Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - From Ranger Battalion to the OR | Dr. Mike Simpson | Ep. 448

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

"Crike him." That's the call a tactical medic makes when a guy can't breathe and the clock is at zero. Mike Simpson is the doctor on the other end of that radio. He's a former 1st Ranger Battalion anti-tank section leader, a Special Forces engineer turned 18 Delta medic with 7th Group, and a board-certified ER physician who spent his last six years on active duty attached to JMAU providing trauma support to tier one units. He retired in 2016 after 32 years and now runs medical direction for Central Texas Regional SWAT while practicing urgent care. We got into the real mechanics of trauma care — what actually happens between the front door of an ER and the OR, why a hundred tourniquets on paper cuts beats one missed arterial bleed, and the brutal physics of wounds incompatible with life. He walked through his own prostate cancer diagnosis and what every man over 40 needs to know about PSA screening. We also got into his path from corrections officer to medical school, why he's writing fantasy novels now, and the conversation every operator avoids until it's too late — documenting injuries before you're out the door. Enjoy.    Today's Sponsors:  Montana Knife Company: https://www.montanaknifecompany.com Better Help: Sign up and get 10% off at https://wwww.BetterHelp.com/clearedhot  

Okay, got the red smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. So it's weird. I'm not a sworn officer, but I do have a state numerical designation as if I were. And so you're augmenting the SWAT team as essentially their real-time medical support. I, well, so it's, it's an interesting animal. Yeah, unpack it for me. Yeah, so the way that it works is central Texas regional SWAT is what's called a composite.

team. Okay. So it's four different law enforcement agencies, two different EMS systems. So they had been, they'd been rolling for, they originally they were original separate teams. A lot of smaller SWAT teams had like a come to Jesus 10, 15 years ago. And we're like, you know what, we can't, we don't have the finances or the manpower or the talent pool to do this on our own. So what we should do is we should we should work with surrounding organizations, bring it all together. And that's what they did. So they made a composite team. And to their credit that everybody that was on the team at the time, they ran they they ran a selection for themselves, but they all went through it again. They reran it. Yeah, they reran it for themselves.

That's clean. Went through training from day one again. Yeah. To do to kind of pick up all their TTPs from the beginning. Put everybody on a blank slate. This was before I even got there. Then they had, they're like, okay, where are we going to draw our REMS from? So they drew partially from Williamson County, partially from one of the cities. So they had like three different medical directors to deal with. None of those medical directors had any tactical experience. So they had another guy who worked as their medical director for a while. And this guy doesn't have the, he doesn't, I'm not going to throw him under the bus, but he doesn't have the best reputation in Texas because he's done this with a couple of different organizations. Hey, I'll be your medical

director. It's a little bit of an issue, like if a guy doesn't know how to put on a tourniquet and how to stage a tourniquet, shit like that, he probably has no business being a tactical medical director. And this guy didn't, right? He was basically a doctor who really wanted to be a cop. And he did some very valuable stuff for the team, but he was a cardiologist. So it didn't have anything to do with trauma. It didn't know. The two things that you have to help him with their V-O-2 max. Actually, no. All he was, all he was, all. really all he was doing was given him their risk assessments. I mean, here's the thing.

I don't actually know what a cardiologist does, so I just assumed that it had something to do with VO2 max. Yeah, I think vo-O-2. Pulmonologists tend to be more in the realm of VO2 max. Yeah. So you have two jobs, you have three jobs as a tactical physician. One is the tactical aspect of it, which 90% of it shouldn't even be you.

It should be training the operators and training the medics, right? That's a huge chunk of the job. That's the sexiest part. and that's actually the smallest portion of your time, really. Right in the middle, you're a sports medicine doctor. These guys are, you know, you know what it's like on a team. Everybody's hurt all the time. At all times, everybody is dealing with something.

Yeah, so you're constantly, okay, I'm going to set it up so you can get imaging, or I'm going to set you up with a physical therapist, or I'm going to prescribe physical therapy for you. I'm going to take a look. I'm going to make a recommendation on what sub-specialists you need to see, all that stuff. And then the third is just sick call stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, you know, hey, I got this. Hey, I got that. All right. Okay, well, I'm going to put you on an antihistamine, so you can't go on target tonight, you know, shit like that. So those are basically the three portions of the job. And this guy was already on the way out. I guess they didn't really like him very much anyway.

And it just so happened that one of the guys on the team, one of the senior guys on the team knew me. He was a former 10th group guy. And he knew me peripherally. Like we'd met in person like one time. And I guess, and that was also when I was podcasting, one of the medics listened to my podcast. And he goes, hey, man, didn't you say you know Mike Simpson? You know he lives right here in Georgetown, right?

So he's like, hey, man, you want to meet for lunch? I got something to talk to you about. And he's like, hey, would you be interested in doing this? It pays nothing, like literally nothing. Like, it's going to cost you money. And I'm like, yeah, I'll do it, whatever. So we did an MOU, so I don't get paid. I'm a private citizen. I'm there in an advisory capacity. And the MOU specifically says that basically when the medics are doing tactical stuff, I can provide an immediate real-time medical direction. Like if I happen to be on the target with him, and they're like, should I crack him? Should I not crack him? And I say, crick him. That, you know, that basically their actual medical director is saying, hey, he's a licensed emergency medicine physician

in good standing. So there's no reason, you know, this is no different than if you went into his home to treat a patient. And he's like, hey, I'm a doctor. I'm a higher level. of medical training than you, this is how we're going to run this code. It's really no different than that. I've actually seen that play out in real life. I've had a guy die on a commercial flight before. Really? Yeah.

And we've had a fair amount of in-flight emergencies. I've never had a death phone. We weren't in flight. Yeah. We were actually still attached to this story as wild. Have I ever told you this story, Michael? No, this is great. How recent?

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Years ago, also, if you're going to talk, talking to the microphone, you would think after years of this that you would understand the roles and responsibilities. Oh, are we recording, by the way? Oh, for sure. Okay. I was just saying the quick things. I don't really.

Yeah. So I'm on a Delta flight. Yeah, we're in Salt Lake City. I can leave most of the details out of it. We're boarding. And it was in the evening. And I kind of just assumed that they would work the medical issue and get to a higher level of care.

But I actually saw what you were talking about in real time happen. We're in the boarding process. And I'm like evening time headset in, kind of nodding off. And then I have the realization that we're kind of at the gate for a lot longer than we should have been. And then I also notice a lot of people are starting to look and to the back. Okay, what's going on?

Well, a gentleman was boarding and had, what I'll have to assume, to be a heart-related issue. So it took a seat and kind of went over. There was a doctor who was there working him hard on the aircraft in the aisle,

which, by the way, not an easy task. Limited it in space, everything. I would literally rather, and from experience, I would rather do it on the floor of a UH60 Oh, for sure.

With all the operators crowded around me. You're going to have more room than you will look middle. You're going to have more, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Because you'd be surprised at when you tell

when you tell eight 250 pound dudes in full kit that you need room to save their buddy, you'll get room. All of a sudden you have space. Yeah, guys will actually jump out of the helicopter. Yeah, they'll hang on the outside. They'll do with Tom Cruise if they need to.

So this guy's working it. It takes, forever for, I believe it was the fire department to respond. And if these details aren't 100% correct, I'm not trying to like give a documentary here. Whatever, I'm pretty sure it was the fire department. They respond. They pull the guy out of the airplane on what I can only describe as a visqueen tarp.

And at thinking about it, that might actually be the move. Yeah. Because what are you going to do under the armpits feet? There wasn't enough room to go side by. So they drag him out. I think probably what you saw is what's called a mega mover, which basically that's what it is. Yeah.

So they drag him out. The person I was sitting next to, I looked over and his head stopped right where we were. I have seen enough dead people in my life to understand what was going on. The person next to me, I believe, was experiencing their first dead person in life, very different trajectories. Yeah. And I'm not laughing about that. Just in hindsight, it's just, you know, it is what it is.

The job comes with some experiences that I don't wish upon other people. they work him out to, they get him out to the Skybridge. They keep working him. And the paramedics or firefighters were on the radio getting guidance from somebody. And the physician that was there was pissed because he was, you know, I think he was trying to do exactly what you were talking about. Give that real time. This is what you can do. But they had to go get authority over the radio.

Yeah. And then I think, again, this is just my perception. I think he started getting pissed because they kept going. And he's just like, dude, the guy is, it's done. Dead. Like injectables and all. Which they couldn't do until they got a hold of the higher level of care. So I'm assuming that they were on the phone or radio with a dock.

They move the evolution off of the sky bridge. They get on the radio like, hey, there's going to be a delay. I'm already on my phone like booking a hotel for them. I'm like, yeah, there's going to be a delay. It's called the flight being canceled. Yeah. As I'm walking out, I hear the people at the desk up there talking about a realization. that they had just made.

They assumed that the person's identity was based off of the seat that he was sitting in when he keeled over. It wasn't as a signed seat. Okay. They had initially reported the wrong person as dying. Yeah. I don't know how that worked itself out.

I went to my hotel. Yeah. So I've seen this battle of, I'll call it a battle of authorities. I didn't realize that, and I guess I had never really thought about it, that there is, based off of your medical training and the tools you have, probably a limit of what you can do without giving that higher level of guidance. Yeah. And so it's, it's difficult. I don't envy, you know, and I went through, I went through paramedic school, you know, as part of my training as being in 18 Delta. And, but my experience working the road

as a paramedic is minimal, right? Because I had to do it. Yeah. I had to go on ride every weekend when I was in school. Um, I didn't really, I, you know, since, you know, since then, you know, there's, I've wrote out with a couple of different EMS organizations in that capacity, you know, before I was a physician. And it's really challenging because, you know, you go into somebody's home or you're in a mall or a restaurant. You never know when somebody's going to come up to you and identify yourself. And there's just, there's memes about it, right? Somebody's going to identify. I'm whatever, right?

I'm taking medical control of this situation. And there's not really time to vet that person. Oh, there's no time. So are they who they say? So your department really has to have protocols in place of either, you know, no, we never, you know, whoever that is, they pound sand, you know, and you do your thing without them, or it varies from department to department. I've been in situations where paramedics have shown up on scene that recognize me.

One was an in-flight emergency. One was a, there was, we were, I forget where we were going. knowing exactly, but we had to stop the plane. When I got on the plane in Denver, and it had stopped over from somewhere else. And it was one of those where you, and you don't see this very much anymore, where you get on a plane and some of the people

never got off the plane. Oh, yeah, I don't think they allow that anymore. I don't think they do either. They make everybody, because I have, I have landed many times. And they're like, we're arriving at gate A18. Right, but you needed a plane anyway. And I look, I'm like, I'm also departing from gate A18.

Right. You don't stay on the plane. You get off and you're, Reboard. And I think and I could be wrong. Everybody might have had to have gotten off, but the short, the short version is, I want to say this person, this person was flying from someplace at a low altitude back to San Antonio, which is a low altitude. But in between, they ended up at high altitude. And I'm pretty sure that's what triggered all this. I'm pretty sure that I'm pretty sure this lady was was having a heart attack, right? Probably from she probably had one of her arteries was, you know, just barely big enough for one red blood cell to squeeze through. And then the lack of oxygen in this place that she landed kind of pushed her over the edge. Because she was having pretty clear MI symptoms on the plane once we took off. Right. And at that point, it's not an issue of how high we're flying because we're pressurized, right?

So put an oxygen mask on her and did some other stuff and helped her out. And she didn't really, she didn't even let the flight attendants know she was having symptoms until we were already essentially, well, the fastest thing is to continue. just to land in San Antonio. So we land in San Antonio and I tell the flight attendants. And there was actually two of us from my residency on board. We were coming back actually from a conference. And I said, yeah, so we're going to have to have EMS pick her up. This isn't one of those. Oh, we'll just walk her out and she's going to be fine. I'm like, it would be advisable that they meet us at the gate and they take her. And the EMS crew comes on and they're like, oh, hey, Doc Simpson, what's up? These are paramedics who have come giving me report in the ER before

with patients or San Antonio paramedics. So I told them what it was and they said, all right, we'll take care of it. And I got report back from one of them later on that sure enough, she ended up getting two stents during her stay. But that was a case where they knew who I was when I walked in.

Yeah, that's an easier one. Your bona fides has already been established. But you also have problems. So I worked during the BLM, during the George Floyd riots. I worked with a state task force in Houston and they had had already by that point had a number of incidents where they were in the middle of treating people, usually civilians, when another civilian, somebody who's an active protester,

not just a bystander, would come over and start interjecting themselves, no, you got to do this. No, they need that. No, you got to do this. You know, I'm a charapotist. I'm, you know, I'm an acupuncturist. You need to listen to me, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they had a, they had, and I asked him specifically about that. I said, what are you doing?

Like, we know there's these guys out here that call themselves street medics. And I can, the whole street medics thing that weren't really medics, that's, these are guys carrying Molotov cocktails in their rucksacks, but they've got a little Velcro patch that says street medics. So they think they can get away. And I actually heard one of them actually invoked the Geneva Convention because they were medic. So try, try basically trying to play both ends against the middle, right? I feel, I mean, the Geneva Convention is a good thing, but that's really a misplaced ideology. Yeah, slightly.

Well, and my response to that was, so you're admitting you're at war with the United States? Yeah, like what's going on here? Because that's the only way that you can invoke the Geneva Convention. I'm going to say, are you in a mature theater of war? Are you a combatant? Is that what you're saying? Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Do the rules of land warfare really apply here in Houston, Texas on this day? Did he at least have his patches on correctly? Well, it was just a Red Cross patch. was all it was. So I want people to live their life however they want to. I was traveling home two days ago. And it's interesting to me, it's not an accident when people flare out or make attire choices to say,

hey, I am either in the military or was in the military or can't let go of either of those. Sure. Like, I guess I can appreciate it when I'm going up an escalator and I can see that somebody has no known allergies. Okay. Yeah. A positive. Great. Great. You know, A, B, negative. Gotcha. Not a problem. Yeah. The number of people that I see that have the wrong American flag on there. I just saw one where I have a picture on my phone and I put it up on Instagram. It's the, it's the one, you know, flag etiquette, it was the right, right shoulder patch, which has the stars leading the way. Yeah. It's, it's, it's back. Correct. Because I'm riding a horse with it. And if you look at the left shoulder, the stars are always leading the way.

The stars are always up and to the left unless it's on the right shoulder. Well, that's what was on the backpack. Like completely flared out American flag hat. And again, I said nothing, blocked out any identifying marks and just put on social me like, listen, live your life however you want to. But if you want to be this guy, be good at being this guy. Like you don't even know that your flag. Like if you were to wear that on your uniform, the wrong one, you're going to get tore up. Yeah.

You're boss can be like, hey, dude, you look like an idiot. Like, understand the etiquette of what it is that you're trying to do. Right. So. And nobody's saying you got to be the gray man. I get it. I don't care how. I'm, look how I'm dressed.

I'm not the gray man today. Okay. Sometimes you give up on being the gray man. But you also, like you say, if you're going to, if you're not going to be the gray man, get it right. At least put some effort in. I mean, Google works for everybody. Yeah. Some people are like, I always use that flag because it shows I'm never retreating.

Like, it doesn't mean that you're never retreating. That's the flag for your. right shoulder, you dip shit. So to each their own. Totally. Given your MOU, which means memorandum of understanding for those of you listening, if you had to, could you go hands on? Yes, I can, I can treat a patient and good, and good Samaritan laws would apply,

apply to me in that case. How much, I mean, how much stuff do you take out in the field with you? Because at some point, you're going to be limited by the tools you have, I'm assuming. Yeah. How bad can it be for you? And then you can actually get somebody to a higher. level of care. Yeah. Like what's as far as you've ever seen it go and you're like, this guy's definitely not going to survive, but you're actually able to plug holes and get somebody to

a higher level in the civilian world or in civilian world? Comments different because we're talking IED stuff. Like I think that stuff is not replicated in the civilian world. I've been, I'm a little bit of a white cloud when I when I roll out with the team. Is that a good thing? And that's a good thing. Okay. Yeah. So you have, you know, a black cloud means we're getting all the sick people. Okay. Like anything that can go wrong is going going wrong. White Cloud is, hey, it's, you know, somehow there before the grace of God, somehow we came out unscathed. So the injuries that I've seen in tactical scenarios in SWAT have all been easy, easy stuff, you know, scrapes, bumps, bruises, easy stuff. You know, our team has had, and, you know, the medics that I supervise have had pretty bad stuff.

I mean, they'd have had to do some, you know, pretty high-level interventions. The answer is, you know, any time, the great thing, and this was a conversation that I had years ago. We were having a problem right about the time I was transitioning out. I retired in 2016. And we were still having a little bit of a problem convincing civilian organizations that a lot of what we learned in T-T-T-T-T-T-Ruble C overseas was applicable. There was a lot, believe it or not, there was a lot of pushback. And I actually had a civilian ER physician who was acting as a tactical medical director tell me, Turnicates have no place in Conis.

How could they say that? Well, and that's... That is one of the... For clarity, when I joined in 96, it was... The narrative around tourniquets was very different. It was last resort. Measure of last resort. Make sure the exact time that you put this on needs to be notated.

And that... No more than an hour. And that limb will be lost. 100%. Yeah. No more than an hour or the body's going to turn in septic. By the end, it was like, hey, how many turning kits do you have? Like five.

They're like rookie numbers. Half a dozen. Bump it out. And you need two for each limb. And regardless of what happens, slap one of those things on there. Don't worry about the time. Get them to a higher level of care. Yeah.

It was diametrically opposed shift. Yeah. How could a civilian doctor say that? So, ignorance. That's the short answer. I could go into a long diet trade, but you'd have to search to be that ignorant. But here's the thing is, this was the argument that I said to him. I said, you know, really, I can make an argument.

In fact, I don't have to make the argument. The data is there to show that overseas in combat, we have put on a lot of tourniquets that did not need to be put on. But guess what? We had good outcomes, right? Yeah. Because I have always had the rule. I don't second guess.

When a paramedic brings me something in the ER, I don't second-guess their treatments in the field. I wasn't there. I don't know what visibility was like. I don't know what the situation was like. I don't know what they saw. I don't know what kind of patient feedback they were getting. I don't know any of that. I don't know what kind of day they had overall.

I don't know what kind of day the patient had overall. I don't second-guess. If I see something that was a blatant mistake, I might pull a medic aside later or get in touch with this emphasis on after. After. Yeah. Never during. Now is not the time.

and say, hey man, great job, but these are the things that I think maybe you could have done better. Take that for what it's worth, you know, based on my level of experience. I was going somewhere with this. We were talking about the tourniquets. Oh, the tourniquets. So, you know, yes, you can make the argument that a lot of turnicates that were put on overseas didn't, you know, they got converted right away or they weren't necessarily needed. Or when we got there, we found out the tourniquet wasn't on properly anyway. Luckily, it was only a venous injury.

Okay, great. But the great thing about being here, Conis, in a tactical situation, is you are never, pretty much never going to be more than an hour away from definitive care from a place with fluorescent lighting, linoleum, guys in scrubs, right, who just came from the doctor's lounge, who can now strip that patient down and correct any mistakes that were made in the field. Yeah, usually minutes, I would guess. And since we know that the tourniquet, and this is the argument that I made with that guy, I said, if I line up 100 people, 100 people, and I paper cut all 100 of them, and I put a tourniquet on each one of them, and then I activate EMS, they go to an ER, they all get the tourniquets taken off, no harm, no foul. They had some discomfort for a little while. Maybe they're going to have a little bruise, right, for a little while. Nobody's hurt. Everybody survived. If I line up that same hundred people, right and I paper cut 99 of them but one of them has an arterial injury and I use your protocols that one person's dead what was his response to that he said maybe I need to rethink this that's a good answer exactly and that's what I said I said and I didn't say this out loud because it would have been an insult but my thought was you're trainable you had a miss you came into this

with a misconception but you're trainable so you're work with that so you're one of the good ones yeah because that's literally all you need for success is to to be trainable. I mean, there's a reason that we have more living triple and quadruple amputees in the modern era of warfare. There's a reason why historically you didn't survive that. You know, some people would make an argument maybe you're not supposed to.

I leave that argument out there. But probably one of the most effective tools. I think Joy Jones would probably agree with you and disagree with them. Yeah. And to each of them, you know what I mean? They can feel about it, how they want to, but man, the results to that test are clearly published. That's wild.

You know, you're, I'm, I think 12 years older than you. Depends on what year you were born. 1976. 76. 77. So you're only 11. Oh, so you're born same year as my wife. You and my wife have seen easy, all right. Quo, quote, man. I just turned 60. I'm feeling a little, I've turned 60 in Mars. How's that feel? I'm a little salty. Feels exactly the way you think it's going to. Can you tell that death is just around the corner? old age. Yeah, you see him in the mirror every morning. I'm brushing my teeth.

