00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten in my case underwear listening to Hunt Don't Meet e podcast. You can't predict that anything. All right, We're here with Ryan Callan and Janie Poodles, otherwise known as the honest who tell us and the beautiful and deadly Rourke Denver who uh whose lips have never been graced by the taste of alcohol. Correct. I wouldn't mind getting into that for a minute now, Rourke, I'm just gonna give you a brief intro that we're gonna do a better intro in a minute. Officer in the Navy transitioned into uh, author writer of books in public speaking, and Rourke is gonna explain. I'm gonna ask Work a lot of questions about why why most people are total pansies, and Work will explain the psychology. He's gonna explain, among other things, the psychology of panziness. Uh. First, I want there's two things I want to deal with real quick. One. UM, we get tons of emails in all time from people who are like are like, man, you guys are talking about eating all this wild game and wild meat. Um, I don't hunt I'd like to check it out, and they're always kind of asking about buying, you know, buying wild game from stores now real quick, when you buy a wild game in stores, not wild game. What it is is when you you can't like buy law you can't sell American wild game in stores. And this was like a landmark. You know, the series of laws and decisions that led to that are largely um what was responsible for the fact that we pulled out of our our nose dive into the decimation of American wildlife. So we made it that you can't market wild game. Um because market hunters, guys who are shooting game to sell to restaurants and into stores in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds pretty much wiped game animals off the face of the country. And we spent the last a hundred plus years digging ourselves out of that hole very successfully. But to hold over from that time is a is a ban on the sale of game meat. When you buy game meat, you're buying like a wild animal. Okay, you're buying like deer, elk, whatever, but it's just raised like livestock. You take it elk put in defense, raise it like livestock, and then you know, it's like a privately owned farm animal, UM brought up and sold his meat. It's just not even like it's not even the same thing, man, It's like it's like elk that you buying a store, Dear, you buying a store has the relationship would be like stealing a car and play a grand theft auto, right like store bought wild game is is just an approximation. So I never recommend it because the problem is raising wild animals in a livestock situation has caused a lot of problems for real wild animals through disease transmission and some other issues. And so when people do come, I've often in the past just said to him, man, just like you know, there's a lot of ways to get good meat. I wouldn't suggesting it that way, um. And recently we had started some relationships with a company that that I would recommend to people who want to go out, Like if you're going to go buy meat, okay, and you don't have the you don't have that sort of savage spirit to go out and hunt itself, I would like highly recommend the boys that butcher box. We've been talking to Lady they sent me some product to check out. It's a very good company where you go in and you're buying from butcher Box, who delivers to your home hunter percent grass fed beef, organic chicken, pork, you name it, and they ship out these boxes that come to you, all right, and it comes in a whole You can get like a whole assortment of high grade meat delivered to you frozen rock solid in a beautifully packaged box, and you put that in your freezer and you can have that wonderful sense of elation previously known only the hunters, of a freezer full of super good meat. I was wondering about that. So it came completely from rock Rock in dry ice rocks out. So like each it's a subscription thing. Okay, each box comes with seven point five to eleven pounds of meat, so it's enough for like twenty individual sized meals in the Ronella household. When we're in our home, we need a pretty uh strict wild game diet. But we did some experiment with our box, high grade very good stuff bacon. They got rib E's, you can you can get like beef bones. Calans over here trying to think if they'll send him a box beef tongues. I don't know, you have to check with them about that. But so when you subscribe, it's a hundred twenty nine dollars a month, all right, and it works out like six dollars and fifty cents a meal. And like I said, every box comes with enough meat for like twenty individual sized meals. So if you're a dude who lives by yourselfs I have a family of five, right, so you figure out and do the math um. Shipping is free nationwide. Now they don't ship up to Alaska in Hawaii, but you can get anywhere in the in the in the lower forty eight. You always hear people say the continental the US, which gets confusing because we're on the same continent with Alaska, but we're talking about the Lower fort And this is free range, grass fed, grass finished, no feed lot right, antibiotic free meat. Good ship now, order today and you get a bunch of free rib bis in your first box, and you also get ten bucks off. But here's the deal. You gotta do it the way that helps us out because you freeloaders who've been listening to this podcast now that hasn't had an add on it for like eighteen months. You people, listen butcher box dot com, butcher box dot com, And here's the catch. You gotta go slash meat Eater and it actually if you do that, it helps us out and keeping this show coming to you. Butcher box dot com. Slash meat Eater. Like I said, you get ten bucks off free rib eyes in your first box. Now you guys already got a freezer from the helped me. Just ignore this. But everyone else out there who's trying to find a good way to get high quality, healthy meat for you and your family. Butcher box dot com backslash meat Eater, go on there and subscribe. I'm telling you it's good, good stuff. Ya. He doesn't know how good it is yet. No, he's gonna find out when he gets his special box. You make so far, dude, I made everything. I just grilled it all. No, there's some pork chops there, and I did the samething I do with like wild pork chops. I brinded them. But everything else that has put on my grill when I'm cooking, like if I cook for my kids, Well, you guys just had some of my leftovers, which is gonna like which is gonna contradict what I'm gonna tell you right now. We generally eat a lot of like meat is cooked on a grill and then vegetables, salad, vegetables, so like I grill a lot. But yeah, yeah, I just gave you guys some of my leftovers, which was which is not that you had American google ish, which is made with buck meat, and then uh veal Parmegan made a moose meat. Um. But yeah, that's what I did with the whole thing. It was good. It was good. My wife, who like just eats, she doesn't really asked what we're eating, she kind of perked up because it was fatty, a little bit of fat on there, which is not something you gently run into on mule deer meat. Um. I used the grain finished beef first as grass fed beef as a as a good like example of how why the game can be different. If you know how a grass grassould beef tastes distinctly different than you know a grain finished beef, Like that's kind of the difference for a wild game. How I try to explain it. That's good, it's good, avenue into it. I remember before you started hearing about grass fed meat, in the U s I'm tiking like ten years ago. I mean, I'm sure it was around. I'm sure as people liked it, but traveling down to Argentina, who would at the time would export a lot of beef and it was like this stuff. The fact that they didn't finish on feed lots made it very popular in certain European markets where they were sending a lot of beef to France and stuff, and they kept talking about, oh, yeah, because it's grass finished, grass finished, you guys in the US grain finished, And I was like, what the hell's the difference, And now it's all you hear about man grass fed. I think one of the things about it, like when people talk about grass fed, why it's sort of the main benefit of grass fed is it's when cattle are in the feed lots that they're susceptible to a lot of different infections, and so that's when you're pumping the extra all the extra antibiotic in them to keep them healthy in a confined, close proximity space. So by finishing things on grass, they're spread out more and that and that's one of the aspects besides flavor that people like more. And there's other thing. You know, there's a lot more. You should just check it out and read up on it. I said, I never have paid that much attention to it because the fact that I don't eat a whole bunch of it. But if I was, I would go on to grass fed side of things, kind of like something that's a little more flavorful, a little more chewy. Um, I just like ship that eats grass now never so so yeah, every time you tell me it's I kind of forget that. I re remember. So like you're seventeen, right, Let's say you're seventeen eighteen, seeing year year of high school, big party out in the woods, and you just knew then at that impressionable, um hell bent stage in life, the discipline, Yes, is it discipline? I think so? I mean it started before seventeen. I mean, I uh, not to air laundry. But you know, I come from there's some big lads in my family bloodline that come from Irish descent and have more or less grenaded their lives going down that path. So I saw that a bunch of as a young man, I mean very very very very lucky and blessed. Not my dad, not not people in my immediate family. I didn't grow up rough because of that, but some uncles and some other family members that I mean truly destroyed themselves. And then my my parents went up when I was eight. Uh. My mom then went on to date, you know a mix of folks that I learned some tremendou this lessons from both good and bad and and and actually the one I like the most basically drank himself to death after you know, he and my mom moved on. But I mean something that I you know, I cared about was, you know, on some level father figure at a point when right actually about that point when people start deciding if they're gonna drink or out of those offers come up. Um. I always loved playing sports, always loved competing. And uh, I don't know, I mean I I should have I guess, uh maybe a more potent story than that, but that that really is it. My brother did the same thing, my younger brothers hat to drop uh, and I think it's been a huge gift. I mean, I look back on it now. I listen, I know, you know, I'm not about to challenge the logic of I and nor am I nor am I saying you are. It's just I don't think I realized how it's been an interesting experience and it's actually weird. It's head within the last week, which I think is kind of interesting that uh a teammate of mine, a fellow seal teammate of mine. It's one of my you know, one of my best friends, one of my longest uh you know, running friends. He he drinks, but very very little. I mean, I've never seen him out of control of alcohol. You'll see plenty of seals out of control with alcohol or just going hard and and and doing that. And I think in particular, he's not he's an officer as well. I think the fact that we haven't played so hugely on my ability to lead. And I'm not talking about not you know, not being capable behind the wheel. I just never compromise myself in front of the boys in such a way that they would have currency over me to where they're be like, well, I we carried you out of the bar, sir yesterday. So the fact that you're making us get up at four am like we're gonna skip never had that option with me because I didn't do that. I didn't compromise that stuff. And I don't think I recognized at the time that the kind of potency of that, uh, and so that was hugely powerful. And we also have some good good buddies also and enlisted that, UM, I thought to be as emotionally and mentally strong as you can be. And and and they're they're falling apart. I mean PTSD and some of the combat trauma that's come out of our experiences, which you know, I try and keep halls checks on. I just haven't experience. And I sleep well at night. I don't feel bad about anything I did, and I'm good. Um. Some of those guys that that that are more kind of consistent drinkers, and I think you've started medicating a little bit with it. It's been a bad path for them, for sure. So it's been a gift, man, it's been it's been a good call on top of saving you know, saving some coin and probably staying out of jail. Oh yeah, oh yeah. And tell some of the places you already alluded to your military career and and I don't and you know, I know that that's like a part of your life. But let's just talk about that for a minute, um. And then we're gonna get out of some other stuff, but walk me through kind of how you went, like what you did in college, what you do with sports, and then what your military career looked like. Yeah, I mean, you know, a lifelong athlete and a lifelong reader. Horrible student, So, I mean, just no desire to excel in a classroom or or put discipline towards academic rigor. That being my said, my dad's probably one of the most well read human beings you've ever been around. And consequently, my brother and I started reading at a very young age. So I always always tout reading as as as one of the best things you can do for yourself, just as uh uh, you know, both the enjoyment of it and what it kind of brings to your mind and opens in your mind. So so books have been a tremendous path to a lot of the things I've experience. When you say bad student, what do you mean like you didn't feel a need to impress your teachers? No? No, no, I just did. I mean I if I look at my report cards like through Actually, when I got to college, I started excelling in the classroom because I started taking it seriously. I mean, I would not have gotten into Syracuse University hands down on academic merit. I sent my application to Syracuse to the athletic office because I was getting recruited to play lacrosse there. I literally sent my application to Syracuse University to the head coach of the lacrosse office, and I think he basically walked it through, which is not uncommon with athletes. And I think there's some academics that that probably, uh, that irritates them. You know, there's so many athletes that become end up becoming high end leaders, performers and get past that because that their team experienced, their life experience playing sports has been I think it's translated better to life and accomplishment than than knocking out straight a's um. So I what I'm saying is I would not have gotten into college if it were not for sports. And so that's what brought me to Syracuse. I got recruited to play lacrosse. Why lacrosse? Did you? Did you surf as a kid? I surfed a little bit as a kid. I mostly learned to serve post college and a lot of fishing, steelhead fishing, trout fishing, fly fishing. Since before I can remember cold rivers, you know, northern California and Oregon, and um, like how did you hit on lacrosse? Did anybody play the cross back? No? No, California was an unknown at that point. I mean, I don't think there's a day I went to practice where somebody didn't yell out of car driving by what is that, you know, holding the lacrosse stick. I mean just not knowing you know what what you had in your hand kind of things. But that, but lacrosse. It originated with like the Native Americans on the St. Lawrence on a dog and tribes all around the St. Lawrence River and the Northeastern seaboard. Exactly who's the artists us do those amazing illustrations you know and Tom Lout of like like outside the the old military forts. Yes, no, I know who you're talking about. And they do these illustrations of like uh the not the Iroquoire, right, Iroquois and very very special game, very very special game. It's it's not a game to them, it's a um it's a religion really, you know. I mean a younger Iroquois is born with a little mini lacrosse deck to given to him, and then they'll take that into the grave. It was bad of game. They played it compatively, but it also was what was called a medicine game. So if somebody was dealing with something family wise, they almost the tribal shaman and stuff would