Sea Control - Sea Control 557 – CIMSEC’s Own Jared Samuelson

Episode Date: December 8, 2024

Links1. “Operational Tripolitan,” by Jared Samuelson, CIMSEC, December 13, 2019. 2. Volunteer for CIMSEC.3. Write for CIMSEC. Mentioned Podcasts (in order): 4. Sea Control 380: Underwriters of the United States with Dr. Hannah Farber.5. Sea Control 460: Hulks of the Hamoaze with Emma Haddon.6. Sea Control 269: General David Berger, Commandant of the United States Marine Corps.7. Sea Control 219: Admiral Karl Schultz, Commandant of the United States Coast Guard.8. Sea Control 169: Larry Bond and Sebastian Bruns on Harpoon, Red Storm Rising and Tom Clancy.9. Sea Control 440: The Wager with David Grann.10. Sea Control 20: Byan McGrath on Maritime Strategy.11. Sea Control 260: The Best Defense is a Good Offense with ENS Kara Dowling.12. Sea Control 203: A Near Miss with LTJG (ret.) Ken Sanger.13. Sea Control 256: Reporting From the Sea with Ian Urbina.

Welcome aboard the Sea Control podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. I'm Walker Mills, and my guest today is Sea Control's own executive producer and co-host, Jared Sandlinson. Jared has been at the helm of Sea Control for almost five years and hosted hundreds of Sea Control episodes, as well as taking care of some of our back-end stuff on the website. Today, we're going to talk about what he's learned and some of his favorite moments on Sea Control. Jared, we know your voice, but what can you tell us? Can you tell us more about your bio? Do you know my voice? Because I usually just sit here quietly. and the thought of having to actively contribute to the conversation like a non-reactive way today

is absolutely terrifying it's a high propensity for a ricky bobby type situation over the course of the next 30 minutes except instead of not knowing what to do with my hands i'm gonna not know what to do with my voice or my brain but yeah so i am a career surface warfare officer I was a what you call a crudez sailor so I start out on a cruiser in Hawaii the BMD test ship USS Lake Erie which is a just waiting to be decommissioned now back in San Diego I was on a German frigate for three years as an exchange officer I was the operations officer on a destroyer out of Norfolk and then I commanded a couple different PCs but the one I spent the most time on was USS Whirlwind, which has since been decommissioned and sold off. So anyways, that's

the source of a lot of the small ship content. If you notice a theme of me sort of promoting small ship captaincy, small ship leadership, that's where a lot of that comes from is that background. But over the course of my 21 years in the Navy, I deployed to the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the South Atlantic, the Arabian Gulf, a lot of sea time, especially in the early part of my career. And then I've been in a series of staff jobs over about the last 10 years that I've been able to see a little bit more strategic view of the Navy in that time, as well as work with some of the interagency and some of our foreign partners. So that's all my professional side. On the personal side, I am married and I have two little kids. As a reminder to the listeners,

all opinions are our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might otherwise be associated with. So Jared, great to have you on. Let's start at the beginning. How did you get started with SimSec and with SeaControl? So I was submitting an article to SimSec's Fiction Week contest back in, it had to have been 2019 at this point. I knew very little about SimSec. One of my co-workers at the German Führungsakademie had sort of tipped me to the website. And then as I'm on my way out there, I wrote an article for War on the Rocks. And then I started writing a fiction piece around about the same time to eventually be published called Operation Tripolitan about LCSs basically being used as fast amphibs in a fictitious assault on a

series of islands. But I had to wait to get clearance to publish this article. And this thing was being forwarded around from person to person, reviewing it to see that I had not disclosed anything, which at that point, I had not touched any classified information for years at that point. And none of the stuff that I was discussing was classified in any way. But that process takes quite a long period of time. And I started to get anxious as a deadline approach. And from looking online at Twitter, I kind of figured out Jimmy Drennan was somehow related to SimSec, though I didn't really understand in what capacity. I saw him retweet something. And I reached out to him and asked him like, Kate, are you able to

put me in touch with whoever is running this contest to let them know that I have something coming, but it may be up to the very last second before I get the approval. And he wrote back to me and said, well, not, not only am I a SimSec client, I'm also the club president. But he said, yes, I'm the president. Let me connect you with this person. Hey, by the way, have you ever thought about, we've been thinking about bringing back our Sea Control podcast. Would you want to do it. At this point, I was a little bit of a career transition having just turned down command afloat. And that's a challenging moment in a surface warfare officer's career when you've been selected for something that you've kind of been pointing at this entire time. So you're in a

