Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Full Auto Friday - Round 69

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

Rapid-fire listener submitted Q and A with a five-minute time cap. 1. negativity and relishing in other people's pain and failure 2. Self-hatred and low self-esteem 3. Advice for deploying for the first time with a wife and child 4. Fantasy adventure mission...who is on the roster, and why Enjoy

What's up, everybody? It's Friday. You know what that means. It's time for Q&A. Before we get into it, briefly, let's talk about the sponsors that make the podcast possible. First, today, this episode is brought to you by OnIt. Onit.com slash hot. If you're in the mood, if you're looking for total human optimization, that's the website that you want to go to. You'll know you're in the right place because the podcast logo is front and center. And you're going to have a variety of choices and how you want to spend your time and energy researching. Across the top. Supplements, nutrition, fitness apparel, sale and more plus content. All of those are very self-explanatory. The main landing page are some products that I use, AlphaBrain, which is a neutropic. It helps with memory, focus, and processing speed. The power food active, which is a protein powder, but also has some stuff in there, micronutrients, a host, actually, if you will. Fitness equipment, total gut health, a variety of things that you can use to optimize your health and performance.

Now, of course, before you go down the road of supplementation, I highly recommend that you deal with the macro portions of your life, the fitness, the diet, the sleep, the working out, get all that stuff dialed, and then you can dig into your total human optimization at onit.com slash hot. This episode is also brought to you by Christensen Arms. If you've heard of them, or actually maybe you haven't heard of them, their claim to fame is that they're the original creators of the carbon fiber rifle barrel. Now, if you never shot with carbon fiber, well, it's actually shooting is relatively the same. But what you might notice is that the heat dissipation and the weight are drastically different. Christensen, they're the makers of the lightest and most accurate rifles in the industry. I have a variety of calibers and rifles from them, and I'm looking forward to hunting with them in November. Perhaps we'll be even doing a, I was going to call it a documentary, but let's just call it a web series.

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and you'll see on that landing page the Find My Firearm tool. Either way, however you get there, enjoy, go check it out. And let's dig into this. Fall Auto Friday episode number 69. All right, now let's talk about being an adult, okay? Before I get into this episode, I understand what the number is. I understand what the number means, but no, we're going to be an adult. We're not going to turn this into a potty mouth episode, a little sexual entendres, the entire.

Actually, it's not a sexual entangelo, but it's a double entendre the entire way. None of that, because I am a grown-up. I am 43 years old. At least that's what my driver's license tells me. We could argue about emotionally how old I am, but that's a different story. So let's get into this, the adult version of Full Auto Friday, number 69. I'm looking at danger close now. All right, everybody.

Four quick questions for today. One of them is based off of something I saw on social media just this morning. Attention, Andy Stumpf, 212. And that's based off of a letter, my commissioning letter that the military accidentally sent me way back in 2008, which made me go overnight on the last day of September as an E6 to the first day of October, as an 01. You're welcome, and I'm sure that there were many people who regretted me getting this letter in the mail. But I digress. Going back to the letter, I would love to hear your perspective on Fallout Friday about the glee being displayed by some over Joe, and he means Joe Rogan,

getting COVID. And why you think certain groups of people take such delight when pain slash death occurs to those they don't agree with? Is it possible to salvage a society where this has become such a common occurrence? I actually saw the post. that Joe made, and it was a video describing, I didn't actually talk about where he likely got COVID. He said he was traveling back, I believe it was from Florida, wasn't feeling well, self-isolated, got tested, and he took a variety of medical treatments. I view that video as like, oh, bummer, he got COVID, but he is talking about what happened with that in his experience, what the medications were that he took, and he was talking about how he was feeling better. And I just at that point, I actually texted him like, hey man, what are your hunting plans? I'm like, oh, okay, cool. I guess I'm updated on what's going on in his life. But however, hunting season is right around the corner.

