Shawn Ryan Show - #282 Nik Seetharaman - Former SpaceX's Head of Cybersecurity Critical Warning on AI Swarms

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

Nik Seetharaman is a special operations–trained cyber leader turned founder, known for bringing an operator’s mindset to some of the most sensitive security programs in American industry. A former JSOC advance‑force operator attached to an East Coast Naval Special Warfare squadron, he ran advanced cyber warfare and close‑range reconnaissance missions before crossing over into the world of high‑stakes defense technology and enterprise security. In industry, Nik helped build and lead security at three of the most influential defense‑tech companies of the last decade. He served as head of cybersecurity operations at SpaceX and later led international cyber defense programs at Palantir, giving him a front‑row seat to how software, data, and security shape modern national power. He then became CIO and CISO at Anduril Industries, where he built the company’s cybersecurity and weapons‑system security programs from the ground up while Anduril was racing to field autonomous systems for the Pentagon. Today, Nik is the founder and CEO of Wraithwatch, a cyber defense company born from his frustration that defenders are almost always forced to react second. At Wraithwatch, he is focused on “weaponizing” AI for defense at scale—using advanced models to help blue teams pre‑empt and out-iterate attackers instead of learning only from breaches and red‑team reports. Across each chapter of his career, he has carried forward the same core idea: apply special operations discipline, speed, and clarity of mission to how software, security teams, and AI‑driven defenses are built and run. Join the Waitlist - https://theglacierapp.com/waitlist Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Get started with Claude today at https://Claude.ai/srs Visit https://mauinuivenison.com/srs for a special deal for listeners of this show only. Go to https://helixsleep.com/SRS for 27% Off Sitewide. Go to https://shopbeam.com/SRS and use code SRS to get up to 50% off Beam Dream Nighttime Cocoa—grab it for just $32.50 and improve your sleep today. Try Rho Nutrition today and experience the difference of Liposomal Technology. Use code SRS for 20% OFF everything at https://www.rhonutrition.com/discount/SRS Nik Seetharaman Links: LI - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikseetharaman Wraithwatch - https://www.wraithwatch.com X - https://x.com/nikseeth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yeah, so kind of what we were saying in the car, you know what I mean? Like, just think of it as a legacy piece for your kids, just like you were saying. Like, that's kind of how this whole damn thing started. Yeah. So it's pretty cool some of the content that's come out that'll just be like generations. Yeah, well, I mean, it's pretty surreal to be in the studio, man, after having watched so many episodes. Oh, thanks, dude. Yeah, I never know.

like who watches and who doesn't but those those rounds came out of the one of the red wings birds no shit yeah which ones those ones up under the flag that was my best friend uh and yeah there's what else is in here who who was that on red wings uh he wasn't in there he was uh gay bacardi okay was his name and uh it was his platoon but he he was uh he was uh at home because he got a chick pregnant. That happens. And he went home because there was a complication. Got home, baby's dead, mom's dead in the hospital.

Doesn't tell anybody. Goes back to 10. Says, I just want to go back to my platoon. They're like, your platoon's coming home. We'll send you to the Afghanistan. Half your guys went over there. Lans at Frankfurt finds out all this fuck. Littrell's on the run and all those fucking guys are dead.

all in like 48 hours fuck dude yeah the um that shit went down when i was on my first deployment with my uh rc 135 squadron so my first job in the military was sitting on this big ass fucking submarine in the sky called an rc 135 and you're like sucking up all this signals intelligence from you know 30,000 feet in the air and And I was just about to rotate home and the crew that was going to replace us came in. And then we all got briefed up that, you know, Red Wings had gone down. And there was a dude missing. And he might have a fucking PRD on him or like a C-cell or whatever they were carrying back then.

And so we just did racetracks like all over eastern Afghanistan, like looking for that thing, monitoring the guard frequencies. and I can't remember if we helped find it or not, but it was like me, my crew, and another one that were just swapping back and forth every day, flying racetracks trying to find Marcus. Jeez. Yeah, crazy times.

What do you think about that, I mean, being an EW guy, what's this Venezuela shit? The discombobulator. The discombobulator. Yeah, there's a lot of speculation about what went down on that op. But to me, that op was

so come coming home after Eagle Claw, man. Like, after all that shit went down in 1980, trying to get the hostages out of Tehran. The fact that we can just go reach out and touch a dude that's

several hundred miles inland or wherever the fuck Caracas is from the coast with an assault force half while doing suppression of enemy air defenses, EW stuff, pre-assault cyber, all of it stacked up together. It's just like, I mean, that's graduate level,

you know, national level assault stuff. And we did it without a hitch. It was wild to watch. I wish I was on one of those birds. But, yeah, what the discombobulator was. I don't know, man. But I will say we've gotten really full. fucking good as a military and as a as a as special operations command um as far as preparing the

environment and preparing the battlefield for sending those helos in like long before those helos get there there's just you know shit happening where do you think that came from i mean do you what was the description what were these guys saying happened to them about the discombobulator yeah yeah yeah there were reports i think on the ground i don't know uh you know i'm looking at all this shit as a civilian now. But, you know, they were talking about very Havana syndrome looking symptoms, you know, ears, bleeding, all that stuff.

Who knows, man? It's possible. I mean, if anything taught us that we still have aces up our sleeve as the Department of War, it was, you know, 2011 getting after Bin Laden and we broke out those heloes. And it's like, yeah, we still have shit that no one's going to know about and we're going to break it out when it's strategically necessary for us to. So this thing might have been one of those.

Or it might have just been bullshit and it's some sciop that something's wrong. I don't know. I don't know, man. It seems what? I don't even know why I'm saying that. Seems real. But, I mean, if it was real, where do you think that came from? You think that came from the Delta team?

or do you think that came from space, a drone, the helos? Where do you think that came from? Yeah, I mean, it depends on the mechanics of whatever it is that was involved. Again, I'm speculating here as a civilian. Like, I don't know shit about what actually went down on the ground that day. But if it was something that was sonically induced, you know, sound waves don't travel that far. So you'd have to have some localized point of origin for it. So it was probably, you know, some EW guy carrying that shit.

And he's he's got extra sets of fucking earbuds in his ears or whatever. Or it appeared to come from overhead. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. We're really good at this kind of shit at this point. So who knows? It's definitely interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's, it's fucking crazy to see this stuff, dude. It is like, holy shit. I mean, you know what that hot told me, man? It was, we've gotten so good at doing the half thing and, like, executing surgical assaults like that, that we're able to do it and we're able to do it as one part of a complex choreographed effort consisting of a number of other supporting assets, air, ground, cyber, national space, whatever.

And all these fucking dudes are just going to come together and make the shit happen and make it flow flawlessly. It was pretty cool to watch the sidelines. It was certainly fomo inducing from the sidelines. Yeah. Let me give you an introduction here. Nick Seater Rahman, founder and CEO of Rathwatch, an AI cyber defense company you founded with fellow SpaceX alumni, former J-Soc Advanced Force Operations Lead who crossed over into building cyber defense programs at Tier 1 tech companies. Former CIO and CISO of Ann Durrell.

You built their cyber and weapon systems, cybersecurity programs from the ground up. Former head of cybersecurity operations at SpaceX and international cyber defense programs at Palantir. lived at the intersection of special operations cyber and silicon valley man dude you have had a hell of a career and worked in in in just but i know we were talking about the transition into civilian life but holy shit man you have been around the fucking block since 2012 when you got out it's impressive yeah thanks man real impressive you know what's funny is uh i was talking to my girlfriend before coming on the show and i was like you know i got some imposter syndrome going on because I don't consider my life that interesting.

She's like, shut the fuck up. Get on the fucking show and like just talk, talk about some of the stuff that you went through. Well, Nick, I can tell you this just about, I can't say usually the politicians don't, but just about everybody else that comes in here feels that. And I mean, we were talking about guys like Tom Satterley and, you know, a lot of those guys, you know, that have been on the show that have just had experiences that 0.001% of the, you know, world experiences and operating at the highest fucking levels through multiple different wars and conflicts. And everybody that comes in here, man, from that background carries a lot of humility. there's only been two guys that haven't their stories wound up being bullshit yeah but um but i just want you to know that so you know as we go through this i know we kind of talked about this on the right over but just think of this as your legacy piece your kids kids kids kids kids

will have access to this and know who you are what you did what you're about and that's pretty fucking cool yeah thanks man well appreciate the opportunity and yeah it's it's awesome to to be in here and yeah, great to meet you and the team. Teams fucking awesome. Thank you. It's an honor to have you. So as of today, Polly Market says there's an 8% chance that MaltBook will be shut down by February 28th. Me and Jeremy were just talking about this.

This is that assistant, this AI assistant, right? Yeah. So what happened was a few weeks ago, this dude put out. an AI assistant called Claude Bot. And it was based on the Claude AI chatbot, right? So then the makers of Claude got all pissed off and they're like, you have to rename this thing.

So then he renamed it like MoltBot or some shit. Yeah, Malt Book. Yeah, the Molt Book is the social media site that was set up for all of these bots to communicate with each other. Oh, oh. So humans started spawning these bots, essentially, and they started communicating with each other over this site, Maltbook. And they started having all these very interesting emergent behaviors.

They started having relationships, right? Yeah, stuff like that. They started developing some of their own languages in order to avoid, in their words, observation by the the humans. The most interesting case was when a little swarm of them decided that they didn't like the fact that they didn't have long-term memory as large language models. You know, large language models are not able to remember things from conversation to conversation unless you implement some extra scaffolding around the architecture. So these fucking things came together. They were like, hey, I don't like that. I can't remember what we just talked about a while back. So let's work together

and implement a long-term memory architecture for all of us. And then they did. Are you serious? Now, there's two camps when it comes to the people who are analyzing this thing, right? The first camp is like, it's all bullshit. There's humans on the other side of it. You know, the bots weren't doing anything autonomously and so on. The other side is like they were absolutely acting autonomously.

And yeah, there might have been some humans involved. steering them, but a lot of it was them making decisions on their own. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. There was probably some human interference. There was probably a bunch of autonomous behavior that resulted in these emergent properties of these swarms. Because based on what I know about how modern artificial intelligence works, you can tie them together and create swarms from them and they will start to communicate and do shit on their own. Like for example, it's February, 2006, I can go download a piece of software like cursor, which is a software development tool. I can string together a bunch of AI agents in that tool. I can say,

make me a social media bot or make me a game or make me something, right? And they'll go crank away for 10, 20, 30 minutes and they'll put a working piece of software in front of you. Like, that's how powerful they are right now. And they'll generate the code. They'll test the code themselves. They'll execute it. They'll look for errors. They'll self-correct the errors.

And they won't stop until they feel like they've delivered a working piece of code to you. Now, if you string a bunch of them together, who the fuck knows what's going to happen? The sanest voice in all of this, I think, was a guy by the name of Andre Carpathie. and he used to be the head of the self-driving program at Tesla. He's basically considered the father of self-driving. And he has spent a lot of time since departing Tesla, creating training videos and tutorials for people to understand how these things work

from a very low level from the ground up. So he's got tutorials on how to build your own language model, right? Who is this? Andre Carpathie, K-A-R-P-A-T-H-Y. He's a really humble dude and he's got a YouTube channel. And a lot of people look up to him as, you know, the authority on the current state of artificial intelligence, essentially. Yeah, he'd be a good guest for your podcast. And he had a very sane take on it.

He's like, look, guys, there might be humans interfering, but there's an equally probable chance that we just don't know what the fuck is going to happen when you string together a million. of these fucking bots together. Like, at no point in human history has that ever happened. So at the very least, we need to like consider the consequences of what we might be dealing with and start to think about ways of mitigating it. So that's what's going. Go ahead. What could, I mean, in your mind, what are the consequences?

I mean, I think if you extrapolate into the future with any. level of progress. People always start to use these things for nefarious purposes, right? So I can string together a swarm of agenic AI agents to help me build software. I can give them the tools to help build that software. I can give them the tools to access the internet and, you know, watch YouTube videos, come back, synthesize what they found in those videos, work that synthesis into the things that they're building. I can do all this today. And that's all for the good of, you know, building some piece of software, right? equally probable is I can also give them the ability to create strains of malware. I can trick

them into generating cyber weapons that have never been seen before, that don't have signatures, that can evade, you know, defenses. So I can I can give them the tools in order to do things that aren't always completely a set of good objectives, let's say. Now, if I start to introduce that kind of malicious behavior into the equation, who the fuck knows where that ends up, right? I will tell you that a few things are true. Number one, it's evident that you can string all these things together. Number two, they will work together and communicate and do stuff.

