Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Cleared Hot Episode 74 - Power Hour with Evan Hafer

Episode Date: March 11, 2019

Evan Hafer is the founder and CEO of Black Rifle Coffee. Prior to founding BRCC he spent twenty years serving this country, first as a Special Forces soldier (Green Beret), then as a contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency, completing multiple tours to Iraq and Afghanistan. Not all military experience is applicable to the business world, and not all veterans are well suited to create, build, and continue to grow a business. There are, however, many skills that have impact and applicability to business. We spent this hour discussing lessons learned, best practices, successful decisions, and mistakes made in the journey of growing BRCC. The last twenty minutes we discussed the long term impact of war on the individual, war crimes, and the ability to detach from an occupation before it is all that defines you. https://www.blackriflecoffee.com/

Well, hello, everybody. I'm back on this Monday morning with a repeat guest. His name is Evan Hafer. And if you are a listener to the podcast, a few months ago, I sat down with him and John Dudley in, where were we? We were in Texas, just outside of San Antonio. And we talked about a variety of things. We had a jolly old time. And I loved the conversation. And then after we were done, I realized that there were a few things that I would have liked to focus on, specifically his experience in business, when it comes to creating or founding first, creating and then building and managing the growth of Black Rifle Coffee. So my guest today is Evan Haver. Obviously, he is the founder of Black Rifle Coffee, which in and of itself I consider to be an awesome organization. but it's filled with some incredible individuals, and they have relationships with some pretty amazing individuals and brands. Evan, though, long before founding Black Rifle Coffee, was a, he describes it as a coffee head.

I'm not sure exactly what you have to do to become a coffee head. I don't think I'm a coffee head because I drink it in a variety of forms purely for effect, and I don't have a discriminating palate. I'll drink cold coffee, hot coffee, everywhere in between. wanted to help me wake up. And that's about it for me. Evan on the other hand, no. This dude is, I would imagine at his house or somewhere in his workshop, it looks like a perfect mind with ropes and schematics and string leading to stuff connecting coffee and origin at the world. He likes coffee. I think that's what I'm trying to say. Getting off track. Before he created Black

Rifle Coffee though, he was serving this country for just about 20 years. I think it was exactly. exactly 20 years, maybe a little bit more, maybe it was a little bit less. He started off in the U.S. Army as a green beret. And a point about the green beret, oftentimes, even though I think people don't mean to do it, they will say the word special forces. And what they think they are saying is they are talking about every military branch's special forces unit, which is actually the incorrect term. So special forces specifically is talking about green berets.

So if you're listening to this and you are going to talk about Green Berets, you could say special forces. If you wanted to talk about any other special operations force soft, then what you would want to do is use that term. You would say special operations. And then that will give you a broad palette across all military branches. So he spent time in the Army as a Special Forces soldier, got out of the Army, and then began contracting for the Central. intelligence agency. We did not go very deep into that. I think we covered that a little bit more in the previous podcast that we did.

Because again, what I wanted to focus on was the lessons that he took with him from his time serving this country and how he applied those lessons in the business world. Because I'll be the first person to tell you as a veteran that not all lessons that you learn are applicable to business. And not all people who are veterans are incredibly well suited to create. and build a business. However, there are a lot of things that you can take from one organization or one occupation and overlay onto another one.

We just spent five days in southern Oklahoma doing some spot and stock. Hog hunting had a time to talk with Evan about a variety of things. And the more I've gotten to know them, the more I enjoy hanging out with them. And every time I have the chance to hang out with them, if I'm being totally honest, I leave inspired to kind of tighten up my own personal life and apply some of the things that he has done in his life for efficiency and growth inside of the organization that he's building. Incredibly smart person. He's got a fantastic sense of humor. And damn, he can make a good cup of coffee.

It takes a little bit, though, when he makes a cup of coffee. But it's worth it. It's pretty tasty. And I'm going to stop rambly. and let you all enjoy episode 74, the power hour, or I tried to keep it close to an hour,

with the one and only, Evan Hafer from Black Rifle Coffee. Here we go. Okay, got the red smoke. North and south, smoke. Okay, copy, west of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. I'm all wondering, man.

They give it to me. I made it. You're clear hot. You can't be cleared hot. Are you ready for the one hour power hour? I'm ready. Just created. I'm ready.

And realize we have to do round two because I was thinking about round one. And we opened strong. We went out of the gates hot talking about the sexual nature of the Spartans and Vikings. Yeah, that was super aggressive. We came out of the pipe pretty hot on that one. And I don't even know if we talked about Black Rifle the entire time. I don't think we did. I tend to not talk about it for some reason.

I don't know why. Well, we need to talk about it because I get hit up by people. people asking me about, well, Black Rifle itself, but business and growing a business. I'll actually get emails for people. What do you think that I should do? I'm like, wow, I don't know, because I don't know you, but I'm also not the right person because I've never built and scaled a business like you have. So let's start at the beginning. How did Black Rifle come to be? Because I have a few questions, but they're going to depend on the answers that you give. Well, it was kind of out of necessity. So I was burnout, angry, and disenfranchised.

franchised contractor for the agency. They had basically told me I should probably look for another job, which I took that as like, I should probably look for another job, right? After nine years, they had every right to be dissatisfied with me, and I had every right to be dissatisfied with them. It was a really bad relationship at that point. Did it start off, kid? It did. It started out really good. I think, you know, for me, I liked the, you know, I liked deploying with them. I liked working in the most difficult cities doing some very complex things. Not to be too vague, but that's what it was. You were operating at a very high level. Yeah. In strategically important locations.

Yeah. And, you know, when you're playing the game and I'm not devaluing the experience by. saying the game, but I think a lot of it was the game, right? It's like, how well can you plan and execute a mission? And then if you come back with all your fingers and toes, you've done well. At that point, though, I think after several years of that, when I say several years, I think from 2003 to 2013, give or take, I figured it out. I was deployed on an average. of about 270 days a year from that point on. And I was really, I was angry with the place, man. It was changing.

It was very bureaucratic. It was political. Whereas in a government or anywhere else, which this stuff tells really nicely in a business, you always have two, well, two very distinct. different people. You have the mission first guys, and then you have the me first guys. And then you have like this strange character that's kind of in the middle where he's mission me or mission me kind of whatever suits the purpose. Floats a little bit to the left and right. Yeah. I think that

describes every team and every organization I've ever been a part of. Right. From organized sports to to junior lifeguards to the military to after. Yeah. So you'll have guys like on the football team or whatever. And there... My mom would let me play. She thought it was too dangerous. It is a dangerous sport. And to be honest with you, she was probably right.

You probably can think a little bit faster and more effectively because of it. But you've got the guys that are trying to seek self-aggrandizement, right? They're in it for getting their name and lights and things like that. You know, in business, it's the same way. In government institutions like that, it's the same way. You know, I think there's some... some interesting personalities that, you know, maybe they were pushed around when they were a kid and they really liked the fact that they work for the CIA and that's going to fulfill them.

You know, it's kind of like being a green beret. And I always say, I didn't go to the course for the hat. I went to the course to do the mission. You know, whether or not I was good at those positions, I'll let my peers decide. But I never, I didn't even like wearing the uniform. like I didn't like wearing the uniform, didn't like wearing the hat. When I say that, I wasn't doing it for public image or to impress people. Like, you know what I liked?

Like winning. I liked winning at a fucking really high level in executing on very difficult tasks. And most of those required that you had to risk life, limb, or eyesight in order to accomplish them because it felt like you were making a difference. But to come home, like war did a lot of really good things for me. One, I think that it got me out of this idea that being a good soldier was one that you had your garrison types, right? I know you saw this. The guys that they were spit and polish and they looked really good.

