Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #360 - My Brother In Farms, Eric Vaughn

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

Eric Vaugh is a born and raised Texan, husband, father, and manager at our farm, Gardeners of Eden. He served in the GWOT as a helicopter mechanic and EOD specialist for the Navy being deployed to Afghanistan twice.  He shares what I’m sure is an abridged version of his life story from growing up in TX to deployments, divorce, marrying his whole mate, and coming home to TX and eventually winding up across from Kyle to reluctantly record this. Thank you brother for sharing and intertwining our lives.  Trimester One with Fit For Service was the best program I’ve personally put together so far. We had 40 folks come with honesty and commitment. We went through cleanses, workout overhauls, working-in practices, optimized our diets and sleep. Then topped it all off with a gathering at the feet of Montana Mountains. Come join me to get on track to the best shape of your life and kick it out in Sedona this fall for Trimester 2.   Connect with Eric: Website: Gardenersofeden.earth  Instagram: @ethefree    Show Notes: Shaun Ryan Show #100 - Tim Kennedy Spotify Apple    Sponsors: True Nutrition Take the guesswork out of nutrition with @True Nutrition and get 15% off with code KKP at Truenutrition.com/KKP! #truenutritionpod Bioptimizers To get the ’Magnesium Breakthrough‘ deal exclusively for fans of the podcast, click the link below and use code word “KINGSBU10” for an additional 10% off. magbreakthrough.com/kingsbu  Lucy Go to lucy.co and use codeword “KKP” at Checkout to get 20% off the best nicotine gum in the game, or check out their lozenge. Fat of the Land Go to www.eatfatoftheland.com to buy some delicious seed oil free chips and use code “KKP” for 10% off at checkout.   To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Twitter: @KINGSBU  Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

Welcome back everybody. Today's guest is my dear friend and brother, Eric Vaughn. Eric's been on this podcast once before we did the farm boys podcast and everybody got to meet him. And so I wanted to, I wanted to take the time to really go through the background and something that I've really, you know, the deep dive on Eric alone. And I'm going to do this with, with each of the farm boys because they've lived some really fucking cool and interesting lives. Eric was an EOD in the Navy and we met in some pretty incredible circumstances that kind of thrusted us together in life, which I really love. You know, like he mentions on the podcast that there, I don't believe in chance. And that's something that has been repeatedly

shown through my life, through synchronicity in various ways. And just thinking about my relationship and friendship with him, which is, we're as close as anybody, you know, just fucking awesome. Love our families, love what we've built together and love what we continue to build together at the farm. I think you guys are going to enjoy this one. There will be a volume two of this, even though this is one of the longest, probably the longest podcast I've done all year. I was inspired by Sean Ryan's podcast. And anytime he has a military veteran on,

I didn't serve in the military, but anytime he has a military veteran on, he does the life story. And those are some of my favorite fucking interviews. Particularly, you know, particularly Tim Kennedy. I learned so much in that podcast that was just under five hours about Tim who I've known for years,

but also haven't, it's not like when you're hanging out with somebody, they just fucking divulge the full story of their life experience. And so I'll link to that in the show notes because that was an excellent one. Sean Ryan has quickly become one of my favorite people to listen to.

And even though we could have done like a five-hour episode, it still felt unnatural for me to do something that long. So there will be a volume two. And in particular, you know, I could have really teased out so much more from Eric, especially once we reached the two-hour mark in terms of his process and path and what's really moved the bar for him in particular. Trust me, there's a ton of cool shit learning about him and everything that he's been through. But in addition to that, there's more. And so I want to really pull that out of him in terms of his plant medicine experiences and breath work and just a number of different things that have really helped him. So

love Eric, love his family. His family's my family. Just good fucking people. Love this podcast. It's a good one. It's a long one, but a good one. And that's it. Support this show, share it with a friend. Word of mouth is always a good thing, but just throwing somebody a link is even better. And support this podcast by supporting our sponsors. They make this show fiscally possible. I couldn't do it without them. And we have a brand new one today. It is truenutrition.com. If you're buying protein powder or other supplements, you should be concerned about the ingredients. It's no secret that the supplement industry is not heavily regulated and many products on the market have fillers and even harmful chemicals in them. That's why I'm excited to talk about today's sponsor,

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order is age verified. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Last but not least, we're about to be by the homies, Fat of the Land. I love it. This is a dad wanting to do good for his kids. I'm constantly looking for shit like this. So right when David sent me this, I was like, this is gold. This is a seed oil-free snack. And if you listen to my podcast with Paul Saladino, of course, he's not eating snacks, but he doesn't have kids either. I'm always looking for seed oil-free snacks. It tastes better than typical store-bought chips. They have an amazing crunch and a perfect level of saltiness that's made from the ingredients that you could find on a regenerative farm. Pasture-raised lard is the second highest source of vitamin D. Pasture-raised lard is the second

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Oysters, of course, being one of the most nutrient-dense foods on planet Earth. The kids will use guacamole since they're not into oysters yet, but just smash an avocado through with some salt in it. And then now they too have a really delicious high-fat snack that they can go with. Go to www.eatfatoftheland.com to buy some delicious seed oil-free chips and use code KKP for 10% off at checkout. That's www.eatfatoftheland.com and use code KKP for 10% off at checkout. That's www.eatfatoftheland.com and use code KKP for 10% off. Without further ado, my brother, Eric Vaughn. First time that I've had a shot of booze of anything

before a podcast ever. It's like trying to think of another time. Rogan offered me alcohol back in the day, but I told him I was good because I was on a microdose of acid, concert dose of acid. I think I had a hundred, a hundred micrograms and then hooked him up. Supposedly that was his first.

And so I was driving back to NorCal and he was like, this shit is awesome. He's like, I'm going to be able to perform. I'm like, dude, as long as it's a true micro, you're going to be golden. And he was like, this shit is awesome. So that was fun. But I like getting a little something to loosen up and warm up. We had some of granddad's scotch. Granddad went out to Scotland from, I guess we have some,

I don't know if we have relatives there, but we got some bloodlines that go back to Scotland and him and his two buddies went in on a barrel. And so, you know, however many barrels they got, got split up amongst the kids. My dad is the oldest. And so he got a portion and split that amongst me and Kendra, my sister. And I've been holding on.

We've got like two and a half barrels left, but it's, or two and a half bottles left rather, not barrels. Barrels would be a lot. It's special stuff because there ain't, there's no more. Yeah, you're not getting that from the store, huh? Uh-uh.

I think it's the first, yeah, that's the first alcohol I've had probably in four years or something. I don't know exactly. I may have it like a sip. No, when we were in Alex and Sarah's house and I had like a quarter glass of wine after I broke my neck.

That's right. Yeah. The dry farm. That was the last time. So whenever that was. That's funny because Jade had funny videos of me being, I was loose for sure.

I wasn't hammered drunk, but I was definitely loose. That was fun. It shows me how loose I was with those videos. Anyhow, General Arc, tell me about life growing up. So I was born, I'm a Texas boy. I was born in San Antonio.

My parents split up when I was three years old. And my dad moved out to California. My mom stayed in Texas. And then I can't remember. I have terrible memory of super young age. I don't know why my sister remembers everything. My sister, Katie. And second grade, we moved to Austin. My dad had made his way to Austin working for Southwest Airlines, working in operations. And so we were doing the every other weekend thing, meeting at like McDonald's parking lot. And I would go with my dad for the weekend and then come back during the summer.

I'd spend a little more time with them. But I'm sure it just wore on my mom, you know, traveling like that. She was working, single mom, working full-time job, had a slew of terrible boyfriends who I have vague memories of. You know, my sister tells stories about them. And so my mom had to get away from that. She's, my mom's super, super precious, super nice, but sometimes she can get walked on because of that. So anyway, make our way to Austin, change elementary schools in second grade. And it was interesting because over time, my mom and my dad remarried to my stepmom, met her out in California. They moved to Austin. She's a chiropractor, Cindy.

They became best friends, which at the time as a kid, it's like, you don't really like think about it. But if I have to think back about it now, it's, we were every day, like dinner. Maybe there's a day here and there where we didn't eat dinner at my dad and stepmom's house in South Austin but every weekend baseball games the whole nine it was like we were doing family I have one full sister and two brothers and a younger sister who are my half-brother sisters although we spend so much time together I don't consider consider them that. They're just my family. You know, I grew up with them. You got my youngest sister is, I'm almost, I think 10 years older than her. So I grew up, you know, as a 19. Was the step-mom quite a bit younger than your mom? No, they're close. Okay. Yeah. Within like a year or something, all three of them, my dad too, they're all born within a year or two of each other.

Completely different people, completely different. Like I said, my mom's super precious, nice. And my stepmom, not to say she's not nice, she's a great woman, but she is like a, she is a fireball, you know, ton of energy, 100% of the time, always going, smart as a whip. And so whatever, you know of the time, always going, smart as a whip. And so whatever, you know, the opposites track thing, they became friends probably in part because of the family connection, obviously, but they hit it off. And anyway, back to what I was saying, I didn't think about this till a few years ago, but I always wondered if the neighbors thought something else was going on.

Sorry, mom. Sorry, Cindy, but I just have to say it. You know, nothing like that was going on to my knowledge. Sorry, dad. But it was great. It was an anomaly. I never heard anything like that. Usually it's some type of turmoil or custody battle. It took my parents fucking 15 years just to be cool.

Just to put up with each other. Maybe 10 to put up with each other, but like 15 to actually call each other friends and then just still piss each other off constantly. I'm sure that would happen if my mom was around my dad for too long he might get annoyed um i'll just say that but but there's they they still love each other i know they do but there's a reason people split up you know there's always some kind of underlying reason it can be like whatever time you're at in your life or just something that's that's uh what do

they call it irreconcilable differences right right? Like when you recognize it, like shit, we had kids together, but we're not going to get over this thing that happened or this thing, this difference in our personalities or what we've become now is too different. Yeah, it'd be interesting. You know, my family growing up was pretty quiet.

My grandma, grandpa, it was like the generation of don't say shit, don't cry, don't show emotion, don't dare ask me what's going on in my personal life. Meaning like my dad, I didn't really know much about him. He was my father figure. I love my dad so much. I love my mom so much, but definitely a lot of, I don't wanna say fake, but like when you ask somebody how they're doing and they always say they're okay. Good.

No matter what, I'm doing good. You know, I'm all right, you know, but never delving into all this, my day is shit. You know, I pissed at your dad today because of X, X, and X, you know? And so that kind of anger comes out and to me in different ways from your parents when that happens. Yeah. And so, so I switched schools a few times, not too much, which I was

grateful for, you know, moving to Austin. I, I switched elementary schools when I was in fifth grade. I started going to elementary school. It was my bad dad's house. This is all South Austin. So I'm South Austin boy, born and raised. I did not like school ever. I can't ever remember enjoying, there were certain teachers I enjoyed, but subjects I enjoyed was like, we had like a drawing class and then, you know, that was fun for me. Woodshop. Yeah, woodshop. And then I had, and actually my favorite class of all time was in eighth grade. I did a theater arts class.

And just so happens in our theater arts class was two of the biggest goofballs in our whole grade. And me, I've always been kind of an introvert, fly on the wall. I'll get in there and mix it up, have conversations, but I'm generally reactionary. I'm not proactive. So that was great. You know, we got to do improv and it really kind of got me out of my shell a little bit. I went to a private school my first year of high school and-

Was that for sports or academics or- It was, my sister had went there. It was a Catholic private school out in Barton Creek by Barton Creek Country Club. Small school at the time. I think they've grown quite a bit since then, like all schools do around Austin. But I just, again, I didn't fit in there. I played sports.

I played baseball. I played football. I played basketball for a little bit. And then I got in trouble on a trip on our freshman year. We took a trip with the baseball team and snuck some whiskey. It comes full circle, baby. Yeah. To our baseball game out of town. I think it was in like Waco or something up North. My buddy, who's got, I think is, gosh, I swear this guy's name is Joe Zingaro. Sorry to call you out if you're listening. I don't think you will be, but he was like the cool kid. You know, everybody

wanted to be with Joe Zingaro. His parents had a lot of money and he was like, all right, I'm going to switch in with this guy's anyway. So he ends up breaking this bottle in the baseball bag. To make things worse, our coaches, at least one of our coaches was drinking with us. You know, it's like, we think they're so old. When we're freshmen, it's like, he thinks, I don't, I never thought about how old my coach was, but he's probably like 22, 23.

You know, I'm sitting there thinking he's like 35, 40, or like could be my dad or something, you know? And some kid got scared and ratted on us. And so I got suspended from school. The story I was told, and I don't remember, I think they asked my parents for them to not have me come back to school. Either that or my parents saw the writing on the wall and go, hey, you don't, this doesn't fit.