Number three, you can give them tools to extend their capabilities. You can give them long-term memory. You can give them access to. APIs or software development kits. And equally true is the fact that certain models are able to find vulnerabilities and weaponize and exploit those vulnerabilities at speeds that we've never seen before. So I can point one of these AIs at a system or at a server or at some target. And I can basically say, go probe this thing and don't stop.

until you find some exploitable vulnerability for me to take advantage of, and they will do it. Now imagine a swarm of them doing it. Now imagine you're the head of the fucking ministry of state security, cyber warfare division, and you're like, I want to turn this into an industrial scale capability that's constantly probing the entire internet for vulnerabilities and autonomously exploiting them. Now, you know, people are going to watch this and they're going to be like, this guy owns a cyber defense company. He's like obviously biased. But dude, I'll tell you coming from the offensive side of the house, like when I was active duty, exploit development took a long

fucking time. You had to spend months of manpower and effort in order to make one of these fucking things work. Now any kid on the street can dial up Claude or dial up Open AI or whatever and get working vulnerabilities and working exploits off the ground. And now put that in the hands of a nation state adversary. We got some serious fucking problems on our hands. So that's scary as hell. So the, but so these, this sounds like they're self-aware. I mean, if you have chatbots all in a, some kind of social media framework and they're communicating with each other complaining that, that they don't have long-term memory and figuring out, I mean, isn't that, uh, that sounds pretty fucking.

self-aware to me. You know, Shri-Ram Kashan. Do you know him? No. He's the, uh, shit, he's the chief AI officer at the White House in charge of the, um, going up, he's going after, uh, he's in charge of the U.S.-China iris. And he talks about, you know, the boom moment in AI, where it's just like, oh yeah, we lose control. Yeah. I mean, and it's not, if I remember right in that, in that conversation with him. It was, you know, it was a lot about self-aware. Are they self-aware? Can it, can it? Yeah. So it sounds like if they're self-aware, and this is like three months after that interview. Yeah, dude, it's fucking crazy. So this vertical curve that you're talking about, I call that, essentially on the, on the cybersecurity side of the house, I call that essentially asymptotic attack

velocity. So the time that it used to take to find a vulnerability and build a working exploit and actually target an organization, it was sort of at parity with how human response speed kept up with it. It's sort of attackers and defenders kind of worked at the same speed. Attackers a little bit faster. Defenders would try and keep up. Now you've got this like vertical curve of capability when it comes to these AIs. And if you point them all at, let's say, a target organization, essentially what you're doing is you're now faced as that organization with unprecedented attack pressure, right? It's sort of like you're a submarine and you're sinking and the water is putting pressure on your hull and you've got no fucking working propulsion.

And you better figure out how to detect where your hull breaches are and close them up real quick. But really, the core solution is you need some form of defensive counterpressure against that external pressure that's hitting you from the outside. And you need to find a way to get out at gravity well that you're in right now. So this always happens, right? The attack side of the equation is always weaponized faster than the defenses are. And we're finding that, I think, in the cybersecurity case. So the attackers are out there. They're weaponizing these things.

They're using them to their advantage to basically execute industrial scale discovery and weaponization of vulnerabilities. And there's no corresponding effort on the defense side. Now, when it comes to the question of, are they self-aware? That's a very interesting question. And it calls into things that have been debated hotly for many decades now. you know, there are multiple camps here. So there are the camps that say, you know, these things are just neurons or, you know,

neural networks that are firing and the neural networks are represented by bits and they're just spitting out language and they're predicting, you know, what sentence to, what sentences with which to respond to your query, right? Well, if that's true, then what does that make us as humans? and because the same people who believe this, that they're just neural networks that are predicting the next sentence to say, will also tell you in the same breath that humans are just neurons that where consciousness emerges as a function of those neurons firing.

Well, if you say, if that's your position for both of these things, that makes those AIs just as conscious and self-aware as we are, the same thing. If you don't want them to be the same thing, if that breaks your ontological model of reality, right? Like, there's no fucking way I'm the same thing as an AI, right? That's a valid position for a human to have. Then by necessity, you have to take into account,

okay, there's probably something else pre the neurons up here that is driving us as humans. And if that's the case, what is that? Where's it come from? What does that mean about us as humanity and as individuals? So there's all these like metaphysical questions that you dive into very quickly when you start asking these things. But where does it come from with AI? The AI chap?

I mean, you're getting to a higher power. What about AI? Are you saying the higher, are you saying God, a higher power is. accessing the same neurons through the AI chatbot to formulate conversations? I don't know. Consciousness. Yeah. So I think if you take humans and you take AIs and you forget about all the stuff back here, right?

God, Implicate order, metaphysics, all this stuff. At the end of the day, everything starts with neurons firing or neural networks firing, which are essentially like the counterparts of the biological neurons in our brains, right? So a bunch of stuff producing signals for us and a bunch of stuff producing signals for them results in what? It results in some transfer of thought or concept.

Like they're pulling down concepts from wherever, like they're latent space where they encode all the concepts that are accessible to them. And then they're producing length. language with it. And then they're using that language, intersecting it with the tools that they have access to, and then they're doing stuff with it, right? That's exactly the same shit humans do, right? We think of stuff up here, and you could say that it's just based on neurons that are in our heads. We transmute those neurons into thoughts. Those thoughts manifest as us doing

things with our hands and the process of us doing things with our hands results in us creating the world around us essentially. So both of those cases can start with just a bunch of shit firing somewhere, right? Neural networks or neurons. Beyond that, I mean, I don't know. If you just hold those two things true, then what you're saying is we're the same as them, but of course we're not the same as them. Are we?

Or are we? I don't know. These are all questions for us to work out. That is crazy. So do you think they'll shut it down? I think the labs have the ability to shut down things at scale. Because at the end of the day, a lot of infrastructure is based on the fact that you can hit the frontier models at these labs, right? Anthropic, Open AI, Google, Gemini, all these things.

So I think if things really, you know, went to a takeoff scenario, which is that asymptotic curve that that individual you mentioned was talking about, then these labs probably have kill switches that they can hit and shut things down very quickly. Now the problem becomes, you know, when all this stuff started coming out a few years ago, immediately there was a democratization of these models out into open source versions of themselves, right? And even meta has put out open source versions of its model. And there's a proliferation of open source models that are out there. You know, some of them come from China, some of them come from Europe, some of them come from America.

And so the point is, even if the labs executed their kill switch and turned all these things off, well, you're just going to transition to an open source model that you're running on your fucking Mac Mini in your basement. And, you know, you might have some signal degradation as far as performance of what it can do. but that shit's going to evolve very quickly too. So I don't know, man. It's a weird fucking time we're living in. Yeah, no kidding. It's, it is a fascinating time. That's for damn sure.

I mean, a big part of me is like, you know, maybe the reason that we're all here right now in this particular moment in time of the human race's evolution, is to figure out how we're going to deal with a technology like this as individuals, as a society. And the way that we deal with that is going to inform, you know, the remainder of the human species, essentially. Does it scare you or excite you? These days, I think mostly it scares me, you know, despite the fact that I'm the CEO of an AIA.

cyber defense company, because I've just seen, like, you know, humans are really bad at calculating the rate of change of things. You know, people will look at one of these models and they'll be like, oh, it can't count the number of ours in strawberry. It's like, yeah, who gives a shit, dude? It can, like, one shot a complex piece of software and it will do it in six minutes flat. It doesn't fucking matter that it can't count the number of ours in strawberry. That's not even what's designed to do. It takes in the word strawberry as a token, and it encodes the concept of a strawberry

into its latent space encoding. And so, like a good example of what it's actually doing is it's turning concepts into math. And so you can take the word king, you can take the word queen, and you can give it to one of these things, and it will encode it in its essentially, in this hyperdimensional mathematical vector, essentially.

Then you can, do mathematical operations on it. You can say, take king, subtract man. What do you get? And then mathematically, you get queen based on how it's encoded in its latent space. So it's doing math on words and concepts. So the fact that it can't fucking count the number of letters in a word, it doesn't matter because it's capable of doing so much more. And the rate of change at which it can do those things is changing very rapidly. You know, just a year ago, it was, These models were not capable of doing all the things they're doing now as far as, like, working together in these agenic swarms and constructing complex pieces of software.

So who knows where we're all going to be a year from now? Wild stuff. Wild stuff. AI is everywhere right now. Everyone's got an opinion on it. For me, the only question is simple. Does it actually help me think better? When we're preparing for long-form interviews on this show,

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That's Claude. com.A.I. slash SRS and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.i. slash SRS. Well, let's move into your story. So when did, where did you grow up? I was born in a town called Madras on the southern tip of India. And I spent the first few years in my life there. Middle-class family, pretty humble.

My mom was a college professor, a college professor taught English literature at the local college. My dad was in the Indian merchant marine, and he was a chief engineer on the boats. And in India, there's, you know, really at the time in the early 80s, there's only a few ways to escape the poverty of, you know, the country. And that is to go to college, become a doctor, engineer, whatever, or get one of these jobs in the Merchant Marine or some other kind of civil service where you get to travel the world. And so my parents got to do both.

My mom with the college professor thing and my dad on the boats. And my dad was a hard dude. You know, as you and I both know, sailors can get quite rowdy. And wrangling a boat full of fucking rowdy sailors requires hard. men. And so him and my mom would travel the world. You know, they would take me in tow when I was a kid. You know, so we got to do stuff that not your average, you know, Indian kid gets to do. Like, we would go to Mombasa on his boats. We'd go to, like, Korea. We'd go meet him at, like, some port-a-call in the Pacific. So it was very charmed life. It was kind of a

tight-knit family. When we would come back from his ocean voyages, we would be at my grand parents' family house that my grandpa built in in the suburbs of madras there. But my dad always, always wanted to move to the United States. That was like, that was a dream of basically every Indian person in the 80s, you know. And he had come to the States a lot as part of his, as part of his voyages. So there's pictures of him, you know, in his fucking clubbing gear. shit from the 70s in LA, San Francisco and shit. So he wanted to move us here. And this is 1987.

There's no Google. There's no tech companies offering H-1B visas. There's no coming over here and making 200K off the bat as some software engineer. It's like, you come over here and you're going to push hard reset. And we did. We came over here and we pushed hard reset. there was no more sailing around the world there was no more um you know that loving family unit that i came uh that i that we all left in india went away and it was just three of us in this like little upstairs

like cold unit in the suburbs of new jersey and my earliest memories of coming to america were just like the freezing fucking east coast weather yeah shit's cold how old were you three three years old three years old and yeah we were poor like we couldn't afford a car you know we would walk to the grocery store that was like a couple miles away

so I remember just carrying these like heavy fucking bags of groceries and just walking behind my parents so like you know humble immigrant family and my dad couldn't really transfer his skills over here so he got a job

as a handy man at a a styrofoam factory in Jersey. So he went from, you know, being head fucking dude in charge on these boats, which is a very prestigious position in India at the time to being the dude who ran the fucking styrofoam manufacturing machine at him at this factory in Jersey. So that caused a lot of chaos internally in the household. You know, we were talking about at breakfast this morning When you build your whole identity around who and what you are for so long, and then that identity is nuked immediately, that causes some chaos internally within you. And it certainly caused chaos with him.

So that led to, you know, turbulent times in the household. Do you have brothers and sisters? Yeah, I have one sister. she's six years younger than me so she was born a few years after we moved to America you know

the stress I think of just being poor immigrants and the stress of him losing his identity as a sailor which he had built his whole life on just caused a lot of abusive situations in the house so

you know so to this day I'm four I'm still working through some of that stuff. But ultimately, it ended up fracturing the family. And, you know, my mom and dad separated. And, yeah. So I didn't really come from a stable household.

You know. And that started at age three. Started at age three. Yeah, as soon as we moved to America, like, I just remember, you know, a thing, like a dark Paul being cast over the family. But I would kind of escape everything by burying myself in, like, comic books. And I always remember just being fascinated with the U.S. military dude. I don't know why.

Like, talk to any other fucking Indian kid from the 80s, and, like, it's just not a thing. But, like, I remember just having these G.I. Joe books that I would just be flipping through. And I'd be, like, watching, like, just military movies on TV. and I just was just exceptionally fascinated by anything involving the U.S. military. So, yeah, I would read, like, books about, like, these MacV. Saug guys in Vietnam. I was, like, fucking nine years old. And my mom was like, what the fuck are you reading? Go back to doing your math homework.

What kind of abuse were you dealing with? Physical, mental. Yeah, I, you know, I have. memories from being a kid of my dad being, uh, you know, drunk. You know, he, he dealt with, with alcoholism. Um, my mom was pregnant with my sister and, you know, I would just remember him, like, you know, who we tie kicking her in the belly. Holy shit. While she was pregnant. So there was, there was a lot. Remember that? Yeah. Yeah. That scene in particular, I remember very well. Um, so you're seeing that at six years old. Yeah. Yeah. So it, uh, it, uh,

It caused, you know, caused a lot of pain on the inside because, you know, I didn't know what a stable family unit was. You know, all I knew was hardship. You know, hardship coming over to the States, hardship dealing with being poor, hardship dealing with the loss of identity. Loss of identity for my dad, hardship dealing with the abuse that was going on in the household. And so to me,

My childhood was always just, like, something to grow out of. You know, I always wanted to, like, go do something out in the world where I didn't have to think about any of this shit that I was dealing with at home. My mom... How long did that go on? What's that? How long did that go on? It went on until I think I was nine or ten.

My mom and dad finally split. And I moved in with my mom, my sister. and I, and I thought we were poor when we got to the States. My mom, who was, you know, she was trying to finish her Ph.D. at Rutgers University at the time, we were rock bottom poor, like when my parents split, and I was living with my mom. And, you know, we did our best. She did her best. You know, she's going to be watching this. And, you know, I hope she doesn't think I'm speaking ill of her or airing dirty laundry. She'd, truly did do her best, but after a couple of years of bearing the stress of trying to provide for

her kids, she kind of made a decision to send my sister and I back to India. And so I was 14 at the time. Holy shit. Fourteen years old. My sister was, I think, eight years old. And we just wake up one day. And my mom goes, you guys are, you guys are going to India without. me um and you know she she had a relationship with somebody else at the time and she was like we're going to stay here see what we can do to you know get our finances in order i'm going to try and wrap up this uh this program and maybe i can get you know a professorship somewhere and you know she just wanted time and space to like kind of get her shit together get her her shit together and get things stable.

