Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - unSEALed - A Navy SEAL's guide to Mastering Life's Transitions - with Mark Greene

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

Mark Greene is a former Navy SEAL with 20 years of distinguished service, and he is one of my oldest friends. Out of the 180 trainees that started day one of BUD/s class 212, Mark is one of the original 18 who successfully graduated. From enlisted SEAL to a transition into the officer ranks, Mark's story encompasses multiple combat deployments and service on both East and West Coast SEAL Teams, including time as a sniper instructor and Special Warfare Combat Crewman OIC (Officer in Charge). Post-military, Mark transitioned to a fundraising role at USC, and now his latest achievement is as an author. Mark's book "Unsealed," is a testament to resilience, transformation, and the unyielding spirit of a warrior turned writer. To learn more about Mark and his book, please visit: https://www.themarkgreene.com/ Check out the newest Cleared Hot Gear here: https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/  

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Let's kick off the week right with a conversation with one of my oldest friends. But before that, let's talk about the brand that makes this podcast possible. That's right. You know it's Black Rifle Coffee Coffee. And you know we're going to go to their website. So let's do it right now and see what they have to offer. First thing I'm seeing is the 15% off of the coffee bundles, which is pretty legit. You can bundle the things the way that you like it and have it delivered, especially if you click on this, you join a Coffee Club subscription. So through this subscription, one of the mechanisms for raising and then donating money, Black Rifle has been able to donate over $4 million to veteran causes and initiatives. My favorite thing about the club is you can customize it to get what you want when you want it delivered, and you're going to get exclusive discounts on some of your favorite brands. And right here on the website, on that rotating banner, you can click and set all that stuff up. If you're new to the podcast or new to the website, the next thing you're going to see as you go down is this rotating or sliding bar that takes you from the lightest of roasts that they make all the way to the podcast.

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or month, I should say. So that's it on the business side of the house. Let's talk about my guest today. His name is Mark Green. And in our Buds class, Mark and I, it's not like it was ours from an ownership perspective, but in the Buds class that Mark and I started with and graduated with, 212, there were 180 people that started, and 18 of those original 180, sequentially went through the training from start to finish. Mark and I were one of those, or were two of those, I should say. So I have known Mark since 1997, and our careers had very similar paths. We went through buds together. We went to basic airborne training together. We checked in Team five at the same time. And then our path diverged a bit, which we get into on the podcast.

And then it would go years without us seeing each other because the community is small, but also big. And if you're on a rotational cycle that is opposite of somebody else, man, It could be a long time from going from seeing your friends and not seeing them. Last time I actually saw Mark, I think was in a Home Depot in San Diego over 10 years ago. And then I was on LinkedIn, which is a platform. I still can't figure out exactly what it's for. But I was on there. And I saw him talking about a book he wrote.

And here it is. Unsealed by Mark Green, an Navy SEAL's Guide to Mastering Life's Transitions. And I used that announcement as an opportunity to reach out and reconnect with Mark. He instantly got back to me. We figured out a date where the podcast was going to work. And I am so incredibly thankful that we did. One of my longest friends, one of the people I have known for the longest in my life. And we have so many shared experiences, whether it was in the military or our personal lives.

And a lot that were different as well, too. But such an incredible opportunity to reconnect. This is one of the things I'm the most grateful for, for hopefully. posting a podcast is the chance to sit down with old friends like this. And I'll shut up. Episode number 318 with retired Navy SEAL and current author Mark Green. Enjoy. I'm looking at danger close now. So that was, uh, that's Andy Stump for me. Yeah.

19 years old? Oh, I wasn't even 19. I was 18. So it was you, cipher it. Lewis Seifred had a great career Post Melfair The murder You know he's out for mandatory parole

In a few years And I really want to get him on the episode You don't Yeah I do I do I think I could entice him to freak out And then just beat the fuck out of it I mean obviously the episode wouldn't air

But Dude these pictures are from 1997. So we started in January of 97. Yep. Do you remember when in January we classed up? Was it right after the new year? Yeah, because I got there January 3rd. Okay. It was a Monday and I was sitting outside of the pit. Yep. And, you know, you see all these horrific injuries come out. Yes, you do. The dude who fell off the obstacle course landed on his feet, hips popped out of socket. That guy walks out. Cali walks out and like all these horrific injuries and then Chief Cairns walks out. God.

And I'm in my blues and it's a little chilly and I'm shivering. And he's like, what the fuck is wrong with you? And I'm like a little bit cold instructor. And it's like, yeah, don't even unpack and walks away. I mean, that's solid advice. I would say the same thing. So I'll put digital perversions of this up for people to see. So the blue helmet means we were in second phase.

So let's see. When we went through what was first phase, was it 10 weeks? It was either eight or ten. Eight. It was eight. Okay. So call that two months. So that means this was probably January, February, March.

This was probably April, because second phase was eight weeks as well. This was April of 97. Yep. Yep. Yeah. God. What a fucking idiot I was then. You know what's interesting?

I haven't changed at all. I know. I watched your podcast. I was like, yep, that's him. So I was. Going through the house and I was just like, I ran into this and those and the podcast came up and I was like, I bet he doesn't have these. I don't. I have.

I am. I don't know the right word for it. I am ashamed at how little I have from a record perspective, like pictures and stuff. Yeah. I just didn't, I didn't realize the value that it would have later in my life. I think I have a few pictures from our Bud's graduation. Mm-hmm. I have.

somehow some pictures from us out at the island okay you have those yeah we are wearing the shortest of shorts so obnoxiously short but I mean at least we're wearing combat boots with tan socks rolled over the top of the but I think it was from I think our class was lined up we had just been doing flights

and so we were lined up out by that shitty tower and I think we were going to go do our what do they used to have it was like pull-ups for food or some shit like that right you run into the compound and then we had to do And Palmer did a flight with a cigar. Yeah, he did. Yeah. Yeah.

He was a character. He was. Yeah. Good job getting kicked out of the military. Palmer. We'll leave your first name out of it. Might be Colin, though. Might rhyme with Colin?

Yeah. No, I wish, looking back, man, I wish. I don't have, I have almost nothing, if not nothing, from my last deployment. I have almost nothing from all of my time out on the East Coast. I have nothing from my time as a buds instruct. I just, I didn't, I didn't value at the time documenting it. And all the pictures, I, like, I have some stuff from my first two platoons at Team 5, pre-9-11.

Yep. But it's because other people were taking the pictures. Yeah, I saw, I found a picture, or I had a picture of you, um, guy who both knew who took his own life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, that was a rough one, man.

Yeah. That one hit me the closest to home for sure. So I didn't know Dave at all, but when he went to Virginia High Performance. Yeah. And where I was working, we had him show up and he couldn't make it through the, he couldn't make it through the first couple weeks. He was a troubled soul. And I didn't realize how troubled he was. it's uh i'm sure between the two of us we could list for a few minutes the number of people

that we know that have made that decision both active duty and afterwards but i know more people who have reached out for help and i'm not worried about them i'm less worried about them not that i'm not worried i had no idea that dave was at the point that he was at dealing with the stuff that he was at until he left things behind and uh i mean i would give him everything that I ever have owned and anything that I ever would own to just have a moment of time with him to force him to communicate and hopefully try to help. And I was just the opposite. I didn't know him until he showed up at high performance.

And he had all the intentions of being successful. Yeah. It was in his DNA. He just wanted to, he just wanted to. he just wanted to do well but then demon got him and he just

and I drove him from the airport and just had a conversation with me I just can't stop drinking so he was in my first platoon he I think at that time he was either in his third or fourth platoon he was a point man for squad one sniper

calm guy free fall fucking everything God walking fucking on water. Yep. Yep. I'm like, brand new guy wasn't a smart ass at all.

You know, yeah, exactly. I don't believe that for a second. He, so Dave, here's the way I described Dave, and I think this is what might have been

his undoing in some ways. He held people to include himself to a standard that was almost impossible and not to be a dick, but because he was capable of doing it. It's not that he was a perfectionist. He was a fucking good operator. Yeah.

technically proficient, tactically proficient, a good knowledge-based love history as well. So he could answer a lot of the why questions. But I think, and this is total hypothesis, later in life, he, you know, that comment to you, like, I just can't stop drinking. He couldn't hold himself to the same standard that he would hold other people to. And I have to think that that in some way, shape, or form contributed to a place where that decision became viable. And from what I know about that moment, it wasn't made in a moment of sobriety, which is not

uncommon. So it's not like you're thinking clearly in the first place, but I've often thought back about, one, the impact that he had on me as a person in my career. Like, he set for me the bar of what it meant to be a seal. Like, that dude had the answer to fucking everything. So I didn't, like, I got thrown off track because first pregnancy, they thought that My oldest daughter Riley had birth defects. Yeah.

So I thought you got to get out of here. So I got pulled from the rotation. So I was in the rotation with you, Fowles, Jason Lewis. Yep. That whole group I was supposed to be with. Jason was in that platoon with. Yeah. That was first with Hoppy.

Yep. Yeah. Just a whole bunch of rock stars. Fucking awesome dudes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And Jason was my swim buddy. And when I found out that he got killed, I'd seen him like right before he went on

deployment. I was like, hey, we got to get back together. And like we always do, we get busy. Yeah. And then I'd heard that he had passed away. Yeah, I mean, that's one way to describe it. Yeah, that was a rough one. That was a rough one for sure.

Yeah. Why do you think Jack Carr wasn't strong enough to graduate with us? I don't know. I always wonder about that. He was pretty skinny. He was skinny at the time, too. But he, like, made it through Hellweek, and then was like, I need a break. and he was under boat crew one he rolled in a boat crew one it was me Tim Thompson

Mikey did him was tall man just a monster yeah six foot four 250 pounds I got a story about that later on I'll tell you why I know his dimension so so well um but Jack jumped under three the three spot I'm like there's no way there's no way he's gonna make it because because we had an officer run with smucker. Yeah. The instructors really liked him. Yeah. He was...

But they loved our class in general. Dudes were quitting after Hell Week. Yeah. And... It is possible that we have one of the most hated Bud's classes in the history of training. And I actually... I have very hazy memories of... Like, I don't remember a lot of specifics in buds.

Yeah. I remember some funny shit for sure. Yeah. I remember our breakout in the Hell Week, only because I was on the far northern tent and the other two tents had run out and we were like peaking at them. And, like, I remember rock portage. I definitely remember fucking Alfred running for the bell first and four. And, like, he just, Usain bolted that motherfucker.

But a lot of the shit I don't remember. Like, why they hated our class. so much. It was, oh, I see. So it was the leadership. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And they took it back so old school that they were just like, hey, guys, it doesn't have to be this hard. And we're going and he's just like, we're not doing it. We always showed up late. The guy had, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah. Yeah. As going back as a Bud's instructor, you realize that you're not actually asking that much of the students. Right. Do you have any idea

how many times you can just push the shit in on a class because they either show up late or cannot determine how many people are in their class? Here's the number one question that starts off most remediation sessions. What's your head count?

Right. Well, let me carry the one on that. It's like your class has 36 people. Are they fucking here or are they not? I can't answer that question. And then he looked at his LPO who was equally returned. So between those two.

Oh, God. And everybody else would be calling out the count. And he was like, no, no, you guys are wrong. And Geika was just like. God, he was a fucking angry, angry man. Him and Kyle. Or Sholand was another angry man. Yeah, Doug was, he wasn't happy.

No. So, like between. Between OIC LPO, they just couldn't get it right. So we would beat ourselves prior. Our class just sucked. You know one of the things? For the first two phases it did, third phase? We were so hard by third phase that.

Oh, yeah, dude. We were hammering in railroad spikes with our cocks. Nobody was going to get rid of us. One of my first days at Buds, I don't know if you had checked in for this yet. I think it was a weekend and fucking Mike Mare. Oh, I remember that. So you were here at that video? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you remember the guy's running for the fucking bell? Because his daughter was, like, walking through. His jaw was wired shut. Oh, is that why he wouldn't? Yeah, he just, I just thought he was mad all the time. That part is accurate, too. He had some type of surgery done on his jaw. His daughter was there.

I don't know if I've ever been in sore in my life as that first, that was, for us, it was called a beat down. We had to change it to remediation session when I was an instructor. I remember people running for the bell, and it was a weekend. There wasn't even anybody there to receive them or allow them to DOR. I remember there was a guy who was in a cast who showed up in his blues. It's a bold move coming. Well, Mike was just like, get your ass in the surf. He's like, I can't, I got a cast on.

So he makes his kid run to the surf, and then he immediately. runs for the bell. I mean, I call that efficiency. As an instructor, I've just saved you and myself time. He just facilitated nutrition. That was actually the worst remediation session I think I was ever a part of, was one of my first days. Really? I don't, again, dude, they beat the fuck out of us so often that I, I just remember whatever we did, it was wrong.

Yeah, yeah. And even if we performed well, the leadership fucked it up. And so therefore we got our shit pushed out. Yeah, yeah. So after Hell Week, We were doing, I think it was, um, beach surveys and something like that. It was pitch black out. Oh, God.

Sholin was on, uh, uh, he was just out for blood, right? Yeah, just being himself. Yeah. So he's like, that was the worst thing I've ever seen. And we just got fucked up for the rest of the night. Yeah, I remember we were doing, uh, charts. I think it was in the third phase classroom. We were doing charts.

Yeah. All night, all day. all day, every day for like a week. A week, yeah. Yeah. I was more swollen in that week than I was coming out of hell week. Yeah. Like, dudes are getting injured.

You were up there with the tall boys in hell. So you under Boat Crew 1. I think I was in like BoCrew 3. Yeah. Whatever Bo Crew, I mean, we obviously would probably dominate your guys' performance, but... I don't think you guys ever beat us? Ever? I don't think there's any stats to prove it either way.

My memory says that we probably dominated. We should explain to people what the fuck we're talking about anyway. So you and I have known each other. Actually, you're probably one of the... the people have known the longest. So we've met, we obviously met in January of 97, yeah,

started Bud's Class 212 together with 180 originals. Of those 180, 18 of us fucking made it through. Jackart, not one of them. Not one of them. I don't know if it's genetics, emotional or physical weakness,

combination of the three. I'll let the listeners figure that out and ask him those things. Are we going to all do a triple? He's probably off right. He's posted the picture of this morning of him in a Gulfstream. am I riding?

I don't know. Are you, Jack? Off. But, yeah, so 18 of us actually of that one. Not that our class was 18 when we graduated because you pick up what's called rollbacks, which are people who make it into training. Like a good example would be somebody makes it through How Week. Actually, Jack is a good example of us.

He made it through Hell Week, had a physical limitation. So they put him into a, what they call it in our time? Fourth phase. PTR. PTRR. Physical training, rest, and recovery. That's out of the fucking. either.

Yeah, you pull that up quick. But it's basically your chance to rehab, recover, and then when the next class comes through, you will join up with them, and probably support their Hell Week, the instructors with that as well, but you'll join up and continue through. So we had rollbacks.

I think we picked up a few in third phase two, because there's post-Hel Week, post-pool comp. Yep. Actually, there's some pre-pool comp, too, the ones who didn't graduate pool comp, who have to go through it again. That's right.

So we picked them up the first day of second phase. post-pool comp, the ones who probably failed Rums, Swimmer, O-Course, and then third phase. So I think, what did we graduate with maybe 30? 36. Yeah, 18 of those, though. Were not our guys. Yeah, we're not the day one to day 180.

Yeah, because I remember Chris Kelly showed up in third phase. Yeah. Thin is a dime. I'd never seen somebody so skinny. Yeah. And I clearly remember Chris, but the other, did Bezelli show up in third place? He was not an original.

I think we got him in second phase. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Together we're going to piece together. Yeah. All this. But yeah. And then of our 18 originals, we had quite an eclectic group. Ciphert, obviously, just Google Benjamin Ciphert.

Murder. And you can go ahead and watch a little bit of that. Dude, we had some legends, though, like Sean Flynn. What a fucking stud, dude. I cannot believe cancer got him. Yeah. He was teaching. CQC on the East Coast.

And I was shocked that I'd seen him. And after that, I went on deployment, came back, and they said that he had passed away from brain cancer. Brain cancer. Yeah. I think he had beaten it one time. And I had not seen him in forever. We had a brief time of overlap on the East Coast.

And I'd heard he was in a wind tunnel, I think, in Arizona, which is where we went out for training a lot of the times, and he had some type of something physically that was a little bit off with him that got him to go get checked out, and it was aggressive. Yeah, yeah. And then Jonas Killsall? I know, the OIC who was killed in extortion. Did he, correct me if I'm wrong on this.

He graduated and then immediately departed from our class to go to University of Texas. Yeah, to become an officer, right? Yeah, you went to ROTC. What a dumbass. So smart. But done. Yeah. The enlisted is the way to go.

You switch to the officer side when you start thinking about retirement. Yeah. So I was... If you want to do burnouts, you stay enlisted. You know what? I had a great time on the enlisted side because you got to do cool stuff. Yeah. But for some reason, I was like, you know what?

