues so when i um when the teams were deploying you know yeah i feel the same thing sean you know just you just don't know you just feel like you can do more you don't know when to quit yeah my father told me once when i first joined the teams um i asked him i said when when did you know you know when when is it enough he goes you know you don't know he never even talked about it he's you don't know and i did at that point i what was more important to me than anything operations or being a commando was finding my peace you know and uh that was that was a long process right um you don't just find your piece you know you don't just go from the teams and then you now you're in the civilian world and instantly you're you're safe and at peace that's how it works you don't find your piece by you know reaching a level of money and success you don't find it there that's not where peace is at you know it took me a while to realize that peace is found in what you do daily peace is found in growth and spirituality and and stuff like that so i want i want to explain this to you because this is the seed of how i healed myself okay so when i was going through all my times you know i i honorably retired out of the military 23 years now i'm at home i'm just retired savann you know no direction ronin has ronin isn't ronin yet you know ronin tactics hasn't run in tactics yet my wife was working up in denver uh colorado you know she's just she has a business degree accounting degree masters you know so she's a big deal in that world you know and here she is you know she's this big time manager managing all these people in a major you know corporation and uh you got a commando with 23 years free right free from the military and what i did all day was i slept i slept in a dark room shades down i was in bed all day were you still on the drugs deoxies the benzos the sleeping pills yeah you know that's what people you know people have judged me on it earlier you shouldn't have done that you're right you're right but when when you've been hurt when you've been when you got hit by ied when when you have over a certain amount of free fall jumps combat equipment you know you're just living that life that team life man your body takes a beating am i right sean oh yeah definitely takes the beating so you know the the painkillers that they prescribe to us i mean that's a fail situation because what works in this treatment the next treatment you're going to require too and it just continues to grow until it spars your world out of control you know the other thing with those that got me was it started as as treating injuries physical injuries but then when you're taking those and especially the you know the oxy or the the the opiates is you you immediately start to realize the it suppresses your thoughts it slows you down you don't really give a [ __ ] about anything and uh just you know just like you were saying it you'd finally become numb that makes you even more numb and i think that's where the the addiction uh really comes in is you're suppressing all those thoughts i wanted that numbness yeah you know i i was in pain you know i lost friends you know and it really bothered me because you know some of these man some of my teammates i actually physically carried off the battlefield they're dead bodies and some of them are laid down in their final resting place at funeral services so that pain is there you know you just i don't care how much you mask it with you know but the medication that allowed me to numb it and i almost lived in this state of numbness you know and you're talking about you know the sleeping pills it's not just opiates i was addicted to sleeping pills i was addicted to um uppers and and the reason why is that during the height of the war i mean we're on a pager right so you're going out and you're conducting these nightly rays or reconnaissance missions and everything and in daytime you know you come back and you sleep but if there's a daytime hvi target you're going to get your pager it's going to go off and you're again and do what you need to do even those days so it's it's never a a cycle it's it can happen any time the missions right so you never really rest right in these combat deployments so you know the recce missions i mean we have to stay awake 72 hours sometimes maybe seven days 10 days depending on the op you know what i'm not saying stay awake but you're you're sleep deprived you're you know you're not eating right you're laying in some kind of old abandoned mall or somewhere across baghdad in a hide site and you're hyper vigilant yeah you know yeah so you know they gave us um they gave us uppers you know to stay awake for that long time and then when you come off of that op or you can't sleep because your mind is spinning on when does that page are going to go off again so you take downers which was you know ambien which is a sleeping pill and you know that can be addictive yup all right so it causes you to change your mood right change your you know change your mood sometimes and and for us a person that's in that much pain you don't want to be in that painful state so you want to always constantly change your mood or you want to mask it um that was my roller coaster man you know i was i was really addicted and you ever had a moment in your life where you look in the mirror and you just not happy with who you are yeah i've had several of those so you know my wife was going up into denver she was working in these jobs i was slaying around in this um bed all day and i was just so tired man like just really run down you know fatigue my body's aching um [Music] i just had enough had enough and i wanted a moment to change i really wanted that but i didn't know how i was um sitting on my couch one day in a dark house you know i had a blanket wrapped around me my wife was up working in denver and i was just really feeling down that day it was just a bad day you ever stared at an empty tv that's off you're sitting there staring at a tv it's not even on yes i have so the house was dark and i had a blanket wrapped around me and i i don't i was walking around the house and i can't tell you what drew me to the final location you know i walked around this dark house and somehow i ended up in my office you know i have a war room with all my war trophies i have a huge library because i'm a big reader and he put me in front of my bookcase don't even know how i got there don't even know why i'm opening up my my bookcase and my hand reached in there without even looking i'm gonna pull it out the book of five rings i haven't read this book since i was thirteen you know and the book of five rings if you don't know was written by ronan back in the late 1500s he died after um writing the book of i rings uh in a buddhist cave where he meditated he was a warrior he was a philosopher he was a gardener he was a renowned swords master swords swordsman you know undefeated as a warrior and as ronin fought in major wars and he killed me a lot of people and he um the story is that you know he he came to a point in his life that he needed peace and he retreated to uh kumamoto japan where uh it was a mountainous region in japan and used to been all covered in water you know back in the you know the uh prehistoric days that whole area and used been japan's an island you know and so it's a lot of coral reefs in this this area so imagine the train rugged mountainous terrain coral reefs um there was a buddhist temple there and musashi went there and he meditated there and found his peace for three years he meditated and reflected on his life and at two o'clock in the morning he said it on the on the book he he finally after meditation for three years he picked up um the ink and he wrote the book of five rings ten days later he died in the buddhist cave you know i when i picked up this book you know i opened up the book and i didn't know even what i was looking at you know and it was a passage that said all your strength all your all your love all your passion is within you everything exists within you don't look anywhere else the answers within you nowhere else you know and you know what's really unique was at that time i was looking for the answers everywhere else i was looking for happiness and success and everything externally you know so i would call my my stepfather and i'm like hey man how did you do it how did you do it how did you do a career and and get over that war you didn't have an answer i'll call my teammates you know hey guys how's it going how what you guys up to you know i was looking for the answers everywhere else so musashi you know that that that book the book of five rings reminded me that everything is within all of our love all of our compassion everything is within i needed to fix this broken man you know spiritually so i remember closing that book and um you ever had a moment of rage when you look in the mirror and you're just like i really hate this person it was rage it wasn't anger it was rage i was very upset at the path i lost myself you know so i remember opening up my my medicine cabinet and things started falling out from all the medication that was in this cabinet i mean guys you know how many how many veterans have died from overdosing drugs i mean that's a normal thing