They've been to every school under the sun. But they're a mess. They're a freaking hot mess. Yeah, from the word go. Hot mess. And cowardice is a real thing. and you see it firsthand. And I think that when I saw guys that I looked up to in war,

I realized they were cowards that changed me. But I also saw something that was like, there were a bunch of other guys that were really surprising going, wow, okay, these dudes get it on. That's the kind of guy I want to be. As a Bud's instructor, you spend time around the students, obviously. and you learn rapidly that you can't point at somebody and say, he's going to make it or he's not going to make it.

And more than often, you could look at it because I made this mistake when I was first there as an instructor, like the physical stud in the class, I'm like, oh, he's got it nailed. One of the first guys to go in Hell Week. I look at my own class, fastest swimmer, gone. Fastest runner was playing the bell, like the first chair of the solo, The harmonic orchestra. That's awesome.

Play the bell. And then I go back as an instructor in guys that I would have guessed would have never made it. This spindly little scrawny kid weighing in at a buck 75. Just not in the front of the pack, not in the back of the pack,

solidly in the middle carrying his share of the load and a portion of the guy next to him. Right. And those are the people. Like the performers, the high physical performers, I can't say that they displayed

cowardice in that moment because it wasn't real, right? but you could probably extrapolate that their desire or their choice to quit might have. If the consequences got worse, it might have manifested itself in cowardice. But it was very interesting exercise in humanity and who you would want to choose to be with. And I guess, you know, the cliche, don't judge a book by its cover. It was certainly true in that setting.

When you saw, I think that what I saw was there was kind of a split, right? and I saw a lot of the repetitional behavior of the me first people, they made sure everybody knew, right? You know, they made sure that everybody knew what they had done, but they also wanted to make sure that they were around to get the medals they put themselves in for, right? They wanted to... Oh, and they did.

And they sure did. So either way, I mean, going back to this whole thing where I was looking to transition. I didn't know necessarily what I was going to do. I'd been roasting coffee since 2005 or six to take with me downrange. So you were a coffee nut to begin with. Yeah, I started being a coffee head, you know, officially and probably around 97, I met a barista that I was really into and I kept frequenting her stand. Because the coffee was amazing? No. The coffee was actually shes. shitty. But it was, but she was, she was, she was, she was an attractive woman and, um, we actually dated for a little while and I, I was, um, you know, I was doing my thing. She was

doing hers, but I, I, I fell in love with coffee then. I realized like, oh, this is interesting, you know, like, all this stuff is interesting. It's just how, how much do you want to unpack it to get into the details of something? And I think it, there's so many different things in life like that. It's like, you know, you can wear something every day, but you don't know what goes into making the materials and the pants and the design. It's just like coffee. Like, the more you dive into it, it's a very complex business. It's a very complex thing. It's just kind of sparked an interest for me very early.

I actually moved out to Seattle for a little while. And this was before there was this really artisan coffee boom. Explosion. Yeah. Um, and I knew a lot of the guys that were doing stuff at that time. Uh, but it was weird. I was always the guy, like, I was like the conservative, right? It was like, I was their conservative friend, you know, like, oh, don't, don't let him show up to the social parties, you know?

He's going to start talking about the constitution. Um, and. Oh, man. So it was interesting living in Seattle. And then I moved away, or I went back to school at University of Idaho, then came back. And then I was living in Seattle for quite a while. So I kind of saw this boom. And I was roasting coffee and going back and forth.

Just for yourself? For me and my teammates. So I would deploy out. And it was another guy, actually, another team guy, V. Diamond. He and I would work a lot of these rotations together. And we were both. we both had these like coffee setups in our room that were just like ridiculous. Intricate?

Yeah. And so, and he was such a cool dude because, you know, V was like he had a CrossFit gym and Salt Lake and, you know, coffee head. And he was into a bunch of weird eclectic stuff, right?

So we could geek out when we were deployed. And there was a couple other guys too. But we, we just kind of like geeked out. So when we would go home, take a few weeks off and then we'd go back to it. It's like, man, you've got to check this out. You know, I got a new roaster.

And one of the guys that I met actually still works through the company. He was one of the first people that I hired. I met him in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Edwin Parnell. So he does a ton of stuff for us still today. But we're all kind of geeking out. And there's a small group of guys that were geeking out on coffee. My wife had a coffee shop in Denver for a long time. That's one of the reasons why I married her because she was a coffee.

coffee had too and I figured that there was like a prerequisite for me a person that loved coffee. So when we were looking at transition, I was teaching a lot of tactical carbine courses for the government at that time. And I had this one pound coffee roaster on the back tailgate of a government truck. And I had my service rifle next to it. I was like, oh, black rifle coffee that you know somebody had said something to and you know we should start a coffee company and you know we call it black rifle coffee and i was like oh that would piss some people off and sounds like a great idea it sounds like a great idea because it's like i want to kind of you know you kind of make fun of people's ridiculous notion that these these rifles that we actually

carry around that are life-saving equipment this is not the boogeyman it can be because it's it is an instrument of violence. Yeah. Depends on the hands of the person holding it. Absolutely. So I roasted coffee initially for Article 15 clothing for something called Freedom Roasters. So what year was this epiphany, though, with the rifle next? 2014.

Okay. Early on in 2014, one of my other friends, we were still in the same range as different, different time. He said, hey, you should meet one of my really good friends. His name's Matt Best. he was, he's doing these videos and I hadn't seen him. I didn't know who he was and he really, he wasn't a, you know, this huge public figure at that point.

So he was still contracting with the agency as well. We linked up and I was like, man, we should, I should roast coffee for Article 15 clothing. He's like, that'd be great. And so we did, I did 500 pounds of coffee for them. Then towards the end of the year, I said, you know what, I think I'm going to do a coffee company. and I told those guys. They said, hey, open door, you know, if you guys ever want to come back and be partners, just tell me this is it.

There's no timestamp on it for him or Jared. So 14 rolled around. Officially, my EIN was established in December of 2014, which, you know, means you just established a number so the government can track you for your tax purposes. And then I didn't have it. my first sell until January 15. And then I started, I was still working, still doing tactical stuff and roasting coffee and

doing all my customer service. So you were roasting all the coffee at this point? Yeah, yeah, I was still roasting all the coffee. How long does it take to do 500 pounds by yourself? A long time. I would rent time, I would rent time on other roasters, bigger roasters. So I would go in and say, hey, can I rent some time on your roaster? and it was it took me a while to find guys that would do that and it seems like it would be a bizarre request

super bizarre but i finally found a guy that i really like he's just great uh in salt lake and he wasn't filling all his roaster time and he was like sure man yeah come on in and uh so i was roasting in my house and then i transitioned over to them but i was still like i would go and roast the coffee in the evenings and then I would or in the or in the mornings and then I would come back and then I would start grinding and backing boxing doing customer service till typically about one in the morning so I'd leave before my kids got up I would be home well after they went to bed so my first year in business I was like trying to figure it out I think I probably slept on an average of about four hours a night for the first year so I didn't I was we

were making money, we were generating revenue, but I was trying to grow the company organically and too I didn't have any money from the outside to invest into it. So we were rolling all of our profits back into the growth of the company, as we still do today. That four hours of sleep catch up with you? It did. Because we're talking about this offline yesterday, even though that sleep deprivation is, I'd be surprised to see a military selection course that doesn't have some aspect of sleep deprivation. The study is showing how, especially for men,

detrimental it is to hormones and... Yeah, my doctor said, because I think I was going on, like year or two of this, I was probably driving myself a little bit crazy. And, you know, and I just thought, hey, you know what?