I think I could be a good officer. So I was completely wrong about that. But I got to meet Admiral Stockdale. Really? Yeah. Like POW? Stockdale? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So we were going to go to, I was putting in my officer package, and there's a gentleman named Dean Laird. We were at Woody Francis's Fourth of July party. So one of the, our CEOs is like, hey, you've got to go as high as you can go to get this letter recommendation. Yeah, the higher, the better. Yeah. So, especially for a competitive slot. Yeah. So Dean Laird was the only fighter ace in the European and the Pacific Theater in World War II. Fuck. Yeah. So I walk up to Mr. Laird. I was like, hey, Mr. Laird, can you sign my OCS package?

And he's like, ah, son, you know, I'm not really good to write in that stuff. But I've got a friend who'd love to do it. I was like, okay. And he said, I've got to go to a funeral. Give me a call in a couple weeks. And Dean was old back then. So I'm like, I might not ever see this guy. Yeah.

Do you have a few weeks left? Yeah. Are we playing craps right now by me not having you sign this? Yeah. And I almost corner him and said, look, you're not going to be around. much longer, so we'll be signed this. But he said, my buddy will be able to sign it for you. And I was like, okay. So I call him in a couple weeks, and he said, yeah, James is going to sign it for you. So go to his house, be dressed up, and it'll be a good time. So I was like, that's great, sir, but who's James? I was like, oh, Jimmy, Stockdale. I was like, wait a second. Yeah, the admiral. It was like, Carrie the one vice presidential candidate.

James Bond Stockdale? He's like, yeah. Yeah. That's going to be a good letter of recommendation. Yeah. So I went to Admiral Stockdale's house on a Saturday, got all dressed up. He was the most wonderful guy I've ever met. Everything he'd been through, he walked me through the house, and he told me about his wife.

He just lit up when he talked about his wife. So he had a four-hour interview, and he said, first thing I said was like, sir, I flunked that. of college so my grades aren't gonna be he's like I don't want to hear that shit like I don't want to hear it who cares what your grades are what do you what have you done until between the time you funked out of college until today and looked over my record he's like yeah I've seen enough so had this great four hour interview and he's like all right son I'll get this letter written up and I'll talk to you soon next morning eight o'clock hey son where are you I was like sir I'll be right over. So his dementia

had started kicking in. He completely forgot the... Shut the fuck up. I had the same interview two days in a row. Do you do better on the first one or the second one? I think the second one. That's what I'm talking about. Practice counts. Yeah. Yeah. So I knew the question. I knew the answers to the test. Yeah. He

sweetheart of a guy, and then he hand wrote a letter of recommendation for me. Damn. Yeah. Was it coherent? Yeah, wonderful letter. All right. Yeah. I mean, You're the one who brought dimension into the conversation. I'm curious. When I say I had it twice, people are saying, well, why did you have it twice?

So I'm just anticipating the recoil. Yeah. Yeah. So is that how you found your way into the Navy? Because you flunked out of college? Which I was not aware that you did, actually. Yeah, I flunked out of college. So Navy was not your first choice.

Well, so I was playing football in college. Yeah. You might want to talk about your lineage in football. Yeah. You're not the only person in your family to play football. Yeah. So, mean Joe, Green played for Steelers.

Warm the bench or something like that. Yeah. Did a few games. Yeah. Yeah. So he did a Pepsi commercial. And my family's just like, that's your cousin right there. And I was too young, but he looked like exactly like my dad.

It was crazy. So it had some green lineage in that respect. And then I played quarterback and they called me a quarter black back then. back in 1990. That's acceptable. Right. You can't do it now. But back then, you know, I was the only game now.

I'm not sure it's acceptable back then either. But it might just be the world we were living in. So I was doing pretty well at Miami of Ohio. And then went up to Kent State. You want to talk about a confusing college name? Miami of Ohio. It's in the Miami, Valley, Andy. Of Ohio? Yeah. Yeah, cool. Miami's in Florida, motherfucker. No, it's not. Well, there is a

Miami. There is a Miami, but this Miami, the only Miami. It's not the only Miami. We clearly just determine there's another one in Florida. Well, we have to put Ohio in it because the U is so prolific. Okay. Miami of Ohio. Right. Yeah. Flyover state. Continue. Just saying. So, we're doing pretty well there. Went to Kent State and just had a blow out on my shoulder. And a buddy of mine, Jeff Turner, said, hey, don't worry about it. We're going to be Navy SEALs. Do you think, how far do you think you could have gone if your shoulder hadn't blown out? You think you had it all the way? I don't know. A chance at it? Maybe. Maybe. And I'll, and I'll tell you about 20 years later what happened that kind of cemented that. But I was progressing, but, you know, I still

needed a lot of work because I didn't learn football until I got to college. Ooh, that's a little bit late than you. Well, most coaches suck. And, you know, you're just a raw talent, but you don't actually know football. And one day one of the coaches was saying, okay, Mark, you're going to drop back, you're going to take seven-step drop. You're going to look off the linebacker, and this spot in the field is going to open up, and this is where you're going to throw the ball. I was like, yeah, okay. and did that did the seven-step drop when I just watched the football play progress

looking that guy off made the linebacker leave this void and right sitting right there in that void was where I was supposed to throw the ball I was so shocked that Mark Staten knocked the fuck out of me because I was just like holy shit I just learned football yeah yep you should have been wearing a red jersey I was wearing a red jersey I thought that means don't hit the quarterback It does mean, but I was a new guy. I was a freshman, so none of that shit counts. Much like it seems. I don't condone hazing, however, I've been a part of it.

So I had the athletic ability, I had the armstring, but what would have stopped me was what it's the speed of the game. Yeah. Right. So there are a million Tom Brady's for a quarter, for a half, for a game. But the consistency, I wasn't good enough to be consistent. Just the game IQ. Yeah. Yeah.

So, I mean, I may have gained that game IQ. I think I had, I mean, I had all the skills to do that. But, I mean, it's such a crapshoot to get to the NFL. To get. I mean, the statistics are pretty revealing on, like, the wide end of the funnel, like, national number of people playing football to. This is the number of people who drafted every year. Right. I mean, you can do backwards math.

Yeah. The odds are not in your favor, for sure. Yeah. So high school quarterbacks, the, like if you're throwing a pass, the window to, for that guy's open is like a barn door. Yeah. And college, it's a window. And the NFL, it's nobody's actually open in the NFL. I love those shots from behind the quarterback where you can see the movement.

Yeah. And that's what fascinates me is they're throwing it not where the person is, but where they're going to be. And the number of hands, it's like the ball misses by a quarter of an inch. Nobody's open. No, they're just literally threading the needle. Yeah. And they're so good. So, like, you have a 300-pound dude, five of them come in full speed.

And they're going to kill you. They're going to kill you. And then you have stuff going on in the secondary. And then you have checkdowns. And there are a thousand different games going on in football. So screw that. Just be a Navy SEAL. It's way safer. Okay, so you blow your shoulder out. First off, how did this guy know anything about being SEALs? That video called Be Someone Special.

I haven't seen this one. You probably have. Michael. So he had this video on VHS tape. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. So he's like, we're going to go be a Navy SEAL, but let's watch this video first. So I watched the video and I was mesmer. I was like, what the fuck is that?

What was in the video? Well, actually, it was old Vietnam War. This is 23 minutes of, we're not going to watch the whole thing. Yeah. Find some exciting shit, Michael. Yep. Oh my goodness. Yep.

So I saw this video and I was just like, holy- That's not a strong opening. You don't open with the aircraft carrier. But wait, watch these guys do an op. Oh, dude, look at those bubble helmets. Yep, fastrope. M16, 48-inch barrel. Mm-hmm.

Fucking. That's probably like an M-16 straight. You're going to have carrying handle, no sights other than your iron sights. Bloused flight suits. And a Huey. Huey, UH-1 on an aircraft carrier. I bet, God, there's some, I guarantee you there's some quality handlebar mustaches. So I'm watching this.

Wet suits, same ones we wore in buds. Yep. Beaver tail for sure. And I see those guys go out of the back. I'm just like, that's what got you? Yeah. Wow. This video and it just kept getting better.

That is a legit M16 with iron sights. Like the mustache. Just the guy on the left with the mustache. Yeah. And the music's playing in the background. I'm like, this is it. I mean, if I was running this evolution, I'd have them hover at that length and throw the fast drop out just to save my ankles.

Now knowing what I know, that's probably like a 60 footer and they took it to like 70 feet. So you free fall the last. But hey, can you hover at two feet and I'll just like jump off the skids? Like my ankles hurt. Skip a little bit ahead, Michael. Yeah. God, I hate this water stuff. flight of UH-1s.

Oh, here we go. This is what didn't happen at our Hell Week beginning. Yeah, we just showed up. This is the tent that I was hiding in, peering at people as they were in the surf. And then they just say, okay, we're starting. This is what we all thought we were going to get. This is breakout. Yep.

Telethone poles. I loved. And when I saw this, light switch. And I was like, this is what I'm going to do. In training, as in combat, seals work in tightly knit groups. See what we are. Yeah, click there, Michael. This is Hell Week.

This is the mud pits. Yep. This is one of the last evolutions that you do. Yep. That water is, uh, awful. Charcoal filtered and super healthy. Nothing's floating in the water, by the way.

Nothing at all, yeah. There's no, like, COVID-19 in there whatsoever. We have many things that came from China. It might have actually come from that mud pit right there. Oh, fuck, yeah. Keep going, Mike. What we got? Nylon, remember, uh,

Dude. Full-size swim fins. On your back, that's comfortable for extended periods of time. A little 203 action. Shirts as tight as it can be. But see, this is second phase back then. That's right, yeah. The dive tower.

Were you there when Keith Kimura died? Yep. Yeah. We just shown up. Yeah. So this is no longer used because an instructor had a shallow water blanket. Look at the fucking. Michael, go back a little bit.

I want people to look at the grape center. smugglers of that instructor right there. Tight, tight, red speedo. Which, when I was an instructor, I was issued those, never wore them a single time. Why not? Why? Did you not see what that motherfucker looked like wearing him? Look at him. Why is the instructor in his speedo?

What the fuck is wrong with, look at that. I mean, UD T-shirts weren't much more than that. I mean, you could tell he was a seal, he's a tight ass. You know what I mean? Like, very, very, just, m-wa. Graduation. Mm-hmm. Yep.

But all this stuff was like, yeah, I'm doing this. Yep, SDV action. Yep. Yep. I'm the only person who applied for SDV and didn't get it. Look at this. Freefall? They're trash exits.

And backslide much? Jesus Christ. You had a world record on skydiving, don't you? Yeah, I have one from January of last year. We did the seven continents in seven days. Okay. Is that where you were talking about Antarctica? Yeah, that's what we started.

Let's see what we got it, Michael. Keep going. Looks like there's a tunnel. What do we got out here? Oh, God. Look at bad mustache. Rock climbing with no helmet. Who did the risk assessment on that evolution?

What a douche. Oh, Redlands, dittah. Not a big deal. I think we've lost 90% of people. Okay, so this is what it was for you. Yep, that's it. Michael, as the youngest person in this room, as the next generation. Yeah.

Are you motivated to go to the name? maybe recruiter after that? Not particularly this one. God, damn it. It's just a little, you know, you can see the age on it, you know. Okay, look. So largely, the SEALs still do the same stuff, but they have better, like, video cameras and recorders and better gear.

Yeah. It's the same actual damn requirements. We just get sexier tools. Yeah, so that's what did it. I have never seen that video. You never saw that? No. The first video I ever saw was in boot camp, like the fourth week when they say, hey, who

wants to go to the UDT seal screener. And it was a VHS again. It opened with some people swimming underwater. I already knew that I wanted to go down that pipeline, so I had to sit through it, not because I wanted to watch the video as part of the process. But, yeah, I have never seen that video. Yeah, so that's what did it for me initially. And then Marchenko's book came out.

Yeah. 92, I think it was. Yeah, I thought that was a nonfiction book. Yeah. I think it was. It's not a nonfiction. That's what I heard. I heard that later on, but as 21-year-old kid, it was amazing.

Yeah, it was fantastic. It was amazing. He is a great author. Skilled writer. Skilled writer can really tell the story, if you know what I mean. Sometimes they're just not true. Yeah. Which, you know, at the time, it was.

Hey, Top Gun is not a documentary. And the number of people who applied for the pilot program after that, the numbers went through the roof. That's why the military obviously supported Top Gun 1 and Top Gun 2. I mean, also because Maverick is a national hero and should be. be celebrated. But it doesn't need to be true. It needs to get people to the recruiting office. That's actually what they're caring about. Yes. And they told enlisted guys that, yeah, you can, you can fly. So they didn't research it. I mean, you can be the dude on the aircraft

carriage on this. Yeah. Yeah. You can be a grape. All right. So how quickly from seeing that video were you at a recruiting office? Four years. That is a longer period of time than I thought you were going to say? Because I was in college and... But not playing ball anymore. Not playing ball anymore. Okay. So I was going to college just because I was supposed to go to college. And my dad said when I was young, I was nine years old, first time I played football, he's like, okay, if you're going to do football, you got one rule. And once you start something, you can't quit. I was like, let me think that over. So I was like, okay. So my entire life was once you start something, you can't quit. I would rather start young men and women off with that, as opposed to make sure you look everywhere and at

everybody for something to offend you and prevent you from doing whatever it is you may want to do. Yeah. And when I don't want to do something, I'll start it because that takes, that changed the calculus. It was like, okay, now that I've started, I can't quit. So you were in college, had to finish it. But like that whole time, were you thinking about the seal teams? Oh, yeah. I was just obsessed about it. But I didn't have a goal. I didn't have a goal. I didn't have. have a purpose. I was there to play football and that was it. And college was just something you're supposed to do. So, um, time's going on and I'm just, I flunk out of college and I'm working a blockbuster video. Fuck you. Yeah. Be kind. Please rewind. Yep. So the key there was to go to the

return bucket for the movies that you actually wanted to see. You have to wait for people to put them back behind the box. Yeah. And I was at University of Cincinnati at the time. So there was a lot of that going on. So a kid from high school walks in and he was like, what are you doing here? He's like, you were supposed to be a quarterback. You're supposed to do all this stuff. And now you're in khakis and a blue shirt checking out dudes watching videos. Now I didn't have an answer for him. So that was on a Monday. And then a dude comes in on Wednesday. And then a dude comes in on Wednesday and black dude

awful why's it got to be black I'm just I mean I'm just setting up the story I mean for clarity that is super racist that you open with that I didn't open with it

you said a dude came in a black dude yeah so he shows up in a velour suit pimp hat and he said hey man I'm looking for this movie

I would look at you so he's looking at you so he's looking for this movie. He's like, hey, get this movie about this girl who turns into an alien starts eating dudes. And I was like, he's like, and he loves this is like, you know, speckies. Speckys? And I was like, sir, do you mean species?

Natasha Hinstrich. I think I might have heard that name before? Mm-hmm. Roommate of yours and Coronado Kay's. Really? He was dating her at the time. Oh. I didn't know that.

Yeah. So he says speckies, and I said, cert do you mean species? He's like, yeah. At that time, I was like, I joined the Navy the next day. That's a good call. Yeah. So I was just like, I was done. And I was like, and realistically, I was like, I'm 24.

And if I don't do this today or if I don't start down the path right now. 28 or 30. Right. Yeah. Thinking that, oh, man, I wish I would have done it. So I joined the Navy the next day. Went through MEPs and showed up at ship 7 at Great Lakes. And then week three or four, same video shows up.

Steve Brown is the instructor. Oh, the pool? Yeah, yeah. And he ended up being my neighbor years later. No way. Yeah. So I go to do the test and could run, swim, push-ups, sit-ups. I couldn't do a fucking pull-up

On that initial test, isn't it like Eight? I was going to say it. Yeah. It's criminal. Yeah. You couldn't do eight pull-ups. I could do a pull-up.

I did one pull-up, and it was the ugliest pull-up you've ever seen. Had you never done a pull-up before? Mm-mm. Nope. I just thought they'd be easy. But you never tested that. No. I can deeply appreciate that headspace.

Fuck yeah. I don't think I've, I mean, I've never flown the spaceship, but I think I could. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's a pull-up. I'd probably hit the simulator first. It's just eight of me. Okay.

So I was running and swimming. Oh, shit, dude. I mean, that's a rough place for that to happen too because you're already in the Matrix. Right. And you may not get another shot at that. Right. So they're like, okay, you do it go to get on everything else. We have another test come up in four weeks.

Okay. And if I don't get that in four weeks, then I'm out into the fleet as a mineman. Yeah, no, no, no. No. So each night over the shitters, they have this bar. Which became your pull-a-bar. It became my pull-up bar every night for four weeks. Okay.

So I could get, by the time, I could get 10. But I hadn't done anything else to get those 10. Yeah. And test is coming up again. Swims fine. Push-ups are fine. Sit-ups are fine. And then I'm doing the pull-ups.

One, two, three, four, knocking them out. Five, I'm like, eh, six, seven. And coming up on eight. and the bar is like right here. Are you really just reaching with the old chin though? No, no. That's cheating, Andy. So.

I mean, it's trying. Right. So I'm right here, right? And one of the instructors, for some reason, gets distracted. And he looks away, and at my end of my mind, I was like, I have this one shot because I'm going out to the fleet after this. That's number eight. Yeah. So he looks away.