I'm brushing my teeth. And right behind me, he's going, he's doing one of these numbers. I can't believe I'm 48. I don't feel like I'm 48. I feel more active now, honestly, than I was in different phases of my life. So imagine this, and I don't want to go too far in this rabbit hole because I wanted to say something about my age first, but I was, I was your age going out on target. Yeah.

I've thought about that. Yeah. I would change how. behaved on target. I actually think I could probably be more effective now, but I would move differently and do different things. I definitely, the efficiency, the shakedown efficiency in what I was carrying on my person

was definitely echelons above what I was doing in my 20s and in my 30s and even in my early 40s. But what I was going to say about, the reason I brought up age is I grew up in the 70s when you would see you would be at a gas station or in a restaurant or something like that. and you'd see a guy with a hook hand. And you just knew that guy was in Vietnam.

Yeah. That guy was in Vietnam. You didn't see a lot of guys with prosthetics. The guys who hit bouncing betties and stuff like that. Yeah. A lot of those guys didn't make it. You know, usually those guys, it was the guys with the arms. It was some type of through and through.

Yeah. Like either shrapnel took their, you know, took their hand off. Or, you know, a machine gun round, something of that nature. I mean, they weren't carrying turnicets to my knowledge. I mean, what would they use? Like a cravat? They would try. They were using what we called drive-on racks, right?

Crevats. That's what they were using. The most I've ever seen. When I went through the 18 Delta course, we were still using those. The most I've ever seen put on a leg associated with an IAD blast with six tourniquets. And it was the sixth one that stopped the bleeding. Yeah. That's 100% of fatality if you don't have those.

So it makes sense that you didn't see people with, you know, double above the knee amputees. I mean, it was at that point, shortly after that, people started carrying magnitudes of order, a greater number of turnecates because we were pulling off of people. Like, I got one, like, dude, hand it over. Yeah. There's a law enforcement officer in the state of Texas who I met, who had a tourniquet on each limb, was serving a high-risk warrant, ended up with a turnicot on each limb and lived, and is back on duty. And there's a reason for that. Yeah. You know, here's a question for you, because I think this is a common misconception.

I'm going to use an example of something that I don't think this would have made a difference. So I'm going to use Charlie Kirk getting shot in the neck. When I saw that, my incident thought was wound and compatible with life. Like you're done. You're going to be dead before you get to the hospital. But my question is this. There's this thought process that when you arrive at a hospital, you're going to be. He probably needed a thoracic surgeon on the spot with an OR prepped.

And the misconception is that hospitals are just sitting around waiting for somebody like that to show up. Yeah. I had a GI blockage. I had an intestinal blocks, which ended up requiring surgery. Not the same issue, by the way. I am not in any way trying to compare these two. My point is they couldn't do the surgery when I would have preferred it to happen because they had to wait for a doctor that was doing a rotation at a different hospital to drive over.

How much, I mean, somebody like Charlie Kirk, using this example, they're hauling ass in a civilian vehicle. How prepared is a hospital to receive them? Like, how quickly can you actually... Depends on the hospital. Let's, I'll let you decide like, like average average and whatever that means in, I don't know what the Salt Lake City area would necessarily have. But it's not like you just get thrown into an OR, I'm assuming. No. And the person's got to be ready.

And you have to kind of assess what's going on. I'm just, I'm just curious on the actual speed and velocity with which people are actually able to take life saving measures on something like that. You get to the hospital like, awesome. We made it. Maybe depending on what they have ready. Yeah. So the OR, think of the OR, think of the operating room as a dive. Do you dive without a plan? No. Absolutely not, right? So you have to have a plan to go to the OR. You develop that plan in the trauma bay, in the ER. Okay. That's when you do the full head-to-to-to-old.

Probably usually pretty close to each other? Actually, no. So, so trauma bay, the ER was always on the bottom floor. Okay. There's a saying in medicine, right? The higher you go in the hospital, the smarter you are because you get second. and guess everybody beneath you. Fair enough. So as an ER physician, I get to talk shit about the cafeteria and literally nothing else. Oh,

but you're on the receiving end of the law. Everybody else is considered smarter than me because there are floors above me. Gotcha. So you come in by ambulance or in some cases by privately owned vehicle. I've been involved in mass cows a couple of times where that's happened.

I was, you know, I was... And I'm not judging that, by the way. Like, get them there how you can get them there. Yeah. Oh, I was, I was Chief of Emergency Medicine at Darnell Hospital when we had the second Ford Hood shooting. And all of the serious casualties that arrived in that first wave, all of them arrived in privately owned vehicles.

Las Vegas, the shooting at the concert in Las Vegas, privately owned vehicles. One guy stole a vehicle. I'm not judging that at all. And the owner of the vehicle ended up saying he could keep it. Yeah, some say, like, I have no judgment against that. Yeah. Man, can you, well, you've experienced it,

that all of a sudden the floodgates open. And now it's like, yeah, you have a surgeon on, But you have eight people. Yeah. Leaking hydraulic fluid. Right. That's a capital P problem. Yeah.

It's huge. Yeah. So what happens is that, and we'll use the example that you gave, which is a single casualty. Yeah. He arrives, he or she arrives in the emergency room, goes directly to the trauma bay. First thing that happens is whoever brought them in gives some type of report. You know, this is a 38-year-old male shot in the neck. you know, this is what we did in the, this is what we did in the field, this what we did in route.

These were his vital signs when we picked him up. These are his vital signs currently as we're handing him off to you. You strip all the clothes off. You do a head to toe treat as you go plug in any holes that you see. If the airway needs to be taking, you take the airway. This is the point typically when an ultrasound machine gets slapped on, you do what's called a fast or an e-fast exam. And you're looking for internal bleeding, right? So you're making an assessment because you have to identify, well, these are the injuries.

If you're going to go to the OR, now we're making our dive plan. So yes, we're going to go to the OR and, oh, it looks like the carotid artery was transected on the right hand side. So this is where you can start blood products, right? So you're doing everything to stabilize them. You're going to close holes. Yep. You're going to try to, you know, the tank has been somewhat emptied. You're going to start trying to refill the tank at this point by giving some blood products because you want them stable enough that they can go to the OR and survive that surgery.

Because that's surgery, you know, if I put a perfectly healthy person under anesthesia and start poking. them around inside them, that takes a toll on the body. Right? So you want somebody as healthy as possible. You want that tank as full as possible. You want the holes plugged, right? What you don't want to do is just start giving blood full blast. And then you find three other holes that you didn't even know we're there because now

that his blood pressure's up, you've blown out the clots. Yeah. And now he's leaking all these other places, right? So like you say, it's a process. And typically there's imaging involved. And sometimes that might be some simple imaging. That might just mean, okay, let's get a, let's get a unit of blood hang and get them over to the CAT scanner just to kind of assess what the damage is so they know what

tools they're going to need for that dive upstairs, right? Because they're going to be pulling out tools, right? They need the, the surgeon needs to say, I want the trauma set, I want the chest set, I want the whatever set. Would the surgeon at this point be working their way down to maybe get visibility of what's going on? Typically in a trauma center, the surgeon, somebody from the surgical team is there. Okay. Okay. So you're working side by side. And I've seen this, I've seen it work different ways in different hospitals. So some hospitals, the surgeon will literally stand at the foot of the patient with his arms folded and watch the ER crew do their thing. And he's just listening to everything you're saying. I had that, I had somebody come in one time, uh, they'd been stabbed,

and I had to do a thoracotomy. So in other words, I had to crack their whole chest open, go in there, find where they were leaking, clamp it off so that they could survive long enough to go to the ER, right? And what this, what ended up happened to this individual is that when they got stabbed, it went through the paracardium, through the heart. So the ventricle was leaking into the paracardium. So they had what's called a tamponod. So imagine a balloon full of blood pushing, compressing the heart. Almost like a tension neural. Yeah. So what I had to do was, we call it birthing the heart. I had to tear open the paracardium. So now the heart's beating, you know, and I, you know, throw a staple in that hole in the heart just to keep it closed

so they can get up to the OR. And I remember doing that that, It's, you don't do a lot of thoracotomies. It just, it doesn't happen that often. And I was getting ready to do the thoracotomy, and it was the first one I'd ever done. I'd participated in, I think, two previous to that. This was the first one I was doing as a senior resident running the trauma myself. So, and I came to the term, hey, we've completely lost pulse. So we've confirmed that pulse is lost.

Now, this is a trauma. We have penetrating trauma of the chest. So now the chest has to get cracked. So I said, okay, I'm going to do a thoracotomy. and I was waiting for somebody to go, hold on. This person was down for whatever time in the field. There's always a, like you say, you know, you don't want to waste resources, right? So I said it out loud, waiting to be rebuked from my staff, you know, oh, hold on, you know.

Or him come, I don't, no, no, you're not doing it, I'm doing it, something like that. And I didn't hear anything. So I looked up and this surgeon is standing at the foot, he's standing like literally right there with his arms folded. And he had been asleep when the page came that a trauma was coming in. And he just went like this. Oh, okay. So I'm like, Okay.

Do you give the guy any pain meds before you do that? No. So in this case, the person... That's not fun. Well, the person had been unconscious completely. I mean, because they had lost a lot of blood. Maybe just to like hook him up a little. Yeah.

Funny story. Funny story about that. Now, this is, and I'm going to caveat this by saying, I was not present at this. I have heard this story told from three separate people that claim to have been there. Okay. Okay. Okay.

And this was at a hospital in Texas, which I shall not name. Uh, a surgeon, which I also shall not name. Uh, but supposedly this guy was very, very over eager. Uh, he had a reputation for being over eager. And similar type situation. The kid came in. It was actually, it was a gang kid, got stabbed in a club, came in. And the kid was apparently the, the, it had been stabbed in the chest, but it never even really made it into the chest cavity proper.

Right. It was a very superficial injury, right? So he has a stab wound, but the kid is being very dramatic. And he's, he's, he's, he's pretending to be unconscious, basically. Because he doesn't, because he's seen so many movies. He's like, well, I got stabbed. So I'm supposed to be unconscious. So I'm just going to lay here, right?

I guess. He wasn't faking. That's a strategy, I suppose. He wasn't faking. Yeah. You know, it's just like, you know, it's like the old saying, why do people fall down when they get shot? Because that's what they see in the movies.

Yeah. Yeah. The misconceptions abound. Yes. So this kid's laying there. Well, the leads came unhooked. So on the monitor, it looked like he flatlined, right? So this surgeon, again, I wasn't there.

This is what I heard. grabs a scalpel decides he's going to do with this kidney's orthochotomy. He's got trauma to the chest. The chest needs to be cracked. We need to see what's going on. So he rams the scalpel between the ribs and starts to cut. The kid goes, oh shit, grabs his wrist. And while the guy's cutting, he says, can I get somebody to restrain the patient?

But he's still cutting. Interesting. Yes. And again, I cannot confirm that this story happened. Three data points are pretty strong. I do have three people that told it to me. And I guess if I get subpoenaed on this, I'll go ahead and tell people who I heard it from and who it was supposedly about. But, wow.

Yeah. The kid ended up doing fine. Yeah. Maybe don't play dead or unconscious. Yeah. So in your professional estimation from flash to bang of a guy like Charlie showing up at the front door, the ER, how long do you think it would, on average take to get him into an OR? Um, it, that's really hard to say because it. 10 minutes, like 15?

I was going to say, like, a real, a real shit hot level one trauma center. under 10 minutes. Which, I mean, honestly, was too much for him anyway. Like, there's no way that guy was alive by the time that he arrived at that possible. He, from what I've seen in the, and I did immediately afterwards, I watched the video. Like most. I didn't mean to see it the first time, but then, you know, I did take a look at it a few times after. I watched it again and again.

And I think if you would have inflicted that, there are some injuries that we say. And I've treated this in combat, an injury that had I taken that same injury, individual into the operating room. And it introduced it there. Sterilize them from head to toe and introduce that injury and said surgical team, go. Still done. Same outcome. Yeah.

There's just wounds that are incompatible with life. What is, so they, let's say they did get, eventually the body makes it into the OR. Does the surgeon just dive in there and see what he has to work with, trying to put pieces together or stop? Like, what is the approach with that? So it's not a surgeon, but from in talking. dissurgents about their approach to something like that. It's, it's, I think the, the closest thing that I can liken it to is CQB is I have principles, right? I'm not telling you you're all, you're going to

definitely go to the left when you go in this room. I'm not telling you that you're definitely going to do this in this order, but these are the principles that you're going to operate in, right? And it's, it's kind of a loose algorithm, right? Okay, step one, I'm going to open up like, so, neck injury. Yeah. I'm going to open up the skin. I'm going to open up the platisma. I'm going to see what's there.

If when I identify this vessel, if it appears to be damaged, I'm going to put in a temporary shunt going from here to here. Once that shunt is operational, then I'm going to assess what the damage is. I'm going to remove the damage tissue. I'm going to see if there's enough room that I can splice it. Oh, there's not. Harvest, harvest the safeness vein. Bring it up here so I can do it.

And again, I'm not a certain. You know, right now there's a trauma surgeon listening to this freaking out. That's not what we do. Well, what you're saying makes sense. Yeah. Is things are, probably the best illustration that I ever saw of that. Do you remember the old TV show ER? Yeah.

Yeah. So Eric LaSalle got most of my medical training. A lot of people did. So that show was actually on, the first season that show was actually on when I was in the 18 Delta course. And we were swearing up and down that they had our course syllabus. Because like, whatever we happened to learn about that, week was on the show. We're like, there it is.

There it is, right? There's a scene where Eric LaSalle, who's a senior surgical resident, and then he ends up becoming a fellow, he gets up early in the morning and he's running on the treadmill. And while he's running on the treadmill, he goes, he goes, place the scalpel between the fourth and fifth ribs, cut, you know, to this depth, spread the ribs, identify the o, and he's basically running through what he's been taught of this is the surgical procedure. Yeah.

Right. And as you run into stuff, it's, you know, it's just like doing CQB. It's reps, man. You're looking for work, right? See a problem, fix a problem. Move on to the next problem. See a problem, fix a problem. Move on to the next problem.

And that's what surgeons are doing. See a problem, fix a problem, move on to the next problem. Everything, you know, we've got enough reps in this that everything, you know, everything's prioritized, right? We know, like we used to be, first aid used to be A, B, C, D, E, right? right? Now it's hemorrhage first because we know I've got two minutes. You could die in two minutes from that hemorrhage, right? Yeah. So that's what I have, that's the problem that I have to solve first. So for trauma surgeons, it's a lot like that. It's like, okay, what I need to go in and right away, you know, if the aorta's got a hole in it, all, you know, big red is going down. All bets are off. Obviously that has to be fixed first. How do you even fix that? these guys are wizards you know i've i've watched them i've watched him do it on human beings and i've

watched him do it uh on uh i've i've hypothetically watched them doing do it on properly sedated animal models i will neither confirm nor deny why is there so much uh concern or issue about the live tissue tissue training with animals when it comes to soldiers so there is some debate And there's some legitimate debate because they're anatomically different. Yeah. So, you know, so the debate is. I've never heard of claim that they're identical. I've always from the people putting the training on that it's similar in nature.

Yeah. And that's why the profused cadaver idea is, is, and we've been getting better and better and better. What is a profuse cadaver? So a perfused cadaver is you take a cadaver, take a dead person, right? And there's a process that you have to do it. You can't just go, oh, we're just going to. pump more blood in you. Yeah.

Like it doesn't work that way because a lot, a lot's gone on, you know, and, you know, wherever, you know, blood just stops where it is. Yeah. And it starts to form kind of pseudo-clots, right? So you got to take care of that. Yeah. Because the pump's not working. Yeah. So you have to hook up to their vascular system. You have to kind of blow all that gunk out, right?

And then the high level ones, and I used to be, I was formerly medical director for a company called Safeguard Medical. And they have a perfused cadaver system that they use that is absolutely outstanding. It's called true bodies. And they use a sealant technique. They have a special patented sealant that they run through the vascular system. So now it's not going to leak. It's not going to, it's not going to third space into the tissues, right? Because that used to be in the early days of perfused cadavers, about 20 minutes in, it looked like the stay puffed marshmallow man, right? Because that's because of osmotic pressure, this would be, leave. People think that, you

know, a vessel's not like a straw at McDonald's. It's made up of little overlying things. And there's little gaps in there, right? There has to be. That's how nutrients and fluids and oxygen and everything else kind of gets passed, right? So there's a reason for that. So they run a sealant through the system. And now I can perfuse it with simulated blood, right? I can use animal blood or I can use a simulated blood.

Now when you go and cut on it, tissue will bleed. If I cut a vessel, that vessel will bleed. So now the realism of now I got to repair that. vessel while it's bleeding, right? I'm not just going into an empty vessel. Because if I go into an empty aorta and just put a cut in it, you can just, you know, I could teach you in two minutes, even though you've never even been a medic. Okay. All right. I stitched it up. It's taken care of it. Probably take one end and the other and put them together. Yeah. And that's basically what you do, right? Yeah. Although, although when that vessel's bleeding, right? Yeah. It's a little bit different.

And yeah, you know, you're going to do things like clamp above it. For sure. You know, but now as soon as you clamp something, the clock's running too, right? So you got to worry about that. Wow. So identical. That is interesting. I mean, yeah, there's an argument that can be made that the animals used in life tissue training sure are not bioidentical. Yeah. I mean, their airways are not the same. Yeah. You know, their, uh, their anatomy's not the same. Um, they're, it's a net positive though from what I've seen from that training. It's not perfect. There, there, there are values in it that They're kind of, I don't want to say they're intangible, but when you know it's a living thing,

it feels different. Everything about it feels different when you're working on it. It's just not, it's not the same feeling. It's not what a mannequin feels like. That's not what a simulator feels like. It's when it's a living thing, you know, even under anesthesia and even not a human being, the flesh feels different.

When you're getting your hands in there and you're doing it, it feels very, very different. And plus there's no, you know, there's, you can't, you know, I can have you, I can have you, you know, put a crick or a chest tube in a simulator and then I'm watching to see what your technique was. And then I'm going, okay, yeah, you did that right. Let's continue on to the next task. But if you, let's say you're putting a crick, an emergency airway in an animal model that's

been sedated, you do it wrong, you go into the subcutaneous tissue, not in the airway. Hey, hey, doc, why isn't it your patient breathing? What's going on? Hey, there's no, there's no mist in your tube. I don't feel anything coming out of your tube. What did you do wrong? Right? Whereas if it's a simulation, right?

It's like, okay, that's not going to happen anyway. Okay, yeah, you did it. Let's move on to the next task. Do people have to volunteer to have that stuff done to their bodies? Like sign paperwork, like after. Yeah. People volunteer to, you know, to. basically that's when you hear the term, I'm going to give my body to science.

That's shout out to when I was in medical school. There was one of my teachers, one of my staff at Eusus was a guy named Simon Oster. Simon had never been in the military, but he loved teaching at Eusis. And he was a fixture there. He'd been there like forever. And Simon had said for years, he said, when I die, I will continue to teach here. and when he passed away his body

found his way down to the cadaver lab and he continued teaching even in death I mean I guess well first of I'd rather be cremated for clarity but yeah I mean if you didn't want to go that route I mean what a way to continue giving back I suppose

yeah yeah I mean I think it's you know there's there's some nobility in that you know to say that you know I want I want my last act as a carbon based unit to be somebody learned something from me that maybe 10 years from now in a little five-minute period on an airfield somewhere saves a life. Do you ever think you were going to be a doctor growing up? Never.

Never. Yeah. Even when you joined the Army, did you want to go down the 18-Delta path? The furthest thing from my mind. I never even thought about it. Most 18-Deltas have told me that. Yeah. So I went in and I graduated in 1984.

two weeks after graduation, I shipped off to basic training with a Ranger contract. How did you choose the Army and where the Ranger idea come from? So I wanted to go, I wanted SF. I wanted to be a Green Beret. So a buddy of mine who was a year ahead of me, Brian Edwards, who ultimately became SF Command Sergeant Major. He did the job. Yeah.

So Brian was, and we watched the movie, the Green Berets, and we started looking, we started buying With John Wayne. Yes. Started buying Soldier Fortune Magazine. You know, people talk a lot of shit about movies that are made about SEALS for clarity. Yeah. Well deserved. But let's not forget.

The Green Berets, that movie with old John Wayne predated Navy SEALs with Charlie Sheen. Now we could argue about which one's better. Clearly Navy SEALs is better. All I'm going to say is this when I was in, because my first exposure working with SEALs was when I was when I was in the 18 Delta course. And one of the instructors said, he goes, all I'm going to say is we got John Wayne. You got Rob Lo. Rob Lo.

