EverydaySpy Podcast - He Survived Navy Special Warfare, Blackwater, and Secret Intel Ops | Trevor Fortner

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

Find your Spy Superpower: https://yt.everydayspy.com/4ffYFzN Learn more from Trevor: https://everydayspy.com/trevor Trevor Fortner is a Navy special warfare veteran, Blackwater private military contractor, and seasoned intel consultant. His professional journey is a wild ride, from hanging out the back of an amphibious assault ship to fast-roping into combat zones in a polo shirt. Humble and wildly successful, you'll love learning from Trevor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How often do you have to touch an explosive? More often than you used to talk. We were off the coast of an Asian country and they said, hey, there's a person coming on a boat to collect explosives. So I'm standing down there in my Navy Dungary uniform. If you ever seen those? This single man in a rubber boat comes in the back of my ship. And he looks like a Greek god. He's got a satcom in there, dive gear, weapon system, and he just gets out of the boat.

It's like, hey, load my stuff up. Where's a chow hall? I can't take you to chowel. I have explosives. He's like, they're mine. Now it's my responsibility. So we go up and we eat, we get back down to his boat. I said, mate, do you mind if I ask you?

What do you do? He's like, I'm a Navy diver. I'm like, Navy has divers? Like, I thought salvage diving. Yeah. That's all I've ever seen. Yeah. He's like, yeah, explosive ordinance disposal.

That's how I started looking at EOD. How you went from whoever you were to the man who's teaching the presidential guard of Abu Dhabi how to protect their president. So we'll start with thought. Trevor, I'm super pumped to have you here. I've been wanting to have this conversation for a long time because you and I have a number of things in common. Now, there's also some awesomely unique things about you that I want to get into. But one of the main things that we have in common is that we both know what it's like to serve as private contractors abroad supporting foreign governments.

Now, for you, you spent some time as a trainer to the presidential guard in Abu Dhabi. Yes. What I would love to do is give folks. a little bit of a background on how you went from whoever you were to the man who's teaching the Presidential Guard of Abu Dhabi how to protect their president. Yeah, for sure. So we'll start with the last three decades. I'll give you a high level overview, and then we can back up into this particular organizations that I worked for. So 1993, I graduated high school, joined the U.S. Navy.

How horrible does it sound to say that? 1993 I graduated from high school on the flight yesterday I was coming up here and uh almost vomited in my mouth I said that out loud and then last night I got in the taxi and um the individual driving was also my age and I said wow what a significant difference he was talking about his upbringing really interesting conversation but it just highlighted the difference of how we look present ourselves at the same age and the completely different past that we've taken. So yeah, it's a mouthful to think, 1993. You know, it's so crazy, though, I mean, you just said something that struck me recently.

So I don't know if this is relevant for you, but as I've been getting older, I'm 44 right now, turned 45 this month, actually. And as I've been getting older, I've been really starting to grow a relationship with mortality that I never really had in the past. and it's for nothing else other than my age. Like I worked for CIA. I was in the Air Force. Like I've been in combat zones.

I never thought about my mortality then. Yes. But now for whatever reason with a couple of kids and like a steady business, now I start thinking about it. It doesn't make any sense to me. But it makes me appreciate these little moments. It does. So much more.

Did you, just because you said mortality, I've been reflecting on this for a couple of weeks, not really ready to make a decision, but it would be an interesting conversation to have with you. Do you remember the guy that wrote, I want to say it's the book, Thinking Fast? Thinking Fast and Slow. Yeah, so he died recently.

Did he really? Like, that's mind-boggling. What? So I've got to send you this man's name and look it up. He kept it really private. I think he was around in his 70s. A phenomenal human being, Nobel Prize winner, something to do with economics.

I turned the economic community on its head. He made a decision to end his life on his own terms while he was fully functioning. I have totally had that thought. And so I'm, I don't want to say because my family's going to watch this. I don't want to say I'm contemplating my own ending. But I've always said, I never want to be an imbecile and have my children look at me deteriorating and go through that process. I've had two grandparents die in the last four months.

And they both deteriorated quickly into like these shadows of who I remember them being when I was growing up. And then my wife had her grandmother pass, I think two years ago with the same kind of thing like this deterioration. And I can't, I mean, after living it and watching it, it's hard to accept that I might ever do that to my. own kids or grandkids. So if you're presented with the opportunity to choose your date on your own terms, how do you think that conversation would go down with your family? That's so, right? So we're way off track from you starting your story. But I will tell you the inappropriate thing that I told my son to test that very question. Okay. I wanted to know, like, how would my oldest feel if I ever proposed controlling the day of my departure? Really? Right. So here's what I told.

was like Sina, you just met him downstairs. How would you feel if I chose to die by skydiving without a parachute? And he was like, well, I don't know, dad. That would definitely kill you. And I was like, here's what I'm thinking. I could pay like some model team of parachutists, right? I could hire the Swedish swimsuit team. I like where you're going with this.

I could hire a plane. I could hire five trained tandem jumpers. Those tandem jumpers strap these beautiful Swedish models to their tandem parachute harness, right? And then we jump altogether. And I have no parachute. All the models have parachutes

tied to professional trained tandem divers, right? And I'm falling through the sky on a beautiful day with like, and I've skydives in California is one of my favorite places of skydive. You've got ocean all to one side and land all to the other side. And I'm like, I'm going to be falling from the sky looking at these beautiful young women, and then they're all going to pull shoots,

and I'm going to look up, and it's going to be like angels all around me. Oh, my God. And then the lights go out. You thought this out. My son supported me. He was like, that's pretty clever, dad. Wow. All right.

Well, you got his approval. Sounds like. Yeah, that's an interesting conversation that I'll have eventually and entertain more of. And I really do wonder how our society will change with the idea of assisted suicide. because we have such hangups about suicide. I mean, even the definition of suicide is seen to be a negative thing. But I promise you that you and I are not the only people

in our middle age who are starting to have this conversation in their head. But going back to 1993, you graduate high school and the Navy calls you? No, actually, I'll get into this later, but I went to an Air Force recruiter. I wanted to be a pilot. I'll explain how that didn't happen. joined the Navy, spent 12 years on active duty.