My chin, do my chin like this and pull myself up. perfect eight pull-ups. Yeah. And he looks around and he's like, you motherfucker, I know what you just did. I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, perfect. He called out eight. And I knew I'd made it at that point because the run was going to be easy.

I would describe it as you had met the minimum criteria. Right. You haven't made shit yet. Yeah. So then I was like, okay, I'll go to A school, do it again. Yep. You have time at A school. At least you had some chance to prepare.

And I needed that failure to kind of pull my head out of my ass. Yeah. And like, do you want this bad enough to stay up late and do pull-ups every night, or do you want to go out into the fleet? And I wanted it bad enough. Yeah. And it's a good motivation. It's nothing against anybody who joins any branch of the military to do whatever job.

But if you wanted to be a seal in your options or go to seal training or go to the fleet, which is not what you signed up for, hell of a fire delight under your ass. Yeah. So we get to 212 together, class up, we make it through, went to airborne together out in Fort Benning. We checked into Team 5 at the same time as well, right? And then did you go, we went through what they called at the time, STT together, or did

you depart at that point? Because I know our careers diverged a little bit. Yeah, so you, I think you guys were the last class to have training done at the command. We, training cell, right? No. You guys were the first class. So I believe it's now called SQT. Yep.

They called it S-T-T-T. We had to do our Trident review boards at the command. Okay, yeah. So it was run individually by each team, but the training leading up to that was done at the group level. Okay. So, yeah, you guys were the first class. Gina got pregnant. I was going to say, when did you get married in this?

Day after Buds. Day after I graduated. You should have come to me for advice. I tried to, but your family was there. I was 18, and I definitely would not have been. You were way older than me. I was the youngest person in our class. That was 25.

Yeah. But then we had Elliot, who was 36. So do you remember how he used to eat 800 milligram Motrin's like Skittles? I'd never understood in the moment why he was doing that. 10 years ago, when I passed that age, it made a lot more sense. Yeah. Can you imagine trying to go through buds in your late 30s? Nope.

I couldn't imagine going through, 25, I thought was a perfect age for me. You know your body. you know what your limitations are. 18 is better. From a recovery perspective. Yeah. And like you were always just good at everything. That is not true.

That is true. I'm aggressively average. No. No. Remember when we did land nav? Oh, at the, God, I was about to pull the name. It's in eastern San Diego. And you got the on.

Mount Laguna. Yep. You put the rucksack on and ran the entire course. course. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody else did that. That's a poor choice on their on their part. So, but, you know, you're just... Are you under the assumption on all of the weight that was supposed to be in my rucksack was in it? I don't break in my mind, in my mind you had all the weight on. I did. Yeah. Yeah. And you just took off running and you were done and you were wiped out, but you were smiling at the end of it. And, um... Yeah, but that's not being good at anything.

That's being stupid enough to run with the weighted rucksack through the forest. We didn't know any better. I knew that I couldn't do it. And I just watched this 18 year old kid just take off. And I never saw you until the night. Because I was like, where the fuck is he going? I had shit to do. I had ammo boxes to find. And you know what? I never found a single. Shut up. I never found one. How did you graduate training? I know how you did. You fucking followed people. Like, I was asking everyone. I was asking everyone. So I found them all on the second, on the, on the, on the second one. But the first day, Yeah.

I was like, well, he ran and found them all. Yeah. I can at least find one. Terrain navigation always made sense to me. And that's how I even, I started walking point in my, I started walking point in my second platoon. And then I was a point man out at the East Coast as well. I always relied on terrain navigation. It just made sense to me.

I always had the backups, like, you know, top of maps and GPS's. But I would just do a map study before. And to me, it just made the most sense. Yeah. I never figured it out at that time. I didn't like, it was very binary. It's on the other side of the mountain. Go up the mountain.

And it's opposed to you were like. That is an approach. Right, right. But you. I'm like, here's a clearly marked walking trail that goes around. I'm going to run that. It's two times the distance, half the effort. Yeah, that's really all I did.

Yeah. And I'll be honest with you. I knew that the rules were you couldn't go on roads. And I 100% ran on roads when the instructor went. I went out to the main hard pack road from the last point because it was, I remember this. It was this. Well, two reasons I remember. One, I had to stop halfway through and take a shit while leaning over and look like a little crowass and rocks.

But two, there was a hard packed, like paved road up to Mount Laguna that led me directly back to where we needed to be. So I ran on that as fast as I could to like the first, like the last 400 yards and then dove off into the bushes. Wow. Yeah. All right. Hey. Strategory. I mean.

Yeah. You know, amenity. Yeah. It, uh, yeah. Okay. But then, you know, um, you had a great reputation. Then you went off to the other command and got released early because you figured it out. Yeah.

I left on my own accord, actually. It's, uh, I would have stayed there longer. I'm grateful that I didn't. But getting hurt on that one on the last deployment I did out there, I needed some time off. No, I mean, just going through the selection. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And you'd figured it out and you got to go.

selection wasn't that hard. I enjoyed it because they were testing your proficiency at being a seal. Like the crucible, like we can both agree, Bud's is designed to be a crucible. It's a mortar and a pestle. And as a student, you're neither of those things. The mortar is the curriculum. The pestle is the instructors. And you're getting great.

That's what it's for. Right. And it does a very good job, except for with people like Cypherit. Because no selection process is perfect. And sometimes people slide through. What I really liked about East Coast selection is it was about your ability to do seal things, not, hey, are you tough enough to be a seal? Not that it was physically easy, but I much prefer shooting standards over pull-up standards. Yeah.

And you know, and you did well over there, and I tracked you. I'm not tracked you, but, you know. It's a small community. Yeah, but I mean, I rode guards together and then I met your family. And, you know. So I can't believe you brought up that high. covered and sensitive unit. But I mean, I guess it's fine.

We'll talk about it. I don't know if it's ever been talked about before, but that's the road guards. The road guards? We were part of the elite. I think there were only four of us. There were only four of us, only because nobody fucking else wanted to do it.

I'm joking about everything, by the way, people. Road guards are literally the idiots who run in front of the class, who stop traffic so the rest of the class can go through. Did we get to go to lunch earlier in the line? There had to been some benefit that we both ended up doing that. We got to go eat first. There you go. Yeah.

There you go. Me, you, Palmer, and Coco. Yeah. And we were the road guards. We were. And I feel like we protected and served, our class. To the utmost.

And let's be honest, we were standing there blocking traffic that was already stopped in the right life. Really a superfluous job. But, I mean, we were together every day. We were. Every time we ran to breakfast, lunch, and dinner, it was the four of us up there. Probably not talking about very high-level geopolitical things. Right. It was just four dudes running across the street.

Yep. And strangely that, we just bonded, I thought. And then what sealed it off was going up to meet your parents. Yeah. So my dad was just, I just did an episode with my dad where we talked about that night that you and Palmer came with me to my mom and dad's house. You were getting ready to move them. And my dad had gone to Costco and gotten just flats of beer. Right.

And that's just the first time that I ever had a drink with my dad. Really? Yeah. I think we drank, and some of my high school friends came over, so we drank, I'm pretty sure all of them and then transitioned to the greyhounds, which was the vodka and grapefruit shoes, which is my dad's go to for years. And my mom was heated, but she kept it to herself. Your mom was the same, by the way.

Yeah. She was such a sweetheart. I mean, she was just, I mean, you know she's your mother, but she was just wonderful. She was awesome. Yeah. And I didn't know the family dynamics. I knew something was going on. Because I kept hearing your dad say, ah, he's fine.

Yeah. Yeah. But then you didn't learn the liquor after beer or beer after liquor, never sicker. I mean, it's a guideline, not a rule. Right. And you decimated that rule and guideline. We're still here. Yeah.

We're still here. But it was the first time. It just kind of sealed everything. Yeah. And then we went out to the island. Yep. And then, yeah, it was cool. I don't know if it was a good idea that the military sense.

our entire Bud's class to Fort Benning together. No. I mean, from a behavioral control issue for the instructors there, I apologize for all of our behavior. It was so bad. How could it be good? It was the first time that we were ever not being the punishment was 10 pushups. Like, oh, yeah. I'm not even going to try.

Our punishment used to be 50. I mean, 50 shitty pushups to be clear. But yeah, so, okay. So we went to Benning. And that's where our class split, too. So, like, that was one of the, I remember saying goodbye to Flynn there because he was heading off to the East Coast. So in, what was it? In second phase, we did our dream sheets.

And I remember we were out on the island. And so a dream sheet, I've talked about this before, is a military term for wasting your time because you're going to fill out what your dream is. And then they're going to fill the gaps with the needs of the Navy. Right. Because I put down two, four and eight, because I was from Santa Cruz, Team five. You put down SDV, Team five. It's like, motherfucker. Why did you just send me where you're going to send me.

Don't waste my time and get my hopes up. But we were out on San Clemente Island. And I think they had the instructors from those teams coming over and like, who's going to go where and all that stuff. So I remember we both, go hit the surf. I'm like, okay, great. The fine for the millionth time. But yeah, I went to, I got to Team 5 and did two Bravo platoons and then screened

and then left. So you, when we got there, your wife was pregnant and then fill me in on what happened with your career post that point. Because we never served together after that. And we would see each other very infrequently. Right, because if you're not on the same cycle, then might as well be on different coast. Yep. Yeah.

Like you were saying in the coffee shop, talking my dad, the last time you and I saw each other was actually at a Home Depot, completely unrelated to military service. Right. Yep. And I think, honestly, that was like 10 years ago. At least. Yeah. At least. And so I did two Charlie's.

At five? At five. Okay. And then. How much time did they allow you to take off to kind of deal with the family issues? They were really cool. They were really good about that. And they're like, all right, you're going to go take care of family.

I was like, okay. And once the amniol came back that Riley was fine, then I started back in the cycle and clean shitters again. But then they assigned me to SQT, and then I knew it was going on as Charlie. So Riley is my oldest son's name. Oh, it is. Okay. Yeah. So my oldest is Riley.

She's 25. R-I-L-E-R-Y-L-E, the only correct way to spell it. for a woman. Right. Okay. Right. Fair enough. Right.

R-I-L-E-Y is correct for a guy. Sometimes people ask me if I smell my name, A-N-D-I. And I just look at them because I don't know what to say to that. I don't even. I'm befuddled. Yeah. And I? I don't know.

So where'd you guys go? Because my first one was to Cadena. then to Guam, just pre-9-11 standard rotations. So I did the opposite of that. I went to Guam and then Cadena and then September 11th happened. Yep. So we, you know what happened. You know, we didn't know what the hell we were doing.

Yeah, nothing, actually, for years. Yeah. So we, I remember watching, I was living in an apartment with Hoppy at the time. And my wife at the time, TV comes on. I think I caught it moments before the second aircraft went in. Yeah. And I'm sitting there like, my phone's probably going to ring pretty soon. because the country needs me to go do some shit.

No, no, no. No, I didn't land in Afghanistan until late 2002. Hmm. All right. So we were in theater. Well, I mean, we were in the Pacific. You were on deployment. We're on deployment.

So we get on the German town because we were going to Jakarta because the embassy down there was, they were afraid he was going to get overrun with the locals because it was a large Muslim population. Maybe do like a meo? Yeah, we're going to do a meo. Okay. So we're steaming down and then we're prepping to do a meo and then we get out and do beach surveys,

which is what we're originally supposed to do. That's what I'm talking about. Core competency. Yeah. Have the lead line and all that stuff. It's super accurate. There's no like side scans sonar or anything that could be more accurate than a dude with a fucking plexiglass rubber band to do his arm. arm, a grease pencil, and a lead shot line.

Well, the Marines took us seriously and didn't use anything we provided. I wouldn't either. Yeah. I'm trained on how you and I learned how to do that. I wouldn't trust my life to the information I gave them. No. Uh-uh. Because half the time, I would lose count of the knots on the fathoms, and I would just write down a number that was one bigger or smaller.

It's like, it's probably either getting deeper gradually or shallow gradually. Well, then they had, like, technology showed up and they had a map up. But yeah, yeah. But it should probably be checked by the being. Yeah. So, so we did absolutely nothing. And then that's when I was like, you know what? I want to, I want to go be an officer now.

What got you thinking about that? I had a great platoon, first platoon. And officer in charge was prior enlisted and had really strong chief and had really strong LPO. And they just kind of cracked the whip on us. And everything ran smoothly. It wasn't fun all the time, but it was like, hey, this is how this is supposed to work. Yeah, it's not supposed to be fun all the time.

Right. But a lot of discipline, did everything right. And that was my initial look into the team. I see what right looks like. Same group of guys, different leadership, a lot younger. And just it was just a different leadership style. So they up the age. waiver from 31 to 37.

Hmm. And I was like, you know what? Let me finish my degree. Oh, on the officer. On the officer side. So I decided I wanted to be an officer and it was like, well, you don't have your degree. So I clept my classes. CLEP for people is basically testing out.

Yeah. For Excelsior College and got my diploma and then submitted my package with Admiral Stockdale's recommendation. And it was taken a little bit too long for the Admiral. and he calls like, hey, where's your OCS package? I was like, sir, I don't know. He's like, God damn it. It was taking a little bit too long for Stockdale? Yeah.

So he shows up at Warcom. I like this story already. And so I guess it was just pandemonium because he just shows up. Yeah. And with Admiral's showing up, Metal Bonner, there's stuff you have to pipe them on. I mean, there's protocols. So he just walks in and it's like, who do I got to screw around here to get Petty Office of Green in an OCS? And I guess it was just mayhem.

Yeah. And one of two things is going to happen with that. You're either instantly going to get approved or your record is never going to be seen again. Right. Those are the only two options. Yeah. They're like, what was his name again? Yeah, we'll look for that for you, sir, is it's fucking into the T.S. Shredder just.

So I pissed off everybody. But they can't go back to an admiral and say, hey, we lost his package. Yeah. So I went to the East Coast, was teaching the sniper school. and got picked up and, you know, got commissioned in 04. Did you, let's see, did you go up to Rhode Island or was it a Florida course? Pecola. Okay.

Yeah, I was down in Pensacola. Is that like the officer and a gentleman course? I know that's maybe like a rough analogy based off of a movie, but is it kind of the same thing? Yeah, yeah. You go to OCS and you have some drill instructor who does Tai Chi on you and jujitsu and kicking the ball. The LDO program is better. I heard you guys just knife and fork, like three weeks, three or four weeks? Yeah, eight months after I got commissioned.

Wait, what? Oh, yeah. So you were commissioned. I went from being an E6 to an 01 with absolutely no training or preparation. Huh. Once I got the message saying that I had been selected, I went over to the exchange on North Island and said, ma'am, I don't know what uniforms an officer needs, nor do I know how to wear them. Can you please pull off the rack everything that I need and tailor them for me?

and after that show me how to put them on. Yeah. And then the first day I wore my khakis, it was at Buds, and I walked over to the first phase office and found Jason Tushin, a guy I knew from the East Coast, and I said, can you give me a once over to make sure that I had this on right? And my belt was on backwards. Swear to God. I'm like, I don't fucking know how to wear any of this.

Eight months later, they sent me out to Rhode Island. Of the, I think it was a month-long course, I participated in eight to ten days. They were doing stuff like navigational board training, like a lot of fleet specific stuff. So I was out there with a guy who was becoming a warrant officer at the time, and we just worked out like sons of bitches and then hydrated with booze. Yeah.

It was glorious. Yeah. Real, real, real snooty officer training, if you know what I mean. I came back really knowing the ropes. Fuck. But did you have a good time as an officer, though? I mean, there's clearly differences. I was in a very unique position.

And my officer career, nobody should ever try to replicate it because it didn't make any sense. In what way? I had no college degree. I have never had a second of higher education beyond barely graduating high school. I never even took my SATs. So I found the LDO program by accident because my chief's package had been denied two years in a row. And I finally was able to talk to somebody who was there, even though they're not really supposed to talk about what happened there.

And the guy said, hey, your LPO tour is considered incomplete because you didn't do it for long enough because I got Medevac out of country on that particular tour. Okay. So there was a guy at second phase who had just started doing his LPO tour. And as you know, for a sure duty billet, it's 24 months. So I would have had to wait for that to start my tour, to complete that tour, to put in a cheese package five years later. Damn.

Okay. Which who, I mean, really? Yeah, why? So did some research, found the LDO program, applied for it. It was an interview, some essays, like, what does honor, courage, and commitment mean? Like, literally, it's what it was. Wrote those out, did an interview with four or five officers from Buds at the time. And they were literally interviewing everybody who wanted to do the LDO and Warren officer,

because it's the same package. So it's not like it was something special for me. Got picked up, went over to Team 3, because of my enlisted experience, they put me into the training officer role, but then one of the AOICs was getting ready, his wife was getting ready to have a kid before deployment, and they were sending that task unit to Afghanistan. I don't think anybody had been there. So I get put into an AOIC role. And an LDO, as you know, you were probably an 1130, right? I was. I don't remember the designator for LDO. Eventually, they got rid of the LDO program and changed it to an 1130. Yeah, you retired as 1130, right? I did, which is insane because I don't have a degree. And it just literally was somebody in there just,

just chchchch, ch. So again, like you couldn't replicate it if you wanted it to. So I'm over in Afghanistan as an AOC carrying two javelin missiles, my 300 wind mag and a clue, the command launching unit for the javelin, just fucking laying heat on people. It's an atypical progression. And then came back and was the, the hell was I, the operations officer at the,

at trade at one and then got medically retired. You know, but having to, like, I know you're supposed to have a degree, but it doesn't fucking matter. You were just as trained up or able to be. It would have it mattered if they were going to have me do a spelling meet. Okay. All right. Economics test. I'm like, I don't fail that one. Okay. So I got my degree from Excelsior. Yep.