little bit of a search for meaning, if you will, because you started in the organization, set all on this thing, and now you've been set to attain it and you turn it down and you turn it down for good reasons, but now you're kind of thinking about, it's like, okay, what is next? What am I going to do next? And I had a job that I was going to go do, which was fine. I mean, it wasn't bad. It wasn't good. It was just a job that I was going to go do while I waited for whatever the next thing that was going to be to me. But I immediately got excited about the idea of doing the podcast and my brain started to fill up with kind of like, oh, I could talk about this and I could interview this person. I could do this. And I already have a journalism background. So

my BA is in print journalism from the University of Southern California. So it seemed like a very natural thing to me. And around about this time, there was an article that published, I can't remember if it was the New York Times, the New Yorker, Wall Street Journal. I forget who published it, but it was like three journalists got together, tried to create a podcast. And the gist of the story when something along the lines of like we set out to set up a podcast this is what happened and basically they did three episodes and they found it to be too much work and quit doing it like that is the kind of thing that when someone forwards that to me i take it as sort of a personal challenge it's like absolutely not not on my watch and here we

are 400 episodes later that's how we got here so quid pro quo walker why do you hate the intro song Why do I hate the intro song? I think it's grating and it's, yeah, I have to say this, but this isn't an interview of me. My first interaction with the Sea Control podcast was I found it. I don't remember if it was recommended to me or what. I was like, oh, that sounds like a cool thing that I want to listen to. I'm, you know, a young lieutenant, and I'm interested in, like, self-development. Like, let me listen to something about maritime security. And I didn't make it past the intro. That was my first experience with SimSec. The intro was so grating that I didn't listen to the episode, and I didn't come back to it until much later. So there you have it.

But I love it so much. I mean, I picked it out before the sea shanty boom, the mid-COVID sea shanty boom, just because my initial focus was going to be very much naval history centric. And we kind of diverted from that. But that was the reason why I went with the sea shanty. I actually love that song. But no offense taken. Music is a very personal thing. So I understand it's not everybody's.

But many, many thanks to John and Kimber's Men for allowing us to use that. I love that song. And I would also say that having talked to people about it, some people do love it. Um, so Jared, what, what are some of your favorite, uh, interviews and some of your favorite interview moments with sea control? And I'm not, I know I just asked you to pick favorites, but like I, you know, to all the people that we've worked with, you know, everybody's, all the interviews are good and we don't publish bad interviews. Um, we like them all, but what are some of your favorites yeah first of all i'm not going to critique anyone as part of this um except for walker because you're here face to face with me uh okay so favorite and

i initially only came up with one and then as i was sitting here doing sort of my last minute prep that's when the all the inspiration strikes you and i wrote down like six more things that came up as i started how do you only how do you only come up with one you've done like hundreds of episodes and you have one i need the last that last bit of pressure to sort of release everything so once i started sitting down and taking a few more notes i was like oh yeah that did happen um so i'll start with the the first one we we get to interview like a lot of high ranking uh people with a lot of notoriety so you know i got to interview the commandant of marine corps you got to interview the commandant of the coast guard i can't remember did you also interview

chief of staff of the air force i didn't that would be cool though if he uh ever wants to come on all right well if he's interested if you're listening sir now's the now's the time um so we get to interview these high-ranking officials but that is not to me like what the most interesting thing is the interesting thing to me is when you find a person who has very low notoriety or zero notoriety or is basically just at the beginning of the career and they turn out to be just incredible and the one that i always come back to is emma hatton who came on uh sea control 460 her work was called master um hulks of the humose it was about uh these british hulks the the ships had basically been stripped down but they're still sitting there and they're using

them to in process people into the royal navy back and i want to say that i may be slightly often the time periods here, but in the 17 and 1800s. And whether or not your guest is quote unquote, like a good guest. And again, that's not meant to be a critique of anyone. So some people are just much better speaking than others. They just are. And when you get one of these people who's just a naturally gifted speaker, because all scholars know their subject inside and out, some are just better speakers. And Emma was working on her master's at that point. I think that eventually became her master's. She completed that and is now doing more work. And I could be confused at where she is in her career there, but I don't think, believe that she had actually

