Julian Dorey Podcast - 😳 [VIDEO] - Shawn Ryan: MI6-Trained Navy SEAL takes us Inside CIA | 148

Episode Date: June 3, 2023

Support Our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey Subscribe To Our Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChs-BsSX71a_leuqUk7vtDg  (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Shawn Ryan is a former Navy SEAL, CIA GRS Spy, and current acclaimed podcast host. After 15 years in the SEALs and CIA, Shawn started the Shawn Ryan Show Podcast which is currently a Top-10 podcast in the country. Subscribe to Shawn Ryan Show: https://www.youtube.com/@ShawnRyanShowOfficial  ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 - Rob O’Neill (Bin Laden Mission Navy SEAL); Shawn’s backstory w/ the show 8:54 - Erik Prince & The Blackwater 4 (Nisour Square Mass@cre) 13:59 - How does Shawn feel about the gov?; Washington DC is messy 18:36 - The division problem; 80-20 rule in mass media 24:57 - The Eddie Gallagher Navy SEAL Case 31:07 - The Gaming Generation & Navy SEALS; Military “Social Influencers” 36:22 - What War looks like today; CIA Spy Andrew Bustamante 39:57 - China; The Chinese Spy Balloon; Power Grid Weakness; Lithium in Afghanistan 45:26 - The Media on China; Peter Zeihan; CCP in Africa 51:54 - China & our power grid; Andy Greenberg’s hacker reporting; “Society is fragile” 59:23 - The advantages China has over US; Devaluation of US Dollar 1:03:30 - Mexican Cartels & CIA 1:09:01 - Julian tells story of last time he saw Biden 1:15:20 - US building energy field around country? 1:17:04 - How Shawn joined CIA 1:21:45 - Diff between Navy SEALs and CIA; Shawn’s rotations for Agency 1:28:48 - CIA communication in field 1:32:13 - Shawn’s CIA Training 1:36:10 - Shawn explains CIA Spy Tradecraft & Surveillance  1:44:01 - No diplomatic immunity in CIA; CIA Spy Covers 1:48:15 - When Shawn got made (and shot at) 1:50:56 - CIA Safe Houses 1:53:33 - Shawn’s spy strategy in first 2 weeks of new location 2:01:15 - The culture at CIA 2:10:55 - The CIA’s relationship with civilians 2:19:08 - Shawn’s rise through the NAVY SEALs 2:26:10 - How SEALs Team numbers work; Navy SEALs Specialties 2:31:43 - Shawn’s British MI6 Spy Training; Shawn goes to Afghanistan & Iraq 2:36:41 - Shawn gives opinion on Iraq War; US are world’s police? 2:43:40 - Afghanistan War; Halliburton in Iraq 2:47:32 - The op tempo in Iraq; Shawn tells stories of missions in Iraq 2:53:47 - What would Shawn have done if he was in charge of Iraq War? 2:56:32 - Why Shawn left Navy SEALs; Anti-Piracy & Captain Phillips 3:00:35 - Why military guys “want” to be in warzones 3:04:07 - Shawn’s experience with PT Ess after the war; Purpose Crisis 3:10:37 - The Veteran health crisis in America 3:12:40 - The vet epidemic going on right now; Shawn remembers lost friends 3:16:45 - Shawn reveals his personal struggle & tells story of his closest call 3:22:49 - Shawn’s holy experience in Mexico; Its benefits for everybody 3:29:04 - Next steps for Shawn Ryan Show ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 148 - Shawn Ryan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up guys, if you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. When you're in Baghdad in that time period, you could just hear the car bombs going off all day, all night, hear the gunshots, hear the gunfights, and it was just bombs, terrorists, suicide bombers all the time. People coming back all f***ed up, seeing these vehicles getting blown up, seeing what's left of them, if anything. I mean, it was, this guy died, this guy died, this guy died, this guy died, and that's why we were so busy. We were killing these guys. They were making the bombs. We were killing the guys that were planting the bombs. We were killing the guys that were

detonating the bombs, and it was saving American lives. John Ryan, welcome to New Jersey, sir. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. It's a pleasure to finally meet you, man. I found your show, I guess, about, what is it now? We're in May or June, so I guess it was like a year ago, probably like April, May last year, you did the one with Rob O'Neill, who's probably been on like 6 000 fucking podcasts so i almost was like oh this again but i'm glad i clicked it because that was actually of the ones i had seen i'd probably watch five or six of him before that was the best podcast anyone has ever done with him and i think a lot of it has to do with the fact that you know you were a navy seal and the two of you just kind of understand each other but i loved every second of that well thanks for watching what made you click it i don't you know what like i'll usually watch podcasts and when i say watch i i say that liberally because

like it's on the third screen there while i'm working so i just kind of listen to it but when i'm doing work that doesn't involve me editing like audio of the show i try to turn on podcasts and i try to listen to all audio of the show i try to turn on podcasts and i try to listen to all kinds of i mean i listen to like everything so i saw this come up the reason you guys are here is this is as close as we've ever been to osama bin laden good evening the al-qaeda leader osama bin laden is dead killed by american special forces who raided his hideout in pakistan in the early hours of the morning. And I remember putting my first foot came out.

I'm looking at bin Laden's house. I remember thinking, I guess we'll start the war from here. And I clicked your channel. I saw it was like a big channel. I was like, why have I not heard of this? And then I just I'm like, all right, let's give this a go. Next thing you know, it's like 3 a.m. And i'm looking at that screen like this like holy shit he's talking about being a foxhole with hillary clinton and shit and i'm like oh my god so i don't know that's that's why well thanks for checking it out man and thanks for checking me out

too i i was happy to see that we had someone in common with with and Bustamante and with Pomp before that. You did a great podcast with him. But it's really cool when you see people from afar and you admire what they're doing. And then you get to connect with them and see what they're about. And then see that they're the same person off camera too, which is always really cool. Yeah. But what got you, like what made you want to do this? Because you were, you know, you did 15 years, Navy SEAL, CIA, and did some crazy work around the world, and then kind of seamlessly transitioned to making fucking amazing podcasts. Well, are you talking about why I went into podcasting or YouTube in general?

Whichever one, actually. went into podcasting or YouTube in general whichever one actually well so when I left the agency I really I didn't have a plan I kind of left abruptly and I'd love to tell you about that but I can't unfortunately but so it goes yep but I didn't have a plan and and so I decided I know I'll start a business and my business was gonna be helping wealthy people come out come up with a plan of action in case of a crisis and never heard that yeah never heard that real original right and that's why I fell flat on my flat on my face so so that didn't work. I didn't know anybody. I was a horrible networker. And so I kind of fell into, well, what does everybody want to see? They want to see seals

and operators shooting guns and teaching tactics. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $5. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, English muffin sandwiches, value iced coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Listen closely. That's not just paint rolling on a wall. It's artistry. A master painter carefully applying Benjamin Moore Regal Select eggshell

with deftly executed strokes. The roller lightly cradled in his hands, applying just the right amount of paint. It's like hearing poetry in motion. Benjamin Moore, see the love. ...practics and stuff like that so that's how i started still couldn't get any clients had some people in south florida i lived in south florida at the time that could that kind of helped uh grow my network helped me get a course together

did that that kind of jet launched it and then I started getting all these emails about what kind of stuff do I teach? What do I carry? Should that should they carry one in the pipe and it was all the same question. So I'm horrible with emails who isn't right and So I decided hey instead of email and all these people back I know I'll just make a youtube video answering all the frequently frequently asked frequently asked questions and one of those videos wound up getting like five or six million views oh wow yeah it was an edc pocket dump uh at a gun shop wex gun works and then we did another one and it was i it was, should I carry around in the chamber?

And that one got a million or two million views. And then, and I would always give these brochures, these kind of like brochures, or not brochures, questionnaires out at my critiques at my courses, asking, and one of the questions was, how did you find us? And it was always YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube. Never Instagram, never word of mouth. it was always YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube. Never Instagram. Never word of mouth.

It was always YouTube. That's amazing. Yeah. And so the channel just started growing. I started getting tired of teaching tactics. And there's a lot of egos in that game, as I'm sure you can imagine. And I don't like that. I'm not a chess pounder i'm not

here to belittle anybody i don't like being belittled and and and um and it just it's just not my tribe man so i i decided i'm gonna try this podcasting stuff and and part of the reason i started that also there was a multitude of reasons, but I got tired of seeing the same fucking people be heard on the media, on podcasts. It was the same shit over and fucking over and over and over again. we both know there's so many people in the world who have something important to say or have a story that's going to bring somebody hope or they have truth that needs to be shared and those are all in historic events being documented i mean there's i don't know how much you listen to my podcast but especially when it comes to the war fighters and the veterans i mean everybody that's been on there has been involved in some very high profile unique stuff and that stuff needs to be documented for the generations coming up and that became that

all of these things kind of encompassed together is what kind of motivated me to do the podcast when you're talking about the same people appearing over and over again on podcasts are you talking in general or also like specifically even from like the military world kind of where you have the same okay both you know in the veteran community and i'll probably get some hate from this from some of the other companies but i don't fucking care you know but um but all they give a shit about is numbers and then once these companies get developed and these personalities get developed and then they get fucking paranoid that somebody's going to overtake them the top the top trainer at the time who you know maybe maybe he's delta maybe he's seal maybe he's Delta, maybe he's SEAL, maybe he's Team Six, maybe he's an Air Force

PG. It doesn't matter. When you reach that level, these guys start getting paranoid and they get selfish and they don't want to spread the wealth around. You know, they want all the fame, they want all the money. And so they control the market. And who they do, they build these little bitty networks. and that's why you see all the same people just go it's like a circle jerk they build networks yeah and so what I did is I I I broke the network and I built your own network I see exactly that's exactly what I did I built my own network I got tired of seeing the same people when every single time when none of these other guys are getting a chance to to to be heard and so I

started going after the people that have these phenomenal stories that have never been heard like DJ Shipley was one yeah Kyle Morgan Kyle Morgan was one oh Just about everybody on my show has been one. And then it just grew. And I started getting guys like Eric Prince, who could be heard if he wanted to be heard, but he avoids the media like the plague. How did you get him? I got him through the Blackwater episode. He watched that and the Blackwater Massacre episode that we were talking about earlier. Can you tell people who haven't heard of that before, who are listening right now, what that was and then how you had in these guys and kind of the background?

I'd love to dig into that. Well, let me think of a shorter explanation but um so i believe it was 2007 baghdad nassau square there was a big shootout i can't remember how many people died um 17 i think was it 17 i think it was we'll check that but the media all of the media, conservative, liberal, doesn't matter, none of the media gave these guys a fair shake, and there was a narrative against them, which I didn't realize actually until I started digging into that interview. And who were these guys? These guys were Blackwater contractors for the State Department. So they're there basically in a military setting protecting people. Okay, so let's go back.

Okay, so Blackwater back in the early 2000s up to maybe 2015 protect this particular contract for the State Department was to protect State Department officials in combat zones. So Baghdad, all over Iraq, all over Afghanistan, various other countries in the world, but they would protect State Department officials and diplomats. And they are the only company that never, ever lost a principal, principal being the person being protected. So that's how Blackwater – that's what the State Department contract at Blackwater was. These guys were on the State Department contract. They got in a shootout. Terrorists initiated it. And because of political reasons, they basically got rolled over. As soon as we came to a stop within a minute or less,

I started hearing the pings on the side of my vehicle. And at the same time, I heard, I don't know if I heard Paul yell it out on the radio or just yell it out down the turret that there was a white Kia that was presenting a threat and it was coming towards the vehicle. Four Americans received lengthy prison sentences today for an infamous incident during the Iraq war. All four are former Blackwater security contractors convicted in the killings of 14 unarmed Iraqis, including women and children, in Baghdad in 2007. And it took years, though, too. I mean, they weren't even, if I remember correctly, because I will say I just listened to that podcast last week, and you changed my mind on it. It was a podcast I'd avoided for a long time because the narrative was what it was and it just seems so strong against them that I'm like, oh, God, because to me like the State Department or I should say the government at that point had gotten to a point two years later where they're like, all right, we're not doing this.

Dropped it and then there was I guess like a gaffe like Biden said something offhand when he was vice president and then they felt like about like oh yeah now we're gonna look at that and then they felt like they had to look at it and then they didn't charge these guys again until it was like what four or five years out from the event itself they there was they went to court three times if i remember correctly they they were not going to get away they were going to keep indicting them keep charging them until they until they got them and they did they did and i mean we don't have to go into everything but you saw all the evidence that was hidden deleted especially the drone footage you know do you remember that part where she was saying that the reporter who you had in there she was saying something about there's like

seven to ten minutes where it's like they show up there was drone footage above and then it's gone and you only see when they're leaving yep and they said they they when they were asked about it they said we routinely delete drone footage to to from to conserve memory but you don't delete a 10-minute piece of drone footage and then just picks back up. It just – you don't do that. They deleted the evidence. They steamrolled them. How do you feel when you find out, get to the bottom of the evidence and see something like that when in this case a country that you love america that you're from that you

fought for at the highest levels served in the military served in the cia you know you've been around the block with some of the most powerful parts of the government how do you feel when you see something like that happen does that make you lose faith in the system in its entirety or do you view that as sometimes these horrible things happen and when they do we need to point them out i lose faith in the system i've seen too many of them happen that inner that particular interview i mean some of these interviews get to me you know you you listen to them at least you listen to a couple of them, and we get deep, and it's, yeah, I lose faith. I realize politicians are political prostitutes, and they will stop at nothing to get what they want, and that's what that was.

There were oral deals involved. There was a status of forces agreement that needed to be re-signed. And just to know that there are people out there. I mean, these guys are, you watch the interview, these are just red-bloated Americans that wanted to defend the country and fight for the country and protect U.S. dignitaries. And they did a phenomenal job doing that. Like I said, Blackwater has never lost a principal ever and and and to throw these to to throw these guys three of them were going to

prison for what 30 something years one of them nick slatton was going to prison for life without parole how the do these people sleep at night yeah and how the fuck are they still in how is one of them the president of the united states now you know yeah it gets to me it really gets to me oh it's it's a career you know that that's the problem if i could sum it all up in in one judgment the problem with washington is that it's a career and that's not just the politicians i mean look at k street look at look at the the i mean i'll i'm not a trump guy at all but i will give him this when he termed that thing the swamp i mean that was pretty spot on i don't know if he came up with that or someone else did but props because that's to me that's exactly what it is and i think a part of it just trying to

look at it from the outside is people will do things when they don't have to see it you know and you could probably relate to this when you hear people like me or anyone out there give opinions on the military or stuff like that there has to be a party that's like well you haven't fucking been there right but that's a big part of me think of that same psychology though with these politicians like yes there are some straight up evil politicians i'd say a lot of them are but they make these choices behind a desk when they got five fucking staffers outside who are then going to go tell some other guy to do something and tell some other guys some other guy and eventually someone goes to prison at the end of that loop there's no like there's no personal facing it

with accountability right now right there they're not like standing next to those guys prison cells and look them in the eyes and saying you deserve to be in here you know there's a piece that gets lost and then tragedy or even corruption in this case I would call it happens no matter what it's a shame you know and these people need to pay for what they've done they're probably not gonna though they probably won't but they need to and it and it just keeps happening and and it's going to keep happening if people don't start digging into this you know and i understood it because i understand it because i had the same opinion as you and i had walked in those shoes you know and i just automatically assumed they were guilty i

mean everybody everybody was out to get these guys and and this goes along the same lines as the Eddie Gallagher case too, but it just goes to show you, you cannot trust what you're watching on the say. They're being censored. They're being told what narrative to push. And then you watch an episode like that and you see how bad it actually is. Yeah. And I think, look, to put on the tinfoil hat with it for a second, I don't think it's much of a tinfoil hat at all. is a long-standing movement in this country that comes from within it and from outside it to sow division and to to look at narratives never with any nuance so at my gym a few years ago i used to have like this little game that i didn't even have to play because it was just automatic all the time every night but when i would go to cool down on cardio afterwards there would be three TVs on and they were always they were on mute with captions on and they were always MSNBC Fox and CNN and I used to

just sit there laughing my ass off watching the two on the outside tell the same story the one in the middle is telling and they're both like the left and right are calling each other completely evil and the other side has absolutely no argument and painting entirely different stories about the same goddamn thing and i'm like how is this not programmed like there's no way this is not literally programmed in because it makes money and it also accomplishes a bigger goal which is you make people fight over all these, not to play down some stories, but let's call it what it is, day-to-day, smaller, one-dimensional type stories

so that whatever the hell they're doing in the back scenes that they don't want you to see, they distract you from by getting you pissed off on all this stuff. I mean, that's very true. The media is manipulated in so many ways you know it's just it's it's it's an advertising platform that's for sale that's a good way to put it it's good i have another theory on this would love to get your thoughts on it but i call it the the front page theory and i'm sure someone else has come up with this before

but it's just something i thought about talking with a few people but if you look at all the major publications that now will see like tweets with their headlines when it's funny because you're like they actually printed this you think like new york times washington post whatever i think there are a lot of good journalists at these places i think that those journalists don't get on the front page very often though when i've talked with other journalists friends of mine who are in the field the way it seems to come out to me is that if you break down the entire system you basically have 80 20 on the 80 side 50 of those 80 are really good journalists who really care and just want to get to the truth 30 of those 80 they care they're just not very talented and then you get the other 20

and the other 20 are those front page whores who will write whatever they gotta write or say whatever they gotta say report whatever they gotta report according to whatever predisposed narrative there is at that fucking time to get their ass on the front page and i don't have to name names you can go pull up the new york times you go pull up the washington post there are people who are just on there all the time and they're constantly you know in beautiful prose i might add reporting things where it's like what the who wrote this headline who wrote this paragraph right here and to me what it's doing is it's destroying the faith in the media as a whole righteously so but it's also taking away

from a lot of the brilliant people including some i've had in here like andy greenberg and joe b warwick who write at some of these places and do a tremendous job and have for years but once you know you have that next to your name there's a subset of the population that through past events is going to be like oh can't listen to that no matter what and you get you get looped in with it well that's the beauty of podcasting right this has taken over the news it is taking over the news and it's the only place that you can come and get your your your message out uninterrupted unfiltered um no agenda depending on which podcast you pick but i mean these long form these long form interviews i mean they're diving deep you're diving deep i'm diving deep concrete's diving deep there's a there's a handful of podcasts out there that are really that are getting truth out and they're getting

new ideas out new opinions out that aren't being heard and that's shaking things up and look what's happening the media is it's crashing yeah it's crashing people are losing confidence in the media and more and more more and more i'm seeing in comments and reviews and emails and messages everything that people are coming to podcasts especially my podcast i mean because that's the messages i read obviously but they're coming there for that's where they're getting their news that's where they're getting truth that's where they're getting their news. That's where they're getting truth. That's where they're diving deep into these subjects. And it's, it's, it's shaking things up and it's going to take a lot of people like us to do that. So Sean was here for over four hours talking with me. And there was another part that we

ended up recording that is different from everything we discussed in this episode that I do not want to cut. So I'm going to put it out and I'm going to put it out as its own separate, probably about one hour long conversation sometime in the week after I record this podcast. So just keep your eyes open for that. It's really, really good. And I will see you when that drops. A hundred percent. But actually you had mentioned this earlier. Your friend, Eddie Gallagher. That whole case. That was another one you litigated on your podcast.

