Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 499 - Eddie Gallagher

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

Chief Petty Officer, Eddie Gallagher, is a retired Navy SEAL and Iraq & Afghanistan War veteran. Eddie Gallagher was brought to national attention when he was charged with 10 offenses under the Uniform Code of Military Justice over accusations of the premeditated murder of an unarmed and injured ISIS prisoner, and posing for a picture with the deceased body. Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

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And if your order is $99 or more, you get free two-day shipping. Highly, highly, highly recommend you check out the Flatiron Steak because what Nsema just said, it's ridiculously high in protein and insanely low in fat. Go check that out right now. I heard Eddie Murphy did some stand-up recently and Joe Rogan was talking about it and he's like, just came out and just annihilated everybody. Oh my God. Was it recorded? Is it going to? I'm not sure.

I don't know. But yeah, Eddie Murphy. Yeah. From like the rumors and we're recording now, but for like the rumors of it all was like, um, he would just host parties and he would just kind of be like, everyone's just hanging out and then he would just get in front of everybody and just slay. Yeah. Kill everybody. But just like being silly, you know, and then everyone's like, dude, you gotta...

So that's... Man. That's great to hear. That's really good to hear that he's killing it. I like him in Shrek. He was really funny in Shrek. I've never seen it. Aw. Wait, really? That's sad. I don't care about it. No, the first Shrek you should see Shrek. You actually really should. It's really fucking good so the the only cry it's a great movie

it made you cry yeah absolutely which part the whole thing oh okay romantic there's one i just remember the one clip where uh pinocchio said like they're like say something that's a lie or whatever and he's like say you're wearing like chick's underwear or something and his nose doesn't grow yeah okay that was a good thing about trek too because it had a lot of like these sneaky adult humor bits that like parents could laugh at yeah but kids would just be like laughing at everything it was really good like austin powers yeah i like that yeah my kids austin powers amazing congrats mark thank you steak shake chocolate sold out before we could Austin Powers. My kids. Austin Powers is amazing. Congrats, Mark. Thank you. Steak Shake. Chocolate sold out before we could even tell anybody that it was for sale.

It's gone. Well, it makes sense. The chocolate favor zone. Yeah. Everyone likes chocolate. Yeah. Everyone likes vanilla, too. Yeah, vanilla's great, but chocolate.

We're working on some salted caramel, too. Hell yeah. You really are working on salted caramel. It's got to represent all three of us. Here we fucking go. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. All three of us. Here we fucking go. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. But that's,

that's amazing. And then vanilla last time I checked, which was early this morning was like already halfway gone. So that's my time. You hear this. It's way too late. Yep. Yeah.

We're working on getting more. I just don't know when that'll be the question. Uh, I don't literally don't know when, but hopefully it doesn't take too long. You literally don't know when, but hopefully it doesn't take too long. You literally don't know when. Yeah. We just popped some of these pills over here.

Andrew was telling us they were working pretty good for him. I dig them, yes. Committed mind stuff from our buddy Charles Brooks. It's nootropic. What's it got in it, Andrew? Actually, I can't remember. We're popping pills and Seamus laughing. It's like, why do we keep getting so high on the show?

Andrew, go ahead. I just got to mention something. So this one does have the 5-HTP. It does have L-theanine. It has caffeine. So anybody in the nootropic world will know smart caffeine, which is essentially just caffeine and L-theanine. And that combination right there will wake you up, but it will make you a little bit more charismatic and then some of the alpha GPC in that one the other day the one

like the first time I took it you were like damn Andrew your comparisons you're making today are top so it will help you kind of just bring shit from like out the back of your brain up to the forefront that day was performance enhanced we just learned Kind of just bring shit from out the back of your brain up to the forefront. That day was performance enhanced, we just learned. Yes, yes. We're going to have to start doing some P-tests on this show. Find out what the hell's going on.

Thought you were natty, bro. Eh. Once you go to the dark side, you can never claim it. It's over. It's over. But no, it felt good, and so I'm pretty pumped about it. Thanks, Charles Brooke, for sending you some. I think it's just committedmind.com.

Is that right? I could check. He sent me a thingy for it. Anyway, he's just a buddy of ours, so if you want to check it out, if you're into nootropics. What you laughing about over there? You overdo things, man. What? You really do.

Me? I just think it's so funny, and I never learned the lesson. I'm insulted. I didn't learn the lesson from the mushrooms. It's not true, right? Well, there was the one time we did mushrooms on air. I was like, let me do one. He's like, no, you should do three. Three is like that.

That's easy. And I get super high. But like with these, right? Andrew's like, take two. I take two. And Mark's like, I'm going to take four. Like, what the fuck? See, you guys, you guys think I'm the devil on your shoulder, like in comparison to the

angel on the other side of your shoulder. But really, you have two devils on your shoulder. And I'm the devil on your shoulder, like in comparison to the angel on the other side of your shoulder. But really, you have two devils on your shoulder, and I'm the better of two devils. That's really the truth of it. That makes more sense. Yes, that does make sense. But damn, man. Yeah, so it's committedmindneutropic.com. I can't wait.

I can't wait for how this is going to feel. Mixed with some Mind Bullet, too. About to be floating over here. Yeah, so it'll do with the Mind Bullet. You'll probably, I mean, I know today's conversation could get pretty heavy. Yeah. But you'll probably just feel a little bit better. And then, again, the one thing that's undeniable with all of it is the caffeine. So you're going to get just a little bump in energy as well.

It's going to be funny. I wonder how much caffeine per serving, because I already had this espresso she out. Caffeine. 100 milligrams. Ooh, Mark, you're about to be hype. Per serving. How many is in a serving? One capsule.

Oh, shit. Serving size of one capsule. 100 milligrams of caffeine. That's huge. And Mark had four and he had coffee. That's great. Something big is going to happen. I mean, it's water man okay good you're

gonna need that water down how many milligrams of alpha gpc alpha gpc it's the first one it's the first one 200 milligrams of alpha that's impressive for one capsule yeah yeah serving size one capsule so that's about yeah okay i'm. Okay. I'm excited for today's guest. You know, it's a, it's always good to have military folks on the podcast. It's a, it's been a little bit since we've had anybody on.

And Eddie Gallagher is somebody that was brought up to me by Carl Lenore. He's like, you got to have this guy on the podcast. And he's like, I just think he's got a lot of interesting things to say. What I'm interested to learn is like, you know, how do you go through something that is so publicly known and like survive it? You know, he obviously is a very strong individual being a Navy SEAL

and all the training that he's gone through. And he's learned a lot of the things that we talk about on the show often about, you know, choosing, you know choosing you know to be happier and and he had a lot of training that i'm sure you know taught him how to get through some tough times but how do you deal with i guess like public perception of you being this horrible person you know he's uh was accused of murdering a terrorist. It's just kind of a confusing thing because we go to war and we have soldiers do certain things. They get certain orders. And then I don't know what line is too far

and even knowing if war is even... It brings up a lot of questions. I would say that, I would say that just by our history, I could say that war appears to be necessary since it's always been around. There must be a reason to fight, I guess, you know, um, as much as none of us probably really want to see anybody die, uh, things get weird when people are doing things that are maybe inappropriate. And so, you know,

I'm excited to talk to him and just kind of see how he's dealt with some of the adversity and some of the fallout, especially after, after having such an illustrious career in the military. Yeah, there's, I think war is a very interesting thing because like, this is coming from the point of view of two civilians,

both, all of us, actually, none of us have been in war, but when you hear people talk about very interesting thing because like, this is coming from the point of view of two civilians, both all of us, actually, none of us have been in war, but when you hear people talk about it, it's like that does change individuals after year one, year two, year three, they see things that we have no,

no literally conception of. We, we can't conceive just thought in a movie. Maybe that's about it. And barely like, yeah, we, we barely see anything

like what those guys see especially like seal teams like they have to do these like cqc things where they go into buildings and they have there's a lot of killing that's involved and a lot of it's super gruesome but when people get used to that it's like when you get accustomed to something let's just say you know we get accustomed to something like working out it's not hard for us to do and when they get used to something also it's not hard for them to do but the the curious thing i have is because like the thing surrounding him is like the photo and then all of that type of stuff like what i'm just curious like what how how they were perceiving it with everything that they've gone through at that point because i feel like it's so different. Like this, like us,

we'll look at things and the things that have happened and like, you know, again, everything will be like, Oh, that's so horrible. That's so evil. But I don't think we realize that they are in such a different mind space over

there. They're not living these nice lives that we're getting to live over here. So it's going to be really interesting. Yeah. Their mindset has to be different, right? You gotta like, gotta be, uh, you gotta be ready for live over here. So it's going to be really interesting. Yeah. Their mindset has to be different, right? You gotta like, gotta be,

uh, you gotta be ready for anything. Right. So, I mean, you must be kind of on edge at, you know, to say the least.

Yeah. I can't even, um, a family member of mine, he was, um, I don't know exact, um,

titles and all that, but he was in the tanks and stuff and he's seen some shit and it's so crazy because he's just like, yeah, he's like, it'll stick with these. Like, but it's not that bad. But then like, you know, Stephanie went to high school with somebody who also, you know, he had a bunch of experiences and it it took him like he committed suicide so it's like holy shit like i don't i don't i don't really know like they talk about it but maybe they don't talk about it enough you know what i mean like it should be more open but it's

just crazy like how one on one side he was like man it's not too bad and then the other side you know the complete worse yeah scary i definitely think that when it comes to people like us again like people like civilians when when we hear certain things that happens during war we just need to remember that you know when you're put in certain situations it can change the way you do certain things apps like 100 100%, you know? So we can't necessarily, like, there's this idea that we have to, we judge something that people do but, like, again, remember, that's a

totally different situation than we're in here. Right. There he is. Hello. Alright, we made a connection over here. Awesome. How's it going, Eddie? Good, man. How are you guys doing?