And this, I would always think about these things. I would go back to selection, the Q course, the different selections I had done. And I'd say, you know, if I can compete at this level doing this other thing, you know what? I might not have business acumen, but what I have is the ability to work 20 hours a day. And I can sit down. I can organize, prioritize, I can start to execute. I can work a planning process. That's one thing I know how to do. And so I was like, I know how to roast coffee. I know how to plan. I know how to manage.

Okay, these are all the skills that were given to me. If I can't turn something into a business that supports my family, then I have wasted 20 years of my life. Like, I mean, not wasted it essentially, but dude, if I don't have legitimate skills that I can apply to this endeavor. The knowledge gained in service was far less valuable than you think it is. Yeah. You can't apply it outside of that world.

Exactly. And so my thing was, discipline, you know, which was to be a big, you know, big bad pseudo-commando, you've got to have discipline. You have to be organized. You have to have discipline. I'm not saying this in the context of like a jaco conversation. I'm saying I wasn't sleeping, but I also thought there wasn't long-term, you know, negative

health effects to sleeping. I thought it was a discipline issue and that I was being weak. if I needed sleep. Yeah. Like, talk about indoctrination. Like, I was, like, auguring my health into the ground. You know, I was gaining weight. I'm still, to this point, like, I'm heavier than I probably ever have been.

And in the back of your mind, you can hear the people in the community that helped raise you talking. Yeah. Come on, pussy. Yeah. Like, you don't need sleep. Sleep's a crutch. You're going to sleep when you're dead. Years of your life, just hearing that over and over and over.

again, and even though I was waking up tired and I knew I was tired, those were the people that were chirping in my brain going, dude, you got to suck it up. And that's what I did. Like, you know, suck it up, feet hit the floor, start moving. Well, what happens is you're just exhausted moving through life all the time like a zombie. Making poor decisions. Yeah. You make poor decisions. You do things just to get them out of your way. You don't work out. You don't, you start, you don't eat right. Like it's just, it really is kind of a cascading,

uh, negative effects, uh, circumstance where I, I, I walked into my, I was at my doctor's office because he was, uh,

you know, getting a, whatever health checkup, whatever that is physical. There we go. And, um, he's like,

man, you are like, you're not doing so hot, dude. What do you been doing? Yeah. And, and I was looking at my previous,

med charts from right before I got out and you know my resting heart rate my EKGs all this stuff I mean we can track it all the way back to when I was 20 years old probably was trending in the wrong direction no he's like dude you're going to kill yourself you're going to be dead by the time you're 50 if you don't start sleeping like you need to sleep and uh that's when I started really kind of waking up but then I'd cause so much harm over the last couple of years It was really hard for me to sleep more, too. To unwind all that? Yeah.

Yeah, it was very difficult. So how did you grow it? I mean, it sounds... The company? Yeah, I mean, you went from, obviously, the idea yourself. Yeah. And trying to do everything yourself. And, I mean, I don't know the ins and outs of where you guys are today, but let's just

say that you're substantially larger as an organization with breadth and depth and scope. How did you go from it being yourself auguring into the ground to where you are today? Well, one I did. I augured myself into the ground, which I would never recommend anybody doing. That's not a successful path forward. It did get me to a certain degree, which was you can get a lot done in 20 hours a day. Like you can get technically speaking, you can get twice as much done as other people. And I think the first year, you know, the big pieces to it was I really track everything.

I was turned on by the aspects of having something that I understood every fanatically detailed piece of it. And so my first year, we did just, we did about $1.3 million gross revenue in a company that I ran basically out of my garage. And I was building all of my ads. I was a direct part of most of all of our content. So that year I learned how to build a website. I learned how to answer customer service tickets. I learned how to, and there's an art to all of this, right? Fulfill, ship.

Yeah. So, you know, the learning curve is just steep. It's like Everest every day where I dedicated every ounce of my energy to either doing the job or learning about the job. So I spent probably 50% of my time watching online tutorials about how to do things. And I will say this to this day, Linda, Linda.com, I don't know if you've ever used it or seen it. No. So they have hundreds of courses. Straight up L-I-N-D-A, like, okay. Yeah. L-Y, I believe. But Linda, it's all courses, basically. on whatever aspect that you want to learn about business.

It could be, you know, design or accounting or website built. It doesn't matter. You can, they have hundreds of courses. All of them are by trusted subject matter experts. And I was watching online tutorials probably 50% of my time. Then I would go and execute on them. So I was in a constant state of learning and execution. So OJT to the math,

On the job training people. Oh, yeah. So OJT, and I didn't give myself a break. Like, I will say this, which is I would, if I could go back now and how I did it, would not be how I would do it, if that makes sense. Well, I was going to get to that as we talk about where the company is now, because I was curious as to, I mean, everybody learns things along the way. I was going to ask you about some mistakes you had made along the way that you would avoid.

But let's not, let's talk about the growth first. So the growth was essentially. I've doubled the business or quadrupled the business every year. And my first year, I was learning, and I still do, but I have less learnings that are taking place because you're doing every aspect of the job. I have to learn how to answer a customer service ticket through the technology. And then you have to implement the technology in a sequence that makes sense. So you have to learn all of it because I'm not a customer service guy.

But it makes, I've done a ton of customer service because you call people and you know what, good customer service looks like. You know what bad customer service looks like? So I'm building the website. I'm doing all my customer service and packing and I'm building this entire company. It's only me and my wife at that time. She's plugging in part time. And I'm tracking everything.

So one of the things that I, and one of the things I will directly credit myself in doing is I would triage everything. And I called it time triage. And I would look at how I, spent my previous day, week, month, and then I would start to chop away the negative time and then only look for the positive return in time. So if I did something and it yielded a return in the direction that I want to take the company, I would do more of that and less of the

things that weren't making direct impacts. So a lot of people, and I saw it firsthand, they take on a bunch of biz dev shit. Like they take on a bunch of meetings, they talk to a bunch of people. And after a while, I realized that didn't pay back a return. It was like 90% of the stuff didn't come through. If it did, it was a low, low rate. Why do you think, and this is kind of anecdotal, I don't have no data to support this, but it seems like on a lot of the business, what's the word that I'm looking for,

A lot of the business programs that you see being sold. It's a lot of get together, meet, business. What you're talking about, the things that had almost no positive return seems to be the selling point for a lot of the traditional business models being sold. You know, I've seen a lot of those, and I think they're good for a lot of people. And I know there are so many different, you know, incubators and labs and places where people get together and socialize and talk about business. I've done a lot of that, but not in. an organized way. So I would call people that I trusted and they would, and I would talk to them

with very specific questions. And then those questions would turn into other questions. So I did at least have a network that allowed me to access other business people that would allow me to sit down with them for a half hour and ask them a laundry list of questions. The other problem I ran into is there just wasn't a lot of people doing what we are doing, which is a direct-to-consumer coffee subscription is nobody does it. So, I wanted to build something that was for me specifically, which was I wanted this, you know, I wanted the freshest coffee that I could get on a subscription that I could change. And then if I deployed, to be able to change it to go, you know, deployed.

So I just wanted this thing to follow with me everywhere, everywhere I went. And I wanted the best coffee. So it sounds like a commercial. But that's exactly why I did this, was most of the coffee industry, they're really progressive. like wing nut progressive liberals. No offense to liberals, but... You built the service you were looking for, essentially. Exactly.