nowadays right it's sad yeah so i saw this dropping down and i don't know i just had that rage that that fire so i took it i dumped it all down the toilet i flushed it every everything i had let me tell you what happens when you go quit code turkey after i don't know five to eight years of being on these meds you know that wall that numbness that you talk about with that wall that we that holds us from the realities of life what that was gone and i felt it man i felt the weight of the world it came my whole life came crashing now because i didn't have the the chemicals right to block it so i felt it it if you think about a stream of water all that emotion hit me at once and you know it was really hard it was really hard time in my life and um that's when i i reflected right like masashi so i basically took his concept and i closed myself off to the world right and there was a uh in my office you know i set up a meditation area you know and uh i made a promise to myself that i need to find my here and now you know so when i say that is when when people say what's that mean here and now you know what's does it mean what's that mean you know how many times have you gone throughout your day in subconscious years who's thinking about man you're thinking about more negative stuff you know that a normal human being thinks about 75 percent of their life like their day 75 percent of their day is thinking about negative stuff i did not know that monitor your thoughts 75 percent of your day a normal human being 75 percent of their their focus more on the negatives they're focusing on the anxieties of the future to focus on mistakes of the past so you're always living within those two time zones the past or the future never in that present moment you're never there in that present moment and in all of time in the past future present the present encompass all of time what you do now reflects your future what you do now is will either get you over your past or imprison you from your past right so i i realized that and um you know i reflected and man you know i i made my share mistakes i'm a human being and the first step was forgiving myself i wrote it all down you know i had this book and i wrote it all down and i remember getting into uh i wrote down mindfulness meditation was a practice i want to get into now when i was out first group you know i travel all through asia you know so i got to see the monks like i meditated with the tibetan monks the thai monks you know the philippines i've meditated and they're more uh uh catholic but there were certain countries that are very buddhists and i meditated and i uh not that i'm buddhist but i i wanted to learn the practice of zazen here and now now i want to bring you back i was doing mountain operations in um in lay india which is the border of pakistan so we're doing a mountain warfare training so you're at 18 500 feet [ __ ] right so you're carrying oxygen tanks up there we're doing cliff assaults and on the weekends you know we have time off and uh i would go to the temples and there was this tibetan monk it was after my uh my time in the philippines you know the war in the philippines we lost some teammates in the philippines and and uh the philippines was it was cruel man you know the the the busan bandits with rape murder kill you know the uh the the christians and the catholics in that area because they wanted an independent muslim state so after my time there there was a there was pain there from that you know so um i had a linguist with me and i went to go visit to tibetan monk and i asked the linguist to translate for me and i asked the monk you know why is the world so cruel you think you think about the sean like you know i was born out of war you know i mean so that's that that's a legitimate question for me why why is it so cruel in the monk um shook my hand took me out back of the temples and there was a uh a dirt courtyard right and he the monk took a stick and he drew a circle onto just dirt ground and he sat there and he had these two sacks that he threw outside of the circle and one sack was full of black rocks and the other sack was full of white rocks and he told the linguist he said um when he he would sit here for years you know four years is what kind of coming to my mind right now but he sat there for a long time every single day and he said he would look at this circle on the ground and when he would think of a negative thought he would take a black rock and cast it into this circle in the dirt and he said for many years you know he was he he was casting black rocks into the circle and eventually um he started casting white and now it's all white rocks and i'm like whoa what changed why why the negative to the positive how's that changed and he said it's simple the human being we don't we go through life focusing on the negatives and if unless you know what you're you're thinking about subconsciously then you can't do anything about it so because i'm totally aware of my thoughts my negative thoughts then i'm able to influence my negative thoughts but i'm unaware of this then i go through living life negative and the world was so cruel because people are unaware of the negative in this world the evils of this world and if they and he said if people are able to control their emotions the world will be less cruel makes total sense it does right we're able to control our emotions so i thought about that right what was weird is fast forwarded to now this dark room depression that image came back in my mind when i was war gaming how am i going to get through this depression right so i googled right the reasons for laying in bed all day in a dark room and the word depression popped out well that can't be that can't be so i re-googled causes for being fatigued post-war depression pumped up ptsd i'm oh no so it worried me enough where i went to go see you know a doctor and a doctor was like look son you know this is normal you've been through it um you have depression here's some antidepressants good luck you see the army the military practices western style medication right western style medicine is i'm gonna fill you up with meds to make that go away but all of it's temporary the eastern side of medication is internal right you're you're not you're relying on the externals you're relying on the internal to heal your body internally so the monk said that it resonated with me and i wanted to walk the path of eastern practice all right so it started off with me carrying a book notebook around and writing down my thoughts throughout the day and my hard days i will write the deepest notes and i will practice meditation every morning every afternoon and every night the monk did say to me that i say hey hey monk what's the best form of pr of meditation i asked him that and the monk smile and he said the one did you do every day so i googled right mindfulness meditation so i got the you know the the con-op i got that down i'm like okay i can do this i can do this how hard is it to sit there and just concentrate your breathing it can't be hard i focus on my breathing that's that nothing else so i was so confident i bought a meditation uh seat mattress um that you sit on the ground i bought that on amazon and i'm like this is gonna be easy day so i went down into my quiet office i closed the door closing the door means i'm trapping my spirit in that room the spirit walks in that room if i'm talking to you right now and you're thinking about your wife then your mind drifts over to wherever she's at if i talk about your past your mind and dress back to your childhood your mind is always floating how you capture that so in my con op i was like well if i lock this door then my spirit is locked in here with me so then i sat down and i started into my meditation practice of breathing you know where you focus only on the breathing inhale exhale inhale exhale i'll tell you what i thought about yemen libya i thought about my wife up in denver i thought about everything else but breathing yeah the noise the noise i i've been hearing this noise for so long and you just can't turn off that noise because you've been doing this every single day for i don't know your whole life so how can you reprogram a mind that's used to go into your mind it's free floating like this you're not controlling it man i failed i failed the first day the second day the first year the second year around the third year i was sitting out in the deck right now when i say i failed i went down every morning and i did it every afternoon i did it every night time i did it even though i was feeling i was sitting there over and over and over and doing it how long were you attempting like what was your daily did you have a time limit or yeah yeah so initially i i i was over achievers like i'm gonna go 30 minutes right and then uh it cracked down to two minutes and then it went to five minutes and now i'm back up to 45 minutes wow right so so i had to go back down because i couldn't lock in at that long of the iteration my mind started drifting you know so when i was failing all this man i was really depressed because i'm trying to make myself better and i'm failing and failing and failing every single day it was around the third year i was sitting out outside on the deck and i