Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - What Happened on the Third Floor | Matt Bissonnette | Ep. 458

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

Matt Bissonnette grew up in a remote Alaskan village, read every SEAL book he could find, and made it all the way to SEAL Team 6. Fourteen years in the Navy, 13 straight combat deployments, team leader at the command, and one of the operators on the third floor of the bin Laden compound. In 2012, writing as Mark Owen, he published No Easy Day — and spent the next decade paying for it. The DOJ came after him for skipping pre-publication review, took every penny the book made, and left him on a 15-year payment plan. We get into what he actually saw that night in Abbottabad, the audio-recorded debrief, and why the competing narratives don't hold up tactically. Then the aftermath: 10-hour DOJ interrogations, being cut off from his own community, and getting to the point of putting a gun to his head. We also cover the hypocrisy of leadership selling their own stories, the award system, funerals he couldn't attend, and why he's now raising Wagyu cattle and self-publishing his third book, No Easy Way. No Easy Way:  https://mattbissonnette.com/ Join the Cleared Hot newsletter:  https://www.clearedhotpodcast.com Take the Operator Code Assessment: https://www.theoperatorcode.com Today's Sponsors:  Montana Knife Company:  https://www.montanaknifecompany.com BetterHelp: Sign up and get 10% off at https://www.BetterHelp.com/clearedhot

Okay, got the red smoke. The west of the smoke, I'm looking at danger close now. Come on win it, baby. Give it to me. I made it. You're clean it hot. Dude, let's start with the easiest question. We'll ease our way into this.

Ready? Who's lying? You or Rob. See what you did there. Who? No, I'm joking. I know everybody wants me to open with that. And it's the same thing I said when Rob sat down.

I actually, I care very little about the. the the actions in that moment, but I am utterly astounded, surprised. I don't know the right word. I've never seen a military operation that at a certain intersection of a certain floor at a junction, it goes into all these different directions. I don't think so. Well, I think it's pretty straightforward for a lot of people. Pull that thing closer to you.

Keep it about a fist away. I think it's pretty straightforward. I don't know. In my opinion, my, I don't know. I hear there might be other people with different thoughts, but. What do you think it would take for the Navy to specifically address it? Or if they ever even. I don't think they won't.

I think the better option is a savvy attorney out there to file some FOIA requests for some audio recordings of debriefs. I think they can be denied, though. I'm sure they can be denied. But I think there's an angle to it because it was recorded on an unclassified cell phone. So if you have, I don't know, I think there's some classification issues. I think some savvy lawyers could maybe say, hey, we at least want, we want the debrief. What do you think the impact is community-wide? Or do you think that there is even an impact?

I don't know. I don't care. Yeah. I didn't write the book, give my version of events to start any drama. I literally gave my version of events and wanted to disappear and be left alone. Yeah, no. And I'm not sure. The only reason I'm even on the radar now is because of the drama that happened.

Not the drama of who shot who. Yeah. No, and I'm not trying to pin on you by any stretch. I'm just curious. I think about stuff like the Maduro raid where the CAD guys launched from naval vessels. I'm like, wait a minute. You sons of bitches. First off, I mean, awesome.

And those guys are, I still, some of my best friends are from that place. They're awesome. Love them to death. No shade whatsoever. Yep. I do think. that the powers that be do look backwards and say, if they're equally capable,

is there any other cascading BS that we would have to deal with in one versus the other? Is one of these guys going to be live streaming or betting on Pauly Market? Huh? Just kidding, green brakes. It was an Intel guy. He wasn't on the operation, which I don't know if that makes it better or worse. Was it an Intel guy? I believe so. I believe he was in... I don't think it was on the raid itself. I think it was a Green Beret that.

that was attached? Attached, I think, at J-Soc in the Intel loop. Gotcha. Which, if you think about it, the operators... It's kind of like every senator and congressman trading on stocks and inside information. Well, the squadron guys would have probably had less actionable betting information. A dude in the Intel circle who maybe had a better understanding of the bigger pieces moving around was like, hmm, maybe these are all colliding to this, you know?

Sure. inside trading and he was allegedly classified $400,000. Where was he, though? He was a special forces soldier stationed at Fort Bragg, was involved in the planning and execution. All right, dude, I don't even know what I'm talking about. This is the danger of believing what you see on the internet. Don't believe any of it.

What are your thoughts on that? Should we be able to polymarket? On the Maduro stuff? I mean, in general, should operators be able to polymarket on their... Oh, gosh. We're way outside of our expertise here. Yeah, that's way out now. I don't know.

I was like to maybe bet on your own survival. I don't know. I don't know, man. I don't either. I like saying I don't know. I have deeply formed opinions on very few things. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.

That wasn't available to us when I was in. I guess I was always too focused on other things than to think of like, wow, I could actually bet on this up to. And I guess, right, the bin Laden, rather there was effects in the markets. And you could read into that. and I don't know. That's good questions to think about, though. I don't know if it's... I don't invest like that.

I don't invest at all because I'm basically scared of just about everything monetarily wise. I'm too busy paying all the money I have to the government, so I don't know. I've got time to invest it. Talk me through how that works.

How what works? I don't even want to say negotiating with the DOJ, just interfacing with... Is it a person? Do you meet multiple people? Has this gone through proxies with your lawyers. Oh my gosh. It was a 10 year process. So yes, I've been through lots of lawyers, lots of different DOJ folks, lots of different levels. Half of the DOJ folks we dealt with were like

officers in our community. No offense to the one sitting at the table. Yeah. But they're there attempts, right? They're there 18 months. They moved in the next position. Yeah. And so then you're dealing with the next one. I've stretched close to 10, over 10 years now. So we've had 10 different reps we've dealt with through the whole process. Um, different types of personality. Different types of personality. Some take it personal, other professional. Every single one that I dealt with was injected into the situation to play the asshole role very well and poke the bear. How was it when you finally came to a settlement with them? Tough. I mean.

It's a large number, obviously. There was so much that got to the number. It wasn't about giving the money back. That wasn't it. It was not about that. It was not about that. it was just about the whole process. To me, it was about the hypocrisy of it all. I mean, yeah, there's a lot to unpack there, but yes. Yes, to me, it was hardest for me to process of just the hypocrisy of it. Because when you break down the facts and when you really look at everything that happened, right, the seal leadership sponsoring acts of valor and all sorts of stuff, McCraven's written books.

Yeah. And I write a book and they come after me, right? I don't know. There was just a lot of hypocrisy that was hard to, hard to take, hard to understand. And how do you feel about it now? Because you have entered into the agreement with them, right? So I guess there's a very long pathway towards being done with them. What was the actual title of the or the name of the agreement? Because I thought, I thought, the settlement agreement. There was no, there was no charges ever filed. There was nothing. There was just accusations, lots and lots of accusations and threats. And if you didn't do this, we're going to do this. And if you didn't do this, we're going to do this. So where they settle on the dollar amount for then?

What is that associated directly with? All the money the book made. Okay. Every penny of the book made they wanted back. So, right? And this is why I thought. No easy days made millions of dollars. We did our whole thing back and forth, back and forth.

And they wanted me on criminal charges for anything they could get. I just said, okay, prove it. Prove it. Where is the criminal behavior? The first thing I did was hire an attorney with the proper bona fides to help me through this process. If there's anything I know, I know I'm not an attorney and I don't know the legalities here. Totally.

Not an expert now. So I was literally the first person I hired on my team was this lawyer, Podlasky, former Army JAG who'd worked in SOCOM. He'd represented a Army Delta guy, Dalton Fury, written a whole bunch of books, Delta Force officer. Yeah. This was the attorney that helped him publish all his books. So I assumed when I got him on my team, I followed all of his advice to a T. We did not get the book reviewed because he said literally in his engagement letter to me, he could review it.

So I didn't think anything other. Oh, he was the reviewing authority. Yeah. Oh, it was literally what he told me. In the engagement letter to me, he said, look, I can review this and make sure it's not and blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, okay, check, sign. Boom.

Let's go. So the, so, so yeah, long story. but the book comes out, government goes high and right. I'm like, talk to my attorney. Right. I keep questioning my attorney. He's like, no, you didn't have to get the book reviewed. I'm like, well, the little, these DOJ assholes really sound serious and they say I should have.

So then I hired a second attorney, got him involved. First attorney, still telling the second attorney that I had no obligation to get it reviewed. My second attorney is like, I don't think that's, I don't think that's quite accurate. Kind of move the first one to the second attorney. side second one takes over and I'm like hey listen I have I have nothing to hide I didn't do this maliciously let's engage with government and so I sat down with them and said look I'll give up attorney client privilege you can go through all my emails go through my computer see my emails of me corresponding with these lawyers so you see exactly how this happened today's episode is brought to you

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card information is saved. There are so many people waiting to buy these knives that if you are hand entering those things at a time when they are releasing a new blade that is high demand, it's not going to happen. So just food for thought. Montanaknifecom.com. You won't be disappointed. Back to the show. How does that, if the attorney gives you improper advice and you follow it, are you liable for that or is the attorney liable for the bad advice? It would seem it's who's yes to both, right? I'm liable for it because I've got to pay the government back. Yeah.

The government gave my attorney no copability in my decision making, right? They said, okay, we want 100% of the book money back. I'm like, okay, you can take the book money. Take it all back. I don't care. Yeah. I had spent, Brian, and we can get in. of this, this is how the government fucks you is they outspend you on attorneys, right?

I would have had to take some sort of settlement, right? I got out with no retirement. Yeah. I got some disability and a black with my name misspelled, right? One T and Matt. Your name is hard to miss spell. I know. It's pretty long.

The front part, though, I would have misspelled the Bissonnette. Not Matt. It's like two Ss here, two T's on the tail end. Yeah. So from the command, they misspelled your name? Yeah. Yeah, from my former squadron. Strong.

Yeah. Very caring. Yeah, where are we going with that? We were talking about how the government will outspend you. So I had thankfully, right, no pension, no retirement. So where did that come? You got up before 20? Yeah.

How many years did you have? 14. 14 out. And so no ability to cover large legal payments. And when we were talking large, I was writing. 50, 60, 70,000 a month for legal bills. They're not cheap. I've never written a check like that in my life.

And so thankfully, the book had sold, made money, and I had that money in a savings account. So for years, I spent out of that to pay my legal fees. After years of the government trying to get me something criminal, finally they came back said, okay, we'll leave you alone. But we want all the book money back. Nothing criminal happened. And by the way, there's nothing classified in your book. Yeah.

Like, oh, so there's nothing classified in my book. you agree to that you just the only thing that I failed to do the only thing they got me on was failure to seek pre-publication review we can talk about book review stuff I picked up a copy your book at the coffee shop this morning there's a process there right and that is the one piece I did not follow and I said well look my attorney that I hired is responsible for me making that decision they're like well we don't care we want all the book money back so so after they said when they gave me that offer just return all the money and we'll leave you alone I'm Fine.

Take it. Wrote them a check, but I was short just under 1.5 because I had spent that on my legal defense. I hate it when I'm short, $1.5 million on things. I've never seen the number $1.5 million in an account ever. Is it cool to at least see that number? Nope, because it's all funny money. It's all fake.

Why do you have to crush my dreams like that? Reality sucks. It is kind of all fake. I mean, you might get that up front. Man, you better put 50% of that in an account for your taxes to begin with. else. It sat in a savings. I was going to donate it. So all good. Give it back to the government, but the government says, hey, you're short 1.5. We want all of it back. I'm cool guys. I clearly don't have that. You've seen my accounts. You've gone through everything. I don't have it.

Like, isn't my attorney culpable to some degree in my decision making to not, and you've seen my emails. They didn't go through the emails to make sure I was in the clear. They went through my emails to dig up anything they could. Yeah. Um, so yeah. At the end of that, once you satisfy the debt, like there's, you're good, you're free and clear. Yeah. Yeah. I just have to satisfy the debt. So, gave them the money back. And then they said, you got three years to pay off the rest. That's when we negotiated with them. I'm like, I turn over all my taxes and my guys, I can't pay this in three years. Like, okay, yeah, you're probably right. Yeah, math is kind of math. Yeah. Um, so they came back and they said, okay, we'll give you the 14 year payment plan.

What's the interest rate? There's no interest rate on this. But in the agreement, it says there will be one if I miss a payment. It would be like 87%. Probably. They give me a discount. They're like, hey, if you make all these payments in the 15 years and don't miss one, we won't charge you back interest and we'll knock off 300 grand or something at the end.

So I then made that agreement with the government because I had no other move to make. And then I went and sued my attorney. How'd that go? I won. Took three years. But three years of the whole legal process of the, and if there's anything I've learned about lawsuits. So what I learned from my malpractice attorney is the first casualty of a lawsuit is the truth. Right.

It doesn't become about the facts of the case. It becomes about statute of limitations and where you filed your motions, right? We filed in New York. It got dismissed. We had to refile in different states. They do everything they can to get it to not. go to trial and the day we got a trial date, they came and settled. Really? Because we had them dead to rights, right? But then it becomes an insurance game of what's the money and the insurance

and how do the lawyers get paid out, et cetera. Interesting. So, I made a winning chuck for that, but I had to pay my attorney. I had to pay taxes. And then I had a piece left and I gave that to the government. Are we just stuck in a mousetrap? Yes. I mean, I don't know. I'm not going to sit here and claim that I deeply understand money and wealth and how it's generated. I understand that I was having this conversation with my middle son over the fourth. You can be broke on the street and you have money problems. You can be really, really rich and you have money problems. The problems don't leave you.

It's what they end up looking like. I don't know. I feel like if you were rich, at least you could sleep on a really comfortable bed. Those money problems are probably better or better. easier to deal with than not having any money at all problems. But sometimes I wonder. I don't know. I know some rich dudes who run pretty tight on going bankrupt or not because they're making such big moves with their cash flow. Or their asset rich and cash poor, which is a different problem to have. And fortunately, I have neither of those problems. So I can pay my bills. Yeah. Let's just say recently I was having a

call with accountants. I'm like, I understand far less than I thought I did about business. So So yeah, it's going to be an interesting next few months as I navigate my way through this particular season, but I guess that's what we get to do. That's why I just bought some cows. What was your stress level like in this 10 years that you were going back and forth with the DOJ? Dude, not good.

Is it ever not in the back of your mind or you're trying to do so? Are you ever able to set it down and be at peace? Are you always worrying about it? No. I have not been able to transition. probably wrong term. I know what you meant.

We'll let others take it for what they will. People may read into that a little differently, but I have not been able to transition out of my military service because I have still been in the fight, right? I've been in the fight with the DOJ, right? I couldn't, right? Every other veteran that gets out goes through their normal process, right? And that's hard enough as it is.

We're absolutely institutionalized doing what we did for as long as we did. that transitioned out hard enough, divorce, all the other craziness, and have the government coming after me. Suicidal. You talk about mental health issues. I got out before they even started talking about that stuff. Right. Now, it was like an evil word if anybody talked about mental health. Yeah. I don't know if you remember, right? The pre and post deployment surveys and all this nonsense. They were trying to get, what year did you get out? 2012. Okay, yeah, I got out in 13. They were trying to be better with it, you know, like the third, they were involving the families

the retreats afterwards, the third location, decompression stuff, which can be argued if getting shit-faced for three days straight actually helps you do anything. Thank you. Two days in Germany. Coming home, smelling like good German beer. It does nothing for your reintegration with mama. It checks a box somewhere, though, I think, on a risk matrix

so that people can say that they did something. And maybe it's they don't know what to do. But it was at least getting a little bit better. I hope that it has continued to get far better. I wouldn't say better. There was some evolution, because there was zero for a long time. long time. Zero. Zero discussion. Zero help, zero anything. And they started instituting some stuff towards the end of my career. I hope they have continued with that. I hope so. I think so because,

I mean, I went to the, I did the brain treatment center. I heard of that stuff, the TMS. Yeah. I did that. And I heard that from, you know, buddies of mine at the command who the command was covering it after I got out. Yeah. For guys that were in or for guys that were out? Guys that were transitioning out, they were covering it for them. Okay. And that's where I heard about the brain treatment center. I'm like, wow, you guys are hearing about this active duty? I want to know, but this all transpired like in the year, two years after I get out. Is it help with your stress at all now that you at least have the deal with the DOJ? You got a new book coming. Is it giving you stress relief at all? Is there a little steam coming out of the kettle? I had a big release

when when we finally got to the point where it was like we were done five, not done. Yeah, fighting. It might be a good way to put it. And the ink was on the paper for lack of the better term. But what a year, year and a half ago? Horrible with dates. When my deal finally kicked in and I started paying and it was like, okay. Yeah.

That's when I was like, all right, this is it. This is the deal they gave me. This is it. I'm coming to peace with it. I was angry, confused, better. Very, very. All the natural cycles of grief. All of that.

Yeah. Combined and pressurized with all the other shit that I was going. through and just transitioning out and everything. It was just pressure going up and up and up. And I finally got the final settlement agreement. It was like, all right, here's my plan. Here's my payment plan. Okay, check. Shift focus from dealing with that war or that battle. Same war. Different battle. Totally. Okay. Boom. Next battle. Next battle is okay. I got to pay this debt off. 15 years. I do not want to be 65, 70 and still be paying on debt from my money. military career. I'm going to pay more money back than I ever made in my 14 years of service.

Oh, we should actually do that. We should do the math, right? It enters an E3, got us an E8, you know, run the numbers. Did I make a million and a half? Don't forget the hazardous duty pay. It really helps it. Yeah. That's where the big bucks start. That buck 50. That buck 50 and it was tax free. So you didn't have to get 135. You got the whole 150. Yeah. I bet you it would be incredibly close within a couple hundred thousand dollars. Yeah. Yeah. Man. And knowing the military they probably did the math on that to come up with the number that I needed to pay. How do you feel today? Are you at peace?

I guess that's where I was going earlier. I think once I shifted from one battle to the next and like, okay, I got to write this. But I'm going to tell the story. I've never told it. I've been very private. I've been very quiet, right? I'm the guy who did the disguise on 60 minutes and the fake name and then went underground. There was no, in my opinion, no value ad to be out there.

People figured it out real quick who you were, though. Yeah. there's not that many people from Alaska. There's actually a handful of deals from Alaska. Yeah, but when you start with a handful of potential candidates and then people go, nope, nope, nope, nope, who's this guy? Oh, it starts west coast and now is, I think we figured it out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Suggestion next time, make up where you're from. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. How are you today, though? How are you feeling as a person today? Good. Yeah, better, better, better, much. Like you have a path?

I'm at peace with it. Like, okay, I've got to tell the story. I've never told it. I've been very private and very quiet about it. So, okay, let's do it. I wrote the book. Like, okay, that was me fighting back my new battle. Okay, I'm going to tell the story because I don't know any other way to go make a million and a half dollars.

I got to get the story out there to get it going. Wrote the book, submitted for review. Very important step. What does the government do? Go cold. They sit on it for almost. was nine months, right? Which is short in some of them I've heard. I've heard up to 18 months. My last book over a year, 50 grand in legal fees. Like, oh, to like needle them to get them to keep

moving? My second book, No Hero, I wrote to help pay my legal fees. Yeah. When I submitted that for review. And in that iteration, I had an attorney helping me with it. And that took almost a year to get that reviewed and 50 grand in legal fees to get that process done. The system has now evolved, not any better, but now there's no longer lawyers involved. I do the back and forth with the government on the redaction stuff. Submitted the book, waited. They weren't reviewing it or they weren't approving it. I just kept, hey, what's the status?

