Shawn Ryan Show - #100 Tim Kennedy

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

Tim Kennedy is a Master Sergeant and Green Beret, New York Times Best Selling Author, and Retired UFC Fighter. He is the Founder of Sheepdog Response, a tactical training company dedicated to preserving human life. He also helped create Save Our Allies in the wake of the Afghanistan withdrawal and successfully assisted in the evacuation of over 17,000 American allies. Today, Kennedy spends his time continuing to serve his country and community through his companies and ventures like Apogee Strong, an online mentorship program that has evolved into a brick and mortar academy that offers an alternative to traditional education. This release marks SRS's 100th episode. Shawn and the team are extremely grateful for the opportunity to engage, educate, and entertain you. Each episode has been an incredible journey and we appreciate all of your support along the way. Celebrate this milestone with us and enjoy the show. Note: While we strive for accuracy, some statements made by our guests may later be found to be verifiably false. We encourage listeners to critically evaluate the content and conduct their own research on the topics discussed. https://www.instagram.com/p/DL3zI0EMSpi Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://shopify.com/shawn https://betterhelp.com/shawn https://ziprecruiter.com/srs https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://blackbuffalo.com https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Tim Kennedy Links: Website - https://timkennedy.com Stars and Stripes Book - https://sheepdogresponse.com/products/scars-stripes-book Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/TimKennedyMMA Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/timkennedymma YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-gO6d2N_MiG5wVuL14okbg  X - https://twitter.com/TimKennedyMMA  Sheepdog Response - https://sheepdogresponse.com Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We are at episode 100. I can't believe it. It took about four and a half years to get here. And truth be told, we're still in our infancy. A lot more to come. But, you know, as I reflect through the past 100 episodes, I've thought a lot about, you know, what does this show mean to me?

What is the, what is the reoccurring message? the reoccurring theme and, and for me, you know, what I get out of this and what I hope you all get out of this is no matter how dark of a place you're in, no matter how bad it is, no matter how much you've messed up in life, there is always a way out. There is, there is always a way to, put that behind you and find redemption to become a better human being, a better dad, a better husband, a better countryman, just a better person all around. And the guests that have been on here have proven that time and time again, thank you for sticking around. Man, that chokes me up to say that. But our 100th guest really needs no introduction,

but I just want to say that I found him to be an incredible human being. I'm proud to know him. He's done a hell of a lot for the country in service and continues to out of service beyond what anybody's ever asked him. And he just still does it today. He's a former UFC fighter. He's a former, he still is Green Beret, actually. And I can't believe I hadn't met him until dinner before we actually recorded this show.

But perfect guest for 100. And a new friend of mine. Ladies and gents, if you get anything out of this, please comment, like, and subscribe to the YouTube channel. And if you're feeling extra generous, head over to Apple and Spotify. Leave us a review. even if it's just one word that really helps the show out. And I want you to know that no matter how you've supported us, whether you've been here from the beginning in the gun review days

or you're just coming and this is your first episode, you're a patron. However it is, I appreciate it. My team appreciates it and we love you. And without further ado, I'd like to welcome Mr. Tim Kennedy to the Sean Ryan show. Here's to the next 100. God bless America. Tim Kennedy,

welcome to the show, man. Oh, Sean, thanks for having me. Dude, long time coming. How have we not crossed past before? I have no idea. I was, as I was throwing out names of good friends, former teammates, and you're doing this with them, and I'm doing this with them,

and we just, there was overlap, but I don't think any ever connected. Yeah. And in our like circles, we probably have two, three hundred people that we both know. But this is the first opportunity I've had to sit down with you. Well, it's an honor to have you here, man. An honor is my honor. I've been real excited to meet you. So thank you for making the trip. But so we're going to do a live story on you. Okay. It's going to be super interesting. I know. I know. You think it might be boring. That's what you said in the text. But I guarantee you it's not.

I can't wait to get this out. And no pressure. I didn't tell you last night at dinner, but you're going to be episode 100. What? Hell yeah. Nice. So pretty cool.

Yeah, that's awesome. But let me kick this off with an introduction here. Okay. It's a long one. Tim Kennedy, husband, father of three, three daughters, one son. You're a special forces green beret, special forces sniper, ranger qualified, infantry men and airborne, former professional men. mixed martial arts fighter and two-time title challenger, having fought in the largest organizations

in the world to include the UFC Strike Force, IFL, and WEC, Black Belt's in Brazilian Juditsu, and U.S. Army Combatives. You're an author, New York Times bestseller of Scars and Stripes and unapologetically American story of fighting the Taliban. UFC Warriors and myself, number one audiobook in the world for more than 13 weeks. It's very impressive. It's wild. It's a mouthful.

Chapstick connoisseur. Yep. Co-owner of Ranger Up, CEO of Sheep Dog Response, which is a tactical training in self-defense company, co-founder and board member of Save Our Allies.

Can't wait to get into that. Opened in Apogi Academy, that's K-12 Charter School, school in 2020, and now you have more than how many schools? We're going to open 50 new schools in 2024, and we launched online mentorship this year, and we have thousands of mentors, what's the plural of, yeah, that are all on this like sovereignty, freedom-loving American element that I think, I wish every single American embraced, which is what it means to be a good contributing citizen.

Man, I love the motto, or maybe it's not the motto of this. I don't know what it is, but it's your personal goal, which is to preserve and protect human life, empower people to provide for their families and expand freedom. And take down the Department of Education. Oh, yeah. The end state for Apogee is to abolish every useless form of education or whatever that word means to truly give back sovereignty to the family so that, children can be what they're they're destined to be, which is amazing individuals and critical

thinkers and contributing members of society, not slaves, not lemmings, not consumers, you know, not laborers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I can't wait to dive into that too. That is, you know, I didn't realize, I knew you had started a school. I did not realize how much traction, uh, and how fast that took off until I started doing a little research on you. So, man, that's just you get some super honorable things you're doing. Yeah, that's not me though. I mean, that's Matt Boudreau, my partner, Michelle Myers and Lauren that run the school.

Like, they're 100% all credit goes to them and to God. Because if I was in charge of any of it, you know, they'd be like, there'd be swords on the walls and they'd be axing. You see little kids running around with pome hawks like, let's go! You know, so fortunately they put me in a corner and limit my influence. And one of the few fighters to serve in the military and fight professionally at the same time. Yeah, I don't know if that was the best idea, but... Well, part of your story now.

Yeah. So, but, yeah, man, I am really excited to have you here. Everybody's pumped about this. We've got a Patreon community. They're the reason I'm here. They're the reason you're here and that I'm able to do this. And so I give them an opportunity to ask questions. And so this one is from Stephen Casey.

In reference to the Hunting Hitler TV series that you did on the history channel, are there any things that didn't make it into the episodes that are worth knowing? What got cut, if anything, from the series that would help us understand better? Yeah, it's a great question. It's a hard question. About half of what we investigated ended up on the edit room floor. So I'd say we overshot 200% of the investigation that never went into, yes, it was real truthful storytelling, but they're also following like this narrative of a story that they wanted to tell

and the arc of that story was, did Hitler get out? The things that I cared about were around the idea of how did these Nazis get out? and more importantly, how did their ideas get ground and, you know, have legs into history moving forward? One of the hardest things that didn't make it into the show was us following some of the Nazis in the Middle East and North Africa. What are they doing in North Africa? Yeah. Well, they were aligning with radical Muslim. groups. And what are the Nazis and the Muslims have in common?

They want to kill Jews. That's right. So, you know, the founding of the Mujahideen to the Grand Mufti, when Israel was first going to become a nation in 1944, they, you know, when it finally happened in 1946, the Grand Mufty was organizing every single neighboring country to attack. The grand mufti was being advised by Nazis. And every, one of those Muslim-based countries, the Grand Mufti, who was like the religious leader at the time over all of them, he was orchestrating and organizing strategically the connective advisors, which were Nazis that had been smuggled out of Germany and into North Africa, anywhere that they could go that they were welcomed. So like in Argentina, for example, a gigantic Nazi population, huge German settlements that were there. I mean, you still see that down there?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wow. This got cut. This is, we went into this fight club as I was trying to find out about these legacy heritage family owners, the landowners down in Argentina. Like, we'd go to these rule remote areas and you'd walk into a coffee shop, you'd like Buenos Aires. And they're like, Guten Morgan. I'm like, all right.

I mean, you're in the middle of nowhere. And there's this blonde, six-year-old dude with. blue eyes and he's correcting you speaking Spanish in Argentina because he wants to speak German in his coffee shop. And I mean, it's rooted in there. I go to this fight club as I was trying to find out who owns some of these pieces of property that we're getting on. There are dudes with SS tattoos on their necks, swastikas on their arms, palm leaves on their sides, you know, and all the way back to the brown. What does the palm leaf mean? The, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, uh, you know, it's, it's like a palm tree. You know, it's, it's like a palm tree.

with a swastika at the base of it. Shit, I've not seen that. Wow. I literally like see, and these are grandsons of, you know, men that escaped war, criminal

hearings to settle in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, North Africa, and the Middle East. Wow. Yeah, they got out. That didn't make into the show. Go figure.

One more question. This is actually from another patron, but I'm personally interested in this, too. Her name's Amy Weaver. She wants to know, did we get Hitler or did he escape? Well, he died for sure. Now, did he die in April in 1945 in the bunker? Or did he live a few more years? We know his health was deteriorating rapidly at the end of the war. Regardless if he got out with him. We know his ideas got out. And the way that we did this investigation was we looked, as we're looking at patterns of life, as you know, like as you hunt people, you first, every person has a fingerprint. And no matter where they go in the world, that fingerprint is how they live.

Like if you want to find me, you're going to find me in Jiu-Jitsu gyms. You're going to find me in good coffee shops. You're going to find me in cold water. You're going to find me at shooting ranges. Like no matter where I go, I end up having this very similar pattern where I stay, the floor that I stand, the room that I stand. So as we figured out the pattern of life of these Nazis, we looked, you know, two through 10 escaped, you know, the Joseph Mangalais, the Skorzenskies, the Adolf Eichmann's, those guys got out. So if number two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, if all, Martin Borman,

if all these guys got out, but Hitler then didn't and was left there to die, was he such a fanatic radical that he wanted to go down with the sinking ship. or we know for a fact that all of the things they rehearsed and all of the escape routes that they had practiced were ultimately used by high-ranking Nazis. Could it have been Hitler? Absolutely. Did we find the smoking gun of here is his body, here is his skull, here is the DNA proof? No, we did not.

Interesting. Yeah. Frustrating. Yeah. It's, man, that had to be a fascinating. project to be on. It was a ton of fun. Getting a call when you're in a weird moment of your life being like, oh, you can fly drones. You know how to use ground penetrating radar. You can speak Spanish. You got deployments in South America. Do you want to hunt Nazis? And I was like, yes,

yes, I do. First, I'm going to hide this erection. Second, book me a flight. Tell me where to go. I cannot wait. I've been hunting people my whole entire adult life and now you're going to tell me to hunt Nazis. The only thing better would be like zombies. Like this. This is. This is like a moral free, no guilt opportunity to hunt people. I'm in. Very cool. Very cool. Well, we're getting ready to get in your life story.

But first, everybody always gets a gift. All right. Any guesses? Clementie, I already have it. No. How many times? Gummy bears. Those are legal in all 50 states.

Okay. Yeah. So feel free to dive in at any moment. moment. These are very nice packaging too. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. And yeah, I don't know. If you've heard of that book. Yeah, that's a fascinating book. It'll be linked in the description if you want to pick up a copy. There's a really ugly dude on the front that needs to get a haircut. And that obviously is a range body armor. I mean, yeah. Stars and Stripes, ladies and Jets, New York Times bestseller for 13 weeks on audiobook.

And I don't know how long for the book, but... It's crazy. But, yeah, so you don't have to read that all now. Okay. A little light reading material for the ride home. When I read the audiobook, you're in a studio like this. It's completely silence. It's like sensory deprivation.

And you're reliving as you're reading your own book. like the worst moments of your life. Like this is not a war story of like, here's all the awesome things I did. It's literally all the things that I failed at in my whole entire life. Failed title fights. Failed as a teammate.

Failed as a Green Beret. Like, failed, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. And you're like sitting there in shame and embarrassment and humiliation by yourself in a sound studio. And dude, it took me, it was so hard to read this book. Oh, but it was hard.

How long did it? take you to do that audio book. They said, you're like, you probably knocked this out in like five days. If you just like sat there, it took me a month. A month? A month. Wow. You know, like the, I'm 15 years old.

My best friend dies in a car crash. And, you know, like the youth, the, the, my childhood ends. And, you know, when you're sitting there reading, walking up to see my best friend's mom who there's she's not the same woman that she was two days ago. There's no life behind her eyes. It's literally like a shark's eyes. There's just deadness behind there. And my best friend's older brother, Jordan, he couldn't even see me. Like, he couldn't look at me because I was his brother's friend. And so like now I'm isolated and I'm living all of that stuff as I'm reading this book, but I'm remembering back to things that aren't even in this book. You know, your mind just

travels so fast, especially with emotions and memories. It was so hard to read. It was so hard to read this. You know, when you got blown up and I lost teammates, when I, you know, like, that brings you back to some, some hard, hard moments. Well, I hope to cover a lot of that today. So, um, well, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. The paperback just came out. Did it really? Yeah. This is, uh, this is like two weeks, two, three weeks, uh, release here. It's cool. Well, let's get into the interview now. So where did you grow up? I was born in San Luis Bispo, California. and my dad was a narcotics officer and my mom was they're like the opposites she was a counselor at the church

she is a piano teacher you know she ultimately homeschooled us and uh you know this is as a child that was born in the 80s and raised in the or born in the 70s and raised in the 80s you know she'd walk around with a wooden spoon in her back pocket you know I think my little sister's first memories were like in the movie Twister, where like chunks of wood were flying past her head, which were these spoons that my mom just kept breaking. And so I was born in San Luis Bispo and raised in the Central Coast of California. Pastoral Wolvesantascadero, Cambria, that was like my, our hood.

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Middle class. Yeah. single income father of uh my mom was all volunteer yeah oh wow okay she's uh off a cop salary off a single income of a police officer in california in the 80s we were poor um you know we did we had one bathroom in the house um we always had somebody living in our house with us as well uh you know somebody from

the church on hard times or like i can't remember I remember a single moment growing up where my brother and I and my sister were sharing a room or that there was somebody else sleeping, you know, if there's a girl that she was sleeping in the room with my sister, you know, she was struggling with an eating disorder or whatever. Or like abuse at the house. They come and live with us because like the Kennedys were the safest place you could possibly be. You know, if you're in Mike Kennedy's house with Paula Kennedy, my parents, like, you're safe.

and that projection of my parents and that essence of being a protector and a provider, like obviously heavily influenced me and how we grew up. You know, by the time, you know, my sister's in elementary school and my brother and I are, you know, eight, ten years old. I'm already ready to throw down with somebody that sends a weird look towards my six-year-old sister. Like it was just, this is who we are as men is where protectors first and foremost of our family. Man, that's great. You don't hear that a lot these days. No, you know. There are some. I wish it was a little bit more common.

Yeah, me too. So you got a tight-knit family. Very tight. Still close with your dad? Incredibly close. And your mom? Yep. And your siblings? Yep. I'm flying. My brother's getting an award next week. His partner was in a really, really bad shooting. And my brother's just an epic hero. As my sister is brilliant.

She's incredible. There's a photograph of my brother running, so like covering fire as he's moving his partner off the X from the shooting. Man. And it's an incredible photo, but more importantly, in that moment, my brother is the ground force commander of the shooting

where, you know, a great community hero gets shot up by a criminal. And my brother's taking this dude, getting him to safety to medevac out to save his life. So I'll fly to California so my brother can get his award next Friday. Oh, man. Yeah. Well, congratulations to him. That's, that's, that's amazing. He's incredible. So what were you into growing up? Fixing fences, fighting Mexicans.

Like, this is rural California. When people hear California, like, yeah, I surfed, I was not a surfer. Hollywood was four hours south. San Francisco is four hours north. You know, know, we, there was avocado trees. There were the beginning of wineries, not a lot of wineries. So there's garlic, there's onions, there's strawberries. The, the orange trees are further south and inland. You know, we, I'm working on the Sclery Ranch. I did martial arts. I shot. I hunted. And I worked. We started working young. What did you really, I mean, what do you think you really excelled at? Getting into trouble. I, man, I started like throwing down early.

You know, somebody would say something slick to my sister and I was like a pit bull that had been starved and locked in a cage for too long and I would just go. I just need an excuse. The first time I heard my brother-in-law who married my sister, he's Asian and his brother also adopted. He was black and we're at the California Mid-State Fair in Pasoble's California. I hear two words that I'd never heard before. Did you just say your brother's adopted? My brother-in-law is Korean and adopted. And his other brother is also adopted.

There were six like white German kids, Koneg. And then there were six adopted kids, a family of 12. And the races of the adopted kids were varying of, you know, black and Asian. and were at the California Mid-State Fair, which is like, again, really rural. And, you know, I hear too nasty, racist words. I didn't even know what they meant, but I knew what they were intended to mean.

And I was like, here we go. Like, that's all I need, you know. So I'm like over here fighting three, four dudes. Men, men, you know, like, I'm a teenager with cowboy hats on and Levi's that are nice impressed with good boots. And like, I don't care. I'm just going for it. So it was really early when my dad recognized that I have to do something with that middle-born,

second-born child because he's going to go to prison forever if I don't figure out what to do with him. So he put me into martial arts, boxing, kickboxing, jujitsu. And I really, really liked that. What age did you start that? I mean, I was in probably 6, 7, 8 when I started the Shodokon Karate, then Taekwondo. then taekwondo to Japanese Jiu-Jitsu, Japanese Jiu-Jitsu, to Hawaiian Kempo, Hawaiian Kempo to, like, I just kept on playing with different styles. It wasn't until like Chuck Liddell and Jake Shields came into my gym. And I was like the, you know, I was 16 years old, big fish in a little pond where I could

do really well against everybody in all styles of fighting stand up and I was competing. I was traveling around. So I thought I was a big deal. until Chuck Liddell and Jake Shields came in and they mopped the match with me like I was a petulant, useless child and I was like, I don't know what just happened, but wherever they train at, I need to go train with them.

So I started training at the pit with John Hackleman and Chuck and Gann and Scott Adams and that was Glover Texera, you know, the guys that became UFC champions. So you were a protector. I mean, it's carried on throughout

your entire lifespan, obviously, you know, but it started, protected your sister and your family and your friends and then special forces, save our allies, sheepdog response. I mean, there's an ongoing trend here. But what you mentioned earlier in the interview about a your best friend died in a car accident. Yeah. And that was the end of your childhood. Let's talk about something that actually brings a lot of stress this time of year. Banking. Most of us are used to the old school banks that seem built for the 1% while they hit the rest of us with overdraft fees, monthly maintenance fees, and minimum balance requirements. Chime is changing the way people bank. They offer fee-free and smarter banking built for you. I look at what

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Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I had an amazing childhood, but it was also wrought with disaster. There's death in my life always. You know, like Christmas Day, my grandma dying, watching my grandpa die slowly of emphysema. He's a World War II greatest generation guy, so watching him slowly shrink and pass. My mom played the piano at church. Carolee Stewart was the worship leader at that church, and she died in a scuba diving accident. Her son, Nathan, was like my best friend through grade school. And her other daughter was my sister's best friend. So Nathan and I. And so when she died, you know, I think I was maybe nine, 10 years old. And having somebody that was such a staple in your life, just gone. You know, she was, she was there every

Sunday. I'd see her three or four days a week as she's dropping Nathan off to our house as she'd go run the errands in town because they kind of lived out a little bit. And, And then I don't see Nathan anymore. And then, you know, that, these are formative memories of like, okay, how do you, death is so prevalent and life is so finite. And then when I was 15, we were, uh, these are great kids. When I say they're going to parties, they're like going to Christian after Bible study parties. Like there was no drinking.

There was no, there are young men behind a steering wheel, which is a very dangerous thing. and trying to pass one of their friends on turn, and somebody came around the turn, and they had a head-to-head collision with another car. You know, Jordan was giving his little brother, Jared, CPR. And that was the last night I saw Jared, obviously, and I didn't see Jordan for a decade. We couldn't see each other.

I didn't want to see him. He didn't want to see me. Like, it was literally just the end and walking up, you know, carrying that casket as a pallbearer and knowing that like my childhood friend is here and you know push it in the back of that go take it up to the top of the atascadero cemetery and um you know that dirt going on the top of that coffin not just literally sealed him but like sealed childhood like the age of innocence is over yeah and um from that moment for the next 15 years, I was a force, a thing without purpose and a thing without direction, which is a really

dangerous thing. Yeah. A young man without purpose, man. Yeah. We see that a lot today too now. Yeah. In all aspects. But what got you interested?

I mean, your dad was a, sounds like he was a very good narcotics cop. Yeah. Well, a peak war on drugs. You know, this is Pablo Escobar and the cartels, the syndicated criminal organizations have finally, like, legitimacy in a way that we are just now understanding where, you know, they're bribing people. As lobbyists have influence over people, the cartels had influence over governments. You know, so they controlled Columbia up to Mexico all through Central America, North, South America. and in an operation very similar to like Fast and Furious, my dad and his team, this narcotics task force,

steal an entire plane of cocaine from Pablo Escobar, Costa Rica. They bring it to the United States. They distribute the cocaine pallets. These are pallets of cocaine. And I remember walking into San Luis Obispo, my mom, my brother's sister and I went to Madonna Inn and grabbed some pies. And we walk into this storage area.

And there's two pallets of cocaine. And my dad, who's a giant, and all of his colleagues are giants. They're all like 6-5-66, 3, 100-pound dudes. They're sitting there with MP5 suppressed. You know, there's a portion of a Lamborghini sitting in this storage facility. And there's two pallets of cocaine.

And I just hand off these pies. And then we go back home. This is like all of my, memories are like this growing up. They took that cocaine and they gave it to regional distributors. Those distributors then gave it to like street dealers and then in one week they went and arrested all of the distributors and all of the dealers. Like they arrested hundreds of these people in the whole entire West Coast. They didn't lose a single gram of cocaine. Wow. You know, this is, um, they're good. Wow. And this is also when meth was starting to really explode on the

West Coast and my dad had a background in chemistry and he started recreating different ways to cook meth. Like we had like big huge glass beakers like huge chemistry sets in my house. I'm like if only people understood that my dad was cooking meth. And the laws that we know now about how much NyQuil you can buy all came from that era of law enforcement guys figuring out, well, if you have this much NyQuil and you have this much. Like if you're using Smurfs to go and buy all these different ingredients, so they added limitations as to how much you could buy of what type of chemicals to be able to produce or mass produce meth. I was like my dad.