So let's talk about that. And I didn't think of it again. I get this question and I went back and I looked at the comment section. I searched back for it and found it. And holy shit, the amount of vitriol and negative commentary, even the positive comment. even the positive comments. And I don't know how Instagram is necessarily set, but I was seeing, I was recognizing most of the names for the comments as I went into the comment section. And underneath them would be 50, 60, 70, 80, hundreds of comments.

And the initial comment would be, hey, buddy, glad to see that you're getting better. And then the last comments, and not even the last comments, but incredibly rapidly, people replying to those initial comments, essentially became, fuck you, fuck Joe, must be nice to be rich and famous, must be nice to be able to afford this. I can't believe that you are taking ivermectin, and down the rabbit hole, it went. It went there rapidly, and I was pretty taken aback by the type of commentary. So I've talked about this briefly, and it was in terms of, or my thoughts on this, I should say. And it was in terms of how people comment negatively on the internet. And my question to everybody

listening or watching when I answered it the first time was, how many people do you know in your personal life that are really happy and are fulfilled who take the time to break other people down negatively on the internet? My answer to that is none. None of the people that I know who are successful and fulfilled and are living a healthy life, and I guess that could be both mentally and physically, take the time to try to chop away at other people with their metaphorical acts on the internet. So it's shocking to me that the volume of negative commentary and how personal it became and the attacks at one another in the comment section, whether it be on their education or what they believe or, wow. It actually, it's

banned quite the gambit of personal attacks. And at the end of the day, my thoughts on the glee being displayed by some over Joe getting COVID is that it just makes me sad. It's so much easier to speak negatively about somebody to just let a flippant comment come out of your mouth or to type away a flippant comment than to either say nothing or to try to build somebody back up. And let me be clear. I have some mortal enemies in the world. And I'm sure there are some people out there who absolutely hate me for something that I have said or done or the combination of both, probably during my time in the sale community. None of that was intentional. But I certainly don't have a perfect track record when it comes to my behavior or personal interactions. And I

also have people who I absolutely fucking hate. And it is a battle for me to not. celebrate their losses, their stumbling, and their pain. But if I do that, if I celebrate somebody else suffering or their pain or their lack of success, it doesn't actually say anything about the person that I'm making that judgment of, and it says a whole hell of a lot about me. And again, I do not have a perfect track record when it comes to my behavior. I have absolutely taken great pleasure in other people's suffering, the people that I would consider to be my mortal enemy. And I regret the fact that I did so. I do believe in forgiveness and we need to branch off into a slight rabbit hole here for a second. Forgiving people is one thing. Allowing them to come back

into your circle and giving them a second chance is something completely different. So for the mortal enemies that, you know, the people that I consider to be my mortal enemies, I can forgive them and I try to for everything that they have ever done to me, whether it's intentional or unintentional. I'm not going to give them a second chance, but I can get past what it is that they have done or how what they have done has made me feel and the fact that I have given them so much free rent in my head and thought about things that probably they never even thought about after it happened. By being able to do that, it removes my desire to pile on to anything that may be going wrong in their life. It removes that desire to be a dickhead on the internet and

insult people because perhaps they have an opportunity that you don't. Perhaps they have a station in life that is higher than yours. Perhaps they are more successful financially than you will ever be. You know, me learning those lessons about trying to, and again, not perfectly for giving those people and moving past that, I personally have found that it has made a huge impact. in my life when it comes to being negative to anybody anywhere else in person or on the internet. And it makes me really sad to see people commenting in the way that they are and going after each other the way that they are. I think it's a perfect highlight of how incredibly difficult the past, what is it now, a year and a half it has been since the beginning of COVID and the impact

that it has had on people's lives, whether that's through isolation or a belief. system that alienates them from friends and family members or the loss of a job or the inability to do at the times that they want to do them the things that they want to do. There's a lot of people out there right now who are really pissed and I think they're expressing that externally. As far as salvaging a society where this has become a common occurrence, I don't think from a societal perspective, it's actually as big of an issue as it appears to be on the internet. I was having this conversation with somebody not too long ago. And I really do think that the detachment from face-to-face interaction and the semi-anonymity of the internet environment, it really creates this

place where people, they interact in a way that they wouldn't do face-to-face because, quite frankly, there's just not the consequences. I have associates, friends, uh, family who have different beliefs on vaccination, whether they have gotten vaccinated with the efficacy of the vaccination, masks, COVID in general, shit, political beliefs, whatever it may be. And I've never personally even been involved in a face-to-face conversation where the language used on that post in the comment section about Joe appeared in a face-to-face conversation. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. But the number of times I see that stuff happen online versus the number of times I've seen that happen in real life are very divergent. So it's not a matter,