What's the status? They were just didn't want to. So that's when I did the Sean Ryan interview. And lo and behold, within a couple weeks after the interview, I got an email from the review office. And they're like, hey, there's been progress on your book. and here's, here's, it's cleared for approval, but there was a whole bunch of redactions in it.

Yeah. And the redactions that are words that you say, are words that are in your book, are words that will slip out in this conversation, but they're like, nope, redacted can't say it. They're openly accessible on the internet. All of it. And so we did another round of probably three to four months

of going back and forth of saying, hey, look, here's the article. Here's where vice president said this. Here's president said that. Here's all the direct correlations. Here's, nope, nope, nope. Fight through all the redactions. Some they'll let you change, some they won't.

In no easy way. I left all the redactions in there that we couldn't come to agreement on because any person with a fourth grade education will be able to read through and say, we know exactly what that word is. As I was reading it. And I can't imagine this is class. My brain was still in the redaction as I was reading it through. 100%.

Yeah. I meant able to do that because I understood where you were going and what you were alluding to, to a civilian reading it, they'll have to use their imagination. But your imagination is probably going to be pretty close. I think there's enough seal books and podcasts and everything out there that that lingo is well established and developed. And for, yeah, so they wanted to take words out. So yeah, we did that. We got it approved finally. And yeah, it starts shipping this week. Do you enjoy writing? It has been therapeutic.

It has been therapeutic. I use a Kevin Mauer, a co-author on the first two. Phenomenal, right? Don't know the punctuation spelling, all that good stuff. Dude, I'm very thankful. My editor had multiple reviews for grammatical usage. I don't know how to use a semicolon at all. And I pluralize words that are not supposed to be.

Yeah. I talk like, I write like a caveman. And then somebody else comes in is like, all right, let's let's. I'm very familiar with the structure. Yeah. The latest one. I did pretty much on my own because it was not a warfare style book. It was more of a, hey, personal, I talk about my mental health.

I talk about my faith. I talk about a lot of that. I had a publishing deal with my same publisher. Gave them the book in the process and got some pushback that they didn't really like what I was talking about. So I was like, all right, let's walk away from that book deal. And I'm going to now self-publish. So this book is self-published instead of using the big New York guys. That could be wildly beneficial depending on how it goes.

Or crash and burn. It could, but at least you have more agency and control over it. That's what I wanted. That was exactly what I wanted, right? I wanted to be able to write exactly what I wanted, right? I didn't want some New York editor telling me, hey, well, didn't you think this way? Weren't you feeling this way when you did this? I'm like, no, I wrote exactly what I was feeling.

That's why I wrote it this way. I feel like they would want you to just make the entire book about chapter one, the 10 pages. I feel like that that's what they would want the vast majority of it either to be or to constantly tie back towards. And it's for the commercial masses. And I'm like, I'm not writing a book for the commercial mass. I'm writing a book about my story. I'm writing something different. So that's why we took the control, everything back in our own hands.

We're selling it off our website. I think you're going to be okay. You already have a dossier of work that's through the New York publishing houses. You're already an established. I think it would be really hard to do if it was your first one. Well, given the subject matter of your first one, it may not have been that hard to do. It was a little bit of the unique circumstance. Oh, for sure, for sure, for sure.

And I don't say that negatively at all. I'm just saying it could have worked there too, but I think... That was just a timing aspect. I think you're going to be okay. I think for you, the self-publishing aspect is going to be good. We'll see. I hope so. We'll see.

Yeah. It just bottom line, it allowed me to take all the control back. I'm like, no, I'm going to write exactly what I want. I call out some names. I call out a lot of leadership. Yeah. Pretty, uh, yeah, pretty honest with my feedback. But, but again, back to your earlier question, the, the writing of this book was very therapeutic.

And it helped me get over a lot of the hate that, uh, that I had bottled up inside. Um, where did the hate start? where I've never no need to be an angry person you know we cross past peripherally and like we were talking about before we started

it might have been an island the last time we saw each other and the last time either you and I were there were in a different century for sure a couple centuries ago so you know it's

it was a bit a long time ago but I've never known you to be an angry person or a hatred of people I've tried to be very positive I'm always trying to be positive. I always see the optimistic side of things. It's hard to deal with the guys in our world that are very pessimistic, right?

It's always negative. I'm like, we deal with enough negative stuff already. I'm going to try and stay on the positive. Do you mean in the service or out of the service? Both. They're more vocal out of the service than in, I have found. Okay. It's a pressure cooker on both sides.

I wouldn't say it was around a lot of negative nancies, but our previous community is very, very vocal. and we'll say judgmental. And I don't mean they always land on the negative side of the house, but they have a very deeply held opinions about anybody who was publicly facing. Sure, sure.

It's tough. They call SEAL Team 6 year old for a reason, right? If I'm even allowed to say the SEAL team SEAS on the- That makes it legal, I think, because nobody- On the mic. Nobody'll know. Isn't it the official name?

I swear if you go to Google, it pops up as the- I'm allowed to say it. It gets redacted. But what if the president says it? He's allowed. I am not. Put it in my book. They'll redact it.

The president can say it, no problem. They redacted every reference to it. I feel like that's almost ridiculous. Well, okay. So that's where the hate comes from. That's where the bitterness and the hate, because it was such blatant hypocrisy. You're like, wait a second.

Leon Panetta within two weeks of the bin Laden raid, right? We go to Langley, Virginia. Right, go see Panetta give his retirement speech because he's leaving Langley. go over and be sec-deff. A handful of guys from the raid go up to Langley, watch him give his little retirement speech. He gets off the stage and he's like, hey, guys, I got to introduce you to a couple people and brings over Catherine Bigelow and Mark Bull, the Hollywood producer, screenwriter, director, 0-530, right?

So within weeks of the mission, they have full access to CIA. Hold on here. So a few weeks after that, they are... Already at Langley. When did they start having discussions with them? Because that's a real quick flash to bang. Yep, you tell me. And they had already put together a screenwriter and a producer.

Yep. That had already got full approvals to meet with the female from the movie, right? She was the mastermind behind putting all this together. And the CIA had approved her to sit down and talk with Hollywood for the movie. We knew this. We knew this very open, honest publicly. We knew the movie was coming out. Right. We knew that immediately after, within weeks of the raid. Fast forward a little bit.

There was an author by the name of Mark Bowden. He wrote Black Hawk Down. Yes. And he wrote a book called The Finish about the Milan raid. I never read that book. We actually ever heard of it. He, uh, he contacts me shortly after I get out. He's like, hey, I'm writing a book about the raid. I've already interviewed Admiral McRaven. Yeah. For the, his perspective. I've just interviewed President Obama. for his perspective.

We got White House. This is within weeks. This is, this is within a couple months. Okay. You get the movie first. That's still really quick flash to bang. For sure.

And getting access to those people. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. I agree. It's being set up behind the scenes here.

So Bowden says, hey, we'd love your ground truth perspective. You know, we got Admiral's perspective. We got White House perspective. I'm like, wow, okay. Well, I mean, Craig, we don't wrong. Both of those perspectives, those are very distant. I mean, McCraven wasn't, he was with you guys in Afghanistan.

And obviously, last I heard the president wasn't on the chalk list. But so watching from distances. So I mean, I guess I get that. But that's still incredible access. Well, if you want to paint a narrative in a positive flavor for possibly yourself for your administration, you're going to allow people to go out there and start talking and sharing the thoughts. So I asked Mr. Bowden. I say, look, you know, when is your book coming out? He's like, well, we're trying really hard to get it out before the election.

There you go. That's so very fast. So to me, a lifelong operator that wasn't interested in politics or any of that nonsense, that's when it kind of started, it hit me in the face. I was like, motherfuckers. Like every leader, Panetta, Obama, McRaven, all of the leadership in our country were now lining up. to tell all their stories, right, to get it out before the very soon upcoming election, presidential election. Yeah.

Right. So I have a book that now pops on the radar that all those people have not approved, right? They've approved their own versions and their own narratives. My book pops on the screen and they have not read it. They have reviewed it. So where they do? Spin up the machine and come after. Right.

If you have a Hunter Biden laptop that pops on the radar before an election, where you do, you crush it. And so on what side is your own? Oh, great. Right. But there's sides. And one side is going to try to crush the other side because there's a lot of pressure hanging on a presidential election and certainly a lot of pressure hanging on, right, approvals and all this great heroic decision making that the administration had done that they wanted to leverage for their next election. So if my book comes out and I make two political shots in no easy day, I don't like any politics. I'm politicians.

I'm not a fan. Yeah, agreed. I make two shots, right. One, when we met President Obama and Vice President Biden at the time, Vice President Biden was very handsy, right? Like coming up behind the team guys and like rubbing them on the shoulders and like trying to tell bad jokes. You're like, very awkward. Who's the handsy guy? that's telling really bad jokes.

So I reference him as the drunk uncle that Thanksgiving dinner. Like who's super creepy. Who invited the creepy guy? It's just he was just odd. So I'd say that. And then of course, when we met President Obama, right, shake his hand, get our photo up, he gives a speech. And he's like, guys, I want to invite you to the, to the residence for a beer.

I'm not the residence for a beer. I'm like, okay, I don't care where you sit politically. If a sitting president invites you to the White House, you got to do it. You fucking put your uniform on. you get dressed up and you go up there and you do it. Do you think he ever followed up with that invite? Probably not. No. That would have been cool. So I end the book with, well, I bet you voted for change too. Right. So I've heard the Secret Service guys don't even really get to see the residents much. It's kind of a, uh, just a limits. It's just a bubble for them to

maintain some semblance of being a human being. Makes sense. Yeah. Makes sense. That would have been very cool. But that was, those were the two political shots I took, right? Small, little jabs. And that was before the presidential election. So then, right, a lot of people got mad because my book came out. It was a surprise. There was a lot of political pressure against who is this guy that just wrote a book that wasn't reproved.

How did he do this? Why did he do this? Boom. So that that began the spiral. Was there an essence of you guys being used a little bit as a dog and pony post post raid going up to those things? For sure. What was that like?

Were you kind of voluntled to do those things? Had that happened to you before in your career? No, because we hadn't done anything that big. Yeah, I'm trying to think of a historical precedent. Maybe some other little dog and ponies for like congressional people, something like that. But nothing. Well, a lot of times they would come to the beach too, right? But it just seems like I can't imagine you guys wanted to do that.

I can't imagine, yeah, if you were put on your, you know, your. Until like post raid? Yeah. Yeah, no, everybody just want to be left alone. Well, and it probably didn't feel great to the other people in the squadron who were not selected to go. And, like, other people are getting to go these places and see these things and they're not. I mean, that's going to happen no matter what, right? It's going to happen.

Well, again, outside of your control, but it's still a real thing. Sure. Yeah, that's weird to be used as a dog and pony show like that. They didn't bring the leadership to or just mostly? No, they're probably for for sure. Majority leadership. Yeah. Yeah.

Trust me, there was a follow-up question to that. Yeah. Lots of grass. That wasn't just the sled dogs invited to those. No. No. Man. So, yeah.

Yeah. Is there historical precedence that you know of of another book, TV show, or movie getting access like that that quickly? Oh, my. Not that I know of. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think of what other political style event. Now, I have heard that what's the fighter pilots who got shot down?

and Iran recently and they were on the run and I think my old squadron got them. The, I think they're already planning a movie for that. But that is, oh yeah, they already got directors. So there you go. I mean, this is not, nobody consults me for anything for clarity, but if they were to, I would say this is not necessarily a good idea. There's no benefit to rushing that. I hesitate to try and judge what the leaders are trying to do at their position for their

reasons, right? I was very happy, an enlisted guy, they're doing my thing, right? I did that until, right, I was on my first deployment when 9-11 happened. Last thing I did was crash into the man's compound. To me, those were good. Was that your last operation? Yep. I hurt my neck real bad and that's it. That's not true. That didn't happen in Zero Dark 30. There was nobody complaining about their neck. I didn't complain a couple weeks later, but joking, obviously. I didn't realize they had such incredible access that that quickly. Yeah, nobody does. You assume, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. There is shady stuff happening at all levels to reinforce Michael Bay. But what? Two pilots. And that was Michael, how long ago was that? Two months ago?

Not that long. Let me see. I think they announced that like within weeks of the mission and the rescue. That that is how quick, right? And who is it? Is it politics? Is it? Is it politics? Is it? military leadership? Is it recruiting? What is it? I don't have an answer for any of that. It was in April. You need to interview. So four months ago. Four months ago. Yeah. Pretty much right after it happened. I mean, I'd heard Latrell got pressure to, you know, do his movie from NSW because they

wanted to tell the story. And I have an interview recorded that's not out yet from Ross. Wes, what's his last name? Schneiderman. He wrote the political article, the recent political article about Red Wings, which we talked for three and a half hours about, I mean, Merck chats, communication logs, what more than likely happened, all those things, the pressure associated with that, the velocity with which things came out, multiple afteractions.

Why would you do that? Yeah, yep. Yeah, it's a lot of it, in my opinion, was swept under the rug. We never heard a lot of AARs from that event. Which is insane. because that was super early on. I get it reflects the value of a good AAR. Oh, my God.

Hey, we can talk about that. I have an entire chapter dedicated AR. I read it today. Because it's, how can you evolve as an organization if you don't sit down? Or as an individual. Dude, those were some of the most uncomfortable rooms to ever be sitting in, especially if you knew you might have had subparth performance, but you hadn't gotten to that phase of the operation yet.

And you were just waiting to be like, hi, guys. Remember that? Yeah. My bad. I said my bad. Yeah. Yeah. But how else are you going to evolve?

You don't. You don't. You get stuck in your own little happy circle because nobody ever calls you out for anything or saying, hey, Andy, you probably should have tried this or tried that or hey, you fuck this up or try that or something, right? That conversation was Ross was an interesting one. And we opened with, I don't want to take away anything from what either those people. had to deal with on the ground or like i met marcus twice i played paintball with him one time of all things um and i don't want to take away anything from what they had to fight their way out of and obviously the loss is real but you can't bury the truth in that because at least from my understanding

red wings in the seal community correct me if you've heard something else is not viewed as a success it's a failure along just about every phase of military operation to include the planning of sending, I don't know, four dudes without a chief in the Coonard? Like, I'm sorry, what? Out of pure respect for the loss of human life, we owe the dead brothers to debrief that and pull out every dirty thing under the rug and say, all right, let's address this so this doesn't happen again. at least to the community. I don't give a shit if none of that makes its way

public facing, but the community should have access to it. I never saw it. I never saw anything. It went under the rug. It still is there. Oh, I'm sure.

There's a lot of that falling around. Do you think that that will ever be corrected? Do you think that's what worries me the most? I'm exceptionally proud of the time I spent in the military and I am very proud of the community, but I think the integrity of the community is of what is of the most important.

if people are going to respect it and view it externally, the civilians, the people we're supposed to be serving, right, and serving for, the community has to maintain its integrity. And to me, that means being honest. Again, don't TTPs, all the sensitive stuff, yes, that's internally facing. Sure. But we don't have to have a tactical failure

be portrayed as, my words, not theirs, recruiting posters. Or, you know what I mean? Yeah. That, to me, goes in the opposite direction. Yeah. And then you wonder why people are losing faith in the integrity of not only just the seal community, but military communities. It's like, guys, we're our own worst enemy. And you can't point at somebody else if we're the ones behind the scenes facilitating the access.

Yep. You know. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. All part of the broader hypocrisy of like where I was sitting in the moment of writing the book, going through everything I have been going through. It's just challenging to wrap it all around.

my tiny little brain. How's the hatred and anger feeling now? Better? Good, good, good, good. Decreasing. I definitely had my, I at my comb to Jesus moment, right? Where I was like, look, this is this is 100%. The things that I don't understand in my life is because maybe it's God's challenging me to see how I act. And if I'm going to be turning to a little bitch about it or not. And so to me, once I started my new little battle, it's like, okay, I got, rid of the hate. I'd freaking let it go. Like, all right, I'm going to write the story and we're going to go with it. And here we are. So no more hate. I'm going to get through it. I'm going to get this paid off and move on with my life. What will you do afterwards? Let's go with the assumption the

book is going to crush and that you'll get it paid off quicker than the 15 years. What would you want to do with your life? Well, I recently bought some bread heifers. It's a technical term for a pregnant cow. Okay. And I'm going to raise some Wagyu beef on my farm and let me. Let's let the world melt away. It's not a bad plan. Yeah. It's not a bad plan. Yeah.

Did you think that growing up in Alaska, that's where you were, your goals were going to end up leading you? No, I had no idea. It's just a little punk kid in Alaska. All I dropped about was getting out of the village and going to be a seal. I mean, I read about it in junior high. I was like, man, bought my first AR-15 from my history teacher at school. It's like, all right. I'm not sure that's legal, but we'll just...

Definitely not. Definitely not. I put it in my locker until the end of the day. I was very proudly walked out of school with my AR-15 on my back. Nobody try that in this modern era. Please do that at a gun store or just at a private residence. Yeah. We don't need to be storing that in school.

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or service odu gives you one place to manage your business visit odoo.com to book a demo it's odioo.com what uh 14 years is an interesting time to get out i got out at 17 or just under but i was medically retired so I had at least preserve the health care and the pension. Did you think about, I mean, where you were at at that time, obviously I'll describe as an F1 car pegged out in the red going as fast as it can around. Did you think it all about or even consider finding a place outside of that but doing the additional six or you just didn't think you'd be able to do it? No, good, good question. Yes, of course I thought about all that. Six years is a long time. As you and I know, in that world. Yes. And that pace, six years is a chunk.

where was I in my career, right? I'd been there. I'd never taken my break. I'd never done anything but deploy. That was it. 13 straight pumps. My longest break was green team, which as you know is not a break.

So I was cooked, bro. I was cooked. Start doing the math here at 14 years. Okay, three year enlistment, four year enlistment. All right. This gets me this far. Okay, that gets me to the 19 years.

Do I want to go to 25 years? and take the blood money at 19 that they were offering a lot of guys, the big money. I looked where I was career-wise, team leader at the command. That to me was like the apex of anything that I ever wanted to do because everything outside of that started getting into the political world. Maybe troop chief would have been cool. But even then there was a lot of that was starting to get into the political infrastructure, the command leadership-wise.

and man, I'd always very happily been the sled dog doing my thing and the team. Such a beautiful role. That is where I loved it. And so I did my math. I looked at all the options. I looked at okay. If I stay, what are my options at the command? I remember setting down with my master chief.

I mean like, hey, what are my options? He gave me one. I'm like, thank you for all my options. Yeah. I'm like, well, that, okay. I've got one option at the command. I didn't want to go out to Buds. I was just like, man, if I'm, if I'm going to stay in, I want to stay operational.

I want to do something that I wanted to do. Even after 13 straight and recognizing you were just ragged. Yes, my ask. I made one request. Thank you for calling me out of that, baby. You were correct. Well, it's tough because what's a guy who has done 13 straight who is operating at a level they want to operate at a place that they want to be?

They're going to say, of course I'm fine, ready for more. How many more can I have? I'll do this until 20. That's what, yeah. I get it. Oh, trust me. I get it. I only recognize those things now and myself looking into the rear view mirror.

Yeah. Yeah. I was like, hey, I remember I going to talking to my master chief. I'm like, can I go to air ops? A whole bunch of air qualls, not as many as you. But I'm like, hey, maybe I can contribute there. I'm like, a couple of my buddies had got like master's degrees online in their spare time. I'm like, master chief.

I'll get my master's degree. I'll do it on my own. I'll do, I'll work air ops or. Green training, one of these, give me a spot for like 18 months. That 18 months is all I need. Yeah. I'm like, get my fan and get things settled down, like decompressed a little bit. He's like, hey, man, I need to send somebody to a squadron.