We're doing fantastic. I'd like to kind of kick things off with, I guess, starting out from the beginning. What prompted you to want to be in the military, or did you even want to be in the military? How did that come to be? Well, I grew up in a military family family so my dad was in the army for i think it's 20 something years oh wow so i was around every two years growing up i grew up most of my childhood in asia on army bases um but by the time i had uh graduated high school i had like no real intentions of joining uh until about a year after when I tried college out

and then decided to work odd jobs and realized none of that was for me. I needed to get out and make something of myself. So I went the military route and decided to join the Navy. I didn't really have any idea that I wanted to be a SEAL until I got into the recruiting office. And then I was like, okay, if I'm going to be in the military, I want to do something extraordinary or something hard. What's it mean to be a Navy SEAL? Because we hear that thrown around a lot, and a lot of us civilians don't know shit about the military. And so I guess I understand some aspects of the Navy,

but what's it mean to be a SEAL? So a SEAL, obviously we're part of the special operations community. So you have the different branches have their own special operations. So the Navy has the SEALs, Army has the Green Berets or Rangers, you know air force has pjs and the marine has marsoc um we're all pretty much do the same job uh which is to work behind you know enemy lines or uh um do operations to uh either capture or kill the enemy or target um but uh we just we go about it differently than other branches who are water-based. So we do a lot of stuff in the water. We get to swim in, for sure. And then, but because of the past two decades of war, we've sort of switched,

not switched, but we've put a lot more focus on land-based. So we've sort of joined the ranks with the Green Berets and everybody else when it comes to doing stuff land-based. So, I mean, we're considered like the jack-of-all-trades, master of none. So SEAL stands for Sea, Air, and Land. So we can operate in any of those environments. Were you always physical before you even entered into the military? Were you already working out and running and things like that? always involved, uh, in something. So I had that, the background of that, but, uh,

yeah, I, I, I'd say I was, I was pretty physical growing up, but I didn't have the, uh, the depth of knowledge that I do now of, you know, working out and maintaining that. How long did it take you to like, you know, cause you were pretty like high up in the military before you left. So how long it take you to reach the rank that you got into? What was your rank? What does it mean? I retired as a chief, which is an E7. I was enlisted.

You have the officers in the military and you have the enlisted officers. Usually, they have a college education and they get commissioned and become officers enlisted you can just join right out of high school um it took me uh a lot longer to get to e7 not because um i couldn't do it's because i didn't want to uh i i tried to put that off as much as possible. I think there's, in the SEAL teams, you know, once you hit a certain rank, which is E7, after that, you are pretty much hanging up your guns and you're more in a leadership role.

Like, you're more in a back, you know, in the rear leadership role advising. I still was super healthy and super motivated. I just wanted to be a door kicker, you know, go out with the guys. So I tried to extend that as much as possible with by not putting on rank. But eventually that caught up to me around 17 years and they were like, hey, you need to, you know, take on this leadership role, which I was like, I knew it at that point. It's like, okay. But picking up E7, it varies for each individual. There are certain wickets you have to hit going through your career, and usually those are leadership wickets,

whether it starts off something as small as a fireteam leader, squad leader, and then LPO, which is second in command enlisted, and then you get to a chief. But yeah, each person has their different time and route to get to that rank. Some guys pick it up quick, and then some guys try and put it off. Taking the ownership of being a leader is one thing, maybe if you're, one thing maybe if you're talking about like business or if you're leading some people through some exercise, you know,

leading some people through a class or teaching them something, but leading people through potentially losing their lives or being at war has got to be just an enormous responsibility. Is that why a lot of people maybe don't, like, they'd rather wish to kind of, you know, kind of stay on the ground floor and not have to be in those positions to, you know, give an order and then, you know, have that weight of that particular operation be on them kind of thing? No, I wouldn't say that. operation beyond them kind of thing uh no i wouldn't i wouldn't say that um i think so in the seal teams you're you're in a leadership role no matter what rank you are so even the lowest guy is in charge of um either individuals or we're in charge of thousands and thousands and thousands

of dollars of gear or equipment so from the, when you get into the SEAL teams, you are expected to be a leader and in the SEAL teams, you are expected to know the next person's job. So if that person gets fired or gets shot or gets killed, you're, you can pick up that, that position just like that. I think putting it off to, you know um the top leadership role especially for

the enlisted um that sort of goes back to guys don't they know like that's the last sort of hoorah of like okay i'm i'm going out with the boys and then i'm gonna pick up rank and that's it then i'm gonna be back in the office you know and i think guys some guys don't want to do that. They're not ready for that, which I wasn't either. I was still healthy enough to be running and gunning with the younger guys. But that's on each individual when they make that decision. For me, it was I just did not want to hang up the guns.

What are some common characteristics that you've seen amongst great leaders that you've worked with? Big one is leading by example. You know, the do as I do, not do as I say. I think that's huge. But then, you know, I think, you know, leadership is very harped upon in the military itself. But I don't think that the military, you know, has – they're not the end-all, be-all when it comes to leadership. They're still working on that too. I think you – being a good leader is you learn as you are leading.

You learn as you go. you're, as you are leading, you learn as you go, um, you're going to make mistakes. It's learning from those mistakes and moving on. Um, but one, you know, another trait is no,

no one, the people that you're in charge of, uh, sort of investing the time to know who they are. Um, especially in today's climate where, I mean, everybody sort of gets butthurt about

everything. Sort of? I try to be as polite as possible. Let it fly, Eddie. Let it fly. Yeah. You know, everybody's triggered. Everybody's feelings are involved now. So I think in today's climate,

I mean, you're going to have to know the individuals that are working for you and i'm not saying you need a deep dive into them and tip you know walk on eggshells around them but you should know like what are their strengths weaknesses you know what are they not good at and then whatever you know they are good at and their strengths well then you delegate stuff to them but that empowers them you know that they can use those strengths you know at the same time sort of helping them pick up on their weaknesses as well um i think that's that's huge and then you know you you

learn that as you go uh you know i had my last platoon when i was in charge i you know i made some mistakes i i was learning as I went. I was dealing with sort of a new generation of SEALs who are very much like we had just talked about, sort of in tune more with their feelings. And you're getting my feelings hurt because, you know, because you said this where I made a big, you know, a big example is, you know, when I was a new guy coming into the teams, you know, my platoon chief, I would, the guy would smack us on a regular basis or call us a bitch or whatever, you know, just, you know, whatever mood he came in. Now we sort of expected that we were like, okay, I'm a new guy.

You know, just if he called me, if he said something to me that was negative, I would then reflect on myself like, am I being that way or is this, you know? But I think nowadays these people, you know, when you say something to some of this new generation, it's automatically, no, this is your fault, not mine. Like, how dare you say that to me? How dare you say I didn't do a good job?

So I was definitely battling uh with that i was you know i i didn't know how to uh at first talk to these guys or like i couldn't even understand where they were coming from uh when they would complain about their feelings being hurt um or whatever whatever else um did it sound a little bit entitled or something? Yeah, there's definitely a huge entitlement role going on at least with some of the guys in my platoon. I didn't really know how to deal

with that at first. I don't think I dealt with it the right way a couple times. I just called them out and was like, you guys are being entitled little bitches. Then they would take offense to that and that would just go down more spiral into their

emotions and feelings. I would say looking back, I could have been more in tune with caring about their feelings or their complaints. There's no bad soldiers, only bad leaders. We've heard that before. Oh yeah. Do you believe that?

Um, no, I don't think that's entirely true. You know, I, I do believe in taking ownership as a leader. Uh, I,

you know, I do, uh, I don't know if you guys have heard Jocko. Absolutely. So he preaches that extreme ownership, which I do think that's the right way to go. You should always try and take accountability when you can. But at the same time, some people that work for you just aren't meant to work there.

They just don't belong. And there's only so much you can do to bend over backwards for them to help you know make them feel like they belong or help them along and if they if they're not changing then it's like you need to cut that cord and be like dude nope you're out of here you know and if you can have bad soldiers so like in your time you've probably seen people that are they're in the navy uh and maybe they quote unquote become a navy seal but maybe they're not a soldier, necessarily, because there's probably some sort of innate nature of some of this to some degree, and there's probably just some traits that I'm sure are learned and taught, but there's got to be some other, like, I just, I don't think there's any way that I could

ever learn how to do any of those things. I don't I don't know if I'm brave enough to even try any of that stuff. And I've heard from other people kind of say, well, it's because you're part of a team, you're part of a squad, you're doing it for the other people. But like, I don't even know if I care about other people enough to even do that, even meet people halfway. So I totally understand your point there. And I think that that's well put because you could have people that are soldiers and they have all the right intentions. And maybe they learned a lot of the skill sets, but maybe when it comes down to it, they just weren't meant for battle. Yeah.

And I think that comes down to your belief system to where like, why did you join? Why did you want to be a Navy SEAL? Yeah. I was, I just wouldn't even go anywhere near it. Cause I know it's not, I don't think it's for me, but I, it's, you know, you see these, you see it in the community as well. Um, it's always been like this guys join for different reasons. Not everybody wants to be a SEAL for the same reason.

Some guys join it because they want to just have a career as a SEAL, pick up rank. They just enjoy having the trident and training or doing the job. Other guys join to go to war. I joined specifically, I want to go to war, I want to fight, but I want to fight with the best. best and so you have these two groups you know in the teams and it they definitely sometimes end up coinciding and not you know it's sort of there's a mix-up um you know that's how that's sort of like my last platoon i had half and half some guys were just there because they wanted to be a seal and but they actually didn't want to go do the job. You know, when the bullets start flying, that's when you see, I'll tell you that, like when the bullets start flying and impacting around you, you see whose belief system is what.

I mean, sorry, I don't know. Wow. Yeah. Like the process for becoming a SEAL, but just as a, you know, just normal person, I would think that there's going to be some checks and balances. Like if, you know, like, you know, like you can't, you can't learn how to deadlift by reading a blog, right? You have to go out and do it. So, is there something like that to become a Navy SEAL where like you have to have, you know, some time like behind enemy lines or like, you know, again, I'm just trying to think that if, you know some time like behind enemy lines or something like you know again i'm just trying to think that if you know half of your platoon was definitely shouldn't they definitely

shouldn't have not been there i mean that's that's a huge miss and i'm just curious like how not that they slid through or they snuck in but like how was that possible so it definitely wasn't half my platoon uh that was you know that the media and everybody was putting on like his whole platoon half this platoon it was it came down to two guys two or three guys was it um they um yeah that that'll be all in the book of how you know how this all came to be but when it comes to guys sort of slipping through there is there's only so many checks and balances so much you could do to see if guys are going to be prepared for actual combat right and i'll tell you we do a hell of a job simulating that environment through our training um you know we're we go through stress inoculation constantly um you know we do we pretty much train

harder than we would fight at war so we have a saying the more you bleed in training or the more you sweat in training the less you bleed more so to that extent these guys the guys that I found out

didn't belong they did fine during training there was no question marks I was like hey you know these guys you know are locked on they know what they're doing um but the thing is we're not getting shot at with live rounds we're getting shot at you know with simunition through that whole time it's not until those rounds start flying and i've seen it before where guys are like okay i had this is not cool you know like there's i'm almost there's a possibility i could die um and they make that decision after that deployment to get you know like this job

isn't for me i'm gonna get out and that's there's nothing wrong with that that's not cowardice that's just they came and they tried out they made made to the teams went to actually do the job found out that maybe hey this isn't for me and got out. There's nothing wrong with that. What these guys did is they went, found out they weren't meant for the job. They were cowards on deployment. And then instead of sort of taking ownership, being like, hey, I probably should get out. This job isn't for me.