I also didn't want to support people that didn't support the things that I believed in. So, you know, when you look at large companies when they're making, you know, $20 some billion a year, kind of what their give-back is and what they're doing, it's their thing. It just wasn't my thing.

So going back to scaling it and then time triage, I was, and it takes a while to get into this rhythm, but I will directly say this is one of the most beneficial things that I've done to this day, is I just start chopping away the time that isn't paying me back, a return in the direction that I want to go. And because I see it with business owners, as they get bogged down into stuff that they like to do, well that's not and I call it eating my vegetables first in business which is you have to do the things that will move the needle for your business you have to do more of those which is a mission oriented person not a me so if you're trying to start a business from the ground up and you think this is just going to be an endeavor and be able to do whatever you want and it's just about me well stand by stand by because that that's not it dude I love roasting coffee

I roast coffee to this day in much smaller batches, typically for just a handful of people. But I couldn't roast all the coffee for Black Rifle Coffee. I mean, we roasted 4 million pounds of coffee last year. Two, if I just stayed roasting coffee or if I stayed doing customer service within my business, but I didn't hire people within those categories and relinquished control, which is another big issue for a lot of businessmen, I made these mistakes, scaling the company. going back, things I did well, time triage, just chop away the dead wood. And you can make your

own assessment as to what's good and what's bad as far as your time. And you can see it. You can see it in your bank account or you can see it in something that's happened that positively affects what you're trying to accomplish. Maybe it's PR, maybe it's marketing. What if that is. Anything that kept popping its head up on the negative side of the house, you were chopping away? Yes. Meetings. Okay. Socialization. Like with other humans in general?

Yes. Socialization without a prioritized prioritized execution list. So if you don't go into meetings with, like people love to go into these meetings to just discover stuff, right? That's kind of like walking out in the middle of the woods expecting to find hogs.

Sometimes you do. Sometimes you do. Not often, though. Not often. Yeah. And so. I and I saw it firsthand even with my partners and other people, they would, what I call grind sausage. They would just sit around and grind sausage.

And I remember very distinctly one day, I had a couple partners in another business that were sitting around. And they'd been like grinding sausage for hours. And I just got up and I was like, all right, I'll see you guys. And I didn't come back. Like I didn't come back to any of their meetings. I never went to any more of their meetings. I never partook in them if I wanted a meeting.

I set up a time. I set up, hey, these are the things that we need to get out of this. And I kept my door closed, basically, because interruptions and impromptu conversations. The socialization. Yeah, you have to schedule it and then come up with a list of outcomes that you're trying to achieve from that time. And then hopefully what you can do to say, these are the do-outs from this conversation. This is what I owe you. This is what you owe me.

We can move on that. But if we just sit down and shoot the shit, we just lost an hour of our time that we'll never get back. We might be better friends, but we're not going to be any wealthier. We'll be wealthier in the aspect of friendship, but that's not how you grow businesses. So my first year, it was a part-time, full-time job,

which was actually a full-time job, but it was one of my two jobs. My second year, I hired my first employee, still with me today. outside of me, Charles Waldron, former Army officer, and that allowed me, what I hired him to do was,

you have to do customer service, man. I'm getting like... Just inundated. Just inundated, because, and even just the questions, you know, which are probably highly repetitive, but it still sucks up your bandwidth to answer that in a personal manner.

Yeah, and you want to treat every customer because they are. They're the people that keep the lights on. You want to give them the amount of time that they deserve. And I wasn't, I wasn't capable of doing that as one person. So he came on as a customer service guy.

And that allowed me to focus on the other high yield opportunities within the company that would grow the company more effectively. And Charles coming on was like, it actually, the company really started to grow at that point because he not only handled the customer service, He handled the other things that were a misappropriation of my time, basically.

If you're the founder, the guy that dreamt this whole thing up, you have to pursue what you're dreaming about or your dream to because if you get bogged down within the minutia, you're just going to be defeated. So he came on and that allowed me to really concentrate on growing the subscription. And then I was able to bring in, I think about three months later, I brought a couple more people, which I brought another person in a comptroller. So I needed somebody that was basically running my books. So offloaded those two things, which not to a full degree,

but they were reporting up what they were doing on a daily basis versus me spending two hours of my time in accounting or finance, and then another three or four in customer service, and then just bouncing from each section. So then I could concentrate most of my time on content, marketing and product. So product, product, product is super key when I

want to come in with that. My second year, we grew the company at about 700%. So we did $8 million, I think, something like that, 6 something, 6. Something. And we did that with just a handful

of knucklejiggers that doesn't have any business experience. So nobody had business experience. All of us were like trying to figure out what the hell was going on with these pieces of technology where, you know, like we built a fulfillment center. I built a fulfillment center

with a bunch of like former special operations and infantry guys that were like, didn't really know what we were doing. And it was crazy now that I think about it. It was crazy. This is the Salt Lake building? Yeah.

Yeah. So, and I built that twice, actually. So I built two fulfillment centers. I built one and I grew out of it in like three months. And then I had to go buy a building. So, because I was like, I'm going to be moving every freaking three months, man.

Like, I'm, you know, no effects. I'm going to be moving every three months. And I just moved in and I, and I built, I not only built, but I bought the internal capability

to print all of our shirts. So I built a fulfillment center and a T-shirt printing facility at the same time. And I had an ops guy at the time. who I truly love, but he was the guy that overpressed and underdelivered all the time based on he was, I don't think he could say no, and I think he was incapable of telling me the truth, which is bad hire, right? So you're growing the company, I'm scaling it, I'm building a bunch of capabilities within the company.

I'm concentrating on, you know, now I have direct reports. So now I've got an ops guy. Now I've got, you know, when I say that, I brought in a chief operations officer. Complete inaccurate label to that title, by the way. I brought in a buddy that had some ops experience. Don't ever get those things confused. And we bought a new roaster, and that was a whole shit show.

So bought a building. I bought a new roaster. Like I said, I was rolling all my profits back in the company, I had only taken, I hadn't taken a salary from the company at that time, still up to that date. And every dime I put back into the company because I figured every dime that I could put back into it, it would continue to grow the company more effectively, and I still believe in that. But recruiting a COO, my buddy, and a couple other guys building a fulfillment center, building a T-shirt, printing facility, you know, buying a building, all of that stuff.

Like, that's like, that's finance-heavy, it's finance-heavy work. And then running the marketing and the sales and all of those things because I had to build out a customer service, basically, call center. So I was just in constant growth, constant management, our third year as we transitioned. And are you still reaching out to people at this time? Because I'd imagine as you're growing, you've got to buy a building. You've got to buy a roaster. I mean, knowing you, I know that you were, if you weren't reaching out to people,

you were making the best decision possible with the knowledge base that you had. But like when you had to go buy a building, did you have people you were consulting? Or were you just driving forward in the manner with which you thought it should be done? No, one of my really good friends, his name is Jason Orvis. He had a lot of business experience. The Orvis fly fishing? No. Well, he started a company called Lexington Law, which was the forefather to credit repair.

