Navy SEAL Motivation: Hell Week, Special Operations, and "Winner" Mindset

you don't go to war to end all war you go to war to purchase a limited amount of freedom for a limited amount of people for a limited amount of time an Isis sniper shoots a former Navy SEAL from Milwaukee as the US medic saves the lives of Iraqi citizens once I've seen all this stuff I can't unsee it I can't just sit back and relax I can't just not go and help these people knowing full well that they need help in May the 25-year-old Milwaukee native went to mosul to volunteer as a medic mat's job was to treat wounded civilians you don't go to war and come back the same person you just don't it changes you every single time hopefully for the better I try to make it for the better the worst the worst thing and I remember I remember when I saw this my brain said this isn't real because it's not in black and white and I was like that's a weird thought why am I thinking that it was because I'd only ever seen things like this in history books in black and white photos if your why is big enough you just you just do what you got to do because if we don't go that girl dies you just make the decision to uh to go because that's my job as a seal um that's my job as a man to protect um to protect the innocent and that's what I Spore to do and that's uh what I chose to do that [Music] day efim thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour it's an honor to have you here you were a Navy SEAL that realized you couldn't help as much as you wanted to doing that so you became a civilian to go fight Isis yeah yeah well first off thanks for having me on I really appreciate it that's sort of the beginning of the of the story that the transition which led me into you know ultimately going back into a lot of different conflict zones uh with my organization to um yeah to protect and care for people in these really really uh rough rough situations and trying to do the best we can to help them and in fact your story is so remarkable that it was actually covered by a mutual friend of ours John Allen aka Mr B he made a video on I think it has like how many views like 14 million 17 it's it's his third most watched video ever which is pretty amazing I'm super grateful for him for uh for doing that video oh yeah so when it comes to a lot of that do you think people in America take their freedom for granted I think yes but um I don't think it's I don't think there's anything Insidious there I think um you know the American Military and um our our forces and stuff we do a very very good job of protecting the Homeland and so it's kind of a good problem to have where people don't understand War they don't understand conflict um cuz it quite frankly if they did understand war and they did understand conflict that means that we failed at our job uh in the military to protect the Homeland so so the way that you need to remember and sort of maintain that respect for um for the guys who who fought and died and and do everything they do to protect this nation guys are still active um that's why we have things like uh Memorial Day Fourth of July um Veterans Day things like that is to try and remember and keep it in the in the public Consciousness um so you can tell those stories of of what the guys have done before uh to protect us without having to actually experience it yeah do you think it is important for people to know about the evils that exist in the world and the war and stuff like that or do you think that like you said it's the job to keep it out of the eye of the public and just let it be so they can make sure that we have peace in America ignorance only leads to uh problems right uh so if people are not aware of the threats that are around the world um then they're going to make decisions whether it's on uh uh for for leadership or for government they're going to elect bad people or not maybe not bad people but people who are not going to um protect the nation as as much as is possible so I think that we need to be aware of it I mean it's not something that you need to like inundate children with and be like oh you know the world's going to blow up tomorrow no but uh everybody who's you know an older teenager especially into adulthood I think people should keep their eye on like what's going on around the world and try to stay as informed on it as possible but don't let it consume you it shouldn't be your whole life you shouldn't be sitting in America uh worried and frustrated and super angry about you know the war in Burma or a different conflict in Africa or and things like that you should still enjoy your freedom understand what's going on but enjoy your freedom and support people who are out there trying to hold back the the evil that's out there that made me think of of one last thing which I I've heard over and over again and it seems obvious but it's also somewhat of a surprise to me the fact that you know however long humans have existed for and how we've gone through like the rise and fall of different Empires and everything and now we have planes that can fly in the air and we have all of this techn ology we have information available to everybody yet we're still ending other humans lives over massive Wars where you have people that essentially have to do things because of what I guess like presidents do or what the people on the the upper people do doesn't it seem like a little Antiquated that we're still taking lives like that it seems like animalistic almost you know that the saying you know war is hell like all war is is horrible and is a tragedy um but the simple reality is I I think we as a culture and as and as a people need to understand the simple fact that war is never ever ever going to go away um we need to lessen it as much as possible we need to seek peace as much as possible through diplomacy and things like that but war is never ever going to go away so one of the things I always say about war is you don't go to war to end all war you go to war to purchase a limited amount of freedom for a limited amount of people for a limited amount of time and then you have to go do it again and there there's a there's a a more deep and fundamental aspect of conflict and that is that a lot of different ideas cannot coexist we love the bumper sticker coexist you know it's a very American idea to um have you know all groups of people just sort of living in Harmony and and that's true when we all have the same values but when you when you go so for me it's like I've been able to travel all around the world and interact with so many different cultures and so many different belief systems and what what you have to understand about people who do things that we see as evil they are completely convinced that they are the good guys they are completely convinced that they are in the right um you know for example an extreme example would be like an Isis fighter I've seen Isis Fighters literally get into a car that's you know that's that has 2,000 pounds worth of explosives in it drive out and blow themselves up trying to kill us and why are they doing that because they truly truly believe that they are doing the right thing they truly believe that they um are are you know are fighting a righteous cause otherwise they're not going to do that they're not Psychopaths they're not insane people they are normal human beings who have accepted a bad ideology a destructive ideology and so what we have to understand is that if you want to end War if you want to have peace it's like we have to have we have to have the same values we have to have the same um belief system when it comes to what is right and wrong what I find fascinating though is the fact that we have such different beliefs from these people in all of these different countries with all of these different religions and beliefs and and everything and and yet we all can agree not to push the big red button mhm so there is some sort of so far knock on wood knock on this is real so we all better knock okay so that for me shows that there is still some sort of like human connection some fundamental shared belief between you know the people over here and the people over there is it that though I feel like people don't want to self-destruct that's that's more you think it's out of fear even look at the situation in the Middle East right now you look at Iran Iran has already said if they get a nuclear weapon they're going to Nuke Israel like they've already said that they're going to do that right now would they actually do it who knows cuz they might actually in the in the in the last minute realize we don't want to get nuked back right because Israel has nukes um the reason people don't use nukes in my opinion is the concept of mutually assured destruction so it's like hey let's leave each other alone you stay over there we're going to stay over here and let's not push the red button because if you push the red button I'm going to push the red button too and I think and Trump's is bigger yeah exactly Trump's red button is bigger yeah his his is bigger yes I think it's more out of self-interest more what Graham said I don't I don't think it's necessarily the shared Humanity unfortunately I wish it was um but I think it's just self-preservation so why don't you think world peace could be achievable that people can just not resort to violence because human beings are fundamentally flawed think about the the arguments we have with people that we love and that we care about um our own family you know uh so imagine that on on like this on this Grand scale um ultimately you know it's going to lead to conflict just think about on your own your own personal life in your own head how often do you argue with yourself how often do you battle in your own head I should do this but I'm going to do that or vice versa right um so we as individuals we don't even have peace in our own heads how are we going to manifest peace for you know billions of people all around the world with entirely different ideas so that's that's why I just I just don't think it it could happen I mean I would love it if it did but I just I just don't see it happening so what type of person becomes a Navy SEAL I would say it's people um with a couple screws loose in their head uh in a in a good way um guys are just a little bit crazy a little bit out there um there's a lot of different reasons why guys join I I really join to you know protect my country and I wanted to fight evil and serve um that was truly my heart I signed the papers when I was 17 and went to boot camp and all that when I was 18 um but I would say one of the fundamental things people always ask like okay well who's going to make it through right so Seal training we've all heard of it like it's very brutal the guys who make it through there the one thing that I that I've seen that all guys have who have made it through every single one is everybody has a very a very strong core sort of sense of humor in the darkest Darkest Hours of hell week or combat or whatever you find yourself in later you can always find somebody who's going to crack a joke you can always find somebody who's going to laugh a little bit you know things things can be light-hearted in the midst of the most terrible terrible situations and that's what I found um is probably the common probably the common thing between all seals is they're like the funniest people you'll ever meet um and they have like just fantastic senses of humor yeah that's interesting is there anything beneath that sense of humor like is it a certain like because I feel like sense of humor is kind of an extension or a symptom of something deeper M I think it's an acceptance of reality um so the you able to laugh at the pain you're able to laugh at your situation when you just accept that like hey this is what it is and we got to go through this sometimes the only way out is through when you're okay Tuesday night Wednesday night of hell week it's you've never been that miserable in your life you're hallucinating all these things are going on you just sort of accept the situation that you're in and and don't get frustrated by it because there's nothing you can do to change it except for quit which is not an option okay so what is hell week so in Seal training you have to go through several months of training to get to um the final sort of not the final test but it's the it's the final um sort of selection test as far as where they're testing how tough you are and it's five five and a half days of you stay awake basically the entire time uh you get two um oh one or two like hour and a half two hour naps um but those happen like 3 4 days in it's you're up for 4 days Days a r yeah you're up for I believe I believe it's 96 hours from the point you wake up on Sunday morning I think it's like Wednesday afternoon you get your first they call it a nap and so it's it's like 90 minutes or 120 minutes I'm not sure exactly are you allowed to have any caffeine or like stimulants or is it purely just you can take whatever you want to before it starts so Sunday morning you can wake up you can take whatever you want obviously whatever's legal but um but then after that I mean uh no they just you they're going to give you whatever they're going to give you there was one one thing they did to like mess with guys heads so every every couple of hours they would um have a table set up and they would put some Gatorade because they keep you they actually keep you fairly well fed the food's not great but they keep you well fed because you have all these calories they can keep pushing you and pushing you and pushing you and pushing you which is different than a lot of other selection courses where they sort of starve you and when when when you're being starved you really can't move that fast you really can't carry that much weight um and you get really emaciated and whatnot but in in Seal train it's like they feed you when they feed you when they feed you but they expect you to keep moving so every few hours they'll actually set up uh Gatorade stations and so you'll go and you can grab you have like 90 seconds and you can chug as much Gatorade as you want uh you know from these cups but on one of the one of the days I think it was like Monday night or Tuesday night of Hell Week um we ran over to the table we got our 90 seconds to have some Gatorade and they had only put they put oral rehydration salts in the water so it's no flavor nothing so it's just tastes like salt water which is obviously is not great and that literally broke people so guys were so expectant of having you know that was their that was they were they were thinking like okay in 2 hours three hours whatever I'm going to be able to have some Gatorade and like they play everybody has their own strategy for making it through H week and so that you I saw two guys in particular just like that were close to me uh quit when they went over there and one guy just saw his face dropped and he almost started crying because he was it was only salt water he just and he couldn't he couldn't do it um and so he so he he quit at that point so yeah they play these they play these mind games with you so all of hell week you're you're getting surf tortured so you're laying in the water you're running with a Ruck you're carrying a boat on your head you're paddling out in the out in the ocean with with with the boats you're carrying logs around um and it's I forget the exact number of miles that you do but it's like multiple marathons like you run like 100 150 miles but and in the entire time you're carrying at least 40 lbs uh per guy of of something whether it's a boat or whether it's a Ruck or whether it's a log or something like that yeah you mentioned carrying the boats have you ever met Mr goggin all right but before we go into that let's do some quick math because the less money your business spends the more money you get to keep however the issue with this is that 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again that is nets.com nets.com thank you so much netsu and back to the episode you mentioned carrying the boats have you ever met Mr goggin I've not met goggin no no definitely definitely familiar yeah he's here in Vegas I I wonder do you think he lives here in Vegas yeah oh cool very yeah do you think that all Navy Seals have that level of like cuz that's like inhuman when I hear the things that he's done like I I straight up think he's like has to be from a different planet yeah well he's he's definitely taken the mental toughness thing and really really run with it no pun intended um I think uh so when when I look at goggin my read on him is obviously he's the real deal you can't fake that that's first and foremost like you can't fake that level of commitment to what he's doing um and then number two it's like he is a professional athlete like he is out there like as an Endurance Sports guy like he is and he's and he's crushing it and he absolutely has found a different part of his brain to go into to be able to do these kind of things and I'm not sure what his motivation is I'm not sure why or his Drive is uh I'm not sure what that is um but he he found it and he and he's and he's going for it and I so I would say like for me I have that level of drive but not to get out and run uh I have that level of Drive um in combat you know if I'm if I'm in a bad situation or something like that and and I and I think too and I think what goggin's message is