Wow. It's sick. Did you realize the significance of all that? Not at the time. No, no. I am dumb and I was even more dumb back then. Man, that's really, that's interesting. I'll bet he's, I'll bet your dad's got some really good stories.

You would love, did he just a wild man? Like, we're just at shot show. You know, he's, he's like the most gregarious. This is not the dad that I grew up in the 80s, right? Like the grandpa that he is to my son, where, you know, he's teaching my son how to shoot his precision rifle. And he's, my son puts his finger on the trigger a little bit early. Doesn't have a sight picture yet.

And he's like, hey, hold on there, Rollo. You know, your middle name's Michael. You're my namesake. We never put our finger on the trigger unless we're actively engaged in a target. And I was like, wait a second. You kicked me in the head. at this moment right here, I remember you kicking me. And he's like, well, it's different now.

And he's like, I got it, dad. But knock it off. Now he's just like the most, he and my mom are the sweetest, like spending time with Mike and Paula is nobody comes away with that. Like if you go to their house, they're cooking for you. A gigantic huge meal. You know, as you watch Tully out come onto the property. You're going to the back patio and shooting out precision rifle a few hundred meters.

that is just the most inclusive family environment. And now they're just the sweetest people. You know, you had mentioned also that you became pretty crafty because of your dad as a kid. Yeah. Breaking into cars, using slim gems. Yep. What age does that start? I mean, I had slim jims like in my room.

I was probably 10 or 11 when I went into the church. parking lot during a week Bible study and I opened up every single car in the parking lot just for the act of knowing that I could break into every car in there and I took things out of their glove box and I set it on the seat. So the pastor, Tom Gattis, he and Woody Shoemaker, who is the youth pastor, they're like, everybody comes out. They see that all their cars are broken into. And, you know, I'm just sitting here like, you know, like, I don't know what happened. I don't know what happened to these cars. Like a ghost broke in there.

And Woody Shoemaker, who is a former Navy SEAL, he's like, my youth pastor, he's like, Tim, come over here. I was like, yes, sir. He's like, you break in these cars? Like, yeah, he's like, would you do that for? I'm like, I just needed to know that I could. Like, my dad taught me how to do it. Like, this is 10.

Me and my friend Augie Gaugh would take our repelling gear. Like, we're teenagers. We would cut holes into roofs of commercial buildings and repel in there to figure out that we could steal stuff out of there. The statute of limitations, I'm fairly certain, has expired. So, like, I'm not breaking your laws now. Just for the act of doing it. And, you know, my dad teaching us how to go up and talk to anybody about anything

and be able to, like, break down barriers of, like, how soon you can, like, you know, make contact with somebody to actually touch them to break down another barrier, like, to find out things about them and to build rapport. Like, he could walk up to a stranger. And as an undercover police officer convinced that stranger to sell him drugs that would send him to jail for forever, that's a skill that he taught all of us. And the skills of breaking into vehicles or breaking into houses or like how to get a warrant or how to like change a narrative to tell a certain story. Like these were things that we grew up. We were also a very Socratic household.

My mom called us living room lawyers. We would sit down. My dad would pick a topic and we'd argue. You'd force you to pick a side. and then you'd have to defend and argue that side. Whether you agreed with it or not. This is us at like six, seven, eight, nine, ten years old. Wow.

So critical thinking was definitely celebrated at your house. Very much so. And by the time you start figuring out kind of who you are, at 18, I became, I went to EMT school and the Fire Academy to become a, firefighter. And dad is still shaping, you know, my brother now is a police officer. He's 21. I'm 18.

I'm working at the Atascarer fire department. My brother's working, I think for his first one, was San Luis Bispo PD. And still being shaped. Like, we're not men yet. Frontal lobe is not developed. And my dad is the first time that I came home from a mass casualty incident. And, you know, I'm covered in dirt and blood. I'm shaking.

And, you know, he's like, hey, go hop in the shower before you talk to your mom. I'm like, I'm fine. I'm just going to go to bed. He's like, go take a shower. I didn't realize that I was covered in blood and shaking and crying and couldn't even talk. I didn't even remember any of this. I remember just walking through the door. My dad telling me to go take a shower.

And, you know, he had already seen everything. He already knew what hell was like. And he was preparing his family. for a real world that he knew would ultimately have to experience. You know, he didn't know that 9-11 was going to happen. So you became a firefighter at age 18? That's right. How long were you a firefighter for?

Three years until I could go to the police academy. No good. Yeah. So you knew, did you know when you became a firefighter was going to be temporary? Yeah. Did you enjoy it? I did. It was really hard work.

not in the way that physically hard. I love that part of it. I loved being on a vehicle rescue and, you know, cutting doors open and building fires. I loved the violence of fire. I made a lot of mistakes because I was young and dumb, you know, got some people hurt because I wanted to push, push more than I should have. Like melted, literally melted my helmet.

my helmet if you go to the task of there, Fire Fire Firefire 42, that was me. You see, like, I heard these pops and bubbles and that was my helmet that was melting and popping the plastic on the top. The thing that was hard was, you know, going to a

domestic violence call and finding, you know, a kid in an oven and not being able to, like, that guy did it. Like, I know that guy did it. And, like, my job is not to be a witness to what's happening, my job is to provide medical aid to what's there.

It's the police officer's job. So I always felt constrained in my hands tied as to what I should have been doing. But similarly, had I been a police officer, my view of justice would be for me to beat that dude to death. So that probably wasn't an alignment either. I don't know. I still figuring it out.

There's a serial killer in San Luis Obispo, California, named Rex Krebs. And I was growing up when he was, was kidnapping women and they were just disappearing. And I was working at a bar called the library in San Luis Bispo, like Chuck and Scott, they were running it. So you literally had the best fighters on the planet as bouncers.

And then this idiot, barbacking and carrying out trash. But I remember at the end of the night, these girls, like I could smell fear from them. They were so terrified to make that walk home from the bar back to their homes, not knowing if they were going to be the next girl that would just disappear. And I thought that that was the, you know, there's an era of silence of the lambs where Jody Foster is hunting this, this unknown murderer. That was the embodiment of evil. Like that is what evil really was.

And it wasn't until 9-11 that I saw what evil could be at scale. And so I wanted to hunt these type of serial killers. I wanted to hunt this type of evil because I thought it was the most evil thing that I could see that could exist. And then I saw a girl in a polka dot dress look out a window of a building that's on fire that she went into early because she was a single mother and she wanted to get off early so she could pick up her kids from school. And she's trying to make this decision about if she's going to jump to her death or burn a line. and her last act of conscious thought is to hold her dress down as she jumps to her death. And I wanted to kill everyone that had anything to do with that. That changed everything.

Man, man. Remember that falling man? That guy that just jumped out head first, like he was a professional skydiver in a Delta position, just tracking down towards the ground. Yeah, I do. So how old were you when 9-11 happened? I was 21. 21, so you're just about to go into the police academy. I was in grad school and, yep, going to the police academy.

You were in it? So what happened then? Finished school and over the course of 18 months, I went to the recruiter's office on 9-11. There were a thousand people in line. A thousand people standing there trying to talk to recruiter. And nobody was there. You know, so I came back a few times.

It took 18 months for me to ultimately get a 18 X-ray contract to go and try to, it was a fast track to become a special forces guy. And looked at every branch, you know, is trying to figure out how to get to Marsok, how to get to buds, how do I get to Green Berets? It was what is the fastest route to get me on a plane to the desert. So you picked special forces.

That's right. Yep. How long did it take for you to ship out? The, uh, to training. Yeah. That 18 month timeline to finally get the 18 X-ray contract. So 2003 is, uh, when I left. And then that pipeline, you know, that year and a half pipeline of basic training to infantry school, to airborne school, to this big huge a tritter called Sop C.

And then to selection and then post selection to small unit tactics, another tritter called Sopsy 2, then to small unit tactics, then to phase 2, three, four, five, six, to Sear School, to the donning of the green beret. Then the day I graduated, I walked and another weird, rare anomaly. I had been, they had been tracking. I'd performed really well through training. And I also was a top 10 fighter on the planet when I enlisted. You were already top 10 on the planet. Yeah. Shit.

I just won the largest middleweight tournament on the planet, the extreme cage fighting championship. Dennis King, Maham Miller, Ryan Narte, me. It was like eight of the best fighters on the time. I was the lowest ranked guy in that whole entire tournament. I won. That was just a few months before I enlisted. And so they had been following me.

And when I graduated, I went to the directly to the criff, which is something that should never happen. What's supposed to happen is you go to an ODA. You spend two, three years out an ODA. You get a bunch of experience. You go to some schools. Then you go to this selection course and a must requirement to go to the SIF and Criff, which is Sifartek. And then from there, you go to a selection to go to this unit.

That's what should always happen. That's not what happened with me. So I was this young child that knew nothing about the military, that knew nothing about war, knew nothing about the army that was then going to a special missions unit. Damn. Bad plan. Well, let's rewind. Let's rewind.

See, let's skip basic training. Let's skip everything up to selection. How was that, was that a challenge for you? No. It wasn't. No. You just breeze right through it. Yeah.

That, I mean, that post-9-11, you would have had to walk in to the barracks, in the middle of night like a ninja with a lead pipe and smashed dude's knees in to have them quit. We, in our selection class,

there was not a single quit. There's not one voluntary withdrawal. So now if there's four or five hundred people that go to selection, three, four hundred of them quit. And then of the remaining one to 200, you know, maybe 20 or 30 end up getting selected.

Four to eight out of 100. And then post 9-11, not one quitter. Not one dude was like ringing a bell. Not one dude is saying that he wants out. Like you'd literally have to kill him to have them.

Dude's feet were falling off and they were taking super glue and gluing the bottom of their feet back on to pass team week. Where were the majority of these guys from? Where they're coming from? that class there were a ton of collegiate athletes. They were from all over the world,

ton from Florida, ton from Texas, and ton from California. Like of the 90, there's 600 something dudes that went through the SOPSI and ultimately the 88 that were selected in our class to go forward. Once you pass Special Forces assessment and selection,

which is a 23, 28-day hard, a trigger. Then you get selected to go to the Q-course. The Q-course is a year-or-to-a-half-long pipeline of training you how to be a Green Beret. And then when you finish that pipeline, then you get to don your green beret and go to a team. And then you get to your team, they tell you that you know nothing,

you start all over again. But that, you know, from that gigantic population of people that first were at SOP C to the 88 guys that ultimately got selected, the 88 came from, like, they were high-level athletes from all over the nation, but most of them, Florida, Texas, and California. 88 people got selected that round. Yeah. That's a lot.

It's a ton. That's a lot. Highest percentage. that they've ever had. Is it still to this day? Man. So it wasn't that it was easy for me. It was easy for us.

There's nothing that, it was the environment. And we'd also been together from like this group of 18 X-rays had been together from basic training to infantry school to airborne school to through Sopsy. And we had learned,

none of us had ever been in the military before. So we didn't know how to do Army. We just knew how to cheat. And we cheated to everything. And we figured out communication systems and how to, you know, tap codes and symbols. And we had watches for when the, the cadre were going to be coming in to check you. So, like, the whole entire barracks of sleep, you're not allowed to be sleeping.

But everybody's sleeping, but two people on either end at the two edges of the windows where the doors, where the doors are cracked out a little bit. And they're looking out. And they had, like, set up things that we could hear the guys walking. So the moment that we heard that sound, the whole entire barracks would get up and guys would start, like, fixing their rucksacks. Like, we're breaking every single rule. You were allowed to run on the roads. We ran every road. So with the 80, its biggest class to ever graduate selection or to get selected.

Highest percentage of graduates. Highest percentage. With that amount of motivated men to go and protect the country, what do you think, I mean, the criteria had to be, had to be upped. They had to level it up, right, from what it usually is. With that, with that amount of talents. the must pass gates which are very close held

not secrets but like the things that you have to do to be selected those don't change like you have to run this far for this fast you have to run this sprint for this fast you have to be able to carry this much weight for this long you here's the grading criteria during team week here's like

so like of these variety of must pass events when you get through those gates and you're like checking as you go, that doesn't change. So like the, like you might have five people that graduate, 10 people that graduate or 100 people that graduate, but everybody has to pass that those gates. But if you pass, I guess what I'm asking is if you pass, does that necessarily guarantee you a slot that you're going to be selected? No. So that's what kind of what I'm asking is usually there's. But this is, this is peak war. Yeah.

So there was, what year is this? 2004. Okay, so there's definitely, so they're expanding at this point. They're expanding and guys are dying. Okay. And they're dying a lot. Okay. So they were needed.

Yeah. That's what I was getting on. I was wondering if they had, if they had the slots to fill, 88 guys. They knew they're going to. Yeah. That's dark, but this is war. And, you know, in 2004, when you're looking at flu, Raja and Ramadi in Sauter City.

This is the first 10 years of GWAT from 2002 to 2012, like, it was very dissimilar to the second 10 years of GWAT. Those first 10 years, that was war. Like, those were battles block by block,

door by door. Lots of killing. And on both sides. And Green Braves were carrying a big burden of that because they were the first ones in Afghanistan. in. They were the first ones that were in the big gun fights. They were also the ones that were by with and through, advised assisting and accompanying these militant fighters, because that's the special forces way, was to work with your aligned fighting force. So those guys were

getting hemmed up and they needed help. Problem was 18 x-rays. we died way more than everyone else. Can you describe what an X-R-R-A is? Normally to go to the Green Berets, you are in whatever, you're in the 82nd, you're in the 101st, you're in Ranger Regiment,

and you are an E-4, an E-5, and you put in your packet to go to selection. That has always been the way that they've only done the 18-X-ray program one other time, which was during Vietnam, where you take a guy qualified off the street.

So he has a high Asveb score. He has a high GT score. He has a high PT score. And you put him into a special forces selection pipeline. And so they're SF babies. They've never spent a day in the army, but they have on paper all of the qualifications that they could potentially later be a green beret.

All of the guys coming from the regular army, from combat arms, they have to have that same GT score, they have to have that same ASVAB score, they have to have the same PT score, but the most important thing is they have experience. And that had always been the requirement. You had to spend three, four, five years in the Army,

then you could go to selection. The 18 X-ray program bypass that. So, you know, a college athlete, and that's why there are so many collegiate athletes in that class because you had to, you know, you had to be smart. You had to have a high GT score and a high ASVB score, and you had to have a very high PT score. you then got this contract that promised you

if you passed past basic training, infantry school, airborne school, and SOP C, which is the bigotritor, then you could go directly to selection. But we died, I think,

at twice the rate of regular army green berets. No kidding. Yeah. Damn, man. Young and dumb. Yeah. Not invincible. You know,

going through the SF baby program you get to you get through selection you get to the Q course correct how are you how are you received there

is a guy off the street who was pipelined right in yeah they hated us did they yeah they got why know they hated you well they told us they hated us that was pretty direct

like I hate you you don't deserve to be here year. And to their, to their credit, they're doing a tour as instructors. Like the NCO development, you'd go to a team for three to five years. And then you would go to SWIC to the Special Warfare Training Group. And you'd become an instructor teaching at one of the different phases, one of the different schools, Halo school, sniper school, scuba school. And you do, you know, your two, three year tour as an instructor. And then you go back as a senior NCO. back to the ODA. So now you have ODA time. You have instructor time. So you've really mastered a

craft. And it made a lot of sense during peacetime. But these guys that are coming off these teams, you don't have a choice of when the timeline is for you to go to SWIC to teach. Maybe they just got back. Maybe they're going to miss a deployment because they got orders to go and teach. And now they're furious because they're missing the war. Now they're furious because their brothers are over there fighting and dying and they're sitting here looking at a 22 year old kid that just came out of college that thinks he knows everything and wants to go and be a warrior and that guy's been on an ODA for five, six years and has during peacetime and has done everything perfect so he can go and be a warfighter and now he's seen there talking to a snot-nosed brat. You know,

like, I get it, man. Yeah. Yeah, I think that was my generation too. I was right there. with you. And yeah, that had to be, I didn't really agree with it, you know, we're all here to protect the country, right? But I do understand it. And, you know, the period between Vietnam and 9-11, there were very few. Panama, Grenada, you know, Desert Storm 1, which we didn't even have a part in. There wasn't, there wasn't much, there wasn't much to spread around. And so, so I get it. But what did you think of the Q course? Was that a challenge for you? No.

No shit. I loved it. I loved every second of it. I loved Sears School. We were chomping at the bit to get done. I took accelerated language school. I tested out early. I just wanted to, how fast can I get that green bray on, get to a team, get on a plane?

That was the only thing all of us wanted to do. All of us were fighting and positioning. we're going down to the companies and asking, hey, do you guys have your deployment orders? Do you know which day you guys are leaving? Because all of us, the day that we graduate, all of us would be requesting to go directly to that company because they're the next one there going to be bouncing.

And so all of us are like positioning and fighting for a chance to get into the fight. Yeah. So did you have any hangups? Did you fail anything? No. Nothing. No.

Just plain. First through everything. funny Sear story one of the guys that had been medically recycled was... Could you please describe

what Sears School is, what the purpose of it is? Every special operation and aviation unit sends their guys to this Seer School and there's different phases and levels of it. But the one that special operations goes to

it's survival evasion resistance and escape. And during this, we also included peace time government detention, which is if you're captured by a non-state or state actor and you're being held, how do you navigate the, which is different than like if you're a P-O-W being held by a combatant. So during the school, they teach you survival, like how do I forge for food, how do I purify water, how do I set traps? And then on the evasion side, if somebody's chasing you, whether it's in a rural area or an urban area, how do you escape?

The resistance portion is during interrogations and torture, how do you stay in the technique is inside of your circle? So they tell you these are the things that you're supposed to know and these are the things that you're supposed to say and these are the things that you're supposed to do. And how do you stay inside of that during, you know, really uncomfortable physical treatment, which I think now they call torture, but you know, you're training people. I hate that people throw stones at training that is hard. Like, how do you prepare people for war without it being like war? And the last portion is

escape. When, uh, so that's Sears School. And, uh, you know, it's a couple of months. The guy that had been recycled, which was one of my friends and teammates that had gone through all these phases to, he was working with the cadre and was learning like all the different escape and evasion routes. So there were lanes that were designated, designated to each of the teams. He told us which lane we were going to be on and I went and I stole MRE boxes and I went out and I plotted a 10 digit grid coordinates and I buried boxes of MREs during my evasion lane. Totally cheating. Like this is not allowed and I'm not recommending anybody to do this, but this is what we did because we knew like we see the guys that were that were coming out

of Sears School. You know, they'd lose 30, 40, 50 pounds during Sears School. Their cheeks are sunken in. Their eyes are sunken in. And they're about to go to a team. It's one of the very last things that you do and their bodies are broken. We want to go to war. So not only did I want to graduate, but I wanted to graduate physically capable of going to a team to immediately hop on a plane to go overseas. So the motivation was kind of pure, but the route was very unethical. So we borrow these MREs. There's 11 guys that are all 18 x-rays that I'm all friends with, and we have one Air Force crew guy that's on our team. And we finish the survival portion.

We get into the evasion. And you're very motivated to not get caught during evasion because the sooner you get caught, the sooner you go into the concentration camp. So if you survive a week, that is an extra week that you are not in the concentration camp. If you're caught on day one, you spend six days in however many hours that you were captured early in the concentration camp getting beaten, getting waterboarded, getting put in torture positions and, you know,

paying isometric positions, getting starved. So, but if you stay out, how long can you survive during that week with the limited food that you're going to have while you're running? And they're, you know, they're hunting you with thermals and dogs and all the things. And they're trying to, you know, manipulate in this lane that you're training. So we buried MREs. We go to these 10-digit grid coordinates.

We dig them up. And I serve, I hand out these MREs and the other guy's like, stick, this is so awesome, you know, way to go. Me and my friend Brian are the ones that went out and buried them. And this Air Force guy's like, where did you get these? Like, I buried them. How did you know that this was where we're going to be? I'm like, I was told by, you know, somebody that's working as support right now that this is what's going to be our lane, so we went and buried our food here. And they're like, that's cheating. I was like, is it? Like, I don't,

I don't think it is. And to his credit, he stuck. to what he thought was right, and he wouldn't eat any of them. And, uh, and we helped, even though we were fed, we helped him forage for food. We're getting deer corn, you know, we were like finding turtles and snakes. That's the way they call us snake eaters. Uh, this, the training area, it's like very swampy and marshy. So there's not, there's not a lot of great food. We're in pine nuts. You know, we're making pine needle tea for vitamin C. Like, we're doing everything we can to help this dude, even though there's plenty of calories over there that he wants nothing to do it. Hold on. Let me finish my snackers bar

real quick. Yep. And again, to his credit, he does that whole week and there's, I mean, there's food for us all the time. And they bring us a roadkill. It was like a dead raccoon or a dead deer. And most people, after not eating for five days, they would just skin this thing, gut this thing, throw it, stew it. And they'd be so pumped to have a little bit of protein. And we're like, that's kind of icky. So, Yeah, the caddrae were like, what's going on here, man? Like, what are you guys doing? Well, during end dock, which is the most dangerous portion, like when you're initially

captured, it's where most casualties occur. And if you look like Shugart and Gordon during Blackhawk down, the thing that they were trying to save the crew from was that initial capture, that wave of emotion that happens on a battlefield, that's when people get killed and don't get moved into captivity. So like the longer and more peaceful that that transition can be the higher the chance of survival. So they make that that end doc when they're taking you in to be very intense during serious school. There's lots of beatings happen. There's, you know, people are getting knocked out and teeth and blood and all the things.

And when we finally, at the end of that week, we go to make our link up to get evacuated, which were betrayed and we get captured by the adversary. force. It's at the end of the week. They force you to go to this link up. And we all get black bagged, all 12 of us. And, you know, they're pulling your hood off. They're smacking you. Like, what's your name? Where are you from? What are you? What are you doing here? And they're going down the line. And the moment they pull up that Air Force is, that guy's hood, he get, all of us, we hear him start screaming. They had food buried. They had food buried. They had food this whole entire time. This whole week they've been eating. And the crazy.

intense in-doc phase where like this whole camp is just beats and screams and slaps you can hear a pin drop everything stops the guy goes what'd you say he says my team had food buried on their lane and immediately they separate all 12 of us they pull us from everybody and for a week during resistance were trying to find legitimate real information, which was where was the food, who had the food, how did you get the food? And they had one guy telling all of the information that he knew, and they had 11 guys that stayed in their circle.