But we're trying to wreck you a spot. And I look over and they had kids' heads, little kids' heads on the spikes. There was dead bodies all over the place we had our Terp blown in half I got pulled into the master you portrayed it um and said hey you're under investigation so when you saw that case because you didn't work with him in the Navy Seals right no what was your first thought did you think the media was doing that or did you think he actually did it i thought he did it really yeah i thought he did it even when there were people that i respected that say he didn't there were people that i respected more who were still in who were saying that he did do it and because those guys were in

i thought well they have more information than i do you know i'm and i really value uh the information that i get from some of the guys that i still know inside of there but when they told me that i was like definitely if if they're saying that he's guilty and can you tell people what he was accused of specifically oh he was accused of a couple things he was accused of the main the main thing was he was the one thing that i didn't get and this was the main thing was he was accused of killing an isis fighter in war supposed to be a good thing right but once again you got half the country jumping on this train i mean let's think about what isis was doing to us in in all these other terrorist organizations they're cutting our dicks off after we're dead stuffing them in our mouth they're raping little kids they put little kids in cages and burn them alive they chop off news reporters heads on national on international television they put people in cages and slowly

drown them in the river you know so why anybody in this country would be fucking outraged that a navy steel killed an isis fighter is beyond me it is it's beyond i just can't think of any circumstance that somebody wouldn't be happy that one of those people were eliminated off the earth. So we'll get through that. But that was the main thing, right? He killed an ISIS fighter. You like stabbed him to death or something? Stabbed him to death. But you thought he was, now again, you thought he was guilty talking to the guys whose opinions you value. So even though it was an ISIS fighter, you thought there was something bad to it?

No, I didn't. That always confused me. But then if you go back in the media, then when that didn't stick, then it was always killing women, always killing children. He's killing all these people. And it was like, well, this didn't stick, so let's add this. Let's add this. Let's add this. And anyway, so was i had valued the opinions and in the information that i was getting from uh former teammates of mine who are still in i mean i figure they've got to know i mean what the hell do i know i've been out for over 10 years at this point close to anyways then when i got him on the show much like like the Blackwater episode, I realized I was like, this guy got steamrolled too. You know, and even after the, actually, I don't want to say that because I'm not 100%.

I don't remember the exact timeline of the case, but he may have been thrown out after this. But even a Marine came out and said, I'm the one that killed him. Oh, they killed the fighter. Yes. I'm the one that killed the fighter, which I believe that's what got it thrown out. But the Navy was still on him. They tried to pull his trident, which is the seal insignia that you wear as a Navy seal. They tried to take his retirement.

And that's where Trump kept having to step in and say, give the fucking guy his retirement back. Give the fucking guy his rank back. Give him his trident back. You're not going to do this. We already went through this it's been through court you know and they had witnesses lying on the stand they you know and so when he came in for the interview like i said it was much it was very similar to the blackwater episode where i became i just i'm gonna be honest i was disgusted that i was ever in a seal for weeks after that i couldn't believe that i had spent

time within a community that fucking burns their own people like that that will that that for killing an isis fighter i mean it was when i was in bought what they were sold kind of like that that is what that is what happened they hadshed throughout the SEAL teams running around telling the knuckle-draggers like me, hey, we have video of them doing this. It's all going to come out in court. But they didn't. They didn't have any fucking video of it. Nothing came out in court.

It was all lies. All of it. See, that's where you lose me when you start like making claims about stuff you know is not true like oh we got video no you don't yeah and my understanding is that he was a particularly hard-o known as like a hard-o within the community but also within like the training realm so some of the guys didn't like him because of that and so perhaps that's maybe why some of the people who were quote-unquote witnesses were pressing that oh yeah he probably did that for sure look just like you have lazy pieces of shit in corporate america

you got lazy pieces of shit in the seal teams too and especially not all of them but it came with this came with the next generation you know you got it came with the gaming generation that's how i think where it started you got guys that would rather sit on their fucking ass and play call of duty and play these video games rather than go out and do the real thing and eddie is from eddie's around my age you know he's my generation he was around when the war kicked off he wasn't a seal when the war kicked off but you know he was around them when it was there was a lot of country pride it was twin towers got hit time to go fuck these people up you know and and that's what we wanted to do everybody from my generation and

prior and almost everybody after you know that was that's why you join you join to go in there and fucking kick these people's ass and kill them you know for what they did to us but then the then social media came around and you had guys that were starting to make it through buds and make it through the SEAL teams only to get out to become an influencer or, you know, and so you had like these small pockets of, of SEALs and other special operations units where that's, that was the goal. I'm here to make a following i mean there's guys on there's guys on youtube right now that we're in that that are in or we're

in that are running around and that's their whole focus let's let's build a following let's make videos let's do instagram posts if you're doing that you can't be you you cannot be a good seal it'd be a fucking social media icon now you just can't you were in for 15 years you also did nine of those years were after being in the seals so like you had a legit long career multiple tours all that stuff do you worry about your type of platform being bastardized by people like that on the come up like oh i want to be sean ryan so i'll be a seal and then start a youtube channel oh yeah i mean do i worry about no because they can't be me they can't or do their own thing like you yeah they'll they'll do it you know they'll i mean it is what it is there's not shit i can do

about it you know what i mean they're yeah they lowered the standard and they let them in yeah i don't think that there should be like i i get really upset about that when you look at different communities and then people who do good things are stripped down just for doing those things because like you were pointing out earlier with some people complaining like oh why did why did they get to do that? Why is it not me? Totally agree. I think that's crazy. I do wonder how that can be looked at by kids coming up, though, who then think that's what it is. They see you in this seat and they think, oh, Sean Ryan's a podcaster.

He just did this Navy SEAL thing on the way, which couldn't be farther from the truth, nor did you ever know you were going to do that. You came into it very honestly and have created a great platform. But, you know, I would imagine, especially with, as you pointed out, like the younger generations who are not just kids, but also different minded, they, I don't want to say like they're too dumb to see through that, but some of them might be too dumb to see through that. Well, most of them, I mean, you know, to to be 100 honest and fair to the teams and then in the community i mean they get they got to get 99 of these guys i mean you're not going to make it through that training pipeline

you know wanting to be an influencer right you know and so there's that aspect as well. But I mean, I can't even believe that they're able to post some of the shit that they're able to post and make videos and become a public figure. I mean, that was an OPSEC violation when I was in. That was a major security concern. Yeah, I wasn't even aware that was a thing that active guys are doing that. Maybe I'm totally like out of the loop there. But that, see, I don't like that for the same reason that like I know there were like some military and marine guys who when TikTok was coming out were posting on all the bases and stuff and drills. And then they got banned from doing that because, you know, it was like a China-owned app.

Yeah. And it wasn't exactly good for data. Like i thought that was like as far as it went i didn't know there aren't rules against this yeah i just want to clarify too i'm not just making this shit up this is information that's coming from the younger generation who's pissed that this is happening you know there are i don't want to like shit on the younger generation because they're they're phenomenal they're the ones doing this now you know and this is but this is this is the kind of that they complain about we've got these people that slip through the cracks and this is this is this is their real motivation and it up the team dynamic it's like like you mentioned talking about eddie and and

also about like your own background with it like you got in when was hitting the fan you when did did you enlist right after 9 11 or was it before i enlisted before 9 11. so it was in 01 but it was before 9 11. yeah i went in july i think it it was July 1st of 2001. okay but then that happens very quickly and now it's like a whole new ball game as far as like what's going to go down and you know I get real uncomfortable with the conversation when people start talking about the complacency in society and how you've heard this a million times the the quote like 9-11 sucked but 9-12 was great. And we all know what the connotation is there. Like, oh, it would take something disastrous like that to bring us all back together.

I don't want to see that happen at all. I just also don't, for the life of me, know how to simulate people understanding what they can't understand. And in English put that better than that not so broadly like these kids coming up maybe who are 20 21 22 all they've ever known is a free island in the west here of america has never been invaded and you know doesn't really have a lot of problems and oh yeah there was that thing before i was born or when I was a baby that happened with 9-11. That sucked, but we mopped the floor with those guys and we're good now. And it's almost like there is that, oh, life's just going to keep going on.

Nothing's going to happen. And usually when you look at history, when you're thinking nothing's going to happen and that becomes a societal thing, something happens. It's already happening. This is the new warfare. Everything you're're seeing what do you mean by that it's a propaganda war happening and people are thinking that people aren't putting the pieces together of everything that's happening in this country

the division the propaganda the the i mean look at it it's everywhere you look people aren't putting it together that this is all engineered to weaken us who's engineering it who's engineering it i think both political parties are engineering it i think china's engineering it i think r Russia's engineering it. I agree with you. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, I don't know what I don't know, but when I look at things that look suspicious, which is pretty much every goddamn day in the informational warfare, I do play

the game in my head like, oh, I wonder which one that was. You know, like if that's from here or from there or from this other place, it's like there is a ton of informational warfare but when you're saying like it's already here how does that i'm trying to think how i want to ask what i'm what i'm trying to get at julian is war looks different now than it did yeah we see this shit going on in ukraine and russia right that's like conventional war what we're seeing here is unconventional war and it's a new era of war so you know i know you had boostamante on who's phenomenal right and i think a lot of the stuff that he says is spot on i think but he also is very very cia-ish and he will not he will

not it has to be a hundred percent fact and that's i'm not saying that's a bad thing that's an extremely good thing and more people should do that but unless it's been proven he's not really going to put it on the table julian do you see what you're doing you are now you are now artificially creating the confines of the exercise because you're looking for see what you're doing? You are now artificially creating the confines of the exercise to tighten it up to a place. Because you're looking for something specific. You're not having a hypothetical conversation. You're digging for some kind of specific parallel. You're not having a true hypothetical.

I think you just can't. I know where you're coming from, and I get it. But the leverage just isn't that particular piece. Deterrent is everything. Does that make sense? 100%. So what I'm getting at is let's look at all these different angles and i brought up a lot of this stuff during our interview right

look at all the different angles that china has on us with our power grid the fentanyl crisis um the supply chain covid all this all these i'm missing stuff because I'm not, I didn't know we were going to dive into this, but they're buying our farmland. Look at all these weird things that keep happening all over the country, all these food plants that are blowing up, chemical spills, water sanitation issues, you know, even our power grid. You want to talk about the power grid? I mean, just interviewed the hacker. I know what these guys are capable of because i've seen this shit working for the agency you know the spy balloon that came over i made a big stink about that all the people who don't know shit about espionage and and cyber warfare and all this stuff and i don't even know much about it i

just know some of the capabilities that are out there when that spy balloon flew over what was it everybody's like oh who gives a shit you could get this information on google earth that's just a that's a face yeah can you explain why that's why that's a facepalm because they're not they're not looking at google earth they don't need imagery. They need fucking data. And so when the things like that go over, what it's doing is it's sucking data. It could be sucking data out of your phone. It could be sucking data out of the computer.

It could be sucking data out of our nuclear silos. It could be sucking data out of Area 51. It could be sucking data out of the White House. Anything that it flies over. How do those things work? 90% of of the time it's line of sight you have to have at least a line of sight uh to get it that information gets sucked in china's claiming that they can communicate through quantum entanglement which i won't get into because i'm not a quantum physics guy but um oh sorry this thing right here i see that going out just do this if you grab that and you're good i forget to tell people that sometimes but i usually just

tuck it in the side of my chair and you're good okay it's not affecting the audio though oh cool it's just in your ears uh where was i you were talking about how it's everything is line of sight and they can suck up the data yeah so they suck up the data and then it gets transmitted to china you know and what and and everybody thought i was full of shit oh this guy's fucking crazy he's a quack whatever well then what a month later it comes out all over media which i hate media but it did but that's how you validate it because that's what people still believe is telling the truth a month later the media is pushing out the exact same fucking information that i warned everybody about with these damn things you know and power in in power grid you know we're we want the green energy right everybody's uh not everybody but we have this narrative we need to

move towards green energy fossil fuels are horrible they're gonna fucking kill us all on the planet it's gonna go to shit that's great cool i'm all for green energy let's go let's make green energy happen let's do it the right way whatever i don't and they claim we're gonna get energy independent i'm trying to weed through some of the narratives. No, this is great. Keep going. I'm trying to get sidetracked. Yeah. That's great, but we're not going to be fucking energy independent. You know why we're not going to be energy independent?

Because we're going to import all of the materials that it takes to move to green energy from fucking China. What do you think they're going to put in our power grid? Power grid power power grid power grid they're going to put these firmwares and things in there and they can control the power grid just have you have you seen the documentary power up grid down no but this is i love what you're talking about watch that check that watch that so our power grid is extremely weak it hasn't been updated since i don't know when it's failing all over the place we saw what green energy did in texas right everybody froze to death when that you know when that i mean they had green energy in texas i mean all those i was

unaware of this you were i was totally i mean i've never been to Texas. All those wind turbines failed. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Shit, that is green energy. Good point. Yeah, that's green energy, man. So all those materials, they come from China. How do we get the batteries that it takes, you know, that these solar devices are storing the energy?

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Ask your Chevrolet dealer for details. It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka. Soda. Natural flavors. So. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple china waiting to negotiate with the taliban to get one of the

biggest lithium deposits in the fucking world to produce america's green energy batteries so if they want to fucking come to war with us what do they do they cut energy production what makes a country powerful energy we're throwing our fucking energy away can we dig into this right now what do you i love this topic and you just introduced like 40 things right there so what do you want to dig into i want to dig into china because everything you say right there not only has a lot of truth to it it it could be completely true, and it's all problematic for, say, like, over the next five to ten years, like where we're at five to ten years from now, looking at race in the world, so to speak, like between countries. The thing about China that confuses me is, like, I had been turned on to looking into this maybe I think when I was in college. I mean I've been looking at China for a long time, very concerned.

And it felt like for a long time no one would talk about it. It even felt like for a time in the media like you couldn't talk about it, which was very weird to me, very strange. And then out of nowhere, last – I want to say like June, something like that, one of the kind of DC-ish policy institutes started putting out reports, like scathing reports about China. Then news dropped about the FBI dropping scathing reports about China. Then the media started talking all about china and i put my hands up i'm like wait a minute this is happening really really fast and i'm here for it because like let's all the things you just laid out laid out about china all problematic let's also consider the fact they're run by a tyrannical sociopath right let's also look at the fact that they have had the ccp

the communist party of china in power now effectively since world war ii right so they haven't been around for five minutes they have therefore developed staying power in this country albeit with only 6.9 percent of the country a member of the party and let's say to be conservative about it 20 of the country is sympathetic to it meaning 80 of the country don't even like this and yet it's still in power which is scary to me you also have for the moment an enormous population i say for the moment because ironically the same country that was having the one child policy 20 years ago is now having like people aren't having kids problem which is interesting but right now 1.4 1.5 billion people whatever it is and it makes all the sense in the world especially when you've looked at the quote-unquote like war footing patterns you've seen over the past

probably three four years specifically that it's like gearing up this US-China thing. My only question there is not like, yo, is Xi Jinping evil? We know that. It's not like, yo, are they stealing our data? Evil. Yeah, we know that. It's not like, oh, are they taking advantage of other countries around the world financially? Yeah, we know that.

