Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 268 - Glenn Cowan

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

Glenn founded One 9 Investments while serving as an Assaulter Officer in Canadian Special Operations Forces; Joint Task Force 2. As a Squadron Commander, Glenn specialized in leadership, command, and strategic planning and successfully translated these skills with the creation of a venture capital fund that invests utilizing the principles of special operations planning, risk mitigation, and execution. Having served on multiple combat deployments in Afghanistan, sensitive information operations in the Middle East, and Hostage Recovery operations in Africa he was a strategic planner and tactical commander. A graduate of McGill University, The Army Operations Course, The Special Operations Assaulter Course, Canadian Securities Course, and Ivey Executive Leadership program, arms Glenn with an unconventional perspective and application to the investment battlefield.

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Today's episode is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee. So I'm on their website right now, blackriflecoffee.com. And the first thing that came up are two brand new ready-to-drink flavors. You have vanilla bomb and salted caramel. Now, one of these is a 300-millimeter-trip-shot. Let me just tell you, I'm still on the road right now, completing the Triple-7 expedition.

We've got one more stop to go. And I've been using these heaters occasionally to give me that little bump in performance, and actually it's not even in performance. It's a bump in attention. If that's not your jam, well, don't worry about it. You can choose from coffee clubs. You can choose from subscriptions, whether that be of coffee, merchandise, stickers, you name it. They have what you need. You can get individual bags of coffee. You could hook up your friends. You could get a coffee mug, whatever it may be. So if you want to support an amazing brand founded by amazing people, two of which are on this trip with me.

We've got two Black Rifle employees who are putting their money where their mouth is. Go to Black Riflecoffee.com and support. And that's it on the business side of the house. My guest today is a member of the Triple Seven Expedition team. He is our lone Canadian. And every once in a while, I call him maple syrup. And he doesn't seem to mind, which sucks, because nicknames should never be picked by yourself.

and they should always have some type of negative connotation. Even though I love Maple Serpent, I find it's delicious. Who's Glenn, though? Glenn spent nearly 20 years in the Canadian military, most of that time, in a special operations capacity. He spent a good amount of time at Joint Task Force 2, also known as JTF2, and I just recommend Googling that yourself. But post-military is where I find it getting really interesting.

I'm going to call him an entrepreneur, and specifically he founded, 19 investments while serving as an assault officer in the Canadian Special Operations Forces, which I've said many times, I think is a fantastic idea for people to do while they're in. Lift your head up and look at the horizon. But what he's doing now, I find to be incredibly interesting just because I don't know much about it. He does a way better job of explaining it than I do. So here's another podcast.

I hope you guys enjoy the green screen. Episode number 268 with Glenn Cowan. Enjoy. The red smoke. To the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. Oh, one a minute. Like, you can't really train for it.

You know? Like, no matter how many times you get kicked in the nuts, the actual time you get kicked in the nuts, it's still going to hurt. I agree. But cold, I would start saying I start bitching about the cold at about minus 15 Celsius. So 15 below. Where do they converge and they're the same? I don't know.

It's like negative 50? Yeah, it's cold. What's negative 15? Celsius in Fahrenheit. I don't know. Like probably five, 10. Okay. I was thinking you were going to say

far into the negatives, like the sub-zeroes. It's pretty sub. That's pretty cold. Like, and cold bugs me when it impacts my life. Like, when I have to, like, start my car for 15 minutes before I get in it, or... Do you guys have to plug them in in the wintertime? Not in Ontario where I live.

In Edmonton, you plug your cars in. They'll... It will seize, right, if you don't? Yeah. So every parking spot has a plug and you got your block heater and that's real. But it gets really cold there. Like it was about minus 40 Celsius out west all over Christmas. But that's unseasonably cold. Are you saying public parking spots have plug-ins too? Everywhere. Really? Everywhere. Okay. That actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Otherwise you'd never leave your house. Right. But it's a better cold out there. And this is where cold is like, well, in the eastern Canada, people are like, well, it's a wet cold. So it gets right through to your bone. It's like, it's a, it's cold. It's cold. It's cold. It's cold. Cold is cold. All I know is I do have a cold plunge, and I have to heat my cold plunge.

So, you know, it's... I feel like that's an excessive purchase. You could just go outside. You could. I mean, it's not an excessive. I mean, it's a 170-liter gallon cow trough. Like, it's not like Sorelli's fancy boy cold plunge. It's just a piece of galvanized metal full of water.

I'm going home to one of those fancy cold plunges. I would do it too. I... Did you get the hookup from the guy? No. Oh. If my hookup, he means full retail off the internet. I totally did.

Yeah, the must be nice. Must be nice to have one of those. Like, yeah, it was nice to go onto the internet and pull my credit card out and pay for it in its entirety. But that guy, that guy that was here with the SpaceX crew, he was like a rep for one of the cold plunge companies. And when he saw, yeah, so when Mike, in the Drop Zone Everest video, when Mike was like talking. about his hot cold. He actually showed the plunge. He showed the plunge and that and it was that same company and that dude that that uh Tyler no like the Instagram dude. Devin yes so he's like a rep for that company and he got super excited about it and couldn't stop and was talking about

the plunges. I know people a few people that have one and they they seem to be really nice. It's got the full filtration. I guess it circulates very often the filter it was the same thing when I found out about the, what are those tanks, zero gravity tank, an isolation tank. Float tanks. My first time I'm like, this is disgusting. And then you find out about the filtration system. And the first time I ever tried one of those actually was in Vancouver. Oh, yeah?

I was up there doing some technical advising stuff. I think from a guy from your old community, he was the armorer. Okay. Which would make sense because it was being shot in Canada. Probably easier for them to source weapons. but it was a retail facility where you'd go rent the time in it. Oh, cool. It was.

It kind of feels greasy, though. Like it's like heavy thick. Yeah, but then when you think about everyone else in it. I did a lot of research, though, about the filtration. Come out with like some fungus? I think that they would be shut down really fast if that happened. You'd think so. Yeah.

What I'm not looking forward to with the coal plunge, for me, it's completely mental. It's hard. despise being like being cold I can deal with being wet I can deal with I despise the combination of the two of them so for me if I like I can sit in mind for a while if my hands and feet are out of the water I can go totally neck deep the second I put my hands and feet in it's like a circuit completes and it's like fucking painful interesting yeah it's as long as there's something out I find it's okay. I mean, it's not pleasant by any stretch, but...

Do you dunk your head? When you get in full submersion and then leave it out? Full submersion, and I leave it out. Jerich, we were talking about coal plunges at one of the meals the other day. Jericho's like, yeah, I just go lay down in the snowbank. It's not the same. I don't think it is the same either, but I appreciate the enthusiasm. Because I'm going to tell you what I'm not going to do is go lay down in the snowbank.

How did you become a member of this merry band of misfits? Mr. Sorrell. How did you guys meet? We met at a bar in Ottawa, which is my hometown, or where I live now with my family, on Remembrance Day. And Mike was in his community. We were in our community, and the subunits within those communities were very close. We did a lot of stuff with Mike's sub element from his community. Mike did some time with an army unit.

While he was in that army unit, we had a guy there. as well. And so they became friends and then Mike came to Ottawa. And we hit it off and it's actually a fucking hilarious story. I told it on his podcast. But I don't know if you've heard this, but I'll tell it very quickly. We got in a big bar fight. Not me and Mike, but there was like a rash of stolen valor in Canada. I remember you referencing a Trident getting ripped off. Is this this night? They ripped off all his ribbons and then he was so mad that he's like, he took us Trident off. He's like, you want my fucking Trident motherfucker? And he used it as a ninja star.