and what people can really take away from it is and I and I and I don't know this but I think maybe this is what gogins is trying to teach is like everybody to an extent has that right like think about the intensity of we just talked about hell week we're talking about you know goggin and and all the extreme things that he's done imagine imagine if somebody you know uh put a gun to your you know to your wife's head or to uh to a love you know a family member that you love they put a gun to their head and we're like hey you're going to go through seal hell week or you're going to go run this 150 miles and if you quit you know we're going to pull the trigger right you have it in you to not quit you might not have it in you to to run it that fast you might have it might not have it in you just physically to like carry the boats that you need to and howw or something but you have it within you to not quit you have it within you to push and push and push and you will complete those 150 mile that 150 mile race or whatever uh or you'll die trying because you found the motivation you found the drive you found the reason to do it and I think that that's the message that Goggins is trying to is trying to push is like dude find your why find why you're doing what you're doing and you're unstoppable you know what's funny on a very small scale I mean obviously I can't relate to that sort of examp but on a lot of tasks I imagine that if there were a gun pointed to my head and they said if you don't do this task you don't finish by a certain time they're going to pull the trigger if I think to myself that's the situation I'll 100% finish it then I know like you said you have what it takes to finish it it's possible and so for me that's always been a good reminder that you can push through anything that seems really difficult in the moment because if you're at that you'll find a way to make it work and that just means it's possible and therefore you could do it yeah absolutely and as soon as you find whatever that whatever that motivation is whatever that drive is um great like you're you're unstoppable at that point and sometimes people just find um things that they really love doing right maybe just really love selling real estate and you just like just dive into this we're talking about fish tanks earlier it's like you're super into that and you can spend hours and hours and hours doing that um so there's that there's those things that you enjoy but then there's those times in life where I do not enjoy this I do not want to do this but it's just got to get done and it's time to man up and and and get it done so how did you make it through hell week so my my strategy my mental strategy was different I've never heard anybody else sort of have the same strategy I did so what most guys do is they sort of think meal to meal so every I think it's like every six hours they give you a meal and there's like the drinks in between that but um from day one of SEAL training including going through boot camp and everything I Was preparing myself mentally for hell week and so for me I I took every week as sort of one day every every week was a day so when it when it came time to hell week I was like all right this is just another week and um I've heard other guys say too it's like well one way to look at hell week is it's actually kind of nice because you don't have to wake up you know because the hardest part of the morning is like when you wake up in Seal training you're like dude this sucks I do not want to go I do not want to go out there most of the guys that quit they quit as soon as they wake up in the morning and they go ring the bell before the day even starts right because that's that that misery uh sort of breaks them so for me um mentally it was just a matter of I was like this is this is who I am this is what I want to do um and quite frankly you're going to have to put a bullet in my head or I'm going to die trying like I'm not you're going to have to drag me off this beach um because this is who I am this is what I want to do and yeah what are the differences between the people who make it through and don't make it through are there any like characteristics that you see that you could point out in the beginning like ah it's not this guy's not going to make it in the beginning yeah most of the time no I mean don't get me wrong you have some like really strange oddballs who kind of show up and you're like okay this guy's like's he's not going to make it you can just kind of tell because they're like emotionally unstable or something but you have like a class of maybe 400 guys show up for training and so there's some oddballs that you can tell right off the bat okay that guy's not going to make it but for the most part no it's completely unpredictable um there's nothing I can say if I was to look at 100 guys who are about to start SEAL training I might be able to pick out two or three of them that are not going to make it just if I know their personality but everybody else it's man it's it's totally up to you to make a decision at that moment so so in steel training it's all about you know team building you work as a team but in in reality it's sort of an individual sport like they're not going to kick you out uh so this is another thing to understand about SEAL training that's very different than others is if you go through let's say Green Beret selection um I don't know the exact exact numbers but this is just the general idea so let's say 100 guys show up to Green Beret selection they put them through incredibly strenuous and Incredibly difficult selection course um at the end of that you might have maybe like 40 or 50 guys who made it through right who finished the course but then they'll take only 20 of them and they say you know only 20 of you the other 30 of you who made it through you have you can try again but we're only selecting these these 20 or whatever out of the 100 when you go to Seal training if you're standing at the end you're in and so because of that they make it excessively excessively brutal there's some good parts about that and there's some bad parts about that but they make it excessively brutal because um the really the only way to weed you out is is if you quit so they just make it as as horrible as possible was there any person that stood out as just a having the highest level of intensity they didn't show any signs of discomfort or suffering and if so where are they now there were some guys who it didn't seem to phase them uh that much um I actually had a buddy who I went through uh he was he was the class ahead of me uh we both from Wisconsin he was just like so mentally tough and he was just once he finished hell week I was talking with him he's like ah wasn't that bad I mean it was tough he's like wasn't that bad and he was just like didn't seem phased by it um unfortunately a few months later he got dropped from training for like um uh I think made some bad calls on on some different stuff so he didn't make it through some of the the training stuff but I remember I was like dude this didn't phase you at all you know like for me it like crushed my crushed my soul and then I had to like push past that but he was just like no it wasn't that bad um and which I'm like that's that's nuts but yeah he unfortunately didn't didn't finish the didn't finish the course but yeah but for the most part it it it affects guys you know that's interesting do do you think there was something like in childhood where he experienced that was just so hard where at like this pales in comparison no no you think he just wired to just some dudes are just wired different uh you know goggin might be one those guys like just wired different like he's you know and I and I don't know what that is um but yeah I it's a pretty pretty rare thing to have those guys that just aren't that affected by it I'd be one of the guys who quits uh in the morning he wakes up and it's like 68 degrees in the in the room or whatever he's like it's a little cold in here CH I like like to my heated house is like n 69 a little too cold is perfect 71 I'm hot you know what's uh you know what's crazy so during that we're talking about the the nap so you do have to wake up from this nap right so it's like 4 days in you are allowed to sleep on a cot in a tent for I think it's 2 hours um and then the instructors come out with blow horns and they wake you up and the very first thing that you do so keep in mind you've been you've been like doing this incredibly brutal Soul crushing uh physical um you know training exercise and then when they wake you up you have to go jump into the freezing cold ocean and salt water so the other thing that's going on is because you're constantly covered in hand you have chafing so you have chafing between your legs under your armpits around your neck around your belt um and it's like it's like between your legs and stuff like your thighs and such it's like raw hamburger meat and you have like um like bald spots on top of your head from carrying the boats and the sand just grinding away at your scalp and so you have all these wounds and then they've all started to start they've all started to kind of heal over over those two hours and then you have to go break the scabs jump in the freezing cold salt water and that was that was the moment when um that's when I saw the most amount of grown men weeping and these were all guys who were going to make it through these were all guys had reached the point where they're not going to quit so all those guys made it but I remember running to the ocean and seeing I think I I know for sure at least I saw two guys um to my left uh crying um because it was so miserable so yeah getting up in the morning is not the deal what was the closest that you got to quitting throughout the entire time and how did you what place did you have to go to to decide to stick with it um so my I actually came very close to quitting on night one of of hell week uh we had been doing log PT uh so carrying around the logs and one of the guys who was on our team he sort of he he pretended to be injured and he was like and he we were we were holding the log above our heads and he he pretended to be injured and he just sort of fell to the ground all dramatically so when that happened all of the weight from the log shifted to me and it like popped in my back so it was a I got a bulging disc and I didn't realize this till later so I had a bulging disc in my back and I I like screamed and I told the told the guys I was like Drop I was like Drop The Log drop the log so we put the log down the instructors are screaming at us they're screaming at him to get the thing going again and so and then after that I had this limp and I was like this is not good this is really really not good and also prior to starting hell week about 48 hours prior to that I got what's called vge viral gastroenteritis which is basically the flu you have diarrhea and vomiting for basically about 5 days so I got that the Friday afternoon before hell week so for the LA for the 3 days prior to hell week I was in a hotel room just vomiting and uncontrollable diarrhea and when hell week started um I I I thought I was good to go but I was not um I had some Gatorade and stuff before I started hell week and I immediately vomited it up within the first two minutes of hell week and I was just projectile vomiting and doing push-ups in my own vomit for the first bit and then I got this injury and so this is all like night one of hell week we're laying in the water and it's you know freezing cold and they had us you know whatever just kind of doing serve torture or something and then I was I basically in my head was like I told myself I was like I'm done like this is this is my limit I'm in excessive pain and it wasn't because the moment was so bad it was because I thought I can't do this for another two three four five days I'm I was like man I'm only I'm only a day into this not even a day into this and I'm already hurting there's no way I'm going to make it through so I started feeling sorry for myself and I was like well I'm going to fail out anyway might as well just end my suffering now I started feeling sorry for myself and in that moment um I snapped out of it and I sort of pictured myself in the future as a seal and I was like no that's that's the guy I want to be and then from that point forward I was like I got angry at the instructors because I was like those these guys almost got me to quit like they almost got me to quit and then I was like all right never again um and so that was the I came very close to quitting and then at that moment um something snapped in my head and quitting was never an option after that did you say surf torture yeah what is that but before we get into that as many of you guys may know I am a single man despite all of these comments we're showing on the screen right now that are saying how much of a catch I am but in all seriousness after spending plenty of time on traditional dating apps I realized I needed something a little bit different about a month ago and that is precisely when I decided to join the League the league is a selective dating app for ambitious people with high standards looking to upgrade their dating life and find the right partner designed for busy yet motivated daters the league provides curated daily recommendations rather than an unlimited 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to this podcast so you're welcome and if you end up finding the love of your life and getting married I will officiate yes I officiated Graham's wedding I can do yours too all you got to do is message # I to your inapp concierge and you can skip that entire weight list thank you so much the league for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast did you say surf torture yeah what is that it's the simplest uh thing you literally just go lay in the freezing cold water for as long as the instructors want you to lay in the water and what they do is they test the temperature of the water and they have a uh a chart that they look at and it tells them how long they can keep you in there before guys start getting hypothermia and so if the water's a little bit warmer you stay in the water longer if it's colder you stay in a little less um because again they're they're going for your core temperature and before hell week in particular they to have you swallow a pill which goes through your digestive tract and so what they do is um when you come out of the water they walk by with a little computer scanner and it reads your core temperature because that pill is in your core and knows exactly what your core temperature is so they have it down to like a science they know exactly how far they can push you and so then guys who are a little bit too low they'll pull them out of the water and they'll make them you know do like push-ups or jumping jacks on the shore and then everyone else like you don't have hypothermia you're good go back in it's then you go lay back in the water and you're laying right in the water right with the right in the surf zone and so you're just getting this W this salt water and everything is going up and down your body so it's like going up your nose all the sand that's being kicked up it's going in your ears it's going in your eyes it's going up your nose and you lay there for very very for a very very long time and they do this multiple multiple multiple times so you finish that for like 45 minutes or however long it is based on the temperature and then it's like all right cool uh pick up your log and you're going to go run eight miles with this thing in the soft sand um and when we come back you put the log down all right cool back in the water for another hour and like that's what hell week is and then all right now you're going to carry this boat 12 miles on your head and you're going to bring it back and then you're going to go get S of tortured you know so that's that's what it is yeah it's very disoriented stuff if you're physically incapable but mentally capable do they still kick you out like if you just collapse but you want to keep going would they then kick you out or absolutely they would so it's brutal it's medieval it's uh they're not there to coddle you they're not there to no nobody cares about your feelings nobody cares about what what you as an individual want their job for the seal instructors is to choose guys who are going to represent the American people on the battlefield and we had a saying the seals like the the um the American taxpayer deserves to have the best warriors representing them on the battlefield and so no they will kick you out in two seconds if you can't take it you can't take it too bad look I pay a good amount in taxes and gr pays a an extreme amount in taxes but I still feel like I don't deserve that here's the thing I also feel like from what I heard from Mr Ballin is that a lot of the Navy seals to me are underpaid I mean to go through that I think that deserves like 500 Grand a year yeah well they also don't want to attract the wrong crowd right or maybe that would attract better talent I don't I don't know well I think you want to attract guys who want to do the job that's the thing so the the thing we we always joked about okay so when I when I signed up for Seal training they're just so happened there was like a shortage they didn't have enough guys to go through Seal training at the time