was just enjoying the day you know and heard the birds chirping let me explain this to you my mind was never there enough where i could hear birds it was always somewhere else i haven't heard birds since the beginning of the war you can hear them obviously right i can hear the noise but i never really said wow how beautiful is that you weren't present and so those were the signs and i wasn't really seeing it in the beginning but later on i started catching on like i have to be present to hear those birds i have to be present to see the sun come up nutrient survival spec ops grade nutrition you know so now i was slowly indoctrinating myself to live in the present moment okay i was still failing meditation right also during that time of me finding my peace you know um entrepreneur accompanying ronin tactics ronin tying back into the book of five rings musashi the words that gave me the courage i needed to take the first steps in finding my peace so that's why it's ronin that's why i call myself ronin tactics because at the birth of my company i was at the lowest point in my life and ronan if you understand that word means masterless right way man wonder but it also means during frugal periods japan disgrace it does it means disgrace right so at that point i was really low so that's why i named myself initially i named myself bruno because i was embarrassed to be my own skin so when i was starting to practice uh the form of meditation around three years i started getting into but you know what's really funny is because i was starting my company and i'm a really big martial artist and i started just filming my training events i started going around and teaching that's part of my healing process that's why you see me traveling all through america i can i can easily be in colorado and just teaching kyronic and all kinds but that's not the journey i wanted to take the journey i wanted to take was take my wife and for us to experience our new journey together and our steps together in helping to reshape are americans right and i can start doing that by the human beings that swore allegiance to god and their community to protect that community so our police officers if i want to affect a community right as a green beret i i trained the commando force that sworn in allegiance to protect that community so that's where i started i started with the police officers right so it became a warrior in the garden you know people ask me what's that look like the warrior in the garden i don't know what that looks like but i am aware in the garden because i took my life experience in the combat experience i'm giving back to what i perceive as a good in this world right and if i want to protect my communities and our country and make it better then i i train the people who swore to allegiance to that community i also trained civilians you know so during that process of me traveling around the united states and i called my friend called ninja camp because i start off with combatives right and i go into the bushido and the way the mind of the warrior and the responsibilities that we need to in the proper way living you know as a warrior and then i go into the skills of lethality because how do you control violence john with violence that's right so i give the good in this world the art of violence right at that level that i fought in i give them that with the way behind it which is compassion so now you have this this skill set with compassion right and you control the hate and the violence and the evil in this world through violence right so i teach them that and then through that process i started filming i started posting on social media and um i got an email from the history channel so the history channel they knew i'm a big knife guy right and they're like hey um would you be interested in being on the tv show and you know this this is what i want to talk to you about man because being a team guy right our world is so secret right we we walk and we hang out with each other during operations and after work because who who else can we talk these stories about who who else can we vent that off too who else is read on there there's nobody so you're very alone during that and the only peers that you have is your team guys if they're even read onto that project right so i realized this and um you know i wanted i wanted to to change right so i started promoting my training the training side of the house of ronin started picking up or all of our events i can truly tell you man all of our events sell out you know even to this day and um it's very successful ninja cam you know so um the history channel uh contact me or is their talent team and they're like would you like to be a co-host on a show for uh this show called forge and fire knife or death which it's like ninja warrior where they run through an obstacle course with a blade i'm like oh how cool is that right like what do you need me to do and they're like i just need you to bring your expertise in so talk about the geometry of the blade talk about did will this blade do good as a forging blade as chopping blade based off of your survival skills and because i know my knives you know i had to use those tools to fabricate um living quarters in the jungle you know so i have i know my blades and um and uh we we linked up with uh you know the host of the show which is bill goldberg wwe wrestler you know it was really cool because we hit it off you know so they flew me into atlanta which is um the new hollywood you know atlanta georgia and um when i say it has a lot of the the shooting in hollywood is going on in atlanta now just tax breaks and location so they had this old abandoned hangar you know my first day on the set pull up limo pulls me into this compound right and um the security guard checks me in and then my assistant comes running out she introduced herself and she walked me to a movie star trailer it was huge man this movie star trailer and i want to say this is i'm not used to this [Music] i'm used to living in the dirt the mud uh eating like crap you know so now i have two assistants i had a my name on uh it's a talent on the door and they had this movie star trailer and that next to me was bill gober in his movie star trailer i'm like what's going on here [Applause] so you know the producer comes in introduced himself saying you know it's great to work with you this is your lines they could send me my script my scripts and i had to recite the script you know and then i had a makeup artist come in and put makeup on my face and i had a tone coach come in and talk to me in tones you know it was really weird and um we would hang out in the trailer right basically you know all morning and then until they need you on the set so then they they call me two lambs to the set right so my system bangs on the door she goes sir i need you on the set and i'm like oh okay so i come out i walk 15 yards from my front entryway to a golf cart and the assistant would drive me literally 50 yards down the street to set i couldn't walk there yeah so they drive me down there and i step off of the go of the golf cart and the makeup artist then looks at my makeup just in case it might have smeared from me riding 50 yards down to the 15 second golf cart ride yeah and um man they had 15 cameras on us you know on tracks you know you big time production you know they had 150 people on the set wow you know setting up the stage the background it was it was really cool had these fire barrels burning it was just oh this is hollywood you know bill goldberg comes in really really cool dude you know uh he has a presence to him and uh he was reading on script him and i hit it off we're still friends to this day but i want you to talk about this first day all right so the producers in my face talking about how i should act i had a fiber optic earpiece in with the control room uh was talking to me and how i should um what conversation i should have about the blade like two go into that blade all right so what what talk to me about the geometry and i believe so i'm like oh the geometry depleting you know i'm hearing all these earpieces makeup artists going and i had my assistant ask me what i want for lunch you know so it's really like i was i was having a little bit anxieties yeah is out of my environment because you know what was going on in my environment in my mind was about 30 yards to that front door that door's a middle saw corridor it swings open that's my escape route this is my exit route why is this guy so close to me i'm looking at threats i'm looking that's what we're trying to do right so i had to like close off that that mindset and go okay two you're in this present moment you're in hollywood right um somehow i made it through it you know and um we filmed for three seasons it was a successful show and um but during that time in filming i was still traveling around united states with my wife and i would train and we were developing our business uh in in uh enroning tactics as in you know merchandise so it was really taken off for us i was still depressed i was still fighting it right so every day i'll meditate and i was going through all this and then infinity ward which is call of duty um contacts me and say hey we're really interested to have you capture your