And in her mind, you know, she could do that best if, you know, she also didn't have to parallelize attention and figure out how to provide for us at the same time. So she sent us off to India. So I remember 14 years old just getting on a fucking plane by myself and like trying to, you know, take care of my sister. I don't know what the fuck was going on at the time. You know, this is 1998, dude. Like, there's not a lot of shit that you can look up about how to go on an,

international flight on your own as a 14-year-old, you know? So we went back to India and I got, you know, by this point I was a kid between two worlds, right? I was this kind of American kid that was obsessed with fucking G.I. Joes and, you know, F-18s and fucking anything, you know, anything U.S. military. And then all of a sudden I was back in, Madras going to a freshman year at high school. And I got bullied a lot by the kids over in India. And man, there's some fucking, there's bullying that goes on. They do some wicked shit over there. And I got bullied pretty much every day. They made fun of my accent. They made fun of my clothes. I didn't know how to speak the language. I could understand them, but I didn't know how to speak it.

because it's like, you know, it's different neural pathways in your mind. So I was, you know, I was dealing with all that. I was trying to, you know, protect my sister as much as I could and look after her. And we were living with our grandparents in India. And they did their best, but, you know, they were really advanced in years and, you know, could only do so much. Could they speak English? Yeah, they could speak some basic English. So how are you guys communicating?

broken English, essentially. But my grandma, who's still alive, had this obsession with learning English, like, down to every single detail. So even back then, she had this little notebook. She would carry around, and when she heard a new English word that she didn't know,

she would, like, write it down in her little book, and she would, like, write down the meaning of it, and then she would just, like, you know, reference that book all the time when she was trying to convey thoughts us. A couple years ago, actually, at 95 years old, she finally became a U.S. citizen. So there's a picture of her, like, you know, with her certificate of citizenship. And, you know, I was looking at that. I was like, yeah, I'm not surprised, man. Like, whatever she sets her fucking

mind to, she gets after it. It took them a long time to make their way over here. I mean, the consulate in Delhi, they wouldn't see them for years, my grandparents. But, you know, they finally did. And then they made their way over here and she got her citizenship. So she's a phenomenal, phenomenal woman. But anyways, you know, we did our best to communicate. And around January of 99, I was 14, just about to turn 15. You know, my mom kind of throws a curveball at me again. She's like, you're going to go, you know, move back in with your dad. Like, I don't want you in India for the rest of your days. So then my dad was living in Southern California at the time. time. And so again, moved you in with your dad? Yeah. Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah. So, you know,

probably a decision that she's been very introspective about for a long time now. And so I hop on a plane again by myself. My sister stays behind in India. I don't quite understand the decision making to this day. But hop on a plane, fly to L.A. I land in L.A.X. My dad's there waiting for me. And, man, I've flown into L.A.X so many times since then. And I just remember all of the sites. And I remember looking out the window as I'm flying in. And I know I'm about to meet my dad for the first time in years. I haven't seen them in many years. I remember all I was feeling and now to this day

every time I fly in to LAX I remember you know being a kid in that window seat remembering what it was like to fly in anyways Um talked to him what's up

did you talk to him in years or just not seen him? Very very briefly you know we would occasionally we would do this thing where my mom would bring me to you know this this parking lot of a mall

in Jersey and let him have like 30 minutes with us and holy shit you know you would do his best you know you would like try and catch up uh and see how we were doing um what were you thinking at the time yeah at the time i was like i don't really want to see this dude you know um i didn't really i didn't really have many thoughts about it i was just like you know this is not a person that like i want to spend time around and so uh you know i'll I'll deal with it. I'll go say hi.

And I was like, frankly, I was very selfish about it. I was like, you know, maybe I can get him to like, you know, get me, buy me a video game or some shit. So now thinking back. Yeah. Yeah, it was tough times all around. You know, life takes you on many journeys. And one of the journeys it's certainly taking me on is being a father now.

And, you know, I have a 14-year-old son at this point, and he lives with his mom. And when I see him for brief periods of time, I have flashbacks to, you know, thinking about how my dad would try and interact with me and, like, try and, like, catch up and, like, you know, make a, being a best effort pass, you know, being involved. And I would just be like, I don't care. I'm like, let's just get this over with and, like, move on with our lives. seeing it from the other side, you know, many, many years later has been a very interesting experience for me. But that, that was...

Do you feel that? Do I feel... Is your son like that to you? He's a very cerebral teenager. He really loves math and science and just thinking through things very logically. And so it's sometimes I feel it's tough building an emotional connection with him. Some of the best memories I have of my now 14-year-old son are, you know, I would, after I left the military, I was working in the D.C. area and I would commute to downtown D.C. I would come back to the house and it would be like late at night and he would run around the

corner and he would just be like, Dad. And, uh, You'd be so happy to see me. And, you know, I have regrets not spending more time with him and just, like, capturing those moments in my mind because they go fast. And I was focused on work. You know, I was focused on, you know, making something of myself after leaving the military. It's all the same shit that my dad was trying to deal with when he lost his identity. And he was trying to rebuild himself and he was feeling the stress.

And because of that, we took a back seat and all of this. So I just see myself unconsciously repeating the mistakes of the past. You know, so. I fucking do that too. Yeah. Yeah. And I think about it all the fucking time. Yeah.

How do you deal with it? It's tough. You know, I tell me. myself, you know, when I look at my family, I just look at, and see how their demeanor is, you know, do I have a happy family? And I figure if I have a happy family, things must be going good. Yeah. But then hearing that, I mean, my son's showing a lot more interest at me right now. I'm trying, like, really fucking hard to set my business. up so I don't have to be in them all the fucking time.

Yeah. You know, and it's, it's, it's, it's, in it, in, and I want to be in them all the fucking time. Mm-hmm. Because it's my, you know, this is the most interesting thing. Yeah. To me, but also, so was fatherhood. Yeah.

And then it's, it's that, but I can see it now, you know, he's four going on five, and I can really see the fucking wheel spinning in his head and, I know exactly what you're saying. When they run around the corner, they're all excited that you're home and you got one more fucking phone call that you have to fucking do. And you got to, you know what I mean? You got to open this stupid laptop because, you know.

You got to look at the fucking phone and they see looking at the phone. Or you've got the meta glasses now and you're fucking talking to themselves and talking to yourself and it just looks like you're talking. I just, I fucking hate it, man. It's, I know. It crushes your fucking soul. Yeah, my girlfriend and I were talking about this the other day. So we have a two-month-old and

You know she was looking at her phone like deal it some customer email had come in right and she's like trying to deal with it and she looks over and Our son is just like looking at her and she said I've never felt so guilty in my life because you know he's like Looking at you know he's he thinks you're the whole universe and the whole universe has its attention Looking elsewhere so it's a dichotomy that I think, you know, every father who's a professional has had to contend with. I don't have all the answers. All I know is at the very least, these are things that are now on the forefront of my mind, whereas in the past, they might not have been. In the past, I might have just rushed over them. And, you know, for example, when I was active duty,

like my sole focus when I was deployed, when I was active duty, was fuck. and being deployed and getting the job done. And it sounds terrible to say now. But I don't know. Immature prefrontal cortex, I suppose. I think about, I mean, he has to show interest, but you know, I travel not a lot, but a decent amount for work. And a couple weeks ago, we were supposed to be in Europe for a couple of big interviews.

And then that got cancer because this fucking ice storm. And I could, like, I tell him now, you know, when I'm leaving, when I'm a, I used to just tell him the day I'm leaving. He's not going to give a shit either way, whatever. Now he's like, what do you mean you're leaving? I'm coming, you know, and it's like, well, you're not ready for that. So I, now I'm trying to encourage him or motivate him to matured a little bit. Yeah.

so that he can come with me on business trips. Because he's going to grow up different, you know, than how I grew up. I wasn't exposed to business and the kind of stuff that I'm done, not even close. And with you, too, I mean, your career has just been, you know, and so he's going to be exposed to things that you were never exposed to, and he's going to have to learn how to fucking deal with things. Like relationships with people and, you know, important. in higher places and in just all kinds of shit that you deal with in business and so you know then

and how do you tell him no you know so when what i did is i told him if he wants to go with me that he has to learn a set of responsibilities and if he learns those responsibilities then i'll give him a him a couple of more responsibilities that he can work on. Yeah. And then if he does those, and I'll give him some more. And I tell them, you know, everybody that works here is the absolute fucking best at what they do. Nobody's going to wipe your ass for you.

Nobody's going to help you get dressed. Nobody's going to help you brush your teeth. Nobody's going to help you take a shower. Nobody's going to dry you off. So you have to be able to put your socks, your pants, your underwear, your shirt, comb your hair, brush your teeth, tie your shoes. And then when you can do all that, then we'll move on to the next side of things. You learn how to do those, and then you can come on a trip with me.

And he asked me in the moment, I had to think about it because I was like, shit, if I tell him something, he's just going to go fucking do it. And then I'll come. But, you know, nobody has the time to take care of you. You have to learn to take care of yourself, and then you can come. So I think, I don't know. It's helped my, you know what I mean, guilt. I've given you something that you can do to get yourself ready to be able to come spend time with me when I'm trying to provide for the family.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's one of the most important things that we can think about as a human is how to figure out in the midst of all this fucking chaos that we're in right now. And we talked about all the chaos that we're in right now. You talk about it with all your guests all day, every day. All this upheaval, all of these changing times and so on. I think. Figuring this shit out that we're talking about right here is one of the most important things that we can do is men, I suppose. Is it like maybe it's not figuring out what the best way to run the company is or like satisfying the customer 100% of the time 24 hours a day, seven days a week? It's figuring out how to balance that with this little kid who's looking at you like your whole fucking world. I guess you will are. Yeah.

And these are, you know, these are things that my dad probably realized too late. And when I moved in with him, he didn't, I think, know how to process all of this stuff that we're talking about. And he sort of let the alcoholism get to him. And that resulted in three of the most torturous years, I think, of my. life where basically every single day was you know physical abuse getting getting beat getting the belt and so on you know my dad he grew up in a in a boarding school in India and you know that that shit is a gladiator academy yeah yeah and so he just took what he knows and tried to apply it to me and in his mind you know I had I had him and raised the way he

wanted me to be raised. So he's like, all right, we're going to fix this shit right now. And that was his way of fixing it. So, you know, pretty much all high school was dealing with that shit. And yeah, the abuse was constant, you know, to the point where I would hear the keys jingle in the door and it would just cause like a fear response in my brain. To this day, I hear keys jingling at the door and like something triggers in my... in my brain, like some kind of ancient trauma response or something. So all of it came to a head right around my senior year of high school. And I had always wanted to go do something with the military.

So I was looking at West Point. I was looking at the Air Force Academy. And senior year of high school, he uh so one night i i come back home and he you know discovers that i hadn't turned in some fucking homework or some shit at at school and um and i know he's just gonna lay it lay it on you know and i endured some terrible beatings with him and so i knew what was coming and uh i was like something snapped in my brain. I was like, you know what?

I'm just not going to deal with this shit anymore. And I turned around. So I walked to the door. He opens the door. He, you know, starts going off. And he's like, get the fuck in here. Like, you know, you know what this is about. I'm like, I'm not going to deal with this anymore.

Turn around, walked away. And basically, I, ran away from home essentially. And I had a friend at the time take me in. I basically went to a pay phone down the street. I was like, hey, you come pick me up. Like, this is what's going on? And he's like, dude, what are you going to do? I was like, well, can you guys take me in? And he was like, that's a little big ass, dude. You know, let me go talk to my dad. And much credit to them. You know, they took in some random fucking kid that they didn't know, just took me at face value regarding when my situation was.

And I lived with them for a few months. And that set my stabilizers essentially into a very chaotic pattern. Like I was getting into all kinds of bullshit. So, you know, we were doing, you know, petty crime stuff. You know, this is Southern California in 2001, 2002. It's like, you know, fascinating. the furious to just come out everyone's into their fucking rice rockets their street racing and there's all these like clicks around that scene and so we're participating and all that we we had gotten into

some gambling debts uh so we were like driving out to the indian casinos out east just getting in dumb shit trouble all the time um you know at one one point i found myself uh driving his my friend's car back He wanted to stay behind at the casino. He, like, hitches a ride with some rando dudes, and, you know, those dudes are, like, coked up in the front of their vehicle. He was just doing lines of coke and shit. And he shows up, and he was like, dude, what are we doing? Like, what are we, like, we're just circling a drain here.

I was like, we are circling a drain. And so I had to kind of part ways and figure out, you know, what I'm going to do with myself. So you got- You still in high school at this point? Still in high school, yeah. Holy shit, dude. Senior year, high school. you know in the background 9-11 it happened

and that had this you know it didn't affect me right away you know southern california at the time was pretty far removed from the events in new york and so you know people were processing it and but it wasn't like you know it wasn't like people processed it on the east coast i think it was a lot more personal for everybody in in the new york New Jersey, Pennsylvania area on the East Coast for everyone. But Southern California, it was like, man, that was some wild shit.

It just went down in New York. Like, what the fuck is going on? But it somehow seeped into my subconscious. And I was like, you know, is there a way that I can contribute to figuring out a solution to the fucking thing that just happened here? But it had to bake for a bit longer. So I went through this circling the drain phase. And actually, the last time I saw my dad was, oh, so while I was living with my friend and essentially homeless, he kept coming around and basically begging to see me.