And your name's on it. I got to send the most qualified person here. I'm like, well, that wasn't the type of squadron that I necessarily wanted to go to. It was not like where I went and came from. And he was like, well, it'd be great for your career. I'm like, I know, but that's a deployable billet. That's just I'm not getting my master's degree. I'm not decompressing.

I'm not anything. I'm just jumping right into the next thing. And I was like, listen, I've never asked for anything ever. I've been the guy who can shows up early, raises my hand. I'm like, I'll go. Take me. And so here I am about to pop. And I'm like, I need a break.

And he's like, this is your only option. So that very clearly. And to be honest, I was becoming very frustrated with the leadership. I saw not all, not all leadership. some leadership. And I saw the rules of engagement changing in Afghanistan, right? I'd been doing this war thing since the beginning. And I'd seen the whole...

You guys were kind of the last to have an impact of that. What were they changing? Were they just tightening things out? Are we've, no canines on the mission. Don't go at night. No assaults. Surround the building and call them out on a bullhorn. So why are you spending a very high-end top-tier?

unit to go basically surround the mud hut, have the interpreter on a bullhorn and say, hey, come out, come out. And like that's a- And that's not an HVT? That's not a tier one job. No. It's really not. And I'm not saying this is an important job.

But if you're going to have the tiers to the cascading organizations and you are consistently using the apex tiers for things that could readily be handled by other traditional special operations. So to me, being utilized in that position, having been utilized in all sorts of different positions and seeing them take the some of our assets away and limit our night raids and all this. I was like, why? Yeah. Why?

Why are we putting ourselves in this additional risk for what? And then, of course, a couple months after the raid extortion. That was a shitty day. That was my old troop. Yeah. Yeah. I knew almost everybody. I mean, Kelso was in buds with me.

And then he departed and went to college in Texas, you know. I had seen them. When I deployed with Team 3, I took him out there for an interoperability trip. And it was like Lou and Jonas, they totally facilitated them just hanging out with those guys. Yeah. When they started slowly releasing the names on that one, that was a, that was not an awesome day. That was a huge gut punch, right? You think of any type of high, whatever you want to call it, coming off the success of the bin Laden mission to that was absolutely devastating.

and and I'll be perfectly honest. I'm not, I have not processed any of the dead friends that I have. I haven't. I did not go to any of their funerals. I hid out. Yeah. No, I was reading that section in your book this morning.

And people may not understand that, but I totally do. I have struggled. I have struggled at the funerals. One of the first funerals I went to is my good friend, Jason Lewis, Team 5 guy. And he died in a pretty violent way. Not that I think there's a lot of combat deaths that would be considered nonviolent, but it's pretty aggressive. And I've had this conversation with a bunch of people.

I don't know if it's, and I think it's an individual thing, but is it better to remember somebody how they were or see them at an open casket funeral for how they... I'm not doing the open casket. Nope, nope, nope, nope, no, no. So I struggle with it. Call me a pussy all you want. I'm not doing it. I struggle with it too. They had a...

I have too many positive memories of my friends. I don't need to see him that way. Yeah, I wish I hadn't seen him at his open. He was still Jason for sure, but there was a... They had a... I don't know what they call it. I'm going to call it a viewing. I think that's the wrong term, though.

And I went there, but it stayed in the back. And then the funeral, there was kind of a procession walking in to get your seats. That was in Bob Beach, right? That was in Connecticut, where they buried him. And, uh, but there was kind of a procession. session and it was just slowly moving along and I wasn't really paying attention to where we were. And the next thing you know, next thing you know, I was standing there with him and his, you know, and Donna, his wife was there and his kids and I'm, and it's, uh, I knew him well enough to know,

like, that's still Jason, but he looked different. And I, and maybe that's just the way that it is, but that is the last memory that I have of him, even though I have so many other memories. I didn't go to all the funerals either, man. And I don't know what, again, does that make us just bitches as it and is it. I don't know the answer to that, but I understand why you do. I'm not ready to process it. I don't even know how, right? I don't know how I would.

I have straight hid from that. I don't know if there's a, I don't know if there's a right answer to that. I think that's dependent on the person. Yeah. Yeah. It hit me again when we, with a pull out of Afghanistan and all that. It was just like another big gut punch. It was like, for what?

Why? I've mentioned this before. I have 43 contacts. in my phone that are, right. That's a lot of different dudes that I knew through the teams in my career. And half, I won't say half. That's wrong, wrong number. I know where you're going because I was going to ask you.

A handful of all been post career. I bet you probably 10 of those are probably post. Not quite but close. I had heard a stat that recently the Green Beret community has now lost more members to suicide than combat operations. Wow. Yeah. I don't know where the seal community is in that, but I bet you with long

of timeline ours will cross that is a horrible statistic i don't yeah i don't have 43 contacts in my phone of people that i knew at that level but i mean extortion again like that was a very buds with with uh heath and rob and yeah i turned over departments to them in when i left gold no like i handed over the end uh in the o department all the night visions stuff to him. It's, uh, I don't know what to make of it, especially the ones who are making the decisions to end their lives afterwards. The things that they were able to tolerate. It's tough. It's tough, right? I got close. I got close. I had gone to my head. Really? Yeah. Fuck yeah. How long did it take you to get to that? Not long. Really? Yeah. No. Right after I got out, the book came out.

And immediately after all the drama with the book, I was like, fuck it, I'm out. Do you remember the first time me that crystallized as a thought or it was actually a viable option? Yeah. Yeah. Had you ever thought about it in your life up until that point? No. No. What do you think it was about that?

Just the pressure, the asymmetrical pressure? Well, of the friends that we know that have killed themselves, a lot of them were associated with that as well, too. There's a very close tie to that. I'm not going to say causality, but there's a correlation there, I think. Yeah. I mean, I think the, during my time, in the team's the only outlet for some sort of release was alcohol. Yeah.

But his dies go burn it down, right? That was the, that was what you used to, to fix things or process or whatever. Come on. So then you get out and you go through the same thing and I'm cut off from all of my buddy. I mean, the, the command, my former command, our former command, they went after every single one of my friends, right? like they threatened guys at the command if they talked to Biss they would pull their trident and kick them out of the command post book you're talking about yeah yeah as soon as the book came out it was like cut me off completely so like I'm getting texts from guys burner phones being like

yo dude I'll hit you when I get out they're gonna they'll they'll kick me out if they catch us talking to you so I went they literally isolated me on purpose cut me off from any of my support structure and and the military knows how hard that is already in any veteran and then And they on purpose cut me off, isolated me and probably hoped I would continue on with bad thoughts. I don't know. You go to, yeah, I wasn't getting a lot of support at that moment from anybody other than being cut off. And so to jump to with a little alcohol to jump to some stupid ideas goes quick. What stopped you?

I just chickened out. Chiggined out. Thought it through enough. Put it to the side of my head. Cocked the hammer back. and was like, that doesn't feel right, put it down, and that was it. Damn, dude. I mean.

Then I was like, all right, all right, all right. Check, not doing that. Let's get smart. Yeah. And then just the, that was, that was, boom, that was within months of the book and everything. And then it was like, okay, let's get back in the fight. Did it? I never quit another fight.

Let's get back in the fight. So I'd buckled down and was like, all right, let's go back in the fight. And as I fought through my least, I fought and cleaned myself up. I wasn't drinking anymore and just got healthier, eating better. There's all the things I needed to had five neck surgeries. Yeah. Traumatic or the TMS stuff. I had muddened on stem cells. I've tried to do anything I can to evolve, get better. Try to not be the same thing I used to be. Did it scare you that you got to that point, that you were literally that close? Or was it shocking to you that you almost got there?

No, because I think I saw enough death. in my career, it was like, eh. It's just, it's a thing. It's a quick. No, I get it. I mean, yeah, I totally get it. The, I mean, statistically, the community is very hard to get into. The command even harder, right?

Sure. The things that they ask you to do are tremendous. And it's not as if that was your first day encountering hardship. It is a career defined by psychological and physical pain. And the only currency people care about is your, unwillingness to quit and to perform. That's why. And it's tough. I loved that, though. I loved that about the space. That's why I joined it because I knew it would be hard and I, I like to work hard. I assumed wrongly that the civilian world was going to be easier than this. And as I stepped

into the civilian world, I got run over with a Mack truck. Do you regret right in the first book? No. No, I really don't. I regret how it went down. But I think telling the story. I think the way I want about it, right? I don't know too many other team guys that have tried to stay out of the limelight when writing such a big topic and story, right? I was really trying to not make it about, oh, look at Matt Bissanette and all his heroic Navy SEAL shit. It was like, Mark Owen.

Yeah, that guy. Great. It's that guy. It's not this guy. Who Matt Bissanette is irrelevant, right? Like, hey, tell it's of the team, right? I tried to really tell that. So I don't regret that.

I regret hiring the attorney that I did and that whole piece. But again, I've come to my understanding. That was just part of God's plan and I had to go through that. I did not. I set up my tactical plan. I put my team together. I hired my experts, right? We came up with our plan based off the experts and we executed that plan.

And then the helo crashed. Just like, you know, metaphorically on the mission, we had a great plan, the helo crash. So things can go sideways. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you learn from the hardship? And that is what I've tried to write about in the book and why I'm trying to be positive now and not the bitter asshole that I was for a period of time. I think we all go through that for sure.

I definitely have had, there's seasons of life, man. Sure. There's seasons of life. We all go through that. What did you think that the command's reaction was going to be to the book? Varying opinions. Because... I have to assume you bounce it off some of the guys. For sure. For sure. 100%. How many team guys, you know, read books when they grew up, and that's what inspired them to share. And I say this all the time. There's a difference between a quiet professional and a silent professional.

Boom. Well said. You know, it... I love, again, the community. very opinionated. There was people all in the 5326 Facebook page. I don't know if you're a part of it. I don't do Facebook. Do they have a page? Basically, it's a skiff.

Oh, my gosh. It's not. But some of the thing I'm like, don't invite me to that. I'm like, guys, I'm inviting you as soon as we leave. I'll figure out a way to sign you up because I know you're not going to look at it. So I must get you in there. The people in there talking shit about the book, never read it.

Sure. And I'm just like, guys. Of course. For your opinion. But they'll say this. Oh, fucking guys out there selling the Trident. Why can't guys just do their job and shut the fuck up? And I'm like, hey, just so you know, I know you.

And I've been with you at a bar where you're trying to pick up chicks by telling them that you're a seal. So what are we talking about? Zero TT. That book that I wrote is about me falling all over my dick, just stepping on my dick, getting in trouble, making mistakes. The only story I told was the single word. jumping experience of my life, which was with the turf in Afghanistan. That's it. Even the night

I talked about getting shot, I was like, yeah, a guy raised a gun up and I was on the ground, end of war story. That's all I got for you. Nothing. Right. But you can't do anything, but they won't read the book. They didn't read the words. They won't process the words to then judge you upon the words you put on there. They'll judge you on the, the action of writing it in and of itself. Yeah. The hypocrisy there is interesting. So I know I'm a fine with criticism, but like, read the book before you try to fillet me on the post. There's going to be what, a third, a fourth, half. I don't know what the percentage is, but there's going to be a contingent,

a percentage of the seal community or the soft community that's going to hate all book writers. Yeah. So I could assume that knowing some of the people that come in are like the old school, oh, fuck you. Nobody writes books. And I bet they all good. That was fun. I bet you that was the book I read.

Same. There was the first book I could find. Yeah. Then I found Rogue Warrior, which I thought was nonfiction. My mistake. I don't know. I think they said something about bench pressing 500 pounds and like eating glass. And I'm like, man, I'm never going to be a dev group guy because I can't.

Ponytail. 70 pounds. Stop and what? I'm not benching 500. No, it was ponytail. In the snow, I'm pretty sure he said that was his first set, no warm up, wrapping 500. Yeah. Yeah.

My mistake for thinking that was a non-fiction. I met him at the shot show one year. I never met him. He's a little guy. A lot smaller than I imagined in my mind. I've heard stories of him and then stories of people running into his daughter. at bars in Virginia Beach. I don't know.

Never met either. But the book thing, yeah, contingent of guys that were going to hate it no matter what. That's the teams. Okay, I didn't care about them because I knew there's no maneuvering their opinions. They're guys I'm probably less interested in their opinions anyway. The guys I valued their opinions the most,

I absolutely went and talked to all them. I was like, hey, here's what I'm doing. Here is how I'm going to approach this. I'm not putting my face and my name on the book and trying to get out in front of this and say, hey, look at me, I want to tell the story the best way I can. I want to support the special operations community by donating the money to this. This is a broader story.

This is not about me. We all knew that there was broader movie and books, stuff going on. There was another author at this time creating manual script as well. Were you guys aware that there was another author? He's been on the show. Rob. Rob, who? No, I had no idea.

who's writing a book then. Okay. Didn't they come out relatively same time period-ish? I have no idea when his book came out officially. Well, after mine, I think. Okay. Several years. Okay.

I think. I don't know. Michael. I hate to Google this, but I don't know the name of his book off the top of my head. Can you Google when the Mark Owen book came out and the Rob O'Neill book came out? I'm just curious on the timeline because I thought that there were people who were aware he was working on his as well, too, at that time. Darrow. The guys who

you talk to about it and were supportive, what were their thoughts? All right. Well, you know, you're going to do it. Do it. Eyebrows up probably. Oh, for sure. Yeah.

For sure. You're like, you know, you're like, yeah. Yeah, well. You know. Oh, Jesus Christ. 18. Yeah. 18.

Oh, yeah. Your book came out way before that. Yeah. Okay. Damn, I thought for some reason that those were way closer tied. There is a, on the internet you can find,

and I don't know if this is true, but I did find it on the internet that you two were supposedly yelling at each other in the team room or in the cage area as to whose book was going to come out first. Don't believe everything you read on the internet. That's not how a fun way to live life is.

Believe everything. No, absolutely not. There was none of that. Okay. Not at all. Were you, did you already know you were going to get out? Was that your plan to, or if it had gone perfectly

the way that you wanted it to, to pre-op or post? What do you mean? Post when your book was coming out. Did you already decided that you were going to eject? Or not eject? I got out before I started writing the book. Okay. I knew my enlistment was up. Okay. I knew I had to reenlist by January. Yep. And that's, we got, we'd just come home from a deployment. Yeah, we just got home. Like, 10 days later, they spent us up for this mission. I had been talking about getting out on my last deployment because it was very slow in Afghanistan, all the rules of all the rules of gate. Everything was changing. And I knew my enlistment was up. And I'm like, I was way. I was way.

all my options very open and I publicly speaking of okay what moves am I going to make um we got back the mission spun up yep boom and then by the time January rolled around I was like okay so you're already out okay I was wondering if you had and then I then I started the book okay I was wondering if you had still been in at that time because I was going to say if in the perfect world where the mark Owen what would that be a nom de gear nom de plume pseudonym whatever it is the name one of those one of those. All three. Or none. Yeah. Nom day something. If it had worked the way that you wanted it to, what would have the perfect execution of that looked like? The book would have been a historical record of what happened, raised money with which you would have donated, and you would have been

able to just kind of stay at an arm's distance to that through the name. Yep. There you go. How quickly after the release day did you go, uh-oh. Or was it release day? Oh, dude. I don't know if you know this did well. I don't know if you know this. It's sold a few copies. Yeah, just how that whole once it hit and how it hit and how it went public and then all the initial craziness was was nuts. How quickly did it make its way back to you as in people started trying to reverse engineer who Mark Owen was? Oh, my name.

I think it was a Fox News producer that ran my name online, ran my real name. Real name came out immediately. We're talking 48 hours? Yeah, pretty damn quick. I was fine, but, you know, reporters and everybody else showing up my parents, family house, had to get them kind of off the grid. And then we just started dealing with hiring the lawyers and engaging with the government. Was there ever?

Interviews for hours and hours and hours, freaking interrogations. They're telling me I have American blood on my hands for writing the book. Who's telling you that? The DOJ. Oh, they were already coming to talk to you? All this spins up. I'm like, hey, guys, simmer down. I didn't do any of this on purpose.

Here's my lawyer. Talk to him. He's the one who advised me on the book publication process and the review process. Are we talking a matter of weeks or days? Whenever it kicked off, it was immediate. All that conversation was, I'm like, we're not going to hold back here. If you have a problem with the book, here's a talk to my attorney. Attorney, talk to them.

Explain this. Do what I pay you for. Right. But he kept shooting himself and saying the same. Same thing over and over that he could approve it. And I didn't have to. And the DOJ is getting more and more heated. So that's when I hired the second attorney. And we completely cooperated immediately the whole time. Again, I had no reason to sit here and think I did anything wrong.

All the advice I've been getting was, hey, this, we did it right based off the attorney. There was nothing classified in the book. And this was just going to get ironed out. And the longer it went on, I was like, okay, well, let's sit down. Let's go through my email. So we had two different sessions with the DOJ, two different occasions, going to a little skiff, San Diego, NCIS building, and they grill me for 10 hours. Do you guys have a lawyer present for that? Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

I had my attorney present. Not the first one. My new much better one. And all it was was a fuck Matt Bessonet session. What were they looking for? Like they weren't looking for anything. Well, first meeting they were looking for everything. Second meeting was they'd gone through everything and now they wanted to give me the exam, whatever.

And that was where they were just like, well, see this right here. You talk about the mission you guys launched from Jalalabad, a base in Jalabad. Do you know Jalabad was mortared and an American service member was killed after your book came out? I mean, draw the breadcrumbs for that. Sorry, sorry, sir. Have you ever been to J-Bed? And he's like, oh, I'm like, okay. Well, I've been there like 12 times.

And every time I've been there, J-Bad's been mortared, right? It's a big base. Everybody knows they're there. I'm like, we have Russian contractors cooking our food. We have Afghans clean in the shitters. Yeah. And you're telling me nobody knew we had a base there. But you're going to put American blood on my hands for writing a book.

Let alone the assets flying in and out of there. I mean, come on. Next page. They're like, see this picture of four tube night vision goggles, highly classified. Airsoft players are running around with those. I'm like, do you have internet down here in the basement? Please pull up GPNVG night vision goggles. The manufacturer's website pops up with all those.

of specifications. And they just PBS 34s or something like that? I don't even know the name. Yeah. But I know on their website, they list all the specs. But these guys are like leaking classified information. It was just a constant barrage of trying to belittle to inflict as much pain as possible. It was DOJ reps and NCIS, not a single NSW person in the room.

I've never spoken to a single NSW rep in this entire process. besides McCraven here at the end and he was retired when I got on the phone with him. Would you want to talk with him? Oh, I did talk with him. No, no, I mean, in that process, would you have wanted to talk with the NSTRA? Yes, I reached out to them and said,

blessed, I'd like to discuss this. Why aren't you guys in these meetings? No show, no response. Really? How many years of that occurred? Two years of dealing with no easy day. Look, after two years, right? They were like, we want you on felony charges.

felony for what? Okay, we want you on misdemeanor charges. Misdemeanor for what? Yeah. They, they leaked. I had told them I had pictures of bin Laden, right? I took all the photos on Target. And when I got out, the digital camera I had,

they hadn't deleted the photos off the SD card. That conflicts with another narrative, just so you know. Who took the pictures? They were on my phone. They were on my phone. Not my phone, my camera. Yeah. when we got back from the op, right?

SOPs, you turn in the cameras, which everybody had to the agency folks who were downloading them and they didn't delete any of the photos like our SOPs were. I never looked at my digital camera again. I threw it back in my kit. Everybody had issued a digital camera. I get out nine months later, half my gear I get to keep and they're like, I'm going to keep the camera. My daughter's running around taking pictures with it on the weekend.