completed her master's at that point, but it felt like discovering a prodigy. Like that's what that interview felt like. She was so good and so engaging. I just, some of those interviews, you sit back and it's like you had your hair blown back, like incredible getting a talk to this person. So there were a few others that were real highlights for me. One was Dr. Hannah Farber. She was Sea Control 380. She had written a book about called Underwriters of the United States about insurance, which sounds like it would be a little bit of a tedious topic, but again, just incredibly engaging speaker incredible topic um larry bond for sea control 169 and i went back and interviewed him specifically about wargaming but to get to talk to him at that point about tom

clancy was one of the sort of dream come true moments and then david gran uh who had written his book the wager but he also wrote what was the movie that just came out with leonardo dicaprio I'm blanking killers of the flower moon killers of the flower moon so Hollywood blockbuster the wager is also going to be made into a movie by Martin Scorsese New York Times best-selling author great book just read it yes just incredible book uh excellent interview could not have been nicer you know New York Times best-selling author there's no reason for that man to spend time on a Sunday talking to me, but he did. And he was just a complete gentleman about it. So some of my favorite moments, though, are things that I found amusing. The very first weekend that I was doing

C-Control, I scheduled six interviews. I said to myself, I want this bank of material that I can draw on so I don't feel pressured to immediately schedule more or feel like I'm falling behind. I'll do. One of these per week, so I'll schedule these six. The very first interview I did was with then commander, now captain, retired Bill Schaftley. Bill and I go back quite a ways. I was in the prospective commanding officer course as a still very junior lieutenant, and Bill was at that point selected for captain, not yet wearing captain, proctoring that course. So we had a mentor-mentee relationship. I still call them sir the entire time. I would correspond with him about my career and where I was at in my career after this. But I

told him who else I was interviewing. And one of the people that I was going to interview later on that day was Brian McGrath. He goes, you're interviewing McGrath? Man, he's smart. Good luck. I was like, what are you trying to tell me, sir? He may have got a bill. And I was like, do you think I'm a moron? It's like, that was not at all what he meant. That was not at all what he meant. But it just, it sent me back in my chair for a second. I was like, oh, oh no. What have I gotten myself into? As if I wasn't intimidated enough already at that point. Later on, I had the opportunity to interview, she was basically a brand new Ensign. I take a lot of pride in trying to make my guests feel comfortable especially if there might be a perceived power dynamics of

people who are junior to me if you're a commander talking to an ensign there's just a an unspoken power dynamic that you have to work very hard to try to make that person feel comfortable so they don't feel like they're within necessarily the strictures of the military hierarchy as we try to have this conversation because what i care about is this incredible work that she had done i realize i'm using the word incredible a lot i'm sorry that part of my the adjective part of my brain is locked up. But she had done this amazing work that expanded on the work that Wayne Hughes had done. And I get this request because I save all of this audio in a Google Drive in a certain place where one, I can parse it out to the editors for them to get it, but I can also

share it with the guests before publishing so they can listen back to themselves and be sure that they didn't misspeak or anything. And a couple hours after I finished interviewing this ensign, I get this request to review the audio. And I write back from a name that I don't recognize, but with the same last name as this woman that I interviewed. I was like, is this blank? I'm not going to use the name here. It's like, oh, no, this is her mom. She just shared the audio with me. I'm just a big fan living vicariously through her. And that made me laugh quite a bit. The last one was I interviewed Lieutenant Junior Grade Retired Ken Sanger back in Episode 203. And sort of the basis for that interview is David Sanger, who writes for The New York Times.

And I think he still works up at the Naval War College periodically as an adjunct. He had posted this tweet about his dad's naval career. And his dad was a fighter controller on a destroyer or destroyer escort off the coast of Okinawa. So pretty heavy surface-to-air combat. Heavy. Kamikazes coming in, just constant alert. And I think at one point in that battle, we're losing something like three-plus ships per day, and Nimitz eventually flies out to talk with the ground commanders to see how much longer this is going to take.