Charlie Sheen, you mean? No, there was a direct to video. Oh, I've seen it. Yes. It's called the Silver Strand. It's the one where they have the big fans. It's called the Silver Strand. They're in a canopy with big fans.

Michael, just to confirm this, because I'm going to recommend that everybody go watch us. Go on to YouTube and look up a Silver Strand Navy Seal movie. I believe it is out there for free. Probably. If it's not, it should be. It should be. And it should be watched. It is one of the worst examples of both acting.

and CGI. It's so bad you can't turn it off. Yeah. Yeah. But still, though, the John Way movie predated that way. So I got a quick side question here. So Michael Bion has played a seal, what, five times now?

If not, over a dozen. He's got to be an honorary trident. I was going to say. That's exactly what I was going to say. Give him the eagle and, give him the anchor in the pistol at least. It's like, come on. The Abyss, Navy SEALs.

There's a couple other ones that are not as popular as those two. The Rock. The Rock. Of course. classic documentary. Yeah. String of Pearls configuration. It's not that big of it.

Yeah. It's so that I love the rock because it shows you what a hard charging battalion staff can do. Oh, God. Because that's basically what they were. Yeah. And just why MP5s are not the right choice of weapon

for anything other than being on the range. I love MP5s, but damn, that is the most useless firearm ever. They're fun. Yeah. But no. And that's it. Fun period. But I wouldn't make entry with it.

one. Michael, what do you got? Yeah, Silver Strand and the Rock. Who cares about the Rock? The Silver Strand is the origin story of all Navy Seal movies. Pull that up. Yes. Oh, it is so, so bad. Wait, I don't think that's the one I'm talking about. The one I'm talking about has Rob Lowe and they're doing the powered parasailers. I know. I've watched it, yeah.

Put it in SilverStrand. Oh, finest hour. Finest hour. That might be it. Try that. Pull that up. Yes. Look at that dick broom on Rob Lowe. Are we going to talk about Thunder and Paradise while we're here?

I'm unfamiliar with Thunder and Paradise. Oh my God. Bring up Thunder and Paradise. It's a movie. Hold on to your hat. No, no, no. It was a TV show. Just so you know, Michael, I'll expect to report on all of these movies the next time we see each other. Which will be tomorrow, by the way. So you have your homework cut out.

Was it with, oh, what's his name, the wrestler guy? Yes, it was. Yeah. Thunder in Paradise. Did you just say the wrestler guy? Yeah, I'm blinking on the name. You mean Hulk Hogan? Yes, Hawking.

Poor Terry. The wrestler guy. That's, for clarity, likely the most iconic wrestler guy that there's. I forgot. And I think, I think, uh, Sting played a villain on a couple episodes. Just, just so you know, all of these movies were like late 90s or mid to late 90s. I don't know what was going on then. I know that there was no combat operations or anything to base these off of.

So I think the screenwriters just took a little. Oh, creative liberal. A bit. Yeah. Them flying around in basically the parasailers. Have you, you've done everything else under canopy. Have you done that? No.

No? Those never interested me. But I can tell you what, you're not sneaking up on anybody with those things. No. No, basically a huge lawnmower. Yeah. Yeah, Michael Bain has been a team guy. He has to have been a team guy in more movies than any other actor.

Does he get invited to events? I don't know. Come on, man. Give the guy some love. I've heard in real life, he's a little out there. Really? Yeah. Huh. Man, I hate hearing shit like that. No, no, I mean, in a bad way.

He's just... Just kooky? He's the the thespian. Oh, yeah. Okay. Enough said. His body is his art for him. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, I don't know. I don't have what it takes to go in front of a camera.

I mean, Kyle fucking Reese, man. I mean, come on. He's a lot of things. Yeah. He's a lot of things. Yeah. There was some pretty funny stories about the making of Navy Seals. Apparently they did come to the Bud's compound and,

they would take some breaks from time to time and come out with a little powdered donut under their nose, you know, to a little bit just to get back into the old PT. Well, I know Charlie, I remember, I remember reading an article back then that Charlie had team guys as his, like, security. Probably. Yeah, like, like, everywhere. And they would go to the gym with him. Yeah. And then they would, like, go out and, you know, and they were going, they were hanging out, like, in seal bars and shit like that. So, why not?

Yeah. All right. So, you were inspired by the Green Berets movie. Yeah. So I was inspired by the. that. And also, so, so I'm going to give, this is a deep cut and this, you probably don't recognize this name. Do you know who Bogrites is? I have heard that name. Do you remember that name? So Bogrites was a retired special forces colonel. Okay. Vietnam era. He had been a team leader in

Vietnam, a battalion commander in seventh group, and he's a battalion commander of 3-7, I believe, at one point. When he retired, so this was back in the 80s and 90s, there was a lot of talk about, that there were MIAs still in Vietnam somewhere. Yes. That was a very widely held book. Chuck Norris made a whole movie franchise. Even in the 90s when I got in. I don't know if I would necessarily say it was a deeply held belief,

but I had heard those conversations. Very deeply held. Especially in the 80s, very deeply held belief. 80s makes more sense to me because of the proximity to Vietnam. So one of the guys on Bo's team in Vietnam was a guy named Chuck Patterson. Chuck Patterson became a sheriff's. deputy in my hometown. I went to high school with his kids. So, uh, and I was, I played football with, uh, with his stepson. I would, you know, go over to his house and he had all the SF stuff.

And they had these really cool. So, you know, uh, everybody remembers Vietnam tiger stripe, but there's also the leopard pattern. You know, you know, you I'm talking about. It's like, it's like the old, it looks like the Marine Corps camouflage from World War II. Okay. Yeah. Oh, that's actually a great pattern. He had a really cool, uh, parachute silk band. bandana that his whole team had wore. And he had it on a plaque. Maybe he even could be considered a scarf. Yes.

One could say so. Scarf. I mean, with a beret, you might as well wear a scarf. Sure, why not? You're accessorizing. It's a weird French painter hat. Let's throw an ascot on there. It's like, go to town.

Yeah. Fuck it. Ascot. So you had the Fairburn Sykes knife in this plaque with the scarf hanging around it. And he's, He didn't tell us a whole lot of war stories, but, you know, we, we'd kind of, you know, heard enough. And he, he'd, he would tell him to his kids.

And then they would, hey, Chuck told us about this one time when he got shot in the lip and all this other stuff. That would hurt like a bitch. That would, yeah, quite a bit, quite a bit. But he ended up going, they ended up going and trying to do a rescue mission. And basically it was a reconnaissance that they didn't find it in the 80s? In the 80s. Whoa.

It was in, it was in all. Like a military operation? No. Civilian. These were, they were, you know, basically Merks. Title 51 authorities. Yeah. So they went over, I forget where they made infill from.

But they basically swam across the river into Vietnam or whatever. You're breaking some laws at that place. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. It was a big deal. They're like, you know, basically it's like, this is an international incident, right? Chuck ended up writing a book about it. Yeah.

Yeah. But before that even, you know, before that even happened that they went and did that, I remember looking up to this guy and I'm like, that's what I want to do. I want to be a green beret. So when the time came for me to sign in to delayed entry, you couldn't do that anymore. A year before, you know, if you're graduating 83, you could do it. There was a couple of guys in my basic training class that got in like just under the wire.

I'm talking about just a direct pipeline. Yeah, from, you know, high school to Q course. Okay. Couldn't do that when I went in. So I went to the MEP station and they said, not a thing anymore buddy so you can you can go airborne or you can go ranger and i'm like i'll go ranger so i had an what's called an unassigned ranger contract as an infantryman i was an 11 x-ray because i didn't have my mOS yet that's what i spent a year on delayed entry i go to uh basic

training at fort benning georgia i go to airborne school i go to savannah georgia which is my first duty station with 175. I go through at the time each at the time second Ranger Battalion and First Ranger Battalion each ran their own Ranger indoctrination program. Interesting. Regiment was a thing but was not really a thing yet. Its regimental headquarters was still very new. Third Ranger Battalion had not stood up yet. We were still wearing different patches. I was still wearing the old Ranger Battalion scroll that the first battalion scroll and the 2nd Battalion scroll, other than the fact that they were the same colors and they were both scrolls, didn't even look like, right? While I was there, I'd only been there a few months

after I made it through Rip and made it to my platoon. We changed over to the regimental scroll, right? And then that was right about the same time that 3rd Ranger Battalion stood up and became active. And we actually did, we were actually the opt for the exeval for them to be certified as yes, you know, you're a real Ranger battalion now. So opt for people as a operative. position force. You're playing the enemy and I'm assuming the X is the, basically the exercise or the certification exercise. We used to call them cert X's. Yeah. It would allow a unit to be deployable or distra. Yeah, they used to call them, uh, R-Teps was a word. I don't remember what that stood for. Exaval means you're getting, uh, an evaluation from an external source. Yeah.

Uh, Eidre was a term that used to get thrown around a lot. That's an acronym that I even know what it means, but I don't know if I know that one either. It basically means you get, it's an, uh, for it to be in Edry, I think it has to be like an alert call out. Like, you know, you're, you're eating at Ryan's steakhouse and, you know, if you get a phone call, hey, you know, come to work. Let's go. We're going. I think that's the qualification for it to be an Edry. But yeah, so I wanted to be SF. I ended up in the Rangers 100%. Not only the best thing that ever happened to militarily, probably the best thing that ever happened to me in my life. If I, as an as a snot-nosed 18-year-old, if I would have gone to SF, there's no way possible. I would have had the maturity to operate on a 12-man team of my own

accord doing everything the way that you're supposed to be doing it in a professional manner. I don't, maybe there's 18-year-olds out there that can do it. I would not have been one of them, in my opinion. I needed that, the atmosphere of, hey, the guy who got here 10 minutes before you got here is senior to you. And if he fucking tells you to do something, you're going to do it. And oh, by the way, anybody that has a black and gold ranger tab on their shoulder, they're a god to you. And if they tell you, if you're sitting on the seat in the, in the truck when we're coming

back from the range, and they tell you to get off the seat and sit on the floor, even though there's plenty of seats available, you're going to do it, right? This is, there's a pecking order. There's a hierarchy. There's hazing involved. I don't, and it wasn't, in my opinion, it was not malicious hazing. It wasn't bad hazing. You know, there's all these discussions about using the military.

The intent behind it really matters. If the intent is I'm going to train you. Yeah. Because I'm going to put my life in your hands and you're going to put your life in my hands. That's good. If it's, uh, I was getting shit on a week ago. Now there's somebody I can shit on. That's a totally different story.

Correct. Right. If you're coming up with new and inventive ways to just shit on people, not cool. Right. If you're coming up with this is corrective training, you know, oh, you, you left whatever it was in your room, or you left it on the drop zone, or you left it on Target,

well, maybe I'm going to make you carry it around your neck for a week with a sign that says, I lost my NVGs or something like that, right? That's not a fun sign to carry. It's not a fun sign to carry, but guess what? That's somebody that's never going to leave their MVGs in their room again.

I lost my nods on my first real world target. Did you? I went back and got them. Well, there you go. I made up for it. I was like, hey boss, I'll be right back. I got to go get something. Because I was getting ready to flip them down.

We're going to external. I was like, because I was sledging a door, hit him right off my helmet. Yeah. Well, see, it's not like, that's a little different too. In your defense, it's not like you set them down. No, no, I hit him right off my own head because I'm an idiot. Yeah. Fucking happens.

I had the... I'm just glad I recognize it. I feel like a jackass running to the helicopter, though, holding your nods in hand, you're just like, hey, guys. Yeah. Hi. Oh, hey, who's that? Oh, yeah, let me look at you. Well, you put your monocle in. Hey. Thankfully, we never had to roll with those. I can't, I've put monocles on. They give me a splitting headache. Do they? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The binos are the way to go for sure. Yeah. I don't, I get, I get very claustrophobic under knots. Really? Yeah. I don't, it's, it's something, it's a me thing, right? It's, and I think the, the biggest part of it is we never, we, I never got

quads. Yeah. Right. Is the, most guys have gone. back to binos. I know. Yeah. The quads are just, they're heavy. They're heavy as fuck. Yeah. And when they increase your field of view, maybe 30%,

I'd rather just move my head around a little bit. Yeah. And just get that field of view back as opposed to add three to four more pounds to my head. You know, on one hand, I would like, because not having the peripheral vision is what really screws with me. Okay. But on the other hand, I have two herniated discs in my neck because of wearing a helmet with MBGs.

Yeah. So. And then, of course, you can counterbalance it, but like, yeah, okay, you're going to and put a dive weight on the back. It's more weight. It's more weight. It's more compression. Then you take a whipper or you do a jump and you, you know, you take a heart, like all that stuff is just going all the way through your neck.

I had my first Afghanistan deployment. We, the way we would do things in the unit is a lot, you know, obviously your weapon is your weapon. So you would fly over with your weapon. But nods and radios were a handoff. They were. Oh, turnover in country type. Yeah. Yeah.

They were in country turnover. Right. So you would, I would go to, if you were my counterpart, the guy that I was relieving, here's your stuff. Here's your, and it would be, it was usually nods, radio, and Garmin. Like, here's your stuff. Just 1149 up between guys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, for whatever reason, the NVGs that I had, they weren't quite right for the mount that I had. It was like the teat, you know, and you know where this is going. The teat was just a little bit too short, right? This just describes the military perfectly. And so I've got the, I've got the bungee cords.

like we all did, right? So I got the bungee cords on, I got the NVGs down, and this happened to me, I don't know how many times. They were driving, and we had this shitty vehicle. It was, you know,

I don't even know what they're called. It's like the groundskeeper vehicle at a football stadium. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, let's just call them that. Yeah, yeah. So we're driving out to go, to go get on the aircraft

and hit a pothole, and the nods are going to do one or two things. They're either going to fly backwards. Or right in your eyeballs. Or go right in both of your eyeballs. Yeah. Right. So, and I had, I always, not everybody did this, but I always wore either goggles or

Clear Oakley's under my knot. And people are like, how can you do that? They fog? I'm like, because I've had this happen so much. Yeah. Like, it's either this or live in constant fear. Yeah. And be squinting everywhere that I go.

Yeah. People made, Night vision goggles are amazing. Well, you're describing it not fitting properly. There's always a little bit of slop. There's always, yeah. And so people started putting bungee cords and they basically loop them into the nods so it's pulling them into your face. And it is great. It takes all the slop out.

But like you're saying, there's a price to pay for that. If you're up there and you're like, maybe you didn't latch it into the tongue and groove as much as you thought you did, you're going to take a whipper right in the eyeballs. Yeah. And you might have a pair of black eyes that you gave yourself. Yeah. Yeah. You would think that the military would have figured out a better solution than basically Ace Hardware small bungee cords. No, I'm sorry to tell you.

They haven't. And people that complain about all the different charging attachments for Apple products and Android's and all the thing. Let me introduce you to nods mounts. Oh, God. 20 times worse, because I swear to God, I swear to God, there are so many. And I've seen. Which is how.

That makes sense, by the way. One universal nod mount for everybody, conventional and special operations. Yeah, should be. Yes. It should be. Why not? Yeah. Aviators have their own.

Oh, ours are based off of this. battery system. And yeah, and our mount is different. I'm like, why? Yeah. Sometimes it's a battery here. Sometimes it's a battery here. You know, sometimes it's both, you know, it's, who knows? This is how old I am. When I came in, we were wearing PBS5s, which is basically the old viewmaster. Yeah. In green. Yeah. That's basically what it is. Yeah, I got issued my first set of Bino nods when I went out to the East Coast command. Up until that, it was, I think we had like two sets that we would hand each other. Like, you know, and Steel Team 5 and the platoon I was in.

And we were just walking around like idiots without night vision. I think like the OIC would have a pair. And everyone saw it be like talking about stuff that he could see. Like I can't even. What are you talking about? Dude, I can see the stars. Dude, when we first got the M4 systems. So every M4 system was supposed to come with, it was.

basically when it came, it was supposed to be, I think you're supposed to have four optics with it. Wasn't it called the SOPMOD system? SOMMOD system. I didn't want to say it, but yeah, it was called the SopMod system. And they had that poster. It's the whole Sopmod system. I never once saw a complete set of that.

It was supposed to be that every weapon had an ACOG, a reflex site. Yep. So ACOG is a 4 power. Reflexite is a red dot. Yeah, an aim point. Yep, red dot. And then there was like one other.

I don't remember what it was. but somebody decided, well, obviously, you're not going to, you're only going to have one optic on your weapon. So we only need the number of optics that we have weapons. Oh, no. So, yeah. So, and this was in, this was in an SF group. Now, this was in an SF group.

This wasn't, this wasn't the Connecticut National Guard. This was in an SF group, right? This decision was made at SF command level. Because this was right around the time you came in, right? This was the 90s. This was during the Clinton administration, where anything that had to do with weapons, oh, we can cut money on that.

We can totally cut money on that. It's bold color. So what ended up happening is when they got the Sop mods, there was like, it was like getting George Strait tickets. There was like a run to the arms room. Don't be the last one there or you're going to get the shitty optics. Yeah. Right?

You're not going to get what you want. You're going to get shit. But I was on a Reki team. So I ran an ACOG up top because it had magnification. So that was good for Rekki. And then actually we started doing this as a team. We started doing, there was a real push in the late 90s for everybody to do more CQB. That's when we started doing the Sefowel courses.

So on my team, we started running the reflex sites forward and at the one clock position. So you could have a near-off position. Yeah. So you'd come up to target and you just transition. The only problem was brass angle fucked you. Yeah, but it looks cool. It looked cool as shit. It looked cool as shit, right?

So I'll never forget this. This was the Warren on my team. we were doing building clearing one time. And he ended up looking like so incredibly cool because we were in one room and he's going on the reflex site. And we come out in the hallway and they purposely had a target on an outer door all the way down this hallway. So it's a pretty long shot.

Yeah. So he goes, do, do, do, do. Translates to ACog, boom, headshot and goes right into the next room. It's not bad. No, he ended up having a lot of cool points for that one. Only real life was like that. Yeah, right? Yeah.

I try to tell people, you know, there's the. perception of how high speed they think things are. You and I can talk for more space than we have on the hard drive about the reality of the radios or the guns or the uniform or like the helmets and how people's neck. They're like, no, no, no, it just always looks amazing. I'm like, it kind of is amazing. But at the same time, it's an absolute catastrophe and clown show at all times as well. Both things are true. Yeah.

Well, that's what somebody, somebody asked me one time, I was talking about a particular, thing that I'd been on and they're like, what were you thinking about in the moment? And I'm like, I was thinking about how much pain I was in from the hook Velcro grinding into the back of my neck. And I literally could think of nothing else. Like, I just wanted everything to be over. There's always some little thing. You're like, I'm just not, I'm not Chuck Norris in this incident, in this instance, because this is really bothering me. And I did not think it was going to be like this. Yeah. Yeah, it's wild. So when did you make the jump from Ranger to S. So I did four years in Raidipatine, made a T.E5. I was an anti-tank section leader.

That was, we had the 90-millimeter recoilless rifles back then. We were making the transition to the Carl G's as I was getting out. I decided that I wanted to stay. I'm like you, I'm a California expat. Where in Cali? I was born in Redonda Beach. I spent my formative years into Tachapi. to hatchetope. Nobody knows where it is. I've heard that name, though, but where is that in Calais? So it is 40 miles east of Bakersfield.

Okay. If you follow the Sierra Nevada chain all the way down, you go to the last mountain in the Sierra Nevada's. There's a little blank spot of desert, and then there's one little mountain off all by its lonesome that's not allowed to be part of the Sierra Nevada chain. That's us. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah.

So I didn't want to go back to California. So I said, I'm going to stay in Georgia. So looked for employment, found employment, and I was going to go in the Georgia Guard. They had... So you exited active duty. I exited active duty. They had a, they had like an Lerce unit, a reconnaissance unit, somewhere in North Georgia. And I was going to go and do that.

And I talked to them on the phone and they were really like, well, and I said, hey, this is who I am. Like, you know, I'm Ranger qualified, you know, I'm on jump status. I made a T5, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, well, yeah, I guess maybe in a couple months we can have you come up for an interview. I was like, oh, okay. But I called 20th group in Florida. And they're like, yeah, how soon can you be here? And I'm like, I can come down on this day.

Okay, yeah, we'll give you. Come down on Friday. So we issue your T.850 so you can drill on Saturday with everybody. Damn. So went into 20th group. I wasn't SF qualified at the time. So they put you in a pipeline. at the time they called us the NQPs, the non-qualified personnel.