And he threw it at these guys. So what had happened was... I was going to back up. What's going on with the stolen valor? Okay. So, like, legit stolen valor. Like in the bar you're in or just in general? Like, leading up to that remembrance day. Okay. So November 11th, remember's day is your, is

Canada. Canada's like... Veterans Day. Veterans Day. Or Memorial Day. It's more of a Memorial Day. We don't have a Veterans Day. So it's kind of both. So it's obviously mostly about Armist from World War I, World War II, but with the war the last 20 years, it's kind of, we have this new generation of veterans. It's kind of got a pretty powerful resurgence

in the way we celebrate. And it's quite a, you should come this year. It's really fun in the sense that like, it's a powerful ceremony. So we were downtown right at our National War Memorial and my old unit would kind of take over this pub right on the corner, get in out of the cold, as soon as sort of the 21 gun salute is done,

And, you know, the last post is played, we kind of, you know, fuck off inside the bar and have a Guinness or start drinking. And it's usually a pretty long day of drinking. And Mike was in town for it. And the guy's told Mike to wear his uniform. So Mike shows up in like navy dress blues. He looked, he looked amazing. He looked super sharp. We don't really wear uniforms a lot.

Some guys were in a uniform. Some weren't. Were they fucking with him by saying you should wear your uniform? Not really. and if they were, if they were, like, it's not a good way to fuck with them because it's, like, actually pretty cool.

Yeah. But, you know, guys have, I find now guys have started wearing their uniforms on that day a little more. Like, we're taken pretty seriously, but at the same time, it's like, you know, once the ceremony's done, it's kind of like let your hair down a bit.

Anyway, long story short, leading up to this, there had been a ton of stolen valor's. Like, guys, like, creating uniforms and walking around Ottawa and, like, being called out in social media and, like, completely, like, fictitious metals and you're talking about stuff that's probably making the news it's made it's totally

making the news so there's like stolen valor that year with that mike came up was very topical and you know it's like at a wedding the longer you drink if you're in something formal the more stuff comes off yeah so by four or five o'clock in the afternoon we're probably 10 or 12 pints into the day if you are wearing a uniform jackets off ties loosen all anyway so his no one recognized his uniform um and and you guys get medals for doing push-ups so he has like not it's not a fucking squads he's got like a fucking rack of medals i call it a war salad it is a war yeah it is it's like you know we're lucky if you get something in canada

it's like um anyway the we we partied at this bar and then we went over to the legion like the the VA and mike was talking to a girl and there were some reserve soldiers there Canada's got a really active militia, not like you're kind of like Michigan militia, but like... Different meaning, I get it. Like primary reserves is like a militia, and these units have really proud heritagees. And there were some pretty drunk reserve soldiers who, again, you know, take the day

pretty seriously. And so they, they like completely surrounded Mike and accosted him and started calling him out for Stolen Valor. So they're like, you're a fucking poser. What is this shit? wearing you fucking making up your own uniforms they're pushing them and you can just see like the compute going on in his head he's like I'm I'm a fucking Navy SEAL like he's like he's like he's like just starts posturing and it's the head twist I know I'm getting under his skin when

he'll start he like the left right left right so you could see it not computing and then he starts fighting back it turns into a giant scuffle it ends up like going down the stairs his ribbons get ripped off and as they're like coming out he's like you want my shit motherfuckers he pulls off his trident and he's just like like uses it as like a ninja star anyways trident went missing so the next day the next day we went down there a couple of guys in my unit knew who these guys were and kind of said you guys kind of overstepped poor choice gentlemen they felt they felt really bad like i think i know who a couple of them are now by name I think they felt pretty bad.

So I think they, you know, kind of apologized. Anyway, we went and we recovered Mike's Trident. And it's now under glass alongside some war awards in a rightfully honored spot. Is Mike's Trident proudly, proudly hung from the Remembrance Day, the Remembrance Day operation. He's lucky he got it back because if you guys hadn't recovered it, he would have had to spend. At least $3. Buy any Navy exchange or $2.50 on the internet to get another one. Can you just buy them in an exchange?

You must have a lot of people just buy them randomly. You know, I bet a lot of people buy them randomly, but I don't think it's for the intention of wearing them. Got it. You know, the Navy exchange, and for people who don't know what that is, it's on Navy bases, they, you know, they try to have almost everything that you would need. So you don't actually have to go off base.

Like they have a grocery store at a lot of places. And the exchange is basically, I'm going to call it a Walmart. Yeah, it's like a PX. A PX, yeah. Because of the variety of things that they sell. And, you know, uniforms are part of military service. So they have, you know, they have every officer and enlisted uniform that you can need depending on the season. They have the rank insignia.

And they have the warfare devices. I mean, you could, I mean, not. I would think that that's kind of like a little bit sacred though. I mean, the one that you get issued the first time is definitely very sacred. Ten years later. I guess. And so that one means a lot to me. But then you end up needing a, you have a dress white and a dress blue.

Yeah. And then, you know, depending on what your rank is, like if you are a chief or above or you're an officer, you're going to have working uniform with khakis. if you need to go something that's beyond. See, I didn't realize you guys had a dress blue until he showed up in that. And I was like, what the fuck is that? I wore mine like maybe three or four times.

I thought you guys were just like a few good men in the white stuff. That is in the summer. Ah. Also, it's seasonal. It is seasonal. It is seasonal. It is seasonal. It is a hundred percent seasonal.

Wintertime is blue, summertime's or whites. I didn't know that. But you end up with a small section of your locker is fully uniforms. And, you know, there's supposed to be an amount of, like, so your jump wings go just below a quarter of an inch. below the left breast left breast pocket then your war salad

or ribbon rack then your warfare pin and it actually takes a little bit of time if you're going to do it properly so what most people do is they have three complete sets a blue a white and a working

and so you don't have to like swap them around so you don't have to swap it so by like 10 years into your career you've bought some tridents because you need to do that stuff and honestly the the allure of it or the luster has worn itself off

but I tell you what before you have earned that I distinctly remember you know, the day leading up to the ceremony itself, the kind of reception from the boys. Yeah, it would be big. It was not blessed by the commanding officer, but at the same time, he was very aware of what was happening. Yeah.

That one meant a lot, and that has always meant a lot. But everything beyond that, yeah, I could see from an outside perspective where, you know, you wouldn't want to let people buy that stuff, but I think a lot of people just kind of buy it. And then out, first of up, anybody you see wearing a Trident, like out in town is suspect. Well, this to the whole stolen valor thing. Yeah. So going back to your question on how do I, why am I sitting here?

After that day, Mike, who's now affectionately known in our community as Magic Mike, yeah. We just kind of hit it off and became friends and stayed in touch. We both left the communities around the same time. We got building businesses kind of together going to, you know, bouncing ideas off each other on sort of an entrepreneurial journey. And then I was going to go to Everest with him last year. but I had a conflict and I ended up going elk hunting instead.

So, uh, it's not a bad second. It was not a bad second. Did you get a bowl? I got a big mule deer. That's not bad. I'm not a hunter. It was my first time. Uh, I'm going to start becoming a hunter.

Uh, it was a big, it was a big buck mule deer. Um, and, and I have a theory about hunting now as the non-hunter. I went out with another, you know, a, a long retired. I'm hired SEAL Team 6 guy, a good buddy of mine who runs a venture capital fund in the U.S. He's a business partner, owns this elk ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico with my dear friend and current business partner. And we, I'm like, look, I've never gone hunting. You're a really experienced hunter, like, teach me everything. Like, I'll do whatever you need me to do, putting urine on and shit.