They're doing all this stuff that's real. But whenever I see something get pushed that hard that quickly on a dime, I start to wonder if maybe it's not – maybe they're a little more fucked than I think. Maybe a guy like Peter Zahan has some points. Have you heard this guy talk at all? Yeah. He's very interesting. Now, he's one of these dudes who's like in my opinion just from what i can see i don't know him so brilliant that like he's like 12 steps ahead on everything and he also comments on fucking everything so

he's got to be wrong about some stuff like it's not possible to be right about everything. But he is so hardcore like, oh, China's fucked, which I don't think that. But when I hear that at the same time, this guy who's operating as his own geopolitical whatever online and then at the same time the whole power of the media is going behind this whole China thing, I start to wonder if it's not quite what we think if like they really are behind and if they are in the end days of the ccp which would be i think great for the world if if the people there rose up and took out that government and replaced it with something more free do you ever wonder if like some of this maybe isn't quite what we think and isn't going to be as big a problem and we're potentially using the military industrial complex to gear up for a war to create an enemy for this country i'm gonna answer your question with a question would you bet your livelihood on that absolutely not me neither yeah

why would you when we can produce it at home you know and yeah it's starting to make the the mainstream media it is and but i want to go through now that i've been now that i'm back on i have my brain back on this subject you know they are behind the fentanyl crisis with the cartels they're settling africa now they're negotiating lithium mines in mexico with the cartels they're settling Africa now they're negotiating lithium mines in Mexico what do you mean they're settling Africa so Africa is being settled by China I mean obviously you know Africa is obviously extremely poor they're building cities in Africa not I'm not talking little villages I'm talking major cities with massive infrastructure well what happens when you put in the massive infrastructure put the money up for that well

then they that government owes you right and so they're doing that all over africa we're nowhere to be found what's africa rich in all these minerals right so that's in there buying they're gonna control that resources now they're gonna control that they now control the lithium mines in Afghanistan they control Africa they're controlling the lithium mines of Mexico they're buying our farmland they own one of the biggest meat meat production companies in the country now that just came out buying up our farm land to buying up our real estate it's a lot of influence they made covid whether it was an accident whether it wasn't an accident it's their fault yeah i don't give a shit what anybody says yeah whether it was man-made or whether it

was an accidental release it came from them no repercussions all of our medical equipment where does it come from china where's all the clothes on your body come from china where these microphones come from probably china probably yeah you know everything everything didn't some of that though our power grid where's that made from even the power grid that we have right now the transformers and stuff are made in china okay i thought you were saying that all they have to do julian is push a button and it's over it's done we don't even produce the own shit for our power grid anymore back up what do you mean they push a button and the power grid's done you don't think they're putting anything in

to our power grid that they could hack into it with? What did you say? They're producing our transformers, you said, for it? What else are they producing for our power grids? Well, all the green energy stuff

that I just said that we're moving towards. So you're saying they could be putting, like, computer systems within some of this stuff that they're providing? They are. Not they could be. They are.

The power grid thing is the thing that scares me the most. I don't think people have any concept of what a serious… What a power outage does? Yeah. Whole population's gone in about three days. 90% of it. Yeah, I've done a lot of content on that and i i look at the comments and i go damn people really don't get this they don't there was a uh they have it too good here they don't dive in they don't research all the shit that we were talking about at the beginning of this podcast oh i had a hard day at work i just want to drink a beer go ahead

drink a fucking beer watch your tv because when it gets cut it's not coming on and you're gonna fucking die do you have a a backup plan for if that happens oh yeah yeah do you no you struck me as the guy i should talk to i'll give you a couple pointers yes i would love that it's because there was there was a book my friend annie greenberg wrote in 2016 he's a reporter over at wired he wrote a book called sandworm and this one was focused on the gru team in russia and does a lot of hacking turns around goes into the into the master bedroom and finds that kaza's laptop is there and still open and alive logged into alpha bay Bay. The cause is arrested. He's taken to Thai jail, essentially. He agrees to extradition. And then a week after his arrest,

he's found dead in his jail cell. Alleged suicide. Right, yeah. So. but he does all kinds of reporting on china and north korea like he's very aware of the capabilities of all these different governments and i would say anything russia can do china could probably do times two at least so one of the things he reported on that we've covered a lot in here and it's had some clips spread on the internet where I get to see how people do not think about this at all. But in 20 – I forget if it was 2014 or 2015. It was December.

The Russian government did a test run of outing some grids in ukraine and they did and it was just like for fun it's like for shits and gigs to see what what they could do and it's it's interesting to me that they haven't from what i've seen at least i don't know what i'm missing but they haven't done a ton of that in this latest in in the war yet with ukraine but they proved fucking eight years ago nine years ago they had the capability to do it and the amount of problems that haven't to your point having the power grid out could cause like i had a clip where i closed saying if they shut down our power grid for i think i even said like a month i was being conservative you know i was like you know how many

people would die in this country millions and people were laughing their ass off at me. And I'm like, what do you think powers everything we do, including the full-blown supply chains we have to get people their basic sustenance every day? The fucking power grids. Everything's done. Everything that you know is done. And desperation kicks in. There won't be any food. There won't be any water. The water

that comes out of your faucet, what do you think that you just fucking turn the faucet on and water comes out? No, it's run by power at a water plant. And so when the power goes out, there goes your water. There goes your food. There goes your heat. There goes your cooling. There goes your gas. There goes your transportation. There there goes every the world as you know it is over it's done it looks like a combination of what happens when a hurricane hits you know you can't get water down there why because there's no power the roads are blocked there's no there's no power to get to clear the roads to get supplies down there they got to bring it in by air half the time then people start getting desperate you see looting

you see crime rise then crimes rising in the hurricanes just because people want some new sneakers wait until you see what it looks like when they just want something to fucking eat because they haven't eaten in three days or they're they're starving to death they're dying of thirst they're dying of heat exhaustion then throw in like some of the stuff you saw during the blm antifa riots add that to the mix because we're talking mass scale we're talking an entire population with no power the only way you're going to survive it is get out of the city number one but and then you look at look at nine look at most americans i mean there are no plumbers there are no people can't even change a light bulb half the time nowadays you know you think you're gonna survive with no power let them laugh keep laughing it's scary and like i didn't know if i was it

sounds like i'm not i didn't know if i was crazy to think it though when i was first really concepting this when i heard about when i was reading the reporting about that attack and and what this could do on a mass scale but i'm like damn if they took down like half the power grids in america for whatever length of time a week no money no communication everything is gone am I crazy to say that that's like worse than a nuclear bomb well I mean some of the nuclear bombs that's what they do that's what an EMP does it just feels like the last few years and i know kovitz like a good thing to reset our perspective on this and to use it as an opportunity to consider stuff like this but it's scary it's like the last few years i can't help but think how fragile society is. Yeah. We're hanging on by a thread, buddy.

I never... I don't want to say I was knowingly complacent, but I was obviously passively complacent to that. It shocked me. I mean, you heard me mention what my dad said about how fast society adjusts to stuff, but like even with COVID and how people started treating each other like that, you know,

there's this idea that kids never really grow up. They just become adults with courtrooms instead of sandboxes. Pretty hard not to think that when you see that imagine a power grid yeah it would be i mean it would be a complete reset now here's the other question though is there anything that they could do that we couldn't do to them times 10 if they even tried it i mean i don't know you know i'd love to tell you that yeah we could but i don't i mean i've been out for since 2015 and that wasn't you know that wasn't my expertise

but i can tell you this we're not producing their power grid true the power grid is a real they are producing ours We are not producing theirs. What do we produce here in America now? Not a lot. Not a lot. I mean, they've really, they've got some good angles on it they've played it really smart i mean look at the i mean you're a wall street guy you know more about the devaluation of the dollar than i do are you aware of all this stuff france is now talking about dropping it brazil dropped it saudi arabia dropped it iran dropped it who else argentina is the latest one i believe they're getting ready to drop it

the currency's a big problem yeah and that was not to be clear that was not my space at all on Wall Street but knowing the basics of that at least the cur that scares me because you put like I I respect Biden for not putting boots on the ground in ukraine and just running into a war i like that but the box you put around russia to put them completely on their back feet from the west to now have them playing in the same sandbox those two countries right there china and russia that's not great to me when i see that now you are talking about shared resources. Now, will they eventually turn on each other? Of course they will.

They're fucking two dictators. That's what they do. But on the lead up to that happening, they might not turn on each other for a decade. There's a lot that can happen in fucking six months, let alone a decade. And, you know, I think there's a lack of respect in the world for us as a leader right now and that is a part of what is good not just a blowback on russia but that is a part of what is leading to a loss of confidence in the things that are literally the underline of what makes us powerful which is our currency i mean you you take i don't know if

you can see this on camera this coaster right look at all these angles they have on us power grid fentanyl crisis owning our farmland let me get in front of the mic um all right hold on wait we just had to come back his his mic went out for a second so you were saying there's an angle. So yeah, let's just say this coaster here is the U.S. Look at all the angles they have on us. They have our power grid. They're settling all the other continents in the world. Now they're going into Antarctica. Did you see that? No, I haven't heard about that. But we've got fentanyl. We've got the power grid. We've got the supply chain. We've got currency. We've got they're buying our farmland. We've got the – I'm missing something.

What am I missing? I mean, you're probably missing several things, but that's a lot right there. Yeah. That's enough. Those things right there. Look at the fentanyl crisis. They're shipping in the supplies for the cartels to make the fentanyl. On top of that, they're also sending in the chemists to teach the cartels how to make the fentanyl.

Now, what do we do? We went from heroin. Now we're at fentanyl. Now, according to Luis Chaparro, who I've had on my podcast a couple of times, now they have the next thing that's going to overtake fentanyl which is even more deadly than fentanyl what's that i can't remember the name of it but it's already it's already been introduced it's already coming through why aren't we locking our border down so here's a difficult question that you'd be a good guy to ask as someone who worked in the cia when i hear something like that one of the one of the you know conspiracies online because a lot of people don't like the cia

i hear about that all the time when i bring on some of these guys i think it's way overboard but you know they'll get on the cia for doing that are very, very uncomfortable or think they do things that are very uncomfortable. Like they talk about CIA involvement with the cartels, for example. When I hear something like this where you have China training chemists in the cartels how to make this shit, it tells me that perhaps in what what is a very dirty world you don't have to like it but that's what it is why the fuck aren't we running like if we can't end the cartels because they're not in our country technically so that's not easy to do why the fuck aren't we running some missions undercover to fucking work with them like as as i know how uncomfortable that sounds to people but like if that would stop a fentanyl crisis here, forget the border for a second.

That's a whole other point. But like why are we not doing that? That seems like a pretty geographically easy thing for us to pull off. I don't know. Maybe we are. I don't know why we wouldn't be doing that. But in the end, if we were to start doing that, it would just be a money game.

It's going to be who pays the most to the cartels. So maybe we're being outspent. Or maybe nobody gives a shit. That would really worry me. But what I'm saying, the reason I kind of brought up all these angles is once they pull the trigger on one, they just pull the trigger on kind of brought up all these angles is all they have to once they pull the trigger on one they just pull the trigger on all of them there goes the supply chain hey let's release another pandemic kick up the fentanyl crisis destroy the meat plants like I said that

a lot of our food stuff is coming from there now too you know I'm trying to just truth be told I'm trying to start a supplement business I don't want to get too too in the weeds on what it's going to be turns out all all of the ingredients that I want in the supplement is from China even the stuff that says it's from that says it's made in the U.S or it's sourced in the u.s if you really dig it comes from china but so you see what i'm saying they could have our power grid kick the fentanyl crisis up then we have the propaganda piece i mean all these things once they all go it's over i mean they're just set up it's not like hey we're just to send an army over there and take these fuckers out. That's not how it goes. It's a dom years ago, if I would have brought this up, I would have been slapped with a, you know,

I would be the biggest racist in the country. You know what I mean? Yeah. Funny how that was like the whole attack. Like, God forbid you talk about another country and shit their government's doing. Yeah. That's just a crazy thing to me. And now look, now look where we are.

It's getting worse and worse and worse. And people are starting to pay attention, but they should have been paying attention 10 years ago. leading to you know some potential worst case scenarios why then is the same media pushing this so hard now that's the only thing that because i've thought all this shit and even it by the way even if peter zan is right about some of the downfall china's gonna have one thing he does say is he's not talking about tomorrow he's talking about 10 15 years out and we've already also established a lot can happen in 10 to 15 years on the way there that can fuck us in the process so that that it does scare me a lot but like why are they why is the same media who seems so intent on making money by just dividing us and pissing us all off,

now trying to unite us around a foreign power that three years ago, like you said, you're being called racist if you even mentioned that COVID came from there? I mean, I don't know. You know what I mean? I'd love to be able to answer that. I mean, you know they're failing. Everybody knows media is failing. And they're not going to go out without a fight. You know, whatever is going to get people to click on their bullshit, they're going to click on it, you know i don't even i i don't like getting into politics but i think a lot of it had to do with you know trump was tough on china he was he was extremely tough on china and that's why it all

came out you're a racist you don't like china you think this virus came from china you're a racist you know and and and it sucks that they did that because that word doesn't even carry the weight that it should anymore because it's been overused. But I think that's a big part of it. Now they're trying to make this new guy look like some kind of a fucking hero when he's just – he doesn't – I mean, come on. You're talking about Biden? Yeah, I'm talking about Biden. They're making him out to be a hero? I mean, yeah.

They're trying everything they can. I think they're trying to make him look competent, and I don't think he's competent. I don't know if they're making him a hero. Well, whatever. That's hard to do. All right, hero, I don't care. They're trying to make him look good. Right. Why are they trying to make him look good?

Because they like him better than Trump. They're that small-minded. That's just, like, you know, it's a sad state on they're that small you know that's just like you know it's a sad state on our country when like that's your choice there but i agree with you like i can't talk he can't yeah i know i mean i remember i remember because i don't you know yeah i'm a conservative but i hate conservative media. I hate liberal media. And I thought that first debate, I was so tired of listening to right-wing media talk that somebody is going to run for president that cannot put a sentence together. And then I watched the first debate and I looked at my wife and I was like, holy shit. Like, this is real.

This guy can't – he can't formulate a thought. I think all – my thought is that their candidates were just so bad like they were overthinking it and then kovat happened and they're like well we got a guy who's been there for 45 years something people have seen we'll just market it and hope he doesn't talk too much yeah and i guess it worked because enough people hated trump but you know to have again to have those options it just it's an indictment on the country to me. And this guy, he... I used to caddy at Wilmington Country Club for years.

He's a member. And I used to caddy regularly for someone very close to him. I never met him. I never caddied for him. But I stood on the practice tee with him on Saturday mornings sometimes. And what's crazy to me is the last time i saw him was like late summer 2014 and i knew he was there because the the secret service golf carts were all there so i'm like okay obviously biden's here and i'm down on the practice tee behind the guy i'm gonna caddy for and he walks on the tee and I mean this guy was busting everybody's balls like hey Jim how are you go fuck yourself Joe like all

this shit gets up straight takes out the driver stripe 250 stripe 250 stripe 250 like he looked yoked and everything and I'm like I'm looking at him like isn't this motherfucker like 70 years old or some shit like it looks pretty good i was like damn like this guy could he might run for president and then he didn't run in 2016 and then he goes and gives he announces his run i think march 2019 so this is less than five years later and i remember i believe he gave the first speech like in Philadelphia and it was outside and they played this on TV or I guess I probably saw it on Twitter. And I'm like, what the fuck happened to this guy? Like he like he couldn't he couldn't talk right away.

Like this wasn't like it happened like as he got close to the election, like literally from the first speech. Like I'm like, did he have 10 brain aneurysms? Three? Like what? Like what happened between then and then? And like to me, it's just such a slap in the face that like this is this is what we're going to get. 10 brain aneurysms? Three? Like what happened between then and then? And like to me, it's just such a slap in the face that like this is what we're going to get. Like what do you think the world thinks of this?

Like we already had Trump for four years. That was not ideal in the world. Now you're going to give this guy who – at least Trump could talk. You know what I mean? Like it just – there's no way that doesn't have downstream effects. You cannot convince me of that. I mean, I don't know. I don't want to beat a dead horse, and this isn't a topic that I like to discuss because then you get labeled. You're this supporter, you're that supporter.