They flipped the tables and were like, no, this is your fault. You put us in this position. You made us go out all the time and, you know, get fire fights. And then they tried to get rid of me. I was curious about this because when you were talking about the, the new generation and like,

I guess the entitlement and also the, the quick way to, to like put blame on others, when you were talking about when you were coming up in the military, how like you were just used to certain things. Right. And, and I feel also that when in the military, if I picture that environment, there needs to be a certain level of just toughness. There needs to be a certain level of, you know, just take this and go. Right. It's not like in a workplace, in a fucking workplace here, your boss can't just like say, hey, bitch, like, right?

That can't happen. But in the military, you gotta be fucking, it seems that you gotta, that's an environment that you have to be hard. You know, there can't be softness there. You can't go to HR department. You can't go to, and then this is another thing. It's like, right?

Like I feel like with the new generation, my generation, there is a level of understanding emotions better, which is a benefit, but potentially in that setting, it might not be that beneficial to be super emotional. And that made me feel bad. And so what I'm trying to get at here is like, when you're coming up, you're used to that level of hardness. Is there any benefit to being more in tune with one's emotions in those types of situations? I definitely, yeah, I definitely think there is. I mean, there's there's definitely a huge benefit to having what you know, what they call like emotional intelligence, which is like, okay, hey, I'm feeling this way

because you said this, and you could do all that jive. And that is a huge benefit. When I, growing up in, so I did my first four years with the Marine Infantry Unit. There's definitely no emotional intelligence there. It's do what you,

do what I fucking say, and do it now. And if you don't do it correctly,'m going to come down you know or you know that you you're getting yelled at you got to have thick skin you also got to sort of know like this is the military like we our main goal all the military is to go to war there's there no other component like, oh, we do this, or we're protecting the country by going to war. That's the end state. You do have to have, you would think, some thick skin and then some also

fortitude to do that job, but also to take criticism or take... If somebody's yelling at you, it's like, hey... I always say if someone's screaming at you, I'm like, well, no no one's shooting at you so just listen to what they're saying and and that's the thing and these i think uh what what goes with being in touch with one's feelings or emotions with this you know emotional intelligence is being able to take that on board but also knowing when

to shut the fuck up like you don't have to respond back just like, okay, I got it. All right. You know, and then move on. Um, a lot with these,

what I saw with these guys, there was always something to come back to, you know, it was, Oh, why are you doing this? Why, why,

why, why, why? Until, you know, you answer the question in a way that it was going with their agenda. Uh, yeah, it was, it was pretty tricky, but I definitely am a big advocate for emotional intelligence.

I think that makes you just a better operator and better warrior. Yeah, I think it's important to understand maybe potentially what somebody's going through. They're super young. They're away from home. This is their first time without their phone., you know, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things at play. They miss their girlfriend and you're, you're thinking, Hey, look, we, you know, we have a job to do here.

I don't really care that much. I don't really, I kind of care about it because I went through the same thing, but we don't have time to like sit around and like play patty cakes over it. You know, we don't have time to like sit here and like play patty cakes over it. You know, we don't have time to like sit here and like cry on each other's shoulders about it. And I think just being aware and saying, Hey, look,

I know that that, that this is happening to you, but we have fucking training to get to. I think that part of it is important, but I think what's really hard is to get somebody to, to have somebody do something because you want them to do something and not have them do it because they want it to be for the betterment of the overall cause, I think is where the problem lies the most. Because maybe they have a misunderstanding of, hey, I'm not trying to bark orders at you. I'm not trying to say something in particular to you to set you off.

I'm not trying to have this be a negative component of your life. I'm trying to move forward with the entire team executing really well. And in order for the team to execute really well, I don't really care that much that you don't want to clean out the shitter, but you have to because that's your job for this month or whatever, whatever the job might be. Right. That kind of stuff. Yeah. And that, you know, through that, I actually had meetings like that multiple times through the deployment to where I would sit down. I called them my, the Kumbaya sessions with them,

like, Hey, okay, what's going on? What are the main problems here? Like, cause I was seriously like sort of concerned, like what,

what's going on. And you know, what it came down to, you know, each time was they they were like you're working us too hard like we don't want to go out as much um well that complaint is invalid when you're laying siege to a city that's like five times the size of san diego that has been pretty much barricaded and prepped for the

past three years by ISIS. I mean, there was no, there's no days off here. Like our job, our objective is to clear Mosul and get rid of ISIS too. We were told why we came in and this was by our higher command. Like you guys need to be aggressive as fuck the next six months.

Like we will clear ISIS and we will kill every isis individual in there like that's that's the main goal and isis isn't really around anymore it's not doesn't like you guys were successful i guess right we were successful yeah through week we cleared missoula six months which they it was the western side of missoula which they said wouldn't couldn't be done when we got there like oh it's going to take years uh we got it done along with our fellow uh brothers of mars you know wack felon and marsak and then there's a couple other seal platoons out there uh but we got the job done but it took working every day going out every day and you are risking your life you i mean there was a lot of uh risk you know we try to mitigate risk when we go out but in that environment there's only so

much you can mitigate and then some of it's like hey you know if something happens it happens but we're doing this for a reason to get rid of evil um these guys i i don't i they didn't see it that way they i mean they literally said verbatim like this isn't our fight this isn't our war we don't we shouldn't be here i mean that that's their that and that's why i talk about belief system that was their belief going into it where as i and a lot of people you know guys, guys that I came up with from the 9-11 generation where, you know, we were in for 9-11. And that's the reason we've been fighting so long, have a completely different outlook. And so you have those two belief systems sort of budding together, which I think caused a lot of the friction as well. You mentioned that these individuals like tried to get rid of you.

And what does that mean? How did they try to get rid of you? My understanding is that they accused you of murder, something to that extent. I don't know the exact details. I don't want to misword it. So I'll just try to do a quick overview of exactly how this transpired to what it became. And honestly, it's embarrassing for the Navy or NSW, but it's exactly what happened. These guys, you know, we ended the deployment.

We cleared it. It was a good deployment. But like I said, a couple of these guys were still holding a grudge against me. I did call them out near the end of deployment. So they held this grudge against me. They were creating a toxic environment behind the scenes. We went back and managed to get a couple more guys on their side. They were avidly doing sort of a a campaign during that

deployment behind behind my back uh and behind some other leaders back trying to get people to take their side they got about two more guys you know on their side and there was nothing brought up about murder or any of the stuff i really got charged with. What it started out as is they came back and said that I was a bad leader, I was too aggressive, and that my tactics were bad, right? They went to the leadership with this, and the leadership said, okay, give us examples of how he's a bad leader. And they couldn't, or bad tactics, they couldn't give anything that would justify their complaint. The leadership's like, nope, that's a tactic. We've been doing that forever. That doesn't sound like bad leadership. That

sounds like the, you know, he was trying to get the job done. So they told him like, if you have, unless you have real complaints, move on. You can, sounds like you guys just need to decompress. About two weeks later, you know, they'd come back come back like okay well now we have evidence that he was stealing from us and they're like okay well what was he stealing uh again there was really nothing everything got you know they're like that's you know he was stealing i think they said power bars or protein bars from we would get care packages those care packages are for everybody uh so it's they were like that's not stealing and the command i think the command got really concerned and they were like what is going on here why are you guys continuing to come with these petty allegations uh and the command even asked them they're like is there something else that we should know about

did he commit any crimes any anything over there that we need to be concerned about these guys said no they asked them three different times they denied it all three times and this is what they told them they said if unless there's something like that like a crime a war crime or then nothing you know is going to happen to Eddie Gallagher. He's going to move on with his career. See, I got ranked number one chief coming back. I got very high praises from my leadership, from everybody else but these three individuals. So because they said that to them, like, hey, unless there's something like war crimes,

nothing's going to be done they sort of coach these guys into like these guys like okay they come back five months later and they're like okay yeah he committed a war crime this is five months after all these conversations almost a year after the deployment yeah and so they're like okay what did he do they're like oh he stabbed a isis prisoner to death and this is the kicker they told the command like we have it on video and unless you don't kick him out of the navy take away his rank and take away his award i was getting i was put in for a silver star then we are going to give the video to CNN and it's going to look bad for the whole community.

So the command, instead of calling their bluff or being like, well, let us see the video. They just bowed down to their, what they wanted. And literally within like a week, my award was gone.

I couldn't pick up. My rank was gone and they pulled me, up. My rank was gone, and they pulled me out of pretty much the job. And they went and told NCIS, who's at Naval Criminal Investigative Service. It's sort of like the

FBI for the Navy. Not even FBI, but it's sort of like they're investigators for the Navy. They look into crimes. They told NCIS about these allegations. No one looked at the videotape. No one asked to see the videotape. Once NCIS got the accusations, that's when it skyrocketed. The lead NCIS agent

named Joe Warpinski, he was probably the worst element to add into all this drama because he had the worst combinations of ambition and incompetence. He wanted to make a name for himself. He's like a Navy SEAL accused of murder. If I can put this guy away, then, um, I'll make, you know,

this'll be a huge career maker for me. Uh, so he went into this investigation, not, not forming an investigation, but more of a prosecution from the beginning. He, he,

uh, cherry picked pieces of evidence that made me look bad. And then anything that, uh, made me look innocent. He, he hit it. They ended up raiding my house.

I wasn't home. My wife wasn't home. And so I sent a 25-man SWAT team armed to the teeth, pulled my two kids out, eight-year-old and just turned 18 in their underwear in the street, and then laid siege to my house.

And from there, that's when my wife and I were like, what is going on? This is unreal. And it just sort of kept skyrocketing from there. They, they finally came about a month and a half later after they had raided my house and then arrested me and threw me in military prison with no charges. No one would tell me what I did.