And we went out and we just started stalking. They might have been fucking with you on the urine. No, it was my own urine. That's reasonable. I mean, that, yeah, that's, that's appropriate. So we stalked. I was fucking quiet, like totally trying to do everything legit and right. We didn't see a thing.

The last morning that we were out, the morning I shot my buck, we walked in loud on white light, gun slung, like fucking smoking and joking. As soon as we got into our hide, three elk scattered. It was still dark. and then we just saw tons of, like, deer. And I was, I was like, I think when you're in, like, kill mode, animals sense it. Like, if you're, like, keep in mind, I don't have a clue what I'm talking about. Yeah.

But, like, you might be, like, putting out, like, a pheromone or, like, like, super kill mode. And I think they can sense it because when we went in as, like, non-threatening, they were everywhere. The second, like, we went into, like, hunt mode, we didn't see shit. I there might be some aspect of that is correct I have not been hunting that long I think it's been four or five years at this point

I think what surprised me as I have spent more time out hunting and had more animal interactions when I first started I remember the very first trip I went with Dudley I was trying to every step it was exhausting

actually it was like those last few hundred yards before you get to a compound wall, right? You're trying to be super sneaky. You want to have the tactical advantage. And the morass around animals, I was surprised. Like, if you're able to go and sit and watch elk or get on a mountainside that they're on, they're noisy as fuck. Yeah. They make more noise and they'll tolerate more noise than you think. I think when we try to be sneaky, you end up moving in a way that I think draws more attention than just the noise. Like, I remember the first time I went hunting, I stepped on a stick. I'm like, that's it.

Yeah. There's no animal within 50 kilometers. We have to get out of here. And then when we actually got around elk, there was one time up, actually up in Alberta, I ended up sneaking my way into one of their bedding areas. Yeah. When they were in there? Oh, there was like five or six bowls screaming at each other, raking trees. Oh, wow. You could have had a DJ playing a set, and I don't think they would have cared. But I do think, you know, when you're making that like a little sneaky movement, which we're not trying to defeat humanize at that time, we're trying to be quiet.

Yeah. I think they, I think they see it and they don't like it. Like, who's this fucking idiot? But I also have no idea. That's where I land, though. I think it's more there. No, but I'd like to get,

I'd like to go again. I enjoyed it a lot. Yeah. It was, it was good. I was with Alex Coons. Okay. Frog Fuel. He was the, he's a big hunter.

So he, you know, when we shot a couple of, like he was walking me through. you know, quartering and field dressing. And it was, I learned a ton. It was super, it was, it was good. Yeah. We'll go again. And this time we'll jump in.

Check the regulations. Many states will make you wait 24 hours. That's fine. Because as with every regulation, there's a story, if not multiple, behind them. Don't eat explosives. Don't, yeah, don't, yeah, man. Yeah. But I have heard stories of people getting up in the air and either spotting for herds or actually trying to push herds.

Yeah, that makes sense. From private to public, then they want to land and go shoot it. Yeah, that would make sense. Because I've looked at doing a jump into both Idaho, Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming, and it was the same thing. We could, in fact, jump in, but you would need to wait 24 hours before you would be able to hunt, which I can respect that. Yeah.

How did you find your way into the military? It's, I think it's probably, like, pretty similar to lots of guys. It's just kind of, like, in your DNA from a young age. like all I did growing up was I just wanted to play guns. My friends called me Combat Boy and I grew up in the summers at the cottage in the woods and me and my brother and buddies would just go out and like sneak around the woods and hide from cars and like pretend we're spying doing little wreckies on. And then really like a powerful event when I was about 15 or 16.

I did a summer in Normandy in France and I did a battlefield tour. where I lived with another family over there. Like an exchange trip? Yeah, kind of an exchange. But I was just captivated by the beaches at Normandy. Is it as powerful as they say? It is. I have that on my bucket list of something that I have to go see before I die.

And I can remember, it's kind of funny. I was chatting with Jericho about it because he's second Rangers. And like, you go to Pointe Hawk, and that's where, like, the Rangers, you know, scaled the cliffs. And I love the Canadian military history, obviously. the American the American museum there the cemetery at Omaha Beach

like it is like overwhelmingly powerful and so I kind of said then I didn't like it wasn't like a big declaration but in my head I was like if something like that ever happens in our generation I don't want to miss it what age were you when you were in Normandy 15 six like probably grade 10

grade 9 or 10 so formidable age yeah like so malleable at that point yeah and then I went to university to play football in Montreal. Let's clarify. By that, do you mean soccer, rugby, or American rules football?

American football. Okay. But it's not American football. It's Canadian football. Bigger balls, because obviously we have bigger balls. I think that lends more to shittier hand-eye coordination. You know what? It's three-down football. So... What? Yeah, it's three downs.

So it's a huge passing game and it's a huge special teams game. It's actually, you get some, like, you get an amazing passing game going. What's like some average scores? High scores. But here's the other thing. You can also like win by a point because if you kick it through the end zone, you get a point.

So if you punt it and it goes at the end of the end zone, you get a root. It's called a rouge. This is a very weird combination of American football and rugby. It's, it's American football. Except there's like some really like, just some nuanced rule sets. But it's American football. No, it's not. We don't have any rougees?

You don't have a rouge. And the rouge is hilarious because you can fucking win by one point. Like, and it happens quite often. So it's like really like that special teams component in the game is really like really strategic. Anyway, long story short, I got there and I didn't want to play football. I was like, I'm not very good at football. Like I'm good. My friends were all playing football.

So it's, you know, it wasn't like I was still hanging out with those guys. And I was like, but I need to, I still need to be in a contact sport. So I joined one of these militia units. It was right down the street. It was called the Black Watch. it was a highland unit so you know aligned with the black watch in scotland um huge long lineage and history in all the wars um you know huge pipes and drums band full highland kilt dress um like that unit's the one you see in the world war one pictures where guys are in the trenches wearing kilts um

and i did that i did that for three years while i was at school um and that was a there's no like connection to the actual federal government no no it's it's a full-on part of the army. So you went through boot camp? Yeah, yeah. Like while I'm doing this, I'm going through boot camp. It's like, it's like a citizen militia. So you do boot camp sequentially or you break it up into chunks? I broke it up in the summers. Okay. But again, I went in as an officer, which, you know, part of maybe another discussion. Well, the military needs those too. We do. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of good and bad. I kind of sometimes regret it. Sometimes I wish often I was enlisted, certainly in my former.

Probably shortened your operational career. It did big time. Although I had a pretty good operational career. Anyway, summers at boot camp, it's kind of like a mix between like an ROTC and a West Point, but at a civilian university, but part of this like really cool unit with its own, like, culture and heritage and stuff like that. It's Canadian military system's built off the British regimental system. Okay. So, you know, just think of different regiments. And the idea was that, you know, in time of war, you mobilize the militia.

You have this core group of, you know, part-time soldiers that then mobilize. And that's actually who did all our fighting in the First and Second World War, was we mobilized the country, mobilized these militia regiments, and then fielded the militia regiments. By the end of university, I fell in love with it. It was a light infantry unit. I just fell in love with being a soldier and said, I'm going to do this full time. But I fucking hated the military at the same time. It's not uncommon.

And so right away, it was like, I don't want to be a career army guy. I'm like, I want to be in a special operations unit. Our unit or our country at that time really only had the one unit, which is our tier one unit. The command has since grown post-9-11 substantially. What does the special operations community look like in Canada, though, outside of the unit?