I'm just fucking calling it how I see it that's fine and do it and um and it's it's it's sad people were misled and they weren't informed and that's how this happens what do you think happens in the next election do you think it's a rematch um man i hope not i'm right there with you but uh i don't know man i hope some younger blood comes in you know but yeah i don't know i mean who i to fuck for like a 50 year old? I mean, this is crazy. You got 80 year old guys talking about running the country. It's just not to be like disrespectful to older people, but like you had your time. You know what I mean? Like you need someone younger and vital in there. I just don't know why that's not like a requirement of of the job but you know in caught in all the middle of the politics though is this is the ever important always happening foreign policy of the world that we've been talking about and so i like i'm i'm glad you let me play some devil's advocate today with the china thing but again like i all the problems you point out are things that i have been concerned about

and i think are fair to have concerned it would be catastrophic if any one of these things kick off food supply especially the power grid it's i mean it's that's the end that's it yeah complete reset 97 90 of the population dead three days done and you said you don't know it wasn't your purview within your work to kind of know what we're working on as far as like deterrence with that no i mean that would be no i mean i'm going after i'm going after taliban al-qaedaaeda Isis like that I'm not involved with what how we're going to combat China on a good note you want to talk about some good stuff let's talk about some good stuff um you know on a good note when it comes to things like EMPs and nukes and all

this other stuff I can tell you that this we are very close to having an entire this sounds crazy but an entire energy field around the us that would disable anything that came in so that would everything we're talking about power grid problems all that no i'm not talking about power grid and hacking in and propaganda and all that i'm talking about blunt force type stuff like nuclear weapons missiles emps shit like that how does this work i don't know about this i don't know how it works but i can tell you um warfare is changing you know techs it's just getting bigger getting stronger and now we do now we have and we literally have energy weapons so these weapons can disable drones they can disable helicopters they may be able to disable satellites. And from what I understand, from what I know, this is coming from the former Secretary of Defense that I had on my show, is now we're getting the capability

to have an entire, basically a perimeter that goes around and over the United States that's an invisible field of energy, which will basically disable or destroy anything that comes into it that's pretty fucking awesome it's pretty cool right yeah that's exciting so that's good how much are you allowed to talk about on a general basis your nine years or eight whatever it was with with cia i mean i don't i don't know how to answer that question but why don't we just go into it and okay i'll navigate through all right so just to give people some background who don't have it and aren't familiar with you after you left the navy seals in 06 how long was it before you went and joined the cia and how did that work what did they bring you in to do uh they brought me so when i when i left i did a quick pump uh at the state

department it was a horrible experience last about a week maybe two weeks and i said give me a flight home i'm fucking out of here went home and um i had i didn't know these were the two things at the time but i was being recruited uh by a friend uh to go into to try out for cia and then i was being recruited also by another company to go to work for NSA, which actually the NSA was paying more at the time. But I wound up going with what wound up being the agency because I had personal friends and people that I'd worked with prior to and the SEAL teams that were vouching for that program. And that was extremely important to me. Who am I going to be working with and what backgrounds, what kind of knowledge do these guys have?

I don't want to be working with, no offense, but with the level of work that I was anticipating we were going to be doing, I didn't want to be out there with a Bank of America security guard or a local cop. I want to be with guys that have been around and seen some real overseas you know not that these guys don't see anything but i like to be with my own i know what we're capable of and i know what they're capable of and um i feel more comfortable with with my peers so i chose that and so what it wound up being at the beginning was it started out as protection for um people like boostamante right people that are going out getting information meeting with

meeting with uh assets all that kind of stuff then this was a the program that I was on was a new program, and the agency did not realize the capabilities that we brought to the table at first. So the requirements were, I think you had to have at least six years special operations to get in the door and so that specific portion within the agency was i mean there was a ton of experience there and they didn't realize what all we were capable of it was these guys can do a lot more than protection they can do surveillance they can do they can we can pretty much do anything i mean it's a it's a it's a large at this point it's now a large special operations unit where you're drawn from green berets navy seals seal team six delta green berets air force pjs uh marine reconnaissance uh marine raiders which are special activities guys and um and you combine all of that knowledge into one unit that's what you get and they started so

when you get when you go out into the field and you have a good boss and they're like oh man i wish we had this capability it's like oh fuck we, fuck, we can do that. What do you want to do? Well, we want to set up comms and be able to push out a surveillance position over here to watch this portion of the border. Yeah, no problem. Well, what do you want? You know, we need to do this. Okay, well, and so all these new capabilities started getting brought to the table, and then that started spreading spreading and it became a lot more than just basic protection were you all over or were you i know you can't say like specifically where but did you specialize in a certain set of countries or did you just send as needed? They just send you as needed. I mean, as needed all over the world.

But at the time that I was in, the majority of us went to the Middle East because that's where everything was kicking off. What did you learn in the CIA in your experience there in all these places if anything what did you learn about the world that you didn't already learn in your experience deploying as a navy seal uh well when you're when you're a seal it's it's let's kick in doors let's go after one guy and you don't really see all the other pieces that that happen you don't see the intelligence piece much you don't you don't see how everything kind of comes together you're just a small part at the agency you start to see how everything comes together you see the intelligence come in you see the analysts get the intelligence you see the hits happen you see how long some of these things take

um you know when i was a seal sometimes i would get really frustrated like why is this guy still alive we could have killed this guy a long time ago well maybe we didn't kill him a long time ago because we're still getting information out of him and as much of a shithead as he is he's leading you to bigger bad guys, worse bad guys, and you get them. And so basically if you're lucky, you know, in the agency you get a guy that's in the middle of a network. You keep that guy. You pay that guy. Yeah, we know he's a dirtbag and a scumbag and the worst of the worst.

But his friends, you know, you get all of them. And then at the end, you know, maybe there's some kind of deal made or maybe he gets outed too. You know, and so you – but you get to see all of that stuff kind of come together from beginning to the end. Can you – Does that make any sense? 100%. That was a great explanation. All right, guys.

I got a quick announcement that I've been waiting three months to tell you guys all about since march i have been working with a fashion brand and i'm going to say that very clearly not a merch house a fashion brand to develop some fashion for this show we will eventually get our way to a bunch of regular merch as well i know you guys have been so patient. Obviously, you know I'm a one-man show doing this thing, so I want to make sure when I do things I do it right. But this is our first step in that direction. And essentially what we're going to be doing is in a few weeks' time,

I'm going to give you the date soon and all the details soon, but in a few weeks' time we are going to be doing an exclusive pop-up shop. I have been working with this company to develop all different types of designs to see what you guys like. We're going to put them all out there, let you guys figure out what you like the best. And with this first pop-up, it's going to be a limited drop over a limited time, and you're going to want to get your hands on it. So keep your eyes open for more details to come. Other than that, back to the show. But is there, because now you're working as you just laid out in like some more, well, let's call it what it is, like more spy work, more less the kicking in the door stuff. Do you see patterns of things more when you do that and specifically what i mean

is when you're a navy seal you have the mission here's what we're doing here's where we're going here's where there's a problem kicking the door get it done people gotta die they gotta die in the cia when you're playing this longer term and trying to get information to figure out what's going on in the world maybe even in places you aren't aware of yet, did you start to notice that you could kind of see trends happening before they happen and maybe to put a specific one on it? Perhaps maybe in the early 2010s you might have been able, with your work, be able to see that something like ISIS was starting to form? Yeah, I mean,

it can be hard to say, you know, when I knew it versus when everybody else has known, because that's kind of what you're getting at, right? You want to know how far in advance I knew things were happening compared to when it hits mainstream in when you're working in that kind of capacity you don't you're so busy and there's so many things going on that you don't you don't have time to worry about mainstream media you know what I mean you're you're making mainstream media but you don't every once in a while you'll get a message from mom or dad or girlfriend or wife or whatever, husband. And it's, oh, were you guys out here doing this? And it's like, yeah, but you don't really – you're just not thinking like that. You know what I mean?

Not at my level, which was a very – which was a pretty low level. But I'm not – I wasn't a policymaker or director or anything even close to that at the agency. I was in a very small group of special operations guys that could do a lot of shit for the agency. and and on top of that like when i'm talking about you can see how everything kind of comes together that doesn't mean that doesn't mean you're previous to that every single time if you're lucky you'll you'll see how it comes together but kind of what i'm getting at is remember how at the beginning of this i was telling you everything inside of there is very compartmentalized and there's a need to know. If you're hunting ISIS down, that doesn't mean you have widespread vision of everything that ISIS is doing. You might be, if you're, let's just say you're a terrorist that we're after. I'm only, and I told you my rotations on the way up here, sometimes they were 120 days out, a couple weeks home. Sometimes it was 45 days out, 45 days home. And every time I go back out, there's a good chance I been going on for 10 years and it's going to go on for another five years but the only information that i'm previous to is during my 45 days on that project

once i'm removed from that project and go to another project i'll never hear about that again unless i get put back on that project and that only happened And that only happened a handful of times. And that's cool when you can leave a project and come back to it several years later and see how it's developed. And see what all has

happened since you've been gone. All the information that's come in. Who did we get? Who did we not get? Who's still out there? What are they doing now? How has the direction of the enemy changed? What's their new goals?

And it's very interesting to see how all this develops. I can't remember if you said this at the very beginning of this when we were talking about your career there at the CIA, but when you would do these deployments, so to speak, how many guys on average would you personally be on that job with or did it totally vary? I mean, I don't want to get into specific numbers, but it could be a lot, especially if you're at somewhere like a capital, then there's going to be a lot. And there's going to be analysts. There's going to be case officers. There's going to be operators. There's going to be targeters.

There's all these people. All of the leadership is going to be there. When you get out to some of these remote places, there may be times where you're out there alone. And what's the – as far as like the cadence goes, obviously there's a huge difference in that you're spying versus knocking in doors now but did you was there a big adjustment to how communication in the field went doing this or was it very similar once you're out there minus you know being all kitted up and everything i would imagine it wasn't really like that in the cia but like when you're out let's say you're out in a city and you're doing reconnaissance on certain people was the

was the i'm trying to think how to ask this right so that people understand what the fuck i'm saying but like was your communication with base slash with the other people involved in your mission maybe dispersed throughout the crowd or with you or whatever was it a similar cadence to when you were working in the seals or was it just a totally new adjustment yet sometimes it was i mean there are there are some times where where you are it looks like a special operations unit where you have your kit on you've got helmets night vision guns i mean you're talking to apaches there's been times where i was working for the agency and i couldn't i couldn't get through a road and so i'd call into apaches and i'd say hey clear this fucking road up

and they would and they would spin yeah no i don't mean like that but what they would spin around. Yeah. No, I don't mean like that. But what they would do is they would just fly low, show their belly, fly in an aggressive pattern. And you want to watch. These people know what's up, you know. So they see an Apache come down and just show their belly and raise up like that. Guess what? That'll do it. That'll clear the seas. You know what I mean?

It's like watching. Nobody wants to get out of your way until the Apaches are on top. And then they're like, okay, I'll get out of the way. And then there's nobody on the road. And that would be an overt operation. And then there's times where you look like, where you're wearing a sports jacket or a suit and the middle of an, a Arab country that's dirt poor and you stick out like a sore thumb, but that may be your cover. You know, your cover may be, Hey,

this is what we want you to look. This is why this is your story. If you, if anybody rolls you up and then there's times where you look exactly like everybody else that's out there. How much like spy training did you get when you went in there? I mean, quite a bit. A lot. A lot of on-the-job training. On the job.

So that's what I was asking. So when they go after a guy like me, they're not looking to really train you. They're looking to see how much training you've had, how much you've retained, and how competent of an operator you are, if that makes sense. They're not looking to – this isn't like the Stanford recruiting fair where CIOs set up a little shop and like, hey, come work. Here's a pamphlet.

Shoot your resume in. They already know, hey, these are the qualifications we're looking for. Now we want to bring these guys in, and then we want to take the best of the best of who tries out for this. So it's like when I went through, it was about a month-long tryout that you go through. And they just put you through all these different skills tests you know and it starts super basic with hey let's make sure this guy can run a mile and or run a mile and a half or whatever it was do a bunch of pull-ups i mean just a basic physical test you know and then and then you get into the kill house maybe when the kill house is going through remember i told you it was protection

right this isn't when i talk about protection this isn't like protection like hey i'm gonna wear a earpiece this isn't secret service protection right this is undercover there's only maybe one of us maybe two you know what i mean that going to have to go in and extract somebody who's been compromised by their own asset, who they're trying to extract information out of. So they'll basically simulate it. They might throw you in a hotel, and they'll be like, all right, your case officer was meeting an asset. Meeting went bad, and the entire hotel's up in arms, da-da-da-da-da. You've got to find him and get him, and you're my partner.

They want to see how you solve that problem, how you get to him. Are you going to shoot the asset? Are you going to shoot your guy? How are you going to get to him? them are you going to shoot the the asset are you going to shoot your guy how are you going to get to them who are you going to call what's your strategy how fast is it how fast can you get to them how effective were all these things you know what I mean and so they'll run you through all those kind of scenarios and then there'll be a driving there'll be a driving course a driving scenario and so driving scenario. So you've always been picky about your produce, but now you find yourself checking every label to make sure it's Canadian. So be it.

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And so that's why they call it betting. And so they take everything that they want out of somebody like me. They make you perform all these crazy skills. They want to see how you think. They want to see how you perform. They want to see how you handle stress. They want to see how you work with other people. They want to see that you can be open-minded enough to have a SEAL and a Green Beret working together or a Green Beret and a MARSOC Marine Raider. Because everybody, yeah, we all do basically the same kind of shit, but everything's very different right when you get into these eight a these these these professions

it's a lot of a personalities and a lot of guys can't let their ego go and realize hey you know maybe there's more than one way to skin this cat and adjust on the fly accordingly and so these guys that are stuck in their ways and their their inability to adapt to uh somebody to somebody in a similar skill set, they go, gone, get out. And then that goes all the way into tradecraft. How do you follow somebody? How do you tail somebody? How do you know if you're being followed? Did you catch the guy that was surveilling you on that training op?

All these kind of things. Did you have already through the Navy SEALs training in that they did okay so that's interesting I wasn't really sure about that aspect within the seals because again it's like you know you're usually kitted up going in and kicking doors I wouldn't I wouldn't associate that together but most guys don't I got lucky and uh I got lucky and I got some training with the MI6. Just, it was, I lucked out. The MI6, like the British MI6? Yeah, when I was on the teams. Are you allowed to talk about that?

Yeah, I mean, it's not, it's not, I mean, it's not terribly exciting to talk about, but I don't mind going through it. We were going to go into Bosnia, basically, and we were going to be hunting war criminals. Huh. Back when the Bosniania kosovo stuff was going on yeah i got yanked from that and uh put into afghanistan uh because that was more important at the time obviously but but yeah they brought in a team of mi6 guys to actually teach us how to how to blend in how to follow somebody how to follow somebody in a team of four how to act if you're following somebody and they they compromise you start talking to you how do you

how do you what do you do if you follow if i follow you into the elevator and we're adding up to the 20th story of the bank of america building and you ask me what time it is and i shit my pants you know and that's what I did the first time. Oh, fuck, I'm supposed to be following this guy. But they teach you how to be comfortable in situations. If you're following somebody in a mall, and you're a 23-year-old guy who they put you in uncomfortable places. So let's say you're following a woman who goes into victoria's secret and now you gotta go into victoria's secret as a you know as a male and look

like act like you're not following this woman you know and how to act and how to ask questions in that situation you got to get comfortable real quick you know and you have to you have to plan you have to kind of pre-plan this stuff you have to you have to plan you have to kind of pre-plan this stuff like what am i going to do if this person thinks i'm following following them and they turn around and ask me hey what time is it hey why are you following me so what what would be like a basic thing you'd do in that situation i mean you say act comfortable real quick real quick but you just like answer them with the time and then keep going? Yeah. That's it?

Yep. I mean, it's up to you how you present yourself, but the wrong thing to do would be like, oh, oh, oh. It's 10.32. You know, because then that's a, you know what I mean? That's a dead giveaway. So, yeah, the correct thing to do do be like oh yeah it's um it's almost dinner time it's 4 30 4 45 you know and that's you know you have to act like you belong and that's extreme that's it like as easy as it sounds it's extremely hard to do when when the pressure's on do you have what do you do you know how you – when somebody thinks they're being followed and they start speeding up and you lose them, are you going to speed up and follow them?

Because that's another tactic that people use. What do you do in that situation? You just drive past them and let somebody behind you and the team follow up. Oh, because you got bad luck. Or if you lose them, then you lose them. But losing them, you pick them back up somewhere else. But you do not want to fucking compromise yourself. You know what I mean?

Yeah. If they think you're following them on the highway and they hit 100 miles an hour and start weaving in and out of traffic, the thing you don't want to do is go 100 miles an hour and start weaving in and out of traffic right after them. You just continue on, normal day, and hopefully their paranoia drops. They teach you how to make a pattern of life and how to work outside of that. Yeah, Andy and I have talked about this. So can you explain that just for people who haven't heard that episode when you say pattern of life this is you andy was explaining in a context of like this is how they catch people if they're if they're a spy because they look at they look at the one thing that they switch up or something

like that yeah exactly that's what that's that is what they do you figure out people's pattern of life they figure out your pattern of life another reason this shit's all important is because yeah you're the the thing that this stuff gets really complicated but you know when you're out there and you are surveilling and you are using tradecraft and following people you also have all these other entities china russia iran uh they're all in these places too and so it becomes this enormous spy game where you're like shit shit, that's who I want to go after. But this guy who's following me can't know that I'm after that guy because then they'll try to get to that guy first and this motherfucker over here. You know what I mean?