He lives in Bountiful. He still is my partner in Readyman. He had the most business experience. And he was providing advice to me for a long period of time. And I would say that he was probably, he was right maybe 20% of the time. you know so that was the all other issue just because a person that was had made wealth in a previous profession doesn't necessarily mean that they're the correct advisor in this so sifting through the information they give you is super important too because I remember times when he was

like man I don't see how this is going to work Evan you know but he also probably didn't understand your exact business model no he didn't but you're you're right I I would talk to a few other people. Tom Davin from 511 was in our life at about that time. So I talked to Tom, talked to a few other guys. Most of the advice was bad advice, by the way. This is about the time I think you and I met. I met you read it on the time, or face-to-face at least. You met Tom. Yep. Okay. And most of the advice that other people gave me was bad advice. Did you find that by actioning that advice or just sitting back? Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, I think, you know, building a T-shirt printing facility, I think that's a great investment. It took us eight months to figure that thing out. Talk about a loss of... That's painful. Well, then, and then we'd hired incorrectly, and it took us hiring a new person to come in and rebuild it. It was a nightmare. Our fulfillment center, nightmare. It would keep me up at night, just like...

the lack of accountability, and this thing was organized. For a bunch of guys that didn't have this in our background, we got a lot of compliments from people that were in supply chain management saying, wow, this is incredible. But what I didn't realize at the time, it was like complimenting a monkey for building a tree house. Like, wow, this is incredible. It's incredible a monkey could pull that off.

I didn't realize they could do that. Yeah. You know, or writing the letter A. Holy shit, monkeys can write letters. Yeah. But from a professional fulfillment standpoint, we weren't even in the right league. So, and I remember it was me, Matt and my other partner, Jeff.

We got, like, tuned up one night at the office, and we were ripping through each because we're having some issues. We couldn't quite figure them out. And we were just ripped through the, Center, all the data. So we're, you know, going through reports and we finished a full handle of makers, I think, that night. At the end of the night, we're like, we have to go, we have to be out of the business of fulfillment. We have to get out of the three, the fulfillment business. We are a coffee company. We are not a fulfillment company. We are effing this up by the numbers.

the next day I started making phone calls to fulfillment centers at 3PLs to shift our business. It took us 90 days in order to execute that to pull out of what we were doing internally and then outsource it to somebody that knew how to actually pack packages. My post audit, because I did basically a post audit, we were probably at about a 7% error rate. 7%. Yeah. And that was with my guys QCing and looking

through every stage triple checking like what's in the box. Wow. It was anything and everything. Unless that stuff is electronically monitored

with barcodes and you have an inventory management system, it is very difficult. So, plus you have we had 23 people just work in our fulfillment center.

So now you have 23 people that you have to manage. You know, 23 people that, you know, they're, they're just like any other person. You've got good people. You've got bad people. It's a lot of hands. Yeah, it's a ton of people. So we went from, I went from like no employees to by the year of,

by year end of three, I had 100. And then now we're moving in, well, no, three. Yeah. so now we do yeah we've got four years under our belt so we're going into our fifth so by four three I had like made these big moves I was concentrated more I mean I was still running all my direct reports are reporting to me as far as each individual aspect of the company but then I realized I'm like man we're we are going to F this thing up dude like we are we are way way over our heads.

You know, we have the, we have the fastest, still do, the fastest growing coffee company in America. Like, we make mistakes all the time with, whether it's marketing or PR, we like to be funny. And some people find what we do funny, and some people don't, which is totally fine. But the internal structure of the company was built on a shaky foundation

because they were all former operator types that didn't have any business experience great dudes, but we had to level up at that time. So I went out and I also knew that we needed a capital partner because I'm looking at that time, I'm like, I need to branch in, I'm going to do brick and mortar and franchises. So I took several meetings with private equity groups and I finally landed on one that I liked

that gave me the position in the company they liked. So I wasn't going to relinquish control the company. I wasn't going to relinquish controlling interest. I wasn't going to give them preferential, which is like they weren't going to get paid out. Like, basically, you guys are going to have to write me a check with no guarantee that your money will ever come back, and you have limited to zero say about anything that happens, which makes it very hard to find capital partners, by the way. I was going to say, it seems advantageous to you and potentially risky investment for them. But I was like, the company's been growing fine.

we're not in a position that would dictate that we have to throw the lifeline. We're like everything going for us. And I finally, I met a great guy. His name is Stephen Taslitz. He came in, he was like, yeah, I'll help you do all of this. I'll help you build out your finance division, your ops division. You know, I'll be your partner. I'm not going to be the guy that's sitting there, you know, wearing cuff links talking to you about, you know, money.

I'll just, after hundreds of businesses, these are the things that I've seen. So in year four, the end of the year of three and then beginning of four, we had a new partner. And at that point, that's when we started to really change the way the company does business all the way around. We put in a roasting facility in Nashville. We moved the company headquarters to Texas. I built a finance team, which, you know, I didn't know that you needed a finance team, right? What's a CFO? I don't know what they do. I know what the title is, but I don't know what they do on a day to day. Yeah, I couldn't write their job description two years ago to save my life.

Like, you would be, you could have put a gun in my head and I'd been like, okay, finance. Yeah. And so I built out, which was a whole fantastic point. process. So now you have to recruit talented people to come in to run these divisions. And then what they have to do is they have to rebuild the divisions. And a lot of people, there's, there, there's a lot of heartache in some of that because when you have a company that you've grown from the ground up, you have people that are great people, but they may have been misplaced in some of their positions, right? So you have to reshuffle. And the other thing is,

is it was highly competitive and stressful for a lot of people. So we lost some employees in three, meaning self-selection, which I perfectly believe in self-selection. And then we also had to, you know, some people that we let go. But that's part of growing a company, which is if your mission first, some people say, well, you know, you can't term people. My answer to that is you actually have to terminate people.

Because when you have a rapid growing company, the company is evolving so fast that if the person that was qualified to be in a $30 million company as the director of operations is not qualified necessarily to be at $100 million company that's the director operations with four different fulfillment centers and roasting facilities and everything. But that's really difficult. Especially if they're the first generation. I saw this in a company. I worked for it. the founder and the very first people there, that first generation, I would say, I would describe it as, I don't know, they would describe it as, but as the second, third, whatever, you know, secondary tertiary, whatever four is,

as they start coming in, and you start getting to that second, third, fourth level higher, they're buying the experience and they're buying the position. There was a lot of budding heads between those closest to the nucleus and everybody else flying around. But it was the right decision for the company. I mean, you went, I mean, you brought in a, co-CEO recently, right? How did you arrive at that decision where you knew you needed to make that call? You know, I'm tired, man.

I'm tired. No, I think, honestly, most of it had to deal with, I want the company to grow and I want it to be successful and I want to fulfill my obligation to my customers and the community. And I got to a point where I was having a really hard time figuring out how to do do it and being realistic with yourself and your capabilities and also understanding like you know I'm 20 pounds heavier than it was you know three years ago uh my girls are two and five I want to see them grow up I don't want to have fucking heart attack you know you enjoy the sunshine as well I do yeah um so you should get out in it yeah I should so I just kind of did this I did a self-assessment

and a life assessment, which is what's best for the company, what's best for me. I want to see my girls grow up. That's what this whole thing was about. When I started it, it was emancipating myself from government service and living a life. And I wrote my own mission statement. So if we go back to the very beginning, I wrote a mission statement for myself when I left government service. And serving your country is a very honorable endeavor.

I'll never I'll never think otherwise but it was time for me to go and when I said my mission statement was to emancipate myself from government service and live a happy and fulfilling life

happiness was void in my life at that point like completely void I enjoyed that we touched on I think on the first podcast you're talking about grinding into dust yeah I was I mean, I was very afraid because I didn't have any emotion. It was very difficult for me.

I was afraid I wouldn't be able to have the capacity to love my children. You know, after nine years of whatever, 10 years. Yeah. And I was very afraid of my life experiences preventing me from new experiences. And so I'm the guy that will say, hey, I'm not. qualified for this point forward. I can, but, like, I'm never going to, I'm never going to be in a position with the company where the company will have to come to me and say, we know you're the founder owner.