I mean, there have to be some. right, to a degree that are feeding into the tier one unit? Yeah. So it's a, the, the tier one unit in Canada is a joint force. So it draws, Canada's small, right? So it draws from all branches. Not from a land perspective. But from the fuck you're talking about.

So the, you know, up until 2006, from 1993 to 2006, that unit took over sort of federal counterterrorism responsibilities from the Royal Canadian Mount of Police, our federal police force. That's right. I forgot that you guys are not limited. by Pasicomatotas. We're not limited by Pasicomatotas. So we do have a pretty robust domestic mandate. Now that gets enacted at the request of the two ministers speaking. So again, in Canada, it's a British system. We have a Westminster system of parliament. So every minister is responsive, kind of like a secretary of state. It would be basically like Homeland Security asking Department

of Defense for support. Okay. Because for whatever reason, something has outstripped capacity. Makes sense? Yeah. But the military does have that remit, and that came through at that time, the Special Operations Unit called Joint Task Force 2. Why two instead of one? Just a nomenclature? We could probably make up some good story for it. Just skipping the one, right? I mean, not like the SEAL teams, we'll just start with one and then two and keep it commensical.

Keep it going. An odd even, yeah. 2006, the command started to grow. and a new unit was formed called Canadian Special Operations Regiment. And then we had another sort of national mission unit called the combined joint incident response unit, which was pretty heavy focused on CBRN. It's a, you know, it's a pretty checked out unit from the perspective of dealing with that specific shitty environment. We're talking to chem, bio. Yeah, chem, biol.

Radiological, yep. Pretty advanced capability they have. both those units could do unilateral missions as a unit, but basically the way that the command started to form its force employment concepts was basically like, depending on the task, standalone task force would be generated. Depending on the mandate and the mission, a unit would take lead and then, you know,

would force generate whatever it needed. Nine times out of ten, certainly in the early days, that was my former unit would probably CT those missions and then we would draw from the community based on what we needed and it's we're not it's just it actually works really well based on the size um so yeah it's it's grown we have a helicopter aviation squadron oh nice we have a training center now so i think there's five units that kind of under the command and control of a operational level headquarters led by a two star um what was your pathway to get there i just direct I just, yeah. So, oh, sorry, no, I came out of McGill. No, great question. I left university at 9-11. So I got stuck in Toronto. I was flying from the, you know, the last sort of getting my commission and coming out of my basic. I got posted to a light infantry battalion called three, third battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. It's in Edmonton. They really should lengthen that out. They should. Oh, it's fine.

words. Dude, this is a cool. The history of this regiment is amazing. You know, and I'll probably butcher it if we get into it. Anyway, at that time, it was a light infantry battalion. And that battalion was NATO's, or Canada's response to a NATO high readiness task force. I got stuck in Toronto because 9-11 happened. Ended up being late reporting in for my first platoon. And literally, like very shortly thereafter we got a warning order for deployment into Afghanistan. So we deployed on what was what we called Op Apollo. It was roto zero into Afghanistan post-9-11. And we hit the ground in January 2002.

And we were actually attached. That battalion was cut to 101st airborne combat brigade group. So we were like the fourth battalion. I'm going to butcher this. in the first of the 187 brigade combat team, 101st Airborne. You could have either butchered that or 100% correct, I have no idea.

And yeah, we went to Kandahar. We were there for seven months. Bless you. And there, that was like the defining moment of one of my best friends, my now best friends, who's a Sergeant Major in my old unit, blew by me on a dirt bike one day.

Fuck you! As we were like walking down the runway, fully like all our shit and I'm like if I'm going to spend my time fighting war it's it's going to be like that guy and then we had a really fortuitous kind of turn of events um we got a task to do security so we did op anaconda the tail end of op anaconda we were in the shawai cut valley kind of sweeping um sweeping up and mopping up from anaconda we did a bunch of other join ops uh and then we got a task to have one of our companies provide just like DNS security to Fob Chapman, which was the early days of the coast outpost.

Yep. Yeah, been there. It was a dirt runway and two dirt huts. That was it. And there was some J-Soc elements there. There were some intelligence community elements there. There was a British element there. And so we got a task to go out and just kind of do gate guard and perimeter security

and give these guys freedom of maneuver to operate. out coast in the frontier. And so we were going out to zero our guns that night. The company that got the task, my buddy came to me. He's like, hey, we actually have a real task. We're not just, you know, it was a lot of like this,

sitting around. There was a lot of sitting around on that deployment. So they took the range. And a company went out, and they got a 500 pound GBU dropped on them from an F-16 and decimated a platoon, killed four guys. who was controlling the aircraft

it was an air national guard pilot who decided to drop on his own he decided to drop on his own it's a crazy story man like it's it's pretty negligent i think he was criminally like he was that is extremely negative you have to have a ground controller to do that shit so they if i understand the story these two guys

um were probably 25 plus thousand feet yeah i think they were doing an administrative transit back from a combat air patrol i think they had their nav lights on and everything and they saw like a 240 machine gun position and some Carl G's firing on the range. And by that, they were looking through their sensors. There's no way they're seeing that naked eye from 20K.

Anyway, the one guy was like, we're getting hit. And his wingman's like, no, we're not. He's like, yeah, we are. I'm rolling into attack. And literally, like, they were clear of the space. And dude just rolled in and dropped a 500-pound GBU. That is so unfortunate. And so, you know, long story short,

In very short order, that task came to my platoon. We kind of missed all the, you know, all the, you know, the follow on with what happened with that, with that fratricide. And we ended up doing security for this camp. And that was a really profound turning point because it was like, if I ever thought I wanted to be in special operations before. You got a good look at the tip of the spear. And it was so, I was the guy that grew up kind of like reading books and like kind of like enamored with the almost like the romanticism of soft. and now here we were in a camp that's so fucking small that like we're sitting in the old groups of these guys

and we're so remote that like the American unit that's working there would be like hey do you guys think if we gave you some trucks you could like punch out and like secure a couple of key intersections so we could run a gauntlet back and we're like fuck yeah so we went out as like QRFs for these guys it was like yeah i just had a complete hard on for this you say for those of you just listening, he made a very big strong dick motion. Big strong dick. And I came home from that tour and I was like, as soon as I'm available to

meet the criteria and the to apply for selection to our unit, I'm doing it. And I did it. What is the criteria? I think it was, I think it was three years in like full MOC.

At that time, I can't remember if you needed, we weren't deploying that much. I think it was a pre-screening like a pre-selection. You had to be in rank and in trade for a certain amount of time. And I had literally to the day, I think it was three years. I put my application in. I was screened successful and then did selection and then our OTC.

And I was fortunate enough to be successful in my first go-around. Is it a similar or exactly the same experience for officer and enlisted? 100% the same. Good. Yeah, 100%. That's the same on our side as well. Yeah, and it's, I'm not going to talk about selection. Yeah.

That's, that's something we hold, we hold very near and dear to the community. You can't and find those answers. You can. And, but, no, there's, that's, for us, that's kind of the, the Cadbury, Cadbury caramel milk secret for us. It's just not something we talk about. But it is 100% the same. And we actually have a really, there's culturally, I think there's a pretty good, like, cohesion between officer NCO and listed culture at the unit. If you keep the pipeline and the entry as close to identical as possible, I think it really helps build that.

Yeah. In communities where there's a very distinct career pass selection crucible for the enlisted, and then other people start ballooning in it out and they come in for phases. Yeah. It almost by design creates this grating that manifests itself much, much later through, like, resentment. You're not setting, you're not setting the office. officer up for success by any stretch and doing that. Yeah.