and so this was pre you know uh pre- Bin Laden shooting and in which case you know recruiting has been easy since then but uh they didn't have enough guys even showing up to training because again they're not going to lower their standards um so they were trying to get more guys to at least show up so one of the things they did was they offered a $40,000 bonus if you finished SEAL training so if you sign up and you finish you get $40,000 minus taxes um I remember when we got our bonus we were all laughing because we were like we would all do this for free was literally our attitude obviously we you know we were young but it's like you got to pay your bills but we're like we don't all do this for free you don't have to pay us anything we're happy to do this we want to do this and so the amount of money that you're paying guys doesn't really affect it too much about who's showing up as far as recruiting I I don't think um at least not the guys who are going to make it through nobody's in uh you know Tuesday night of hell week and they're like well I wish I was getting paid 50k more per year I'm I think I'm gonna get out of the Navy I'm not going to do the seal thing anymore right like that that that's not that's not even entered into the sort of the equation like if you're if you're a seal your family's going to be taken care of obviously you have to be financially responsible but you you'll be taken care of you'll be able to save money if you if you don't spend you know uh if you don't have bad spending habits and stuff but um now to be fair like when you become a seal you do get some special pays and things like that per uh per month like extra stuff added on top of your normal Navy pay what's the base income of a Navy SEAL I do not remember um and I've been out for seven years so my my numbers would be totally off I I believe it was Mr B that was saying it was somewhere around like 60 Grand a year okay could could be something like that yeah I'm sure the benefits increased Health everything's taken care of yeah yeah but to to be fair um yeah it's like you we should take care of our our Elite guys and Green Berets and Rangers and seals and all that stuff for sure um but also I mean the guys would do the job for free quite frankly because we just we just love it how was the expectation versus reality of that it was actually worse than what I thought it was going to be because I watched the um buds class 234 um his or Discovery Channel documentary that was done in like the late '90s or early 2000s um pre 911 and I remember watching you know the instructors like for example there's one where they have where the the the students the the seal trainees have to do this 50 meter underwater swim and they finished the swim and then the instructors are like hey guys like you just proved to your bodies that you can control it through your mind or something like that they were kind of like giving like you know hya you know they were kind of like being nice to the guys a little bit and I remember specifically when we did that 50 m underwater swim I got back and I was like oh going to be like nice to us they're going to like give us this sort of mental you like whatever some sort of lesson about like mental toughness or something no they beat us as soon as we were done and when I say beating that's just physical you know physical uh you know PT or whatever but yeah the expectation was actually much worse than it was much worse than I thought it was going to be um ironically and how was hell week relative to like sear training sear training oh hell week's it's like on a whole different ball game um you you could compare hell week to like if if hell week is the the Green Bay Packers sear training is like your local JV like no way team yeah SE training is not at least at least the Seal training that sear training that I went through like it was not it's not that big of a deal don't me wrong it's challenging um but it's not even it's not even in the same like Realm of of anything yeah and just for people to get an understanding my my very limited knowledge on that is they like release you into some forest and then chase you down essentially yeah so there's there's some of that um the SE the SE training that I went through so sear survival evasion resistance Escape um basically you're simulating running from an enemy that's trying to capture you eventually they do capture you and then you're put into a simulated prison for a few days um and don't get me wrong that was challenging it was uncomfortable but it's just not in the same ballpark as as like hell week so for example like um let's say 100 guys show up to Seal training before you even get to hell week you're going to lose 50 guys because they quit once you start hell week you're going to lose of the guys that are left you're going to lose another 50 to 60% of them so at the end of that you have you know you're down to like 20 guys SE training um I don't think we lost anybody like you know so it's it's challenging but it's not yeah it's just an entirely different realm I would say so going through that when you come back to America and you see people complaining about traffic or maybe someone cut them off or something like that do you do you feel like people are just too soft um I I feel I think that people are a bit entitled and we get used to things um my wife's probably laughing if she's watching this cuz she'll see me get angry I I get you cut me off so um but yeah I think I think that Society um as a whole we've become far too effeminate we've become far too soft we've become far too weak and I think that that's not just on the physical side of like physical strength it's the mental the mental game um people have become so entitled they become yeah again very just effeminate and weak and everything bothers them and everybody has to they everybody demands that each individual in society bows to their own particular you know thought process and what they want and I think that that's a huge problem so if I can go back to take this philosophically a little bit um so if you look at the beginning of the of the Bible you look at the beginning of of Genesis you look at um when Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden you know the snake or Satan or whatever comes to them and he tempts them with the fruit to you know and this is sort of the fall of Man like when man no no longer is perfect the the thing he says is that uh you will become God's knowing good and evil right and so the the first sin the very the very Foundation of what makes humans flawed is that we want to be God we want to choose what is good and evil we want to make up whatever we want to as far as what's right and wrong and obviously that's going to cause strife and all this other stuff but the deeper thing is it causes ego and entitlement and when people walk around they see themselves as a God in a way uh little G and they and they they are saying like I am God I choose whatever you know I choose what reality is and everyone else has to cow to to that and I am God I you know I deserve to be driving faster than everybody else on the road they're not they're not actually thinking that but on a deeper level that's what ego is so I guess what I'm trying to say is the big thing is just ego everybody is so self-obsessed um with themselves and then that causes a lot of the strife and turmoil you mentioned something really interesting in there which was little G because it just so happens we have him here today mhh sitting right beside me this is little g g that but we should that's that's a great nickname for him I like it a lot all right that's great about people being too effeminate or soft do you think every guy should know how to fight every man needs to know how to protect and care for those around him I think that that is a fundamental um part of what it means to be a man um I think that the ability to physically protect your yourself and protect others I think is important um I think that guys who are weak guys who are who choose to not know how to protect others uh who cannot defend themselves um I think Jordan Peterson's actually talked about this where if you have guys who are weak and they are not able to protect themselves or others that it is impossible for them to be virtuous and truly like a virtuous man because um they're they're kind and they're peaceful and everything not because they're good in their heart not because they're capable of but because they're just they're just so afraid of getting into any kind of altercation and um yeah I think it's a duty of of every man to know how to defend himself and that way he can protect others because ultimately it's not about you it's about protecting um your wife and your kids and and society as a whole so yeah you you you absolutely need to do you think it's uh an obligation for men to be in somewhat good physical shape to have a sixpack or to not be obese or something like that I think it's incumbent upon every human being to be as healthy as you realistically can we don't need to go overboard but I think that yeah humans should absolutely be be healthy and um you know there's I don't think everybody needs to have six-pack abs but like there's an objective measurement of let's say body fat percentage that is healthy um and that's going to give you a long and happy and healthy life and I think that that's incumbent upon the individual to try to strive for that and again we all fail we all fail um at that and for me I'll be the first one to raise my hand and like yeah that's that's been a struggle of mine for for the longest time um and at one point I was actually like 100 PB overweight like like 100 pounds heavier than I am right now um and like suicidal and was like in a horrible horrible Place had a full-blown mental breakdown for like for like a year um but ultimately it's like the goal needs to be healthy it's not about fat shaming it's not about um attacking how people are it's not about looking down on people it's about you need to take care of yourself so you can take care of others and so you can quite frankly so you can be happy it's very very difficult and again speaking for personal experience to enjoy the world to enjoy your family to enjoy things in life um if you are extremely unhealthy so yeah I think it's I don't think it's just a man thing I just think it's a human thing got to be healthy when you were in that dark place and you mentioned you were suicidal that's interesting because the fact that that was probably harder for you than than hell week is like without a doubt and people go through that M so if people think that they can't tolerate something like hell week maybe that's just not what they can take or the the region in themselves that they that they can't take but they have other things problems that they're dealing people go through hell years true you know hell lifetimes probably yeah absolutely um I will absolutely say that so so for for me I went to this really dark place um I developed an actual um an actual addiction to food uh not not just any food but like specifically like bread and sweets I don't know if it's gluten I don't know I don't know specifically what it is there's a lot of sugar and bread yeah so it's like so like the but like I can have like Ezekiel bread for example um or non- sugary bread it's fine so I don't know what exactly it is but um I developed an actual addiction was diagnosed with like the actual addiction and I had to go through the um uh AA type program to get myself off of this and I put myself through it I actually just listened to Russell Brand's book recovery which is hilarious and phenomenal so anybody who's dealing with addiction definitely go check that book out um and I listen to the audio version of it um and it's and it's it's it's really great so like I had to put myself through that um to to deal with this actual actual addiction and um yeah I can honestly say as somebody who has I've fought in three Wars I've been through all kinds of Hell on Earth um I can tell you that the most difficult thing was getting control of the addiction and then getting control of my health and everything else that went with that um without a doubt so to people who struggle with eating healthy or I think there's a lot of people who actually are addicted to food who just don't realize it um and people who are going through that it's like you don't have to beat yourself up and go like Oh I'm a weak person I'm a terrible person I'm the worst human being ever because I made it through hell week with a herniated disc in vge it's like I've been shot I've fought in three Wars I've done all this stuff and the hardest thing I've ever had to do deal with was was that um so I would just encourage people who are in that situation keep working at it keep trying to figure it out um don't give up and don't just let yourself go and keep uh keep trying to get get out of that hole do you think all of the stuff that you saw in war being shot at uh led to this or do you think that this was like somewhat detached from all of that oh absolutely yeah yeah I went for I went for years um you know going through you know SEAL training whatever but then like you go to combat and it's like there's this constant stress that you have and you have to cope with the stress in one way or another and some guys they deal with it with alcohol some guys deal with it in a healthy way through exercise and stuff which is like the way to do it um and for me it's like I started abusing I started just eating too much I started abusing food and that eventually turned into a full-blown addiction and then when I was out of the military it's like i' had been in in combat and such after that I went through this this dark period where um yeah for about a year year and a half I just um I think all my demons just came up and just just smacked me in the face and just and just brought me to my lowest point yeah nearly killed me but uh pulled through and uh you know so I'm able to on what was your first job after completing SEAL training um so once I completed SEAL training I was assigned to a West Coast Seal Team and then I was within within the team everybody has different Specialties and jobs and my job was actually as the uh radio operator so my job was to I was the youngest um lowest ranking guy and I was with the I was assigned to be shooting buddies with the highest ranking guy in combat and be his and be his radio man how old were you at the time oh man actually I think I turned 22 in Afghanistan that's insane yeah as a my my first deployment yeah okay so your job how did that work exactly like could you walk us through the steps of of you know calling in or working with someone of that ranking yeah yeah absolutely so when we go on a when we would go on an operation the um Ground Force Commander he's the highest ranking officer who's on the ground his job is to direct the troops and he doesn't need to be sitting there constantly on the phone talking back to headquarters he doesn't need to be sitting there talking to the aircraft he doesn't need to be requesting aircraft or if somebody gets shot God forbid he doesn't need to be the one calling in the metac he needs to be focused on Big Picture keeping um you know all the different players in the game where they need to be right on the battlefield and so my job was basically stick directly with him attach attached to the hip anything communication that needed to happen it was my job to know all of that so I knew the frequencies um I knew where all the different elements on the battlefield were and I would communicate between the different elements I had three different radios on me and I would have to switch between them I would have a different voice in each ear um plus I would then have to switch channels from time to time to talk to like you know a third or a fourth element all at the same time while I'm fighting firing my weapon and the Ground Force Commander is talking to me and giving me instructions and then I'm trying to relay so basically it was like a glorified combat switchboard operator just making sure everything making sure everything functions Under Fire yeah would you say all the years of training that you did adequately set you up for what real life combat is like or was that still just a completely different world um I was definitely prepared for it the the the training that our special operations guys go through is topnotch and so when the first bullets were fired first time in combat um I I felt uh cool and calm um and just followed my training did what I was supposed to do and it and it I felt very much prepared for it when I walked out I was never thinking like okay I don't know what to do what am I what am I doing I I never felt that um in combat as a seal never what was the goal in Afghanistan what was what was your specific Mission yeah so specific Mission we were in a we were in an area in uh Southeast Afghanistan near the Pakistan border and so the Pakistan border was controlled by a group of guys called the hakani network from the hakani family and so they controlled both sides of the border from Pakistan and Afghanistan and so when I deployed in 2014 so 10 years ago um they that the hakani network basically had unlimited weapons and ammo and um terrorists coming across from Pakistan into Afghanistan and at the time US forces were withdrawing from Afghanistan and sort of we call it retrograding basically they