I sat in military prison for about two and a half months until I was officially charged with murder. And from there, it was just a fight to sort of combat the narrative that they were putting out and prove my innocence. And I finally, you know, it all came out during the trial. And that was what the most amazing thing was, you know. All these guys' lies, because these guys had lied from the beginning, it caused everyone else to lie.

That was sort of taking their side. And that all culminated at the trial. And then when they were in trial, like, one of the other guys admitted to what he accused you of, I think, right? Yeah. That's fucking wild. When I was in military prison, I had two of the guys visit me that had sort of been sucked in by the accusers. And they got them on their side.

They came to prison and told me that they were lying. They knew this was a lie. And their conscience got the better of them. And they're like, we're sorry we did this. But at that point, you couldn't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Like, this was going full speed ahead. I was being charged, like I said, with murder. But I was facing life in prison without parole.

Like, that's what I was getting. There was nothing else on the table. What was the, like, when you first got news of this, the first time, where were you? Were you still in the military or were you home for a little bit? What was going on in your life and how did you feel? Were you in total disbelief or were you just like, well, that's never going to become a thing because I never did that. That sounds like a bunch of bullshit.

I've been accused of a bunch of stuff and I didn't do that. And this will probably never come to mean anything. Yeah. So I knew when we got back from that deployment, I had guys coming up to me that I knew that were saying, hey, these guys are saying some crazy shit. Like at first, like I said, it was all that, you know, I was a thief. I was too aggressive. I was too aggressive. I was that.

Yeah, I knew none of that was true. So it ticked me off that I was being called a thief. I was like, okay, I did have a meeting with the guys, and I was like, I want to know what I stole from you. I've never been called a thief before. I was like, please tell me there's something. They couldn't produce anything. They were just like, we just don we just when this was like two or three

guys talking like oh we just don't like you I'm like alright then move on I don't like you guys either I'm not going to let it run my life but then as the time went on I kept I would hear like sort of crazier and crazier

accusations or rumors. And SEAL teams are like one big rumor bill. It's like high school. Just think it's the most dramatic. As much as these guys are alpha males and warriors, we talk shit about each other nonstop. And it gets pretty toxic. So I'd been in long enough at that point to where i was like rumors are rumors i'm not you know i'm not even going to address them uh it

wasn't until they started getting crazy where i was like oh now they're saying you murdered somebody where i was like okay this is fucked up i went and actually asked for someone to launch an investigation into it so i could an internal investigation because i was like let's just clear this and get this over with uh because these these guys going around spreading these rumors is getting out of hand um i had one of the master chiefs come talk to me about it just the one time anybody talked to me the whole time and i told him that you know these aren't true and i don't know what else to say but unfortunately the military and this goes through all the military you are guilty until proven innocent um they're like well you have to prove that you didn't do this so it literally just

took them verbalizing he murdered somebody and that was it that was enough uh to start moving forward but uh yeah my wife and i both sort of turned the other cheek that whole time uh we're like hey this is going to go away this is ridiculous um until like i said our house got raided then we're like oh okay this is real okay two two things i'm actually curious about the video that you know they said that they had what would people have seen in the video because you mentioned stabbing so what like what were they talking about if that video was shown and then secondly you know we're saying you were accused of murder right what i heard though was that like the individual that was murdered was a terrorist and i mean you guys i mean if can you explain to us

why this situation was a murder because you said that you guys were on an operation to go into this place and kill a bunch of ISIS operatives. So there must have been a lot of murder going on if that's the case. So what was so significant about this that it's like this was murder? Yeah. So I think everybody had the same reaction, just like you did. Like, how is this murder? What the prosecution at NCIS did, well, this is what their narrative. And today, it doesn't make any sense to me either.

I'm like, they, well, so to clarify, it was premeditated murder. Okay. So, they said that I had the intention, and it still makes me laugh just even thinking about it. I had the intention that day of murdering a combatant that was in our care. And just saying, I mean, it sounds ridiculous to even think that I would have that thought process like, you know what, today I'm going to capture a guy then kill him. But that's what narrative they were putting i'm going to capture a guy then then kill him but that's what narrative they they were putting out the whole time so they they were saying that as soon as we had the guy in our in our care and we were treating him then he was no longer a terrorist he was a patient so because i killed the patient and that's premeditated murder and they said i had a

i had it all planned out from the beginning which that got their whole narrative got torn apart during court it was because it was so amateur so ridiculous um as far as the video the video was played during the trial uh polish it actually shows the opposite of what they were saying It shows me coming up with the med bag, the terrorist. We had just, uh, bombed the terrorists, uh,

about him and 20 other guys. And all of them died except him. He was pretty much on his deathbed. Our Iraqi partner forces brought him back to us. They on a hood of a Humvee. I mean, he was bleeding out. Um,

I grabbed the med bag and just ran up and started treating him assessing him um and that's all the video showed so it showed me coming down with the med bag he i think tries to lunge up at me not lunge up but like reach up to grab me i pushed him back down and started treating him and then it cuts off at some point so they they were saying at some point after that they said that i treated him and then i went insane and took out a knife and started stabbing him in the neck and that's i mean that's what they went with and so it uh let me help you recover so i can kill you. Yeah, basically. I'll tell you this, and this is going to come out in the book. So strange.

We didn't care if this guy lived or died. He was just trying to kill us. We were treating him to death pretty much. Like, hey, we'll just do these treatments on him because he was going out. There was no plans on medevacking him, no plans on taking him to a hospital. We were just like hey we'll just do these treatments until he's dead everybody there was on board with it even the accusers were involved in uh doing some treatments on him but you know of course none of that was said you know

during during the trial until the trial uh when it came out and then it came out that that video was a big lie. What they were saying, it's, you know, cause they were telling everybody, it showed me stabbing the guy and it, you know,

it showed nothing. Um, that video was used as a weapon the whole time I was locked up. They were telling members of Congress, uh, all the way up to the white house that there was a video showing me doing the stabbing and that I, they, nobody should support me. they should get on board with persecuting me um and thank god that uh we had president trump at that time and uh i think he took he took sort of a deep dive

into it and um so did some certain members of congress and they got behind me and i mean that's a huge part of the reason why I'm still talking, I'm talking to you right now and not in prison. It's got to be a weird thing to go through where you feel like you have to constantly kind of clear your name. You know, like even amongst family, you know, one of your younger family members, you know, learns that Uncle, you know that Uncle Eddie is accused of this or hears it from someone in school or hears a rumor circulating.

That's got to be really, really tough to deal with. And you say, oh, no, no, no, this is a misunderstanding, you know, but no one else is accused of murder. You know what I mean? So it's a tough thing to have, uh, just have ever even been in any sort of contact with. How do you, how do you deal with that? Is it you and your wife,

uh, you know, decide like, Hey, we got to stay closer than ever. Or did you get with family and friends and say, we got to really shut the world out for a little bit and, uh,

and just take a deep dive into us moving forward as a family type thing. Um, so during, during the whole thing, when I was locked up in the trial, my family was a rock. My, my wife and my brother were both, I mean, those two are my heroes to this day. They, I don't know how they got the strength to do what they did, but they, they pretty much created a campaign. My wife started an Instagram account and organically just put out all the stuff that was happening to me, trying to get people to pay attention because I had a lot of rights being violated. Like I said, I was locked up for no reason. So she got a huge following.

My brother, who had worked on Capitol Hill hill in the past went down to dc and was knocking on doors of congress for weeks on end trying to get somebody to pay attention and this is what we learned during that process is the media if they put something out whether it's false information or whatever people that that's the first thing they see and they believe it um so there was they had a hard time getting people to sort of get on my side because they there was the media was smearing me at the same time writing all these smear articles and it was all misinformation um but the blessing and all that is the people that stuck with us and knew me and knew like

this doesn't make any sense that that was probably one of the biggest blessing you know but that that circle of people was smaller than i thought would be um but i because of that i was able to cut the fat out of my life i'm like hey if you aren't going to get behind me you know who i am we've known each other for years but if you're going to believe the bs is putting out there then all right man you know i'll see you when i see you uh but then um afterwards that it was a lot tougher to deal with i think after the trial because i had proven my innocence but it didn't matter the media was already on a full frenzy to like they make me look like a psychopath like a warmongering psychopath killer.

And that didn't stop after the trial, you know, certain, certain entities of the media, New York times for one, they would just write, I think it was months after the trial months after I got out of the Navy, they were writing an article a month,

just smearing me nonstop. So we sort of learned to tune all that out it was a you get to a point where yeah it does bother you but you if you just let it bother you it's going to it's going to ruin you you're you're it's going to eat you up from the inside so we learned how we learned to sort of close all that out um you know your opinion doesn't matter to me. I know the truth. Uh, you can think what you want, but, um, it, that, that, that went away last year. I think, I think the more we just ignored it and then wouldn't address all the negative stuff, it, it dissipated. You know, I'm curious about this.

Uh, if you could like, because again, all of us here are civilians, so we don't necessarily understand how something, how, like, I guess war can change individuals. Because, you know, one of the big aspects of, you know, when people look into the story and what happened was the picture, right? The picture was what, and that was what was used in a lot of things that the news put forward. And that was what was used in a lot of things that the news put forward. And even when I first started learning about it, I was like kind of shocked because initially I was like, damn, like these dudes taking pictures with the dead body. Right. But at the same time, when I was thinking about it, I was just I was like, well, I mean, OK, looks pretty bad. It doesn't look good. But at the same time, I would assume when people get used to being in war and the enemy is also who's doing very evil things. You're very used to killing the enemy.