Damn. At the end of this, 11 dudes graduated, and one guy failed for an integrity violation. He got recycled. All 11 of us stayed in our circle and didn't break. for 11 for the whole entire time. And at the very final moment, and I'm not going to give away the final day of senior school. It's like a big emotional event. ID cards come out from the instructor's necks. And you see like that military DOD card. And they're no longer,

they're not sitting there like evil torturing pricks. They're now Sergeant so and so. and you have graduated. And they, the whole entire cadre comes and gets the 11 of us and they're like, hey, we need to talk to you guys. The ID cards are hanging around their neck. And we're like, yeah? Okay, seriously, what happened?

You need to tell us what occurred during evasion week. And now during a resistance week where you guys, one, all had the same story the whole entire time. And like, it was fascinating because it proved the things that they were teaching actually worked in real interrogations.

And they had real interrogators coming in to interrogate this class, the 11 of us, to get out real information. And all of us knew that if we messed up, all of us are going to go recycled at best, worst kicked out of the Q-course. And all 11 of us, like we look at each other and we look back at them, we're like, Donnie the Green Beret is going to be in five weeks.

When I put on my Green Bray, you can be there. and the moment I get my green beret, I will talk to you about what this looked like. Good call. And all of them were there, Sean, every single one of them. No shit.

It proved that like their GTPs, their POIs, their points of instruction, their tactical training points were legitimate and truly worked in interrogation. And they, this was not. This was not.

A case study. A perfect case study. Yep. Nice. Well, you know, don't rat your team out. It was a good lesson.

Yeah, it's pretty. straightforward. You know, that might be the biggest integrity violation of all. But, wow, no shit. Well, what did they say when you told them? They changed rules where any student that was in a support role for the cadre was never, they, they like siloed information that was relevant to the training so that the students, that, the trainees that were going through the course never had access to the cadre information. So like, you know, they'd hang outside of the cadre rooms. So they changed a

bunch of rules to limit in silo information. But they were, they were thrilled that this, that this stuff worked. That's amazing. That's amazing. So, so you get done with Serra school. Where are you going next? So I went to Charlie Company for 3rd Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group. It was the At the time it was the SIF, the commander's in extremist force And every How did you wind up?

Can you explain what the SIF is? Yeah. First, because not a lot of people know about that. No. The SIF, every special forces group takes an area,

a region of the globe. So seventh group handles South America. Third and fifth group balance between Africa and the Middle East. First and 10th group, between Europe and the Asian Pacific. So regionally, we always have four deployed companies

that are in that region. So you have a special forces company that's in South America. You have a special forces company that's in Africa. You have a special forces company that's in the Philippines or in Japan or in Europe. And so that's, that is a crazy concentration of talent and firepower. That's four deployed all of the time. They were tasked with hostage rescue and counterterrorism. So

you would go to special schools and a special selection to be selected to go to the criff. At the time, the commander in extremist force, so you had the combatant commander, which was, you know, the four-star guy

that was in charge of that region of the planet. He had his own special operations company that was his. So that was if the cartels ran into Bogota, Columbia and took over the embassy, you had a company of special forces guys that were standing by. This is why Benghazi was so infuriating to so many green berets is because when that was happening, there was a company of special forces guys that were sitting on a plane. Like, just imagine, you know, there was, what, 12 GRS dudes that were saving two different compounds,

the Department of State compound and the agency compound, what would have happened if you dropped 60 green berets into this fight? You're like, the whole thing's over. Yeah. You take one ODA, the whole thing's over. But it's like there's a lot of survivor guilt in that. But that was the SIF. They were a hostage rescue four deputies. Where were those guys sitting?

They were two-hour flight. I think Glover was one of those guys. That's right. You know? Take Mike Glover and a company of Mike Glovers and drop them into that firefight, dude. Completely different outcome. Yeah. Infuriating. Yeah.

Phone gets, ultimately, somebody picks up a phone and says, no, those guys can't go. Yep. Hope that person burns the hell. I'm sure they will. Yeah, me too. Yeah, so that's the SIF. So hold on, hold on, let's backtrack. Because the SIF, so the SIF is basically, it's a hostage rescue team.

Yep. Very advanced tactics. Very, I mean, just to get in the door over there, how did you get in the door of the SIF as a new guy? Yeah, I should have been there. And SF baby new guy, nonetheless. John McPhee, former Delta Force operator, amazing war fighter, a storied career at the unit.

He was my boss. He was my first team sergeant. And he had been kind of paying attention to some guys going through the Q-course because he knew we're about to go to war. And this was also the SIFs' first deployment. deployment to combat. They had missed all the other rotations because the combatant commander hadn't released them to go into non-theater conflict. So he had kept them kind of unfairly

saying like, no, no, I need my SIF. You guys are under my control. You have this competition about who could control which units were going to be in what battle space. And he didn't want to release his elite fighting force to go from South America and go fight so they missed the first few rotations and they were just like they were ravenous to get into the fight

and you can train tactics into young men preparing for war but putting the will to fight and

that dog in somebody some people have that and it's really hard to artificially train that into somebody. I think the Marines do a really great job of planting that dog in somebody. The Special Forces Regiment, it's a group of intellectuals. Like, yes, they're war fighters, but they also are kind of ambassadors and they work a lot with different governments. and the embassy and it's a joint interagency multi-department. It's kind of a complex world that special forces works in. And John knew that we're going to go to war.

And he wanted a guy that had the dog on him. I can think of hundreds of teammates that have it. And they were the guys that you wanted to be the first guy through the door. you know the Brian Hall the Jeremy and Haskell the Ben Rios like those guys kicking a door anything on the other side of that door is going to be melt with with speed surprise and violence faction Helen Fury and that's a hard thing to like to put into somebody so John had knew my fighting background knew my hunting background knew my shooting background and then had followed me through the Q-course and I was also moonlighting as a as a bouncer in Fasdale North Carolina where I was going to school and I was also fighting, moonlighting, fighting. Like, while I was going to the Q-course, I was still training and fighting

as a professional fighter. No shit. Yeah. Why were you doing that? I'm sorry, we've got to go down this rabbit hole. Why would you put yourself... Yeah. I'm just curious. The dog. Why would you put yourself into a situation that could potentially take you out of your ultimate goal, which is fighting for the country?

It would have been relatively easy for that to happen. the young men think that they are invincible. And the balance of me wanting to keep my sword sharp and keep that like ability to fight, you know, fighting, gunfighting, knife fighting, brick fighting, fist fighting. It's all fighting.

You know, like you take some person that's good fighting at fighting and you give them a battle axe or you give them a club, like that dude is still like really dangerous. What's because he's a fighter first. So like the heart of that warrior is a is a very powerful thing regardless of what tool he has. You're like I am you know in this room no more or less dangerous because I have a gun or I don't have a gun like I you know kill him without anything and I wanted one that please don't kill my camera guy. I won't know I like him.

that illusion that you are invincible as a young man, but you feel invincible. Like I remember feeling invincible. Like you can't hurt me. You can't kill me. You can't stop me from graduating. You can't stop me from making it to a war. You can't stop me from going to this unit.

And you definitely can't stop me in a fight. You know, like to me, fighting was just plain. You know, I was making money on the side, and I was keeping my sword sharp, and I was keeping, you know, the ability to do violence at an acute point. So I wanted to keep doing it.

And I did it all the way through my whole entire career. Makes sense. I figured that's what you were going to say, you know? Yeah. Would you do that again if you had the wisdom you had now? No. So John McPhee. Yeah.

He hands selected you to come into the SIF. Yep. And Sergeant Major O'Quendo, who is the company Sergeant Major Major, he brought me in. He pushed back real hard. And he was right. But man, John was a force. He's one of those guys in Garrison. He is not a fun human to work for. He is not a fun guy to be a subordinate to. He's definitely not one that you want as your personal mentor about how to be a good human. but you put John McPhee in a case in glass that says break in case of war violence. And you break that, he is one of the greatest war fighters to like walk during GWAT.

And we were a hammer in that first deployment. I'll bet. I don't want to get into that yet. But what year is this? 2005. Oh, shit. So this is like the height. This is peak.

This is the height. So John had. hanging from bridges burnt alive. This is like this is peak war. Yeah, this is the height. So you get into the SIF. How are you received?

Not well. You have to go to the school. This multi-month hostage rescue school that is a high-a-tritter. So I go to this school, graduate, come back to the team. You know, I thought I'd be accepted. And where weeks,

PDSS, the pre-deployment site survey team has already launched. They've already set up where we're going to be landing at, where we're going to be working out of. They're starting to set up target packages. You know, they're getting, working in our TS briefs about what it's going to look like when we get into the operational environment. This is before we even wheels up, you know, and I knew nothing, Sean. I had no idea how to order ammo. I had no idea how to do a forecast. I had no idea how to pack a palette.

I had all the things that while the Q-course taught you the skills to be a green beret, they didn't teach you how to be a good teammate of doing the things of your job. You know, like how to do an inventory of our night vision, how to, they know how to zero a gun because I'm an 18 Bravo. But like as I'm packing out, the guns for this deployment, how many guns am I supposed to take all of our guns? Like, every single dude has 10 different guns. You know, am I taking 120 guns? Like, I had no idea what to do. And, and I had no idea how to ask. I had, I was too conceded or egotistical to ask in the right way,

which is like, hey, can you teach me? I don't know how to do this or find a peer in the company that could explain how to do it because my senior, God bless his heart, Ben, was he had to do everything because he had an idiot for a junior, me that had no idea how to do anything.

And he didn't have the time as he's prepping to go to war to teach me how to do things because he had to do them. He had to palatize everything because I didn't know how to do it. He had to do, and he didn't have the time

in peak war pre-deployment to teach the subordinate. So it just and made it hard. Were you the only new guy? Yeah. They wound up on the stuff. Yeah. There's one other guy, Dave. That was same age.

And, uh, but a little bit, you know, maybe six months more experience than me. He and I were the kind of the only two guys there and the last two. They never did it again. Yeah, that's a, I mean, that's a steep learning curve. Wow. Yeah. When did, how, when did you figure out, you know, what the significance of being on a SIF team was? I was pulling outside security in Iraq when a squadron Delta Force leadership, D. Tamaso, comes and takes a knee next to me.

He goes, what are you doing? and I'm wearing DCUs, like cool, fancy desert camo that we had altered. You know, it's like we took our pockets and moved them up to our sleeves. We put like spandex shirts underneath our body armor. Complete like unauthorized but functional. And I look over this and he's wearing multicam. And none of us had multi-cam. And I was like, who the fuck are you?

He's like, I'm DiTMaso. And I was like, I don't know who the fuck that is. He's like, you didn't answer my question. I'm like, appoint security. He's like, where's your intersecting sector of fire? I turn on my laser and like two seconds later, the guy on the right corner of the building turns on his lasers and our lasers goes like that.

He's like, all right, great, have a great night. It just gets up and walks away and I was like, who the fuck was this guy? You know? And we're at a bomb maker's house for one of Zaraki's lead henchmen, like this, the VBI IDs that were kind of plaguing Baghdad at the time. Like this was one of those houses. And this dude just like shows up on target.

walks up and starts talking to me. And it wasn't until afterwards when I was like, who is this dude? And they tell me who this is. And I start understanding who the units are that are part of this task force. And then it like clicks. I was like, holy shit. This is the A team. Like this is like the most elite fighting force on the planet.

All 100% focus focused on one kill capture thing of one person, the sharpest tool in the entire arsenal of the American military. was being wielded towards one person. And it was that night that was like, holy crap, like, this is frightening. Damn, man. That's when it's starting to make sense. Very cool. Wow.

I still couldn't grasp it because I'm dumb, but that was the first time where I was like, whoa. Yeah, yeah, lucky to be here. Yeah. Didn't deserve to be there. How long were you at the SIF before you got kicked out the door on deployment? Uh, three months. That's it. That's it.

Three months. Yep, I got, I missed one month of our pre-mission train up because I was still in Sephardic. So I, like, I missed a portion of, so pre-before our special operation unit goes, they, they look at their metal task, their mission, mission, mission, mission, these are all the skills that they're supposed to be able to have to go and do this mission. So they go and they rehearse and execute and they're graded on all of their core tasks before they go overseas. and that's called your PMT, your pre-mission train-up. And I missed a month of that because I was in school. So then I get there, I finished the last two months. We have two weeks off before we ultimately have to show back up.

They give us like eight days permissive leave where we got to hang out with our families before we went overseas. Are you married at this time? Uh-uh. Were you together? Yeah. How's she taking all this? Um, she's, she's such an amazing woman. And, uh, everybody that comes to her now,

whereas like, um, how are you dealing with Tim and Afghanistan right now or in Israel or Ukraine? And, uh, she knew what she signed up for. You know, she, she, she was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in 2004, five, and six. And she saw her friends coming back without limbs. She saw her friends. She saw her friends coming back without eyes. She had friends that deployed and never came back. You know, she was there on the green ramp receiving her friends. She's such good, good human. When I say friends, like, these weren't boyfriends. They were just her friends that she was there to support. She was so young. And so she knew what, she actually probably knew better than I did, what the cost of war was. She got there before I did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So you guys, okay, so how did you guys meet? Super creepy. She was working a government contract and she was keeping inventory of these secret devices. And every single one of them has a serial number. And she was working for a government contracting company that kept the inventory of all those things and then reported it back to the army. And she shows up and I saw her as like, that's a Russian spy. There's no way that that supermodel of a human exists in this world, which is like, you know, butt sweat and ECT charges and pet and no nail lines.

And, you know, like there's guns everywhere in Greece and were covered in carbon from shooting all day. and there's just no possible way. So I figure out who she is. I kind of like make friends with some of her friends. I go up and try to talk to her. As I'm standing in front of her like this, she just like starts turning without acknowledging that I'm talking to her. So I kept like adjusting to try to stay in front of her as she kept turning.

I was like, are you, do you not see me right here? I'm like, what's wrong with you? And then she just turns and walks away. It doesn't say anything to me. And I see her stab a dude that grabs her leg with her. stiletto. She balances on one foot and she's walking up this ramp. She stabs this guy that's trying to get her attention and, uh, us love. I was like, that's, that's, uh, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, uh, that's the woman for me. So I, um, I spend a, I have to manipulate a

date out of her. I tell all of her friends that we're going to be like meeting up at this time and I tell her a different time. She shows up early, although a little bit late, it's fine, but I had enough of a window that the nobody else had arrived yet. And as she got there, this is like the flip phone razor time. So I preset text messages with all recipients. So I hit send and it goes out to all of them that dinner's canceled. And I take her out to dinner. And I go out to dinner with her every single day. I go on a date with her every single night all the way up until I leave. And that was my first trip with her. And then when I was gone, I had some. A SOC guys, some advanced special operations, spy guys that literally followed her around Fort Bragg to make sure that she was a good girl.

And she was. She was. Yeah. And you guys have been married for 17 years now? Yeah. Congratulations. Wild. What, in your opinion, is the secret to a successful marriage? You have to fight.

Complacency kills. We know that. combat and complacency kills in marriage where you take things for granted about the person that you're with, you know, this person that you chose to spend the rest of your life with. But now you, you know, you let yourself go. You get a little bit the dad bod. You know, you stop buying flowers. You stop lighting candles. You stop buying lingerie. You stop fighting for that person that you fought for, that you dated, that you courted, that you tried to sweep off their feet. And, you know, now 10 years down the road, you're fat and, you know, you're not sleeping, you're drinking

a little bit. You care more about a football game than you do her. You know, like, shame on you. You don't deserve her. So, like, you set down the sword. And when you set down that sword, that sword's hard to pick up sometimes. You know, you don't have the calluses anymore. You don't have the strength anymore. You don't have the condition anymore. And it's the same way with the marriage where it's like constant vigilance and intentionality into your marriage. And the heart of a man is a hard thing. You know, we can fall in love easy. We can, you know, we have these aspirations and these dreams.

You know, I have to choose between going overseas and doing something that I know I was put on this planet to do or to be present. And I know I can't be present and look at that person, look at her or my kids in in the face and the eyes without the things that I know that God put me on this planet to do and trying to reconcile those two things. The only way that can happen is with intentionality and discipline. Well, I think that's great advice, ma'am. Thank you.

I don't know. I'm still figuring out, though. Hey, well, you're doing a hell of a good job. There's not too many people running around out there that could say they've been married for 17 years and for all the combat deployments and the time apart. Yeah. her. Yeah. But last question, then we'll take a break. So you're at the SIF and you find out you're going to Iraq. Did that hone in your mindset at all? I mean, that you're getting exactly what

you asked for. You're going to war. It did, but I didn't appreciate it. Okay. And I didn't understand what that meant. You know, like I still had John Wayne movies in my head. You know, I still had Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis. Like this is what I thought war was going to look like. You know, it's like this barrel-chested freedom fighter as I'm like covered in the enemy's blood as I'm standing there with an American flag behind me. You know, like this is, I don't know,

the mind of a young man that knew nothing. What I thought war was going to be like and what war was like was very different. And those were the delta between those two things are indescribable. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, on that note, let's take a break when we come back. We'll pick up in Baghdad. All right.

All right, Tim, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to go into your first deployment with the SIF team under Shrek McPhee in Baghdad. That's right. Yep. We first went to Al-Assad. And we're there with the Seals. and we're logistically constrained with the amount of error that we had. Number of targets in this time period were plentiful. And everybody fighting, doing a mobile vehicle assault was very difficult from that spot. So we relocated a few weeks later from Al-Assad into Baghdad. And we're in the international, the Green Zone. kind of on the row of the Joint Special Operation Command houses.

And once we tied in with them, it went from, you know, two, three targets a week to like 10 targets a night. So let's, what year is this? This is 2005, 2006. Oh, I was there then. So we're there at the same time. So everybody's there. Yeah.

So what I want to get at is Baghdad. at that time was like the Wild West. You're hearing car bombs all the time. You're hearing gunshots all throughout the day. It becomes very real. The smell, everything. You know, it's there. You'd hear at night when it's quiet,

you could hear five or six different units in gunfights. And like, is that us? No, that's not us. Who is that? Do they need? Are they good? And like, we're sharing QRFs. And QRFs is running to you guys to provide

support and then another QRF is coming to us. It's madness. The whole entire city. You know, Zarkawi's peak power right now. All of his lieutenants are in hammer mode. Al-Qaeda is for the sole purpose of destroying and killing as many Americans that are on their soil as they, as they can, and to destabilize the new Iraqi government that we were trying to put into place. It's like this. It was a very volatile peak war. This is war. Yeah. Yeah. Did it start to set in? at all, hearing that, seeing it? It was, we never got, this deployment in comparison to my next deployment to Afghanistan could not have been more dissimilar.

This, I'm part of an elite unit that's part of an elite joint special operations task force that is part of an elite coordinated strategic mission. that is a very different thing than you being in Afghanistan as a special force of sniper, advisor to NATO allies, like could not be further apart. We were the hammer every night. You know, if somebody from this task force is showing up at a door, if you shot from that house, everybody dies. You know, if you're on target, you're going to get bit, you're going to get this battlefield

interrogation, that's pretty intense, the tactical questioning as we're finding following on targets, as we're continuing to build out this target set, Americans are hanging from bridges after been burnt alive and dragged through the street. That's this era of war. This is, you know, black, black water dudes being tortured, football players being kidnapped and tortured, you know, having anybody that was working for the American government, Zarkawi's having his henchmen, you know, like they drill their hands to the wall. they'd cut off their eyelids and then they'd rape their family in front of them before they'd killed them and you'd walk in, you'd find this raped and murdered family with this dude's hands

drilled to the wall. Like this is fucking peak war. Did you see that? Yeah. You walked in on that. We found every kind of imaginable horror that terrorist due to civilians, we found. Let's rewind. Let's re let's

I want to go right into that First time you saw that What is the op? Just everything From the from the From the insertion To walking in that room It's funny Full circle is in Israel

Just this recent October And we're in some of the kibbutz's adjacent to Gaza And seeing the same things That I saw back 18, 17 years earlier In Iraq the inhumane barbaric

things that these radical extremists do are just inhuman and I think that's the point is they want to show that anybody that does anything to support not Sharia law not these radical ideas isn't human right? They're infidels

so they can do anything they want to them on this is God what month is this this is early 2006, we are going to what we thought was a VBID target. And Al Al-Aavera was like the point guy. And we do a call out initially. So you set up like an L-shaped ambush on the outside of the house.

And this was early tactics of, for 2006, 2005, 2006. Not a lot of only special operations units were still. combat arms, we're still doing hard knocks. And there's no immediate dynamic entries. We're doing as deliberate as we possibly can after some houses get blown up and there's booby traps and bombs. So we're trying to do callouts. And we're doing a call out of a target.

And when we finally go to assault and clear the building, as we come in through the front door and you find a couple of kids that had been raped and murdered. your brain doesn't process it. You know, you can't, not that you're planning what you're going to see, but the last thing you plan on scene is, you know, dead kids in a corner. And I have a really good memory,

and I journaled the whole entire time that I was deployed in all my deployments. And I'll go back and I'll read some of these journals and there's things I literally don't remember, but it's written down. You know, like I came back and I sat there with a pencil in one of my green notebooks, and I wrote for hours, everything that I experienced. My GRG is in there, like the target package is in there. Everything's in there.

And I'm like, no way this happened. I don't remember this. And I'll go and I'll ask teammates that were there at that same time. And they're like, dude, I barely remember that. The way the brain works, like the fog of war and then... Compartmentalization. Yep. The trauma.

Like, I deny myself that, like, I saw some of the things that I saw. You know, but we saw them. Do you remember it now? Yeah. Do you remember seeing them now? Some of them. Some of them know. Some of them, yeah.

But a lot of them know. You remember the first time? No. And then confusing. Afghanistan to Ukraine to Israel. The rooms look the same. The trauma looks the same. The date is different.

Yeah. But the journal is accurate. Yeah, I'm sure it is. Why did you start journaling? I was, we had one of the very first kill capture missions. we do a dynamic entry of a house. And as we're approached in the front door, the front door is opened.

And a man is standing, a military-aged man is standing there. There is an AK on the other side of, so there's a T intersection of a hallway that is from the main entry of the room. I'm stacked on the right-hand side behind the owl. And he and I are on the right-hand side. The other side of the stack is on the left,

and we're kind of like have cross coverage inside of this door. So like once the number man goes, number one man goes, you kind of just follow taking opposing directions. And from the right hand side of the door, we could see the gun and we could see the guy. From the left hand side of the door, you could only see the guy, but you couldn't see the gun. So Al and the translator,

they're yelling to this guy to get on the ground, get on the ground, get on the ground. And the guy goes to grab the gun. and the right stack shoots him. And military-age man on target as he's trying to grab a weapon and he literally falls on top of the gun. You know, he's a stack of green-tip rounds. He was wearing one of those bead prayer necklaces.