I think, of us needing to salvage our society. I think that the internet, and maybe Instagram is a great medium for this, it allows people to behave in a way that they think is consequence-free and perhaps elevate to a position or a place to say those things that they wouldn't in real life. I'm not saying our society is doing incredibly well. And I'm very disheartened by the way that those people are interacting and engaging with each other online. But I think I understand their frustration and I think I can understand or at least try to see it from their, from their perception. I'm not saying I agree with how they believe. And I don't agree with negatively attacking people on public platforms. I don't agree with attacking people on in private instances.

as well, unless you want to do it from a face-to-face perspective, I feel like, let's take the things that were being said on Instagram, and I've talked about this before, I like to use the elevator rule. I online will never say anything to anybody that I would not say if we weren't trapped in an elevator together for hours at a time. That's the litmus test that I use. If I wouldn't say it in an elevator where there's no escape, I'm not going to say it online. And I think a lot of people would change their behavior in what they say if they use that same litmus test themselves. However, like I said, I'm trying to view this from the other side of the coin and their perspective of, you know, maybe whatever it may be, family situation, economic situation. It's hard to view it from

their perspective sometimes based off what it is that they're saying, but I'm doing the best that I can, and it just makes me feel bad for them. It makes me feel sad for the people that are making those comments. The number of people who essentially said, hey, must be nice to be rich and famous. Like, I get why you potentially would say that, but trust me, it doesn't say anything about Joe, and it says a lot about you. If you think that Joe is the luckiest man in the world, and he just woke up one day and he arrived at the station that he's at, then you're living in a different fucking universe. Is he a very fortunate man? Yes, he is, and he talks about it. He's also a very generous man and a very helping man and a very helpful man.

and he worked his ass off to get to where he is. And what you're actually pissed about is where he is in comparison to where you are. And the healthiest thing you could probably do is stop measuring yourself against other people. You throw in all of this a very contentious topic about COVID. And yeah, the worst of humanity, at least on the Internet, displays itself. So I was disheartened to answer your question and very lengthy. manner, a very short question. I give you a very long answer. It makes me sad to see people interacting and engaging that way. But I think as a society, when we get face-to-face,

it prevents people from talking like that. And I think actually we would be better if we put our connected devices down where we seem to pretend like, oh, we're Facebook friends. It's like, no, you're fucking not. You're connected on a social network. The people who are actually my friends are the ones that I engage with face-to-face. And I think our society would be much better off if we relied less on those social media and devices and more on the face-to-face. So hopefully I answered your question in there somewhere. All right. Moving on.

My full-auto question is in regards to regretting mistakes and the self-loathing that follows. I believe the subject matter of this question was mistakes and self-loathing. So, of course, I'm reading that. I'm a 26-year-old man and I strive for excellence in parentheses. To be honest, I often expect perfection in everything that I do, be it my job, hobbies or personal relationships. Being human, especially a bumbling fuck wit of one as I often am, doesn't allow for perfection, and no matter how hard I try, I sometimes royally fuck things up. When the baseline expectation is perfection, anything less feels soul-crushing. I cannot escape

the feeling that I have permanently failed myself, my peers, my family, and my friends. While my failures tend to drive me to work harder and be better, I am often unable to let the past go. I get stuck in an unhealthy cycle of self-hatred and low self-esteem. New successes never seem to fill the void. Do you have any tips for a fellow shit brain on learning to accept and let go of past mistakes? Damn, man. All right. My first thought on reading this was that you are living in a very painful headspace.