And then got an MBA from Naval Postgraduate School. Yep. And then I got a master's in public policy from University of Southern California. Never once took GRE. Really? Not one time. Huh. All right.

So, I mean, are you glad you went to all that schooling? Yes. I wasn't any smarter. Yeah. Well, there's a difference between educated and intelligent. Right. I wasn't any. I walked out, just like after Hell Week, I didn't feel any different.

I got my degree. Yeah. Checked a couple of boxes and, hey, you have a master's. Was it a valuable use of your time? Yes, because it kind of changed the way you had to critically think about things. So you take a bunch of information. I was always terrible at garbage and garbage out. I'm like, here's the curriculum for a week, and you're going to take a test on it.

I always sucked at that because I could never figure out what was important. So everything was important. So I never really figured. that out. But once you get to the second portion of it, you do case studies, and then you just kind of think through the problem. And then that part was very valuable because you get real-world problems, and you kind of have to figure out how to solve that problem and then execute it. So it was, it really filled in the blanks of just doing a mission and then doing a mission with assets.

That's how I would say it. So you have your apertures open a little bit differently to a different possibility. I would say that's highly valid. Yeah. So, but I didn't appreciate it at the time because I didn't understand it. But grad school is really a networking event. So I went to the naval postgraduate school. So now my cohort of I got a guy is a lot bigger.

Yeah. So it's like going to the academy. More senior guys too. Yeah, yeah. So names come up, you get 20 names, and hey, Mark Green, I went to the postgraduate school with him. Let me give that as a second look. And then that could lead to a lot of different possibilities. And you'll always have that network. But then the second time I went was, as I was transitioning out of the Navy, I was working at USC. And I was just struggling. I was having a hard.

hard time. After going to NICO, figured out the why. You know, you go for that outpatient. Yeah, I went to. Yeah. So you get, and you're just like, okay, here's the why of what's going on.

Here's why you can't cognitively do things as good as you used to be able to. It's like, okay. But the first question I had coming out of NICO was, so what's next? Where's my tune up? We've identified potential issues. What is my protocol to make,

progress on these things. Or how do I do it once life really starts happening? Yeah. And they're like, well, we don't have the budget for that. So they patch you on the ass and it's a great diagnostic tool. It's, uh, it is an interesting concept to diagnose to that level and identify issues and then send people out into the wild. Right. And I don't, there's no malicious intent. Right. And my understanding. Right. I think they articulated it well. They, they have constraints with what they're able to do with their budget. I'm thankful that NICO exists. It's the single best medical care I ever got well in the military, which makes sense because it's run by civilians. Right.

And it's the National Intrepid Center of Excellence. I believe there are a couple, I think there's a West Coast one now. I went to the one attached to Walter Reed. I'm assuming you probably did this one. Yeah, that's the one I went to as well. Yeah. And 30 days, 250 pages, maybe of stuff. There were some tests I couldn't do because I have like MRI stuff I can't do because

of the retained metal in my body. Yeah. Almost everything else was just absolutely world class. Yeah, and once I got that print out and said, here's what's going on and here's the why. I was like, oh, I get it. Now what? Yeah. I'm like, I don't know.

Backtrack a little bit, though. Fill me in on how your career went. You went to NICO towards the tail end, I'm assuming? Yeah. Leave me up to that point when you were switched over to being an officer. So I did AIC at Team 8. Where did you guys to play to? Iraq.

What year? 04. 04-05. Okay. And then went right. over to because I was way ahead of schedule. So I showed up, did my AOC as an O-1. As an O-1. So they're like, where are you going to go? I had a great, when we were on the Germantown, had a great experience with the boat guys. And they said, you can go to a unit or you could go over

to the boats. And I was like, well, I need to kind of learn the taxi service or the support side of it. Yep. So that was something I identified that I didn't know enough about. And the guys I worked with were great. So he went over to the boat team. He had a great. time over there. It has work hard and it's a shitty job. They do it well. And when we came in, they were the SWICs were, you know,

not, we didn't. It just wasn't structured. Right. And they had guys from the fleet. It was an oil and water mixer. They tried to bring fleet guys into the NSW community. Special Warfare combat crewmen, right? Yeah. Swix. And had a great time over there. I've really figured out how to

kind of lead my guys and see. if my leadership style worked. And it was a no fail because I really couldn't screw it up. And the guys were just receptive to team guys leading them. So I had a great experience there and then went to Naval Postgraduate School. Two years there? Two years there. And then we went to Pacific Theater.

Okay. Again. So you left there as what, 02? O2. Okay. And then went to Naval Postgraduate School for two, 18 months. I got my MBA and Worst places to go to school in Monterey

Yeah it's not bad 30 minutes south of where we were drinking beers with my dad Yeah And I just finally got to Kind of get a break And already had three kids And they say you're going to either leave with a divorce

A diploma or a dependent So I got the diploma Who said that? That's a saying they have up there At post graduates school A divorce, a diploma or dependent I don't know if I'd put that on a bumper sticker holder or like a license plate holder.

I saw my car right now. It's appropriate. Well, you went there. Yeah. I'm just saying as a recruiting tool. You know. So we, I'm getting ready to finish up and doing my master's thesis project. And all of a sudden, Gina's late.

How did you two meet? We were in college. She went to the University of Cincinnati. I went to Miami of Ohio. I was going to be a seal, so I didn't drink. So I was always everybody's designated driver. We went to Cincinnati to pick her up. And great time.

Okay. Yeah, she was a fun girl. So you knew her before your time in the military. Yeah. Okay. So we dated up until from 91, beginning of 92. Okay. And then got married in 97.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So you left with it? and a diploma. And a diploma. Two out of three, not bad. Not bad.

But we could only have kids every four years. She'd have a bunch of miscarriages. So that's why all my kids are four years apart. Oh, interesting. And then Olivia came two years. So she's pregnant. I was like, nah, sitting in going to have a miscarriage. We're just going to be fine.

She didn't have a miscarriage. And then all of a sudden, I have a brand new fourth child as I'm finishing. up starting the thesis project and then trying to get my OIC, trying to get moved back into Virginia, calling it Margaret, the Detailer to... Has she finally moved on? She did. She did. But...

The amount of power that that one person held was, my words, nobody else's irresponsible. I would agree with that. However, I'm not saying she, again, was malicious, even though I saw some things from time to time, instilling anybody with that level of corporate knowledge to the point where they are an absolute cannot fail, cannot be gone is dangerous at an organizational level. That's what I mean by irresponsible. Yeah, I mean, she could pick, she hand-picked our leadership for decades. Yes, because she knew them since they were, Ensign. Yeah. And I'm not saying that that level of corporate knowledge is bad. Having all of that exist in one brain, dude. And she was bulletproof.

Yeah. You couldn't get rid of her. Yeah. So we were sitting up in group two and she showed up. And all the captains of stuff like, hey, Ensign go sit by Margaret. I'm like, is that Margaret, Margaret, Margaret? The Margaret. Yeah.

They can't go sit by her. Nobody else wants to sit by her. So I sit by her and we just start talking. And she's like, hey. I know these guys are a bunch of pussies and they sent you over here. So I want to take care of you after that. She was always kind to me. Always.

I never had anything but great interactions with her. She was wonderful to me. Yeah. And I was just always, I never made sense to me the structure of it. I'm like, what's going on here? Yeah. Everybody's terrified. And like, do you imagine, can you think of how many people she had dirt on?

Everybody. Dude, we're talking full dossiers. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder why they are. I wonder if I can give her a call. I'd put them on the internet.

But she said, hey, because when I was going to go to grad school, I was going to take the special low-intensity conflict course. I have no idea. Yeah. So it was the curriculum to where they sent all the special operations guys. Basically, they read a bunch of books by the campfire and just recover. Get to know your family. And so I was like, hey, I want to go to the course. She's like, nah, I'm going to send you to get your MBA.

I was like, Margaret, I flunked out of college. You can't send me to get my MBA. And she's like, I want you to have a good job because you have all those damn kids. So you're going to be fine. And I showed up and I learned the business, earned a business degree with no knowledge whatsoever. I had a criminology background that I clept half of. Yeah. So.

And that's when I did. say about the education part of it. Like, you grind it out and you learn the, so you learn the language of the business school, learn the language of business so you can speak to economics or you can speak to statistics or you can speak to everything that's business related. And then you get a network out of it. But like I said, I didn't feel like I was any smarter after I left. Yeah.

I just had a little bit of a network and learn how to speak business. but we already had the leadership side of it. So it was valuable in a way, but I didn't have enough respect for because I just showed up, and I didn't think I'd earned it because I didn't take the test to get in somebody who's just nice and said, you're going to get your MBA now. Well, they have allocated slots for people that were in your position.

Yeah. And so I took it really seriously because I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't dumb. Because after I flunked out of college, I'm an idiot. I hope nobody finds out. I'm not so sure that flunking out of school is actually an indication of being dumb. It's not.

Some people just don't mesh well with the traditional schooling model. And I was one of those guys. I just couldn't figure out the importance of it and I couldn't connect with it at all. I know a lot of people who have advanced degrees that are idiots. Right.

And I'm not saying those two are necessarily correlated, but education and intelligence don't mean the same thing. Right, because even though you don't have a degree, you're one of the smartest people I've ever met. Me? Yeah, yeah.

No. Just the way you problem solve is... I use the theory of big rock into small rock into dust. That shit works. No, you can't hide it. That's the thing. You can't hide it. I'm not trying to.

I just told you my recipe. No. It's a false recipe. I can tell you things about you. You can't tell me shit about me because I know me and I know you. I know you since you were a story. kid. You have known me since I was a kid.

So watching you on in the teams and then doing different podcasts. God, I got so much fucking trouble in the SEAL teams. The way you solve problems, the way you break it up into, you're just smart. You can just tell. You can't hide it. I would say I have okay street smarts. That's what I, I'm aggressively average at everything that I do. I don't believe that.

You don't have to believe it. I've known you since you were a child. I know that. Yeah. You're just a, you're a smart guy. Okay. And you just figure things out and you, now we may approach it as a caveman and just bulldozing it. That's what I'm talking about.

But that's what I'm full back dive. Let's go, maybe. I can't throw a pass, but I can put my head down and run. I would put you in a room with anybody. It would, we would really need to boundary what we were going to be asked to do in that room. Okay. We're going to put some fucking qualifications on. what we're going to be asked to do.

No, I do. Okay. I mean, it's, everybody has what they has, and it's more about what you can do with what you have than anything else. Yeah. But,

um, but just watching you from 18-year-old to 946. Yeah, I still feel like I'm 18, though, man. I feel like I'm 18, too. I don't understand the numbers. Like when people, what's your day at a birth?

Uh-huh. That number can't be correct. I can't be 15. I don't think that I actually think any differently than I did when we were in those fucking pictures. Yeah. I'm the same way. Which, and then, you know, ran into my dad again today. He clearly is still 18 at best.

At best. Just in there with, Michael, you love this. He was trying to explain to Mark. He's like, yeah, I have stage two diabetes. And I'm looking at him. And I'm saying, motherfucker, you have pre-diabetes. He's like, don't tell me. I'm like, I'm not telling you.

I'm repeating what the doctor's. I have stage two diabetes. Meanwhile, he has chocolate that's like this size. And he's just like, yeah, you know, I just really got to worry about my sugar. That's classic bond. Also, I didn't realize his diabetes had stages. It does. It doesn't.

He has, he was, his metrics came back. is slightly pre-diabetic. Yeah. He's like, yeah, I really got to cut the sugar. I don't only have one of these hot chocolates per week. I've seen him in there the last five days. And he doesn't even go up in order anymore. They just bring him the largest cup of hot chocolate possible.

Was it stage two or type two? Stage two. He said he had stage two diabetes. And then he's just like offended at the fact. I'm like, no, you have pre-diabetes. Don't tell me. I know what the doctor said. Do you know what day it is?

No, you don't. So shut up. up it's like it's like i've just shifted back to 97 when i first met him such a good dude has jovial he's as he's ever been it's so awesome having him up here yeah and just uh yeah your parents i mean i won the lottery you did you did your parents were amazing yeah yeah yeah yeah my mom was a saint to put up with both of us between my dad and the shit that i put them through man that's a she's up there somewhere the thing about what i noticed about your parents is just they just adored each other.

Yeah. That was kind of the foundation for everything. I mean, don't get me wrong. Ups and downs. Yep. But that's normal. People who tell me, hey, just so you know, I've been married for 20 years and it's perfect.

I want to just ask him what it feels like to be a liar. So you enjoy lying to people's faces, right? Because first off, there's no way that's possible. And I don't even think it should be expected. What I learned from my parents, was how you can work your way through issues. They did not agree on everything, for sure. Money's a good example.

Oh, man. My dad likes to keep money in a sock. Sorry, Dad. I'm going to tell the truth about you. So we moved back to Santa Cruz in 89 after the earthquake. I was actually the only year my mother, She would not let me play football for one year except for Pop Warner. And we were living in Sebastopol, California.

And I was on a knee tying my shoelace. And I'm like, is somebody holding on my shoulder pads? Oh, the big one that hit. The big one that hit, the San Andreas, which it didn't like decimate Santa Cruz, but there is probably still earthquake damage related from the 89 earthquake. Because the San Andreas fault runs very close. My grandfather had one of the, well, my grandfather's father, three generations back, had one of the first masonry, brick stone masonry businesses in Santa Cruz, which my grandfather worked for him.

My father worked for my grandfather. So that's where he learned to trade from. And he was actually doing construction work up in Sebastopol. But, you know, like, hey, there's a medical emergency. What do we need? We need doctors. Hey, there's a construction void. What do we need?

So we move back. And, God, what he could charge? for a fireplace was ungodly. And I so distinctly remember him saying to people, well, here's the price if you pay with the check. Here's the price if you pay with cash. So he had a lot of money in a fucking sock. Under his bed?

Dude, no. It was in with the rest of his socks. When my mother died, he went to a safety deposit box and there was cash molding. in the safety deposit box. His theory is spend what you got, especially if it's in your sock.

The only reason, my mother, the only reason my dad has, like, investments and all this other shit is because my mom was the bookkeeper for the business. Like IRAs, stocks, bonds.

If you were to ask, like, dad, how much money is like, I can tell you. Could be a billion, could be zero. You want to go get it? breakfast and like fuck he is out of his fucking mind to this day he was living up at my lakehouse and he had a bowling bag that is supposed to hold a bowling ball it was full of cash wow what the fuck are you doing why and then of course my middle son season is like crampy tell me

tell me more about bowling why where did you get this money also can i count it Fuck. So was it from like the 80s? If I see the year on it, it's like 1989 or? I don't even know. I don't even, you know. Then after my mom died, he sold weed professionally for like eight years. And you want to talk about a cash business?

He's out of his fucking mind, like straight up out of his mind. So I don't even know how we got on that topic. But yeah. But we were talking about marriage and just. Yeah. You had a compromise. So different philosophies on money. My mom, very forward planning.

My dad, it's burning a hole in my pocket. Let's go. So I got the blend of both. And they made it work. Yeah. You know? My dad was, they got married at 18. My mom was 19.

He joined the Air Force. And all of a sudden he was a dad at 19 with my brother. It's rough. And then 21 with me. and then ended up having three kids. And I didn't really appreciate what my dad was going through because I was just a kid. But my mom suffered from mental illness and I had no idea. She was just my mom.

Like genetic? Yeah. Mental illness? Yeah. It's like. But back in those days, that generation did not go to the hospital, didn't go to the doctor. So my dad was managing that situation. babies having babies

and they just figured it out my dad adored my mom though until the day he died back in 2003 um but he had no idea how to manage money yeah like I would save up money and then they'd find out that I had it

and they're like hey we need this to pay for bills I was like I'm 12 so that set the kind of the framework of how I'm very careful with money just because I watch my parents struggle and ask their 10-year-old son, 12-year-old son for money because they couldn't. Man, that's a wild burden at that age. Money can really fuck people up.

And my thoughts about money have shifted over time. To me, wealth is the ability to do what you want to with your time. It's not necessarily – and I don't have any issue with people who want to collect things or get eccentric. I mean, do whatever you want to do with your money. To me, the value of money is that it buys your own time back. And don't get me wrong. Like, I, there are something, like, I like trucks. You know, like, I'm like, okay, that's a cool truck.

I'd like to have a cool truck. Beyond that, I'd rather just go do stuff. Yeah? Yeah, I'm finding that out in my, as I'm getting older and just watching my kids. I enjoy watching my kids grow up. Yeah. And Riley just got her MBA and she lives in Paris, just got married. Jesus.

Yeah. France or some other weird fucked up place in Ohio? At France. Okay. There is a Paris, Ohio. I know. That's why I'm checking with you. Yeah.