Maybe at some point, some like at some point they start to be dehumanized as far as like, right? Like the enemy is no longer just a human being with their issues they're just the enemy that's doing evil shit and like they're not maybe does that happen does it does do do do i guess soldiers get detached get detached from like this is like almost like you know when people will go and they hunt lions and you see them they post an instagram with their they post on instagram a kill right and people are like oh my god that's so disgusting and it's kind of fucked up yeah but at the same time they're used to they shouldn't be killing lions but they're used to that shit right so so what does that do

when when that photo was taken did did did they even feel or did you guys really like i guess feel like that was still a person in a way i'd imagine it's pretty common right i'd imagine it's a common thing to an extent i still don't think that i mean i don't have any emotions about that that person or that the dude like it's yeah i'm sent over there to do a job and that's to you know i don't and this is the other thing like after you've been over on so many combat deployments at least this is how it was for me yeah you know my fifth or sixth combat deployment you know you're going over there you know you're being told like hey we're going over to fight being told like,

Hey, we're going over to fight because of nine 11, um, protect this country. But then it's like, okay, two, three deployments later, like,

what are we still doing here? But then it turns into, well, now we're going to stay and destabilize or, you know, try and stabilize Afghanistan and sort of bring our ways to them. It's like, okay,

what's this got to do with defeating the enemy like why are we staying here and you know while you're doing that the same time you're fighting the enemy you know and then it's that drags on and then eventually you're like what is the why did we come over here like why are we here we still have american soldiers dying by these by these guys but at the same time we're trying to protect people that don't want us there. They really don't. I think most of them would get the fuck out. They have their own way, and it's not

our way, and that's fine. So I do think after fighting an enemy like that for so long, yeah, you do dehumanize them. Especially the atrocities that you see that they commit which you'll never see on the news so i've i talk about this in the book as well you know the that that deployment uh

especially you know we would we would clear through this city after uh our partner force would sort of clear through first and we'd see you know kids heads on spikes uh there was i mean we watched randomly they would send women and children out into a field and gun them down we're watching that firsthand we can't do anything about it um so yeah i would say after seeing shit like that i'm like i have no like my my feel sorry or sympathy button for those people is rubbed out like i'm like dude fuck you like i've seen what you do and if you're part of that group and maybe that individual didn't really fit into that agenda maybe he just joined the group out of whatever but either way you're part of that group now man like it's pure evil it seems pure evil and guess what they

think of us just the same way yeah they hate us that much so there's there's no room to be like oh well maybe this person joined isis because his dad treated him wrong you know i'm like no like sorry bro you chose the wrong side you're getting smoked it's got to be it's a tough position to be in you know like uh i guess some people would look at it as if well if you kill the person now you are becoming them why would you why would you personally uh believe differently um that what they're doing is wrong and potentially what we're doing is correct. Because that's otherwise, I mean, if I, if I questioned it any other way, then I wouldn't be in the military. Yeah.

I joined the military to protect this country. That's, you know, my number one priority. I do think those evil people are trying to come over here and if they get any chance to come over here and hurt us, which they've shown, they've shown in the past, you know, the random shootings, the bombings that, you know, ISIS takes claim for or Al Qaeda, like they will come and harm us. And I think that's what people sort of forget. You know, it's 9-11 happened almost 20. We're coming up on 20 years. It's and I, you you know i get it that's 20 years

ago but it's like you do remember like what they did and they're still planning to do it again but the only reason they haven't because people are like well it's been so long it's like because we've been over there making sure it stays over there and not over here that's why it hasn't happened in such a big way again. But, I mean, as soon as we start doing this softer approach, which is happening, and like, oh, well, okay, let's try and be friends. It's only a matter of time before it happens over here again because they generally hate us. They hate everything we stand for. They don't care what color you are.

They don't care, you know, what type of American you are. They hate you just because you're an American because they cannot stand our belief system. And I'm not saying that's everybody over there. I'm saying that's these extremist groups that we're fighting. I think it can be confusing sometimes for some of us that aren't involved at all. We don't really understand the circumstances and ISIS. And these are extremist groups and it doesn't represent the entire population and the uh people that they're executing the people that are shooting the kids that they're murdering the they're raping people and doing all kinds of crazy uh evil stuff like you said that really you just don't really hear it talked about much.

So it's not like we're over there randomly killing people that are evil or bad, but these are people that are trying to rule with terror and fear other people. And so the United States has been the world police for a very long time, and we are doing what we think is best to go over there and handle some of those things. And as you said, I thought it was very well put, is that we're trying to keep it over that way. And I don't think we know any other good way of handling it because I don't think, like you said, I don't really know if we could sit down with, you know, with these people and have conversation, uh, that would lead us to anything different. Otherwise war wouldn't exist,

which I think, uh, like everybody would be pretty pumped if we didn't have to fight. And if there wasn't evil and there wasn't people murdering people, there wasn't people hurting each other and things like that. But the world has never been that way. No, war has been around since the beginning of humans i mean it's

there's two like definite things i know there's good and there's evil and that's that's the truth you know and one has to prevail you know and whatever you can look at it like well how do you know what's good or not like that's your belief system, you know? And I believe America is good. I believe America is one of the greatest countries on the planet. We take in, even with the little minute problems that we have now, like this, I think everybody thinks America's falling apart. Like, believe me, we're not even close. We're doing pretty good. If you go ahead and go over these other third world countries, that's when you can see true chaos. That's,

you know, did the military do anything to assist you through any of this process in like getting you a specific attorney or getting you some help from a mental perspective, send you to a doctor, get evaluated, get support for your family, anything like that? No.

So the one thing they did is what they're mandated to do is give me a military lawyer, a defender. But this is the kicker. The military defender that they assigned to me didn't live anywhere near me. He lived five or six hours from the military brig or prison I was staying in. So this guy, I didn't get a visit from him. And he's not a bad guy, but I didn't get a visit from him until I was in prison for about two months. And he told me, he was like, hey, I'm not going to be able to,

I don't know why they assigned me to you, which they did it for a purpose so I couldn't properly defend myself even with the lawyer they gave me um but that's that's the only thing i'll say they did for me other than that no they violated all of my uh which they got in trouble for they violated my fourth fifth and sixth amendment rights um they refused to take me to medical they refused to get me any type of care um it was full-on an assault from the leadership of the navy to try and make me look guilty and try to put me away because they were like we need to use him as an example um and they had their just their their minds were made up no matter what evidence or proof was shown to them like look this is

BS they wouldn't look at it they're like nope this is already happening it's in full swing and I think it escalated when the president got involved because the president got involved then the military's ego was hurt because he pretty much put the smack down and was like let him out of prison

so he can defend himself and their ego ego got bruised. And then from there, their assault escalated on me. It was a very, very stressful time. There's a lot of stuff being done to me and my family that a lot of people don't know about that of course is never reported. And that's all, that's why I had, that's why I wrote the book because I don't, if I could sit here and tell you all the things that they did to me and you would have a hard time believing it because I would never believe it until it happened.

Yeah. I was like, what, what were some of the things that they did? Because it's like, it's so, it's so weird to me how like you serve for these people and first off like what were some things that they did but then also what were they trying

to prove with you behind bars like what what were they trying to be like okay what were they trying to make an example of isn't it is the question there so i think that well first off they they locked me away unjustly uh because they were still doing the investigation so they're like hey if he's behind bars he has no way to to fight this like we can we can say whatever we want and he's not he's not there to rebut it he's he's locked away that was the main reason they put me in prison I I was not a threat to anybody. I was living my best life, trying to prepare to get out to retire. And they made the choice that, hey, we're going to go ahead and throw him in prison and continue this investigation until we can find some legitimate charges. While I was locked up, my command, NCIS, and also the prosecution, was telling guards to make me snap.

So they would, every day, so these guards would come in, strip me naked, do shit, like say shit to me, to get me to try and fight them so they could point the finger and be like, see, he is crazy. They would toss my cell all the time. They would deny me visitations. They would deny me my... I had medical appointments because of my trauma.

I went to a TBI clinic and I had two bulging discs. They were like, nope, you can't have any of that. And they denied my lawyer visits. My lawyer would try and come visit me. This is my civilian lawyer that I hired. And they deny him talking to me. Now, those are just the things that happened in the brig. On the outside, the prosecution, during the course of we were going to court the judge said that

there was a gag order on all the evidence which meant nobody was allowed to see any of the evidence except for the defense prosecution and the judge like it was illegal to share the evidence with anybody else the prosecution was sneaking the evidence or leaking the evidence to the media the whole time, which is how you saw all those articles before I went to trial. Those were all smear articles of misinformation. They were doing that to promote their agenda, but also to sway the jury. So if they're like, if this gets out in the media enough and he gets smeared enough the jury's already going to come in here with a bias that's so they were doing that the whole time and this is how bad it is like we would bring it up in court we literally would get evidence like a new

batch of evidence that day that was already out in the media so my lawyers were like how is it that this is already out in the media and we're just now getting this? We're like, we told the prosecution, like, are you guys leaking this? Nope. The judge would be like, okay, well, they said no, so move on. Like, there's no checks and balances. It's just, hey, they're going to do to you what they want to do to you. I mean, it's a scary thing. And then one of the final things that really,

this is what everybody sort of found out about and that did get reported was the prosecution sent a email to my lawyer, to every lawyer that I had on my team at the time, to other lawyers who were representing guys that were on my side. That email had a spyware in it that if they clicked on the email or applied to it they would be able to get into all of our evidence

what are everything that we had so they they got my thank god my lawyer caught it and was like what the hell is this he replied back to and was like, please tell me this is not what I think it is. And never got a reply back. We invested, we brought it up, complained about it, investigated it. And it came out that yes,

the prosecution, uh, this guy prosecutor named Chris Chaplack and also the NCIS agent schemed up a plan to spy on us to get all of our information. So the prosecutor, the punter, or the remedy for that was not dropping the case. It was, oh, we'll just kick this prosecutor out and put in another one. Now, if that happened in civilian court, my case would have been dropped. And also that prosecutor would have been locked up in prison.

my case would have been dropped. And also that prosecutor would have been locked up in prison. That's cause that was, he broke my, forget how many rights at that time. But those are, I mean, those are some of like the,

well, one, you know, minute or bigger things. And there was so much stuff in between that, you know, it would take me hours to go through, but you know, that, that will all be in the book. I mean, it know, it would take me hours to go through, but you know, that,

that will all be in the book. I mean, it gets, it gets disgusting, uh, just how far these guys would, would go to try and get a win. It's,

uh, it's pretty bad. I can't think of anything more admirable than, you know, uh, being in our military and, and being someone that, uh,

kind of lived through some of the nine 11, uh, or seeing nine 11 and reacting to it like a Pat Tillman. Or, you know, we've heard of all these people that are like, yeah, I saw 9-11, saw what happened. And I felt compelled that I personally had to do something about it. I love this country and I want to defend it. And then to go through what you're going through and what you went through, And then to go through what you're going through and what you went through, I'm really massively impressed by the fact that I'm not really, I don't really hear, you sound upset by it more so than like disgruntled by it. Like you don't sound like you're not a believer in our military. It doesn't sound like you're not a believer in the United States of America. It sounds like you're still

Team America. You're still part of it all, which is amazing to be patriotic after serving the country, doing all the things that you did, doing all the right things, doing what everyone views as being really admirable. And it does appear that you're hurt by it it does appear that you are i can kind of see it in your eyes even just talking through this zoom call uh but it doesn't seem like um i'd never heard you once raise your voice or say those motherfuckers or like i've never i haven't heard any of that from you so uh it's just impressive

to me of how tough you are mentally that that is really impressive because i don't know you know i'm thinking like i i wouldn't be able to respond the same way so uh congrats to you on that that's impressive yeah thanks thanks for that compliment and you know i get i do get asked all the time especially like oh what are your thoughts on the navy what are your thoughts on the Navy? What are your thoughts on SEAL teams? And I'll, I get the same response. Like, you know, I was proud and I was honored to be able to serve the 20 years that I did. You know, if my kids wanted to join, I'd let them join. I think it's one of the most honored professions you can have. And the big thing is I will not blanket statement a whole organization because of a few bad actors.