I go to download it and I see all the photos are still on the chip. Probably good that she didn't look through the photo. Yeah. Well, I disclosed all this in my multiple because the government was going to go through my computer and I was like, hey, I want to make sure I'm, so I disclose all this. They're like, oh, yeah, no problem. Did you delete it? I'm like, yes, I deleted it. You can confirm it. They're like, okay. So as they're trying to get me on a felony or a misdemeanor, would having those pictures be either of those? I don't think so. But they're, they're pressuring me into some sort of deal. And like within the week that they're pressuring me, all of a sudden, there's an article. that comes out in the paper that says Matt Bissanet retained photos have been lawed. Now, nobody else knew that information, but the government. And the week, they're trying to pressure me like,

hey, if you don't cop to a misdemeanor, we're going to come after you. Now all of a sudden, in the press, they start talking about how I had the photos. I'm like, nothing illegal with that. I've destroyed them. I've confirmed I've destroyed them, all of them, shared them with the press,

didn't sell them, none of that nonsense. I'm actually amazed by the way that those pictures never did get leaked by anybody or sold to the people. or sold to the press. I don't know. I mean,

I'm going to make an assumption. Government controls them all. I had the extras and I deleted them. I don't know. I say that you probably didn't have all the extras. I don't know. I can only assume. I'm just saying I know how things work.

And again, you're not the only person who might not have looked at, you know what I mean? Or a deletion or all that stuff. Sure. Eventually, at some point, somebody goes, man, these are worth something. And I'm not saying it'd be a team guy.

Maybe it's a guy who literally throws their digital camera into a recycle bit and somebody pulls out. It was like, oh, if the photos were ever released, it would help clear up some questions, I believe, very quickly, because you would, you would see that there is no gray hair in the beard. Very clearly, very quickly, just like you see in some of the, like, videos we pulled off Target where you see Bin Laden sitting there watching TV and he's got the black beard. Yeah. Right. Exact same. Looked way younger. I found just for men hair dye in his bathroom. A little box of it.

It was a, it might not have been CBS NBC. We'll call it one of the alphabet soup. And I don't mean intelligence apparatus. But somebody walked through there within 24, 48 hours. And I think in the background of their footage, you can see hair club for men in the bathroom. Yeah. There you sure you can visually see it. That's amazing.

Is that the same guy who talked about the blood splatter above the door on the ceiling? I believe so. Yes. Peter Bergen? I believe so. Yeah. Yeah. I think he was the only reporter to actually to a compound before.

it before it was torn down. Oh, is that what they eventually did? It was terrible. Yeah, it's all all that. Yeah, that makes sense. What do you think of the burial at sea thing and the controversy that surrounded that? I'm assuming you guys had no... It only became controversial because it's gone. Now, to one hand, I like that because it's just gone. There's no shrine, no memorial, no place to go. And on the other hand, it's a conspiracy theory. On the other hand, you bury him to see, it opens it up for, well, you know, he lives on the moon with Elvis or something. Did you guys know that was going to be the end state when you launched or was that a decision made later? I don't, I don't know that I remember thinking through or worrying about

what we're going to do with the body. That's a downstream problem. Like, I got you had a few that people that's even more upstream to worry about. Like, let's get the raft to the end of the stream for, I feel like there's a few things we got to work to before we forgot where we're dumping the body and like at that point. I do remember the Army Rangers coming up and grabbing the body. I was going to say because I would imagine they just at some point there's going to be, we'll call it a chain of custody handover for that way. Yeah. There was a, I remember very specifically the Army Rangers coming out, grabbing them, and they flew them out to the carrier from what I was told. Oh, man.

But yeah, the photos, if they ever got released, I don't know. I think that would help clear some stuff up. But I think you'd also see very quickly it's high forehead shots. His face is not all fucked up. You can very clearly see his bridge of his nose, whole face, mouth structure. So this is the narrative. Easily identifiable. Yeah.

The idea that there were extra shots or any of this, that his face was distorted. Release the photos. High forehead shots. Do you think there's any benefit to the community or the world in general? To release photos? To get to finality or clarity, to have either the military come out and be like, listen. Finality or clarity for what? I think there's a lot of people are pretty final and clear on this,

except a few other people are not final and clear on it. And there's some confusion of, listen. I don't know. It's final and clear in everyone's mind depending on what version of the story. And let's say there are two competing narratives to the story. Okay. What I don't want to do is put on the thread because I don't want to, you know what I mean? In a world where somebody who is involved in this who still remains nameless and wants to be so, I don't want to change that for anybody. I don't want to pull the thread on anything, expose anything. I want the SEAL teams to maintain their integrity.

But there are two competing slightly different narratives. Everything's largely the same until the threshold between the second and third floor. At that point, there's some deviation. I don't know, A, the dude's dead. Huge victory for the United States and for the command. Like, dude, you guys, 24 guys went, right? Something like that, mid-20s? 24 that went to the compound.

There was additional seals involved. It was not just 24. And hundreds of thousands of support personnel to make all it happen. Like you're not trying to diminish it. But for those guys, fucking operation of a lifetime. Like, awesome, dude, I can't even imagine. And at the same time, I'm just glad that dude's dead. You know what I mean?

The actual trigger puller, it doesn't, I think, change. It's irrelevant. It doesn't matter. Because most, how many times do you pull the trigger? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to most guys. And if somebody truly wants to maintain their anonymity, of course, I'm going to absolutely respect that. I'm not going to pull in that thread ever because to me, there's nothing to be gained from that.

I would love for at some point the stories to be able to overlap because without that, it allows space in between the two. And that's where the internet goes crazy. My problem is I don't see a lot of space between the two. I know what I saw. I know what we witnessed. And then I know we all came back and did a debrief with everybody in the room. room that was audio recorded. So if if the other version says there was lying going on in the debrief, I don't know what

the fuck that means. I've never lied in an AAR debrief because it's not lying. You may have your perspective. We all know you might have your perspective of admission. That is exactly why you do the debrief is so everybody else talks about their perspective and how they match up or how they don't. And you work through that. So when we did the debrief, it was, right, different people talked in different areas.

But then when the point man came up, it was the first guy going up the stairs, he's the one who talked through all of the final sequences. Nobody interrupted. Nobody talked about, nobody talked about a second train. Nobody said there was a delay. Nobody talked about, hey, there was only two guys. The point man talked about shooting and moving into the room, right? this whole question of the point man missing, I didn't see him miss, right? And I don't know why we would need to lie about him missing or lie about recover up any form of

there was a woman killed on the first floor. Yeah. That we talked about in the debrief on the first floor. It's in the movie. Right. So now we're not going to talk about a woman being wounded on the third floor or talk about somebody missing a shot that doesn't make any sense.

Plus, you're going to have to get everybody in the room to go along with that story. You're going to have to coordinate a whole bunch of people to lie. Yeah. Right? To act like they didn't see what they actually saw. That's why a debrief is what it is, right? Everybody in the debrief shares their opinion.

If you talk about your movements and it's pretty simple when you're going up a set of stairs, right? It's not. I mean, I haven't cleared every set of stairs, but I've cleared a lot of stairs. Right. But if you're a point, man, talking about you clearing up a single set of stairs, it's not a lot of leeway for other people to see different things. He just talks through his actions.

The shot that the point man took, right? What seal out there is not going to follow his shots? It's a good question. Tactically, that is what we're taught. Your threat matrix. What's your biggest threat out there? Unknown male, right? You know, everybody knew.

Bin Laden most likely lived on the third floor. He had just eliminated Khalid in the landing with a gun. You have to assume, right, the guy on the third floor is armed, right? So he takes a shot. Enough within the rules of engagement to shoot at that head. Yeah. And he decides to stay in the hallway. He decides to come off the known threat that he just shot at and chase women and kids.

What team guys doing that? Why? Where? And then where are the kids? Where's the women and kids? I've heard 38 different versions from other people of where the women were. The women were in the room, right? That's where the chick was wounded in the leg. The women were in the room, not out of the room. So if the first, you can pull up the sketches and the

layout of the third floor, right, up the set of stairs, open door on the right, shots go, right? Pointman follows his shots to the doorway. He doesn't stay in the hallway. He doesn't come off of where he just shot at an adult male head in Bedladen's compound on the third floor. Tactically what you're saying makes out of a sudden. Who is all of a sudden going to be like, okay, shoot, okay, I'm going to go check this way. There's just nobody that does that. There's not a team guy out there that does that. You follow your shots and that's exactly what he did.

Was it a tight stairwell? Were you guys able to be double stacked? There's a picture of it. Pull it up alone. Are you serious? Yeah. Shows you how little I've been looking at it. Jesus, Michael.

This seems pretty good if you're thinking of a different one. been typing away with their little fingers. That's not the best picture. If you pull some up from my book, and then there's an actual live shot of the stairwell. Okay, I'll see. Where they, you see blood on it from where they drug them down the stairs. But the reason I ask about it.

Pretty narrow hallway. And so. Or stairway. And again, if you're thinking, so if you're a point man in you're up front and the stack behind you a single file and you take that shot, you might be the only person to see what it is you had taken the shot at. So, yes, tactically, what you're saying is,

it would make, unless you had some other incredibly compelling reason. You would have to follow that because what's the higher threat than that? They've told you. Bin Laden lives on the third floor. They might have a chair stick out the male head on the third floor. You're willing to take a shot at it. But now all of a sudden something changes and you're going to stay in the hallway or you're going to stay in another room or you're not going to follow your shots. doesn't make sense.

Tactically, it doesn't work. That's why he would have been the first person in the room. Yeah. And any other versions don't work. Where were you, just so people, I mean, you did an excellent job describing all this on the Sean Ryan episode, fantastic episode, by the way. So people can understand what, I don't think they often understand so many things. Wait, people don't understand things?

Well, I think they want to believe that. it's running around and yelling and ultra high speed. And the reality is oftentimes it's slow and quiet. You know what I mean? Well, let's talk about the pacing. Yeah. This was not a hostage rescue style mission where it was burned through the house. Yeah, where you absorb the maximum amount of risk as you're trying to save.

Save a hostage. That wasn't it. We had evolved our tactics a little bit. I talk a lot about, hey, don't run to your death, right? Let's be slow and methodical. There was no rush. The only sense of urgency was, okay. do they have S-FES?

Is the house rig to blow? And are they prepping something? But that's still not dictating our tactics. She should just sprint upstairs. Yeah. So it was slow and methodical. The two trains going up the stairs, I just don't understand. I don't see.

I don't. You can talk and maybe I'll get him to come to an interview with you. He was the breacher that breached the bottom of the stairs. He's the point man that led up to the second floor. And he'll tell you, he's like, yeah, I see. stood there and called for more bodies for a handful of minutes, minutes probably a long time, but because everybody was going busting right by him to go to the third floor. So he says everybody was going by.

He got some guys to help him clear the second floor because we all blew right past him to the third floor. Which is the opposite of the other publicly recognized narrative. There wasn't enough bodies and all of a sudden the split happens between the second floor. So they were left holding on the third. Right. And in a proper debrief, you hear from all these different angles. And you hear from the guy there who was like, yeah, man, everybody, he's like, Biss, you were a fucking train jumper. You blew right past you went upstairs.

I'm like, oh, I guess I did. Listen, sometimes you have to jump the train. Sometimes. Sometimes. Where were you in the train? And the reason I wanted to talk, just so people, again, you can do a, the deep dive with Sean was fantastic. But I want people to understand what you would have been able to see versus what you wouldn't have been able to see just to encapsulate that. If you guys can find the picture of the hallway, stairs.

Oh, I'm trying. Where would it be? And actually, if we can, can I take a piss break? Yeah, of course. Good. Michael, do your research. Today's episode is brought to you by Better Help. Man, there are so many things in life that can cause stress or anxiety.

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I was going to give Michael props for finding this, but both you and I know he didn't. Teamwork. Yeah. Oh, that is true. It is from the unreleased book. Oh, that was from my first book. Oh. Did you send the stairwell picture?

as well because there you go. Okay. Yeah. So that's pretty tight stairwell. So where were you at in the train? Just so we can make it standalone, what were you able to see versus not able to see? Not a enormous amount, but enough to see a. So that 180 goes up to Michael, go one more image back. So does that 180 lead to, okay, got you right there. Okay. Yep. This is why I said when the point man took the shots. Yep. The wives were not in the hallway. The wives were not across the hallway.

The wives were in the bedroom behind the man. And you were saying there is... So why would the point man take shots and then stay in an empty hallway that he can very clearly see as an empty hallway, right? Very easily see. Or why would he take shots and then go into another bedroom? How would he let anybody around him to now enter the room in front of him? I don't know.

I don't know. Rules of engagement? Yeah. capture or kill. This was not a kill-only mission, right? We were, if he was, did not present a threat, right? I think other versions have said the women were in the room, right? Bin Laden was hiding behind one of the women.

So if bin Laden was hiding behind one of the women, where are the women that were outside the room that the point man diverted to? I don't understand. That was the bear hugging thing afterwards, right? That the other version talks about. He basically took a shot, but then, corralled, bear hugged, right.

But the women were in the room. The women weren't in the hallway. So if he took a shot and then stayed in the hallway, sure, but there was no women in the hallway. There was no women across the room. The women were in the room. So he would have had to enter the room after he shot the guy on the ground, which is what I say. Shot him. He's on the ground.

Now he enters the room and pushes the two women back. I listened to your interview with the other guy the other day. He mentions in that interview. I don't know if you remember that the point man jumped on the two. women and the women had grenades. Did he say that all that? He said that. Listen to it. Your interview. He said, I should have recommend him for the Medal of Honor. He jumped on. They didn't go off. Women did not have grenades. They didn't have anything. There was no S-Fest. There was no explosives. One of the women had been shot, wounded something in the leg in the calf area.

I didn't deal with her much. I was taking photos of the body and doing all that. Yeah. But somehow she had been wounded. So I just, if you can explain to me where the women were because a lot of the versions I've heard from the other people or the women were in the room and Bin Laden was hiding behind over or whatever. Yeah. Where's the threat? The rules of engaged. Where's the gun? I know they've actually found one in the room, but it was in the, uh, when Trippi found. S.C. Yeah. Above the door on a shelf. Bin Laden standing in the doorway, right? Above the shelf, troop leader found an AK, five minutes into the search. So where's the threat for the rules of engagement to enter the, if, if, if,

You entered the room, saw him face to face. Where's the gun? Rules of engagement wise. Right? Where's the threat to engage? There's, he doesn't have a gun. If the point man engaged coming up the stairs and he only saw a head sticking down, looking at us. Yeah.

Right. Khalid had just been shot down 10 feet with a gun in hand. We just stepped over his body. We're both going to assume that the next head popping out further up the stairs probably has a gun or the device to clack or a grenade. or something. I would agree. That's justified. Within the rules of engagement,

the point man took shots. Yeah, I see that. But if you now enter the room and bin Laden standing there, unarmed, which we know he was, where's the threat?

Per rules of engagement. I don't have answers to those questions. I don't either. I'm just saying, I always go back to what I saw, what we talked about in the AAR, right? The point man talks through his actions.

nobody counters those, right? Nobody saw anything different to counter it unless you're telling me and you did the interview where somebody said they had not told the 100% truth or whatever. Okay, that's on them. I don't know anything about that. I've certainly never done a debrief where you don't tell the whole truth because you've got enough people around who saw other pieces. They're going to bring it up.

So nobody brought up the, you know, in the debrief, nobody mentioned anything about a second train. Nobody didn't mention anything about a delay. Nobody mentioned any of that in the audio recorded debrief. We have our debrief. That was fine. Change, come back to the states, and all of a sudden, the story had changed. And now you have other people stepping out in front of this other narrative. But here's the problem.

Why did you lie to the one group that's the most, the group you should be honest with? but then come back and tell the whole world and everybody at the bar or wherever else a different story. That's the confusion, right? There was, we got back from the raid. There was a lot of confusion going around because there was people saluting Rob when we met the president. There was stuff that was just really odd. And it kept like, wow, this is interesting. And at one point, our master chief pulled the,

The first four guys that were in the room into his office, and this is after we got back from the mission. And O'Neil's even talked about this. Master Chief pulled us all in his office, right? One by one, question to each of us. I don't know if they relisten to the audio. I don't know what they did. They talked to all of us.

A couple weeks later, Rob moved to another squadron. So I don't know. I don't know. I don't care. I'm not trying to. How many people could have? have realistically seen what happened right there where the shots were taken because I know you were you uh third or fourth in the train at that point how many people could have seen the shots from where and which

shots the talk about just the schematic that we're looking at right now so we'll say the top of the initial point man shots yeah from the top of the stairs how many people could have seen it yeah maybe your first three but but still you probably would have heard it more than seen it for sure and you would have had to been cocked way off the side to try to get visibility and if If you're saying seeing the guy shoot or seeing the guy get hit, I mean, that's just actually see what happened because that's where the divergence, again, seems to come from. No, the divergence seems to come from the second deck where now all of a sudden there's this, this gap that allows for separation and allows for this gap that's appeared.

And I don't think the gap ever appeared. I don't think the gap is ever addressed in the AAR, which it would be addressed if it happened. Unless you're telling me there was some sort of massive cover up and you got. all the assaulters to to cover up a story for what? Now, now that's a much bigger issue, right? And if there's other versions of while we're taking the photos, somebody comes in and canoes the face,

another massive cover up that you need to be able to pull off to get everybody to now not talk about somebody coming in in the middle of an SSE photo and shooting them in the face. Sorry, that is a major, major issue if somebody does that. And that's not going to be just brushed over in the debrief. I'm sorry. Well, and again, so I'm going to reference exactly what Rob said, and you can address it or not, but he basically said that he was the one doing the SSC photos when that person came in,

shot him at close range. But you're saying you were doing the photos on your camera. I believe Rob said it was his hands holding the, I don't know, brother. I don't know. Fair enough. I'm not going to guess what Rob says. I don't know. I haven't watched all of his interviews.

I haven't. I'm only going to speak to what I saw and what I know is in the debrief, right? With everybody there that was audio recorded. And so that's what's hard for me to understand is if this was some type of cover-up to change the story, then, okay, that's on Rob. And he can explain that. That's not on me. My version has always been what we debriefed. And I don't think the debrief was a setup.

or I don't think, I don't know. And I don't know how it could have been. I don't, I've never been to a debrief. Too many of them. And I don't know how, I don't know how you would set up a debrief like that either. How often do you guys audio record the debriefs? It's first one I've ever done. I was going to ask.

I don't ever remember doing it. Well, I would think because of the historical significance. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been done. This is the type of AAR that historically should be recorded for posterity sake. Yeah. Kind of kind of a big moment. That's probably why the commanding officer. pulled out a cell phone and was like, all right, let's record this. So we've got this.

Should the skipper really have had his cell phone? I mean, listen. I'm not here to judge. I'm not here to judge. I'm not here. But as somebody who got a whole lot of trouble from the government for classification, unclassification issues, recording that debrief on his unclass cell phone, probably could have been done in a smarter form. I feel like he could get issued a sensitive recording device that could have been used. I would, one would think. Where do you think that recording is today? I don't know. That's why I said a savvy attorney with some good FOIA skills.

I'll just deny it on national security grounds. Yeah. Yeah. Again. Yeah. Then I don't know where it is. I brought it up to the government multiple times as they were coming after me. I'm like, look, he's got it on his cell phone.

Do you guys have it? They'd never, they'd never admit that they had it or heard it. Yeah. I don't know if one necessarily has to do with the other. But. Oh. How was that helicopter crash? Scary.