But he was also one of the first people to pull into the port of Hiroshima after the bomb. might have been nagasaki but i think i believe it was hiroshima i said it's been a while uh we've done like 300 since then so i don't mean to misspeak there you can go back and listen to the episode but david was super enthusiastic connect me with his dad helped steward him through the process of getting the audio recorded and i don't think david will mind me sharing this but ken passed like within a year of having that recorder and i got a very nice note from david afterwards saying it's like hey the fact that this podcast exists out there there's you know one of the last times that he was really able to coherently communicate a lot of things here and

you captured a nice piece of his personal history so that that was probably proudest moment we're talking proudest moments wow yeah the listeners can't see but i'm i'm i'm taking notes over here and i'm writing down all these all these episodes so that i can go back and find them and we'll make sure to put the put the links to all the episodes that jared references um below the show so what are what are some things that you've learned through all of this like personal growth uh or you know most interesting bits of maritime history etc so i have a couple things that i have taken away from this. The first is that in a real peer-to-peer flight, even in a non-peer-to-peer flight, anything that floats is useful. And a lot of my information for that comes from looking at

all these stories from World War II, because it's just one after another comes out about these small ships or weird ships that did something that was absolutely crucial to a much larger scale event. So if you're talking about all those fights that are happening in the channel in the lead up to the D-Day invasion, so the Battle of the Sein Bay really begins, I may be mispronouncing the name of that river, maybe Sein Bay, starts in 1943. And it's British motor torpedo boats crewed by a lot of guys who were civilian yachtsmen in their lives. And I don't mean like yachtsmen like we think of today, like big fancy yacht down on the waterfront in San Diego. I mean, some guy basically bought a kit, put this thing together, and would take it out in his little local river on the weekends or just off the coast on the weekends and kind of cruise around with it. But these weren't men of wealth and power or anything. They were just guys fighting their German counterparts in e-boats in the dark, no radar, just shooting guns at each other, running around in the middle of the night.

The Brits trying to land agents, in some cases land supplies, do scouting, protect minefields that were being put in, and the Germans trying to counter all of that. There's also a lot of stories about things in the eastern Mediterranean, up in the Aegean Sea, of people using sailing barks to land agents on these little islands into coves, inlets, bays. and it made me think a lot about lcs uh i'm not i'm not saying that lcs is the solution to any great problems uh oh there well it's not it's not meant to be to ride plane guard with the aircraft carrier do we have you on record as being pro lcs jared i'm pretty pro lcs like look the thing is out there and it exists so you should find a use for it and i would say that if you walk on to the independence class lcs which is the trimaran hall one i'm not going to defend type one um i will defend type two if you walk onto that thing

into the hangar bay and look at the cavernous space before you and the massive flight deck above you and then consider the handling characteristics of that vessel and what it able to do and its maneuverability and you can't come up with a single use for that in a peer slash near peer conflict i would say that's kind of a failure of imagination and if the ships are going to exist we should use them and they exist so we should use them um the type one i can't really i can't really offer you anything on i don't have A lot of experience with that hull form. And I get it. Like, look, we all wish they were more reliable. We all wish they were something different than what they are. But sailors crew those ships. Sailors would make those ships work in some very specific mission sets that I think would be useful in a fight. so there's a few lessons from the black sea that i mean i have three quarters of an article written

about this that i don't know that i'm ever going to get to publish unless i get a little bit more time to do research research but my theory for the black sea is that it's actually taught us very few new lessons about naval warfare a lot of the things that we see there are things that have happened in other conflicts, but it does reinforce a couple of old lessons, and that is the importance of damage control, importance of vigilance or discipline. So again, you can go back to the Second World War and the British fleet, like the British, the Royal Air Force is kind of swept from the skies in the eastern Mediterranean, and the British fleet is still there, but with no air cover. And there are multiple stories of British watch officers basically just having

mental breakdowns because of the need to maintain vigilance at all times against air attack, because that eternal vigilance is kind of the only thing that's going to save them. And if you're not able to maintain that vigilance, you will see, or if you never have that vigilance to begin with, because you don't have any discipline, that is kind of what you see playing out in the Black Sea is just one Russian vessel after another gets surprised by these U.S. fees. And it's not just that they're surprised because those things are difficult to see,

is that they then underreact after that. You don't see the puff of smoke from them lighting off another engine to go to high speed. You don't see them blazing away with small arms, which is probably your primary argument against a target like a USV. You don't see any of that sort of reaction. And the damage control piece is like, look, It's not exactly proud moments when two U.S. Navy ships are being hit by merchant ships, but both those ships stayed afloat with some pretty significant damage and were brought back home and made whole again. It may not have been on the timeline that we all wanted to see it as far as the recapitalization of those, but the fact that we were able to keep them afloat and then look at sort of the damage that we've seen some other navies take in this timeframe.