And so it's identifying all of these different spy games happening all at the same time when you only have one goal and so you see how complicated this shit can get you know and and and and then conducting surveillance on their spies to figure out where their safe house is what vehicles are they driving what vehicles do we need to watch out for what kind of equipment do they have and so it's really it's a we call it three three sixty seven twenty game where it's you gotta be on look up down everywhere around every angle you know somebody's somebody's on your ass but what i'm sorry what was the pattern of life pattern live question yeah you kind of answered it through that a little bit i think but just to be clear like for the people that hadn't heard it when you you say establishing a pattern of life, let's say you drop into an area, right?

And this is where you're going to have a job for whatever, a year, whatever it is. You need to – the way Andy explained it is you have to set up like, well, I have this front business and at 9 o'clock I go here. At 5 o'clock I go here and my wife cooks dinner at 7 and that's how it needs to be all the time. And if I break that, I'm going to get caught by somebody. Yeah, pretty much. So everybody has a pattern of life, you know. So most people, what, they work nine to five job, they'll get up, make a coffee, they go to the same gym every day. Then they come, then they go to the same Starbucks every day, They park in the same parking lot in the same parking spot. They go to the same cubicle. They come out, they go home every Friday night, they go watch their football game at their favorite bar. And so you see like you develop this pattern of life. You have a daily pattern of life, weekly pattern of life, monthly pattern of life, yearly pattern of life. And so you build this pattern of life, a weekly pattern of life, a monthly pattern of life, a yearly pattern of life.

And so you build this pattern of life. What a lot of people will do is they'll build this pattern of life because it shows that they're unassuming. Does that make sense? So it's, okay, this is just Julian. He's just here to get his fucking coffee every day. He's not a threat. You know what i mean and it makes people become lackadaisical when you get inserted into a place and build your pattern of life and people see your routine they become lackadaisical even people that are surveilling

you become lackadaisical nothing's more boring than following your ass from your house to the coffee shop every single day for a year you know what i mean until the one time until the one time and by the time that one time happens they're so lackadaisical because they've seen you do the exact same shit every fucking day for a year that's when you slip it in but when you're doing these you said they're they could be 45 day 120 day that you weren't really doing stuff where like you're in one you said they're they could be 45 day 120 day that you weren't really doing stuff where like you're in one place for two years or three years or something no so what kinds of again i don't know how you go as specific as you can but like what kinds of

things would be a cover and also did you have diplomatic help like if you got caught were you deniable to the government or yeah i'm deniable you know i mean cia loves contractors for a reason you know what i mean so they do i mean the majority of it is comprised of contractors not employees and that's one of the reasons um but like i said you know pattern i i said pattern you have a daily pattern of life a weekly pattern of life monthly yearly you know what i mean and so yeah i was never at the exact same place for years you know but and i can't go into what my cover may or may not have been it's always different sometimes it changes you know um sometimes it changes at the exact same location but you start to build these pattern of lives no matter what your duration at that spot is because maybe you know you if you think

we're the only ones that knows that i was on a 45 day rotation rotation, you're crazy. All of these entities that I just talked about, they all know the rotations as well. You know what I mean? And so the pattern of life may not be your specific pattern of life, but it's whoever is in your rotation, you know what I mean? Whoever you're replacing, because I'm not just leaving and going somewhere else. Somebody with the exact same skill set is coming in behind me to fill my slot. You know what I mean? And so they'll pick up that pattern of life. We'll have a turnover for a couple of days, maybe a week. And it's like, hey, this is the pattern of life. This is this. This is who you need to watch out for. This is what the Chinese are driving.

This is what the Russians are driving. This is what the Iranians are driving. This is what they look like. This is how many of them are. This is what the russians are driving this what the iranians are driving this is what they look like this is how many of them are that this is their weapons these are the cameras they use this is how they transmit information all that stuff gets passed yeah that's what's confusing to me about thinking about the specific role you're playing because you're kind of you're in a spot where you automatically stick out if you're doing that like you said they know they know the length of some of these rotations so they see some white dude drop into wherever you know where there's not a lot of white people and you know he's an american and oh he's here for four well cia spy right like i don't see why like what you could possibly do

to get them to not have some recognizability on you because then – like let's say you drop into one country. Let's say you do 120-day rotation and then you leave. The people that were watching you, when they see you drop into some other country a year later, they got to know, right? Like they got to know that you're not just like some business guy. Like you're – there's a high degree of confidence that you're some sort of spy. Well, I don't know how the hell they do it now with this facial recognition shit. Because that's a whole other beast that I didn't have to deal with. But, you know, you're not always, you're not always, look, maybe I'm a businessman or they think I'm a businessman and I'm just coming back every 45 days to make a new deal or meet with my business contacts.

You know what I mean? Maybe I'm embedded in, I don't know't know on me in oil Titan out of Texas and that's why I happen to be in the Middle East you know what I mean and that's why I'm dressed in a business suit with a Rolex and nice glasses you know what I mean and i'm driving a nice car and then the next place i go you know maybe um i don't know maybe you see what i'm getting yes you know did you ever get made and know it oh yeah like a lot or uh i mean not a lot but yeah it, it's happened. What'd you do? I got shot at. Holy shit!

But, I mean, yeah, you know, I mean, you do get made. And sometimes you have to come to the determination whether, is this, is this, it's a judgment call just like anything else it's all right do we just roll with the punches and continue on or do we get made by somebody that's gonna that we need to drop the mission you know it depends what happens if we do drop the mission maybe it's maybe it's a mission that's not you know maybe it's not super critical maybe we just started it and it's like all right let's just wipe what we did let it cool off for a minute and then come back or maybe it's something like you know I mean it's not everything is of the utmost importance like the bin Laden raid right you know what's the what's the cadence though like when you get shot at i assume because again i don't know what kind of detail you can go into that but like i assume that's probably in a public

place maybe it's somewhere where there's a lot of bullets flying all the time i don't know but like you just start shooting back or like what do you have a protocol like what's your I mean if you can and in and shooting back would be about the last thing you'd want to do because that's like a dead giveaway you know what I mean yeah and so the thing to do when you're doing espionage and stuff like that is just get the just do what you can to get the hell out of there you know a few bullets flying yeah i mean it sucks it's it's horrible i've had it happen a couple of times but you know you you just gotta you gotta drive on you're not when you're working there you're not there to pick a fight you know you're not you're not there to pick a fight. You're not there to – not that it's letting your ego get the best of you. I mean, yeah, I wanted to kill every one of those guys that shot at me or shot my vehicle up or whatever.

But that would have – it just wouldn't have ended well for me. It would have been better for me to escape and evade and let it cool off because then it's well maybe I don't know maybe that was just maybe we were wrong yeah you know when you when you're in these various places though the things we see in the movies all the time which I take with an enormous grain of salt because you know hollywood obviously changes a lot of things but like we constantly see that there's like a safe house everywhere is that somewhat realistic or did it really vary based on where you were oh it varies i mean it's very realistic but it varies and how do you not like that's what i always wondered how do safe houses not get made? Because they're kind of like sitting ducks.

Like, they're a house. People go in and out. They don't move. It all depends on how much you use it. You know, there's houses that there are locations that you may use once a year. You know what i mean and maybe the family who owns the house is still there guess what they have a pattern of life yes got it maybe you enter into that pattern of life and you happen to have dinner with them every friday and so it becomes a normal thing that would be a safe house

so it's it's more of a symbol in the word rather than an actual you just go there when things go red it's not a mold you know what i mean it's not like it's not every safe house is the same a safe house could be a hotel room a safe house could be a house A safe house could be a hotel room. A safe house could be a house. A safe house could be a water plant. A safe house could be an office building. It could be anywhere. It all depends on what fits with what you're doing.

And the best way to hide is in plain sight it's not it's not the batman cave or the house that's way out in the country that nobody those aren't because what do i do if somebody's following me out there why the hell is this white dude you know what i mean look at my ranch out in the country here yeah i'm just going to my fink out in the middle of nowhere in colombia but um you know what i mean it's it's it's everything has to fit everything has to fit the narrative did you speak other languages too or did you have to learn anything no interesting so the and i guess that makes sense because like if you're going in with different types of covers like forms of american businessmen so to speak something like that that

does make sense but still like when you get on the ground i mean your channel was initially called vigilance elite and you talk about like hyper vigilance and things like that and maybe we can get to some of the some of the effect that that's had just due to your career and some ptsd and things like that and being hyper aware stuff but like when you get on the ground somewhere new did you have a go-to list of i don't know three five ten things like behaviors that you would do outside of establishing a pattern of life to get full awareness of your surroundings and get comfortable with with the area well what do you mean did you have a strategy like i'd put you in a new country right like you're going there for 45

120 days whatever it was you drop on the ground you've never been there before it's a new mission new people involved whatever do you have like a list of things for your own personal checklist that you need to go through to be comfortable by day two there oh yeah i mean first thing you need to do is figure is a map study you need to figure out where you're at what you're the lay of the land where are the friendlies where are the safe houses where's the hospital what's our evacuation plan what do i do uh if i get hit here versus hit here where are our friendly where's all the government facilities that we're going to be working in and out of uh both foreign and and and and our own you know And so you need to be,

when I would show up into a country, the first thing that happens is you get the lay of the land. You do the map study, you figure out where all the sites are, you learn all the back roads, you aren't navigating off of Google Maps or a GPS or anything. You should be able to navigate that entire city i mean

if if it was a place like philadelphia it would take two weeks and i would know it the whole city in two damn near the whole city is there like a mental like trick you do to be able to to patternize that you just do it you start with the major routes all the interstates then you go to the you know then you go to the smaller state highways then you get into the neighborhoods then you section it off you know what i mean so this is you know this is i don't know anything about philadelphia i've only been here for two hours but but you know what i mean it's if if it was new york city or something you would know all the boroughs right and then you would you you you would be able to section it all off and say all right these are the different boroughs now i'm going to get into each borough and learn each and every one of those

and so you just take it in sections you know what i mean but you also gotta know which roads are one ways which roads have people that regularly walk in them like a street square sometimes which areas have construction like just in my head thinking about a city like the size of philadelphia that you're dropping into somewhere in the middle east that just sounds like yeah it sounds insane but it's not i mean you already know all the traffic patterns you know when when to go. You know when traffic's going to be heavy. You know the back way if there's a wreck, how to get home so you're not sitting in the traffic because you're a local, right? But you've just accumulated this knowledge because

you live here. You're not attempting to learn it. When you go to a place like that, that's your whole focus. I'm going to learn everything about this you go to a place like that, that's your whole focus. I'm going to learn everything about this fucking city. You know what I mean? And you get Passover from the guy that was there ahead of you, and you give Passover to the guy behind you during that turnover. You know what I mean? You're helping this guy like, hey, stay out of this neighborhood.

Maybe you don't need to know that neighborhood. And so there's a lot of turnover, a lot of tips tips a lot of secret stuff that you know what i mean not like secret classified stuff but just just shortcuts and all kinds of things that you've learned during your time there that you can pass on to the next guy you know and so is that yeah that answers the question for sure because i mean it just there's so much that would go into these high octane scenarios and the entire time you have to maintain a cover like you can't get caught like you said it was like 24 7 365 i mean when you're over there every second counts you make a mistake for one minute that's it you know so the idea of a lay person like me trying to wonder about dropping into all these new places and getting all this information like that so fast and being able to have it like the back of my hand, it's it seems like impossible when you think about it.

But I mean, I guess that's kind of in a lot of ways, the intense training and hyper awareness you had to have as a Navy SEAL Pretty much prepares you for that. I would guess I mean It's it's not Yeah, it is it is difficult. I'm not gonna lie, but it's not as difficult as you think I mean I Wish I wish I could see a map right now and I would just show you What I would do, you know, but let's let's talk about like yeah pull up Philadelphia let's let's pull up New York because that's like a grid pattern that's why I want to ask that let's let's pull up pull up something that's not a grid because most cities aren't a grid okay here we go I'll put this in the corner

of the screen for people to see cool so you see all those yellow roads? Yeah. I could learn those in a day. Those are all your major thoroughfares, right? You're going to get anywhere you need to go in a hurry, you need to be on one of those yellow roads, right? They're the arteries. They're the arteries. How long do you think it would take you to learn that? Just that? That I could do in a day. Right? Yeah. So now you're starting to see it's not maybe as difficult as you think then after you learn those then you're going to learn where's the shopping mall where's the hospital where's the police station where's the military base where's this all right and then you just start yourself at different points throughout the city all right

take me to the police station okay you know and you just use all those yellow thoroughfares that I'm talking about. Then you break it up in neighborhoods, in most important, most critical to least critical. So let's say... You got northeast, yeah. Yeah, let's say we're gonna be all right we got a lot of activity that we're going to be doing in

kensington well i'm sorry to hear that yeah i don't know anything about kensington but you see what i'm saying then i'm gonna to go to Kensington and learn all the different little streets and neighborhoods and everything inside all the businesses, all the checkpoints. What time do the businesses shut down? They call it area familiarization. Then once I have, I'll probably learn that in a day or two. You know what I mean? Then I'll move to the next. All right, where else are we going? Oh, over here? Okay, get in there there you know what i mean and and that's how you do it you just break it down so when you do it like that it's not nearly as complicated as you might think patterning it out kind of like everything else that makes sense i don't know i guess when you don't do this stuff you start to think of like how you know it's kind of like that with anything complicated it's like how the hell do they do that like when i watch an engineer do something i'm like where the fuck like where do you even start but then everyone's got to start somewhere make sense of it so that's that's that's pretty easy but break it down but when you are like working with i mean you mentioned like

obviously there's a lot of guys who are from all the different types of special forces and high level military across who are doing jobs like you but then you're working with the guys like boost amante who are in that case career cia spies is there was there ever a cultural problem there was there always a mutual respect like how did you experience that? Yeah, there was definitely some cultural problems. But like I said, you're coming. So agency likes to recruit from when I was there, Ivy Leagues. So what does Ivy League produce? A lot of liberals, right?

Which is fine. I'm not going political here but you have liberals and you have you have you have to have tact and you can't be blatant about things you have to and i'm coming from a super alpha profession where it's guys like me who like to go to the gym get tattoos and shoot things and blow shit up you know what i mean kick doors in and so when you get when you get these type of personalities together they they generally clash that's not what i was going to be talking about but that's interesting when i say cultural i, I was thinking like the, the, like, oh, you're different. You're not us or whatever. But you're talking about even on like a human level, there was just a whole different worldview, so to speak.

Oh, yeah. That's interesting to me that that would, like the stereotype of what you just described would impact. I'm just going gonna name a random place here some fucking mission in abadabad you know what i mean because it's like you don't really have time to worry about that stuff at least that's what i would think but when that stuff comes in i mean in the seal teams if somebody messes up you can be like hey what the fuck were you thinking? Why didn't you fucking go through that door?

You didn't clear your fucking corner. What the fuck is your problem? You know what I mean? And you can be abrasive and shame them and then lift them back up. You know what I mean? So that they don't fuck up again. They need to know the severity of it. If you do that shit at the agency with a case officer who just got recruited

out of harvard you're gonna make him fucking cry and he's gonna go whine to his to his superior and then your ass is gonna get in trouble see some of the guys i know in this space that i've dealt with they're not that type like i've had jim lawler in here who's he was 25 years he's an old school but yeah it's interesting to talk with you because your expertise was in the field undercover with nuclear arms deals and things like that and it's like the whole reason we went to iraq was because they had wmd and that turned out to not be true that's exactly right people ask me about that sometime and it is it is true that saddam

hussein had been working on nuclear weapons before then he had used chemical weapons against the kurds the kurds are an ethnic group there in iraq killed thousands of them in fact one of his cousins was known as chemical ali and chemical ali used andy bustamante you know him i mean he's intense as fuck andy didn't have to i don't believe andy worked with us i don't think he i don't think he was in locations where we were we were in the worst of the worst places and so what you had is a lot of ivy leaguers coming into war zones just to punch their tickets so that they could get a promotion uh okay does that make sense yeah so they're not and I'm not in and I want to be clear that's not a hit on them all I'm saying is you're getting two different cultures very

different cultures you're getting I mean the do you see what I'm getting at yes I'm just shocked they would send that type of stereotype into the worst of the worst places they have to they need the experience they need to get their people experience and a lot of times those attitudes change but my attitude changed and their attitudes changed and you you learn how to work together to get the fucking mission done but yeah for a while it was a culture shock for me because i wasn't for lack of a better term i wasn't used to having baby people and there you have to baby people and how old were you when you joined the seals again uh i joined when i was 18 i think yeah so this is like in your adult life that's all i was out at 24 but this is my point is like is like, this is the attitude, you know. Yeah.