So they put you in basically in a pipeline and you do separate training. Well, the team guys are doing their team guy stuff. Every drill, you're doing, you know, classes in land navigation and stuff like that. Over time, it ended up a lot of us that had come from, you know, either, we had a few guys that came from Ranger Regiment and a few guys that came from had been like squad leaders in the 82nd. We ended up teaching a lot of those classes and kind of, you know, keeping everybody else corralled to get ready to go. I wanted to go to the Q course as soon as possible.

It didn't work. It's with problems with orders and my physical and a bunch of other stuff. It ended up not happening. And I ended up putting it on hold. So I ended up, I was in, I got there in 88 and we got mobilized for Desert Storm in 91. And I still had not gone to the course yet. So guess what? We showed up at Fort Bragg and they said, hey, there's going to be a bus outside in 10 minutes, get on it, you're going to selection. And I'm like, oh, when, when am I going? Tomorrow, you're going to selection tomorrow. So I went from being a college kid at Georgia Southern University. You know, luckily, I had enough background that, you know, you could do it from memory as they speak. Yeah. So I went to selection, made it. There was, they sent 11 of us

from our battalion to selection. And I think four of us made it. And this is the pre-Q-Course selection. This is pre- Yeah, this is SFAS, right. So made it through SIF. FAS and at that time I said, you know what? I want to play with explosives. So I'm going to be an 18 Charlie, be an engineer. So I went through the engineer course, loved it, loved everything. I loved playing with explosives. I like building stuff.

Hey, I'm learning to build bridges. Hey, that's kind of cool. I'm learning to work with mines. That's pretty cool. I figured out while I was in the course. I'm like, you know, I have been without direction. You know, I was working as a corrections officer. I was going to college.

How was that, by the way? That is an occupation that seems to be just savage. It's soul killing. Yeah. If it's not soul killing, either you're working someplace that has a really good system to keep you up or there's something wrong with you. Well, how'd you get into that line of work to begin with? Yeah.

So, a little niche, if you will. Yeah. So at the time, the career track in the 80s for most guys in Rangers, was you're either going to stay in and then go SF, Delta, maybe go to Korea for a tour and come back or something like that, or you're going to get out and you're going to be a cop. That's pretty much what everybody did.

So I got out and initially I applied to Savannah PD. And there were a few former battalion guys who were on Savannah PD. I applied, boom, they went into a hiring freeze, like immediately. So I worked at Sam's Club. stock and shelves just to pay my bills. I decided, I said, you know what, there's nothing going on for me right here in Savannah. I'm going to move down the road to Statesboro. I'm going to go to Georgia Southern, right? That was the college up the road. So what can I do there for work? So I got out the one ads. Boom, corrections officer. Call them up. How do they describe that job in the one ad?

It said, officer of corrections, duties, you know, 40 hours a week working inside. supervision of inmates, security, blah, blah, blah. So they really rounded some edges on it. Yeah, but I mean, I knew. So growing up in Tachby, there's a state penitentiary in Tachia. Oh, there is out of that area, yeah. I knew, I had friends who had fathers who worked in corrections. So I was not clueless about what corrections entailed, right?

And you still wanted to go. And I still, well, because here was the appeal is it was nights. Right? So it's like I can work nights, go to school during the day. And I'm like, it's not law enforcement, but it's law enforcement adjacent. So maybe it gives me a little foot in the door. So I applied for the job. I went down there, interviewed.

There was a very low bar to get the job. I was the guy who showed up and interviewed, so I got the job. I started on the job training immediately. I think I worked for two months before I went to the corrections officer academy. Then I went to the corrections officer academy in Forsyth, Georgia at a place called G-Post. Those were big training center that they had there. And I did that for almost three years, just shy of three years. So it's, it's a, it's.

It seems like almost an impossible job. Well, the problem is it's like running a daycare with a bunch of toddlers who might have a knife between their butt cheeks. Yeah. The difference is, well, there's the. knife and that's there full grown adults and have the capacity associated with being a full grown adult. Yeah. Physical capacity.

Maybe not mental, but physical. It's, uh, everything's a battle. Like it's, they don't want to be there, obviously. You're a symbol of that to them. So you might be telling them something that's 100% in their best interest. And they're going to do the exactly the opposite of what you're telling them because you were the one that told them. Okay.

it's trying to think of the best way to say this so the big thing the the big determiners that I saw of how people ended up there had a lot to do well I won't say ended up there but whether they were going to keep coming back had to do with accountability interesting right it's not about you know I tell people this all the time there's a huge misconception everybody in prison oh they're full of badasses These are the toughest people on earth. No. No, not at all.

Just like special operations. Yeah. It's not a bunch of badasses that are the toughest people on earth. No. But, you know, I tell them, I said, if I line up a hundred, pluck me 100 convicts out of any institutional system, line them up across 100 civilians, cross-level them to make sure you have basically, you know, they're all about the same age and come from similar backgrounds. The civilians are going to run through them like a hot knife through butter. Because most of these guys, okay, they're not. they're not watching out for their fitness and health. Most of them were smokers. I didn't see a whole

lot of fighting ability, you know, in inmates. I was, this was before, you know, I trained just like you, I trained jitsu now. I didn't have a lot of formal fight training at that point and I had to go hands on a good bit and I never had issues with it. And this wasn't, I said that to somebody one time and they're like, well, that's because it was six on one or whatever. No, I worked nights when there There was two of us in the entire facility. Oh, that's not good odds at all. Yeah. Oh, I had to wait.

When I knew that I really needed to get out of it was we had an inmate strike once that almost became an inmate riot. Interesting. And I had to wade into the dining hall with 100 and whatever it was. I think we had 157 inmates on the census at that time. I had to wade through 157 inmates to walk up to the biggest son of the city. a bitch in there and go, hey man, you need to have everybody get back in the dorms because I got to do a headcount while a bunch of fellow fellow officers are watching from behind locked doors. How did he respond to said request?

He did. I had a really, this, you know how they say, you know, make friends with the biggest guy in prison? Yeah. I mean, I make sense. I'm not technically familiar with that phrase. I inadvertently made friends with the biggest guy in there. And I had worked there for two years before this guy got transferred into there.

Big son of a bitch, big weightlifter guy. Well, when he got there, I was already in the process because they had no physical fitness equipment for the inmates. And I go, you know, you should really, like they're not, the ones that play, they play softball on the yard. Some of them shoot hoops, but a lot of them don't have anything to do. I said, you got 150-some-odd guys with no outlet for, you know, for all this energy and everything. I said, you know, get him a gym. You know, get him an outside gym. And I ended up getting tasked.

They gave me a budget. I took one of the county vans. I drove to a sports store and I ended up getting a bunch of dumbbells and a bunch of other stuff. So this guy, I got him weights. I was his friend for life because he wanted weights and I got him weights. and he ended up being the guy that was kind of the titular figurehead of this convict strike. And I just walked up to him. I go, hey, man, I need you to get everybody back in the dorms because I got to do a count.

And then, you know, we get it. You guys aren't refusing to work today. That's fine. But you can't be doing it out here, right? Because this is, this is, I said, this is bad. People are going to start getting worked up. And then pretty soon tables are going to start getting thrown. That's not good for anybody.

Yeah, I said people are going to start getting more time. And once you say that, you're speaking their language. Yeah. Right. So he stood up on the table and he goes, everybody back in the dorms now. And they went back in the dorms. And I went behind him and I locked down all the dorms. And I went to where officers were watching from the other side of the bars.

I said, let me out. They let me out. I handed one dude the keys and I said, I'm going home. I feel like my shift is done for the day. Yeah, I feel like I think I had 20 minutes left in my shift. But I'm like, I feel like I've done enough for the day. I defuse that while you guys watched. and potentially could have watched me get torn apart and you all were just stood here and done nothing.

A lot of people would think that violence is a solution to that or forcing in some way them to comply. Yeah, like fire hoses or something like that. Oh, man. No. You'd be surprised what a man-to-man conversation will accomplish. Yeah. Not always the correct move. No, but I get it.

All right, so you eventually get your chance. And how does that work? Do they activate you, you were in the National Guard at the time or reserves? Do they activate you to go through the Q-Course? Because that's about a year, right? Yeah. So typically the way that it happened, so we were activated anyway

because we got activated for Desert Storm. Fair enough. We only got activated, though, to, there was no intention of deploying 20 Special Forces Group overseas for that conflict. We only got activated to literally to validate the concept of a National Guard SF unit. So they're like, okay, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to activate you. We're going to bring you to Fort Bragg. and we're going to X a value. And that way we can determine, okay, if we did have to deploy you, either you would be able to perform these missions or you would not be able to perform these missions, right? Yeah. So we got activated for that purpose.

So I was already activated when I went through selection and that I just stayed on active duty to finish out the Q course. But in answer to your question, so most people, they would go to selection. Selection's three weeks. And selection is the way that it works in Army, selection is a go and return. So whether you're in a National Guard unit like I was,

or let's say you're stationed in Korea or Germany, right? You say, I want to go SF. They don't say, okay, all right, your PCS into Fort Bragg. Because in the 80s, that's how they used to do it. It's like, I'm going to go to the Q course. Okay, move you and your family and everything to Fort Bragg. Oh, you failed out three days in? There's the 82nd.

Yeah. That's where you're going. So they don't do it that way anymore. And they didn't during the 90s is, you would go on TDI-Y orders to Fort Bragg. Which means temporary duty. Temporary duty. So you go through selection.

You get, if at the end you go selected, you get selected, they say, okay, now go back to your unit, turn in all your shit, you know, do what you need to do. And then communicate with us on when the, you know, like, because you might get back, and this happened to some people, they get back to their unit. They're like, hey, we're getting ready to do X or Y. We really, we need you for this. And then you can start clearing. That would happen to some people.

So they might have to delay it. But that was good. That was actually good for people because you came out of selection pretty busted up. That three weeks beat you down a lot. Like I had stress fractures in both feet. I remember just like it hurt to walk for a few weeks after I got out of SFAS. So if I would have had to go right into the Q course, that probably would have been a problem. So I had about a month to six weeks maybe between the time.

I went to SFAS and the time I started the course, which was good for me. It gave me plenty of time to heal up and get back to running again without my feet hurting. And then I went through the Charlie course. But yeah, that's, you know, for most people, they would get basically if, you know, another 20th group guy would go to SFAS, come back for a couple of drills and heal up. And they say, okay, we're cutting your orders for the course. And they would go to the course. Okay.

So you make it through the course, obviously. Where did you end up going from there? I went to seventh group. after so while I was in I would have gone back to 20th group but I decided uh I decided I made my intentions known when I was still in the Q course and then those solidified when I was in language school so I went to Spanish language school um I waited till about halfway through then I started talking to recruit I'd already talked to the unit I said this is my plan and they said okay is that pretty easy process since you were you were you reserve or national guard national guard so you were

it's not that you weren't active duty but you were acting in that capacity Is that just paperwork on their side to reactivate? Basically. Yeah. Basically. So all that happened was they said, okay, you're going to finish language school, right? And you're on active duty for language school. So you're going to get a DG214 and separate, go back to inactive status to the guard.

That's why they have so many DD214s. Oh, I, dude, you have, I have like six DD214s. Okay. Maybe even more than that. I have a ridiculous number of DG4. Because every time you end a stint as active, you were essentially dischurched. If it was six months or more, you get a DG214. That makes sense.

Okay. So I've got one from Ranger Battalion. I've got one from Ranger Battalion, one from activation with 20th group, and then deactivation, one from the Q-course, and one from language school. Then I got one from, when I got out as an E-7 and got commissioned. I think I even got another one for the end of medical school, because you're still on active duty, but it's a weird system. We're decommissioninging you as a second lieutenant, recommissioning you as an O3.

So I might even have one in there. And then I have my final retirement one that has basically everything on it. But it's a little bit confusing when you read it because it's like, wait a minute, how do you have all these awards but all the schools aren't listed? All the schools are listed on all my other DD-214s because I have a whole stack of them, right? Yeah. So for me, I went to the, I went to a regular recruiter there in Spring Lake. And I said, hey, this is who I am. I'm a staff sergeant, 18 Charlie,

and I want to go on active duty. And they're like, okay. So, and then he goes, so you're going to have to take the ASVAB again because it's been more than X number of years since you took the ASVab. So I had to go take the ASVAB. I had to go do the regular, the physical,

all that stuff, go through MEPs. So I went through the Raleigh Meps. Hell yeah. Got orders for Fort Bragg. Duck walking, all sorts of things. Oh, yeah, all that shit. Do the number of questions that everybody else is like all the, and you can always tell, like, in between, you know, you're doing all the different stations. Like, yeah.

One of the guy, you know, because, you know, people, oh, you're going to go around the room, tell me who you are and what your contract is, blah, blah, blah, blah. So everybody knew that I was already an E6 and all, and the guys would come over. I'm like, okay, here it comes. So, hey, a question for you, you know. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you follow the show, I hope that you realize I consistently and constantly push people towards getting a higher level of care when it comes to anything that they are struggling with between the ears. And the reason I do so is that I have had to do that or I have chosen to do that would be a better term for that in my life. And it has had an immense impact.

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Back to the show. Yeah. So I ended up being the unofficial, the G2 channel. You got to get your bailout from somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. And then they were getting it from me. I had taken it upon myself in the interim to make contact with the seventh

special force group sergeant major because I didn't, I wanted to go to seventh group. Everybody that I knew was in seventh group. I spoke Spanish. It was logical that I go to seventh group. But they were still filling up third group. So there was a chance that I could go to third group. And I didn't want to go to third group. I wanted to go to seventh.

So I made contact with the seventh group Sergeant Major. Told him, you know, this is who I am. This is where I'm coming from in the background. And initially he was a little bit standoffish about it. But I think he'd been burned before by taking some guys on. But he's like, oh, you came from the Ranger Battalion. And his name was Sergeant Major Bone. He was a little bit infamous in special forces and not necessarily for good ways.

but he did like guys that came from Ranger Battalion, ran from Ranger Regiment. So he said, okay, which he said, call me back when you get your language rating. And then I'll decide. And I ended up getting, I think, I was a 2-2 or a 2-2-plus. Damn. For people who think that's based off of a test.

Yeah. I mean, I never took one of those tests because I went to language school. You tell me it's essentially your proficiency and fluency. Yeah, the highest it goes is 3-3, which... Most people get a 1-1. Most people get a 1-1, which is functional. Or if some people, a 0-0-0-plus is considered, hey, I can order a glass of water and find out what the bathroom is.

Daughey and start La Biblioteca. Exactly. Exactly. Sometimes that's all you need. Yeah. I was by the time, you know, years, by the time I'd been on a team for six months, I was a 3-3. Okay. And I maintained a 3-3.

Which is well. That's very proficient. Yeah. It was, you know, I would, you know, I lived in Peru for six months and, you know, all of my, you know, all of my, You get a lot of reps in it. Yeah, all of my daily interactions with people were in Spanish. And they say you really know you've mastered a language when you dream in that language. So I did ultimately get to that point where I would have dreams that were completely in Spanish.

Can you imagine if you had gotten a sign like Farsi or Arabic? Oh, I can't even imagine it. So, well, and I had an FDLPT score that I could have gone to Mandarin. And I'm so glad I didn't. So, so glad I didn't. I just, I mean, I feel like it's almost impossible to master unless you grew up in that environment. Yeah. It's, it gives people fits.

So, yeah. So I was really for, not only is, you know, Spanish, I mean, it's a romance language. It's considered somewhat easier to learn. But the other advantage in Spanish is, like you say, getting the reps in is, you know, you can, you know, we were constantly actively deploying to Central and South America. So you're getting the epaubes. Are similar as well, too. You're not working off Cyrillic or like these other. Or Arabic.

Yeah. Symbology based stuff where they all have a different meaning. Right. And there's places you can go to a Mexican restaurant if you need to get, you know, we did that when I was in language school. Hey, we're going to go. We're going to go out to Mika Cita tea today. Yeah.

So you guys can all practice. Yeah, Spanish only. Speaking to somebody, you know, we're not allowed to speak English while we're at lunch. Yeah. You know, stuff like that. Can a farce speaker do that? There's a lot of Farsi restaurants out there. A lot of restaurant, you might not even, you know, just because you're going

to a Chinese restaurant, they might be speaking Cantonese. Might not be speaking Mandarin. You know, and if that's your language of choice, the language you got assigned, you're not going to get the reps in. So. So how'd you switch from being an engineer the Bravo pipeline to the Delta? Yeah. I haven't heard many people making that choice.

Yeah, it's more than you think. It does happen. So it's a lot of guys will do, hey, I want to, and I wasn't one of them. I didn't even have my eye on 18 Delta at all. But I did know some guys that were like, I always planned on being an 18 Delta. But I wanted to hedge my bets because my number one priority was being SF. my number two priority was being an 18 Delta NSF. So I went to the Bravo course or the Charlie course first.

So, okay, now I'm SF. So the worst that can happen to me if I fail out of the 18 Delta course is I go back to this great job that I already loved anyway. So okay. Yeah, so that was their strategy. That was not my strategy. I was going to be an 18 Charlie till the end. And I did think about, you know, I was looking at, you know, what's my path going to be? Am I going to work my way up to being a team sergeant?

or am I going to go to the warrant officer course and be a Warrant? NSF warrant? What am I going to do? I ended up having a personal crisis. A lot of stuff was going on in my home life. And I needed, for lack of a better phrase, I needed to get the fuck out of Fayetteville. I just needed to be away from Fayetteville to get my head right. I needed a total change of scenery.

I needed something to focus on because I was not in a good place. And I had already had the medic on my team. Rick Silva had already, he had told me numerous times. He goes, you need to go to the medic course, dude. You need to go to the medic course. He goes, you have, he goes, I know how to pick out the mindset of somebody who would kick ass in the metacourse. You totally have that.

You need to go. You have this eye for minutia. You love learning. He said, you should go. And the medic course, the first one is the short course, right? Six months? Yeah. Yeah.

So, and it was, so the way that it was structured then was, you went to Fort Sam Houston. And it was more than six months. I think end to end was nine. I think it was based off six months schoolhouse and then three months basically out doing rotations and ambulances with the way that described to me. Yeah. So the way that it was for us, I think it was nine months on station there. But one entire month of that was what they called CPT, clinical proficiency training.

So you were basically, I worked in an Indian Reservation Hospital in Gallup, New Mexico for a month. I bet you saw some wild shit. I was taking out appendices, appendices, you know, with a surgeon looking over my shoulder. I was scrubbing down on orthopedic procedures. I was in in the OR. I was running traumas in the trauma. It's not a trauma hospital, but you do get some trauma.

Saw a lot of rodeo injuries. Oh, I bet. So it did a lot of just general medicine stuff. I got to work. They have a clinic in Tohatchy that is basically like a military clinic almost running like sick call, urgent care type stuff. I got to work there. Really, really great experience.

Just really, really good experience. At that time, you came out of the course. with an EMT basic, not a paramedic. You went and got that later. So we finished up at Ford Sam. Then you pick up and move to Bragg. And that's when we talked about live tissue, that's when you start doing the live tissue portion of it,

which was a four month. So you'd go to Bragg. When we picked up and moved to Bragg, the way that it worked at that time is everybody who was in my class, who was already SF qualified, and there were a few of us. There was, you had guys that were already SF qualified and we also had,

full trident wearing seals in the class as well. We sent guys to the short and long course. Yeah. Yeah. So we had some guys who only went to the short course, just a couple, and then they peeled off, didn't go with us, but most went with us. And we basically sat around and did admin stuff while the rest of our class went out and did phase one. So they went out and did, you know, the first field phase that you do before the MOS phase.

Then they came back. We did four months of the 18 Delta core stuff. there at Bragg and then we graduated and they did phase three. So, and that was my first experience really being around Seals, which, and some of them might be guys, you know, Herschel Haynes was in my class. I recognize that name. Yeah. Yeah. I would not, I would not be a physician today if it were not for Herschel. Really? Yeah. So Herschel and I ended up being really good friends. And Herschel went back to the West Coast and forgive me, I don't remember which team he was on. It's just an odd number.

Yeah, just an odd number team. It might have been five. He was there briefly, and then they're like, hey, we need, that was when they're opening up the new 18 Delta schoolhouse. So they shipped him back to Bragg. And Herschel comes up to me one day and he goes, hey, man, we're going to go to med school. I'm like, what? What do you mean to go to med school?