It says to me that damage control remains, there's a reason why every sailor on a ship, their very first qualification is basic damage control, because that's what they're going to be tasked to do in a fight. The last lesson is that, and it's been a consistent point of feedback that I've received over the course of four plus years, especially as we've sort of expanded the scope of the things that we talk about. um there's much more going on in the maritime domain than most people are aware of uh most people are aware of their very specific niche i'm talking about surface warfare we kind of think yeah we're focused on our mariner skills we're focused on our war fighting but that's not actually what we spend the preponderance of our time doing we spend the preponderance of our time doing leadership and administration which is fine that's not a complaint but all those things together take up so much time that we kind of forget about everything outside of the lifelines

of our ship and don't realize so i have told this story multiple times on here but i'm over in the arabian gulf as a commanding officer of a pc and i'm getting these plaudits from my commodore for having pointed out that we figured something out about the shrimp fishing season and where these fishing vessels were clustered in the Arabian Gulf as we're going around observing pattern of life. And I come back on land and I meet up with my Coast Guard CO counterparts, Anna McNeil among them, one of our hosts here. And I'm sort of explaining what I figured out relating this very proudly about what a brilliant fish tactician I am. And all these Coast Guard people are looking at me like morons because one of their professional competencies is fisheries

management. And of course, they've known this the entire time. And what have I been doing with my time up to this point? So that was a real genesis point for wanting to sort of expand the scope of the podcast. It's like, look, you can learn about the vast array of things that happen out on the water i mean your interview with uh ian ian urbina on outlaw ocean the outlaw ocean yeah he has a great many great examples of just the things that go on out on the high seas that no one is aware of because there is no communications when you're out there there's extremely limited communication yeah and coasties for the win we've done we've like that has been one of my takeaways from all the Sea Control episodes, like, wow, the Coast Guard is really

killing it, and they do so much more than we appreciate. Jared, do you have any advice for folks who are interested in maritime security or who might want to get involved with Sea Control or with SIMSEC or with similar types of organizations, people who, you know, listeners to the podcast who want to, you know, do something a little bit more or contribute beyond just, you know, listening when we put out episodes. So what I would tell you to do it, because we always need volunteers, it's a volunteer organization. People, especially when I started, would say, why doesn't SimSec sponsor that?

SimSec could host that. I was like, well, one, we have no physical location. And if I were to describe the organization to you, it's kind of three raccoons in a trench coat. And which raccoon I am varies based on the day. It's like how you rank your raccoon. So I may be one day I may be raccoon number two. One day I may be raccoon number three. I don't know. But what I would tell you is like the benefits of a volunteer organization, you have to go in eyes wide open that the benefits are not tangible things, tangible or fungible. Okay, so I'm not going to get a bunch of money out of this. What I will get out of this. You're not going to get any money out of this.

You're not going to get any money out of this. You're not going to get any money out of it. You're going to lose money because you're probably. Zero dollars. You're going to lose money because I bought this sweet podcast microphone, which I'll now use to do calls with my mother and stuff. but what you do will get out of it is the most ridiculous networking opportunity you will ever experience because you're going to have simsec behind your name so when you reach out and you say i am the executive producer i am a host the center for international maritime

security is sea control podcast that'll open a lot of doors for you coming on burger did not agree you know to an interview with me because of my good looks he interviewed me because he's aware of the work that simsec does i have sat in a room at west and heard him quote from one of your articles while we're there so people read this publication there's a lot of credibility but also gives you an opportunity to follow up with these people and develop longer-term relationships with them. So that is kind of the number one benefit that you're going to get out of it. You just have to understand. The other thing with hosting this is you're kind of creating your own PME course for yourself over the course of time. What do I want to learn about? Who do I want to talk to

about this? And then you get to have a one-on-one conversation with them. How often do you get that opportunity? Even in PME, you don't get that opportunity. You're sitting in a room with 60 other people who also have questions. So these kinds of opportunities, again, it costs nothing to reach out and say that you're interested in doing it. And then it's just a matter of doing the work. And where most people stumble, where you read about those three people from the New Yorker article I mentioned earlier, it's like, they just stumble on the logistics. Like, well, I'm writing a one-page frame to do this podcast interview. It's like, oh man, that's so much work. Like, is it, though? It's one page with five questions and some intro and outro verbiage and hanging the refs there.