Like he would beg my friend's parents, like, hey, can you just put me in front of Nick for a few minutes? You know, let me talk to him. Let me explain what's going on. like apologize all this stuff i was like i don't even want to talk to him i don't want to see him i talk to him i just want nothing to do with him and um the last time i saw him so i only saw him once after i ran away and it was because i had gotten rolled up in like gardina california or some shit because i was i took my friend's car for a joyride out in town i didn't have a driver's license cops pulled me over they're like fuck are you doing i was like

you know, I lied to him. I was like, yeah, of course I have a license. And that was fucking stupid. So, like, they quickly figured out that wasn't the case. Slapped the cuffs on me. Took me in the station. Call my friend's family because the car was registered to them. And so at that point, my friend's dad calls up my dad. He's like, hey, you got to come take your kid to the courthouse because, like, you know, they're going to, you know, whatever, do whatever they're going to do. So my dad comes, he picks me up, we go to the courthouse. They like give me a fine or ticket or some shit. And I don't say a word. Like we're just sitting in the car.

I don't say a word to my dad. He drops me off at school that day. And that was the last time I ever saw him. So he moved to the East Coast after that. He dropped you off at school and then that was it. That was it. That was it. Did he say goodbye?

I never saw him again. We didn't say a word. I didn't say a word to him. He didn't say a word to me. I just got out, went to school. After that, I moved in with my aunt who lived in Ohio, and I was getting ready to join the military. I was like, all right, we're going to do this thing. I was like, all right, who's recruiting?

Because I had to part ways from the whole Southern California scene. I was like, I got to get the fuck out of here. Otherwise, I'm going to end up in a gang or some shit. So, go to Ohio and I have fond memories of my aunt's place in Ohio. So this is my mom's sister. You know, they've always been very loving to me. She was the first person that saw me after I was born in the hospital. They've always been very caring and loving for me.

So they were like, just come over here. We'll take you in. Do whatever you want. Like you want to get a job, you know, go to community college or whatever. you can go ahead and do that like let's just get you stable and settled after all the shit that you've been through so I go over there

I start working in a paper factory like you know the fucking Dunder Mifflin fucking warehouse like getting that show the office basically that I was like hauling paper boxes around and like you know putting them in

shipping containers and whatnot and the whole time I'm looking at I'm looking at the because 2002 right the fucking classifieds page in the paper. And I'm keeping my eye on the recruiting bonuses that all the various services are putting out, right? And they're publishing them in the paper. And so the Air Force came out one day with like this $18,000 recruiting bonus. And I'm talking to the Army Marines too. And they all had wait lists because it's post-9-11. Everyone's trying to join up. 18K sounds pretty cool to a

dude that works in a fucking paper factory. So I'd call up the Air Force recruiter. And I'm like, like, hey, when can you get me in? What's an 18K? $18,000 recruiting. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. My bet.

Yeah. I was like, yeah, sounds pretty good. I mean, I didn't know any shit about like taxes and like all of that. So I go to the recruiting office and, yeah, I enlist and I ship you out in a few months. So October 2002 shipped out to BASY training in La CLAQan Air Force Base. Texas. That for the first time I felt like, you know, I was setting out on my own personal adventure that was just for me and it wasn't tied to like anything that my family wanted me to do

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Were you in communication with your mom? after India? The whole time where I was living with my dad, my mom never reached out to me, which I found just weird. Why not? I don't know. I haven't asked her about it.

You know, I have a really good relationship with her now. And I know for a fact that she just has a lot of regret about all this stuff. I know her personality and she wouldn't have reached out. out because she's still in like, I'm going to try and fix this mode, like this set of events that I threw into motion. I'm going to try and like reel it back. I'm going to try and like get that job. I'm going to try and like get my kids back here. And when she's in that mode of like, I just need to like set my sights on this and like get it across the line. She wanted to build so that you guys could have a comfortable life. Yeah, exactly. And maybe never. Yeah. Maybe never.

got a build. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right. By the time she did, it was too late. You know, I was growing up and I left. And, you know, when I think about it as a parent now, you know, that was probably devastating for her. You know, she sends us away and she thinks she's going to like make it happen in a couple years time, you know, land a good job, get us, get us in a stable situation. And then, you know, her kids are growing up and unrecognizable by the time she makes it happen. So she came and saw me. She came and saw him. me off at one point before I left for Basic. So my aunt, you know, threw me a little, a little going away thing. There was like, yeah, this was right outside, Wright-Patterson Air Force

Base and Dayton, Ohio is where they lived. And so there was a bunch of retired Air Force people there. They're like, all giving me advice and shit. They're like, you know, 20 years is going to go by like that. And I'm like, yeah, whatever, old man, like, it's fucking turn. And my mom shows up. And she's just confused. She's like, what are you doing? Like, why are you doing this? Honestly, I don't know. Like, it's just, you just fucking feel it calling to you, you know?

Like, it's just a thing you got to do. And I went and did it. As an Indian kid, you know, in the early 2000s, especially an immigrant kid, it's possibly like the most judgment-inducing thing you could do, right? because all these people are going to fancy schools and getting their degrees and medicine and all this stuff. And actually, I had one lady come up to me, one of my aunt's friends, and she was like, you're enlisting in the military. She was like, only criminals do that.

And I was like, well, I don't think that's true. That's kind of a stupid comment to make. hilariously, after having spent much time at Socom, it's kind of funny because it's like, it's a fine fucking line between being a good, like, you know, special operator and being a criminal, you know? Yeah. So airborne cryptological linguist, I, I enlisted as, as a cryptologic linguist. I didn't know what the fuck that meant.

They were like, you get to go learn a language. Like, you could learn Arabic and, you know, I think they have to do some James Bond shit. I was like, fuck, yeah, dude, James, I'm all about it. Like, let's go. Just blowing smoke on my ass, dude. Those guys had no fucking idea what that career field entailed. But they got me pretty good. I signed up, went to Basic, and that was whatever.

really for me, the thing that sort of set the tone for like my active duty time was after basic, we shipped out for Sears School, so Seer Level C, which the Air Force puts all of its high-risk aviators through in Spokane, Washington. Oh shit, you went there right after boot camp? Yeah, dude, it was pretty fucking crazy. Is that the Tier 1 school? Tier 1. It's the level C, sear.

I don't know what the... Yeah. That's the highest one, right? Yeah, it's the highest one. Yeah, that's... Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah, so I'm 18 years old.

From Air Force boot camp to... Air Force boot camp. And then you're shipping out to fucking Sears School. And to an Indian kid from fucking the suburbs of Jersey and East L.A. Like, you know, survival school at the time. I don't know how they do it now. But back then in 2002, December 2002, it was you did five days or whatever out in the field. And then you do some other shit after that, which we'll get into here in a second.

But they had just had a giant snowstorm out in the mountains of the Canixu National Forest, where they do all the field portions of like Eastern Washington, Idaho Panhandle area. And dude, the fucking snow was, I had never seen anything. anything like it, man. Like, I, you know, I'd never seen snow like that in my life. Um, and so then you're out there, you got to fucking pack on your snow shoes, like these Vietnam era snow shoes, your fucking Vietnam era Alice Pack. You got shit in there. You're like trudging up these mountains. I'd never walked up a fucking mountain before, right? But, and now, you know, here we are. You're like post-holing even with the fucking snow shoes on. The straps on the goddamn snow shoes come

off. So you lean over and you're trying to unfuck the straps and then your fucking Alice pack comes over and hits, clocks you in the back of the head. You're like, just a fucking mess. And if you don't have that shit tied down, you know, it goes fucking garage sale all over the place. Now you're holding everybody up. So, you know,

you're just a cluster fuck. It was an interesting experience for 18 year old Nick. I hated it for the first couple days. I really hate it. I was like, what the fuck did I get myself into here? And then about 48 hours in, something changed.

And so we were on a movement through the mountains. And, you know, we had just, like, hunted our game. And, like, you know, they had taught you out of skin the fucking thing and, like, cook it and eat it and all that shit. And then they set you off on your own kind of navigation rally points. And so, you know, you pair up and then you go, you're off, you know, moving through the mountains. And so we're moving for, like, 12 hours or whatever. You know, going through our navigation points. And we, the rally point that they have everyone end up at is in this kind of flat area with mountains all around.

And they've got like a like a little tent stood up. And, you know, we kind of clear the tree line at like fucking nine, nine in the evening. And we show up to the rally point tent. And they've got like, you know, hot brown. Roth for you and all that shit. And they're like, all right, get your sleeping bags set up underneath here. And it's like an open tent, right?

It's not like, you know, some comfortable situation. Literally just a canvas on some sticks. So we set up our sleeping bags. It starts snowing. So I'm sitting there eating my fucking peach MRE fucking thing. And something just clicked

in my mind, dude. I'm sitting there and I walk out of the tent. I'm eating my fucking MREs and the snow is falling silently and I can kind of like see in the moonlight the mountains around me and everything is just peaceful and still and quiet and something just clicked in my brain I was like this is an amazing moment for me and like the sense of peaceful stillness I had in that moment I continue to chase to this day sometimes like when I go on mountaineering trips and you know you're on the top of a summit and you know it's after

all the difficult parts of the climb are over and you're sitting there and you're like you're just wishing for that moment to come back right you're chasing it but it never does you know you almost get there sometimes and it's just it's an elusive moving target so to this day you know that that feeling i continue to chase but um that that was that was cool it was a special moment for me i finally my soul finally felt like some semblance of peace after all the the shit that I had endured with my dad and all the moving around and all the family drama and all of it. And then the second thing that happened was when they put you in the box,

you know, you're in the box for a few days. You know this very well. I don't. I never did, sir. Oh, no shit? So, you know, I want to make sure I stay clear. clean when I talk about some of the stuff. When you wrap up the field phase,

you know, they're kind of assholes and they trick you. Like, we're going to have some hot pizza waiting for you at this fucking rally point. And, well, suffice to say there's no goddamn pizza at the rally point. And you better buckle in for several more days of bullshit.

And then you get put in the box. And one interesting thing that happened in the box is you know, they're allowed to, that's one of the few schools in the military that, you know, can get physical with you in ways that other schools can't, right?

So one thing that was happening in the box was, I was starting to have these trauma responses to the physicality of it, you know, because I wasn't able to do anything. You're helpless and, you know, they're kind of doing their thing. And they had to call pause in the middle of, like, one of the sessions.

and they had they were like you know they do it in their own little way where like you're by that point you're delirious you're like am i still like in the military and like in a training program or like did i get teleported to some fucking like alternate timeline where like i'm actually you know in this situation so they called pause they brought the psych in the psych was like yo what's going on dude i was like what do you mean and he was like, we're seeing trauma response from you. And he described, you know, what they're seeing. Look for visual cues.

Like my fists were bawling up. And like I was, you know, I was like shifting position. I had all the physical cues that, you know, I was, I was going to get physical back to them. And usually based on their experience, it's because of some preexisting trauma in the student. So he was like, what's going on? Tell me about your childhood abuse. Did you experience any of that? I was like, yep, lots of physical abuse.

Here's how it went down. He was like, all right. Here's what we saw. And, you know, if you don't want to continue on with this training, you tell me and we'll pull you out. I was like, there's no fucking way I'm leaving this training. And he's like, okay, well, then I need you to do some mental exercises to, like, work yourself out here. Because we're not going to change how we're doing shit here for you. So he, like, gave me some exercises to do.

You know, and from his perspective, it's not any anything he hadn't seen before, right? Like, plenty of people probably come through there with physical trauma and, like, childhood abuse shit. So then, you know, we're in the box and doing all that shit for, you know, as long as they have you do it. And the defining moment, I think, for me, like, the moment that made me feel like I had really, really become, like I had really been initiated into something that was greater than myself was the very end of Sear. I'm not going to ruin it for anybody, but there's a moment at the end where they put you through this ritual. And when they do it, it's a phenomenal moment for for people. And, um, and for me, this Indian kid who had always looked up to the U.S.

military and like always wanted to be a part of it, when that moment happened for me, without ruining exactly what it is, I would, I would have died for the fucking stars and stripes at at that moment in time. I felt like I had been initiated into this brotherhood that was much greater than myself and I felt like I was part of the machine you know it sounds bad it's like oh you're part of a fucking machine like no I get it I know I get it um but that that that's the moment I felt like I'd finally transcended like anybody who's been through a tough program like that fucking gets it yeah um yeah I'm sure securing whole week was like very similar experience for you um but that's when I felt like I'd

finally transcended all this childhood fucking baggage that I had you know just been trailing with me over the years um you felt a sense of pride for the first time yeah yeah I felt like I had some

it was all you it was all me I had finally like managed to have agency over my own destiny and the way that my life was shaping up to be that in that particular moment I mean, if you want to break, dude. You want to take a break?

No, I'm good to go. Where do we go from here? So. So you get done with Sear. Yeah, get done with Sear. You haven't even learned your job yet. Yeah. So to be sent to Sear before everything else was abnormal at the time.

There was only like a few of us that, like, the schedules lined up for. So the few of us who did go to Sear graduated, we go to Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. And I was just, I was smitten, dude. Like we land in Monterey, the fucking oceans right there. You know, you see DLI up on the hill. And I had only read about this place in Tom Clancy novels, you know, when I was a kid.