emotions on the game your movements right your martial arts so you know we had a initial conversation with them they wanted to capture my movements you know it's just we were just so busy you know so i didn't think too much of it um we did talk to him but i just didn't think too much of it you know you just wanted to capture my movements and then we flew out to san francisco while i was training with their law enforcement teams on close quarters combat and then uh you know they follow me on social media and they're like hey you're in san francisco we want to fly you from san francisco to l.a so here i am doing cqb training and in two days i got to fly to la and interview with infinity ward you know so my wife and i we flew into la and um they took us into their their compound basically it's a more secure compound in a special forces compound i mean it's it's legit you know they know what they're doing so um we signed them on we met the the president if any award and we hit it off and he asked me to be a part of the game he wanted ronan to be a part of the game so that's how i was entered into the game we do motion capture for them so a lot of the martial art moves the gun fighting scenes it's coming up with our new contract with them so um it was a huge journey and then but i think what what's really unique about infinity ward call of duty opportunities and also the history channel was um my platform you know it got bigger right so along with that comes um well you have your haters obviously but along with that comes i have a huge fan base so why not i'm working on myself why not give others like the tools they need to find their happiness so you know my healing process became me just writing my thoughts on instagram and then i found out that it helps other people and in that process i started healing had you put together yet that all this good that you're injecting into the world is coming back around full circle to you it is with these opportunities yeah it was starting to come back around and you know at that time i didn't see it i didn't see because i'm giving i'm receiving you know i didn't see it like i just wanted to give because i'm healing that way i was just healing that way you know one step at a time and i was like man i helped this person i feel better about myself and i heal that way but i want to go back to this so you know i started going and seeing a lot of professionals like scientists i would listen to lectures and and how how the human brain functions and all that you know because as special forces soldier we dive into intelligence where we don't just fight a war we look at the intelligence situation and we develop a course of action in order to combat that well my my combat was in within myself right i was fighting internal war so i need to arm myself with intelligence so i was going to these seminars these doctors these uh scientists and and you know why 75 of our day is focused on the negative do you know why i don't so you know everything goes back to the creation of a human being right so whenever we create as caveman's our mind and body is hardwired right we're an animal we're just an intelligent animal but we're we're still an animal right every animal is born with a survival instinct we see it right an animal uh that lives in the jungle he has a survival instinct that's what keeps him alive a human being since day one has a survival instinct and our mind is connected to our body we're highly intelligent so that means that we can think about something that's very stressful and we'll feel that stress through our body right think about like anxieties when you think about something you it forms anxieties you think about a loss or failure you have anxieties or whatever you can feel it you can physically feel this okay so the human being's neurological pathways connected from the mind to the body we're nursely we're neurologically wired that way fast forward that you know fast forward out to modern times well we're not being chased by a saber-toothed tire we're not you know we're not trying to fight to survive for our next meal anymore but what is today what's today's saber-tooth tiger what's today's threat and i'll tell you for a normal human being today's threat is opinions of other people and acceptance acceptance opinions of other people on today's social world is social media right when somebody talks bad about you right i think about how many kids are killing themselves today because they're getting insulted on a social media platform there's words yeah right but they're so focused on that because their survival instinct is saying focus on that because that's negative and you need to look at that because that's a threat to you so imagine you can have a thousand people that says you know sean you're the man really respect you man thank you for being such a great american then you have one guy who said no do you focus on that i do you do i do too because that's a natural instinct as an animal species you're hardwired that way you're going to focus on that because now that's negative right well that's not a path to happiness that might keep you alive right but that's not a path to happiness so what i realized was my training and everything that kicked in i will never find happiness if i continue to live with the same mindset that made me who i am in the military i would never find happiness so i i went to tony robbins seminar and it's about leadership and and life and tony robbins you know claim to fame is uh he can uh change his physiology he has this exercise that he does to change his physiology and if the body is connected to the mind you change your physiology your physical state then you can change your mind and how it reacts remember that smile i talked about smile be brave yeah well the brain is connected neurologically to a smile registers to your brain everything is good everything's okay because you've been establishing that neurological pathway since you're a child smiling it's good right so now that your body is sending information to your brain your brain is saying hey everything's good because you're smiling same thing so uh tony robbins talk about if you have a bad day you change your physiology and then that can change your your mind state so what he does is he changes physiology it's like booting up a computer right and then now he's going to inject positive thoughts into that computer which is your brain and that's how you do it so i'm like oh that makes sense it makes sense but how's how's that happen right so i went through a seminar because i wanted to learn it more and the guy took all these practices from around the world he meditated with monks he walked through fire i mean this guy's the real deal you know so um i realized that majority of us if we walk around we focus on the negative then you're just going to be a negative guy so if your survival instinct is to focus on the negative and that's a human thing how do you break it you ever had something to happen to you and you you can't shake it you think about all day subconsciously you just can't it doesn't matter you can beat your head to a wall and you just stare it's always there you can go cut the grass and it's still there in the background talking to you yeah that's because you can't shake it so tony robbins talk about changing physiology so how do you do that right so you know in the mornings is when i practice it the most nowadays in the mornings and uh the reason why i say that is if i'm able to wake up at a peak stake in the morning you ever had a good morning with a lot of energy and you feel like you can accomplish anything during the day yeah you ever had a bad morning where you don't feel like doing anything i've had those two so if i can tell you if i could put your mind and body at a peak stake every single day you think you're gonna accomplish anything as a human being yeah right so that's called living intelligently so now i want it because now i understand how the mind and body connection works right i understand the intelligence the situation now i can develop a course action to intercept that right so first is monitoring my thoughts going back to that monk a certain monitor might write down what i'm thinking it was man it was so negative just negative and um then i started changing my practice in the morning just instead of meditating in the morning right i started throwing in other applications like gratitude you know if i can express gratitude in the morning then how can you not be happy if you're grateful for everything in your life you know how are you expressing that okay so you have a lot of things that's great in your life sean you have a beautiful family a beautiful house successful company but yet you're focused on a negative why because of that animal instinct it forces you to focus on but if i if i change your physiology and i inject john you have a great life you have a beautiful family you have a beautiful life and a beautiful company that you started yourself great job and you inject that in every morning you're grateful for that how can you not have a great day you're you're at a peak state now right so i do so my process now in the morning is i get up at 4 30 in the morning i change my physiology is i take a shower and and for the next for