Like, it's hard enough. That job can be hard enough. Like, it's, I mean, it's pretty intimidating going in as a, a new troop commander.

Like, it's, it's a pretty daunting task. Like, it's pretty, it's, I mean, from the enlisted side when I went through our selection,

it's a daunting and intimidating task just going in as a new guy, period. Yeah. Like, I can, I can, I laugh because I'm like, oh, man,

if I could go back in time and, like, redo my troop command time. the shit I would do differently. I must, if I could, like, if I could have had, like a GoPro on the wall

of probably some of the things I said or how, I would just be like, oh my God, what was I doing? And, and, you know, I've often thought, as I kind of have reflected on,

I'm like, I went to the unit very young. It, it was not a bad thing, but I also was pretty stupid. Like, I probably would have benefited from a few more years of, of just maturity.

Like, we had a really strong cohort of officers the year I went through. And the squadron I went to, you know, I went there with the officer who's now the commanding general of the whole force and the deputy commander of the whole force. Not to say that I would have been a go foe or a general officer. I was pretty good at stepping on my dick. But those guys were very senior to me. Like they were probably 10 or 12 year captains at selection and I was like a three year captain. So like I probably would have benefited from a little bit more maturity.

When did you start deploying with the unit? I was on roto zero like right away. Like within within within a month of being badged, I was deployed. And what was the operational cycle back then? We, I finished in 2004. Our process took about 14 months from sort of. by the time we did our, you know, day one selection, which kind of equated to maybe like a hell week. It's a very specific process designed to determine a few things about a guy.

And then we enter like our OTC pipeline, which would be like our green team. Yep. That's probably about a 14-month process, all in all. And the deployment cycle at that time was really up in the air because Canada was really up in the air because Canada was really. at the strategic level trying to figure out what they were going to do with Afghanistan. And so it wasn't, there wasn't really an immediate cycle. I ended up deploying, uh, into Afghanistan to do a very specific mission on a security side before we had a, before we had a task force there. Um, that was just a short duration stint. And that's what I did

right away. And it was really, uh, one of the senior enlisted guys said, uh, he's coming to our troop, um, give this, put him in a turret. Give him, give him, give him, give him, give a gun, just get them deployed. Yeah. Not in a command position, but just get them out with the guys to get some experience. Get a little dirt on your uniform. And I wish, and we wanted to do this,

but we just didn't have the capacity of guys. I wish we could have, officers could have done a year in a team, like in the debt, in the stack, to really just be, learn, eat, sleep, and breathe the role of the enlisted guys. Just to learn how the sausage is made. Learn how the sausage. And I was lucky.

I got about three months of that. And in that, I got a deployment. And then we got another deployment into Lebanon, actually, during the second Israeli Hezbole War, which was kind of cool to kind of see that. So we were there doing support to a non-combatant evacuation operation. Canada has a huge Lebanese diaspora. And so that was pretty cool experience.

And then that was the same time that Canada made the decision strategically to put a brigade group into Kandahar and own Kandahar province as a Canadian A.O. And then we got the task to go in as a full-up combat task force before we put our conventional troops in. And it was just like, here's your JPL target lists. Yes, never ending. It was, it was, uh, it was awesome.

It was like supreme freedom maneuver. It was pre-IED. You know, IEDs probably didn't really kick in there till about, not until the conventional guys got there starting rolling around in big vehicles. So we had a ton Actually it was on the tour That the first IED hit So we had a lot of freedom of maneuver

It was just an awesome Awesome tour My first I think two trips to Afghanistan Thinskin Highlux Yep With I mean they probably briefed an IED threat But I don't remember

Being concerned about it I vividly remember the first one And it did have a big knock on It did have a big knock on Just sort of like day to day operations And how kind of guys moved around It was like, oh, fuck, this is... By the time I went back with Team 3 in 2010,

I wouldn't go anywhere near a road. Yeah. And the first, we were out in Navajar. We stood up a new fob there. We ripped in place. They were co-located with the A&A or the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police.

That's where the platoon we ripped with was staying, and then they built, like, literally laid in the first Hescoes and built it up. I think we had a couple RG33s, and I don't remember what we were doing, but and I was in a side by side a distance away from it but the first time we took that thing out

yeah popped it and then it was like we had to sit out there and secure that thing for like 72 hours until an ODA convoy could come drag it back to the base I felt so I felt bad for the conventional guys because I mean we I mean you know like we could choose our time and location

we would go at night we would pick the route that was the most beneficial we picked our route and you know maintain control And I'm a fucking control freak. I think we all kind of are. And these guys just sitting in the back of a lab or a carrier, just no control, no situational awareness,

just kind of waiting. It's, I think it would have been, I've got so much respect for those guys, because it would have been miserable. Later in that deployment, because I was, I had switched over and I was an officer at that point, and there was one of the assistant officer in charge,

his wife was getting ready to have a baby, so we stayed back for a little bit. So the commanding officer slid me into that, slot. He ended up coming over. The OIC ended up getting fired. They surged another officer over from Iraq. Nick Norris, the guy who does protect products. I've heard his name. He's awesome. He's as tall as the chair you're sitting in. Slightly shorter maybe. He'd have to get another chair to get in that chair, but that's not part of the story. It's just the truth. When they got there, I bumped to the ops officer role, sitting in between two operational platoons, but it was at

Moganson and Route 1 went right past there and so there was of course you know the people whose job was to literally have a presence on Route 1. Yeah. Sweeping for mines, you know, the cameras that are looking into the culverts and Those guys have fucking parts on them. Bro. I mean, but at the same time, every once in a while, they'd bury 1,500 pounds of HME. Yeah.

And they would take a V-hold vehicle. and invert the V. Yeah. Which, of course, is not survivable for anybody inside. But we're talking, what do you think of RG33 ways? Thousands of pounds. We had leopard twos there. Yeah.

And they were cracking the hulls on the leopard twos. Some of these charges were throwing RG33s. I want to say hundreds of feet. I know at least 100. And we're talking probably, God, I'm maybe way off in this. But I bet you at least getting close to like 20 tons. Yeah. Throwing them into the,

the air. I can remember a couple of the craters. Yeah. But you can see it in their faces too. Yeah. Like this is our job and the odds are not in our favor and I fucking hate everything about my life. I could watch you could almost watch the internal geometry between their ears and you could almost see the screws coming loose a little bit and I and I don't blame them for it. I don't blame them at all and I've mad respect. Oh God. Yeah. That's not even the word. You know, like, I don't know what the word is, but it's, I agree with you.

We would get into it, too, amongst, like, our crew, because we're, like, anytime that we thought we had any kind of, like, hardship or risk, we're like, fuck, no way, man. Like, we, yeah, it's dangerous what we're doing, but, like, if we do it well, we can pretty much mitigate a lot of that danger. We, we chose violence, or when we encountered violence, it was almost always on our terms. Yeah, 100%. For those other guys, it was never on the dream. reactive yeah yeah and i actually think i'm not an expert in post-traumatic stress at all but i've talked

with a fair amount of psychiatrists and psychologists they call it the locus of control because we were able to and it's not like it's some panacea that means it's not going to have an impact on you but it it it changes the way that you process it if you are choosing and you know when you're going to encounter violence you have that locus of control it is a different experience than somebody who is sitting there like a victim yeah Correct. Yeah. For sure.