were kind of slowly over the course of months and years were sort of slowly falling back to um sort of core positions within Afghanistan so our job was to basically just go out find Taliban because there's tons of them coming across the border pick a fight with them and kill as many of them as possible that was it that was the job um there was no you know we weren't like trying to dismantle the network it was just slow these guys down as this influx of weapons and Personnel is coming and trying to hit the bigger bases basically how do you pick a fight with them is it just going and just walk outside just go walk outside just go walk right where you know they are um or you so you don't initiate but you put yourself in a position where they'll engage with you first um kind of yeah I mean they're not just like standing around outside with with rifles and like we're sneaking up on them and sniping them um those kind of missions do happen but that that's not the mission we were on um they our our thing was like we would go hit a house or something like that where we know there's weapons or something and on our way to the house they know that we're coming for the weapons they know that they know what our objective is and so then um now a big fight pops off or we um do a mission where we're clearing through a series of houses and eventually they all kind of come out of the woodwork to try to to to try to fight us and then we would just basically fight them at that point yeah so it's it's uh kind of a um putting yourself out there not as bait cuz like we are the Hunter there's no doubt but um yeah picking a fight and trying to knock out as many of them as possible you mentioned combat and actually going and taking people's lives mhm was there anything that surprised you about the first time that you had to take someone's life um my first time that I got so so I'll say like in Afghanistan um you know when we when we're fighting 99% of the time you really aren't even seeing the bad guys you hear you hear the bullet snapping past your head you see the bullets impacting on the walls or you know leaves falling down on top has bullets are going over your head in a tree line or something most of the time you're not really seeing them very at least during our deployment the Taliban would stay very well hidden they'd fire from dark Windows they'd fire from hidden in tree lines and things like that so so I don't know if I even personally uh shot anybody in in Afghanistan um my first time for sure knowing um that I took someone's life I can't talk about that just yet uh at this point in history maybe in a couple years I can talk about it um my I was surprised actually I wasn't that surprised I was just it wasn't that big of a deal um because it had to get done um I was on a sniper Mission and yeah um took a couple guys out and it wasn't um you know I didn't I didn't get any Joy from it because war is tragic and it's horrible and taking anybody's life you know I think I I often think about the the guys that I killed I was like you know that's somebody's son don't get me wrong I did the right thing I needed to take those guys out I have no regrets and I sleep just fine um but it just it just hits it just hits you the tragedy of War like why did why do we have to keep doing this you know kind of going back to the beginning of our conversation it's like okay why why do we keep fighting and killing each other and it's so frustrating and it annoys me because um for me I'm actually my my personality I'm very much like a home body I just want to be home with my wife with my family I just want to live a nice quiet life um but um unfortunately the world doesn't work like that and sort of the particular skill set that I have um I go into places and that's not that's not my reality um I mean just a nice peaceful calm existence all the time um so yeah as far as taking someone's life if you if you know for sure that what you're doing is the right thing and you know for sure that that person is going to kill or hurt someone you know for me it's like I had no problem with it but I do recognize the tragedy of of what's going on like okay I just spent my day hunting these guys down and you know taking them out um you know it' be much better if I spent my day spent my life you know uh if I could spend my life building um and making Humanity better in some sort of way you know um so I recognize the tragedy of it there's no enjoyment there maybe in other situations where you've had to take someone's life what were the psychological effects of those maybe where it wasn't so cut and dry I've I've never been in a situation where it wasn't cut cut and dry um the only time as far as like me having to actually um take someone's life it's always been a cut and dry very easy situation the the difficult part one of the most difficult decisions well it wasn't a difficult decision because I knew it was the right thing to do but I've was in a situation where it's like I had to leave someone behind to die um who I was trying to rescue and we could not rescue this person we're under Fire um and I had to like leave this person and just go I'm sorry um and um you know that was that took a little bit more of a toll on me mentally um but again I I I know that I made the right decision if had I tried to stay with that guy it was as an Iraqi civilian unfortunately who' been shot by ISIS and we were trying to get him out um I had to make the decision to leave him because I was like I'm going to die if I go up there I'm going to get shot like I'm going to die right here right now and I'm not going to rescue him um and then ironically within 10 seconds after me not moving forward to to to get this guy sort of leaving him I ended up I did end up getting shot um from from a different angle it's like I would be dead had I been up there so um that's that's the tragedy of it that's the horror of it you know when you see war movies you always see you know guys rescuing people or you know um it's not a lot of times it's not morally ambiguous but in that situation it was like yeah you have to make a decision to just leave someone to die and that's not a uh not a decision that you know I won't ever have to make again but yeah yeah how long were you in Afghanistan before before coming back to the United States and then going back out again I was actually I was I was in Afghanistan a very short amount of time um I was only in country I think for about four months because the particular Outpost that we were working from um we were planning the US military was planning on shutting it down so when I went there it was only a few months and then um I yeah we all came back to the came back to the States four or five months in and um yeah and then I I wasn't that was 2014 and I wasn't um deployed again for about another 18 months because you got to go through another 18month cycle with a new seal platoon before you go out on another deployment yeah and then what was the second deployment that you did the second deployment I did was uh it's ironically it it uh sort of it solidified what I what I do today yeah uh so I on my second deployment I was deployed to Southeast Asia and we did basically nothing um so our job was to go to uh partner Nations our allies and work with their you know Special Operations units and so specifically I was in Thailand for six weeks of this deployment um and when I was in Thailand I just remember I was so frustrated with the fact that you had a full seal platoon and we are a 4-Hour helicopter AR ride away from villages in Burma where people are being raped and massacred and genocide is happening and it's like we're just sitting here on this side of the Border doing nothing about it and to be clear I understand the US government we can't just go get involved in everything so I'm not saying the US government needs to go into Burma now maybe a little different story but um I was like we don't we don't need to go in there I get that but that's really one of the reasons that I was um that it solidified in my mind that I need to get out and go help people and actually if I can backtrack just a little bit um I talked about Mr ball talked about this on his on his YouTube video when I was in Afghanistan we talked about taking someone's life um I was in a situation where I almost had to shoot two little girls and I made the decision in my head that I was going to kill them if they got any closer and I they had already kind of crossed the line to where they would hurt me if they detonated we we we believe that they were carrying um suicide backpacks and so and one of the girls was you know maybe like eight the other one's like five just little girls um coming straight at us from or coming straight at my position and um so I was screaming at them to get away get away um I let them get close enough to where if they blew up they would hurt me but they would not hurt my team and and I'm not exaggerate when I say like had they taken another step and a half forward I would have shot both of them because they got to the point where they almost were close enough to hit my team um and so I already had gone through the mental exercise of saying okay I have to shoot these little girls and that is the worst feeling in the world um that is something that messed with my head after after that uh deployment and after that mission um that's something that gave me flashbacks that's something brought me nightmares and sleep as I was like what what is happening in this world where little girls are being used by the Taliban to run at us um and I don't know for sure but I I would bet that the Taliban sent those little girls at us and were filming from some angle probably for me to shoot the little girls that's that's total guas I have no evidence of that but just looking at the situation I'm like that's probably what happened what to then use that and turn around and say look at what the Navy Seals shoot children yeah exactly so I um so I had that experience in 2014 and so then in 2016 I'm deployed to Southeast Asia and my heart and my head was now all right I there's these civilians in Conflict zones how can I help them like what can I do to help them I can't save all of them I'm not Rambo but you know I want to do something I want to do something and so anyway during that deployment in 2016 I was very frustrated with the fact that I couldn't go help these people who I know genocide is happening right over there and there's nothing I can do about it and so when we got back from that deployment like I knew I was getting out of the military and then I was going to find a way to go to these War zones and do what I could uh and I didn't know what ultimately was going to turn out to be but I knew I had to do something but before we get into that time is a very precious thing and unfortunately I bet we are all way too familiar with scrolling away on our phones for countless hours just wasting time well if that sounds like you and you want to be investing your time way more productively you could be learning about history economics or the great works of literature for free today with our sponsor or Hillsdale College Hillsdale College is currently offering more than 40 free online courses in the most important and enduring 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led you to believe that these two girls were indeed like suicide bombers sure so I'll tell that story a little bit more in detail so we were on a patrol um through a particular uh neighborhood in Afghanistan and we came across a child's backpack uh the dog the bomb sniffing dog sniffed it and saw that there was or and sat on it meaning that there's a bomb it let us know that there's a bomb inside that backpack and so um it was an IED sitting on the side of the road for the talipan to to try and kill us right and so our our um EOD our explosive Tech he went up and put a small charge on it we everybody we stepped back a little bit and blew up the the IED in place when that happened the Taliban knew exactly where we were because the bomb had gone off they thought that they had hit us so they thought that we were weak they thought we would have wounded and so then they swarmed us to try and kill us but we didn't actually have any wounded um and so we ended up intercepting them before they got to us our platoon leadership made a really solid decision we're like Hey we're going to get in position and wait for the Taliban to come to us so we did that and um we ended up killing I think like 20 or 25 Taliban as they were like assaulting our position and um was it was a really really good decision by our by our platoon leadership um but during that firefight one of our Afghan allies was shot four or five times I believe in like the hips in the groin area so he's like screaming bloody murder and we had to move back a few tree lines to set up a perimeter so we could call in a helicopter to evacuate him out while we're in that Circle in that perimeter we started inter we started intercepting Taliban radio communication saying that they knew where we were the Taliban knew where we were and they were planning on attacking us from the south and in the perimeter I was the only guy on the south in the open covering this particular Field of Fire and so I was waiting for this attack to come from the south and the only people that ever came from the south was these two little girls wearing the same exact kind of backpacks that we had just blown up an hour earlier they were wearing the same kind of um things and like girls aren't going to school at that point so um very very high likelihood that they were that the Taliban sent them specifically straight at us cuz the Taliban never attacked us after that it was only the two little girls very specific they came exactly when the Taliban attack was going to happen and whatnot and those girls had no idea what they were doing they were probably just given these backpacks and told to go run out in this Direction that's probably what happened and they were they were terrified they were tears screaming down their face they were horrified when we sort of made eye contact I was watching them through my scope um so the one girl's face was sort of like blown up in my you know in the scope there and I'm looking at her and I have like have my Crosshair right in the middle of her face um because that's what you do with suicide bombers shoot them in the face um and I'm like screaming and like begging this girl don't come any closer and I don't speak the language I'm just like waving at her I'm just like with one hand on the machine gun cuz I'm laying down and I'm just like get away get away get away couldn't you fire a warning shot or something where you miss her but now she sees the idea that like there's a bullet that's coming in theory yes it all happened so fast that that wasn't an option um I just had to put the scope directly on her I was like if she gets closer this all happened over the course of like 10 seconds right so um I put the I immediately put the crosshairs right on her on her face um and was just like as they're running straight at me I don't have time for I was also using a machine gun too so it would have been uh challenging I'm not sure if I'm not sure if it would worked yeah and why do you think they turned around last second because they saw me they saw me laying on the ground pointing the rifle right at them CU I started waving my arm I was like cuz I'm camouflaged a little bit so they're not necessarily going to see me and so then I started screaming at them and I just saw the girl look straight down scope again her her face is like blown up in my mind and I'm like you know yelling at her and then they saw me and then we're like all right we you know we don't want to die today so they turned around and went straight back the direction they'd come from and then we never heard from the Taliban again that day yeah how do you how do you process that and how are you so open about speaking about these things I've noticed with some of the podcasts I've listened to like you're very candid about your experience and I I I think that bottling the stuff up doesn't doesn't help me doesn't help anybody uh we talked earlier in this podcast about like people need to know what the evil is that's out there so I part of my job is to talk about that and like let people know hey here's what's up here's reality in a way I found it actually was kind of cathartic for me at the beginning to sort of talk about this stuff because like how how do you go home and tell people about this how do you how do you sleep at night how do you you like how do you just move on with your life and just pretend that that didn't happen um and like that's not even the worst of what I've seen that's like a a small amount of what I've seen and and um so allows me to tell the world about like what's going on and then also too with my organization stronghold rescue and relief like we still go into these situations we intentionally seek these kinds of situations out to help people in those situations and so I have to tell people about the reality of what's going on these are deeply personal stories um you know if you're just hanging out with me and we're just kind of chilling like I'm not going to bring this stuff up but I will talk about it on a podcast because these stories need to be told and it's a way to um help me heal but then also have some good come out of it because if we're able