the last minute i turn it to ice cold water and basically i'm shocking my body so i'm seeing all these blood uh cells to my muscles to keep it warm right so now i'm truly alive i could feel my body alive because muscle is rushing i mean blood is rushing throughout my muscles to keep it warm so i get out and get dressed and i go out to my quiet meditation place and there's a a cross out there and i i pray to god right so prayer so the thing is i'm i'm not here to talk about religion right but i am here to talk about if you believe in a higher form of living right if you believe in a higher purpose than yourself a higher being a creator then you're going to live up to that creator you're going to live up to that power the higher power if you don't believe in a higher power you're going to live up to yourself which is addictions selfishness you're going to drive your whole day around everything that's good for you and not everything that's good for that higher power that makes sense okay so if you believe in that right now you can live up to the higher power so first it was god right and then i go into changing my physiology so literally i sit down and i change my breath my my breathing patterns you think about when you're you're a seal so when you hold your breath and you hold that breath and you exhale that breath where you have more oxygen in your brain it changes your physiology right so basically i'm waking up my brain i'm injecting more oxygen into my brain so i take nine quick steps like and then i inhale my last breath at 10 10 seconds inhale hold for 10 seconds 10 second exhale and you you're going to feel it it changes your whole physiology right and then at that moment when when my brain is awake i have a notebook and i physically not thinking i fizzly write down three to four things i'm grateful for in my life you know for me it's i'm grateful for my wife her health and her love i'm grateful for my parents their health and support and love i'm grateful for god in this day i'm grateful for my health and i promise to this higher power that i will do everything within this day to be my best self so i inject those positive thoughts after i wake up the brain and then after that i go into meditation so uh here and now so basically i'm training my brain to be in the present moment okay so i go into a form of meditation it's called mindfulness meditation of zen where it's five seconds inhale five seconds exhale five seconds inhale five seconds exhale there's a posture a form of meditation you know um so i go into that and then i do about for now i do 45 minutes of that because i can lock in now back then i couldn't right and as soon as that man i feel um it's like drinking coffee right that you feel that adrenaline going through your body that that energy resonating through your body they actually did a uh a study on this this monk that was meditating and they had um i don't know these spectrums light and they found energy radiating from his body no [ __ ] yeah so i feel that's what's going on in my but i feel incredible energy in the mornings and after that i burn it down man i go down to my gym and i destroy my body you know depending on whatever fitness plan i have going on that might and it changes my goal changes and and that changes so the tony robbins seminar this this is the keynote here and you're going to take away so much from this is there are moral uh needs of a human being tony talks about he breaks it down into significance certainty uncertainty love and connection love and connection being the same thing right and then he has spiritual needs which is growth and contribution okay so a normal human being man you think about for us to be who we are type a personality to be who we were in the military in the world and who we are in in war man you have to place a higher level standard on yourself right you have this higher level than than a normal person because you pass through that rigorous training you have to have a strong mind so significance have been your number one priority that you put is number one importance in your life because you have such a high standard non-quit attitude because you hold yourself at a higher standard than anybody else so significance is your number one and that's going to get you pretty far in life when it comes to business and career because you're placing that higher standard first makes sense and then being a ceo or green beret we work in the uncertainty we're not scared to take risk that's why you're successful in your business you're not scared to take risk right and then you have certainty and you have love and connection now where i went wrong was what worked for me in the military i was trying to take that what made me so successful and replicate that into the next evolution of my life which is now business public exposure fame you know being in in tv shows and video games i was trying to take what worked for me it made me significant in the army and trying to replicate that in a civilian sector and it didn't work i never found happiness but my career and my success and business was growing but i wasn't happy i placed too much emphasis on significance and so after this tony robbins seminar i realized that whatever you place value as first as a moral value would decide how you're going to live so you place significance first sean because you're this badass navy seal and then now you go into a business world and you're just huge successful person because your significance is first a guy on social media who is jealous of your success badmouth you now you focus on that because you place significance first you care about what that other person thinks because that's so important to you because significance is what's driving you in your life i was that way i was never happy so i replaced significance with compassion love you know i place that first now and love is tied to gratitude gratitude's tied to happiness right significance is tied to yes it's a powerful energy that can get you there but the negative is you're concentrating what other people say about you yeah you care about living for somebody else's opinion because you value significance i think that also ties into ego yes huge do you believe me when i say majority of team guys have a huge ego i i more than believe it i know i knew it yeah i was a guilty for that yeah you know because that's the culture you just don't see until you step away from that culture you know and you know it's and i'm not bad-mouthing the culture you have to be who you have to be when you're there and that's the fire and the drive that makes you who you are on the teams but in this evolution it's not going to it's not going to work for you it's not yeah you know like i said you're going to like the brain is hardwired like a caveman you know since beginning time so you're focused on because you value significance you're focused on the negative so easily if you just place significance it's still there your higher standard is still there but you just don't place it first anymore so when somebody badmouths me when somebody's jealous of my success when somebody ridicules me because they don't man i'm a human being man you know and i i have my own opinions on things and not everybody's going to agree with you or like you right so how do you deal with that you know when somebody insult me online or in front of my face or not really in front of my face but when they do it online you know i just remind myself that i don't hold significance that important anymore would you say the first step to that is probably don't just don't engage yeah because you know we agree this is a hateful world we saw the worst in humanity in our old former jobs we saw the worst so in a hateful war what are you gonna do give more hate yeah it takes a stronger person to show compassion so i do i show compassion so when a hater hates on me you know i'm grateful i am actually grateful i look at that i'm like wow so grateful that you fabricated a fake account and you're talking to me uh you're you're putting me down so you're spending your day and your energy on somebody you don't even like thank you thank you for thinking of me and because you have no control over your emotions which is the cause of majority of the hate in the world this is how you act out so i'm gratitude i i'm grateful that first you took time to insult me like that because you're thinking of me and you're viewing me at a distance but second i'm grateful because i don't want to be like you and i forgive you so what i just did think about what i just did i changed something that was negative into something that's positive so it doesn't stay in my mind anymore because it's not negative so i'm not going to think about it it's defeating that survival mindset yeah now i look at that as wow that's a win i'm grateful that you did that so now i just don't care nutrient survival spec ops grade nutrition you know um you mentioned before that uh you've written down all your flaws when you left uh the team and i think the most significant flaw maybe uh was kindness she said you did not have kindness and you you articulated that that was a weakness you know most guys coming out probably just about everybody i know would not consider not having kindness a weakness and so being