It was really weird because it looked like a rosary, but it's not because they're Muslim prayer beads. And I remember looking at those beads and be like, is this dude Catholic? What is this guy doing here? Obviously, you know, like, but these are the things that go through your mind in real time and a million thoughts per millisecond. And, you know, ta-t-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. The guy falls over on top of this weapon and we flow through the house.

You know, whether it's going to be a flashbang or it's going to be a dynamic breach and explosive breach of the door, the moment that goes off, just like a bullet, those bullets going to overpressure from the barrels and those bullets impacting, create a, in the udaloupe, the, the, the, you know, It resets everybody on the inside. So you always follow your rounds in. So, pop, we shoot and we flow into the target. After we secure the building

and we're trying to find where the follow on target is, like move off to the next one. And I don't know who made the calls. So a 15-6 investigation is where the army goes into fact-finding about information that of possible criminal

activity for UCMJ action. And I've had a few 15-6s of these military investigations. And this was the first one where it should have been military age man on target, corroborated statements from teammates that he was trying to grab a gun, was shot on target, died on top of a gun, case closed. No investigation. totally fine. And this is peak war. When you say wild, Wild West, like you're shooting dudes squirting off targets when they're trying to move. Like if you do a deliberate assault on a house, so like a callout and you see guys start squirting out the back of the houses, we are set up to engage those guys that are leaving the target. But then we have a guy on a target that dies on a gun and this initiated an investigation. And it was at this moment where I was like, we're hunting the highest level dude in all of Iraq. And, And the scrutiny of this task force post Blackwater, as now the press is looking for excuses and opportunities to hang figuratively and literally and metaphorically, special operations and contractors, that in response to that scrutiny, we were, I don't know, like putting ourselves unnecessarily at risk.

So I started journaling from that night forward. Every single target, this is why I was able to write that book with such clarity with Nick, was because I had 15 years of journals from me in a variety of conflict zones. So starting that night after that investigation, Al was actually pulled off of the assault team because of that shooting. Who initiated the investigation, do you know? No. You know, and this is, I mean, I do, but, uh, um, was it a U.S. service member? Yep.

I, uh, I'm never going to disparage this. There's a guy that was at war. Um, I am an E5 at the time that just wants to get in gunfights. I did, I was not in his shoes. I was not in his position. I was not in his position of authority or responsibility. That's his name on documents. Those are his men that work for him.

So like, if I were in his position, I'm going to say I'm of course going to do something totally different, but where I'm at now, I'm never going to throw a stone. I didn't know what he knew at the time. Do I think it was wrong? Of course. Dude, I would do anything to have Al in every single, to be the number one guy in every single room that I ever went into

because he was fast, he was dynamic, and he was violent. I mean, this happened a lot. It did a lot. And it just got worse and worse and worse. And I really don't want to steer the interview this way. but I think it's important that people hear this type of stuff, you know, and how early in the deployment?

I mean, that's your first deployment. Welcome to war. That was my first weapon from Select to Fire and press the trigger. Really? First time. Right there, initiated a 15-6 investigation. So you pulled the trigger? That whole right side of the stack did.

And everybody stepped over. There's three people that shot that dude, And there was a stack arounds like this right here. It's crazy, right at the intersection of that necklace. They've 15 bullets all touching each other. How did that investigation affect your mental state? Negatively. It made me second-guessed everything that I was doing.

It made me, you know, in that observe-oriented side act, what should be the gunfighter loop of how fast I can recognize, that there's a problem, direct my attention towards that problem, decide what the appropriate action is to take on that, and then act on that. You know, that's milliseconds and that's live or die. And then confusing all of that is, well, what should be the action might cause me to be investigated for a not-righteous shooting that's going to get me kicked out of country or, like, even worse, you know, be arrested and sent to jail. or kicked off the team.

You know, that was the worst fear for me was to do something that would get me kicked off the team. And you should not have fear of fighting when you're in the middle of war. And there was all of the, just like the same moment that we started losing momentum in the Vietnam War when cameras started coming in there and you're supposed to be fighting and winning.

Our job is to go and kill the enemy. We're supposed to be the most lethal fighting force on the planet And I should not have to think about what some politician is going to be leveraging and positioning and some argument on the floor to try to demonize what the men and women that are wearing the flag on the shoulder forward are doing in combat. Like you sent us there. So let us do our job. And right now we've been seeing it for the past 10 years where every single opportunity is just a talking point for some politician. Well, you go all the way back to 2005 and 2006. It was very similar.

You had journalists looking for opportunities. You had politicians looking for opportunities. It was just infuriating. Yeah. Yeah. What did... So that was the first time you pressed the sugar. Yeah.

What did that feel like for you? Minimal recoil. You know, the green tip. It's a high energy, fast bullet that is... very lighten grains, you know, and stepping over a body that is shot. Afterwards, John again, we get back to the hooch and it slaps on backs and pop in a bottle of whiskey. You know, like, I didn't know what to think.

I didn't know what to feel. You know, he'd already been in a thousand gun fights. I have no idea how many, you know, deployments he'd been in. but it was normalized in this is the way, like that you are a warrior, you are on a warrior team, and you just had your first welcome. And for a man,

for a young man searching for purpose and for searching for a place, not knowing if he deserved or belonged to be, like deserved and belonged on that ODA, there was maybe for the first time a feeling of I deserve to be here. I wanted to be there, but I didn't know if I deserved to be there. Did you feel in a tremendous sense of accomplishment? Yes.

I did the thing that I was trained to do that night in my journey. journal, I wrote, because there were two young boys in that house and alive or dead. Alive. And I posed this question to myself that I couldn't answer at the time because I just remember the wife screaming and the boys screaming for their dead dad. And did I just create a new revolution in this wheel? Was I spoke that just continued to, I just killed one bad guy, but just made. made two more. Like these are going to be forever men, future men that hate everything about me and

us. And yes, I took out one, but it created two more. Have I just perpetuated this, this endless saga that is good versus evil? And I just created two more versions of evil. You know, I cut off the snake, the head of the snake and two more sprouted up in its place because of my actions. Well, there's another way to look at that, too. I mean, look at the example they had to follow. For sure. You know? Yeah.

So that's interesting that you were already thinking that. Yeah. Did it bother you at all? A little bit. You know, the, man, it would be so nice if war was against 30-year-old men with beards that are doing evil. You know, if you took the kids off the battlefield, if you took the women off the battlefield, old. If you took the confusing smells of the kitchen mixed with the smell of all the dust that's kicked up from the overpressure of a door charge, you know, where you're like, I remember the

smell of that dust, that fine moon-like dust that gets kicked up from our charges or from our flashbangs. And you walk through the kitchen. You're smelling curries and spices and herbs that are hanging on the wall. But then you also smell the lead smell of the blood from that's pooling on the floor. for you know like all of that is not what the brain's built to do um all the while there's a 28 year old girl with two sons all three of them are screaming for their dead dad um this is as good as it's going to get you know it just gets worse after that yeah like that's on the best case scenario bad dude with a gun on target um you know with legitimate intel you took out a top terrorist on your first deployment.

Well, you guys. Yeah. That would be really cool. Let me correct myself there. But let's get into that. I mean, that is a huge piece of American history that not a lot of people have insight into. So can you walk us through the Zarqawi operation?

Yeah. So there were... Actually, let's start here. Who was Zarqawi? Yeah, one of the embodiment of the embodiment evil, like the personification of inhumane, radical Islam. Zarqawi was the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. You had bin Laden, if you think kind of two separate but connected elements.

You had bin Laden that was still on the run, but unknown since Torboer, right, he's kind of disappeared, but he is the figurehead of this larger radical terrorist wing. but the man that is the ground force commander that is in charge of everything that's happening in Iraq is Zarqawi. Zarqawi and his lieutenants, you know, he was infamous for posing with dead American soldiers, battlefield recovery of their weapons. And if you saw him, he's sitting there with a 249 or a 240 or an M4 that he took off dead soldiers, dragging them through the streets.

Heaven forbid somebody gets captured. He was infamous and notorious for torturing. So he would torture any American informant. So anybody that was giving information to the Americans, he would torture them. You know, Chris Kyle, American sniper, his book is following some of the enforcers from the Zarqawi Network. And there were a few different special operations task forces that were tasked with eliminating support. and strategic ground that he controlled while all the while we're on this kill capture mission

to find him specifically. And that the climax, the crescendo of that led to a single night where we had taken down targets leading up to it week after week after week. When did you find out you were going after him? Um, this would be March of, until a month before we finally found him and killed him. Damn. I mean, that's got to be, that's got to be motivating as hell.

Yeah. To be out there after that guy. Let's revisit that I am an E6 now. Mm-hmm. And brand new to the team. So the task force 100% knew who they're going after. And my team's leadership knew who they're going after. But the junior 18 Bravo that gets a GRG and is told where I'm going to go and where

I'm going to attack and where my position is going to be and where I am in the stack and where my load plan is on the helicopter or where my position is on the vehicle that night. My level of understanding of what was happening in the battle space was, you know, like, prepubescent at best. Gotcha. So, like, everybody maybe besides me knew what was happening. Because, you know,

it's difficult when you're stupid. And that's where I was. Right on, man. At least you're honest. Yeah. But, well, yeah, let's walk through the, just walk through everything.

Dude, so much. You know, this is a. This is good. Nobody's done this yet. Yeah. We didn't lose. We didn't lose anything. That task force had the unit, Ranger Regiment, the Criff, the SIF had our QRF were Abrams and Bradley's loaded with infantrymen.

You know, like if we start getting scuffed up, Abram tanks and Bradley tanks. tanks came and just leveled blocks. You know, this is, I say we didn't lose. We're hitting a target that has maybe, you know, a bomb maker, an assistant, and a couple of security guys. So four guys on target, we're hitting them with a company. You know, you're hitting them with six, like an entire troop of an assault force. And how victors and winners approach a gunfight is every. Every single thing is in your favor.

You know, you're in the dominant position. You have the dominant technology. You have the dominant men. You have every dominant speed surprise and violence of action that you can execute on target is being done in real time. That's what this entire deployment was. You know, the purple hearts that were given out to the guys in the task force were from, you know, trapnel. Like, nobody got shot. Nobody got killed.

This was. This was murder time. This is, we're going to find this guy and we're going to kill him. So the target board or the murder board, right? You have the guy at the top and then you have strings connecting to every single one of his lieutenants. And then from his lieutenants, every single one of their enablers. And then from their enablers, every single one of their advisors.

And you create this big, huge target list. and then you attach physical locations to where these people could be or will be in real time. And you've seen hundreds of these boards. You have the people and then you have the targets. Those targets aren't always exactly like even though this is, you know, number three guys' house, he's not, he's only going to be at this house at this specific time. So you have to figure out the pattern of life and where that person is going to be for, you to not just take down that target, but also take out that person because what we're trying

to do is limit the options available for where this, where Zarqawi can squirt to. And, um, the targeters, the, the army and joint military intel team, they're amazing. They're just so good. They're, they are the best that have ever been in the existence of this speed. sees watching what you know J-Soc can do is and I'm watching you know like by no stretch of the imagination do I deserve to be there. I am at best a gun that is barely competent in how to use it you know I'm just doing what I'm told and getting to see the effectiveness of all of America's might power, technology, and military prowess directed at an acute single thing is just the most impressive display, maybe in history. Like, I got it. We went to the moon. We found one dude that

owned an entire country, and we took out every single bit of ground and person that that man knew until we ultimately dropped two bombs on top of him, and he dies looking up at an American operator. That's freaking epic. It is. So we hit target, target, target, target weeks leading up to this final night. And this is my understanding of it is that we had hit enough targets and taken enough literal ground, enough of his safe houses where there were a few, there were few enough for him to run to in one night. You know, in some nights we'd have five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten follow on targets as we're

doing a battlefield interrogation and during tactical questioning. And the guy says, yeah, this is the other place that we go to. And limiting, as you look at like the physical places on the board, there's lines through them. Now there's like 10 or 15 left. We can do 10 or 15 in a night. And they get prioritized. And of course, the highest priority targets, the ones that have the highest likelihood of finding, you know, numero uno dude, get, you know, one through four. The unit takes this one.

these guys take this one down to us and then he goes back through the list and that night we just hit him house after house after house after house and uh for those listening right now that are wondering what the unit is that is delta yeah and they're you know they're they're the leaders of the task force they are the best most capable fighting force on the planet and um they're hitting all the houses, you know, the first time in seventh group history. And to my, to my knowledge, the first time in special forces history was during this deployment where the CRIF and the Delta Force were on targets for the first time on for gunfighting. It's kind of cool. I was outside security.

just a real clear. That was not an house. Really wanted it to be, but I'll be wherever John told me to be at this moment of my career. And when it was wild leading up to these final nights

where 160th soar, the Army's Special Operations Aviation group, they're flying guys to targets. We have panders, like armored personnel carriers

that are really, really fast, zipping all over the town. The Iraqi counterterrorism force is co-located with another element of the SIF and they're going and hitting all of these different targets and they're the ones that are really driving a ton of information.

You get you hit a target. Sometimes the guys from that target try to squirt and that's the end of it. Sometimes they call for QRF because they don't realize who they're in a gunfight. with. And the QRF that shows up is the Iraqi police that are supplied and trained by American military. And they're pulling out guns that were given to them by the United States government. And you're picking up a Glock off target and being like, we gave you, we gave you this. You're dead, but I want to lecture you that you do not deserve to have this.

You're like trying to figure out who the enemy was at this time is, because we're training some of the Iraqi military, we're training some of the Iraqi police, but then some of them are being controlled by Zarqawi. You know, he has some pretty long levers and he's able to manipulate via force and fear and power for them to do what he wants it. And we get some nights, we're in a gunfight and 160th got shot up so bad. They couldn't even come and pick us up. So our exfiel, we're like at our exfiel spot after a full night of gunfighting. And we don't have a ride out to get back to Baghdad into the city proper, into the international, into the green zone. And we're like, well, where's the closest friendly force? We find this little tiny marine fob. And we try to get them up on

columns. You know, talk about one of the scariest moments of my life is walking up to a marine base as a bunch of dudes blacked out in body armor and guns with dudes in drag bags and a couple of dudes that are zip tied as we're walking up and like, don't shoot us, you know, like front link up of friendly forces in a battle space and like lasers start popping at us, you know, and we're like, we're doing the worldly bird up in the sky with our lasers, be like, no, no, no, don't murder us, please. We walk into this firebase, these guys have nothing. They have, you know, they're using M16s with ACogs. They're getting mortared every single day. They're eating T-rats. Their gym are buckets filled with sand and milk jugs filled with cement.

That's what they're doing for like shoulder press and bench press. And they're training every single day. They're going outside the wire every single day. And I'm coming from a base where I have all the protein powder. We have like stacks of energy drinks. Like we have this big, huge, nice gym with like a jiu-sitsu mat. We have our own shooting range. You know, I get to go and I walk into this.

And remember, I've never spent a day in the military. I've only been in special operations. And my whole entire time on a team, I've only been at the SIF. So I walk into this, I'm like, what? Like, you guys live here? And they're on a 12-month deployment.

Yeah. Yeah. And they're getting hit every single day. It's wild. It is. And that led up to, you know, two weeks later, us being able to in one night

hit every target. Drivings are Kaui to his final last safe safe house where they drop two guided bombs, two munitions on top of him. Did you guys know he was on the run while you were hitting these targets? Yeah. Well, during the interrogation of people on target, you're starting to get this picture of the spider web. And things were being corroborated from multiple targets where people were saying the same things.

Like, yeah, this guy's going here, this guy's going there. Everybody's like this address, this house, this location are all like driving back to these limited you know like on the location killboard there's only a few left and we've now seen that they're all going back to those same places and it wasn't you know i wasn't on target when he died but when we get back you know we're unloading we're pulling belts were you know open bolt machine guns from 240s and 249 start stripping gear start repacking speed bags you know starting to change batteries and everything goes black like all columns get shes shut down all jammers get turned on so sat phones aren't working like nothing's working and um and uh all cell phones

all internet all uh landlines everything gets cut for the whole entire compound and that's when i was like did this just happen you know only a couple of that only happens for a couple of reasons one somebody messed up really bad and they have to shut out shut down all calms out. Two is something really good happened. And you have to shut down all calms out. I was really hoping it was the latter. And it ultimately ended up being the latter. When did you get the news? When, uh, almost the same time that I heard that George Bush is going to fly in to shake everybody's hand. No shit. Dude. Yeah. I don't think, like, I mean, I know it's been leaked and there's photos that had been leaked. But, you know, that was regiment.

Delta Force and seventh group SIF all standing there shaking hands as George Bush walked down and like he didn't do that for publicity nobody knew he just topped on a plane and flew over there to shake the hands of the men that killed the guy that had been doing so many unspeakable acts to so many innocent people did it register at that point no still didn't register still doesn't it still doesn't... Damn, Tim. I mean, there's a moment in history and like, how do you know that you're there? I didn't deserve to be there. I was still an immature teammate not supporting in any way. So like, there's a lot of like emotions of shame and regret. Like, I would have wished so desperately to be the 2010 operator back in 2000.

Just four years, man. Just give me four years. A couple of combat deployments. A couple more schools. A little bit more understanding of how to actually contribute. Instead, you know, like, I'm just looking at a door in front of me. And if the guy, number one guy goes right, I'm going to go left. Like, that's where I was.

And that sucks. Well, you are hand selected by a very seasoned operator for, I'm sure, a very good reason. Yeah. I bet if you ask John, if he could go. back and make that same decision he'd make a different decision well that doesn't matter yeah but it was pretty epic it sounds like it that is uh did you know the guy that found him yeah and one one of uh matt smith who's the director of training for sheepdog response retired special forces sergeant major he's worked for a bunch of incredible units special missions

units, you know, he was long-time friends. And so getting to like hear the stories and firsthand and, you know, being there, getting to tie what happened at that target with where we were at the exact same time, you know, is, you know, going back to my journals too and like re-looking at that night, which target we're at and which people we are questioning when that happened. And we roll back in to the compound when, you know, when. they finally dropped those bombs and we'd just been in another fight with a different QRF

it's like the elevation and adrenaline you know is freaking out and then like wait what just happened it's over like we got him damn do you want to talk about what happened

when they found him or should we keep that offline totally up to you I want everybody to know that this dude that Zarkawi radical

murderous raping torturing fanatic burnt people alive you know dragged them through the street tortured

I don't know if you're trying how many do you think Sean do you under his lieutenants did he how many people did he torture and murder specifically Iraqis

that I can't answer that. You know, I don't know. Thousands? Tens of thousands? It's got to be. I mean, I remember rolling up to locations where they would put people's heads on cinder blocks on huge blocks. And then just launch cinder blocks straight down and pop people's heads like a grape.

I've seen pregnant woman, you know, get hung on hooks just to, bleed out with the fetus inside and he was part of all that. He's orchestrating all that. The headings. All of the

shit that you saw over there he had a hand in. So his last his last breaths as he was dying from shrapnel and overpressure was an American commando with his foot on his chest.

You know, that's, I'm not sure Americans have the appetite or the tolerance for what it means to win a war. You know, in 1941, a day that I live in infamy and we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, it finished with us dropping two nuclear bombs on a people that wouldn't submit. You know, behind every blade of grass, when you come onto the motherland of Japan, you'll find somebody fighting to protect Japan. Like, fine, Hiroshima. You're like, do, are you done? No, fine. Here's Nakasaki. You know, are you done?

Then we won that war, right? In Europe, in the, in, as we pushed into Berlin, it was absolute destruction and carnage of everything. If you look at photographs from early 1945, late 1944, it is destruction in epic proportions. there's no moral equivalency when you're trying to win a war. There's winning and there's losing. That's it. And we're looking for some moral justification about how we're going to be fighting these wars these days.

And there's winning and there's losing. And so I realize that now people may not have the appetite of what it looks like to have an American standing with his boot on the chest of one of the evilest men to walk to face the planet in my lifetime. But that is a beautiful, glorious thing. And I hope they can understand why that's important. I think most people listening here are going to understand why that's important. But thank you for sharing that. America. That's right.

Greatest country and history. That's right. So what do you do? So you take out Zarqawi. You guys take out Sarkali. How much long? do you have on this deployment? I mean, that was the point of the deployment. So we come back, keeping the momentum and hitting, making sure that none of his lieutenants are promoted. So

keeping that initiative where we continue to hit targets rapidly over the next few nights. We maybe had a 48-hour stand-down as the president came, which is another one of the reasons why all the comms were shut down. And once you're told that, you know, President Bush is coming in, uh, everybody goes from the task force and is there and, you know,

they shake hands and a few pictures are taken and he bounces. And then it was like, let's go back to work. Every single bit of information that was taken off of every single one of those targets on that night is then reprioritized into a new target list as we, you know, taking this guy off, but moving,

elevating these two guys that we haven't yet found. and trying to keep that momentum to secure and stabilize that battle space. And then you go home. How many top terrorists do you think were neutralized that deployment? 50? 50. Top. I mean, there's a lot.

That's a whole deck of cards. That's right. Yeah. I mean, in that deck of cards, I think there's three or four. just in that specific 2004, 5, 6, 7 deck of cards. I think there's like

five or six dudes that were in that deck. Nice. In that one deployment. But then, you know, the lieutenants for every single one of them, respectively, like, those guys went to

the dirt as well. So there was a 48-hour window of... I worked out like nine times. You got to meet the president. I'm sorry, but we got to slow down the ops because you got to meet the president. And then it's

Right back at it. Right back to work. As it should be. Yep. No time for celebration. Let's go get the rest of them. I think in that tactical pause and that battlefield patience, which is so important and often misunderstood, they were also processing all of the information taken off of all of those targets that night.

And then they had to reprioritize all new targets going forward. I mean, that's hard. Like, even now, if I were tasked with that, how do you reorganize your whole entire target list with all information that's taken off of 25 targets in one night? And then you move out, you know, number two, number one, two, five, and seven. Like. And then all of the new ones that we didn't even know about. Yep. Man, that's a, that's a hell of.

the first deployment too. Holy shit. Dude. I still get like part racing thinking back. That's deployment number one. My first combat deployment. Man. Amazing.

Yeah. And things changed. Afghanistan. Yeah, so let's go home. Okay. So you get home. Do you get married on this trip home? Yep. So you come back, you find out you talk to the spies. She's good. spies she's good yeah and uh i know i'm going to be going to ranger school to special force of sniper school and um and i'm already starting to position i'm trying to find out which unit is

the next unit going back to afghanistan and i start trying to uh manipulate position myself to get on that hitch so i'd like knock out to schools and then go on the next rotation so you're not the SIF. No, I'm still on the SIF. Then what are you looking at other units for? So the you, once you spend a couple of deployments or a couple of years on

the assault force, you can move to the recon HALO sniper team. So I go to Ranger School. My team sergeant, John, says, hey, if you're going to go to Ranger School, you can't come back to this team unless you're on a graduate. And so you have no choice but to go to Ranger

School. Because, you're going to, You're immature. You don't understand leadership. You don't understand the army. So go to Ranger School. And if you're not honor graduate, you can't come back to this team. So I go, I'm an honor graduate.