I would describe where you are is you're in a ditch and you're trying to get yourself out of the ditch, but what you're actually doing is you're holding onto the shovel and you're making it deeper. You describe failures. Guess what? Welcome to being a human being. I cannot think of a single example. I mean, I don't even know if I can think of a single example of anything, but specifically and precisely of a human being that is capable of. perfection. And I would ask you, the writer of this, do you have an example in your life or somebody

that you look to that is perfect, that models this expectation of behavior that you are putting on yourself? And that's why I say that I feel like you're holding onto the shovel and you're digging the hole. Nobody else is levying this expectation of perfection on you. It is singularly you. And if you can't think of an example of somebody that you believe can maintain this expectation, why are you putting it on yourself? I mean, let's be honest. Being a human being is very messy. If I had to column out and, you know, two columns, successes and failures of my life in total and aggregate, there's a good chance I would have more in the failure column than the success column. And if you only see that side, I think I have an understanding of the mental anguish that you are putting yourself in. So my first thought to you or idea would be reestablish your baseline. You're in 100% control of that.

There's nobody forcing you. There's nobody putting a gun to your head. So the first step that I would recommend is give yourself some grace. Holy shit, man. Take a wrap off, let off the gas a little bit. and take a breath. And if you're able to do that, I think that your headspace and probably happiness is going to overall improve.

I oftentimes feel, you know, the end of your first paragraph. I can't escape the feeling that I have permanently failed myself, my peers, my family, and my friends. So I don't know if I've ever felt like I've permanently failed myself, my peers, my family, and my friends, but what I will say is this. I also struggle with viewing myself through the lens of my mistakes. And like I said on the last question, I'm not a perfect human being. I have made many mistakes in my life.

And there have been times in my life where I have recently made a mistake. And it even got to the point where I didn't want to socially go out or engage with anybody. Because I felt that if I did, if I went and hung out with my peers, my family or my friends, that the only thing that they would be able to see was my failure, specifically the most recent failure. And it took me a really long time of sitting down, one, talking with a professional about this, and two, thinking about for myself,

how do I view other people? Do I, when I interface with my social circle or my friends, who all of which, spoiler alert, have made mistakes throughout their life, when I see them is the first thing that goes through my head, oh yeah, that fucker. And the only thing I can remember is the last mistake that they made. And the answer to that for me is no, I absolutely don't. Mistakes oftentimes that other people think or take very seriously or very personal, I think a lot of the times they go right over the top of other people's heads. It's not that they're not noticed. It's that they don't put their claws into the person the same way they do that individual that it directly involves.

And again, after talking to a professional about this and coming to the realization, that I don't view people like that, it made it much easier for me to take it easier on myself. You know, I am my own worst critic. The things that I am capable of saying to myself in the morning when I see myself in the mirror, I would never say to another human being. And again, I'll sit and think about it. Why the fuck would I say them to myself? You know, why would I not treat myself like I would somebody that I care deeply about?

And instead, why is it that I'm opening with this incredibly negative narrative? And the reality is, is you have to figure out a way to interrupt that cycle. I haven't had, I have not figured out a perfect way to do so. But what I try to do is recognize when it's happening and I stop it. So for you, one, reset the expectation. And two, if you feel yourself starting to become overly critical and feeling like you've permanently failed yourself, your peers, your family members, and your friends, I think the first step is recognize when you're doing that to yourself.

And the best piece of advice I can give you is talk to a. a professional who understands how the brain works and allow them to work with you so you can create or implement some tools that can hijack that negative feedback cycle and turn it into a positive feedback cycle. Now, the end of your question you said, your failures tend to drive you to work harder and be better. And that's great. But you do have to be able to let go of the past from the perspective of it being an anchor.