First one. Yeah. How high at the ground and did you guys kind of bounce in? About 40 feet. Oh, that's a pretty good amount. Did they at least say, hey, grab your ass? No, nothing in. No indication?

I was in the left door. Had the rope getting ready to like release the bag. And then all of a sudden we started rotating and then kind of going in with me sitting there. that's not a great visual we just got here dude do you pick your feet up i did i did my little chicken legs were gonna get you're gonna hit and roll like maybe maybe if i hang my feet me get my feet up god the guy behind me's holding me in we we got so lucky with the we got lucky with the crash right first off those pilots are spectacular i'm sure they did everything they i'm sure they fought that thing to the last moment going in there yeah rumor has it the uh the pilot right he's propped up

against the wall we get out we're doing our thing while he's trying to get it unfucked, whatever he's trying to do out there. Yeah. He made the comment that maybe he could try and like take it off and reset it down into the courtyard. Only those guys would think that. You're like, A forever.

A forever. Love your style. But only those guys would think that. Let's just blow it up. I got to be honest, when I saw some of those pictures, I had never seen those helicopters in person. I'd always heard the whisper rumors. And which are now probably,

they were probably in China, within 48 hours would be my guess, pieces of the technology. I remember seeing those and I was thinking the Bin Laden thing is pretty cool. But the actual bigger secret out here is those things sitting in the courtyard. No comment. Well, at this point, the pictures are already out there. And I know you guys tried to destroy it. But at this point, the government would still fuck me for saying to comment about it.

So yeah, I'm not saying it went over. But I get it. And I'm sure there's other tech at this point. But man, I'm like, oh boy. that's kind of a big deal. Those are sitting there. Not those. That thing.

What was remaining of it was sitting there. One of the coolest things I've seen in my career. For sure. I had only ever heard whispers. I'd never seen in person. So again, you lucky bastards. Or not so lucky. I was going to say, yeah.

Yeah. Five neck surgeries. I think eight guys on that bird have had a lot of neck and back issues now. Yeah. Now that I fly helicopters, man. Yeah. Now that I fly helicopters, man. If it, again, I'm not incredibly familiar with that platform.

But there's a lot of things like Vortex, ring state where you're descending into your own downwash and you can't stop it. You need the laterally move, which over the top of a courtyard, I'm telling you, I guarantee those guys fought it to the best of their ability and stuff that thing in there. It's a, I would say it's a testament to them that people were able to actually walk. Were the pilots okay too? Yeah, yeah. No, they all walked out.

Yeah, again, again, I give all credit to them and the big guy upstairs, right? Your time's up, your time's up. It's not. It's not. It was not our time in that moment. I had heard rumors, right, about the temperature. We had been delayed a day. Yeah.

And the temperature was warmer that next day. You're a helo pilot, so maybe you can explain it better to me, but the density altitude. Think of the air particles just farther apart. And the blades are essentially wings, very similar to an airplane wing. So they create lift with the difference in high pressure air going underneath and the low pressure air. That's literally. So warmer, you're losing ability to weight. So there's the altitude, what you see on an altimeter, but the density altitude.

is essentially what your engine and the blades think you're at. Okay. And so up here in the summers, we had two fatal accidents at a runway, a grass runway just by the entrance to Glacier National Park last year. Wasn't directly involved in it, but both of them, it's a high and hot day, meaning high altitude, hot temperature. So your density altitude, we might be at 4,000 foot here, but your airplane might be trying to fly as if it was 8,000 feet. And that's where you can run into performance issues. I had heard, and again, you're a pilot, I am not. It was eight degrees.

We got delayed a day. Yeah. The next day we went, the temperature was warmer. And that played a role in the crash because our weight and balance was already super close as it was. Just because we wanted as many assaulters in the bird as possible. Nobody carried one guy carried a pistol. Nobody else carried a pistol. Like we put little camp chairs in the, we ripped out all the seats.

You bought like. So you were just. go an absolute minimum weight to make it. Yes. And if you can get the helicopter or aircraft flying, let me tell you it flies better at those maxed out than it does hovering. So they were probably- It flies better than hovers.

It's called effective transitional lift. You'll feel it tomorrow when I fly you down to Missoula. The transition between vertical flight and Ford, you feel this bump where all of a sudden now your energy is being directed forward as opposed to just fighting gravity straight up. Okay. The hover is the hardest. is, well, you're at the highest power setting.

And if you were maxed out and weight, and that's where you're pushing the maximum. And I've never. Wall's compound. And I've never done that. So who knows what that has to do with it? Yeah. And if those guys.

In a fancy aircraft, a lot of at night. Yeah. Looking through toilet paper tubes and like, and I think that's, again, given props to the helo pilots. When we went in, there was no radio call that was like, hey, Mayday, Mayday, you know, chalk one going in.

It was just, boom, we're parked. Yeah. Chalk 2 was coming in and they were supposed to land on the roof, right? Lipp land on the roof. Guys were supposed to get off. As that pilot's coming in, a lot of stress, a lot of pressure, lots going on, looking through toilet paper tubes. He notices there's a helo parked in the compound. I like, hey, say parked. Yeah. Yeah. So he's like, that's not good. And he makes the best call of the entire night, right? Had he tried his lip landing? I would argue. Who knows? Who knows? Right. Maybe they didn't. because that would have been higher than where we were hovering at at 40. Hot and high, it kills people. Again, I wasn't directly involved in those,

but both of the incidents were overruns of the runway into the tree. Wow. And burned, you know, I don't know if they survived the impact with the trees. However, both were engulfed in fire afterwards. And I believe there was passengers in both. Wow. But again, there's the difference between what you see on your altimeter and what the aircraft actually thinks it's trying to fly at.

And there, it's just, yeah, hot and high will kill you. Well, again, we got lucky second Hilo pilot, you know, caught that we had crashed and was like, okay, I'm going to make a safe. You set it down outside the compound. He went across the street and set them down. They were supposed to be on the roof. Now they're outside the compound. So again, Hilo pilots really made a lot of great saves, good decisions. They didn't push bad positions.

They got us on the ground safely so we could do our thing. And then when it was time to go, it was they sent us out on the, we had the body. So they sent us out on the on the black hawk. Yeah. And then they pulled some 47s in. What do you think if you had to estimate from the first guy getting into what is called entering the compound, not even the initial clearance? 38 minutes total time on target. How about was it from time on target till target's secure?

Oh, I don't know. 10 minutes maybe? Because you guys spent most of the time, I'm assuming trying to just sysse your asses off with a limited time. you had your ability. I mean, the clearance took a little bit of time, but nothing, no massive delays other than the breaching problems, just getting up the stairs. Yeah, I would hesitate to guess on an exact number of targets of cure. But yeah, the SSE thing was huge. Of course.

I stayed on the third floor, did all the photos, DNA, searches room, all that. The second floor, I guess, was a lot more lucrative from a stash standpoint. they had all his computers and all of his stuff down there. And so they were SSEing. I can remember the Mass Chief getting on and be like, everybody ex-ville now. Like, because we'd already gone past our numbers. And he's like, everybody leave the building now.

Drop what you're doing. Grab what you've got and leave now or you're walking home. So everybody hauled ass out. I remember running out with my stuff and looking over. And there's one of the, or a couple of the pilots, you know, they got their big aviator helmets on. And they got their army uniforms on these big helmets.

and like a, right, one of the, just sitting there like, traditional M-16 standard jobs, like look completely out of their element. You're like, good for them, though. Good for them, though. Good for them.

Dude, can't say a bad thing about them. You should have thrown them in the train, just on the bottom floor. Like, follow us to the heels of leaving. Grab a hold of, come with me, sir. Yeah. You get your first ride in the back. You can see what we get to experience.

Yeah. Tell you what. We got in the black hawk and I remember the whole cockpit was flashing red. I'm a little sensitive because my one crashed that evening and it was the gas gauges. But it was still fresh, you know. Yeah.

Too soon. So yeah, we flew a short distance refueled on the ground, right? Nobody talks about the young army refueler kids that came out and refueled us, got gas, took back off and then all that's to the border. But guys pretty chill about it, even on target? Was there a sense of elation while you guys were there? Or was it just professionalism screws tight? Just get the job done.

I'll speak from my opinion. And what I saw and witnessed, I didn't see any high-fiving. I didn't see around around any of this nonsense. I saw everybody just trying to get out and get on the heloes and get home. What time did we have to fuck around? Yeah, I didn't realize it was 38 minutes from... 40 was our drop-dead time. 30 was planned X-ville.

40 was dropped dead or you're walking home. 38, we lifted off. So we were that close. And then when we landed to refuel, I was told we had something like two minutes of fuel left in the... Hilo when we landed at the FARP. That's not fun as a pilot. I'm out of it. At this point, I'm back on the Hilo.

Yes. All right. Let's just get out of here. Yeah, until you stay here, here, a boom. I'm like, ah, it sounds like one of the engines turning off. And you have your second controlled landing of the evening. Again. Two minutes of gas.

Again, not my problem at this point. Totally. The Hilo pilots, they got to do their thing, right? Everybody had a key role to play. And we were, we were done doing our job for the night. We were just sitting there. Now that I fly helicopters and a lot of this flying with your ass feeling, but it's also hearing things and understanding rotor chop or noises now before that I,

I'm so thankful. I had no understanding of what those noises. Oh, when you're in? Or the shuddering. Yeah, because my favorite position was the front right of a black hawk with my feet up on the wheel because I'm right handed, so I'd have that. And you'd come in and just when it was shuddering, the noises it was making. Now I'm like, you sons of bitches.

almost killed us every night. Oh, because now you understand the noises. You're like, that's how I'm almost crashing. That's, okay. They're just, they're flying on the razor's edge. And I have such, at night, in brownouts, in conditions and stuffing guys in places, like landing where there's so, I get to fly when I want to. I can set up, I'm, oh, I'm going to land here.

Here's my seven outs. When they're flying into downtown Baghdad. And it's like, you have to hit this intersection because there are no outs. I mean, I did. my rotation with Green. And we were like, we were the little bird team for a whole rotation, man. And like Baghdad Swat, little birds to the roof every night, twice a night. I just a whole mad respect for, okay, you're flying over Baghdad, big city. And you're like, okay, one minute out, 30 seconds out. And they already have eyes on which rooftop they're going to put you on.

Dude. I don't see it until we're four seconds out. And then I'm still confused which house we're going to land until they land in. Like, okay, I'm going that way. Yeah, just a whole different skill set, one that I can appreciate, but I don't, I understand a little bit of it and I can appreciate the amount of skill that goes into it. Coordination. Right. From the assets, a point in the house and the landing and the outs and the second helo and ground assault force. It's insane, man. It was pretty, pretty cool when you think about. And then what's their standard plus or minus 15 seconds? It's just ridiculous. Or more like five. I've never. I've never. had them late.

Yeah. Man. Huge respect for, I mean, that was what I enjoyed about the teams, right? Working with people who were at the top of their game, whatever they did, whether your intel or comms or operators or pilots or whatever, I enjoyed that, I'm sure like you did, right? Putting a team together and going solving some complex problems.

You'll never be able to replicate it either. At that level, I have found outside of the military. No, no. And I think that's part of the problem with vets, right? We get out and we hope, well, we're going to find this feeling or find this enjoyment on the outside. And if you're seeking that same thing on the outside, I don't think you'll ever find it. And I think that's not to that level. I don't think it's unhealthy.

I don't think it's healthy to actually chase it. But, I mean, that goes back to, and I've asked a lot of guys this, especially guys who spend a lot of time at the command, do you think that there is an argument for limiting people's combat exposure so they don't get to the 13 pumps in a row ragged edge but still volunteering and they're going to be the first person? Because you know the residual. Say that one more time. Do you think it's worth limiting that? Well, is there an argument? Here's the thing. The person that you would approach and say, listen, you are getting close to a threshold of where later in life, statistically you may have some. some substantial issues, psychologically, emotionally, whatever it may be. Do you want to take a break? That person's always going to say no. So I, because I look at myself, if somebody were to try to limit my experience, I would

argue against it. But now years out of the military, the neck surgeries, the understanding the psychological, the physiological, the emotional burden of that job, even though you know as the person, you would have argued against it. Would your life have the chance to be still ongoing or, better if they were to put a limit to that exposure. It may. It may. Good luck in the guys to agree to it. Sure. Sure. Because when you're there, right, you've gone through all the selection where they try and get you to weed you out. So it's ingrained in you that you have to be the guy. No, no,

we're good. We're good. We're good. We're here. It probably would have been helpful. It might have provided some some longevity to the operator, right? It would have, would have kept us healthier for longer. Would it kept me operating longer, right? Had they worked in some sort of beneficial break type thing? But then allowed me to go back, right? I'm not trying to get out. I didn't want to go to training. I wanted a little bit of a break and jump right back in it. So had they mandated maybe a little more of a break or built it in and said, all right, hey, anybody over 10 pumps in a row? you have to take a break

probably would have been something smart I think there but there's take a break I don't even know if I would use that vernacular because guys would say fuck you I don't want to take a break well and I'll be honest I won't say his name he was a guy at your old squadron

he took a four year break and then came to my squadron and was a troop chief and was a train wreck because a four year break in the middle of a very high up temple war is a freaking You mean from a currency perspective?

Yep. Yeah. Four year non-operational break, worked at the command, different departments. Didn't mean, it wasn't, but from the ability to make savvy combat decisions under stress and pressure, understanding the enemy, understanding the tactics and where exactly they'd evolved to if you take a four-year break. Sorry. I can understand that one of especially in the pace that we were operating at for a decade, right? Well, the tactics.

Four years? We evolved a lot in six months. So four years. Yep. Okay. I understand what you're saying for sure. Pulling guys out for too long is a detriment, making it quick,

mandating it a quick one, keep them healthy. Maybe teach him some meditation. Right. I would have laughed at that before, but now my hippie wife has got me meditating. Is it working for you? It helps.

All right? Try, right? I've never, I've, he ever sat around and tried to just self-reflect for 20 minutes or something? sitting, sit in silence for several seconds, yes. Yeah. Right, right.

Yeah. I go to like burning in a car in two seconds. I'm like, this is supposed to be a calming thing and I'm always like going the wrong way with it. But I just wonder if some of our friends would be alive if they, the residual TBI stuff, the concussive exposure, whether it be in training, real world test parachute jumping that stuff. I wonder if it would save some lives. To mandate a break? To mandate maybe, and again, I don't know if break is the right idea.

Maybe just a mid-career assessment. Because also from what I can determine, and I'm not a doctor, much like six people could go into a compound and they all have their experience, their lived experience. And the stories might be slightly different, but they're going to align. It seems as if some people are more resilient towards those things than others. So maybe that mid-career assessment, maybe some people, maybe some people, people, they say, actually, yeah, you've done 10 pumps. These are the things you're exposed to, but for whatever reason, genetically, you're tolerating you better. We're going to give you that choice. For the other person, dude, maybe it does end their career, but maybe they don't walk up into the woods

and kill themselves. You know what I mean? Like, I just don't know the answer. No, it's tough. It's tough. I think the way, if a person chooses on their own accord to leave and get out, like I did, right? I made the cognizant decision to get out. Right. Our good friend, Jimmy Hatch, right? He was shot in front of me, you know, on an op. And he did not make the decision to get out, right? That was not on his terms, not at his time. And if you've read his book, right, he had his demons that he needed to fight to get through that process. And I think that's got to play some sort of factor with a lot of soft guys, right? Whether they choose to get out, how they choose to get out on what terms were they wounded, forced out, medically retired. I think that's got to play a

role somewhere in the in the mindset of hey what am I going to do now that I'm out am I still an operator you know how do you define yourself all of that stuff that we all have to go through and process um I've I've because I chose to get out I have not at all hung on to this so I'm still a seal I want to still do seal things I don't do steal things anymore I don't what I want to do anymore I chose to leave that and pursue and learn other new things so Yeah, I don't know if you could get the guys to agree to it. I just wonder. I mean, the job is unique in many ways, the impacts from the job.

It's very unique. It is, but then so are the things that come from it, you know, and so are the ways that it can materially change you or in the gray areas of your brain, you know, that it changes you to make life-altering decisions later on. I don't know. I wish that there was a way that we could figure out a solution to that one. I don't know what it is.

Purpose and community are the two things that I've in my process, right? You go from a you go from a job where your purpose is at a high level, right? You're willing to give your life for this purpose and this job. I think there's very few of those careers and environments in the civilian world where that that translates. And so this is very special in and of itself. And I think that's very tough. I think, too, in the teams, we're surrounded by somewhat like-minded individuals. And when you get out, it's harder to find that new community that relates to you. Yeah. Because few civilians that haven't had your experiences or our experiences can relate. We can relate on a certain level that other people can't, period. We could have conversations that most people should not be involved with.

For sure. Absolutely, without a doubt. Yeah. Yeah. So I think when for me, when I got out, I was cut off from my community, right? I lost everybody. No friends. No friends from the community. And that's grown back. And now I've reconnected with all my boys. So that's great. But there was a period, long period of time where that was cut. And I think getting rid of the purpose and losing your community really puts that guy in a bad spot. If you can step out of purpose, find a new purpose. Okay, it may not need to be taking lines, whatever. But a new purpose. All right, it could be saving puppies. Find a new purpose.

It's important. And a new community around that. And I think that would help. And I think when you lose community and lose purpose, it's dangerous. What's your new purpose now? Your sales order says one thing. Your inventory says another. Your spreadsheet says, good luck.

O-D-D-U brings your business together on a single platform. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, visit O-D-com to book a demo. It's O-D-O-O-O-O-com. Hmm. I got to get out of debt. I got to get this government shit behind me. I mean, I've been fighting this since I get out. I'm not out of the battle.

Yeah. I am still in the war. I've just gone from firefight to firefight to firefight and hopefully I'm in my last firefight. That's why I'm doing the podcast and I'll do my little circuit. Hopefully sell some books and then I'm going back under the radar. After that, though, I mean, and I'll tell you what I've determined mine is, and this is after years of getting out and struggling, I think, to find it.

I think that is the identity piece, the identity and purpose. The identity, I think, has talked about more because you physically take a uniform off, whatever you hang it up, who am I without this uniform? The purpose one is tougher, man. What do you want to do with your life? And for me, I realized probably within the last few years, and I think what got me over the hurdle of being willing to write the book that I did through the lens that I did was

I just want to try to be a value ad. I want to try to make the world around me a slightly better place. Is it a little hippie coming out of you? No, I mean, dude, we broke enough shit. Yeah. If you think about it in totality. We broke enough shit.

And I wonder often about the long-term impact of the things that we broke. And the history books long enough out how they will judge us. I wouldn't take back any of the actions and I wouldn't change anything about it. I made the best decisions I could in the moment with the information that I had, period.

That's how that job works. But I think trying to be as positive as possible to make as much of a difference as possible is what I want to do, the purpose. I'm not sure how I'm going to. The book falls in line with that. I think you're doing that. I'm trying to. I'm trying to.

I'm trying to. I'm trying to. I'm trying to be writing about it. So I'm not necessarily prescriptive or have a mechanism of how I'm going to do that, but I've identified that as what I want to do and it's been very helpful to do. You'll get through this stuff with the deal. you'll pay the money back for sure yeah for for sure and that and that's where i got over my negativity i'm listen this is i 100% believe my opinion this was this was something that god set in my life

there's a reason i survived everything i survived there's a reason the book drama went down and and there's a reason i've kind of reconnected with my faith and me like look this is i had to go through this for whatever reasons i had to go through this and and i am now positive and i can share the positive message moving forward. What do you want people to get out of your next book? There are the book that it, when does it release? You say you start shipping when? Well, the eighth.