You don't know another real world where it's not like, get your fucking shit together. There's no time for crying in the SEAL teams. Right. There's lots of time for crying at the agency. I'm still, I understand people got to get their experience, but that still does surprise me a little bit that they do it like that. Because I also don't want to comment on some things with Andy, because I know some of that's still like classified. I don't want to fuck up, but we could talk about that offline like you know he was also a very he was just into different stuff that i was into yeah he was a little bit more of a unique situation than just like some of the case officer stuff you're talking about but still like as you said to use your words the worst of the worst places i would think there'd be a little

bit of a of a people who have a reality check that this is not you know a domestic issue to fight over you have to get in the end you know now i'm going to go on the defensive side and defend these guys you know what i mean who are coming out of ivy leagues they don't know what they're getting into you know they don't i mean you don't see the shit that i see in the media you know what i mean so when they're showing up in a remote location in afghanistan i mean the media isn't showing what isis is doing the media isn't showing what al-qaeda does to people wait till you see this shit that uh i just interviewed this kid tyler andrew vargas or tyler vargas andrews who is the marine sniper uh that got blown up during the afghan withdrawal and and

and where do you see what he was seeing like during that i mean they had people a hundred yards away from where we evac just lining women up lining kids up lining men up literally just shooting them in the back of the head one by one just executing people you think they're gonna put that shit on the media well they did for a short time in like 2014 and then they stopped so you get these guys coming out they show up there they don't realize how bad it is they want they just don't realize how how how much of a threat it actually is and so you have to show them i'm obviously naive but i'm pretty like, again, the people coming in out of college who I know, according to when you when I talk to these spies and some of the training they go through, they'll go through 12, 18 months of training. I'm kind of shocked that, like, the CIA doesn't wake them up a little bit with this.

I know it's a whole different thing when you get there, obviously, but like still. They don't know where they're going. That's the thing like you can't yes they the feelings are on are a thing over there it's it's stupid um i come from a place where we don't give a shit about feelings we just want the fucking job done because the security of our nation depends on it you know and. But they're not brought up like that. They're not. And they're not necessarily going to be working in places like that.

They might be working in China or Taiwan. They might be working, you know, a lot of clash happened with guys that were working the Cold War back in the Cold war days with Russia. What do you mean clash? Because they've never worked in a hostile environment. They've worked in permissive environments. You know what I mean?

They're working in cities like Philadelphia where you're not going to get shot out every time you walk down. Right. At least I hope not, but you know what I mean? And, and then they come to a place like like kandahar or afghanistan you know or helmand province afghanistan or right in the middle of baghdad and o5 you know and and they show up and they don't they don't understand how bad it is and then they do doesn't take long but they

figure it out you know they're like oh shit the culture shock doesn't last these guys might be onto something here you know and so it's it's but you know that was very extremely frustrating with me for me at the beginning and then until i figured out, okay, I just, you know, I have to adapt, you know, and that's going to make me more effective. It's going to make them more effective and they figure it out too. They figure out they, hey, we have to adapt. Maybe feelings aren't as important as I thought they were, you know, and for me, maybe feelings are a little bit more important than I thought they were. Meet them halfway a little bit.

Yeah, you know. Yeah, not everyone's going to have that. I mean, again, like you have the most extreme important than i thought they were meet them halfway a little bit yeah you know yeah not everyone's going to have that per i mean again like you have the most extreme perspective because of what you had to do before you were the most prepared you could be for something like that not i recognize now everyone's going to have something like that yeah but like looking at it today you know the cia thing is such an interesting subcategory online i see the worst of it because of all the content with like Bustamante and stuff where I see what people say.

But what's your – like I personally subscribe to the idea that no place is perfect and mistakes get made and there are bad people in anything that ever happens, right? Like whether it be government, private, whatever. You're always going to have some bad people. But with all the heat that people put on the cia online these days like even on your episode with boostamante i know a lot of your fans were talking about that just like they were on all his other videos as well like oh you can't talk to this fucking cia guy can't be trusted like whatever like what's your attitude on the agency how do

you view their work in the world do you think do you think they're extremely important or do you think they got to be tamped back like what's what's your takeaway i mean i understand everybody's frustration you know what i mean i get frustrated with it too uh i think 99 of the people that work over there are solid americans doing great work and the agency is the best at what they do i've seen i've i've seen how other other countries operate uh with the with the the equivalent and we are for the most part leaps and bounds over anything any other country does um unfortunately you know sometimes bad leadership will bring a bad rap to an organization and uh and you know people have a right to be pissed i don't fucking blame them yeah yeah i feel the same way about the fbi but i know lots

of people that work for the fbi and they're not bad people yeah but you know so i i i get it man you know what i mean it is bad shit has happened a lot of good stuff's happened too the thing i always try to remember is is that last point you're making right there it's like we don't really see the good shit yeah you generally only hear about the bad right and sometimes like yeah like you hear it and you're like that's bad like heads need to roll for that that is what it is but you know when i start seeing we talk we've talked a lot about today like the division in the country and how things are pushed on society and i start seeing you know three four years ago,

everyone's like defund the police, right? At this level. And now you're seeing like defund the three-letter agencies, get rid of them. This zero or a hundred mindset that we seem to have in society with what I would characterize as whether you like it or not,

some very important things, right? I got a lot of problem with policing in this country. We can't have a country without police though, right? I got a lot of problem with policing in this country. We can't have a country without police though, right? I got a lot of problem with MKUltra and some other things that the CIA has done. I also, in some things, recognize maybe the intentions were okay, the execution was just bad. But they also are the first line of defense in the information war around the world. Do you just want to get rid of that? Like, it doesn't really work that way.

I'll put it to you this way. Throughout my entire career, minus bin Laden, the number one guy had about a two-week life expectancy. Oh. So that means there were a lot of number one guys and that's because the cia is so good at what they do yeah makes sense yeah i mean and bin laden was such a and if so if the cia wasn't around the number one guy would probably still be there you know but every two weeks there's a new number one every two weeks they keep having to replace them because the intelligence comes out and then we kill them and then the intelligence comes out and he gets killed

and he gets killed and he gets killed so we went through a lot of number ones and even more number twos and even more number threes and that's all because of the work that these people are doing over at CIA NSA you know I'd like to correct myself in the next section i'm not trying to put out any disinformation here but it did come to me in a conversation after we recorded this podcast uh with a former colleague of mine that there was the number two that had a two-week life expectancy not the number one so i apologize for for any confusion that this may have caused, but I just want to set the record straight and say that was the number two that had the two-week life expectancy, not the number one. We're talking about high-value targets that the CIA was after.

And there's still things like we should raise. I mean, obviously you and I would have a disagreement with Andy on some issues with like privacy and domestically, like some of those things. I understand where he's coming from because of his, you know, where he was and his worldview. But, you know, i think those are good arguments to have publicly and to keep places like that in check i don't think those arguments should go to these people get

rid of them like that just doesn't you don't really get to in life at least from what i've seen in my young years like you don't really get to pick up your ball and go home yeah like that's not really how the world works you sometimes you got to play ball with people that maybe you don't love you know and it's like okay people have issues with things the cia did we'll talk about it on here we do but like get rid of it and watch what happens yeah it's command structure that's what needs to be reorganized i feel like some interesting people find their way to the top of that stuff yeah they do yeah you know what's funny the guy who oversaw – because the CIA like officially started after World War II. I guess it was the OSS before that. But like CIA was like 48 or something.

The guy who oversaw probably the most tumultuous years in the history of the CIA was George Tenet from 97 to 2004. I mean we can all do math out there and figure out what happened and yet when you hear all these ex-head guys talk and you hear him talk he's the realist and most likable guy of all of them and the thing that i think and when when i talked to cia guys who served under him like jim lawler was like reading he had he had in his pocket he had like a notebook with a with like letters like handwritten letters that george tenant has sent him and like they talk about him like such a saint and if i could guess from totally from the outside one of the big problems that perhaps some of these most senior positions have is you get people up there who have zero empathy and no no understanding like they look at everything as x's and o's and a guy like him who happened to be there during you know there was some

problem with politics during that time that he didn't really have control over but like that's one thing that he understood pretty well and i kind of wonder forget some of the things that happened there and who you want to blame for that. But I wonder if leadership had more people with his personality traits, if things would be a little different. Because sometimes from the outside, it seems like a lot of these people who make their way to the top are very cold and calculating. I mean, I don't really know what to add to that.

But yeah, I mean. Okay. I mean. So I'm on to something. Yeah, i don't know what to add to that so all right that's cool but we haven't really talked about your your navy seal time today and i know like you you did you did a great you did a great podcast with pomp on that but you had said you got in i think we covered you got in in july 2001. So on, on 9-11, were you in training while that was happening? So when 9-11 happened, I was, I had just graduated bootcamp and I had a

hernia surgery and I was supposed to fly home that day on recovery. And so i wasn't i guess i wasn't training but it wasn't still training yet so then from there i went to in a school which is basically so when in my time when if you wanted to join the navy and become a seal they basically you it was almost like an advertising thing it was it was hey nobody makes it through this pipeline but let's advertise the out of it because all the people that quit we will put them in jobs that we have a shortage in so you would have to pick one of those jobs that there was a shortage in the navy before you actually went to buds so I picked one of those jobs went through that course and then got to buds and made it through went to the SEAL team how long is that process like approximately it can be like

to get to to get to buds to get to buds yeah like I can be pretty quick you can probably get there in three months oh shit yeah it's not that that's not that long yeah but like when 9-11 happens because you were you said you were going to be going home that day or something but like did did that change something in you obviously you had committed you wanted to do this before 9-11 happened so like you were already obviously like wanted to represent the country and stuff like that but did that like flip a switch in you at all oh yeah definitely i mean it didn't hit me to the fullest extent i mean i was i was only 18 you know what i mean so it i was still just an 18 year old kid but what it did do is it i did i knew i was like all right we're going to war so then you go into buds a few months later

how long is buds training if you make it through with no hiccups six months and it's like just six grueling intense months of non-stop physical like how much trauma can you take not all of it about the first it's broken up into three different phases you have first phase which is what you're talking about then you have second phase which is kind of what you're talking about but that's dive phase first phase is hell week and all that kind of shit where they're just it just it's horrible um so you got hell week first phase then you've got you've got dive phase which is it can be just as bad but it's not it's not all the time there's some classroom you actually have to learn how to dive and and do open circuit then you move into rebreather uh rebreather is where

you don't have any bubbles so you can't be detected you learn how to plant bombs on ships all that kind of stuff and then and then you move into land warfare demolition and that's when you learn that's when you really start learning how to do demo make bombs you see for use bangalore torpedoes TNT data sheet all kinds of explosives and and and kind of like I would say basic infantry tactics then after you get through buds then you go to jump school learn how to jump out of planes then after you get done with that then you go to jump school learn how to jump out of planes then after you get done with that then you go to sqt that's seal qualification training seal qualification training is kind of

when they actually turn you in they know you have the guts to take that it takes to do the job and so this is kind of like perfecting you and turning you into a special operator then when you get through sqt then you show up to the team if you show up at the team at the beginning of the cycle then you got about another year and a half of training before you go out the door what do you mean beginning of the cycle so when i was in there was i don't know what what they're doing now i think they've shortened the cycle but they would have six months of this thing called pro dev professional development so that would be when you're going to individual schools individual specialties so you might go to a breacher's course and learn how to

blow doors and make entry into buildings houses targets whatever sniper school that thing I was telling you about with the mi6 that would be in their communication school JTAC school JTAC we're talking to fast a tens f-18 stuff like that dropping ordinance dropping bombs you go out to Nevada and do that stuff all these all these kind of schools right that would be pro pro dev professional development then you go into your workup your workup is when you work as a team you you kind of meet everybody in your platoon or they call them troops now squadron whatever you want to call call it. And you start working with your team and everything starts getting put together.

So you guys are running. It's almost, it's train up, but you're doing a lot of that kind of stuff that I was talking to you about, that the CIA is kind of like checking the box to see if you can perform it. That's where you learn all these different, where you really learn these skills

and learn your team, how they they move they learn how you move and you become you basically become one you know with your team and that is everything from land warfare to cqb to mount which which is like fighting in cities. What else? Diving, over the beach, MAROPS, which is when you see the – MAROPS is like the little black rubber boats with an engine on the back. That's that stuff, how to navigate an open ocean. Aero ops, more jumping, fast roping out of helicopters. And then you move into, I think they called it SIT. I can't remember what they called it, and I don't remember what it stood for.

But that's when you start working with other counterparts that you might be deploying with. So the SEAL team or your SEAL platoon that you're working with, you might be working with another team. Like the teams are broken up. You've got West Coast teams. You've got East Coast teams. Those teams can mirror each other. Where do the numbers come in? That's what has always confused me. You're the first Navy SEAL I've had on here.

But like when we hear SEAL Team 2, SEAL Team 6, SEAL Team 7. So all the odd-number teams are on the west coast out of san diego all the even number teams are out of virginia is there any difference in specialties that they do as far as like i mean at least when i've talked with seals in the past obviously off camera like they it sounds like some team is like more senior than another team like people the two that i hear maybe i'm totally off on this or like seal teams two and six are like the prestigious ones is that a real thing or is it totally just based on the coast uh so the way it used to be broken down was each team had an area of operation so team two was Europe team four was

South America team three was the Middle East team one I think was Southeast Asia so that's how it was originally broken up team six uh was your anti-terrorism team and so there they would be what you would consider the most prestigious right got it um does that make sense yes good breakdown yeah that's great um what was the what was the question before that so we were you were getting to you were walking through the whole process and then how you join in the cycles you join your oh so yeah so you may be you may be so when i was at team two we mirrored team three and so we would work my platoon with Team 2 would work with a specific platoon and SEAL Team 3 because we might be working together overseas. Or you may be working with a Ranger unit or you may be working with a Green Beret unit and you start to get to know all these other teams that you're going to be working with in theater, theater being in the specific war zone that you're gonna be operating in

together and and you start that's where you start working with uh you start doing like ftx's which are field training exercises where you start working with apaches and you start working with f18s and and and a-10s and jumping out of planes and linking up with green beret units and linking up with ranger units and and they kind of it's kind of like putting everything together everybody gets to know each other and everybody works together before you do it for real so you're doing work that's something i kind of miss out on like you're in the past you're doing work with other segments of the military early on like you're working with rangers you said and green berets you have the potential you don't always i never actually

worked with a ranger team you work with everybody man you work with fbi you work with cia you work with nsa you work you work with everybody that's interesting that's not how like in pop culture we tend to think about it yeah at the same time like thinking about when I see even when I see thinking like things in like movies usually they are coming in to like cover somebody and it's not you know it's not necessarily like another SEAL team it's like Marines on the ground or something like that. So that makes sense. But like you also, each team has guys who have different specialties. No?

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A lot of times it's picked out for you, and it doesn't follow you throughout the entire duration of your team. So you may be a sniper on on you may be the lead sniper i'll just call him the lead sniper right you may be the lead sniper for this rotation meaning from you you learn you pick up the school in pro dev you're the you're the lead sniper in your workup into the last portion into the deployment then cycle starts over maybe this time they're like hey you're going to be a communicator this time you know what i mean and then you go to communication school and and you learn all the different radios and how to talk to airplanes and helicopters and boats and you name it you know what i mean and and and getting your team's communications all wired

ready to go out on operations and everything. Then maybe after that rotation, they're like, hey, we're going to send you to breacher school. Then you're going to be the lead breacher and you're going to be the lead explosives guy. And the list just goes on and on. What was your main area of expertise like throughout your career uh i really didn't have a specific area of expertise i showed up late in the cycle on the first one so i went to a bunch of bullshit schools uh that i'm not proud of and not that they were they just weren't exciting to talk about it and i don't want to bore people to death but um then the second rotation i came in and that's when i went to that mi6 school

okay so the mi6 school just to refresh when you first brought that up you thought you were going to go i thought i was going in bosnia for war criminals yeah and this is like oh two oh three something like that yeah somewhere around there so this is like a whole and you guys did a great job with this in i think a a few of the sit downs i've i've listened to where it's been guys who were over in this theater but in the rob o'neill one i remember you guys talked about like kosovo and stuff because he was there this to me is like a forgotten part of history yeah but the breakup of the Soviet bloc in the 90s was nuts so Bosnia if I remember correctly that was where

like the biggest there were a few different genocides but that was where like the biggest genocide happened right I don't know if it was the biggest but there was a lot of it going on so what as a like this isn't spy work you're going in as a seal to like capture and well that was spy work oh that's right yes you were getting duh you were getting trained by mi6 so you're you're going in that situation as a seal are you going in plain clothes yep yeah you're rolling around and who knows what maybe an ice cream truck but it was a lot of it was a lot of snatch and grab type work where it'd be tracking somebody surveilling them snatching them up interrogating them whatever but you never got to do it you I didn't do that before

yep so was your whole team pulled off and then sent to Afghanistan or just some of you just some of us and this is like oh three or something so actually the whole team wound up getting pulled off yeah because because I got pulled out to go to Afghanistan and then those guys were over there but then they got pulled out into Baghdad and then and then my team left Afghanistan so I volunteered to go to Baghdad to jump in with my sister platoon who were the guys that were going to Bosnia and then we did we did a lot of sniper work got it so in it they pulled you in this is just interesting timing it seems like they pulled you into Afghanistan when Iraq was taken off, like first? Well, I got, everything was taken off. So I went to Afghanistan, right?