around that for 23 years you know you don't know what you don't know how did you figure out that by not by not having kindness uh in your heart or in your daily life that was a weakness because i think it's actually quite the opposite in the team where kindness would be considered weakness so you got to think about like two different evolutions right so what i drove as a weapon in this evolution which is hate you know because in war you do use hate as a weapon you know you drive off of that because you're i mean you are fearful for your life in a gunfight so you use that aggression that hate but how do you take hate and put into a civilian world in business it doesn't work right and yeah what the team guys you know and when i say this is you know when i left the teams i left the teams man you know the team life and you can back me up on this is a very opinionated world yeah your type a personality you know so guys that they're going to tell you what they think and their opinions on things and it's just the way it is you know so when you step away from the teams now you start hearing your own voice and what's truly important to you and for me it was happiness so if i hold on to hate and my in-state is to be happy and complete and successful in my life and be happily married with my wife then that kind of goes against that so i had to kill off the energy that kept me alive it's like killing off your best friend yeah you know so kindness let's talk about that at one point you know and and after the war i realized i'm not a kind human being anymore i'm not mean or rude or anything i'm very respectful but i was just i wasn't where i wanted to be in kindness so i would get dressed i'll go out in town and um hang out in starbucks and when somebody walks through the door i'll open up the door for them and they have a nice day i'll go up to the counter i'm like thank you so much for making me this coffee i swear i go here because of you and you make the best coffee thank you so much and i brighten up their day you think that was hard i do that was very hard it was very hard to even talk to a human being but because i wanted to be kind right i needed to change who i am as a human being so i went out and i was polite and kind and and after a year i was kind again you see and the kindness led me to happiness so you have to pick your energies right in life you have to pick your battles your energy and for me i realized that i put too much emphasis on significance and that's why i failed in this evolution i still haven't you know i mean you still see me getting up at 4 30 in the morning i still meditate i still so that's significance but i just don't put value on that it's so high anymore yeah love and compassion is where i put it because i realize that's tied into gratitude and god and everything else so if i put that as the most important thing then how can i not live my life in beauty in peace and if i realize that something's affecting me i know the practice of changing my physiology and getting rid of that thought so i always have great days it took me a long time to come realize that you know and let's talk about the last two right so spirituality so you have your spiritual needs as in growth and contribution you think about the sean like if you you know you you accomplish all this and then one day let's say you retire and you don't want to work anymore you don't want to educate yourself anymore anything new and you just want to relax and just chill out there's no growth in your life anymore within six months you're going to be depressed the reason why i'm saying this is because you know i'm in a hollywood world and i i meet some very successful people and they're very depressed you know you would think like you're an actor you make this amount of money you got all this stuff that's not what's going to make you happy yeah let's say you you know wanted the proud days in your life was probably graduating buds right yeah okay so you you felt the top of your world how long that lasts not very long exactly so growth right you can be this successful businessman millionaire entrepreneur your own you know be this role model and everything but if you're not really growing on a daily basis you're going to be depressed robin williams i mean do you think that has to do with ego at all though you know constantly growing yeah remember why i told you last night i said you know if you let go of the ego and realize that you're in a new phase of your life you just let that go who cares yeah you know who you are let go of that ego you don't need to you don't need to defend yourself against this person show them gratitude thank you for thinking of me and then continue on with your own ways you know but ego is a huge um it stops you from living a complete life yeah it stops you from learning growing and growth is spiritual right so growth uh every day i educate myself on whatever you know i'm a huge science guy i'm a huge history guy so i read educate myself i learn new uh trade crafts you know cameras i i i'm an artist i'm a gardener you know i mean so i get into all that and i find that that balance me from a warrior you know and i'm growing as a human being the gym is huge for me because i push myself to muscle failure and through muscle failure is growth and then i uh contribution right so during covid my wife and i would go um and pack groceries for elderly people that cannot go out and and uh and go shopping for their own food so we pack foods for them to deliver to their homes and that was contribution contribution being a ronin to give to teach you know so that's how i i overcame the depression by changing what's important in my life restructuring the order of what's important in my life how long did it take you to quit living in the past that's something that most i would say the majority of guys coming out is that it's it's a major hurdle and it's a hurdle that a lot of guys don't ever get over is living in the past and and and and consistently comparing themselves to their peers or or or the guys that are you know coming in or or it doesn't matter who anybody who's been in the community it's a lot of guys are are consistently comparing themselves their their service record to the next guy's service record and it's just this never-ending you know it just never ends yeah absolutely so you look that's that's tied into ego right so let's say you're this really successful career commando and and then you got this young guy who came in and you're like oh back in my day i did this just i had this you know you're nothing compared to what i went through how's the ego man he's a great american just like you he's just this this is air right so first i stop comparing myself and i i show gratitude to to the team guys because that's a hard life yeah it is right so first i show gratitude thank you for what you do you're the next generational warriors and they think they're better than me okay you're better than me thank you i don't i don't play significance first anymore so that's what i'm talking about it ties into that you know when team guys can't let it go that's because they're not living in the present moment they're not applying to practice to live in the present moment you can't just oh i want to live in the present moment and that's it no you have to practice you have to you're gonna have to fail you're gonna have to try you know every single day and whatever you do every day becomes who you are right so for me it was a practice of meditation every single day to live in the present moment like i told you it took me five years yeah you know all this leads to you know happiness right and everybody says you know happiness it takes it takes a lot of work it's it's a it is a decision you have to make every day you know to to actually be happy and that's that's the beautiful word jesus said decision so individual as a human being no matter your teams or your past whatever you have to make a decision as a human being right now i don't want to be like this anymore you know that's where that moment of me reflecting in the mirror and that rage that came across me dumping that medication down the toilet that was decision i made at that point that i would not take one more moment of this decisions right man i still have team guys coming me egotistical guys talking and all that bad mouthing other guys and you know what i do i separate myself from them yeah good for you yeah it's just for what yeah you know you want a bad mouth another american okay you're you're you're you're who you are then yeah and i'm not gonna judge you man i know you're going through it so i don't judge them you know i wish them the best best for me you know i know i'm not perfect and i'm just trying to right my wrongs and i'm trying to live my life as a human being to be happy so that's what led to a lot of my success you know is it's really the more you get the more you receive you know and um giving was a healing process for me so you know i went to japan you know um so after five years uh we filmed for the history channel because right before i uh i got asked to go into infinity award call of duty i was at a moment of um i wouldn't say i was totally at peace but i was controlling my emotions better right and uh i told my wife that i