So two days. Indeed. Okay. Two days. It's called No Easy Way. It's just turns out no easy day is not long enough, right? The point being is life's journey will always kick you in the nuts at some point. You're going to have your ups and downs.

And it's how it's your perspective on, on that process, right? And it's, you know, it's to your point. Like, hey, instead of focusing on the negative loops, yeah, let's focus on some positive stuff. It's tough, man. It is tough. It's tough. I'm not saying it's not easy.

Yeah. But focus on the positive. Surround yourself with other positive people and then keep digging out. If you surround yourself with the wrong people, then it just spirals and it's, I don't know. At the end of the book, anything in particular that you would want people to walk away from, a better understanding of who you are perhaps your journey in life man i i my my my father passed away about a year and a half ago and sorry and a 30 year battle with parkinson's um but he was a guy who who called me out literally it's like a couple months before he died he's like he just called me

out in my whole pity party that i was having over the situation i found myself in and he was a guy who fought a disease that took his life and never complained once. Like 25, 30 years of Parkinson's, he knew exactly what was coming and he never complained. And so when he called me out for that, I was like, Mother God. Damn, that hurt. That hurts so bad. All right. All right. All right. I got I cannot be negative and I've got to move through it. And so I guess my point with that is I spoke at my dad's memorial and and the biggest things I took away from him are things that I now try to apply to my life and it's his four Fs that his family, right, his friends, his fun and his faith, right? Those were the things that kind of guided him and

kept him on track. And I was like, you know, I don't care what career you are, whatever. If you surround yourself a good family, good friends, have some fun in whatever fashion and then have some sort of faith in the bigger picture. So when you don't, understand something, you don't just automatically think the sky's falling. You can have a more positive spend on it and be like, hey, maybe I'm just being tested and I need to move through this smartly. You think you write another book? God, I hope not. I really just want to sell this one. But if it crashes me. Pay my taxes, pay the government and go to my farm. Although cows can be a bitch to deal with. I've heard that actually. Yeah. They seem like they would be kind,

but I think they're probably can be asked. They're a little dumber than I thought. I was hoping they'd be smarter. But, yeah. No. Did you have a history of doing ranching type stuff? Where did you end of this waggoo?

No, none of it. Army Ranger, a friend of mine, he owns a company called Valor Provisions. It's an online direct-to-consumer protein seller, right? You're about your healthy chicken, beef, all this stuff. You buy it through there, skip the grocery store, and it's healthier. And so the more I got to know him,

He's like, biss, I know you got this little farm. You need to put this into action. And then he started sending me YouTube videos and a whole bunch of stuff about cows and Wagyu. And here I am. You're remarried now as well, right? Yes. How long you've been married? Oh, God.

You really want me? Listen, Michael, make a note. We're going to edit this out so his wife isn't get mad at him. No, she won't. You're supposed to know this answer. We've been together for a while, but we've been married for less than that. I was never getting remarried. I was over that institution.

And then eventually I folded. My divorce was not awesome. I'm actually yet to meet somebody who said that there was. I'm just leaving space out there for that person. It doesn't leave you looking for your next marriage. Yeah. For sure. I found the right person.

That was the difference for me. Yeah. I went five years and then we were finally like, all. Let's get married. Did she know you at all when you were in the military? Nope. That's why it works. Yeah.

Mine has no object of being in the military as well. That's why mine works, right? We would not have worked when I was in 100%. But yeah, she doesn't know anything really about, you know, she's seen what she's seen, but she doesn't. Did she ever ask you about your old Joe? Very little. Same with my wife, too.

Because it's irrelevant almost, right? If it comes up, it's like if I have issues, she'll ask me questions. Otherwise, it's say, let's talk about modern day things. Well, she doesn't know what to ask. Every once in a while, though, I'll run into an old friend and they'll tell a story about something and she'll say, were they talking about you? Were you there for them? Like, yeah. I don't know that, Andy.

Like, yeah. Yes, I was. That was not my best moment. But yeah, it's a different. We all evolve. We all evolve. And I was a different person when I was an E3 than I was an E5. When I was an E7, that I was civilian.

And hopefully I continue to evolve, right? Hopefully I'm not. stuck. What would you have changed about your career looking back now, if anything? Nothing. Man, I fucking loved it. Do you think you still would have gotten out at 14? Or would you have found a mechanism?

No, I said earlier, I was, some of the leadership was, was, I was bumping against the rules of engagement I was bumping against. Yeah. We'd had a massive loss of life that it was really affecting me because it's like, okay, for what, right? That was a, they were going to help some. Rangers who had gotten troops in contact for in full of loom from what I understand the team guys had passed on the target the night before.

So you started thinking about those decisions that led to a lot of death and then we pulled out of Afghanistan, right? And then just process all that. Do you think that the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which I think we can call a massive tactical failure, has anything to do with though the service and sacrifice that people put into it leading up to that? No, but it was an optics thing. it was just like, man, we left in such a fucked up manner with people dying on the way out.

Agreed. Agreed. That just made it feel wrong where I, my opinion, right? I thought we ran al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan on the first nine months of the war. I was going to say days. Right? They're all in Pakistan, the smart ones. And then we fought the Taliban for the next 10 years.

Like, to me, the Taliban's not flying planes into the World Trade Center, right? The Taliban has a different set of rules, but who are we to be world? police running around the world, you know, like maybe we don't need to go to war with the Taliban. I don't know. Think of the money we spent. Think of the lives lost for what to eventually leave? Like we probably could have taken what we spent on the war each month, gone to every tribal leader in Afghanistan and bribed them for a fraction of the cost.

I think peak spending in Iraq and Afghanistan when they were both going on was a billion a day. Okay. Let's divide that against the main. warlords in Afghanistan and you go to each of them and say, hey, listen, we're going to give you a hundred grand a month or whatever the math is. If there's any attacks, if there's anything that happens in the tribal region that you control, we're pulling the money back and we're carpet bombing your village or 100 grand a month, 500 grand a month, whatever it is, keep the peace. We'd save money. We'd been out of there sooner. I didn't certainly seem like we had an exit strategy.

No. And then it was confirmed when we exited the fucked up way we exited. And I think that's why you get the veterans that are that are bummed about that. I get the optic, but it has nothing to do with what they did. It's a tough one. I get the optic. But one has nothing to do with the other. One highlights, I mean, how many times have you ever been in a leadership role where your job is to execute a plan? Maybe it wasn't your plan. Like, And that's the thing about the withdrawal. Everybody wants to blame it on either Biden, but the reality is our entrance and exit from those countries span multiple administrations. I'm not sure any of them really thought about the exit. And it really looked like it wasn't going well. And I don't know about you, but if you're in a leadership role and an objective and things, here's what the plan says we have to do, but the real world is saying this isn't working.

I'm like, hey, this plan sucks. Yeah, we're orienting. We are now going to change. Totally. Something. That is basic leadership. To me, the withdrawal highlights a leadership failure at a governance level, not a military level. They were doing the best they could trying to get out of their very constrained.

It's everybody that was upstream. No. It's, I think that's what I was seeing with the whole everything that was going on in Afghanistan. The drawdown, the changes, rules of engagement, all of that was all getting more and more sticky. And you could see where it was going. And I was just smart enough because I'd been around the whole time. I was like, let's see where that's going. I don't want to do this anymore.

I don't need to do this. I've checked every box there. I'm not, definitely not chasing it. I'd been there the whole time. What would you say to somebody now who, a young man who will listen to this and is considering or wants to go down our previous career field? And they hear you talking about the leadership and the arc like that. Would you recommend service to somebody or pursuit of that career path? of course, I do.

And I would do it all over again, right? Like, why though? If you saw the arc like that and you saw the community bending the knee, not that they don't have a, it's a rock paper rank organization, obviously the military, so it's not bending the knee. It's following orders. But you would still recommend somebody go down that path, even though you have the disdain for the direction you saw it was going.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This disdain wasn't constant. The disdain was at the end of my career where I was like, okay, I don't need to be here any longer and I'll remove myself from that. Leadership changes, right? Yeah, leadership changes. Time changes a lot. Next thing you know, different country priorities, whatever.

We're doing different things, different places. So yes, we absolutely still need people raising their hands, standing up serving and be like, yeah, I want to join an organization like the SEAL teams because of what it stands for. And I, I'm proud of that and everything I accomplished at the ground force level. I think anything above the actual operator level is where I was an operator, right? I was the guy on the ground. I was not a guy that spent any board of my career at that operational on and that's not my happy place. So it may not be a happy place, but it's where you could have the most impact.

Agree. And I talk about that in my book. That was I could have stayed in. I had my degree, right? I could have done your degree. What did you get your degree? I don't have a degree. How did you become an O?

Are you an L&O? Listen. Oh, you're an LNO. LDO. Oh, LDL. Oh, LD, I'm sorry. No, because they got rid of the LDO program, so they made me an 1130. It's not a big deal.

We don't have to celebrate it. What's an 1130? I don't know. That's the official coding for a naval officer. How did you know an officer with no degree? Some of us know how to use Google better than others. Yeah, I had my degree before I came in. What's it in?

Criminal justice. How that work out for you, you criminal? Look at you getting misdemeanors and felonies. You should have, didn't you learn about these things? Yep, apparently not. Yeah, so I trust me, I thought about that. I had, I actually could have done the OCS thing and applied. And that, that was a real lane of thought that I went down for a period of time.

I was like, all right, I can be the guy who bitches and moans, right? Because, you know, there's that enlisted level where you can just bitch and moan and you can get away with it. But then you matured through that and you're like, okay. It's called the E5 mafia. We both know what it is. Yeah. But then eventually you got to mature and grow up and actually.

Some people don't. Not just bitch and moan. You got to bring solutions. right um yeah so it was time for me to evolve i get hit up a lot from people recently asking me whether or not military service is still worthwhile it's why i asked you that particular question it's tough to what i don't want to do ever to people is paint with the rosy brush look at the excitement the challenge all of these things and the commercial yeah and then leave out the shadow because you really need to let people know what they're getting into.

Because people, how old were you when you knew you wanted to be a team guy? 15, 16? Read a book. Yeah. Did you even really, could you even really articulate what it was or was it this just gravitational pull? I read every book under the sun. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, anybody's special operations, whatever,

or SEALs, I was reading all of that to try and understand the culture of the organization and what I was getting into. but this is all pre-war too yeah totally right all of that changed drastically 9-11 and then it was like oh okay this isn't just the books and historical this was like okay now we're now there's a real job i probably would have got out had 9-11 or had gotten out sooner had uh had 9-11 not happen i've done a couple pumps and like all right check nothing to do i think it was beneficial because i so you probably went through buds and what about 2 000 99 maybe okay okay Okay.

Graduated early 99. I think it's good that we saw the pre 9-11 teams. I think the people that struggled the most were the ones who entered post-9-11 early G-Wat. And then as it kind of came over the bell curve kinetically, they were struggling. And I saw that as like, oh, I've been part of this community before. And it was a good balance to see it kind of going back to that. Yeah, but that's a special perspective. Well, and it takes time and maturity to have that perspective.

And the luck or disluck or bad luck to enter into, I mean, there was generations of guys at our community people, post-Vietnam, pre-9-11, spectacular guys. I mean, the command that we were at was founded on those people. When I went through selection in 2002 and got upstairs late 2002, I mean, they had been on combat deployments, but I'm not going to say that they were looking back at it now. I mean, laughable levels of combat exposure. I don't mean that negatively. It just was, it was. It just was what it was.

The reps, they were earlier in the rep cycle. But those reps picked up. Yes. They ran for a long time. Yeah. That's where I got to see it all. I got to see all the freaking change and leadership.

I got to see it all, right? To where I saw it to and was like, all right, I'm good. I'm cooked. I'm full. I wonder what it will look like because I think the senior most members of people that were in our generation,

are now largely in the senior most positions or getting close to the senior. Our friend who may be the Mick Ponson. I swear one time he told me he was going to get out of 20. I said, do you? He's already well past 20. I know. I was thinking about it.

Did you mean 20 times two? Yeah. I'm not sure what the retirement calculator is, but I think it's only 1.5% per year, buddy. But also, if that's thing, like if you love that stuff and you want to do that and you're the person for the job. Yep, yep, yep.

To each their own. To each their own, for sure. But I mean, I wonder. when those people eventually hang it up, if there is going to be a change in the community, either it will come under their guidance and leadership or it will come after them when the next generation of people

who didn't have their experience comes into it. And maybe that's just the balancing act of that community. The ebb and flow of the world. Right? I don't know. I don't either. To be honest, I try not to think about it anymore. Not my problem.

What would you say to somebody, though, who asked you, not service is worth it anymore, but they're considering it. What would you answer to them be? Yes, 100%. Uh, neighbors where I live, uh, good friend just went to buds, made it through buds, just graduated Corman school checking it at his team. Um, I've helped mentor him through the through the whole process and, and right, it was,

uh, never saying, don't do this. This isn't worth it. This is worth it. But think of this, this and this. Think of balancing your family in a way time. Here's here's some lessons learned from a guy who's been there a long time and here's a little perspective for you. What was your strategy for balancing family time? Because I failed.

I didn't have any of that. I figured that out way later. So that's why I could be the guy to tell the young kid like, hey, think through some of this stuff, right? Like when my, I guess it was my, when my son was born, the squadron had blown out or was blowing out for some stuff. We won't talk about where, but the whole squadron was blown out. They were going to do some things. Thanks. And I was like, I'm not missing this, but it was over the, when my son was due.

And I'm like, no, I'm going. I had my gear packed. I was like on the chalk lists and everything. And then one of the team leaders came back. He's like, you're not going. What are you talking about? I'm like, I'm good. I can miss it.

This was fine. He's like, no, you have to stay. I was like, oh, geez, he took me off the load. I didn't go. And then of course I stayed. And Lance Vicaro from my old squad who's a tandem bundle course burnt in and died. And so then of course I didn't do the blowout. I'm there waiting for my son to be born.

And then I have to go do the notification. That is rough. Yeah. Yeah. How do you even prepare yourself for that? Like half the other shit we did that we've never done before. you just jump in the deep plan or you try to just hold your shit together to get the information across in the most compassionate way possible i mean what's the game plan going into that um

we found out he passed the you know the old command spins up the caco casual casualty assistance calls officer there you go uh they had somebody you know was one of the officers or something at the command attached and then they were like hey and and his parents were split so we needed two teams So I went with one of the KACOs and we notified his dad. Fuck. But yeah, dude, I mean, putting your uniform on at a freaking, you know, you fly up to local area, civilian clothes. Yeah. I go change in a, you know, bathroom at the 7-Eleven, put your uniform on.

And then drive to the house and knock on the door. And deliver the worst news. And you know that there is no confused. about why you are there. No. As soon as you open the door, they know what it is. Open the door. He sat there for two seconds and he fell to his knees.

So. Yeah. No prepping for that. No training. No nothing. Talk about it. Like the mental health aspect of the backside of the back side of dealing with everything we dealt with. No training.

No ability. All the front load of like how to blow something up, how to jump out of a plane, how to do this, how to do this, how to do this, how to do this. how to do this. Where was the, hey, when this happens, here's, here's some strategy off ramp, something. Here's some stuff to think about. None of that, man. Never.

Right. Hey, you just, you just went notified your buddy's parents that he died. And now you've got to process that. Yeah. Or go back to work or deal with your family or still keep working or whatever. And so that's all of those things. Right. And so that that is why, and I mentioned it earlier, with all of the death that I had to deal with through my career, I hid from it.

I buried myself in work because that, to me, justified the skip. Like, okay. What's your plan to deal with it if you have one or if ever? I got to figure it out. I don't know. Unfortunately, I still feel like I'm in the fucking battle with the government that I can't let my guard down to process anything. I got to keep my fucking guns up and keep fighting until this is over and I feel like I can have a letdown. And then when I have a let down from like, okay, the war is over.

Okay, let me go process some of this war. Unless you repeat your previous behavior and find another battle to fight as opposed to processing. I don't want another battle unless it's with some fucking cows. I'm trying very hard to avoid any battles. Yeah. I'm a living a much slower, more comfortable, less. stressful life, hanging out with family and friends. And that's it, man.

And trying to sell a book so I can get out of debt. You're going to be okay. You're going to work your way out of that one. Like all life's problems have solutions, as long as you don't make decisions that are, you know, life altering. You're going to be okay. And I hope that you have,

I mean, I would feel like, a small victory is the DOJ. Like, here's a deal. Let's sign the deal. Now we can execute. Like, that's a good step. The fact that you got to there and then you can at least the breadcrumbs.

are out there. There's there and I don't even I hesitate to bring this up because who every time I've seen a crack of opportunity that there may something could change or whatever I've been literally shot in a not literally shot in the face every time right every opportunity is gone nowhere after the the Sean because I've been very quiet right I've never shared any of my story besides the books yeah after the Sean Ryan interview people within the current administration reached out to my legal team and have engaged with them. We'll see where that goes.

But the consensus has been, wow, Biss got fucked. We want to see if we can help you. So we'll see where that goes. I don't know. What else were you doing after you got out other than the books? I mean, there's kind of an interesting pallet of occupational stuff you got involved with. Oh, dude. I've tried everything.

I wasn't, I didn't want to go work for somebody else. I was done working for the man. So I was like, all right, I'm going to go just swing away at what I've done. That's the game I'm in. Again, there are self-employed problems and there are working for other people problems. The problems come with you. So just don't think that one of those choices is absent problems. But I'd rather bitch it me being the boss than my other boss.

I'd rather be the warden of my own prison where I can shift the view. or if I need to find a person to blame, it's a bathroom walk away into the mirror. Like, hey, what's up, buddy? I love my weekly personal AARs when I call myself out for all the things I missed or fucked up or whatever. I'm like, okay, I live way happier there.

And go from there. So speaking, done a handful of speaking. Do you enjoy it? It's been therapeutic. It's been therapeutic. That's been helpful. I had an opportunity to sit down with the president of CBS, the SEAL team CBS show that was on for, for a while.

I'm aware of it. Watched zero episodes. Yep, there you go. As I think most team guys have. You should take a look. I'm not, I'm not saying it's horrible. I'm saying I'm at least proud of it from a few takeaways. What was your role there or interaction there?

I had a meeting with the president of CBS. And the topic came up. What does Hollywood do? wrong with military content. And I was like, yeah, basically. I was like, well, first of all, you don't hire any veterans to actually portray the stories. Or if you do, he's the technical advisor.

You don't give him, you know, the technical advisors to make sure we're all wearing the uniforms and run around with the right stuff and the right look. But he doesn't help shape the stories. And I'm like, listen, I might have done all the seal rambo shit. But, you know, we all try to stay married. We had kids. There's a lot of other balancing act that goes on here. And then there's mental health stuff.

There's a lot more than just the rambo. that's always been portrayed. And so CBS guy was like, all right, well, would you help us put a team together? Sure. So an executive producer on it and involved from day one helped hire a whole bunch of different veterans. Tyler Gray. Literally the show would not have worked without Tyler on the show because Tyler was the tech advisor. We got him directing.

He was invaluable. We had some other character. Yeah. Yep. We had a couple other characters I went to Green Team with. We had writers in the writers room, right? If you understand the Hollywood stuff, you get the whole bunch of writers that write the script. And by the time it gets on set, you can't go change it.

So we were getting these script ideas where they're throwing nuclear hand grenades and, you know, parachuting from space. I like both of those ideas. Phenomenal, very realistic. But that was the Hollywood machine spinning up in the typical wrong direction. And so we were able to put people into the all aspects of the production and that just grew and grew and grew. And it made the show more authentic and successful. We talk a lot about mental health. We have a we have a character commit suicide and a VA parking lot.