So yeah, that's kind of how we rolled. We stayed almost exclusively in Afghanistan until about 2011. But again, partnered with you guys, like with your community, very, very closely with your community. Living together, doing joint ops. Yeah, I mean, it's chapters of the same book. Yeah. And the same guys, because it's a small world. It's a very small community.

So like, you know, Mike talks a lot about extortion 17. And, you know, a lot of my friends were very, very close with those guys because they did a lot of join ops together. And that hit our community very hard because, you know, I didn't know many of those guys very well at all. But some of my best friends were very close with them. And yeah, it's just that's another reason why I think I'm here. Like, just because the war stopped doesn't really mean that like cross-border stacking up together doesn't need to stop, you know? Yeah. I think it's, I think it's important.

There's large theaters of war may have wound down, but I don't know. I think at this point a lot of people realize that we were so good at our job that I think we actually pushed it instead of getting together in large groups. And it's like, whoa, every time we have more than four people on a cell phone together, these dudes show up. So let's not do that and let's not communicate that way and let's spread out to all these different countries. So actually, I still think it has happened and is happening as we're sitting here speaking,

I'm sure somewhere on the globe. And I don't think it's ever going to stop. It's just it doesn't make the headlines because it's not that mature theater of war with a consistent deployment. And war now is near peer. Yeah. The whole nature of it is now it's really scary.

Yeah, it's wild. And it's not on the battlefield as much for us. but it's in, but it's very real. And I'm seeing that with some of the work I'm doing now. Why did you decide to get out? I medically released.

I got hurt in 2014, doing a rehearsal and a workup for an op. And I was dumb and I kind of fought through it. We were doing a ship underway about 200 nautical miles off the North Atlantic.

And I slipped and fell back going over the, going over the railing. around the height of the bridge deck and I fell back into the the rib we were climbing out of and I hit my head and my back and my hip on the tranceom

and I kind of snapped kind of my whole body and I was early into my squadron command time and the smart move would have been to like take a knee and actually heal but I was like I'm fine I'm fine and I wasn't fine but I was also

so I I, that was like the precursor to getting out, but I got out in 2016 and I was, I was ready to go. I had finished my squadron command time. I didn't want to be a careerist. And I certainly didn't want to be moving through on someone else's. I would have stayed if I could have stayed at the unit, but I was kind of being pushed out to go get bigger and better experiences and wear polyester uniforms and get a haircut and take a pay cut. And I was just kind of like, I want to be, I want to build my business. And so sort of, I had the right reason to get out medically, but it was the right time. When did you start looking beyond the horizon, the military service?

Day one of the military. I started my businesses while I was still in the unit. More of just like a hobby. I run an investment fund right now. And I built that while I was in the unit. I was always just I came from a very entrepreneurial family so I was always just into like

the idea of starting businesses What kind of businesses did your families have Or your family? Going way back to my great-grandfather Outfitted the British expeditionary forces With all the hot chocolate in the First World War So he ran a chocolate company Of all the things I guess that you were going to say

Yeah I was like I need some chocolate To tell you right now that was not what I thought you were going to say A lot of a lot of a lot of, like, food importing from historically through my family. My great grand, or my grandfather started a company called Double Bubble, which is a bubble gum. Um, my dad did a lot of import, export, started a bunch of Christmas decoration type companies. Um, and, uh, yeah, just, you know, real estate. Uh, and, and in 2005, I came back from my first, I don't know, 2006, I came back from my first Afghan tour.

And Canada had just kind of given everybody tax-free, which is shocking in Canada with our tax system. So you came back with a little bit of cash. Tax-free while you were overseas? While you're overseas, your no-income tax. Okay. We got paid very well at the unit. We got a lot of danger and hardship and risk,

and all that was tax-free. So I came back with a pretty good little chunk of change, and I could have bought a pimped-out truck or something, but I ended up investing in my best friend's self-storage company. And that remains to this day, like probably my biggest investment holding. It's been an awesome investment. And I just kind of learned from him as he built a bit of a real estate empire in Canada. And when I started my company, it was really to just like channel the profits of those investments.

And I didn't know anything about it. It was incredibly boring. Well, comparatively, maybe. No, but like it didn't excite me or anything. So I just kind of, you know, align with people that know exactly what the fucking, what the fuck they're talking about, trust them. And, and that's what I did in that. And that was kind of the start of my business.

And then when I got out, it was like, hey, what do I actually know? And it was all this security technology and solving problems and stuff like that. So, yeah, but I was, I knew from day one I wasn't going to be a lifer. Yeah. we were you know so we're people can't figure out where we are right now yeah where are we in Antarctica I was gonna say you want to talk about where we are

and then I figured there'd be like a I asked the fucking questions here oh no I don't know it's pretty wild the life of me do you remember the mountain range behind us the name of it yeah is it Roswell Ross no it's a classic like as soon as I turn my head back and I was gonna tell people where we are I forget the name of the like this the one that starts with the R

I think it's like Ellsworth oh Oh, like the whole range. Like that range. I think it's like the L. Yeah, it might be Ellsworth. There's the Vincent range over there. Listen, people. We've been here for almost a week,

and I forgot the goddamn name of the mountain. We're on the sleep till you're hungry, eat till you're tired routine, and the sun never goes down. So we have a documentary crew with us, and have you done some interviews with them? I did. I've done some as well.

I had a good chat with them yesterday. And then our fearless leader, can you, do you agree that Mike looks a little bit like a teenage mutant ninja turtle. Can you see it? When he gets mad and he, when he, when he does that and, you can see it, right?

I think he looks like Donatello. The banter between you and Mike is fucking priceless. I fuck him up. Because he's got at most one set of return fire. And I've got like several rounds fucking loaded up. And then finally he, his head starts spinning. He just, I'm done here. I'm just, I'm done.

I'm on the trip. I'm on the trip until... And I always fuck with him on the same stuff. Yeah. It's very simple. He doesn't hurt tell me shit. He doesn't involve me in the planning. And then he just tells me what to do.

And the Tumblr. Well, in the Tumblr. But everybody should give him shit for that. But those first three, he keeps doing it. So I'm going to keep giving him shit. Yeah. But anyway, to go back to what I was going to ask you, we've done interviews individually.

And I'm actually really glad that we had... Has it been six days here? Yeah. Tomorrow will be six. If we didn't have this time to get to know each other better, to sit down with the documentary crew to do the interviews, I think we would have struggled in the after. Because everybody would have gone back to their life. We're in a total comms blackout right now, which I actually really have enjoyed. There was a guy here from Starlink on New Year's Eve. They did a from Mount Vinson, which I believe is the tallest mountain in Antarctica. They did a live stream with this portable Starlink on Instagram, I think, with one of the,

Influencer guys. The pass through camp. So for a brief period of time, I had a little bit of Starlink, and it loaded some emails, and all I could see was who it was from in the subject and none of the context would load. Perfect. And I turned it off. Because I was like, you know what? I don't want to do this.

I want to actually enjoy being here. But we have, I think we have a really good opportunity to gather a lot of the story, because once this candle lights tomorrow. It's going to be go. We're going to do, Nick was just over the other side of the Birmingham game and the thumbs up. So we're going to jump today. Yep. Or jumping today?

At about 8 o'clock. Oh. Because we're going to drive. This should continue to clear up. It is. Yeah, that's four hours from now. Okay. The reason being, we're going to get our flag in the ground.

Like we were talking earlier this morning. Are we jumping tomorrow too then? We're going to try. We're going to do both. Oh, fuck. Because. Sorrelli opened the, opened up a bit. A little bit.