You know, this Catholic school thing does not fit. And it didn't fit. Funny, because my favorite class there was my theology class, because I just had a really cool teacher. It wasn't necessarily the content of the subject, just my teacher. Was that world religion or was it basically like, you know, here's when they were polytheistic in society and animistic,

and then here's where it became monotheistic and just kind of like the history of how we got to Christianity? No, there was some of that for sure, but it was definitely like Catholic theology. History, a lot of Bible reading, a lot of meaning of the Bible, a lot of which I don't remember. The only book I can remember we read was called The Chosen,

which I think was about, I wanna say a Jewish boy. I don't remember the whole story, but anyway, so I ended up going to public school, Bowie High School in South Austin. And that's really where my disdain for school kind of kicked in. It's a big, huge school. I don't know what the numbering systems in different states are, but this is a 5A. So it's like big super school, few thousand kids type of thing, huge baseball team, huge football team. Tried out for my sophomore, or as a

sophomore, tried out for the baseball team and didn't make it. I got cut from the team. Coach called me in there and said, hey, you're not, you don't quite cut. And I wasn't, I was never like really that good at baseball. I was a lanky, skinny bag of bones, you know, I could run and I could get a bat on a ball. But, you know, in high school, these kids really start to progress and become men, you know, and I was not that whatsoever all through high school. And so I always thought of like the Michael Jordan story, you know, there's the famous story of him getting cut from his sophomore team. And I really like was super hard on myself because I felt at the time that I didn't have support from my family. It was kind of like, you're the kid that

has all the potential in the world, but you just don't put any effort in. Which may have been true, but that's probably the worst thing to tell a kid that's 15, 16 years old, who doesn't quite know who he is without a lot of confidence that gets made fun of because I have super skinny legs, as you know. So I was called chicken legs growing up my whole life. So my confidence was just in the gutter.

And so that really kind of like, that really set off like a disdain in my mouth for school. You know, I was just like, what is the bare minimum I can do so I don't have to be at school so I can graduate? I have no idea what I'm going to do, but I just want to get through this and get out of here so my parents aren't mad at me. So anyway, I go through high school and I'm getting closer to graduation as a senior. And I turned 18 early on in August birthday. And so year starts, I turn a senior, which is funny because like my sister always made fun of me saying that like I, like I said, I don't have a great memory of super young. She always claims I was like held back in first grade or something,

but I think she's just fucking with me. 25 year old senior. Right. Yeah. And cause there was, there was a couple of kids in our high school that were like 20, you know? And, and it's funny cause it's like, why was the 20 year old kid in high school, like a cool kid looking back on it? It's like, what? Um, anyway, so, uh, my dad was working with this guy, Mr. Dixon, was his boss at Southwest Airlines, and his son, Clint, was going to join the Navy. And basically, my dad was one of those guys like, hey, if you can't go to college or get a job,

you can't go home, you got to get the fuck up out of here. You got to leave. And so I had no clue what I wanted to do. I did know that I didn't want to hang around and be like what some of my friends did just, and we still went to college, but just hung around Austin and went down the path of- Tripp McNeely. Remember Tripp McNeely? Jerry O'Connell. Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Got the letterman jacket on. You know, the college kid that's still going to hang

out at high school parties. Yeah, that's funny you say that. So I'll go back to that because they're funny. It's actually not quite funny, but it's interesting nonetheless. So this guy, Clint, he's my friend. I don't talk to him much anymore. I think he's actually in the police department with Austin. I think he's like a helicopter pilot or something. Cool. So he ends up, this guy was like recruited to colleges like D1 schools. I think he got injured or something anyway so he ends up this guy was like recruited to colleges like

d1 schools i think he got injured or something and so he's like i'm joining the navy and so like okay i'm joining the navy i'm gonna go get out of town it wasn't really ever i was probably too immature at the time it like 9-11 happened you know whatever you think about that I get my own thoughts on that. But 9-11. Well, I mean, in the moment, right? Because like you listen, we listened to Tim Kennedy on, on who, you know, good buddy y'all have met and trained together.

In the moments different than what we see in hindsight. Yeah. Right. Like I remember Andy Stumpf on Rogan's, you know, and he's with Tate Fletcher and Tate, you know, Tate's like, when did you realize when there was no yellow cake or whatever the fuck that you guys have been duped? And he's like, dude, when we're there, we have the best intel on planet Earth. We're in the best military on planet Earth. So like you framed it properly.

You can say whatever you want, you know, like in hindsight. But yeah, I was just blown. I'd never thought I'd go to the military just because of how poorly I did with aggressive instruction from football coaches to anything. It was just like, fuck you. And I had, you know, my house was that way where I had aggressive instruction. So I would just shut down. And so I didn't think I'd ever have an ability to do that. But I remember just being like a holy shit confused, walking through junior college halls, seeing every TV hauled out in the center aisle and just be like, what's happening right now? What's going to happen? Whereas like

Tim Kennedy was older, always knew he was going to be in the military or was it going to be a cop and then decided I'm going to enlist right now. It's like, how did that land for you too? Because you're about to go in, you'd already decided you're going to the Navy. Um, not, no, not quite this. So that was September, 2001, I graduated in 2002. So that was, there was an inkling of that. You know, I have to go back and ask my dad when I really started talking to recruiters and stuff like that. Cause I left in August, uh, for bootcamp bootcamp, August of 2002. Right, you know, summer, a little bit of summer action and boom, I was in bootcamp.

But really, it was jarring. It was really jarring like to, because of the way the media portrays things and as they're happening in the moment, most reporters, they don't know, they don't know anything that's going on. They're just, they know what they see, you know? And so I had, because of what you know, it's like you think some stuff's gonna be like the movies.

You know, you think, oh shit, Austin's a big city. Are they gonna come start dropping bombs? I knew nothing of the world. I didn't pay attention in school. I knew nothing of other, you know, terrorists, anything like that. Like I just had no clue. And so I just remember being glad to get out of school so I could go home and see my friends and family.

I wasn't in fear for them, but I just, you know, it just jarred me where I'm like, hey, I'm ready to go home, which we did. I think we didn't even go to school like the next day. I think they shut down most schools for another day. So shortly after that, like I said, I left for the Navy, had my summer of fun after graduating high school by the skin of my teeth. And it was more for me, it was like, just get out of here. Go, leave Austin. Don't fall into traps. Plus I was given only a few options.

So my buddy, he's like, I am doing this air crewman thing. I don't, the recruiters are, I know they're doing their best, but their job's to get you in the Navy, the Army, the Marine Corps, Coast Guard, whatever it is, Air Force. So if you have something you want to do,

they don't want to talk to you about anything else. It's like you go to a car salesman and you go, hey, I want this Nissan Altima you're selling. All right, here we go. Sometimes they'll try to sell you something different, but for me, it's like I had my buddy, we had the same recruiter. And anyway, so an air crewman flies in the back of several different aircraft, not jets.

Those are pilots and NFOs, I think they call them backseat guys like goose and top gun. So this is not that, this is an enlisted guy. You go to a school where you have a primary job, which could be some, it's something in aviation. And so I went to be a aircraft mechanic, which is- Was that because of your dad's work with Southwest? Or just interested you? You know, it's interesting you say that, like I was kind of following, but now that you say that,

it's like maybe something subconsciously. I just wasn't, I wasn't a leader at the time either. Like I would just like, this guy's doing that. That sounds cool. I'll go do that. You know,

plus I have a buddy that's doing the same thing. And if we're something hard, we have something in common. Yeah, you got each other. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, go to bootcamp. I think bootcamp is like nine weeks in the navy it is for me it was like it was it was shaping for me i just didn't

know it at the time um because i was still i considered myself later on in life like i was a boy at that time oh for sure i was 18 you not a man. I mean, there's some people that have it together, you know, but you usually see those 18 year olds are doing something great, you know? Anyway, bootcamp was shaping for me. I didn't like it at the time. I was so ready, just like everybody. Nobody's in there like loving bootcamp.

You're getting screamed at and having to fold your freaking chonies to a T or they get tossed across the barracks room. One thing that's interesting about bootcamp, you're getting screamed at and having to fold your freaking chonies to a tee, or they get tossed across the barracks room. One thing that's interesting about bootcamp though, is you there for whatever reason, I don't know why, my bootcamp, they call them divisions, and my bootcamp divisions, my bootcamp division, there's two of them. You have like yours and a sister one, you live in the same building, top and bottom um my particular division had some real hardcore people in it and i grew up guys or like some some want to be tough guys you know but because there's a difference between like tough guys on paper right actual badasses yeah so it's and there's a few older guys in there some people

join the navy later in life you know maybe they lose their job or maybe they're just like, I don't want to do this anymore. I want to go serve my country, especially at that time. Right after 9-11, people were signing up left and right. Anyway, there were some wannabe tough guys and some real tough guys, which was new for me because South Austin is like, there's, you know, I grew up like liking rap music and thinking I was cool. I love having new tennis shoes and wearing like my polo shirt and my hat and trying to be cool all the time. But there's nothing hardcore about my upbringing, you know?

So to see that in real life, I was like, oh, okay. It was funny though, because there was like this one kid, two guys from New York City. I think his name was Tori or Tony or something. He was a short half Puerto Rican, half African-American guy. And this other guy, I don't remember his name, but he would always just run his mouth.

And they had these like concrete, like you see in a parking garage, you know, the concrete pillars that go up vertically. And I remember he's like being real quiet, the one guy, this guy's just being real quiet, the one guy. And this guy's just running his mouth, running his mouth. And the next thing you know, I see like a bed sheet or a pillowcase or something just go around this guy's neck. And he just traps him against the pillar.

I'm like, oh, that guy's the real gangster. And then later on, he showed me pictures of like him and his brothers in New York City. I think he's from from the Bronx or something. I'm like, oh, okay. I see what happened there. Anyway, got out of boot camp, and then you go to your rating school in the Navy. It's called a rate. Aircraft mechanics work on engines.

Is this where they grade you and tell you where you're going to go? No. It's a school just to learn the basics of working. Okay, so it has nothing to do with like getting a rating. It's just like- No, no, no. Rating is just what they called it in the Navy. Like in the Army calls it MOS.

The Navy calls it a rate. Okay. So it's not pay grade. It's none of that. It's like your rate is AD, which is aircraft machinist mate in the Navy. So I go to that school and then I go to Air Crewman School. Like I say, you just learn the basics of how to work on helicopters in your particular section. So engines and a few other things, but basically engines.

And then you go to Air Crewman School, which is where you learn how to fly in the back of various types of helicopters. And then you have the choice to go to what they call rescue swimmer school, which I didn't know what it was at the time. It just like, this is supposed to be like one harder thing to do. So I chose to do that. My buddy stayed doing the regular air crewman thing. So I go through that school, which was for me at the time, pretty difficult because I was just not, I was like 150 pounds soaking wet, still 6'2 like I am now. And so I swam because I was a pencil through the water. So with flippers on, I could swim pretty quick. But anyway, I think that was like a six week school. You learn how to, you know, enter the water. You learn how to hook people up to a helicopter where they reel them in.

You know, like you see on it, I keep referencing Top Gun. Kevin Costner and, uh, Josh Hartnett. Yeah. The Coast Guard one, right? Yeah. Yeah. So the Coast Guard one is, is to my understanding a little more robust, um, because it is like your secondary job in the Coast Guard. Like that's

your full-time gig. You know, our deal was like when you do the rescue swimmer thing, which basically means that you fly in the back of a helicopter, you do these little checks in the back of certain systems because they're old freaking riggedy Navy helicopters. And then you learn how to operate the little cable that can pick up cargo or people out of the water and that sort of thing. And then you have the capability to jump in the water. So you learn how to operate the little cable that can pick up cargo or people out of the water and that sort of thing and then you have the capability to jump in the water so you learn how to do that in pensacola florida and then you go to your squadron and our squadron at the time was in norfolk and uh it was the old the best way to describe it is like the if you see the helicopter the president flies in,

you know, like the green Marine one or whatever, it's the same. It's not the same helicopter because it's not nearly as freaking nice, but it's the same series of helicopter. It's an older one. I think it was like, you know, from the mid fifties or something like that. So then you learn a little bit about that aircraft

and then you go on and you do your business. When you're not flying in the helicopter, you're working on your rating, whatever it is. You're working on the airframe, you're working on the blades of the helicopter, you're working on the engine, that sort of thing. Electronics is in there too. And then shortly after I got to my squadron, I go on my first deployment to Italy in Naples, Italy, which was like a vacation, the best vacation because it's Italy. And I'm like right by the Amalfi Coast and this famous island Capri and this island with like hot springs and going to Mount Vesuvius where, you know, the bottom of Mount Vesuvius is Pompeii and you're like an hour and a half train ride from Rome. And I get to that deployment

and it's funny saying deployment now, but get to that deployment and our helicopter is broken like the entire time. Not only that, I get there in Thanksgiving. So I get there, we have a week off. Shortly after we have two weeks off for Christmas time. You're not going home, you're still staying there because that's what you're doing. But almost that whole deployment for six months, I was on like literal vacation. We flew around every once in a while, but

it was few and far between because our helicopter was just broken. And our helicopter was for the Admiraliral of the sixth fleet. A fleet of ships is like all your difference from submarine destroyer to aircraft carriers and anything and everything in between. And our admiral did not like flying. I probably wouldn't want to fly in that thing anyways. No, yeah. So we tried and tried and tried to get that thing to work.