He goes, we got it all mapped out. He goes, we're at Campbell University. We're going to get undergraduates. They're going to give a 60 resident hours for a health science degree. He goes, we've got it all mapped out. You want to do it? And I was like, and I was thinking about going to people. at the time. I said, I don't know if medical school is longer and then there's residency

and I'm a little bit older than you. He's like, come on, come on, come on. He goes, he goes, if nothing else, you get the college credits and you go to PA school, whatever. So really because of Herschel Haynes, he's the one that talked me into finishing my undergrad, getting my health science degree and then going on and going to medical school. So I basically, I dove Herschel's plan. Yeah. And it worked. Did he also dive? He did not dive the plan. So there was like six of the There was like six of us that started out. And people were peeling off. The farther we got in the process, the more people peeled off.

And there was one guy that we were in an MCAT study course together. And we were about halfway through that MCAT study course. And we used to meet and drive up because the study course was in Raleigh. So we would drive up on weekends. And I meet him to drive up because we'd carpool up. And he goes, hey man, this is my last time going up. I'm not taking the MCAT. And I'm like, what?

I got too much going on. I'm going to go to PA school instead. He did. He ended up being a really successful PA. So the day that I sat down to take the MCAT, I think six of us that started, I was the only one in there. But I had some really, I got to say,

not having been around SEALs a lot, I had some just absolutely, I became really close friends. It's all the same. Scotty Clark. Yeah, I recognize that name too. Ron Yenaga. Yonaga for sure.

Jerry Wagner. Don't recognize that one. Yeah, I saw Jerry Jerry almost boxed the ears of a fucking instructor that got out of his lane one day and I was there for it. That's a ballsy move.

I'm there for it too, but there's consequences to that action. Yeah, oh, this was a, there was a little blowup that happened in the schoolhouse. Basically, they felt that all of us, all the guys wearing tabs and tridents, they thought we were a little bit too big

for our britches. So they picked a day and they're like, today's the day we're going to really smack them the fuck down. And one in particular was feeling a little bit salty, came in throwing his weight around. And Jerry, remember Jerry pulling off his surgical mask?

And Jerry's a big dude. And he goes, I'm going to kick your ass. And that guy went, go to the head shed. And Jerry's like, no, we're doing it right here. And he didn't. He didn't lay a hand on him. Yeah. Yeah.

Are you glad you went through? I mean, because medical school, pack a lunch. Yeah. I've never gone, but I've heard the tales at the schooling, the residency.

I mean, it's multi-year. Yeah. I realized in, so the big thing, and you know, and I mentioned, I went to the meta course to begin with

because people were like, hey, man, you should totally do this. And I did, I wanted the mental challenge more than anything. I'm like, yeah, it's a mental challenge,

you know, and I want to challenge myself. And the thing, the way that, you know, whether you're an 18, Charlie, 18 Bravo, whatever. Everybody looked at the medics on the team and they're like, those guys, bar none, you can say, those guys are at the top of their game. Because those are the

guys that can walk out of this, this life tomorrow and get a job of the infinitely employable. Yeah, infinitely employable, right? They're always, 18 DELs are always the most understrength MOS because you can't qualify enough of them. Yeah. So I knew that I wanted to do it. I wanted the challenge I wanted to equate myself with that level of professionalism, I didn't really know that I liked medicine until I started doing it. And then I'm like, wow, I really do like doing medicine. And I had a conversation with myself that basically had to do with, I've always felt that whatever unit you're in, you need to be selfless enough that you are doing the job you are best suited to do, even if it's not the job that's the most fun.

Yeah. Right? So that's a tough one. Yeah. And that's when I started realizing, you know what? I need to either, I need to be either a doctor or a PA and I need to come back to the community because I'd seen enough, I'd seen enough medical officers that they were good. They didn't really understand what we do in the soft community.

They didn't, you know, yeah, they ran sick call and they gave physicals and stuff like that. but they needed a lot of them need a lot of train up you know battalion surgeon would show up to group you'd have him trained up about the time he was scheduled to rotate out like he finally got it he finally it figured everything out and now he's leaving and what's funny is I had that exact conversation when I ultimately got accepted to med school I had the group commander pulled me aside and he goes you're coming back right

and I said yes sir I'm coming back come back to the community and he said good because that's what we need he goes He goes, you know, God bless them. He goes, I love the guys we've had, but he goes, it's a little bit of a pain in the ass. You know, we're on this learning curve as soon as they get here. And then by the time they're flying solo, they're leaving and then we're training somebody else up. He said, we need somebody. And this was, I got accepted to med school post 9-11.

So he said, especially in this environment, we're going to need guys that can hit the ground running. How long did you have to detach for? Is that a four year? You're off? Medical school is four years. Residency was three. And at that time, were you just fully immersed in that medical pipeline, military was in the site? And then you came back?

Well, but so I went to EUSS. So I was wearing a uniform every day. What is EUSIS? Uniform Services University of the Health Sciences. Okay. So it's in Bethesda, Maryland. Okay. Okay.

It's on the, it's on the Navy installation there. It's the F. Edward A. Baer School of Medicine. It's been around for a little while. But it's basically, it's the west point of medicine. But for seven years, that's where you were. Four years I was there. Okay. Medical school.

And then I graduated. And then I went to residency. And I went to a military residency. Okay. In emergency medicine in San Antonio. Okay. So you're still in the military. Still wearing a uniform.

Still drawing a paycheck. Still, you know, still taking PT tests and sign MOUER. Straight up. Head down to the grindstone on medicine. Medicine, medicine, medicine. Okay. Yeah. How was it getting out of that going back into the community?

Great. Because it's... Change of pace? Yeah. So I had some come to Jesus moments in... So I graduated undergrad with a 4.0. Okay, well, so let me caveat that. When I went to Georgia Southern University initially,

that was my first foray into higher learning. I was a C-Steen because everybody told me, oh, you just get the degree. So I phoned it in. Yeah. But when it came to my undergrad, I knew I was going to be applying for med school, I'm like, I need an A in organic chemistry.

I need an A in physics. Like I need to do this. I need to do this for real. So I had a 4.0 when I graduated undergrad. And then I got to med school and I failed my second biochem test. Failed it. I'd never failed a test before in higher learning. And that shook me up bad.

I ended up getting a C in biochem. Pretty strong C, if I do say so myself. So that was one come to Jesus moment that I had. And then in residency, I started to feel like, I'm like, you know, I can do working on shift, I don't have any problem with. Like, I can do all the procedural stuff. I know when I know sick versus not sick, right? You know, I know this is a person I need to really be worried about, you know, stuff wasn't slipping through my fingers when it, when it came to seeing patients. But we have every year, you got to, you know, you're academically measured constantly, you know,

once a year you take what's called a shelf exam. It was basically a fake board exam, right? They take old board questions and they recycle them into another exam. To this day you do that? No, no, no. No, but in residency you do. Okay. And I was passing those tests, but I was far behind my peers.

I was in the lower third of my residency class on those tests. And that was difficult for me. I'm like, wow, this is. And I don't know what it was, you know, still to this day, I don't know what it is about that. You know, I've never, I've taken, I took my boards out of residency and I've had to recertify my boards one time and I didn't have any, any difficulty passing either time. But there was a point in residency.

And it was, it was for a lot of things, not just the academics, but I was starting to get an attitude. I was starting to really, I was starting to dislike patients. And I was really disliking other doctors, especially consultants. Because everything was a battle. Like if I wanted to admit somebody to internal medicine, I'm on the phone with another guy whose life is just as miserable as mine

because he's a resident too. And I'm basically telling him, hey, I have more work for you to do. I'm going to take this guy that's been my patient for the last two to three hours and now he's going to become your fucking problem. And I'm probably waking you up to tell you that, right? So he can think of every reason in the world

to either delay this process or to block this process entirely. So I'm constantly dealing with that. I'm constantly being talked down to. And I'm constantly being talked down to a lot of people that I'm looking at a, the guy who's talking down to me is an 05 morbidly obese, who I would not fucking, I would not get on an aircraft with on any day or night. and to me he's a complete piece of shit and doesn't measure up to what I consider

to be a good shoulder. But he gets to talk, he gets to lecture me like this in front of the whole department because I didn't run his little, he has his little pet lab that he has to have run on every patient and I didn't run that lab.

So now I have to hear about it. And it just, over time, it just started wearing, wearing on me. And I wasn't, we had, my residency class was, and I don't remember the exact number I could crunch it, but we had more prior service in my residency class than

any other residency class they'd ever seen and we were also considered the class with the worst attitude. Interesting. How'd you reorient your headspace and get through that? I had a talk, I reached out to one of my staff, which is a guy named John Rayfield. And I would take a bullet

for this guy. So I trusted his judgment. And I said, hey, I don't know any other way to put this. I'm starting to to wonder if I shouldn't be a doctor. Because I'm being told by staff, you probably shouldn't be a doctor. I'm feeling like I shouldn't be a doctor. I'm looking, you know, I'm looking at where my peers are academically and I don't feel that I'm measuring up to them. And I don't want to be here. I'm absolutely miserable. And he's like, Mike, listen. He said, you're going to graduate. You're going to

deploy. You're going to be back around people that you respect. You're going to be back in the type of environments you grew up in. And you're going to realize that you're there and you can make a difference because of the training you're getting here. He goes, we all go through a phase like this. You're no different. He said, this will come around. You're going to see this will come around. And I ended up emailing him on my second deployment and saying, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for talking me, you know, talking me out of quitting because this is where I belong. How was, so let's fast forward to that time where you, you know, you get out of the residency, you're back with in special operations. What did your life look like then? What kind of,

back in the community, back doing the things you wanted? What do they have you doing? Yeah. I obviously medicine, but so I, uh, my last year in residency, it was early in my last year in residency and I still wasn't quite sure where I was going to go. And, um, I, um, I, had I'd pissed some people off in the leadership in the residency program. So I wasn't going to get a lot of help as far as, hey, can you make a call, put in a good word for me, you know, get me this job or get me that job. I had burned some bridges. And that's, that's on me. I take that. I would just had been on nights. And I remember it was, I'd been on a night shift. I had to stick around. for like an hour to go to the first.

We have what's called grand rounds. So once a week you have like a teaching day that kicks off in the morning. If you were on the night before, you only have to go to like the first hour. You know, they understand you've been up all night. You know, because usually that's, if there's any admin stuff like,

hey, we need to have everybody fill out or whatever for them, whatever. It's going to be during that first hour. So after the first hour, you can go home and get some sleep. So I go home and I just fall in asleep and my phone rings.

and it's a Fort Bragg number. That's weird. So I pick up. And it was my old battalion surgeon. And he was, he had been assigned, and I knew this, he'd been assigned to J-Socke to the Joint Medical Augmentation Unit. And he said, hey, it's Sean. And I said, hey, how's it going, sir? And he said, I don't fucking serve me.

He said, you know where I work, right? I said, yeah. He said, would you like to work here? said yeah he goes okay you're going to get a phone call here in a couple of minutes and uh somebody's going to get all your information so a couple minutes later i get a phone call and that he had called me from his cell the the next call that i got said you know unidentified uh and uh it was the the admin guy was a retired navy chief who who ran all of our admin he uh said okay here's what we're going to do i'm going to send you i'm going to i'm going to send you hard copy tDI orders and and

And a blank travel voucher. We're going to have you come out. And I looked at my schedule. I said, yeah, I can come out on this day. He said, okay. He said, make sure you tell them that you're going TDI. So, you know, they're not surprised by that. He goes, but we're going to cut the orders.

They don't have to do anything. And I was like, okay. So, and I hang up. And I'm like, wow, is this really happening? Because this, you know, this isn't a typical job you get right out of residency. Yeah. Explain what J-Mow is for people listening. Yeah.

So, and I'm going to do this as delicately as possible. Yeah. because I don't, there's been some close scrutiny on podcast. So I'm, I'm going to, I'm going to endeavor to not say anything that you can find it on Google. You can find it on Google. J-M-A-U. Yeah. So,

people want to. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The J-M-L, the joint medical augmentation unit. So what the, what the J-MAL is, it's been renamed since, but was a medical unit to provide direct support, specifically direct trauma support to, to tier one units.

Okay. So this is, you know, when you think of the guys, that are at the tip of the spear. You know, you think of guys like Andy, you think of, you know, guys like, you know, cag, stuff like that. You know, obviously you want to have a medical asset that they can depend on that is, you know,

so they don't have to just drag along some, you know, cash unit or, you know, forward surgical unit that doesn't know what they do. You know, something that understand, some, a group of people that understand special operations that they're kidded out appropriately, that they're trained appropriately. And they know how to work in that environment.

Yeah. Okay. So far forward medical care for special operations is the best way that I can say it. I was a couple years ago, I was on Kyle Lam's podcast. And he went on like a 10 minute, very descriptive thing about exactly what we do. People can find it. Yeah. It's out there.

My only interface actually was indirect when we actioned the hospital in Nazaria. There was a J-MAL-C-130 on standby. So Jessica got taken from her hospital room to have. helicopter transferred to the J-Mow C-130 and where they went from there, I don't know, but that was the beginning of the repatriation. But exactly what, I mean, they were legitimately on standby. I think they were actually spinning by the time. I think they probably fired up once the helicopter was lifting and shifting, probably

back to the airport we launched from. But that was my only tangential interaction with the J-Mow guys. Okay. And that was before my time. Yeah. So, but I knew, I was aware. Yeah. You know, and I was not so really aware because, you know, in seventh group, we never interacted with him.

But one of the guys in my medical school class who was also in my residency class was a former CagMedic. And he was intimately familiar. He should know all about it. Yeah. And we had multiple staff when I was going through residency who had also been in the unit, either or either was in the unit at the time or had been in the unit at one time. So after I got that call, I couldn't sleep. I actually drove to the hospital. As luck would have it, I walked in.

The three staff that happened to be on, you have what's called staff day. While all the residents are over doing grand rounds, you have staff running the ER without residents. And the three staff that happened to be there were all, one was a current unit member and two were former unit members. And I said, hey, I just had this phone conversation. And they were like, I can't. I can't overstate how incredibly supportive they were. They're like, oh, yes, we were hoping you would get that call. Sweet.

Like, like, we weren't going to be the ones to make the call because it's, you know, that's not the way this works, but we were hoping you would get the call and you got the call. So, and I interviewed and assessed, and I got picked up, and that's where my orders were. So when I packed up my Jeep and I drove out of San Antonio and drove back to Fort Bragg, back to my old stomping grounds and and signed in.

And so I would work at Womack Hospital as a regular staff there. But my cool guy job was to work at the compound. Did you do that job until you ended up getting out? I did that job three years out of Bragg and then another three years out of Ford Hood. Well, if we're going to get technical because I know a podcast are. So somebody's going to go through this with a fine tooth comb and try to call me a liar. So I was in the unit for five years, 10 months, and 18 days. So yes, I cannot.

So I, yeah, six. So, you know, I don't want to say, I don't want to say six years. And somebody goes, no, it was not six years. Here's the thing, though. I'm glad there's people out there with fine tooth combs because for far too long, there wasn't. There was no comb. There was no comb.

And people that you and I both know pretty well. Yeah. Started coloring outside the lines. Yeah. And that's, and I'm acutely aware of that. Yeah. Because of, because of events over the past few years, I'm acutely aware of that. It's a net positive, I think, that there are people out there with a fine tooth comb.

And I also know for a fact that the PAO will listen to every minute of this podcast. Public Affairs Officer people. Yeah. And if I say anything that violates my NDA, I'll get a phone call. Let's just focus on those things then. It'll violate your NDA. Tell me everything you're not supposed to roll up the sleeves and have at it. You know, it's funny, most of this stuff in NDAs that I've seen.

If you know what to search on Google, you can find it. Yeah, it's just a matter of people don't know necessarily where to look, and I just leave it at that. Yeah. You know, all the dumb programs that I was read into, and I'm not joking, the technical term would be dumb. They all exist on Google because I might have gone sniffing around peripherally just to see what was there. People just don't know where to look. Yeah. Well, that's like I, and after the mics are off, we can talk about it.

But the coolest thing that I ever got to do in my military career, I have told. told five people about that. Five. I've been approached by dozens. Dozens. Hey man, tell me about X, Y, and Z. How do you know about that? So-and-so told me. I don't even know so-and-so. Where did so-and-so hear about it? Yeah. I don't know. You know? So what's the old saying? There's two types of secrets. Those that aren't good enough to keep and those that are so good that you can't keep it. Yeah. Yeah. Or how do you keep a secret between three people? two of them are dead. Yeah. That's literally the only way. It's, uh, yeah, see, that's the thing is out of the five people that I told, I know my, my dad's passed away, so I know he didn't tell anybody.

Yeah. He might have written it down somewhere. He might have. You never know. Why'd you decide to get out? Um, the war was winding down. Um, I had already purposely, so I was, I was already on a glide path to get out, 2016, which is where I got out. I was on, I was on a mission with, uh, some guys that some guys from the unit that I had worked with that I had known my whole time there and I'm sitting next to one and uh we're sitting on a ship that's all I'll say but uh sitting on the fantail and which is the back for listening yeah so his his watch goes off and he goes fuck I go what and he goes that's my reminder that I'm supposed to have this appointment in 10 minutes getting ready for my retirement and he looked at me and he goes Mike he goes I know what you're thinking you're thinking I'm going to stay in the unit and then I'm going to stay until the last day possible I'm going to turn in my gear I'm going to fly back to Texas and then I'm going to out process the army and he goes don't do that and he goes I miss he goes since we've been out here I've missed five very important retirement appointments that I'm now going to have to reschedule he goes I'm I'm almost going to be in for probably a whole other year you guys I'm I'm I'm almost going to be in for probably a whole other year. year to take care of all this shit. That's rough too, especially if your trajectory is heading on the outside. So I really took that to heart.

And I did one more deployment after that. And about two-thirds away from that, through that deployment. I said, yeah, I think I'm, you know, I've kind of seen when the, when you kind of feel like you've seen this movie before a little bit, right? And I've heard some of your fellow CLS say stuff. It's like when you go out on a target and you feel like, have we already hit this target? Like it feels the same. Like, and my heart rate's not even going up, you know.

It wasn't to that level. But I did feel like, you know, it's probably, it's time for me. And I'm older than most of the guys in the unit. Like I say, I was 48 on my last trip. I'm like, you know what? I'm a little bit older. I'm slowing down a little bit. I've kind of done all the things that I set out to do.

while I was here, it's probably time. And six years ago, you know, three years in town, three years out of town, that's probably, it's probably a good time frame, right? Yeah. So I said, and I said on that trip, I said, yeah, I'm going to talk about turning in when we get back. And, you know, and you always want to, you want to leave a job on your own terms, right? You don't want to stick around.

You don't want to stay too long at the dance. For sure. And I kind of, when it comes to being department chief at Darnell, I kind of did stay too long at the dance because I went into that job like a fucking fire hose like hey we're going to change shit you know and I'm going to fight I'm going to fight all these battles against all these other departments by a certain number of years into the job you're you start to just am I fight really fighting this battle again like I just I don't have the I don't have the heart for it anymore and I think it's so important for people to remember that regardless of what you're doing and

how good you're at it and how much you love it that it is going to end at some point yeah You can't lose sight of that. Yeah. And I never had the illusion that I was indispensable either. Yeah. Ever. Yeah. Ever.

Like I knew. Somebody can come in and take this job and they're going to be as good or better than me. But you tell yourself, it'll probably happen to Bob. Who's sitting next to me right or Frank who's on the other side. The people I see who have struggled the most as the end comes act as if two months before their E-A-OS, which is your end of service. Like, oh, shit, I didn't know. I was like, dude, you've been in for 28 years. Yeah.

Like, yeah, I just started my bachelor program. I'm like, what? What do you mean? You just started your bachelor program two months ago. What have you been doing that the rest? Yeah, yeah. Those are the ones that struggle the most. Yeah.

And I'm not going to argue against fully committing yourself to that job. But I was literally on a call this morning where people were asking about, you know, what advice would I give to people who are looking at bridging the gap between military and civilian? I'm like, listen, give yourself 12 months, 24 if you can. Dedicate yourself to your job, but just lift your gaze up a little bit. Yeah. And build the bridge to where you want to be. So you're not standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon going, I guess I got a broad jump.

Yeah. And that's what, so my last, I turned in in 2014 to the unit. I went back to, I went back to Hood. And I said, okay, I'm going to start my glide path. And that meant documenting 32 years of injuries that I had avoided. sick call for. At least you knew how to write the paperwork. Well, so here's what's funny.

Here's what's funny is I go, I didn't even know. At this point, I'd been, I'd been on Ford Hood for two years. I didn't even know, as a patient, I didn't know what clinic I was assigned to. I'd ask, what clinic am I assigned? Oh, you're stunned to the family medicine clinic. Yeah. So I go down to the family medicine clinic. I go, hey, yeah, I need to, I need to make an appointment.