would actually organize a game almost as a healing process to kind of um. I think they thought you'd be a gift to the from the creator seeing them play and kind of revel in the sport that that was given to them. It's a very very neat tradition. And playing at Syracuse was neat because you're right in the we went, We went played pregames on the on a dog in nation and I mean you you cross over onto the nation and you guys know you're not on us territory now you're on their sovereign land, which is cool, and uh so it's a it's it's a neat connection there and usually every few years a couple of folks from the reservation play for play for Syracuse. Some of our greatest players have come from there. You know. I mean, there's there's a story. Maybe you know it. If not, you should go find out and learn it better than I know it. Because it combined, it will combine your love of uh military operations and kind of like dirty pool type military and lacrosse. There's a there's a situation that I can't remember whose fort it was. It was in the Upper Great Lakes area where the European colonizers would like to as spectator. They would like to have the Indians come play lacrosse, and it was a way for them outside the borders of the fort to get a like a ton of young men. They're under a situation it would seem normal. So they had a lacrosse game and they got hundreds of young men out in front of the doors playing the cross. But not because the minute that door cracked open, they slaughtered. Were able to rush through the gates and slaughter everyone in the fort ye like a trojan horse. Yeah, I was thinking it was gonna go the other way. Yeah, They're like, I got an idea. Let's act like we're playing the cross that way. There could be like three of a standing out front, but not Yeah, where they running and clothe their heads open. I can't remember any of the details. Yeah, I'll look it up. I'll look it up. So that so that brought me there in the spring of my senior and it was great. I mean, we we were a national powerhouse the whole time I was there. We won two national championships. Um, I got to captain that team my senior year and then my senior year. My dad had sent me a copy of Winston Churchill's My Early Life and autobiography. He wrote, uh kind of in the twilight of his life, but kind of cat uh catalog his first thirty years. You know, being a war correspondent, being in the Boer wars in Africa is nor war escape from war, uh, frontier wars on you know what's now in and around Pakistan, Afghanistan. Just these unbelievable adventures on top of you know, if you're a reader, you'll you'll you'll happen upon those few writers where it just feels like they're talking to you, right, like every every line is gold. And Churchill is one of those guys, which is not a small statement. Most what happened to those kind of politicians, man, I mean that the saddest thing about that is he he wouldn't survive in today's climate, right, twenty four hour reporting cycle and and Facebook and and somebody using their cell phone. You know, he'd make some off color comment or be seen smoking a scar drinking whiskey and never get the job. It's a shame. We're gonna kill ourselves with that anyway I read that's like but like just that kind of sort of pedigree man, nothing like it. There's no yeah, there's definitely like no flies at McCain, you know, but there's a lot like Yeah, it's just like he used to hear about that with him, I mean he's like exemplary even outside of that, like no one has his background. It's pretty phenomenal. Nor his vision. I mean he he predicted so many things. I mean he predicted, he could see the things taking place and in Europe that led to World War Two. He he you know, the iron curtain is his phrase. He saw that the Soviets, the Soviets would you know, draw that curtain and even though that their allies and that fight, that they were gonna be the next big power. He was a piece of work. But go back to your earlier thoughts, like how far down that road would you have even gotten? Because he had like terrible money management. Loved he like he like to pull a court, pull a court, probably stepping out on the old Mrs quite off. It's precisely what I mean. I feel like in today's climate, person like that will not get to the front office or get any close to it because they'll get nuke before that. But he was the man for the time. Yeah, we'd be we'd be in a very different world if it wasn't. It wasn't for him, So no doubt about it. So there you are. You're in college. Ye read it all right? You told me this, I'm gonna I don't want to mess you story. I want you to continue telling, of course, But let me back up. I know where this is going. What was your plan before this book fell into your lap? No plan? Okay. I mean most most of the guys that graduate, you're going to play professional l across as well. There is professional across. It's not something that people make a lip, you know. I mean there's a couple of guys that that make a living off at now because it's grown and they have you know, they have gear doors and endorsements things like that. But no, most of the guys that play even currently, they've got a real job and they and they played pro ball because that's the level they play at UM. But no, I did not have a plan. I was a fine Arts major. I mean, you know, yeah, what was that all about. I just enjoyed art and literature much more than math and science. And it was a place I found a footing visual art, yeah yeah, and and architecture and history and and you you could fold kind of anything in the fine arts, which was nice. Uh. And I took my cursory, you know, freshman class of biology and and the things I need to take. And then from that point on I got to pick and choose, which is why I think I actually end up getting good grades. And you know, I was on the Dean list because something I wanted to study and enjoyed. Yeah yeah, yeah. And then I I mean I I put that book down an absolutely new military service is the right place to kind of cut my teeth and keep playing rough. I mean, lacrosse has a combative sport. I like playing rob mount drink, but I like like scrapping, so uh, you know, for me, it just was, you know, I thought I thought being in the military would be a great place, being an officer, because I like, I like being in charge. I mean, I don't think there's ever a team. I didn't end up being the captain of and I think people gravitate towards leader leadership positions. So um I walked into a Navy recruiting office in Syracuse, New York, and said, well, I knew I wanted to be an officer in the military. I read a bunch of things on special Forces and Marines and all these different, you know, kind of elite teams because I felt like that's where I wanted to be. And I found something that I just probably the same thing on sports. You know, I could have gone and played at a different school of Syracuse and probably been a starter as a freshman and played all four years and been a high impact player right from the get go. Going to Syracuse from California, I knew I wasn't gonna cracked the starting lineup for a while. But I like being in that end of the pool. It just doesn't appeal to me. Yeah. So I remember, I wish I knew the name of the book that I was reading, But I found a book that was like a compilation of short stories of all Special Forces, Green Berets, Air Force, so guys in Vietnam. And there's one chapter. I need to try and find this book because I'd love to read it now because it was one of those things that became, you know, the fuel or the spark that kind of got me going on seals. But I had seen all right, I read in this book, how you know of the guys that show up seal training don't make it, and you know you're this commando that came from the water and you could sneak up on people, attack ships and land time. It was just like, come on, this is exactly where I need to be. So that that that's what so I knew I want to be an officer. That's what led towards seal teams. And then I I walked into recruiter's office in Syracuse, New York, so I want to be an officer and I want to be a I want to be a seal. And after the laughter died down simply because they've never had anyone recruited out of there and actually make it or go, we drew up the paperwork and and um, they weren't wrong. It took me to two years and two applications to get accepted because it's just so competitive as an officer to get a spot. Like when you say that, I went in and I said I want to be an officer. Like you know, there's two tracks in the military. You're you're either gonna enlist, you know, in the Navy or the Marines or that the Army um which are you know, the bulk of the military are enlisted folks that do the you know, the kind of day to day job of of a grunt or an aviation technician or hell technician whatever that might be. All the different jobs you can find the military. And then the officers come from three tracks. Basically, you have the academies. You know, you went to West Point or Annapolis, and therefore you're an officer when you when you graduate r OTC Reserve Officer Training Corps, which is through a regular college but doing some military service to build towards a commission, being commissioned as an officer or my pool was what's called o CS or officer can at school, so four year degree which you have to have UM and then once you finish your bachelor's degree, you can apply direct. It was perfect for me because I got a normal college life, you know, I mean, I got to be with my buddies, play sports. There's no military connection to my time. Um, you know, in college and then you applied OCS. If you get accepted, you go to When I went through was in Pensacola, it's now in in Newport, Rhode Island. Thirteen weeks of you know how to stand tall, polish your shoes, and learned naval history and leadership, and then you're an officer just as much as the person that you know grounded out in four years the academy just as much. There's no penalty, no difference, no difference. But then he still had to go and do all the elimination ship for for yeah, yeah, no, that's just again that's the beginning to answer you honest questions. Not like a boot camp. Part boot camp for officers is either the academy. And you know the thing that was fun about o CS is you've got the kind of if you ever saw that movie an officer and a gentleman with you know, those Marine Corps Drinal instructors with the you know, the smokey bear helmet, you know, screaming at you and lighten you up. That's there. That's fun. I mean, I enjoyed it. You know, there's some I don't want I don't want to be his auditions to say there's some parallels in our story because like the inspiration, like the book that provided the inspiration, Like I didn't have any of that ship. But when I was in high school, when I was a junior in high school, I started I had in my head that I wanted to go into the Green Bray's Okay, So I started meeting with an army recruiter and they started calling the home and I went and took the test. So I took the test, and they started recruiting very aggressively, where they would even come to my home. Okay. Um. And my old man who served, okay, he was in the army, fought in World War Two. He kind of like caught wind of this a little bit and he was like, why in the world would join you don't join the militator's no war? What are you gonna do? Because he signed up like you know, Japs bound Pearl Harbor as he tells it, and you go down. Everyone joins the army, and then you fight the war, and the war ends and everyone quits the army. And that's like that's sort of his view of military service. And he told these guys, He's like, don't call, don't come over. You know, and that was this thing like he'd be wasting your time, there's no one to fight. Yeah, now that was kind of your situation though, but it wi not becoming very different. It became very different. Yeah, So we walked in during peacetime service. I did, and I would recommend it to anybody. Well, I don't know when we're gonna see that again. Um, I think we may be a country semi permanently at war like the Romans. Yeah, we might. We might be like that until long after year and my kids grow grow old. I think that's very very reasonable to think that could be the case. So I feel blessed that I was actually in pre nine eleven military, no no real combat engagement in that atmosphere. I did. I did, which is fascinating because I finished my active duty career running the training for Seals, both basic and advanced out in California. And it was interesting because when I went through training, the Vietnam era guys that were long in the tooth and kind of leaving. Couple of guys left usually at the teams, but all the lessons had come out of the Vietnam guys. That's where that's where the Seals kind of made their name in the Mekon Delta and coming out of those riverine areas of Vietnam and scaring the hell out of the Vietcong. And and really it was it was there coming out party, are coming out party for how lethal and capable and creative those operators could be. But by the time I went through training, you know, not none of the guys that were running the day day training, like you know, kicking your ascid seal training were combat vets. There just wasn't a bad guy to go fight. But they'd give the speech, you know, like don't screw this up, or you're gonna get your whole platoon killed, or you're gonna you're gonna die, and you just but it wasn't it wasn't coming from so you're taking at face value and you sort weren't gonna give m a hard time and call their call their card on it. But then when I ran training, you know, when one of my instructors told a young lion, hey, don't do that, because and they could see that guy had like a silver star and like two purple hearts and knew what the hell he was talking about. It was pretty potent as very very cool. So but that's I want to get to that because I want to get to your experiences as a trainer and in focus on that, because that's that's the thing that I and I'm gonna make you do the not very huge leap of talking about that and how it kind of applies to what a lot of people that that that listen to this do recreationally as like hunters and fishermen and things about perseverance and focus and um being real tough. But I want to build more groundwork here before before we get to that. Uh So, we got you up. You go through your officer part ye, but there's still a big hurdle left. There is the hurdle. The hurdle like breakdown the hurdle. So the hurdle is called Bud's Basic Underwater Demolition Seal Training and that's the you know, mythic course course of instruction that takes place on Coronado Island, San Diego. You know, you if you visit San Diego, you're gonna walk onto that island and be like, what do you mean they're training like hardcore commandos here. I mean it's just beautiful weather and and and you know this idealic southern California town, which you don't realize unless you hop in the water, is that the Pacific Current runs through there, and so it's about fifty degree water most mostly year in Sandy Ago, which is what I always tell people when it comes at eight percent of the people that quit training about those do so because of the cold water. I mean, if they move seal training to Hawaii or Florida, you get a lot more graduates, for sure. But we put these young lions and I was put into that water. Um. I mean, I just don't remember not being wet for six months. You're just wet and miserable and sandy all the time. And cold, and I mean cold to the point. I mean people listen to this show are gonna know cold because they sit in cold places and rugged climates. But I think short of hunters and you know, outdoorsman, I think very few people would appreciate the type of cold we experience, and hunters and fishermen will also know. There is a tectonic difference between dry cold and wet cold, and wet cold falls into the worst category, no doubt about it. Right, Like, when you're wet and cold, you're going to find out how tough you are. You said any wants, Um, it's probably annoying to keep to have someone keep reminding the things you told them. But you said to me once about the cold You're like, like, we used the cold water to achieve your kind of paraphrase. And you're like, we used cold water to get to something. There's other ways to get there, and