Okay. I think it was more in just how it was a position. You know, we had the meeting this morning and we're talking about the flights that we have schedule. It's like, guys, we're probably not going to make this if we had any level of complication. And so we're setting up all of these mechanisms to make sure that we can make all of our flights. Yep.

The one thing we're not giving ourselves a buffer on is the jump. Here. So we're going to get it. Move our flag forward because we have done a practice jump, and I'm glad that we did. So we'll probably jump tonight around. We think this is going to clear? I mean, we could probably hop and pop. That's what I'm saying.

This is literally what you can't see just out of the frame is the triangular orange. Wind indicator, which is currently facing 180 degrees in the wrong direction. Which I think we're going to leave and do downwinders tonight. Fuck that. I'll be the first person down and I will absolutely set the pattern for you guys. This much wind actually would help to go into it. But we're going to bump the flag forward so we can reset the clock. Because to me, the record doesn't matter at all, but let's be smart and at least give ourselves choices as opposed to being put into the corner.

Well, if something happened tomorrow, we'd be fucked. We wouldn't actually be fucked because we already on the clock. clock right now if we wanted to be. Oh, God. Right. Right. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. The goal. But again, at the end of the day, it's not about the jump. It's about the awareness and the fundraising. But we did a, you know, so we've done some interviews and then I would describe a really awkwardly facilitated conversation about suicide. Like, so like, hey guys, just, and I'm being facetious when I say this, because I'm sure he'll watch this and get super pissed to me. But, like, hey, guys, just like, bring it together. We're going to have a meeting and get

two cameras set up. So, yeah, what do you guys think about your friends killing themselves? I mean, it wasn't that blunt.

I shouldn't laugh. It wasn't that blunt. I mean, you're laughing at how it was set up. It was kind of out of left field. Yeah. It wasn't that blunt, but it also wasn't that much sharper.

And people were pretty resistant to the idea, and I don't blame them because they didn't have any time to really even kind of think through what they were going to say. But I don't remember if it was during or was there after you and I were talking.

And I was talking about how, much time I've spent about thinking about people who have made that decision. I just can't rationally understand that unrational decision. And you from across the room said, yeah, I can. Yeah. And if, I mean, if you're comfortable with it, I would love for you to unpack that a little bit. Yeah. No, it's a heavy topic. I think everybody, and I've learned this and I'm seeing it with our dynamic here. I know from from my friends. We all carry trauma like some pretty fucking heavy trauma. It would be impossible not to unless Jeffrey Dahmer and I don't know if Jeffrey Dahmer would be the

case. What I'm saying is a sociopath of which there have been a few in the seal community. Yeah. Otherwise it's the saying I always go back to if you touch war, it touches you back. The other thing that I've learned, I think, and I'm not an expert on this at all. But I've Because of my, like I left ultimately with a pretty significant brain injury. And I was just kind of released with no real support structure. And, and I didn't know anything about brain injuries. And I spiraled in, in, in a couple of ways that really fucked my life up a bit. And in some of those sort of episodes and the way that I was living my life and decisions I was making,

I was like retreating to this comfort zone of chaos. And the units that we were in were often really chaotic. We were doing fucked up shit. But that was really normal. And all of a sudden, like being at home with my wife and my two kids who were perfect and like life is great and everything looks perfect. I'm like, that was uncomfortable to me. So I would retreat to chaos.

And an example is like, I have two beautiful daughters, two like the most gorgeous blonde-haired girls ever. I took them trick-or-treating. They were dressed as shimmer and shine to like Disney fairies or something. They're super cute. Brought them home, tucked them into bed, went downtown to a bar and met a buddy, got blackout drive drunk, and then found a gang and got in a gang fight with a Somali gang in Ottawa. That doesn't sound like a good call. And they put me in the hospital.

They, but I was just, I was like, I need to, I need something to go kind of fucked up here. The normal guy would have like put his two fairy dressed Halloween trick-or-treating kids to bed. And then been like, that was a great Halloween. Had three fingers of maple syrup and shut it down. That's it. And my wife, I didn't get through to her. She ended up coming to the hospital because I learned if you go to the hospital drunk, they just put you in the fucking corner for like 14 hours.

So it was about 14 hours before they stitched up my head because these guys were just smashing bottles on me and stuff. And I just needed that like chaos. And I didn't realize it at the time. But these kinds of things were normal. And again, throughout this process, I was like, I'm kind of fucked. And I was never suicidal.

And I can say that like honestly. But I got myself. sometimes into a position where I was like, I'm not in a good headspace. I could see how someone not in a good headspace could very rapidly deteriorate. And so that was a, that was like a really holy shit moment

that, hey, everybody, everybody that's in this kind of predicament despite what you're dealing with. And my life was good. Like, I was healthy, I didn't have a ton of financial stress. My marriage was good. I have two healthy kids.

Like, the external stress in my life at the time wasn't that heavy. But if one of those things was heavy, that just compounds and compounds. And then you add on something like a brain injury, which most of the people in our community have to some degree on the spectrum of brain injury. You're already not playing with a full deck. and Mike introduced me to an amazing clinical psychologist from the U.S. soft community guy named Chris Free, who you got to chat with this guy. He's unbelievable. And he coined the whole concept of operator syndrome. And operator syndrome is very specifically sort of the comorbidity of injuries that guys in our communities have, usually predicated by a head injury. And then an understanding of what actually like physiologically happens in your body when you get your bell rung and you know the first is your sleep gets fucked up your endocrine system completely dysfunction so the drug store in your brain starts like giving you all kinds of different drugs

at different times and it makes no sense but you don't know that it's often predicated with low testosterone so here you're this fucking guy who now somehow is like going to overcompensate for feeling like emasculated because you don't feel the same way you used to you're in fucking pain because you've had five surgeries and and and and you're starting to drink and and and and you get to the point where it's like this is fucking bad and that's where in that conversation i'm like oh i totally get why someone could do that um and and if without having a network or an ability to see it for themselves or some kind of other outlet, I think it's very reasonable to understand how and why someone could spiral so quickly, even if things are

seemingly good on the surface. And it scared the shit out of me because irrational thought became rational. And that I think is, and that I think is a really hard thing to recognize. But when I started talking to this guy, Chris, this doc, and I read his paper and I started to understand what was actually happening.

I'm like, first of all, I'm like, oh, I'm not a fucking, there's nothing wrong. Like, this is normal. And then the second I showed it to my buddies, they're like, dude, I'm in the exact same boat. and every single guy I've talked to to some degree on that spectrum is in the same boat. And that was like an incredibly comforting position for me to understand. I'm like, I'm not alone.

Like every single guy, the toughest fucking guys that I've ever worked with have probably broken down in tears to me now. because I kind of came to this realization. I understood things myself. I'm trying to... We have a couch in my office at work, and it looks like a therapy couch. That's right beside our Scotch bar and our coffee bar. And we have a constant open-door policy with guys from the unit.

Just come on in, hang out at the office, put your feet up. It's rare that a guy doesn't come by, put his feet up, have a cup of coffee, and then get something off his chest that's important to get off his chest. And I think that's the really, I think that's the really important part of that discussion is. It's cool they feel comfortable doing that. Yeah. Well, vulnerability, I think collectively guys like us have gotten smarter about vulnerability.