For what? Stuff. I said, and I'm like, so medically, right, you always say head to toe, right? So I had a headache. Headaches. I'm getting headaches, which is true, right? So I said headaches, among other things. And they said, okay, who's your primary care?

No idea. Oh, it's major so-and-so. Okay, we have next Tuesday this time. Perfect. I'll see you then. So I go home. I type, again, head to toe. I type everything that's wrong with me that I know is wrong with me so we can figure

this out. So I show to my appointment, and my PCP was a kick-ass major, 04. So she comes in and she goes, hey, Dr. Simpson, yeah. So weird. I was looking, because typically what they do when they have a new patient come in is they open up the electronic medical record and they look at your most recent visit. And then they do copy-paste. Oh, here's your medical history. I'm going to copy-paste that into this document.

I'm going to start a new visit. She goes, there's nothing to copy-paste in your record. It's blank. how is this possible? And she goes, well, don't answer that. I know how it's possible because I'm looking at your uniform. She goes, you wanted to deploy. You wanted to be on jump status.

You've been keeping all this a secret. She goes, so she goes, so tell me your secrets. And I pulled out three typewritten pages. In her language. Yeah. Here are my secrets. And she goes, okay, all right, here's what we're going to do. These are all the MRIs that you need.

Yeah. You need a sleep study. You need a podiatry appointment. I found out I had a fracture on my left foot since 1986 that never healed that the bones were worn smooth because I just been walking around on it with a neuroma under it, all this other stuff. I got MRIed basically from head to toe, everything documented. And that's what I spent the last couple years getting everything documented, applying for a job because I knew I'm going to need a job when I get out.

Thankfully you were infinitely employable. Yeah, well, and that's it. I used to joke when people go, why did you go to medical school? because I didn't have a retirement plan. I think medical school might be one. It is. Yeah. So let me ask you this,

because you bring up a really interesting situation that is very common from people in the special operations background. I was five days from being out of the Navy. And I went to have my discharge physical side. And the doctor... It's less than ideal. Oh, totally. But I had plans, right?

I had aviation stuff lined up. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I was going to get out no retirement. I wasn't even going to submit for a disability. Nothing. I was just going to leave services. That would have been 16 years. And the doc looks at it, maybe a six-page document.

And he's like, no. And I'm like, I don't think you understand. I have plans. So I'm going to go ahead and need your John Hancock right here. He looks at me and goes, no, I'm not going to do that. What I am going to do is I'm going to send you to NICO. And at first I was very, very, very pissed. And I have reconnected with this guy.

He's awesome. I'm so thankful that he ended up doing this. But it launched a year of basically paperwork and going to NICO, getting some of the best care I've ever received hundreds of pages of documentation that. Then buttressed, what, they put me through the P-EB, M-EB process. Once you start into that, the ship is down the, you know what I mean? Like, it's going. Now, when you went for that five-day, because you were medically retired, right? I wasn't.

I was eventually. after that doctor hung me up. But you had 20, so you had 20 years. No, 16. You had 16. I had 16 years when I was sitting in that doctor's office. I was just going to get out of the military. You were just going to ETS.

Yeah. Oh. And he was like one of the last signatures I needed to get. So you were pissed at him at the time probably. But he did you a massive favor. Massive salary. So I had to call the officer detailer because I had, I think, five or seven days left on my contract.

I had fortunately worked with the active duty officer that was sitting there at the detailer's desk. And he said, give me a second. A couple minutes later, calls me back. He's like, I extended you for a year. I was like, okay, this is pretty awesome. The rest of that year was admin time. Up front, heavy, it was about three or four months,

getting a slot at NICO, going to NICO. The P-E-B-M-E-B paperwork process, not short. I mean, we're talking, a stack. Finished all that, submit it. And then, though, you just wait. So, but like I said, once that trains out of the station, you have no control of it. The military is going to make their decision.

The guy reading it was like, I'm not going to guarantee you what this decision is going to be, but more than likely you're going to be medically retired from this. We'll let you know and you know. I ended up finding out about six months later. And then they gave me, I think, 90 days to get my affairs in order. That is a more common story. Somebody coming to the end, having no documentation of the things that will ail them

for the rest of their life. But you risk if you go, in your career and are honest about these things, you risk, well, what's going on with your neck? Man, you may shouldn't be on jump status, dive status. You're getting headaches. I don't know if we should put you under pressure. How do you do both? Protect yourself for the end, but also fight to stay in the career that you want to stay in. It's like walking a razor blade. What advice would you give guys? So the one thing that people in our community lack is patience. I was going to say intelligence, but I'll go with yours.

You know, you can't argue against that either. I made a little more generous. Patience. So, because, you know, guys see, like, I want this and I want it now. And, you know, what have I been doing my whole career? I've been, I've been envisioning what my goal is, and I've been achieving that goal, right? this doctor telling me he's not going to sign my paperwork he's being an obstacle to my my goal is on the other side of him that's exactly how he and he is blocking that goal how dare he right and you can't

look at it that way and i've seen uh a couple years ago i was assume i was in a facebook forum uh that's all uh former rangers and this ranger was talking about basically he had no uh i don't remember how many years he did, but he basically, he had zero disability rating. And he's like, yeah, they just totally screwed me. They just like, they just said goodbye and gave me my paperwork. I'm like, no, they didn't. Yeah, let's put an asterisk on that. No, they didn't.

What was your role and not being honest about the shit that was going on with you? No, you were sitting in a room because what is like when you out process? You go into a room on main post and, you know, you're a ranger. You're in a room with a bunch of people. You don't want to be around, right? Because these are all conventional Joe's, right? You don't want to, you feel it's a little bit beneath you to even be. this room and they're up there speaking to the lowest common denominator on block two mark yes or no

on block three put your last name don't put your first name or we're going to have to tear up the paper and you'll do it again I'm like you did a lot of paperwork like that and they were telling you if you have this now's the time to raise your hand if you have that now's the time to raise your hand and you didn't do any of that or in your career leading up to that you weren't going in and documenting the things that were actually happening which is what I did which is what I did did too because I don't take me out of the game coach. Right. Then you have a massive hurdle you have to clear at the tail end.

Yeah. And that's what it's, it's tough. And I think that you might risk if you're completely, I mean, I don't know a single guy who made it through a career without being banged and bruised and just bumped along the way. Everybody is always dealing with something.

You do risk if you go into medical and are transparent about what is actually going on with you. You might be put on the bench for a little bit. Yeah. nobody wants that so they don't do that. But it actually might save your life in the long run. So it's this balance that I know guys struggle with. And I don't know what advice to give them because I don't, I wouldn't follow the advice that I would give,

which is go in and be honest when I was a younger man because I wanted to be in there. But looking back at how the exit happened and the difference in exit between leaving the military with no disability rating, which by the way, after a career in the Rangers, statistically impossible unless... Completely. Yeah. Unless you didn't talk about

with medical professionals any of the things that you were dealing with because it's not about what you're feeling. It's about what's documented in your record. That's what all these decisions are based off of. You might not like it, but you might be put on the bench

and it might save your life. Yeah, totally. And telling guys that, they're still not going to do it. So I don't know the solution. You know, there's a great scene in Band of Brothers. There's several great scenes in Band of Brothers, by the way.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, period. End of the story. But there's one where a guy comes back and he's been in the hospital. And people are like, oh, you're back. He's like, yeah, I was in the hospital. And they're like, why did you take so long to get back? Well, I just got discharged.

Oh, well, so-and-so came back and so-and-so. Because what were guys doing? They were going AWOL for medical to get back to their units. Some guys, half of their ass cheek blown off. And they're fucking going AWOL and hitching a ride. you know, to jump into, you know, to jump into Holland, you know, shit like that. And this guy didn't and they're giving him shit for it, you know, because that's the mentality. It is.

It is like, you know, it's, you know, you don't want to be a sick call writer, right? You don't want that attached to your name. But you also don't want to be 50 and falling apart. And falling apart. Yeah. Because of the things that you were asked to do that you dedicated your life to and your heart to to the detriment of almost everything else, personal and professional relationships, but because you didn't have it documented, now you were in an uphill battle for the rest of your

life. Yep. I don't want that either. Yeah. Again, I don't, I know what advice I would give, and that is be transparent and go in and talk about those things. And I wouldn't have done that as a younger person. And in, you know, hindsight's always 2020.

We, I know now that if I had been honest about all the injuries, it wouldn't have, you know, None of those things would have taken me off status. None of those things would have kept me from deploying. I still could have done it. But I didn't, because you don't know. You're like, you're kind of afraid of what they're going to find. It's like, it's, it's,

fear of missing out. It's fear of missing out is a big part. There's layers to this, right? It's FOMO is part of it, right? Finding out that something's really wrong with you, having somebody look you in the eye. So this is a joke that I, this is a very bad taste joke that I've been telling for years.

Tell me more. So, you know, whenever you have something in your life, trying to think of a good example, like somebody will say, I'll be in a situation and somebody who, hey, what do you think we should do about such and such? And I'll joke, I'll say,

oh, let's treat it like a testicular lump. If we ignore it, it'll just go away. And the reason that joke is both in bad taste and funny is that's what most young men do. Oh, there's a lump on my testicles. Oh, shit, this could be nut cancer. Oh, that could mean I had my nut chipped off. I'm just going to forget about it, right?

If only it worked like that. And that's a microcosm for all the other medical shit. Oh, why am I getting shooting numbness down the back of my leg? That's probably some type of spinal injury of some type. But that's bad. And I don't want to talk about that. So I'm just going to put a salon posse on it and take 800 milligrams Motrin every single day at every meal. And I'm going to ignore it.

And you can't do that. You know, you have to, like I said, I ignored a broken bone on my foot. for so long that there's nothing they can even do about it. And you can't do that. You know, you have to, if you're hurt, you need to say you're hurt. And guess what? Modern medicine is such, you know, for you, anybody active duty listening to this, they can fix you up and get you back in the fight.

All right, they can. You know, there's very, very few things that are going to permanently deeniff you to the point that you're not going to get back out there. And if you have one of those things, it's probably to the benefit of the people around you that you're not back out there. Yeah. Yeah. As much as you may not like to hear that.

diagnosis, sorry. At the end of the day, it's actually not about you. Yeah. Because what if that injury causes you to become a liability at a key moment, right? And how would you feel if because you blew off that injury, something bad happened to somebody else on your team because you couldn't keep up and they had to carry you or, you know, or at the last minute, you couldn't go through that door. They had to go the stack was a man short because your leg wouldn't work you know and you were you were on the second deck when they were going through that door in the third deck what is something like that happened uh so you have to consider all those things you know it's not just it's not just about you know it's about the unit it's about your kids right you know what's old saying you know do you want to play

catch with your kids then you'll do this you know do you want to go on one more deployment or do you want to play catch with your kids you know do you want to take your grandkids to the park and fly kites or do you want to go on this mission? That might be the choice that you're making. So yeah, don't hide injuries, man. So there was a, it wasn't my team sergeant. There was a team sergeant, seventh group that I ended up hearing kind of through the grapevine. This guy had like out of control blood pressure.

And so he was avoiding getting physicals because he didn't want it documented. And he wasn't saying shit. And he was like having daily splitting migraine headaches. And I'm like, oh, yeah, you know, headache and high blood pressure. or yeah, that seems like those things go together in a pretty dangerous way. And he's just riding it out. So what's going to happen when he strokes out during freefall or on an objective somewhere? Nothing good.

Yeah, nothing good for him. But then the question is, is it only going to affect him or is it going to affect somebody else? You know? So at the end of the day, you're kind of, you're being, you think you're being selfless. You're being selfish. It's a tough one, man. It is hard. It is hard.

And I understand the mindset, man. I'm being honest. I wouldn't have listened to my advice as a younger man because that's all I wanted to do. Yeah. I would have crawled my way into work. Yeah. And even in the face of demonstrable evidence that I wasn't okay, I'm like, no, I'm totally fine. This is, I always didn't have a left arm.

So let's talk about this, and I mentioned it briefly before. So I have prostate cancer. So, and I for early? Like, what are we talking? Yeah. So, yeah. So I was diagnosed back. actually a couple months ago.

So what happened is I would get it. I'm on TRT, so I would get a PSA drawn every year. I ended up changing doctors. And the doctor that I switched to, who's a good friend of mine, taught me everything that I know about TRT. He was in a transition phase of his practice. And he kind of took for granted a little bit of professional courtesy. It's like, oh, you're Mike's on top of his own labs, I'm sure. And then he said, hey, man, send me your most recent labs.

I'm like, oh, they're two years old. He's like, what, dude? And he goes, I never should have given you that option. And he goes, go get your labs drawn. Yep. Right. So your normal blood draw. Normal blood draw.

Yep. My PSA was elevated. 4.5. 4.5. Okay. Because I am on TRT as well. I have been for a couple years. And PSA is one of the numbers.

Yeah. Always looking at. Now, and we can do, I'm actually going to do a deep dive in this with Drew Wingy on his podcast later in the week. Used to be prostate cancer, suspected prostate cancer, stopped TRT. Not the case anymore. Yeah. Not the case.

What number are you looking at considered elevated? You want it to be, depending on which assay you're looking at and who you're talking to, it's either under three or under four. Do you say assay or ass? Assay. Because we've got to be careful here. We're talking about the old prostit. Whose ass are you looking at?

Mine's like a point whatever still. Like I haven't noticed. Oh, you're, yeah. I haven't noticed an elevation. I ran in the twos. Okay. I ran in the two. So the indications for if it's.

over, again, it depends on the assay, but if it's over three or over four, that triggers secondary evaluation. Or if it goes up by 50% or more between tests. So like if you go from, yeah, so if you go from 0.8 to 1.6. If you go to 2 to 3, it's like, whoa, that's a big jump. Yeah. And if it doubles, and mine almost doubled. So I went from like 2 and a half to 4 and half. Do you think you would have caught it in those 24 months if you had been doing blood draws? You would have seen this increase? No, we probably would have watched. Okay. Probably would have still watched. So, but that was a big enough jump at that point. I think we probably caught it in and this, I don't take credit for this. It would kind of, you know, it got intervened and said,

hey, Mike's going to draw his labs. So it was four and a half. We redrew it just to make sure. Yeah. Because you can, there's some confounders there. Yeah, that's smart. Right. Same, same result. So luckily I have Tricare Select, which means I don't have to wait for a referral. I can call a sub-specialist and say, give me an appointment, which I did. So I made an appointment with urologist, went in, and urologist was great. And my big concern was, okay, I'm going to go to the urologist, and they're going to go, okay, we need to draw the lab now and see for ourselves. But I had the lab with me, so they didn't.

So they said, okay, we'll schedule for the MRI. So I got the MRI in January. And then based on the morphology of what they see in the MRI, so what's the size, what's the shape, what's the location of this different tissue in your prostate, they gravest. they grade it and it goes to seven. I was a six. I'm assuming the higher the number, the worst. The worse, yeah.

The more likely that it is cancer, right? So I was, I was a Pyrad six, right? So I'm like, okay, done deal. It's cancer. Let's take it out. So I go to my next appointment. I'm like, hey, when are we doing this? And he's like, whoa, slow down, cowboy.

Who's going to do a biopsy? And I said, but why? And he goes, because it's only, he goes, 83% chance of it being cancer is not 100%. He goes, and you don't want to, he goes, once we take your prostate out, he goes, that's, it's done. That bullets out of the gun. He didn't use that phrase. That's mine.

But he said, you know, we don't put it back if we decide we made a mistake. Like, this is permanent. And he goes, and it's not, yeah, you know, we minimize complications, but it's not without complications. He goes, so you don't want to make that decision unless we're 100% sure. He goes, so the next phrase, next step is a biopsy. So I got the biopsy, came back cancer, right? So then I got enrolled in a study. So I'm in a study called the Water 4 trial.

So quarter of the people in the study are getting traditional radical prostatectomy. So you remove the entire prostate. And it's done under this big robot machine that they slide you into where a guy uses a video game controller across the room to spare the nerves. It used to be a prostatectomy. If you look up a YouTube video of prostatectomy. I'm not sure I want to see a YouTube video. You don't because, so the penis is cut off completely. So you know what a Foley catheter is, right?

It's a catheter that show up your dickhole. Yes. So imagine this. I put a Foley catheter in the penis. Then I take the end of that Foley catheter and I connect it to an arm hanging up here. Then I, at the base of your penis, I cut it off. And then I slide the penis. So your penis is now three feet away from your body while I'm down here working as the surgeon.

Fuck all of you that ever created this. Yeah. So what the fuck? Imagine an entire room full of 18 DELs is watching this video and the, oh, at the moment that they slide it away. Michael, I will absolutely beat the shit out of you if you pull this video. Do not put up that video. Okay.

So that's what a prostatectomy used to look like. Used to look like. In 1742? Yeah. No, no. What the fuck? This was 1990s. Oh.

So then they came out with this robotic procedure that's nerve sparing. Because it used to be once we chop it, we chop everything off. So the nerves are not connected anymore. We got to reconnect the vessels. So guess what? You're never getting a heart on again, right? This is where, this is where penis implants became a thing, right? Because you get your prostate out.

They sever the nerves. Okay. The pump just doesn't have to be just for shoes, all right? It doesn't have to be just for rebox. Yeah. And that's, you know, the pump, the rigid, they had just some rigid ones that look kind of like Legos. They had a bunch of different ones that you, oh, that's another surgery you don't want to watch.

No, I don't. And I'm not even going to describe that one. Thank you. Because it's incredibly barbaric. Michael's already writing down a watch notes for himself later. Put penis implant corpus cavernosa. You're welcome, Michael. Anyway.

So, but I got randomized to what's called aquablation. So rather than go into the robot and have the, uh, the prostate removed completely with the capsule and the seminal vesicles and everything, I'm going to get what's called an aquablation procedure. So basically, they're going to shove a fire hose in my urethra, and they're going to blast that shit out. I think what you're saying is you're going to get a fire hose shoved in your dick hole.

Yes. Where is the prostate? It's at the base of your penis. They're going to blast it out. Yeah. This sounds like not good. I think... This is a procedure that they've been doing.

doing for prostate hypertrophy, which is the thing, right, for years. Yeah. And it works great. And I, do you know who Rich Jadik is? No. So Rich Jadik was, I believe he was a Marine infantryman. He went to medical school. He wrote the, there's a book called On Call in Hell.

So he was a Marine battalion, infantry Marine battalion surgeon, I think first Battle of Fallujah. Really, really good book. really good explanation of combat medicine and how things work. And Rich and I worked for a nonprofit together called Save Our Allies. We met over in Poland. Great guy. He's a urologist. So I reached out to him about this. And he said, oh, yeah, I do aqua blations for BPH all the time. He goes, great procedure. Patients love it. He goes, in 10 minutes, I'm on my way to go in. I just did one. Recovery is substantial. Recovery is great. How do you know you get it all? they can tell.

Because they're going to, they're going to visualize it while they're doing it. So all they're going to see that's left is capsule. So the prostate has a capsule around it. You know, imagine it like an eggshell. They're going to see that the capsule's left. Then they'll also do some imaging afterwards to make sure.

Where do they blast it to? Like where does it come out? They pulverize it and then suck it back out. So they're going to suck it right back out my urethra and flush it in? All this is happening in your dick. In my dick. Yeah. It's like a party in my dick.

Everybody's coming. Michael? What are you pulling? So there's the prostate. So there's the prostate. Oh, by, oh, by the way.

I caught out of the corner of my eye him pulling something onto the screen and for a second. Like, I don't want. Before I got, I'm glad, you know,

given your audience, I'm actually really glad that we're talking about this because hopefully, guys, get your PSA checked. Get your fucking PSA. Well,

and it's just an additional lab that you can put on the blood screen. Yeah, like totally. So, so if you look at where the, that's the prostate, right?

So you see how your urethra runs through it right there. So look, go just forward of his finger, that line coming down. That's the urethra coming through it, right? So your prosthetic urethra is, you know, however big your prostate, it's about the size of a walnut. Your prostate is? Your prostate is. What is it responsible for? So it makes prostatic fluid.

So the bulk of your ejaculate is prostatic fluid. Okay. Okay. So when they take out the prostate, right? You lose all that prostatic urethra. So they reconnect the base of your urethra at the base of your penis, basically to write where the bladder is. So you lose a walnuts worth of penile length in that process.

So, and I don't know about you, but so I'm of Welsh ancestry. Have you ever heard the phrase hung like a Welshman? Yeah, but I don't know what it means. It doesn't mean anything because nobody brags about being hung like a Welshman. Okay. We're not known, we're not known. Maybe we're known for girth, but we're not known for length. They say size doesn't matter.