you're like, the Rangers use starvation. Okay, let's talk about that, Like what what you're you know, what they're getting at and the tools that you use to get there. Yeah. I mean, I think military organizations have figured out this real elemental building block, the first of which is we get rid of the individual. So everybody has their head shaved. You put on the same T shirt, pants and boots, so we all look the same. I mean, all four of us look different sitting at this table, but start shaving everybody's head, put a T shirt and boots and pants on. We kind of look the same at a distance. But it's it's like a socio economic leveler. Yeah, and that's thehing. Oh, I'll say right now, whenever I talk to somebody about the military, the gift of the military that I think our country benefit from, which is why in my you know, my most recent book, I talk about the idea of universal service in the country. And I don't just mean military. I think that'd be a great way, but some type of required mandatory service for young people would be a gift to this country because I don't think people leave their silos. Right. You grow up in this part of the world, and and a lot of our country is real homogeneous in the different spots you come from. But in the military, you show up day one of training. You got a kid from the South side of Chicago, and you got a kid that went to private school in Connecticut, and then a kid that was breaking you know, horses in Texas. And then you're all together working it out and figuring out how to how to perform and achieve and and really in the end take care of one another on the battlefield. But um, but all the all the services figured that out. So you break people down to kind of the most you know, basic building block you can you know, you don't have this personal identity or they sure don't. We don't care about it when you show up. We don't care about any gift you're bringing to the seal teams as a new person. We'll get that out of you eventually. But that's not what we're looking for, and that's not what any military un it's looking forward's looking for subjugation. And I don't say that as a negative. I say that as a positive of getting rid of that individual desire and what you need to be happy and good and be thinking about the team and the collective and the greater good. And so all the units use a different system to figure out how to break somebody down to kind of the bone marrow. And you know, I went to I went to seal training. I was sent to Army Ranger School when I showed up my first seal team. So I'm already at a seal team. I made it through seal training and that whole crucible. My commanding officer was was a member what's called Jaysack Joint Special Operations, and so he wanted all his junior officers to kind of speak army. He's like, I want you to go get a little Army indoctrination, because at that point in our history, the Army really ruled the roost. They ran all the all the you know, all of special operations. It was all Army generals basically that ran special operations at that point because the steals seals were still just very new um to that organization. So UM would explained buds before you talk about because that's the thing. I think it's fasting and you had to go through all that buds bullshit. Yeah, and then turn around and go through the arms version of the same damn thing, almost as like a side trip. It was. It was I have a quick question about the buds. When you're breaking people down with the cold water, Um, can you fail because of your like, uh, physical limitations or if you always let's just say, because obviously guys must just pass out and their body just quits themselves without them mentally quitting, right, They're just going, They're going going, and then they fall over. If you if you wake up, let me feel that in a way that it's gonna prompt you to say. Another thing is you spoke to me about that too, as you said, we lost good guys that would have been great. Accidentally, Yeah, it's it's it's it's rare. But the biggest fear of somebody that would otherwise make it is getting injured or having their body kind of betray them, So guys got stress fractures or some over use injury, or they couldn't kind of thermoregulate. Like there's like we'd have elite level swimmers. That's a good example. So we'd have elite level swimmers that you would think obviously would make good seals right where aquatic maritime operators. If you're a you know, sub Olympic swimmer, you're the perfect guy. The problem is, I think a lot of those guys athletically have been training in like an ambient aquatic temperature of whatever pool is sixty sixty degrees right, And so we get them on land, they'd start running. Their body just didn't know how to regulate itself when it started getting hot. So we'd have actually more this This is I want to make sure I'm not statistically wrong, but I think we have as many, if not more heat related injuries at seal training as we do hypothermic related injuries at seal training. So every once while, somebody's body would betray them and they couldn't get through. And the worst thing was you would see this is a story I probably told you, is you'd see some kid that look like Michelangelo, chiseled him out of steel. He's got every attribute you could want to be a top performer, and he was just weak, just a weak mental person. He'd hit that cold water and quit. And you have this little kid that he has got baby fat on him. Taught himself to swim two weeks before came from like you know, the flyover States. You're like, I wish I could rip the heart out of that guy slamming into that guy and we'd have something, you know, because unfortunately that guy was just soft. Now there, I mean, there's no exceptions, right, It's like everybody crosses this line. Everybody has to cross the same line, and if you don't, for any reason, you're out. That's accurate. What what I'll say is we just don't drop that many people at steal training. Very few guys go out because we say you're not the right guy or you failed in performance levels to to leave. I mean, we'll lose guys for that. There's guys that can't handle the stress of the underwater tests. And if they make it all the way training where they're shooting and we're working with demolition, and they're just not They're just a rock. They're not bright enough to get it. We're like, I don't think you need to be dealing with explosive ordinance or shooting next to the rest of us. You're out of here. Very few of that happens. Almost everybody leaves that training program with their own volition. They just got ring a bell. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a l on the grinder, which is kind of where we do our pt you know, push ups, calistenics and all that stuff, right in the middle of the training compound. A bunch of famous signs around there. It's it's it's you know, it's kind of mecca for for seal training. That's like the heartbeat right there. And that bell. Bells in the Navy are a long standing tradition from the Brits and and the British Royal Navy where you'd be using bells to pass information on on back to wooden ship days, where you know, three bells means this, two bells means that, and so we adopted that as big Navy. I mean, if you go on a Navy ship today, I mean a nuclear aircraft carrier launching, you know, the most state of the art equipment on the face of the Earth or submarine you're gonna hear bells that that will pass information on time and what's taking place. It's a long stand tradition. So at seal training there's a bell sitting there that's omnipresent. Um. And if you quit and you go up to instructor and like I've had enough, I'm out of here, you gotta go out and ring that bell three times. You take your helmet off, which is kind of like your I D Card to Seal train. You put it down. This long graveyard of helmets, lines, lines, the grinder of people. Bit of how many guys go in to the class. I don't know if it's it's uh, if it's limited. Right now, when I was running training, we actually limited to a hundred fifties starting a class might start with more of that. Around a hundred eight hundred ninety guys started my comedy helmets laying there at the bell. We graduated two out of Yeah. That bells ringing, nonstops. It's the soundtrack of seal training. That bell ringing. And before oh, let me tell you this, because I almost forgot this right before Hell Week, which is our most you know, kind of famous week of training where you basically you start training on a Sunday night. It ends on Friday afternoon, and you get about three hours sleep in that entire period of time with a nap on I think your first nap comes on Wednesday for like an hour and a half. You get a nap on Thursday for an hour and a half, and then you hopefully see the finish line but leave the week before Hell Week, the senior classes that have made it through will be playing a C. D C Hell's bells like on a loop. You'll just hear the bell you know, from that a C d C saw like just cranking all the time. It's it's it's a twisted place. But you know the people that the people that are made to get through that place, they really know they're in the rights. Are the instructors the same instructors the whole way through? Like I mean, are they maintaining the same paste during that hill week? Are they up the whole three it's three shifts of instructors. So they take a you know a shift, uh from you know, day shift, half the night shift, half the night shift in the morning, and you split up. No, we keep our instructors. I mean, you're still smoked. As an instructor doing one third of a day for the week. But those guys can be out with their wife eating dinner at night. Yeah, and you're like, it's stuck in this weird like hell that you don't even know what is super strange. You mamagine clocking in for that saying by the like the biggest like emotional psychological battle they'll ever being. There's a good story. You're telling your first book. Damn few what's the subtitle, making of them? Making Making the Modern Civil Warrior? Yeah, you have a lengthy like anyone who's curious to hear about, just like what goes on in the buds class? The is it fair to say like the seal elimination class? Yeah? Yeah, how do you guys describe like if you had to do buds in a second, Like, what is it? Like? What do you mean? Like, how do you like if someone says, what's buds? Yeah, I mean it's it's it's basically three phases of training. First phase. First phase is selection training, which includes hell week. By by the end of first phase, most of the people that have quit have quit, I mean most of guys. That's seven weeks. Oh, so that hundred and sixty people that quit quit during a seven week period, I would say they probably have the stat but call it sixty quit right. And there then you go on to second phase, which is dive phase, where you learn to do all the underwater stuff dry, you know, dive a rebreather, closed loop oxygen system, so we can step up, sneak up on ships and blow them, blow them up, or sneak ashore without somebody knowing it. Uh. We lose probably the rest of the guys in that phase because we do tests underwater where you know, if cal was the student, I was the instructor, he'd have a two hose regulator, a twin set of eighty um you know, scuba tanks on his back and these these hoses that come in our rubbery and I basically shove him onto the bottom of the pool deck, pull that out of his mouth and start tying knots in that behind his back and then shove them. Then you got to figure it out, and some people freak out and can't can't handle the stress of the underwater stuff that they would put you at night with no light underwater to swim out in the ocean, but with shipping containers laying on the bottom that are open on one end that's in the that's the East coast. So that that's kind of an insider story. And I don't want to give it away because somebody's no, somebody's gonna run into it. But there there is a shipping container. I'm not gonna say where, but in a in a harbor in in Virginia beach, Virginia. And one of my buddies on a dive is just following a nav course and I'm sure the instructor is like intended hoping somebody would go in and basically gets inside the shipping container. Now is his compass is like spinning around underwater? And you know he's just swam into a box with one small opening the under water in the dark, and and it took quite a while to figure out what he was doing to get out of there. God, it's funny, good times. The thing you tell I think you tell damn few that I like, is is it? You guys are laying in the water right, everybody's freezing her half but you can like And they incentivize ringing the bell with coffee and donuts. Yea. So the so the bell which sits on the grinder every day of the year other than when Hell weeks going on. They can detach the bell and we have built this like welded a rig arm, a boom arm on the back of the trucks. Of the bell travels with the class because they don't want to be too far away should you decide to leave, so you can just kind of see it the whole time. And then yeah, I've seen instructors with, you know, a twenty four pack of crispy cream, doughnuts and pizzas and coffee and just like all I gotta do is come on up, you know, and they get it too, like if you quit at that point, you're eating donuts and you're on you're on your way. And when when a hell week always like this is your book too, when hell weekends, right, so you've lost all these you know, there's a horrible attrition. There's twenties and left and what they I think you're saying. You get a medium pepperoni pizza and the pot of gatorade and then you slept for thirty six hours. The class that's gonna go in next, they like prep. First of all, you're in a white T shirt with your name on it leading up to Hell Week, and if you finish Hell Week, you transition from a white T shirt to a brown military T shirt. And you would have thought somebody gave you like the Cup of Christ. When you get that brown T shirt, I mean, it is like the best thing you've ever experienced. But yeah, they buy you a pizza, pizza in like a sixty four ounce gatorade. I remember Wolf and that whole pizza down during that gatorade. And then that you have your your barracks is actually set up um for you to go in there and go to sleep, and and you have a twenty four hour medical watch. The doctors and other students are walking around your Your body is so toxic from me. I mean you think about when you sleep, that's your body's you know, system and time to kind of redistribute everything and take a break, right, And you don't do that for an entire week. So all this, you know, lactic acid and name the the alchemy of of junk that's in your system from surviving being that cold and miserable and wet and going that hard physically when you lay down and if you're laying down your bed and your arm fell off the bed. I mean it could just go septic to the point where you'd be in real danger of damaging that arm. So I mean you're you're being observed the whole time, and they give you some pointers on how to sleep. Yeah, they you set up the beds so you know, your legs are up high so you can kind of get that stuff draining out of your legs. And hell, and I'm telling you, when you wake up from that first block of sleep, you think you're gonna feel good, and it's it's almost worse. I mean, it's just like you've crushed yourself so bad that you wake up and uh, you know, you keep a gatorade bottle next to your bed so you don't even have to walk to the bathroom should you have to, should you have to pee, right, I mean, it's just it's misery. But but within days you're you're back up and running. But it's it's eat to see the guys at the end of that walk and they they look like they just finished the batamda march. I mean, it's it's something to see because all that chafe and you think of the sand and grit and all this stuff that's getting in your pants and like the chafing just on your belt line. I'm built like a linebacker, so my legs rubbed together. I mean it was like put a put like a meat grinder in between your legs and walk around with that. You should have material about it, because we just got back from Mexico and try running around for a week and a swim diaper with a bunch of sand packed into exact same thing dude was looking rough about. Really