to raise support to help how did the Taliban justify that like what's going through their mind or they think that's reasonable to send out two little girls like that um I'm just curious yeah so that's that so that's the that's the fundamental question we talked earlier about like why can't we have World Peace because fundamentally they don't value them the same so if you're driving through certain parts of Afghanistan or even Iraq um certain areas you'll see that they'll have a goat in the the man is driving they'll have a goat in the front seat and they'll have the wife in the back seat literally cuz they just don't value these these terrorist organizations they do not value women um and human life in general the same way that we do and it's difficult for us to understand because we think we think that like oh there are certain values you need to have like oh we we we love and protect our wives and we uh love and protect our children and and all that other cultures uh especially these very Twisted you know terrorist groups they do not care um I'll say a lot of the violence that I saw in Iraq was ISIS killing civilians Iraqi civilians Iraqi Muslim civilians who were just trying to get away from Isis and so Isis would look at Iraqi Muslim civilians they look at them lower than dogs because you are abandoning what what what they what they think is you know the true Islam or whatever right so these terrorist groups they in their minds it's like you're worse than the Christians you're worse than the Jews you're worse than the Americans you know um if you leave us because you're leaving the true caliphate you're leaving the true Empire you're leaving true Islam right and so their their entire concept of morality is not the same as ours and this is one of those things where it's like you cannot peacefully coexist with people like that you cannot have them in your house you cannot have them in your country they need to stay over there um and if you come over here you know you're going to find out like just just stay away from us and stop doing what you're doing but um yeah entirely different value systems it's difficult to Fathom you said that the story with those girl was not the worst that you've seen yeah no what would you say is the thing that maybe keeps you up most at night or the worst thing that you've seen I I'll say that nothing nothing keeps me up at night um I sleep well I I don't sleep great but uh nothing there's nothing that truly like keeps me up there's images in my head constantly that I'll see um so when I was in so I left the military in 2017 and I bought a one-way ticket to Iraq um basically to do humanitarian Aid work and I ended up with a a group of other American volunteers and we were sort of embedded with the Iraqi Army and we ended up becoming basically the Iraqi Army's Frontline combat Medics because I just didn't have the medical personnel and I was not a medic but the level of training that I had as a seal basically made me a medic and the other guys as well um and so I the the unit that we were attached to the Iraqi army unit they were assigned to actually go into West mosle and clear west mosul from the from the west side and so 30 days into that we' been the Iraqi Army was fighting Street to Street house to house and we were treating the wounded and Isis is gunning down civilians and all this stuff um and it's a horrible horrible um undescribable uh tragedy and and just evil but uh on June 2nd 2017 um we came across a road it was like it had been a I believe a four or six Lane Highway previously um that was right in front of Isis headquarters in the city overlooking uh the river and overlooking a lot of mosul and Isis was holed up in a hospital like a four or five story hospital and they had a bunch of civilians in there as using them as human Shields to prevent air strikes from taking them out so that's what they would do and so as we got up close to there um we discovered on that road that the day before Isis had killed about 200 people and so there was 200 bodies in the street and it was because what had happened it was a mass Exodus of civilians all tried to get up and run away at the same time and Isis from their perch um from The High Ground just raak them all with machine guns and killed all of them so we're talking women we're talking kids we're talking babies um pregnant women um the thing that always sticks out of my head was there was a um so about about six feet away from where people could turn the corner and get to safety like literally six or seven feet right there there were three bodies of an Iraqi family um there was a father a mother and between them was was their baby if you looked at how the bodies were laying the father clearly was the one holding the baby and the mother was you know carrying some other stuff as they were trying to get just five or six feet away to safety and the father had clearly been shot in the back from the machine gun fire and when he was shot he had clearly Fallen forward and his baby he fell forward into the rubble of the street and his F his baby's head was bashed in so there's a little one-year-old maybe six-month old just tiny little baby with his head bashed in laying between its dead mother and father six feet away from freedom and but then on that street there was piles of bodies where people have been killed and then they tried to climb over the bodies and then they were killed and more people tried to climb over the bodies and they were killed and so you're looking at the worst the worst thing and I remember I remember when I saw this my brain for a second my brain literally said this isn't real because it's not in black and white and I was like that's a weird thought why am I thinking that it was because I'd only ever seen things like this in history books in black and white photos the the atrocities of the Nazis the atrocities you know pulpot and cir Rouge um you know all the different communist Killing Fields and such as well I'd never seen something like this in real life I was like how is this in color I I don't I my brain it took me like 3 seconds to process what I was looking at as I looked out over the bodies but within that within the pile of bodies there was a little girl who was still alive and she was like maybe 3 or 5 years old and um so we were like she's you know 50 to 100 yards away from Isis Isis is all around her um and she's like hiding under her dead mother and we were like all right well we got to go do something we got to get this little girl out because she's not going to survive the day um she's going to get cooked in the in the heat in mosul um and so yeah we launched a launched a rescue mission to go get her and so that whole situation that level of brutality uh was something I just had never seen before and um and I've seen those images and I've seen stuff like that unfortunately dozens of times since then not on that scale not 200 people but the same thing um working in Burma um in particular and uh where you know there's all kinds of evil happening there as well so yeah just really really really dark stuff so so to understand this you realized you couldn't help out enough as a Navy SEAL so you became went back to being a civilian and then went to these places because you realized you I guess weren't beholden to the command of the Navy well so to be clear like my job as a seal is a very important job and it was it was making a difference in the world and it was an important job for sure um my thought was just there are people in these active War zones where um they they have nobody to come help them they don't have Navy Seals and Green Berets and Army Rangers and Marines to come help them they don't have that it doesn't exist and so when Isis shows up at their front door or when the Burma Army shows up at their front door they have no idea what to do there's nobody coming to help them they're on their own and so this so what I why I got out was it wasn't it wasn't about like I don't want to be controlled by the government that wasn't at all I was just like there's there's a need over there that nobody's filling I'm only one guy but I'm going to go fill that need as much as I can and how are you able like legally to do that because I imagine that you are still taking lives and you're a US citizen I'll be it in a different country like is there any sort of like legal stuff that's happening there or when you are in those countries how are you affording you know the Weaponry the foods all of that stuff was it just provided to you by the government yeah so each each situation is different uh first and foremost we're only going to work in situations that are clearly black and white um good versus evil um and so the situations that we choose to go into there's no ambiguity you know we're not going to go into some place where it's like H you know maybe the US supports bu side or whatever like that's not it at all that's one number two is our focus when we choose a place to go to is like we're going there as humanitarians we're there to extract people and protect people as needed so our our attitude is we're not going there to fight occasionally it does happen but we are not going there to fight that is not our intention um and then the third thing is when we go into these places we always work with local authorities always at their invitation um in conjunction with them we're not running around like Cowboys we're not showing up and just hopping in a car and doing whatever we want like no the first thing we do is you know we have an invitation from the local uh group from the from the government and then we and then we have um and and then we find ways to help them as far as Weapons um we only carry weapons if they allow us to carry weapons we do not bring weapons or anything like that internationally um the only the we also with the weapons and ammo it's like they always give it to us there's been a couple times where we've had to just buy a couple of like handguns or pistols or something in the country local forces and local authorities know that we're doing that so we have you know some so we can protect ourselves if there's you know something squirly happens but um yeah we're not there going to try to be Rambo we're there we're going there to um try and evacuate people medically and then also do some Frontline mentoring for the groups that already are there and we're like hey here's how you can best protect this Village here's how you can best stop these bad guys from coming in here and raping and murdering everybody body um and that's that's our mission set yeah but it's always in conjunction with them we're there to serve those people we don't take any pay from them everything we do is nonprofit so we go and find people who would never be able to pay us and we offer them the same services that um in a way that that Americans have you know we have seals and Rangers and stuff to to protect us um these people don't and so we bring what we can there to some knowledge that we can there to help those people survive and how is it all afforded like how do we pay for everything yeah yeah so I run a so stronghold rescue relief is a nonprofit 501c3 organization and all the money that that comes in 100% of it is just donations from people so the way it works is we work primarily on a uh sort of subscription style Netflix style model so 99% of our funding that comes in it's from on average like $20 a month donations from thousands of people and so because of that we're able to raise several million a year to to go and um um serve people who otherwise would never be able to have have this help and it's you're directly we are directly saving lives that if we do not go to these places nobody's going there because they the the Gap and the need is so big we're only able to we're only a drop in the bucket of of what's needed and I'm sure you have a link to that which will be down in the description if you guys want to help support that which would be absolutely amazing where did the desire to come uh come from to help people like this you know I I I don't really know um I think it's something that's innate um my father always taught me to you know protect others and look after others and I think that that's something that was instilled in me at a young age yeah I think my my father was such a was such a servant of other people he was also um and he when I say that he like took care of our family incredibly well um and then also when I was young he was in the uh in the Air Force Reserves and so he got activated after 911 and and was he you know was part of was was uh on C he worked on C130 aircraft transport planes and things like that so he was over in Iraq and Afghanistan in the Middle East and stuff so I was aware of that the impulse to serve uh and help other people is uh I think a lot of it just comes down to um you know that that statement you know greater love hath no man than this that he lay down his life for his friends and I truly believe that Humanity we're all brothers and sisters people say that and they don't really truly truly mean that I was like I truly mean that I've had people ask me like why would you go to Iraq and get shot to rescue a little brown Muslim girl as a white Christian male from America and it's like because I don't see her as all those things I see her as a little girl that needs help and I'm going to go help her and once I've everything that I've seen once I've seen once I've seen all this stuff I can't unsee it I can't just sit back and relax I can't just not go and help these people knowing full well that they need help um imagine if there was some sort of emergency here uh outside and somebody was dying and it's like what well you're going to call the cops you're going to call an ambulance you're going to go and try to help them you're going to you're going to stop everything you're doing to try and go and help that person that's bleeding out or whatever right outside because because you have goodness in your heart um and so I just see that on a different scale it's like I go to other countries and stronghold rescue in relief we go to other countries to do that and so this specific instance with this girl that was hiding under her mom's body how did you go and actually bring her out was this the video that like kind of went viral yes this was the video that went viral so we um the the group of guys I was with we were all again just American civilian volunteers and um we talked with the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi Army um basically called the American Military and the American Military agreed to give us a smoke screen so the American Military started firing a smoke screen to kind of blur the vision of the uh of the Isis fighters in that particular area and then the Iraqi Army um they were driving an americanmade tank but it was Iraqi Army um and they drove basically they were like that's all we're going to send we're going to send this tank that's it and so basically they drove this tank straight up to Isis headquarters in mosul um which is just like a couple blocks away from where Isis was started where the calipat was declared by Al baghdaddy um in the Leaning mosque um anyway so they they drove this tank straight up to Isis headquarters again we're 50 to 100 meters away like we're right there and um so the rest of us we just went in on foot behind this tank and as soon as we get out behind the tank Isis they immediately they think that they're being assaulted they they they see the smoke screen they can hear and sort of see a tank coming they see little figures running around they think that they're under direct assault and that Iraqi forces or something are going to come push them out so they unleash everything they have they have prided mortars they've got mortars going off that are landing behind us because we're moving forward into Isis territory um and then they're firing at us through the smoke from the front and from the sides there's Rockets going off there's you know mortars popping off and um so we got up close to the um uh where the pile of bodies was and just because of the angle basically one of the guys had to run out and grab the little girl his name was Dave Dave Eubank so Dave Eubank runs out and grabs the little girl uh my buddy Sky Barkley he laid down covering fire I also laid down covering fire and we're firing directly into Isis positions like I'm I'm firing Through the Windows where Isis is like they're right they are right there and that's those are the same Windows where these 200 dead bodies that were literally tripping over as we're moving into Isis territory um they they they were all killed from those wind window so we're just you know laying down what what what we can with with covering fire and then so Dave grabs a little girl and he brings her back behind the tank and um then we tried to grab um we we grabbed two men as well who were also injured in that pile of bodies we brought them back with us and on our way back um as the tank is just backing up uh can't we can't communicate with the tank it doesn't see us um we're we're moving back and that's when the one of the guys we were trying to drag out of there he unfortunately fell off of this uh angled table that we were dragging him on and this tabletop thing so he fell off I I rolled him out of the way of the tank treads because again this tank is just backing up and backing up and it's not stopping so I roll him out of