Anyway, so I go, um, go home from that, which was great for me as a young guy. Um, and then I went on another deployment to Italy in between those two deployments. Um, I got married. I don't know if you knew that about me. No. No. So as many a young Navy, Army, Marine Corps folk do, they make, sometimes, it's not always a mistake, but they generally make the mistake of marrying some girl at a very young age because they've spent their life in high school, not getting any. How old were you? I was, I was 22. Oh my God. 22 or 23 maybe. I can't imagine being married or being a dad at that age. Like I was just an absolute child. Oh my gosh. Me too. I found that out quick too, because, um, you come around and you're,

we were in the same squadron together. So she was a Navy chick. She was way more of a woman than I was a man, but by a lot, you know, we were right around the same age. I think I was like a year older than her, but end up making my way to Japan, still married.

And I go from flying in helicopters to working on jet engines. So we would test jet engines before they go into Super Hornets and whatever aircraft that they go into. So they hook up on the ground, you run them through the series of tests. So I did that in Japan on the Kitty Hawk, which I wasn't really on the ship that much, but I got to go, you know, to Singapore, Thailand, Australia, South Korea, multiple places in Australia. And so that was another fun time. Although I was in turmoil living in Japan most of the time, because I had, I had a wife that didn't, I just, she just didn't love me, you know? Which at the time as a boy, it's like, you're still mama's boy, a lot of people, you know?

So like, yeah, I didn't know it at the time, but you're like, hey, I'm looking for a mother figure and this other person doesn't need that. Yeah. So we separate, get divorced. I was in Japan, like I said, about a year. And then finally make my way over. I was at the point where it was like,

this was going on in my life and I wanted to do something different. So eventually I make my way to EOD school, which is Explosive Ordnance Disposal. It's a bomb technician. It's not what you think. It's not Hurt Locker. Jeremy Renner.

Jeremy Renner. Doing whatever the fuck he wants. Yeah, picking up a bunch of 155 Mike Mikes by the hand, connected to demolition cord. But it's a movie, so whatever. But I've had multiple people say, oh, I like the Hurt Locker. Well, that is he wasn't

eod that's the only similarity right because a lot of anybody who's been in the military and i from the jump it was like all getting all these awards and all this attention and then everyone that i knew that was in the service was like it's the fucking dumbest movie on earth no one had this guy did you know he was he was so off the wall he wouldn't kick that you'd have thrown out day one yeah you know it's a it's a problem It's a problem for military people too, to watch movies about, especially ones that have been in combat, to watch movies that are military related, because you just like pick them apart. I've learned to just enjoy them. But Leah, my beautiful wife, who I'm married to now for a long time, 15 years. And I love to death, but watching military movies with me is a chore for her

because she's just annoyed that I'm picking apart. We would appreciate, though, like if a military movie brings in, you know, former servicemen and women to actually get real information about what happened on the ground. Like the more realistic it is, the more you're like, fuck yeah, they did that excellent, right? So even if you can't help but grade the damn thing, there are some, right? Where you're like, they did a really fucking good job in the scene, you know, in a combat scene

or with this one thread, you know? Yeah, yeah, that's picked up over the years, the consultation with former military people, in particular with special operations guys on how they portray the military in particular with tactics. Um, because there are so many people in the military. So in certain things they, they can't show, you know, they can't give away everything because it could put people in danger. Um, anyway, so the whole EOD bomb technician process is about a year long, in particular for the Navy. The EOD school is a Navy-run school,

but it teaches EOD to all the forces other than the Coast Guard doesn't have an EOD force, but Army, Marines, Navy, and Air Force. And that portion is nine months long. Prior to that, you go to Chicago and you do, I think it was two weeks long. And basically they just try to like, see if you can tread water with scuba tanks on. They sort of try to get you to give up, but nothing crazy. Not like that whatsoever. Although it's in the same vein in terms of

trying to check out and see who can hang but not even holding a candle to something like that so you do that for two weeks then you go down to dive school in Panama City Beach which was a lot of fun

but at the time it's like that's where a lot of people drop out to because you're learning how to dive and you're learning how to dive in particular, sometimes in stressful environments in the real world. So they're trying to test that as well. They have this big dive pool and a lot of working out, pushups,, you know, the whole calisthenics thing, a lot of running and a lot of in-the-water stuff. A lot of times swims, but in particular, a lot of scuba diving. So they have this big, deep 20-foot, I think it's 20 feet deep pool. It's funny because it had a little window in the bottom

for people to watch you get fucked up. You basically swim around the bottom of the pool with your tanks on and they come from the top and they come and they do what simulating like a surf wave hits you. Oh, okay. So that's the whole point. Simulating something, you got hit by something,

you know, or turbulence or a current in the water, what have you. So they come and they rough you up. They pull your mask off. They pull your mask off. They pull your fins off. They tie your scuba gear in a knot. And then you sit there and stay calm. And you untie your knot.

You get your stuff back on. And you keep swimming in this circle. And so you do a series of tests like that. I think dive school is six weeks long. Then you go to EOD school, which is nine months long. And that school is primarily technical. The Navy side of it has its own rigmarole of physical tests in the mornings, but more so it's like school.

So you learn how to, you learn about all different kinds of ordinance. You learn how to, I don't like using the word disarm, but for lack of a better term and nomenclature, like learn how to disarm fuses, how to make an area safe. So no one gets hurt, including yourself. Um, all while at that time, you don't really learn about tactics all

that much. You just learn about the process of dealing with IEDs, which at the time, this is 2008, 2009 at the time. Um, so still a lot going on overseas. So a lot of focus in the IED realm. You wear the whole bomb suit thing. We call it dummy suit because you just turn into a marshmallow man dummy when you put that thing on. You learn how to drive. You're just waddling everywhere. You got this visor on that's like four inch thick glass or something. It's 70 pounds. It has a little fan in it that never works. Either never works or they just wouldn't turn it on or something. I don't know. So you learn how to do so. You learn how to drive a robot. You learn about all different kinds of

ordinance and types of warfare, including, and this is base level, base level. Other than the basic ordinance, like bombs dropped out of plane, IED stuff, this is the beginning of your learning journey. But it's, you learn about chemical, biological warfare, you learn about nuclear bombs on, like, those sections in particular are very basic. There's a lot more to the pie, and a lot of that information is not available to most people. So you learn the basics of that. But the main thing is there are a lot of ways to fail in that school. And the reason there's a lot of ways to fail

is because it's a life or death thing. You know, I don't mean to sound hyperbolic or anything like that, but a mistake can kill you. It's like, if you imagine a gun that has a stuck firing pin, and at any moment that firing pin could slam home, and there's a bullet in the chamber, and the gun is pointed at you. You know, the gun's not going to blow up, but let's just imagine a bullet. So there are fuses like that that can strike something that can make that entire bomb go off and kill you and everyone around you instantaneously. And so, so many of the rules and things you had to do,

including looking up publications, there'd be like safety stuff that would fail you a test by writing down the wrong thing, because even writing down the wrong thing could mean you do a procedure that gets someone hurt or killed. And I failed one of those tests and had to go back into another class, which was terrifying to me at the time because I did not want to go back to the regular Navy. Nothing against the regular Navy. It's just like I was terrified to be on a ship.

I didn't want to be on the ship. I didn't wanna be on the ship. I felt like this was like my last chance to do something useful, you know, and be a part of something small, but also to me still, and at the time, very important. So I go back to another class. I end up getting to like graduate that school with another class that's one behind that

is happens to be a Navy class, which for me was great because they do like a full Navy class that some people who fail tests get rolled into there in the Air Force and stuff. But they, every once in a while, they do a Navy class and Navy class. So like to end with a Navy class

was really great for me because I was, I mean, my head was, I partied a lot right outside of Destin, Florida because it's like, it's just a haven for Southern girls and in particular. And so I start to get towards the end of that school and my buddy Dylan Mudloff is married to Laura and she's pregnant at the time. And this smoking hot woman comes to Florida to visit her best friend

who she lived with in San Diego. So Leah, who's now my wife, like I said before, comes to visit Laura and doesn't want anything to do with me, really, in the beginning. She can tell you whatever she wants, but she didn't. She has a black leather jacket on, black pants, dark makeup, black sunglasses, Ray-Bans, and just was giving me the stink eye. And I'm wearing cowboy boots and a flannel shirt or something. So we end up all going out that night to hang out,

end up hitting it off. She leaves and she is the one trying to find me on MySpace. And at the time- MySpace, let's go. So like at the time, like I thought I was, you know, being cool by making all my MySpace stuff, like the public couldn't see it or whatever. So her and her sister-in-law Paige are trying, this is Leah telling me this, you know, years after, but trying to find me on

MySpace anyway, ends up coming back out for a longer period of time to see her friend again. And we just fall in love, like hard, man. It was, and for me and for her at the time, it was like, you know, it's, you know, it's the one and you, you know, Leah and love Leah. She's a, she's a ride or die. She's, she's a real deal ride or die woman. And I, I felt that about her. And anyway, we fall in love. She ends up after going through all my schools, I go to this little school in Mississippi, end up, I'm having to drive out to San Diego. So she hops in my truck with me, flies all the way to Mississippi. And I'm like, this is the one, dude.

And it was good. Like we had talked every day. We're talking multiple times a day when I'm not studying in the school. Luckily it was like towards the end of my school. So it gets a little more light. Yeah. In terms of- The heavy lifting. The heavy lifting is done yeah it's not smooth

sailing but it's like you're doing diving stuff that's just the fun stuff um anyway so she drives with me to mississippi um or drives with me from mississippi out to san die. And we ended up driving back. I ended up staying out. She was living at Long Beach. And she was at the point, like, it was, there was no ultimatum or anything like that. She never said anything to me, but in my mind, like, oh, I'm going to marry Leah. Like, there's no doubt. And in her mind, she's like, if this dude doesn't freaking get serious with me, I'm not going back with you. I got orders to Virginia, back to Norfolk and Virginia Beecher in the same general area, Hampton Roads area. So anyway, I go through and stop in Austin

and tell my family that I'm getting married to Leah and my sister about lost it, dude. She was like, what? I don't even know her. It's like, you were already married. You fuck that up. I can picture your sister just shitting on you. Oh my gosh, dude.

And so that was very awkward at the time to take Leah back. And we were partying at the time. My family was old enough to party. We were just having a good old time. Anyway, we end up going back to Virginia Beach and we fly back to California to get married in December, right before Christmas, December 19th, you know? And so all the guys in my unit I'm just showing up to are going, what are you doing? You just got

here. You're going to be out of town all the time. But I just knew, I knew like, hey, it doesn't matter what happens. Like Leah is going to be there 100% of the time, no matter what. And that is something to this day that like, man, you can't, nothing can buy that. You know that. Natasha's that too. It's really special when you find somebody like that. Anyway, so we start doing what they call workup. We get married, we come back, we're living together. I get in with my team. I get, EOD works with all other forces. So each force has their EOD guys,

but the Navy in particular has a different and more robust capability as any other EOD force because they dive, they can parachute, they're generally tactically sound, they use a lot of tactics. And so they end up working a lot for different special operations units. And, you know, Green Berets, Rangers, I think the Marines have their own like special ops Marine EOD guys. And that was kind of standing up at the time, but working for the Marines. So either you go on that sort of a team, you go on a dive team, or you go on a team that's like a whole group of EOD guys that would go out to a base overseas. Let's say like the army was on an operation and

they find an IED, they would call back and call in, hey, we found this IED. If they don't have an EOD guy with them or an engineer or something of that sort, it's like they're calling EOD guys, they're coming out to respond to it with a robot or maybe on foot. It just depends on the scenario. I got put onto a team that supported Navy special operations. And so when I got to Virginia Beach,

it was like we started working immediately. And typically at the time, like they were, the guys going on that team typically had some type of EOD experience. They weren't a brand new guy. I was older, you know, so I had been in the Navy for a while and I go there and meet them and they choose me to be on this team, but it was a pressure cooker. And I'm like sitting here thinking, hey, I'm here for work. I have no idea what's in front of me. I don't know what it means to go to war. I don't know what it means to be in danger, real danger. EOD school is not that. It's like there's the

ultimate safety there. And like I said, it's technical. Anyway, so we start our work up and what you do is you do your own EOD training with your eight to ten man team you're broken up into two man pairs and I got broken up with my buddy Matt Wheeler who had been on one deployment with the same the same SEAL team prior and so he had experience and so he was my team leader and I'm what's called a team member. So in the beginning, I'm basically just doing what I'm told. But because of the greater pace of what you were getting into and the fact that you're operating out

in the real world, essentially with your other guy who when you're on a mission, you're separated from and you got to make your own decisions. And they'll send you out as a pair. They send you out as a mission, you're separated from, and you got to make your own decisions. They don't send you out as a pair. They send you out as a pair with like, so they send you out as a pair with your platoon.

But when you go out on an operation in real world, you break up into smaller teams that go to different positions to stay tactically sound. And because the IED threat is so high overseas, you're not walking with, next to, sure you have a radio, you could talk, but you're going to be left on your own. So because of that, the training gets ramped up. And we go to this place in Virginia where they have all these kind of fake towns that they have set up with tunnels. And it's kind of like urban warfare, which at the time,

that's where the action was. Well, we found out we're going on a deployment to Afghanistan in particular, which is a whole kind of different set of rules. But our training was in buildings and in our two-man pairs. And you're trained by these older guys that have been on deployments that are taking a break. But they're most more often than not, they're not taking a break because they want to. They're taking a break because they need to. They've seen a lot of arduous things. And he's gone now.