The first three years was in Sassabo, Japan on two Navy ships. I was a gunner's mate, which Gus was a gunner's mate when he first went in. It's just our, it was a nine-month A-school about weapon systems and small arms. Went to those two ships for three years and have the opportunity to go to explosive ordinance disposal school, EOD school, which is the military's version of bomb squad. The Navy's bomb squad is our actual dive. as well. So I did that for the last nine years. First team was a mine countermeasures team, mostly maritime diving. And then I supported an Army Green Beret ODA unit. They used to be called SIF teams, commander and extremist force teams. And then I did a stent as an instructor.

So let me back, let me back you a little bit because I don't think the average person even knows the term EOD, right? Our veterans would know that term. People who are familiar with the military understand explosive ordinance disposal EOD. What is that job? What does it mean? How I think most people probably don't understand how often do you have to touch an explosive? More often than you expect. And it's not just the disablement of devices.

You know, Hollywood movies, they make it seem, you know, they portray it a certain way. Now, EOD is a naval EOD school. It's managed and controlled by the Department of Navy. All military branches attend. a six-month EOD school that's hosted by the Navy. The Navy does 12 to 13 months of training. First, you have to go through a three-month dive phase, make it through that portion.

Then you commence what we call bomb school, EOD school. That encompasses demolitions and explosives, core fundamentals of EOD operations. You do ground ordinance, air ordinance, chemical, biological, radiological items, and then you wrap up with improvised explosive devices. all the other militaries graduate and go off to their units. After six months? After six months. No dive phase.

No dive phase. And then the Navy continues on with another three months, what we referred to as Area 8. It was basically maritime ordinance, a little bit of diving still. All the nasty stuff that explodes underwater. And then, so now you're in it for about a year. At the completion of that, you'll go through parachuting school, and then you'll go through some, I think it's about six weeks of tactical training, shoot, move, communicate, land navigation, and fast rope, repelling, insertion type techniques.

So, so Navy SEALs go through something called Buds. And Buds stands for basic underwater demolition school. School. Buds, BUDS. How is how is buds different, related to, or separate from EOD school? So let's say back in 1939, you had the British UXO teams dealing with the German sea mines. the U.S. Navy sent a few people over there to learn from them. In 1941, Rear Admiral Kaufman came back to the United States and started the first naval mine school,

where they were teaching sailors how to identify, recognize, and exploit foreign minds, which required that they become scuba dive qualified. Fast forward up in the Vietnam, you have the UDT teams, underwater demolition teams, that eventually became a precursor to buds. So they were doing riverine operations, small unit tactics, jungle warfare. Riverine, is that what you said? Riverine operations. What does that mean in a river?

In a river, like the Mekong Delta, like small patrol boats. Yeah, when you first said underwater demolitions for Vietnam, I was like, where were we in the water? We were all up in the water. All up in those canals and rivers. And those men were UDT, underwater demolition teams. They did some other things like for beach landings that would go in and do a beach maritime reconnaissance

Gather and tell us provide that to policy makers on which beach heads to hit so they eventually morphed into the basic underwater demolition school or seals training. Gosh, I'm sorry of all the things you don't ever think about think about the poor bastards in Vietnam

who were underwater demolition specialists in those rivers. You can't see anything no, it's mud. And everything that lives in there wants to eat or kill you. Same with the jungle. Yeah, there were some hard men. Like, young just want to get after it.

And yeah, we'll do it. Let's go. And the techniques and tactics really started to evolve and develop from there. So you had that capability. And then you also had the naval mine school happening at the same time. There were some incidents between, say, the 40s and 70s, early 80s that involved. Navy EOD personnel in 19 I think it was 71 or 72 we actually formed EOD school we brought all these training organizations together to create the NAV school EOD and what was noticed is that the Navy

I think there were some Iranian missiles that hit a particular ship that did not detonate and they flew some Navy EOD techs over to it well now they need to know how to fast rope repel and climb boats so over the like two to three decades they started to realize Yes, we need an EOD bomb squad capable military in all branches, but the Navy particularly has some unique situations, right? We still have ground units that work, you know, in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we also have units now to support counterterrorism operations, that support maritime operations. And so your question of how often do you handle explosives, we'll do things from threat

and vulnerability assessments, we'll augment the Secret Service and other organizations to go look at venues and clear and search those venues. So we do a lot of building searches, vehicle searches. It's not just the movie disarming a bomb. Yeah, exactly. Where everybody puts on the big bomb suit and rolls in with the machine. Yeah. So it sounds like there's a relationship between the Navy Seals and EOD because they

were both kind of formed from the same muck in like the 40s, 50s, and 60s. To some extent, when they did, when UDT transitioned, there was a bit of a break, some people went the bomb disposal route. EOD and others went off to BUD. Which is special forces. So it's more of a, I mean in your words, how would you differentiate between EOD and Navy SEAL? What's the two different mission directives?

EOD is specific about UXO unexploded ordinance, IEDs, improvised explosive devices, and hazardous devices. That's our primary mission area. The SEAL teams are advanced soldiers conducting soldier operations. And of course, they go into their more refined. Some teams will work in mountains. Some will be desert. Some will be jungle warfare.

Some are specific to counterterrorism. And so they're really, when you think about shoot, move and communicate, get into places, get out of places. That's their skill set. Got it. Now, on those teams, they'll have a qualified medic, a qualified communications person. and over lessons learned, we need somebody that's capable of disarming booby traps

clearing a hostage device but can still do what we do to a certain level, maybe not as good as them, but to a certain level. And that's the second team that I started supporting. That was their mission,

counterterrorism. So you start to go through all of their tactics and their training and their trade craft stuff. So you start to run as a tandem party to a CLE team.

similar to what happens with some cyber people, similar to what happens with some human people, they're kind of secunded for a series of operations or missions, but they're not full-blown seals. Correct. Now, it sounds like, so you went through EOD school, you did the EOD thing after being a gunner's mate

is how you came into the Navy, and then now you end up kind of three steps removed from normal surface warfare operations. Which was amazing. I've heard, I've heard surface warfare is like, it's hard work. It's so three years spent on two ships. It was towards the end of my service and I was contemplating getting out.