I come back to this team. But then, like, I still have the chip on my shoulder because I'm a prick. And I still haven't learned humility, evidently. So I'm like, fuck this team then. I'm going to, you know, I'll go to the hell of sniper team. So then I, uh, Alex Ortiz is the team sergeant for 796.

And, uh, He offers me a spot to come to 796. So I go to sniper school after Ranger School. And I'm looking for when is the next combat deployment for anyone in the greater special forces regiment? Because now I wanted to deploy as a sniper. And so I'm still in the SIF, but I'm looking for jobs for Usasok, J-Soc, for coalition soft forces that need a sniper. that need a sniper because I wanted to be an experienced sniper,

not just a paper sniper. And that was, and especially as a special forces sniper, in addition to being able to shoot far, you know, far far away, you come with the understanding of a battle space and how to, you know,

call in nine lines and how to be the connective tissue between other special operations units and combat units in the theater. with like as a softly like a special operations liaison. So a sniper is really useful in those roles because he can speak the languages of lots of different types of units.

So I was trying to find a way to get to war as a sniper. And the SIF, having just returned, they weren't on the playbook to go back for like two more years. Okay. And I did not want to wait two more years. Gotcha. Gotcha. How did you propose to your wife? Yeah. So I had, first we were going to be going to a baseball game in Southern California, and I was going to do that cringy, seventh inning thing. I had that set.

And it, for a variety of reasons, a nephew that was sick, we ended up not going to the game, so I canceled that. Then I was going to do it at Disneyland, during the fireworks. But fog and weather came in and they canceled the fireworks that night. So then I was going to do it at the beach house in California in Cambria, and we're driving on the coast road over, and as soon as you crest the hill, and you see the ocean, I saw this gigantic layer of marine clouds. So I knew that once we got, it was going to be a full moon that night, that once we got to the beach, you wouldn't be able to see anything besides the black murkiness that is fog.

And I have a bad relationship with fog, so I was like, I don't really want to propose to my wife on a dark beach in the middle of the fog. So as we're on top of this hill looking, this mountain, looking out on the Pacific and the Pacific Ocean is like, it's my, my home. It's my, I love that water. I right there on the side of the road, I got down on anine, was, like, you're made for me. I don't deserve you.

And I, and I, I know that you fight for me. I'm not going to tell you how I know, but, uh, and she, she said,

yeah. Oh, that was it. And I drove to my grandma's house in Cambria and told her, she was the first to hear that, uh, I was getting married.

Oh, man. That's cool. very cool very cool now marriage is tough so you get married you get engaged and you get married on the same trip home yep and find your new unit well i stay in the siff um i find my new deployment okay um so i still at c37 i was still in the seventh group siff and um i okay so hold on let me so there's multiple teams and within the SIF in each group. There are two

troops and each troop is comprised of an assault force of two ODAs and a a reckey team. Okay. And that reckey team is broken into like the Halo sniper and then like the tech human side of the reckey team. Got it. So each of those troops

could kind of work independently but as a squadron they can like work as a four team assault team with two reckey teams. You know that's how we were organized. Got it. And this deployment,

a new battalion was going into Afghanistan and the soft coalition, so all of our NATO allies with all of their special operations teams that are four deployed, the British, the Canadian, Czech, the French,

all of those teams are under the battle space, commander of the American military. So the American kind of combatant commander of Afghanistan has all of these different countries that are all allies that are all working under this kind of coordinated combatant wing. As a special force of sniper, I myself and my sniper partner volunteered to be Usa Sok snipers for the coalition SOF. Sof. So anytime that any one of our allied tier one units were going to be going to a target.

One of us would, well, the plan for both of us was to go, but as soon as we landed in Afghanistan, my sniper partner gets the dear John letter that his bank account had been dumped. That his wife had a dude on the side and she was just waiting for him to fly overseas. She's like selling his guns,

selling his motorcycle, dumping his bank account. So he was going to be Combat ineffective So they flew him home Which left me there by myself So now I'm a USOX special forces sniper assigned to the coalition

And I'm like I got nobody So this whole entire deployment I am just hopping From TST to TST Time Sensitive Target Or trip or mission Which with each of these different coalition units

Before we get into the actual deployment You did another thing on your off time. You started your first company, correct? That's right. Ranger up. How did that come about? There's this fighting tournament called the Army Combatives Tournament, and all military branches could send their best fighters

to this four-day long, just violent tournament. tournament. You'd weigh in. The first phase was fighting in grappling. The second phase was fighting in pancreas limited striking rules. And the third phase was you fighting in real MMA fights for who is going to be the Army combatives champion. Ranger Up was like this apparel line that would make fun of all of the things about the military that you couldn't make fun of. being in the military. And it was awesome. And Nick Palmeschiano and Tom Mementa and Dave were like, hey, we want to sponsor you.

So I went and fought in those Army Combatives tournaments as a former professional fighter. So I'm the only guy in history to win them three times. And you'd fight anywhere from 10 to 20 times over the weekend. You know, obviously submission fights, pancrease fights, and then finally, MMA fights. What's a pancreas fight? It's a, so your bare knuckle that's close fist to the body, kicks to the head, but you can't close fist punch somebody to the face. So it's grappling and kickboxing heavy. Gotcha.

And then it kind of like limits face damage so that you are able to fight, which would be your third phase and final phase, which is the championships, in MMA rules. When I won that, Nick and Tom and Dave were like, hey man, we also heard that you're like fighting on the side. So they started sponsoring me. And I said, well, why don't, instead of you sponsoring and paying me, like I would like some equity.

And I would like to help build Ranger up. So that was my first like business entrepreneurial step, was getting equity of Ranger Up and then starting to help build that brand. Man, you guys had some great branding for the time. I remember this one video specifically and it was, I've never met Nick, but I think it was Nick.

And he was, he had this old Special Forces medic on there. Dude, that was hilarious. We were like so, so, far ahead. Now there's tons of great military apparel lines. You know, you had like 7662, you have 9 line, you have grunt style, and they're all great companies owned by great guys. We were the first. You know, we're the first ones to do it. You know, Matt Best and Jared that went on to own Black Rifle Coffee. They had Article 15, you know, with Rocco. So like, but we were the first. And, you know, we're the first ones in PXs. We were the first ones like saying things that you

couldn't say and putting them on shirts and having soldiers, like, wear those things around. It was freaking awesome. Yeah. Yeah. That stuff really, I mean, that got legs fast. Yeah, it took off. It seemed like it. Yeah, it blew up.

It was crazy to go from, you know, Nick and Tom and Dave, like, printing shirts in a garage to them, you know, selling five million in shirts. Wow. You know. Yeah. An infantry officer, an SF officer, a Ranger Battalion kid, and a Green Bray. Damn. Damn. That is very cool. It's fun.

Did you guys get a lot of shit for that? Did you? Yeah, we got like, oh, you're those guys. You know, like, and some people didn't get the jokes. And, and military humor is not humor that is appreciated sometimes out of the military. So, non-service members would see some things and they'd be like, dude, that's not funny at all. You're like, no, it's, it's absolutely hilarious. You're like, and I'm sorry that you don't get it,

and I'm sorry that you're offended or whatever triggered word is now. But this is funny, you just don't get it. And that's a you problem. Yeah. How long did that run go on for? Wait, 10 years. 10 years? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that carried me into, you know, I fought for IFL and Strike Force. UFC, I was wearing Ranger up on fight shorts. And that, the success of that company and how to do it and how to market really led into me opening new business ventures and how to organize business. There were a lot of mistakes that we made at Ranger Up, but like with all mistakes, ideally you learn from them. And I was just surrounded by really smart people that once we made a mistake and they learned from them, they would then tell me what to do. So I didn't make them again because I would make them again because I'm dumb.

But they would be like, ah, maybe if you learn from this, we'd do this differently. And it just kept kind of getting better. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. That's, I mean, it essentially created an entire subculture out of the military that brands have taken ideas from, learned from, developed new ideas. I mean, that was kind of the start, you know, and it's very cool. Yeah, we're definitely proud of it. We didn't exit like the way that you'd want, you know, as you position yourself to sell a company at the right time. We did it in all the wrong ways, which is another hard lesson to learn where you've been part of a brand for 10 years and then you kind of watch that brand die on the vine. You know, like, Rainierp still exists. You know, I still own a percentage of it. You know, but that company, which I don't control anymore and neither does Nick. And, you know, it.

is like a shell of what it once was. You know, that, that stings. Yeah. We're like, man, why don't we sell at this moment? Or why didn't we position to exit at this moment? And we just didn't know any better. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, plus, it wasn't your primary focus. You know? So, all right. Let's move into Afghanistan. So you're a sniper for use of sock. Yeah. So going from being on a J-Soc task force hunting the number one dude on the planet to being a single sniper in support of coalition units that do not get tier level targets. You get whatever's there in their battle space.

There's no QRF. There's no support. There's not even another person on target that speaks English and sometimes. In some instances, like, I knew some of the guys on Target spoke English. They just went talk to me in English. You know, like, I don't speak French. I don't speak German. You know, like, I'd fight to go with the Canadians or the British, but they weren't trying to get in the fights like the Czechs were.

Like, the Czechs wanted to get into fights. So, like, me traveling and deploying and going with the Czechs off, for example, into Firebase Anaconda, like, they wanted to get into gunfights. No, shit. I never even... I never worked with the checks. Dude, they're bad. Are they?

Yeah, a bunch of Viking-blooded dudes. Hey, I never got the opportunity. I've seen the Polacks. I've seen the Polacks. And those boys were hungry. Yeah. But I never, yeah, never saw the checks. Kind of same vibe between the two of them.

You know, they're like the, like, the guru and checks off both have that like something to prove, Eastern block anxiety of post-USSR where like they got they have a chip on their shoulder. They want to know how to fight. They want to bring lessons learned from combat back to their homes. You have to be in Eastern Europe when you have Russia knocking on your door often and then making incursions into Crimea and Ukraine and for you to understand the permanent anxiety that these special operations guys have because it's on them right like you can say NATO all you want but if Russia came to the Polish border which they were trying to push through you know like

when they got all the way to Kiev and they're looking at moving all the way up into Poland Poland was positioned to find a line in the sand and stand there and die on it like you'd have to step over the bodies of every single Polish special operations guy if you're a Russian soldier trying to invade Poland. And they have had that for 20 years. So then they get to go to war, but they haven't been in war, like real war, and now they want to prove their tactics, their procedures. They want to make sure that their equipment is right. They're using the right ammo. All the things that you learn from war, they're trying to perfect there. The Czech and the polls were maybe the most hungry.

Yeah. Yeah. Did you, so what's it like going out with those guys? They don't shoot at them. They also don't have the same scrutiny. You know, this is 2008. Now we're peak Afghanistan war. I went from like peak Iraq war to, you know, 2007.

7, 8, 9 is peak Afghanistan war. And if you're on, you know, if we're moving, we're on a gaff, a ground assault force, we're in vehicles moving towards a target. And that target starts shooting at the ground assault force. They're just going to level the target. You know, like this is the war that we're at now. It's not like, hey, let's continue to roll up and hit them. a dynamic entry, it's like, cool, let's stop and we're just going to drop bombs and mortars on top

of these guys, and then we're going to cruise down as maneuver elements and pick up the bodies. You know, this is, we got blown up as Valley and Erzgan with the checks, and it was a IED initiated ambush, and they had positioned a few hundred foreign fighters and Taliban in this Valley with this intent of taking out the entire Czech special operations, the special forces ODA that was escorting them to firebase Anaconda, and all of the resupply that was going to keep them at this firebase throughout the winter. So there's this gigantic caravan of jingo trucks, and then the Czech special operations forces and the American escorts to there.

And I was the liaison to the Czech special forces. Okay. This is just an example of like the different types of missions that I went on as that Usasok sniper liaison. From the time that initiated, that IED initiated ambush kicks off, P-KMachine guns start going off. RPGs are skipping off hoods and slamming into vehicles. Like that was the beginning of a three-day gunfight.

And if you're doing your, your, you're doing your, your, battlefield damage assessment, you know, you're looking at a few hundred dead foreign fighters. Damn. You know, the vehicle in front of me gets disintegrated. Everybody inside of it dies, you know, like purple hands hearts were handed out to like, not handed out. That's not the right word. Everybody gets purple hearts from this mission.

You know, shrapnel in the back and the necks. We're in villages as we're moving from there all the way to fire base, Anaconda, every time that we moved to the next village, we're having to fight door to door, building to building, to get through this village. And you couldn't go around this village because around the outsides of these villages, they'd put IEDs. Damn. So it's just like... And you're with the checks. Yeah. How are you communicating with them? How are you integrating with their tactics? I would mostly talk to the Americans about where we were and where we were going. And I would just observe what the checks were doing or how they were

maneuvering and then I would communicate to the team sergeant of the special forces ODA about, hey, we're going to be heading, you know, like we're going no with rest, our azimuth is this right now, we're going to be moving to this position. And the company commander spoke broken English, but English enough, where he would relay to his unit that would be maneuvering to a new position. And then he'd give me like the bluff. He'd give me the wave tops. You know, like this is the bottom line up front, we're moving to this hill and we're going to be providing suppressive fire as the ODA is going to be moving to the south. So I'd call the ODA, be like, okay, we're moving up to this hill.

This is going to be the grid coordinates. And I'll give you intel from this position as we go. And that would be rapidly changing. And I'd always be struggling and to figure it out like what the heck is going on right now. Yeah. And so, I mean, I've got to be honest, this sounds like a pretty good mission set to me. I mean, so you're basically a strap hanger for anybody that's doing shit. That's right.

I got to... Was it hard to integrate in with these units and get them to say, yeah, we want them on the off? No, I mean, you know, you pass a sniff test. You go into the pre-mission briefing and you ask a few of the right questions and, you know, how am I going to be an asset? Where would you like me? How would you like me to communicate? What kind of information do you want me to relay to the American? Americans. Like here are some capabilities that I have in calling for fire. This is the equipment

that I'm bringing with me. Is this appropriate where I would be useful if I have the stuff? Is there other stuff that you would like me to have that I do have that I can bring if you'd like? You know, those type of things really build immediate rapport when you're having kind of an outsider come into your unit. They also recognized the value of having that. American special operations liaison. You know, if you want air support and you are French special operations and you're trying to call for American call for fire, that's hard. Right?

But then you have a me there where I can just pick up my phone and be like, I'm like, figure to phone and be like, hey, this is where we're at. This is what we need. This is where I need it. Send it. And it's done. So like they recognize the, the value in that. So with the right questions and the right kind of immediate rapport building,

and I would also bounce each one of the different nationalities had their own bases when you got to like Bogrom or Kandahar. They were all segregated into like the Italians were here, you know, the French were here, the British were here. Do you remember like, I remember. So I was, I would go and spent, I'd go have dinners with them. I would, you know, like if there's a soccer game happening, I would go and hang out with them. And I was able to go outside of the wire and acquire things that help build rapport with foreign units. So, you know, I'd bring a bottle of wine or, you know, like things that are hard to come by in Afghanistan. I'd bring and show up with, you know, some salted meats and for a soccer game.

And then, you know, you're, I was an E6 with, you know, combat patch recently came from Afghanistan. I got a Ranger tab. They know that I'm the Special Forces sniper. So it wasn't as hard to build that initial rapport. You know, I thinking back to my dad about like how to break down barriers. I came bearing gifts. I kept my mouth shut, asked questions when appropriate, and looked for opportunities to contribute.

How many different units did you operate with? About a dozen. Wow. Over the course of eight months. Damn. Did you, so now you're a, you're a special force of sniper. You've got a whole new set of capabilities and skills. Did you engage anybody as a sniper? Yeah, a lot. Did you kill anybody as a sniper? Yeah, a lot. Can we talk about the first one? Yeah, that's a bad one. It was sad. Like all war is. I wish it was like, dude, I saw this dude squirt out of the back of the target.

You know, he was holding the head of a baby on a shoulder, you know, and he's carrying an AK, and I see that he's wearing a VBID vest, and he's running towards an American unit, and I shot him. You know, yeah. It was a child carrying a 1875 lever action British rifle, and he was moving in resupply points between this Taliban machine gun position. and I saw him move a couple of times. I didn't know how old he was. He's about five, six hundred meters.

There's like hours of limited visibility. So like I see a guy with a gun moving from like the far side of a hill to a machine gun position. It does it a couple of times. So the next time that I see him moving, I shot him. Very rarely do you get to go and see the people you shoot as a sniper? And this was. in our direction of travel. So as the caravan starts to move in that direction, and I come and I see this 11, 12 year old kid with a rifle. Actually, have you ever come to my office in Texas and

Austin, I have this gun hanging on my wall? Right underneath it is the sent calm permission from the JAG for me to bring. It's not a war trophy. They said it's not even functional. And I also have U.S. Special Operations Command JAG authorizing me. And I have both of them, like the stamped approved, what were those like little squeeze things that put a permanent mark on the paper? Yeah. You know, with the JAG signature. Yeah, with their little pressure seal. Both of those things sitting right underneath there.

And it reminds me of two things. One is every time I hear a politician say, like, why do you need a gun? Like, what is the importance of the Second Amendment? We have F-16s and F-18s and M1 Abrams. And I think back to a little boy, a peasant, a nomad that had been kicking the American Special Operations ass in this valley for three days. And he's running around with an 1875 musket, one man with a rifle protecting his own land, how powerful he is and the power of the Second Amendment, and how this insurmountable

force of one good guy with a gun, how powerful that is. So that's one reason. And the second is to remind me the cost of war. It's never the way that you want it to be. It's never the way that it is in the movies. It is horrible. It is young. It is pain.

And, you know, I don't want my son to ever have to shoot an 11-year-old kid carrying a gun that doesn't even work. That's war. Everything else is for the movies. Is that still haunt you? Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. It's war.

Yeah. Someday we'll have peace. We'll all live together. But until then, this is what war looks like. You can have these ideals and dreams of grandeur, but it's eviscerated bodies and burnt, smell of hair and flesh and children that are raped. and tortured and die from overpressure wounds and bad guys all the same not but two days later from me shooting that kid. I throw a grenade through a window with a P-Cam machine gun. Mike Goebel, hero. One of the greatest green brays to walk the face of the planet. Roy Benavita's level green bray.

I walk up to a door and I don't know how he knew this. I don't know if he was pre-cogged. Like maybe he came from the future and came back in time. And I walk up. to this door, divine intervention. It's happened multiple times in my life. I walk up to this door. We see bad guys move into this building. And as soon as I go to reach for the handle the door, Mike and I, we always had like some friction. We had been in a couple of fights over some dumb stuff. He was in a machine gun position. He had a pistol out. I was like, why aren't you on your machine gun? He's like, well, I want a pistol kill. Like you're a stupid idiot. And I would fist fight. So like, fast forward to this door.

Typical Neanderthal conversation. 100%. I put my hand on this door and he hits me so hard and shoves me and I stumble back and fall over as this door gets shredded with machine gun fire. And I don't know if he like heard a bolt drop or if he heard a selector switch. There's no way because I was at this door, right? Like I didn't hear anything. All I know is like I just start falling back.

And I'm like trying to get my feet because I'm going to come at him and knock his teeth through his face because he just shoved me because I thought he wanted to be the number one guy through the door. And as soon as he shoves me, it pushes him back and this door just gets shredded with machine gun fire. And saves my life. No question. Had I been there like a half a second later and Mike Goldbl will not been there, I'd be dead. And I see as this door like kind of starts swinging that there's a machine gun. sticking out of this window and I take a grenade

I throw this frag grenade through this window again it's not like the movies right there's not like this flame there's not this like da-da it's just this thud and what you want to hear is silence you know all I hear is women and children

start screaming this guy had barricaded himself and surrounded himself with a bunch of women and children in this room and you know this is two days after coming off this kid. You got a lot of Spartan stuff in here.

Do you remember the plungers behind the line of the 300? So you'd have the guys in the front, the phalanx, right? The short stores and the spears and they would move that line forward and then step over the bodies of the people that were fighting

that would die against the shields. The next row behind them were long spears. So they were guys that were stabbing through the shoulders and over the shoulders of the forces that were coming so the wall would come,

that attacked, they'd close the wall, spears would come. And as you'd step over these bodies, the third row would be a plunger. And he would have this metal spike and he'd just stab these guys as the Spartans would move forward. Every night as we moved forward, I would sit there all night long with a thermal imager and I would splash rounds into every heated body on the battlefield. Holy shit, dude.

And I did it every night for eight hours, a couple hundred rounds a night. Shit. The only one that could shoot out. So the, with these RG33s with the crow's, um, amazing targeting system, what we didn't have was a lot of ammo. So the crows has thermal. They'd be able to spot a target. I would lay and they'd give me an azmuth and a desk, in a distance and direction, right?

And with distance and direction, I'd kind of PID the body. And then I would dump a couple of rounds in it. And then they'd move it. five degrees. And then give me a new distance and direction. I would adjust and I'd splash a couple of rounds. Repeat every night. And that, uh, exhausting. Yeah, it's heavy. And then you drive out and you just see these bodies that have, you know, your holes in them to, uh, to go into the next village that a dude is fighting from a room that he's surrounded women and children. This is war. Fuck war.

Man. How did that deployment end? With no allation or grandeur, with no celebration, with no time, you know, a redeployment date for me to go to another school. I had that rifle, which I had kept in my little tiny, crappy plywood sleeping area. And I remember like getting in fight after fight after with an Air Force Jag guy with like the redeployment security clerk. He's like, you can't come up. I'm like, I can.

I literally can. Like this is paperwork with a stamp that outranks you saying that I can. Like you can't. I'm like, this gun's coming with me. It's like that fight to bring that gun back home was crazy. But ultimately, you know, that. deployment date ended and I'm by myself. Like I didn't fly home with the team.

I didn't like high five. Like let's go back. My wife met me at the green ramp when I landed. There's nobody there. Damn. How was it coming home to your wife? Broken. Yeah, I was a broken dude.

How was she? I didn't know her. It was eight months since I saw her. And in eight months, you know, I did the worst things that a person can do to another person. And she didn't, right? She's at home. She's working every day. She's taking care of our shepherd.

You know, she's running marathons and, you know, she's finishing her MBA. And so she's developing as a human. And I'm developing in a totally different way, you know, not better or worse, just different. So I was at a Best Buy. This guy in this BMW starts cruising by. And he's smoking cloves. There was an Indian restaurant that was like just a couple buildings away. But clearly it was like downwind from it because I could smell like the curry from the Indian restaurant.