Scotty Dayton died in 2016 in Syria, killed by an IED. And he was one of the first guys who sort of, it was the anomaly of someone like being really hard on you, but at the same time later on befriending you because he knew like what you were going to face. And, you know, I can't say he wasn't my best friend. I wasn't even super close to him. I didn't hang, I hung out with him sometimes, but like in the work environment, like I viewed him as a mentor. And that's kind of the way it is. They try to make everything

as real as possible. So you go through that and then you go work for whatever team you're going to work for and you do most of the portions of the training that they do to build up to go on deployment. Because when you go on deployment, you're not a SEAL by any means. You're a support person. You're what they called an enabler, which means you enable them to do their mission.

But as an EOD guy, because of the threat, you need to prove yourself. And so they go to all these different shooting courses and land warfare and urban training, training inside of a house, all those sorts of shoot houses and stuff like that. And people on EOD teams, they drop left and right all the time, get kicked off because they have a safety violation or something. And I,

you can't blame those guys. It's like, they, they don't know you from Adam. A lot of these dudes, they know what they've been through. They know where they came from. And a lot of them already know each other. So like, who are you to come in there and just jump in the mix and think you're like, Oh, I'm the, I'm the bomb guy. So I just kept my mouth shut. You definitely do all the things that new people do on a team. You get run through the ringer quite a bit and participate in a lot of fuckery

that really builds you. It doesn't break you down. I'm sure there's instances where it gets out of hand, but I always viewed it as a camaraderie thing that banded the quote-unquote new guys together. Anyway, so we have a little bit of time off your deployment. It took us forever to leave for our first appointment, which was like the freaking worst thing.

So we find out we're going on thing. So we find out we're going on deployment and we find out we're jumping into the mix of what the army was conducting operations in Afghanistan, what they were doing. And while the army special operations unit, they were going on deployment for, I don't know if this was all the time, but in this instance, they were on deployment for like almost a year at a time. Well, the Navy typically does six months, comes home. And that comes from a higher operational tempo. So like when guys would go to Iraq, they were doing direct action missions,

meaning hitting targets every day, day in, day out, never stop. It's like, so to do that for a year, not gonna happen. So six months, you know know when you go home i'm sure guys did longer stuff but afghanistan is not everywhere not everywhere but in a lot of environments you're in a sort of longer range environment so the pace can be more drawn out slow and you have to build you know build your set of operations over time so we find out we're doing that we're going on,

I don't remember the exact amount of time. I think it was like 11 months and change. We ended up being gone, but it took us forever to leave home. We kept getting flights canceled. I think I said bye to Leah like four times. Damn. And when you do that, like you don't realize at the time, but dude, when you're, when you need, when you know what you're leaving to and what she's staying home to, you don't want to do that more than once, dude. She was ready for me to go. And I don't blame her. I was too, because I'm going overseas to be with people that I'm extremely close to. It's only guys. You're living together. You have no other responsibility except having responsibility over your team and working with them. Leah's back home. I can't talk to her all

the time. Every once in a while, I get to chat with her, but the spouses are the ones that bear the brunt of the stress and the not knowing if you're gonna come home. Anyway, so I end up leaving. We go on deployment and this is 2011. Go on deployment for 11 months and we were in Southern Afghanistan. So we were north of a city called Kandahar, which is a big city. And you probably know some of this already.

No, I don't. Doing the troop thing. I know the camp, we got to visit, we had two goodwill tours to Afghanistan. One was north near the Hindu Kush mountains and then the other one was south with Kabul and Kandahar. Okay, yeah, yeah. So we're sort of in between the two.

At the time, we were the furthest outpost from any major resupply base in the whole country. So I was told. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. But we were out there on our own, like many of other camps in Afghanistan that are out there on their own. And we had another platoon.

So we start, you're kind of trying, and it still sounds a little ridiculous to me, you're trying to, they call it village stability operations. So it's like, you're trying to, they call it village stability operations. So it's like, you're trying to talk to people that in general don't wanna talk to you. And so you're trying to build trust with them so you can find out who's coming in their village and hurting them.

But the challenge with that is, one, you're a white person, uh, and these guys, they, they don't even like people that are from a different part of Afghanistan. So like we have interpreters that are from wherever, because we can't have an interpreter that's from, uh, the same area. Cause they're going to find out who they are and they're going to go murder their family. So the guys are generally are from different areas and they turn their back on them, won't talk to interpreters

because they're from like the Northern part of Afghanistan or something. So difficulty, difficulty building that sort of thing. And they know that if a village elder seen talking to us or they find out that they gave us information where maybe some weapons are or something like that, that they're gonna get killed. It happened a lot.

You know, there are people in the villages who are dying, whole family slaughtered because even the thought of them talking to us. So you have guys sneaking through the night that are trying to, in my mind, trying to do the right thing or tired of getting bullied around. Sort of like, and maybe I'm wrong, from my purview, what I saw was a, and this may not even be the right term, but to put it in perspective is like people that are in the mafia, right? They're gonna provide you some sort of security,

but you better let them use your house, eat food, stay with you, run through your village, put IEDs all around your village, shoot from your rooftop at the troops coming in. Now, do I know if that would happen if we weren't there? You know, them getting, you know, people getting raped, in particular boys.

You know, do I know that that, I think that would have continued. So in my mind, I always viewed it as like, just people that were turd sandwiches, you know? I never really viewed it as this real patriotic thing. I always sort of viewed it as like, I'm watching the backs of my buddies because like, I, essentially my job is like, to carry this metal detector. So, which sounds so ridiculous. So you have your, I had this, you know, but I'm a gunsling, but my gunsling is like strapped to my chest and clipped in because

what's in my right hand is this metal detector that I'm sweeping across the ground, like an 80 year old man on the beach. That was the training they had you do in South Florida. Yeah. Go to the beach. How far can you walk? You had to rock with the metal detector. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It depends on the threat of how much you're using that thing. There were some areas where like,

I'm not putting my metal detector in my backpack because you learn from history. I'll just say it that way. You learn from other stuff that's happened to other people or things that have been found in the ground or tactics that have been used are remembered. And you use that to conduct your operations the way that you will. So sometimes you have your metal detector out. Sometimes you're walking across a giant valley, you're going a direction you've never been before, and you're not in an area that's, for instance, like they call it a choke point. So like this door right here is a choke point because the only way to exit this

room is there. So if you can imagine like a big ditch or something like that, then my metal detector's coming out and my feelers are going off and we're sending, the team is sending people around to hold security and you're sweeping the thing to make sure there's nothing in the ground. It's funny though, because the first, the first IED I ever found was with my vehicle. Does your vehicle have sensors

or was that making one go off? It has a sensor called your tire that drives over and it explodes so we would like like i said we lived at the time we lived in this big valley and so they have these things they call them wadis i don't it was basically a dry creek ditch well sometimes the dry creek ditch falls off because it's all sand and so the way the earth slips off is it creates a cliff and so so you can't drive through it. So you get into all these choke points. And usually at those, you're clearing with your metal detector.

And sometimes you have other people helping you do that. Well, we had some people helping us do that. And generally you would send your heavy vehicles across because of the terrain and the way we were set up. We had, um, we had some Hiluxes go across, which is like the overseas equivalent of like we have so like a razor you know two-person cedar thing that you drive has a gun mount on the top and you drive those around the valley it was pretty fun sometimes but we also had we also had dirt bikes that were pakistani made i think they were baby chinese made or they called pashwar or something so that somebody can tell me um but they were dog shit but my buddy matt wheel Wheeler, my team leader, he was a dirt bike rider. And so they camoed these things up and they would go do

reconnaissance on dirt bikes. And we'd ride in the side-by-sides and sometimes we would take the big, they're called MTA TVs, basically like a giant armored off-road machine that I never learned the capability of until I was on deployment. So mistakes being made, the forerunners go across, the side-by-sides crow across. It's all clear, right? Those guys didn't blow up. We cleared the area. We looked around. We drive our MTA TV across and boom, get blown up right on the back tire. And when that happens, like, I'm still sitting here. You know, I have all my limbs and thank God. And at the time I remember I had my helmet on and all your stuff is dusty. You know, you know what that dust is like. It doesn't come out of anything. You probably have a piece of clothing,

a sock or something that you would find 10 years from now and you freaking pick at the Elastigone and that freaking moon dust will go everywhere. Anyway, so there's moon dust going everywhere in the car and everything kind of settles. It settles in an instant. Things slow down for sure, but it's an explosion. It happens quick and it's over quick.

Boom, this explosion goes off. We get kind of blown up in the air. We don't know what's happening at the time. And my helmet goes and like flies into the windshield. And I remember being like, where the fuck is my helmet? And it's like blown into the windshield. I was okay. I was rattled, but I knew I wasn't like super injured. I looked down,, and blown into the windshield. I was okay. I was rattled. But I

knew I wasn't like super injured. I looked down, looked at everybody in the vehicle. Our interpreter got pretty, come to find out later on deployment, this guy had been blown up so many times that like he would be walking with us and his, it was like his brain would switch off. This dude would be walking and we'd be, and where you walk, it's like you walk where I walk with my metal detector, especially in a high threat environment. And if you don't, you're gonna get somebody killed or hurt.

And he would just start walking off the path and it was like when somebody gets stuck in a stair, you know, but come to find out, he'd been blown up a bunch of times or in Humvees and not vehicles like this one. So that little, I'm going to say it was a little explosion, but none of us were severely injured, you know, other than maybe concussion and stuff like that.

But this guy was rocked. He was completely out of it because of once you get one concussion or TBI, you know, as a fighter, it starts to, it can happen a lot easier, you know, it becomes more dangerous for you. So my buddy, Matt Wheeler gets out of the car. Everybody's like surprised, like, well, we couldn't have, you know, we just drove over there. How could this have happened? And my buddy gets out and what you do, you basically make, without saying anything revealing,

you basically approach the vehicle in a way that doesn't allow anyone else to get hurt. And in doing that, my buddy finds one of these little, it's called a toe popper mine, little Chinese Russian mines that like blow your foot off. And so they do that because the highest threat is

an IED. So why not use more of them? You can get the most amount of people hurt, best bang for your buck. They don't win many gunfights with you. Most of the gunfights you get in are little pop shots. Sometimes everything, something could be a little more serious, but it's like harassing gunfire. Well, if I can leave something in the ground and walk away and not even have to look at it and all I have to do is wait to hear for an explosion, well, that's more bang for my buck. I don't risk my life. Anyway, so he finds this little mine, clears it out,

and we end up having to get the vehicle towed to a base. As we're getting it towed to the base we're going to get resupply, the tow truck comes out. We start to go up the hill a little bit shortly after. And right there is another blown up like school bus or something, an Afghani school bus. So like there was no, other than the visual scenery, there was no real other indicator that was recorded

that there was a threat there. And the IED just happened to be buried and so many vehicles had been over it that only ours was heavy enough to set it off. So anyway, that's how I found my first IED. Not with my metal detector. And so that was a long deployment. Because of that, we got to go home for a couple weeks.

Some guys in the middle of it, but they forced us to go home. That's what the Army does when they have those long deployments. So Lee and I went to Santa Barbara and had a good time, stayed in a little Airbnb-type house and went on wine tours and had a good old time. But, man, it is hard to check back in at home. It was great to get home and have sex with my wife and have little roses on the ground

and do that sort of thing. But to be present was very, it was difficult. Yeah, it was difficult to be present. So I stayed home for two weeks and I'd never trade anything for that because it was a beautiful time. But mentally, that was tough to leave again too. too luckily we didn't have kids at the time so it was uh still tough but it was manageable so I go back on deployment and just prior to that we because of

the long deployment we our two-man teams did this thing where you could like swap where operations were conducted so we would have two guys come out to our base or maybe one, and one of us would go to where they were operating in. And so I went to a place a little closer to Kandahar that would operate out in this nasty little place called the Horn of Panjwe, which was like a freaking jungle in the desert. All these crazy grape fields,

big old trees, almond groves, the Kandahar River runs through it. They've got really good water close to the surface. They flood irrigate their fields. So in particular, that valley is like a lot of the crops and stuff in Afghanistan come out of there. But because of the money flowing through there and its proximity to Kandahar,

it can be a tough place to operate in. Because not every place, but a lot of those places right along the Highway 1 there were very jungle-like. So you had a lot of engagements that were a little bit closer, a lot more people hiding from you. And just in general, that was a place where I always had my metal detector out, 100% of the time. And I remember one story. We were on this, seemed like it was a long operation. It was all in one day,

but we got in a couple contacts. They call it contact or tick. They call it troops in contact which can mean a variety thing troops in contact could mean like someone's shooting someone's shooting from way far away against you um sometimes you may not even call that in if it's harassing fire but um so we get in contact that involves air support and we were already kind of smoked at the time. It was a hot day, long walk. I had my metal detector out all day.

We're finding stuff. We're finding weapons caches. We're finding IEDs. We're getting ambushed. I remember we went, we were, not all of us, there were probably too many of us on this rooftop, and they were calling in air support, and I remember going up to the rooftop to support and trying to get a lay of the land, because as an EOD guy, you kind of want to have a good bead on

where everybody is, because if something happens, like, you're the guy that's going to support them, so you need to know where fire teams are, you need to know who's getting shot at from where. You need to know, you know, basically what the threat is and how to respond to it if you need to. So anyway, we go up on this rooftop and it was actually, it sounds morbid to say, but it was actually very interesting and exciting to see somebody uh shooting at you get fired upon by air support that's really close to you i mean it's like a kid you know you see explosions like that and stuff go off and um you know people aren't there any longer like it it's a different kind of feeling but it's in that realm it's like when you're a little kid and you see like a huge ass firecracker go off, like it's exciting.

I can imagine too, like on a lesser scale, if someone's punching at me or tries to like, say it's in a street fight or something, right? Somebody's trying to take my head off. When the fight's over and I've won, there's like a certain level of like, oh, this guy was going to fucking take my head off. Right. So like, I only imagine how amplified that would be. These guys were trying to fucking kill

me and then air support comes through and then they're no longer there. You know, like how that would feel. Yeah. And so, I mean, fighting too, someone's, I don't know that feeling. I've been in only a couple of fights in my life, but I imagine the feeling is like, you're in there to kill somebody, you know? You have to have that mentality. But anyway, so everything kind of settles down and we start to go back home. And I remember this was one of those areas, like I said, you had your metal drought the whole time.

We ended up progressing forward through this great field. And it just was like, when the village is empty and quiet, that's when you're like, okay, it's time to leave. So we, right where all these guys are shooting at us from, like, hey, we got to bound forward and see if there's any threat left until we find a scenario where we got to leave. And so we ended up finally getting forward to this village and me and my buddy Brad

are clearing around and we go in this village and it's like, it's just like a freaking ghost town. No kids, just some dogs. And so we're like, okay, it's time to get the freak out of here. So we start leaving. We get in another, just a small contact on our way back as we're bounding. So you're bounding you. And it can happen in a variety of ways. One element is supporting you while this other element is moving to cover. And that element turns around and supports you. The other element-

It's kind of like ladder drill. What are you talking about? Yeah, yeah. They call it bounding. So you're bounding back. You're not bounding forward because you're essentially, your mission's over. You're going home back to the base that you drove out to support

and as we're going back i have my metal detector out and i remember you have like up front you have it's generally like an eod guy an interpreter and somebody on reconnaissance and a lot of times it's like a sniper. There's snipers always on like reconnaissance teams most of the time. That's pretty well known. But so I'm clearing and it's one of those areas like you step where I step.

And all the guys I've been training with for the last year and a half, they know that. And a lot of guys know that because they've seen people get blown up and killed. And so, but the partner forces that you work with, I don't wanna say unequivocally, but more often than not, they don't carry the same value

of your conscious life here on earth as we do. So because of that, some tactics may change, or maybe they're just not paying attention. Maybe they're an idiot. Who knows? So I'm clearing through this little hole in a wall. If you can imagine the chair right here and where I'm sitting, I go through and clear there. There's another little cutout in the wall like this. And the Afghani guy behind me, I didn't know it at the time because I'm still clearing, looking for ways to go. He had jumped through that wall.

And so my buddy, my buddy Juno goes behind him and he sees like a little battery poking out of the ground. So they, because batteries get drained, you know, so they come in when they know you're coming. And so maybe the civilian population doesn't get hurt. They plug in their little batteries and then they go and they attack you. You know, it's one of the tactics.

And so he sees this little battery on the ground and he's just like, oh shit, you know. Thank God nothing happened. But that was a time where I like, I really realized your, my mortality, you know, what mortality means. You know, I was like, had a lot of life left to live in front of me. It didn't necessarily scare me. You know, it just made me like, it was a good thing. It happened in the deployment when it did, because you tend to get complacent. You're going through this routine, you're have your metal detector out all the time. You're looking at evidence and you're doing certain things on missions and you just get into this, you know,

routine. The rhythm. Yeah. The rhythm. Yeah. And so it was really an eyeopening experience for me. The, the blessing is nobody got hurt because they had put the trigger device in a different area that no one was walking and was designed to hurt somebody in a different way. Um, and, uh, yeah, so that really switched me on for the rest of the deployment. Come home from that deployment. Um, I could keep talking. So many things are coming up in my mind right now. Uh, so I come home and, uh, luck, I get the luck of being able to be on the same team and work for the same SEAL team for a second deployment, which was huge for me. I'd built a ton of trust with those guys. And I even ended up, actually didn't end up deploying with the same platoon,

but doing my whole workup with the same exact guys and some new guys that I had done my previous deployment with. And it was a tough deployment for some people. So to be able to be back in the mix with those same guys, it was like, you have that thing to like hold on to, you know? You've built a lot together already. Yeah, you've built a ton, you know? And you've built oftentimes more than you've built with your own family, you know?

So it's like, you have the ultimate, ultimate trust. You may not all be best friends. A lot of people are, but you're just like, I know what that guy's gonna do, you know? I know that guy's got my back. I know he's gonna make good decisions when something bad happens. I kind of want to go back

because I got to talk about my boy. September 7th, 2011, my buddy, the whole reason I started talking about that area and I just got really long-winded was in that same area of operations, my buddy Brad, they were doing this, doing this series of operations where they were pushing through this area.

I don't remember the exact village they were, you know, pushing through this area. I don't remember the exact, you know, village they were in or whatever, but in that same general area, it's a nasty place. They're clearing along and one of their Afghanis jumps out a line from where my buddy's clearing, gets blown up, right? So my buddy, Adam Fleck, love him to death. Clearing, Afghani decides he's gonna jump across a ditch and this is through Adam's, I wasn't there to experience the story.

This is Adam telling me. According to Adam, jumps across his ditch and lands on IED and just gets blown to shreds. And so your job as a EOD guy is to, again, make the area safe and also find an area to get a medevac to land. And that can be tough to do in the, it's not a jungle environment by any means, but it's tight. It's a tighter environment, harder to land a helicopter sometimes.

So Brad, Adam starts going to get in this blast hole and help people out there. And then Brad starts to go look for a helicopter landing zone. And as he's doing that, he steps on IED. And the way it blew up and the way he tells it is it blew up like a foot and a half in front of his face. It blows up his glasses and hits him in the eyes. Doesn't lose all his limbs, but over time loses his eyesight very quickly over time. He's blinded and we're all on deployment at this time.

When you're in an eight man crew and Brad at the time was one of my closest friends who I trusted. He was our officer in charge, they call it. So he went to the Naval Academy, swam at the Naval Academy, became an EOD guy and was our officer. Just an amazing human. The reason I want to talk about him is he goes, and one year later, he's a swimmer at the Naval Academy. He goes one year later and goes to the Paralympics and we're all home at the time. So it's like, we can, it's a Paralympic, so maybe it's not NBC or whatever, but 2011, it's like, oh, you can stream stuff now, you know, that sort of thing. So everybody and their mom and our, you know, that knows him is logging online. And one year to the day, Brad wins a gold medal at London in the Paralympics,

which is so gratifying, dude. Like sure, Brad didn't get killed, but there's a piece of you that leaves, you know? And it's weird because sometimes when people get hurt, and I know this isn't always the case, but I have two friends that have got hurt like that. And both of them are like, oh, that's the guy. Like if anybody can come out of the other side of this, it would, I don't think anything's an accident, anything at all, good, bad, ugly. Everything in our known universe and unknown universe is, I don't know if it's completely predetermined, but there's a purpose to it all. And to see Brad do that, like was just so, like I said,

gratifying to know like, okay, Brad's okay. You know, none of us know what it's like to be blind. Um, but I remember both times, like, I don't know, how would you describe, I don't mean to start talking about plants now, but it's just part of this part of the story. How would you describe Sonanga? Who like, uh, it's funny cause I've never worked with battery acid but i imagine battery acid going into your eyes you know like it's the uh it's like a it's a spice you know it's a spice that stings and burns and and it doesn't let up like you feel like you reach peak and some people around us are like oh okay it's better now I'm always like, it ain't better now.

We got blue eyes. Yeah, you're supposed to blink and blink it in and it fucking hurts. And there's a point to it, but it's a hard medicine. You know, it's not a. Yeah. And so like, you know, Tabasco for your eyeballs, but way, way more, way deeper than that, obviously. It's just a joke, but we're out hunting with Monsel and doing a sacred hunting trip in, what was that, 2021? Yeah, it was snowpocalypse year.

Snowpocalypse year, yeah. So I know I'm skipping forward here a little bit, but it's relevant to what I was just saying. We go, we have some sonanga in that little cool cave area. Um, and I didn't know anything about Sonanga. I didn't know anything until the day, until Manso said what it is. And like, I don't, I'm just down. Like, I don't. Yeah. You basically got like 30 seconds. It's going to sting really bad. It's going to clear vision. It's going to clear third eye. It's done pre-hunts as a, as a way of like initiating and

opening up the senses so that you can, you have clearer vision with your shot. vision it's going to clear third eye it's done pre-hunts as a way of like initiating and opening up the senses so that you can you have clearer vision with your shot yeah so so this has happened multiple times of and i don't say multiple times because i've only had it a few times but i'm laying down um blinking my eyes and rolling around and wanting it to stop and having to concentrate on my breath and all these things. And it's still painful, but it was the most surreal feeling. I have no idea what it's like to be blind, lose my eyesight like Brad did and many others. But it was like I could feel some of the emotionality behind what it means to be a

blind person. And this is not mushrooms. This is not, you know, ayahuasca. This is, you're here on earth, you know, but you're, you're transported in a way to be able to, I just, it shot me up and I just sit right up. My eyes are still, look like I've been crying forever. And I could see through his eyes, like what his life was like and that it was okay. And every time I've had Sananga, just the other day I had some

and the same exact feeling came up. And, um, it's just very powerful to know one that we have these sorts of tools, but also that, um, there's hope for people to get injured. There's hope for people that, um, lose a limb. There's hope for families that, um, have lost loved ones. There's hope for everybody, not just people injured in war, but like to have those grounding courts to someone you're so close to was such a cool thing. And like I said, I know I jumped ahead, but man, that was just a very powerful thing. And the whole reason I started talking about that area of Afghanistan. So we get home and after about 11 months,

you get a couple of weeks off, which is really kind of a joke. Like it's, you know, plenty of people that have been in the service and to have, to be gone for a year. And we weren't in danger all the time. There's plenty of, there's thousands of people that have had a harder time than I have on deployment, getting shot at and risk of being blown up and that sort of thing. There's always somebody that's had a harder experience

than you, right? I mean, there's one guy that has the most, but anyway, point is that like coming home we went to like Delaware for like a night and they talked to you about sleep and how to sleep better and how to not get angry at your family and you're like dude is this real like some shitty hotel in

freaking Delaware where Joe Biden's from gosh Delaware shout out to Delaware if anybody's from. Gosh, Delaware. Shout out to Delaware if anybody's from there. I'm not talking about you individually, but the hotel they put us in, it was just a joke. It was like, what kind of support is this to people coming home?

They had us talk to like a psychiatrist that was, and she, I don't remember her name. She was a great lady. It just, I'm not ragging on the military but the support for veterans coming home um it needs work still to this day i don't i've been out of the navy now for shit 10 years damn i realize it's been 10've, I've been out for a long time. It could be totally different now. I remember being on,

being at one of the, one of the bases doing the Goodwill tour. And it was a really nice base. And, and it might've been a Kuwait or something like that. They had everything. They had like the brand new PlayStation, whatever that might've been PS3 or PS4.

They had the X boxes. They had big screen TVs. We could order food. So you could order and actually select the meal you want. It wasn't cafeteria style. And the lady kept making us I gained 13 pounds in three days. She kept making us fried

ice cream, fried Snickers bars, fried Twix. Every time I'd see her we took a photo with all the kitchen staff and said, anything I wanted you'd hook up. But I remember saying why is we took a photo with all the kitchen staff. And it's like anything I wanted you to hook up. But I remember saying like, why is this place so nice? And they go, Oh,

this is where we take the, you know, the people that have been in serious combat and they come here. And I was like, for what? And they're like, well, this is where they,

this is where they, you know, this is the cushion in between going back to the modern world. And they said they stay there for three days to two weeks. I was like, you think fucking three games of video, three days of video games and eating like for three days to two weeks. I was like, you think fucking three days of video games and eating like shit is prep to go home? That was just blown away.

I was like, it's nice. That's cool, but it just didn't, it seemed like far too little, far too little. Yeah, it's like, where is the, where is the, you know, NFL version of a, of a, you know, psychologist? You know, that's the level. And I'm sure some of those people are supporting the military.

I know that they are. But overall, that's where I think the level of care should be, should be. And there are, I'm sure doctors have the best of intentions, but I wanna say it's more like the frequency of support and the time, the length of support and the time to decompress. Maybe you give a month off, I don't know,

or a couple before you roll back into it. So luckily Leah's a badass and knows how to hold me. So we go right back into the mix and end up going, you know, we get orders to go back to Afghanistan again. And this time it was like six and a half, seven months or something like that. Well, in between the deployment and the next, so we're going through all the same things, you know, checking the same boxes, training. This time I'm doing it as like what they call a team leader.

So like me and my partner, I have one junior guy with me and then I'm the senior guy. And yeah, so we go through that. But in between that and 2013, about four months before going on my first appointment, we have our first daughter, Liberty. And, uh, yeah, we had made the choice to do that. I, I, you know, it was self-serving to want to go on another deployment for sure. But I just knew in my heart that if I didn't, I wouldn't ever live it down.

You know, something told me like, hey, you have to go back and do this. And I liked it. You know, I liked the camaraderie. I liked the working up. I liked freaking jumping out of airplanes and swimming in water. And even the training stuff you get to do is just like, dude, I enjoyed the shit out of that um and so lee and i came to agreement like you can go on this deployment and then we're you know i'm gonna get out of the military because for me i had already had it's not a regular job by any means um a lot of wonderful wonderful people serve the country and and work in helicopter squadrons um but i was kind of i was looking at that time in my life i was i wanted to do the next thing like what's the next level well

the next level and that sort of a job you're going to be gone even more from home you thought you were gone a lot now well you want to kick it up a notch. Okay, well, the being gone is kicked up a notch. And I just didn't, I didn't want that, dude. Leah's too awesome in having a daughter, obviously. So prior to Leah getting pregnant, we had already started our workup, but I'm going back on deployment. I go on that deployment back to Afghanistan and in a different area this time.

And I don't know how much time we got but keep rolling nobody's nobody's pulled me out all this yeah all right so i'll just spend a bit of time on that deployment because that was another good one um completely different um big valley still big mountains around um not as much in the middle of nowhere we had an asphalt road that led to another. So you're up north? Further north, yes. Still south, a little southeast, south of Kabul still. What did they call it? There was a base there they called Fob Rocket that we were somewhat close to.

I don't know the real name of it. They called it Fob Rocket because they would just shoot rockets at it all day long, Chinese rockets, um, you know, and, uh, anyway, so we were outside of that, but it was on, on a highway. Um, that was actually the, the one I'm talking about was later on in deployment, we had moved to a different area. Um, so we started on this base and then the village stability operations again, right? It's funny because we were like inside this compound that's in this bigger base. Well, eventually the base like kind of started to close down around us. And, you know, they had like, it was big enough

to where like helicopters were stationed there and they had like a real chow hall and then we just had our compound that was like no one can go into um type of thing um but anyway the base starts to close down around us because things are shrinking and i'm sure it happens you know even while stuff's kicked up a notch but um we end up taking over this as the base closes down we end up taking over this uh it's like a. We ended up taking over this, it was like a command center. So like we have like couches, big screen TV. So it's like these rooms, a big briefing table, you know, there's like kernels and shit in there, right?

Internet, there's admin people, you know, it's like an admin briefing building. And so we, at the time we were living in tents, the people we turned over with. And so we just commandeered that thing. And I live with my buddy, Ryan Carroll, in a room where we had a coffee bar. So we had this coffee bar that we drug in from one of the tents.

We had to chop it in half to get it through the door. That's how big this thing was. Drag it through the door. We steal these couches, set up big screen TVs. One of the guys was like, not just one, but a few of the guys were like big video game nerds. And I remember they like tied together all the Xboxes, I think by like LAN cables.

I was always dog shit at these games. I loved playing them when we weren't doing shit. But we'd sit on the couches and hang out while we weren't doing stuff. And so that base closed down around us, and we ended up moving north. There was activity during that deployment. It wasn't as prevalent, I would say, as my first deployment, and that may be just because of the time, but also the area.

There was all kinds, it felt like every day they were claiming a vehicle born IED, call it VBID or whatever, was like driving down the freeway to come blow our base up. You know how easy that is to say on comms so someone hears you. Not to say that that's not a real threat and it happened

happened quite a lot but um you know it was it was uh it was a different deployment i do remember we there's a couple uh there's a base we went to that um a couple eod guys have been either hurt or killed very close to. And so as a EOD guy, I know exactly where that happened. I know the whole story about it. Even if I don't know the guy, I have access to information about, not that it's like some, top secret information or something. It's just like, I can look to build my knowledge base of what's happening in the country. And so like, I remember being really, really angry at the place.

You know, it's like, oh, I want it in my mind. I'm like, I want to get revenge, which is a terrible way to operate, you know? It's like, you're it in my mind. I'm like, I want to get revenge, which is a terrible way to operate. It's like you're operating off of anger. It's like I tell my kids all the time, when you operate out of anger, it's like you can't make good decisions, which is so true.

So I ended up talking about that and then just going on about our business. We went, this place had been left over to Afghanis at the time. It was, things were gearing down. Things were getting turned over to Afghanis, but these guys were getting their butts handed to them on the daily. Very close to a town. They were getting in firefights every single day,

getting blown up, this and that. So we go, okay, let's go here. Let's support these guys. We go out there and we go out and we are like, hey, we got to send these guys out on their own. These Afghanis, we can support them. But if they in bed with us, we're just going to be a crutch for them just like when we left them, you know?

So we send them out in their own element. We go out in our own element to look at a different village and hold kind of security position for them. And they went kind of far away. Like they had their own supporting elements as well as their own main element. So they were basically doing their own mission, so to speak. They get in a firefight, not simultaneously, shortly thereafter, we're up on this little hilltop and we have elements spread all over. It's funny, the rules of engagement, because, you know, it's like,

you never want, you don't want to shoot somebody that's just some dude in a village. Like anybody that wants to do that, like you're either a psycho or you're not telling the truth, you know? So you understand that, but that being said, that can put a lot of lives in danger, you know? And so we're sitting there holding, we start getting in, it's not,

I wouldn't call it a firefight, troops in contact kind of thing. We start shooting back at this guy and this guy here, this guy there. And we see this tractor and this tractor's just rolling out of the village. We're all looking, can't see anything on him. So basically we're hamstrung.

Like, oh, this guy could just be a freaking farmer. He's getting the heck out of Dodge because, uh, you know, he doesn't want to get shot or be around this thing. Well, about 15, 20 minutes later, we start hearing these freaking low buzzing sounds over our heads, which is the sound of a dish,ka, which is, I think it's 51 caliber. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not a super big gun guy, but I think it's like 51, 51 cal or something like that. Is that just like a quarter inch bigger on the cock measurement? Yeah. Yeah. It's nothing. It's like, we're going to make it 51. Yeah. Or whatever it is. I think it's, I think it is actually a slightly bigger bullet, but we hear these things start going over our heads

and instantly, dude, everybody is just like, oh, that's the fucker on the tractor. He just drove up the mountain, set up his dishka because he needed a tractor to get it up the hill and now they're shooting at us. Yeah, it's a big ass gun. Yeah, so they drive this tractor up there. Yeah, it was one of the,

I think it might've been the only time. It was one of the only times where we actually ran. Like we were, they had us dead to rights. I still don't know what we could have done differently. I'm sure there's always something you can do differently, but anyway, we start, like I said before, we start bounding back to try to go back. We were close enough to our base to bound back to it. We start calling in air support and now guys are getting shot at from multiple directions. I remember running with my metal detector because this was another one of those places that you had your metal detector out. They were putting random IEDs,

like normally it makes sense where they put them, but this place they were putting them like out in the freaking middle of a field because they would see us walk and they were just at a loss. They're like, I'm just going to throw one out there. Maybe they'll walk over it, you know? So because I have my metal detector out and you seek cover. So when you seek cover, you seek cover typically in places where there could be an IED threat because they're behind cover, they're on a path, they're behind a wall, you know, something like that.

So I'm running with my metal detector and I remember having the thought in my mind, like, how slow am I running? What's the threat right now? And it kind of just made the choice, okay, if I get blown up here, I get blown up. If I get hit by a bullet that is a known thing, then I'm fucked too, right?

So I remember just picking up my metal detector. And at the time, like my buddy, Jake Rosigana, I haven't talked to him since I got out of the Navy, but I remember Jake, he just goes past me because I have a metal detector out. And that's when I kind of realized like, oh, okay, go this way or whatever. Anyway, we ended up calling in air support. I think we got air support from like a B-2 bomber or something. I think it was because I remember it taking them

forever to turn around. So we are back all in this safe area. Some of us are hiding behind like a hay bale or something, all the kind of shooting and stuff. We were like settled down, counting for everybody, making sure everybody's got all their stuff, realizing we just got shot off our target, which is embarrassing for that caliber of squad, you know, regardless of the situation, you know, if there's something I could have done about it or not but um we just all got to watch this giant bomber whatever it was come in and our team that had previously been they were in this old russian fighting position that had like bricks and stuff around it well they had

bounded from that location and the guys that were attacking us had came over to that location and started trying to catch up to us to shoot us because we were they had the high ground on us too so we're like running back downhill to safety which is like not a great position to be in you know your angle increases as you go up in your distance you can see as a as a fighter um as a gunfighter anyway um and so we get back and they just annihilated this fighting position, which is another one of those moments that was just like a little kid moment. You know?

I remember somebody even got a hold of the video, I think. These guys, they're basically, they get trained and they're SEALs and they get trained how to talk on the radio and stuff. And I shouldn't put it that way. They become experts in talking to aircraft and talking them on to fighting positions of enemies and letting them know where our troops are. So it's an entire job in the Air Force.

And the Air Force does it extremely well. They're called combat controllers. Well, the Navy has their version of it that is called a joint tactical air commander. And so the SEALs go to this and they're like radio cities. Guys got radios all over them, but they are like talking to every person,

me, the commander, the senior enlisted guy in charge, this fire team, that fire team, aircraft back to the home tactical operations command. So to say they learn how to talk on radios is I shouldn't have put it that way. These guys become badasses at painting a picture of the battlefield for aircraft in particular.

So anyway, my point is they got a hold of that video. It was fun to watch at the time because you're in one of those moments where it's like you just punched me in the face and my tail's also between my legs. Now my big brother, Mr. Aircraft's gonna come in and take care of you, which that's part of your toolbox as your team,

you have that support, which I thank God for. Anyway, so we come home from that deployment and a few months later, I'm out of the navy most guys take quite a bit of time to transition and get out of the navy but like I had liberty I had liberty and I came home she she was still basically an infant but she didn't know who I was you know know, when I looked in her eyes, I know she's my daughter, but there was something different about it, looking in her eyes and realizing that you've been gone all that time. And you start having all these crazy thoughts,

why did I do that? What did I do? Like I left my family. It's like, she's never going to know, you know, there's a million different things that we question about life and our choices. Um, but it was, it was great to be home on that one. Cause I knew the path in front of me, um, ended up, uh, getting out of the Navy a few months later. And like I said, people usually take a lot longer, but I'm like, I knew I already had a job lined up. I went to work leah's dad and brother and we ran this concrete company after i got out and um move out to california to palm springs area i say palm springs as most people don't know um where that is but it's where they have like coachella fest and it's that giant giant valley i don't know if you ever been to palm springs but i've been to Palm Springs, flown in once.

Oh, yeah. I think you told me that. Been to Indio and Blythe and a lot of the— Oh, yeah, yeah, Blythe, dude. Blythe is a shithole. Courtside's only one notch below Blythe, but Blythe is a dump, dude. So we live out in that valley for seven years, seven years in Chanes. See, I got on the Navy in 2014.

I moved here in 2022. So it was seven years and change because we moved here in April, end of April, 2022. It's like a year, yeah, a year after the time before that I had been out here visiting. So I had all, a lot of the questions that, that people have when they make the choice to leave, leave a job like that. You question yourself, like, what did you do? It's hard. And you, you know, this as a fighter, like it's hard to replicate some of your experience when you stop fighting,

when you stop being a part of that team because you feel like you do, it's not an arrogant thing, but you feel safe in your own shoes when you've done certain things, when you've had arduous moments, when you've been in fights and you've came out on the other side. There's a pride about you.

You know who's got your back and where you live. You know you have people you can call on. You have a squad with you. And that kind of goes away, especially if you move away from where you were operating out of. Like Virginia Beach, it moved on the other side of the country. And that was, I didn't know, I didn't, other than Leah, I didn't have a lot of real support.

Leah was my real support. And she would tell you that there were hard times where it was like, I don't know if I've ever said this out loud. There were times where I didn't know if I wanted to be alive. So I knew like, I'm never gonna replicate this. And the only thing,

I really believe the only thing that kept me alive was Leah and Liberty at the time. And you've talked publicly about this, brother. That is the lowest of the low feeling. No addiction. I don't know. I've never been addicted to heroin or anything like that, but it just felt like there's nothing,

there isn't a lower feeling on earth than feeling like you don't want to live anymore to the point where I feel like some people, when they do make that unfortunate decision, it's almost like, not that they're happy to do it, but like, and they're ending the suffering. And that's how I felt like, is I didn't even know what the suffering was sometimes, you know, I didn't know. I just knew I was angry. It was like, why the fuck am I doing this? I shouldn't have moved out here. I should have just stayed in the

Navy. You know, all the, all those sorts of thoughts go through your head. Luckily, like I said, I had Leah and Liberty. And it's hard to look into your daughter's eyes and continually have those thoughts. And basically it's like, okay, are you going to do something about it or are you going to kill yourself? And you're just, no, you're not going to. So, you know, shut up about it and, and take the

next step. Um, and things did, did get a lot better, but obviously, uh, I had, we had Presley, um, in 2015 and then in 2018, River was born in the summer. So at that point having three beautiful kids um going through after after pressy was born you know leah had her own bout of a rough time um which was tough and there were times in that too where i didn't um i thought it was my fault and then i thought like how are you gonna say it's your fault like you're gonna become a martyr while your wife's going through something tough? You know, she had a hard time with alcohol. It seems like it would be fairly common for women who have met the men in service, you know, the spouses. I think it is.

Yeah, it's definitely, like, especially on deployment. Like, women are going hard in the paint back home, you know. Drinking a lot of buffoonery takes place. But, you know, it's a little different when you're in the paint back home, you know, drinking a lot of buffoonery takes place. But, you know, it's a little different when you're in the child environment. Now, like I'm out of service, I'm home every day, but I still question to this day, like, did I make Leah miserable

because I was gone that long? You know, I moved her out to Virginia Beach. Now it's her turn to be gone and checked out. You know, I don't know. I've never, honey, if you're listening, I love you. Um, if I'm not supposed to talk about any of this, I'm sorry, but it's just part of my story. Um, and so Leah, man, Leah, Leah stopped that cold turkey. I mean, it was, she was, you know, hiding stuff in Evian bottles and that sort of thing, which many people do. Like, if I made that choice, I'd be doing the same thing.

And luckily, she's a champ, dude. She quit drinking cold turkey, went to the hospital. At the time, I was angry, you know. I was angry. Luckily, she had a friend, Nikki, that was just there by her side the whole time who had been through something similar, that was just there by her side the whole time. We'd been through something similar. Who was addicted to heroin and got her life back. They became great friends.

Really, that was kind of a defining... I've had a lot of defining moments, but that's changed. Honestly, I think it's changed Leah for the better. Not that she needed to change, but it's like upgrade. We have these little upgrades and it's funny, man. These upgrades, they're generally through something arduous. Yeah. Like something joyful.

If it's a real, I mean, that's what Maladoma Patrice Sommet says that in Of the Water and Spirit, one of my favorite books on initiation is like, in order for it to be an actual initiation or an actual rite of passage, death must be on the line. Right. And so like, even though we don't grow up in a society that cultivates that for us, we often find ourselves placing ourselves in a positions where like, it's fucking do or die, you know, like by staying in this, I'm dead. Or, you know, like,

and I think just touching that level of our own mortality allows for a greater transformation to take place. Yeah, yeah. It's just, there's like, what do you call it? I don't know if you've coined this or not, but what do you say, the cosmic giggle? Cosmic giggle, I love that, man. Yeah, cosmic giggle.

I didn't coin that, but yeah, it's something. Shervin's always talking love that, man. Yeah, cosmic giggle. I didn't coin that. But yeah, it's something. Sherveen's always talking about that. You know, which just, it's like, it's hard, as life is hard, to remember that. And then there's a certain point where it just fucking makes sense, or it doesn't make sense, and it makes you laugh. You know, and like that laughter is such a critical piece. The burst, breaking it up, you know? Oh, it's like you taking it, getting laughed at in str up, you know? Oh, it's like you taking it,

getting laughed at in stride, you know? If you don't take it in stride, people just want to make fun of you more. But if you're a good sport about it, you know, life goes on to the next thing. So yeah, we have Presley, like I said, 2015 River in the summer of 2018. And right about that time,

I start right in the beginning of that year, before River's born, I have the notion, like I start thinking about, I want to get out of California. Just after, you know, what Leah went through, and I just wanted to come back to where I came from. I wanted to be closer with some things happening in California with Leah's family that, not with everybody, but, you know, life is life, and things get hard,

and things change. And we had three little kids. No, we didn't have River yet, but we had Presley, uh, River on the way. And like, I need people I can harmonize with and be close to. And at the time we had, you know, I had just started a mild, uh, plant medicine journey on my own. Um, and really it was, you know, I started eating really well.

It got rid of all the shitty food. Like you just, it's amazing what changes in your brain and your physical body when you drop the shit and you start trying to upgrade your life, um, and make yourself important. You know, start to, you start to think outside the box. Like when you take care of yourself, one, you can start to take care of others, but two, you can, your, your brain goes outside of itself a little bit and starts seeing things in the world. Expanded vision. And so I start having these inklings of wanting to leave.

And gosh, when was this? When I met you in 2018, when was that event? I think it was October. Was it October? Yeah, October 2018. Tasha and I had just opened our marriage. Yes, that's right. We were fucking balls deep in a shit stew.

As low as our marriage has ever been. That was that critical point. But yeah, they'd known each other. Keep going. Yeah, so Leah and Natasha, they had lived together in this thing called Master's Commission, which is, some of you may already know this, but basically a part of a church group

that went on missions trips together and then lived in this little town, this little fishing town below Mammoth Mountain, which is a famous snowboarding mountain in California next to June Lake and just outside of Yosemite, Crowley Lake. And so I don't really really how long was Natasha there she didn't stay for too long I don't think yeah I don't I don't think she was there very long Leah had done it like multiple years you know I've been like to the

tsunami in Thailand and Mexico and they went to Hurricane Katrina and so Leah and Tosh kind of hit it off and were really close there and then loosely kept in touch over the years. And this was like when they were close, this is back to, I don't know the exact year, but this is early 2000s, 2005, 2006, something in that range. And then loosely keep in touch.

And I can't remember if I had found you online prior to this. I had already listened to your stuff a bunch before even going to that thing in, was it Santa Monica? I don't remember if Leah had already been sort of reconnecting with Tosh. She had, yeah, they were. They of reconnecting with Tosh. She had. Yeah, they were. They were reconnecting online.

That's why I went out. Because I was told ahead of time from Tosh that, hey, one of my friends' husbands is going to be there. You might meet him. I'm like, I don't know. This thing could be fucking huge or it could be small. It was before Fit for Service was ever started. It was like a one-off, you know, a one-off just as a tester. Yeah.

Yeah, so it was a good tester for me dude because like me like i said early on in the podcast like i i am a fly on the wall most of the time and talk even before today there's a reason i had a shot of whiskey a social lubricant because like i have a hard time talking about myself or even meeting people. Some of that comes from just me as a kid. Some of that comes from having trust issues, being around people that I trusted my life with. I was very careful, probably too careful about giving up a piece of myself to somebody else because I didn't know if I could trust them. So anyway, we end up going to this Lowe's Hotel thing

and I wait until the last day. It was a three days. It was like Friday, Saturday, Sunday or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wait until the last day, sort of towards the end of everything and to wait and go like approach you at the time you know i was just i was intimidated you know i was just intimidated by the whole the thing as a

whole you know it was like all these people getting up and talking in front of people they're talking about psychedelics and they're talking about their life's journey and all these uh great amazing things i think you guys have like duncan trussell was there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Duncan Trussell. What's his name? Chris Ryan. Chris Ryan. Yeah. Like I felt inferior at the time in life. So we ended up chatting and that's the first time I had met you. And Natasha, like after that, I think I like even sent you an email or something back in the day. I remember like looking over that email,

like, does this sound stupid? Like, I don't wanna sound stupid. This guy's gonna think I'm an idiot. Anyway, so I met Natasha too on the way out. Like I had met her before, but you were like, you were sitting at a table, talking to your crew or whatever. And I think it was actually Tasha was like,

hey, Kyle, this is Eric or whatever. And then I ended was actually Tasha was like, hey, Kyle, this is Eric or whatever. And then I ended up seeing Tasha on the way out of there. And we just sort of reconnect. We reconnected over since meeting you. I don't know how many times we've been back to Austin, but Leah and Tasha in particular, they really reconnected hard, um, from that, from that moment on. And, uh, dude, like I didn't know how I was going to get back to Texas.

And that's, that's an interesting story too. Um, but I knew, like, I didn't even know if we'd be friends. I didn't know if Natasha and Leo would continue on their relationship. But like every time we came back to Austin after that, we hung out with you guys more than we did our own families. You know, there's no knock against my family, but you had kids, we have kids, common interests, and just really enjoyed being around people that I felt like I could trust. It's one of those weird things. I'm sure you've had this sensation too, but like there's a knowing you have of somebody that you can trust, you know? And like, I'm talking about, like, I'm only looking for the ultimate trust, you know? Like I can tell you anything. I know

that if I call you and you're around your phone like you're gonna help me out if i'm struggling um it's different you know you find it's rare to find people like that it's more rare in austin post 2020 yes folks from la and new It's very true. Yeah. So, I end up, during one of these trips, I end up coming to visit my sister, surprise her for her birthday in April, end of April, 2021. Shout out Katie.

So they're going to this house they rented, you know, on Lake LBJ up in North Austin or Marble Falls. I think it's one in the same. And so I had told you guys I was coming to town. I think we were going to like watch a UFC fight that night. Yeah. Yeah. That was it.

And so I'm like, okay, I'm gonna go hang out with my sister, but I know they're not drinking at the time at all. And so I'm not gonna be around that at nighttime. I can go till maybe eight, nine o'clock and then I'm out. I'm not gonna be babysitting people that get too hammered because I'm the sober guy that doesn't drink. No, no. So in my mind, I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna come hang out with you. End up taking out, uh, we ended up taking out a pontoon

boat and, uh, uh, anchoring. So we anchor this pontoon boat, start jumping in the water. Everything's gravy. The wind starts to pick up. And, uh, so we pick up the anchor and we're like, oh, let's just go down this way. It's in the cove a little bit and, you know, be out of the wind, the cut from the wind, the way it was coming. And so we go, we drop an anchor. And as I drop the anchor, the anchor drops, you know, it's like taking a minute. So I'm like, oh, cool. This, you know, We're good right here. Nice and deep, right? And I have to ask my younger sister. But anyway, so I decided I'm going to do like a flying squirrel off the front of the boat or something like that. Grab your ankles and go head first into the water. So I do that. And I have to ask my younger sister. She was in the water at the time. And I don't really remember,

but I want to say she hollered something like, wait, no, or something like that. But maybe it was after the fact. So I end up diving head first and landing, boom, shallow water. I do like this slow-mo 180, come up to the surface. And at the time I'm like, you know, I think I'm like tough guy or something. I'm like, oh, good. You know, I just hurt my neck a little bit. I crawl back on the boat. Meanwhile, I'm like, you know, I think I'm like tough guy or something. I'm like, oh, good. You know, I just hurt my neck a little bit. I crawl back on the boat. Meanwhile, I'm like soup sandwich.

My vision's all out of whack. And I have this strange feeling that I've never had before. It was unlike anything else. And still at the time, I rode back in this pontoon boat. And then I just feel like my neck is going to explode. Like I feel like, you ever seen the movie Little Monsters? Yeah.

With Howie Mandel? Yeah, Fred Savage. Yeah, but remember the big fat monster guy in there? He had this like huge traps or whatever. I remember thinking about him. I felt like that dude. And so we get back and no offense to this person whatsoever. I don't even know their

name, but one of the guys was a firefighter and he's just having a good time, you know, he's doing his thing. And so he's trying to assess me, but I can tell that like, he's, you know, he needs to just have his good time and maybe not help people out right now. Cause he just told me to go lay down and him being, I don't know if he's a paramedic or a firefighter or both. And so I ended up going to lay down and I just had this feeling like something's not, this is not like a crick in my neck, like for sure something's wrong. I don't know what. So my sister ends up driving me to the hospital,

I think like in my little tiny rental car, just lay the seat back and get inside and start taking x-rays and find out. I haven't looked at it in so long, but I broke, I think C1, C2, and C3, which are right up here, right? Top three. Towards the top three. Right below occiput, yeah. Okay.

So luckily none of those moved. Well, in my T-spine, I think I broke three and four because they bracketed two and five when they fixed it. So I think it was three and four. And those were like out of alignment in a way that I ended up getting surgery. But the interesting part is, is I don't know how many people I know now.

I know now. I know Kyle knows a lot of people that have broke their neck. Dr. Dan Engel. One in particular. Yeah. Both of them dove in the exact same way as you. Yeah. Maybe not the frog splash squirrel guy, but like head first into a shallow water.

Yeah. So, and I think like Dr. Dan was supposed to be there at your house, right? Hanging out or something to watch the UFC fights, I think. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. I think we called, and I don't know if he was actually over there. I was so out of it and on painkillers and stuff at the time. But anyway, long story short, end up getting surgery and go back to California, start to recover. I don't know the rate of like people getting paralyzed from breaking their C1, but I do know the doctors coming into my room

were surprised that I was up and walking around because of the proximity to your brainstem that your C1 is. And it just made me really grateful and really kicked me off on like a journey of like, okay, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna, it's time to kick ass, you know, whatever. And that, what that meant at the time

was taking laps around my neighborhood at a snail's pace, walking with my neck straight up with headphones in, listening to, I listened to the first book I ever listened, I listened to after I got hurt was the Ugas. It was a long book and I had to rewind it so many times because I was just like trying to concentrate. Plus there's so much info in that book. It's like, that's a mouthful of book right there. It's a great, great read. Yeah. I remember the Ugas and really that just kind of started a journey of getting towards Austin. It was another arduous moment that kickstarted another journey.

And we go on the hunting trip in 2022. No, wait, that was 2021, wasn't it? Something, I don't know. I think it was before. I don't think my neck was hurt at the time we went hunting that was 2021, wasn't it? Something, I don't know. I think it was before. I don't think my neck was hurt at the time we went hunting. No, it wasn't. Yeah, so this would have been 2021 where we went hunting. Yeah, so we went hunting in February or something, I think it was. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, yeah, snow apocalypse. Right when the snow apocalypse started. Yep. Yeah, I remember sliding around the road in your truck driving home. Anyway, so hurt my neck, fast forward, I'm healed up. I'm doing a lot better. Uh, and, uh, we come to Texas to help start this farm we're sitting on right now. And at the time, in my mind, I was just coming to Texas to help out my friend. I had no thought of anything else.

I just like, a farm that's starting? Fuck yeah, dude. I want to get in there in the mix and help. And that sounds great. My family can be out there, you know, can hang out with you guys and a bunch of other people, planting trees and moving dirt and digging ponds and learning from Chad and that sort of thing. And so I think we stay out here for like a couple weeks,

leaving your house every morning. I think there were a lot of early mornings that time. Yeah, we were grinding. The old timer was with us too. Yeah. And so stay out here for two weeks. I'm sitting on a different skid steer than we have now, but a skid steer nonetheless,

basically one of those vehicles with a bucket on the front that has tracks on the side and you drive it with two joysticks. So I'm driving that thing. I don't think Leah was even out there. Leah calls me and says, hey, I talked, we were renting from our friends, Mitch and Nikki at the time. And Mitch and Nikki called me and said, hey, we got to move out of

our house. They need to sell their home. And we had, I sold my home in 2020 because I was scared to death of what was going on in California. It turns out that was a huge mistake because my home like doubled in value after I sold it. And I still get the freaking Zillow emails. Like your house is worth this. Your house just sold for that. I'm like, how do I turn this off? But anyway, I don't regret doing that because it really started the journey

of getting eventually to what led me here. Renting at the time, it was like our third rental house in the desert. And I was just like, I'm not moving into another house. I don't, I haven't had too many of these moments. I know you've had some of these moments yourself, but it was just like this, like God hit me in the face with like a, I had never felt so sure of myself. I did not care what it meant. Like I was moving back to Texas right now. I don't own a house.

I have to be out of my house in a couple months. I don't give a shit what I do. Like I will go freaking work at, you know, everybody says they'll go work at Burger King or whatever, but that's where my mind state was at. I'm like, I'm just, I'm moving to Texas. I'm gonna figure it out. So lo and behold, a few months after that,

maybe we moved. That was when we came out here because that was April. Was that March? It was March when we were planting stuff in the ground. Yeah, in the February, early March when we started planting trees, yeah. So yeah, I go back.

I told his brother I'm moving to Texas. And he's like, okay, cool, when? You know, like in a couple months. Which is it, Justin, I love you. It took it very well and just supported me in my journey to get here. And ended up helping me out. And I was able to come here and kind of just do what I wanted.

Not talking about here at the farm, but coming to Austin. I had some time to figure things out. And I think he even called me before we moved. And we were talking about working part-time and stuff. And so shortly after we got here, we started doing that. And that was early days no chickens no sheep no that was some plants in the ground yeah and that was water in the empress trees rest in peace empress trees uh there's a few of them left uh yeah and then eventually

i i got on and kyle and the farm offered me full-time work to manage the farm, which was another one of those moments that one, I didn't know exactly what that meant, but there was no other clear sign to me. I've never ran a farm. I've never, I've had people work with me that I had some leadership over.

I don't want to say in charge because I don't like that terminology, but I've worked on a crew that I was leading in the Navy, not on a high level, but I had some guys I worked with. I felt like working for the SEAL teams, that gave me a lot of leadership capability to handle things at different times. So start working full-time when I thought I had resumes. I went and hired, I forget the name of the company, like Monster or one of those companies.

I paid some lady to, i basically just gave her all the info and she made a resume for me and she had worked with veterans in the past so i'm like i just had my resume i actually didn't do anything with it i hadn't i got it made we were in taking the kids to 10th planet at the time that's when i was working on my resume so that's like i'm i'm when when i say like I'm going to Texas, I don't care, like I don't need a resume. I'll figure it out when I get there. Yeah, that's what I was doing on my computer

a lot of the time, was building a dang resume while the kids were practicing jitsu. Anyway, start working full-time and now it's been two years and change. Yeah, shoot, we're almost at the end of June and we've gosh we've went from zero chickens to like 115 right now with the new little babies to a few geese to ducks to we had cows up to 25 cows now we have no cows we had cows up to 25 cows. Now we have no cows. We had sheep. We have dogs. We have puppies on the farm. Shoot, we got 132 sheep or something right now. A lot of lamb that we're about to separate from their mamas. And six livestock guardian dogs that are adults. Yeah some puppies yeah yeah we got puppies that are six

months old and uh we have one of the baby girls um it's athena's baby you know athena passed away uh sweetest dog ever athena was my goodness um she just she had complications at birth but now we get to raise one of her offspring, which is a really big blessing. And, you know, there's a lot that happens at the farm. And I just love, I love being here and the way that it's, not that it's worked out yet, nothing's worked out, but like that things are the way that they are.

I've never been happier in my life being able to be here and work with my brother Kyle and be outside every day and being afforded the gracious leeway to make decisions about the farm that maybe I have no business making choices with animals and stuff, but it's been really fun. I've always loved problem solving and figuring things out that I don't have a

very wide knowledge base of. Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's a lot to come with the farm brother. A lot to come. Yeah. Well, you're, you're the perfect guy for the job, not just because of your leadership skills, but because you know how to think. And, and that's such a big one because all of us are learning about this for the first time. And thank God we have connections to some of the best in each field from Daniel Firth Griffith to Chad Johnson. And, and even online, you know, working with Richard Perkins and things like that, we get to draw on all these masters and, and apply it. And there has been

so many instances, you know, like like where we we learn at the pace of nature and and when we fuck up we take a big one you know we take six six sheep dead in the night and then another seven dead in the night yeah and we get to have those together you know and we've been here from the jump so i remember driving up to get our first pyrenees and they were too young to go in the field and protect anything. But it was a scene in Apollo and four months and six months and, and, you know, raising her was just a year in change, you know, but it made it, you know, every moment of that I shared with you, you know, I shared the same sensation, you know, cause there, we, there was only one boy.

We knew we were taking Apollo, but all those girls, you know, and she just selected both of us. Just an absolute gem, you know, and I can feel that in her daughters. And I can see the, you know, just the rambunctiousness of the boys, you know, from Apollo. Even more rambunctious than he was, you know. It's just really rad. And, yeah, there is so much to come with the farm, but it's been,

it's been one of the most challenging things that I've ever had to do because, you know, like, like you, we're, we're have to run a family as well. And, you know, I've got the podcast and other things that I really care about fit for service, which I was super stoked. We got to bring it to the, you had done fit for service here, but like getting you to come out to Montana was really, really powerful too. That was, you know, I'd been around events here at the farm, but when they happen at the farm, it's like-

You're working too. You're doing stuff too, you know? You just are. It's the nature of the beast. I love it to death. You know, someone's coming on. It's not my land, but someone's coming of the beast. I love it to death. You know, someone's coming on. It's not my land, but someone's coming on the land to do an event that isn't here all the time.

And so there's things that come with taking care of it. But anyway, it kind of takes you away from the experience. So going to Montana, I honestly didn't know what to expect. Being away from the farm and just being fully immersed in that sort of event. And from like, really the, honestly, even we had done somatic breath work over here in the mural barn before. And that was great and powerful. But doing it in Montana when I was in a different state and you're able to check out, you know, and just be in the

moment is like, I was so much more present there and, um, had a wonderful experience doing, doing breath work. And even like I had said, um, doing simple, it's not really simple, but it it's the action of it is simple doing something like, uh, eye gazing, eye gazing that I got to do with Amy and really did a fact that I got to do that with somebody that's on the farm squad and in charge of the team. That was really powerful, and I didn't expect that. I'm like, yeah, cool, I'll go to Montana. This sounds great.

It's awesome. I get to see my brother Kyle in action. I don't have anything else to worry about. You know, I get to be fully in it, which was really, really an amazing experience. And all these little things that we get to be a part of is such a blessing because it is so much more than a farm. You know, it's a family, it's a crew, it's a place for people to gather. It's a place for people to connect and it's a farm, you know? And so to, I think with that, like we all have to round ourselves out, you know, keep, you know, rounding out the, rounding out the proverbial globe. That's something I love too.

You know, it's like, there's no, and I think about this just with Fit for Service, you know, being year six and we're doing so much different this year, but like me and Godsey and Caitlin all had desks next to each other on it, you know, and that was like 20 yards from Ob's office. So we'd pop in there, we'd go for walks together

and, you know, to the dismay of some employees, they could sell that we had a proximity most people didn't you know and i didn't treat anyone differently there but um we we always had that think tank you know and then when it transitioned to fit for service and we all left on it um we continue to hold those containers for for ourselves you know we're doing the breath work. We're doing ceremonies out in the Amazon or at Sultara and things like that that really allow us to grow and bond and stay together. But just the general trajectory of what we're doing is one of growth.

And so if you're just along for the ride, you have no other option but to shift and to grow with it. And I think that's just a really cool thing that I see that with everyone. I've watched Amy go through that. I remember when her and Ryan Giles, you know, Amy's our president at the farm and she runs all sorts of fucking businesses for Aubrey. She's, she's, she's the chief in many arenas. And Ryan, you know, he was my podcast guy and Aubrey's podcast guy for years, I remember just partying with Ryan in New York.

He and Amy, they're parents, and they didn't feel super called to medicine work and things like that. Just to see them where they're at now, it's just like fucking night and day. Everyone that's a part of it has grown so much. There's the container of Fit for service, which travels. There's also the container of this land, which brings so many great people here, like Bobby Kennedy and all the amazing events that we get to throw.

So I think it's just a, I mean, we are so blessed to have that and to have each other, you know, and just to have the multiple containers, the container that moves, the container that stays, but always with that, you know, the chance for have the multiple containers, the container that moves, the container that stays, but always with that, you know, the chance for transformation, the chance for growth and the chance for healing. Yeah.

Yeah, it's really, I hope to never get lost about how unique this place is. I don't ever want to lose sight of something that is so very special and unique and young. Young by farm standards. Yeah. Or a baby. Big time.

But it's just, like I said, I've never been happier. Alongside of, again, just going back to that theme of there are some arduous moments. There's some death. There's some kicking yourself in the butt. There's some hard times. There's a few late nights here and there. But it's all part of the growth, the growth journey. Yeah, the work.

That's the arduous nature of it. It makes it valuable too, right? Fuck yeah. Well, we've hit two hours and change here this is fucking great you'll definitely be back on because the farm is always learning and we're always growing we've always got more to talk about but I definitely

want to get you back on once we dive into I don't know that we'll do it this year it seems like it's a bit complicated with all the changes being made and fit for service but we did talk the last time we had all the farm boys on about throwing an event here that would be, you know, kind of multifaceted between, you know, people getting to learn about health and wellness, people getting to learn about food and diet, and also people getting to learn about farming at the same time, which really

makes us unique, you know, and speaking at the Rome Ranch event, Force of Nature event, What Good Shall I Do last year. Taylor is a good buddy, you know, and really helped us a lot in the farming game, told me, you know, some of these guys are nutritionists. Some of these guys are, you know, old farmers that are looking for a new way. Some of them are people who don't farm yet,

but want to because they understand the benefit of the regenerative agriculture movement, permaculture, and they want to get into it. And I really just feel that that's a crowd we can speak to, you know, because we come from a high background of expertise in various things and have made it, not simple, but have made a working thing here, you know,

where we can really speak to the pitfalls and any good farmer should be able to tell you about all the shit they've done wrong, you know? That's a part of it for sure. And it's fresh too. Whatever we've done wrong is, you know, it's like there's a proverbial brother in arms of somebody that may be starting something because, hey, you know, it's like I said, it's young.

Yeah. Well, we do have Daniel First Griffiths going to come out sometime this summer. And he's an author. He's got a new book called Stag Teen that's coming out here, but he's a fucking Renaissance man. He's a polymath. He's a poet.

He's highly intelligent. And he's a Savory Hub as well as a Savory Understudy for Alan Savory. And he's really brilliant. He was the lead speaker at Force of Nature's event last year. And he wants to come here. We're going to do a live podcast. So we'll, we'll, we'll do tickets. We'll keep the ticket price low. So as many people

that are interested can come and probably around a hundred bucks. So nothing crazy. And, um, at the end we'll podcast for, for about 30 minutes on the book, then we'll open it up for live Q and a. So that is one event that we're going to throw here in the next couple of months. And, um, to be on the lookout for that, just sign up, just join our mailing list at gardeners of eden.earth and uh if you want to volunteer you can sign up the volunteer form and come out and get to check out the space and and live a day in the life with us um but that'll be the first one and then the actual weekend in the life where we do a harvest a field harvest and put stuff in the ground and things like that, we'll probably save for next spring. Heck yeah.

Yeah, come see Daniel. If you, gosh, man, I never knew who I'd be meeting in Virginia until I met Daniel. In China. In China, Virginia. I got a lot of history there too, but what a great dude. If you have a chance to come to that, you'll be blown away. There's no doubt in my mind.

Fuck yeah. I love you, brother. I'm so happy you got to do this. See, that wasn't so bad. All right. Thank you.