She lives in. I know my geography. She lives because you're so smart. Flyover state. So she lives in Paris and I got to go travel to see my daughter in Paris driving. You know, and then my son's at Virginia Tech, going to be a computer engineer. and then it's just my younger two daughters. I just sit and just watch them grow up.

And I have the time now, like you just said, that's what I want to do with my time. Because they're all growing up and they're going to do their own thing. My daughter's in France, I'll see her very rarely. She'll come back to you. She'll come back. Yeah. But as of right now, it's just like, hey, I've given you everything I can. just go to your thing and have a great time at it.

I'm always going to be here to course correct or give you some advice, but it's just watching them thrive from infant until adult. Yeah. And I love my kids, but I like my kids too. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's good to have a mix of both. Yeah. What, uh, where'd you do your OIC tour?

Team 8. Okay. Where'd you guys end up going? We went to Afghanistan and then we sent some guys to Iraq and then we still had to do some Fid stuff. Yeah. So some partnering stuff. Okay. Half the platoon for half the time went to Iraq.

Some went to Afghanistan. Some of us did the Fid stuff and then we switched. And then I went to Afghanistan the last three months of my deployment, which was crazy. We were at Camp Wolverine. And I don't know if you remember. year 2010. It was the same year I was over there. Okay.

What months? We left in September, came back in April. September of 9 and came back in April of 10, or was it 10 into 11? So I started in 9. So we left in 2010. So April of 2010 to September. Okay. We were over there during the same time.

Okay. So we were in Wolverine. It was, remember where they found that huge cash of, precious metals like worth a trillion dollars. What province was in? North, south, east, west, where was it? West. Okay.

Yeah. So we were at the foot of those mountains. Okay. And not a whole lot of missions. I wanted to send my guys off to do stuff, but one day, Team 5 had a helicopter go down. Yeah. And the skipper or the base was like,

hey, Mark, helicopter with your guys went out, went down. We're going to go do the recovery. you've done a great job, have a good time up there. And I was like, awesome. So we go up, do recovery of the helicopter, and bad guys everywhere.

So me and this other Army guy were just kind of stand and watch. And all of a sudden these little dust bunnies start tracking. And we got into a firefight on top of the mountain. You know, all the assets were coming in. we were exchanging fire and helicopter came in. Rounds were bouncing off the helicopter and landed, packed up my shit. I was back home 36 hours later as a father of four.

That was the beginning of the cognitive spiral because I could, and I can't really articulate, but I wasn't quite the same after that. Yeah. I was always on edge. I mean, that wasn't the first firefight you'd ever been in one. No, uh-uh. No, but it was like going from firefight to dad. So it's interesting you describe that experience.

I got a red cross message about my mom in August of 2010 when we were over there. And there was a little bit of time in between when I could catch a rotator out. I was in, uh, where the fuck were we? I was at the camp Morgensen, and I needed to work my way down to Kandahar, where the rotator was going to work its way out of. But there was a little bit of time in between the rotation cycle, the helicopters to get me down there,

and an operation popped up. And I remember thinking about it because I knew that if I wanted to, I could pass on it and that my operational career was probably over. Like, this is actually going to be it. And I decided to go because phomo is real. Right. Right. So I ended up killing three guys on that objective with a javelin in my 300 Wimag. Get back, turn everything over, and I'm on a rotator home within 48 hours at a hospital with my mom dying of cancer in palliative care.

It's a wild, mental, and emotional ride. Yeah. And I don't, I was so binary in my thought process at that point, because of being overseas, I think we had been there since February or March, so seven, eight months. And it was very, it was like, you're either going to live or you're going to die, this or that. And I remember the first time I saw my mom. And in talking to my sister and my dad, my sister actually, Casey, provided the pallet of care for my mom, which I don't know if that is a good idea. Because she was acting as a clinician, which I think shielded her from some of the emotions that she would have felt.

if she was just there as her daughter. Yeah. Which maybe helped in the moment, but I think maybe, you know, hurt in the long run, do you really get the chance to grieve if you are legitimately being the care provider at that time? I don't think you can. But in talking to my dad and my mom, it seemed as if they thought my mom had a chance. And I remember walking to the hospital room and seeing her for the first time. And as much as I'm ashamed to say it, my first thought of my head was, she's dead.

And I just, I didn't understand why people couldn't get there. And I directly associate that with the emotion. space that I was in when I was coming back because that's the space that I operated in overseas. Yeah. It was a very binary. If you do this, I'm going to do that. Yeah.

If you don't do this, I'm not going to do that. And I didn't have any problem with it. You know, it's, it took a long time, though, to unwind from that for me. My, I lost my dad in 03. And he was cutting the grass one day, slipped, and pulled his hammy. and everything was fine. He went to the dock. They gave him some motron.

And a month goes by, two months goes by. The pain's not really going away. And he goes to the doctor. Bright Patterson Air Force Base was 15 minutes from my house. And we go to the doctor. They do an x-ray. Send him home. And within the 15 minutes from the time they read his x-ray,

the time he got home, they had like five messages. Like, you have to come back right now. What was it? Condra sarcoma. How was that? It's a very rare bone cancer. So he fractured his hip when he was 15. And from that fracture, that cancer...

It created the environment to grow. Yeah. And it's so slow growing that he was 51 when it finally degraded. enough to where that when he slipped he fractured his hip and that cancer just started it was leaking for months so we're getting the diagnosis and he's like yeah got cancer so we go to the specialist and and I was like hey doc what's going on he's like well your dad's got a really rare form of bone cancer it's so rare that only a thousand people get it and we only regionally specialize in it because nobody gets it and he said but it's a death sentence

if we don't catch it in time. So we went to the hospital, and they're going to go in and do a hip replacement. Take out the bad stuff, put a new hip in. He's going to be fine. 30 minutes later, they come out. Worse than they thought. Yeah. So we got in there.

It's all over. So he's still unconscious at this point. The doctors are going to. Yeah. So it's like it's spread into his leg. It's all over. his gall platter, everything. And my mom was just not, she was unable to make that decision.

Yeah. So the doc comes and he's giving me the rundown. I was like, all right, doc, what's going to have to happen? It's like, we're going to have to take his hip and we're going to have to clean everything out. But I need your permission to do it. And it was, for me, it was very binary also. So I said, Doc, is it going to save his life? And he said, yes.

I was like, okay, take the hip. So hours and hours pass. And he's coming out of recovery. And Doc said, hey, looks like we got everything. And did you ever see that movie, Poltergeist? There's a scene in it where it's a very short hallway, but it stretches out for it. It looks like a mile long.

So as I'm going down that very short corridor, it seems like it's taken me an hour to get to that room. because I know what I'm going to see when I get in there. And he, I walk in the room and he didn't have his leg. And he looks like an infant. He's so small because he's my dad. He's the biggest person I'd known for most of my life. And all of a sudden, that one decision I made, he has no idea.

So he wakes up. First thing he sees me for the first time, first person he sees, he's like, hey, buddy, how's he going? heart broke because I'm like when he wakes up he's going to realize he doesn't have his leg anymore and he's going to like who made this decision and he's going to find out I made that decision but um so that was very binary and it was it was probably the best decision it was the best decision to make yeah but I was teaching sniper squad at adaberry in Indiana two hour drive from my house and my dad and I had grown apart.

Sometimes dad and sons go through stuff. So, the doc said if it comes back, we're not even going to touch them because it's inoperable. It's going to go to his brain. And so How did he eventually respond to

losing his leg? I never complained one time. I'd never heard him complain once. And he had complications that had to do post-surgery's and stuff. Never heard the man complain one time. Yeah. I was thankful to be alive, man. Yeah. And so I got to go from Adaberry to my house every weekend because we were teaching the course up there. And I just got to really reconnect with my dad and bury the hatch because I had to make a very conscious decision to say, am I going to hold this grudge over shit that I can't change anymore? Or am I going to let it go and just spend time with my dad? I had to go through the same thing on my own side.

Like you said, you know, fathers and sons go through stuff. Parents aren't perfect. I think it's a mistake that people think that, you know, it's their first time being alive too. There's no fucking instruction manual for any of this stuff. And I definitely have had, I actually had a very strained time period with both my mom and my dad. And it took work to get through it for sure. Yeah. And that was the best time I had with my dad.

So I'm hanging out with my dad. And when I was young, he had to watch his father go through withdrawal from heroin. God was addicted heroin. Went through the withdrawal. And my dad was just like, I'm never going to watch anybody go through that again. And I was the kid who would have, man, let me try that. And he knew it. He's like, boy, if I ever catch you doing drugs, I'm going to kill you myself.

He's like, I'm going to use this bullet. He has me a bullet. I look at it and I turn it over It's got Mark and great in it It's something pretty clear message Yeah I was just like And and I grew up with Snoop And NWA

Cypress Hill weed weed weed weed Never touched stuff I thought he was gonna I thought he was gonna I thought he was gonna use that bullet On me So we're sitting in the house And he's like hey son

I was like yeah pop He looks around he's like I never owned a gun I was like, you son of a bitch. He didn't need a gun. It was the concept of a gun. Yeah, yeah. I'm 52 years old.

I still haven't tried anything because that bullet's somewhere out there. You're not in the snow. Yeah, I know. Yeah. But I got to recover that relationship with my dad. And, you know, when he said I didn't own a gun, it's been on my mind at the front of my mind for years. I was like, you son of a bitch, I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah.

But he, he. It's a boss move. Yeah, and he did everything he could to save his son from what he saw. And I just have a lot of – that time that I had with him were just a lot of great memories. And we buried the hatchet, and we laughed a lot and cried a lot. I'm assuming the cancer eventually came back. Yeah, it came back within four months. Yeah, they probably didn't get it all.

Yeah, and the doc, I think he knew he didn't get it all. It's people forget that medicine is a practice, not a science. Right. Again, human beings. They're doing the best you can. Yeah. And I didn't fault the doc. You know, he went in and he wanted to save my dad's life.

And he said, hey, if this comes back, there's nothing we can do about it. And it progressed to the brain. And he was starting to lose it. And he'd get like, it was so aggressive and violent that it was on his skin. He had cancer just drawn on his skin. And then he passed away, and I never shed a tear. I haven't for my mom either because it happened. I don't know if that's good or bad.

It's bad. Maybe, right? I mean, I don't know if there's a manual for grief either. I'm not saying that I, you know what I mean? I'm not saying it didn't have an impact on me. and I'm not saying, I mean, I think about her all the time. Her birthday was four days after Christmas. I think about her all the time.

But I don't know what I could have done differently. So say I could have forced a tear. What would have been the point? You know what I mean? It wouldn't have been real. I was in a place physically and emotionally where I was not able to process that, which I don't think means I haven't processed it. but I think I might have just missed that emotional window.

And I don't know if that's good or bad. Now that just like I, I had closure. That's what I mean. Like I had closure too. I don't, life isn't the hallmark movie that people wanted to be. Right. You know, where it's like the last breath is just peaceful. And every word that you want to say is the way that you wanted to say it.

And you had the conversations and you're surrounded by loved ones. I mean, the end is ugly. for most people. It's the opposite of a Hallmark movie. But the Hallmark grief recovery cycle, I don't think it's real either. I don't think there's a template for it. Yeah, and I valued that time that I got.

I mean, that was a treasure to me that I got to see him every week. We got to reconnect. You know, he told the stories that he'd told his whole life. And I learned a lot that he never. complained and I was like this man's going through it I know he's in pain I know he's scared but he showed up with a smile when he could and we caught up and sometimes we didn't say a word we just sat in the same room yeah so when he passed I was in

the room when he passed took his last breath and I was okay I was like I got that time back I got to know my dad again and I think that's all I really needed just to... I can't imagine not having that time because he would have died and I would have had animosity and you pissed me off or you did this wrong when I was a kid. You didn't do what I thought you should do. Even though I didn't know what parenting was,

I just know he did it wrong for some things. I mean, welcome to the club. Yeah. You know? And as a parent, I do it wrong. Galactic mistakes. Yeah, my dad and my sister were with my mom when she passed. I was back down in San Diego.

ago, but I was grateful when I got the call that she had passed because she was a shadow and shell of the person that, and cancer, same thing, she died of non-smokers lung cancer. She didn't smoke. Wow. And survivability rate of 0.00, you know, like, astronomically small. Death sentence for sure. And for people who have never been around somebody that cancer is destroying, I mean, you'll recognize them if you've spent a lot of time around them, but they are.

a skeleton of the person. I mean, it's, you can tell that every breath movement, probably even thought is painful. Yeah. I mean, it was, I was thankful when she passed, so she didn't have to suffer anymore. Yeah, I remember, like, your body's wants to survive so much that, like, he was drowning.

Like, he'd gotten to his lungs. Yeah, the last, the last breaths. Yeah. And I was mad because he just wouldn't stop fighting. I was like, just, you're just, die. I would put a pillow over your face. I'd welcome that. Yeah. Even if you asked not to me, I would put a pillow over your face if you were dying.

Yeah. Well, back to the 212 thing. Yeah. Huh. I'll keep that mind. Yeah. Like, if you need me, call me. As I'm dying. Before you die. Give me time to travel there. Like, if you're fighting it at the end. Hell, I might move here. I'll snuff you out. I might move here. You should move here. It would be less of a commute for me.

Yeah, because you were just right now. the street. Yeah, it was a... No, the end of life, again, the end of life is not like a Hallmark movie. Right. It is, your body is, it will do everything to try to survive.

The diagonal, like, last gasping breath. It's an emotional situation to be around. So I, I would kill you, Mark. Yeah, I appreciate that. I know you would. I wouldn't do that for everybody, but I would do it for you. Road guard Road guards

have to be there to snuff each other out If we're not there for that Who are we actually protecting With our road guard duties You know If we're not protecting each other So what does that mean

Road guard's one thing But you, me and Jack Two 12 guys All became officers And are now You two are big And I don't know what that means

Well I mean You have your own studio, you got your own logo. Oh, that's just a curtain. I found that light in China. They sent it to me. Yeah, but I mean, you guys are doing great work. I don't fucking know about that. I'm doing what I'm doing what I do.

It's fun. I tell you what, I enjoy doing this more than I ever thought I would. I never thought in a million years I would do anything like public facing. I just, it, if I was, towards a tail into my military career, if you said list out a hundred things you think you might do. First of stuff, I didn't know what a podcast was at the time, so it wouldn't have been on the list. Yeah. But it would have not been, hey, I'll do something in the public sphere. I just never thought it would be something I would have an interest in.

I never thought I'd write a book. Yeah. Quiet professional stuff. And I took that to heart. Even though I looking back, I don't understand because we all read a book of Dick Couch or Morsenko. The books have a role. And I've actually, Jack and I have talked about this because it went. from an uranized era a void of information except for what you could find at the library

right to so much information i mean there there are websites that have every single day of the blood's curriculum on there which i don't actually think is a net positive for people i don't either i like the mystery of it well there's not this get like oh god if we get through this then we have to do this it's just why don't you just focus on the moment that you're in and when that particular thing ends you'll do the next one and at some point you'll be running to go have chow yeah right Hopefully as a road guard, if you are elite enough to get out there. It's only four out of 180. It's true.

Of the 180, 18 graduated, but only four of us are fucking road guards. That's right. That's right. God damn it. But now there's so much information, and it has become so ridiculously popular and blown on it. We're talking CLE team on CBS. Never watched an episode. I have nothing negative to say about the show. I know it exists.

zero dark 30s of the world. And the problem is, and I think you would probably agree with this, a lot of it's bullshit. Right. So much of it. So much of it. But what if somebody reads a book that's totally bullshit, but they're an awesome person and it gets them to the Navy recruiter's office?

I think that's okay. I think it's okay too. And my opinion on that has changed. I used to hate, hate the fucking book section. with the military history. Because I've gone throughout my, every time I'm in a bookstore, I swing by to just kind of like take a pulse

on how much stuff is coming out and what it's about. I started being very angry about people riding shit with a casual relationship to the truth. And for a long time, I was just vehemently against it. I was so angry because of, not that it was there, because it was bullshit.

And then having that conversation with Jack, I was like, you know, you're right. We probably all read men with green faces. We probably all read some of Marcinko's works that were clearly fiction-guised as nonfiction. And it made a mark on us. So, okay, there is value there. Whether or not you choose to participate in that as an author, I mean, that's for you to decide.

I was reluctant to do it. Just because of the era in which we came up, it was taboo. Yeah, but they didn't have the internet. internet either. Right. You know, that, that changes some shit. Yeah, because everything you can say in a book, we can talk about our podcast openly. Yeah. Every day for 365 days a year. Yeah. So, as, and I was approached to do a book because I was speaking at USC, Michael Jervais showed up. What do I know that name? He's a mindfulness guru. And the guy, Red Bull guy was, I was, I don't like that at all.

Okay. A mindfulness guru, that sounds made up. Agreed. Yeah. So he's speaking to the class and he's talking about mental toughness and stuff like that. And the Q&A shows up and the kid's like, well, how to special operations guys mentally prepare for stuff? And he said, funny, you should ask. We have one sitting right here.

And I look around. I'm like, oh, there's another team guy in here. Or some. Yeah, he was talking about you. And he's like, hey, Mark, after the break, come and tell the kid. Come and tell the students about. And I was like, motherfucker, okay. So I get up and I talk to the students for 15 minutes and didn't think anything of it.