I mean, we we hit a lot of that. The central focus is mental health. And so I think the veterans. that have watched it can connect. Yeah, it's Hollywood. Yeah. But it's, in my opinion, it's been a very good version. And it's portrayed some decent messaging around the community.

So that ran its course. Trying to get another one going right now about the Coast Guard. We'll see how that plays out. But yeah, do that. A little farming, a little, I went through the brain treatment stuff. I opened up one of those clinics for a minute. of, yeah, a whole bunch of different stuff. What happened with the video game?

The video game stuff? Yes. Mostly because other people got... Did you Google that? I knew people directly involved. Oh, cool. Don names. Yeah.

Guys from the command, I was actually asked if I had wanted to be a part of that. My schedule didn't align for me to be able to. For the jump stuff? Correct. My schedule didn't align for me. I would have said yes. Okay. And I don't know what trajectory that would have had in my career.

That, the video games. Dude, I got out and like two weeks after I got out, I knew all these guys. And they're like, they work with EA sports, video game company. And they had a Medal of Honor Warfighter, I think was a game. I don't know. They were like, hey, will you help us make some promo videos, like tactical promo videos that are all over online these days? Like, sure. So I was out, but I had reached out because they were paying really well.

I reached out to a whole bunch of my friends and I said, hey, if you guys want to come shoot some videos over the weekend or whatever, jump stuff, whatever. We didn't borrow any rigs from the command. We rented everything. Rented C-130s, did the whole thing. Those videos were out, but as soon as my book came out and they were looking for any way to hurt me, they then knew I was involved in those videos and they knew other people were involved in those videos. So then they started tracking down all the guys, all the active duty guys that participated in those. They came down with a heavy hammer. They fucked them.

They came down with a heavy hammer on those guys. Yep. They, I'm telling you, they are other good friend that you went to buds with. They basically told him not to come in to work for his last year in the Navy because they had seen that I had sent him an early copy of the book via email. I mean, anybody who was associated with me got friends. Where do you stand down with the community, do you think? Obviously, you reconnected with your boys. Don't care.

The community, don't care. The boys, the guys I served with that actually I care about that I went to war with these guys and they're my friends. Connected great, reconnected with all the ones I care about. And slowly they pop back up on the radar. So the community, I don't care. Have you been back to the command at all? Why? I don't know.

I get invited to go to the Stelmuster. I haven't been back since I left. I've never seen the new facilities. The new cop-out? I've never even seen it. That's probably worth checking out. I don't know if I want to go. I feel like at this point,

they're probably taking my name off the Gold Squadron Wall just because I host the podcast and talk openly about my experiences. I always say the same thing, though. I didn't do shit, and I was happy, and I did the minimum amount of time there when I moved on. I don't know.

The judgment from who and where is so hard to get. Like, it's impossible to guess. I'm a happy, healthier person. Like I said, not worrying about it. I don't care. That what value would that add to me to go back to a command? Like, all my best friends now are former team guys. Yeah.

And those that I, they're in my closest community. They've all transitioned out. They've all had their ups and downs. They've all tried to move into the civilian life in a positive mental way. And those are the guys that I hang out with. So to go to a. stump muster and see a whole bunch of... I've never even been to a seal reunion.

That was never just my thing. I'd rather go spend holiday weekends with my family as opposed to going... I'll see you at work on Tuesday, dude. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yeah. No, I've never gone back there.

No, I did my time. I was happy to do it, but I'm happy I'm done. I don't feel the need to go back, right? I left on my terms. I don't feel like I need to go... I'm good. I'm happy. I did my time.

Was it tough for you? getting over the uh because up until you went on shons like you had done jack's podcast a few times filmed from the back of your head blacked my better side um when you were doing those though that was mark owen right is it was like yeah okay yeah how only reason i chose the matt besinette yeah out of the shadows on this is because i had to right i needed to it was part of the story it was like hey my real name's been leaked for sure the only thing that was not out was my face The only thing was out was my face. Was it a tough decision for you to make the intentionally be the one to, and obviously

a great platform to do it on with Sean's, but was there any hesitation in being able to do so or just kind of this, we have to do this. Sean, talk me into it. I was like, hey, Sean, I'd like to come on and promote my book and, you know, can you not show my face? He's like, no, you have to show my face. Like, Sean, can we talk about this? He's like, this, if you wanted to sell books and if you want the podcast to be a success, you've

just come on it's been 10 years get over it and we had a conversation about it he's like what value add do you have by continuing i'm like so we had a whole conversation i was like okay he gave you good advice if if i need to come out of the shadows own you know i was played by the mark owen stuff if i did speaking events it was mark owen and and no photos allowed whatever like because the story's not about this it's about mark owen and whatever he's fictional um Oh, yeah. Has it been almost a sense of relief to not have to balance between those two?

And you can just be this? Or has it what you thought it would be stepping out of the shadows like that? I very much enjoy the position I put myself in, right? Like some people enjoy the being out there. There's other people you've interviewed that like all of that. I don't. I chose for 10 years to avoid that very strategically. and yeah, judge me for my actions.

I did not want to get out in front of this. And, okay, look at me. I wanted to tell the story and be left alone. And then I got in the fight and had to get through the fight. And then that's the only reason I popped up back on the radar was, okay, I got to get through this fight. And this is probably the best way to help kick that off. How did you explain to the 60 Minutes people you needed an intricate disguise? They're like, so.

We're going to do this. I used, again, all very early on, I used my fucking attorney that gave me all the bad advice. He was Dalton Fury's attorney, Dalton Fury, the Delta guy. He used the disguise on 60 minutes when he did his interview. Yes. And so he was like, oh, yeah, I helped Dalton disguised. We could do this. And so when we sat down with 60 minutes, I was like, hey, I don't want to look like myself.

I want some anonymity here. And I'm like just a fake beard and sunglasses. It makes me look like a homeless person. Maybe we could try something different. And so they had the disguise people come in and put it on. And it had to have been very bizarre. Yes, very. Bizarre enough to do it twice.

Yeah. I actually did it a couple more times for different speaking events. Did you really? For large groups because I've never had my, I tried very hard to not have my photo taken for 10 years. moving around in the public space, I do it smartly. So I would limit audience size or whatever. I'd take people's phones. Like, you can't take photos.

I don't want my photo taken. And so for bigger audiences, for certain things, I'd be like, all right, if you want me to do it, you'll put the disguise back on and then we don't have to worry about photos. Man. Okay. Never thought about that doing a public speaking event. I don't know. The, I'm in small town where I live now. Yeah.

I'm not going to name where. It's definitely good not to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm at like this little dive restaurant and have dinner with my wife would go home. Like the next day on Instagram, I get this DM from this, this random dude. And he's like, hey, man, I don't want to be weird. But did I see you at this restaurant in such and such and such location? yesterday and I'm like, motherfucker.

So that's the stuff that I don't necessarily like because I very much enjoyed the fact that nobody knows anything. I walk around everybody and it's nice. Right. It is nice. Our good friend Jack Carr, right, hit the shot show with him this year and he can't go five feet without six million people. And they talk to him and have no clue who I am.

So it's great. Like, Jack, you go take care of that. I'll go. I'm going to hang out. I move there as you just grab people's phones and take He'll take pictures and that way you're then you're out of it immediately. That's smooth. Yeah.

That's the move. Yeah. Oh, hey, did you want a picture? Hand me your phone. Yeah, I got it. I got it. Totally. Yeah.

It solves the problem. No, that's good. You're just immediately out of it and they don't even think about you. Correct. Yeah, you're just the polite friend that takes the photo. Oh, Jack. Man, he's crushed it. He's done great.

It is awesome to see. I hope he gets some downtime. I feel like he writes when he's asleep. I feel like he writes when he's awake. I feel like he has. I don't think he gets much downtime. I don't think he does. either.

Yeah. No. He's, he's a very, very busy man. I can't wait to see the next terminal list that pops.

No, they're all going to be great. I mean, he's proven to be a spectacular author. Does that just go on for the rest of your life?

I think so. For guys like that, I mean, that's the world that he wants to be in and has put himself in and is certainly putting a lot of work and effort into it and doing very well in that space.

So respect to him. Right. Everybody used to choose what they want to do and how they want to go about it. Seriously. Yeah, he openly said, and openly says he only wants to do two things. He wanted to be a seal and an author. That's it. He kept that second one to himself while he was in.

Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, you probably know him pretty well. He was one of the best most well-read seals. Oh, yeah. Right. Most seals don't read books. I mean, some of us too.

Well, maybe we did in, you're right, right. Maybe in middle school, but active duty. You guys read less and less where Jack was always the guy reading tons of books and, you know, a big thinker. And I think it's perfect one to punch. How old do you know? 51. 51. Yeah.

Fucking old. How does that feel? Old. No, I don't know. Ages in the head, man. Age is in the head. I feel healthier now. It sounds like real, though.

I've gotten, I've gotten, I went through my, my fat post-Navy stage unhealthy. I've had five neck surgeries now. Yeah. I fucked up my neck really bad in the crash. A couple artificial discs, a fusion. So that's helped a ton, just medically. Yeah. Are you able to attach that, obviously, to disability?

I mean, those are directly service-related. I've got my disability rating, but the VA did none of the work. I went to the VA for a year and a half. Yeah. Trying to get an MRI. And all I got fed was pain meds and never got to an MRI. That's rough. The last time I came back with a bag full of pain meds, I'm like, I'm not doing this.

So I just didn't take any. And just dealt with what I was dealing with. Through a friend of a friend in San Diego or in L.A., connect me with a neck doctor out there, former Air Force train guy. He's like, yeah, Biss, come on out, I'll see you. Show up at his office. I got x-rays. I got an MRI. And I met the doctor in like two hour time span.

And he's like, dude, you're C4 and C5 or not looking good. They're millimeters offset. Like you hit the speed bump the wrong way. You're probably not going to walk. I need to fuse that immediately. So like a week, 10 days later. Oh, damn. Yeah.

I mean, three through the front or a fusion. Two artificial discs on either side of that. So he's reconstructed a lot. He started a foundation to work on other veterans. I've connected him with three other guys who were on my helicopter. that he's worked on them now. He's worked on other guys from Team 5. Damn.

So he's a doctor who gives back. And so that was a key part of my kind of my medical health transition, right? As he was working on my neck and getting me physically fit there. That was about the same time I went through the brain treatment stuff. I was about the same time I cut back on my alcohol and, you know, started eating healthier, working out again, just all the needed things. Yeah. And yeah, so healthier, happier, all good.

What if the cows aren't enough? Do you think it was the last time you fucked with a cow? There's a lot to do. Never. Well, I eat them. Come out and visit. What if it's not enough for you? Are you hoping that that will be enough?

And that's what you want to occupy your time with? I'd like to think I have plenty of things to do. I don't think I'm going to be bored outside of the cows, right? making money in other ways, business ideas, other opportunities. I'm pursuing a million different things. Those aren't going to stop. And actually, when we're off this, I've got a something we need to talk to you about business-wise. Viagra?

No. It's this new idea. More about archery. It's this pill you chew on. Less Viagra, more archery. Okay. Anyway. Maybe there's a tie over there.

I'm not sure of, but. Arrows do have a shaft. Interesting. Yeah, I'm not going to pursue that. Yeah. Serial entrepreneur, like, clearly it's not just the cows aren't going to pay all the bills. So, yeah, I'll do other things. But the cows are a nice escape, right?

For sure. The cows, I get to go to my farm and I get to their, it's not people that talk back and helps me. I only ask because I have found, I don't even know. The easiest answer when people ask me what I do is I say, own a coffee shop. because it's the easiest one to talk about. If you say, oh, I host a podcast, they say, what's it about? And then I have to say, I don't know. It depends on the guest.

And then they say, who is your favorite guest? Then it's a follow-on. And it's not that I mind it. They ask questions that are, you know, when somebody says, who is your favorite guest? Like, dude, I've had 500 of these at this point. That's tough. That's not fair. You know.

So I don't know what I necessarily do, but I know I like doing a variety of different things. I don't know if I'd call that being a serial entrepreneur, but I enjoy. the brief attention in certain areas and consistently trying to learn new stuff and figure it out. I like being challenged in new areas and learning things. Figuring it out. Yeah. Because I've never done cows, right? That's a new thing.

I got to go learn. I do not want to go back to what I've always done. The last thing you're going to see me doing is teaching shooting, right? I'm not interested in doing that. I want to evolve outside of that world. So yeah. And whether it's cows or something else, there will be. A million different things, right?

Yeah. And now, honestly, my kids are a lot older, so I'm putting energy and effort into them. How were you able to stay connected with them as you were going through this pressure cooker? Or was there an aspect of time where you needed to reconnect with them? Mine were super young when I was in. Like my daughter, I kissed her in a crib the last appointment I did in 2010 and zero recollection of my military time. Maybe my oldest son remembers a little bit of coming and going. Yeah.

So I didn't have to, that would be, can you imagine our old job and you had teenagers? No. Or, no, no, no, no, no. I can't. You'd be a phantom in their life. Yeah. You'd have to reconnect with them as an adult, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mine were seven and four when I got out. So my daughter knew long trips or short trips, deployment or training trips. And, you know, she knew if we went to Home Depot, she saw somebody with a beard. It was probably daddy's friend or something. You know what I mean? Virginia Beach, small town. Totally. Got to be the team guy.

But no. So got out, got divorced, all that. I'd live in the same very close proximity to them. Still now you do? Yeah. Awesome. So very good relationship. Lots of all the right steps were taken at the right time.

Thankfully, to your point, had they been teenagers when I was in? No freaking way. How would you be home enough to even? It wouldn't be. Yeah. And then when you were home to be able to put any energy into them that they need. So no, I'm very happy looking back when I got out in the timeline from them, from them from a family aspect of being able to put energy into them during, right? Because once they're out of high school, which they now are, they're flying on their own now.

And that's that's the that's your area of impact. And once once that area of impact leaves, you've got very small windows of any impact. Dude, it's such a wild phase. I have my middle son is turning 21 next month. My daughter just turned 18. My oldest is 23. Wild. How long after you got out did you end up getting a divorce?

I was getting it before I got out. It just, that was that was a that was in process for a while. My move is a few years later, and I've noticed that, you know, statistics are sometimes accurate, sometimes inaccurate. Are they online? Because they're always accurate if they're online. I feel that way when I fight them. Or I'll make up studies to support my opinions. There's the families that don't survive the military service. And then there's this weird jump where about two years later, they fall apart there. And if you think about it, it's probably because they're spending more time with each other. And I can only speak from the community we came from.

They're now actually spending more time with the person than they were married with before. Like, who are you? I don't like you. Yeah. I forget to see you in seconds before. Now I got to see you in minutes. Way too many. And let's be honest.

Coming back from that op temple, you're a disruption to the life that they've created to be able to facilitate while you're gone. And now you're back and you want to be like, I have to be a hero. I'm the hero of my own story and I demand to be the hero of yours as well too. And then the marriage just goes whack. But yeah, it's about two years afterwards. It spikes up there again. That's kind of there were my marriage wasn't doing great when I got out of the military,

but we divorced shortly after that. A couple more years beyond that. But it was all the residual things that we didn't deal with. The nucleus of all called the merry-go-round of things that we would, I don't want to say, fight but ruminate over all was the origin of that time period and yeah the more time with each other it's like oh maybe we just don't like each other that much i think how for me personally right that job is gonna change you somehow some way um in lots of ways and that's you're changing your spouse may not or maybe they're changing in their own ways but but you are maybe arguably changing

in more dynamic ways because of the environment you're in. And that's tough. I can remember coming home and like the biggest arguments I'd have with the X were what the sprinkler setting was going to be. Because I'm like, 40 minutes twice a week. Yeah. More water gets the roots. Yeah.

She'd be like, well, I think 30 minutes, three times a week. You know, she's like, fine, set it. So I'd set it. And I'd leave again in a day. And I'd come back a week later and it's gone. And it's switched back. And you're like, stupid. little things that and then you're just you're not connecting and I just I found myself just moving

further and further and it was really hard to reconnect and and again it was arguably my fault because I continued to raise my hand and continued to volunteer here and I never volunteered to just stay here I volunteered to go here and so if you lay a resentment into that man you are loading up a poison pill towards the end. It's a tough one to get over. How do we prepare people for what you said that that job will change you? Because I agree. I don't think it has to make you a worse version of yourself. I think in many ways it can make you a better version, but it will change you. I wish I had an older mentor, someone, anybody in my career path that was above me, and I had a few, don't think that I didn't have any, but I wish I had a few more good mentors. The, the,

could come back and say, share a few words of wisdom. And, and, but they'd have to be guys that I respected enough to listen to. Were you mentoring anybody when you got out in that role that you had looked for? Well, I mentioned it earlier that the young kid getting in. It was just past Corman school. He's going, that's where I'm like, hey, don't always volunteer for the trips. Yeah. Right.

He's young and he's married already. I'm like, oh, strike one. You already got married. All right. Well, if you're already married, well, let's, let's not make more mistakes. Yeah. Let's keep that marriage. But there's, there's some things you need to.

think about and your ego is going to be telling you you want to go to that next school and you want to go on this trip and you want to do all these things but you need to understand there's going to be side effects that come with that that are going to that are going to counter your true love know that yeah calculate that into your equations and your decision making and then make smart decisions but i never i never really had too many people lay that out for me um because honestly there wasn't that war going on before we got i was going to say they may not have known I think a lot of this stuff is still, they're figuring it out. It's not a lack of desire to try to figure it out.

Some of the stuff is just evolving at the speed of war. I think though too early on, a lot of our senior leadership in the community hadn't seen any combat. So now I remember early on Iraq is when Iraq kicked off, what was the motto? And it might have been a team three thing. When we turned over with team three in Kuwait, it was never have so few.

been led by so many, so poorly. Wait, wait, say that again. Never have so few been led by so many so poorly. And you looked around the seal base in Kuwait, and there was more worn-offs or fives and fours and all these crusty old team guys. No, no disrespect, no judgment, but they were there to get their war on.

And okay, great, but that ended real quick, and they moved up in the ranks. Were they there to get their war on? or were they there to get their war award so they could advance? Both? Both? I've never saw, I mean, I don't know what does. It depends on who they were.

Yeah. It was top heavy at times. And I'm speaking specifically at the very beginning because I think everybody thought the war was going to be over three weeks. And this is, 100.5% of people. We got to get our end now because it's going to be over. And then it just stretched and stretched and stretched. And so a lot of those senior moved up in ranks.

So they stopped deploying. and my brand new guy on my first deployment. 9-11 happens. You want to talk about sitting in a freaking home-run position to then keep doing what I did. Yeah. I was there for OIF one. And I don't know, probably OEF, very low single digits as well, too.

It's interesting. I'd love to get your take on the military award system. Oh, God. No comment. Well, here's the thing. Early on, I do believe, and I think it's fair to say, that most people thought that it was not going to be 20 years. That will just say that. For a war?

20 years. Yes. It wasn't going to be 20 years. Yeah. I remember, and it wasn't leadership talking, but I do remember conversations, people saying, and oh, I have better get it in now because it's probably going to be over Thursday. You know. So awards come out, though, at the end of that. And I'm not here to judge the award system, but in my opinion, and I can only speak for my opinion,

the award system started getting broken because certain awards were associated more with rank than actual actions, which made them more competitive on advancement boards. And so then every subsequent person, if that becomes the new standard to be competitive, it now detaches itself. Especially for which ranks? Specifically, I'm talking about officers. You said it, not me. I am always speaking from my experience.