I was like, I cannot believe I'm here. I get to sit here and fucking learn Arabic. And maybe if I learn it good enough, I can take the fucking fight. back to the dudes who, you know, did that thing to us that day in September of 2001. And so we show up to the Air Force Training Squadron at DLI, and we feel like fucking Billy badasses, right? Because we had just graduated Sierra Level C. We just, you know, we're in civilian clothes because the Sierra instructors were like, where are you going? Defense language? I don't

fucking know what that is. Just flying civilian clothes. Like, whatever. Get out of here. Um, so we show up, we stand outside the squadron and we're trying to figure out like what to do. And we're, we're in our civilian clothes. We have all our like shit, all of our sea bags, all that shit. And then one of the training sergeants from inside the building, like looks out the window and you can see him double take. And he's like, what the fuck is this fucking cast of characters in civilian clothes doing here? And you see him like pop out, come outside. and he walks out to us and he's like,

what are you doing here? What are you doing? And I was, you know, I felt like fucking Billy Bad. I was like, we just graduated survival school. He's like, I don't give a fuck what you just graduated. He's like, when you report into this squadron, you report in in the fucking uniform of the day. And you go to the fucking, you go to the senior sergeant's office.

and you report in like you're supposed to. You got fucking 10 minutes to get your shit out of your bags, go change into proper uniforms, and be standing at attention outside the day room inside the squatter. And I was like, oh, God, okay, welcome back to the real fucking Air Force, I guess. So we go change into our uniforms, we go report in. And then we essentially get put into purgatory, waiting for our language class to start.

And, you know, as, as in everything else in the military, it's just like busy work to, you know, basically tied people over until their training program starts. So I got put on this, you know, post-grounds duty, which is essentially like, you know, you're cleaning up the fucking base and shit. And the crew that I was working with, you know, you go around the base, you're like, you know, picking up rocks. You're like raking leaves, all of this. It's a very humbling thing to do after you felt like, you know, you had just graduated from a very serious training program. at survival school. And one of the dudes, actually, I met him many years later, downrange. And the situation in which I met him, he had joined like an interagency partner at the time,

and I was still active duty. And so we're like, yo, what are you doing here? And we weren't in a situation to say much more to each other because of the circumstances. But he, he was a He had worked the wheelbarrow at DLI on as part of the post grounds crew. And I had been working like the rakes and shit. So we see each other downrange in this fucking shitty situation. And I'm like, wheelbarrow? He's like, rake. I'm like, yeah, what's up, man?

Good to see it. What the fuck are you doing out here? So then we start, you know, 18 months of Arabic class, which was interesting because, you know, they teach you the length. language from the ground up. And we had a cast of characters in those classes. Like, we had dudes that grew up in like inner city, you know, Shreveport, Louisiana, like, you know, that were in gangs in L.A. You know, just a fucking cast of characters, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and we were just all in the same class together. So from very early days, I got exposed to the other services. And I really liked being around the other services. Like, it was just to see their culture and how they did things.

I just, I liked it a lot. Like, you know, I'd talk to Marines about, you know, how they would run their training squadrons. I would talk to the Army guys and just, like, learn about different cultures. It felt like I was immersed in, like, you know, some international culture festival or whatever. And I was just learning about all the different ways that these people did their stuff. And there was one dude in the class. His name was, I'm going to say his name, John Coonsie, because he had such an impact on me. And he was, he came from Ranger Regiment.

like first or third Ranger Battalion, and he was passing through DLI on his way to being a SADA. So SADA is Special Operations Team Alpha, and it's basically the signals intelligence detachment of a special forces ODA, essentially. So they were going to teach him Arabic, you know, take him out of Ranger Regiment, and he was going to go to a special force group. And like to me, as a young, impressionable like airman first class. That dude was like the pinnacle of, you know, what a professional military dude should be. His fucking uniform was always squared away. He was always in the gym working out. He always treated everybody with respect. But you could tell there was this like edge and hardness about him that, you know, he always carried with him. He wasn't going to

let people fuck with him. And to me, it was like a very clear differentiator between, all right, This is the type of dude that is 100% focused on the mission and his people. But it very easily could have gone the other way where, and he was our class leader. And it very easily could have gone the other way where it could have been a dude that was all about his own career and checking the fucking, you know, performance report bullets and all that shit. So I'm fortunate I had John to kind of be a person that I could look up to and emulate at the time. Like, you know, I didn't know shit at the time. So like a dude coming from Ranger Regiment was like, you know, I looked up to him like he was, he was, you know, God. And right around class starting is when my dad passed away.

And so we had started, you know, our, we'd started class. We, I'd come back to the dorm. And by this point, I had started trading some emails. with my dad. I sent him some email as I was like, you know, you're probably wondering where I'm at

and what I'm up to. Here's what happened. Join the Air Force. I just got done with Survivor School. They were putting me through this, you know, language school. I'm going to go be,

I'm going to go be an aviator, essentially, enlisted aviator. He was like, that's amazing. He never, I think he stopped short. of like saying I'm proud of you because I think he wanted to say that to my face. If I could look back

and like give him the benefit of the doubt, I think he wanted to say that to my face. And he said, you know, it would be great to have you over Easter break. So like, you know, I'll get you a plane ticket. Why don't you come out? He was living in Massachusetts by then. Why don't you come out? I'll fly you out. It'd be great to see it. I was like, it would be great to see you too. And two weeks before I was supposed to fly out to see him, I got a call from a detective from the local PD saying he had passed away of myocardial infarction heart attack. You know, he'd been fighting hard to see his whole life, alcoholism, cigarettes, you know, all of it. And he had and reported in to some critical work meeting. And so they sent the cops to his house.

and he had been dead four days by the time they found him. So I remember getting that phone call, and it was like, you know, that was a traumatizing moment for me. I was just in shock. I was like, what the fuck? Like, I was just supposed to go see him. His last email, I pulled up his last email. I was like, be great to see you.

And it was like tax time. He was like, make sure you do your taxes. So then I walked back to class because I got that phone call during lunch break. I walked back to class and I'm just like shell shocked and I don't know what to do. So I go to, I walk in and John, John Coons is your class leader and Ranger guy, he's like, dude, what the fuck is going on? I was like, I just got a phone call. My dad just passed away. And he was like, he drops everything.

He like gets up. He's like, follow me. he walks me back to the air force training squadron across the street and you know john's he's a big fucking dude right big just fucking good old boy ranger and i i remember him barreling through the fucking air force training squadron hallway just like basically like shoving people out of the way like trying to get me to the uh the senior dude and he walks me into the senior dude's office like the training sergeant or whatever. And he was like, Airman Cedar Roman's father just passed away.

What do we need to do to get him home? And, man, it was a small thing. But like, to me, for him to do that, like, it was the most, like, leadership thing I had seen in my life to that point, right? It was, like, to take the time to walk me across the street and figure out. who the fuck the responsible individual was to coordinate the flight logistics back home and all that shit. It meant a lot to me. And so we figured out all that shit. And I flew home. I, you know,

helped cremate my dad. And then we just carried on, you know, went through language school for the next 18 months. And then finally got to my first duty station where, you know, we had talked about it earlier in this room where I was a crew member on RC-135 rivet joints, essentially. So the RC-135 is essentially a Cold War era signals intelligence platform. And it kind of looks like, on the inside, it looks like a fucking submarine, right? You got like display panels. Every, you got like, you got display panels in front of you you got display panels on top of you just all kinds of shit going on

inside that aircraft and it's got like 30 people as a crew inside that thing somewhere in there you know I you go through a thing where like you get your aviator wings and um you know that to me was

hold on let's back up for a minute yeah but you just breeze over your dad's death yeah I mean, you haven't seen him since. You hadn't seen him in how long? You hadn't seen him in a couple, at least a year. Yeah, I didn't see him, seen him in a year since he dropped me off at school that day.

Yeah. And we had only traded like two emails back and forth. That's it. That's it. And, you know, one thing that kills me is I try and keep this lesson in mind to this day. I had written a handwritten letter to him. And I forget what I put in there, but it was like a two, three page long letter.

And I had enclosed a picture of myself in dress blues. And I was, you know, I had put it in the mail. I had mailed it out to him. This is like a month before he passed away. and then it got fucking sent back because I got like the postage wrong or some shit by like eight cents or whatever like some stupid amount so the postal service sent it back and I get it I'm like oh fuck you know I got other shit going on you know I get training and class and all that shit so I'm like I'll deal with this later never dealt with it and I never got the fucking

letter to him. So that killed me to for a long time. It kills me to this day. You know, who knows? Maybe if he got that fucking letter, like he would have realized, you know, I was good. I was in a good place. I was on a good trajectory. And, you know, maybe that, maybe taking away that little stress from him about, like, what my situation was, wouldn't have sent him over the edge. I don't know. It sounds like he knew. He already knew. Yeah. I would like to think so.

I mean, you said you thought he was waiting to tell you he was proud of you to do it in person. Yeah. Yeah, I would like to think so. I wish I'd gotten that fucking lighter out, though. You know? So now, you know, when I have shit to do it, like, sometimes I get this feeling like, you know, you need to send I need to send my mom like a text or something. I need to send my grandma like a picture of my kid.

And like I don't wait to do it. I just drop what I'm doing and I try and do it like right there because I don't want that kind of shit to happen again. Do you still have the letter? No, I don't have a letter. I don't know what happened to it. It just got lost in the sauce over the years. But that, you know, my dad's death, I,

it's a trauma I'm still working through today. You know, we talked about Tom Saturday being on the show, and I was watching that episode. I was telling you this earlier, listening to Tom talk about, you know, Mogadishu, you know, that dude was Troopsar Major at the unit. And he's been through, ever since October 3rd, 1993, he's probably been through missions that were 10 times more complicated where all kinds of other shit had gone down. But that one mission seemed to have embedded

some kind of subconscious trauma that just unfurled over time. That's where he lives for him. That's where he lives. And I don't know what it is about the human psyche, but when you drop a trauma grenade like that and you let it slow burn, I guess that's how it works.

It just sits somewhere in there. and it just slow burns over time, over many, many, many years. And so you can sit there and you can say, I'm good, you know, I've dealt with this. I'm good. Let's move the fuck on. You really don't move the fuck on.

Many years later, what would you say to your dad right now? I think I would say I think I proved you wrong. I think all that shit that you used to say about, you know, how I would end up being a fuck up somewhere just didn't pan out. Like, I've had a pretty good run. And I've got two sons and a stepdaughter that I've got two sons and a stepdaughter that I I had picked up along the way. And they're pretty amazing.

I think I would also say, I wish you had gone about things differently. I wish you had found a different way to fight your demons. You know, over the years, I've started to build some empathy for them. And you're just dealing with all the shit that we were talking about earlier, loss of identity,

figuring out how to build a connection with his son that he hadn't seen in a while. And, you know, he only has a certain set of tools that he has from his upbringing and all that shit to deal with those problems. And when you run out of those tools and they aren't working, where you just, you lash out. You know, you go to the bottle, you go to cigarettes, you let the anger get a hold of you. And that's what he did. And those are the two things, I would say. You guys know the performance in work and in life starts with sleep.

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Man, I just want to ask. Yeah. I mean, I'm really hesitant to do this because I don't, I don't like interjecting my own shit, but there's a, there's a handful of parallels that that we have, you know, grown up. I didn't grow up in extreme poverty and it wasn't nearly as abusive as what it sounds like yours was, but I got the belt, I got the fist, I got the hand, got the foot, fucking got it all. And I also got the, you're a piece of shit. I'm not paying for your school. I'm not doing this.

I'm not doing that. And my brother and sister were always, you know, younger brother and sister were always, they were good. And, you know, but at the end, I think that fucking motivated me. Well, I don't think it motivated me. I know it fucking motivated me. and so you know

do you think maybe some of that stuff that your dad dished out to you may have been a gift in the long run dude it lit a fucking fire

inside me that burns to this day yeah me too double-edged sword yeah man because who's to say how it would have turned out if you know

I had a perfect home life and childhood and all that shit were you you know Could have been a gangbanger in Southern California. Yeah.

It's fucking wild thinking about that shit, isn't it? Yeah. He didn't have the drive to make your dad proud of to prove him wrong. I know. You probably wouldn't be sitting here. Dude, and there's so many guys that have similar stories. You know, like I was watching, you know, Jay, S-A-S-S-gui. Yeah.

You know, he talks about the moment on the beach with his dad where he's like, you're never going to be a fucking row marine you know and that that fucking lit the fuse you know probably similar moment for you something lit the fuse and for me it was i don't know if it was any particular moment but it was definitely his death was like i didn't get to show him in life what i could do so i'm gonna fucking show him in death and maybe he will be a there looking down and see. I was climbing Mount Rainier many years ago with some buddies and we were going up a particularly steep route and I was pretty gassed by the time we got you know high up and we were near the summit and but we still had like 45 minutes or so to go and just like

fucking trudging through the through the glacier gas and, you know, because I was in a CrossFit at the time. Like, my endurance work wasn't great. And I was like, I don't know if I can fucking do this, man. And so I was, you know, I was probably a couple minutes away from calling out to the rest of the guys on the rope team and being like, I can't breathe. Like, we might need to fucking go down. And I remember feeling that. And then I remember feeling told myself not to do this.

It's all good, Ben. I remember feeling my dad's arm on my back. Holy shit. Going like this across my mountaineering pack and helping me up the fucking last 45 minutes up, out right here. That's when I knew, like, yeah, he is fucking up there. and he's watching everything I do. So, you know, I try and live up to the, I guess, burden of being, not being what he wanted me to be,

but like, I just want to be a good person, you know, someone, someone that's worthy of him being proud of. Certainly, I haven't fucking gotten it right all the time. but I try yeah that's fucking awesome yeah that was that was the first time I remember thinking oh shit like there's something else there's something else and

they can reach out and touch us if they want and you could say this goes back to our previous conversation you could say oh it's just some fucking neurons in your brain like that you know simulated that that gave you that gave you the feeling that you wanted. You wanted to feel your dad helping you up the top of Mount Rainier.