exact same thing that happens at that training that should make people wear swim diapers and see how they like that. I'm still blowing with it, just I can't figure out how I would handle like checking in and out of my job and seeing all these kids like they have to look like they're in a far away planet mentally, and how you like you check out, you have dinner, like Steve was saying with the fam and then being like, probably the same way that you know a brain surgeon is doing something that intense and doing that and then goes and lead using gets a you know, gets a Starbucks. I mean, I think all the guys that are instructors are seals. They all went through that training, then they went onto the combat assault teams then have come back to run the train. So everybody's hugely invested in the moment. So I mean, I I it's interesting. I've never really thought about it. Mean, it wasn't like I had a hard time separating from the two are coming back and and during hell week, you just know the job is to is to make it that rough. So the right guys are at the finish line. Yeah, so walk through. There's a couple of moments in your career. I want you to touch on, uh, walk through real quick when you get out, when you when you finish all your training, what your impression of life was going to be like? Yeah, like when you enter like the Special Operations world. Yeah. So I mean this is pre nine elevens. This is like when I finished Seal training, I show up at Seal Team four on the East Coast. Um, you know, you're a brand new guy. Back then, you didn't have your trident. The trident is that gold eagle that seals wear on their uniform. Um, guys that go through training now go all the way through for almost a year, they earn their tried and which means they're a seal, and then they go to their first Seal team when I showed up, you you finished buds and then you went to your Seal team. You're on probation for six eight months for them to kind of evaluate you, put you through a bunch of advanced training and tests to find out if you're worthy of the tried. So I mean you're you're let me talk about fraternity hazing. It's like the worst thing ever showing up a Seal team. No tried, And so that that's the way I showed up in my first team. Um, but I remember thinking to myself, you know, I was gonna show up at Seal Team four. There'd be a laser retina scan, you know, the CEO would pull up or the match you pull up in like a James Bond card, and then I'd get inside and I'd see all the guns we didn't know existed, and guys will be launched that night to attack targets you know, uh, you know, domestic and abroad, and and it's, uh, it's it's much less sexy than that when you first show up. You know, you show up and it's it's actually kind of an old Navy building with cool history and it Now I'd give anything to go back to that team. But um, but it's much more utilitarian and then kind of um, you know, learning to learn the skills of a warrior. I mean you learn this kind of cursory cursory level of it at at Seal Training. It's gotten much better now. The guys that are leaving Seal Training they're they're they're kind of ready to go. It's pretty unbelievable. But then you still do a tremendous amount of advanced training that team to become a capable operator on the battlefield. It's just less it's less high speed than you think. I think it gets better all the time because you know, funding has built new new new training grounds and new um, you know, new locations. But it's pretty spartan when I when I showed up, and less less high speed than I thought. That being said, the operators are just um are just otherworldly. The guys you get through there, the guys you show up with at the team, UM, it's just kind of that peer group that I feel like I was meant to go be a part of and and and be connected to. It was the friendships are just sublime that you make in that in that organization. Then then you throw throw in you know, now approaching twenty years of sustained combat, and it goes to a pretty intense that's interesting thing I thought about, man is a couple of years ago, I got invited down to Fort Brant to give a talk in front of a bunch of the guys with the third Special Forces Group. And so it's a class of Green Bray's generally a little bit younger than me. Some of the officers are about my age, and like, I actually kind of had like a a when I left there. I fell into kind of like a minor depression for a few days because something kind of like struck me in a in a really profound way that made me feel just like like fortunate and selfish I am, or that we're allowed to be because here I am like sort of my contemporaries, right. And I got out of high school, okay, and I went and had like this very you know, self focused college career and then went out to go to graduate school and and like get an m f A. And I memori was in the middle of graduate school and waking up one day and like hole ship eleven and just being like catatonic about that. But it was sort of you know, just this thing we all experienced collectively and then went on to have this like really selfish life for you know, have like this beautiful wedding and and have this kind of like romance with my wife. We get married, have children, I spend you know, I travel for work, which my work is like kind of a luxury and it's very nice, and spend all this time with my kids. Right, and I go and meet these guys who have during that whole when all of that super good ship, all that super good selfish it was happening to me. All they had done for the previous thirteen at the time, the previous thirteen or fourteen years is all they had done is go back and forth between Afghanistan and Iraq. That's all they had known. And these are guys that went in just prior to mostly a lot of guys that went into just prior to and just after, and that had been like all they've done. I mean, they tried to squeeze in marriages and ship. Right. And he one day, as an antegot, he says, he know what, let's he opens up the Yellow Pages that shows me the divorceitory section in Fort Bright. All that fucking book is his divorce. It's otherworldly how much stress it puts on families and and and the families, the ones that pay the price, you know, as as a as a warrior. And I don't know if I've talked about this with you or not, but I make a distinction a little bit between a soldier and a warrior. And I don't I don't mean this disrespect. No, Please, we've talked about this, you should tell it. I think there's people that that go into military, and I respect every single person that serves in the military since sincerely. Um, But there's plenty of people, if not most of the people in military are not going to be in a combat unit that's going through I mean, there's just a lot of jobs in the military. You can be a cook, you can be an engineer, you can be there's all these different jobs. There's only so many. It's not it's not most won't be in combat. Most actually have been into the combat theater. There's only so many units that are gonna be The guys are like, we are going to chase the worst dragons we can find, Like we want to go slay the top of the top and just go hunt bad guys. That's Seals, Rangers, Green Berets, Marine, aggressive combat units. I mean, it's it's the infantry units that are going to do that. And there's there's folks that fall into this category. In my mind, I know for a fact, it's it's just what my spirit is made up of, and that is a warrior, somebody that wants to go turn those stones over on the battlefield and see what it's like to um, you know, lay it all out there and compete at the highest level, like the tradition of like Hector and Achilles, and so those are the guys that gravitate towards our units. Like our guys. None of our guys are like not wanting to go fight. I see young guys going through Seals training right now, and they'll come up to me like my generation that they know have just been nothing but banging heads with bad guys, are like, God, I hope we didn't miss it. Do we miss it? I'm like, you didn't miss it. There's plenty of fighting left. But they want it, you know, our guys want that, which is a big distinction between those between those two talk about the interesting mix of emotions you had eleven if if, if you, if you're comfortable talking about that, Yeah, it was Uh No, I talked about a lot when I talked to kind of corporate America. I talk a little bit about it in the sense that, um, yeah, because because just explain that one of the several things to do besides working on your books, is you talk about leadership. Yes, you do lectures on leadership to a variety of audiences, including corporate audience. Yeah, a lot of a lot of a lot of businesses, coaching executives and kind of working with with both mid range to very very senior executive level leaders on on leadership and and the principles of that and how my my experience in in combat leadership translates very much to leadership. In my mind, is leadership. I mean, if you're in charge of a boy Scout troop or a seal team, the basic elements of it remain the same. The consequence can be very very different. But I think leadership in itself is very much, um the same, if you're gonna do it well. But but when nine eleven happened, my team was deployed, so we're actually overseas. My team was in charge of central and South America at the time, the Seals at that point in their history had a regional responsibility, and my team was a Central and South America team. So anything goes wrong in Central and South America, a platoon or assault team from Seal Team four is the one that's gonna respond to that. And so I remember I was on a run, uh, just getting my morning workout in. I come walking into this location where all my guys were hold up and and um, I arrived on that scene right as that second plane was crashing into town. That's when I showed up kind of in that moment. And I love language, I love literature and the power of words. It was just strange. I can't come up with a better word than that, because on one side of the coin, we were very, very aware of the horror that was unfolding in front of our eyes. Right by the time that second plane hit, you knew that wasn't an accident. People were making you know, people have just lost their life instantly on the planes and where the plane struck, and now people are trying to get out of that building. People are making decisions of whether they're gonna burn to death or jump to their death. I mean, you just talk about the savagery of that moment, and then all these first responders that were coming to the families that we're gonna get the worst new as they were ever going to hear in their lives, were very sensitive to that. Right, we're aware of that as we watch it and that we've been attacked. The reason it was strange is on the other side of that coin, we're a little bit excited, a little bit excited and and and bear with me. So I don't sound like a sociopath when I say that. I don't think you should be. Yeah, I like, if someone can't understand what you're you're getting at, they're just not gonna understand. Yeah, they're not. And I'm gonna I'll equate it to sports. You know, imagine you practice every day of your life to perform at a high level of sport, but you never got to play a game. You'd be a crazy person, right. You know. You're not in a position where you're gonna like profit. No, no, no, we're not. We didn't go to You're in a position where like this could very well mean my life, This could very well mean my death. Yeah, I think I think you could talk about the mixed feelings. I asked you if you were comfortable with because I can picture in your mind how someone might take what you're saying the wrong way. Yeah, no, no, for sure, and so and so we were excited because we knew our phone was gonna be ringing, we were going to get to go respond. And I think it's it's interesting to reflect on that moment now, because that excitement was real and we knew we were going to get to go do to the job. It's amazing to think how little we knew how long we're going to be in this fight. I mean, no way could anybody have predicted we'd be approaching two decades of of of combat, you know now, that being said, just a tremendous gift for me. I mean, I I think if I had gone my entire like the guys that were post Vietnam, pre nine eleven, that had those full careers, thirty year careers, in their twenty five year careers, that never got to fire a shot at a bad guy, and mean, I feeling like you'd be a lunatic if it. Yeah, grenadea Panama, a couple little events, and they're short of that. There was no bad guy, a little little little events. So I mean, for me, I feel like if I'd gotten through that whole thing and N eleven nine eleven hadn't happened, I would have had to sign up with, like, I don't know, somebody that was hunting rhino poachers in Zimbabwe or something like that, and just like I gotta go get in a gunfight with somebody. Man, this is this is what I came to do. I would have had to seek it out. Now. Now I've turned over every stone I wanted to want to turn in my experience, so so we got I think this maybe the surprise people. Maybe doesn't we feel lucky? I mean seals in particular special operators that wanted to go to the fight. You know, we we knew our number was gonna get called and and it has been ever since. But it had a big toll, tremendous toll. But I mean, you know, I'm lucky. I'm on the lucky end of it, you know, I mean, I made out of there safe. I think, both physically and spiritually and emotionally, I married the right gal who's tough as nails and can run our family without me um and we're crazy about each other, and we have a I mean just an absolutely I think enviable marriage compared to a lot of folks I know, but that comes from a very tough gal that can do that without me and her knowing full well she she signed on to Mary. I mean, I was a seal when she married me, so she knew she was signing onto something where I might not come home from one of those times I leave the Uh we no, no, we were. Yeah after Night eleven, we did yeah, uh not long about a year after not she knew what she was gonna be the she knew, she knew, she knew if you ask her. Attrition for you, guys, as high as it seems, it seems like helicopter crashes, helicopter crashes are the are the bitch of the battlefield. You take three or four helicopter Chris crashes that were connected to seals, the number even with those, the numbers we've lost based on the mission sets and how far into bad guy country we've pushed it and sustained combat. It does not make sense how few people we've lost. If you take those helicopter crashed out of it, two hundred years from now, they'll start talking about like this is otherworldly with the that group accomplished in the damage they inflicted on the enemy and how few casualties they took in the fight. Yeah, because some of them. I remember one of the helicopter crash carried off eighteen. Oh yeah, we've had twenty plus guys, twenty three guys killed in a single helicopter crash twelve and another four in a helicopter. You take those crashes away, our numbers would be I mean mythical. Just real quick, because I've never never really asked, you know, I always feel uncomfortable like talking to guys that are in the military because I feel like the time when they're talking to me, they don't want to talk about that stuff, right, they want to talk about wool. But um, what would you mind, just real quick, like the numbers, Like what does Seal Team four have a specialty as opposed to and I know there's odd and even numbers. That's East coast, West coast. Yeah, just a super simple term. Seal Team one and Seal Team two were the first commission seal teams then Navy. This was then the sixties. Seal Team one just happened beyond the west Coast. Seal Team two was on the East coast. Every team that was born after that Seal Team one, three, five, and seven are all in the West UH two, four, eight, And now we weren't supposed to even be able to talk about this, but now Team Sex has become, you know, normal conversation, all on the East coast. So East Coast teams are even number of teams. West Coast teams are odd number teams. Pre nine eleven, we were connected to a geographic region of the world, so the entire team was responsible for Central and South America, Africa, Middle