That's going to make my life easier. Refs being references, not referees. Probably does get easier after you've done a couple hundred of them, Jared. I mean, yeah, like the first one is always the hardest, right? Once you've turned it into a process, it goes very quickly. But people also get hung up on the logistics of scheduling, which oftentimes requires a lot of back and forth. but again it's like if you are if you want the interview you're going to have to meet that guest where they are in their life and maybe they have little kids maybe they're they're in a difficult work situation where they're trying to squeeze you in um they're they're doing you a favor because

you're not paying them either so you got to kind of meet them where they are and if you can kind of go into it with your eyes wide open to accept some of those things this has been a tremendously rewarding experience over the course of the last four and a half years and i i don't walk away from it lightly. In fact, I think about like, okay, maybe four or five years after I've kind of accomplished a couple of things that I've set in front of myself here, I may want to come back to this or try to do it differently. Good advice. And like you said, SimSec's always looking for new volunteers. So if anybody that's listening wants to step forward, reach out. We'll make sure we put some contact information below the show as well. Jared, so what are some of the

interviews or what interview are you most proud of now that you've talked some about your favorite moments? Yeah, so we got General Berger right as Force Design 2030 was coming out and turned that interview around in really a couple of hours, but that's not the one. That's sort of the easy button answer, but that was very serendipitous that that was the timing of when that interview came out. What I'm most proud of is really the totality of the body of work. If you look across the 400 plus episodes, and by the time someone listens to this 600,000 downloads, the diversity of people and topics that we're able to cover. So I started out with kind of a tagline, I stands for international. I believe we covered the globe about as well as possible

to cover something over the course of four plus years. We did French language interviews. We did stories from every continent, multiple parts of every continent. We didn't just go back to the Gulf of Guinea six times. We were talking about Africa. We went all around the African continent to include sort of the North African coast as well. We didn't just hang out in the South China Sea the other time. We offered a lot of different viewpoints from all over the Pacific Islands there as well. And I mean, it was very important to me too, when we were talking about a place, I didn't just want to be talking with an American about that place. I wanted to talk with someone from that place to give us the local perspective of how the people there viewed

maritime security or whatever particular challenge that we happen to be talking about that week. So that is the thing that I'm most proud of. Lastly, Jared, while we've got you on, I know you've you've said that this is going to be your last podcast, but it's not the first time you've said that. So not really. You know, we'll see what happens. Is there anyone you want to thank, you know, on the record? Well, we've got you here a little bit emotional. Yeah. Who do you want to give a shout out to? not as emotional as i anticipated being uh with this being the last one i mean i did do another

interview this morning so perhaps i'm just already warmed up but i would be clear for the for the listeners he is not crying i know i don't see any i don't see any tears unless he's doing a really good job of hiding it no no um i definitely want to thank my wife and kids for all the time this taken from them so start out doing this in a very small house in san diego with not a great recording setup and a running joke especially in that first year was that my daughter was the most frequent guest because my daughter was a very boisterous child as a young child um very loud not in a crying and wailing way either she was very happy all the time and you would just hear her constantly in the background and I did not have enough editing expertise to edit her out

plus she'd be doing it while I was talking so almost impossible to take it out but since we transitioned into some slightly better setups here the kids have kind of disappeared from it but they're always there because we're scheduling the recordings around family events here to still allow us to do all the things that you want to do with your family while at the same time you know this is a passion project for me and my wife is allowing me to indulge my passion here so I kind of have my set recording windows where if I'm talking to Europeans as I was this morning 0700 we're gonna kick off because that's around noon for them that allows me the rest of the day to kind of work with people there's a window between like 1 and 3 p.m. that usually coincides

with my son's nap time that I can also shoot for. And if I've got Aussies, well, it's going to be at like eight thirty nine o'clock at night after the kids are in bed. Then we're going to have to use that window. But I have not received in four plus years a single complaint from any member of my family about it, which is pretty amazing if you think about the amount of time invested in 400 episodes because, yes, I didn't record every one of those 400 episodes, but I was usually the final person with their hands on it, meaning that I had to sit there and listen for the duration of the episode, then write up the emails that you see from me every week and actually publish it and push it out into the world. So, okay, family most important here. There have been

A number of guests who have really lifted me up, provided offline counsel, connected me to other people. They're just routine sources of positive feedback to me that they don't need to give me that positive feedback. They just do it because that's the kind of people they are. And it's Josh Tallis and Claude Barabee, Liz Buchanan, Salmer Cogliano, Jimmy Drennan, like I mentioned here, my students at the Furings Academy, when I was teaching over there who made me think that I could do something like this, Sebastian Bruns. I'm definitely missing like 30 other people, but those in particular jump out at me as people who have just been incredibly positive in all the feedback that they've provided and the help that they have offered if I was dealing with a problem. And then lastly, the editing team and the host, you know, Walker, I'll start with you, the poor man's Brian Kirk, as I call you.