I think that's, I think that's what goes on a lot now in today's society where there's, it's like, Oh, like, you know, are there bad cops? Yeah.

Do you know how many cops there are? There's tons of them. Is there a couple of bad apples in there? Probably there's bad apples in any environment. Um, but I've've you know i think because those two bad apples or whatever get blasted into the media that everybody blank oh all you know all cops are bad or or all this group is bad because and that you know that's on both sides of the fence when you're talking politically so i won't go down that road i'm like i love the

seal teams there were just some bad actors who made some bad decisions and that's, that's the end of it, you know? And, um, yeah. And I try to keep that attitude. Yeah. It seems like a massive part of your career, but really you, you have, you had nearly 20 years of a lot of success and a lot of great things. And probably even though there's, uh, some heartache and some things that you saw that you maybe rather not see, but, uh, it sounds like,

you know, it was an illustrious career in a lot of ways. Oh yeah. It's, you know, I, you know, the stuff that I did in my career was,

is whatever. It's the, the men that I got to serve with. I got to walk amongst giants. I got to work with heroes. I mean, I've've lost i don't know how many friends um but it's to spit on that would be a disgrace to spit on that service is a is a disgrace to them and to the guys that i worked with i mean those guys are heroes there's and they're still heroes they're they're doing the job right now um and we you

know i we should be grateful that we have men and women that exist and that want that want to do that career you know from you know with all your experiences the friends that you said eventually that you've lost and all the experiences that you had in the military so far when navigating day-to-day life now as a civilian how do you look at life differently if you can remember like right before you joined the military and had all those experiences you had what what's your perspective now like like how do you go through your day-to-day and how do you like what goes on in your head oh that's a that'd be another hour long discussion but you know i i think that like transition out of the military is a very difficult thing uh for a lot of guys like no matter what you've gone through you know you're you're transitioning from 20 years of your life where most people are

20 plus years where most people at that point in their life have they've lived in the military longer than you know they haven't like that's been their life so coming out of that is definitely difficult in a way to you you want to find a new purpose you're you're no longer are serving in the military fulfilling your purpose whatever whatever that was now you have to find something else and And I think, um, guys struggle. I've struggled with trying to find out what that new purpose is that will give me the drive that I had to, you know, become a Navy SEAL or to, you know, do, do the things that I did. Um, but you know, I, I, I get, you know, it's, it's been good. I've, I took the last year, uh, wrote the book,

um, you know, as crappy as the whole COVID mess that happened. It sort of helped me out cause it kept me inside and I made me focus on the book and I got it, I got it done in a pretty good amount of time. Um, I try to,

uh, just keep a positive mindset, which is not easy all the time, especially with everything that we're inundated with constantly. So I'm negative. So, you know, I try to work on meditation, breathing, my workout. That's like I have to work out every day, some form or fashion. I'm pretty big into that.

And then what's really kept me grounded is my focus on my family. It's, you know, I spent the last 20 years away from them. You know, I wasn't around for my kids, like, growing up when they were little. I would just be in and out. So now it's like that's my main focus is to be here, be present, you know, and learn to sort of, you know, learn to be a stay-at-home dad, stay-at-home husband again, which it's a process, you know, and learn to sort of, you're learning to be a stay at home dad, stay at home husband again, um, which it's a process, you know? Yeah, we, I got kids and so does, uh, Andrew.

It certainly is a process. How were you able to stay connected to like, or were you able to stay connected to fitness, uh, and or nutrition, uh, through all, through all of this, you know, being in prison for a while, did you have access to anything? Are you just doing some squats or were you just not even thinking of, not even just your mindset, just not even, you know, in the frame of mind to think about those things? No, no, I was definitely thinking about those things in there. I think that's the one way,

one of the ways that helped me sort of cope with being in there. So I put myself on a pretty regimented schedule with what I had. So I just, I had a cell, nothing in there. I made workouts up with just calisthenics. I did a burpee workout every morning. This is the ultimate. So here at Slingshot and at Super Training, we say lift through it. This is like the ultimate lift through it story that I've ever heard. Yeah. Well, it's, but it, it helped me kept my mind right. You know, like if I,

if I didn't have that, yeah, I probably could have went down a real dark hole in there. Um, so I would use what I had. Um, you got supposed to get one outside. Uh, you got to go outside for an hour each day one hour and that was at night from 7 to 8 so we would go out they had two pull up bars and then one ollie bar that had

45 pound plates welded onto it so you are sharing that with 60 other prisoners which sort of sucks but um you know i can't i actually created a workout group with some of the other prisoners because they were like hey you want to get in shape so i was like hey man yeah you i ran workouts with them during that time you and which also then allowed me to have access to all the workout equipment because I had a group. I was able to work out that way.

So that was, you know, working out in there was huge. Now, the nutrition part was, this is actually pretty funny. So they don't feed you for shit in there. You get 20 minutes to eat your meal. You're only allowed the three meals a day. You're allowed nothing else in between. You can't have any food, nothing in your cell. The food that they do serve you is like the lowest grade quality, whatever, of meat, whatever they're making.

And they only give you these – they have other prisoners who are serving you. Those prisoners are only giving you a small portion. So I was losing weight in there for the first couple months real quick. I had to adapt to that environment. So I would have one guard that I made friends with sneak me in Copenhagen. And I would then baggy that up into a they had uh cleaning gloves i would bag it up to each glove and then i would slip it to the prisoners who were serving chow for double portions um and that's how i sort of tried to keep my nutrition in balance and like try and eat eat healthy you know i was like hey give me more meat do stuff like that so what a fucking meathead i love it you gotta adapt to your environment and make it work that's amazing

you know yeah i was curious about this real quick because you mentioned you were given a military lawyer initially but then you also mentioned that like later on yeah that's civilian lawyer so was you know i'd imagine that if the military you know they're trying to do something to you and then they give you a lawyer that seems kind of shady uh okay now you're getting into a whole nother realm of what we it's called uniform code of military justice the ucmj and just how broken that system is so the military assigns you a lawyer i got you know a navy jag you also have navy lawyers that are prosecuting against you uh then you also have a judge who's a navy lawyer that just was in long enough to become a judge. All those people work for each other.

So when you have, say, when the prosecution was doing all of this illegal shit to me, I, you know, it was evident. My JAG was very hesitant to call them out on anything because he's like, they might write my evals one day. I might work for them one day. So their careers are all on the line when it comes to doing their jobs, which right there, you will not get fair representation. So you're not getting somebody that's like fully invested in you and trying to,

you know, prove your innocence. You're getting someone that's like, oh, well, I'll help you out as much as I can as long as it doesn't hurt my career. And that happens to everybody in the military. I mean, when I got locked in military prison, I met a lot of people that didn't belong in there. I met a lot of people who were duped by this corrupt system that they

literally so i'll back up a second the military prison what we call that is a plea bargain factory so what they do is just like they did to me they throw guys in there before they're even charged threatening them like yep you're going away we're going to hold you in here um while you're in there awaiting your trial they'll constantly tell you like you know the case is done like you're guilty it's it's not looking good unless like we suggest you take a plea deal so guys at that point and you got to think a lot of people in the military cannot afford civilian lawyers so they they don't have the luxury of getting the best defense for them so guys at that point are sort of at a stalemate and they're like well i'll just take

the plea deal then if you know if i'm going to get something like oh and what they do is they threaten them at first with like 50 years like oh you're going to be in here for 50 years like oh unless you plead guilty and we'll only give you six and so that after you're leaving a 20 something you know a lot of these kids are like 21 years old as well because they popped on a piss test or something you know for smoking weed or you know they get thrown in oh yeah so they're weak they take the plea deal because they're like well 50 or six years i'll just take and that's i'll just take the six that's how the navy or the military ucmj keeps their prosecution rating just take and that's i'll just take the six that's how the navy or the military ucmj keeps their prosecution rating so high because that's just a win for them so what's

so other than having like the uh the stats for what's in it for them because you think if like a like a private prison you know they they'll have uh inmates and they basically can work for pennies on the dollar. What's in it for them to try to keep giving these plea deals to keep people locked up? So there's a lot of money made in the military prisons. So when you're in there, to even use the phone, have to have i mean i i excuse i don't forget the exact numbers but it was like a dollar a minute or a little less than that so you had to have you had to pay all this money to use the phone in there that money goes to the military prison so that therefore it's like it's better for them to keep as many prisoners in there. Um,

they also charge you if you want to pay all this stuff, they overcharge you for everything. Um, and that money goes directly to them. So there, there is sort of a hidden deal, you know, with the prosecution and the military prison,

like, Hey, we bringing you another batch of guys, like cool. Or we just lost, you know, a couple of guys just got out. Oh, we oh we got some guys to fill their spots it's uh it's pretty disgusting now i i know that's sort of like going down a rabbit hole but i mean i saw it firsthand it's it's there so that i think that's in their best interest to also keep you know the prosecution ratings high and then also keep guys locked up. How are you with your kids?

Are you able to instill some of the things you learned in the military that were maybe considered cold or hard? Or are you just a big softie and they run all over you? I'm a big softie. They definitely run all over me. um i'm a big softie they were they definitely run all over me i uh with my kids like especially with in the career field i was in um since like i said i was never home so when i was home i was like the fun time guy you know i was like hey let's do i'd spoil them where my poor wife was like pretty much a single mom raising them on her own and being like, you come home and you,

you don't discipline enough. You don't do this. And, uh, I, um, I've definitely, I'm,

that's, that's the growing part of this past year of being out. I'm like, all right, trying to be more, more present and disciplining them and like staying on top of them. And, also find that fine balance between,

you know, discipline is not yelling at them discipline is like sitting them down talking to them you know telling them like hey this is right or wrong definitely not trying to use the military approach at all you know if they want to join the military they'll get that there like mark mentioned you know when you when you do talk about the military you still have the so you still know that the good ideals are still there. Yeah. You haven't been like bad mouthing it.