wanted to go to japan and um i wanted to walk the path of bushido of aronin and she goes what's that mean i'm gonna go visit the 47 ronins i'm gonna pay homage to them and i'm to go to kimoto uh japan and visit musashi's cave and i want to have a taco musashi and she was like what what's that mean right so we uh we linked it with our japanese friends one's a journalist and he wanted to do a story of a modern day ronin you know so when i went to japan they gave us the red carpet treatment man they really took care of us you know to be a foreigner as in not japanese for them to treat me the way they did was a huge honor when i say that is they took me to osumo town where sumo wrestling was developed you know sumo wrestlers uh were wrestlers back in because there there were a farming uh society in japan right so the sumo wrestlers were fighting and they'll uh it basically kicks off the harvest seasons for them so it's tied into that culture of farming and stuff like that so i went to old farming town in in japan where sumo wrestling was started the birth and they took me to this old uh dojo where they closed down the dojo and they had this uh they had this dirt floor and they had this bam uh they had this huge log that was embedded into the ground with the sumos was slapped you know and they literally they put me in the center of the stage and they perform like they were practicing back in the 8th century and they uh they bowed and they paid their respects to ronin and then um we went to a four so they shut down this four floors of uh there was this sword collector an armor collector he had swords dating back 800 years and wow you know and i what i want to do is i want to put this history unto you you know the swords and the armor after world war ii general rick after demanded off a peace treaty he demanded that the japanese on or they surrender treaty that they would turn in all their swords because he was eliminating the bushido code from the japanese right so the japanese were turning in their swords okay and then um the americans they they banded swords they destroy majority of the swords these are war stating periods japan swords that fought in histories that were hand me down by generations so when i sat there these swords that were around me survived the war the bombings right yeah the war stating periods you know i mean this should have not been in existence this all went underground all this art the art of budo had to go underground after um world war ii because they couldn't even practice the art of combat anymore so all that was underground so here i am i'm sitting i'm seeing all this armor the swords and everything and the uh sword collector had this book and he would talk about the history of this clan it was really cool what they did and uh eventually we we came out to uh my blade smith who it's uh he lives in the town where um uh oda nabagata was uh a daimyo so oda nabagata if you look at my weapon uh on my m4 is the sakura symbol the clan symbol what that was this clan symbol oda rose up to be one of the most powerful daimyos in all of japan he almost united all of japan during war staying periods and here i am in his hometown and that's where i received my my swords heaven and earth wow right so it was a huge ceremony um they presented to me traditionally how they would you know the two swords and and what's really cool about these swords is they were scanned into the video game call of duty heaven and earth so those are the swords i slice up my my guys with on call of duty but that's where i received it and then the final culmination was uh i we flew out to kia malta japan and uh you you i had a driver meet us at the airport and ruthie and i and we had uh our friends which was um they live in california but they were there and we drove about an hour and a half from the airport up in the mountains to where musashi miyamoto found his piece that numbered at the buddhist grounds yeah the sacred grounds so we drove into the sacred grounds and there was a huge statue of musashi meditating and there was this uh bell and then basically you got this line that comes down this rope and you pray and then you supposedly what you do is you pray you ring the bell and that sends it to the buddhas right the god their god so um they had a lot of warrior like bushido sounds like digging this this uh monk grounds right because it's very warrior-based so then you walk uh from the parking lot to the entrance of the temples remember this is sacred grounds right so there was a monk out in the uh in the temples and you have to walk through the the hmong temples and when you walk through among temples they had musashi stuff laying an exhibit his swords his pen where he wrote the book of eye rings his scrolls i mean it was really cool this was his original stuff and then you uh you walk through um basically this coral reef area and this trail and it leads you to the cave right where he wrote the book of i rings so we we went to the cave and um you know it was really weird that morning because you know it's an open ground like that's a tourist area it's a highly popular area for tourists to come that morning it was only us nobody else was on that sacred ground the driver even said i never seen it this empty you know yeah basically you know and he um so he stopped at the entrance of the cave and ruthie asked me you know this is your moment so i climbed up the uh the coral reefs to the entry of the cave and that's where i saw the rock where miyamoto wrote the book of five rings i don't know man it was uh it was so surreal you know that that emotion i can't i can't describe it you know so when i entered that cave you know um i bow to miyamoto about the musashi and i took off my boots and i climbed up in that rock and i sat there the rock where he wrote the book in five rings i sat there and overlooked you know the uh the sacred grounds of buddhist sacred grounds and i meditated and uh i said my peace you know that closed off the chapter at a war for me you know and then um and i thank musashi for his words then i climbed back down the cave and uh then ruthie went up there and you know they did their thing but um it was really spiritual for me you know and i would say that it was so surreal because you know in my darkest moments when i was wrapped in that blanket walking around the house defeated it was musashi's words from the book of five rings written in 1645 and here i am in this cave sitting at the very spot that he wrote that book of i rings and that's where i closed the book on war wow and when i came out of the cave i don't know i just felt at peace focused did you feel a sense of relief i felt hungry as in hunger for life and i knew my path now as a ronin was you need to come back and you need to influence as much people as you can you need to utilize any platform to try to better this world you need to walk the path of bushido and you're in the dull phase of your life which is to give back and it resonated with me i'm in dull and this is it so you need to live it live it up so after i came out i felt you know this this urge of purpose again and then um we drove about 45 minutes to musashi's final resting place where he was buried musashi in his final moments um felt death setting in in that cave you know he felt deaf setting in so at that point he was this master swordsman that you know he was well respected as a warrior and uh he asked his closest retainers to help him onto his knees now death is setting in right his final moments of his life and they got him to his knees and he held his sword in a kneeling position the warrior position and that's how he died because the path of bushido is to not fear death is to embrace death so what musashi did was death was setting in he was going to walk into the afterlife as a warrior with a sword in him so after he died he asked um to be buried right he wanted to be buried at this burial ground was a sacred bear ground that's where i was going to and it was entry to the uh a temple right and what musashi wanted was his spirits his spirit to wave at the future samurais you know as they walk past that road you know where his barrel grounds are at his spirit wanted to remain there so he could see the warriors of the samurais you know so we drove there and um i went to musashi's very ground and and it was really cool man it was it was very surreal in the zen garden musashi's um statue was there you know um i paid homage to that ronin i thanked him and um i closed off my chapter on war you know so by the time i uh came back to america i was roaming i was ready you know when i say i was ronin is i had the courage the purpose and the energy now and the spirit to walk this path and i've been walking ever since you know so that was the story of how i i closed that chapter in war you know but ronin tactics um we're just blessed man you know my wife she has a master's degree a business degree so she spearheads the uh the business side of the growth of ronin and i'm the face and i communicate with you know the people that are hurting in this world and i try to heal them through my words through my practice i try to set the example on social media because you think about the sean social media man it could be such a powerful tool right yeah like think about