Yeah. I think dudes say that. I'm not so sure women say that. A guy with a really big dick said that. Let's be honest. So before I got randomized to the aquiblation arm of the trial, they're like, oh, yeah, if we do the prostatectomy, you're going to lose about an inch. That was exactly the facial expression you just made was exactly the way I looked at the surgeon when he said that.

Fuck me. I wouldn't have to rewatch this episode to figure out how we ended up down this rabbit hole because this is the most scary conversation. Down this, down this urethral hole. Okay. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that you have options and I'm glad that things are, Michael, can you change the picture from a fucking finger up somebody's asshole to literally any other picture? I give him credit that it's a gloved finger at least, right? God.

That's a medical procedure. Yeah. Literally anything else, Michael. Any other picture that you would like. Let's go back to Thunder. If you want to have it as a screen grab on your computer over there, you do that. When are you getting this done? So actually the scheduler called Friday and I missed the call.

So I'm actually going to wait. I'm flying back tomorrow. I'm going to call on Wednesday that I can have all of my work schedules out in front of me because obviously there is going to be some recovery involved. I didn't want to do it. It's probably going to be sometime end of June. I don't want to do it before that because I'm going to, there's an event in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, called the Living Dead Weekend.

Okay. So it takes place at the Monroeville Mall, which is where they filmed Dawn of the Dead. Okay. Back in the, whatever it was, 1970s. Yep. My youngest son, Daniel, is a huge George Romero fan. So he's always wanted to go to this,

and it's the last year they're doing it. They're going to tear them all down, turn it into a Walmart. So this is the last year. So I didn't want it to interfere with that trip. There's no risk in waiting, though? No. So here's the prostate cancer.

they even said, they gave me the option of just watching and waiting at one point, because prostate cancer is very slow growing. So here's the things that you absolutely need to know about prostate cancer. First of all, whatever your age is, that is your percentage likelihood of having prostate cancer. Really? In other words, if you're an 80-year-old man, you have an 80% chance of having prostate cancer. Okay. Everyone eventually, every one with a prostate eventually gets prostate cancer.

Okay, I have heard that. It's a done deal. Yeah, if you live long enough, yeah. So that's one thing that you need to know. And for that reason, you need to get your PSA from age 40 and on, right? And just think of it as, oh, I'm coming up on a 50% chance. Yeah. From age 40 and on, you definitely need to get it drawn every year.

Yeah. Most people think it's the gloved image that Michael is probably air dropping over to his phone right now. Yeah. No, it's a blood test. It's a box. It's a blood test. Yeah. Yeah.

It's not the DRE, the digital rectal exam is not, you know, we used to think, that that was how we detected prostate cancer. Yeah. And I think they found it, it's like, it had like a 5% effectiveness or something like that. I think that's how doctors just fuck with people. Just really wanted to stick their finger up people's asses. I mean, listen, I'm not here to tell people how to party.

Yeah. But some people are into that. Yeah. That's your thing. Well, it's the doctor's thing. Yeah. Like, my throat hurts. They're like, yeah, take your pain.

Like, no, no, no. No, my throat. Tonsils. Yeah. No, not connected at all. Yeah. So then the other thing that you need to know, it's slow growing. So you want to catch it early.

Okay. Then you have time. Again, I had time for an MRI. I had time for a biopsy. They even said, hey, now that we even know what it is, if you want to watch it for a little bit. Because the question was, because I'm like, hey, now that I've heard about this aquibulation procedure, I really want that procedure. I don't want to get traditional radical.

Totally. And I said, so what happens? I said, so hypothetically, what happens if I get randomized? Because this is a study, right? So you have, so the control group, what they call the control group, which is very important whenever you're doing research, is the radical because that's the gold standard. And I said, what if I get randomized to the control group? I'm like, I don't want that.

And he goes, well, we can talk about that if it happens. And he goes, you know, theoretically, you know, you could withdraw from the study and then come to me as a patient like six months down the road, maybe. There's ways around it. Yeah, he said, and I said, but what do I ultimately? decided, I actually decided on the drive home. I'm like, you know what? It's, uh, I'm not an incredibly religious person, but, you know, I am a religious person. I do pray on things. And I'm like, you know, God's going to decide. I've got a, I've got a 75% chance of getting randomized to

what I want. If I don't, that means there was some reason that I shouldn't have got that procedure, that I should have got this procedure. So I'm, yeah. So I'm just going to, whatever they tell me, that's, you know, that's what I'm going to get. So, uh, it ended up, you know, that I did get randomized to the procedure that I was hoping to get. So hopefully by the end of June or sometime in July, I'll get that procedure and it'll be done. And then I won't have to worry about it again. I'll check him with you from sure around that time period. I won't have to pee every 10 minutes like I do literally right now.

Go for it. Take it right. Okay. You can take right? Yeah. What else should guys be paying attention to? Is there any other warning signs for prostate cancer? Yeah.

So getting up to pee multiple times a night, which I've done my whole life because I don't like the sensation of a full bladder. Yeah. But like you find yourself doing it more, right? Your stream is not, you don't have the forcefulness in your stream anymore. These are all signs. It could be a tumor. It could also just be an enlarged prostate.

In which case you do need to see somebody. You can get put on medication for BPH that'll help with that. So these are things you should definitely be looking at. I talk about in my book honed. I talk a lot about men's health and screening and, you know, the importance of, you know, getting regular labs, especially, you know, your PSA, your cholesterol, stuff like that. I had some people, when I published this book, it was right about the time that the carnivore diet was really taken off. And I had people trying to say, oh, no, no, the whole cholesterol thing is bullshit.

Thankfully, there's been enough studies since then that have kind of put the kibosh on that that people realize, no, it's not bullshit. It's legitimate. I am not a scientist. I'm not a doctor. But every time people try to simplify the root cause of all issues down to one thing or one thing, in what I, from the best that I can tell is an incredibly complex system where things are playing off of each other. It's like I get the marketing aspect of that. If you just cut fat out of your diet, you're going to be fine. I don't think that's the case. So that's, you know, it's the,

the two words you never want to use in medicine because they're always wrong are, and I just use one of them, always and never. Yeah. Those are the two numbers, zero and 100 percent, that I dislike the most. Because over a long enough timeline, both of them will absolutely be untrue at some point in time. And I'm automatically going to, if you're giving me a zero or a 100, I'm automatically distrustful of that. 100%. Yeah. Well, dude, tell me about your books. We've been talking for two and a half hours about gloved fingers up your asshole.

Yeah. So let's talk about something better. So I wrote, so I wrote Honed was the first book that I wrote. And it's a, basically it's a men's health book. At the time, I was still podcasting. And I... Why yourself? Um,

let's get into that afterwards. Okay. Yeah, because that's layered. Okay. So I was getting a lot of emails. I was getting a lot of social media questions. I was getting a lot of emails about, hey, doc, I love your show.

You know, I have two herniated discs. I've been thinking about doing jiu-jitsu. Do you think, you know, hey, doc, you know, I'm having trouble. Can you look, I would have guys randomly. Can I send you my lab results? I don't trust my doctor. Can you look at my lab results? Can you tell me if I need to be on TRT?

Stuff like that. Hey doc, I'm 45. I was an active duty infantry guy for 12 years. You know, now I've gotten out. I put on some weight, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, what type of exercises should I be doing stuff like that? And I'm going to caveat this by saying, right now I'm in like probably the worst shape I've been in 10 years because it's been a pretty rough year for me.

I'm not making excuses. But at the time. Life happens. Yeah, life happens. I was in, when I wrote the book, I was in really, especially for my age, I was in great fucking shape. I was in great shape. And I basically just wrote in there.

I took everything that I had answered in an email and I made it into a chapter. You know, and that's a, that's one of the things I really like about your book is you're, you, you, you have it set up by lessons learned. Yeah. That's basically what I did with this book, but from a men's health kind of, kind of point of view. It kind of fell into that. I didn't necessarily know I was going to do that. It was a little bit accidental. That's why, but that's, that's why it works because it's organic.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's totally why. Because the book that I had set out. to write was actually not dissimilar from your book is I wanted to write a book on my own experiences but what I was going to write it about was I was going to take things like the oath of enlistment and the Ranger Creed and I was going to break down why these are important and how you can apply

them in your daily life. Totally. Type thing. And Tucker Max, who used to own scribe publishing, which is a self-publishing service, I pitched the book to him and he goes, no, mm-mm. He goes, that's not the book you want to write right now. He goes, he goes, the book you want to write, he goes, I've heard you, he had, we had been at a range together. And people were coming up to me asking me about stuff. And I was telling them about, you know, you know, little things like, you know, first thing you should do every morning when you get up is you have a bottle of water on the nightstand. And before you even get out of bed, you drink 16 ounces of water, you know, things like

that. He goes, he goes, these are the things that people are going to gravitate for towards, that's the book that's going to give you not only sales in the short term, but longevity because people are going to be interested in that. He goes, philosophy. books, another book's going to come in and eclipse it later on down the road. You know, somebody's going to have a different out, you know, he's like, you know, if you look at, you know, and a good example is if you, do you know, hackworth was? Yeah. Yeah. Nobody really reads Hackworth's book anymore.

But for like 10 years, it was all the rage. Dude, about, about face is a phenomenal book. Phenomenal book. So I decided to write this, you know, basically, you know, about men's health and, and, you know, using myself as a guinea pig and describing the type of health I. I had to be in it 48 years old, you know, doing an eight-click offset with a range of platoon in the mountains of Afghanistan, you know, what that was like for me, what type of routine that I had to have, how I had to monitor my nutrition, my supplementation. It was a whole different game at that age.

And at the time, I had, I, it's since gone out of business, but I had my own supplement line, gray-beard performance. So I meant for this book to kind of dovetail with the supplement line. Makes sense. And it's, I've sold over 11, thousand copies total. So I don't even promote the book anymore. And it's still, I sold one today. You know, it's still, you know, people. And what I love about is, is people buy it in paperback. They don't buy it in Kindle. And I said when I first started, when I first put the book out there, I said, I hope people will buy it in physical form. And I want you to write in the margins.

Yeah. I want you to underline stuff. I want you to highlight stuff. It's one of the things the digital format misses. Yeah. And I put bullet points at the end of every chapter. Okay, these are your takeaways, you know. This is how you're going to, this is how, this is how you can, this is how I want you to get every night. This is how I want you to get there. These are things that you can take that will help you sleep. These are things that you can do to make sure you're getting quality sleep, you know, things of that nature. And it was really well received.

And, you know, I've gotten, I've gotten emails. I've gotten social media message, hey, man, you know, since reading your book, I, I started lifting again. I started, I started going to jiu-tzu. My life's totally turned around. I got my cholesterol under control because of, you know, you know, of you and that makes me really happy. Yeah, how could it not? Yeah, yeah.

And then I transitioned. Slightly genre shift. Yeah, slight genre shift. So, uh, did you have aspirations of writing fiction before you started writing fiction? Forever. Okay. I mean, like literally going back, I, I used to tell people about screenplays that I wanted to write when I was in the Ranger Battalion.

So that seems to be the common narrative. Yeah. I have yet to meet somebody who says, Now I accidentally became a fiction writer. Fell into it. Yeah. It seems like you either have that or you don't. Yeah.

Desire. It's, some people can make up stories and some people can't make up stories. There's a lot of people that can make up stories and make up some damn good ones and, but they lack, for whatever reason, they lack the confidence of the opportunity to put it on paper. There's some great stories out there that will never get to hear. Oh, for sure. You know? But what ended up happening to me, I had numerous stories that I bounced around in my head in, in different genres, everything from science fiction to stories about a private detective,

taken on the CIA. You know, I had all these crazy, crazy ideas. Then what ended up happening is there was a unique confluence of events kind of all at once. I got a raging case of cellulitis on my back. I got hospitalized with it. That's how bad it was. This was right, this was 2024. So pandemic was over, we're still in the recession. So I get out of the hospital and at the time I was medical director for a company called Safeguard Medical. Great company. I would never throw them under the bus.

They're awesome. They had to let me go. And it just coincidentally, it happened to be right after I got to the hospital. But they had to, they're like, hey, we got to make some cuts. That's how to go some. Yeah. And I don't bear them any ill will. I still buy their products.

I still support everything that they do. But I got let go. fortunately, they gave me severance. They gave me eight weeks of severance. And I looked and I said, like you said, as a physician, I'm employable. Yeah. Right? So I have a retirement plan.

I always have a backup plan. I had not worked clinically at that point in years. Oh, really? I had not. Yeah. Because it's, before I was medical director for them, I was medical director for a company called Pursus Medical. I worked, I had worked in a couple of different ERs.

Then I transitioned to doing what's called Locum's work. which is you work for an agency, and then they identify hospitals that have a need. And they credential you through that hospital. And then, you know, you might have never been in that hospital before, but, you know, I drive a couple hours. I show up on a Friday night and I'm working in that hospital, you know, for a couple of days. It's called, it's called Locum's. Okay.

Locum Tenens is the full Latin turn. I don't know what that means in Latin, but. So I transitioned to Locum's work. Well, what ended up happening during the pandemic is patient sentences and emergency rooms, dropped drastically because people are like, I don't want to, you know, there's going to be a bunch of sick people in the hospital. I don't want to go there.

What ended up happening is, for the first time in American history, only true emergencies were going to the emergency room. So that's when we saw all along what our emergency room censuses should have been. Yeah. Those people are using their primary health care system. Exactly.

So like for the first time, this was like a wake-up call. But what ended up happening is they had to cut man hours, right? They're like, well, if we're at 30%, census. So what are they going to cut first? They're not going to cut the guy who's been working there 10 years and is like is a partner in that practice. No, the locums guy. So loombs got cut. And at one point I get an email from, excuse me, from one of the hospital systems, I was doing locums. And they said, hey, coming up next month, you have not worked a shift in 12 months.

So you have one or two choices. You can either ask for your credentials to be turned off or we can turn them off. But if we turn them off, that you have to report that to the state medical board, that we withdrew your credentials. Interesting. And it's, it wouldn't have been a big deal because they said, well, why are they withdrawn? Well, because they didn't have hours for me. Yeah. But I still would have had to, every time I applied for a job, I would have to write it. It would have been an explanation. Every time I apply for a new license I would have had to. So they said, and I said, okay, what do I need to do? They said, just reply to this email and say, please deactivate my credentials, which I did. So by the time I got let go from saying,

I had not worked clinically in over a year. And I'm like, you know, I don't really want to go back to the ER. And now, that being said, I'm still, there's still a couple of locums companies that I'm attached to that if I get a good enough offer and like, okay, I'll drive three hours for that rate. Yeah. I'll drive and stay in a hotel for that rate. But for the most part, I just, I worked urgent care now.

And I knew I couldn't jump right back into working locums because they don't care that you need the money. They, you know, you're not working based on what you need. You're working based on what they need. And the need wasn't there. So I'm like, okay, I need to find something else. So I guess I said, I guess I'm going to have to have to work, you know, like urgent care or a family medicine clinic, something of that nature. So I found a local urgent care company and I applied. And I, I know how this works. I used to be a department chief. So I know the flash to bang is about three months from the time they say, okay, yeah, we want you to, you know, okay, fill out all this paperwork. work. Now we're going to vet you. We're going to check your references. Now we're going to put you in

the credentialing pipeline. Now you're working. I knew it was going to be three months. And I'm like, okay, I've got eight weeks severance, plus I've got some money saved up. So build paid wise, I'm fine. But I basically don't have anything to do for three months. So what am I going to do? You know what? You should write that story that you've been kicking around in your head all this time. So I sat down. And I didn't, even though there's a bunch of fictional stories, like I say, that have flashed through my mind over the years. And every military guy thinks he's going to get out and be the next Jack car, right? But I'm like, no, Jack's already out there. So I don't want to compete with Jack.

He's doing great in that space. Slaying. I don't want to be another former soft guy writing about the hardened former operator getting revenge because that story is out there. Right. So I said, I need to do something totally out of the wheelhouse to set myself apart. This story that was based on a Dungeons and Dragons character that I played years ago had been bouncing around between my ears for years. And I said, you know, you know what?

I'm going to write that story. So it's basically the guy you see on the cover there is a dwarf. He's 6,000 years old. And he has been. Is this a memoir? Yeah. Well, so I'm 5'6. A dwarf. I'm 5.6. He's 5.5.

Stop it. You're not 5.6. I'm, okay. That's what Evan says too. Yeah. He could walk without crouching under this table. I stood next to Evan and I'm trying to think somewhere there's a picture of me and Evan together. We're both wearing hats though. So I think we're the exact same white. Tom Cruise says he's 58. Okay. I'm 5.6, but okay, I was 56 when I enlisted. I have four herniated discs now. Okay, so maybe I'm 5.5 and a half. I don't know.

I'm calling it 53. There's no way I'm 53, dude There's no fucking way I'm 5 3 I'm calling bullshit I am not 5 3 3 I'll give you 5 3 and a half All right I'm gonna have to take Because I'm in your home I'm gonna take that

This guy's 5 5 5 I'm just saying you said dwarf and I'm like hold on Yeah So and he's considered tall for a dwarf By the way I should I should caveat that So for 6,000 years he's been around And his job is

He finds magical objects That humans could potentially harm themselves with and he destroys him. And, you know, he's like, he's like basically the last guardian of humanity and the last remnant of a bygone age from 6,000 years ago. So that's his backstory. And I wrote the first book and I did everything on my own. Did you get it done in that 90 days? I did. Yeah. I had to go back because I showed it, I showed it to my friend Randy Searles who runs a professional editing service. And he gave me some tips up front about some stuff that I needed to change. So I went back and I made some revisions. So by the time it was probably,

I wrote the bulk of it in three months. It took me another two months to fine tune it. That's still not bad. Yeah. And then I ended up going through. I didn't, uh, Randy didn't do the bulk of the editing. I actually got a guy named Brian Neemeyer that did the, uh, did the copy editing for me, uh, and went through it. In the meantime, I got on fire. I found a cover artist. You have the first edition that I sent you, which is a different cover from this. Okay. This is the, I have a new cover artist now that does all of my covers. So she did these, but I uploaded, I already had a KDP account because when I published through Scribe, they gave

me a KDP account for Honed. So all I had to do was figure out how to do the uploading and all that stuff, which I did. I've done all my own, I uploaded it myself. I've done all my own marketing. All my marketing has been organic. The feedback that I've gotten on the the first book has been really good. I've sold over a thousand copies at this point. Got almost 300 reviews on Amazon. That's awesome. And then I went to work on the second book, which is complete and has been out since April 1st. I'm about to hit 300 copies sold on it. I already have 56 pre-orders on book three, which I'm two chapters into writing. So how do you write? Do you go sequentially or do you write this segments of the story as they come to you and then weave them together?

I write, I envision it as they come to me, but then I make notes and write it sequentially. Like, I already know what the very last scene of book three is. You're just not sure how you're going to get there? Yeah, I'm 80% sure how I get there, but I'm a discovery writer, which means sometimes the characters do and say things that I wasn't necessarily expecting. Do you whiteboard and have like a story arc? I write it down on a piece of paper. I actually, for book one, I did none of that.

It was all in my head. I tried to write an outline and I failed. Okay. And then I ended up writing the outlines for book two and three at one sitting. It was, I think book one had been out like two or three months. And I was laying in bed. I'm like, okay, I got to start tomorrow. I got to start working. I had a day off the next day.

I'm like tomorrow I got to really start working on book two. I'm going to have to write an outline. So I closed my eyes. I started thinking about book two. And I basically got all the way through it in my head. Wow. And then I was like, and I left it on a cliffhanger. So I'm like, and I didn't probably fall asleep until 1 o'clock in the morning that night.

But I just laid there going all the way through both book one and book two. And then I went back and thought it all through again because I didn't, I didn't want to do that thing where you get up in the morning. You're like, oh, wait, what was that idea that I had? You know, because you know how often that happens. Only every day. Only every day. Yeah. And I didn't want that to happen.

So I kept like, that's why I was up until 1 o'clock because I kept repeating it in my head. And at one point I almost got out of bed to go write it down. I said, no, I'm not going to do that. So I got up the next morning. I went over to the printer in my wife's office. I yanked out four pieces of paper and I just started basically automatic writing and wrote down the outline for books two and books three and then launched into it. And then I launched book two, three months early. Yeah. And I'm hoping book three, my goal is to have it one January, 2027. In an ideal world, I'm going to the Author Nation Convention in Vegas in November. So in an ideal world, I could get it done before then, but I'm not, I'm not going to punish

myself if that doesn't look like it's going to happen because I don't want to, I don't want to try to rush through and get a rush product that it's not 100% something that I'm proud of. You know, I like to look at every piece of dialogue, every scene description and go, yeah, I'm, you know, that is good. You know, I'm, I'm proud of that. So, and I think I've gotten better as I've gone, too. I was going to ask you, the more you do, is it getting easier?