So I'm actually curious, like when it comes to like, if your son, cause you said, I think you said your dad was in the army, correct? Yes. Okay. So like if your son wanted to join the military or, you know, we've got a lot of listeners that are probably considering, right? Um, what, what kind of things would you tell them to maybe think about? Cause it's not like, again, the military is bad. What happened to you is horrible, like horrible, you know, but that's not everything, right? So what should, what should one, uh, kind of think about before taking that leap? Um, well, I would definitely go in with a plan.

Um, so if you are thinking of joining, and I've told my son this as well, my oldest, I have an old son, he's 20, he's going to turn 21 this year. But so he was considering it. So I told him, I was like, I want to go with you. Just to double check. But to anybody else, I would say have a plan what's your motives for joining what are you joining for and it doesn't have to be you know I want to go to war shoot bad guys it's like maybe you want to learn

I mean you can pretty much learn any career path you want in the military and that's what I would say to people like hey get a career path that you can use when you get out it's going to set you up for success um you know i wouldn't go in with the mindset of i'm just going to stay in and do my 20 years i would take it chunk by chunk uh you know go in with that plan start executing that plan when you get in uh like say you want to be a welder. The Navy has

some of the top welding schools you can go to. Then when you get out, you can apply those skills. But then you never know. You might join and you actually might like the structure of the military. Because it is. There's sort of a comfort in it. You get used to it

and then you also know your schedule. you sort of know what's coming um and if you want to you know stay in for the 20 then i would uh start looking on you know ways to advance and to make as much money as you can in the military uh because that's the other thing i would tell people is like the pay is the pay is not as good as the recruiter is telling you it is. I mean, it's enough to survive,

but, and it'd make it tough to make you comfortable, but, uh, just be prepared for that as well. Um, but, uh,

yeah, that's, that's what I would tell people. I think that's the most important thing is have a plan before you join. When's your book going to be ready? Uh, so that's sort of the unknown right now so we um turned it into a dod it's uh so because i was a seal and because i wrote a book and talk about certain things uh it has to go through a dod review process so it goes to the pentagon and gets passed around until everybody approves it. And during that, they could be like, oh, you're not allowed to say this and sort of black out certain things in the book.

It's definitely taking a long time. It's been there since last September. And that's the one sort of frustrating thing is we already control that. We can't, you know, they're going to give it back when they give it back. frustrating thing is we are in control that we can't you know they're going to give it back when they give it back uh you know the big worry is because it doesn't make the navy look good um maybe somebody's holding on to it on purpose but i mean either way we i knew that it was going to take a while going into it we are hoping that and hoping and praying that within the next month month and a half they'll release it so uh once it's released from them, it'll be about another month of getting it ready to go to the pub date and be out.

So I'm hoping and praying this summer it's going to be out in stores. Is it frowned upon by some other military personnel maybe to, uh, speak out, uh, against, against the military or like, I mean, have you lost kind of friends over some of that kind of thing? I guess the book's not out yet, but does anyone give a shit about that or not really? Nope. And that's, I had a, uh, I had a very hard time writing a book because of that ideal. I grew up thinking that you should never write books about what you've done. You're the quiet professional. Um,

of course that is changing. You know, there's tons of seal books out. So I had, uh, I was like, Oh, I'm just another seal writing a book.

And I called my friends who are still in, uh, I talked to multiple of them. I was like, Hey, and they were like, no, everybody was on board.

Like you need to tell this story. This is not, this needs to be told to everybody. By you to everybody so everybody can hear the truth. I've gotten no pushback on it at all. Except I'm sure some of the higher ups are not going to be too happy about it. But it is what it is. I mean, it happened. Where can people continue to follow along with some of your life and your story? You've got Instagram and stuff like that. You want to share that with us? Yeah, so it's at Eddie underscore Gallagher at Instagram.

I also have our own website, theeddiegallagher.com. You can follow along there and see you know what I'm doing and I'm also promoting you know other businesses helping other businesses especially working with Redcon1 and Aaron Singerman who's just a phenomenal human being and I'm also

working with NineLine and I'm working with a tactical store that's local to me to Precision Tactical I'm making AR a tactical store that's local to me to Precision Tactical. I'm making ARs on there and selling them and also some brass knuckles. Yeah, and we're coming out with a pistol here

next week. So that's going really well, yeah. So we're going to continue to build on that. It's my Seek Battle brand. So we started getting that going last year and we're hoping to just expand it more this year. And that can all be found on your website? Yeah. Are we able to buy those weapons in California? Yep, we make them California

compliant if need be. Sick. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you. Hey, I appreciate it. thank you guys for having me on thank you awesome man that was there was a lot there i was very i i feel like um that guy's strong man yeah that like that prison group pretty much made a prison crossfit team yeah right um just uh must have been really brutal to go through all that and then to he still seems like he doesn't seem like he's like pissed off about it seems like he just is he seems like he's frustrated by it but uh yeah it didn't seem like it just seemed like

he's uh he like understands that if he does go crazy it's not gonna look good right right i you know for sure he wants to you know like you don't go through all that and you know have the that stoic face like that without knowing for sure that like this is what i have to do right now everyone's paying attention and watching right or just maybe maybe he just has that much control man like oh absolutely yeah you do something like when you have that type of job for 20 some odd years like either your personality hardens to be able to handle the stress or i mean you see some guys break right he's definitely not broken right so like i would assume that what he went through with all of this probably doesn't compare to what he's done and seen on the battlefield. I would assume that would just be my assumption.

I could be totally wrong, but I mean, shit. Yeah. What he said about, um, what he said about having a skill that you can utilize when you're out of the military.

I think that that was really, really useful for anybody that's thinking about it. Cause I have a friend right now who's been in for, I think, nearly 20 years. And with his profession of what he has, it's not very useful. I guess he could perhaps continue to pursue it, but it just doesn't really make any sense. It's not a very common job. Obviously there's like leadership traits that like, if somebody was to apply here and they said like,

I don't know what I can do, but you know, I was a Marine. I'd be like, well, I'd imagine that you can do something, you know, same if someone came here and they said, I, I don't have much education, but I'm a black belt in judo.'d be like all right well that shows a sign of something you know or a deadlift 900 pounds that's what college is pretty much i mean like when people apply for jobs stamp next to your name kind of thing yeah like does people apply for jobs and their major has nothing to do with that job but some employers look at it like well you did four years of this and you completed it. Like that's so,

I mean, shoot. You had to show up on time. You had deadlines, you had different things you needed. And with the military, you're just thinking, shit,

this guy, you know, must be, uh, you know, put together. But I think that's important. Like what,

what's the skill that you want to learn and what's something that you may want to be involved in even, uh, even when you do retire. So, man, there's a lot of great stuff from, uh, Eddie today. and what's something that you may want to be involved in even when you do retire. So, man, there's a lot of great stuff from Eddie today. And I loved his kind of lift through it story, how he was still training and 135 pounds to share with 60 other people and how he got a little extra protein. Yeah.

Talk about protein leveraging using tobacco. He was using tobacco to leverage the protein intake that's sick get another scoop coming out of the joint all jacked man that's crazy and then you know the one hour that he would get outside was when the sun was already gone 7 8 p.m that was the only time he gets to go outside prison is fucking and dang man like it's it's it's crazy i mean you hear all the crazy stuff that goes on with the justice system here in the u.s but then like even military the military yeah justice system right like just the the pure corruption it's scary to think about i hope that

they don't like take out too many of his words from that book but i think because if they have the power to do that then you just just wonder, what are we not able to understand or get from it? But it'll be a good book when it's out, I assume. The prison system is a good thing to review. We talk often on the show about the education system and

how I think all three of us are believers that hey, it should be looked at. Let's just open up some dialogue of let's make some changes to the education system the way that it currently is uh but man our prison systems like and i don't pretend to have a bunch of solutions to it but uh are there things that could be done that could be helpful that are probably fairly easy to uh implement probably but are there things that if you implement this thing now you're cutting out that other thing that gives the prison money and you know you run into different things but

could you get outside during sunlight could you always make sure that the men and women of the prison get to see the sun set and the sun rise you know it just little little shit like just you know hey you have an opportunity to go out for 15 minutes to see you know and but i don't know like it's tough because there are some people that deserve to be there yeah absolutely and then you're like fuck you know the conversation we had yesterday with with Settlage you know it was like yeah go you I don't know if you want to retell it but like the wrestling thing when you're like you know you have one of your uh the guys that you coach like hey I want you to go kill this guy on oh yeah he's across the mat you need to take him out and then he'd like dump him on a neck or something and now that kid's paralyzed like whoa

like I wanted you to take him out but not not like that. Yeah. So with, you know, like prison system. Right, right. It's like, yeah, we want it to be a little bit better, but maybe not for that guy right there. Yeah, right, right. You know, it's, it's, it's. Yeah, you're supposed to be. It's really hard. Supposed to be locked up.

There are a lot of people that say that, yeah, you're, you're no longer a normal citizen. Right. But my, my reaction to that would just be uh oh i guess i got two things on that one would be um you know we're only as good as we treat our people that commit crimes and people that are less fortunate so it's never good to look down on people it's never and then also every i believe that everyone deserves multiple chances you know i, I believe that. I don't, I mean, look, maybe saying everybody is maybe a stretch, you know, because there's some people who just have really done horrific stuff that we can kind of just face the facts with some things that are just so horrific that you're like, there's no rehabilitation

process for this person, you know? And that's where the ideas of the death penalty and shit come into mind. And it's like, I don't know if that's right or wrong or, um, uh, you know, and then you end up with so many other issues of like, did the guy actually do what you, you know, is the guy going to the electric chair is the guy getting killed, uh, for something that he didn't, it gets to be really messy really quick so i i'm not a fan of the death penalty because of that if it was simple and we're like yeah that

guy did this and we knew that and it then uh i would be a fan of it because i don't know what else the other the person's uh reason is to be around any longer and if there are threats to everybody um but taking someone's life is a is a fucking wild thing and imagine just like eddie today uh being accused of that but also being somebody that has killed a lot of people like we did i didn't really ask him flat out but i'm sure he's uh whether it's indirect you know you know, set out to detonate a bomb or through a grenade or not sure if you killed somebody, maybe never even saw or identified that you actually were the one that did that. Or was it in Seamus grenade that did it with my grenade or yours? Maybe you don't really know all the time, but I'm sure that he's participated and been part of his team killing other people.