East. He did post nine eleven. There was so much fight, there was so much, so many bad guys go chase that we just reorganized the deck and said, you know what, instead of sending one platoon to a geographic region in case something happens, we know where everything's happening, let's just send everybody. So now entire teams deployed to a region the team behind him, Like if Stial Team three is deployed UH in Iraq and Afghanistan. Right now, still Team five is on deck. They're getting ready and trained up in the final end of their train to kind of go relieve Team three, Team three comes home, takes a break, Team seven is in the mix getting ready, and we just cycle like that too. Watch. So now we have a little bit more of a focus where we deploy for purpose as opposed to deploy for presidence. We still have a presence all over the world, more countries than you could believe. We have folks kind of sneaking around and taking a look to see what the next next fight could be, and be in president in case something happens. But most of the time are our teams are now deploying for specific purpose as opposed to just being a geographic region. Um, there's a term you use. Maybe you can give you some background on where it comes from. And you bring this up. I can't really tell me this you you bring it up in damn you, but you were I'm gonna tell you what you said. And then within that is the term you used. You were saying that you said to me, if I fell. Yeah, And that's why I want you to talk about. You said if I felt. Your primary worry was that your mother would turn that into anger with her country too, So talk about that, but talk about why the word fell. I heard you say that so many times. I don't know. Maybe it's just like a language thing from literature or writing or or you know. I think people talk about and I've written a little bit of as like the kind of concept of the romance of war, the you know, and I assure you there's nothing romantic about being in war. Upon on reflection, when I think of some of the things my teammates did, which were absolutely um, just the stuff of legend. I mean, watching what some of my teammates did. Uh, I'm sure they'd say the same about some of the things I did. But you just can't think that way. As a war you're just hoping to not fail your teammate. But you know, falling in combat being killed in combat. So when I say fell, it means, you know, being being taken down, and it's not a euphemism. It's not a euphemism. Is that meant to sort of like make it seem less. I guess I could say if I were killed in combat. I just don't think I ever thought about that way. It's just said, Yeah, a couple of times you said fell, and I'm like, why did why that word? Yeah? Maybe that's why, because it's I think it sounds better than just the real killed. Yeah. Yeah, but talking about that feeling about your explain, you know, it's too full. With my parents, I mean, I got I got a younger brother, and we're best friends, have been since the day he's he was born. He's a paramedic and firefighter ye and um and a writer and a musician, just a I mean, a pure renaissance man and tough. Anyone I've ever met my life, he would have been a phenomenal seal phenomenal seal um. But he uh, you know, obviously I knew it would have broke his back and heart if I had, if I had, if I had fell in combat, But my parents, in particular, I was worried about, and I was worried about. I was probably least worried about my bride than anybody on the list, just because she's tough and not not because it would have been obviously it would have been crushing, and you know, worst case scenario in her life. That said, yeah, but you said, she uh, she shied away, She stayed away from the teams. And then no idea that three of my teammates have been killed on my last deployment until I got home and told her. That's how that's how much she like isolated herself from that, which was very healthy for her. And you're saying too, she waited a long long time to ask you, like, did you ever have to kill anybody? Years later, years later at the dinner. I'll never forget it when she asked you, yeah, yeah, because I think she knew, but I mean, it's not something we'd come back and say, hey, you know, here's the notches on the gun belt. This is not something. But she didn't want to hear like, oh, plane went on, helicopter went down. Let's all wait around to see who they because look they're there are wives on the wives network that would be connected to the team kind of leadership back home. And you know when it gets announced, I mean you you, you, you guys have experienced this when when somebody gets announced he three service members were killed in Afghanistan last night, it's not Billy, Jimmy and Johnny were killing. Takes days because you want to make sure the families here in first, so it takes time. So in two days. The thing it always gives me, man is like especially with guys, and like the more senior, more elite people tend to be a little bit older, and when I see those, I'll always see it and then you get the story about who they were and never, never, no, it's always the first single guy. So I was like, oh, he had four one year old and five year old and nine year olds like fun, it's unbelievable. But anyway, my mom is just a special a special lady, but a very emotional lady. And she I just was aware that I feel like if I if I had not come back, if I had been killed combat, that that she would have just just grenaded and just would you know, blame the country, been pissed and just I don't know this. I mean I've never I don't think I've ever talked to her about it, but I just felt like I remember having a conversation with my brother being like, Hey, if I fall, don't let mom like just descend into chaos and hate this country. Make sure she knows I believed in what I was doing. I was with the people I wanted to be with. There'ld frankly be no better way for me to transition into the next life than than in combat. I mean, that's you know, I don't think you can die better than that. I hope I lived to be very old and gray and smoking a cigar on my porch and watching my great grandchildren run around. But the guys that get killed in combat, you're like, look, that's that's a gunfighter's life right there. That's that's about as good a death as you can have. So there's a real that And that's when I talk about a warrior. That's a different concept than I think most soldiers. I think a warrior sees his teammate with that flag draped over that coffin, is like that, dude's a lucky one man. He went out better than any of us are ever going to go out, for sure. So I was worried about that for my mom. And then my dad's dad was killed in the Pacific it or World War two. So in my mind, I was real worried that, like what, like what could be the worst case scenario in someone's life to have your life book ended by having your dad killed in combat and then have your son, probably a gazillion times worst killed combat. So I thought more about that than my own I feel like mortality or or or you know what, what could have happened on the battlefield that that that occupied some actual emotional currency, talk about talk about fishing with your dad when you guys a fish, and and uh and and the idea of complaining. So you know, nobody that's ever fished for steelheader has done it for any any more than one season. I mean, if you fish one time for steelhead on a bluebird day, you don't know what I'm talking about. Most people that have fished for steelhead or salmon would know how cold it is to sit in a drift boat or weighed into a cold river in the Pacific Northwest and just be freezing your butt off, wet, cold and miserable all day. And I remember being then those those beautiful drift boats, you know, my dad, brother and I sitting in the front and a guide, you know, rowing us down the Smith or the Trinity or some some great you know Western trout stream or Steelhead stream. And I remember, you know, you're up at three in the morning, four in the morning, putting the boat in. It's freezing cold. Then it starts raining on you. And I remember looking up at my dad midway through. I think it was an oregon A fishing trip, and just being so cold. I don't think I was that cold again until I went to steal training, being wet, my hands shaking, just sitting there hold and I remember looking up at my dad and there was no discussion about whether we were gonna, you know, go ashore early or take a break. It was just like, this is fishing, and we don't complain and that's who we are. And I was like, I guess that's who we are. We just don't complain. And so my brother and I have just always been tough. And I think it was those little those little lessons watching that and how you mimic that, and um, I think a lot of people have those experiences, particularly outdoorsmen and people like that that they saw, you know, their dad or their mentor out in a spot like that kind of sucking up and you're like, okay, I want to be that. But that suggests to me that you feel of it that like physical mental toughness. Well, okay, this I'm gonna stack two questions together. That suggests to me that you feel that physical and mental toughness are learned and not in eate. So speak to that and also speak to how how what is the relationship after all the things you've seen, And let's just I want to jump ahead real quick. You were on to run buts okay, So you have your old set of experiences from going through it, then you have your set of experiences watching how many classes go through I mean keep ball, Oh yeah, I mean I was there for about three years all told, and six classes go through a year. So you've seen hundreds and hundreds of people ringing the thousands of yeah. So ye, physical mental toughness one are they related to? Is it learned or innate? I don't want to give a cop out answer, but I feel like it's impossible for you to answer that honestly without somewhat doing it. I do think it's a little bit of both. I mean, I think I think that everything. I have three kids, I think there's a lot of learn ship. And that's a parent knows this for a fact that your kids, in my mind, are who they are from the day they were born. I mean, I think the best parents will help their kid become the best version of who they are. But me trying to get one of my two daughters be different than who they are, I mean, I'd rather sooner hold back the tide than get my girls to be something different than they are on kind of an elemental level. That being said, I know they're looking at me and looking at their mama as to how to behave and who we are and what we believe in and how we just function in a daily life. So my my sense will be is that I don't think my kids will probably complain a lot and and um because they will see that and hopefully model that. Uh So, when I think it comes to being tough, I mean, I think I do think there's some predisposed genetic stuff in there that you know, you see some kids that fall down and they cry and go screaming a mom and lose their mind. And there's some kids that get like bonk with a two by four and just kind of suck it up and power on. I mean, so I think there's some part of that that that's maybe genetic. And I think there's a lot of what you model and see and and and you know how you learn that stuff. So I do think it's both. I think it's both. I think leaders are the same way. When I talk to leaders about leadership and my book, there's all these xs and os I can teach you about how to do things right in leadership, how do things wrong. There's things that obviously fall into those two categories, and I think you could learn the good stuff and execute that as best you can. I think you can do that, though, And if you don't have some certain level of X factor that's connected to that something where people gravitate towards you as a leader, you're you're probably gonna have a lot more trouble than those folks that have it. And so I so I think it is a combination. I think it is a combination. What about the physical and mental stuff? So I think it uh again the same. I mean, I think I think, like Janice asked earlier, my body never broke down the Seals train. It hasn't really broke down to this point. I mean, I've had one shoulder surgery. Other than that, my body can take a pretty phenomenal amount abuse and keep going on. I'm not the fastest guy. I'm not the quickest guy. I'm not the strongest guy or any of those things. But my body is like kind of like a diesel pickup truck. It will just keep going. And there's guys that are very elite performers that almost performed like a Ferrari, but they're high tuned like a Ferrari and broke down more. And so I think my body on just like a metabolic you know, physical way it can withstand a tremendous amount of abuse. Now, so that was a gift for sure. But along with that, there's there's your mental attitude going into the training or going into combat that that has to be the strongest, because I think as your mind and kind of spirit goes, so goes the rest of your body. I mean, you know, I think that's what seal training offers up. We we break everybody down to a point where you you definitely have a legitimate reason to quit. You have a legitimate reason. And seal train. No one has ever gone through training and been like this is a good day. I'm I'm happy with every single day that went through. None of that was hard or whatever. Everybody will hit some point where they could easily quit and nobody would frankly fault, and they don't. And that's what lives up in between your ears and and maybe in your heart probably connection between your heart and your your heart and your mind. But you knew, like you you told me. I think you told me you knew going and you would not quit, no doubt about it. And I don't mean that I don't know people going into are like, maybe I'll quit. I think a lot of people look out of the out of that. This is one thing I share, and I always kind of find it funny because I think I'm right when I say this. We had like a hund eight nine guys start, twenty two guys finished. I bet one guy at graduation one out of twenty two probably was sitting at graduation day going, holy sh it, I made it. I can't believe I saw the finish line like one I bet surprised himself, but that the rest of them were just sitting there, steely eyed killers, ready to go. I knew they were gonna get through because most of the guys I know that I showed up at the team with we're just that way. If you made that program twice as hard, if their body didn't break down, they would have made it. And if you made it half again as easy, I think most of the guys that quit would have quit as well. So I really think it does come down to you know your upbringing, your you know your mentors, whether that was a coach, a pastor, a parent, that kind of gave you the we don't give up or you developed that through sports. I mean, athletes do really well there because I think athletes are used to suffering to work towards a goal and want to compete and win, and so I think they developed this like hunters probably do the same. I would think good hunters probably do the same thing, where even when they feel like they're out of the fight and and things have gone south on a hunt, they're like, I'm just gonna keep working. I'm gonna keep working and see it through the end. And so I feel like my voice going through seal train was just like I can do this, and instructor would get in my ear and try and make fun of my family and my bloodline and my performance that moment I'd just be like, after you, dude, and there's nothing you're gonna do to stop me. And probably all the guys that quit, we're hearing that voice or hearing their own voice being like you're not good enough, you can't do it, and that's got to be toxic as anything out there. It's the thing I see all the time with hunting and fishing is just like some people who there's like this attitude that they're like, it's not gonna work. I tried. I fished that hole in that hole. Why would I go down and look for another guy? Damn hole. We already know what's gonna happen. Here's one of the best. You know. I feel like it's just a it's like a it's an attitude. But I'm not even trying. I hope you don't think I'm anybody trying to equate that ship with what you've been through. No, no, no, but I think that I don't think that. I