We know that you control the company, but you fucking suck. Yeah. And actually for the company to survive, you need to take the seat. Too many lives depend on the company being successful and evolving to the next level. And to be just super frank. I just don't think that I, I mean, I just don't think that I could do it. And when I say that, if I did it, it would come at a massive sacrifice, which would have been probably open heart surgery by the time that I'm 50.

And it would defeat the mission statement that you wrote for yourself. Yeah. Single biggest, two-part question. Single decision that had the greatest positive impact and the biggest mistake you've made along the way. the best decision I ever made was bringing Matt and Jared in to the company they're you know Matt Best and Jared Taylor they're great people they're great human beings

they're very passionate they fill my life with with happiness literally every time I'm around them and that's that's really hard to come by yeah best decision by hands down best decision Which is interesting because we were talking about this the other day as well. Oftentimes you'll hear people cautioning you of going into business with your friends.

Yeah. And I liked your response and let me know I get this wrong. But it was, you know, don't go into business with people you wouldn't want to be friends with. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Because I don't, I'm never friends with people that I don't trust. Ever.

Like, never. Yeah, it's a ticking time bomb. Yep. And if you, how people select their friends, you have to share a lot of different experience. experiences and be able to trust them. You know, just like if we're hunting, you know, I have to trust that you're not going to be a total, you know, an idiot. Like, I don't want to get my head blown off. No guarantees.

No guarantees. But, you know, your friends have to provide legitimate value in your life. They have to increase who you are, not decrease you. And you can't be constantly pulling people up the mountain. Your friends can't be that person either or those people. So yeah, people say you never go into business through friends. I say never, well, yeah, never go into business you can't be friends with. And I truly believe that.

But the problem is, is people select their friends on an artificial circumstance. They go into friendships because they don't understand, and when I say that, I'm not devaluing friendships, but they don't understand what a real friend looks like. And I think that's the thing that we do. We get it. Like a real friend. Yeah. the people who are there when your chips are down yeah that are always they're the people that are

positive they're encouraging you they legitimately want to see your success they don't want they don't want to say great job but deep inside they're they're not believing that your friends have to be those people that are like your cheerleaders but they're also the people that will give you the real deal yeah like when you're messed up they're going to be the people coming in going giving you the hard news too the hard reality step into the team room we have to talk Yeah. Can you want to work 20 minutes early day? You know what?

Let's meet for coffee before work. Hey, let's meet off site. Yeah. Yeah, let's meet off site. Yeah. I just wanted to take this time to talk to you about how fucked up you are. Yeah. Yeah.

And I've had great friends that have done those things for me for my adult life. It's important to have those people, man. Biggest mistake. One, you're like, son of a bitch. You know, that's funny. I have one hire that, which goes into our previous thing, which was never going to business you can be friends with. I hired people and then I hired one individual specifically.

And I thought he was a friend. But I didn't really know the guy all that well. And I would say my biggest regret or mistake in my company was not, attracting, recruiting, and putting in a professional HR person really early, early in the process, and then also being able to screen people more effectively versus the people that I think are good, because my gut's not always right. Yeah, that makes sense. And that one came back on me pretty hard.

Coming from our subculture, I don't know if you've experienced this, but it's been a very difficult. learning process for me because most of the guys that we that we served with or worked with when you ask them something they'll tell you the truth or when they say they're going to do something they're typically going to do it there's not there's less excuses and less lying right what i've had to deal with i guess is the adjustment to people that there are a lot of people out there that lie, which is, it's like a foreign, it's a foreign concept to me. And there are people that will directly do things to benefit themselves. And ultimately, they're, they're fine with sacrificing you on the altar of their own benefit. And I hadn't, I'd met a few people that

were self-serving, like, you know, the me versus mission, but we had more mission than me's a lot of the time. Anomily and not the norm. And the me's were, were less me-dreferving. And the me's, driven than some of these characters that are so McLevelian in business that it's crazy to me where it's such a foreign concept where wow this person will really just say anything and do anything and they I haven't I've run across that like with Afghans and you know Iraqis and things like that but I hadn't really run across that so biggest mistake is there's this old adage and I think Zuckerberg actually said it which was higher, slow, fire fast. If I would have, if I would have lived my life in this business like that,

it would have saved me mountains of sleepless nights because it's not just whether or not the person will be manipulative or lying. It's the amount of drama they cause in a company too. You know, they might not be a great cultural fit for your company. They might be a good person, but just the drama that's attached with people that don't fit into the team organically, man, that's tough. And then it's tough to unwind the whole thing, you know? So I would have done and lived my business life with higher, slow, with a lot of process and a lot of getting to know people.

And then as soon as I smelled something, out the door. Yeah. And I think that's great advice. It is. One more question. Ready to transition topics? Yeah. Okay.

This one's been sitting on my brain for a while, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this. Okay. War crimes. Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah. Because we've been chatting, and the SEAL teams have been making the news for, I would say, other than awesome reasons. One, I don't think they should make the news at all, but what has been kind of leading the news.

So there's two instances that I can think of, and I'll preface everything that I say beyond this with. I don't know anything about these incidents other than what I can read. I don't know any of the individuals who are involved. And I'm limited to what anybody else has research to on Google. And also, and probably most importantly, I 100% believe in presumption of innocence. And so until the court of law or jury, they're peers, says, hey, you guys are guilty of this.

I'll leave it to that. So one of them that we had talked about was an East Coast SEAL team member, a Marsock Marine. I'm pretty sure those two details are correct. Right. Charged with essentially murdering a green beret overseas around somehow tied to an operational fund, which will be the easiest way to describe that for somebody who's not familiar with an op fund. It's typically the fund that you have available for incidentals,

and it's going to be a fund that you might have earmarked for a certain amount of expense, but you don't exact know what those expenses are going to be. So it's incremental expense. And you have a little bit of latitude in how. you spend it as long as you can justify it. So it's not like that bills are serialized, but the lump sum is serialized and you have to account for its expendent. Yeah, all the details. And I think the story that I read in Reuters was it was Intel Fund.

So it was actually a section of the op-on that was allocated for sources. Yeah. And so then the second scenario directly tie in into the teams is Eddie Gallagher, who I don't know. Very high profile case. Yeah. Extremely high profile case. I've actually had a few journalists reach out to me for my take on it. I'm like, dude, I got nothing.

I have Google, which is how I'm finding out my information. So that case, just go to Google for people who don't know what that is if you want to find out more about it. But my question when it comes to war crimes is, let us – so those are the two scenarios. Yep. So, again, innocent until proven guilty. if it were to be found out that in both of those cases, the verdict were to come back as guilty, would that surprise you?

No. It doesn't surprise me either. And I don't know how to articulate to people that obviously it's not okay, but that living that long in that environment is going to fray certain people at edges. And the behavior that comes from that is going to be other than what you would want to have on the headings of a newspaper. For sure. I don't think you can manufacture ultra-violent men and not having some negative outcomes from that. I was talking to a U.S.S.ok or J-Sach psychologist a few years ago.

And we were actually talking about Tier 1 units. And he said, yeah, we don't have an issue. with, because we were talking about on killing, which I'm sure you're familiar with the book. Grossman, yeah. We're talking about, you know, the man's propensity to take life and how to build that in. And he said, we actually don't have that problem.

Like most of the guys that we recruit and come in through these pipelines are typically geared to do that. They don't have a lot of psychological issues doing it. It's turning it off that we have a problem with. So we're more concerned with turning it off than we are turning it on. Interesting. And that was, I mean, a direct quote, which was, yeah, the guys that are moving through these selection process. And we don't know, you know, correlation causation.