the way of the tank treads the tank misses him by four or five inches like no more than like the width of my hand and that was the point where I had to look at this guy and go like dude I'm sorry because we're still taken we're taking fire now and now Isis thinks that they've won this battle they don't really know what's going on so they're doubling down on the machine gun fire um because they think that we're running away yeah so um and then after I let this guy go I stepped back behind the tank and was just thinking like like dear God like I can't believe I had just had to do that and then boom got hit in the leg uh from a burst of machine gun fire from our from our right and um fell down behind the tank and the tank was maybe 3 or 4 feet away from running me over and I didn't hear it I didn't think about it if if the other guys on the team hadn't screamed at me and like started hitting me to get up I would have been run over by that tank cuz it would have just fold me folded me flat and would have killed me um cuz I was just staring at my leg kind of in shock like what what the hell just happened so I stood back up luckily the bone was not hit so it was just a just a flesh wound in and out through my calf and so I was able to move out of there on foot um as I'm throwing a tourniquet on my leg I'm um we want to talk about the other horrible image there was a little girl she maybe I don't know maybe 15 years old a young girl she'd been shot in the back of the head head by ISIS and her whole face she must have been hit with like a 50 caliber or something cuz her entire face was gone she been in the back of the head and then from her hairline to her jaw that her entire face had been blown off and it was just a black hole of uh drying blood um and so as I was walking backwards throwing a tourniquet on but blood pumping from two holes in my leg I literally tripped over her body and she was standing right there she was laying there right between my feet and like just and then the smell of the of the Rotting Flesh just you know hit me um and then we we continued moving back and then in order for us to in order for we we had to basically move across this highway again one more time uh to get to safety and there was no way we'd be able to move the the the man or or like for all of us to run across it was just wasn't going to happen we were going to get shot so I was already shot and so I just volunteer I was like I'm going to run across the street and tell them to send an armored Humvee out here and so I ran across the street back to Iraqi Army lines and they Iraqi Army they're they're all right there watching this and so I just run at them and I'm screaming humy as I'm hobbling across No Man's Land um to try to in case I get shot again and you can hear this is also in video too you can hear the Isis bullets snapping past me as they're they see me and they're taking shots they're trying to kill me uh luckily I make it to safety um and then they sent a Humvee out to rescue the the the team and sort of bring them back that last like 100 yards or so what does it feel like to get shot um for me it felt felt like uh felt like getting hit with a sledgehammer um and then the burning it felt so the the the physical sensation is like getting hit with a sledgehammer and then once the adrenaline wears off a little bit it takes it feels like somebody just took a red hot poker out of the fire and just shoved it through your leg um because as the bullet goes through it burns it burns everything so um yeah it it's uh it's it's excruciating but again if you're going to get wounded uh like uh as as far as wounds are concerned mine was very very minor um to be very clearly was very minor but how do you accept the possibility of dying I guess this goes back to what we were talking about before if your why is big enough you just you just do what you got to do because in that situation um I actually when we first got back behind the tank and Isis was shooting at us I was like this is insane like what like what is going on and I'm like I'm standing around and there's dead people everywhere all on the ground around me and there's bullets coming in and hitting the bodies and hitting the dirt around us Isis can't quite see us but they're firing through it I'm just like dude I'm in the Kill Zone um and when that F when this first when this Mission first started I actually started to um I don't know I don't know what was happening I think I might have been going into like Terror shock or something because like my legs and my arms kind of stopped working and I think I think I was going into shock because I was so afraid um and then in that moment I thought of two things I thought first is I'm a Navy SEAL and I'm going to die out here before I let down the Brotherhood and don't represent them well on the battlefield I'm a seal it doesn't matter like if I die out here so be it um because of that and the second was if we don't go that girl dies that girl's one that girl has a 100% chance of dying today if we don't go and so you I just you just make the decision to uh to go because that's my job as a seal um that's my job as a man to protect um to protect the innocent and that's what I swore to do and that's uh what I chose to do that day yeah so what I'm most curious about is how do you assimilate back into society because I know for myself if I saw what you went through I don't think I'd ever be normal after that I don't think I could comprehend what I saw um I don't know if I could ever fit back in because I I I just and again this is me having not experienced it but even if I see something on Twitter that's like you know one of those one of those videos it it screws me up for like the day and sometimes like multiple days depending on like what I see even if it's just a few seconds on my phone mhm is that just the way my mind is wired or like how do you cope with that well I would say several things one is I I'll reference like the Seal training so SEAL training toughens you in in one regard but it also selects four guys that are already sort of predisposed to be able to handle things a little more so there's that um and but the rest of what you just said yeah like that that I experienced all that as well um it's it's difficult to come back and then just sit down and you know have an actual you know super serious conversation about the Green Bay Packers you know it's like it's it's kind of difficult to do because you're like three months ago I just you know like I was just I just got back from a war you know and now we're talking about the weather and small talk and these different things when I when I was younger when I first got back from from war it um I would get frustrated with people I would get mad and I would just go like why don't you understand you know but the real and then I as I matured I realized I like well of course you don't understand um and that's okay it's good that you don't understand it's good that you don't have these same things but yeah for the rest of your life you just see the world entirely different and your priorities are different it it can be difficult to um assimilate back into society and just kind of go work a regular job and I think that's part of one of the reasons why um we see like um you know veteran suicide numbers are so excessively High I think a lot of guys they've seen things they've done things they've been a part of something bigger than themselves and then they come back and you're like well none of this matters you know uh and again that's not a healthy attitude to have because like no life does matter life goes on you fought to protect this now enjoy your life but there's also I would say the biggest thing that I've struggled with is survivors guilt knowing so many guys personally who died in combat having seen so many civilians and such dying combat and dying War zones um and having come very very close multiple times myself to having almost been killed but I just wasn't for whatever reason that day I got lucky or God was looking out for me or whatever and I didn't die and other guys did die and so there's guilt and it can be difficult to move on with your life and uh just enjoy your life knowing what other guys have sacrificed and what other people are still going through so I would say for me that's probably the biggest thing for me is uh um yeah it's probably just guilt yeah why do you think you survived do you feel like that was luck or do you feel like your your training prepared you um well I will say certainly training does help um knowing what to do your call them you know your Spidey senses going off there are certain instincts that you have um and other guys have them much stronger than I do um so there so there is a certain level of of just training so you put yourself in the correct position and knowing what your limitations are knowing what the anemal is capable of and so there are there there is that element of training I'll will also say there also is an element of luck there is a huge element of luck where if because here here's the thing like if the enemy knows where you are and they have a good weapon that's zeroed in they're going to kill you like that's it like they're going to kill you that's how we're able to defeat them so um there's no I I don't believe that you know um you know God moves bullets or anything like that out of the way I believe discretion is the better part of valor you have to use your head you have to use the training you have to suck it up and make tough decisions in combat um but I will say though I'm also a firm believer in the idea that um all things work together for good uh to those who love God and those who are called according to his purpose so these tragedies these bad things do I think that I was hand selected for some greater purpose no but uh because I'm not special do I believe I have the ability to do something special because I've gone through all these things because because I've seen all this tragedy and all this death and all this war and all this destruction and now I can take all that and draw attention to it and help save lives and help end some of that suffering now yeah absolutely and so that's where that's where I see my role in life is to sort of be self- selected and go all right I'm my volunteer I'll I'll go help out in that situation yeah is it ever like a switch that you could flip on and off at this point where you go and see those things and then come back and can you know separate the two yeah I mean I I think so there's a there's the the the switch isn't flipped necessarily right away it can take uh decompression time it can take a month or two or a couple months to kind of get back down to normal get back down to Baseline for sure when when coming back um because yeah you're in these incredibly you know intense situations like just in December uh I got hit with or my position got hit with three bombs from a from fighter jets three fighter jets came in targeted our building the first one you know nearly killed us we ran out of the building the next two bombs hit the building and destroyed it all my gear everything uh that was in in Burma and you know so it's like you're in that level of intensity of that crazy kind of situation and yeah it takes some time to decompress from that when you come back um but I've done it now so many times where it's like I I know I'm going to be fine I know that I'm going to be heightened my my senses are going to be heightened for a little bit I'm going to have some crazy dreams as my brain is processing you know what's going on and and realizing hey you're safe you're fine it's okay you're home um but um yeah I I feel like I have the ability to to flip that switch but with that being said you don't go to war and come back the same person you just don't um every single time I go out the every single time I go out the door and I'm in a combat conflict situation um it changes you every single time and um hopefully for the better I try to make it for the better what strategies do you use to decompress do you have like certain things you like to do for me I like to I guess sort of like Des stimulate meaning uh I like I like to go spend time with my wife and with my parents and just sit in the quiet you know for couple of weeks and just sort of relax and let my brain just accept the fact that it's safe um I like to read um and just kind of come back um to that and then I also I also am intentional about um dealing with the stuff that I know is going to give me nightmares later like I know I know it's coming I know the nightmares are coming I know it's going to happen um as my brain is decompressing because my brain is just trying to make sense of what happened right um it doesn't have to be this horribly traumatic thing I know it's coming and so I'll sit by myself and I'll just literally play through what happened sometimes I'll write it down I'll uh talk with other people about it my family and such and I'll just say here's what happened and and just accept it I think the big thing is just accepting like Yep this happened and acknowledge the fact that you're not there anymore you're home live your life um so I guess that's kind of my general strategy for for that I was always curious when you're in combat like that how do you know when to retreat or give up I can so so there's this statement that I that I live by again discretion is the better part of valor there is no uh one litmus test that I can give you to say like oh this is the right decision you need to you know if as long you know if you hit this criteria you know this is the decision you need to make every time every single battle's different every single situation is different every single Army is different every single enem is different every single day is different every single weapon is different so it's so you you have to make extremely difficult um life or death decisions with not nearly enough information you don't really know you don't have all the information but you have to make the best possible decision that you can so there's no um there's no way to there's no way to really to know you just have to make the best decision that you possibly can I know that's kind of a a vague answer but um you just have to you have to look at the situation and just accept that 50% of the time you're going to make the wrong call after spending so much time in combat how does that affect your everyday life in terms of like just awareness do you have heightened awareness when you're just walking into a place or are you all like constantly sussing out certain people and like looking for for bad guys I know for a lot of cops out there something that they experience is it's hard to to not judge a lot and to always be trying to like perceive people essentially is that something that you experience as well um to an extent but very different than how police um experience it so um so so my my experience with that is my brain unfortunately is always locked in like fight ORF flight mode um so I'm a very light sleeper um you know it so it's like my my my brain often thinks that I'm in a in a bad situation even though I'm not that's very different than police officers so police officers in my opinion have it a thousand times worse because of what you just said I'm not in a my my role is not going around constantly sort of looking at individuals and you know these really crazy situations and I'm going home at night to my own house and I could be called in at any point because you know if there's some mass shooting or something God forb in the city so police officers in my opinion have it much worse than we do than combat veterans do because you're always on call you always have your badge on uh you're constantly looking at your neighbors and your your own community and you're looking for threats to protect them but you're also constantly looking for that and so your brain is is going to be working very very different um and you're going to be viewing things very different than for example like I would be yeah so when's the last time that you were facing combat a few months ago a few months ago and that was in Burma yeah um yeah so what's happening there right yeah so the situation in Burma Burma was a British colony uh pre World War II and then during World War II the so Burma has like about 12 or 13 sort of major tribes the central largest tribe is the ethnic Burmese people during World War II the uh Burmese people fought with the Japanese against the uh against the British in Burma but then halfway through the war the people switch sides because the British were winning the Allies were winning and so then they fought alongside the British to get rid of the Japanese now when that happened the British left Burma ultimately and basically the burmes were left in power with all this weapons and and all this kind of stuff and so then what happened was unfortunately the the the Burmese generals got power and so they basically started trying to subjugate the entire country and all the other ethnic minority groups um again it's not all Burmese people it's just the people who got in control of the Burmese Army so um what's been going on is World War II has never ended and so what's going on in Burma is the Burma army they are this they basically control the country they are the central government um it's imagined if the US Army some US Army General was like got rid of the president got rid of Congress and was