That's all I can speak from. Yeah. I witnessed firsthand awards, very high awards that have very specific guidance that have very specific guidance that have to be awarded for singular acts involving combat action. Yep. Being awarded to people that I was on deployment with and knew where they were they were. were. And I'm not trying to say my service was any different than theirs, but I'm also not trying to say I was deserving of that award either. But when that award is issued to leadership, what does that then do and what does that say to everybody coming after that? If you don't do that or close to it,

you're not going to compete. You're not going to compete. Career-wise. And so then it breaks the system. Yep. I didn't join for awards. Nor did I. You didn't join for awards. Most guys I served with and actually went to combat with. The only award I ever received in person was the one post-Bin-Lond mission. Every other award I got, I think I got just set in my cage at work. Like, just whatever.

We had a- Did they do a big award ceremony for you guys, for the raid guys? Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't say big. It was official, like, yeah, it was a very official fly somewhere, a whole bunch of brass was there

and everybody got a better award. What did you guys get? Silver Stars? Yeah. I'd say deserved. The, we had a commanding officer, squadron commander. I was not on this mission. The, he's on the op.

They get into troops in contact. Very good friend of mine. There's like four dudes flanking their formation. He's, he's at the far right flank and happens to see them flanking them. He maneuvers on them and eliminates all four. Very heroic, very strategic, life-saving for the group. They write them up for a silver star. Very deserving.

Actions were pretty gnarly. Commanding officer. Because I was the ground force commander and overall responsible and he got a silver star, I need one too. He wrote himself up for the silver. The guidance award. He got it. So specific.

I know. But they wrote around it enough. And I saw. the award to exactly your point. I saw that game being played by lots and lots of people enlisted an officer because it did help with, well, if commanding officer so-and-so led so many missions and his troop did this many missions and had this many awards under hit. Well, he must be a better strategic leader and he should be promoted. This guy had half the missions and half the awards. Well, he didn't do it. It was wintertime. Yes, but that's not what the, that's not what I know. I know. And,

That is why from the beginning, it's never about awards. It's never about self. Anything. It's about just get the job done, do the thing. Have you ever read a BV from like Korea? No. It sounds like a Medal of Honor citation. I bet.

Well, alone in a trench, batting away grenades with a shovel for 48 hours. Right, right. Out of ammo. Navy achievement medal, no V. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They were handing out, I mean, a bronze star with no V.

Yeah. It was like fucking hard candy for everybody now, right? Like, oh, do it up. Oh, I think there's a ton of people with bronzes with no V. Which for people listening, that is the highest award that is allowed to be given for, if it's without a V, your certificate will say for meritorious achievement. If it is with a V, it'll open with for heroic achievement. But above that, they're all, they are by doctrine supposed to be for actions under combat. The Bronze Star is the highest one that can go either direction.

So you got a lot of people like, oh, I'll get a bronze, but for leadership or whatever. Yeah. I really don't care. Yeah. That was just interesting. It was something that I saw. And I even remember it in the moment thinking, man, if you guys start this, there's no end. Do you have a shadow box type set up with your like awards and your Trident and all that stuff?

You know, a lot of guys like retire and get to like the wall at home with the flag and the Trident and their awards and everything in there. I don't know where any of that stuff is. I've never done that because I again, to your point with the awards, I'm like, I don't care. I didn't join for that. That's great. I've got some. Yeah. No, I have a three ring binder that has like school certificates and stuff.

And I think I have... Those are more important than the awards. Yeah. Well, I have the, you know, the little folding thing. They give you the award. Like, it has a little picture of it is. And then the little... I have that in the three binder.

I pulled a piece of the paper out. And I did that while I was still... I'm glad that I did because my kids have never asked to see it, but maybe one day they will. I'd be like, make sense of this if you can. You know, like, go ahead. But as far as the physical awards themselves or any memorabilia,

I actually think one of the few things I have is the gold's water in line behind you. which was my departing gift. And other than that, that was, I found that at our lake house in the garage, at a box. Yeah. And I was thankful because I was looking for it

because I knew I wanted it to be there. Yeah. And the paddle that the team five game. Those are the two things that actually that I have physical items. I never got a paddle from five. Just left without one or whatever. Just, I don't know. And then Team five,

I got the plaque when I left, or damn neck, when I left with my name is spelled. And when they handed it to me, they're like, oh, we notice. I'm like, we'll get it fixed. I'm like, no, no, no. I think it's a power move. Just leave it with one T.

It's a power move for sure. So, yeah, again, I didn't do it for awards, accolades. I did it for the boys and to do it. I agree. I did it for exactly the same reason. But I also, again, if you go back and if what you care about the most is the community and the integrity, you have to have conversations about the awards. You have to talk about what.

can happen if it detaches itself from what they're supposed to be and becomes a metric of a leadership position. I'm not saying that always happens, but I have a hard time finding people who were around it who say, yeah, I never saw that. Right. I will say, you know, because I'd been around for as long as I had and seen a lot of the change, right, I was only an E8 when I got out. Only an E8, yeah, there's only one more to go. Well, but there's a ton of E9s floating around the command. So I'm, you know, I'm still ending eight. Um, I'm sorry. I just lost my train of thought.

What were we just talking about? Awards. Awards. Because you had been there for so long and you had seen the ups and downs is what you were saying. Oh my gosh. I just lost my complete train of thought. I'm sorry. Probably because you have TBI type stuff.

I'm not cutting that shit out at all. This is the cost of going to war. Where was I going with that? Sorry. We were just talking about it. I mean, the bottom line is I wanted to talk to you about it because I do believe that the integrity of the community is of the utmost importance. and you have to have those conversations about the reality of it. Conversations.

I was getting more and more verbal with some of the, my disdain for a lot of the award stuff or a lot of the other stuff that was happening around the command, right? Or just in the community in general. And a lot of the guys that I'd served so long with were getting more vocal as well. and we'd call out a lot of these ridiculous things that we saw. And then it finally got to the point where there was a lot more pushback for anybody being mouty. And we're like, okay, we've been around long enough. We can get away with it, but we can only get away with it to a certain point.

And we'd always try the best to kind of poke the bear and poke the leadership. They were like, hey, the enlisted guys are watching and we see this. But eventually, you know, we just get overrun and they do their thing. It is a rock paper rank world in that community. Yeah. So again, you can only push as far as hard as you can. And again, I could have put in for OCS. I could have gone and been an officer.

I could have been involved in those conversations and added context there. But I chose not to. So based off my position, I can only push it so far and then go back to work. Yeah. We think the hardest thing you did was during your career or in your perspective, from your perspective. What was the most difficult? Like operationally, mission-wise, mentally?

What either or? What was the most difficult thing that you think you were able to accomplish while you were in? Or that they asked you to do? To, I mean, maybe looking back now, I see it as probably pretty challenging,

but to stay as positive and to stay as fired up and to stay as motivated and to stay as all the things. I tried to very much stay on the positive side of things, right? It's a slippery slope. The hardest thing looking back was to stay positive as positive as I could be through 13 straight pumps. It's a lot, man. Yeah. Yeah. Because you see things and then they don't get, you see things in a different way

from different perspectives. Yeah. Talked about that all day. And I think the hardest thing looking back was staying positive through that, continuing to learn and evolve through it, not getting disgruntled, right? There's plenty of old dudes floating around the community that are just old curmudgins. And I saw those looking up. And I was like, I'm not doing that. I'll get out before I reached that level. That's fair. So that was probably the hardest. I loved the work. So that wasn't hard. It's hard not to love the work. It was busy. The work was good, right? Like, man, you're like living the dream, right?

Everything I read about. I left at the time where it was ramping up for you guys. I mean, we were busy in relative terms, but I think 06 and beyond until probably 09 was substantially busier operational tempo-wise. Just the savviness of the enemy as well, too, them changing their tactics, information passing back and forth. Yeah.

I feel like there was a slowdown come. 2010 it was slowing down a little bit 11, 12. It was just a slow nose dive. Yeah, it's, and I talked to a lot of my, all my best friends are guys that I served with that whole chunk. And we talk about it. We're like, you know, there's not too, too many guys in the overall community that literally operated that long.

Yeah. And you had to have almost gone to dev group, you know, because if I'd stayed at five, they would have pulled me out and sent me to training cell or something after two deployments or three or whatever it is. But to stay operational for 13,

I don't know, it just adds a different perspective and there's not too, too many guys. I feel like you should have augmented the squadron for one more operation and not had a helicopter crash on your last one. Oh, that's good, I'm good. Just put me on the C2 element over here.

Just drop me off and come get me. We'll just go out with a thumbs up. You guys went out with a huge, thumbs up, but like just we'll skip the helicopter wreck. Yeah. No, it was a good. I mean, if you're going to go out on top, that's a hell of a one to end it on for sure. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I mean, we got, we get very, very lucky. Yeah. For sure. What makes you happy in life now? Hmm. My family, friends, fun, and faith. Right. That's a good answer, man. Not. not talking about old work drama, right?

I'm talking about new exciting, fun stuff what people are up to now. Sweet. Creating new things, what they're doing. We've had a ton of veteran buddies that are getting out. They're all doing new fun, exciting things. It's cool to see the guys reinventing themselves. Those that can and those that choose to.

Yeah. I'm excited to see, you know. For the ones you can, and it gets all personal choice with the trajectory you put your life on. And some people, I think, I've heard them say this. and it breaks my heart.

Well, I don't know how to do anything else. And I understand why they say that, but also you can teach yourself. And I say that as a barely functioning human being from an intellectual capacity that has stumbled their way through enough things in life. If I can do it, you can do it too. You are going to fail.

It's going to be embarrassing at times. I think it's the easy out. Come on. Team guys, since you made it through buds, all you've done is evolved through your career and learn new things. So to then leave the Navy and be like, oh, I can't evolve. And that's the only thing I know.

You're like, you know, not saying that's an excuse, but I think it's the easy out to just like, well, I don't want to go evolve. I don't want to go learn anything. I just, I just want to do this. And no judgment. That's easy. You've worked hard to earn the right to go do what you do. Zero. I, I, you and others just don't want to do that.

We chose another route. Well, there's also a shelf life on the tactical prowess, you know. So for guys, my shelf life expired a while ago. As did mine. And I don't have any desire to. extend that show flight. And again, no shade towards the people who do. But that evolution of what's going to be next will come from them at some point. Because you will, you will. I got to be honest. Do you watch these drone videos from Ukraine? It is an entire different warfare, dude. It's a different

level. It is not what we did. Future war is drone on drone. It is not what we are used to. But here's the craziest thing about Ukraine. It's the cutting edge of electronic warfare drone on drone. and still they're fighting in trenches like they were in World War I. Yeah. So there's two, like, so is that the solution to drone battle as we get shotguns and go into trenches? Which, holy shit, hard pass by the way. Yeah. No, that's my point.

I'm glad I'm expired. Yeah. And the drone stuff, even harder pass. Yeah. I don't. And you know, you see recruiting videos now that used to be in, they'd be like the guy pulling the nods down. Now it's an FPVE going. Yeah.

And now he's flying a drone. Like I said, it has evolved a lot. and I'm happy with my time. I'm happy I evolved out. There's a amount of evolution going on that I can't keep up with. There's new, smarter, faster, way more tech savvy kids

going through that pipeline. Have you ever seen the videos over in like China and Taiwan where they'll have a dragon flying through the air because there's thousands of drones that are synchronized? Yeah. What does that look like?

First off, keep it looking like a dragon because that'll terrify everybody. Yeah, right? But how, how, how do you combat that? I mean, I'm sure we have people thinking about that stuff. Oh, boy. Yeah.

Damn, Michael. Now, first off, if you could get the front of this to spew fire out of some of those. But like, come on. You're telling me that if you launched that over a hill in Afghanistan, that that's not going to have a psychological impact. That scare the shit out of everybody in the valley for sure. If I could call that in for close air support, just to fuck with somebody.

Be like, all right. Send in the flying dragon. No, dude. That's pre-assault fires. But it doesn't have to land. It just flies over the battlefield just to scare people. Just up the valley and have a cruise back. Maybe one pass over the target.

If that didn't make the bad guys run away, I don't know. Point being way over my head. Totally. Look at this shit. Yeah. You're telling me there's, oh my God. I mean, yeah, that's just weaponized that. And I'm sure this is dated technology and ability.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I'm, again, happy I did my time. Happy I rotated out. Happy I live kind of in the middle of nowhere. Because when the power grid goes down, bro. Yeah.

I know, man. Where can people find your book? We've been at it for three hours. I'm on my website. It'll be available on Amazon to service that market. But Amazon takes a huge piece of that. What do they take percentage-wise? A very large amount.

More than 30? Depends on different percentages for my audiobook or written. But do they take it because they produce the book? Or are you talking about having them just physically? They're just physically the distribution for Amazon markets. Because everybody, Amazon's such a big powerhouse, right? So they want their pound of flesh. I've tried to sell directly through my website.

So matbusonet.com, people can get it. And then that helps me the most because it's no Amazon fees. Audio book? Audio book. And this time I actually read the audiobooks. The last one I had the voice actor. Yeah. I was like, all right, this is personal enough.

I want to read this one. Gives you an appreciation for people who read other people's books, especially if they go into a blind because I did my audio book as well. Did you? Okay. And at least I did it right here. but at least I wrote the thing and I know where I could put a pause or some reflection

but for a voice actor coming in blind. Well, then the voice actors have to do all the other voices and I'm like, no offense, but I'm not playing every other voice either. That's gonna be the worst audio book ever. If you want me busting in the master chief. Oh, yeah. No, no, not. So yeah, I did some stuff and then we used AI to do the other voices.

Sweet. So, yeah, that'll be. So the main portal, Matt Bissonette.com. Matt Bissonette.com. And then on socials, are you active-ish peripheral? I am, but I hate all social media and all that stuff. I do it. I have a Matt Bissanette official, I think, Instagram.

Yeah. Those are, that's it. That's my two. That's my one social media outlet. I'm not on Twitter. I'm not on anywhere else. You're not missing. I do a horrible job servicing my Instagram.

stuff. I like it because I've got a ton of different kids that have hit me up. They're like, hey, I'm thinking to go into Buzz. What do you think? And I've engaged with a lot of them. And so that's been a fun way to actually be able to engage with some young folks looking to serve. Otherwise, how would they find me? How would they ask those questions? And so there's an actual outlet and I actually try hard to answer all those. So imagine if we had had, I didn't meet my first team guy until I was in the military. Really? I did was from Santa Cruz, California. Traditionally not a hallmark of military enlistment.

San Bernard servers. I mean, it just, I didn't, I mean, I had an idea. But the first people, it was a dive motivator at Great Lakes. Yeah. There's a guy who was rotating through there. I can't even fathom having these anxiety rectangles in your pocket, but you can occasionally use it to reach out to a guy and say, what was it like for you? I've got none of that.

Yeah. I get a ton of those guys that hit me up. I think that's important. I do my best to answer. as well too. Back to your point of giving back and with your book and writing. And I'm like, okay, if I'm in this position where a person wants to reach out and ask a legitimate question, I'm not going to be rude and ignore them. I'm going to try my best to. Yeah. And I say I'm obligated to tell the true. Not just the shiny stuff, but hey, this is probably what you're seeing,

but consider that here's the shadow of what that could be. Your decision to make, I'm not talking you into it or out of it. Yeah. But let's give you as much information so you can make a total decision that will serve your life better. That's what I go for. Okay. Question for you and your book. Fire away. Did you go through a...

It was cleared. Review process. It was cleared. How was that for you? Pretty easy. Was it? Yes. Did it take a while?

No. No? It did not. Did you have a back channel way in? It's hard to say. Mm-hmm. You know some people may listen to this. I knew the right people.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I'm glad you didn't get. And I get it.

I read half years this morning already. Yeah. You don't get into any crazy stuff. Literally like, hey, this is how I lost my trident. I did notice you have a picture of a Trident in there. And when I went through my review process, they were like, you have to, they wouldn't allow me to do the Trident. Like, really?

Oh, yeah. Are they where you can get one on Amazon? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you got to remember, too, that through the process of the community coming after me for writing the book, they try to remember. tried to take my trident like I'd been out of the Navy four years five years they tried to after you were retroactively as part of my punishment for no easy day and all the other nonsense they were like

oh yeah we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna retroactively pull this trident oh that's just a straight if you move well that's what I was dealing with for as long as I was and my attorney's like they can't do that you're out you can't take a warfare insignia after you've already left but this was this was how bad they were trying to be like hey if you do this we're going to come after you so So yeah. Greener pastures. Fun, fun, fun. Greener pastures.

Old news. Onward and upward. I like it. Cool. What do you want to close it out with? Like I said, we've been out for three hours. No.

Hey, just thanks, thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it. Open invite. Anytime. Definitely.

I did not come here to bring up any drama. I don't think you did. The stuff. I don't like name and names. I just want to talk about what I remember. What I know was audio recorded. All the stuff. we talked about, and then I want to leave it and move on.

I don't think it's ever going to be clarified at a level institutionally. I think there's enough guys that are coming out. You know, I mentioned it on the Sean Ryan interview, the Admiral McCraven Netflix documentary, right? I got to talk to Admiral McRaven about that. Yeah. I was like, you know, sir, what's the authority? What's the approvals that you got to sit on a Netflix documentary and talk about this?

How does that work? Did you point to this color at his store? Yeah. They're right here. You don't have these? I can make my own decisions. Actually, these days, he'd be like right here in this. See, he, yeah, he's like, you know, Biss, I explained to him.

I said, look, this Netflix producer, he's trying to get any of the other operators that participated to sit down and talk. And for years now, they've all been worried about sitting down and talking because they've seen what's happened to me. but if if you're okay with it and just to sit down on Netflix and I think Rob was on the thing I'm like well is it cool if why don't we get everybody I'm sure I could make some calls and there would be some people who'd more than well income share their story if you said it was okay and he immediately was like oh oh Matt you know nobody should feel obligated do this Michael they don't feel obligated nobody said the word obligated nobody felt obligated but if you were doing it sir and leading from the front then people feel like it's okay now is this you open They want to care. They want to share their story. And can you help me with this? Help me justify the decision making my head, whether I'm going to participate in this interview or not. He didn't help me with anybody. He's like, oh, I'll transfer you to somebody I know inside Warcom. And of course, I talked to a few people inside Warcom. And they never once gave me advice on how to deal with Netflix. They just wouldn't engage with me because Warcom didn't want to be seen engaging with this event. So it's there will be others and it's only a matter of time, right? If we're all allowed to have these conversations, I don't multiple, right?

The point man, or the seal that I mentioned that was the breacher and made it to the top of the second set of stairs, right? He's going to come share his story at some point, I'm sure. And I think slowly through different people, you will hear enough to make your own decisions and people can make them out. That's what it'll come down to. It'll be the totality of the information. And as with a lot of things, let's say there's a road and you have to pick the side of the road.

If things are trending in all in this direction, the totality or that, then, yeah, people can make their mind up based off of that. That's the world we lived in. I agree. Who's going to uptake the information enough to actually make a smart decision? Or I feel like in today's day and age, if you're just, you're stuck on one side, you're always stuck on that side. In politics, I think it's that way for sure. Very team sport. Yeah.

which I know very little about the politics aspect. Cool, man. Hell yeah. Thanks for making the trip out. I appreciate it. It was a process. Cal spells not easy. It's not hard, though.

I mean, you also live in a small place and this is, your origin story and where you were landing were two small places, so there's some hops in between to get to the small place. That's it. Well, I appreciate it, brother. Yeah, of course, man. Thank you. Yeah.