We were off the coast of an Asian country and they said, hey, there's a person coming on a boat to collect explosives. Here's a shopping list. Go to the magazine and pull it out. There were some grenades, C4 and a few other things. The back of our boat opens up. It's an amphibious ship. It opens up and it floods so that smaller boats can come into basically like a mother ship. So I'm standing down there in my Navy Dungaree uniform.

So you ever seen those? Like, looks like Cracker Jack uniform. The white ones, right? So the dress ones are whites. The working ones are blue. Oh, blue, yes. So I'm standing down there in these bell bottom pants waiting on this guy. This single man in a rubber boat comes into the back of my ship.

And then he looks like a Greek god. He's got brown UD shorts on, sunglasses. That's it. Bleach blonde hair, fit, tan as can be. He's got a satcom in there. dive gear weapon system and he just gets out of the boat it's like hey load my stuff up where's a chow hall like dude i can't take you to chow hall i have explosives he's like they're mine now it's my responsibility so we go up and we eat we get back down to his boat i said mate you mind if i ask

you what do you do he's like i'm a navy diver i'm like navy has divers like i thought salvage diving yeah that's all i've ever seen yeah he's like yeah explosive ordinance disposal so he gave me something to go research and look into and that's how i started looking at eOD and i just happened to have a lieutenant that was on the boat that was in the pipeline. He had to finish his surface warfare deployment before he could go to EOD school. And that's how I got interested in EOD and actually got involved. How wild, man. So, we're fast forward, what, nine years? Is that right nine years of military career? 12. Nine years in EOD. So at 12 years, I'd keep a hard time to get out. Oh, it was a life event. I became a single father to a newborn daughter.

Fortunately, I was an instructor at the time, so I was mostly at home. When she turned about a year and a half, that's when I was about to go back operational. And I had screened before for Damneg. I had went to a one-week screening process and got accepted in an invitation to go to Green Team. Right before 9-11 and happened. Green Team is a SEAL training team. Green Team is the training cell to go to the development group. Yes.

Now, three of us from my unit had went out there and went through the one week selection process, and all three of us got an invitation to return. When I got back to my unit, I'm stoked. Like, I'm single, no children. I'm ready to go do this. The command master chief called me into the office and said, hey, good job. Way to represent. But you're not going this year. I thought, you know, you sent us to go try out for this.

And he goes normally out of three of you, not all of you. not all of you would get accepted. He goes, but you guys did, which is fantastic, but I can't lose three of my top guys. Talk about being. Heartbroken. Oh, man, I was so upset. I get it from a business model.

Like, as the command master chief, he made the right decision for his mission and his unit, but it affected me personally. So 9-11 happened, and I got forced to be an instructor to teach what we had been doing, operating with special forces. At the end of that, I had wanted to go back and try out again.

Ended up having a child threw me for a loop. So I had to make the decision at 12 years to get out, but I still wanted to do patriotic, military things. And private military contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan was really kicking off in the early 2000s. So I had the opportunity to do that. My sister, Brandy, and my mom knew that I was a patriot, knew that I was always working, and they offer to take my daughter for a couple of months at a time while I would go on contract appointments because I didn't have to go away for a year.

I could go one, two, three months, come home for a month. So I want to dig into the PMC stuff because that's an area that, again, the movies talk about a lot, but so few people actually understand the realities of PMC. And it's such an interesting time too because this would have been 2001, 2002? When it started off, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So I also understand the significance of you, screening for Green Team and the fact that you didn't get that opportunity is it breaks my heart too right to this day I still wonder what if yeah that's tough that's tough but as a father I also completely understand when you have a child not even when you have a child once you know a child is on the way that's the thing nobody talks about you don't become a dad the day a child comes out you become a dad the day you find out that you're pregnant 100% and then every and then every priority changes every thought changes emotions change everything changes right so I can also completely understand why you made the

choice that you chose so PMC private military contracting people talk about how much money it pays people talk about how cool it is some people even joke that they're better than professional military right yeah I want to break this down into some of the realities so 2007 2008 I knew ground level troops who had left to the Marine Corps, who had taken PMC contracts to be ground level troops, like defending Afghanistan and Iraqi locations, right? Prisons, bases, et cetera, et cetera. On average, those guys, I'm pretty sure they were making

about $200 to $250,000 for a six-month contract. Does that track with your experience, too? On the very high end, the typical blackwater in the 2004 times, frame was 90,000 for a six-month contract. Now you could do back-to-back contract so it brings it up to 180,000 there's a completion bonus involved. So around 200,000 if you were gonna work for an entire year straight was pretty reasonable. And those contracts were 10 hour, 12 hour days. They were not easy days.

No, they're not easy days. It's not like when you deploy in the military and you have built-in downtime and built-in facilities. How did they support you guys, how did a PMC contract support you do you does the military take care of you or is it like a separate PMC chow hall or a second separate PMC gym or how does all that work it depends on the location the the facilities that are available one of the deployments i was on a special operations car Iraqi special operations compound that we had our own chow hall we were the minorities there the expat instructors so we slept in tents we ate in their chow hall we ate their food. We lived not their lifestyle because it was still set up by us as a military organization.

And then with Blackwater, we had our own camp, like a full of contractors. We had our own chow hall. We could go on to the military compounds and certain military chow halls. We could use our IDs to get in there and eat. So normally the PMCs will be self-sufficient or they're augmented somewhere else and they're using their facilities. What's the relationship like between a uniform soldier and a PMC soldier? It can go either way. Early 2004, 2005, those soldiers loved Blackwater. You could go into a military Humvee and on their dash for the tactical commander says

he would have the call signs for Blackwater Aviation and Blackwater QRF. Because if you called Blackwater, they were going to come for you. Like no questions asked. in the early stages. Eventually, rules and policies got in place and you have to follow, you know, stringent guidelines. So in that aspect, they love the fact that they could call you and there was no red tape.

We were going to come assist you. There's other people that will look at you and go, oh, you're in a polo shirt and tactical equipment. I'm like, yeah, it's in my contract. I have to wear a polo shirt. But I'm still going outside in the wire and conducting missions. And it really comes down to how you portray yourself.