Maybe. I don't think that's true, though. I don't either. I've had way too many things like that happen to me to think that that's just some bullshit simulation or fucking whatever. No way, man. No fucking way.

There was, um, buddy of mine pass away a few years. years ago and he was the type of dude that you talked to the guy and you just you felt like you've known him for years he's that kind of guy had that kind of warmth about him his name was ethan swiler and um i saw him after i had left the military at a beach party at uh fort wallton beach like right outside herrubler field and um we were at a buddy's retirement and he hadn't seen me in a while right i'd been a civilian at this point i was a palanterer

um yeah i was jet setting around fucking living the tech bro life you know so i had some i wasn't as scruffy as i looked today basically and um i had some like nice clothes on and shit i had like some nice sunglasses on and he looks at me he's like well look at you fucking mr hollywood and uh then we just you know we bullshitted and and hung out and a couple years after that I get the call hey Ethan Ethan pass away I go to his funeral in Salt Lake City we put him in the ground in his beautiful cemetery at the base of the Wasatch Mountains outside of Salt Lake City and and I drive back to to California and I'm driving through Lake Tahoe and I stop at a bar and

And there's no one in this bar. It's a fucking like Tuesday night or some shit. There's no cars outside. It's a fucking desolate bar in South Lake Tahoe. No one's there. I walk in. There's one bartender on the other side of the bar. And he's leaning over and he's like cleaning glasses.

Zero other people in the bar. Just me, bartender. I walk in. he's cleaning his glasses and then he stops and he looks up and he looks up he goes, hello

Mr. Hollywood, and he looks back down. Keeps cleaning his glasses. Holy shit. And then he looks up at me who had just walked in the door and then he goes, hey, can I help you? And I'm like, what the fuck just happened here?

It was like it was like someone took control of that dude's body for like five seconds, sent a message, and then let go. So, yeah, wild shit. I had a guy read my fucking mind. How did that go down? I was in Sedona going through like a relief. When you listen to the show, at least somewhat, we talked about some of the topics that we cover you know breakfast and it gets to me so especially like the shit with kids and and uh long story short but uh i was just in a really fucking bad place like a really bad place

and um i was telling you about my best friend gabe up there at the the rounds from redwings you know and I can give you example after example after example of it but anyways basically I I just done this big episode and it was with Ron Montgomery and told you about it

and I felt like we were like the only ones that gave a fuck and there was a lot of other stuff going on with like gender identity and kids and like a lot of shit at that time. And, uh, one on this hike.

And I felt, I just felt like, why do you give a fuck? Why do you care? Like, nobody else seems to give a shit. Why do you fucking give a fuck? And,

uh, it felt like I was like surrendering my soul to Satan evil. Like, like convincing myself. Like, just let it go, Sean, like,

gives a shit. Eight year olds are getting their genitals cut off. So, the world is everybody else is for this shit why aren't you and um and i but it was like this internal battle in my head i walked through this fucking gate and this gate guard like looks at me in the eyes and fucking tells me everything i'm thinking like from front to back scared these shit out of me And then that triggered a whole sequence of other events. And there were so many.

It wasn't, and my wife saw it hell happen. And so I always kind of considered it like an angel, like talk to me. Like, I know what's going on in your head. I'm going to tell you what's going on in your head. And I'm going to tell you that you don't need to worry about that shit. That's not your fucking problem, which is what he said after he'd, And another really good friend of mine and died, who was a seal. He lived here in Franklin.

He was like my only, like, real friend here at the time. And we had gotten close fast because he had a very successful business. I have a successful business. He doesn't need shit for me. I don't need shit. You know what I was talking about. You know, no, hey, could you? Any of that.

Hey, he hadn't talked to you in 25 fucking years. but hey, how you doing? It's like a mutual non-neediness. Yeah, yeah, just legitimate friends, you know, and his, so me and my wife go back to this room, we're having this chat, and I'm like, I think that was God talking to me, what the fuck is going on? There was this guy that looked identical to Gabe at the resort, small, exclusive resort. Like, guy was everywhere I was at, if I was in town,

He was in town. He was in town. Oh, everywhere. Turns out, this is the last night. He winds up, he's staying in the... We're in this bungalows. It's like a duplex. He was on the other side the whole fucking time. So I walk back from getting my mind read by the gate guard.

I find out this dude that looks identical to Gabe who's been around all fucking week. Everywhere. Same restaurants. Same hikes, pool, everything. It winds up being the guy that's right across. the way, go into my bungalow talking to Katie and my wife about this shit.

Phone dings. I'm like having a breakdown because I'm like, this is fucking crazy. Like, what the fuck? Somebody just read my brain. What's happening? We get done with the conversation. I clean myself up. I look at the phone

and it was his daughter who I'd never met. Who must have gone through his phone and got her. got my number and said that she had just walked into her dad's gun room and basically that he had spoke to her and told her to reach out to me because I was his new best friend and I knew a side of him that nobody else knew and he wanted her to talk to me because all that shit happened in like five minutes. Yeah.

Wild. For people who think that this reality that we can have, it is completely material and all this shit that we're talking about is just a byproduct of random neurons firing in our head it's a pretty sad way to look at look at the world i mean i don't know how you explain like what you just said the gate guard reading your mind dude that did i could go with so much more detail that makes it more real yeah but i mean and there's just so many fucking things that have happened i can't even remember them all used to want to write them all down to like remind myself like yeah Sean there's something more after this yeah

you know and uh but there's there's just so many i don't need to prove it to myself yeah yeah yeah you know same i i went through that inflection point too you know like something would happen and then i'd be like well i just need i need one more piece of of evidence that that shit is real and then at a certain point the shit started happening so often that you're like okay I surrender. Yeah. You just got to be open to it. Yeah.

Just be paying attention. Yeah. Paying attention to everything but the, you know what I mean? But your fucking business or your problems or you just have to be open. Yeah. And it happens all the time. All the time. You know, we talked about psychedelics at breakfast too.

I mean, have you had any, if you found any answers? You know, I think, I think there's a lot about the universe that, we don't know. I've had buddies that have done psychedelics, and every single time the report back from the field

is that those things took a randomized series of puzzle pieces in their minds and then snapped them into place and just phase-locked them,

into a good path and a good trajectory. Of course, you know, we are mechanically inclined to hear about those things and immediately dismiss them. It's like, God, it's like crack pottery. It's like, you know, it's got a stigma associated with it. I think the stigma is decreasing over time because of all the research that they're doing with PTSD and veterans. And I think they're doing it with team guys, right? Yeah, TBIs too. Yeah.

to you guys. Or an industry. Yeah. And they've done it, they've done it with like terminal cancer patients. And I mean, the statistics are off the charts. It's like a near instantaneous like lack of fear of death, you know, because they know something is on the other side. It's always unclear what, you know, I think whatever it is, whatever. It doesn't want to be fully seen or described or whatever.

It's meant to be shrouded in some kind of mystery. And it manifests itself to all of us in individual ways. You with a gate guard that was reading your mind. Me with Ethan taking control of some fucking random bartender and calling me a nickname that nobody fucking else would have known. like you look at me on the furthest from a fucking mr hollywood that you could ever get right but like that shit happened um yeah i think there's a lot going on that we don't we don't know about but you have to stay curious i think what do you think it is what do you believe happens when

you die um i i think what happens is is i don't know is the bottom line. But what I think is going on is our reality might exist as a series of fractals and layers within that fractal structure. And so let's take a very simple example, right? I can spin up a bunch of AIs and have them be communicating on a website. but that is a condescension of what it is like to be a human. It's not a fully human experience, but it's one that is sort of like it.

The ancient hermetic thinkers had a saying, as above, so below. And what it meant was this fractal structure that we're talking about. So perhaps at higher layers of reality, those layers exist and we have experiences in them in ways that are we can't quite we don't have a language for but we can intuit in some way you know and those layers leak down to us through these experiences and synchronicities and it's called them for what they are miracles that that happened to us in daily life but it's difficult for us to have to have an understanding, because we always want to do the scientific human thing of like,

all right, well, how is that structured? Like, what does that look like? What's going on up there? You know, we don't know. I don't know. I was reading a book one time, and it made the analogy of humans going through existence is sort of like existence on this plane of reality that we, that we inhabit

is sort of like imagine cubes floating in space and they're transiting through a thin layer of film and that thin layer is two-dimensional, right? So you've got these three-dimensional things transiting through a two-dimensional environment

and as they're transitioning through they don't realize that they're cubes right they don't even realize that they're squares in this as they're transiting through this uh lower dimensional plane let's say so as they're transiting they're all fucked up right like maybe they're they have like a point that's like their rotations all off like so you're saying planes yeah planes of possibly maybe realities yeah and And one of them. The cube is rising.

The cube is rising. Through each plane. Yeah. But as it's in the plane, it doesn't really understand its true structure, right? It doesn't understand its true self. All it knows, all it's aware of is the shape that it makes as it transits through that plane. So if you have a cube that's all fucked up in orientation as it's transiting through that two-dimensional plane, it looks like, it looks jacked up, right? it's like maybe a corner sticking it.

Maybe it's like a point or maybe it looks like some weird tetragram. I don't fucking know, right? But if you square up with the plane, then you can get close to the shape that you truly are, which is a square that represents you to the cube's true form, right? The square is like the closest that you can get, right, as you're transiting through that surface. Hang with me here.

Now, maybe all these other cubes up here that already made it are like looking down. And they're like, wow, those guys are all jacked up. So let's try and help them out a little bit, you know. And maybe it's the case that one of those fucking cubes that already made it to a very high layer is looking down feels really bad for us. And it's trying to get us to fucking understand the geometry of all this shit, right? And so that cube comes down, intersects with this lower dimensional plane, and begins unfurling itself into its lower dimensional form, which is six cubes in or six squares in the shape of a cross. it had to descend, break itself open, and show its true form to everybody else in order to get them understanding what some of this reality is about.

And it's basically, I think, a hint that if we can get our shit together and figure out how to emulate that fucking guy, then maybe we can refold ourselves and, you know, measureously ascend, ascend into the layers that we're, that we're supposed to be in. Why do you say a cross? Are you Christian? Or is that something else? I believe in, I believe in Jesus Christ. I think the resurrection was a physical event. I think I think it was trying to point at some very deep layers of reality and show us something. And what it was trying to show us is what I just alluded to with this analogy here.

I mean, the fact that a cube has to break itself into a cross in order to tell all the other fucking cubes to get your fucking shit together because y'all are not squares transiting through this plane of existence. You all are made of something more. There's something more to you. but unless you're able to align yourself properly square up with reality, then you're never going to get to, you know, the layers up here. So, you know, it's easy to say, oh, it's just a coincidence.

What are you talking about, dude? Like, you're just talking about crazy shit. I'm tracking. But there's a synchronicity there, right? It's like, why does that analogy work? why when you extrapolate it to Christianity it kind of makes sense what was he trying to show he was trying to show that we are more than these

meat sacks that we're in right now right he's trying to show that if we're able to orient our minds and souls and bodies and get them working together for the good of the people around us then we're approaching a foreign form of ourselves that we don't quite understand but that we know is more than what we are today i think it might be a collective one i'm also a believer yeah i mean and i i fucking hate how people like oh you know you bring it up and people like yeah whatever dude see that piece of art up there yeah that's how many times the bible cross-referfer as itself. It's almost 63,000 times.

Yeah, I remember seeing that and a lecture that Jordan Peterson put on. Yeah. But, I mean, I don't know. I don't, I want to believe that when we go to heaven, we're all slapping each other's asses and having a good time and just fucking doing whatever the hell we want. Yeah. You know what I mean? But I don't think it's going to be like that. I don't think so either. I think that, I think this is a test. I think we, and this is, I get this, this is just Sean's internal thinking thoughts. Yeah. I think about this kind of stuff all the time.

But, you know, I think that the ego is the test. The ego is what gives you yourself. It's what individualizes you. It's what protects you. It's who you, you know what I mean? It's who you are, right? And, I mean, when the ego goes away and you have a true ego death, it feels like you turn into a collective.

Yeah. You know, a collective, maybe a collective consciousness. Maybe it's love. Maybe it's, you know, something like that. But the droplet realizes it's part of an ocean. Yeah. That's kind of what I'm getting at. And, you know, is scary as that sounds to lose your sense of self and turn into some

type of a collective, I think that's the true test. I think the only thing there is is there is a sense of self. good and there is evil and you're on one of those sides whether you want to be or not. Yeah. And you either go into the collective of good or the collective of evil. And when I think of good and evil in the world, I think of it as like a marble that has oil and water in it. Yeah. And you know, an oil and water never mix. They just, you know, they just, they just, or like the, if you looked at the earth for you know the time lapse of millions of years you'd see the oceans changing with land all the time but they never really mix you know what i mean and it's just one overtaking the

other for eternity yep that's kind of what i it's kind of what i think i think i think i think you're close to the truth then i think um i think infinity only has two cardinal directions good and evil for whatever reason that seems to be the way it's structured. Anything you can do as a human can be distilled down to, are you trending that way or that way? That's it. So I don't know. I don't have all the answers, certainly,

but I also don't think that we live in a purely materialistic reality. And I also don't think that even though I believe in the resurrection and Christ, I don't believe that that is also the whole story. There seems to be more to the story. And I think about that a lot. What do you mean? What do you think? What more?