Oh, absolutely. And then, but then to be wrongfully accused of like a war crime is weird the whole thing is weird like you throw a grenade and then people are wounded and they're really messed up he said everybody died except for that one guy and then you have to help them like that seems weird but it also seems savage to like go and just you know run up and stab the guy when he clearly can't defend himself anymore but what if he can defend himself enough to where he can he can grab a knife out of his pocket or yeah you know i mean yeah it could

quickly turn to oh you you didn't kill him and then he had a knife and he killed one of your guys that's a different story now and now he's getting you know and more shit because we lost one of our guys right like holy crap what a lot of messy stuck between a rock and a hard place yeah messy situation yeah yeah when i was like when i was like again reading about all this stuff like there's this knee-jerk reaction to be like oh gosh, that's like, there's, this is, this is horrible. What's wrong with this guy? He can't do that. Taking a picture with a dead person and stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. But then like when I was, when I backed off and been like, okay, well, you know, you always got to try and put yourself in that situation. Do you think you'd be capable? Well, doing all of that over and over and over again, it's almost like, you know, like you start to joke around about certain things. Like when we, I had a, there was a kind of a meeting that I had with some guys when, when this stuff was going on last year with like George Floyd. Right. So a group of like white guys and white guys and black guys met

and we all just kind of talked about the situation that was going on and uh we we taught we some some of myself and some of the other guys like we were laughing at situations when we got like pulled over or some bad situations that we had with police and all of us were laughing about it like we just thought it was funny because it shit happens a lot. And some of those, the white guys were like, how can you guys laugh about this? That's so horrible. Like, well, it's like, well, this shit's kind of common. And I was like, well, that's kind of the same shit here.

Like when you, when you see things so often and you have to do things so often, well, this is just, it's just it's just another body just taking a picture like it's it's dark humor within that context and it's tough like it's like you would never want to think that you would have the ability to do something like that but hey if you're put in that situation you never really know and if you're conditioned at all like if you've been through the situation multiple times, you know, maybe somebody that has been pulled over that has been in those situations before, maybe like, here we go again. You know, the cop's going to give me shit. You know, I think my son and my dad had some sort of thing where they got pulled over and my son was driving. I don't think my son had his license on him and I forget exactly what happened,

but, uh, and maybe my dad wasn't with, I can't even remember, really remember, but they just let him go. They're like your tail, your taillights out,

you know, like, and, they didn't give him a fix a ticket, nothing, you know? And, uh,

so we talked about that and i said i said you know they they're probably just like you're a 17 year old kid you're with your grandpa like he's like i couldn't believe it the guy like i didn't have my license with me he's like i got really nervous because i was like oh shit like i'm gonna get a ticket or something's gonna happen and the guy just said hey you just you got to fix your taillight and don't drive without your license. You need to have your license with you. Just got a warning. And I said, you know, you got to think about that

in comparison to what we're seeing on TV and what you hear other people experience. And he was like, yeah. He's like, I think it would have been different if I was a different color. And I said, possibly, yeah. Possibly could be. It's good to know that kind of stuff.

And it's good to just to examine that and just say, hey, like, are these things that we can make better? Like, it seems like there's a lot of things that we can work on and make better. And with all the stuff that Eddie went through, it's all stuff like I've never even thought about that before. I'm not really thinking about friends that I have getting pulled over and being harassed by police officers because I never went through it. It's not that I don't care about it. It's just like I don't know much about it until you bring it up or until someone that I'm close to brings it up. And I'm like, holy fuck, that really sucks. When Eddie started bringing up this other side of the military, like military prison, if you would ask me before the show, hey, what do you know about military prison?

I would say zero. And I still don't know anything about it, but at least, you know, I learned a little bit more about it and everything he talked about sounded so backwards and wrong. And like, I'm sure there's, I'm sure it exists for a reason. And I'm sure that there are certain things they execute that work really well. But at the same time, almost everything he said sounded strange and odd, even like the lawyer that he got and the lawyer was far away and like, just, it's like, man, these are people that signed up, you know, to

do a job for our country and I think everyone should be able to have some sort of representation but if you figure with these people in particular that they would get a little bit you know they would get a little bit extra help yeah yeah or at least uh fuck have a psychiatrist hey man i came i came in to see how you're doing because this is a lot to handle you want to talk about it you know like just that i mean they couldn't they couldn't bring one one person in to assist or you know hey we're we're going to send a psychiatrist out to your family because we know how hard this must be nothing got nothing nothing back from that the fact that it was every everyone that he could have seen or did see and like the lawyer was kind of on their side um obviously this is not even

close but my first job where like i had to do a lot of typing i developed this weird uh like ganglion cysts whatever like out of nowhere and i was like this kind of hurts i don't know it ended up being nothing yeah but i was like i think i could i don't think I got insurance now. I want to see what this is all about. And I was forced to see, I forgot what it's called, but basically the company doctor. And they're like, oh, yeah, that has nothing to do with typing. I was like, I think it does. And they're like, no, no, no, it has nothing to do with your job or what your daily tasks are and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, can i see a normal doctor like well

if you do it like they made it really hard not comparing the two yeah so but what i'm saying is like it i felt that that was unfair and the fact that they gave him you know again somebody on their team like that is wild like holy shit like how is that okay and on top of that i don't again just like you know we've been saying like i don't know how this shit works but i think it's insane that the military prisons make money off of the inmates if they're even called them inmates i'm not sure what the the terminology is so i apologize for that but i don't know man that that seems pretty freaking wild to me that they you know again like mark said they serve the country something happened you mentioned smoking pot yeah yeah testing positive for like drugs yeah that's yeah that's

um and you think about the situations they're in like i smoke a little bit of weed and feel okay i'm sorry great get that prescribed to everybody like hey you need to mellow out a little bit all right here's some weed gummies or something but yeah and of course then there's like the other side where maybe somebody does belong there but i i don't know i just i think that's that's fucking crazy like hey you signed up then can we at least give them a i don't know a phone call you know like that i i don't you know again i mean zero experience zero knowledge on the whole system it just as a civilian from the outside looking in it appears to be really fucked up yeah and i mean like like mark said like there's

probably some reasons that some things are put in place like in military prison you've got to imagine that well some of those guys have probably done some some shit yeah no like so so it's not like everyone in there's you know a victim but i mean when when he was mentioning like the fact that yeah you are given this military lawyer a lot of young guys don't have the money to to get a civilian lawyer how scary is that it's like everything is it's there's this everything is against you and you don't have a choice but to just go with what is given to you and take like take that you can't really defend yourself 60 years or six years what what do you think is gonna be more you know enticing that reminds me of like you know i mean you heard the central park five right those yeah it was back in the 90s or late 80s 90s these five black kids were um they were

put in jail because they were they they said that they raped a woman in in like you know in a park which they were actually innocent of but what they did is they brought these kids in individually and they're like hey if you don't say you did this then you're gonna get this yeah with no supervision and they got these kids to admit to something and to tell stories different from each other um by force like it's it's very reminiscent of that and it's just fucked up yeah yeah a lot of similarities there i didn't want to i was going to talk to you after the show because i just didn't want to turn people off to that but yeah it does seem like when the cards keep getting stacked against you it reminds me a lot of similarities there. I didn't want to, I was going to talk to you after the show because I just didn't want to turn people off to that. But yeah, it does seem like when the cards keep getting stacked against you, it reminds me a lot of, you know, when the black person's on trial and it's like, you know, there's a lot of shit going on. You hear about that all the time.

Very conveniently, you know, against the individual and, you know, but again, that's another conversation another day. Sorry. That's another conversation. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. It's, it's, uh,

it's all stuff that you don't know much about it until you hear about it from, you know, uh, and then if, if, uh, somebody does talk about it, then it sounds like they're complaining and you're like,

that's not true. Yeah. You didn't get pulled over by a cop. That didn't happen. Like, not like that. Like, what are you talking about?

Why, why would a police officer physically grab you and and remove you from the car when you were just speeding you know you're like hey it sounds unbelievable something right when you hear somebody say something but you know you see it happen time and time again you hear about it time and time again it's like okay well there's probably truth to this we should probably investigate this we should work on making it better but a lot of the stuff that's in our society, it's just been here forever. Why is this still done this way?

Oh, it's because of the way we've always done it. And like, well, that's fucking dumb. It's not a good excuse. Yeah, that sounds pretty stupid. I know it might be tough to implement some change, but it sounds like we'd be better off for it. Anyway, Andrew, take us on out of here. I will. Real quick, that picture you just sent, shout out, and huge, did you make it?

Way short. Congrats. There we go. It's a once-a-second opportunity. Everybody deserves a second shot. There we go. And. Oh, it's in there.

How the hell did that go? Jesus. Okay. We're not very good. Okay. We're not good. Congrats to another, I believe he's a Navy SEAL, Shane, and his wifey, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon.

What's that little thing's name? Any idea? I do not know. Looks like a little burrito in that picture. Can you bring the picture up? I would have to email it myself. Are we talking about a baby? I can.

Actually, you know, let's pretend that it's up right now. Yeah. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, she had her baby, I think, sometime early yesterday. What's his name? We didn't get a name, but congratulations. Ooh, he does look like a little burrito. A little burrito. Aww, cute.

Congrats, guys. You did a really good job. Look at those. Baby's cute. Look at those cheeks. Damn. So, on that note, thank note thank you everybody for checking out today's episode thank you p montes for sponsoring today's episode uh links down in the description below or the podcast show notes promo code power project to get you 25 off your order and free uh two-day shipping on any orders of 99 or more please make sure you follow the podcast at

mark bow's power project on instagram at MB Power Project on Twitter. My Instagram Twitter clubhouse is at I am Andrew Z. And Seema, what you got? And Seema Inyang on Instagram, YouTube, clubhouse, TikTok, and Seema Inyang on Mark. Today was a big day. We planted a flag in the ground and started a supplement brand called Within You.

Thank you guys for everybody that has bought the Steak Shake. By the time you listen to this, it will be gone. But today also is a special day to me because it would have been my brother Mike's 50th birthday. So props to Mr. Mad Dog for forcing me to lift weights when I was a kid and I didn't want to. And to kind of get this whole entire thing started in the first place. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. Catch you guys later.

Bye.