And I could smell his clove. And he was listening to some Arabic music. And then he's like in a bad guy's car because like that's what. All of them drew, and I, I mean, I was thinking about just like smoking this dude in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I've been home like three days and I was like, man, I got to go back to my house for a few days. They had just had the UFC fight for the troops the same weekend that I got home and I got home the day after it happened.

So like Brock Lesnar is in town, Randy Couters in town. Like, these are all dudes that I knew. and um and my and i love the brotherhood of combat arms specifically special operations uh Alex Ortiz and uh this sucks because i can't remember a couple of their names because they're dead now some of my teammates that sucks um they knew and had heard what that deployment was like for me. And, you know, when I'd call back to give them updates to my team sergeant, I'd call Alex, I'd like, hey, boss, just wanted to give an update.

I'm back. I just got back from this hitch that I was with the British or the Canadians or whatever. He's like, hey, man, I heard, like, I'm getting updates every single day on the red side. So first of all, I just want you know that I'm super proud of you. I want you to not feel any pressure to do anything. like, you know, be the best that you can be, but you're not proven anything to anybody. Like, we're proud to have you.

And like that really, that was the first time that I was like, I felt like I belonged there. It was because of Alex. And even like my team leader was supportive. We're not highly developed on the emotional IQ scale. Yeah, that was shit. So having, you know, a superior give you that affirmation was rare. And so when I came home, they were there physically.

You know, my wife was there, like, emotionally. Like, I don't know what you need right now, but I'm like here. And then the team was like, you know, take whatever time you need, but we're not going to let you get out of the saddle. So like we're going to be sending you to another school immediately. So like take a week, figure things out. and let's get you back on the horse. You had kids too. Yep.

They had two daughters from pre-military. They were born 10 months after 9-11. So I tried to recruit on 9-11 and in this kind of period of debauchery of me living as a broken man without purpose because I was trying to get in the military. Like it took me. 18 months trying to figure out what branch I'm going to. They have delayed enlistment things or

trying to put me in like this IRR thing. And I had no idea how any of it worked. So I knew where I wanted to go, but I had no purpose or direction. And a young man without purpose is a very dangerous thing. So yeah, I was got a few girls pregnant. I thought I got AIDS. I went for a swim in the Pacific Ocean. But ass-ass. naked out into the fog with no plan about how to get back just uh trying to figure things out were you hoping to die out there not consciously you know there was no i was trying to get baptized you know i was trying to like wash away i mean at that moment i literally thought i had AIDS i had a I had a girl that I had partied with after a cage fight, and she was a ring girl.

She comes and she is trying to find all of her partners because she tested positive for HIV. And so one, kudos to her is she's trying to track everybody down and be like, hey, you know, so she walks into the gym. I have a few girls pregnant at this moment of my life. My grandpa's dying of emphysema, and I can't do the thing that I want to do, which is going to the military. and uh you know post 9-11 it's just chaos like this this is you're in basic training which just blows my mind and going to buds like the same year that i'm walking into the ocean butt-ass naked and swimming into the fog like i just wanted i would have done anything to be where you were yeah that is some heavy

shit man but you find purpose well let's talk about divine intervention so you're a christian yeah you're a man of faith very much so we've talked to we just didn't talked about something that happened. Now we're getting into this, which we had discussed either last night or this morning. Yeah, I mean, even getting plucked out of this water. Like, I get naked. I swim a mile or two miles out into the fog. If you ever try to recover somebody from the fog, it's nearly impossible. Just trying to recover somebody in the ocean at night. We just lost two seals at night that went into the drink as they're trying to board. Like, we knew where they fell in. Like, we're talking about an entire body.

body of water where nobody saw me walk into this water. Supposedly, some, some old woman, uh, had a witness of me getting into the water. It's impossible. This is like pre-cell phone. Like there's a page, there's a pager on, on the sand next to my wallet. Um, there's no vantage point that any house with a phone can see me. So that doesn't make any sense. But ultimately, a coast guard boat, and I hate that I got rescued by the coast guard. Ultimately, a coast guard boat with this dude with his feet hanging off the front of this boat cruises up and he's like hey what are you doing tell him I'm swimming and he makes fun of me uh I give him a brief update of like what's happening in my life and he's like man I was going to offer you a ride back in but maybe you just want to stay in the

water and I was like no it's cold and he leans forward he like looks at my dick and he goes I see it's cold like but like lit a fire you know I was like all right he's like well I'll you an option. You can climb up on the boat, but from this point forward, you're going to treat your life with a little bit more of respect than you do at this moment, or did it this moment. I said, all right. And he threw that ladder down. Ah, man, it was so hard to climb up. I'm in that water, maybe an hour, hour and a half to climb up that rope net with my hands that weren't even working right. In the Pacific Ocean of Morro Bay, I'm going to guess it's 52, 53 degrees. I've been out there hour, hour and a half, you know, long enough to be in bad shape.

And he put one of those wool navy blankets on me. And it felt like a million needles or burning steel needles were like burning in my back. It was like the best feeling ever felt. I was alive. There's no way that Mike Goldwell heard that bolt drop and saved my life. There's no way that some woman saw me walk into the ocean and was able to give a specific distance and direction as to where I was in the water. It's impossible. And there's no way that in the fog, in the darkness, a boat would be able to come up and find somebody in the water. There's no way.

Go forward to my wife and I have been married about 10 years and coming back from 20th something trip, burnt emotionally, you know, raw, all the wires are exposed. And I'm just going to call it quits. You know, we're, I'm done. And we're together. And I don't know, we hadn't been to church. I hadn't been to church in 10 years. I couldn't reconcile, like, what was happening in war and the things that we're seeing with,

that there's an existence of a loving God. And so. we walk into this church and the pastor is giving a sermon on the importance of marriage and why it is one of the most important things that you can do in your whole entire life. And I was like, well, that's kind of awkward. We're kind of already in this let's be done moment. And she's not really looking at me. I'm not looking at her.

And he's like, you know, and starting today, we have this new small group called Marriage matters and there is room for everybody that wants to go. If there's a thousand people in here that want to start marriage matters, we will find a thousand slots. And come as you are. We don't care what you have going on in your life. Just come. And like, she won't look at me. I won't look at her. You know, and I was like, oh, this is awkward. And she's like, yeah, like, what do you want to do? And the girl next to my wife that I've never met before, her name is Jen Ferguson. Jen Ferguson, she leans forward. She goes, well, I'll tell you guys what you want to do.

So I'm the small group leader for this marriage matters thing. I was like, do you want, Jen? I need you to not talk for a little while. I don't know you. And I just want you to pump the brake, suspension. And like, your awesome energy is like, you're in 11. I need to get like a two. And I knew you get a two over there.

So, you know, on that day, my wife and I walk into a marriage matters class and saves our marriage. it's going to give it even more weird. And you're this exact same time, one of my older daughters, Sabrina, there's a, there's a well, there's a hole. It's called a deep blue well in Texas. It's called Jacob's Well. It's about an 80 foot straight down dive, but an entire river comes up from this spring. So you're swimming against this current and it's about 20 by 20 wide hole that goes deep into the water. You're not allowed to scuba dive in it because a bunch of people have been lost and they died down there.

It's a very difficult free dive. And in the same time that I am trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do in this marriage, Sabrina and I go there and she's a great swimmer and she's hanging out on the top. I do a free dive down to the bottom, grab a rock, fight my way back up, set the rock there, go back through my free dive pre-dive breath protocols take the rock slip off and go all the way down to the bottom i'm sitting down there maybe about two minutes and i'm just like it's cold this is like texas spring aquifer water and um just in the darkness and it's very eerie a lot of people can't even like swim over it because it's literally just this straight down blue hole and

I see this glimmer of this ring or of this metal and I swim over there and I fan it and I find a size 14 Irish band titanium wedding ring and I grab it and I swim back up to the top and I'm like Sabrina look what I just found. She's like where do you find that? It's like at the bottom. Are you kidding me? Clearly like somebody had jumped off and it had fallen off their finger and uh I have giant apans.

It's my ring size. You can't resize titanium. And it's an Irish band. I'm Kennedy. I'm obviously Irish. I'd taken my ring off, my original ring, and I hadn't been wearing it. And then sitting here at the bottom of this deep blue hole is my new wedding band. At this exact same time of my life.

Yeah. Wow. I'm not saying confirmation bias that I could prove. project that these things I wanted to happen, but they did happen. And they're so statistically impossible that I can't sit back objectively and be like, these were coincidences. You know, there's no way I didn't die in that valley. There's no way I didn't die at that door. There's no way I didn't die in the water. There's no way that that ring wasn't put there for me. You still have it? Yeah.

Yeah. Man. Wear it every day at home. I don't shoot train or travel with rings. It cause extra problems. Does your faith continue to develop? Do you practice it? I definitely practice it.

I read the Bible. I do devotionals. I know God exists. I know a loving God exists. I know that there's divine purpose. I know that every single person was made for a purpose and finding that purpose. And I've found my purpose and I know why I am here. What is your purpose?

It's literally the mission statement of our company. And everything that I do is tied back to preserving and protecting human life and enabling and empowering people to provide for their families and be able to expand freedom. Like, that is why I'm here. It's a damn good purpose. Yeah. I think on that note, let's take a quick break. How many guys out there are worried about brain health? You know, all we hear about is fitness.

Everybody's getting ready for a bikini season because springs right around the corner. I'm personally more concerned about my brain. You look around, you see all these brain diseases that are getting out of control. I'm going to take everything I can to improve the health of my brain. And I'm going to tell you about my five. favorite supplements from Laird's superfoods that help with brain health.

All right, the first thing I do every morning is I have Laird Superfood creamer. It's got adaptogens and functional mushrooms, which are great for brain health. I put this in my tea. Tastes amazing. Who likes vegetables? Cool. Me neither. That's why I take Laird's daily greens.

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This one doesn't actually have any functional mushrooms in it. But I can't stand beets. I think they taste like shit. And so I take one scoop of this, put it in my water, and I don't have to eat beats anymore. All right, we're winding down the day now. This is the next supplement I take every single night. Laird's sleep and recovery.

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to the show. Thank you. All right Tim. Back from the break. I need that break. Yeah. It was getting pretty heavy there and I appreciate you diving deep for that last segment there. but so now it's you're leaving the SIF and UFC is about to pick you up. That's right. How does that, how does that even happen?

So I was fighting the whole time that when I'd come back from deployments or I'd get back from a school, I fought five days after graduating from Ranger School. Most people don't walk for months. Like you don't have to take a PT test for a year after graduating from Ranger School. I graduated from Ranger School and I got a call. from Leo Coralinski, who is one of the owners of the teams in the international fight league, the IFL on Fox. And he's, hey, I have a fight this weekend.

I lost my light heavyweight. Can you come in? I heard that you're a fighter and you're on some shows that you're just in. Can you come this weekend? I was like, well, it's Monday. Like, weigh-ins or Friday, fight Saturday. I was like, all right. So five days later, I weigh in on Friday.

And I go in a fight. Dante Rivera, incredible black belt professional fighter and beat the brakes off of him. And Leo Krolynski is like, who are you? Like what is going on here? And I'm trying to explain him like everybody on Fort Bragg or on Coronado, all of us trained. All of us fought. All of us are like, it is just part of the, in every course that you'd go to, whether it's Sephardic or Sepahic or Cyc, every single.

morning, you're fighting, you're grappling, you're, you know, on the CMMS range. You're, like, it's just fighting. And they wanted to keep that warrior's spirit healthy. And I was like, I hate to break this to you. But I literally know about a thousand guys that fight as well as I do. And they're at Fort Bride currently. But, uh, but I'm here if you want me to fight. So I kept on fighting. And that went well. And it went unnoticed for a while until one night, live on Fox, a couple of sergeant majors were at a famous bar and, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and they see this kid with a shaved head walk out to the ring, and it says, a ranger from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. There are no rangers at Fort Bragg,

North Carolina. And they're like, well, that's probably one of our guys, isn't it? And they see me go and knock this guy out in a main event fight. And so they go, Tim Kennedy, they get on the global, and they search a staff sergeant Tim Kennedy. It's assigned a C-37. And, um, so. And, um, I get back. I'm on leave. I haven't broken any rules. So I took permissive leave to to travel, um, wait in on Friday. So I took leave on Thursday and Friday, traveled Friday, waited in, fought on Saturday, flew home on Sunday. And I get home Monday morning at six. I show up for PT. And my team sergeant goes, hey, uh, we have to go down to group headquarters. I was like, like our group. They're like, no, no, no. Special forces.

command. I was like, okay. You got a good uniform. I'm like, marginally, you know, so I go in there. The only thing that was good was my beret. I looked like a dumpster fire. We walk in and the command sergeant major of Special Forces Command, of U.S. Special Operations Command and of Group are sitting there and they're like, so, hey, how was your weekend? I was like, it's fantastic. You know, we saw that you're fighting. And I was like, Roger. And I do something wrong. And they're like, well, you can't do both. I was like, I've been doing both. I've literally done both for the past eight years. You know, you just saw it as a main event fight. But like I've been, I've been fighting for the past eight years. I've, you know, a couple dozen fights in my duration of here at Special Forces. They, they said, you have to choose. You have to pick between the two. And I don't want to. I was like, no. Like, make me. Like, we will make you.

This is the army. This is how this works. You'll literally have a choice so you can do one or the other. So what was the rationale behind that? I don't know. Digital footprint, facial recognition. I don't know. I've always fought this like misconception about what I'm, I was 100% a company guy.

They could have told me to do anything. I would have worn anything. I have always just wanted to support the regiment in the best way that I possibly could. most people couldn't understand they couldn't control me and that scared them even though they didn't need to control me because I would have done anything that they asked

you're already loyal to the death but they couldn't understand that because they couldn't control me doesn't mean that they can't control me because I voluntarily would have done anything that they needed to do for the regiment you want me to go on suicide prevention you know like recruiting retention

I would have done any of that. You know, just let me fight. You know, if you leave me alone and let me stay on my team and continue to deploy and go to specialty schools and develop as an NCO and also win every single of the most prestigious fighting tournaments within the military and bring that recognition and honor back to the regiment, which I was doing. Like that's gigantic trophy on your wall. I brought that to you. Like all of those ribbons, those are mine. Like, I got awards for those. Like, oh, you don't care.

Okay, got it. the Green Berets have two National Guard special forces groups, 19th group and 20th group. So when I was leaving active duty, the National Guard, they're part-time soldiers and full-time civilians. So you, as an M-Day soldier, you work some weekends a month, a couple of weeks a year, and then deploy when called upon. And so when I was trying to figure out like, well, how do I do both? because I'm going to do both. Get a call from the Texas National Guard, 19th Special Forces Group,

and they're like, hey, come to us. You can fight. We'll use use recruiting. And you get to go to an ODA. The day I got out, they just left me alone, pay me as an E7, salary,

nice. Pennies, right? Like, I would have done anything that the Army wanted. They did. So then I go to the National Guard, and the National Guard pays a contract to me as a marketing, recruiting retention tool. And they're paying me to hundreds of thousands of dollars to put Go Army on my butt. No way.

I've done it for free. You know, like that I would just, just let me fight, man. Good for you, man. But so that was like the beginning of then the marketing and media was a forced position from the army saying you can't do both. Damn. I mean, it turned out, you know. I, I, how do you feel about it? I don't know.

Teammates got in fights when I wasn't there. You know, deployments that didn't go perfect. And the what ifs, right? Like, never go down that road because that is, that is just one that leaves to despair. But like, had I been there, would this have gone different? Could I have been part of this operation? And it, you know, could I have been with Mike? Goebel when he died.

in one of his many deployments later into Afghanistan. He saved my life. I wasn't there when he died. Like, would that be different? I don't know. Andrew McKenna, like, I don't know. Got it. I understand that.

But UFC. Yeah. And I go for the title runs. So I commit to fighting. I'm a part-time soldier, full-time fighter. and while I'm doing that, I am contracting for a bunch of different

for-profit government contractors and, you know, because I still got to put food on the table, so I'm, I have a skill set and so my full-time job is like fighting and contracting, and then I'm like a part-time soldier. Shit. I mean, food on the table.

You're making hundreds of thousands for wearing army on your fight shorts. You're kind of, Contracting. Yep. You've got to be making at least two, three hundred thousand a year off of that. Yeah. $1,500 a day at the time.

And you're in the National Guard. Yeah. And then the fight purses. What? Yeah. So what is, how does it work? How does it work in there? So pre, we'll say the Reebok deal.

So the UFC controls all apparel now. So you wear what they want you to wear and you get a, you get, depending on how many fights you have, you get a purse, an apparel salary purse. But back then, you could sell every inch of your shorts and your fight banner. So I could take on, you know, like Tridicon or a firearm, a knife, a, I would never do it, but like, condom depot or like you could have any sponsor that you want and they would pay you to have their name on your banner and on your fight shorts. then you would have your fight purse

and then you had kind of like the commercial marketing so you know as professional athlete and with the military background there were a bunch of different commercial entities that were like hey will you film this commercial for us like this is the very beginning of social media

like Facebook and MySpace and so like social media influencing wasn't a thing but television and radio and serious XM were. So you could like go on there. You could record like a 30 second. Hey, I'm Tim Kennedy. I'm a UFC fighter. You know, I'm also like a green bray, blah, blah, blah. Insert like all the cringy things

and you'd get paid for those things. So I'd take my fight purse. I would take my banner, fight shorts, marketing purse. And then I'd take like my commercial purse and break those down into these quarters where my wife and I would then like reinvest those monies into businesses. Okay. Because we're still just living off of one of our respective solid incomes. Okay. And she was at W-2 still as a government contractor. And as we were trying to buy a house and continue to grow our position, it was hard to go to a bank as a professional fighter and overseas contractor.

Yeah. It's like, no, no, I promise they're going to pay me. Like, I was going to find some more poachers or some pirates. I'm going to win. Yeah. Leave me alone. Give me the loan. But, I mean, how are you managing?

So you're fighting at the number one. I mean, what did that mean to you to be fighting in the UFC at the, I mean, you just came from the apex of military special operations. You went to the SIF, then you had an extremely eventful deployment in Afghanistan. Now you're fighting at the apex of the U.S. military. Now you're fighting at the apex in mixed martial arts. Yeah. I mean, what's the sense of accomplishment? Right. There's no, like I haven't arrived. There's no feeling of like I've accomplished anything. I wanted, I wanted to be the world champion. That's what I wanted. I wanted that. Tim Kennedy is the world champion of the world. And, you know, fighting for the world title a couple of times, fought for the strike force, middleweight title against Chalkaray and Luke Rockhold. You know, when I go into my first fight in the UFC, I'm fighting Hodra Gracie, like the most accomplished. One of the one of the

the greatest grapplers in the history of pugilistic sports, my first fight in the UFC. A stay or go, winner stays, loser goes. You know, to go to fight main events against like Michael Bisbing and I was the last person to fight in a UFC fight for the troops. I fought Hafen-A-Tal. I was supposed to fight Little Machita,

but fought at Fort Carson in an aircraft hanger as the main event. Damn, that's cool. For the UFC. That is surrounded. by service members. Oh man, that's awesome.

Dude. I mean the... Talk about full circle. Whoa. That's got to be... I mean, that's got to be a... Just an awesome experience and adrenaline just pumping and I mean... Again, like I hadn't felt like I arrived and I didn't feel like I deserved to be there.

And I had so much guilt like I had abandoned all these men and women in uniform. And now I'm in there as a prize fighter making, you know, hundreds of... thousands of dollars and all these men and women are in their uniform in an aircraft hangar for their first opportunity to see a live UFC event. And, you know, it kind of stung a little bit. And Joe, Rogan walks in to talk to me after. And I could barely formulate words. You know, it was, I'm sorry. I love you. I wish I was with you. Like, that's what I was able to get out. So you really felt a lot of guilt. Yeah. Damn, man. Yeah. Fighting. How were you able to, I mean, how are you able to compete at that level?

I mean, I don't know a lot about mixed martial arts, and I don't know a lot about the UFC, but I do can appreciate the dedication that it must take to get to that level. And, you know, I hear about these guys fight camps and in how much time, blood, sweat, and tears goes into training for, especially a title fight. but you don't have that kind of time because you're still deploying, you're still in the National Guard, and on top of that,

you're doing, I guess I shouldn't assume anything, but probably combat deployments with U.S. military contracting companies. That's right. So you're going to war, coming home, what, doing a quick fight camp and then going right into the ring? You could stay in shape when you're overseas.

I wrote this, online, they're called letters from a foreign land. And it was talking about like me doing snatches with 50 cows and running up hills with transmissions and filling them up ammo cans, like all of the unconventional training that I was doing while I was overseas to stay in shape. And that would come back and I would immediately go into fight camp. So I'd fly to Albuquerque in New Mexico with Jackson Winklejohn, best fight team on the planet at the time. And we have John Jones, Rashad Evans, George St. Pierre, Carlos Conda, Demecchio Page, Holly Holm, like, the list just goes on and on of all of these incredible world champions. And I'm Brian Stan, and I'm one of those guys there.

So I could immediately walk into this room, and the best in the world are all consolidated into this one place. There's only like three or four super camps on the planet at the time, and Jackson Winklejohn was one of them. and so I start doing my fight camps there. I'm at altitude and I'm training with the best in the world. So I come back in shape, arguably. Had I taken a different approach, that little bio would not say two-time title challenger, you know, that stings quite a bit

because I never won the world title. I was a perennial contender that was, you know, on three different title runs, fought for the title twice, was positioned to fight for the third time. and never won. What could you have done differently? I was always torn.

I don't think I could have done anything differently because my heart was always in two different places. I wanted to be in Africa. I wanted to be in the Middle East. I mean, desperately. Like, I couldn't not be there. And then I wanted to be a world champion. You know, my, this is the worst thing about the ego.

There's my ego that one of those two things. And I probably didn't need either of them. You know, how about, like, being like the best teammates or the best employee or the best husband or the best father? I argue that those are far superior to these other two wants. But those were the things that were driving me was to be in war and to be a world champion. Are there any similarities between being on the battlefield in the thick of it and being in the ring in the thick of it? Physiologically, there's a ton of similarities. You know, like the exhaustion physically and putting all of who you are and everything that you have into this moment to not get knocked out or choked out.