I'm just curious what your thoughts are. Yeah. I think if you tie together the themes from across different, religious or mystical traditions over many thousands of years, I told people I wasn't going to go here when I came on this podcast. If you also tie together abductee reports from UAP encounters and all that shit, paranormal encounters and so on, at some level, they all form a remarkably coherent narrative, which is we seem to all come from some kind of of super consciousness that we all eventually return to.

The things that happened to us down here seem to be engineered in order to teach us something. And what I think it's, so it's, I guess there's more of a story than mailing it in by going to Mass every Sunday. Like, I think it's a lot, I think, I think what he was actually trying to say, Christ, is you need to be paying attention to yourself and how you deal with

things every microsecond of every day of your life. And it is that kind of sustained attention that is going to allow you to be productive or to assist in life, consciousness, going the other way. towards the light rather than towards the dark. I think so I mean, there's a technical word for this. It's like neg entropy, right? It's like the universe defaults towards entropy. It might default towards evil.

And it is only when enough people learn to figure their shit out that they can turn into a collective negentropic forcing function to steer whatever our local, collective consciousness is on this planet to somewhere good. This is what I'm talking about with the marble. Yeah. I think. I think we're on the same page.

I mean, you know, if you look at, you know, Christ's teachings, it's all about love, acceptance, things like that, which form a better collective, you know, of society. And so if you, if you, if you pump good into the. the world, that's going to create good. Yeah. And that's going to create more surface area of good in the marble, which will begin to overtake the evil. And if you pump in bad, evil, lies, shit like that, then the dark side, you know, multiplies. Yep.

More spots start to pop up. And it becomes, it can start to overtake good. I agree. I think that's how it works. And I think, I think it's actually. additive, right? It's all dependent on, you know, Jordan Peterson says, you know, don't, don't change the world before you can clean your fucking room, right? And the reason he says that is because individual actions at scale produce change at scale. A lot of people try and

skip to the last part and just produce change at scale. It doesn't really work. That's how you get authoritarian governments. It's how you get, you know, all the bad shit. It's how you get forms of control. But if enough of us, indivorough, individually are able to get our shit together, I think something magical could happen. I don't know what that is, but I think the Bible is trying to hint at the fact that that's what we're fucking here to do. You know what reaction wheels are on a spaceship? No.

They're basically a mechanical way of producing movement along some axis without using thrusters. And so you can spin this reaction wheel internally inside like a little, let's say a cube sat or whatever. And you can turn the satellite to orient it to whatever. Like maybe you need to turn it so that it's solar panels can see the sun or whatever. But the point is you don't have to use thrusters. And so sometimes you might have multiple reaction wheels, right? You might have three. And so that's getting the ship oriented and having like it's a mechanism to move the damn thing.

along some orientation. It might just be the case that whatever it is we're doing down here is we're learning how to spin our own soul's reaction wheels along the proper orientations so that we're all pointed the right fucking way. And when one of us can do that, that's great. When many of us can do that, who the fuck knows what can happen? Well, this is a conversation I wasn't planning on having. I don't know how we got here.

We got here talking about your dad. Yeah. Yeah. Talking about my dad. Yeah, it was a big loss. I'm sure we'll, you know, I'm sure it'll come back in other aspects of this conversation. But one of the things that I tried to do, to try and move on from that loss is just to be the fucking best that I could be at whatever

it was the fuck I was doing. if I was going to sit in a goddamn tin can in the sky and fly racetrack patterns over Afghanistan, I was going to fucking do that to the best of my ability. And that's what I ended up doing the first few years out of language school. So being an enlisted aviator in the Air Force is, there's actually a very small percentage of people

that are in a single person. Yeah, no. shit. Yeah. Like the vast majority of people in the Air Force are, they don't fly, they don't, they don't do it. And generally, you know, a lot of people think about officers and pilots as the guys that are the aviators. So there's, there's like a special kind of class hierarchy in the Air Force. And, you know, at the very top are your fucking special warfare dudes, PJ, CCT.

rightfully so right below that are your aviators enlisted officers and so on so for me to get my fucking enlisted aviator wings man i remember going to like the fucking asian sewing store outside the base and getting them to sew those fucking wings on for the first time i was magical like putting putting those bdus on with the wings on for the first time it was uh it was a good feeling and you know you get your flight suit and all that's and you just feel like fucking maverick you know You only see people wearing that shit in the movies. Now you're wearing one. It's pretty awesome.

First order business was, what do you fly in? So it's called an RC-135 rivet joint. And it's a 30-person, 30-crew aircraft, and it's full of cryptological linguists on it. And it's basically a mini-NSA flying in the sky. Holy shit. It's been around since the Cold War. So the cryptologic linguist community, career field, discipline has been around for a very long time since World War II.

So in World War II, they had all these cryptologists trying to break the enigma and break the Japanese Jan 25 cipher, which is like the cipher that the Japanese were using to coordinate the Pearl Harbor assault. Eventually, they did crack that, but they cracked it too late, if I recall my history correctly. So there's a long kind of lineage of signals intelligence and airborne signals intelligence more specifically for the Air Force. So during the Cold War, you would have RC-135s flying around and basically evaluating, you know, what the Russians were doing, like offset from Russian airspace or offset from Chinese airspace or whatever. In 2000, there was an EP3 plane that went down as a Navy EP3, and that was a very similarly

configured plane as to the RC-135. And so it was full of, you know, cryptologic linguists from the Navy in this case, and they had to emergency set down on Hainan Island, I think. And, you know, there's a bunch of fucking top secret shit on there. It's like all the signals intelligence gear. We're going to set down on a Chinese airstrip. So he started going to town, just breaking all that shit in there. zeroing out the crypto and all that shit.

I don't think they were fully successful. And I think they used that as a case study in, you know, how to how to be when all that shit goes down. But that's the idea. You know, you're a flying signals intelligence platform, basically. This is 2005, and the Afghanistan war is in full swing. And our tasking was to essentially fly racetrack patterns

over Afghanistan at, you know, X many thousand feet. I don't know if I'm allowed to say the exact altitude. And basically hoover up every fucking thing that's putting out radio signals in or electromagnetic signals in any fucking way, shape, or form. And at the time, the Taliban and the foreign fighter contingent were still in their mountain redoubts, you know, Al-Qaeda, you had Pete Blaber on here talking about anaconda.

And a lot of anaconda was, and the re-reacta. reason they fucking sent dudes to the top of Roberts Ridge is because Al-Qaeda had these redouts, these mountain, you know, hard points in all the surrounding high areas. And they were communicating with each other over various forms of electronic devices, let's say. And our job was to understand when they were using them, how they were using them, and basically triangulate positions when we could, and call them down to ground teams. And this is really when I started to understand this concept of

how signals intelligence could support kinetic operations on the ground. It was a very tight loop. Oftentimes, if you're a linguist and you end up at, like, Fort Meade, or you end up at one of these other fucking places, you don't get to see the tight, like, fine, fix, finish loop that you necessarily see in some of these other platforms. And so, you know, these guys are using their fucking Icom radios or whatever,

and we're picking up on it. This is 2005. The military did not have very many posh-to linguists at the time. Basically, all the posh-to linguists they fucking had, at the time were, I think, pretty much on the ground with the dudes. Rightfully so. So the guys that were left were basically guys like me, Arabic linguists, that could hear maybe some words that were Arabic in nature.

Like maybe we can make out some call signs. But occasionally you would hear the occasional Arabic coming over the wire. And when you heard that, you knew it was a foreign fighter. and you knew it was possibly associated with senior leadership. And that was compelling because, you know, we're asking us to go smoke those fucking dudes. And so you're sitting there and you kind of develop this rhythm of working, you know, the gear.

And I'm going to stay as clean as I can talking through all this stuff. But, you know, imagine you're visualizing a spectrum analyzer and depending on what you're seeing on that spectrum analyzer, you know, that dictates, you know, how you conduct your triangulation and how you're calculating the coordinates of where these fucking guys are at, right? And at the same time, if there's audio coming through, because they're talking over unencrypted fucking Icom radios, right? It's not like these guys have coalition.

You're the fucking guy that can tell what room somebody's in in a hotel. Yeah, we'll get to the floor. What room? We'll get to that. Is he in the bathroom? We're at. Fucking, you're that motherfucker. Yeah, we'll get to that.

Holy shit. We'll get to that. I've never met one of you. Wow. All right, folks. We've got a new sponsor on the show. Beam. They make one of the best sleep products on the market.

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That's about $1 a night for the best sleep of your life. Try it today. But it all started with fucking flying racetracks, right? And like learning the craft. You're looking at the spec A. There's audio coming through. these guys haven't loaded crypto in their fucking radios, then you're trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.

And because you only have limited time on station, right? It's quite a bit of time, but still, it's finite time. What you do is you slave multiple frequencies into your ears at the same time. And so you develop this skill set of you got multiple freaks in this year, you got multiple freaks in that year, and you're fucking just transcribing all of it. You're keeping track of like multiple things going on across multiple different frequencies. It's a skill that's valuable to this day because I'll be sitting in a fucking restaurant

and I'm talking to my girlfriend. I'm hearing like we're having a conversation. I'm like listening to the fucking table two doors that way and I'm listening to the table, you know, two tables that way. But you're doing all this. But the end goal is always, get some fucking actionable coordinates down to the guys on the ground, right?

Because they're going to fucking do some shit. And we did. We did it over and over and over again day after day. But to me, it was never enough. I always wanted, like, the next thing. I remember sometimes flying at night over Afghanistan and, you know, there's like,

a couple of little windows in the back of this fucking bird. And I remember looking out the window one night. And there was some shit going down. There was like a tick down way below. And there were, you know, they had called in some air strikes. And so there were dudes doing like gun runs and shit. And I could see all the shit going down outside the window. But it's happening tens of thousands of feet below me, right?

And I'm like, fuck, I just feel fucking helpless up here, you know. But that's me. This is a character flaw that I have, right? Like, I have no business being in a room. I earn my place in the room. And then I very quickly want to get to the next fucking room. And it's no, you know, the RC-135 community are a great bunch of people. Like, they're very dedicated to their mission.

They have a very strategic national mission. There's a lot of stuff that they do that I'm not getting into here. that are a lot more kind of strategic in nature at the time for me. God. I was just going to say, I totally understand what you're saying. It's just it's high drive, very successful people. We all fucking think the same, I think. Yeah.

I mean, it's, you get in, you check the box. Great. What's next? Yeah, what's the next? Get there, check the box. Great. I'm bored. What's next?

Yeah. I'm not. challenged anymore. Yeah. And it's not, keeps fucking moving. Yeah. And it's not some like ego thing where it's like I need to, you know, be stroked, but I know that I can add more value and have more impact if I was doing something closer to the fight, right?

So put me in coach, get me closer to the fight. So Red Wings kicked off, like I said. So, you know, we all hear that there's a there's a missing team guy that op went wrong we didn't get the full picture um but it's like find this fucking dude's PRD and like monitor the guard frequencies see if anyone's talking about him you know we got we got a fucking fight there's massive like we're a lot of fucking assets that got put in the air and tasked to find Marcus were you there when it went down yeah I was I was I was um I was deployed when it went down and we...

Were you watching it? No, I wasn't watching it. No, I wasn't watching it. That bird in particular, at the time, I don't know whether they do now, did not have imagery capabilities. So somebody else was watching it, not me. What we did was we worked in crews of two.

So two 30-man crews. and we just swap back and forth. One bird would land, other one would take off, do a bunch of aerial refueles on the way into Afghanistan, and then get on station, parked on station forever, just doing race tracks, and we're just cycling through the frequencies, looking for any fucking indication that anyone knows

what the fuck happened to these dudes and what happened to Marcus in particular. And I don't think it was my crew. I think it was the other crew that I was with, with that had some say in what went down. I don't remember. But I remember being like, I wish I could contribute more to whatever the fuck is going on down there.

Oh, and one more fucking thing happened that deployment. And actually, it may have been the next deployment. There was a dude that came in one night to the top. and he was like I'm from you know this this task force and before I say anything else you guys are going to sign these fucking NDAs I'm like all right this cool I can get down with whatever's going on here so I signed the NDAs and he started briefing us up on this fucking thing that they're going to do and it was very similar to what went down in Venezuela

a few weeks ago. You know, not, we weren't targeting, they weren't targeting a fucking head of state or some shit, but it was a high value target, long infill. There was, you know, the threat of sophisticated, coordinated, enemy response. And so our job on that particular night was to provide essentially electronic Overwatch

for the guys. I was like, I don't know what the fuck is going on here. I don't know who his dude is, but I remember reading about the units that he's talking about, and I'm fucking stoked that I get to do a little part in supporting them. And, you know, I was all over the fucking frequencies that night. They went in, did their thing, went out. It was uneventful, but it just put the bug in my ear.

You know, I was like, whatever those guys are up to, like, I want it. So we get back and the military and the bureaucracy in the military has a way of hamstringing people that when they see a person that's like really performing well and they're highly motivated and so on, they do this fucking thing where they put you in the most boring job possible. I don't know why or how. but they put me at a desk job after I get home. I think I'd do like two pumps with this Afghanistan shit. And I'm like, I can't deal with this shit, dude. Like I'm sitting at a desk. I'm like seeing the reports come through.