when we were growing up man right if you and i if there was no social media you and i would never met right you these these fans and followers they would never be able to access you or talk to you but now so basically i'm saying the world is a smaller place yes it is right the world is a smaller place they what we do as a society is we take something that's so good that can help so many people and the people that can't control their emotions they use that platform to put down other people to ridicule to make fun of them to create hate sites to make fun of other people right yeah so i never wanted that and i wanted to use my presence my fame my exposure to better this world because why not i have the platform now yeah you know um if i'm a call of duty character i realize that you know the next generation the younger generations are playing my character why not give them a word to better themselves why not show them the path you know if they want to live a full life then they'll walk that path it's up to down but i will never really kill somebody man words can help so many people well you're doing a hell of a job man thank you yeah you really are and that's uh that's an amazing journey you know that you just brought us through and you know i mean yeah i'm i'm pretty speechless that's amazing and uh and you did it yourself you know so you know what people don't get is like you know when i said i study how the mind works i actually did yeah you know i mean it's like you said last night you taught yourself this yeah i i realized that i had an issue and it was a wound that i can't see if if you were to shoot me in an arm right now i got shot in the arm i see that wound i could put a tourniquet on stop that bleeding but if i can't see the wound where do i start right so the five years of reflecting was i was healing my wounds since childhood yeah you know because you know like i told you you know when i was going through and i was free no press and doing all that i didn't really think about it i didn't tie in like i was a refugee now i'm giving back never now i knew that as a child i knew that was a path but when i was doing it i wasn't thinking about that it wasn't to like when i shut off the world and i reflected back on my life was like you did do that you're a lot more you know in the moment than probably just about anybody i know and um do you pick up on a lot of details and life coincidences and and uh is your faith in a higher power stronger now that you're more in the moment because maybe you've seen you know you were able to connect some dots or certain things have happened that maybe you wouldn't have noticed if you weren't in the moment you know i wasn't raised about religion you know my mother's buddhist and she's a great person great human being that's the religion she was raised on and i don't judge anybody on their religion if you're a good human being you're a good human being you know i know if you respect a higher power i got that it doesn't matter what god as long as he's not extremists or hurting other people off of religion but i never had religion shown you know i didn't i didn't go to church when i was a child my my stepfather he he he wasn't a very religious he's a great man beautiful guy but i wasn't talk not and you know when i was going through uh growing up and uh as a young soldier in the military you know they have chapels and all that and i'm sorry to say this but i have to tell you you know i was going to ranger training and i would go to church so i can just eat the bread because i was so [ __ ] hungry i was so hungry that course and i knew like that would break me away so it was all for the wrong reasons you know well i didn't necessarily mean uh religion yeah i just meant something greater than you know so it wasn't into when i faced depression was when i had to reflect on a higher power you know i mean the universe man so big yeah right so big we're we're but a grain of sand in this world we're nothing yeah our problems or issues is nothing but that higher power man that created all this beauty if you don't if you don't believe in that like i said you're going to live for who you think you are yeah right so when i believed in the higher power when i accepted that you know when i truly accepted it and i surrendered myself to the higher power then that allowed me to have the energy to wake up in the morning and to live up to the expectation of higher power because when i when i want to lay in bed and i don't want to do anything i say no i have to get up because i believe in this power yeah and that drives me every single day and when somebody's mean to me or they're they're cruel and their words whatever because i believe in a higher power i look at them with more compassion because you know what man if a veteran talks about about me you know why i said it now and i used to go oh whatever you know but now i go he's going through it yeah and i forgive him i believe in a man you know i do and i think you know i wouldn't say i was in doubt but the final i've seen a lot of little signs and you know whatever kind of stuff that you tell somebody and they think you're full of [ __ ] but the last one was uh that flag behind you right there is all i have to remember my best friend by uh you know who's who's dead now and he died on september 4th and uh and i come up here and talk to him you know every once in a while and and uh and my wife does too she got close with him uh towards the end of his days and you know nobody really knows us but um you know we've been trying to have a baby and and uh and she's pregnant now um congratulations thank you and my son is gonna be born on september 4th the day my best friend died that's powerful and uh you know or at least that's the due date but that's not a coincidence so yeah i'm all in you know i believe in it too man but but um you know i kind of want to wrap this thing up too and i just want to tell you i mean i really mean that that the journey that you've been on is amazing you know from birth all the way until now and uh and uh you are you know helping a ton of people and you are so full of wisdom you know that anybody that's willing to listen um they have a lot to benefit from you know from listening to you and uh so thank you thank you i appreciate you and like i say you know the power of the universe is what brought us together and with your platform you're doing some great things man and i and i really wanted to to utilize this platform to to send a message out you know to so many people that are in pain so many people that's lost in this world you know don't give in to the hate yeah right give into the the powers that are going to bring you to the higher level right don't give in to the hate it's so easy to you know in today's world it seems like that's becoming a norm and that's why you don't see me really talking too much about the asian hate thing yeah because you know what man i faced with racism my whole life my whole life but that don't ever that would never decide the way i'm going to live and that's not the energy that i will ever project to others yeah you know so it's through that pain you find a higher purpose so when people ask me you know what was a ronin like what's that mean is to be able to submerge yourself in pain and suffering right because you understand by going through pain and suffering in life that that will allow you to grow as a human being the discomfort is through growth right when we're discomfort when we're uncomfortable about things we change if i take a lighter and i put it underneath your hand right and the light is not on and i just put it there you're not going to move there's no pain but if i light that thing and it burns your hand you're going to move it so you have to go where that pain is at you have to go where the struggle is at because that's where the growth is at that's the only way that you have enough energy to change as a human being and you know i think back to my path as a ronin and where i am today it was because i was eight years old and i was crying in my bedroom because i was tired of being weak and defeated and ridiculed spit on i wanted to be a stronger human being and i knew that i needed to go through the struggles and losses in order for me to arrive at being this person that i wish to be in life you know along with that comes a lot of pain you know but pain is needed yep well i just want to say thank you for coming on i really really appreciate your time and and uh i cannot wait to get this out so absolutely brother i appreciate you and thank you for everything you do you're welcome and um best of luck to you thank you you

Channel: Vigilance Elite

Views: 773,818

Keywords: vigilance elite, shawn ryan, the shawn ryan show, ronin tactics, tu lam, cod, modern warfare, asian hate, asian racism, overcoming racism, Shawn Ryan Show #009 Green Beret / Call of Duty / Rōnin Tactics (浪人) Tu Lam, Rōnin, call of duty, PTSD, delta force, military transition, shawn ryan podcast, tu lam green beret, cia, shawn ryan cia contractor, ronin shawn ryan, asian celebrity news, samurai, asian awareness month 2021, stop asian hate, green beret, tu lam shawn ryan, operator

Id: oZLUyOmJt3c

Length: 257min 15sec (15435 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021