Like if I walk up to a soldier, I introduce myself. How are you? I'm not better than you. I'm not because I make more money or because I have a different job title or what I do. I'm just here like you are. They will receive that much better. But there's, I was just going to say, there's some arrogant people out there that think, oh, I'm a private contractor. What does that really mean?

Yeah. It just means military, you get paid by the military. This time I'm getting paid. The money's still coming from the U.S. government. It just goes through different organizations. We're all doing the same job. What was the business case to have an organization, a private organization, supplementing the U.S. military in 2004, 2005?

Efficiency. Saving money. Don't say that too much. Don't say that too bad right now. Yeah, so that's what it is, right? Eric Prince, there's an article that you can find online. They were talking about doing maritime interdiction operations. for piracy.

And the U.S. military as an example in this article says, okay, if we're going to send three helicopters, we're going to send nine. We need a couple of helicopters for every operational helicopter. Now you need all the support crew, the logistics, the footprint

becomes extremely large. Eric Prince says, I'll send two helicopters, two flight crews, and some supplies. For this much money, they'll be there in 24 hours. They will work. long days, long hours every single day, they will be more efficient at this. And he always came through with that type of stuff. So military private military contractors, I hesitate to say they can

navigate the red tape. There's different regulations and rules and efficiencies that they can just, the military can outsource the work to somebody that can just go out and get it done. Yeah. You know, I can understand that too, because again, speaking through the business this lens, if you need three sets of teams, but you only have two sets of teams, then essentially what that means is the two teams doing the job for three teams gain proficiency that much faster, gain mastery that much faster. And then all you need to do is have a strong contingency plan for what happens when one of those two crews goes down. And then you bring in a third crew that essentially operates as a second crew, again, rapidly building proficiency, rapidly gaining

mastery where the U.S. military will send nine crews. Nobody becomes proficient. Nobody becomes masterful at what they do. They all just, they wait till it's their turn to check the box or punch the code. And then they don't do it very well. And that's, I, I am owning that as a former military person myself. I was a redundancy of a redundancy of a redundancy when I was in the nuclear misty silos. Yeah, absolutely. And you, you own that. You start like, that becomes your justification for why you just do the bare minimum, why you don't have to worry about, working hard. There is no such thing as a completion bonus. There's no such thing as a performance bonus. There's no getting invited back. Like you're on a contract that you control, whether you

re-up it after five years or not. It's a whole different ballgame in the private world. It is. And so that private world, you can weed out people quite easily. Like you are paid decently. You're provided the right equipment in gear and you're expected to go perform a job. And it's not seven to five. Yeah. It may be three o'clock in the morning, and it will end when it ends. Of course, we as team leaders look at our teams and monitor like, hey, we need to get some downtime for this guy. We're always checking on one another. If other than that, you're there to work. And people like us, we go there to work.

And it makes sense because, like you said at the beginning, a generalized contract might be $90,000 for six months. $90,000 in six months for. for an entry level enlisted person is an incredible amount of money. I mean, they're making, what, 45K in a full year in uniform? Yeah. So 90K and six months. It was very enticing.

It's very enticing, absolutely. So you have this incredible background with the Navy. You go through EOD school. I can only imagine the amazing stories that you got from doing stuff with EOD. That was fun. Disarming minds underwater coming up with improvised explosive solutions.

I also would love to hear more about how you even devise those processes. That'll be a different conversation. But you go from this cool military experience on the verge of going into Green Team to join the damn neck, Dev Gru, seal team. Potentially. Yeah, potentially, which I understand it's a big, big potentially. But then life happens. You transition into private military contracting.

So now you're supporting Blackwater in the early days of Afghanistan, Iraq. when does the turn come where you go from supporting military contracts for the U.S. to government contracts for Abu Dhabi an ally? So that was a bit unexpected. I wrapped up working for Blackwater. I did some aviation work with them and then run an ambassador, Zalme-Kalzad security detail. And that's what really got me into the executive protection of running a security detail for a VIP. And who was the ambassador that you were protecting?

Zalme Khalil Zad. And he was what, ambassador to the U.S.? U.S. ambassador to Iraq. U.S. ambassador to Iraq. A phenomenal man. Like, you know, there's people that you protect sometimes that you're like, I really don't want to, you know. Take a bullet for that guy.

Right. But this man, he was a phenomenal human being. So I wrap that up. One of my teammates that I'd worked with on Blackwater and in the military had started a job with a defense threat reduction agency. And they have a contingency operations team called technical support groups. So I went over and joined them and spent a couple of years working with them.

And we can get into details about what Ditcher actually does. According to their website, what their website says. I won't talk about really what we did on the on the TSG teams. But TSG. Technical support groups. Yeah. So one of the program managers and owners of that contract that was supporting DITRA, a couple of years later, reached out to me and said, hey, I've started the business in Abu Dhabi.

We're going to be training and advising the presidential guard. Are you interested in moving to the Middle East? And my daughter was, Jaden was, I think, 10 years old, nine or 10 at the time. And I had always wanted to take her to the Middle East to a safe location and teach her the culture and show her where I'd spent the better part of my adult life. So I jumped on the opportunity and went to Abu Dhabi for four years. So Abu Dhabi is in the United Arab Emirates for anybody who doesn't know right away. It's actually the capital of UAE, even though Dubai is the most, I would argue, the most famous city.

For a reason. Yeah, in the United Arab Emirates. And it's interesting to me because I also took a contract in the UAE, 2019, 2018 and 19, after I left CIA. there was an appetite, a huge appetite, specifically in the UAE for experienced American experts. Can you talk about that? Yeah. So what we were told was their national security advisor was a former high-ranking Australian commando.

And I forget his exactile if he was a brigadier general, but he was one of the highest-ranking military members of the Australian military. He had been hired by the UAE. military to come in and basically reform their military organization, which includes their presidential guard. Their presidential guard is akin to our secret service. That's the roles that they do, protect them, the royal family. And so he put a big push in bringing subject matter experts from around the world into

Abu Dhabi and Dubai and teach their instructors how to teach, what to teach, why to teach, why to teach it this way and help train up their military. So there was a massive initiative a couple of years before you got there that they actually did the UAE implemented. You might know the term. I won't say it's a draft, but it was, it's like a compulsory service. Compulsory service. Thank you.

There you go. A compulsory service. And a lot of the UAE nationals were very patriotic with that. Like they were proud that they were in their normal daily lives. Also doing this compulsory service of various training programs for the military, for their nation. So he brought in this Australian, he brought in a bunch of Australians, Kiwis, Brits and Americans from very particular skill sets. And we started teaching anything from counter IED, EOD, shooting, moving, driving tactics, intelligence gathering, venue assessments, threat assessments. Yeah, building, clearing, self-defense.

Very similar to what we were doing as well. You know, it's one of the things that I think makes the UAE such a brilliant country is that nobody real, nobody talks about the UAE, right? When you think about wealth and power in the Middle East, you think Saudi Arabia. That the whole world thinks Saudi Arabia. Right away. UAE is what, like a tenth of the size of Saudi Arabia? If that, right?

800,000 national, like, citizens, 800,000, less than a million. Very small. Super small, right? Incredibly wealthy country. Very pro-Western, very modernized country. They still have their own Sharia law that they follow, but that's broken into the seven different Emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates. They have this really strange to us custom of having both royalty and election. officials.

Yes. Like you were just saying, like, for those of us that heard you say it in your words, you were there for the presidential guard, which is there to protect the royal family. So there's an interesting dynamic there. But all of that to say, an incredibly patriotic country. And when compulsory, yeah, when compulsory service was introduced, those 800,000 nationals didn't balk at it. No.

Now, an Emirati and Emirati culture is nothing like American culture. An Emirati veteran is nothing like an American veteran. Two years of compulsory service is completely different than four or five years of voluntary service. The levels of professionalism are different. And I think it's really interesting because I came in because they were doing the same kind of intelligence reform that you said they were doing for national security reform. So they were bringing in subject matter experts from the United States and from Australia and from New Zealand and from Canada and from Great Britain.

And it was an incredible smorgasbord of people to work with. But the challenge was all these people are Westerners. Western mindset, Western discipline, Western expectations, Western structure. And that did not jive well with Emirati customs at the time. Yeah, we had this joke. There's a short book. It talks about Lawrence of Livermore that went out there in the Arabian desert that, I don't know,

40, 50 years ago the book was written. It still stands true to this day about their culture. And what's interesting when you first walk into a meeting with their upper leadership, we expect to walk in in a 30-minute meeting. Like, here's the agenda. Here's the topics. Let's get it done. Solve problems to move on.

You walk into their meetings. And now I appreciate it. It's how are you? Yeah. How's your family? It's personal. How's your children? We'll talk about random things.

So like if it's a ABC, you start with D. F, Z. Maybe you make it to A. Yeah. Yeah. So you have to really learn their culture and adhere to them and slow down, be patient. There's a real, I mean, it's a really practical element. In my opinion, there's a practical element to how collegi, wealthy, Arabs handle themselves in business settings and professional settings.

They're testing the relationship all the time. All the time. All the time. because if they know negotiation is coming in the future, so they don't want to wait until the future to determine how to negotiate with you. They want to understand right now. So they're testing who's in control of the conversation.

They're testing, what are your limits for blowing a 30-minute meeting? How do you feel if they show up 11 minutes late? How do you feel if they're in the middle of talking to you and then they get interrupted by their advisor and they pause you? Misbeat all the time. On their turf, right, on their dime, they're constantly testing it. And it makes complete sense when you look at it through a lens of how the Bedouin culture before oil money ever set in.

Right. Which, let's not forget, they were Bedouins until the 1950s. And then almost overnight, the region became billionaires, right? It's incredible. It's right to think about it. People don't really understand that when they go to Dubai and they see all this fancy, glittery stuff. There's a famous picture of the row between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. dirt with camels, like from the 1940s, I think it was.

And then within like a couple of months, it's this massive six-lane highway. Yeah. With nice cars on it. And automated, like automated speed traps. Oh, yeah. It's an incredible place. They're very efficient about those. It's an incredible place.

But so now you're training the presidential guard. Again, that's a whole separate conversation on its own, that the stories that must have come along with that. But what I want to understand is how. How did you craft that career? Why did you want to take your children, your child, into that culture? Why did you want her to spend time there? How long did you spend there?

How did that a whole experience go? Overall, we lived there for four years, which we had intended to stay a little bit longer. But again, found out a birth of a child was coming and you make all kinds of new decisions. That was a very interesting transition. I it's interesting when I look at my family growing up in Indiana and myself like they are very content with where they live they're super happy and I love going to see them but once I left home in 18 years old and arrived in Japan I was like this is it I want to see more I want to travel like I have a hard time staying in one place for a little bit I just want to keep traveling and seeing new cultures And so by default, there was no mother involved. It was just myself. So whatever I told my kid, she was going to do.

So, hey, grab a backpack. We're going over here. She was like, cool, dad, let's go. And then, you know, all of her uncles were guys like me. That's just how she, the environment, good or bad. That's how she grew up. And so now she has that mentality of traveling and seeing cultures. And I wanted her to be able to, one, experience the Middle East at her age to be able to understand.

the differences of our cultures, one just for her general awareness, but also to know a little bit about my background and what I was doing. And in that process, ended up meeting another person and Christy, my wife, and found out that we were going to have another child unexpectedly. And there was some things going on at the time. I was in the middle of buying a cellboat. I had just came back to the U.S. I had an invitation to do a five-week selection slash interview process for a particular particular organization. I'd completed that and got a job offer, bought the cellboat, found out my wife was pregnant. Was that a government organization or another private organization? Let's just say it was I was hicking up on which one to say. It was to support the U.S. government. Gotcha. Okay. So then,

so how old was Jaden, your oldest? How old was she when you guys ultimately left Abu Dhabi? 10. So she was there from six to 10? No, I'm sorry. nine to 13. From nine to 13. She just turned 13 when we were leaving. And what's her opinion now of the Middle East? She has a pretty direct personality like me, which is interesting to talk to her now as an adult.

She loved it. I mean, she, so growing up in Midwest, you know, in Indiana, she has brown skin. She's half Pacific Islander. So she has this beautiful brown skin, jet black hair. In the early 2000s in Indiana, my sister who's completely white walking around with her and her two white sons and my brown daughter,

people would be like, oh, where did you adopt her from? She'd be like, what? It's my brother's kid. So she kind of had that little racism growing up in Indiana. Not that people were mean to her, but she was a different baby. Like I remember walking around to Walmart one time

pushing her in a trolley and there's pictures of children over the children's clothing hanging and she looks up in points, dad, like me. it was a black kid. And I was like, oh my God, kid, I didn't realize. Yeah, you haven't had diversity.

I didn't realize this is a real thing. So that was one of the driving factors of, hey, let's take my kid around the world. So we lived in Australia, had an international school there that was fantastic. Abadabi, she was in a multi-international school. Half the populace of the kids were local nationals and the rest were all expatriate kids. So she had a beautiful experience, made some really good friends that she's still in touch with from around the world, which not too many kids can really say that that they have friends in Canada,

Australia, Great Britain, the Middle East still. So she has a pretty good outlook on it. She does know some of the challenges of the cultural differences. Not that the UAE nationals are being rude to you. They're just, matter of fact, very direct. Like, no, I don't want that. Like, it's quite simple to them.

It's their culture. Yeah, it's fine. And so that's one of the big takeaways that she took was you are in the United Arab of Emirates. This is their country. It's their laws. It's their rules.

You will respect them. You don't have to agree with them. You don't have to like them. But you will adhere to them. So now here in America, she was like, this is America. I'm not American by choice. I'm an American by default. These are the rules and regulations.

Anybody that wants to come to my country, you should do so legally. Just like when I go to the UAE, have to get, you know, biometrics down, blood drawn. There's all these things. If you don't want to be there, don't, if you don't want to do those things, don't go. Yeah. Right. So she has that very profound stance on following the rules. Not because he's a rule follower.

She'll break some rules for sure. But she understands why they're there and why each nation has their own culture and that you should respect their culture. What an awesome takeaway. I mean, that sounds like a pretty incredible experience for her in the Middle East. My son, my son is the oldest. He's the one that remembers the Middle East the most. Okay. My daughter was there from one to three, so she's got a softer memory of it.

But he loved it. The only thing he remembers that's negative is the heat. And the heat is a massive negative. Don't get me wrong. The heat is a massive negative. The winter season is heaven on earth. Beautiful. Heaven on earth.

But when it's like, oh my gosh, 120 degrees outside and the wind is blowing the sand into your face and your eyes, and you can't even like, you turn on your windshield wipers for the sand, not for the rain, it's a whole different. And then they melt these things. And then they do, they melt to the window. Oh my gosh. That was such a wild experience. It's hot, very hot.

Such a wild experience. So you end up ultimately leaving UAE and transitioning into private contracting here in the U.S. How has that experience been for you? What are you willing to share about what you do now, who you work with now, et cetera? I won't really go into the private like intel jobs just out of professional reasons. We can talk about if people want to get into them, like some trade craft skills to go through. But my main full-time job is I currently work for Raytheon missile systems doing, working on some government classified project. And what have you seen are the skills that people should focus on if they want to get into private contracting, private intelligence, or even working for a major weapons defense contractor?

Well, let's start with private military contracting. Obviously, if you're a veteran, you check the. box for some sort of military training that says you can follow rules and regulations and you have a little bit of work experience. So for the veterans out there, that is a big deal. It's unbelievably a big deal. That's a big deal. The vast majority of non-veterans, even those that went to college, even those that have fancy degrees and fancy names and multiple titles and all sorts of certifications, that does not equate to them being able to follow rules and regulations that are required to hit the the oh what's that I just lost it the word where you

have to adhere to specific like specific rules and expectations to make sure that things pass qualification whatever there's a fancy word for it I lose it right now but compliance compliance just because somebody has certifications doesn't mean they can be compliant to what it takes for a PMC to meet the requirement of the customer yeah I I see it all the time in the engineering defense world. Yeah. Some college graduates come in with these titles, PhDs, zero work experience. And come on.

Like, you got, you got to know a little bit of experience, right? So private military contracting. Eric Prince started this really cool thing. I don't know if the company, I think it's called Academy right now, if they still do it. But he saw a need for additional static type roles where he started his own boot camp for people that couldn't actually join the military due to colorblindness, flatfoot, or people that were 30, 32 years old that really didn't want to go to boot camp in the military. He ran his own boot camp specific to private military and protecting work and static work.

And then you could go on your first deployment for that. I think they still offer something like that. But those are contract gigs around the world. It's still good experience for people. If you're trying to get into the, I'd say domestic. or corporate executive protection, most PMC organizations still run a two to four a week,

what they call PSD training, protective security detail training, while you learn driving formations, walking formations. And then I think Gavin DeBacker is probably one of the biggest ones in the U.S. that does executive protection from small areas to high-level VIPs. And then what trade craft skills do you see

are actually relevant in the private intel world? for folks to learn a second language a second language start with you know most people will go down the rabbit hole of tactical shooting schools like uh thora like look six 10 schools mate if you can shoot a weapon I can take a good instructor and get you up to speed to pass a course right executive protection work you don't do a lot of shooting private intelligence work you don't do a lot and if you do there's other problems as well right so you definitely need the skill set But a second language is extremely useful for just at various places that high-level people in corporate roles, international dealings. They're always looking for a second language.

Medical training, situational awareness is a huge one. And I hate to say situational awareness because it is this military tactic, YouTube, like, oh, we're so cool. No, mate, just walking from here to the grocery store, who's out is the environment? It's normal baseline. What is the baseline? That is such a huge component of intelligence and protecting people because you have to be able to anticipate in order to prepare and mitigate a potential threat. It's funny because I often answer when people ask me the same question.

I often answer you need to have analytical thinking that's objective based, not subjective based. And then you need to have the ability to write. If you can't write, you're basically worthless in the Intel world. Oh my God. You've got to be able to articulate to your audience clearly and concisely. Because your audience is always a customer and the customer is always like the last thing they want to do is dig through poorly written reports to try to figure out the things that they need.

And I've seen more people fired because of poor writing skills than I've seen if people fired because they don't know how to do a dead drop or they don't know how to use situational awareness or whatever else, right? There's no tolerance. There's no patience for people who share their opinion as fast. and there is no patience for people who write poorly when the deliverable is written assessments. So that comes to professionalism and awareness. People think, oh, I want to go be a bodyguard because I can fight, I can shoot, and I'm 220 pounds.

Yeah, that comes into play, but look at the end result, the deliverable. And it comes to a lot of times in intelligence definitely comes down to report writing and that being usable by somebody else. Yeah, the concept of getting off the X is a concept that the movies don't ever highlight. A true professional avoids the X, or gets off the X. They don't engage in combat

to dominate their enemy when they're attacked. That's not what they do, because you never know what the enemy actually has. Just because you think you see six shooters, doesn't mean there's only six shooters. It doesn't mean that there isn't, you know, droves of reinforcements on the way. It doesn't mean that there isn't an improvised explosive device hiding just five feet

to your left or to your right. So the whole idea is identify the threat before it happens. Yes. That's an intelligence challenge. It is. And that's where that's where the Holy Grail is that can't really portray that in action movies because it's not action. It's quite mundane. It's a lot involved with it. But it's just not as sexy. People like you and I, it is very sexy because we see the value in that and we can read between the lines and go, oh, that's important. That small detail is critically important. So, Trevor, we have a lot more conversations ahead of us because you're just such a fascinating guy with such an incredible background. But for now, tell folks where they can find you, tell folks what you're working on, tell folks what's important to you.

The most important thing is family and kids. That is a driving factor of why I'm doing what I'm doing right now. I'm working on a project for us called the family disaster planning. I looked online to figure out how to make an emergency disaster plan for my family. Now, my college degree is actually an emergency, excuse me, emergency preparedness and disaster management, which was a phenomenal experience. Researching online, may, you get some weird stuff. Yeah.

You get what's free. Yeah. So I decided to start making this course so that we could teach and educate people and guide them through a framework of how to become better prepared. And what you're talking about when you say you're doing it for us, like this is a project you're working on for everyday spy. Everyday spy. Absolutely. Why have you chosen to put any of your effort or time into everyday spy? I was talking to Ji a little bit this morning about this.

A couple of years ago, I started watching your content and videos. I got a compliment there. Like that caught my attention. And like this man just looks like he's very relaxed, comfortable with himself, which you don't see a lot of YouTube people like that. They seem a little bit fake. So I'm watching your videos. I'm reading the emails and content. You had a lot of courses that were going on, but I didn't really want to go to those courses.

I didn't want to invest the resource of time and money to do something you'd already done. Yeah, but I'm still interested. Like selfishly, I want to go do it. Like, I want to go do streetcraft. But I can't look at my wife and kids and say, I'm sorry, I can't spend the weekend with you because I'm going to go do this, right? She's like, your career is over. Like, stay at home.

I was out at a San Clemente Island military range off the coast of California and an email came through. And it was about you were having an Intel Edge in Las Vegas this upcoming Saturday. And I was in the process of moving to Las Vegas. I have no excuse. I don't have to pay for flights. I don't have to pay for a car. It's right there in the town that I'm living in. So I called my wife and said, hey, Saturday, I'm sorry, I can't do a barbecue.

I'm going to be busy because I wanted to come meet you in person and fill your energy. Like are you just blowing smoke or are you genuinely passionate about helping people? And so I signed up for Intel Edge and I was telling Gus this. Like once I met you in the team and went, wow, they're wanting to help people break barriers that want to break barriers. You're not trying to market to a person this I don't want your help. Like you're only looking to help those that want to help themselves. And you're not limiting your skill sets. Like coming from your background, you know we need health.

We need wealth. We need to develop relationships. Of course, there's skills that we need to develop as well. And that was profound to me. And so I thought, instead of trying to go off and do this by myself, this man is already on that mission. I'm just going to see if I can join his team. That's awesome. So that's what made me passionate about working with the everyday spy.

I mean, the power of the mission is something that, I am just blessed beyond words for. Because to folks like you, to folks like us, to folks like the other, the countless people that work with us and support us, mission is everything, right? Mission is family. Mission is friends. Mission is impact. Mission is legacy.

Mission is wealth. And mission is something that really drives us forward. People with no mission, I don't know how they get up every day. How do you feel? And we can do this on the next one. how do you feel like when you came out of the military we call it you refer to it as mission I may say what's my purpose purpose because in the military you had a purpose you were told what your purpose was and you were told you were the tip of the spear and you were valuable and you were

this the day you step out of uniform that all goes away and you talk about being lost so it's interesting when you said the mission of your family like you're always open about talking about your wife and your children, that's how I feel now. When I started the conversation with my family is my life, the reason that I'm doing what I'm doing now, my mission, my purpose for my wife and my children. I wish there were more men especially, but I'm sure they exist as women too.

I just don't know them as intimately. I wish there were more people who were willing to say, my family is my mission. Because instead what happens, I think is people feel like family is, like an afterthought. It's like a requirement or a, you should do this. Yeah, it's just, it's checking a box.

For me, it's everything. Like, it's the reason you do what you do to change. The children that we have are the next generation. They will be the 40-year-olds of a future day making the decisions for our economy, making the decisions for our progeny, because their children will be our children too, right? Our grandchildren. children. They carry the DNA forward. They carry the memories forward. They carry the values forward.

So to me, family is, it's the most important thing. It's the only thing that could have pulled me from CIA was family. And it did. Yeah, same. So you already have your thoughts on this. Society is not set up to push family first. Yeah. It's a value. Over the last couple of decades, it's other bright, shiny objects. You need this PhD. You need this. You need this. career you need to be the CEO yeah one of the one of the most interesting persons that I know works at Raytheon really great chief engineer when I first met him I had the opportunity well where I set shared a common wall with him and I would hear his conversations every day probably shouldn't hear some of them but he was such an intelligent person I really started to

like pay attention to how he conducted himself and how he ran programs this was a man that was striving to eventually become like the president of the company like his ambition was insane and he's quite skilled for it during covid i was selling some bumper plates like crossfit bumper plates from my house this man knocks on the door and i was like oh my god he's like yeah i got to set up my CrossFit gym in my house. And so we were talking a little bit. About a year later, he came up to me and he said, Trevor, he had had triplets. Wow. I think triplets. He already had twins, I think. Wow. Oh, yeah. Blood for punishment. And he said, we were working on the same project together and he came up to me and says, hey, I'm going to leave this project and go to another one. I said, oh, what's going on, man?

Like, if anybody can solve this, it's you. And he said, this COVID thing. He said, I've been a home remote working for a while. He goes, what am I doing? He goes, I used to get up, drive into the office early, stay stress, stay late, go home. He goes, do you know what I see when I'm at home? My wife with our children. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever witnessed. He goes, so I'm going, I'll admit, I want to take an easier job that I can work nine to five, be home every night, be home with my kids, because that is now my focus. And I compliment and I'm going, you know how many middle-aged men do not recognize that and become aware of it until it's too late. So I found that I always think about that every week about that conversation to keep me focused on when I get down in the

weeds like, hey, this job effort is an effort, but my mission is my family. I, uh, we decided to homeschool our kids fairly early on. I remember, great decision. It's, it's been a great decision. It's been a challenge, but it's been a wonderful experience. But the reason I bring it up is because I remember as a kid how every time I was around my parents during the weekdays, it was clear they didn't want me around. I was stressful. I was noisy. I was whatever else.

Me plus two sisters, they didn't want any of us around. Right? Basically everything from wake up until we got on the school bus was hell for everybody. And then everything from when they got home from work to when we all went to bed was hell on earth for everybody. It was noisy. It was fights. It was screams. It was yells. It was, you know, do your chores and brush your teeth and everything else. And that was for 18 years before I left home. It clicked when my son was about two and a half or three years old. He was

going to a day school so that I could work. And I was working from home. When we left CIA, one of the big things I wanted was I wanted to work from home. I wanted to live in Florida and work in my house. And I knew it was possible. It was before COVID. I was like I know this is possible. So I'm going to build this into my contract. I'm going to use my CIA negotiation skills in whatever that was, 2015, to negotiate the job that I want. So I was successful.

We send him to day school. We pick him up from day school every day at like 4 o'clock. And then I found out like it was the same thing. I was getting up, fighting with him. He had to eat in a certain time. Oh, yeah. He had to poopy in a certain time. He had to get dressed in a certain time.

Whether or not he had nightmares the night before or not, didn't matter. Like, you're out the door at a certain time to get to. school and then the same thing happened on the back end you pick him up at five rush him home you have to eat you have to shower you have to you have to bathe you have to you know get your bedtime and you have to be asleep by eight o'clock because the whole thing starts again tomorrow morning right and i found myself in that cycle and i talked to my wife and i was like why are we doing this like he he can't be miserable all the time like we have a we have a child and for some reason we don't enjoy having a child because we only get them at these two chunks and then on the weekends it's not any better because

in the weekends, the whole cycle's, and it's like thrown off. So he doesn't know it's time to sleep in. He's two. Yeah. He doesn't, like, we don't know what he eats for lunch because he eats for lunch at the day school. So all of this kind of clicked and we decided to try homeschooling because he was young enough that we could try homeschooling.

And then after like six weeks, my wife and I both had two kind of different epiphanies. Her epiphany was it didn't take long before she knew everything about our child. She knew his sleep habits, his food preferences, she knew his dietary movements. She could tell by the look on his face and the murmurs coming up his mouth what he needed. We had never known that before. It had been years of guessing and guessing wrong.

And for me, I came to the epiphany that a kid's best hours are from like 10 until noon and then again from 1 until 3. This is when kids are magical. They're hydrated, they're fed, they're energized, they're creative, they're social, they're engaging. everything before 10 o'clock is work. And then everything after 3 o'clock is work

because they wake up slowly and they go to sleep slowly. Very slowly sometimes. How many times I have to read this book and scratch your back? Yes. So the reason I'm saying all this, it's a long winded way of saying, most parents miss the best hours of the day for their kids. 10 to noon, 1 to 3.

They're with somebody else. Somebody else gets the best hours of your kids' day. and that person doesn't appreciate it because that person's got 30 other kids they have to deal with. And they're learning from that person. Yeah. And arguably...

Good or bad. Exactly. That's the person they're seeing as their mentor, their role model, or whatever else. So for me, it was a... As soon as that light bulb clicked, I never went back.

I was like, I can't give... I only have 18 years with this kid. I can't give five days a week four hours of high quality time. I can't just give. give that to somebody else. I've got to keep that for myself because after 18 years are up, they make their own decisions. And I would rather them make the decisions based off of those quality hours with me than based

off of feeling like I gave those quality hours to somebody else. That is a beautiful way to look at it that most people will not be aware of. Most people will think, oh, you homeschool your kid, you don't like public school systems. You're a Jesus freak. That's an entirely separate conversation to have. If we just look at it the way you view it, that's phenomenal. Like that is the quality time that you actually get with your children. And if you can learn to structure your work-life balance around those hours,

you'll have that epiphany yourself. And then regret sending them away that many hours. So I'm going to wrap us up today. Trevor, where can folks find you if they want to see you online? Everydayspy.com slash Trevor. And I absolutely encourage everybody to follow Trevor, hear about what he's working on, learn about what he's doing. You do some incredible stuff, man.

And I love the way that you view the world, especially through your lens of experience. And I'm super excited because we're going to have you back again. And we've got so much to dig into. I want to dig into what you did with that sailboat that you bought. I want to dig into, you know, what drives you about the idea of preparedness and emergency preparedness. And then find out more about your vision and your passion for your own family

and what you plan on doing in the future. Absolutely. Folks, if you've enjoyed this conversation, make sure that you click on the link below. We've got all of Trevor's details there. Like, share, subscribe, share this with a friend that you think might have something to learn from this conversation between Trevor and I today.

And we will see you on the other side.