Similarly, like putting everything that you are and everything that you have into this moment to not die. So, like, physically it's very similar. you know, and when a commentator is talking about like, man, these guys are going to battle. Look at this war. Man, it feels like it when you're in there. And like I would never, I would never castigate or disparage, you know, one of the commentators or one of the athletes that are out there that describe what they're going through as, you know, like as a war or a battle. Because I mean, it's, it's, you're out there completely raw and exposed. You know, you're wearing shorts, a cup, tape gloves and a mouthpiece.

and you're going to go try to knock out another dude in a cage. It's pretty gladiator. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's as close as it gets, right? But, I mean, what were, how would you prepare yourself mentally for, you know, the similarities between preparing yourself for going on an operation and going into the ring. They're really, really similar. You, you know, that preparation and that training and that skill development, you know, on the military side, those core metal tasks, making sure that you know how to

shoot, move, communicate Medicaid, you know, when you look at the fighter, making sure that I'm able to grapple both offensively and defensively, making sure I'm going to have good offense and defense as a striker, being about I'm going to dictate range and execute my game plan over their game plan. Those are the same things that I'm trying to do in combat. And then a big, advantage that I had was like the military discipline and this very clear approach to both business and being an athlete. I took it like, I treated it like a business. I was 10 minutes early to every single training session. You know, I had all of my gear. I was at the right place, the right time, with the right equipment, to the right training. You know, when Greg Jackson walked in for our first

private and I was sitting there. I was already wrapped up. And, and I was sitting there. I was already wrapped up. And 10 minutes before our session was supposed to start. And he's like, I was about to go and like watch some tape for a little bit. I didn't even know that you're here. I was like, well, we start in 10 minutes, don't we? He's like, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't have expected to see here for like 30 more minutes. I'm like, all right, well, moving forward, I'll be here 10 minutes early. Let me know if you want me to arrive later and then set that time accordingly.

And that's same with Winklejohn, you know, with striking coach. and it was hilarious because I'm in the gym with John Jones who's on the opposite of that spectrum right like he's out partying late and burning it down and showing up like hungover talking about the most talented athlete on the planet man that guy is the best to ever done it and he could show up two hours late to practice

be there for five minutes and get more out of that practice than I would have been there having been there the whole time damn he's just such so superior Is it surreal training with people like that for the first time? Yeah, I mean like, what the hell am I doing here? Rashad Evans was the champ at the time and like walk in like champs there. You know, Brian Stan who is like one of my favorite fighters. He's a Marine officer that, uh, we were in Iraq at the same time, kind of cool.

But watching him just knock people out with his right hand and then being like to walk in and see him to George St. Pierre. you know, like one of the greatest welterweight champions in the history of the sport and like, they're d'Or. Damn. It's rad. Cowboy Soroni. You know, he's in the Hall of Fame now, but he'll probably be inducted for a few things to include, you know, his fight with War on McDonald

one of the best fights in UFC history. And like, that's one of my teammates. I'm training at his house. I'm going to his ranch, you know, and, yeah, it's weird. It's surreal, like, not even the right weird. Like, it's indescribably weird. Again, like, do I belong here? But I'm like thumping you up, like mauling you in the corner.

I hit harder than you. You can't hit, I guess I deserve to be here. Like, when's my fight date? Damn. Damn. How long would it take you to prepare for any particular fight? Six weeks? Six weeks.

Would you time your deployments to where you had six weeks straight with them? Yep. I'd try to set it where I'd come back from a hitch and I'd, you know, wife and I would pack up the car, drive to Albuquerque, and do the fight camp, go to the fight, come back, pump, do another pump. Had you experienced a lot of losses or failures up to this point? I mean, you blew through SF selection, you blew through the Q-Course, you said there was no challenge there, blew through Sears School, pumped out two crazy deployments.

Sounds like you're crushing. as a kid, you know, and then now you're fighting at the apex of, like I said, mixed martial arts. And, I mean, is that the first time you've really experienced failure? Yeah, that's not like self-induced from choices. You know, standing there as a 21-year-old with a couple of girls pregnant and no source of income, that's failure. It's a different kind of failure. but this this one is like in your face you're standing there you're covered in your own blood mostly naked and the dude next to you gets his hand raised and he's called the champion and you're just

standing there they have to go to your after party because like sponsors paid for you to go there your eyes swollen shut and your hands are swollen you can barely hold a glass with them and you got to walk into this room of your fans that you just failed and let down um but i'm not going to not show up, you know, because like, they're there to see me. They love me, like, win or lose. Um, and it, yeah, it's, it sucks. How do you learn from it? What did you take from it? The long term. After the fight, you had a fun account to follow as the UFC fight doc. He's the guy that stitches most fighters up. He's, um, he's a cosmetic guy. And, you know, he'd put the little local painkillers on these. He's inject, um, some laticane. And he'd come

up to sew my face closed. And, um, like, Kaylee down on the table, he'd walk up with the, the painkiller. He's like, nah, I don't want that. So you got to, I can see your skull, Tim. I need to, like this is from Robbie Lawler. This is from Jacques, Reuzeuza. You know, like, this was, I think, from Luke Rockhold. And, um, I'm like, nah, just sew me closed. And he would sit there and he'd pull out and he's talked about it a bunch of times on his, on his pages, he'd sit there and he'd sew my face closed and I wanted to feel every bit of that pain because every single one of those things was like a mistake that I had made. And I would carry that. I would like breathe in this failure and I would breathe in this pain and I would like exhale

purpose. And this embracing the suck, embracing failure as we kind of move into the some of the darkest, most horrific moments in my life to include the Mexico border, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Israel. The same thing. And I would like suck in all of this failure, my failure, the failure of the situation, the pain that I see. And then I would like exhale purpose. Dan Holloway kind of coined that phrase.

And it doesn't more aptly describe what I would feel and weaponize all of that failure into purpose. makes a whole lot of sense. It makes sense. It's hard to do. Yeah. Because there's embarrassment and shame and ego and, you know, like, and then the physical portion of it, like, okay, well, how do I then take this purpose and direct it into something meaningful and constructive?

Like, motivation is failing. Discipline and intentionality is permanent. So I have to take that purpose and turn it into what I'm doing in the gym, what I'm doing in my technique, what I'm doing in my businesses, what I'm doing overseas, how I'm planning in these AARs when we fail. or do something unsuccessfully. Like, how do I turn that to good? Yeah.

Do you, did you ever, I'm trying to think out of word this, did your coaches or your team or your, your opponents, anybody, you know, the UFC commentators, did they see anything different in you coming from the background? I mean, this is a sport, extremely grueling, as close to being a gladiator as you get a couple months earlier, you're putting hundreds of rounds in the bodies in the middle of the night.

Yeah. Do they see a difference in the way you carry yourself, the way you fight, the way you train, your discipline, your motivation, your dedication, like is there a difference between what you brought to the table? Yeah. With all that other life experience, that nobody else in the UFC has compared to.

Leo Karelinski first was like, what is wrong with you? Because we're about to walk out to the fight. Everybody's young. Come on, let's go. Let's go. Let's do this. You know, like getting ready to go out. And I'm sitting there.

Are we having sushi after this fight? Because that sounds great. You know, I haven't some real wasabi. You know, not the fake paste stuff. And he's like, you're about to fight. Can you focus on your fight? And I was like, yeah, I got it, man, just relax. And I went out there, picked this dude up, put him on his ear, knocked him out.

And I come in the back after my fight with Robbie Lawler, barn burner, like bathed in blood. And they come and stick a microphone. And they're like, man, how was that? That was one of the craziest, most brutal fights we've ever seen. You know, Robbie comes on to like to become one of the greatest, like George St. Pierre, one of the greatest welterweight champions knocking everybody out. He has the Cinderella story of an exit. He's in the, he's going to the, he is in the Hall of Fame,

and he'll go in as one of the permanent halls of fame. And, um, hey, how do you feel? I'm like, I feel good. You know, they're like, doctors taking my pulse and I'm already back down to like a 55 heart rate. And like, what is, what is wrong with you? You're like, I'm like, well, there's nothing wrong with me. Just my experiences leading up to this have been vastly different. Like, this is not the pinnacle of my life.

This is a fight and this is a sport. I want to be world champion, but this is not the wildest thing that's happened to me in this past couple of months. Yeah, yeah. Do you think that scared your opponents? Yeah, I don't know if it's a good thing either. Why is that? Remember the first time walking into a shoot house

and like it felt like you're looking through a straw? And then the 500th time that you went in there and you could see everything, and you could see that they glued a flashlight. over the hand of the guy that originally held a gun because they're trying to have you shoot a no-shoot target when which was a shoot target. You know, but you saw it. And you also saw like that was crappy glue

and it was a bad paint job. And you realize that the door that you guys breached last time, they didn't change that door out. Now you can just swing it open. You don't even need to put an ECT charger. You see it all. Yeah. Compared to like number one where like all you could see was like walk through the house like this.

When I was walking out of the cage, I'd have to hide my wife in the audience. because I could see everything. I could describe where every judge was. I could tell you what my corner was wearing. Like I was seen too much. Or like I should have just seen what was in front of me. So I think there was like there was some value to that.

Like I never had the pre-fight butterflies. You know, like guys were throwing up before they're walking out. You know, like I'm playing on my phone and figuring out what I'm going to have for dinner. I mean, it's got to be. There has to be a certain amount of fear for somebody to walk into the ring with another man who has taken life. Legitimately killed for survival. And this is a fucking sport. Yeah.

I mean, I can't think of anything that would be more intimidating for an athlete. Well, kudos to the dudes because I got beat. Yeah. Luke Rockhold beat me. Jacques, Ray, squeaked out of decision. Yor Romero, although he cheated, he beat me. So there's a couple of losses on there that those badasses in light of standing across from a dude that's been to war a bunch of times. And is like...

But have you ever had that conversation with anybody? I'm friends with most of the athletes that I competed against with in my era. And, you know, we joke a lot about some of those things. You know, like Luke Rockhold, you know, his credit, he's like, man, I had no idea. what I was supposed to do with you, I just wanted to keep on the outside and pepper you because I didn't want to let you near me. That's what he did, and that's how he beat me.

You know, literally that was his game plan. And, um, so, you know, it's just interesting. It's a, I mean, it's a, it's an interesting psychology to tap into, you know, it's, uh, I've always thought about that ever since I've, I've heard about you.

So, yeah. It's fun. Yeah. That it was. I'll bet that was a hell of a ride. But so what was it that, why did you leave UFC? When, you know, my heart got broken in the fight with U.R. Romero and knock him out at the end of the second round, Michael Bisbing is the champion. Michael Bisbing's last loss was to me. I beat the breaks off of him for 25 minutes. And so like, this is my third title run. You know, I beat

you all Romero. This is a title eliminator fight. The winner of us. is going to go on to fight for the title. And he threw a variety of mischievous and cheating mechanisms is able to, after he gets saved by the bell at the end of the second round, blow some big punches into him up against the cage. John McCarthy pulls me off him. And, you know, like, did he get saved by the bell? Or is that at the end of the fight?

You like to John touch me after the, because if John touches me before the bell, then I won. If he touched me after the bell, then I'm blasting him. And he's just like, he's out. He crumbles to the ground. And I was like, okay, that was the round. So I go back to my corner and I'm sitting there. I'm pacing back and forth, just looking at U.L. Romero as he's just messed up. And his corner's in there.

They're fixing his face. The bell sounds. Ding. And I take a couple of steps forward. And John McCarthy grabs me. He was like, no, Tim, go back to your corner. So the athletic commission rules are very matter of fact. You have 10 seconds to answer the bell.

If you don't answer the bell, it's disqualification. And as you can imagine, I'm a man that would know the rules. So 10 seconds passes. And that's the end of the fight. I'm screaming. I take my mouthpiece out. I chucked across the floor. I point at Dana White.

I was like, you're fucking going to pay me for that fight. You know, I'm looking for my wife. Put your red panties on. I'm coming. you know, and figured out the after party. I also know I'm going straight to the title. I'm going to be fighting Michael Bisbee. I'm going to destroy him.

This is all happening in a matter of seconds, right? 10 seconds happens, 15 seconds happens, 20 seconds happen. You know, like I'm talking with my corner, like, all right, hey, let's get these gloves off. Let's start getting things going. And John McCarthy is like, hey, come back in. We're fighting. We're fighting.

They call it Stoolgate is a pretty, there is a calamity of errors. that John messed up big time. He got played by his corner. The corner spilled some ice. They put on too much Vaseline. They're pretending like they couldn't speak English. There's confusion about when he had to get off the stool. Ultimately, they were able to buy him an extra of 40-something seconds.

And so he sat there for almost two minutes. While I'm leaving the cage mentally, he's with the sole focus of getting back into the fight. And a huge adrenaline dump, you know, like that end of consistent. It comes wild and I get knocked out a few seconds later. That's the, that's the end. That was, I was like, man, I don't want to do this all over again. How do you recover from that?

That was, I actually fought one more time against Kelvin Gesslam. And I didn't, I shouldn't have. I was already done at the end of the YWL fight. But all of that propelled me into everything that I've done post-fighting, into starting these companies, into going overseas on rescue operations, you know, nonprofits, for-profits, like filling gaps. It gave me purpose. Gotcha.

And it also ended the most selfish portion of my life. being a professional fighter, everything has to be about you. Your diet, your travel schedule, your sleep schedule, your training, like all of these things you're trying to line up from this periodization so that you're peeking at the right moment. So everything is, and it's terrible. It's like the most selfish thing that you could, it's, and I wanted so to be done with it. Because I wanted to do something to contribute. in a meaningful way back to the things that I care about.

I couldn't when I was fighting. I could like amplify because I had a big platform, you know, to talk about things, but I couldn't specifically contribute. Gotcha. So this propels you into what you just said, the darkest portion of your life, which, Tim, we got about an hour left before you got to get to the airport. So I'm going to leave this up to you.

We got a lot to cover. we could talk about the school, we could talk about sheepdog, we could talk about Ukraine, Israel, the border. Where do you want to go? I think they're all, we kind of, I think maybe cover wavops of them

because they're all very connected. When you take a step back, you know, like, you know, what I was doing in Ukraine was different than what I was doing in Israel, which was different than I was doing in Afghanistan, what I was doing in those who were vastly different than what I was doing in the military,

part of Operation Lone Star on the Mexican border, you know, fighting cartels. and human traffickers and drug smugglers. Sheep dog response where we're training under the soft model of like empowering people to force multiplication. It's the special operations. The green bray soft model.

Like we don't want to do all the fighting. I want to go and find a populace that supports our ideas, equip and train them to do the fighting with and for us. Sheep dog response is fully embracing the soft approach where I'm trying to train as many Americans as I possibly can in really basic good citizen skills of like being able to provide for your family, being able to preserve and protect human life. That's what we're, all the shoot move, communicate, Medicaid, like we're trying to give those skills to civilians. And after, you know, nearly 20 years from, well, 25 years as a EMT, a firefighter, a police officer, and then a special operations guy, and then a government contractor, when I saw

globally the frail edges of the canvas and how weak we were strategically, I knew that big problems were going to be on the horizon. So in August of 2021, which is when we founded Save Our Allies, I was on the phone. I was actually writing Scars and Stripes. I was sitting on the couch with Nick Palmishano. and my phone rings and it was Chad Rovisho. And Chad said, hey man, I have my translators in Afghanistan. He's currently being hunted by the Taliban.

They're going to rape and murder his family and they're going to kill him. I've been on multiple deployments with this guy. Can you get in there? And my phone had been burning down since Afghanistan started crumbling for contract jobs, like personal recovery, evacuations. And I didn't want to be that, I wanted that chapter of my life to end of this profit. tear. And I was like, yeah, I'll be on a plane tomorrow. And I look over at Nick. And Nick's on the phone.

Nick's talking to Sarah Verardo. Serra Verardo was, is this incredible woman whose husband was horrifically wounded in Afghanistan. And she's carried all that purpose and pain or all that pain and all that suffering and directed it into purpose. So she started the Independence Fund, the first responders action group, a whole bunch of different military nonprofits. And she has a ton of connectivity at the Pentagon. So as I start trying to figure out how am I going to get into Afghanistan, Nick turns to me is like, you're not believe who I'm the phone with right now. And she is saying that we got our way into Afghanistan.

So like divine intervention yet again. Like I'm on the phone, like we're doing that Spider-Man thing or it's like, wait, you got, you got, you got, let's go. So I booked a flight that same day. We had to fly into UAE and figure out other routes to smuggle us into Afghanistan. And that was literally the four of us on the phone was the beginning of several allies. Damn. And it was identifying these gaps that the U.S. military wasn't able to go outside the wire at H. Kaya

to go and recover people that had been isolated and were unable to make it onto H. Kaya. So Hamid Karzai Airport, which was the final neo, the non-combatant evacuation operation, which was being run by Department of State, which is a bad idea. But they're doing the best with what they had. Everybody that was flooding to H. Kaya was getting stuck at these choke points. And the people that controlled the outer perimeter was the Taliban. So nobody could make it past the Taliban to even. make it to the base to get onto a plane to be flown out. So all these people that fought with us for 20 years, you know, these are Special Forces Commandos with a dozen deployments.

You know, they have T.S. clearances and, you know, they fly helicopters that we gave them. They stay. They're either going to be working for the Taliban or they're going to be killed by the Taliban. It's going to be one or the other. And then we have all of our legitimate allies, to include Americans that were contractors, that were plumbers and electricians. for KBR, Haliburton, Raytheon, all those contractors were stuck in Afghanistan. So, like, they had to be brought out. And for them to be brought out, they had to be escorted in. Well, this was the first identified gap, which was the American military can move.

Logistics-wise, we could do anything. But how do you go and find three people, five people, seven people that are hiding in a warehouse out in the city and then be escort them past the Taliban and bring them on to the the base past you past american lines and then put them on a plane that's the gap and that's we had four guys on the ground and that's what we immediately went to work doing how did you do it um i have a picture of a target on the back of the target are three different con ops so there's four of us Dave was going to be staying back as like comms for the three of us that went to do solo singleton missions. And on the back of a target is in permanent marker, like concept of the operation number one.

This guy is going to Eaglegate. He's linking up with this, the agency, to go find this group of people and they're going to be bringing them through this guy. Number two, Tim is going to be going out this Abbey Gate. He's going to be picking up so-and-so. Number three, we're going to be going to be going to be going to be going to and we would do this every 60 minutes for the entire time that we had left until ultimately the bombing of Aba Gate happened on the 26th and they like locked down the base. Were you there for that?

It was. What a mess. It was so bad. You know, we, uh, we, we, we did really, those men and the team back in D.C., they're so brilliant. They didn't sleep for for weeks doing everything. Again, like I was, I was barely deserving to be there, being surrounded by so many capable operators that knew how to do so much, so fast, so effectively and so efficiently. I'm just like trying to contribute in the best way that I can. Not every mission went well. You know, we had, we were bringing in some buses

through Blackgate and there was a miscommunication and a commander at that gate. And a commander at that gate wouldn't let those buses in and everybody thought that it was me like that Tim Kennedy was the one that had set all of these buses up this was absolutely our operation but guess who are the people that were making the calls to link up this is at the highest level of of government right like the most elite commanders on the planet are saying who's getting on these things and trying to communicate that down to a ground captain or a ground like colonel and that's coming from like a four-star joint level is where wires get crossed, right? And so these buses get kicked

back out into the city and, you know, all those people got tortured and killed by the Taliban. But you didn't have time to think about it because the moment that that gate gets closed, I had nine other, I had to run over to the UN gate to clamber over that wall through Constantina wire to run out to do another link up with a command. that was bringing him and another aviator on and their entire families, you know, like had minutes to like take a breath. Yeah. Yeah.

Damn. How long were you guys there? I mean, Save our allies started working from the moment Taliban crossed the border and started taking Kandahar and Bogram, you know, as Kabul. like all the way until they're stuck at Kandahar. We were, we had teams in D.C. that were doing logistics and building lists and deconflicting lists to get rid of duplicate names and also verifying.

You know, if we brought in one wrong person, the whole thing's for not, you know, like the whole thing's a failure. I could have, you know, saved a thousand people, but we bring in one terrorist done. Yeah. Right. So, like, we had to be perfect. And so 10 days total on the ground all the way up to where outside the wire operations were, can't, like, I would have had to fight my way against 80-second airborne and Marines to go outside of H. Kaya. So that was the...

And you guys evacuated how many people? Oh, man. if you went into the talk that night, they have, we moved privately 12% of everybody that left, anywhere from 6,000 to 15,000 people were moved by private NGOs and private contractors, you know, Pineapple Express, the Glenn Beck and Mercury One, obviously save our allies, Mighty Yokes, like the dozens of veteran organizations all mobilized. And I'm never going to take credit for us moving one because there's not one person that moved off that air base that was not coordinated, facilitated by 10 other groups. You know, so like total 15 to 20,000.

Man, you know, is tragic as that story is and is what a. fucking complete disgrace our government is like a complete incompetent fucking nightmare the fact that a few veteran organizations were able to have been able to come together and get six to 15 save 6 to 15 000 lives against you're more effective than the u.s government yeah i don't think people fucking are hearing that. You're more effective than the U.S. government. Yeah. That's how, I mean, that's insane to me, you know, and man, you guys did amazing work there, man. I can't even say their names, you know, but like Kevin, Sean, Sean, Dave, Nick, Sarah, like the, this group of people, again, divine. There's no way that you could.

the connections that each of us brought and the experiences that each of us brought from all of the different things that we've been doing for the past 10 years made for the perfect recipe for success. Like had it not been us, it wouldn't have happened. You know, from, you know, Eric Prince and Glenn Beck and like the connections that they have, you know, Mark, these people were able to just. just move little tiny nidgets and knobs to make this a possibility. And what hell? What a hell hole, though.

You know, those baby stuck in Constitina Wire, you know, executed women on the side of the road by the Taliban, right in the face of the Marines in the 82nd. And we funded it. Yeah, we did. And we're continuing to fund them. Yeah. It's, um...

Yeah, when Iran... Are we, are we a failed state? Not yet. We're close. We're knocking on the door to complete disaster. We still have the best and brightest on the planet. We're the most prosperous nation in the world with the most elite fighting force

to ever walk the face of this planet. So no. But, man, we're close. Yeah, we're definitely right. in the line. Yeah. Let's get into what you're doing in Ukraine. So we recognized in Afghanistan that there is never going to be a single solution to a problem when you have a gigantic gorilla that is the American government and the bureaucratic approach

to problem solving. They're always going to be constrained by rules, authorities, and authorizations, funding, permission, like, the list of their constraints are seemingly endless, right? But if you're small, if you're like this small expeditionary ability, small digital footprint, small financial footprint, small risk, we provide an incredible asset to the large behemoth, right? Where, cool, you have a problem. We too care about that problem, but we have a bunch of different opportunities or different approaches to solve this problem. You got all these constraints. We don't have any of these

constraints. Whether I'm going to go as a for-profit contracting company and not once ever has anyone ever profited in any way, shape, or form off of anything that we've ever done in the humanitarian evacuation, neosense, everything that we've ever done always stays within the organization to advance abilities and capabilities so that then when the next crisis happens and fuck, have been so many in the past three years where I can pick up the phone and be like, hey, sir, just want to give you an update. Here's some current capabilities that we have in the region. I have a team that's on the ground or they're at the border or they've positioned themselves.