Some of it gets easier. Some of it gets harder because, like, I don't want to, I don't want to be known for constantly using the same descriptive terms. I don't want one scene to be, oh, this is just like that other scene you did in the other book. Retreading the same. Yeah. So, you know, so coming up, especially when it comes to things like battle scenes and stuff like that, you don't want to use, you don't want it to be cliche that you're throwing out the same,

you know, his shield rang out. You don't want to use the same terms and shit like that all the time. How many do you think are in the series? There's going to be, so this is going to be a trilogy. And it's going to wrap up very, very nicely. There is the opportunity because this character has 6,000 years of background. Go back in time a little bit. I would like to go back.

Are you familiar with the Casca series? No. So this is a little after your time. These were really big in the 80s. There's a book, a series of books called Casca the Eternal Mercenary. They were actually written by Barry Sadler, who is famous for composing and singing the Ballad of the Green Berets. Interesting tie-in.

Yes. Yes. So he became a novelist. Casca Rufio Longinus was the sergeant of the guard at Christ's crucifixion. Okay. In the fictional world that Barry Sadler is created, he became immortal. Christ cursed him with immortality and said, soldier, you are what you are and that you shall remain until I return.

So Casca wanders the earth as a soldier until the second coming. That's the premise of the books. So you follow him, like book one starts. He's in Vietnam. And he's telling his backstory to a field surgeon, right? That's how the whole book starts. But he was treating him after that point for insanity. Yes, yeah, yeah.

Well, no, so what happens is he arrives at a mash unit and they put him in the expectant pile. Yeah. Because half of his skull's blown. Yeah, but he doesn't die. Well, and they go over there, they're like, hey, you need to see this. And the doctor goes over there and he can see white blood cells pushing a piece of shrapnel out of his brain. Very wolverine-ish. Yes.

And the skull is coming back together, like as he's watching it. So he ends up x-raying him from head to toe. And there's like, there's a bronze arrowhead in his thigh and all this. stuff. So the books go then they're all pretty short. They're all like novelettes. But like, you know, he was a gladiator. He was a Viking. He fought for the Confederacy. He was, he was worshipped as a god by the Incas at one point, all this other stuff. So I would like to someday go back after the trilogy is over. And I think it's fertile ground for me to fill in that 6,000 years. And I've a lot of time to work with. I've dropped a lot of breadcrime.

in both of these books about places that the character has been in history that you would, you know, that, oh, he was, he was right there at this battle, right along, he was so-and-so's number two man, you know, this, this famous person that you're familiar with. There's a book, and this isn't spoiling too much, so I'll go ahead and tell you. In the first book, there's a scene where he talks about how he was one of, at Oxford, he was one of J.R. Tolkien's professors. Okay. So, and one night in a.

Little inspiration for Tolkien's stories. Yeah, one night he got a little bit drunk and he got a little bit loose with what he was talking about. And that may or may not have given Tolkien some inspiration. Yeah. So do you like writing more or medicine? Writing. No question. Yeah.

Damn. Well, I think you've answered what you'd be spending most of your time doing going forward then. Yeah. Medicine, you know, I'm very thankful that, that God has given me the abilities that he has when it comes to being a physician. to ignore that would be, you know, like I say, you have to play to your strengths, right? So it would be wrong for me to ignore that. I'm thankful for what I can do in medicine. I appreciate it.

I love the feeling of alleviating somebody's pain. I love the feeling of, you know, this is a sick person and I'm going to make them better. But it would be one thing if medicine was just, hey, I'm going to show up every day and you're going to come. Okay, what's going on? I'm going to examine you. Okay, here's what we're going to do. Next, it's another thing when it's like a medical legal documentation. So, oh, here's my online training.

It's, oh, make sure you're certifying this. You know, it's all the things that kind of sap the joy from it. You know, I ran a, when I was in, as an 18 Delta, I spent 90 days running a clinic in Chimerae, Bolivia. And that was some of the funnest time I've ever had practicing medicine. Because all I had to do was write a little, a brief little note, three lines on what I did for these guys. But, you know, I had people coming in that have been dealing with. with stuff and I was treating them. Yeah.

You know, treating them and treating them. Patient-centric. Yeah. Practicing medicine-centric. Yeah. And that's the draw too for, you know, for people that work with, you know, for things like, you know, Team Rubicon is a great example. Samaritan's Purse, another great example.

You know, Operation Smile. You know, these guys that go in these medical teams and it's like, we're not worried about paperwork. We're not worried about anybody suing us. Yeah. We're not, you know, worrying about, oh. I had the wrong color lanyard on my name tag. It's, no, we're seeing sick people and we're making them better. Which is why people I feel like want to go into medicine in the first place.

Yeah. But there's a lot, you know, there's, it's like anything. It's like being on a team. You know, the deployment part of it, you know, the training part of it and the deployment part of it, those were great. The paperwork, oh, you didn't fill out your hazmat form right. So you can't put that ammo can't go on this palette. It has to go on this palette, you know. Nobody believes me when I tell them those stories.

Yeah. They're like, what do you mean you guys would mission plan for 72 hours? I'm like, yeah, if not 96. So you should have heard me laughing, driving in my car, listening to you explain to Joe Rogan what a spin-ex was. Oh, God. And I don't believe it. I'm like, no, you wouldn't let you leave until you shot it all. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Or you don't get it next year. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, what do you mean you shoot Carl Gustavs until you bleed out of your ears and nose? I'm like they're, you shoot them and what else you're going to do with them? Because otherwise we're not going to get them next year.

We might need them next year. We didn't need them this year, but we might need him next year. That's why I told them, ask some other people, just so I'm not your single data point. And they're all going to tell you the same thing. It's 100% real. Yeah, 100% real. Man. What else do you want to accomplish in your life?

For me, like, so speaking specifically about authorship, to me, somebody posed this question the other day. They said, when do you feel like you've made it as an author? It's a good question. Yeah. Very individualized answers. And for me, it would be being somewhere in an airport, in a restaurant or something like that, and somebody saying, excuse me, are you Mike Simpson the author? Like, to me, that would be it.

That would be like the pinnacle of, I've made it. Like, I don't care how many books I've sold. Just somebody read my book. And then they looked me up to see what I looked like, recognized me in public, and took the time. Not just to go, oh, I think that's it. That shit head that wrote that book I read. No, they came over to actually talk to me about it. you know, to me, that would be like the pinnacle. But I think for me, I want to continue to

write. I'm going to practice medicine for as long as I can practice, which I think I got another five years left in me. You know, we all slow down. You slow down cognitively as well as physically, right? That's a thing. Yeah. I don't want to take my boards a third time. I don't want to take my boards at 65. I just, I don't feel like doing that. So my exit strategy is I'm going to practice medicine for probably five more years. Ideally, at that point, you know, if I still need the income, maybe I can move into like a teaching position somewhere. You know, there's plenty of med schools looking for people.

I got to say, I know you probably don't want to hear this, but after coming up here, I'm seriously thinking about moving up here. Oh, I love it when people say that. Yeah. But I'm also, you know, I'm not a Montana native. Yeah. Probably technically neither is Michael. I've heard people where it doesn't countless you've been here for six generations.

I'm like, I can't control where I was bored. Exactly. Yeah. But there's nothing wrong with good people coming here for the right reasons. Yeah. I mean, there's also, I think, just under 1.1 million people in the entire state. So there's plenty of room for you. Yeah, I looked up how many people were in Calispell. It's like 28,000 or something like that. Michael, you lived here most of your life. This is a debatable number, actually. My guess would be 40,000. Yeah. I'm including in that like evergreen. How many high schools are there? Two. Two. And what's, how big is a graduating class at that high school? 300-ish. Yeah, there you go.

300-ish. So there were in Tachby High School when I graduated in 1984. There were 122 people in my graduating class. And what was the population in the city? I don't. I don't know. The high school was a little over 500 people. We had one high school.

My graduating class was 122, of which I graduated 102. It was good numbers. Yeah. So do you think my guidance counselor thought I'd ever be a doctor? Not so much. Yeah. It ends up being a guidance counselor, though, anyway, right? Like, he's like, I know what I want to do with my life?

I want to be a guidance counselor. Yeah, so you're taking advice from somebody who couldn't get a better job than guidance counselor. Yeah. Those who can't do teach, they say. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's Whitefish has a high school. Seafalls has a high school. Big Fork has a high school.

What do you think, Michael? In the Valley? 100,000? Yeah, probably 100,000 in the valley. Yeah, that's my guess. I have yet to find a good number for, if you say just Calispell City, like where the PD is responsible for, it's probably 20,000. But then there's evergreen,

there's a little bit north of town, a little bit south, I don't know. Somewhere between 20 to 40, call it that. Beautiful area. It's amazing. Yeah. Well, and you guys went into GNP Glacier National Park yesterday.

You can see it. I mean, the opening and entrance to it. It's a sleeper. It's not as big as Yellowstone, but man, it rivals it for beauty. It's beautiful. Yeah. I spent a lot of time in Yosemite growing up.

We had friends there. My parents had friends there. so we would summer up there quite a bit. And it's the ride, when you're up, when you're at the park and you're on the road and the water's right there to your left, that reminds me of the drive into Yosemite. Yeah. Because the Merced River is right there as you're coming in and then you cross the South Fork. Yeah.

And you go on into the park. But yeah, it's, God, the mountains are just so beautiful. It's beautiful. And there's plenty of room for everybody. Yeah. My wife had no idea where this close to Canada. 60 miles as the crow flies. Yeah.

And when you're in the park, you're, 40 at one point. Oh, yeah. Yeah, depending on where you are in the park for sure. Yeah, we're much closer. Where can people find you? I've monopolized your time for over three hours. No, this has been awesome, man.

I appreciate the opportunity to be on here. I want to publicly acknowledge, so Blake Hayes was the one who he made the connection with somebody, you and he have a mutual friend. Somehow, yeah, I forget. We originally got connected over text, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, but that was through Blake Hayes.

Okay. out of Tulsa. So he has a jiu-jitsu school, a sheep dog in Tulsa. How long have you been in purple belt? I'm a brown belt now. Okay, I was going to say. Yeah, I was a purple belt forever. Well, how often were you going to class?

Not as much as I should have. Okay, I'm seeing a probable reason here as to why you were purple belt forever. Okay, the amount of time that it's that I've been on this road, I own it. I do not put that off on anybody. You know, I'm not going to, okay, did I have a hip replacement as a purple belt? Yes. But I'm not going to blame that. It's it's it's it's it's it's me. I control that nobody else. You got five and a half years to black belt right? Good for you man. I just was able to train that's like Kit Dale level there. It's definitely not.

I just had an opportunity and ability to train more frequently than most people like I was explaining with Joe the math still maths. If you go two times a week and you get your belt in 10 years, if I go eight times a week, five and a half years is no longer that like insurmountable of a feed. My schedule allowed for me to train a substantial amount. It was really all it was. There's no magic to it. I actually just to see this was a, this was a few years ago. I think it was right or was a pandemic time. Might have been right around pandemic time or just after. It was like 2022, 2023 time frame. I just for a week just to see what it would do to my body. I did a strength and conditioning workout every day and I went to jiu-jitsu every day.

How'd that treat you? And oh, I needed two full days to rest when I was done because I was, so I did, I did three class, I did two GEE classes at my school, John's Jim Georgetown. So I did two Gie classes and one no-gee class. And then I did three no-gey classes with Dana-Hur. that when he was doing, before they opened Kingsway when he was working with

at the Roca facility? Yeah, he was doing, no, it wasn't at Roca. So those, oh, those are private. Rokkas are private. Oh, okay. Yeah, no, no, this was, he was, Jason Rebs owns, Hensos, Austin.

Gotcha. So that's where they were teaching out of. And the, but John, Professor Danner, would go to Rokas every morning to train his team. His competition team. His competition team. And then he would drive straight, straight to Hensis.

to teach the 1030 class, which was often like an 1115 class because you had to wait for John to get there. What do you think the odds are he's a serial killer? My personal guess is 93.8. So that's probably a decent number. I mean, if a report came out, Jiu-Jitsu instructor John Danahar

found collecting human heads in jars. I would say... So... Yeah. But here's the thing. We will never... So like we will never really know who Jack the Ripper was. Yeah.

We will never know. John, John Deannaher would be such a good serial killer that we will never know. In fact, I could see someone else getting convicted for it and that he planned it that way all along. Yeah. He'll definitely hang on somebody else. So. No pun intended.

So I got to, so I know that I'm, I derail. We're closing out. Now I've re-railed us again. One of the proudest moments of my life was having. having Professor John Danaher yell. So we did the technique of the day and everything. And then you don't, in Daner's classes, you don't just, okay, now we're gonna roll.

No, no, no. You do specific training. Yeah. Yeah, it's all- Positional's. Because you do positionals, right? So we were doing the positionals. And I shot a double leg.

And the technique that we had been using was a specific variation off the double leg. And he calls me, it was called me doc. Hey, doc. I think he doesn't know my real name. but yeah but he shouted across the room great double leg doc and I was like this is it that's when you retire this is the pinnacle yeah I was you literally stop mid roll you're like I'm out I'm out I'm retiring from jiu jitsu I got a compliment from John it's like the joke uh it's like the joke

that was the greatest moment on my life and then my son says well after me being born right no not even close yeah yeah sorry no I'm actually a huge fan of John uh what he's been able to produce athlete wise is just amazing. It's phenomenal. Have you, so have you been to the Roka sessions? No. Yeah. So I've been to Roka. I've rolled at Roka, but not, not within her. Same. Yeah, I've been there. Yeah, I've been to Roka, probably the same people that you have. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I've hung out there. I've done workout, done horrendous work. That's a great. It is a phenomenal. There's nothing like doing a horrendous workout and literally vomiting afterwards. And then, okay, now we're going to roll. Yeah, that's not great. After your science experiment,

you basically felt like you were dying doing it. Yeah. Yeah. So, and as I did it, you know, I did a at least an hour of strength and conditioning a day. Yeah. Plus a full jiu-jitsu class every day. Oh, you felt like you got hit by a semi-truck. Yeah. It's all my, my inflammatory markers were like off the scale. Like I was in, and, and I was, I had to be really religious about how clean I was eating. Oh, for sure. That week. Like, I couldn't put anything bad in my body or it came back like a vengeance. Yeah.

Like that's, I cannot overstate that. Because one thing you'll, I mean, you're at an age where you're finding it already, but you're going to find it even more when you get to my age is it's not about what you're doing. It's all about the recovery. Oh, for sure. In the moment,

you're like, yeah, yeah, I still got it. It's how you feel afterwards. Yeah, the drive home, you start to feel it, brushing your teeth. You're like, ooh. I'm already, next morning. I'm already, my game, I mean, Michael can tell you,

he and I have rolled shit, probably thousands of times at this point. It's not, I don't have a complex game. I don't do anything fancy. I don't rely upon attributes or speed or any of that. And I think that that will probably serve me well over a longer time period because everybody who out there is relying upon attributes, I wish I had them. I would too.

But they're going to, they're going to leave you high and dry one day, just given enough time on the old clock. Yep. And so I'd rather develop a game that doesn't really rely upon those things and hope that it serves me well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I started, I started, I started, Jiu-Jitsu late. You started Jiu-Soo-Lay. And I think that's one of the advantages of doing that is you have to do old man's jiu-jitsu. So you have to do a game that's going to give you longevity. Yeah, I didn't go into it with the attributes that I wish I, you know, I see other people having, which, again, use them when you got them. I'm not going to cartwheel through somebody's guard. It's not going to happen. You know, I'm not doing dynamic. I will never do a flying arm bar. I have tried to cartwheel. Yeah. It didn't work out. It doesn't work out so good. It's not, You don't even want to see that.

My professor always talks to me about, John, he says, you got a video, you need to video your roles. That's how you get better. And it's like, but I can't stand to watch myself. There is that. Yeah. When I watch myself, I'm like, I'm like, you are terrible. You are terrible. Go turn your brown belt in.

Right now you are terrible. I hate to tell you, you're going to feel like that when you become a black belt too. It just never ends. Yeah. Well, and that's, you know, that's one of the great things about it is it's, jiu-jitsu is a never-ending journey. You know, Black Belt is not the end of the journey. Oh, it's the beginning, if anything. It's totally the beginning, yeah. And, you know, I love it. I'm, I have so many chronic injuries now, and that's, those do hold me back. Schedule holds me back. Dealing what the prostate cancer thing has

held me back. At the end of the day, though, I'm going to be totally honest. Yes, those are all excuses, you know, I could train. Some of those are very valid reasons. But I could train more. I'm, you know, when I look on the mirror, I know that I could train more. Yeah. And, you know, at the end of the day, that's on me, you know. But I'm also at a point where I've had to prioritize some stuff that, you know, that maybe wasn't jiu-jitsu. I had, I was able, I had a couple of years there where I was able to really prioritize it because the way that my job worked, you know,

I jump on a video call at 10 o'clock and, you know, everything else, all my strength and conditioning, everything else is taking care of. And that's another thing is I can't imagine at my age, And I talk about this in the book. I actually thought at one point like, oh, Jiu-Jitsu is going to be my fitness. No. You know,

I absolutely positively have to be doing other stuff. It'll actually degrade your fitness. It's not an equal measure of push and pull. You're way more contorted and inflection than you are in extension. And you're going to be way, your injuries. You're going to be so prone to injuries. It's asymmetrical too.

Like most people pass to the passers left. You know, like I don't have any data to support it. almost everybody does. So that means you're probably playing guard off of your right hip more than your left. You know what I mean? Like there's some asymmetrical stuff that will develop as well. Notice, I mean, you're 90% of the time if you're in top half card, your right leg is what's trapped.

Yeah. That's just the way it is. Right? So, you know, so like you said. That's because people pass the left. Yeah. So it's not symmetrical. That's the way, you know, same thing.

When you're on the bottom. Yeah. You know, you're locking down the guy's right leg. So all of your sweeps. I haven't done. Lockdown doesn't work. That's trash. I haven't, well, I'm not a locked down guy.

So I'm an early sweep guy. I go basically as soon as you get there, I'm going for that. I'm going for the underhook and going for the switch. Don't let him settle. Well, what do they say? The difference between a white belt and a blue belt is transition time. I don't know if I've ever heard that. Yeah.

Yeah. I could buy that. Is it that a blue belt doesn't get to a white belt. We all did this as a white belt. Oh, I passed. Now what am I going to do? I still do that. Yeah.

So do I. Where can people find you? So I am on Instagram, Mike Simpson, USA. I do have a website that I don't use that much, but you can contact me through it. There is a contact page, Dr. Mike Simpson.com. That's D-R-M-I-K-E-S-I-M-P-S-O-N.com. I've got a Facebook page too to push my books, but most of my time, social media-wise, is on Instagram.

You can find all of my books on Amazon. and goodreads. I don't use Twitter. I think my Twitter account got suspended for non-use. Threads is a cesspool, so I don't want to do anything over there. You're not missing out on either of those. Yeah. So, yeah, I like being on Instagram.

I like sharing pictures of stuff. I like doing, I like making AI generated images because it pisses a certain segment of people off to see AI generated images, and they accuse you of destroying the environment and putting artists out of work. And so I get a little bit of a kick out of that. But, uh, Yeah. Cool, man.

Yeah, so that's pretty much where it is. Well, let's get you back to your wife. Yeah. You guys out of here tomorrow? Yep, we fly out at noon tomorrow. What are you got a plan between now and then? We are going to go eat at Heliscoes tonight. Nice.

Have you been there? It's good. Yep. You'll be listening. So I'm going to say we're standing at the lodge of white fish. Yep. Restaurant there is really good. And of course, you got the port.

You watch the sunset right over the lake there. It's absolutely gorgeous place to stay. Elisos is, you've eaten there, right, Michael? Yes, just recently, actually. I would say the best Mexican food in the valley. Okay. Would you agree, Michael? No, actually.

It's very good. Don't say Costa. Mexico because I'll slap that mustache off your face. Now, my wife's Mexican-American, so. Where were you going to say? There's a place. It's called, of course, I'm La Casita, right by the fairgrounds. It's connected to a gas station.

First off. Which throws people off. No. Absolutely not. Oh, that's right. Immediately no. You've never been to this place, but you always say you're never going to know. Immediately no.

Did you hear the initial? it shares a door with a gas station. But to me, that's a good thing. Yeah, exactly. Did you ever read at Holiscoes in Coronado? Oh, yeah, all the time. Yeah, that was, Herschel Haynes took me there. That was his favorite place.

They had a little cool little patio area. Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, man, we'll get you out of it. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you. Yeah, of course.