like I'm in charge now right that's the situation in Burma and so the uh Burma Army um they are trying to subjugate all the ethnic minority groups um they so there's everything from genocide to um um I guess genocide is is is is the biggest thing but it's like it's it's everything from genocide they're trying to take the land from these people for subjugation slavery child sorry human trafficking drugs all this kind of stuff and so we work in East Burma with one of the tribes we work with the Ken tribe um they're just one of the tribes that's being persecuted but we work directly with them um to help them against all these attacks and things that are constantly happening to them and we run the only we set up and run the only um Ambulance Service in that part of East Burma where there's never been ambulances before and uh we run them in ruggedized um Hues uh like pick up trucks and move move patients and such and what are the ethnic minorities in Burma like I I feel like that's not typically so Burma I'm I'm very confused on this I'm not like very strong geographically speaking but isn't that Myanmar the same thing yes yes it is Myanmar so so why is it called Burma instead of Myanmar and what are the ethnic minority I feel like that's not typically a place that like people would kind of go right right okay that's a fair question so in general the uh Burma was called Burma before the Burma Army took over okay the Burma army they changed the name to Myanmar and so as an act of defiance people most people in Burma at least people that I've worked with in Burma they do not call it Myanmar they call it Burma because they don't recognize the authority of these corrupt genocidal Maniacs to change the name of their country right um however if you do call it Myanmar it's like I'm not going to mad about it nobody gets mad about it we understand um so yeah it's Myanmar or Burma I personally just use the term Burma um so there's a lot of different um ethnic groups I don't know the names of all of them there's a lot of them um but there's the kachin the Shan the W the arakan the Ken the keni um the mon and I'm definitely missing it's all kind of just like Southeast Asian kind of yeah yeah it's all Southeast Asian cultures and they all have their own distinct languages and cultures and everything like that so it's it's uh yeah it's quite the quite the Melting Pot of all these different uh cultures and such how long do you see yourself doing this for um that is a fantastic question uh so I was I got married a year ago um and so I want to take stronghold rescue and relief and make us obviously much much bigger than we are now um and help more people over time um but I do definitely see as the years go by I definitely want to be personally like less and less involved like in the in sort of the Frontline um aspects of the job um as time goes on also right now I'm I'm currently uh at Harvard University knocking out my MPA I'm doing it's a one-year intensive MPA so I just finished the summer term and then now I have to do two semesters at more than full at more than full-time and so I'm using that as an opportunity I'm using this as an opportunity as well to just sort of see what other options there are out there I I want to grow the organization and lead the organization into the future um but I'm not sure what exactly my role is going to be uh you know five years from I really don't know that what would you do if it were not this if like if I didn't if I didn't run stronghold yeah man that is a that is a very very uh interesting question I would love there's so many things in life that I would love to do um I would love to uh I'd love to be a doctor I'd love to be a lawyer I'd love to you know be be an engineer there's so many things I would love to do I'd love to be an academic I'm a total nerd I love reading um you know so there's so many things in life that I would just that I would love to do and quite frankly I don't I don't even know what I would do outside of this uh in if this didn't exist this is definitely like where my where my uh where my head and my heart is at for now at least yeah what are some of your favorite books oh man um so I read a lot of history books um one of my favorite books is uh bana brothers so that was like and that's like one of the original sort of books that I read when I was a teenager there's another book um it's uh it was a so actually so this is actually funny the first book that I ever read I I was I was either 10 or 11 and the first book that I ever just went and just grabbed off grabbed on my own it was at school I just grabbed it off the shelf just randomly it was yellow and I grabbed it off and I sat there and I read it and it was basically a child's version of Lawrence of Arabia um and so TE Lawrence during World War I he worked with uh he was a British officer and he led Arab armies to fight the Turks in throughout the Middle East and I just was like man that's like insane that's so that's so crazy so incredible so that was like the first book that I ever read so I read a lot of read a lot of military stuff probably my my favorite book um that I've read more than any other book uh is Gates of Fire by Steven pressfield um that book is incredibly it just is just wonderful some of my other favorite books are um letters from A stoic I read senica uh like a crazy person I I love it and it really helps me out I'm reading through the Bible right now currently um I'm also reading through guns of August which is about World War I so lots of History lots of that kind of stuff yeah what do you think is your biggest achieve oh jeez um I would say probably I guess the probably the thing I'm most proud of in life is that um I was able to dig myself out of that hole um back in 2020 2021 when I was suicidal and hated my life and wanted to give up um I think my biggest achievement in life was not giving up in that moment um being a seal is cool being the CEO of a you know big organization is cool uh going to Harvard school but quite frankly not giving up in in that moment that's probably that was my biggest challenge ever and um that's the thing I'm probably the most proud of yeah if you could Credit One thing to being able to escape that hole would you say it was AA or was it like a support group like your family or I I I I think probably the single biggest thing that got me through it was my parents at because at the time I didn't know my wife um probably my parents my parents were incredibly kind and supportive and standing and they let me stay in their house um again it was a dark dark time like I was Lally sleeping on the floor in my parents house after having been a seal and having done all this other stuff and then it's like I lost everything um and was just having a total mental breakdown you know um my parents my parents are definitely the single biggest thing my single my my single biggest unfair advantage in life was just good hardworking Christian uh middle class parents you going to have kids yeah I to yeah would love to I feel like you'd be a pretty good dad from what I've from everything I've looked into so far yeah yeah I hope so I I really really hope so yeah what's your biggest insecurity oh man um my biggest insecurity I would say my biggest insecurity is probably um this is more of like my biggest fear my biggest fear is that I would relapse back into um that dark that dark place I was in before um my biggest insecurity is that I all the all the progress I've made in life that I would kind of throw all that away through you know through addiction or um you know just selfishness or or whatever um I would say that's probably my biggest insecurity what was the impact of Biden pulling out and leaving all the equipment oh we have yet to see the uh the impact of that so just I believe it was a a week or two ago the Taliban did a huge parade at bogram Airbase showing all of the helicopter and the armored vehicles and the Machine Guns yeah so they just did a huge middle finger to the United States think about the Terrible Things That terrorists were able to do and have been able to do in the past with just a few rifles or just a few box cutters or whatever now imagine they have machine guns night vision goggles rifles unlimited ammunition armored vehicles helicopters for the love of God they have helicopters now the terrorist attacks that are going to happen in the future um there's a huge there a huge danger that they are going to be massive so that's on the that's on the security side the other thing is and this is a bit vulgar but it's it's the reality every single day right now in Afghanistan there are women and girls who will will say are in relationships that they do not want to be in and we'll leave it at that every single day these are girls who had the opportunity to go to school these are girls who experienced Freedom many of them for the first 10 15 20 years of their life and that it was all snatched away from them and now they're being sold off to Taliban fighters they're being married off to Taliban fighters families are trying to survive and the women be because of and I don't want to go political here but because of what Joe Biden did every single day this moment at this exact moment there was a woman and there are women and girls girls who are suffering because they are in relationships that they do not want to be in and again we all know what we mean here um and so that is a dark dark dark evil repercussion of terrible foreign policy how should that have been handled differently and what was the reason that we decided to pull out the the pull out from Afghanistan I was started or the the conversation started under the Trump Administration Trump um started talking with the Taliban about okay how do we end this thing right because it's like are we going to be there for the next 100 years you know there's an argument to be made for that um or are we just going to um you know we have we have to do something we have to leave at some point so there was an agreement made with the Taliban that we were going to pull out and that happened under under Trump Biden comes into office and then he uh from what I understand the the timeline got extended a little bit and then we just sort of pulled the plug and got out of there so the argument of whether or not we should have stayed in Afghanistan is one portion of the discussion so on that end you can make the argument that we should just completely leave that's fair you can also make the argument that and my personal opinion is we should have kept a small Force there keep just keep bogram Air Base keep uh uh quick reaction force of Rangers and sales and Green Berets and a few and a few um attack helicopters and aircraft and we can keep the Taliban from controlling the country basically forever and then that also gives us the ability to project power in that part of the world um and it it' be just a fraction it wouldn't cost that much of our actual defense budget so my personal opinion is we should have just kept a small base there all right so that's that's one side of the argument the other side of the argument and the real problem here is the way that the withdrawal happened um the complete collapse um everything that happened at the Cobble airport um all of that is completely 100% unacceptable and look when you're in a historical situation like that people are going to make mistakes I I do not either you know the president President Biden I don't expect the Joint Chiefs of Staff I don't expect all of them to make perfect decisions of course not they're humans they're dealing with a sort of an unprecedented situation however the way that it was handled and all the mistakes that were made and the Dozen plus service members who were killed not to mention all those who were wounded not to mention the dozens and dozens and dozens of Afghans who were killed during that um nobody's been held accountable for it and that's the real problem mistakes be made mistakes will be made I will make mistakes we will all make mistakes nobody's been held accountable for it nobody was fired and so when you when you look at that it's a huge slap in the face to every person who fought in Afghanistan it's a huge slap in the face to every woman who is now married off to some Taliban fighter it's a huge slap in the face to every little girl who's being sold by her parents um to so they can have money and survive it's a huge slap in the face to everything um if you not aren't even going to if you aren't even going to try to hold anybody accountable for what happened um what happened is it's evil what happened is evil one and um it's completely completely unacceptable how it went down how do you think things should change going forward what do you think needs to be done for that situation I don't know enough about the situation to sit here and say definitively this is what our foreign policy should be toward Afghanistan um I I I don't think we've seen the last of Afghanistan um we will probably we were talking about this actually I was talking with this some some of the other veterans at at Harvard we were talking about like how long how long until troops have to go back into Afghanistan um you know Special Operation soldiers or the CIA in some way shape or form um probably not that long if they're not already there because um there's too much Weaponry there's too much there's too much ammunition there's too many helicopters and armored vehicles and stuff in the hands of 8th Century barbarians who want to murder all of us um to not go in and do something about that so I don't know if that's going to look like in my my personal opinion is uh send longrange bombers blow up all that aircraft or sorry blow up all those aircraft blow up all of the uh Supply dumps blow up everything and again I don't know the logistics on that so um I'm not saying it's easy to do that but I think go in and blow up all the hardware um and get rid of it so it can't cause a problem for the future what do you think is something the average American public is unaware of that they should know about well I think I think a big uh a big thing that's going on right now is if you look at China's aggression um in the in the world um so I think that there's there's there there's several things going on um when you talk about just sort of society as a whole so there's all these different armed conflicts the the Chinese thing is a big one you look at Hades falling apart that's going to affect what's going on here uh people need to be looking at what's going on in Venezuela with Nicholas Maduro refusing to hand over he obviously lost the election he rigged the election refused to turn over power you have Hades falling apart to The Gangs the UN peacekeeping Force there is totally failing at this point maybe look at their act together probably not um that's going to cause violence drugs um you know uh refugees fleeing um that's going to cause all kinds of problems just in the Western Hemisphere here um and then you look at China's aggression and I think that I think that um Americans we unfortunately are a little bit um ignorant of History if you want to make good decisions today you need three things you need to understand history you need to understand psychology and you need to understand a little bit of philosophy right so history how did we get where we are psychology how do people actually think in philosophy uh philosophy is what do people actually believe and what are the what are the ways in which they're making decisions and I Feel Like We As Americans do not look at those things enough and we're ignorant of History um so for example you look at China most people don't know about China like why is China so aggressive like what like what's going on what's the history there well it goes back to the early 1800s when um Britain started smuggling opium into China so that way the Chinese would get addicted to Opium that that way they would trade opium for Chinese Goods because at the time the Chinese only wanted silver and the Chinese didn't want very much else to do with the um with the outside world and so Britain basically got all of China addicted to Opium and then that caused several Wars which the British won and so then they forced more opium onto China when that happened basically for a hundred years China was just sort of overrun by by the British and by the French and then obviously the Japanese went in there as well and so the Chinese call that the century of humiliation which ended around the end of World War II so when you look at Chinese psychology you have to look at why are they making the decisions that they're making today you have to look at the history and then you have to look at the psychology they were also confusion at the time which meant uh at least at that point uh China they believed that they were sort of the central moral good of the world and so they still in a lot of ways see themselves as the central sort of moral good of the world see themselves at the center of the universe and so they are incredibly humiliated and I'm going somewhere with this I promise so when you look at their actions it starts to make sense you see like oh this is how a humiliated sort of narcissistic group of people acts I mean like the Chinese Communist Party they're humiliated but they're also narcissist and so then you look at the fentanyl crisis happening in the US where's all that coming from it's all coming from China they're sending