There's no reason that your mistakes in the past have to be forgotten completely, but they don't have to anchor you to the ground. They can absolutely springboard you forward and you can level up in life. So some of the mistakes that bigger mistakes that I've made in life, one in the business world. I've made quite a few. And they sucked at the time. I felt like a total failure. I felt like an idiot. But moving forward, I used them to bypass future mistakes. I was not defined by those mistakes. I learned from them. They were useful to me and they became a spring, not an anchor in the ground. Easier said than done. Relationship failures are exactly the same thing. Because a relationship fails does not mean that all relationships are going to fail. Could you go back and identify the

things that your failed partner where they let you down? You absolutely could, but I think you should spend more time thinking about where you could have done better and learning from those mistakes. Hold on to your past, but don't spend 99% of your time looking in the rearview mirror. I'd say 95% of the time you need to be looking where you're going. 5% of the time look in the rear view mirror to make sure that those lessons are still sticking with you. And I'll be honest with you, the ones in my life that hurt the most have had the most impact. And that's the most beneficial thing, I think, about holding on to those experiences in your past. It sounds like where you're at right now is a really difficult place.

And it sucks. I've been where you are. I wasn't able to get out of it on my own. I needed to talk to somebody who understood how not necessarily my brain, but brains in general, worked. And in doing so, it gave me a different outlook and it gave me a different path to walk that put me into a much more healthy headspace. And the beauty of this, I just released, I did last week's, no, this week, Monday. This Monday was with Kevin Estella. And one of the segments we talked about was the 24-hour clone principle.

focus on being better than you were 24 hours from you know at the end of every day if you can sit there and say you know what i made improvement in one small portion of my life maybe i know a little bit more about one subject maybe i did better today on my diet than the previous day maybe i went to a jihitsu class and i got tapped one less time or i was able to go another minute without getting tapped whatever level of improvement it may be as long as you could beat yourself from 24 hours ago which is the only metric that actually matters right you're in this unhealthy cycle of self-hatred and low self-esteem well one of the best ways to help get out of that is stop comparing yourself to other people and start looking for these small victories 24 hours at a time and the only thing that matters is where you are in comparison to your previous self hopefully in doing so you know these new successes that you have they're

going to help fill that void uh they may never because i think you need to have both you need to have those successes and you need to have the failures and to be honest for my in my life the more failures that I have had, because I have had less successes than failures, when I do have success, they're that much sweeter, especially when I can take a lesson from my past and implement that into what it is that I'm doing and achieve that success. So hopefully that helps. Question three about military deployment. Good evening, sir. I have a question for you and full out of Friday. I've been in the military, former Marine currently a medic in the National Guard for almost 15 years. However, I'm looking at my first deployment with a wife and a child back home.

Do you have any advice for being separated from your family for a prolonged period of time? Thank you for your advice and your time. I do have some advice for you and this one I'll try to keep short and sweet. First and foremost, try to get absolutely everything that you can get handled done before you leave. I'm talking wills, power of attorneys, guidance from a medical perspective, you know, what you would want to have done with your remains, just get it all covered. And establish a network of people that you know will be there to support your spouse and child back home in case something bad happens while you're gone. And by that I mean the dishwasher is going to stop working. The washer and dryer is not going to work anymore. She might have a flat tire, whatever it may be.

Establish all the networks that you would want to have in place before you leave. Make sure everybody has everybody's number. Make sure those people know that you're going to be gone. Obviously, if they know you're going to be gone, they need to be very, trusted individual, hopefully close to your family. And like I said, I cannot put enough emphasis on getting all the legal frameworks, the will, the power of return, get all of that stuff done. Do not try to do that overseas. So that's your prep. When you're overseas, what I would recommend is to set broad parameters for how often you guys are going to communicate. You may be, if I have no idea where you're going, but you might be going with a place that has incredible

Wi-Fi and cellular connection, and you might be able to be incredibly connected. And my own experience, that's going to make the time seem like it's actually dragging on longer, probably for both sides. And I think it is actually possible to over communicate. And then there's the other side of that where you talk, you know, once every three months. And I'm not recommending that either. But I would say, and what I tried to do on my very last deployment, as I would set a time period, like once every two weeks or once a week, whatever may work for your situation. And there would be a window inside of that week. Like, I'll try to call somewhere between a Monday to a Wednesday. And the reason I didn't have it on a precise day and a precise time is I didn't know what was going to be happening.