don't think that like hunting and fishing would inform your experiences, But I think that your experiences could inform hunting and fishing, no doubt about it. And and we'll get that. The one story I'll share that I think was really potent for my Seal Traine. I wrote about this in my first book. I did this little like two page about it, and it was this, uh, it's this phrase, I this is mine. I kind of coined this when I was running training, because I didn't recognize it until I ran training, but we had something that I would call I kind of coined it random acts of instructor violence, random acts of instructor violence. And this is the way that would work if if if I was the lead instructor, and let's say you, you know, Stephen Andell are in charge of the class, and I said to you, like on a Tuesday, Hey, Wednesday morning, you're in charge of class. I need you to be at the pool deck at six am on the dot, No, no later than six am. You need to have your fins, you know, your dive fins at a forty five degree angle. I want your mask to be mirror clear. I want your knife to be sharp. And we're gonna start training at six am. Got it, Beat it, and then you go and take off. If you showed up at Seal training, which just savage from the day it begins till it ends, and you showed up at six o four, you could pretty much guarantee what your day is going to be as a class, Like forget getting in the pool. We're just gonna crush you for the next eighteen hours because you left up a simple directive that I said be there at six and so we beat the class mercilessly if they if they showed up late. But every once in a while the class would show up, they'd beat ten minutes early. We'd come walking in as instructors and you could even see them smiling. I mean, everybody's fins are in the right place, their mask is mirrors, their knife sharp, they raised. You can even see the students kind of like a little shit eating grin and be like, yeah, we got it. We're here already. And we'd beat them worse than the day they failed, twice as bad. And I remember a lot of guys would quit in those moments, like guys going through and be like, this is unfair. I'm out of here. You go ring the belt. And the lesson is you can do everything absolutely right, particularly on the battlefield, and it can go catastrophically wrong, and you can do everything wrong. I mean, I saw guys do the stupidest things you can imagine and walk out of their unscathed. And I saw guys do things perfectly and get blown out of their boots and lose it. Everyone in combat, every one of those guys in the Hellcape Copter, the best operators in the world, with the best pilots in the world, and it just went wrong that way. They didn't do anything wrong, They're doing it right. It just went wrong and so you gotta be comfortable with doing everything right and have it going wrong. I think hunting is very much the same way. You can do everything perfectly right by everything we've all amassed in a knowledge base of how you go pursue an animal, do it everything perfect, and just come up goose goose eggs right, nothing. And you can have a guy come from you know, I'm not gonna beat up any state. Somebody comes from New Jersey, is fifty pounds overweight, never carried a gun in his life, sited in the day before, walks one step off the trail and takes a six six like half hour into hunting light, no skill, no nothing, just bom it, walks right back to New Jersey and puts a trophy on as well. Didn't do anything, no, no like talent to get to that point whatsoever. So I feel like as a hunter, you gotta be okay with both. You know, the fact that you can work your tail off and and and have it go wrong and nothing, nothing happened. You can every once in a while you're gonna walk out and you're gonna get hooked up. In the case you're talking about beating people for doing everything right, like when you do that, are you trying to Are you looking for the guy that already gets it, or you're trying to Actually, uh, you're more to be honest, you're more so looking for the person that's gonna quit in that scenario. You're looking for the guy that's gonna say this is untried to find the guy this is unfair, who would feel outrage over unfairness. Exactly right. It's time for you to go because you're not in the wrong, you're not in the right line of work. But the guys that are, you know, the guys that like when we had a couple of those initial aircraft go down, those helicopters go down, like like during you know, the Loan Survive Ever event and then Extortion Won seven was went down. We lost twenty people. I'm telling you right now, people were in almost fist fights to be on the next helicopter going in. And that level of kind of cultural resilience that it's like it's gonna go wrong, and yet we still want you to press forward and go do it. That that that is taught through lessons like that, and that's what that's what you need from your operators. We can't have guys who are like, Oh, it's gonna go wrong. I'm out of here. I'm gonna quit today. We don't. We don't deal on that. We don't deal on that. You, Um, you took a long, long like you grew up fishing with your dad and spent a lot of time outdoors, and then he took a long long break, uh for your service and didn't do really anything recreationally, started a family and served and didn't do anything kind of fun. I'm sure you had moments of fun moments, but not like dedicated days that No. I mean, we fished multiple times a year since before I can remember, and I joined the Navy in ninety nine. The next time my dad brother I want to fish and trip was two thousand six. Yeah. When now that that, how do you look at like, how do you see hunting and fishing now that you're done? Uh? It has become just an otherworldly kind of pillar in my life at this point. And I'm still a complete rookie to like, you know, big game hunting for sure. I mean, I I feel like I jumped to the head of the class because I got to go home my first big gay hump, big big game hunt with you guys. So I mean I got to jump jump and do an Alaska you know, float plane trip to go after bear from my very first big hand point out cried the whole time to quit, kept trying to quit. But I mean, so I jumped. I jumped the line. Um. But I feel like there's these there's these these choices you can make in life about what you're gonna do with your time, right, like what you can do with your leisure time. And I've seen this written before, this is in mind. But like how you see somebody like you evalue what they do with their leisure time, you can kind of take the measure of a man. And I think there's a couple of things that are much bigger than a hobby, right, and hunting resolutely falls into that category. Surfing is another one. I mean, surfing is one of those things that people get bit by it. It becomes a path, It becomes this like journey whose destination you might not even know where it's gonna go, but you are just constantly it's a pursuit. You're just constantly pursuing some level of that experience, whether it's the perfect wave or the perfect moment or your skill set, and I think hunting is the same. I think anybody that takes hunting seriously, not not not the guy that goes out once or twice I don't, or maybe gets a kick and shoot hunt or something with somebody's because they wanted at an auction. But I mean people that made hunting a big part of their life. It's it's um, it's far far bigger than than just going to pursue an animal, at least it is for me. So I mean the thing I found when we went on that first hunt that was so such a gift and why it was an instant love affair and something that I will never not be doing until somehow I can't do it anymore. Is I remember, is sending me a gear list? Right? So just emailed me a gear list and what I do And now all of a sudden in my garage laying out all my kit, my gear and getting it ready, which is exactly what we did when we prepared for a deployment or a mission. And he's like this, we're gonna be going. So now I'm doing a map study and taking a look at the terrain, what the weather will be, which is exactly what we did we went on a mission, and then I show up and meet you guys at you know, ce Tack, and then we fly up into what you know, we land an anchorage and kind of get ready and all of a sudden, we're hopping in the floatplane and you know, packing gear, we're testing weight, we know how much weights in that aircraft. That's very familiar. Then we land in this remote location and and at that point it still hadn't struck me. The moment that struck me, and it's even on the episode is when we first put that backpack on. I've got a heavy pack, you know, capable boots and gear, and and a rifle on my shoulder. And I remember we wave by the buck and start walking off into the country and I could see big mountains that I was like, well, this is pretty familiar, like rocking around with a heavy pack and a gun, and then we're gonna go like chase something. So I tell anyone that's a veteran that isn't hunting is doing themselves a disservice, particularly if they're in a combat unit, because it is an unbelievably healthy transition from what we did in our last life. I mean now now I get to go walk around rugged terrain and what I kill. Instead of being a two legged animal, it's a four legged animal that I can bring home and eat and provide good food for my family and still get off in these beautiful, remote um places and and suffer a little bit, which I I think. Um, I think one of the biggest mistakes we're making as a country is not suffering. You know, we we just established these very comfortable lives. I think sufferings where all the growth is men. There's the thing I talked about and I've written about it is um. It's the thing that's important to me with my kids. It's a slow process, but like learning to be comfortable, being uncomfortable, no doubt we even had. There's so many ways to achieve it. There's a guy we work with, Rick Smith. He's been doing yoga for a million years and UM. He talks about you know, like hot yoga. Right where you going to room, it's a hundred four degrees and you're gonna hold these very uncomfortab bowling. He says. You walk in there and you get into an uncomfortable position. It's a hundred four degrees and some part of your body is like, get out of here, right, And he's like you're okay, Yeah, you're okay. It's hot, but you're okay. We're gonna concentrate, We're gonna be in this real, this space and hold an uncomfortable pose and we're okay. And then you learn later you know what I was Okay, No, it is. Those are the big building blocks for sure. I mean I remember when my kids were first I'm just even trying to zip up a jacket. I mean, you go to any playground, USA and you see some kid like struggling to zip a jack, You'll see like seven moms rush in to try and help them get their Jacket'm like, get the f away from my kid. My kids gotta learn to put her jacket on. So she's just gonna wrestle with that zipper for a little while. Could become the child be in a situation where they would have to zip their own jacket. It's possible. It's possible. So no, no, I'm four it so so, I mean hunting has just become I mean I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about it now. But it's a tranquility to it. Though it's very different than what you experienced serving overseas and combast situation of course, of course, I mean you know, how do you view that? I mean there's a you know, like like I know, you feel it like a like a physical beauty of peacefulness. And from your perspective, there has been an element of like this is my space that I that I fought for, Like I think you mentioned me one time, doubt is you mentioned to me that like that, that that coming up as a leader, coming up as an American citizen, as someone who is going to have opinions about how we were in the country, how we should Behave you said something about that you always felt that you wanted to earn your seat at the table, right, so now here you are and imagine you have to look at a lot of these places and have sort of a refined sense of ownership. I think I enjoy it about the natural world, no doubt about it. I think I enjoyed. And when you look at like the great writers and even the eight readers this country, I mean Teddy Rose about and some of these folks, I mean everyone knows. I mean, I know they've studied this in detail. That time and wild places out of doors is just good for you, and so few people are doing it, but all of us know it, like like it's like a Dick and Jane book. Well, of course, go out into some beautiful spot, breathe that air and and and do something worthwhile, you know, out of the confines of what now is just uh. Cal and I were joking about in the airport. I mean it's like if you don't really think the zombie apocalypse has actually already arrived, when you look at cell phones and everybody just staring at that phone as soon as a plane lands or in a Starbucks, I mean, it's it's here. The zombie apocalypse is here. If you live in cyberspace and on your phone, you have you have achieved the zombie lifestyle. And and when you get away from that and you're off off the grid, it's just uh, I mean, I just think it. It just feeds some part. It definitely feeds like the the conscious part of you, but you also know it's feeding someplace inside you that comes from a very primal, primal place. And and I think when you do it for the purpose of of taking game and then providing food, you're even more connected to this thing that we've been doing a lot longer than we haven't. Right, Like, as a species, it's much more natural to go out and do that than it is unnatural. And I think warriors kind of know that too. I think we believe people fighting and fighting for what they believe in and who they are is probably more natural than it is unnatural. Like the folks that don't understand combat and want to put their head in the sand and believe the world's a happy place. We're all going to get along. It just it just isn't, you know. And I think if you have any sense of history, you will recognize that there have not been large pieces of time when that's not the case. But no hunting, I mean, it's uh, it's just become an otherworldly part of my life and and um uh dominates a lot of my time for all healthy good reasons. UM give me the quick. Tell people your two books kind of the the what's what with them? Yeah? The first books called Damn Few Making the Modern Seal War, that's what. That one's more autobiographical with kind of how I grew up. Um, not not so much. I II in the book I try not to do there's a lot of there's a lot of there's a lot of seal books that are I killed this many people, I killed this person, and I got I got. I'm not I'm not trying to beat those guys up. It's much more this is what led me to this level of service and and and pursuing some of those things that I wanted to experience in service, and then why we do it, what we do it for? And then a little bit outward looking on on maybe what the how the country can see, um, you know what what combat and what fighting and being prepared to fight anyway does you know for our position in the world. My second book is called Worth Dying for a Navy Seals Call to a Nation, And this one's a little much more forward looking and kind of again it covers some of the higher ideals I learned and seal training that that applied to leadership and um, you know, managing your life. And it's also real outward looking on how I think we can make the country a stronger place. Like I talked about universal service, um and how potent I think that would be, and military service could be one way. I also think it could be you know, your kid finishes high school and they gotta go give just and there's plenty of you know, some Eastern European Israel where military services compulsory. I think that would satisfy that public service. But I think everybody should do service. Military is not for everybody. And so, you know, a year out of high school, I think you should go out of your hometown and give back, Like you just gotta go work for either an NGO or a government program or something that kind of gives back on a subsistence wage. Suffer a little bit, don't be comfortable and really think of somebody other than yourself for a block of time. And I just think it would be a game changer, um for our country