no shots at brian i don't know why i started calling you that i think it was just a way to jab you after he beat you for author of the year at proceedings the one year which you guys are both absolutely tremendous but you were the original guy who said yes i was apprehensive about reaching out to you thinking that we were too small time for you but uh you you've been a tremendous member of the team and uh you know you and i talk frequently about things that are not podcast related at this point so thank you um dr ed salo fits kind of that same thing as like i can't believe this guy wants to work with us he has an actual phd but there he was signing up to be an editor and after i'd had him editing for a while i was like ed do you want to host something

i mean you're more academically qualified than literally anyone who's on our team would you like to would you like to host something he's like yeah sure i guess and you know he's done a tremendous job for us and still fills in as an editor from time to time yeah that is great it is tremendous marie williams alexia bulagi alexia gave us our first french language it um episodes here which i thought was incredible uh there's that word again incredible i gotta i gotta come up with something else we'll see if i can do it in the next two minutes um william mcquisson has been with us for a very long time as an editor he started using phrases about the audio like sibilance that made me realize like okay we have exceeded my capacity this is another level

and this is yes there are other levels to this and i'm so happy that this man is on the team addison pelerano brennan costello and johan barish are all three marines who are helping us out here again giving time on deployment uh you know in their spare time over there using god only knows what equipment to go through listen to audio and then provide constructive feedback which is one of the best things about the relationships with the editors andrew frame who is our one editor who is actually a professional audio editor and has greatly improved the sound quality for us across not just his episodes but sort of all the episodes just hasn't gotten around to changing the Yeah, changing the intro, yeah.

Now, it's like, oh, well, August 1st, you guys can do what you want. But it's three more days of bully in the alley. And then Jonathan Selling, who will actually be taking this over, effective August 1st. So I don't know when this will air, but that's sort of the cutover date. Jonathan has been with us for a very long time as an editor. I think he might be the fastest as far as how quickly he turns his audio around. But I'm really looking forward to seeing what he does here as a host and as executive producer. Thank you, Jared, and definitely thank all those people as well for supporting you and working on the podcast and supporting the podcast.

We're definitely going to miss you. Let me jump in with one more because I realize there are a whole bunch of team members that I didn't list off who have sort of departed the podcast. the reason is because I could not piece them all together from emails going back and I was going to wind up inadvertently missing three or four but there are a number of people who contributed along the way and did sort of briefer stints with us as editors or hosts that I'm just not listening here for fear of having missed someone so those folks I listed those are your team members now but there have been quite a few people along the way who have stepped in and helped out absolutely and that's part of the volunteer thing that we were talking about before where you've

always got people coming in and coming out and some people stay for a long time and some people can help out for just just a shorter period but they're all they're all important and they all you know help get the the podcast done and there's the whole simsec team uh that's doing doing the other stuff as well well jared i i think we're kind of running out of time here um but i'd like to thank my guest, Jared Samuelson, Sea Control's own executive producer and co-host. You can call him the man behind Sea Control. And so now I have to ask, what are you working on next? What's the next chapter? And where will listeners be able to find you during that time? So I have one article submitted right now. I'm not going to list the publication's name, but it covers the last 50

years of wargaming in the surface Navy. So hopefully we'll be seeing that come out sooner rather than later. I don't know what the actual publication date will be though. And then in about a month, I'm going to be starting a master's in naval history at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. I am on Twitter at JWSC03, not going anywhere from there. LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are probably the best for the general public to reach me though. we'll have to have you back on uh as a guest when you get published a little transition from the uh from the audio medium to uh a little bit more writing and a little more academic work um jared samuelson thanks again for joining us uh and thank you for everything that you've done

uh for the sea control podcast and by everything that you've done i mean doing most of the things that the sea control podcast does if listeners haven't picked up on it already it's really the jared podcast uh with a couple of guest hosts like myself as well um thank you again fair winds and following seas as we say into the listeners thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next time one last peek behind the uh behind the curtain is like at this point sometimes the guest doesn't know what to do and we just sit here awkwardly while walker will press stop recording but i want to say thank you walker at the end so thank you yeah yeah i'm gonna press stop Thank you.

Thank you.