They have this ground evacuation route. We've set up these rat lines. We have these evacuation and evasion lane set. We have these boats. We have these planes, right? Like all I do is come with assets. tell me how you want me to skin this for you. Like, because I can do it as an NGO.

I can come in a humanitarian aid and evacuate personal recovery. But ultimately, like with our mission, with our purpose, everything else is for the sole reason of being able to accomplish that. Mission first always. No paid salaries. You know, I've never, never taken a cent. Neither has anyone else that is part of that organization, all 100% program funded. Damn. We were talking last night how much you hate NGOs, and you're not wrong.

When they get so big and they lose that, but when you look at a problem and you go, like, how do I, how do I get Americans out of Sudan? How do I get Americans out of Israel after the worst terrorist attack in their history and per capita in American, in any history, you know, 10 times worse than Pearl Harbor, um, eight times worse than 9-11 per capita. and but the difference was that everybody there was raped and murdered and tortured. Big significant difference. All the Americans, 40,000 of them that are in Israel now have no flights to get out.

They're also, some of them are old and they went to see where Jesus was baptized, but they can't make it back to the airport or they're in Jerusalem. They have to get back to Tel Aviv. Like Delta United American, all those flights are canceled, even though you've booked, you've tried to book three, four, five, six different times. and now your card has been charged every time. Now you have no money to book another flight because your credit card's frozen

and there's no airline that'll take you. So how do you get out? So then Department of State says, hey, we're setting up these corridors and these timelines for us to fly these people out. We're going to bring them back to Europe into a safe area to get them out. But we can't go actually out and pick them up.

Boom. New gap identified. Let's build rosters. Let's start building manifest. Let's start building movement sheets and start escorting these people insert the next conflict you know man you guys are effective you know and yes i do hate a lot of non-profits me too a lot of nonprofits start off with a very good mission statement and they want to do good and then they explode and then greed kicks in and then actually you know nobody gives a shit about what

they were doing and originally it's all about fucking money and taking out the competing nonprofit out rather than, and, you know, in the way the conversation went is when we started talking about keeping it small, keeping it grassroots, having specific investors that don't need name recognition and aren't trying to build a massive business. They want to affect the world in a positive matter. And so that's what I was getting that. Yeah, the other side of that coin that you're totally right about that, NGOs, like how many times have you and your professional career a missionary group, you know,

a nonprofit, Doctors Without Borders that gets hemmed up and they're stuck. Now they're captives and they're being used as hostages or leverage for not just money, but also like positioning within the government. Like it happens time and time and time and time again. So like they are and have been historically big problems. We are organized in a way that we are small. maneuverable and most of all that the talent you know if you look at the group that was in Israel um jp ryan um Nate these people are coming from tier one the most elite special operations

backgrounds in the world and then moved on to work for other groups that gave them even more skills and like these are the guys that are that are effectively doing the evacuations and the rescuing Like there's nobody more capable or competent on the planet. And they want to be there. Their heart is there to do the right thing. They've always wanted to be able to help in a meaningful way. But they've always had their hands tied. And sometimes by the government, sometimes by by bureau chiefs,

sometimes by, be like case officers. Sometimes the list goes on of all of the ways that they've been constrained. Now they just get to do good. Yeah. And they have all the, well, not all the resources because we're small, but we have enough resources to do the job at the highest level. Freaking rad. Yeah, it is, man. You know?

Dave, Benjamin Hall, he was the Fox News correspondent that got blown up in Ukraine. Oh, okay. I'm not familiar with him. Kind of peak evasion. Fox News correspondent is doing a segment and his. car gets attacked. His cameraman dies. He gets horrifically wounded.

Rad, right now Ben Hall is in Israel covering the conflict there. Full circle. Saber allies was mobilized by Fox to go and rescue him out of Ukraine. So we had to first find him in the middle of this invasion

in the entire conflict. Like, where is this one dude that got blown up? He's in some hospital somewhere and he's dying. And we had to evacuate him out of the country, get him into Poland, and then get permission from the Secretary of Defense to fly him into the military combatant recovery. Like we brought him to Landstool to Ramstein. And then he moved as if he was a combatant into the military hospital system. And had that not happened, he'd be dead.

So like when people are throwing stones, like the Secretary of Defense put his name on the bottom line that we could move this dude out of here. So like if you think that I'm out there doing like some John Wayne shit, like you could not be further from the truth. Like I'm doing in whatever way we can contribute the best that we can with the assets and support that we have. We'll do that. But by no mean is anyone out there being like, hey, look where my name is. Like what I did. Well, thank you for setting the record straight. I want to fight some people sometimes.

You and me both, man. Throwing darts at my forehead. You and me both. Trying to take a selfie. Hey, you know, everybody's tough on the internet, right? Yeah. But the border. I might take you down there?

I would love to go down there. Let's go. It is insanity. Yeah, that's what I keep hearing. It's hard to believe. It's very hard to believe. When you see numbers, when you see like 300,000 people a month, the Super Bowl had some.

60,000 people in it, right, this last couple of days ago. 60,000 people, then you multiply that to 300,000 come across in a month. One month. Five times the Super Bowl. Cross on our border, military-aged men from every single one of our enemies, state actors, moving their people across our open border, Chinese. Russian, terrorists, multi-time felons.

This is where I get into, this is what really, I mean, everything else that's gone on, all of it. The Afghan withdrawal, Ukraine, Russia, is like, Epstein, like all of it, dude, all of it.

This shit, when I just asked you, do you think we're in a failed state? I don't know how you can answer that question and say no. because we have become so fucking incompetent in this country. I don't understand how we could not be defeated. It would have to be a nation that is more incompetent than we are.

And that's fucking hard to find right now. That is really hard to find. We don't have a fucking border. We are the only free country left in the world, supposedly free, right? Yeah. And we have a wide open border that roughly, what, last thing I read,

six million plus people have crossed. We are broke. We are printing our money. We have weaponized our dollar. We have destroyed the First Amendment by tech corporations. It's fake money. It's, I mean, in, in, how could we possibly not already be defeated?

That's a real fucking question. Yeah. What would you do if you were Russia? What would you do if you were China? What would you do if you were one of these many terrorist organizations who, by the way, are all joining forces against a common enemy? You know who that common enemy is? For those listening, we're the fucking common enemy. Good job. Good fucking job letting this shit happen. I wouldn't have to do anything.

I would continue to stoke and stalk the flames and fires of dissent, of racism, of every form and fashion of divisive issue that Americans have right now to confuse and divide us further. I would throw all of my money into TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat to make these kids sit there on those phones for as long as I could, which they are. I would show them that the nuclear family is not necessary, that freedom isn't really a thing that's given by God, but it's something that's given to us by the family or by the government, which is another thing that they're paying for us to see on our phones often. I would finance and support political opponents that would want to fight American values and put in other forms of governance that are wholly against the American ideals and the founding fathers would have imagined. I would try to support the expansion of the federal government.

These are all the things that I would do if I was the adversary. And that's what they're doing. They don't have to do anything. They just sit back and hang out and watch us just eat ourselves. that's what I'm getting that you know we we I just I don't know how we pull out of this I don't know I mean we talked about we talked about at the beginning before the cameras got turned on you know people people think something people thought something was going to happen at the Super Bowl people think you know how how come nothing's happened yet you hear one side of the aisle

mocking people that are concerned that are borders wide open and mocking them because nothing's happened yet. We've had three years where there has not been any terrorist attack. Well, let me tell you about war games and simulations. They inject, they put these things through a simulation. It shows the probability and the percentage that they're going to have to come out on top. What's, you know, maybe today they have a 65% this is hypothetical maybe maybe today in the simulation that they they they they they feeded all the information and the simulation says hey you get a 65% chance you're going to come out on top against the US yeah but right now we are a failed state we are completely incompetent and so why would they take that time to attack us right now why wouldn't they

up the percentage. Okay, well, let's put a little more people in this way, put them up in this region. Let's infiltrate the power grid over here. It's weak. You can't even arrest an immigrant right now. Even in this state. In Tennessee. A multi-time felon. Exactly. And so all they're doing right now is strategy. They're just infiltrating, doing whatever they need to do. to get that percentage up. And then when somebody's strong comes in and the shit starts to get cleaned up, that's when it's going to happen.

Yeah, so how do you fight that? I argue, you know, for the Titanic, which was headed towards that iceberg, had they known, and they just made a slight adjustment, just a couple of degrees, they would have avoided that whole entire iceberg, right? None of those people. is that what we need to do just the slightest of adjustments?

Does that pendulum need to swing back once again towards sovereignty and freedom? You know, the founding of Apogee, our school, was in that same vein. The founding of Save Our Allies, the founding of sheepdog response. Like all of these things, all it takes is this entrepreneurial American spirit for we as a collective to be like, man, we acknowledge that this is not right and this is dangerous. And for us to combat, for us to have a strong America, again, is for the individual to be a strong, competent, capable individual, right? Not to be fat, not to be this gelatinous mass that can barely read that just sits there and swipes on their phone and looks at porn all day long. It doesn't know how to use a rifle. It doesn't know how to purify water.

It doesn't know how to be an intentional, disciplined parent to their children or a loyal entrepreneur that's going to be dedicated to his employees and his employees. colleagues and his partners and the companies. Like this is, when you look at the founding fathers, when you read that beautiful declaration, declaration of independence and the bill of rights, like these were written by Americans that stood on the core values of what it meant to be an American. They were not educated at some Ivy League university, but they wrote a document that will stand the test of time. And God, I need Americans to recognize how vulnerable we are. Everything that you just said right now can be fixed. We adjust. We adjust.

just a couple of degrees and people take back their sovereignty, they start growing their own food, they start having their own chickens, they start getting strong and body and in mind. They are an ungovernable force. The Americans, the essence of being an American is ungovernable. We are rebellious traitors from our origin. Let's remember what that looked like.

They told us to do something. We said no, and we put their tea in the harbor. Then they went to Boston, and that shot that was hurt around the world kicked off, us killing every single one of them and kicking them off of this continent. That is what Americans can do. You mess with our boats in Pearl Harbor?

We dropped two atomic bombs. Yeah. There's only so many Americans left. Yeah. I'm hopeful. Unfortunately. But, you know, I think that kind of where I'm going was, how do you fix it?

I think you're doing it. Trying to the youth. That's right. Let's get into the school that you started and how that's developed. Yeah. So Apogee. The first school was Apogee Cedar Park.

And it was literally a brick and mortar Socratic school. And man, year one was hard. I did everything wrong. I thought I knew how to run a business, having ran a bunch of businesses and running a school is pretty different. Then year or two kind of like learn from our mistakes,

like a phoenix rising from the ashes. We adjusted. We also realized that we have to expand the influence. So we went from just being a brick and mortar to online mentorship. I partnered with Matt Boudreau and we started Apogee Strong and we brought in thousands of people in the online mentorship program like how to be leaders in your community, what sovereignty, financial sovereignty, physical sovereignty looks like. And then from that mentorship program, we said, hey, we want to expand this Apogee school idea. Who wants to open a

school and all of these owners stepped up and raised their hand like, I want this in my community. So we have been training and mentoring all of these school owners about in 2024, we'll open another 50 schools. And then all of, again, back to doing the right thing with money and being small enough to make sure that you're aligning with your purpose and direction and motivation. taking all of those funds and putting them back in to then help other schools launch and to build a larger campus to be able to mentor more people. So until we bring the Department of Education to its knees or completely abolish them, we haven't produced something from public school.

Yes, there's outliers and there's anomalies where, like, extraordinary kids are going to always rise. But you take that same kid and put them anywhere. They're also going to be wildly sick. successful. It's the massive percent. And they have just been turned to useless masses. The consumers,

laborers, tax meals. That's it. I don't need those. We're a bunch of tax meals. But I'm really interested in this school. And so one question I have is

when did you start that? Three years ago. Three years ago. And how many schools are there now? Well, I'll have 50 launching in in 24. And how many are there right now? One. One. Yeah.

Okay. So we went one year one. Mentorship launched year two. And expansion happens year three. Year five will be at 300 schools. Wow. So how do you, how do you filter who's coming in to the school without getting sued? Yeah.

You know, because this shit seems to just bleed in everywhere. Yeah. We have, one, the people opening the schools, they are part of the mentorship program. So we've spent months and months and months that go into live events with them, training with them, talking to them, learning about their values, making sure that their vision aligns with the vision of the school. So we have, you know, Matt has hundreds of hours with these new school owners on. on the and then on the mentorship side when we are advising about how they're going to be accepting families

and we've this gigantic waiting list. We're accepting applications for 24 school year for Apogee Cedar Park. So you can go to Apogee Cedar Park.org and put an application right now. And when you put in an application, you're going to be entered into this big huge funnel and there's these gates that you have to go through. Here's a reading list of books. Here is you coming into Tour the Academy where we get to do a face-to-face with you. Here is your hero, your kid, getting to go into one of the studios and spend time with the teachers and the other heroes. I love kids. And they're also innocent. They're not great liars.

So when they're in there for a week, they're interviewing with the whole entire studio. That kid goes home. We get to ask all of the kids. And these Socratic minds, these critical thinking minds, they know, like they're amazing, brilliant, truly brilliant, genius. little kids. And when we go like, hey, man, what were your impressions? What did you think? And we have a bunch of series of questions. We have Socratic conversations. Like, you know, he would be a value added to the studio? What does he bring that would be useful and that you would benefit from? That you would learn from him. What are some things that you think would be kind of a detriment?

And listening to an eight-year-old in a very clear way articulate why that kid is good or bad for the studio, man, like, wow. Wow. That's good. It's a learner-driven environment. That means the leaders of that studio are the kids. You're also given these kids freedom of thought. Yeah. Without any repercussions.

What do you think about this? All questions are open-ended. So they're guides, not teachers. In every single one of the studios, not classrooms, in the studios, like Socrates, he wasn't telling somebody how to do something. And he was asking questions, open-ended questions, for that person to think through their answers and critically devise the solution to the question that was being posed by the leader, by the guide. So I'm not going to say, hey, we're going to add mulch to the playground.

This is how much mulch we're going to add. I'm going to go to the kids and I'm going to say, hey, what mulch do you want? How much volume of mulch will you need to make this three inches deep? okay if the thickness of the mulch like you know a sand compared to a gravel compared to a rock is that going to change the amount of volume that we're going to have to order like we've so we have just done these kids so dirty because we they're so capable they're so much more capable and they're so there's fascinating study done by NASA and MIT they took a bunch of kids preschool they started tracking them saying which ones could problem solve at a genius level so take

something, give them a problem, and you provide them with existing solutions. Which ones could use the non-existing solutions to solve the same problem? And the longer, long story short, the longer that these kids were in school, the less capable and less genius they ever were in problem solving. Are you kidding? No, 100%. Google this right now. It is the most mind-blowing study. The final conclusion was the longer these kids were in public school, the dumber they got. the less critical thinking and problem solving where they capable of. And MIT and NASA were like, all right, man,

let's just kill the study. Yeah, let's sweep this one under the rug. When you go back to the origin of public education with Rockefeller saying, man, I don't need anything. I don't need a critical thinker. I don't need a collaborator. I don't need an innovator. I don't need somebody that can create.

I just need somebody that can work. I just need a labor. I just need somebody smart enough. to show up to my factory and do the work to make me money. That is the origin of public education. And every day since then, it's just gotten worse. So you have two options right now. You open your own school or your homeschoolers' kids.

That's it. How do you... I'm really interested in this. I mean, I told you my idea last night. I don't want to take any time up explaining my idea. But how do you vet... I'm sorry, I know that what do you... How do you, the teachers, what do you call them?

Guides. How do you vet the guides? Yeah, in a really similar way. Of course, like the background check and the social media scrape scrub, the drug test, all of those things. But most importantly, the people that are applying are when that first email comes across, hey, I'd really love to come work for your school. I am leaving insert this place that I currently have been a guide or a teacher at for this amount of time for these reasons. Now I'm going to ask five very basic open-ended questions.

And these open-ended questions are very similar to that kid showing up to the studio and saying, you know, as he's auditioning and interviewing against all of his peers, the last thing that we need is a teacher in there. You know, how are you going to be at a peer-by-peer level, be able to guide these kids through here's a problem? And they're open-ended narrative questions. And when we interview these guides, it's very evident which ones get it and which ones don't. My first year, major mistake, I hired teachers.

I went and I bought the highest, fanciest, you know, with the best resumes and like awards for this and this. But they weren't aligned with this vision. And catastrophic failure. Really? Yeah. What are some of the things that you saw? When a critical thinker that can't sit at a desk that needs to move to problem solve and is going to think in an atypical way,

that teacher who can only do something linear, but then something that's kind of chaos and anarchy in an approach to a solution, they literally can't process. So they've combat it and then stifle and then stuff and then stomp and then stop or instead we're supposed to inspire and supposed to to give resources. And if they fail, it's fine. Like if the kid fails, you will learn from that failure. And I don't need to have every kid passing in a session. I just need that kid to grow. I just need that child to evolve and to continue down this road of becoming a critical thinker. They can do anything. Like if you can program manage and you can critical think, you can do anything.

So like, why don't, why aren't we, and we haven't been in education doing anything besides teaching kids how to take a test? I'm not, I'm fairly certain. I've never been to war and I've never walked into a ring and I've never started business that I was like given anything that, was useful that resembled a test that I ever took in school. Why don't we prepare them for what real life looks like? You know, you were talking to me about some of the curriculum, and you were

talking about some type of an exercise that you had these kids doing where they were building their own business. What age group was that? First, second, third, fourth grade. Can you go through that exercise? Yeah. It was super simple. We had a business fair. a date set. So in two months from now, we're going to go to this business fair or we're going to go to a farmer's market. Everyone in the studio, you have to create a product, you have to create this product, you have to market this product, and you have to bring this product to market. Then at the end, you're going to come back to the studio and you're going to give a brief about the performance of your product. So one little girl took a loan from her parents, bought Mason jars, got, got

kinetic sand and then built themed environments in every single one of these kinetic sands. So like one of them was like green and brown kinetic sand. She put all these little dinosaurs in there. She sold them for $25 a piece. The cost of her product, like her out of pocket cost was like $3. You know, so she's making $22 for every single one of these sales. And she sold a whole bunch of them at the farmer's market. And she paid her parents back. Then she took her profit and gave her presentation. Here was what I spent. Here's how much my booth cost. Here's how much the cost of goods were. This is the loan that I took. This is the interest that I paid back. And here's my profit. And then we had another one that took, he went and collected all the sheds off his parents ranch.

And he trimmed them and cut them with the skill saw, which is kind of cool. How many kids know how to use a skill saw? Put screws through them with like nice little fancy washers with this big huge industrial screw and turned them into hardware. So it was like a bolt that. went through it. On the back, you could screw in the nut with another washer, and you would have like this axis handles for your cabin tree. He took those and sold them as sets, like six and eight and 12, depending on how many drawers you had for within your bedroom, and sold dozens of sets and made a ton of money. He had almost no overhead besides some bolts and some nuts and some washers. So he was almost pure profit besides the cost of him renting one table to put at the

farmer's market. And so success, massive success. And then this other kid went and took some sticks, some branches that he thought looked like guns and tried to sell them at the farmer's market and made no money because nobody bought them. I think his uncle bought one and, you know, out of charity. And he went back and he had to brief everybody in his class and he was embarrassed. And I remember being embarrassed. I remember failing. I remember not doing well in a spelling test. I remember all the times that I failed were the moments that I learned the most.

And I will argue, even though the two success stories, sure, they made some money and they learned a ton about how to do business. Their parents were super involved. But that kid that sat there with shame and embarrassment learned the best lesson of them all. And everybody's walking out of the studio. parents are mad because you know Tommy didn't do great in his presentation

where he lost time, lost a little bit of money, but most of all was embarrassed because all of his friends were successful. And instead being able to, you know, juxtaposition, switch the perspective. It'd be like, but look at what he learned.

You know, and are you excited to see what he's going to do in this next one? Yeah. But it's on you, parent. like there's no teacher that's going to sit here and hold their hand and do this work for them and it's not your job parent to do all the work for them it is your job to help them be able to learn how to do this it's your responsibility it's nobody else's responsibility governs not going to teach your kids ethics grit integrity and hard work that is your job so rise how many how many

kids are in the school roughly apagy sort of 24 i think we'll probably be around 3,000. 3,000. Between mentorship, physical locations, brick and mortar schools. That's incredible. So if I wanted to...

John, we're not. We're like just getting started. I know. I know. That's what's so exciting about it. I mean... We're literally like the second... First year was a real rough start. We're in our second year right now. You know, we're three years into this,

two years of actually doing it right. Yeah. And we're going. It's, I mean, it's obviously spreading like wildfire. Yeah. So, you know, I want to know if I want to bring this to Franklin, Tennessee. Yeah. What do I do?

Where do I start? You go to apagetstrong.com. We launched a documentary yesterday, like an hour-long documentary talking about public education, talking about our purpose, talking about our vision, how, you know, Matt and I are approaching not education, not schooling about creating critical thinkers. And so you're going to go to apagystrong.com. All the people that are going to be opening schools

are going to come from within the mentorship program. There'll be very rare exceptions because we have to know everybody. Like if we don't know them personally and we haven't spent time with them, you're not going to open a school. So like we have to have the rapport and relationship and trust and faith

that you're going to be doing the right thing to continue to spread this vision. So if you go to Apogee, you get out of the mentorship program. And there's a lot. We demand your big reading list, like you're journaling, you're working out every single day. We're asking questions about intentionality as you as a parent and you as a husband or wife and your family. And it's a full family approach. Like this isn't, hey, you leader of the household. It is you as a complete family nuclear family as a family unit. How are you approaching, raising the most powerful influential children that you possibly can.

Man, you are doing a lot of good stuff. I hope so. I'm trying. If not, I'm going to go crazy. Yeah, man, we covered a lot of ground there. Yeah. And I wish we had another six hours to dive into some of this stuff. As we're walking across Big Bend in southwest Texas towards the Mexican border,

we can talk more right on well i'll meet you down there but tim i just want to say man um i'm really happy that our paths have crossed and and uh it's an honor to know you it's an honor to be able to get your story out and um man i'm just uh i'm blown away at all of the good that you're injecting into this world because we sure is all needed man so thank you thank you man thanks Thanks for having a voice. Dude, I'm proud to know you. Thank you. Keep on killing it.

All right, brother. Thank you.