And Glenn Fox, who's the professor at USC, said, hey, the kids really enjoyed your talk. I was like, I don't know how because I just pull it out of my ass and hope that it stuck. So then a couple months later, I think Kobe Bryant was. was supposed to speak for the class and he could make it. And Glenn calls and said, Mark, our speaker, Flake Donas, do you mind come and talk into the class? And I was like, yeah, okay, I'll come talk to the class. So I told them just my story, but it wasn't like the rah, rah, rah,

seal stuff. It's like, good, bad, ugly. Here's how I made it. Did you tell them about being a road guard? I didn't want to tell them without you being there. I was going to say they probably weren't ready for it anyway. Yeah, I mean, that's, yeah. It's covered program.

Yeah. Yeah. Hold on, though. Put a pin in this for a second. How did you end up at USC? Because we have a gap here between your OIC tour and then ending up at USC. Okay, so I went through NICO. Yep. And retirement was forced upon me, right?

Medical or 20 year? 20 year. Okay. So, wasn't going to get promoted, and 20 years was coming up. 20, 2004? Three. Okay. We can either talk about it here or we can talk about it elsewhere.

I don't care. I also read out as an O3. E. I was an E also. So retirement showing up. What year did you make O3? O4. Oh, and I'm sorry.

What the fuck am I talking about? I made, I guess it was 2008 because I got pinned. That's fucking bullshit. You were senior to me. I got, I got pinned. Lieutenant at Naval Postgraduate School. So I think it was in 08. Piece of shit.

I was a piece of shit. 2012 for me. Oh, still baby. That's true. So I was retiring and it was coming. So went to a fundraiser in New York City. Didn't want to go. They're weird.

They are weird. Yeah, they're really strange. Yeah. But I'm going to this function. The night before is the mixer. And I show up and I meet this gentleman and we're talking. And he's like, oh, man, I've never met a seal before. And I was like, nice to meet you.

And it's like, you have to meet Bill. So I was like, okay, I'll meet Bill. So Bill shows up and just this wonderful guy, older gentleman. And he was, he's like, so what are you going to do now? You're going to retire. and you know, you have your MBA, you've been an officer, and I was like, I have no idea.

Yeah. I was like, I'm absolutely. Common answer, actually. And he's like, how do you feel? And without a filter, because nobody had asked me, I was like, I am terrified. I was like, I don't even know what I'm good at. And he was like, oh, no, no.

He gave me his card and said, come out to L.A., all expenses paid, we're going to figure out what's next for you. first thing I said was why? Why would you offer this to me? You don't even know. And I kind of get defensive just because I never had anybody just show up and say, hey, you're coming out to L.A., all expenses paid. We're going to figure this out for you.

So I was applying for the FBI and the ROTC program because Gene was like, you need to be a teacher. I'm saying, eh. So I look at the card for about a month. So finally I'm like, give Bill a call. Like, hey, Bill, I'm going to come on out. I'm like, can't wait to have you out. Land, he puts me up in the four seasons in Beverly Hills. And I walk into his, we have breakfast, and he's just excited to see me.

He's like, I'm so glad you made it out. I put this offer out for 10 years. You're the only person's ever taking me up on it. So he works, he owns the commercial real estate company. and I meet his staff and I meet his friends and stuff. And he looks over my resume on Wednesday. He's like, this is a pretty good resume. And I was like, well, about goddamn time you read it, it's Wednesday.

He's like, well, I like to read the resume, meet the person and see if they match. And he's like, you have a good resume. He's like, but I would be doing you a disservice to push you behind a desk and do TPS reports. And he's like, but I'm going to USC tomorrow. You want to come? I was like, yeah. So we go to USC and pull in the parking and it's graduation week and it's absolute mayhem on campus.

And it's so much, so I take two steps out of the car and say, Bill, this would be a great place to work. He didn't say anything. I didn't say anything. We do the campus tour. And I fly out the next day. He calls me back two weeks later. He said, everything we talked about two weeks ago, forget it.

I got your four interviews that you. USC. And I said, what am I interviewing for? He's like, don't worry about it. Just don't suck. And they hang up the phone. Okay. So I get a series of emails like you're, here are your four interviews. Here's what time you're going to be there. And here's your plane ticket and good luck. Well, it turns out he's like, I would be doing you a disservice putting you up my company, but you'd fit great at USC. It turns out he was a trustee at USC. So he just pulled some strings And say hey this is my guy

Give him four interviews If he sucks Then he sucks Yeah But I got three job offers on the four interviews Because I wasn't trying to get hired Yeah I was just practicing

And I was telling team guy stories And laughing and stuff But I wouldn't move to L.A And Gentlemen who I first met with Say hey come back after your interviews I was like okay And basically it was

out of a movie, hey, what's you going to take to get you to USC? And I didn't comprehend, I was so stupid that I didn't comprehend that this was a job offer. Yeah, that's not stupidity that's lack of reps. Yeah, he was asking you what you needed from an economic perspective

to make it work. Right, thank you, Andy. I know that now. Did he, like, ask you to touch his penis at all, or was there anything? That was later. Okay. Yeah, this seems like a real handshake job. Yeah. You edit that out.

Absolutely not. So he really just makes me an offer I can't refuse. And so I'm like, okay, I'll be able to take care of my family. What was the role you ended up settling on? It was fundraising, which I sucked at. It's a hard job, man. Separating people's money from their wallets is not a joke. Right.

And I wasn't good at it. So it was, I asked for what I thought was an astronomical number. What you asked for? $150,000. And I thought I was going to say, you little punk get out of my office. And he's like, okay. I'm like, fuck. Should have been $250.

Yeah. So then I said, well, you know, my wife has a job back east, gets on the phone, makes a phone call. So, hey, I got a guy I want to hire. do we have any positions at the USC medical center? I'm like, fuck. I didn't research it because so strike two. And then I'm like, well, I've got three kids and schools aren't great around here. Gets on the phone again and said, hey, got a guy I want to hire.

Do you have these three scholarships available at XYZ private school? Yeah, man, anything for you? Hanged up the phone. It's like, are you good? I'm like, yeah. So salary's great. U.S., L.A., that'd be a hard sell. Not the most awesome place to raise a family.

Right. But I have three kids that put through college. I stay at USC for two years. Their college, they go to USC for free. Oh, damn. Yeah. Okay. That's $300,000 for four years per student.

That's overpriced. Right. Extremely overpriced. Yeah. So I go back and it's like, you aren't going to believe this, Gina. This is the job offer. And she's like, no, I'm good. I'm like, okay.

So I called Bill. Does she even consider it? No. She wanted to stay in Virginia. So I called Bill back and say, Bill, thanks for the offer. Wife didn't want anything to do with it. They say, how about this? How about I give you a low-interest loan?

Gina can come out and pick any house she wants in L.A. Pacific Palisades. Wherever she wants to live, beach, wherever. I give you a low-interest loan. Stay here for five years. House is yours. What? Mm-hmm.

She's like, no, I'm good. So I feel like there was more going on here than just that. How was your guy's relationship? Well, it was special. But she's the mother of my kids. Yeah. We were together for a long time. I'll never say a bad word about her.

Yeah. It was just a team guy marriage. And honestly, I think it was one mission too much. And it was time. to put that away, no more traveling. Did she not want to come to L.A. Or did she not want to be with you? Um,

I think she didn't want to go to L.A. She didn't, she was tired of moving. And I totally got there because we were all over the place, East Coast, West Coast. So I totally understood. But at the same time, there were no job offers in Virginia. Yeah. Um, and I needed to put food on the table. Yeah.

Retirement wouldn't be enough. Oh, I asked that because one situation, can be a convenient excuse to justify. You know what I mean? Yeah, and it had layers. And to this day, I don't know the extent of those layers. It was just, she's like, yeah, I'm not going. So I said, thanks for let me know.

I still have to put food on the table. I'm taking the job. So I took the job and then I negotiated, hey, I need to commute. Yeah. I need to, you know, save my family. So they said, okay, you can commute. And I was going back two weeks there, two weeks in Virginia. And then, you know, she was going to leave anyway.

And that way, I think it was just a catalyst for, hey, I'm good, I'm done. So as soon as the paperwork was handed to me that we're going to, I'm filing for a divorce now. Then it became a business transaction. Yeah. And I was like, okay, this is what you want? Yes. Okay.

So I started to separate myself from the relationship, which was really hard. I mean, it's as challenging as marriages can be even the best ones. It's an investment, you know. Were you happy in the marriage? Yeah. It was challenging But I was I was I was happy It was there were some dynamics of it that

Kind of came with life in the teams Yeah But my Parents were married My aunts and uncles Everybody was married Yeah And they all figured it out

And I was stuck on that Yeah So I was like I got to figure out how to make this work be it two weeks or if I Sometimes you can't make it work man Right and I and I learned that

And that was a situation I couldn't make work I couldn't force the relationship How long were you married? I think by the end of it's like 21 years At what point in that If looking back on it now do you feel like It might have been smarter to make different choices Looking back on

So I took it as a family decision the divorce no no the the the taking the job in L.A yeah like this is a this is a family decision and honestly I think she took it as an individual decision and individually made that decision but at the end of the day I have to make sure my family's taken care of and like said it was very binary situation so I can take care of them or be a barista nothing against paristas but it's not going to put kids through college. Yeah, you're going to make, you're going to make, you're going to make

$300,000 a year USC tuition money. Right. So Riley was using my GI Bill, so she was taking care of, still had three more kids that put through college. Yeah. I mean, the GI Bill, it's 36 months. You should be able to aggregate that out against four kids. Yeah. That's about seven minutes in class. Right. Yeah. Two minutes at USC. You each get two months paid for education. Bon voyage. Yeah. So, and I worked as marriage counseling. I did what I went down all the steps I thought you should just try to save your marriage. And it just, you know, it's two people make that decision. I agree. So. How's your relationship with her now? We don't really, it's still business. So we don't really talk all that much. It's for. family logistics yeah kid business and that's pretty much it she got she got married right away and um seven eight years out i'm still not married so she's still married

yeah i don't like that guy he's a he's a i think he's a good man fuck that guy you know what i mean fuck that guy i don't like him to support you i don't like him either perfect because i was saying that to support you i don't like him either perfect because i was saying that to support road guard stick together. That's how it works. It's a tough one. I mean, I got remarried, and I'm sure my ex-wife is, fuck me and fuck my wife.

You know what I mean? And it's just, it is what it is. Yeah. I tell you what, though, I'm a better person for my kids not being in that marriage. And I don't say that trying to say anything negative about my ex-wife. I am only talking about myself. It was fucking rough. It was honestly that divorce that two years was harder than anything I was ever asked to do in the SEAL teams

Yeah that was a substantial margin That was a hard that was the hardest Like you said two years Yeah I felt like a quitter for the first time of my life Yep But I can't make this work Yeah

And you have to come to a place where you realize you have to let it go But we come from a community where the only Currency and equity is your ability to do everything without giving up Right It's fucking double-edged sword man. Yeah. And that was the toughest lesson I learned that sometimes you can't make. Sometimes there are no good options. Sometimes you can't affect this outcome no matter what you do. And once I got to that point, then I really went for how do I best take care of my kids? Is your relationship

with them now better? Yes. So the first two years, I'm sorry, for my first Riley and Braden was really, really hard. because Riley was transitioning from high school to college. She was going to American University. My son was transitioning from eighth grade to high school. Dad was retiring and moving to L.A. stuff. And then she wasn't very kind about me as the divorce was happening, even though I didn't file to the point where in her profession, and she would see her patience and say,

I'm getting divorced and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's important that they knew that. Right. I'm just like, you're telling strangers this stuff? And so I moved into my old neighborhood because I wanted my kids to walk to my house. And I wanted to take as much off their plate as they could because they didn't ask for this,

but I wanted them to be close to dad. So by a house, like six houses down around the corner. A guy in my, O. I seeplatoon buys my house. Gina doesn't know that she doesn't remember meeting him. So he gets on the phone and just like, dude,

you are not going to believe what your wife is saying. I was like, you know what? I don't even want to know. Thanks for telling me. And years later, people sold him writing a book and it's like, hey, were you married to so-and-so? Man, I went to see her.

Dude, she was lighten your ass up. You know what's interesting about that? God, what you were talking about is broadly, very parallel to my own situation. And I think that the person who is running their mouth like that believes that it buttresses their case. But all it really does is make them look terrible. Nobody wants to hear that shit. Right. It doesn't help anybody.

trying to turn your kids against your former spouse that you spent. I mean, I was with my ex-wife. We were together for two years before getting married. Married for 19 years and 11 months. Over 20 years. What's the long-term win here? You're going to try to turn my kids against me. You're going to try to poison the well so they don't want to have anything to do with me.

In the end, I have a lot of time to show them who I really am. And what happens when they find out? that the shit you have been saying is bullshit. Yeah. It doesn't help your case. Yeah. And I made a, like, this is the first time happened, started, process started seven years. No one's ever asked me about it.

So I've never talked about it. Yeah. This is the first conversation I'm having about it. I will only talk about mine in super broad terms, you know. And I can only talk about my own experience and the own mistakes that I made in that. For me, one of the biggest mistakes, I think looking back was not doing it earlier, to be honest. Yeah. Staying, trying to fight for it too long.

I think one of the biggest lies people are told is you have to stay for the kids. Yeah. And I just, I don't believe in that. I think the best thing you can do for your kids is to be the absolute best version of yourself. And if you're in a relationship, you know, I got married young, 22, 23. I don't, like, I look at that picture. I don't fucking know who that kid is. Yeah.

I got married four years after that. And I don't know who that kid was either. And that's okay. And I don't think my ex-wife knew who she was either. And you fucking grow and change over time. And there are some unique requirements of the job that we had. And I am in no way trying to blame the job for what happened with my marriage. But if you choose to go down that path, with that comes obligations on time, energy, and effort.

It just is the way that it is. People can grow apart. There's plenty of space for people to grow apart because of the amount of time that you have apart from each other. But staying for the kids, fuck you. How about creating the most positive environment possible for your kids at all times? And, you know, it took time to get to that point. But I'm there now and, you know, I had to rethink everything. Christmas is all holidays, what I do with the kids.

And I didn't know what the hell I was doing because I'd never done it by myself. Yeah. So I was just building the plane that was flying. That's all you can do, man. Yeah. And at the end of the day, I just was available to him. hugs all over the place. Oh,

I'm so ridiculously I'm stupid Yeah, yeah. And I piss my kids off, my youngest two. Like, with Beyonce's on, I'll say,

hey, is that a new song by Rihanna? And I'll, I'll use, like, asymmetrical, subtle warfare. Yeah,

yeah. Dude, I do the same. So my middle son is 18. He lives with us with, my wife,

Lee and I. And, uh, boundaries were a thing with him. He, fucking steals my socks and my boxers. So I have started a campaign of like Ace Metro Warfare against him.

I'm not saying I'm proud of the things that I'm about to list, but I'm going to share my, my truth. All right, let's hear it. So I've started stealing his socks, which is like low grade. And he's finally now started complaining like, where's my socks?

I'm like, I don't know. Isn't it so weird when you want something and you can't find it? One of my favorite things to do, though, is I'll get up before him and have a coffee and just go destroy his toilet and not flush it. Morning. Just do your work in there.

Maybe watch some reels. Take your time. Really flesh it out. Really flesh it out. And then don't flush it. So he gets to marinate in there? Just like he probably needs to come in in the morning to go pee and it's like, good morning. You're welcome.

I'm not saying I'm going to write a parenting book, but this is the type of show. that I do with him. Yeah, I mean, I take his dishes now and I put him under the covers on his bed, when he leaves him out on, like, the counter and stuff, because I can't ask him anymore to put them in the dishwasher. So I just put him on his bed. Let's do this. Yeah, so you've given me some ideas with girls, you have to do it a little bit different?

I have a daughter as well. She's 15. I have a completely different approach. Her toilet is not going to get the same level of reception as his. Yeah, for her, it's totally different. Yeah, but I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, I would not have been the parent. The, I, I, I, I, I think I'm a good parent. I'm a much better parent now than I was when I was married.

Yeah. 100% different. And the fact that that is the case, and I'm not saying, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not trying to make an argument for divorce, but it would seem like you made the correct decision. Not only for your health and growth, but for your kids' health. Yeah. which is at the end of the day. They didn't have a choice

to being brought into the world. It was a choice that people make between each other, but that doesn't remove you from the obligation of everything after that. Yeah. And I was able to focus all the things that I was trying to focus on now that I don't have the marriage and the relationship

and how contentious things could get. Now it's just they get... A whole other world happens up, man. They get 100% of me just being me. So I stopped you when you were talking about you went to go speak when Kobe Bryant was going to be there because we were getting to where the origin story for the book came.

Yes. Okay. So I started telling my story. It starts really resonating with the students. And I'm late 40s, early 50s and trying to connect with 18 to 22 year old young kids. And Glenn would send out a email saying, hey, thank the speaker for coming. They just had all this great feedback. So Glenn would say, you know, have you thought about writing a buck?

I'm like, bro, it's not permitted. And I moved back to the East Coast and met a gentleman with pivotal moments media. Pivotal moments? Yeah. Okay. And he is, it's a startup company. So I met him in L.A. He was coming to L.A.

and he had heard my story and just talking at the bar or whatever and he's like hey you can write a book I'm like nope so he finally came to watch me speak and finally he's like I've had enough of you here's four ghostwriters pick one we're funding your book to get read or for you to read it yeah or for you to write it. So I was just like, well, shit, I guess I'm writing a book. So I got with the ghost writer, but I still felt guilty because our upbringing was like, it's just something you just don't do. But I started to hear the stats of how many of people or veterans were taking their own lives,

which is 22 a day. And the math to get that is super flawed. It's like a very, it's not across all 50 states. I think it was at maximum 30 states. So the number is very likely higher. So, meaning it was an incomplete data set. Yeah. So I was like, well, what if I, everybody goes through transitions.

And it initially started off was military transition. But then looking back on life, I was like, well, I was an athlete. And then I wasn't an athlete. So that was a transition in itself that brought its own set of problems because you were doing this thing. thousands of hours of football and all of a sudden you hurt your shoulder and you're done

never gonna play again right that's a transition point that so many college athletes and I was on the college campus so these guys think they're getting drafted and they don't and they're professional something else

and I was working with the athletes at USC and a lot of them were having the same issues like I don't even know what I'm going to do I have all this time now I'm not playing football what am I going to do and so then I added an athletic story

and then the transition to lose my dad. And then the transition of marriage became a parent, right? All that stuff are transition points. So it was, let's write just no rah, rah, rah, story, some good, some bad. I was good at this thing.

I was really shitty at this thing. And it's just my story of transitions and how challenging they were. Some were good, some were bad. And I really want somebody to read it. the service member, the athlete, or more importantly, the spouse or children, it's like, my dad's going through that same thing. And maybe if he reads this story and says, hey, I got the help I needed. I found out what was going on cognitively or whatever's going on with your person as they're transitioning.

If they read this and it changes their life, that's one victory. because as I was not good at any one thing, moved to a different city, not good at my job, mirrors just falling apart, and I wasn't really doing, and I started grad school because what do you do when you're floundering as a team guy,

you add more shit on to the top of it. Or drink. Or drink. So I didn't, drinking wasn't my thing, and I just started piling more stuff on. So then I wasn't good at those other things. And then I wasn't good at school either.

And one day, it was just a really low point. And I'm like, I think everybody would be better if I just wasn't here anymore. Really? Yeah. And it was a very short, like, very short amount of time, like an hour. But like a lucid, rational thought you were talking away from? Yeah. I was just like, well, I'm not good at this.

My kids are, I'm not connected with my kids. I feel like in my burden. so if I'm a burden why don't I just take myself out of the equation and I had this really great friend in L.A. She had attempted to take her own life

jumped from fifth floor. That's not a good call. Right. But she and her mother saw it. I mean... You're going to break a lot, but you're probably not going to die.

Well, she should have died. that she hit the deck bounced up and then landed again survived it and she knew what that looks like and she's like

you're we there are a lot of people who value you a lot of people really care about you and in the back of my mind I was like four kids I can't leave them without their dad so

it's amazing the power of how we speak to ourselves you know you have both sides of a conversation where you can end up from that is super dangerous. Yeah. And I mean, like, and that's, it's such a, it's a mistake that I've made many times in my life. Like, you know you need to talk to somebody about something and maybe it's a little bit contentious. So instead of actually having the conversation, you have this fake conversation where you play

their role too. Right. Right. And you're like, you're like, you're mad at this person. Yeah. I'm the one. And then you have the conversation. You're like, oh, that was totally fine.

Yeah. Yeah. It's so much more dangerous to have the conversation in isolation in a vacuum with just yourself. That's how people find up, I think that's part of the way that people get to this point where these irrational choices

seem rational. And just at a blind look, she happened to call and said, hey, you're all right? I was like, no. I need you to do me favor. Going through a rough patch, got guns in the house.

Come on over, get them out of the house. And I know that, I know rationally that this is going to pass. Yeah, it's a good call, though. But she's like on my way. So I walked. She lived in Hollywood,

30-minute drive. So I walk around the block. 15 minutes out, 15 minutes back. And as I'm coming in to my apartment, she's pulling in. And she gives me a hug and said, you're going to be fine. I was like, here's the key.

They're in, guns are in my room. You didn't. have a safe, did you? I did have a safe. Don't lie. Don't try to be responsible when you actually weren't. Do you tell the truth in here?

I did not have a safe. They were in a fucking sock drawer, weren't they? With your money. With your dad's money. You know what else my dad had with his fucking socks? It was a dirty, hairy, 357 magnum. Oh. His wife now is an absolute sweetheart.

And one day she said, would you teach me how to shoot this? And I looked at her and said, that will break both of your wrists. Right. You are not shooting a fucking snub-nose, 357 magnum. You're a good man, Andy. Let me teach you how to dial nine and one.

Or 22 or air ride. How about, let's just play cribbage. Yeah. Yeah. So she was just that moment, and I was fine after that. Never thought, never had a inkling again. Yeah. But had I not had that conversation, then, you know.

They never know. Yeah. So I want to knock down that number by and just saying, hey, here are my transition stories, ups and downs, good, bad, ugly. You ready for a marketing tip from a guy who knows nothing about marketing? Please. You should tell people the name of your book. Andrew. Funny you should ask.

Where is it at? Pull that thing up. Let's get it on the table. I mean, I know there's no way that you would try to tie it into your seal career. Well, I'm just joking. I already know what it's called. The book is called Unsealed. Yeah.

And it is... Mark, we have to talk about this. Okay. Okay. There is a section on the top of your head that doesn't have any hair. Uh-huh. What are we going to do about that? We are going to talk about the round I took to the head.

Oh. That is an acceptable reason. If it were true... Can I buy you a toupee of hair that... doesn't match what you have and pay you to wear it. If it were true, then that'd be one thing. It's alopecia. I don't know what that is.

Remember we had to get the anthrax shot back in the day? I remember the cormons squirting mine into the garbage tank because I asked me to do that. Yeah. I remember I got the first shot. Oh, fuck, yeah. And then one of the side effects was I would, patches of hair would go away. And it would just rotate around my head. So, here's what we're going to do.

Yeah. I am going to pay to send you to the most suspect European hair transplant facility we can find. In Calisville? No. We're going to go overseas. We're going to throw a world this shit. It might be cat hair. It might be like a rug.

But we're going to either, we're going to fill that up. I'm 52 years old, man. You need to commit to cutting it off. No. You can't have. Both. All right? I can't have both.

This is steak and potatoes. I'm a grown ass man. Not with this haircut. You are not a grown man with this haircut. You need to Joe Rogan this shit right now. Well, it's already on the cover. I know how to Photoshop. Does he know how to Photoshop?

He does not have a photo shot. Barely. Damn it. No, it's a good picture. I'm just fucking with you. Yeah, I know. It's road guard shit. But, so it's about my transition stories.

And really it's a, I came up with, accidentally came up with the sixth step. I'm an introvert. Yeah. So I really just came up with these steps that really helped me through. I didn't know I was going through it at the time. And it is isolation, indulgence, cocooning, emergence, grief, and resolution. So, yeah. So I would isolate and just like, hey, what the fuck is going on?

Why do you have a Trident Patch on the front of your uniform? Because they couldn't see it on the back. God, you disgusted me. At least your flag is oriented the correct direction, except for the one on your left shoulder. So there has to be a continuity error. What? There has to be a continuity error. What is a continuity error?

So if somebody sees my uniform, it's just like, well, I can mimic this now. And in a lot of movies, police officers and the military, they have one little thing that's wrong, that if you saw it as a military member, you'd be like, something's wrong here. That's a fake uniform. I think that everything that you just said is a long-winded excuse for your backwards flag patch. Fine.

You caught me. Come on, dude, stars always under the way. So I needed to isolate, which was just like, I need to just be by myself and figure this out. Where do I want to live? What do I want to do? Yep. And then I called it indulgent.

because then I just gorged myself on information. As much as I could, obsessed about it. And then I went into like, okay, I got it. Absorb it. Go into your cocoon and emerge your butterfly. So emerged out of that whole thing. You're a butterfly to me for sure. Like tall by your butterfly.

With a patch missing in my head. Listen, you chose to put that on your book. I am choosing to make fun of it. of you for it. And you would not. We each have a hand in this. You would not. The Andy I know.

We've known each other long enough. You know, God damn well I'm going to say whatever. I knew you were going to say it. I was like, it's coming. So I'm surprised it took two hours. But, um. Oh, you're butterfly to me. I get it.

Um, you just had to find your wings. Mm-hmm. And I did. Yeah. And then I went through what I did. not expect with, hey man, you're grieving. Like, you're never going to recreate the seal locker room ever. Would you want to?

No. Looking back on your career, I think there's immense value in that environment. But I don't know how healthy it is in the long term. I think it's healthy in context. When you're in it, you need that competition. Yeah. You need, you know, you need to be in that environment to thrive. in that environment. And if you take any parts of those out, I think, then it would just kind of change,

it would just kind of change their product, I think, because it's, when they started to incorporate some Army stuff into the teams, it was just an oil and water mix, and it was just not really. The teams could use, so I got out the last day of June 2013, there are things the teams are good at and there are things the teams are not. Doctrine, they're not great at. Army is fucking good at doctrine. You can point to a manual for almost every tactic piece of gear, all that stuff. I think it's a net positive to bring a little bit of that in.

As long as it doesn't dilute the core product. The teams needed to evolve a little bit in that direction, in my personal opinion. Yeah, and I didn't find that out until, well, I found that out kind of early that when we were down, range early on. We didn't know what we were doing. Nobody else really did either. We kind of knew what we were doing. We hadn't been tested.

Right. And we were, I think one of the biggest errors, like, you went out to an island a bunch of times, right? Fucking river and stream crossing in the canals. Why? I mean, it was a legacy task and tactic. Now, having said that, there was a guy from the East Coast Command who drowned on a river and stream crossing.

I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. but like the Vietnam jungle warfare tactics the run into every room regardless of there's a compelling reason to or not like that's rear view mirror

oriented training not progressive forward training and I think just about every military unit was stuck in that because that's what they had yeah it was we were training for the previous war based off the last kinetic operations that we had

where those tactics were developed and refined And the problem was it had been about 40 years. Yeah. And it showed when we first got there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, we won because we were fighting people who were centuries behind. I mean, let's be honest.

Yeah. Yeah. And it was just being there at the beginning of it and then towards the end of it. Yeah, it was very different. Very different. Very different. And when I was at Sakhir, four years from retiring, I was sent, to a new shop and the army guys

were like, okay, from one to three, we're going to teach you to do your next job. I was like, what the fuck? What did you just say? It was like he was cursing at me. Yeah. And he's like, yeah, we've got to teach how to do your job. 16 years into this first time somebody said,

hey, we're going to teach you how to do this thing that we're then going to grade you on with your fit reps or whatever. Do you mean an effective approach to crawl, walk, run? Yeah. And I think, count on the teams. You know, they would say do this and then you would get hazed afterwards for subpar performance. Right. Yeah. And you would modify behavior until the hazing decreased. Right.

Or the, hey, hey, boss, will you teach me how to do this? I don't have fucking, you should know this already. Yeah. Sorry, I don't know what you know. Yeah, through osmosis, how the fuck am I supposed to learn this? Well, I don't have time to teach you. So these army guys, green, green beret guys were like, yeah, one to three, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we're going to teach you. So when they left, and proficient in what I was going to do. Yeah. That's no, uh, that's no shock. It's almost a winning formula.

Yeah, it's amazing. So, um, you know, we always had the sibling rivalry with the, with the, whoas. Um, those guys are, they were. They're awesome. They're awesome guys friends. Yeah. Are a green beret. Mm-hmm.

And I was in a green beret shop at Suckier, so these guys were great. And they really gave a shit about how I was going to progress. Yeah. So, yeah, it was the most valuable two years of my career. Year and a half, because the first year I was there was with a team guy who intrusive leadership. Yeah. Yeah. So didn't thrive there, and I never really thrived in that way because once I learned something,

I need to really dissect and ask a bunch of questions and bug this shit out of people until I understand it as opposed to, hey, this is a job and, oh, you're fucking it up. and you're not making the cut. Yeah. Yeah. Poor way to lead. But I would rather create that lessons learned. I'd rather be in the teams now as opposed to crawling through the Vietnam Air Tactics and throwing everything on your back and just because we don't know what else to do.

Totally. I agree. Yeah. So when's the book come out? January 22nd. So pre-sale. And then... So this will come out.

Michael, what day is it on Monday? Ninth. Let me see. Eighth. Either way, people will have. Is it going to be... Is it available for pre-sale right now? It's available for presale right now.

We're going to end the presale on the seventh. And then it's going to go presale for our Kindle. Okay. And then it's going to be available on Amazon. Can we buy a bunch and sell them in the coffee shop? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, absolutely.

We just had Nick Lavery come out speaking in a green... Okay. He is fucking awesome. Not a tiny man. He would tower over you. He is huge. His arms are the width of this table. It's ridiculous,

but he has a book called Objective Secure. And Glover has a book in there. Both of them Green Berets, you know, speaking of good friends. I want to collect and curate like a good section in there. Not a library.

Let's take it easy. Yeah, yeah. But like, baby steps. Half a dozen books. Yeah. You know? This would be a good one. Well, thank you.

And we've known each other for a long time, but when you reached out and said, hey, come do the podcast, I was so grateful. I was just like... I mean, probably six or seven people are going to listen to this. It's going to be big. I thought it was going to be ten. I'm not going to guarantee anything. Can we go on shorts? For sure.

Well, who will get 10 views on shorts? We might. Depends on what the AI program that I create. I can't trust Michael to do shit, so... Yeah, but... You can order it on the website and then we can get it to you as soon as possible. Yeah, I'll order Nick. I just wanted to make sure that whatever book sales, we purchase, work towards your guys' numbers.

Okay. So, yeah, he sent us a bulk order website and we just ordered something for the shop. Okay. And they're selling great. Okay. It's cool. How many times you've ever been into a coffee shop that has books? Because I was thinking back, I don't think ever.

What a cool place. Most people are having, like, you know, enjoying a beverage and reading a book. Well, fuck, here's a bunch of cool books. Yeah. And yeah, so I really appreciate it and I really hope that it reaches the audience. It's that I wanted to reach. And, you know, I'm forever grateful for this opportunity. Yeah, man.

My pleasure. What do you got, what do you get planned next, man? I'm not sure. Because at some point, your kids are going to be off flying under their own wings. What, uh, are you got anything left on like a bucket list that you want to accomplish? That's the thing I just ran out of bucketless stuff. I really did, like I did not expect to write a book. How many total words?

15,700. No way. This is more than 15,000. Do you not know anything about your own fucking book? It's been through a bunch of edits. Unbelievable. Unfucking believable. Why would you?

You ask me how many... You know I wouldn't know that answer? You shouldn't... God damn it, didn't you write it? Yeah, it's 255 pages. Okay. There's no way that this is 15,000. It's not. I don't know the number.

Edit that out. We're not in it. Shit, out. Nothing has changed since our road card days. Fucking constantly picking up the slack. Yeah. I know, because I'm just curious. Like, you know, I've heard that the average book

has 80,000 words, but this is like a very manageable size book is this 35 is this i don't fucking know i'm just curious as an author i thought you would know things i should know but i'm the first time off i'm a new guy yeah so i'm gonna have gaps in my knowledge base do you know what we call that hmm an excuse so i think i start off with i think i start off with i don't know but that was unacceptable to andy so it's unacceptable yeah but it is unacceptable i should know i'm just curious i mean it it it doesn't matter because i've read books that are 80 000 words and you're like, holy fuck, that was an hour of my time.

And I've tried to read books that are maybe 15,000. Like, I'm done at chapter one. So I don't think it matters the total volume. I think it matters the subject matter. Yeah. And it's really, it's people have done to pre-read. And I've gotten really good reviews on it. And they say people who know me, they're like, this is Mark talking to me.

Yeah. So. I think when people are authentic, about who they are and their experiences and they don't try to speak about shit that's way over the front of their skis and they stay in their lane and they just tell the truth.

I think most people have a better bullshit filter than they give them self-credit for it. There's a reason why people gravitate or are drawn towards some things, in my opinion. Yeah, and I wanted to leave a legacy for my kids and I wanted this to be something my dad would be proud of if you read it. Yeah, that's awesome.

And he'd read it and say, oh, yeah, this is my kid. You think you'll ever get remarried? I don't know I don't know I want to say yes but the divorce was such a crusher

that it's not something I want to go through again and at 52 I couldn't recover from another divorce now what I married a really rich woman you know what I'm saying let's look at this

let's get asymmetrical on this shit instead of being the victim you could be the victor let's talk about let's talk more about that yeah I don't know Andy

I want to say yes because I have no problem committing to somebody for the rest of my life I just I need to get the the divorce

PTSD out of my head so I can move forward clearly and just like hey this is not This next one is not the previous one. Yeah. Which seems like you've done.