There's really no way to determine necessarily why people are selected and who can drive through these selection processes go through to the, you know, the top 1% of each one of these units. But typically, I don't know if you've seen it. You don't have a lot of, what do they call those when you get stopped in the, or frozen jumpers, guys that are like, I'm not ready to jump. Oh, like freezing the door? Yeah, yeah, you don't. Jump refusals. Yeah, jump refusals.

You don't have a lot of jump refusals when it comes to taking life. Like, you just don't. But you do in other portions of the military. but I've necessarily I've not necessarily seen a significant amount of that and that would directly

correlate back to what he said where the selection process and the individuals that moved through these selections are typically more geared for that and it's more about how do we turn it off than having to turn it on

and then when you have people that have been selected indoctrinated, trained and deployed and then you don't know what's going on with their brain chemistry either. You know how many times these guys have been blown up? Yeah.

You don't know how many rounds have been by them or through them or gone through their friends. These, and you know better than anybody, that psychological soup of just the experience, but then take some trauma and lots of overpressure and a few other things in there, we have no idea what's what the fully baked cake looks like going on in there. And I think part of this might be a direct result of how long we've been at war. And, you know, there are a lot of guys that are very good at, I mean, there's a ton of guys that are very good at their job. But we don't know exactly what's going on in their brains. And I think that that's one thing that we have to be concerned with as a community just in general.

It's so complex, and I don't think that we've even come close to scratching the surface. Yeah. on the type of effects that the brain has experienced just from combat. Because when you are in the frame of mind of taking life as easy, and I mean, you know a ton of guys like this, when taking life is easy, it becomes less significant the entire event. Yeah, it has less value.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's as easy as like, you know, swatting a fly for a lot of guys. So I was talking to Ivan when I was out in Sun Valley, I asked him this question. I'd be curious to hear your answer. Do you think they should limit guys' exposure

to combat throughout a career? I think so. To ease that transition back or to be able to govern the off switch? I do. Yeah. That's 100%. Yeah, I think I think you can't run the horses at Red all the

time. Well, you can, but the outcome has to be understood what it's going to be. Because, again, you go back to an egg timer. Well, not an egg timer. It's a ticking time bomb. Yes. Well, and they used to limit, so a good example of that would be, one, I think a lot of this wasn't for psychological effects,

but I remember my grandfather, he flew B24 Liberators, and in World War II, out of the allusions into Japanese territory. And you only had to fly so many missions before they're like, you're good. That's right. You're good. Nailed it. you're out buddy see you later and talking to him he never unpacked it with me you know in great detail he just was in like a passing conversation and i've read things about it since where i think that after a certain

point even though a person continues to want to go back and do the job i think which is what evan said he's like you know you'd be directly limiting what guys have expressed their you know their meaning or purpose in life to do. And my response to that is, yeah, but you might be saving their life in the end or somebody else's life in the end. I don't know the answer to it, but I think I fall on your side of the house where I think I think at some point the community owes it to the people who create and are the community that somebody steps back and like, hey, man, you're going to be in a training capacity.

We're never going to make you leave, but you're going to take the knowledge you have now and you're going to impart it on other people as opposed to continuing to fray at the edge of the potentially harming those that don't deserve to have harm come to them. Well, and yourself, one of my really good friends, he was killed last year. Actually, yeah, just at the end of last year, he had been met it out once for TBI. So he'd been blown up in Iraq a couple times, and he got blown up in Afghanistan. And the last time on a complex attack that killed a couple of guys on his team. He was out in recovery for two years.

He'd done multiple, I think, I don't know how many rotations the dude had done. And then he lobbied to come back in on active duty. He was put back in on active duty. He did a couple more years on active duty. And then he was killed at the end of last year. And, you know, Eric's incredible man, like, absolutely one of the best men that I've known in my life. He was still active duty at the time. Yeah, still active duty, and he fought so hard to come back and get on active duty.

Such a shame, man. That sucks. And I couldn't help but think he did such a service to the community. He started a TBI Foundation in Boston, and he was helping other service members. He was doing all these incredible things, and I'm like, man, this is such a loss to the community in such a big way. Not that every life isn't a loss. Some have greater impact on humanity than others, though. His impact would have been felt for generations within the community,

and we lost somebody that was obviously very significant. And I've thought a lot about that exact same question, which is like, when is enough enough when you have to say, hey, man, you are going to serve a much greater purpose to the military by making sure these guys coming in that are much younger, and they're going to be exposed to combat, they're going to be in multiple rotations. You have to make them better

so we don't get guys killed down range. And two, you have to make the institution better. We have to learn from you to see how we don't repeat these same mistakes. And now we've lost that, his experience, forever, and this family has lost it. So it's like, man, you can only get blown up, shot at so many times before.

It's just a matter of when, the odds stacked against you. So I would agree with that. I would disagree with Sean. I think he's, I don't know if he said, no, you'd be taking it away. I think you have to, at least at a certain point, protect people from themselves because people will run themselves. They'll kill themselves.

Yeah. These guys will kill themselves not. Or if they psychologically snap, they'll kill other people as well. Well, my really good friend, Tom Spooner, runs Warriors Heart, which is a nonprofit out of Texas. he's a retired star major out of Delta and he was telling me he was telling the story

where he was driving to and from work at Fort Bragg and he had suffered a TBI and he had to plug in the compound on his GPS because he couldn't remember how to get there and he couldn't remember how to get home but he's still going to work and he was still trying to do the job

at some point we have to make it psychologically acceptable. More importantly, I think the community has to say you've done enough for the country. You have to embrace those people and create an environment where a guy can go. Because what I tell you what Tom, I don't know Tom at all, but for myself, if I was having to do that, what I likely wouldn't do if you were the command psych, I wouldn't go, hey, Evan, I can't, I'm not going to come to you and say, hey, I don't remember how to get home. People will look at you and say, hey, are you good?

And you go, yeah. Yeah. Are you good? Right. You good? Of course I'm good. Yeah. What's wrong with you?

Yeah. You know, these are guys that are, you know, will break a foot on a, on mile two of a 26-mile infill. And tell you two weeks later. And yeah. Their foot will essentially be crushed and they will walk on it for 20-some miles to a target, X-fil. And you won't know until they're like, man, my foot, I can't put this boot on anymore. It's like, why? Oh, I crushed it.

Oh, you did. Well, maybe you should get that looked at. I'm not sure. You know? I mean, I don't know. I spend a good amount of time thinking back about previous occupation, and there's a lot of aspects to it that are fascinating, from the social dynamics to the mental gymnastics that the military does a good job

of teaching you how to do double backflips and triple gainers, you know, and to work your way through complex problems. But I just think the biggest place for improvement, at least in the, the community that I came from is that more tail end where you're embracing the guys like listen you know trying to figure out a way to ease that transition or to just be able to

I mean well a lot of the guys like I said though they won't say anything so it becomes so difficult and oh did you do your post-deployment health survey yes I did and I also know which questions to answer the correct way so you leave me alone yeah so I don't have to talk to a psych for you know two months and

you're ostracized by your subculture and there are all these negative effects. You've seen them, I've seen them, where people start to self-medicate. They turn to alcohol typically and then they're writing both alcohol and ambient to try to sleep and now they're not necessarily sleeping and they're drinking too much and you've got the, you can see it. You can see it unfold and guess what? That person typically will never say a word, but you can see it and you know what's going

on. I think now that I have some distance from the community, I didn't realize how many people in and around me were having issues because it just became part of the subculture to, you know, to drink. And when I say that, like alcohol is a super easy drug to turn to most of the time. And I didn't realize how many guys were drinking to go to sleep. I was like most. Yeah. It's crazy. I mean,

I can add to that with some perspective being out of my own community. I didn't realize how much I was falling into those same trappings myself. Yeah. Until it's like,

wow, man, I hate feeling like this when I wake up. I'm going to not drink every day this week. Not that I was ever a huge drinker, but it's like,

I'd come home from deployment like, oh, where's this extra ambient? You know what I mean? All those little just additional pushes to help. It's so easy to fall

into those trappings. And then, yeah, It's got to be compounding. I don't know anything about the brain other than it's essential for life. Fairly essential. That's a good statement. Struggle with that one.