because I think we are so self looking and self centered on on kind of our desires and we want things to be to be that that I think thinking of others and kind of think of the collective would be a good thing. Yeah, what are you gonna? Um? Oh? Do you mind tell people quick about your your the movie you worked on active? Yeah? Yeah, I mean the funny thing about this. Yeah, so two thousand and twelve, Act of Valor came out as a major motion picture. Yeah, I hadn't, I hadn't hung out with you so everyone in the mill, everyone in that movie that's in the military was actually in the military doing their job. So we were actually put on Navy orders, which I have kept in case there's every like a congressional inquiry as to you know, why we did this movie. But the Navy put on us us on a set of orders saying to make this movie act of valor, which you get called in and said here's what you're gonna do. Well, we got called in to get interviewed by these filmmakers that had been green lit to make a movie about seals. So we got called in really just do interviews with those directors so they could learn about seals. Their plan was to go back to Hollywood and cast you know, Vin Diesel or something like that to be a seal. And they got done with those interviews and went back up to Hollywood started think about, I think it's gonna be easier to teach seals to act than actors to be seals if we want to get this right and make it authentic, And then um and the Pentagon was cool with it as promotion. It was like a promos all the way through. It was totally cool until it came out and like when it came out and all of a sudden, there's like commercials on the Super Bowl and it becomes the number one movie in America. People started flipping out the front office. Yes, I think some heads rolled, not not ours, but um no, I mean everybody that got asked to do it, because I mean it is, you know, kind of taboo to try to turn and buck off of this stuff. And and and that all was pretty clean. We didn't get paid to make the movie. I mean I didn't make a dime off being an active valor you know in that that's expense. Yeah, I got your normal three seals a day and Navy squares a day and in my regular ways. Yeah, so um no, we didn't. We didn't profit. But that was the rub as they thought, Wait a minute, why are we pushing assets or actual military person l and material to help make a movie? Like once people at a certain level looked at it. Yeah, yeah, it's a fun it's a fun movie. Watch. Yeah, it's like inspiring and fun. One thing that a lot of people will realize the reason it's called Act of Valor is every big moment that happens that movie is something from actual seal history. Like one of our chiefs was shot twenty seven times. He killed like the four bad guys in the room and walked to the helicopter and survived. And one of my teammates in two thousand six jumped under grenade to protect his teammates and and you know, pay the ultimate price for that. Uh, and we capture that. You know, another guy was hit by I mean, everything that takes place in that movie is out of our actual history, actual history. Yeah, without giving a playbook to al Qaeda. I mean that was the big thing about doing the movie is we we look at footage and say, you know what, let's cut this one. You know, the way we wrapped around this corner with a gun. You don't need to show that it wasn't something like crazy advanced tactic. But we're like, we don't want to give the the enemy of playbook based on watching this movie. So we're here's what it'll look like and feel like if you get rated exactly. No, okay, so what like what are you gonna do now? I mean, right, for thirteen years, you know what you're doing. I mean now that you don't know what you're doing now, But like, what's the I mean you have a ten year plan. No, I'm not a great strategic thinker admittedly, Like I'm not like when somebody's like, where do you want to be in five years? I just don't do that. I'm not going to continue to do books. Yeah, but I don't want to write them just to write them. I feel like you feel the same, Like I'm not. I could. I could write twenty five leadership books starting tomorrow with building you know, a system of books that that that I could make very commercial. Um, I just want to write them if I have something to write about. And I think I'm I'm circling. I'm circling in on what the next one will be. So I think I'm gonna start grinding on that soon. I do a lot of consulting on leadership and for high performance teams. I'm really looking consulting, yeah, not just not just speaking, do just speaking, And and now I'm starting to offer up you know, executive kind of coaching sessions and leadership and talking to teams with like new folks and organization, how those new folks and organization can perform and kind of think of the organization above and beyond themselves, which I think I can speak to and, um, hey have you, uh, have you watched I've actually recommended this movie. Um, have you watched some kind of monster? This movie and melt your This movie could melt your brain in in a bad way. But it's about it's a documentary about the band Metallica, where like into it they're grown ups with families and ship and uh, they can't get along anymore. And they hire a consultant who's kind of like half shrink half consultant who's who specializes in helping teams, oftentimes athletic teams, helping teams like find a way to work, especially big personalities, find a way to like work together on a goal. But he takes it very soft approach. Um, it's a fascinating movie. I'll check it my brother, he said. The problem the Metallica is haven't isn't enter personal. It's just that they suck now and they used to be good. But um no, it's an interesting movie. If you were in that role, I feel like you would have walked in and beat the ship out of all of them and then said, well let's start now, now, let's get up and start. I mean I do, I do talk about this a lot when when organizations ask me, you know, for some advice on how to make themselves stronger. I do think you gotta figure out a way to suffer a little bit and and do it as a group. I mean, I feel like if you do that, I don't care it's even just going out on a height, but do a height for the group that most people will be uncomfortable with. And when you get to the top of the mountain, have a little have a little talk, and then come back down then debrief it over the next couple of days. It's just again, everybody's so comfortable all the time. And the reason I have those unreal relationships with the guys I have from the Seal teams is because of that shared like misery, like when you suffer with somebody in our miserable doing something like I mean, the hunts that you two guys have had will make you better friends. And most people will ever be friends with somebody because of going to do that. I don't think that just happens at a coffin. No, there's something that clicks, man, There's something that clicks, like a little bit of just dealing with something. Yep, it does you know? It does it? Makes you really really love someone or makes you not like them at all. I mean, that's the thing. That's the thing I like about is crucial talking about the camp cancer. Yeah, and you take it so serious, right, Like the people you're actually gonna go hunting with, that's a small list of folks that you're gonna want to like, spend that cherished time with. If somebody's not on that list or like black balls up, I know you're not inviting them to another huh call it OTC out of the club for sure, you know, Like I think Steve and I and UH have talked about it in the past. It's like it makes you really think hard, not for necessarily having a bad time in the short term with a new hunting partner, but being like, I may never look at D the same again, because chances are it's not gonna go that great. You can ruin. You can ruin by going on a on a difficult hunting, your fishing trip. You can ruin what might have otherwise been a fine ten year friendship. Absolutely, I'd be like, if we hadn't have done that for three days, I might have drank beer with you, not I might have drank tea with them. I would have drank tea with them for ten years, but now I can't. I can't look at them. I think because it does go, it does run very much parallel, like like I said to military service, where it's it gets to those like primal things when you go hunting, like whether it's just well, it's just showing up on time, right, Like if if somebody tells me, hey, let's meet at six am and they show up at five forty five, they're pretty much off like my list, They're like O T C. I'm like, I was there at because you said be there at six. That's just what I do. Like, you been there at six fifteen is unacceptable to me. And then you know where you're gonna set up camp. Are you cold? Are you gonna complain about being cold? Are you gonna do you're part of the workload within camp? Are you just gonna be a leech? Like? All those things are big things in my mind about the character of someone. So when you go on a hunt, you're you do like a one or two day hunt, You're probably gonna have the complete like character breakdown of who that person is. And it might be false, but it sure feels real. Yeah, it might be that you pushed it too hard, too fast, but it feels real enough where you can't undo the damage. There's probably a danger there because you might be like, yeah, maybe it would have been better had we just maybe I should just forget that and then have the ten year beer drinking friendship. Um, are you gonna go into politics? I've been asked a lot about it. Why do people ask you that? Be Well, my hope is my hope is that they think there's a big gap in the folks that are leading this country and probably want the right people to be doing it. And I'm not sure if I'm that person. I know I could do that job. I mean I I know how to lead. I know how I would do that. The two thousand eighteen UH governorship is open right now in Colorado, but it's just too early. I think I think I'd probably be miserable. I mean, I think I'd probably be miserable. I also very you like challenges, I think because the construct of that is so I think a governorship would be interesting because you do get to run a smaller version of the greater, you know, kind of country system in a little more insulated environment. You know and and kind of get real tangible results like, Okay, if I implement this, let's see what happens, and you're probably gonna see pretty quick what you what you can do and can't do. I don't know, the jury's out a little bit. I mean I still have this sense again, it's very much akin to Churchill. I mean, he went into combat and and kind of got all that out of his system. And then the end of that book worth uh, my early life, which is that book I read that led me to military service. That book ends about the time he entered parliament started his political service, and he saw that as yet another vehicle through which he felt like he was earning his seat at the table. Now he had family history with that obviously was the right man for that season in world history, and and and one the day. Um, I don't know, we'll see not now. I mean what I I can definitely say is I have a lot of adventures to get on before that happens. I think I'd be better at it down the road. I don't want my kiddos to experience that social calendar and the scrutiny that goes into that. I mean, I I you're not gonna find skeletons in my closet. That that's why I feel like you should like it, because um uh, I think a lot of people have to aggonize about their infidelities, about how they used to get too wasted. No, I wouldn't be worried about this, but like, yeah, if you go dig into like Rourke Denver over the years, you're not gonna like start finding all kinds of weird ship. No. I do pretty good, There's no doubt day by day basis, I think that becomes the scary thing is I feel like we're watching the political climate right now and a lot of that I think it's just driven so much by media and social media and what people how people are digesting their information. But I think everyone can agree that far from the most talented people in this country are running this country. Far from it. Whereas it was absolutely the inverse at the beginning. I mean, when you start talking about the Founding Fathers, you were talking about some of the most talented, intelligent, capable human beings that have ever walk the earth. Yeah, but even now there's this bad habit of uh, there's this bad habit of dissecting them relative to social norms at the time relative to social norms at the time. That would have been like it would have been unfathomable that there would be another path, but nobviously sort of like take like contemporary senses of morality and social justice and hold them up to that lens and be like, oh, can you believe it's like okay, it would have been like you might as well have gone and talk to him, you know, about concepts of outer space and infinity and see what he thinks about that, because he wouldn't know about that either. Yeah. No, no, for sure, But I guess I think we're we are just yeah, you're I think that. Yeah, yeah, with those guys visionaries visionaries and they spent The other thing too, is I think this is another thing about hunting that that appeals is hunting gives you these big swaths of silence, of time to kind of be quiet. I mean, it's a tactical imperative right to actually be quiet and not scare your quarry away. I think being silent and having that time to think, it's just not something that a lot of people do. They're just filling that time with either drugs, alcohol, social media, watching TV, and and and so you kind of avoid these things that that folks from that era couldn't avoid. I mean, god, you know, guys like our founding fathers, they were at study like nine hours a day on top of like founding this country. And I don't know how many people that aren't actually in school study much anymore. All the friends I know that I like to talk to our readers and that's where they're digesting information, taking this thing in. But the the pure silence that you get to experience hunting is another gift. I think you give yourself hands down, and even being silent with a buddy, you know, like being silent with the person you even like spending time and like talking to a campfire round. That's one of those unique things. I mean, I feel like if if you sat silently next to like somebody in a Starbucks without watching your cell phones at the same time, they think you are an f and lunatic, you know, whereas like you go with a hunting buddy, you could be quiet for four days and then just kind of like, well, okay, let's debrief now that we're out out of here. When I'm on an airplane, um, I will judge in a very negative way. Someone who sits down in their seat and reads the in flight magazine. Because I think, so you like you knew you were getting out a plane, right, you had no plan? You're like, I will I want to fill my brain. I have such low levels of discretion. I'm gonna fill my brain with some product that's been placed here in anticipation of some dumb son of a bitch like me picking it up and looking at it like that's sort of how I envisioned my time. But a guy that could sit next to me, a person sits next to me in quiet contemplation of the plane ride. I look at him, I'm like, god, it, man, I wish, I wish I could like find that. It can't you ed with like I need to be. If I see a guy played the video game, I judge him negatively too. But but a guy that just is like being, I'm like, what is that? Yeah? No, My bride showed me this Facebook post the other day. That was just most of my Facebook I get from somebody else showing me something, but it was it was one of those that was like this. This girl was saying I'm gonna butcher it. But she says, I'm like I watched this guy walk into Starbucks today, orders coffee, sit down and just rank it like a fucking lunatic, because like you can't imagine what what what it would be like nobody's just sitting there drinking coffee, like thinking in themselves, sitting at baggage claim. Yeah, man, you used to sit at bagger's claim and just wait for your bags. Fun that now no one sits at baggage claiming. You think it was like, yeah, you get your bag, you get the baggage claim, you pull on your