all the they're sending all the supplies and everything that that needs to be that that that the cartels in Mexico need to make fentanyl that's coming from China China is is sending that stuff to Mexico and it's being smuggled up into the US you think China doesn't know that of course they know that they are literally repeating 200 or 175 years later what happened to them and so if we are ignorant of our history if we don't look at Psychology if we don't look at the beliefs and philosophy of the other players on the board we will continue to make bad decisions as the American people um and you know that applies to us as individuals as well but that's another topic but yeah so I think those are some of the things that people should be looking at and trying to understand better should we be concerned about the war that's happening in like Gaza right now as well what I will say so after October 7th um my organization we went into Israel we ended up not in not in the South not down toward Gaza but we went into the North of Israel um where Hezbollah was firing Rockets into Israel and we were helping um set up medical care and bringing in medical supplies and things like that um because again our mission there is to help the civilians the Israeli civilians who were just caught in the middle of rockets firing down and and the Israeli Defense Forces they're firing back into Lebanon trying to stop these attacks and things so should we be concerned about the war um happening in Gaza absolutely I mean it's it's it's a it's a tragedy what's happening but we also need to remember our sort of uh moral we need to have some moral courage here as well so the Israeli military um they are here here's the thing the Israeli military they are going after hostages right now um I forget the exact number but if you look at what happened on October 7th per capita imagine it per capita it's like 4 911s happening in America all on the same day and hundreds or I don't remember how many it is but dozens I think at this point still hostages are still stuck in these Terror tunnels in Gaza and so the Israeli military are trying to get their people back and war is bloody war is ugly and they are doing their best to get these people back and quite frankly Hamas has done an incredible job of putting out propaganda that it seems like half the world is swallowing maybe more than half the world is buying into the Hamas propaganda so let's back up a little bit we're talking about Isis remember Isis they they were Isis took over a hospital and they kept Iraqi civilians in the hospital with them that way air strikes couldn't take out their Command Center and so many many many Iraqi soldiers were killed um fighting Isis to get them out of that hospital later whereas an air strike could have just taken them all out right um but we all recognize when Isis does it we all recognize oh that's evil you don't use humans as you don't use civilians as human Shields you are scum you deserve to be slaughtered and your entire cause is evil right but for whatever reason now Hamas is doing doing the same thing they are keeping Palestinian people they they the Hamas is taking over hospitals and churches or so not churches but mosques and schools and whatever else and they are keeping Palestinian people hostage and so Israeli soldiers are dying to go into these places to try and find these hostages Israeli like make no mistake Israeli soldiers are dying every day in Gaza to protect Palestinian lives because at any point the Israelis could just drop a bomb on anything that they want to um but they choose not to um they could carpet bomb and just wipe the entire place off the map if they wanted to they have the technological ability to do that but Israeli soldiers and Jewish soldiers are going in there and and and and Arab Muslim soldiers who are who are part of uh who are part of Israel they are going into Gaza and fighting and dying to protect the Palestinian people and to get rid of Hamas there's no hatred for Palestinian people of course there's going to be some people are racist and whatever else and like they're going to be racist no matter what but they are going in to try to get their hostages back and to try to rescue the Palestinian people who are being held hostage by Hamas and many of the Palestinian people you know some of them support Hamas but they've been lied to right so it's it's not good that these civilians are supporting Hamas but quite frankly they've been lied to by Hamas and quite frankly they're at the gunpoint of Hamas as well and so I think we as the Western World we need to let Israel finish the job get their people home and when I say finish the job I mean get their people home get rid of of Hamas and the horror and Terror of war is that Hamas is hiding behind civilians and that's what's causing the massive amount of Civilian casualties which is a tragedy at the risk of sounding completely ignorant I mean Graham and I we don't talk about any stuff like this because this is not where we research this is not what we look into I mean mostly about finance and Entrepreneurship business and stuff like that sometimes Health ask us about credit scores yeah to help but it's it's interesting because I I do like to try to understand but I feel like I'm sure a lot of viewers can relate to this um like even as I just scroll X I think X is probably the best place to be getting information Twitter uh I feel like it's probably the best place because under one article or post you can see dissenting opinions and supporting opinions so I can kind of like get a gauge on both rather than media which kind of just like throws an agenda down down your throat um I still feel like like both sides have different what appears to be facts so it's not even an inter interpretation of the same fact but it appears though they have completely uh like facts that completely disagree with one another like one side says oh look what these Israeli soldiers did and then you know some people say oh look what you know Hamas is doing look what these Palestinians have done this and that and it it's so hard to try to get an accurate opinion or grasp on what's going on I guess without actually talking with someone that's been there yeah no it absolutely is difficult um and these things are complicated so this is again we have to kind of go back to the values all regardless of so what's happening right now the arguments that are happening on Twitter X in media whatever it's about like oh the Israelis did this all the Palestinians did this right because everybody's arguing about the conflict itself that's happening at the moment let's all take a deep breath go back October 7th Hamas went into Israel raped and murdered on mass and took I forget the number of hostages more than 100 hostages I believe into the terrot tunnels in Gaza like that's fact done Hamas are the bad guys period done um and if you agrees that if if you believe that they're good guys that's like okay cool well now you're supporting terrorism like that's that's on you uh and I can't really help you with that um and the Israeli military wants their people back IM imagine what you would do um if someone took your wife or your mother and you knew for sure that she was being raped and she was down in some Terror tunnel um by these people and she'd been held there for months for 10 months at this point and you just wanted to get her back like imagine what you would the blank she would go through to get her back right so now to be fair you might also be angry and you might start making bad decisions and hurting people that are not guilty of that right so that is possible and that does happen for sure I'm not saying the Israeli military I'm not saying at all that they're perfectly innocent and everything but the cause of getting these these hostages back and and and nobody talks about this too I believe it's five we have five American citizens who are being held in those Terror tunnels right now when was the last time the president came out and did a press conference about the American hostages being held like why isn't SEAL Team Six and Delta Force in there you know making heads roll and getting our people back right so I think the Hamas is evil IDF is doing the best they can but um so so that's that's on one end um I I'll kind of comment as well on like people not knowing all the different things that are going on so this is this is a problem that I see as well and for me it's like I want to be up to date on all these different conflicts that are going on because this is like the world that I live in and I go into conflict zones to help people who are caught in the middle um so actually this year at at uh at Harvard I started this this summer um I U I started a um a company called the OverWatch and basically it's it's going to start out right now as a Weekly Newsletter and it's going to cover the latest news um from multiple sources about what's going on specifically with armed conflicts International crises and government specifically on on all those things and what's also different about it is we're going to add links for additional context so if there's a story about uh you know for example the the the the new letter that went out today it was one of them was about um you know we're talking about the Venezuela situation and the and whatnot we we put a link in there so you can just click on it and you can go to sort of a a neutral page or a YouTube channel um or a Wikipedia page or something and you can research more about this and make up your own mind uh we just want to throw facts out there just so people are aware of like okay what's going on in the war in Ethiopia what's going on in the war in Burma like you know outside of just Israel and Ukraine right there's other things happening yeah what's going on in human trafficking what's going on with the drug board on the on our Southern border and so we talk about all those things and just sort of give a quick highlight about 15 or 20 stories of what's going on around the world and so people can kind of get a quick digest and if they want to they can click on on the other links and kind of go down these other rabbit holes to learn more and more about it where can people access that uh it's called the O the the problem that I want to solve is people always ask like what's happening in Burma I've never heard of that and it's like I get that question all the time and totally fair um because I don't even know what's going on half the time in in different places so this is a solution to that to that problem to help people out I met someone from Burma oh nice in Thailand and she was telling me she had to escape it because it was so dangerous yes which I thought was really interesting absolutely yeah actually so funny story my wife is actually from Burma yeah so I was uh I'd finished this Mission and was at a clinic deep in the jungle and I met her and I knew within 5 Seconds of talking to her I was like I'm going to marry her if everything checks out I'm going to marry her um but actually she was she was a refugee from Burma um and lived in a refugee camp in Thailand on the Thailand side of the Border until she was 10 and then she was able to go to Canada um where she grew up um and then she had just returned to Burma to see what she could do to help her people and um yeah and then so we we ended up getting married he got married last year July 4th con long thanks July 4th in can July 4 July 4th cuz that was the only day that nobody had anything going on so dude so okay we got married pretty much right away so I met her and then four months and 16 days later we got married um and it was because uh we knew like we knew we were going to get married um and then her so her family um they have like a uh every three years her family from around the world comes together for a family reunion and her grandfather was getting super old so we were already talking about maybe maybe we'll get married in a year or something like that but the whole family was coming in anyway and so they the their family joked and we're like well why don't you guys just get married when everybody's here during the family reunion and then we kind of like looked at each other and we're like yeah like let's go for it uh so we ended up uh yeah we get we we met and then got married four months and 16 days later yeah and so now we're able to go back to Burma and work together and it's it's amazing what your parents think about that oh they're totally supportive of it my wife is an absolute Angel she's she's she's she's the absolute best what is it about her specifically like as soon as you met her that you knew you know this is going to sound super corny uh but it was like my soul recognized her I was like I was like I I know you um and I know that sounds super whatever spiritual weird but it was like I met her and I was just like I know you and yeah and like we're meant to be together she felt a Sparks as well or did you have to Chas she did no she did not yeah well she was she yeah so we we we were chatting and I had to go off on another mission like a day later um and so then we uh we exchanged numbers but I you know I asked her out on a date and we met up in Thailand and um yeah and so um then eventually yeah she was like all right he's all right and then ended up uh yeah he's okay end he's all right saves lives hey it's okay yeah so it was uh it was yeah it was good and what and what was the line that you used to like win or over I'm trying to find you know right now I got to know a pickup line the line to win or over uh there was no line I was just I was just honest I think the best thing the best thing with that is just honesty I was just like he didn't go and like you know RIS her up a little bit well we had been chatting for several hours no this so This is actually funny when I asked her out on a date I I did it over text um so I was about to go off on this like deep recon mission with like this group of Karen gorillas like deep into the mountains um and one of the guys like on this mountain toop he had like one bar of signal from like a local Burma Army um cell phone tower and so he put up a Wi-Fi hotspot and so I messaged her I was like hey it was really great meeting you um I would love it I would love to take you I don't know if you have a boyfriend or not I was like but if you're single like i' I'd love to take you out on a date when when we get back to Thailand so I sent this message to her and I saw that she read it and then as she read it like like the the guys were like everybody was like racking B you know was putting rounds into their rifle ready to walk off on this Patrol like deep into this into this area and uh I was like you got to be kidding me you got to be kidding me so she like I saw it she left me on red and then for like the next 3 days I I was off on this like reconnaissance mission checking out this particular area and I was just like oh God I hope she says yes and then we got back to that mountain top three days later turned it on it was like sure and it was like perfect so and then she went three days just yeah I was like went three days not knowing what what what her response was going to be pleas yeah so I get back I'm like I still like I'm just like covered in sweat and like you know cuts and you know I've got like this uh this like poisonous uh bug had like bit my neck and you know I was like I'm just like miserable I'm just standing there just covered and sweat and like I first thing I checked was see if she said yes and she was like yeah let's go on a date I was like yes so that's so cool um yeah so yeah so what do you think is something that the average American could take away from your story to improve their own life whether that be just mental performance overcoming something what do you think is like the biggest takeaway that you could teach somebody else I would say all depends on the different things one is I would say um the story so the the the fact of um you know like how I went to a really really dark place and I chose I was like I'm not going to give up I'm not going to commit suicide I'm not going to let this defeat me I'm going to keep trying again and again and again I'm going to figure out what's up I would say um so if people if other people are in a dark spot don't give up that's one uh two if your dark spot is particularly your health and possibly food addiction like get help with that um again I recommend Russell br's book Discovery or sorry recovery um and um the other thing too is if people aren't sure about God their faith or whatnot I would I would encourage them to uh read the Bible uh check out their local church and um explore that and uh see what happens in their life yeah so where could our audience go to help you out yeah so if people want to help out our organization stronghold rescue and relief they can go to stronghold rescue.org and then if people want to check out um the other uh newsletter thing about the armed conflicts and all that stuff they can go to the OverWatch cool I'll put all of your info Down Below in the description I really appreciate this thank you so much for being one of my favorite episodes I I honestly think we've ever recorded like that your storytelling ability is incredible and I love how candid and and honestly transparent you are about it so it's it's great awesome well thank you guys for having me on I really appreciate it thanks so much till next time till next time