But I don't mean, I just look back and it's like, okay, I could have seen myself falling into those easier than I probably would have liked to admit. Well, it's culturally acceptable, too. And push to some degree, especially the booze, which I appreciated when I was 21. So did I. I had a blast. Yeah. So did I. Like, I mean, it was, like, think about all the old dudes.

It's like, it was almost a brag. Like, oh, that guy, he can't really put him back, you know. Well, absent an enemy to fight, we had to fight beer bottles. Yeah. And I saw it even from your guys' side when I say that. And I don't know if you saw this, but it seemed like the older-gen, uh, damn it guys. Wow.

It was part of the culture. Oh, my God. I mean, obviously the Marcinco books are, they go in the fiction category, not nonfiction, but he's pretty open with how, you know, we're going to go out and we're going to get as drunk as humanely possible. We're going to have a contest who can act the most sober while drinking enough to kill a donkey. Yeah. And then, oh, by the way, your page is going to go off shooting qualls. Yeah.

I worked with some of those guys in the past where they went hard. It was culturally ingrained, hard in the pain. when one of my friends he actually passed away last two years ago now his son actually works for us and he was that guy where you're like

you know bigger than life loud somewhat obnoxious I mean he's a great guy but he you know he could when he was a he was by every definition

an alcoholic but at that time but you so you go into a community for 20 years right yeah you're still going to take those behaviors with you afterwards, especially, like I got into the teams, I was 19. Yeah. That didn't stop them from like, hey, man, we're going out.

Yeah. So that behavior ingrained that young. If you don't keep that in check, it's going to put you in check later on in your life when you're functioning idiot. You can't get anything done. You can't get anything done. Like we were talking about it earlier, get these guys that get older, they've had a few injuries because their life is dangerous.

You know, you're living a dangerous life. Then you have. ankles, knees, shoulders, necks. Yeah. I mean, for about everybody. Everybody, you know, everybody, like, I can tell you just by, like, looking at you and understanding, well, I don't understand your past, too, but pretty much everybody. Yeah.

You know, well, how do you do that? How do you destroy your body? Well, which is essentially what we're doing for years on end. And then I know that it was culturally acceptable for us where it was like you're going to live on caffeine, nicotine. We were talking about the other days. All the a ines. You're going to fill yourself up.

with ibuprofen, like just shovel that stuff away. They call it Ranger Candy. Yeah. It should have come in a Pesdispenders. Yeah, the 800s. Yeah, the eight hundies. Just like thrashing yourself. It's like a freaking 45 round.

Yeah, just like, it's like, and it was just shake the bottle. You know, here you go. Here's your MREs, your all your ains. Here's your ibuprofen. You know, run this horse until it stops. The problem with that is we, That is an extreme disservice to the people that serve the country to just say, we're going to put you to pasture now.

And I think that's what they, I think that's what society has done. And then to pass these selections, you have to have a psychology that's basically directly contributed to the lack of openness. So I'm way more open than I have been in my life at this point talking about these things. Whereas if we would have had this conversation four years ago, I would have never been able to tell you that I was, afraid that I wouldn't have the capacity to love my children.

I've just come to that conclusion in the last year. I wouldn't. And you've been away from it now for what? Four years? Yeah, almost five, five years. I got it the last day of June 2013, so I'm at like five and a half. And I have, it's amazing the thoughts I have about myself now, looking back in the mirror, and I feel like I understand myself better.

But one of the best things for me to understand myself better, was the geographical isolation to Montana. Oh, yeah. And because San Diego and Virginia Beach, right? Yeah. If you throw a nickel, you're going to hit five team guys. And so it's easy to get stuck in conversations with the same vernacular. And you're not, I didn't find myself.

And it's nothing negative about the community. It was just something I look back on on myself. You're like, stuck talking about shit that doesn't matter. So there's no evolution and there's no innovation. And I wasn't taking a hard look at myself. But in the 18 months, we've lived in Montana. and I think I have come to understand myself better and the impact that the service had on me, for sure. But it took time.

Yeah. And if we, I wouldn't have been able to have this conversation with you four years ago because I didn't have, I didn't have the vernacular to describe the experience or the understanding of the impact it had on me. Yeah. And I think with time to, you have, you've opened yourself up, I would imagine, a diversified pool of information. You've talked to more people. Well, I wasn't paying attention. to anything other than work when I was in. Yeah.

Because they have time. Well, there's no time, and there's no other means of information other than inside the subculture. So, like, it was the same thing. And in-hall packets are never wrong. They're never wrong. I remember thinking, I remember thinking when I left, I was like, man, I'm free. To a certain degree, I was like, man, I'm free.

And not in like an overwork. overwhelmingly positive way. I was like, okay, well, now what do I do with my life? You know, what do I do with my life now that I don't have this as part of my identity? My dad said something was really good. He said, your rear view mirror is three by four, right? Your front windshield is three by four feet. So stop looking in the rearview mirror and start looking in the front through the front windshield. And that's kind of way, way, way. I've dealt with it is just I try to turn the page on it and just evolve now. So I'm no longer that guy.

I'm the same dude. I just, if we're always living in the past, we're never living in the future. If we're always thinking and dreaming about the past, we can't think and dream about the person we want to become the future, right? It's a super easy equation. It's like really put yourself in the... Simple, not easy. Yeah, simple.

But I've really tried that the last year, especially with my kids. kids really help me too where I really visualize myself being the best father that I can be and that actually helps with my decision making because if that's my primary objective is to be a good father to my children and this is the way I define a good man

that means I can't work 20 hours a day because actually I've got these two other kids I've got these two other children that I have to be a good father for because they've continued to visualize what success looks. like. Anyway. I like it. And that's the end of our power hour segment.

Power hour. Would we go an hour? 120. That's not bad. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. We covered coffee and war crumbs. Thanks a lot.

I appreciate it. That's it, everybody. 74 episodes down one more to go, hit the milestone of 75. Thank you to everybody who has taken the time to reach out to me with feedback, whether it's on iTunes, write and a review. And like I always say, if you think the podcast sucks, go put a one-star up and tell me I suck in the review. I don't care. I mean, I do care. I'm interested to hear how you think I can make it better. And if you think it's great, then do me favor and go there and

give it whatever review you think it deserves. What else? I was out of some of the cleared hot apparel that is landing this week, probably midweek, but what I'm going to do is put it up for sale, the numbers that are available that I have ordered that are coming midweek. They're going to come up for sale. Actually, they'll be live by the time this podcast. airs if not shortly thereafter so if you were looking to get one of the shirts they should all be available if the item is not going to land until later in the week it's not going to ship until later in the week so if i can get it out the door first thing in the morning uh tomorrow or in the next few days i will but if not you can have to just wait a few days and it'll make its way to you and i think

that is about it thank you everybody for the support and thanks for helping me spread the word with episode 75.