Do you remember the movie, did you ever watch that movie, The Lone Survivor? Of course. So my platoon was a platoon that relieved those guys. Oh, shit. Yep, and then that, because that operation went so bad, it created a lot of political problems within that theater

in afghanistan and what do you mean by political problems that op should have never happened and that created political problems not like politics like you're thinking not like left right uh politics within the military so and this is way above my pay grade at the time but there was basically a pissing match going on between the the the i'll just call them the head of the seal teams and the head of special operations and the seals got pulled out of afghanistan and so we went over to iraq oh so wow that that happened pretty quickly then i mean that was the biggest loss in seal team history at the time you know what i mean so it it it i mean it just a lot of things went wrong you know on that operation and and it you know yeah yeah if people haven't seen that

movie it is a really good movie but really scary too i mean it's like you know those are the best of the best and that still ha it just goes to show you like if the planning's not there if one thing's wrong doesn't matter how great the operators are they could still be sitting ducks there it's it's really it's something but so you didn't see much action in afghanistan it sounds like no i didn't see a whole lot we did a couple of we did a couple of hits uh snatched a couple of prisoners did a couple interrogations uh but it wasn't like what i was expecting where we were going to be kicking doors in every single night, multiple times a night. That didn't happen. Not for me there.

There was too much. Because of Red Wings, when that went down, everybody got very trigger shy. They didn't want that to happen again. You know what I mean? And so everything just, it unfortunately affected the off-tempo. Right. And so we went to another theater and did a lot of good work there. So it didn't really carry over to Iraq. You were kind of more free-rolling there, it sounds like.

Okay. How did you, I always ask this because i i like to be very very clear on the iraq war and stuff like i look at it as an enormous problem and a huge mistake in this country but i separate that hardcore from the military the military goes where they're told to go by the politicians in dc they go there to do a job and like i respect all the people that went there. So I just want to be very clear about that. But when you were going in there,

you know, there was a lot of support in this country at the time, like bipartisan, even across the population for a war in Iraq, because we thought Saddam had WMDs. We were told that and whatever. Was there a point, was there any point where you started to feel like what the fuck are we doing

here no because well i i definitely agree with you you know what i mean with kind of what the fuck were we doing there a lot of good things happened there i mean what you didn't see is all the genocide and shit that was going on there that wasn't being reported so i've been to places where they would take pregnant women and if they didn't belong to a certain tribe then they would hang them on meat hooks on the side of a wall and let them bleed to death if you didn't belong to the certain the certain religious group they would take men and they would put their heads on concrete blocks and throw cinder blocks off the third story and just watch these people's head explode just because you know and that happened everywhere this was in oh four oh five you're talking about oh yeah oh yeah and so we were killing the people that were doing that shit. Maybe we didn't get the WMDs, but we still saved a lot of fucking people who were being oppressed by Saddam and his regime.

Well, here's the question on that. We could talk about that a little bit, take a sidebar here. But Saddam was obviously very bad, and as you just laid out, there's things that weren't even reported that were worse. His sons were even worse than he was, and they were going to be in power. So the country was, fair to say, pretty fucked. And with hindsight 2020, I think it was more a leadership problem and more of a political problem than a military problem. But when we went there, the beginning of the mission, the military took care of business. And then you have – I always forget the goddamn guy's name. But the guy is like, ladies and gentlemen, we got him. You have that guy who was the attache or whatever of Iraq for America coming and saying and saying okay anyone who's a sunni can't be in government now and then you create all this sectarian violence you get a you know vacuum sound guy like al-zakawi comes in total psycho the godfather of what became isis i'm sure doing the exact shit you're talking about and everything goes to hell because of that it was like kind of an unwinnable situation at that

point the question is as bad as that is can we like there's a lot of bad shit that happens in this world there's genocide going on right now in other countries can we be in a position as america to try to go in and be the world's police in every single place as painful as this is to say because you don't want to see this shit happen but like is that is that even realistic to do that i mean i felt pretty good doing it when you see a mom who's you know a couple of three-year-olds got blown up and vaporized by a fucking bomb you feel like you're doing good work on the contrary now what are we doing now we're in fucking ukraine fighting for land that belongs to ukraine but the people that live in that land don't even want to be a fucking part of ukraine

they want to be part of r. So what are we doing there? Well, we're technically not there, but we're funding the whole thing. You know what I mean? Yeah. We're talking about world police. Yeah, that one's a weird one. Yeah, it's weird, all right. I agree.

So you know what I mean, though? Those people don't even want to be a part of Ukraine. Yeah. At all. They want to be a part of ukraine yeah at all they want to be part of russia part of russia but we're there at least in iraq you know yeah i don't think we should have been there but i think we have more of a reason to be there than we do in ukraine that's interesting yeah because the the clarification i was gonna give at the beginning there is like obviously you're doing a great thing when you're freeing stuff like that i don't want that lost in this argument it's just the question of what you got to at the end which is you know

and the thing that everybody forgets too you know is these people were coming to our country to us up we were over there fighting them on their own turf so people like you to our country to us up we were over there fighting them on their own turf so people like you didn't have to now if we wouldn't have gone there you would have seen a lot more violence in this country you think so oh yeah you don't it's not maybe on the time period we would have here's how i look at i'm looking at it over a 15 20 year period rather than the five i think on the five you're spot on there could have been not that saddam was like the terrorist himself in fact he didn't like al-qaeda but like you know there's a hotbed for extremism going on for sure.

But in going there, creating the sectarian violence that then happened, you know, we didn't mean to do that, but that's what happened. That then birthed ISIS. You know, we had Joby Warwick in here talking about that. He wrote the Bible on this, Black Flags. The most fascinating terrorist figure I think I've ever come across. We're familiar with, with bin Laden, bin Laden and Zawahiri, his number two guy, they were of a completely different type. These were people who were professionals.

Bin Laden was an engineer. His number two was a medical physician. So they're educated, sophisticated people. They have sort of a strategic vision of this terrorist organization is trying to create. So Kali was none of that he was just a street tough and you know zakawi died in 2006 but like the formation was there and then by 2014 again journalists getting their heads chopped off in the middle of the desert when did we when did obama pull us out of iraq was it 2011 is that right i don't know i'll check it but it's interesting a couple years after we pulled out isis right yeah and that's the

thing it's like you get and we could talk about this with Afghanistan too. It's like you get into the endless war and then the minute – now Afghanistan, they fucked up the pullout beyond belief, let's be honest. But still, like the Taliban was already starting to take control in a way of that country. You get out, now they take control, right right I would argue with Afghanistan though we absolutely had to go there right they're harboring the people that take the buildings down you have to go there well actually Pakistan was too you know but yeah that's a weird one. I mean, the thing is, like, you're not fighting a nation. You're fighting an ideology. And that ideology spreads from country to country. It's not Afghanistan. It's not Iraq.

It's not Iran. It's not Yemen. It's not Pakistan. It's an ideology that spreads throughout. You know what I mean? And that's what we were fighting. But I do agree with you. I don't think we should have been there.

I think that was the military-industrial complex. I think, I mean, Dick Cheney had a big hand in KVR, you know, and he's a fucking scumbag. Everything over there, everything over there was Halliburton how quickly did you realize that immediately immediately I didn't realize it so much in Afghanistan because I was in these very remote places when I got to Iraq and I saw I was like holy shit the construction all the construction which you don't realize how much construction is going on over there at that time but every chow halls meal rooms planning rooms barracks every everything everything over there was built by halliburton all the all the workers

everybody that makes the meals halliburton everybody that delivers the mail halliburton all the logistics halliburton every everything was halliburton all of it the gas the the fuel who's fueling up the the trucks who's fueling up the helicopters who's fueling up the planes halliburton who's feeding all these people halliburton who's building the places where these people sleep halliburton everything was halliburton in plain sight too that's what's scary yeah did it in plain sight it was literally like the ceo of the fucking company yep and then vp and then oh wmd yep that's that's well i'd say that's surprising but it's not no you know we've seen shit like that i just hate you know i love the veterans and you know you guys

you guys do you do the ultimate sacrifice going to fight for the country so that we don't have to fight here and i hate when you know then we have to monday morning quarterback some things righteously so and you guys are stuck in the middle of it because then by the way guess what that's how the attitudes happen that then you know someone like eddie gallagher's attacked in the media right and there's a narrative because it's like oh the military industrial complex the war machine let's do a story on that you know but i don't see dick cheney in shackles or anything for kickbacks i don't see any of these people who are investing in all the companies that profit off of this who sit in fucking congress and get information about i don't

see them in shackles to me sitting in my seat here armchair expert you know that seems like a pretty obvious one to me where i'd start it's pretty complicated yeah fair enough but back to iraq so minus all the extracurriculars there in the war itself you guys were were way higher up tempo going in there and are you like immediately like what what was the lay of the land at that point like what month did you get there man i don't remember to me i think i know i spent christmas there uh so i guess right around probably late november december okay so it wasn't at like the outset like the initial invasion no had gone down already so you're going in on the ground did you notice right away that the sectarian violence had started

to get out of control or at what point did that start to become like oh there's something going on here that's has nothing to do with Saddam oh man dude you didn't have time for that when you land when you're in baghdad in iraq and that in that time period you could just hear the car bombs going off all day all night hear the gunshots hear the gunfights and it was just bombs, terrorists, suicide bombers all the time. Every time you went anywhere. I mean, my asshole was about that big the entire time because I just I was like, today's going to be the day we're going to fucking eat it. I don't know why we're in these stupid vehicles. We should be in a helicopter or something, but we're not. We're in this fucking vehicle. we're going to fucking eat it. I don't know why we're in these stupid vehicles. We should be in a helicopter or something, but we're not.

We're in this fucking vehicle. We're going to get blown up. And because it was just, I mean, I'm not over-exaggerating. I mean, it was bombs all night, all day. People coming back all fucked up. Seeing these vehicles getting blown up seeing what's left of them if anything i mean it was this guy died this guy died this guy died this guy died and that's why we're so busy is because we were killing these guys that were

making the bombs we were killing the guys that were planting the bombs we were killing the guys that were detonating the bombs and it was saving american lives wow was there any pattern to it or was every day very different or every mission different setup different lay of the land like yeah we would just go we would go all over the country you know and and to these conventional units meaning like infantry units uh non-special operations units and and these guys were just getting hammered man and they would they didn't care who it was they could if it was KBR delivering mail they'd blow them up if it was if it was just a supply chain route you know it's just somebody delivering vehicle parts they would blow them up they didn't care you know and so the units that were taking the most casualties or the ones that would

reach out to us would you know like man we're just getting hammered over here we need some we need some help so we would go in and um take a couple of the guys at whatever unit we showed up we worked with 10th mountain uh a couple times we worked with uh fourth id a couple times and a couple other ones that I can't remember. Sorry. But we would go in, and we would hand-select a couple of their guys, train them up, hey, get them out, hey, get rid of this, get rid of this, get rid of this, this is bullshit, this is bullshit, teach them how to basically plan a mission, take them out, kill some bad guys, come home, go to another spot they're getting hit at kill those bad guys come back set them free be like all right we we've taught you how to make a sniper hive we've taught you how to snipe we've taught you how to do a mission profile how

to plan the mission how to go on the mission how to target these how to kill them how to identify them how to get your intel and and then we'd turn it over and be like all right you got this now and then we go to the next place do it all over again some of it was urban some of it was out of buildings apartment buildings houses um one got uh one op we were in a chocolate factory chocolate yeah we took us we hid in a chocolate factory uh guys were uh there was another team that wound up taking over a brothel and fighting out of there that was a disaster that's interesting they didn't realize it was a brothel but then they had people knock they had guys knocking on the door like all day wanting to want to uh see their favorite lady friend and uh and luckily the the head woman was the was actually she was happy that we were there so she would answer the door and tell them they were closed for business today.

And they were tired of bombs going off in the front yard. And then everything out to being in the bush in Geely suits. Geely suits? Yeah, Geely. You ever seen a sniper stand up and they have the weeds and shit hanging off that i mean there are times we were so well hidden we actually had goats eating the vegetation right out of our suits not even knowing where they're goat herders slapping them around and shit right literally right on top of us had no idea where

they were that we were there holy shit yeah yeah that's nuts yeah so you never knew i mean it was either going to be an urban environment or a rural environment and uh i don't really have a preference they're both uh i mean we got to you got it done yeah we got it done so it sounds like obviously all different types of things is the answer and a lot like for your personal team sounds like pretty successful missions over and over again i'm hearing that right yeah so what would you have done like if you were in charge if you were the general of the military in iraq what would you have done differently with what i mean what's up it's a good question which break it down a little bit more sure with the so we we invade iraq that's done like an overall strategy yes i would have kicked 90 of kbr out of the fucking country uh which i'm sure was impossible to do considering

right genie but uh i would have i would have made that a special operations war and that's it um so you wouldn't had the major military boots on the ground. You would have had tactical. Yep. Interesting. Everything would – minus Fallujah going in there with the Marines. When was Fallujah again? 06, 07? I don't remember.

Something like that. But the majority of that war should have been fought with special operations and only special operations. That would have just made things more effective. The politics shit wouldn't have been involved as much. Especially when the Obama administration came in, we really got our legs chopped out from under us. It got to the point where we could barely even defend ourselves. And that's when I really was like, what the fuck are we doing here? You know, we had, that was when I got to the agency.

I was going to say you weren't in the SEALs at that point. But I remember being in Helmand Province, Afghanistan under the agency when the Marines were going to take that. That was going to be the biggest offensive force uh since fallujah and they came out with roes that said uh if if a terrorist is shooting at you and drops his weapon you can't shoot back or and that just totally fucked and mind fucked these poor guys that had to go in and do that mission you know why why why why the fuck are we here in the middle of a fire i don't understand things like that you're in the middle of firefights like it doesn't really work like that nobody does nobody understands it but um but that's what i would have done if i was a general i would have made this an aviation drone and special operations war interesting now you when you're there it was what like oh three to oh six

you were there yeah roughly were you did you have breaks where you came home oh yeah sure yeah you have to have that inner spliced in there right yeah and what made you want to get out in oh six and leave the seals wasn't enough action really yeah so by the end you weren't doing a ton of missions you were just sitting around oh no we were doing a ton of missions but out of the six years there was maybe six months of hard combat interesting and I was like at the time that wasn't enough for me i didn't i never wanted to see my first rotation i went to europe i did i i got i did a bunch of stuff i went to panama i went to haiti those were kind of cool then i went to germany and all that was was chasing women and drinking booze and getting in bar fights and uh you know as fun as that was

uh i was like what the fuck am i doing here man i did not i didn't come for this shit if i wanted to do this i would have went to school and become a fucking frat boy i came over to kick some ass and fight for my country and that isn't what i was doing and And then we went to Greece for 2004 when the Olympics were there, and we came up with all these evacuation routes for the terrorist threat that was pretty imminent at the time. But that's not what I did. I didn't want to do that. It was cool.

Yeah, I got to see the Olympics. I got to meet a bunch of the athletes. I, me and my team designed the entire, um, contingency plans and evacuation plans and all that. If something were to happen, but I didn't, I wasn't killing bad guys and I didn't want to be there. And,

uh, then we did the NATO convention in Turkey in in 2004 as well that wasn't exciting for me at all it was a bunch of sniper overwatch for the president and the sec def and secretary of state and like that and then we went to afghanistan and um like i said we got to see a little bit of there um not a whole lot pretty uneventful for the most part. And then Iraq was the big ticket that I wanted to do. But I didn't want to give another four or five years of my life up to go sit on my ass in Germany and chase ass and drink booze. I was just like, this is not what it's cracked up to be

and uh and that was my experience that's not everybody's experience you know but you didn't like you had been saying it's not like you're like well i'm gonna go to the agency now there was there was time there you went to i said you went to the state department for five minutes or something and then i think you were did you tell me off camera you were in the private sector at some point too for a short time or was that afterwards, after everything? That was – I did some anti-piracy stuff as well when that whole thing was going on after the – what was it? The Marisk, Alabama, Captain Phillips. Oh, yeah. captain Phillips oh yeah yeah after that there was they realized there was a big problem with piracy that was also pretty boring I mean it's just you're just sitting on a ship waiting for pirates to come try to take it over and you shoot him at last like I don't know Oh home

30 seconds yeah that and so then I went back to the agency yeah because like just looking at it from the outside i would think like you go to leave the navy seals like what are you gonna unless you have the plan to go to the agency right away like what'd you think you were gonna find like back working in the states or something compared to that even if it wasn't the op tempo you wanted by the end like you didn't want to do five years where it wasn't as much like action like doesn't really get more potential for action i would think than that i mean look man i was 24 years old right you know yeah so that's all i knew right so you you come back you get in you find your way into the agency, now you're actually in action again. But I think the thing that I can't totally wrap my head around as much as I hear it, and I probably won't be able to wrap my head around it with whatever answer you give. a lot of veterans talk like across anything i'm not just talking about navy seals you know

special forces guys infantrymen whatever they talk about war zones and they highlight that war is hell and all these things as they should and and you guys recognize that you've seen it but there's also the almost like the paradox to it that like but we wanted to be there and it was there was no place in the world we wanted to be besides that yeah what what do you think that is that like burns inside you that needs to be in the middle of something that you know is like the worst you could possibly be seeing in the world at that time but you're there and you belong there i mean a lot of guys consider it to be a privilege to be in combat. And that's just something that if you haven't experienced it, you'll never understand it.