And what used to be perceived as weakness is now actually a pretty big strength. Yeah. And so I think it's a pretty good sign of strength to be able to be a bit vulnerable. I mean, there's degrees. But like, I think it's, I think it's being, you know, widely accepted to have a little bit of vulnerability and that's actually like a sign of strength not weakness but here we are like fucking macho guy like dude no it's okay to talk about your feelings yeah i mean you can pretend not to have them or you can pretend that they don't impact you what i think you're doing is just gift wrapping

for later and you have to unwrap that at some point 100% or you just get you get you know you wrap up you put a little box and you just put another one and another one and another one and the next thing you know it's just an avalanche on top of you the the other thing that i learned and it i don't know what the solution is and I don't know how it plays out in the US but this is like chris's mission with his operator syndrome discussion is the fact that like every ailment that someone is feeling is treated individually as a standalone problem interesting and and you don't think that like like for me i had four surgeries to repair my hips and back those surgeries i'm in pain I don't sleep because I'm in pain

Now I'm not sleeping Now my sleep's impacted I have a brain injury I had six beers Like It's all very interconnected Oh and your endocrine system is like You know

Giving you like bad drugs Yeah you know And so each one You got mental health issues Go see the head shrinker You got knee and shoulder And go see the orthopedic You got sleep problems

go to the sleep clinic, but there's like, there needs to be a more like connected, holistic approach because individually those specialists don't understand that guys like us with our experiences are coming out of it with like a pretty messy interconnected web of like ailments. I do think they are interconnected. I certainly think they can compound to the point where for some people very quietly they fucking get to a place where. Yeah. The irrational and unreasonable will somehow becomes the choice of the day or hour or minute or second.

And that's maybe all it takes. And it's really fucking scary. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck. Tell me a little bit more about the fund you manage. Yeah, I run a venture capital fund.

I'm one of one in Canada. We are, invest in early stage security technologies that are dual use. What's it called? The fund is called One-9 Special Mission Fund One. We're raising 50 million.

million dollars. We've made four investments already, mostly into American companies. We like to invest alongside strategic investors. And even though we're new and small, we find ourselves being invited into deals with some pretty heavy hitting investors. So our network is solid. As end users of national security technologies, a lot of the time founders like us because we get it. We can look it's something, be like, yeah, it's fucking not going to work. Really, you have the real world witness test. Not going to work. Or we have the network where we'll take it to the guys that are still in that business, whether it's on the intelligence side.

Let them test it. And be like, I mean, if you get something past, I mean, you know, your community, the guys are probably the biggest critics in the world. If you get, if you get consensus of the guys saying, hey, this is a good piece of kit, I like this. That's got some legs. It's got some legs. So we're able to validate early stage before we make an investment.

I co-run the business with a buddy of mine Daniel who founded a massive company called Shopify so he brings a ton of experience on how to build and grow companies and scale companies. So we've got a good team. One of our one of the portfolio investments we made is sponsored the Triple Seven,

which is awesome. I'm pretty proud to be flying the canopy of Ventus Respiratory, which we think is going to save a lot of lives in soldiers by giving a new level of personal protection against lung cancers, which is an epidemic unto itself from the whole burn pit and heavy metal exposure that we all experienced. Gun range, lead exposure, kill house.

Yeah. So we're seeing a lot of signal that that's a new area. We're building technologies into that to make military tech wearables that integrate with a bunch of other stuff. So yeah, that's the fund. We're a Canadian fund in US dollars. like I said, a lot of our investments are into American companies. How big you want to make it? How far do you want to take it?

I want to take it far. I want to be as big as I can with assets under management, with as minimal people as I can. Because I don't want to have to deal with the HR aspect of growing my own company. So, I don't know. $500 million, $800 million would be a great goal. I've got some great capital partners that actually know what the fuck they're doing with managing that type of cash.

I feel like that could probably help. That helps. That helps. Go on to YouTube. How do you manage 200 million? How do you deploy 200 million? And it's crazy to even have those kinds of conversations because that's just like fictitious amount of money.

But in that business, it's kind of not, you know? Like it's a figure much smaller than that. It stops making sense. Yeah. But in this, I mean, this place has been crazy. Like Antarctica is kind of like a billionaire's playground. We came across a couple. There's a couple of billionaires cruising around.

The guys that they took off, they went up to Elon Musk's camp. I don't know what, maybe 20 or 30 miles over the mountains. They're living at like some resort camp up there. It's pretty cool. But yeah, it's the barrier to get here. You need cash to get here. And there's been a lot of interesting connections that have happened from being here. What do you think about the expedition so far?

Love it. I haven't laughed this hard. I think we're, I think we're on pace. I think it's a, I think it's an ambitious goal. And I don't know, call me, I don't know, spiritual or something, but I think the reason why we're doing it honoring, honoring fallen friends, um, the world works in mysterious ways. And I think the powers that be are going to align the hurdles we need to jump through.

And I think, I think, uh, that energy and the power. of what we're honoring will help smooth the logistical potential obstacles that are probably going to be the hard part. Yeah, I think that's where we're going to encounter the challenge. It's going to be, my biggest fear is an aircraft mechanical en route to one of these other locations. Yeah. Especially if it's an international flight because there's often only one per night.

There shouldn't be weather issues. So aircraft mechanical. Yeah, yeah, you're right. You feel that temperature drop? It just dropped. Like five to ten degrees. So you think we're going to get a jump off tonight? We get four hours.

I mean, I think the ceiling is right now. Like, could we hop and pop this? I could, but I don't think the tandem could. I don't think the light. I don't want to land, like... They'll throw smoke out. What's the worst it could happen? Smash that berm.

Yeah, but you know, it's there. You just don't know where it is. I mean, it's half the battle. If you can't, it's hard to see, but there is probably the most flat light right now. It's crazy. You can't see any contour in the snow whatsoever. So, Last question, close it up so we don't freeze to death.

Yes, it did drop. It really did. Yep. So Mike and I founded legacy expeditions so we can continue to do a bunch of stuff like this. And it's something the name of that company has got me kicking around things in my own head. And my question for you is, you know, at the end of the day, like, we're all, we're all going to get there at some point. What do you want your legacy to be? I think it's probably cliche, but I want my legacy to live through my kids.

I have two daughters, 11 and 8, and I want them to know their dad. I want them to look up to their dad. I kind of want to go out of here with the idea that just he was kind of a good guy. Do right by people, you know, show up for people, show up for the world in a positive way. And I think, you know, without like being all like fucking kumbaya, but just like try and do right by people. And if my daughters and my wife can be like, he's a good, he's a good dude. And he was there when we needed him.

I think I did it right. Yeah. I think that's awesome. This was great. Yeah, it's perfect. We'll grab another one maybe at the end. On the tail end when we're just like drooling fucking shattered. The crazy thing is, you know, so we've been on the road.

I left, I think, the 29th. Yeah, I left the 29th. Today is the 8th. Eighth. And the reality is, yes, we have a practice jump in or the first jump. That's the beauty of we got it in when we could because the weather was fantastic. But we're actually just about to start. Yeah.

Like, this is all preamble. Race starts either tonight or tomorrow. Yeah. Really tomorrow when race starts. It's easy to forget that everything that we've done up to this point is truly preamble. Yeah. And we're about to go first to third to fifth. And it'll be long and slow, but at the end of it, it'll fucking go by in a blink, I think.

In the moment, it'll feel like it's dragging, but it'll go by pretty quick. We'll be in Perth before we know it. Yep. And, uh... I can't fucking wait. The flight I'm looking forward to the least is that Sydney to L-A-X. Oh, that's going to be long. I think it's 16 hours.

I think so. But we have to go Perth, Sydney, Sydney, L-A-X, Austin, then Tampa. Yeah. Yeah. Pack a lunch. Hell yeah. Until next time. All right. Thank you.