And, um, I think a lot of it has to do with the equation. I think that there are people who are well suited and matched for each other. And that can commit to growing and working through things. And then I do believe that are, there are just some people that are not very compatible. Yeah. But sometimes we like to round peg square hole shit. Yeah. And it's like, fuck, man.

There's wood shavings everywhere, and it's just, it kind of ends up the way that it would end up. I thought when I was in the middle, no, the early stages of the divorce, which I initiated, I was driving south of town, and I had to pull the car over to the side of the road because I couldn't drive it safely anymore. Like, it was just completely breaking down in tears at the realization that I probably was going to be alone for the rest of my life. And I didn't want that. Not that I was also either rushing to try to find somebody to fill that gap. But I also didn't think I was probably ever going to get married again. I mean, I wasn't even through the process, which was fucking horrendous. And I'm

sure it was horrendous for my ex-wife as well. But I think when you find the right person, it'll answer itself. Yeah. And I think, I 100% agree with that. And it's just, I just really have to open myself up to it and not like. You have to be a butterfly mark. And emerge from my cocoon. And you're going to have to fly around to track the other female butterflies. I'm willing to.

Yeah. I'm really willing to. And, you know, once you told me you were remarried and I could see how happy you were, I was just like, oh, okay. It's possible for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, it's probably one of the first times I've seen somebody who's been remarried who just, you can tell that whenever you just had that short conversation about your wife. Yeah. She's the right one.

She's amazing for sure. She's well beyond anything that I deserve. I mean, think about it like this. How many times did we go out on Target and not everything went perfect? Right. Right. Almost every time. Almost every time.

And we never gave up. Right. We just continued to go back and try to do better. Yeah. You know, I think you can apply that to a lot of things in life. Yeah. And, you know, I'm still learning, which I'm glad that I'm still learning a lot. And maybe that'll be on my bucket list.

Maybe. What kind of hobbies you're into? Are you doing, like, old man shit now, like watching birds or whatever the fuck old people do? Well, I still hit the gym four days a week. That's good. Do a cardio day. And then after my fourth shoulder surgery. I asked my doc, I said, hey, doc, I don't want to be on any pain meds.

What do you recommend? He's like, do yoga. It's better than meds anyway. I was like, get the fuck out of here. He's like, no. I could see that. So go to do yoga on Saturdays. Okay.

What else? Golf? Not yet. I ride my bicycle a lot. It really just helps me organize my thoughts. What kind of outfit do you ride it in? Right now, I'm riding a special. tarmac red so I have a matching outfit so sexy god I would fucking run into you if I saw you

with my car so you're spandexed out no uh yeah yeah padded crotch pants oh yeah do you ever just wear those around town because they're comfortable yes hell yeah yeah you ever do like an energy drink down the phone just be like what's up I don't know if you guys are seeing what I'm putting down but this is what I bring to the table. Yes. Okay, I would. I would. Yeah.

Probably going to be warmer than you would want to drink it if you keep it there for long enough. But I mean, there's no reason to not peacock a little bit, if you know what I mean. Yeah, and then my other hobbies of my kids. Yeah. Reconnected with my kids. And we go on vacations now. Those are the best gifts. I just had all three of my kids in Costa Rica with my wife at a jiu-jitsu seminar.

And then we were there a little couple days before and a couple days after. and it was some of the best time I've ever spent with my kids. And I told him, I'm like, this is a wildly expensive trip, and this is our Christmas present, because I actually can't think of any thing, literal thing, that I could even provide for you that probably wouldn't be a second thought or forgotten in X amount of time.

I took my kids on a Disney cruise two years ago. That sounds like something I would rather saw my fucking leg off without anesthesia than doing. It was the best time. That's, no. I had a blast. Have you researched like sicknesses that go through cruise ships? Yes.

Yeah. It was, yeah. But I was trying to figure out what to do with my kids, right? And never been on a cruise. So I'm like, what the fuck? Disney Cruiser was supposed to be great, right? Went all out, showed up on the cruise and just had a blast. Completely unexpected.

I walked on the ship. Like, I'm either never coming back because I'm going to die on this thing. Yeah. Or I'm going to have a great time with my kids. I had the absolute best time. Took my two girls with me and they did the princess stuff. We went to see shows. That's rough.

I thought it was going to be the worst experience in my life. Do your kids play sports? My one daughter was a gymnast and my 17-year-old was really into soccer. tore her Achilles after tearing an ACL. So she tore ACL, recovered from that, and then freak accident got kicked in the ankle, thought it was just a sprain. A couple months later, she wasn't healing up,

go to the dock, and they said, oh, wouldn't you rupture your Achilles? So she's recovering from that. Do you enjoy watching them play sports? I love it. Love watching them play sports. My daughter, God, I hope she knows less to this. My daughter played basketball.

Oh, okay. Two years ago. Her team never won. Ever? Because they were not good at basketball. They had a tournament that I went to go watch. And for whatever reason, this day, they started winning basketball games. So it kept going and going and going.

But I sat there and I watched a game that went into quadruple. Overtime because neither team was capable of scoring the basket. So it was zero, zero, or six to six? It was like 22 to 22 at the end of regulation play. And then it was 22 to 22 at the end of the first overtime and the second and the third and the fourth. These motherfuckers were not even getting near the rim. I'm talking about it would be like blind people who are handicapped throwing bowling balls at a basketball hoop. And I just was in fucking awe of how bad it was.

It wouldn't end. I remember texting my wife like, I live here now. This is like watching Pygmy's fuck. Like it's the worst I've ever seen. I've never seen a lack of athleticism that is like this. This needs to be stopped. I just want to go home. I would like to clap for the victor.

None of them can score a basket. Do you have any idea how many times they went back and forth and didn't even hit the backboard? I'm talking shots were being missed by eight to ten feet. So how old are the kids? Eighth grade. Damn. Okay.

That's bad. That's bad. It was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. And so I enjoy watching my kids play because Because whenever I played a sport, my dad was always in the stands. Yeah. He always showed up. So with that, I always wanted to show up for my kids for games.

And started off with Riley. She started playing soccer. Every practice or game I could show up at, I would go to it. Yeah, you have to. And I would always wear a red hat. So she could see you. So, yeah. So Evan was playing soccer, and I was commuting back and forth.

And sometimes I would get off the plane and make it to her game. And the one time she was, I could tell she was looking around for me, and I didn't have my hat on, pulled my hat out of my bag. She saw the red hat. She completely relaxed and had a great game. That's awesome. So sometimes it's painful to watch, but my kids were ungodly talented like their dad. So.

Ungodly talented, unlike their dad. No, no, no, no. I played college football, Andrew. Yeah. Yeah. So did thousands of other people. That was good, though. Did you go pro?

I don't think so. Hold on a second. I don't know. Wait, wait, wait. So I've got one story. So, um. Before you get to it, yeah, my daughter the next year decided to wrestle.

Oh. And was disqualified from her first match for biting the woman. That's what I'm dealing with. That's what I'm dealing with. So we, NSW teamed up with the NFL. Okay. And they were trying to get more African Americans, which I hate that term, by the way. What term would you prefer?

Black. But that's racist. It's not, though. I can't say it. You can say it. Say it on your shoes. I give you permission. Say black, Andy.

This book has someone on the comment. So I hate the term because you're assuming the entire continent is black. You have Egypt, Algeria. Oh, yeah. I see where you're going with this. So I'm just like, so the whole continent's not black. Yeah. So I just find it intellectually lazy.

I find all isms or most of them to be very indicative of people's intelligence. Like racism. Mm-hmm. I obviously like I'm not colorblind I have the ability to see colors but I don't fucking pay attention to them I really don't give a fuck what colors somebody's skin is yeah and the people who either get to a place because they're born that way or whatever they're a little bit jaded and they land in some ism category it's like man worried about your IQ score yeah like and I don't code racism I guess the same as a lot

of people would what do you mean So people would ask like, hey, not a lot of black dudes in the teams. Yeah, because not a lot of black dudes try out for it. Right. And so, like, did you experience any racism? I'm like, it's not a lot of white dudes in the fucking NBA either. Right. So I'm just like, I don't think so.

Do I run into people who were assholes? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Do I run into people who don't like black people? Sure. Probably. Yeah. But did it affect my ability to do my job or did it affect the opportunities that were provided to me?

Not one time. So I was given the opportunity to be a team guy. I was given the opportunity to go to sniper school and be a sniper, get my degree, get my master's, be an officer. Just because there are racist people around, and they could make it a little bit challenging to maneuver around that bias. I don't really call it racism. I just call it bias.

maneuvering around their way of thinking, and it didn't affect me. So that's just really just the guy being an asshole who just happens to not like either me or other people look like me. But what are your thoughts on people who say they are due millions of dollars in reparations? Hate it. Yeah. I struggle to understand. I struggle to conceptual. connect the dots on that one.

And, and again, I am much better off than my grandfather was, which was, and I'm better off than my father was, and my kids are better off than I was. I had been given every opportunity as a poor kid growing up in the Air Force kid, who's now has taken advantage of. Published author. Yeah. No big deal. Right.

And like all the things I just said. I was given the opportunity to do that, which wasn't always available to generations prior. So my reparation was, hey, do you have the opportunity to succeed here? Yes. Reparations accepted. In my mind, those that have been the reparations that there are no real barriers to success anymore. Fuck, I tell you what, man, in some communities, and I don't, I'm not, no, I'm not talking about color of skin or belief, just groups of people. Holy fuck they would argue against that belief.

I welcome it. And I can say, look, I've had an incredible journey. And I've been an opportunist the whole time. Hey, you have the opportunity to do this. Okay, I'll take it. Which leads to something else, which leads to something else, which leads to me sitting in Montana with a guy I've known for over 20, something years.

30 at this point. 30, yeah. Talking about a book that I just wrote. What else you got? Well, I'm not the person who would be arguing against that. Right. So, I mean, that's the person. So tell me where the disconnect is, where I...

I'm not allowed to argue against your point because I'm white. I give you permission. I give you permission as you and I talking as old friends. No, again, I... You know, white privilege is the other angle of this, that people come at me with. And I grew up in a solidly middle class family. Barely graduated high school.

There was every ethnicity at my high school. So it was not like it was exclusive by any stretch public school. When I went into the Navy recruiter's office and then went through MEPs in boot camp, there was every ethnicity, probably race, belief, ideology. They were all there. No, I've, am I privileged because. my skin is white and with the color of my skin have changed any of the opportunities that I was given in my life? I don't think so. I don't think so either. Like if you and you and I walking

down the street together, we've been given the same opportunities. I mean, your, your opportunities came at a different place in time than mine did. But that's the way because you take the opportunities that you choose to take lead to offshoots that you. you can't foresee. Right. And you could take you, maybe take the same opportunity I did, but maybe two years later, I bet you's going to be different offshoots, right? So the end state's always going to be different.

But I think the initial offering of opportunities is a pretty level playing field. I agree. I 100% agree because all the opportunities I've been given, I wasn't the only person who had those opportunities. Even in my own family, I have a brother and sister. vastly different outcomes, but we grew up in the same house, had the same family, and their choices led them down one direction. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger's two sons. Yeah. One of them is jacked.

The other one is gelatinous. Same genes. Yeah. Different choices. Right. Probably same opportunities as well. Yeah. And I think it's more about what you do with what you have than what is presented to you.

Right. Yeah. Because you could be You could be presented with the world And if you don't have fucking work ethic And the ability to survive In that mortar and pestle environment I don't really give a shit

What opportunities in front of you You're not going to do anything with it Right Yeah, so I just had enough Either vision or drive Or like I could see 10 steps down the road What this decision is going to lead to

We got pretty lucky too You know, I think back on those pictures Yeah Did you have any idea The number of people Who got injured in training No, it has I had no fucking idea.

Has to be. I had no idea. We are so lucky that we made it through. Mm-hmm. And that we were capable to make it through, which Jack Carr was not. I mean, that's, you know, it is what it is.

You know, it's a fact. Yeah, I mean, I'm disappointed in Jack, but. I have been for many years, for so many reasons, to include that one, just his conduct as a human. Do you know what he did?

So when the... That's a broad question. The TV show that was coming coming out with him and Chris Pratt. Yep. He loaded up a picture of him and Chris about Terminalist. He left me off of that picture that I took. Bull shit.

Yep. That's right. Yep. Real character comes through. Real character comes through. Yeah. Unforgivable. It is unforgivable.

He's such an awesome movie. I know. I love Jack. He's so good. He is the best. I saw your podcast with him. He's just such a genuine guy. It's like you're having a conversation with...

Well, he's in the same boat. We've all known each other for so long. Yeah. It's wild. I'm so happy for his success. Like, it's interesting to me to see people really get angry at others' success. And I think, I actually think the mistake they make is they're measuring themselves against those other people's success.

I could give two shits. I have nothing but a cheerleader for. for him. I love what he's doing. I like the books that he writes. I could give two shits how successful he is. And I would do anything I could to try to help him be successful. Yeah, absolutely. And he, when I reached out to him and said, Jack, will you read the book and give me an endorsement? He's like, absolutely. And I was blown away. For some reason, I, and this is my own issue, I thought he'd be like, well, I'm not quite sure. He'd snap of a fan. Yeah.

Yep. I sent from the book and gave a great endorsement and I was just... I mean, he remembers. He knows that he wasn't performing under that boat in El Week. I know. The three spot. You know what I mean? You know and he knows.

And he knows that you know. And now the world knows. And now the world knows. He's like, I'm going to make that right by doing this book endorsement. That's what I think happened. What do you want to close out with him? We've been going for over three hours. Have we really?

Yeah. It's 537. Okay. I mean, we covered a lot of ground. And here's the thing. Like, this can be just round one. There's no reason to not do round two. But, I mean, to keep it digestible for people, it's probably a good idea to put a bow on it.

What do you want to leave people with, man? I want to leave people with the, I thought that there's support out there. and there's help out there and I reached out to my network for help which included people that I thought were listening and then people who I didn't think were listening

and they're like hey heard you're in a bad spot so you don't surprise me in my life because I've always been hesitant to ask for help I have never not a single fucking time asked for help where it wasn't given in spades.

Right. It's not that people don't want to help. If you don't open your fucking mouth, nobody knows you need it. Right. And with talking with Bill, he's like, you're the first person who took me up on it.

Because if somebody in that position says, hey, do you need some help? And if you say, no, I'm good, they're going to say, career seal, been through some shit. If he says he's good, I'm moving on to the next game. Yeah, who might have questioned that?

Yeah. He said he's good, he's good. Yep. And biggest mistake, if you need help and somebody says, hey, do you need some help? Fucking say yes. Yeah. Say yes. Because they're asking, they either have the ability to help or they got a guy who can help.

And that saying yes, I decided to say yes to everything. and that has been the best decision I've ever made. Hey, do you want to write a book? Not really, but yeah. Yeah. Who knows what's going to be a day of that journey? Yeah. And who knows what other opportunities are they present to?

Yeah. What's the best place people can find the book? Like right now. Is it on Amazon? It's not on Amazon yet. It's on the markgreen.com, which is the website. Which I'll put in the show notes. And then it takes you right to the show page and they can get it.

And then it's available on Amazon. It's going to be available on any place where books are sold. How about the social medias? Do you play in the ecosystem? Oh, God. I just started. I literally just started. Have fun with that pig pen. Yeah.

So it's all at Demart Green on Instagram. TikTok. They made me get a TikTok. I'm like, I'm too old. Who made you get a TikTok? The social media people. Who are these people? They gave me a social media person named Lexi.

She's fantastic. Well, she has permission to chop this episode up and put it all over the tiki talk. Okay. What you guys can do it what you want? It'll be out in four days. Okay. So LinkedIn, it's all been changed from Mark Green to the Mark Green. Yeah.

And you can get it anywhere you want. LinkedIn's a great platform for octogenarians, so that's good. You got anything for people who are younger than that? I still don't know what the fuck LinkedIn is for. I don't either. Is it where we connected because I was like, oh shit. Yeah. I saw it.

I was like, oh, I didn't know you were on LinkedIn. To be honest with you. I didn't either. You got a guy? No, I don't. I'm a one-man show. So yeah, so it's on all the social media posts. And right now I'm putting out stuff that I'm almost embarrassed about.

It's okay. But that's the way people communicate now. So I have to adjust. And I'm, what do you think about the place being sad? saturated with podcasts. What place? The podcast. Yeah, like the podcast sphere.

So I've heard numbers, you know, like there's a thousand a day that are created. And who cares? Because if you have something to say and it's meaningful, I think people will find it. So if a thousand podcasts are created a day, but a 99 of them are shit, that's going to work itself out. So I think it can seem overcrowded. but people can separate like the cream from the butter. Okay. I don't know if that's an accurate analogy.

It is today. Okay. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I do, but I understand what you mean. Yeah.

So. It's like Tierra Mousseau. There's a lot of layers. Nice reference. Yeah. You must have been a road guard at some point. I mean, it's only the finest desserts for the Ronegard. God, I remember when I'd just eat Tierra Mousseau for lunch.

It's like, today for lunch, I'll have 14 oatmeal raisins and cooking. and lose weight. Right, right. Yeah. What a fucking wild time, man. Well, fuck. Until round two. Yeah.

Hi, man. Thanks so much. So good to see. You too. Marketing is hard. But I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out.

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