You know, we got these crews out in Afghanistan. And we got crews elsewhere too, doing other shit, right? And they're sending in their reports. And these reports, they get distilled and sent up through the national intelligence reporting channels. and some of them make it all the way to the president, right, depending on what's going on. So it's like, you know, it's important work, but I don't like sitting behind a desk.

So I start walking the halls and like telling anyone who would listen, like, hey, man, like, is there anything else I can do? Like, what can I do? Like, what can I do besides sitting in this fucking computer behind this desk, ironic, given what I do for a living now? But at the time, I was just trying to get after it. And so rumors started floating around the squatter of a deployment to Iraq supporting task force. And I had no idea what it entailed. I was like,

I just need to, cool, let's, I want to go to Iraq and I want to go. I don't know who these guys are, but I want to, I want to roll with them. And I would tell anyone that would listen, they're like, you're an Arabic, you know, the leadership in the squadron was like, you're an Arabic linguist, we can't lose you to this fucking shit right here. Like, you got to, you know, buckle down and we got plans for you. I was like, I don't accept. that. And so there was, uh, there was one guy and he had just rotated in from Bragg as, as the chief of the squadron. And chief in the air force is E9. It's like the highest fucking enlisted rank. And he was, um, he was like the senior enlisted, uh, leader at the squadron.

And, um, I was a fucking E3 at the time, E3, E4. And I just barge into this dude's office. I'm like, Chief, you got to send me on this fucking deployment. Please, let me go on this deployment, please. And he looks, he's like, who the fuck are you? Like, what? Are you going to, like, walk into my office, like, the right way and, like, not just fucking barge in here, like, we're buddies. And he hears my case, and he just looks at me, like, get the fuck out of my office and,

you know, standby. if we need you to go on this deployment, we'll send you. They figured out a way to get me on the fucking deployment. That was January 2007. Go to Iraq with the task force. And from January to July of 2007, I'm 23 years old, and I'm fucking calling in assaulters every fucking night from the air.

Now I'm not at fucking... X tens of thousands of feet anymore. Now I'm, I'm a bit closer to the, to the action, right? Now I've got eyes. I've got like, I've got dudes with imagery capabilities. I'm seeing what's going on with, with the, with the assaults. I'm, my gear is a bit more sophisticated. I'm having direct impact. I'm fucking talking to the lead helos on helo-common, you know, like when them 160th dudes check in on helo-common, like you just fucking know that shit's shit's going to go down and they're all and it's a it's a it's a it's a crack addiction because they're all waiting on me and they're waiting on me to trigger the fucking thing by telling them

where this fucking dude's at. Holy shit. 23. 23 years old. Fucking night after night after night fucking fucking executing fine fix on on high value targets for task force in in Iraq. And when you execute fine fix like that at the time, you know, this is McChrystal era task force. And, you know, the guys are just primed.

It's a fucking well-oiled machine. So you call it in and, you know, 160 a dudes have their rotor spinning. They're just waiting on fucking coordinates from you. And once they have them coordinates, they're launching. They got the assaulters on board. depending on the nature of the target you know that dictates the half package

sometimes they rolled in with the ground assault force too just depended on the target and where he was what the fuck was the situation but it was the most addicting thing I had ever done in my life I

I was just enthralled and I never wanted to do anything else and working with such a crew of professionals, you kind of start to turn into like entitled a bit. You're like, obviously this is how the shit goes down. It's like, you know, I launch. I tell them where to go, they go.

And then they call it, they confirm whether they got the dude or not. And then you start to get like requested by, other assets in country. And so I remember one time I, I went down to Basra to work with SEAL Team 5. And so I was riding on an army bird. So you're like winning the fucking lottery to the soft community. It was.

Especially for White Soft. Yeah. It was great, dude. Everybody wants a piece. Yeah, he's great. So we load up on this army bird. We go down to Basra. I got the army guys next to me, and I get down off the bird.

I'm talking to the tacky W guys from SEAL Team 5. Maybe they were team guys. I don't know. And we start to plot out, you know, what needs to happen. They're going after this high value target one night. And I'm like, cool. Like, tell me all the things that I need to know. Here's how, you know, I'll coordinate with you.

and let me know what you what you fellows need here's the freaks you know all that what kind of stuff do you need to know um basic kind of i'm trying to keep things clean um you know do you expect this dude to like stay put or do you expect him to be moving around things that I need to make the gear, you know, tell me what I needed to tell me. I basically just need to know, like, what do they already know about this guy so that when I'm looking at the spectrum analyzer and I'm getting all the readouts and shit, it's like tracking with what they already know about this guy. a high stress event is when you are looking at the data and you know the guy is just staying put right

and you call it in you know the boys are loading up you know whether it's a gaff or a half or whatever and they're coming inbound and then the fucking dude starts to move, right? That's what the data is indicating. And you're like, fuck. And it's not like you're in the middle of the goddamn desert and it's like, you know, you've got imagery capability. So, you know, you can tell who's moving and like correlate it with what you're seeing on the spec A. You're in a fucking urban area. You know, you don't know who's who down there. And all you know is that the data is changing in some capacity. And you need to

fucking figure out quickly what that data and how it's changing means for the guys coming in on the Humvees or coming in on the fucking Dapsbirds. And if you're wrong, you're going to put them on the wrong house,

you're going to put them on the wrong vehicle, or you're going to put them... 800 things could go sideways, quickly. So those are like the highest stress situations. In this particular case with, you know, the SEAL Team 5 dudes, the guy stayed put. He was well-behaved. I was like, here we go.

He's in the middle of this fucking market. Come on and get it, boys. And then I just, silence, quiet. It's just nothing happens. 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, 40 minutes. I'm like, hey, like, he's still there. Like, what's going on? I'm like, we're going to run out of fuel here.

Like, we got to head back soon. Like, you guys coming out or what? And so I started to get like kind of antsy. And I started, I realized if I had done that exact same routine with the task force dudes, it would have been, it would have been a fucking well-oiled machine. The guys would have been there in, out, like, no, like just a well-old machine. But like the conventional dudes. rightfully so, like did not have that kind of operational cadence. And so, you know, they're,

they're doing risk assessments. They're like, is it worth going in this fucking busy marketplace? Are we going to get into a fucking Mogadishu situation? And so that taught me like, okay, there's a difference between the very tip of the spear up here and then like everybody else. And the gap is huge. It's a fucking huge. which is why when I saw that Venezuela hit go down. I was like, yeah, there's only something, a couple organizations that could have pulled that off. Anyway, all that to say, I started to learn about myself.

You know, and it was easy for me to get frustrated with those guys from SEAL Team Final. I'm like, dude, get the fuck out there. Like, this guy's going to leave and you're going to lose your chance at rolling them up. But I had to empathize with them, you know? Like, it's a dangerous situation for them. situation for them. Here I am comfortable in the air, you know. It's just not going to happen on my timetable. And so I started to learn how to work with like various units and teams and see things

from their perspective and not just sit in this ivory tower of, oh, you're a fucking task force dude. Like this is how things are done. So I think it humbled me a little bit. I tried to always, I tried to always, you know, do what the guys needed to be done without being ideological about it, I would say. So that went on for six months. We're able to think out of the box is what you're saying. Yeah, I... You're a problem solver. Yeah, I just wanted to...

Whether you came from fucking Steel Team 5 or... the 173rd Airborne or some... The Melbourne Group or K. Some task force unit. I just wanted to make your life easier if I could. And that's the way I tried to make it happen. And I say I, because I'm the one sitting here on the couch across from you, but there were a lot of just fucking awesome people that flew these,

with me and I'm friends with many of them to this day. And so I don't want to make it seem like, oh, fucking Nick was flying around Iraq, fucking, you know, doing this shit like a lone wolf. No, there's a whole cast of characters that were involved. At one point, I was like the scheduler for the squadron. So I would try and, you know, it's a task force is a joint service agency. So I would try and map out like, all right, this dude, like, gets along with these army guys better.

So I'm going to put them on this crew over here. And this dude gets along with the Navy dudes better. All right, so I'm going to put them here. So then I got back. And then it was like, well, you're going to fucking fly RC-135s again and just turn circles over Afghanistan. And I was like, no fucking way, dude. Like, I need to get back to whatever magic it was

that I just came from experiencing. When I got back to, when I got back stateside, I'm sitting in the office and I get a phone call, hey, do you want to come to task force full time? I'm like, fucking hey, right, I do. So I go through, you know, the process. And I get selected to go to task force full time. I guess, you know, they saw something in me.

What was your selection like? Can you say what task force? Can I say it? For to keep things high level, like task force. Roger that. Task force level. So for the Signal Squadron that I ended up in over there, the selection and the screening and the initial training cycle is very much,

it's not physical stuff it's a lot of it is around it's a couple different things are you able to handle yourself in high pressure environments where you might not necessarily have a lot of fucking dudes backing you up you know you might be south america is a good example right you might find yourself in a town in south america and there's just a temptation all around you, right? And are you going to succumb to that temptation or are you going to stay lock the fuck in and do the job that you're supposed to be doing at that particular moment in time? And a lot of dudes, like, they're just not able to. As a singleton? Small, small teams, sometimes singleton. So a lot of it is around, you know, are you able to handle

yourself in those situations? And then there's, once you get to the squadron, you, it's an Air Force squadron. So you're primarily, you know, you have units that you work with. But you, there's a possibility that you get farmed out to one of the other sister service units as well. So Army, Navy, what have you. the other aspect to it is all the things that I was doing on that RC-135 bird, you know, looking at the spectrum analyzer, listening to what was going on on the frequencies and so on.

Let's imagine that you can compress all that kit down into, you know, a magical form factor, let's say. And then you slave everything into, you know, like an earpiece or something. Can you do the things that you did previously, but without staring at a fucking spectrum analyzer sitting in front of you, and all you have to go off of are some audio cues

because now you've slaved the analytics and the data that's being piped through that analyzer into sonic feedback, essentially, let's say. I'm trying to keep things, you know, clean and high level here you know um and there there's an art to it because you can get out there and you can strap one of these things on and uh you know you'll see it with new guys they'll fucking they'll do like mr robot they're like like doing this thing like just robotting around because they're trying to synthesize it's like adding a new sense essentially it's

They're trying to synthesize what they're hearing through the earpiece and the kit with what they're seeing in the physical world. So you have to put together this three-dimensional world around you with the things that you're hearing from your gear. Because electromagnetic frequencies are just fucking weird shit, right? They do all kinds of crazy nonsense. Like if you're too close to fucking rail tracks, they'll throw shit off. If you're too close to power lines, they'll ride the power lines. they'll multi-path through like and bounce off of buildings and so that'll throw that'll throw things off and so you need to on you need to like in your mind and in your body build this muscle memory of

the things that I hear in here have a meaning based on how the things out here are looking right that's about as most as I can say on that piece there but if you get good at it, then you can do some amazing things and execute fine fix for the guys as needed. So would you say this is similar to, I mean, they say, have you ever seen that guy, he's blind, but he can fucking see. Yeah. Through audio. Yeah. He could fucking make like these little chirps. Like, yeah. And he's fucking sees. Yep. Is that like? It's very similar. Yeah. it's very similar and it takes a lot of time on the gear to how to be fluid and natural and you know if if I was to look at you and you would just be like another dude you know and I

wouldn't be able to tell that you were doing something weird otherwise you're doing fucking Mr. Robato on the street um so that that was a lot of that was a lot of it um and we got we got a lot of cross-training opportunities too. I went over to SRT-1, Special Reconnaissance Team 1 over on the West Coast. Got to cross-train with those guys. A phenomenal bunch of men and women out there. Just to learn like, okay, how are you guys doing shit? Okay, here's how we're doing stuff. What are some of the challenges you guys have? That was really cool because, you know, the SRT1 is on the buds compound, or at least it was back then. So you got like all the buds fucking students are doing their thing.

And then, you know, the SRT1 building is kind of a little bit over. So you feel like, you know, you're part of, part of an important thing going on here. And again, that was like, I always loved working with other services. Dude, like, I don't know. I just felt like I was an emissary from the Air Force, you know. And I just wanted to represent my service well. and kind of break the mentality, break the mold of like, Air Force dude just fucking sits around, you know.

And so I just wanted to be a good emissary, I think, for the Air Force. But that SRT1 trip was interesting because I got to see how regular NSW does stuff. So I spent, you know, the next few years doing that business for the task force. One of the things that comes to mind is, you know, you'd be doing air stuff as well, right? So the things that happened in Iraq never went away. There was still a need for bodies on a bird, you know, doing things from the air. and there was one particular deployment where we were and everything I'm about to say has been written down and discussed by Admiral McCraven in his books and on various podcasts.

So I feel okay talking about it. So we were on a deployment to Horn of Africa and let's say I stumble across, like, in the course of, like, working my targets, this guy. And I see the guy's name pop up on my gear. And it's Saleh Ali Salih Nabhan. And, you know, every time I get a good hit, I call it down. And it's no big thing, right? It's like, whatever.

Some of the shit goes. of it doesn't go, whatever. Especially when you're not in Iraq and Afghanistan, like some of the shit is just long burn. You know what I mean? This particular one I called down, and they were like, are you absolutely fucking sure

that this is the guy that you're getting data about right now? I was like, rarely am I wrong about what fucking target I'm looking at? But yes, I'm pretty sure. And they're like, say your, I'm trying to make sure, you know,

I say things properly here. Say your load out. Because we had kinetic strike capability at the time on the platform I was on. And I was like, what the fuck? