Jocko Podcast - 507: Leadership and Accountability at the VA. With Secretary Doug Collins

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

>Join Jocko Underground< Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins about the realities of leadership in war, ministry, law, Congress, and now the VA. Collins shares hard lessons from funerals and eulogies, where grief and writing become tools for healing. He reflects on the brutality of “full-contact politics,” bipartisan wins that mattered, and the chaos of impeachment battles. From his close work with President Trump to his current mission inside the nation’s second-largest department, Collins lays out the scale of the VA—health care, benefits, cemeteries—and the fight to cut through bureaucracy. This conversation is about service, accountability, and the relentless effort to honor veterans not as victims, but as warriors who deserve the best care their nation can give.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko Podcast number 507 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. A veteran committed suicide by setting himself on fire in front of a New Jersey VA clinic after staff at the clinic repeatedly failed to ensure he received adequate mental health care and investigation of the death found. Department of Veterans Affairs staff canceled an appointment. Charles Ingram had in fall 2015 because a provider was unavailable, didn't find

follow up to reschedule and when he walked into the clinic to ask for an appointment they didn't schedule it until three months later the VA inspector general found ingram a 51 year old gulf war veteran had been approved to receive treatment at a non-VA facility but no one at VA contacted him or scheduled an appointment in March 2016 shortly before his VA appointment ingram went into the clinic in Northfield New Jersey doused himself in gasoline and himself on fire. The clinic was closed at the time. Staff failed to show up on no-shows, clinic cancellations, termination of services, and non-VA care coordination consults as required, the Inspector General wrote in a report released Wednesday. This led to a lack of ordered

mental health therapy and necessary medications and may have contributed to his distress. And that right there is from a USA Today article from 2017. And the article goes on to say that after the death, the VA, quote, allocated more clinical resources to the clinic, removed the hospital director overseeing the facility and instituted same day mental health services for urgent cases. And so some lessons were learned, but clearly at a devastating cost. and the VA is a massive organization with massive responsibilities, first and foremost, obviously, supporting our veterans. And here's another quote, and this one is from an interview from August 6, 2025, from a YouTube channel called About Face Veterans. And it says this quote, I sent the VA an email. They said they would send someone out to give me an assessment.

And they came out and they gave me an assessment. and they said I needed inpatient rehab. They told me and they talked to the judge and they got the judge to let me turn my plea of not guilty into treatment in lieu of a conviction. The VA literally saved my life. The only two stops left for me were death and prison. And the VA made sure I had options.

It was just up to me to put in the work, end quote. So when functioning correctly, the VA absolutely saves lives and takes care of our veterans, but it is no easy task. And like any endeavor, leadership is the most important factor in the mission. The mission success or mission failure. And the leader currently in charge of the Department of Veterans Affairs is Secretary Doug Collins. He's been a pastor, a lawyer. Maybe we'll hold that against him.

A representative in Georgia's state and a U.S. representative for Georgia's ninth congressional district, he served in the Navy. He's currently serving as a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, in addition to his duties serving our veterans as Secretary of Veterans Affairs. And it's an honor to have him with us here tonight to share his experiences and his perspectives

and what's happening today in the VA. Mr. Secretary, thank you for joining us. It's honor to have you here. It's my honor to be here with you're welcome. Now, I know you've been doing a decent amount of podcasts lately, which is awesome. It's awesome that we have some of our people inside of our government that are willing to just go out and do long-form podcasts, which it seems like in the past the government was very scared to do. Sit there and have conversations, people. It's very threatening.

But let's just do a little bit of background for you. It's just a little bit about how you grew up, where you're from, et cetera. Georgia, right? Yep, Georgia, North Georgia. In fact, I still live there, been all over the world, but North Georgia's home. That's where my bride's at. And we were been there forever. She's winning in D.C. right now, so it's a great kids are there.

I grew up in a sort of fairly just middle class, lower middle class home. My dad is a state trooper from Georgia, 31 years. I grew up a trooper's kid. Believe me, I fought the law. The law won every time. I mean, he's six foot two, 250 pounds. I was scrawny, six foot four, 130 pounds soaking wet. Yeah, it was, his idea of fun was picked me up in high school and put me in the back seat of the car on the troll car on the way home.

So, yeah, it was a mom worked with senior adults. And so I grew up there and just had an inordinate desire to be empowered in leadership, just going and being a part of our society, giving what we've had back. Lisa and I got married right out of college, for me right out of college. And at that time, thought I was going to go on a different path. God led a different way. I had went into doing some sales, doing some work, and then answered to call to ministry. I got a master's pastored for over 11 years. During that time, I served a little bit in the Navy.

Actually came out here to San Diego, who was mine. My cot training, my commissioned officer training. What year was that? It was about 93 time frame, 94 time frame. And spent the summer when it was a little bit of time up at Pendleton. Nice. And doing a summer up there. And then spent it for a couple of years.

But I have a, when we started having kids, my daughter has Spina Bifta, my oldest daughter. She's 33. She still lives with us, but she works every day. I wish I had her attitude. And so there's some things going on in church going. So it was a chance for me to decide I needed it. Because if the Navy wanted me go full time. And it just, it was as I said.

And what were you doing in the Navy? Chaplain. You were a chaplain. Yeah. Chaplain Canada started that. And did you work with the Marine Corps when you were out here? Yeah. That is.

So it's most people, you know, really, if you don't know from the outside, the, the Chapplin Corps, Jad Corps, mostly the Navy is supplying that to the Marine. And it was really a great time. So I've had really the benefit, if you look at over time. I've been with Marines, Navy, and Air Force. So I have a, you know, broad experience on each side. I got out for a little while, while I was passionate. But in 2002, got back.

I'd been warning. to go back in for about a year and a half and then 2002 made it happen and I've been there ever since 24 years. Was that September 11th? A little bit. It was something I was missing it. You know, when you're out and I know most people feel this, I love being part of the Navy. I wanted to back in but couldn't find a way.

And that just heightened it even more. It's going forward to saying, hey, I've got to get back in this. And during that time, it was also a transition from the church, been there 11 years. We had a great success at the church. But I've always felt life as sort of a dirt road, old country dirt road from where I'm at. up in the mountains and so we're twisting. And an opportunity opened up, and it was just something my wife and I had settled in. She said, something's wrong.

And I said, yeah, it is. And so we've got to fix it. And crazy enough, you know, it seems it was to go back to what I originally thought I was going to do back when we first got married and I was go to law school. And so here we are, 38 years old. I got three kids, a wife who teaches school, and I go back full time to law school, leave the church. My only income was reserve pay that I had once a month when I was at the 94th Air Wing down at Dobbins.

And your wife agreed to all this. Yeah, it was amazing. She's pretty cool gal. What's up? So how did you get to this point? You know, you've got a good life going. You've got things squared away. You're doing good things.

You're doing the Lord's work. And then one day she recognizes that, hey, something's wrong? It'd been going on for a little bit. It was one of those things that, you know, it was, again, from a faith perspective, is just why I was leaving church and we'd have, you know, people come, people join. We had a building probably. They're all going well. But by the what time, I was about a mile or two down the road, kids in the car.

It was just, it was just a homesick feeling. It was just like something's missing. And so one day we're at home, she teaches school, and I was at the church, and she had to go to a doctor's woman. And I had stayed at the house that day. And she got back, and I just said, I remember saying, I said, I'm miserable. And she said, and of course in Lisa format, my little wife is five foot two little nothing. She looked at him and said, what are you going to do about it? Well, thanks, honey.

You know, where's that hug and saying, oh, I know, you're there. And it was what are you going to do about it? And that's when we just sat down and we just had an honest conversation about where we were and what we wanted to do. And we knew something was sort of up. I learned a lot. I think here's, I've said this before. And for young people listening to this podcast, I don't care where you're at, especially if you're in a college years or others, you think you've got the world mapped out. Maybe it's your first couple years in the military.

You got your, you know, your path, the general's already there. Yeah, right. Look at it. But don't be afraid to realize there's seasons in life. And sometimes you're not ready. And for me, if I had become a lawyer, I believe back in the late 80s when I thought I was going to. I believe in fullness I would have probably been divorced because sometimes ambition gets the better of you. You look beyond what you can do and handle.

God knew that. And so I spent years in ministry working with senior adults and dealing with death and dealing with a lot of issues having children. So when I started back that, it opened the door. The interesting thing is for about a year and a half I've been really feeling miserable. The minute she and I had that conversation and we decided that that was the path that I was going to leave the church and if I got accepted, it was relief. Because I knew it was the right thing

to do. Yeah, that's one of the reasons I wanted to ask you that question because I hear from a lot of people, I've talked to a lot of people, a lot of people ask me questions and that's a question that I get people, I guess it's similar to what people would call the midlife crisis. I guess you weren't quite to midlife yet, but you were getting close. And sometimes when people get to their midlife crisis, they do really dumb things. Like they don't share the fact

that they're having some thoughts in their head with you know, their spouse, which if you don't do that, now you end up making a move without your spouse and you end up with real problems. Oh, yeah. So it's just a good way to face that, the reality of what you're feeling and where you're at and where you want to be and doing something about it,

like your wife said. Well, it is. And that was at motion. Yeah, you know, doing, you know, chaplaincy and being in the military and also in the civilian world, the one of the things I used to tell couples when they got together. And if somebody's listening today and, you know, everybody struggles.

Everybody has issues. Everybody there's not all, you know, great days. wake up in a needlehead. But I've always told them, and I stick to this, it's not how you make love, it's how you make war. And it's how you handle the difficulties. Everybody can do the other part, but it's how you handle the conversations and honest conversations between you and your spouse, or you and your partner, whatever it may be. If you don't have those honest conversations and there's a relationship there that breeds that, then you're really two separate people living in the same place. And when she was backing, she's backed me completely and everything, but we went into

of law school. I remember making my sandwiches. I'd go down and get on the bus. I mean, we cut back everything. About a year, my first year of law school, a state house seat that I'd always dabbled in politics is another. I'd always been around it. And it was something I was very much interested in. It came open. And so I went to this meeting one morning and I heard that this, they weren't going to be running. So I said, okay, I'll solve this. You know, that little bug gets inside of it. And I said, I'm going to call Lisa on the way home. And I said, Lisa, this is 2006. I said, hey, you know, this Stacy's not going to be running and you know there's going to be the seat open in north hall and again here she goes again she says well might be your time so first year law school I run for

office public office state house in Georgia and from there it just sort of it took on I passed that finished bar my law school in three years graduated in May took the bar in July deployed to Iraq in August found out I passed the bar on Halloween in Belad and came back started law practice this a few years later got elected to Congress. So let's go, let's just pause a little bit at, um, you're, so now you're in the Air Force. Yes. And so you finish law school, let me get this right. You finish law school.

You take the bar and then you go on deployment. Yep. And again, now you're going on deployment. You go to the Balad and you're a chaplain. Yes. But, and you're, but you're in Balad and Balad is like the big air base in Iraq. Huge. What was your, what was your mission there?

It was chaplain. I was not time flatline chaplain. So it was great. For me, it was one of those things where I was, you know, put at a time that was just after the surge, you know, just we were drawing down. There was still a lot of action. Belad became this sort of the center point for all, especially my mask owls, others coming out of the current. If you remember back in that summer, right before I got there, about four weeks before I got there, there was the, was it, 08 or 08? Oh, 8.

There was the bomb that blew up, and I think it was Mosul. It was north of us. and it was the, like one of the mayors and all of them, they were at a town meeting and a suicide bomb blew up. I get to, so I remember seeing that on the, when I get to Bala, many of those were there in our hospital. And so it was just like you brought it all around, very stark reality. So at night I would go out and I had free, basically,

I ran all around the flight lines, went over the Army side, went over special ops. We had, I was there chaplain when we went over, went out with the other folks in our security forces. One of the first times Air Force was actually taking over perimeter duty since Vietnam in that time. So it was really a challenge. And I would go out and get with them and I'd go out in the Overwatch Towers. And they loved it because they would get to fire if I was coming out because they could say, oh, well, the child was here.

We're going to fire. We're going to do live fire. So one of the gates that gave me my causal was White Reaper. White Reaper? White Reaper. So you can hear them on the rain. White weepers here. White reaper's here.

Get up. That's an interesting call side for the chaplain. Yeah, well, I thought it was pretty cool too. But, you know, it was there. But so it was something I let me go into everything. Chaplains, I could have went after graduate special law school. I could have already started transition if I wanted to to go to the Jaguar. Had no desire to.

I was where I believed I was supposed to be. And so I would get to go and go into the talk, going to the, the other places and just be there and talk, going to the control tower and not when the planes are coming. And it gave me a chance to get into their life, understand what they were doing, but also talk. It was so many stories. I had, you know, several groups that came in and I watched, you know, units come in. I remember, and it just instilled in me that this country is still, you know, blessed with some of the greatest young people in the world coming forward. I had a young lady who had was late for the deployment. And I had been going around to this, and I saw it. And I saw,

and I didn't recognize her because I was at those gates every night. And so I asked her, I said, why are you, why are you, I hadn't seen you? I said, where are you been? She said, well, I just got here. I said, well, why did you just get here? I said, you know, your unit's been here about a month, month. She said, I just had a baby. And she had a six month old.

And so she had worked up. I said, and I asked her. And my first thought was, you know, here I'm a dad. I got three. I said, why don't you just defer to the next deployment? I said, you know, she said, this is my unit. I said I'm supposed to come with them. And so here was an interesting thing.

Here in the middle of the night, I would go by and see her about two to three times a week, and she would show me pictures and video, so I actually watched her little one, you know, even I think caught even a first sort of step one night. And, you know, here we are both in tears in the middle of the desert. But it just, but she was there wanting to do her job. And so it was, it was, I enjoyed it. We got, I did travel a little bit in the country. And, but it just for me now, it also just deepens.

It's my understanding what we do at the VA. But it was a massive base. The hospital out there is pretty amazing. And what we did. If you came under, there was the discussion. Many people have this vision of the flag that is coming. It's called the Heroes Highway was what it was. It's coming from the helicopters into the hospital.

And they said, if you came in under that flag alive, you were breathing, you were alive, that we had a 98% survival rate to get you. to the next stop. And, Jock, I was, there was many nights that I was there. We had units that were messed up. And, um, I mean, I was with a lot of them. And there was one time, and I still got the paper, the stars and stripes. So they used to, if you remember, they used to put the pictures of deceased in there. And, you know, if there's a lot, there's some, there's some weeks it wouldn't to me. And I remember one week, um, I picked up the paper. I was at the defact and picked up the and looked in and opened it up. And there were five faces that I knew that I had either been by

their bedside knew where they were one who was I still see his face blonde hair blue eye and he was struggling and his unit some of his other guys in the unit got his eyeing attack and all they want to do is know how he was and he got back we was alive but my understanding is he made it back to the states and my understanding is at least what we thought was his family got to be with him but you know those are the kinds of things that you see, and it's infected me. It affected how we operate. But it was also the chaplains. I mean, there's sometimes, you know, there's always this believable.

The chaplain is either throwing the Bible out here or come to service. The chaplain has a unique role in our military. And it's there to give you a place to go to talk to that confidential communication, to talk, to get you through and be prepared. I always said that I was part of readiness, that my job was to keep you ready. I remember one guy. I got called early one morning. I'm supposed to get off at 7 o'clock that morning.

I get a call at 645. It's the hey chap, you need to come by the security. I said, okay, what's up? And they said, we got a guy here that we don't know what to do it. I said, okay, so I went over. And this is still just, I don't know you've seen it before as well. We get there, and this guy, I said, okay, what's wrong when he comes out to him? He just landed in country, made it to the phone, calling home, and his wife says she wants a divorce.

just made it in the country. I mean, I don't understand that thought. I do not understand hating, in my mind, somebody that bad, that they're getting ready to go out and you're sending this in. This is infantry and army. And so I talked with him for several hours because he was distraught. We finally, I think we just got to the point where we had to send him home. I mean, it was just not there.

And so that's a readiness issue. And if your mind's not ready, I always told people, and there's a lot of people how to talk about, and sort of sometimes derisively so the reserves and the weekend warriors and stuff. Frankly, if you look at our DOD set up now, our DOW now, Department of War set up. Correct yourself, Mr. Secretary. Director of War, yeah. Pete will get up, you know, Pete will get upset and the boss will say something. So, no, the Department of War is they're so integrated that it's just not even, you know, look.

But I used to do, when I do the newcomers briefs, I'd say, look, you're coming in, I said, here's what's going to happen. You're going to leave on Friday night. You're going to be here for Saturday. And they said, the minute you get out the door and you get on base, the kids are going to get sick, the doll is going to run away, the car is not going to crank. And it's all going to happen on the weekend. You're supposed to be here. I said, so just get ready.

It's going to happen. And, you know, and you walk them through that. So, Balad was an interesting experience. You know, of course, we were, you know, Mortaritaville was sort of the moniker nickname of Belad. I knew I had survived. Somebody was laughing about this the other day. You knew you had made it, you know, to that certain point of being in the country. when about the first two or three days, you know, the siren to go off and you start looking,

okay, where do I need to go? After about three or four days, like, you know, whatever. Whatever. They're going to give me. They're going to give me. I'll never forget the last night I was there. I'm packing, you know, getting stuff together. I got my bill.

I got my ticket. I'm going on that C-130 tomorrow. I'm ready to go. How long was your deployment over there? From end of August to about the end of January, that's your time for them. So I covered all the football season, all, you know, but that actually made a great connection point with troops. I go out and be with them. But I got there in that night, the course the sire and, of course, goes off.

And I didn't think anything about it because we're in those big, you know, cement areas. And this one racked. I mean, it was like, wow. I mean, it was like blowing up stuff. And it was, well, come to find out it was about 60, 70 yards on the other side near the flight line where we're at in G. And then I'm saying, well, okay, that was pretty close. That'll get your blood flow. Yeah.

And then then about not three minutes later, I mean, even closer on the other side. And it's like, really? Okay, if you're going to get me now, you can get it. I just back more and just went at it. I said, I'm getting out here. But you just get to see a cross-country, a section of country of our life and our people. And from a chaplain perspective, sometimes just people need to talk. I'll tell you, one of the interesting cases I saw when that I was at the late night

defense, my supper, and I was in there, just sitting around talking and went and sat down. And all of a sudden, I see this guy walking toward me. He had Army PTO. And they came up. And he said, he said, hey. And he said, you're a chaplain, aren't you? I said, yeah. And he said, oh, it's good.

He said, well, I'm an army chaplain. And, but at some point, you just said, something wasn't right. And he sat down and we began to talk. And he had not been home. He had only been home, let's rephrase this way. He had been home like eight months in almost three years. He was fried. I mean, God love him.

He tried. And we just, we just, we just. sat there and talked for almost two hours. I put him in, I had a vehicle, and I took him back to his parrot as Hoochin said, you know, look, and the next morning, you know, I tried to get, you know, I did, and we, hopefully I think he got out. I went and told his folks he said he's gone home. You know, he's not good, you know, for himself, he's not good for us.

Because he was just, I mean, the three years. I mean, he was, you know, and getting to go home just enough to get bad. And this is the thing that everybody forgets these days. war is so different. Our deployments are so different. You know, the cell phone, the sat phone, the Zoom, you know, Lisa and I had a deal. We did no video calls while I was in a row. We just couldn't handle it.

I couldn't be there, but I could talk. So we called and we had our phone time and we'd do that and I taught the kids. If the kids wanted to talk, they were younger then. But I watched, you know, some of these folks that they were trying to still live two lives. And you can't do that. And it's terrible. Yeah.

My wife called me. I was in Iraq, 2006, and my wife, you know, sends me a message and says, hey, the kids want to see where you're sleeping. You know, my kids were like, you know, probably three, four, three, five, something like that, young kids. And, hey, can you send a picture of where you're sleeping at night? And I was sleeping, you know, in a little bed that was made out of plywood or whatever. And before I took the picture, I opened up a bag and pulled out a folder.

and took pictures of my family out and hung up the pictures. Yeah. Around my bed, took the picture of where I slept, and then took the pictures back down, put them back in the folder and put them away. Because I just, same thing. I just couldn't, I didn't want to be thinking about,

I mean, look, obviously I love my family, but I didn't want to be thinking about my family when I've got to be thinking about the troops and my guys and the mission. And I just, you know, just didn't want to do it. My wife and I were the same way. We would talk like, you know, probably once a week on the phone for 10,

minutes and she'd tell me that the water heater broke and you know whatever but she you know just just she was going to handle it yeah and so i think that does make it very very difficult and the the other thing is is you know and i think this is bad for the military but these the way we do deployments now like in world war two you were going until we went daughter come home yep yep yep and that's that's just the way it is and when you can see the light at the end of the tunnel whatever that is whether it's a year whether it's, you know, six months, whatever it's going to be, you know if you can get to there, you can go home. And that does not seem like a great way to win wars.

And by the way, we haven't won any wars with that particular procedure. Well, think about it in Vietnam. Yeah. The count of the 365. Yep. You know, it became the whole thing. And how many, you know, got to that last 30, you know, or they, you know, it came up. And it's just an issue.

And it's tough. And when you talk about this, it's not just, you know, deployments we've had and everything else. This translates into the very issues that we're seeing in my current job. This just translates directly into, you know, how people are affected by that. I mean, you go, you come home. It's almost like you're living, you know, these dual lives. And now you even get into it today when you have the, quote, remote control wars. You have the drones.

You have, you know, the stuff that we use all the time, you know, unmanned aircraft, those kind of things like that. But there's still people behind those. Oh, yeah. I got a friend that back stateside killed a bunch of, you know, enemy fighters on a daily basin. He'd go home for dinner. Yeah.

And see his kids and, you know, take his kids to their dance recital. And then the next day, he's out killing people again. Yeah, that's a different situation. But, you know, what does that do to the human mind? Well, it does. And we're seeing some of the, and that was when, you know, there's been some, a lot of discussion on the issues of that with, you know, you said, well, you never left X place. But, you know, we're seeing PTS.

We're seeing that kind of thing. because sometimes you look at this, they're doing this long term. This has become sort of an invested kind of mission, if you would, to be very generic. But it's something they do, and they have to do it every day, and then they have to cut that switch on and off. And I think that's a different – it's not something we've gotten to really good handle on how do you handle that. One of the areas that we're doing is we also have some of our shorter timeframes now. You know, we're doing everything we can to – oh, we'll get you in for four years. We'll get you in for three, you know, six years, you know.

And the reality is all of our studies are showing today that the, and this is just an interesting look, that the shorter the in-service time. So the shorter, like the four-year stand, the six-year stand, even, you know, a lot shorter, are our most at risk later in life. It's not the 20, it's not those of us who've been in 24 years. And it's those that especially in the last 25 years have come in. It's still amazes me too, John. How many people think that right now that we're at this quasi-piece kind of stuff?

And we don't have anybody anywhere. And we've got people all over the place. And you can just publicly look at the paper and look at that. But it's still going on. This ops tempo is high. And when they're in for three or four years in this high-adrenaline, high-impact environment, and then they go back out into the world. And the world is not high-adrenaline.

The world is not high-impact. You don't have your buddies beside you. You're not have a common mission. And you've got to make choices again. We've not had a chance to sort of what I call, you know, we break, build, but not mend. And so I think that's going to be the thing that we're having to really seriously look at. And it's not just, frankly, the newer veteran, that statistic holds through all the way to Vietnam. And people who have unfortunately, you know, chose death by suicide, even in their 50, 60s and older,

there's that percentage, that very high percentage, had shorter term enlistments. in shorter term service. So there's got to be something there that you've got to look at. It may not be this, you know, one plus one equals the two kind of thing. But there's a one and a half in there somewhere. You've got to put it in the calculus for sure. Now you're over in Balad and clearly a lot of casualties are coming through there. And although most of them live, I mean a lot of those guys, they might live, but they're going to be, they got serious.

Major wounds, physical wounds, mental wounds, the whole nine yards. And, of course, not all of them making. And he just mentioned the stars of stripes with five guys on the paper there. As you, you know, this was 2008 that you're there. We'd already been in Iraq for five years. What do you, as you weigh out, you got to see what this costs. And as you weigh that out,

and as you look at what's going on in the world right now, it seems like we need to raise the bar quite a bit in terms of when we go to war. I think so. I think what's to disturb me more as we go past, this is what's happened in the end results, the out years. Okay? And sort of it's a good movie, good book, good song always ends in a way that hooks you.

I guess it's the best way I can describe this. Or it ends in a way that's fitting to the cause. And an end that doesn't fit sort of that whole area of how we're doing it. And I think that's the part that has become so disturbing for many of us. if I'm not mistaken and you know it's a lot of you know time gone past but it was less than two and a half years after I left that we shut down a lot and turned it back over pulled out yeah just I think it was 2010 2011 11 time and I thought about that to myself I'm saying about how much of our precious life was there and all of a sudden you know we're gone and we see what happened

within a matter of years and I just got asked this the other day anyone that had been in a Iraq knew that when we left, if we left completely, it was just a matter of time. And anyone that had served in Afghanistan, I didn't serve in Afghanistan, but everyone that I knew that served in Afghanistan said, oh, if we pull out of there, it's going to get overrun by the Taliban very quickly. Everyone thought that except for, I guess, the official intelligence reports coming from the Pentagon, which said, no, no, the, you know, the forces are ready and the Taliban doesn't stand a chance. And they said, well, they might do something. Oh, it's going to take them seven days. Oh, actually, they'll be there in three. Yeah, it's game over. Yeah. Well, by the time

we acknowledge it, it was over. So I think that's the, that's the part for me. me that yes, it raises the bar on where we should be and how we should be. It also goes, you know, frankly, from a perspective and I'm, you know, not in that chain of command, but looking at it from someone who serves is this idea, you do it or don't. You do it or don't. And this idea, this, you know, the idea that if we're going to commit, then by God you commit and you don't, you know, wonder, well, we're going to commit partially here and then we'll see what we can do. You're going to be in trouble there. Yeah, there's some level of arrogance. if you're a military leader and you think you can go into another country and number one,

you think you can do a clean job of just taking out the enemy and not causing collateral damage, not destroying a bunch of infrastructure, not killing innocent civilians. If you think you can do that, you're wrong. And then if you think you can go to another country and fight and you're not going to take any casualties yourself. And finally, if you think that whatever your plan is that you came up with sitting back in your office in the Pentagon and you think that's going to go that way, you're wrong on all counts. and so if you're not seriously considering the worst possible outcome, you know, it's like you said with the National Guard,

a guy's going to go for his weekend away. Everything's going to go wrong. That has to be your attitude when you're looking to go into war, that everything you think is going to happen is, everything good that you think is going to happen is not going to go that way. So you come back, how is your transition come back to America when you come back from below? I haven't really thought about it in these terms because that's one of the real issues

we're dealing with right now. For me, I just, it was suck it up and go. I came back. I had got my law degree now. I wanted to start a law practice. I was in the, I was just getting sworn into my second. By the way,

I got reelected to office while I was in Iraq. And how was, how was the political thing? Like when you entered the political, did the people come and like, start digging all the dirt and throwing mud at you in the whole nine yards? Yeah,

not early on. Early on was not as bad because you're in a local kind of state house kind of stuff. You mean, it's in North Georgia. I'm, like I said, I was born and raised.

My dad, you know, I knew a lot of folks. It was in a sort of my backyard, if you would, where I live still live to this day, except when I'm trapped in D.C. I'll just leave it back. That one has become the hard one for Lisa and I.

We're not sure if we're newlyweds or we're empty nesters or what. But, you know, we go from our house in Georgia, which we live in, you know, in the lake where I grew up in that area. And now we go to a little condo in D.C. in which we rarely get to go out or anything else. It's like, this is a whole different era. So, but coming back, I'm the classic case of what you should. I came in, went to, within 48 hours, Lisa picked me up at the airport. I went and we picked up the kids.

We had the best time with the kids. Well, she and I spent the night Atlanta. Then I picked up the kids the next day. I think it was either the day after or the next day I went down to the Capitol, got sworn in for the session that had just started, began putting my paperwork, got my bar swearing in, got all this done in that first few weeks, tried to start a practice. we went right into our session, did everything, never once reflecting, you know, hey, maybe I need to take a few minutes here. And, you know, then you're in public life.

And then it, what you do, I think people today, and I'm encouraging, you know, folks listening today, maybe you did this as well. Maybe you sort of half rear-ended the transition. You didn't either from a diploma or even actually getting out. It's not too late to go back and sort of fix some of that. you're never going to put, it's going to be scarred, so it's not never going to be like, it should have been, but you can at least go back and start. And for me, it was never really acknowledging it, that it had been stressful, that it had been a problem.

And let me take it back a step further. When I was pastoring, I had volunteered as a chaplain for the police and fire. So my job, a lot of times the police fire, I was not only to ride with them during that time, but also I was the death notification person. I was the one that had, you know, when it went bad, I was the one that was in that middle. I mean, I've had people yell at me. I've had people tell me I'm lying. I've had people tell me that I'm wrong.

I've had people hit me. I've had people, you know, you know, run away out of the room. And it all gets to you. Would you do notification for like victims of car crashes and stuff like that? Oh, gosh. I had one one time and it was actually an educator in my home county that got called that night. Young guy died. never came home from school.

He was at a school. Never came home. And they had to go tell the wife. She was calling. The phone on his desk was calling. It was her. We couldn't talk to me. So I had to go.

We went to the house. He went to the house. He had three little kids and toys everywhere. And it's just, you know, you try it. What you do is just like as a leader and you just eat it and you move on. Eat it and move on. That's not a good thing. You know, over time, you'll beat it up.

What's your protocol for a situation like that? For what we'd had then is you would go up, and one of the things that you learn early on is there's no sugar-coding what has happened. I've had so many times I've had to train chattel. Because the good part of it is I came back as a chaplain, a little bit of older. I had a lot of pretty good bit of experience already. I had like seven years, you know, senior pastor experience. So when I came back in, especially the younger chaplain, I'd say, you know, they do this. Well, you know, you go in and you say, well, we're sorry to say, but, you know, your loved ones no longer here.

what do you mean they're not here? So, you know, or they have went on. Well, what does that mean? And so really your protocol is to come in and you acknowledge who you are, you know, tell who you are. And then this is why, frankly, this is one area that, again, for all our military folks out there, I'm just saying a preference that's it. I'm not building doctrine here.

We put that on the officer. We put that on the line side, so to speak. And we have the chaplain there sort of support. Frankly, it should be reversed in my mind. Because I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've been in the car with an officer, you know, that they had to go. They didn't want to do this. They're looking at me terrified. They never done it before.

And they never done it before. Because you're not trying. I mean, how many times are you trained for that? You don't train for that. And frankly, sometimes a lot of us didn't either. So you get in and you, you know, look across the person and say, you know, I'm here tonight because, and I'll try to call them by their name, was killed tonight in a car. Or they were killed. And at that moment, you've pulled the pen.

so to speak and you've got to be ready for anything and at that moment I've had them just simply collapse I've had them like I said get mad they run they did and then you just you talk with them for a little bit as best you can and you try to hit them where they are and some of them you know it's just you know how could this happen they want to know and any but you know sometimes it's just you know this is where we go one of the things that I've learned over time to try and deal with it and people because the obvious answer to question that is why why did this happen why why why why why and I tell them you're asking the wrong question. Although you want to know why, and I get it, why is not the right question.

What is the right question? What now? It's not why. You may not ever get that answer. Why didn't I go with them? You know, again, what? What do I do now to take what I have and move on? And so back to your question, when I transitioned, you know, out from the deployment,

I never took, you know, really that time because I didn't think I had to. I'm, you know, chaplain, you've got to do this stuff. And so it really, I tell you, over time, you know, built up and then you go into, you're talking about the national politics. So when you hit Congress, when I ran for Congress in 12, which was just a few years later, that's the NFL. You know, the lights are on. Everybody looks at you. You hear it all. And even in a district like mine, which was very safely conservative, you still get it.

And then when you get to D.C., the lights are on it. So it's always this constant tension. And really it started hitting me, and I started noticing later the buildup was when I, was in Congress, I became the ranking member of Judiciary Committee in 2018. At the end of that, at the end of 2018, the end of 2019, the Congress that was the Congress that first impeached the president, had the Mueller hearing. So I was the lead person on judiciary, which was all this was on. We had the massive hearings, and I was sitting next to Natalie. And it's just this constant struggling. I started noticing that you start eating

more and more. So the reason I tell you that whole story is, is, I wish I had taken a month, which I could have, and just said, hey, you know, I'm just going to rest here with a family. I'm going to think about it. I'll go talk to somebody, you know, just say, hey, wasn't terrible. I wasn't injured per se. You know, mentally is a different issue. But, you know, and instead, I let that scab over, let it become a callus, still there. And over time, those calluses get removed a little bit, as most would know in this.

So I would encourage everyone use their time and transition, find, you know, even if you don't think so, I found, I don't know from your perspective, did you ever find stuff coming back that it was little things? It was not the big things. I mean, our house could fall down and be burned outside. I'm calm as a cucumber. I start watching something on TV or a song come on and all of a sudden I'm in tears. Yeah, I mean, certainly, you know, like hearing the national anthem can make me. you know, make me tear up for sure. And yeah, yeah, there's, there's like a little, little things, little reminder of your, of my friends, you know, that, that I lost that can definitely catch you off guard. And, you know, I was trying to explain to people that, you know, one thing that makes losing someone so difficult is when you're an adult, you're supposed to have control over your emotions.

And there's going to be some emotions that come your way that you're not going to be able to control. And that's very scary because if you can't control it, then you think, well, then I've lost control of my life. I've lost control of my emotions. I don't know what, you know, what's going to happen. And what I tell them, which I've found to be true, um,

is those emotions are going to dissipate over time and, and they're going to become less frequent and less strong. So, and then people run into the problem where they think that because their emotions are less strong and because they're less frequent, then they're a bad person because they're, you know, moving on when they're not a bad person.

Oh, you're just processing what happened. And that's what you're supposed to do as a human being. And that's, that's, that's, that's, that's the way life goes.

And by the way, people have been dealing with loss forever. And there's not one single person on this planet that hasn't had to deal with loss. And that's the process that people go through. And one of the things I think that hurts America is we don't, we've got such a diverse culture in America that we don't have a protocol,

a set protocol to deal with loss. You know, if you look at other cultures, they got their little protocol that you do. It's like, oh, you're going to go to this ceremony. You're going to do this thing. You're going to say, this thing and then that morning period's over and then you're gonna move on. But in America

it's kind of wishy-washy, which depends on what religion you are, it depends on what your parents did, it depends on what their parents did. And by the way, you got two sides of the family and they have different traditions. So you end up just going, well, I know I'm supposed to be sad. Yeah. And I feel sad. So that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna be sad. And that's not a protocol, right?

That's just washing around in the tide. And so I think that causes problems too. And I think it's good to have, you know, we do an okay job in the military from like a ceremonial side. But we don't explain that, hey, that ceremony is taking place for a reason. There's a reason that you're doing these things.

I mean, even the act of burying someone is, you know, if you think about that metaphorically, it's like, okay, like you're burying them. You're putting them back into the earth.

And like, that's a, if you think about that from a metaphorical perspective, you go, okay, okay, they're still there, but I have to move on from it.

So those are some of the things I think help out So to answer your question, yes, do some small things, you know, make me feel sad? Yeah. And I've had this conversation with many veterans. That's totally normal. Yeah. Like if you think that you're not going to think about your friends that you lost, that you were your brothers, and you're not going to be sad. And, you know, I had a guy in my podcast, Colonel Tom Fife who he was in World War II, Korean, Vietnam.

He got a purple heart in World War II, Korean, Vietnam. And it was very reassuring to me. We were talking about his career. We were talking about his life. We go all the way through World War II. We go all the way through Korea. We get to Vietnam. We're talking about Vietnam.

And he was a battalion commander of Vietnam. He started off as a private in the army. Now he's a battalion commander in Vietnam. And I asked him the question. You know, we were talking about what operations they were doing, what the op temple was like and what their mission was. And finally, you know, just all good, all good conversation. And then I say, well, how many casualties did you take in your battalion?

And I asked him that question, he got choked up. And I realized at that moment, I said, oh. This guy, the Vietnam War was, whatever it was, 60 years ago. And this man who's lived through World War II, who lived through Korea and lived through Vietnam, he gets choked up when he thinks about the guys he lost. So it's totally normal that I'm a normal person. And when I talk about my friends,

sometimes I'm going to get choked up. And I've explained that story to a lot of veterans. There's nothing wrong. There's absolutely nothing wrong. As a matter of fact, that is normal. Yeah, I would be concerned with the other. side. Yeah. Yeah. If you've so blocked it out that you don't deal with it, that's the bigger concern for me. Because at some point, it's, it's like this, probably about the best of like

analogy. It's like that dormant volcano. I mean, it doesn't mean that there's not lava there. It doesn't mean that there's not something in there. It just means that for whatever reason, it's not risen to the point where it blows. And a lot of that is, is that self-made stuff that we go that, oh, I can't think about that. Or when I do, you know, when I do, I've got to act this way. No, I say this, and I was just at a funeral the other day. I spoke actually at a funeral, and I make this comment at the funerals a lot, and I say this. I said that the reason, I mean, for many of you, I just, I'm going to say something that's going to make you think that I'm crazy. I said, but I'm not. I said, the reason you're here is not because

somebody died. And most times at a funeral, they're sort of like, well, there's a casket here. I said, the reason you're here is because they lived. I said, how many times do you drive by churches or funeral homes every day and you see a funeral going on, but you don't stop? It's not a culture that we just, oh, they died, so I got to go in. No, you're there because they lived. And I said, that's what you got to hold on to. This is the part that you've got to get into. The reason that you took time out of your day to go out of a normal routine is because this person lived.

And when we focus on that living and then dying is a part of that living, then you're able to try and put those pieces together. And, you know, again, too many times we, I mean, I've got friends who I don't go to the funeral. I don't go to the hospital. I'm, you know, I don't know, why the hell not? You know, I mean, it's part of life. I mean, really? Maybe if I don't go to funerals, I'm not going to die. Exactly.

You'll be surprised. I've actually had somebody tell me that. Well, if I got a funeral, I don't worry about nine. Well, good luck. It's going to catch you one day. Yeah, and that's really, that's another thing I've tell people all the time is I, like you, have done a decent amount of eulogies. And so when someone dies and you then are forced to in a state of despair,

sit down and write out your emotions and your feelings and your thoughts. That is a very therapeutic thing in my, which I didn't think about that, you know, the first time I ever did it. By the time I'm doing it for the third, fourth, fifth time, it's like, oh, okay. And then I see other people going through loss. And I, that's what I tell them. I'm like, hey, write, you know, write that personal letter. You know, it doesn't matter if you ever deliver it at, at the church, but write that

personal letter. Tell them what you thought about them. Tell them what you're going to miss about them. Tell them what you're going to do now that they're gone. how are you going to carry on without them and how are you going to make them proud? Yep. You know, people think that chaplains and pastors, you know, we do this all the time. So we go, you know, you can just do it.

And I had a gentleman talking about this. It was not military. It was in my pastor. And he was a Vietnam vet. He came in and was one of my deacons. And I saw him that morning at church. And we talked about it. We were having this issue that we were trying to get some stuff done.

And he was an old cop. He came back. He became a cop in Atlanta. David was his name. And so he, and he treated me not like a pastor with that kid glove kind of pastor. It was just, I was just one of the, a guy. He just, I was a little brother. He didn't really care.

He'd tell me if I was, get my head out of my rear. And, uh, he did it. And I saw him that day. We had kids in the car. And, and I'll never forget, last time I said to him, all right, I'll see you tonight. That afternoon he went home. He was in the backyard and doing some stuff, I think, with the grass. And he fell over dead.

Had hard to do it. Went to the hospital. Um, I still remember walking. I've done that hundreds of times, but that one was just different. And it was about the time of this transition I was discussing. And I went in and I remember leaving. I did my thing that I was, you know, be there as a family, have prayer to.

And I remember just walking out of the door with some other said, and I just started walking. And I had one of my gentlemen who was a little bit older than me. He followed me out and I was just walking. And I was walking out of the hospital. And he said, where are you going? I said, I don't know and I don't care. I said, I'm none. I was just, I just got to the point where I was tired.

And here was somebody that I had depended on that had helped me, and it was gone. I was mad at God. I was mad at the world. And it was just, it was just a struggle. But to the, I went through the motions of, you know, doing the stuff with the family, getting ready for the funeral, which was going to be, I think two days after, or whatever, three days after.

It's going to be at the church. I remember going in the, you know, the family. the office and my secretary, Mary, was like a mom, and I said, I don't want to do this. And she said, well, I understand, but, you know, we love David, but you got to do this. And so I don't want to. I'm mad. And she sort of just walked me through it as only she could. And I remember sitting in that room in hurdle office up from mine, and I'm sitting there.

and there's a passage in the scripture where Jonah was, if you remember the biblical story, there's Jonah in the whale. We all talk about it. Most people don't realize that the reason he got in the whale is because he didn't do what God had wanted him to do. So that's how he ended up there. And then he went and did it. And I'm doing my North Georgia paraphrase here.

He went and did it. And then he saw that it did exactly what God said, and he got ticked about it. Because he didn't like the people he was supposed to go see anyway. So he's sitting under the shade tree, Bessade bush or whatever you don't call it. And he starts complaining, well, God takes one of the shade tree.

And it's like, what have you abandoned me here for? And God made it, in the scripture, says that God told him and said, look, he said, what do you grab me? He said, I gave you this. I gave you the shade.

You're complaining about something you didn't have anything to do with it. And I remember sitting there, she's talking. This is a weirdest like, she's talking to me. And I'm here. That just came into my head.

And it was basically like saying, Get over yourself. I gave him to you to help you through a time. It's now time to do what you need to do. I tried to then go back and I just sort of calmed. I walked back to my office and I started thinking about what I was going to say. Never could. And so the morning of the funeral, I got up and I wrote him a letter.

And when it got time for me to do my part of the yield you in the service, I got up and I told everybody I said, I've struggled with this. I don't know what to say. So I said, I'm just going to simply read the letter I wrote to it. And I read the letter. Probably the shortest, you know, one of the shorter, used the idea, but it was about two-page letter. And I just wrote it to him, talked about the things that you just talked about.

You know, we didn't get to build that pole barn, but I'm going to figure out how. Yeah, we can make it happen. We'll make it happen. And so, it was therapeutic. It was writing, one is reminding me in our position in the world. It's all about us, and sometimes life will remind you, it's not. And, but also being able to write that down, being able to, Just say it in words that I couldn't have said any other way.

Let's you remember that one, that person meant the world to you will still mean the world to you, but they're not just going to be there. I think that's a big difference. So, you know, finding your ways to cope, and in our society, we sort of frown on that. You've got to have those moments of coping. And in this fast, microwaved, get it now. I mean, think about how many times, I can't think of how many times in life. I get mad at a drive-through.

Jesus. said, I go in and get a cheeseburger. And it's like, well, are they ever going to kill the cow? It's been all of six minutes. And I'm upset. I can't get a burger. You know, we got to have a reality check in some ways in our life. And I think that's the way, unfortunately, military sort of builds that in in a different

way. Yeah. When you mentioned that, you know, you didn't take that month, right? No, I didn't. You didn't take that downtime. What, when did that kind of surface the fact that you look back and you go, man, I needed a little bit of a breath. there. About two or three years later. It was, it was, and, and we were, again, going back to my

bride, who Lisa is, I truly believe, given, and we're together for a dairy purpose because she's, she has such insight into me and I into her. But we were talking and we go back and sometimes you look and you're trying to transition to something. I said, well, I didn't spend enough time learning this, right? And going back on it, she said, well, you know, part of that is you just had to go do it. And I said, yeah. And sometimes it's, you start figuring out that you should have done it because of what you can't do now. And so there's some things that, you know, my, if I, if I hadn't went into politics, which I think, you know, was part of this whole plan, but from a legal perspective, I didn't go get a mentor and a help, even though I was, you know,

40, you know, 30, 40 years old, I needed somebody to go. help me with the basics. I just started off a practice and said, hey, I'll just do this on my own, you know, type A at me. Well, I needed to be at a firm to be taught. What did you do at your firm? I did everything. I was a walk in. If you walked in, if you got whatever you got, if you had business, you had a divorce, you had criminal, I mean, I did it all. I was called storefront law, baby, you know. And how long did you do that for? How long did you do that practice for? About four,

about four years. Did you enjoy it? I did. I did. It was an extension of pastoring in a way. You'd be how many times the pastors ask legal questions, you know,

kind of thing. It's like, well, pastor helped me here. And I was able to, you know, help people when they came in. And I ended up, probably lost this.

I can't remember how to completely ended up. But this woman, a lady came in one day and wanted, she was looking toward getting a divorce. And we started talking. And I think my pastor, master mind kicked in before my legal mind. And I said, what is your problem?

And what's the problem? And she described us. I said, have y'all just trying to talk about this? And she said, I don't want to talk to him. I said, well, here's what you do. I gave her this whole checklist on it. How do you go back home? I never heard from her again.

I think she may have went home and never got a divorce. So, you know, there went my fee. But other than that, you know, there's a marriage stage. And so I count that as a win. Is it weird when you're a lawyer, when someone comes to you and you know that they're bad? How do you handle that? A couple of ways. Number one, our system, no matter who you are, demands that we have, you do process,

and that they get that hearing. And if we ever lose that in our society, no matter how bad they are, then it could be lost for any of us. But the other one is very, and it's interesting. You should ask this question because it's a very spiritual answer for me. And I heard it from someone. I don't claim to be original, but it was actually said, they said, well, Doug, how can you represent somebody that you know, did it, so to speak?

and I had people who did stupid stuff, and they did. I said, well, I said, I'll look at this way. Number one, I'm not condoning, you know, maybe what they did or did not. I said, but the law says, this is what we're supposed to do. But then I said, for anybody, and I've had a lot of people, when I left the church, you talk about leaving a pastorate and then going to law, it's like, you know, what are you doing here? I mean, I was the complete apostate at that point. He was like, well, and I actually had a pastor say, well, you're leaving the mission,

you're leaving the ministry. I said, do you not hear what you preach every week? you talk about going back to their workplace. That only for them, not you? I went back into the world. I had more chances for ministry and being a lawyer and in law school than people who walked through the doors of a church. Most of them there have it all together.

These folks didn't. And so when I say this, I meant it. I said, you know, from my faith perspective, it teaches me that Christ stood with me on my worst day, how can I not stand with somebody on their worst day? And doesn't mean I agree with them. Doesn't mean I think that they deserve the punishment. what they're going to get, but somebody needs to be there.

And maybe by being there with them, it'll help them, you know, find a new perspective in life as they go forward. So four years of that, then you end up, so you end up in the U.S. Congress, right? And now you said that's like the NFL. This is full contact politics. Oh, yeah, it is. What does that look like? I mean, are you reading articles about yourself in the paper going, oh, my gosh, I never did any of that.

What are they talking about? What does it look like? What's full contact politics look like? That means that everything's on the board. that everything you say, everything you do is under Microsoft. You know, if frankly, if the Congress is NFL, Senate and House is NFL

and campaigns of the NFL, and now what we're doing now in the cabinet is, is, you know, more Olympics. Olympics kind of thing, yeah, because it is. But it's just a whole different attitude. It becomes, you know, your shirts and skins. It's pure raw power at the national level because Washington is the ultimate peak of,

you know, national politics, and it is. And you then interact with the executive branch, whoever the president may be. When I first got elected, it was President Obama. And he had just won re-election. And so I go into D.C. in a turmoil because that was the time of, if you remember the old sequestration

and the super committee and the fiscal cliff and all this kind of crap. So I come into it in that time. So everything is just, yeah, you read yourself. What's amazes me is how many times I read stuff in the paper, I read stuff online. and I'm saying, and they talk about a meeting that happened, and I'm saying, I just was out that man.

It didn't happen that way. But people get enough and they just write about it. So it's very open in the sense of what you do and how you do it or what people think of you, you know, that perception. People also, we've had an interesting breakdown. I remember when I was younger, you know, if you had politicians or you had members of judiciary or even military members, you know, there were certain things that you just didn't go up and, you know, say,

I noticed the other night that the president went to someplace to eat, and there were people actually yelling at him and calling him a dictator and all of a sudden. I was like, whether that was true or not years ago, nobody did that. There was a decorum. There's no decorum anymore as far as that goes. I mean, people think they can, I mean, I get stopped in grocery stores. I get stopped everywhere, and they'll just come up and, you know, one, ask you to do something or tell you off or whatever.

So it's very high visibility when it comes to that perspective, everything, get scrutinized. And, you know, you have to remember that, you know, whatever you say, somebody's going to say something, you know, they'll may be, and they'll use it as an advantage. I think somebody once said, you know, was being in politics and pastoring were similar. I said, well, yeah, I said to an extent, I said, but except in politics, I can fight back. And in the pastor, you know, it's like you just sort of had, okay, you're our congregation, please come together.

You know, now I just fight back. You know, if you're going to lie, I'm going to poppy on your lie. And so we've developed this very confrontational culture in politics, not to the best. And I'll just be very brutally honest about that. I was able to do a lot of bipartisan things when I was in Congress. We changed the stuff. I focused on the things that a lot of them didn't focus on. And I had a lot of Democrat support.

But it was common sense kind of stuff. Now, when you get to the bigger stuff, I say shirts and skins. and you're not very few, shall the two meet, and that's made it very difficult to do big things. I don't care who's there. Is it worse than you thought it was going to be

when you showed up, or was it worse than you thought it was going to be as far as the partisanship when you showed up in D.C.? After coming from six years in the Georgia legislature, which we thought we had partisanship, which we really didn't, I mean, when I look at it from the perspective now,

I mean, most people don't realize, like, and I'll just use Georgia, and this is true for most states. I've talked to a lot of state, reps as well. In Georgia, we had like, 92 or 3% of all the bills passed with either both parties voting for it or only about five or six people voting against it, you know, just very overwhelming majorities. We only had about four to five bills that were ever down to, you know, just splitting party lines or people splitting over. So there's a, will it pass? Will it not pass? That was just,

you know, we just didn't have it. Go to D.C. I mean, you vote on, well, we're going to recognize that tomorrow is sunshine come up day and you're going to have all the Democrats vote. Yes. and all the Republicans may vote no. And so it's just you just walk that sort of, this is our party position and we're going to take that position. That's much more evident in D.C. than others. And it's gotten worse over time.

Like I said, we were able to pass some stuff that we were able to do some things with. But it took time, a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that, you know, that were really big things like intellectual property stuff, music modernization. I did. That was a bill that I did actually with, who's the current minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries. we changed how people

are like songwriters and stuff get paid on Spotify and all these platforms where as the old system they were able to make a living new system all the digital stuff they were getting screwed and so those are kind of things

that's not headlines but they make a billions of dollars difference in the lives of everyday people we did that for other bills as well but so when you get there you just sort of have to understand where it is and what I've noticed even further

how do you connect with Hakeem Jeffries to start that process? He was on the committee with me. We both came in the same year. And so when you look at some issues, you always try to get, you know, somebody on the other side to be on a sponsor, on a bill like that. And it was really interesting, you know, he would handle sort of his side of the house. I would handle sort of my side of the house. And we got it through the Senate.

And we did some criminal justice form work. We did some trade secret stuff. And, you know, it was just big bills that made a big difference. But it was just stuff that you were able to find common ground that wasn't the hot button. issues that everybody was going to to talk about. And you have, obviously, you have to have conversations with them, sit down, talk to them. And it's like you're treating each other like human beings. Yes.

I've jokingly described the Congress as the WVE. So what you do in the cages or in the ring is a bit of an act? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, social media has made it worse. Yeah. Oh, it's completely worse.

You know, it's five minute questioning. I was, look, I'm just, I'm one of those open kind of guys. That's why at the VA and the people who don't like the change we're made, they just sort of attack. But I just said, look, if we're wrong, I'm going to tell you. If we're right, I'm going to tell you how we're right. I'm going to fight you the way. You know, we're going to do this.

But yeah, I mean, I have it all the time where, you know, the five-minute questioning that we see all the time in Congress, you know, I once asked because there's a number of people on that committee. And so one day, your staff kind of helps you get this. because the one thing is right now, we expect members of Congress to be experts on everything. And an old friend of mine one time, he was a member of Congress. He came in. He said, here's what you're going to learn.

He said, here's your first week you're going to walk in. You're going to look at the big room. You're going to look at the speaker. You're going to see the TV. You're going to see all the capital. And it's going to be amazing. He said, you're going to ask yourself, how did I get here? He said, in about a month, you're going to walk in.

He said, you're going to look around at your colleagues and everybody. You're going to say, oh, my God, how did they get here? and that's just sort of where it comes out of. But yeah, there's this five minutes. So I asked my staff one day, they had asked some questions that I knew were going to be asked earlier because it was just the headline. And I said, why do you want me to ask these questions? Because I made a habit of I did my own.

And I would watch the hearing because, you know, my legal background where I was, you know, I said, I'll just take what they say and just ask those questions. They said, but sir, when we put it on YouTube, nobody knows that you, those questions had already been asked. And it's like, really? That's the answer you just gave me. But it's an honest answer for them. And I don't blame the comms people for that.

That's what their job is, is to give their member the best, quote, visibility. And how big is your staff when you're a congressman? In the House, you have about, depends on how you want to staff it out, but I'd say somewhere between 14 and 16. And who's paying them? Government, federal government.

There's a budget for each office. It's called the MRA. So you get about a, I may be off on this, so, but I want to say it was like a million six, something like that. But that takes your district for your whoever's in the state and also who's in D.C. And you typically have seven, if you're not in leadership or in a committee, you probably have about six to seven in your D.C. office that handles all things. Because remember, as I just said a few minutes ago, we expect them to be experts and everything.

But there's absolutely no way. On any given day in your office, you'll have somebody talking about. everything from AI to abortion to dog fighting to I mean I'm just making you know just to give you the to add to seeding and agriculture to the you know undergrowth in a forest I mean all of this is just no way so you have people who handle those committees that you either you sit on or the committees that you don't sit on to keep up with what's going on and then back in this district you have folks who take care of the local stuff and also the constituent services but now that goes everything so that covers your plane tickets back home that covers everything

that you get to make it happen. And that's what happens. So you were on high visibility during the, as the Judiciary Committee, during the whole Trump. What was that like from the inside? Chaos. It really was because what I noticed something,

and I noticed from the moment the 18 election occurred. Now, 17 and 18, in those first two years, it was building just sort of storm. And we knew that a lot of the rush of stuff was fake. We knew that it was, we couldn't put our hand on why it was, but because they were hiding stuff, which Tulsi and many of us have now found cash and the rest. But so myself,

others on the committee, of course, Debbie Nunez, Trey Gowdy, many of those had worked on this. Well, 18 happens. And we knew that Chairman Goodlatte was going to retire and he wasn't coming back. I was not the most senior person, but I had done a lot of work. And so we made a lot friends. I would have been part of leadership and the House. So we made our play for what would have been chairmanship. Well, we lost the way. So I had been ranking, what's called ranking member. So I was the chairman for the Republicans in essence. And I noticed the change right after the November election when the Democrats won again. And they went from folks that I had worked with. Now they didn't want to work. I remember a bill that was, and this shows you

interesting. It was anti-Semitism bill that finally, I think the president actually tried to put it into executive order in the first term. We were simply aligning the anti-Semitism language with other agencies in the state and education from State Department and others. We'd worked on this for like three Congresses and everybody, you know, you go, well, that's a First Amendment problem. And it was, we'd work through it all. By the time we got it down, it was going to be fine. It would have been a good bill. Me being a ranking member gives me some power on our side to boost that. So I said, right after the first, I said, I'm not going to be able to work with Mr. Nadler, and Jerry Nadler on a lot of things. I said, but this was the area because Jerry had looked at it,

some of the other members and his side had worked on it as well. I said, let's go ahead and push this through. I said, it's something I can work with. Well, we got some language problems. Don't want to tell you. So here was a bill that we could have easily gotten passed in their side, because they were pushing it before. All of a sudden it became, well, we're not going to do this. And it became a partisan issue. It became we're not going to put Trump. We're not going to give Trump any victories. So it was chaos from the beginning. I mean, Matt Whitaker, who's become a dear friend now, he's a NATO ambassador,

was the interim attorney general at the time before Barr came in. And the first thing they wanted to do was get him in because they wanted to see if he was doing anything with the Mueller investigation. And so that began my year. I actually ended up writing a book about it. It was called Clock in the Calendar. And there was some of my speeches. If you go to YouTube, you can look up this time. And I started saying this is all about the clock.

clock in the calendar. And what it was is they were trying to do what my opinion was, and I believe frankly they in some way succeeded, was to tear down the president for the next presidential race. And that's all it was. And so it was a clause against the clock and race against the calendar. We thought we'd beat Mueller. And because there was nothing there. And when the report came out, it was terrible. And we had set it up. And when his hearing was there, I took the first questions of it. And by the time I was done with my five minutes, he actually sort of admitted to the point that he didn't know what his own report said, and then it was just downhill from there.

So we left July that year thinking, okay, we're behind this a little bit. Little did we know there was going to be somebody to decide to leak to Adam Schiff and others, the call between Zelensky and the president. I remember being back in Georgia. I was actually doing two weeks Air Force at the time, and I'm working between the two and the nights,

and all of a sudden we started hearing this rumors, rumblings about this issue. We get back in the fall of 2019, and that was all it was, was the impeach Zelensky and the stuff that we had already seen. And so it was chaos in the sense of it just divulged into where nothing else happened. This is what most people don't understand. They see this, and then the partisans are drawn to it, and rightfully so, this was interesting.

We were fighting from the fact that this was not an issue. We shouldn't be doing it. But at the same point in time, we wasn't passing spending bills. we wasn't passing anything else that helped the American people. We were focused on the drama. And that's sort of where it comes. Nowadays, because of the way it's set up, Congress has to deal with the issues of that it's not necessarily what you do.

I mean, there's a lot of members of Congress that are very well known. You know, I don't speak ill of them in the sense of there, but they're very well known, but they've not accomplished anything legislatively. And they're actually called legislators, but they've never done anything legislatively. what they have done is talk about issues, frame issues, talk about the other side, whatever. And I think that's, you know, it has this place. I mean, it's like football.

You know, it's like trash talking and, you know, you see it in USC. You see it. It's there. But it shouldn't be the main, the actual contest is what we need to be doing. And so I now have a unique perspective of having congressional legislative and administrative side. And so it's just really interesting to look back on it and see that. what may make good media doesn't necessarily help make good policy as we go forward. Now, did you get to know President Trump at that time?

I did. That's when I got to know him. What was it like being introduced to him? How did that relationship? It was interesting. I didn't really know him before he ran, and there was a few of us, a few of the members did. But I guess so I got known a little bit in 17 and 18 when I was in the leadership, but then having to walk into that role, which put us into contact a great deal.

I saw somebody who really wanted to do something good, but was very frustrated with it, the lies, a lot of what was going on, the constant attacks, the constant, you know, nothing was going to get done. And even internally, you know, it was just dealing with the government that he came in thinking, hey, like everybody else, let's make deals, let's work with this. And I think by the time 18 rolled around, he realized that it was just they want to get me. that's all they want to do. And he was in fighting mode. And believe me, there's been no better president in the last, I don't think there's another president in the last hundred years that could have withstood what he withstood and did what he did

to fight back and to do the best he could with what it. And then to see the things that he was doing in those last part of the years, I mean, the Abraham Accords, the stuff that we had going on, defeating ISIS, defeating these things, they don't get any discussion. And this is not just a partisan speaking. I mean, I was, you know, I did history in college. Look at what happened here. Why aren't we, you know, you may not like the individual, but you got to look at least these accomplishments.

You know, he took on historical black college universities, made permanent funding for them. We took on, you know, criminal justice reform, which actually helped, you know, large positions of our population, which I had a great deal of interest in, in getting them back into society and getting them back as being, you know, husbands and fathers and family members and taxpayers and getting them back to a life. instead of us just incarcerating them forever and making them better criminals when they got out. I mean, he did all of this, but yet the only thing people want to talk about is we impeached him. All they wanted to do was impeach him. They knew they had no hope of it going through, but they had to do it because that's what they're based. So with him, you could just, you sensed his frustration. I kept up the relationship, of course, after the, I got out then that year as well.

And what made you decide to get out? I ran for Senate, the crazy thing. But that's a whole another three-hour podcast. But I ran in Georgia, and it was one in which we thought we could win. It got our governor had played in that and appointed someone else. And I ran ahead and ran because I thought we were going to, we had a chance that we could have lost. Kelly left for, who's now in the administration, we're friends. But I just thought I could win and she could at the time.

And that's why I ran. We ended up losing both seats in Georgia in 2020. So that's how you have two, a very conservative state has two Democrat senators. And over time. But so we kept him touch and it was just over time he would call and I'd call him and we would just communicate. And then what did you do when you're out of a job? I started to practice law for a little bit and that didn't work out real well. Going back to that, remember that scab we talked about?

It just spent so long, I've been out of it. I hadn't practiced that long anyway. And then I got back into it and enjoyed it. I went with a firm this time that was really good. A guy that I knew, we didn't, I never worked directly, but he allowed me to be a part of his office and just, you know, rent office space and stuff like that. So I took on some small cases, but realized pretty quickly that I was doing some other things with, you know, staying involved in government politics that it wasn't there. And I didn't have the resources, the money to hire anybody to help me, so to speak. So I just sort of, after about, after about eight, nine months, I just said, no, I'll go do the other stuff that I was working with some consulting.

in doing that. So that's how I got out. And then what were you doing for the last campaign for Trump? Are you doing anything inside the campaign organization? What did you do? I'd go to rallies. I'd go do interviews. I'd do a lot of media.

I did a lot of media of the last four years. And so did social media, but also did Fox, did Newsmax, did CNN, did all this. I'd raised a very large profile from 2019 and 2020 from being on, you know, everybody's TV. I mean, there's probably, you know, some of those Mueller hearings, I mean, we had 20, 25 million people watching it any one time. I had clips of opening statements or questioning that were getting, you know, 15 million views on YouTube. I mean, it was, you know, because they were just being over and overplayed. So it raised a profile up overplay. So I just continued some of that and to the media.

So I did a lot of interviews, a lot of commentating. I did a short time, did a podcast as well, did some just, you know, keeping out there. And so when the campaign really kicked in when he said he's going to, to run again and then it uh through the end of 23 and in 24 so he would do rallies i'd go speak at the rallies um you know and and keep up that way and we'd always just conversed and what did you did it feel like inside the campaign like like trump was going to win or was it a question and no i always thought he i thought he's always going to be the nominee that was never a doubt i knew some of the others uh i had served with ronda santas i had served uh you know with others and i said no he's going

he's going to win this. The people, President Trump is a force of nature unto himself, okay? And then there's some people going to just hate him. There's only something that will love him. You rarely find anybody in the middle with that. And you could tell after 2016,

I mean, I was going to places in Georgia. I mean, back country, Georgia, which I love dearly. And there's 2016 signs still up. I mean, it goes back. And they never came down. And these were not in front of houses. It always amazed me that this billionaire,

literally from New York who related to common folks and he still does it to this day amazingly it is just is and so you could see it and some it never went out of the campaign mode they just, so when 23, 24 last year hit

you just knew he was going to win the numbers were there they weren't going to take it the only question became was is how was the campaign going to go you know in all the lawsuits and the warfare lawfare that it was going on. But he, amazingly again, he just, he went through it. And it just showed a tenacity that

was pretty amazing. And then when the real truth about Biden started to come out and then that debate, which was a complete disaster, you know, I began to feel good. I thought I was a little concerned right after that because then the Democrats got all fired up because they said, well, let's put in Harrison. But you could just see the president being just the president. And he continued on. So I, I felt good about it. And every time I'd see him, we'd always, we'd always. We'd always. We'd always, we'd always sort of have the conversation. He said, well, I said, he said, you got to come back to do this. I said, Mr. Pratt, let's just get you elected.

I said, we'll talk about it later. And that's the way it ended up. And so. Yeah, for a while, it seemed like every day I would, you know, open up the news. And every day, every day, every day there was the, the new story that was going to end Donald Trump's presidential campaign. And then every day that happened. And then with each day, you know, two days later, the story that,

that was two days old was now disproven, and now you had some other story that'd pop up. And it seemed like that was just a terrible tactic for the media and the Democrats to take, we're going to throw something at this guy every single day. But instead of it piling up, it all just kind of faded away because people just didn't trust them anymore

of what the media was saying. Yeah, it goes back to what I was, you ever had that person, remember back in, maybe in the military, maybe in high school, that they were just full of crap. I don't really know why to put him. You know, you loved them.

They're great. It was always great to hang around. But, you know, little whatever you call him. You know, they come up and nothing came out of their mouth was like, yeah, right. Okay. Yeah, I just saw a Tyrannosaurus Rex out back of the gym. No, you didn't. Shut up.

Let's go on. I mean, the sad part of buzz, it could have been a Tyrannosaurus race, but you wouldn't believe it would start with. And I think that's where it came with the media. And they thought what would hurt him was stuff that they cared about. It was because this, you know, it's been Trump derangement syndrome, whatever you're on a call. There is just this fascination, but there's also a different side here.

The press would hate to not have him. They eat it up. Think about it. I've been with him now in the cabinet for, you know, we're eight months now. What other president has said at his desk for three hours and answered just every question? And yet, it was so amazing is, well, you know, Joe Biden's not had a press conference in 300 days, but that's okay. He's running the country.

You know, we never have a. I sit down with President Obama, you know, and, you know, they just sort of let it go. Trump gives them every answer they want, and they still grow up about it. It's like, oh, well, he said this was wrong and this was wrong, and he put a, you know, they're about the only people that I say that they used the Oxford comma wrong and he was speaking, not writing. It's like, my God, you know, they just hate it. But he answers every question.

And people, on both sides, it gets to be, okay, it's just the same old, same old as we go. So I think that's what it actually brought. it to light and people were, you know, frankly, we're tired. But now I see him in this new administration, you know, asking between the two, he's focused, he's relaxed. I got to know him when he was under constant siege and a lot of us were in that time frame. It was just everything was going on. And he reacted in the way you would expect him to act. He fought back and he did well. Now is that I'm here. I get another chance.

He put together a cabinet that all of us, you know, and I know watch these people who watch it, say, that's the least experience, the worst cabinet, fine, whatever, get a lot. You know, but we're there. And the interesting thing is, we all work together. We've either worked together or known each other for a while. We're not, we didn't get plucked from commerce or treasury or vets or other, from these sort of silos of what you used to be built up to how you went to these administrations. We actually know each other.

Tulsi and I served together for years. I mean, she's a dear friend. I know cash from working on the hill in these issues. I've known Pete from Fox. I knew Brooke Rawlins from working with her. I knew Linda from working with her. I knew Pam Bondi. Lee Zeldon, we served together.

We were on the community together. We pick up the phone and call each other. We work together. And we're only there for one reason. Make it better. And I think that's what's given the president the ability to go set an agenda. Let this agenda go. It's going, and we're coming through.

We're seeing the results of the big, beautiful bill. We're seeing the, it's slow and coming, but you're taking an economy that had been so government-centric for so long that now we're saying, let the, let the real enterprise start going here. And we're seeing it work. Veterans are being experienced because they can start jobs. They can get stuff. People are seeing, you know, inflation going down. They're seeing gas prices down. They're seeing the eggs down, if that's the big thing for the moment.

So that's when you see this stuff happening. So I think he is very focused and he's willing to. it's the best I can put it. I like to say this. He's Trump being Trump. And it's pretty cool to see. Because the rest of the world, think about this, the rest of the world, they don't know how to deal with him. They didn't know how to deal with the first time.

They really don't know how to deal with him now. And, you know, Putin's about, you know, in these others where he's really working at hard. I mean, I mean, he's trying, but I think they're going to push a button, you know, and it just gets him to the point to say, look, I'm going to put us first. And he said, I'm going to make sure our folks are protected. And he said, I'm going to make sure the world understands who we are. So once Trump wins, do you already know, do you have a foresight of that you're going to be put in this position? No, a little bit.

I mean, we had taught, and like I said, he said, well, you know, I want you to come out and he, because it was always discussed to me running for another office. And I said, well, sir, I want to help you anyway. He said, I just want, you know, you come to me. I said, sir, fine. You win. We'll talk about it. Well, he won. And about a week later, we'd had some conversation with some of the staff as they were getting the transition done.

And that's how it came about. and he called and we were looking at several things. And I just looked at it from my experience being in 24-year, you know, in the Air Force Navy, a lawyer, been in Congress. I'm the first VA secretary that's been a member, had been a former member of Congress since it became a cabinet position. That, to me, is vital because I understand what happens on Capitol Hill. You understand how the sausage gets me.

Oh, you better believe it. And I know how they're working. And, you know, and I've had some contentious hearings in my confirmation hearing and stuff, but I'll go back and forth with them. And I've made it very clear. you're not going to lie about the VA. I mean, you have your own political position, that's fine, but you're not going to use it for propaganda pieces.

And so many times the VA has been used by both sides, and I'll say that for political purposes. Because who doesn't want to be elected office and say, I'm not for the veteran? That's a quick way to get beat. But they want to say they're for the veteran, but yet they try to use the VA as their whipping post to do that. And I've just taken a different attitude and said,

after this, so I looked at it, I said, I've got this experience. The president agreed. We put it in. And we've been putting that veteran-centric, veteran-first perspective to the largest agency in government. So now you're in the VA, and there's the background of the VA, the VA's been around forever. Is it the second largest?

We are. We're the largest civilian, purely civilian department. Okay. We're the same size after, by the end of September, we're going to be the, we're still larger than the active duty army. And I kind of opened up today talking about some. trying to paint the obvious clear picture of why the VA is so important. And obviously, almost all my friends are veterans.

We got in the VA, it's disability compensation and pension payments. It's comprehensive health care, which includes mental health, long-term care, nursing homes, telehealth services, counseling, mental health services, crisis support, prescription drugs, rehabilitation services, education benefits. education benefits, home loan guarantee VA VA loans outstanding, life insurance programs, burial and memorial benefits, support for family caregivers. I mean, it is just a massive, massive department. You come on board. What does it look like when you get there? When you, when you first walk in the door and you start looking at what's happening there, what are your immediate thoughts? Oh my God. That's really that first. I'm really, Because I was starting to learn a little bit because you have to go through confirmation.

So I had to start learning about the department. Even though 60% of my caseload as a congressman was dealing with VA issues, and I had dealt with it with Johnny Isison when he was chairman of the VA committee in the Senate. And he was a dear friend of my senator from the home estate. But you began to look at the scope and scale of this, the hospitals. We have 170 vansies, 170 hospitals. We have 1,200 clinics. We're the biggest health care system in the world, especially the U.S.

And so we deal with that. That's a, you know, a massive organization, 370,000, 80,000 people or more. Then you got our benefit side, which deal with everything that you just touched on from actual disabilities and compensation to VBA also handles your home loans, your student loans, you know, the GI bills, those kind of things. And then you have our cemeteries, which is our smallest of our group, but to me is one of our most precious that we have because of what we get to do. In fact, I was just here yesterday. I spent some time out at Rosencrantz and went by Mike and laid a coin yesterday. Thank you for doing it. His site.

But I looked at it, what I began to see, and I started having these meetings. And get the picture. And if you ever have a chance, I'd love for you to come to see my office. I'll show you where this was. And we've sat there. And these cars come in and say, well, sir, here's what we're doing. And they would come with you with questions. And I wasn't raised in the VA.

It was not a, you know, so the sense because I see it from the outside. I just ask questions as an outsider would ask questions. And so my favorite line, and it still is to this day, and I talk about all the time, I just ask why. They'll say, well, here's what we're doing. And I'll say, why? Well, and they try to move on. I said, no, no, no, explain to me why we do it this way.

I said, it may be perfect. I said, but just explain to me why. Couldn't explain it. A lot of times they just couldn't explain it. Or then I would get this. Well, it's statute. You know, we just have to follow the statute. Well, I was in Congress for a year.

You know where those statutes come from. I'm a lawyer. So I said, well, show me the statute. And I said, I would love to see the statute. And I said, if we need to change it, I'll go to Congress and we'll work on changing it. I said, but show me the statute. Well, it is policy and procedure. It's a regulation.

I said, now we're getting somewhere. I said, statute, I have to work with Congress. That's law. I said, we're going to follow the law. I said, but policy and procedure is regulation? That's me. That's us. That's called a pen.

I said, if we're doing something we don't need to be doing, and we're doing it in a way this counterintuitive of our mission, I said, we're going to change it. And so that's what we've done so far. What happened was, and if you think of it in silos, is really truly siloed to silo. We see this in the military, unfortunately, it's where we get in trouble when we have siloed missions.

Our health mission became very solid because it's the largest. So they just developed their own procedures. They developed their own protocol. Every hospital thought they were a startup. I had to fight this from day one. I remind them if you have VA on the side of your building, you're not a startup, you're not by yourself, and you will not act like you are. Why are we wasting the possibilities of 170 hospitals being standardized to actually do stuff the right way? I was amazed.

I had a young man tell me one day, he was amputee, told me he was getting a treatment in one facility and moved to another facility across country, and the facility he moved to, told him the VA, we don't do that. He said, I just came from facilities where this is where this was done. Oh, well, I don't care. We don't do that. It's like, this is what we faced. Something's wrong. So, yeah, something's wrong in this picture. You know, somebody pulled the rip cord because there's a problem here.

This is what we saw. So I saw a lot of people doing want to do good work. But the problem was, it was, we've always done it that way before. I think that's the old Baptist preacher of me now that didn't tolerate that at all. Well, we've always done it that way before. So what? We're not, we added in 10 years. So 15 to 25.

We added over 100 billion or more in budget and over 100,000 people. And you know what's happened to our, quote, metrics? Service levels. All went the wrong way. All went through all the way. By the time I got in, and we had 260,000 in backlog disability claims when I took office on February 5th. That means they're over 125 days. And some were a lot longer than that.

And I said, we put a tag team on it. We put overtime in it. We put other people. we're now under 150 did that in less than four months. I mean, it's just a matter. What gets measured gets done. And we looked at, I just got a report on our VHA system

in which we started putting stuff like best medical interest. So if a member comes in and they say, you know, look, I would rather go to my cardiologist in close to my home or it's just in town. I love you at the VA. I'm going to get other care here, but I want to go there. Then the doctor can simply say,

yep, we're going to send you over there and it not have to go through another doctor or anything else. So look, And I'm going to say this because here's the thing. I'll guarantee you what's going to happen is when this comes out, you're going to see in the comment section, oh, secretary is full of crap. I went and it was awful. I couldn't get this.

Bear with me. Some of it aren't going to like this because I don't put the VA, the organization is not, we're a service organization designed to help veterans. We're not an organization designed to help ourselves. And you may have had a bad experience, and I understand that. You may have still had a bad experience. Well, comment on there because here's an interesting thing. You talked about early me coming into this position, I had a very high profile.

I'm one of the highest profile social media and others that's ever served in this position. I could probably give the names of others, and they were great people, but nobody would know them anywhere. So what we found out early on is when I posted on social media, Twitter, Instagram, these others, we were having massive response because I had a huge, you know, large following. So we have now put internally a group that actually reads those comments. And we have actually started doing a constituent and reaching out of these folks. We don't encourage that because, I mean, we may miss one, but we're actually doing this to say, look, we want to get better. Okay.

You may say that we're not moving fast enough. You may say it's easy. Well, we're 450,000 people. 170 hospitals. I'm trying to get across to every one of them as we do this. Give us some time. If you got the feedback, let us know. We're willing to take feedback.

And I'm willing to make changes. But as we go through this, I'm also having to take an organization that has been very adept at doing it the way they wanted to do it. So they had no problem in not having extended hours. I've implemented a program in which we've added almost a million, 200,000 extra hours of service in just the last few months at our C-box. Because we're actually keeping some people late. We're opening on weekends. That gives, you know, our younger veterans a chance to get there. We're listening.

You know, the best medical interest stuff, get you out to where you need to go. We're looking at holding our doctors accountable in the community to get the stuff back so that we can make sure. We're not the simple things that take so much time, we're saying let's take those out. I'm getting to the point now, and some are not as happy about this because they're invested in how they do it, but others are getting on to it. is if I've of the opinion that no veteran who's earned a benefit should have to have anybody to help them get that benefit. In other words, the paperwork should be simple enough,

the process should be simple enough, that they can get the benefit that they've earned. Instead of having to go to somebody else and say, I don't understand this. I'm not. We actually have a form. It's still in our form, and I'm trying to get this out,

but it's still in there on disability claims that actually asked for the person's military history where they had served and everything else. I looked at this. I said, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my life. All I need your name, your Social Security number, your DD214 number, or even just that, I can pull your entire record. I know everywhere you've been.

Why am I making them fill that out? Because we just thought it would be good to ask. Well, I don't do that anymore. So like I said, for those out there who, you know, look, you know, we're a health care system. And this is one thing I want to emphasize to all you're listening. Congress put metrics out there, and we hear this all the time. You hear about wait times. You hear about these others.

we're the only health care system in the world that measures wait times. And it's because Congress, and I was there when we did this Mission Act and everything else. It was because we were having issues in Phoenix and others where people were getting, you know, wasn't getting scheduled appointments. So we said, how do we get a handle on this and make sure, okay, so if you don't have a appointment within 10 days, you can go to the community. Well, I'm sort of redoing that all together, so we're not really worried about it. But no one of the health care system here in California or anywhere else deals in that.

It's just something we can look at, but it also gives a false reality. what the VA can look like. You could have great wait times and terrible quality. So I'm trying to get us back to a standard of quality being the metric, not the wait times. We're going to continue to get you in as quickly as possible. But also I need you to know, and again, I'll hear from it, because I've already seen this enough. They canceled my appointment last week. Well, guess what?

I'm in private health care. My doctor canceled my appointment last week because they get sick. They can't come in. They got overbooked. They had to go to a trip. We're a health care organization. And now I've had the media getting on me. Well, you have people leaving and you have doctors that, you know, you need more doctors in certain areas.

I said, yeah, have you done a story lately on the hospitals in town that they have doctor shortages as well? Well, they don't want to talk about that because it's easy to get on the veteran because it's a heartstring issue. I have the veteran at my heart center getting up. I am one. I've been there. There's nothing I'm going to do. It's not going to be focused on getting them what they need. but also I'm also tired of a society that looks at veterans as victims.

We're not victims. I may have people, and I met so many, they may have lost legs, arms, everything. They're not victims. They're just now empowered to do it in a different way, and we're going to help them do whatever we can. So that's my philosophy, and it ruffles some edges, and, you know, people are, oh, you're killing morale. No, we're just getting back to doing what we're supposed to be doing. And I love every one of my VA employees. I want them to be the best they can be.

but we're also going to have standardization. We're going to do it the same way. You know, the calisthenics run the same way everywhere. But when you've not had that, it's been a situation in which we've had a system that was good. And I'm not, I don't want to, I never will detriment. But every system can get better. And every organization that's not looked at itself. I got you one, because I know you do organizational stuff and everything.

Did you realize that the first week that I got there, I asked for how many employees we had, it took a week and a half for them to tell me. Dang. And right now, a big headline came out about a week ago because we're doing organizational charts and manning documents. Okay, just think about what I just said. Manning documents, I've been eight months in, we're doing this. It got leaked to the press and saying, oh, there's organizational and change the manning document.

Yeah, I'm doing a manning document. Tell me any company in the world that doesn't have a manning document. I come from the military side. I was at Africa headquarters for chaplains. I could tell you where every billet I had, I could tell you, where every billet I had, I could tell you who was assigned to that billet, who was in that billet, who was coming out of that building. And I go to the largest health care system in the world, and you can't tell me a manning

document or chart. That's how bad it was. So you ask, that's where it was. We're moving forward. Well, change is coming. And changes come today for us because I know you got called back to D.C. And we're short on time. We've got to get you on a flight out of here.

So any other closing thoughts before we get you out of here? No, John, I appreciate what you're doing. And just telling everybody, One of the things is, and I says this always, especially those if you're listening to this and maybe you're out there somewhere and you think you're alone, you're not. Okay, don't ever think you're alone. And I'm calling it all veterans, and I know the folks who listen to this podcast, it's amazing how we had a camaraderie when we were in and we seemed to forget it when we leave.

Those battle buddies, wing man, those folks, if somebody's on your heart and you hadn't talked to them in a while, text them, call them, do something. Because right now we're losing 17 or more today to death by suicide. many of them as you started off this whole thing we're trying our best in the VA to get them as help many of them as help but them are never going to ask for help they're just looking for a buddy they're just looking for someone to listen

and all I ask is that we all work at us together going forward I'm going to do everything I can for the VA and the VA's going to work for veterans and we're going to do it across our board and nobody ever questioned you know if they want to question my belief fine but I just say prove it because I'm working at this every day

but we've all got the part to play here and the VA is no longer going to be the, oh, we're going to make it better and we're going to do that. No, the VA's going to be the best we can be. Our standards are going to be high. And I'm not going to let anybody, if we're doing it wrong, I'm going to fix it. If we're doing it right, I'm going to fight you with it.

Because I'm not going to let anybody take, because when I see so many of this happening and they start lying about what's going on, I tell them, don't think about the situation that you're lying about. Think about the person who hears this. It's a veteran out there that 60% of our veterans who have death by suicide have never had contact with the VA. And I said, if you keep

telling them that the VA's bad or you keep telling them this and you don't go follow up with the right answer, then they're going to stay away. And if you keep doing that and you're lying to them and scaring them, then you're part of the problem. And so for me, it's just about putting it all together and saying, you know, let's take this time, let's make this work because we have men and women who want to serve this country who raise that right hand. They've earned a benefit. Our country said we're going to do it. Well, by God, we're going to do it. Indeed. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for service in the Navy. Thank you, service in the Navy. Thank you service in the Air Force.

And thanks for what you're doing today to take care of our veterans. Much appreciated. Thank you. Chalk, I appreciate it. And with that, Secretary Collins has left the building. And as I mentioned, during the podcast, he got called back to Washington, D.C., surprisingly, or whatever is a surprise to them. They got called back to D.C. with some project or tasking or something like that. So, unfortunately, couldn't stick around very long.

but great to have him on and just just FY he mentioned his social media and that they're actually doing stuff for their social media so there's a couple things for to find secretary Collins himself he's on Twitter X at sec vet affairs and at rep Doug Collins so that's that's where he is so he kind of has two and then same thing with Instagram. He's at SECVet Affairs and then at Doug Collins GA. I think I'd focus on the at sec vet affairs since that's its current job. And then for the VA itself, for the VA itself on the interwebs, VA.gov. And then on Instagram, Twitter, X, and YouTube, it's at depart, dept, DEPT, VET affairs. And then on Facebook, it's your U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. So there you go.

You know, and as they mentioned, they're paying attention to that social media. So if you need to pass some word and whatnot, then that seems like a place to do it. And, you know, as he was leaving, you know, we'll try and get a chance to get him back on here and discuss some more of this stuff and a little bit more detail. I had a bunch of things, a bunch of topics we were going to cover, but we just, we just ran out of time. So it's the way it goes sometimes. But one thing we do know is this. Your mind and your body are attached. and that was one of the things that, you know,

we really didn't get to it, but it's one of the things that I wanted to talk about. Just your mind and your body are attached. And if you're strong in your body, there's a decent chance, you'll be strong in your mind. And so doing things like training is very helpful. When you train,

guess what are you going to need, Echo Charles? Fuel. Yes. I thought you were going to say rest. Which you are. You do need rest. You need fuel. So check out joccofuel.com.

Get yourself some. Hydrate I'm having a hydrate right now because I ran this morning a little further than I wanted to You know we had various activities that were happening on the run we had dogs the beach was looking tempting the whole nine yards So ended up probably losing quite a bit of sweat and then just rolled right in here with a hydrate so Hydrate energy drinks the whole nine yards protein you need protein check out joccofuil.com or check out wherever you shop We're getting there you can probably like it's up there street from my house at my local Jensen's supermarket you can get Jocko fuel right now. So check it out the best cleanest stuff for your system, your fuel, joccofuel.com.

Check it out. And then Origin USA, you know, we're doing these efforts in America to bring manufacturing back right now. Well, we've been doing that for a while at Origin USA. We recognize that manufacturing is a key component. of a nation and we were selling that out overseas so at origin we are bringing it back check out origin usa.com you need t-shirt hoodie whatever you need training shorts i got the nilok training shorts yeah they're they're good to go for the for jihitsu training

good to go so check it out origin usa.com get yourself some boots jeans whatever you need also jocco store dot com that's where you can get your shirts uh representing on the discipline equals freedom good these notions that that we need and that we have on the path you can represent those anyway yeah some good stuff on there some socks on there too even it's very good also we have a lot of new stuff coming get after it standby to get some all these shirts that we know but like 2.0 scenarios like 2.0 scenarios exactly right you know because we've had these on the on the store for a long time but it's uh might be time for an update anyway If you're interested in any new stuff,

you can put your email in the little email list there. I won't spam. I don't spam. I'm against spam. Spaming. So, yeah, but we'll keep you updated as far as new stuff and when it comes out. Because a lot of times, you know,

things, every once in a while they get sold out. Then you've got to wait for the new thing. And it can be a thing. But if you get the heads up through the email, boom, you can get yours when they come out. It's the best time to do it. Also, shirt locker. Subscriptions scenario, new design.

every month. People seem to like it. Designs a little bit outside the box sometimes. Probably. Sometimes they're smack bag. In the middle of the box. Sometimes, exactly right.

It's kind of the... I notice that my daughters like the shirt locker shirts. Yeah. They don't like the standard issue stuff. Yeah, like the Sherlocker shirts. Sometimes it can be fun. You know, the designs are fun.

You know, that's why I'm with you and... Or I'm with them on these notions. The last one or sorry, the next one, the current one right now is, uh, Viking runes, I think, themed. How come? Discipline equals freedom.

Did you send me one? No, not yet. But if you want to see, you know, you want to see kind of like a hint of what they look like, go on jocco store.com, click on the shirtlock. You can see what it's all about.

Anyway, it's all good. It's all on jocco store.com. All right. Also, Dave, Dave Burke has a book coming out. It's called Need to Lead. It comes out in October. Order it now to get the,

I wrote the forward to it. Order it now to get the first dish. You want that first a day? Also, Eschelonfront, we have a leadership consultancy. That's what we do. We solve problems through leadership. Go to Eschalonfront.com if you need help inside your organization. Also, check out Extreme Ownership.com.

It's our online training academy. You can learn how to lead in the comfort of your own home. It's important. Also, if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. And actually, there's a little gap in service sometimes with the VA.

And there's some things that they don't cover. Mama Lee comes into play with America's mighty warriors.org. She can help cover that gap. So check that out if you want to donate or get involved. Also check out Heroes and Horses.org. And of course, Jimmy May's organization beyond the brotherhood. Dot org. Once again, to connect with the secretary, TwitterX, it's at SECVet Affairs.

And at rep Doug Collins on Instagram, it's at SEC vet affairs and at Doug Collins, GA. And for the VA on the interwebs, it's VA.com. And then Instagram, Twitter, X, YouTube, at department DEPT, vet affairs. For us, you can check out jocco.com. And then on social media, I'm at Jocko Willink and Echl's at Echolz. Just be careful because there's an algorithm there. And you don't want to spend all your time in that algorithm. and you also don't want your your main place for action to be posting stuff.

That's not what you want to do in your life. So just be careful of the algorithm. It's there. Once again, thanks to the Honorable Doug Collins for joining us. Thanks for your service in the military. Thanks for your service in the government. Thank you for your service as the secretary taking care of our veterans. We appreciate what you are doing.

And thanks to all of our military around the world. active duty and our veterans, of course, thank you for your service for what you are doing right now and for what you have done. And also thanks to our police law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol secret service as well as all other first responders. Thank you for your service protecting us here at home. And for everyone else out there, whether you're a veteran or not, you are possibly likely in one of these three situations.

Maybe you're doing okay and you got things handled and that's great. Stay on the path. Maybe things are going well for you. And if things are going well for you, then maybe you have the capacity to help others. And if that's the position you're in where you got a little capacity, well, then you know what to do. Help some other people out. And then you also might be a person who's in a spot right now where you need some help. And that's normal.

And everyone's been there and ask for help and hang in. there and things will get better that's the way it works so hang tough and that's all i've got for tonight and until next time this echo and jocco out