And I didn't want somebody on the other end of that expecting a call or communication to not get it and then become worried. And that's what's going to happen if you have a really, if you have this ability for connectivity and you're talking all the time and maybe something comes up and you don't have the ability to notify the person on the other end or maybe you shouldn't notify the person on the other end, it's going to create a hiccup and it's going to create some stress probably on both sides. And I don't recommend that. Deployment is going to be stressful enough as it is. And giving people a break in that time period will allow them to live their own life as well. It will support and empower their independence. They're not going to be constantly sitting and waiting for a phone call every single day at the same time. It just is something that worked out well for me.

And having said that, I saw people who went too far one direction and were like constantly in communication. And it was an issue when they, you know, hey, something came up for 72 hours, like, Sorry, I'm not going to be able to call. So manage it the best that you can and do everything you can. I don't know where you're going to go. Keep your head on a swivel. Maybe keep your head down and do everything you can to get back to your wife and child back home. Hopefully that helped.

Last question. I believe the title of this one was Fantasy Scenario. Of course, we all know this would never happen. However, given the crazy shit that's going on in the last year and a half, who the fuck knows? Here's the scenario. It's 1 a.m. Your phone rings and you actually answer. it's Congressman Daniel Crenshaw. He tells you he's putting together a 12-person team

that will go to Afghanistan and rescue American hostages. He tells you the team litter will be Jocko. Johnny Kim has signed on to be the team medic. Mike Ritland will handle the team canine. Mike Glover will handle the logistics and Kevin Owens will be the team sniper. Shani Evangelista, Bill Rapier, Andy Eribeto, and Dan Cirillo are all in. First question, are you in yes or no and why? Second question, who do you recommend to fill the remaining spots and why? And the bonus question, who plays you in the movie? I like this question. My first answer would be unequivocally, yes. And a lot of people in my life would be pissed to include my kids for me to take a step back into this world. But the reason that my answer would be yes is that why, watching what has happened or unraveled itself in Afghanistan and many other places throughout the world in the times that I have been out of the military has been extremely difficult to watch. And I went from a job where sometimes I would be directly involved in the situations or

activities that could make the news. And at this point in my life, all I can do is watch them. So the true answer is I would unequivocally say yes. But then, I would have to say, however, Daniel, I cannot go with you because I am not current. I am not competent to the way or the level that I used to be and the level that would actually enhance this team as opposed to me being the weak link in the chain. And lastly, it is no longer my time in the breach to be able to do this. I gave 17 years of my life and a lot of time, energy. energy, effort, and probably longevity for my life in an attempt to do things exactly like this.

It's just not, my head isn't in it the same way anymore. My heart is, but my head just isn't. And the reality is, is I would probably be the weak link on this team that you had listed. So yes, would I want to go? I absolutely would. Would I, though? No, because I'm not willing to risk other people's life due to my subpar performance. The second question, you know, what do I recommend or who I recommend for filling in the remaining spots, there are quite a few people that I would recommend, but I cannot give out their names because, for one, they're private. And I, you know, they choose not to have a large social media presence or a social media presence at all. And I'm going to respect that. What I will say is I feel so incredibly fortunate in my life to have worked with

the most amazing people that I've ever been around from a tactical, technical perspective, from a leadership perspective. And when they choose to hang it up, they choose to hang it up. And they're living their lives quietly and hopefully as much peace as they can find. And because of that, I'm going to hopefully allow them to continue to do so by not naming them. But they are out there. There are some amazingly capable Americans who you've never heard of. Hundreds of them, thousands of them that should get this phone call ever before I should.

Bonus question, who would play me in the movie? There's no fucking movie because I'm not going. And that's it for Full Out of Friday. 69. Have a good weekend. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. Thanks for taking the time to tune in, whether you're listening on an audio-only platform or you're watching on YouTube. I appreciate that you take the time every week to tune in.

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