It's... There's nothing more real than being in those type of situations. And you come to find what you're capable of, how much courage you actually have, what are you actually willing to do. I mean, you can sit there and think about it all. I would have done this, I would have done that, but you don't really fucking know how you would react if I whipped out a gun right now and pointed it at your head or we got into a gunfight

and you'd been training for this for years and years and years and then you experience it it's it's it is a privilege to be able to to fight in that capacity you know alongside the guys that you consider your family and and and you find a lot out about yourself as a man that most men will never they'll never they'll never know how they how they would have uh reacted you know and so i wouldn't take i wouldn't take it back that's awesome that actually is a really really good answer i think you know it's it's nice and it's something that's great about your platform guys like me can watch that and listen to all these different people from all the ends of the military come to that kind of conclusion. No matter what their background is, what they did, what they didn't do.

There are different answers, but it's in the same there are different answers but it's in the same wavelength like it's something bigger than you and i think that's what it takes to be able to you know be an 18 year old who's like yeah i'm going to sign my life to go fight for my country i mean that's that's a it's like the ballsiest thing you can do yeah i mean when i was 18 i mean christ man wouldn't have even been a thought to do. You know what I mean? I didn't even know what's going on at 18. But you're like, fuck it. We're going to become a SEAL.

That's pretty cool. Thank you. But what about, like, you've been really open on your platform, not just through your guests, but with yourself, about, like, your own experience with, we highlighted a little bit of this earlier, but, taking it home with you, being in war zones and high-octane situations for 15 years pretty much and then shutting it down in 2015 and coming home and being a civilian and still having – I don't know, maybe some of the things that you had to do every day now hitting you because you get to think about it for the first time like did you how bad did the experiences with with ptsd get for you they got pretty bad i mean you know when you come home it's it's it's it's not just all the traumatic events that you've experienced and all the things that you had to do and all the things that you had to see and and shit that maybe you could have done something about that you didn't and it's also i mean you're you're stripped of your identity you know that you've put so much into that so much blood sweat and tears i mean just to just to get to the point where you have the opportunity

to go into combat as a as a spec operator i mean that alone is you know a grueling process. And then to experience it, and to experience loss, and you come home and you don't feel appreciated at all. And all you hear are everybody's opinions on why we shouldn't be there. And you see people like Gallagher and these Blackwater guys get fucking railroaded. And it's, man, it just, it can build a lot of resentment. A lot of resentment a lot of resentment and so you're dealing with all of this you know what i mean i mean man you can't even get medical care when you get home because the va is a disaster and nobody gives a you don't ever hear anybody talking about that do you not enough all you hear about is oh oh, we got to do something for these people because they can't get their shit together.

You know, we got to make it easier. We got to drop standards. We got to fucking, you know, and it's like, what the fuck, man? What about the people that actually give a shit about this fucking country? What about them? Nobody cares. VA is still a disaster. it always will be a fucking disaster nobody gives a shit except other veterans and we have to lift ourselves up because nobody else will

do it for us you know and and support each other and and we're good at that you know in a lot of ways but it's tough man to experience to have all these different feelings and experiences happen and happening to you and and and and then feeling all that shit on top of it and and having to reinvent yourself i mean what do you do what do you do as a fucking washed up navy seal cia guy what do you do i don't know yeah exactly the skills don't fucking translate you gotta start a business but i mean you know how hard that shit is nobody's gonna tell you how to do it nobody i mean not that and none of these guys expect them to but some people just don't

have it in them you know and and but these skills they don't translate so you have to start over you you go from the apex of war fighting but what you go from what people dream about being i mean fantasizing about it when you're little playing gi joes and watching the fucking vietnam movies and watching shit like Black Hawk Down and Lone Survival and all these all these things right nowadays that what else are they watching Benghazi all that kind of stuff you know and then you come home and it's just all stripped away from you and it's time to start over where do you start what do you do go back to school with a bunch of 18 year old dipshits you know it doesn't you don't fit in anywhere i think you know from the outside it seems like there's just

there's nothing that can even slightly approach that adrenaline. That's one thing. But the other thing is the sense of purpose. What I'm hearing in that answer you're giving is like the purpose is gone. Because think of it this way. Let's say you had a goal day one. I'm going to go start business X. Make it worth $20 dollars in 10 years that sounds cool but at the end of the day it's like it's a business with some money mm-hmm right it's not you can't recreate the life and death importance right is that fair to say yeah and the stuff that you would think that it would

translate to doesn't you know police police FBI these organizations where you think that they would be like all right we have these guys who've been operating at the apex of warfare they don't want us because they think we're a bunch of loose cannons when really i mean we are like the premier experts at target identification and not shooting civilians and way better than anybody else out there i mean the precisions that it takes to do those type of operations i mean you don't just go in there and just fucking smoke everybody you're processing every single room you're reading every single room every step that everybody's making

every movement, all of it there's no room for error and then you come home and you think maybe I'll go work for the FBI or DEA you know and then you come home and you think maybe i'll go work for the fbi or the or um or dea or police department i'll be a swat guy they don't hire these guys because they're afraid of one if they're fucked up or something yeah one they're afraid of the psychological stuff which is ridiculous i mean we're just doing it we were just doing it right you know what i mean and then two egos

what do you mean egos for a guy like let's just take kyle morgan for example the knowledge that that guy has and the level that he was operating at would be beneficial to every police department in the fucking country and not just him all these guys that have been on my show me shipley eddie penny nickvery, all of them. They could, I mean, this active shooter stuff, if people would hire these guys, would be dropped dramatically. But they're not going to do it because they're going to come in

and tell these departments how fucked up they are. You know what I mean? How outdated their tactics are, how they need to change things, and that's not going to go good that's going to ruffle feathers and they don't want that you know and and man this is a big subject to tackle man but um as far as coming home you know but it's it's it's all of these things you know and and because you think it would just carry over, right?

Like they would love to have these guys because that's what I thought. They don't. And then it fucks with you because they don't want you and you don't know. It's like, why, why? Like I could bring so much to the table here, you know, and then, bam, there you go. Loss of purpose. Then you have nothing but time on your hands to drink, drug, and relive all the shit that you've been dealing with. And it turns into this fucked up cycle that kills a lot of us.

I mean, I've had more friends kill themselves than i have um died in combat by a long shot you're not the first person i've heard that from i've heard that from a lot of veterans that that blows my fucking mind you know there's a there's a there's a real crisis going on in the veteran community and it's been going on for a long time and you never fucking hear about it ever you said something really interesting in there a few minutes ago though when you were talking about the how you're mentioning like the fbi police department stuff they think these they think these guys are loose cannons or whatever and i'm paraphrasing what you said but it's like what do you mean they were just there they're translating right over you get them when they come back you translate it right over

and this is really telling to me because i i don't remember who said it someone really smart a long time ago said it but there's a quote i think about a lot where they say the hardest thing for a man to do is sit alone in a room with nothing but his thoughts and be okay and i from the outside it seems like that is probably a key trigger to the downward spiral that can happen when guys do lose their purpose and then don't have opportunity and aren't wanted whereas not to say like oh let's kick the can down the curb that's that's or down the road that's not what i mean but like if guys did kind

of have that in a good way like rotating door to come back to we're like oh you can go here you can go there yada yada yada and they could kind of stay with it they're not in a war zone now stakes are lower but like their expertise is used they feel that purpose they're they're it's almost like us i don't want to say the wrong words here but it's almost like a soft landing from the hardest ride whereas when you come back and then you're alone with your thoughts you're not wanted you don't have a purpose these everything creeps in it's like a crash landing from that ride that's how it seems to me at least i don't know if that's fair to say yeah i mean that's that's a good way

to put it you know but it's uh it's just it's it's it's uh it's there's just so many things going on all at once you know it's like your entire life got ripped out from under you nobody understands you nobody understands why you get pissed off all the time nobody understands why you're so passionate about what people are saying about what's going on over there because they don't fucking know because the media doesn't report what's actually going on and and then you listen to these uninformed opinions and you're dealing with all the trauma that that you've had to deal with and and all the shit that you've seen and friends are still fucking dying and then your buddies are killing themselves and and especially for these guys that are getting out now they know they know what back when i Back when I got out the first time, you know, out of the teams,

I didn't know any of this shit. I was just dealing with it. But now these guys know, like, they know suicide's a real threat. I mean, I could just go on and on and on about people that are some of the strongest men that I looked up to and that you'd never, ever in a million fucking years would think that they would do this. And time and time again, it's just gone, gone, gone, gone, another one gone, another one gone, another one gone.

And you know that could be you. Did you ever struggle with that at all personally? Yeah. With suicide? Yeah. Yeah, I tried to kill myself in my car. How long ago was that? Right after I left the agency.

I left the car running in the garage, leaned the seat back, and after a night of drinking, and somehow I didn't fucking die. because my entire house smelled like gasoline and went downstairs saw my gun on my couch so I was probably gonna shoot myself there then went out to the garage the garage door was hot to the touch uh thought if I opened the door I gonna, I don't know why I thought this probably cause I was still fucking drunk, but, um, but, uh, thought if I opened the door, I might be blown to smithereens, uh, opening the door, got in there, saw my car was still running, saw the seat laid back. Um, remembered leaning the seat back. Turns out it got so hot in there, my gas tank melted, and the gas was leaking onto my muffler. And so I obviously shut the car off.

And, yeah, I didn't die. I'm glad you're here. That's wild wild though it's gonna be here but it doesn't you know it I do here and it's not just with veterans by the way it's with a lot of a lot of different people on this like especially when when you're feeling certain types of ways or whatever whatever it may be you know the drinking doesn't help with it and so that situation i mean you're saying right there you had a long night of drinking and then you don't really know why but yeah but every night so every night and every day is a long day and a long night of drinking back then that's how you cope it's a coping mechanism and there was a lot more than that

there was drugs there was benzos opiates cocaine booze whatever whatever i get my hands on to make me not think about things and that was the only time you tried it yeah that i active that i actually tried to kill myself. Yeah, that was the only time. Why do you think... What do you think saved you? God. Was that something you had believed in growing up or something you found

uh that's something i found but are you talking about that night what no in in general that time period um because i mean i should be dead you know you don't you don't live you don't live through that um so that's the only explanation i've been able to come up with it's an it's it's an amazing thing that you know you can't explain sometimes but i do feel like maybe the universe intervenes in some things. You're not supposed to make it through something. I'm sure you probably had moments like that, even in the military in certain spots,

but there's a reason for everything, and I see what you're doing now. Again, far from just your own story, but all these stories of all these guys you bring on and you give a light to and they really open up in there. Sometimes for six, seven hours on these episodes, you're doing a great thing for more than just veterans too. You're doing a great thing for people to get aware that they're not alone in how they think. They're not alone in how they think they're not alone in in their own struggles they're they're they're the strongest dudes in the world in some cases are

going through this and I I can imagine that you know we've had a few people in here before you also really open up on that and it made a huge difference for some people and I don't take lightly at all the messages i get and it wasn't coming from my mouth you know just like hey man that changed me or like that i've had messages where like that that really saved me like hearing that i know that sounds crazy but like that man spoke the exact words that that spoke to me and like spoke what i'm going through and I think the more you do things like this whether you're going on someone else's show or using your own platform to do it it's it's just it's an amazing thing so I I couldn't encourage that enough and and I I

really appreciate you opening up on that here because I I know that's that's a heavy thing. It's not really something, from the outside when I hear this stuff, it's not really something you can fully explain. It's just you get to a point, whatever it is, obviously for you, that particular situation was shortly after leaving. It sounds like, I think you said that, right?

Yeah. That's an extreme switch. Yeah. situation was shortly after leaving it sounds like I think you said that right yep you know that's an extreme switch yep you know I think uh you know the best the best advice I could give anybody getting out um who's who knows are going to struggle with this stuff is be open and really work on reinventing yourself mmm you got a you've got to just keep pushing forward and you would the other the one other thing I wanted to ask about is some another thing you've been really open about with this for your own Zen so to speak but you you did a you did a psychedelic experience what was it about a year ago something like that yeah it was a year ago what made you want to do that uh i was going

back i mean it's a constant struggle you know what i mean i mean that's the only time that i legitimately can say yeah i tried to kill myself um that doesn't mean i haven't thought about it several times you know and thought about how i would do it stuff like that and and you after being out for a while you you see the cycles and you can tell when you're starting to slip and fall back into that and it'll happen then just happened again a couple weeks ago i mean it and it'll happen again you know what i mean i'll start to see the signs my wife will start to pick up the signs and and uh it's just a it's just an ongoing struggle you know and um so that's that's what led me to it. And what did you do specifically?

Which, I forget, were you, did you do psilocybin? I did Ibogaine and then 5-MeO DMT. Okay. And what was that, like take me through that experience. Like what do you, you went down to Mexico or Costa Rica to do it? Yeah, I went down to mexico or costa rica to do it uh yeah i went down to mexico and did it and um it was i mean it just it uh was nothing like i expected and i thought you know i i thought it was kind of hokey you know i never i've done a lot of drugs i never did actually i never did any drugs until after i i left the teams um but

i'll just say this man it changed me you know changed me in a lot of ways it made me a lot more open to things It made me a lot more open to things. It made me a lot more tolerant to things. I quit drinking. It took a lot of my... I was forced to face a lot of the trauma. I haven't drank coffee. I haven't drank any alcohol.

I haven't had any opiates, hadn't had any benzos, haven't done any of that stuff. Was that the goal, to stop any substance? No, that was just a byproduct. I just wanted to be back in the moment. I just had, my son was just born, and my mind was elsewhere, and I didn't want it to be elsewhere.

I wanted to be at home with my son present in the moment. And it did that. The goal was accomplished. And that was a life changing experience. I've never heard. Have you ever done them? No. It's actually a big regret.

I wrote my term this Saturday in college when all my boys were doing it together. I wrote my term paper that day. And I actually do regret that. I would like to. But I will say that everyone I've spoken with who has done it, especially in a medical setting like that, which I think is the right way to do it, to be honest.

I've not had one person not tell me that it was the most profound experience they ever had. Yeah. I hope I said that right. Basically, they all said it was profound as hell. Yeah. yeah i hope i said that right basically they all said it was profound as hell yeah and it just it opened up like they all explain it like it opened up things that they weren't looking to open up like you say you weren't going down there like quit alcohol or something but you just did there's something to happen that you were just like you know what this isn't this isn't for me and that's a that's a positive it's an amazing positive thing i mean you hear the hippies say you know it unlocks your brain and i always

thought that was a like a figure of speech or something it literally unlocks your brain and um like scientifically legitimately unlocks your brain. And some of the stuff that this is doing for guys is with traumatic brain injury being blown up. Not all the pistons are firing up there. And you get these brain scans and you'll see like black spots where there's zero brain activity all of these all of those spots are lighting up again and and um and they're doing studies and it's being proven you know that it's it's it's bringing guys back to who they are it's something that I would like to,

and I hope a lot of people do, you know, I'm just one guy, but I'd like to use a platform to get awareness on that. And I know you're doing a great job with that. A lot of people got to do it because it is especially something that seems to have a significant impact on veterans in particularly. Yeah, it absolutely absolutely for their health care and to fight back against the epidemic of veteran suicide and things like that and when i hear that over and over again tells me why the fuck are we not normalizing this here the fact like it pisses me off that you got to go down to mexico to do that yeah i don't like that you know that should be something that is given to you yeah well i know they're working on some things you know and uh

hopefully some of them pass i know they got i think they have va trials happening um so that'll be good and uh yeah hopefully the hopefully big pharma doesn't fight back too hard because this shit actually works and everything that they've developed up to this point is not not working yeah i agree man well listen dude this was everything i hope to be and more you are you're a great guy you're exactly like you are off camera on camera which i love that when i meet people who are like that but i'm i'm a fan of what you're doing huge fan of what you're doing it sounds like you love it so i do something we're going to see for years to come i'm happy about that and where can everyone find your show who

hasn't yet seen it yet uh just google sean ryan show one of them will pop up and uh hopefully a good one but uh you too man i'm it's i can't wait to see what this develops into you guys you have got a hell of a thing going on here and i know it's going to grow it's already growing pretty damn fast and it's i i just i just want to say man i know what goes into this and um i respect you and thank you and i know you're going to be a big player on this. You already are. You just don't realize it. But you're going to get big.

You're doing phenomenal work here. I appreciate that a lot, especially coming from you. It's great to have peers in doing what I do, especially people with huge platforms. It just means more coming from you. So thank you very much and i hope to do this again at some point would love to have you back next year if you're down i'm always down all right cool well everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get

back to me peace