phone. Yeah, you feel every second security security is gonna come get you. I think it was like a psychopath drank his coffee like a psychopath, like not saying anything because it's true. It's true. Yeah, And that that same quality is something that we find very valuable up on the mountain, right, Yeah, six words exchange the entire day. I think. I think also to hunting in in the military and combat, it is very much the same. It's not inappropriate to like draw tremendous parallels because the other thing too about that silence is it's it's not just silence because you don't have any to say. It's a choice that you know, the language of what you're doing out there, so you don't need to say. I mean, the best thing about me getting around seal teammates in mind is is there's just there's actually a little that needs to be said. With those guys, we know, like we know, we just know what we're thinking. I know what my buddy Sonny is thinking before he says something. And if and if some I mean, if we're at a barbecue joint in you know, Louisiana and something went down, I know exactly what Sonny he's gonna do. He knows what I'm gonna do. We know how we're gonna survive that moment. If he did something I didn't expect, I'd probably know why that was coming around, how to react to that. And that's the same thing with with with hunting and with hunting buddies and and and kind of teammates out there is is the same thing. You know, and you watch, you know, you watch you guys on the show or you watch you watch folks that know what they're doing, and they can kind of, you know, even through just like mind melding, like okay, I'm going this way. And sometimes it's some hand singles, but in general I bet if cal went around the corner, you'd have a pretty good sense. We do. But it's awesome the way, like a yeah, the way when you host them a lot, they kind of veer off. You're like, oh, he's yeah, I know he's he's gonna wander back up this way, like I know what he's doing. You know, there's a gem. There's kind of a gem of a moment hidden in the movie Read Dawn, which is a very influential movie for us as kids, where one of the guys goes among the other guys and he's just sitting on a mountain like surveying the landscape. Ok, this is Swazy Red Dog, and it's just this beautiful mountain. And one of the guys comes up to the other one and the ones whispering. You're guys, like, why are you whispering? It's just kind of like why do you feel? Like why do some people know that you whisper on a mountain and some people don't. My brother took his little daughter caribou hunting, and um, yeah, I think she was ten when she went took a caribou hunting. And he gets back, I'm like, how'd it go? He goes. You know, it's interesting, uh, knowing that you whisper when there's an animal real close. Apparently it's not like innate. Apparently that's a learned thing. Because a caribou rolled up and she was like, hey Dad, He's like, whoa, it's whispers So cal you got any uh what's on your mind? Concluders picture little picture? Well, I think it would be important just this conversation has been so much about like high high level, elite performing folks. But you know, I definitely think a lot on on the physical mental things, like it can always be learned. I I think and I think about that hunt that we did with Helen and Brittany. You know, when Helen and I fished earlier that year, she couldn't hardly walk across the river rocks to the point where I was like, is there something physically wrong here? She's like, listen, you do this all the time. I walk on pavement all the time, right, And that was it. But then a couple of months later, you know, they put up with the lot of mental ship. You know, that was a mentally tough, tough hunt as well as being physically way out of the you know, your normal stuff. That you're exposed to every day, and you know, we saw some major, major growth and real toughness and that week, right, But then you're coming with people who are already you know, stellar individuals. You know, like if I had questions about them, you know, about their like what makes them up, what was in their heart? I wouldn't wanted to get into that situation. Not that I haven't, but in that's that I guess, not that I have done that. I have had questions about what people are made of and then brought them into situations where you could anticipate them failing and watch that happen. But with those guys, it's like, you know, they were like kinda hungry and ready for a challenge. Yeah, but it was it's just you watch it happen. You also watch you go like, should I start complaining now or not? Because it's fun to complain. Oh, absolutely, everybody likes that's that's commiserating. Some guys are good at it and it's funny. Some guys do it and you're like, shut the fun You're like, hey, bud, take a look around. Everybody's wet. Okay you honest, um, I was gonna ask for your time about like getting your spot at the table. Um, do you have any thoughts on the whole like public lands thing, like if you are you up to speed on that whole like the possible Yeah, I mean I don't. I definitely will not speak to it on the level that I feel like you guys understand it. But I mean my sense is giving public lands or federal lands back to state sounds like about the worst idea we've come up with and forever, because in general, you have like, do you have a pretty good outlook on just like how like the federal government run and like not just what you were involved in, but the whole country, because a lot of people are like, well, how can you let the Feds run your land in Montana? You know, the way I look at the government is is the least amount they can do, the better. So there's very little I want from the government. But there are a couple you know, non negotiables that I think they do exceeding the welst security running the military security, yeah, running security in the military, and monetary policy that goes worldwide and how that you know affects your daily you know, bank accounting and ability to pursue um, excellence. It strikes me that the system of them, you know, holding on those lands to where if I, if I understand it right, if if states all of a sudden own those things and it goes onto their balance sheet, and now all of a sudden they're running their state like a business and you can sell that to China to keep yourself good. That's that's bad business. But I can't talk into in a great, great detail, but I'll listen to you guys and what you have to say about it. You know, one thing that we didn't talk about that I've forgotten. I feel like we should have talked perfect um is you know, like I feel like you're supposed to like do a synopsis of what you said, But I'll broach just a subject that I think apply so much from military, particularly in what we do in the seals and to hunting. You feel it right now, you're supposed to do a synopsis, know when you finish like what you're saying that, like you come up with some like this is what we talked about, okay, perfect Yeah, you talk about whatever you want about your favorite kind of pop yep I love, okay um is the idea of training and when it comes to hunting, how much I'm realized again when I'm talking to people that are all on the microphone right now, this doesn't apply because you guys realize the training should be purposeful and it should be realistic, authentic to what you're gonna go do. I think there are a lot of people in hunting that don't realize you should be training in a very purposeful way for what you're gonna go do. You know, for me, like when we the very first time I got into a gunfight, the very first time I shot a bad guy. And I won't talk about the details of how many people have shot how it works, but like the very first time a bad guy popped up with an a K forty seven started shooting at me, and I shot at him and won that engaged engagement. It was very mechanical and as if I had done it a thousand times, because I'd done it about fifty thousand times in training. They the training we do in the Seal teams is so visceral and real that we make it like we don't shoot a big circle targets. We shoot at human silhouettes because that's what we're gonna see on the battlefield, so you have a lot of practice and identifying your target and making that very real. And you know, before we run into a house and blow the doors off at hinges, well everybody will do like fifty burpees or fifty push ups in some squads. So your heart rate is going through the roof. Now get the door and go in, because you're gonna shoot differently when your heart's pounding compared to when you're sitting on a bench rest taking a shot. So my recommendation to hunters in particular, no matter what they're hunting with, what weapons is, and whatever it is, make your training purposeful. You know, you can be at arrange. It's it's nothing to go out and do ten squats, do ten burpies, get your heart rate going. Now get back on the gun and look how different that optic now looks when when you're rested and comfortable. Because when you happen to be in the Grand Titons or like you know, somewhere running around in Idaho or the Rocky Mountains in particular, like when you came from sea level and you go shooting up a little draw to find that trophy, You're not gonna be a bench rest situation in that moment and practice shooting shringing it up, because when I'm shooting, like a lot of my shooting comes down to me trying to shrink from a bench, trying to like shrink that that five shot group. Yep, down, down, down, No now. But I haven't live a life. I get to do a lot of real world hunting, so I kind of like I practice by doing. But yeah, I think that if you we're just in the head, like, yeah, I'm gonna go hunt. So I'm gonna go sit at a bench and just shoot ship loads around at a paper target and just in my and just get that group showing down. It really has like you know, I've seen a lot of game Get. I've seen a lot of game Fall. I've seen a lot of game Get shot, and it's typically not like that. That's right, different angles, high angle, low angle, different ways you're gonna hold that rifle, different angles, you're gonna be up on that optic, you know, how you get that that gun level exactly, exactly exactly all that stuff, um, you know, and be ready. I mean the hunting partner I have back in Colorado, he's you know, he's he's like a Billy goat. He can run. He's he's fitter than I am, and I like that because we can go hard. But I'm like, I'm gonna take my diet seriously this summer. So we go running up into the rocky mountains. Man, I can crank, you know, And so you gotta. If you don't take that seriously, I think you're being disrespectful to yourself and you're also gonna just degrade your ability to have success. Whereas the guys I think could put again end gals that put in the training to make it real so that when they show up that moment, it's not the first time, they're prepped for it and and can be like, Okay, I know I actually where I'm setting. I can use my foot to balance, you know, the mother of this gun because there's not a perfect V and a sage brush here. I need that to get this shot off. You do yourself a huge service doing so. Yeah, you gotta talks a lot about walk through the woods shooting stumps with his bow. The stump shooting, you know, which is different than when I shoot my boat was just generally like in my yard, flinging arrows, like between the house and the fence. Well yeah, stump shooting just jump in real quick is I think quite valuable because it forces you to pick a spot whereas amorphous blob. Yeah, and on a target, there's so many spots like right there for you. Um yeah, yeah, because that's the thing. Man was like, Uh in reviewing, you know, I've messed up a lot of bow shots. But as much as you go to shoot at elk with your bow. Uh, And then you review the not the not the not footage like where we're thinking of when we talk about filming, you review your mental picture. Sometimes you don't have a clear mental you don't have a clear recollection of what just occurred. But sometimes you're like gifted this, Like I remember exactly what I was thinking and what I was looking at, And what I remember is all I saw was elk and I don't let the arrow fly right. And you're not going like, oh, a little tough to hair. I like that little tough to hair right there. You know, you're just like ribs shoot yea, and then bad stuff occurs. Bad stuff occurs because the same way you might miss that little tough to hair. Uh, if it's just the whole ribs, you might just miss the whole ribs and you learn your gear too. You know a lot of people own gear. They spend a ton of money on a beautiful optic and they don't know how to use it. They just haven't putting that time. They're like they don't know what that turret does. They don't know what you know, the different systems on there, and like you can't be wanting for that in the moment when things are happening fast and you don't know what to come off safe right now, you don't know to be like I mean, it's just that's all stuff to be practicing in almost exhaustive repetition. So when you are fired up and see elk, like you said, you can zero in and do what it takes to you know, take that home. I would say that's like very complicated end of the gear spectrum. Like there are so many people I see that literally don't know how their boots really work, Like, oh, well, that thing really pinches my lass, So I just skipped that one, you know, Like it's it amazes man. So many folks are there. They let kind of the bravado or the excitement lead the way before they slow down and go boy, I should probably figure probably should have figured out this pack before a couple hundred pounds of meat on the ground. You always gotta be aware of the dude that like is getting at the trail head tearing tags off his stuff. Well, how's the sigwork? Uh? That's that was another great I don't think we actually named it as a parallel, but it is a good parallel, is the Uh you said that one guy's chiseled like Michael Angelo drew him, and then you got that kind of pudgy kid from the farm and he outperforms that guy. There's a lot of that going on that we see. The dude just rolls in. You're like, man, that's a good look at something right there. But he can't hike. You know what. I remember this cartoon. I played paintball a little bit when I was in high school, and paintball was like first kind of coming out. My mom thought for sure, like paintball was gonna lead me to like become a mascular So she stopped it and I was like, well, you didn't see the you didn't see the finish line because I actually ended up, you know, going the full Monty with this uh you know, force on Force competition. But I remember a buddy of mine like gave me like that a paintball magazine. It's one of my favorite cartoons I ever saw drawn. But everyone that's a hunter will know exactly what I'm talking about. The magazine had a cartoon that showed a paintballer, right and like the the progression of a paint ball So it had the beginner and the beginners and like a pair of jeans, you know, decent pair of boots and like a T shirt and like you know, a paintball gun but just kind of looks like a rookie. And then the you know, the the intermediate has like a bunch of like cooler stuff, a better upgraded gun and like a little more cammy than the advanced or expert was like just ninja it out right, full gilly suit, the like best high pressure gun there is. And then it said master. It was the same picture as the beginning because he just doesn't need all that extra stuff, you know, He's just like got the goods. And it was totally true. And I remembered that as like when I went into the Seals, I was like, yeah, I don't need all the ninja out stuff my skills right exactly. Yeah, like he went through everything, came up ther side and blue jeans and like some tennis shoes. It was walking around up there. It's awesome, yeah for sure. Alright, man, K, thank you very much. Thanks for having they hit the hit. The book titles one mort uh uh damn Few, Making the modern Civil Warrior and worth dying for Navy Seals. Call to a nation, or call Rourke for some consultant. Boom you do, marriage, marriage consulting my bride and I've been talking about that a little bit. All right, thanks man, Thanks brother,

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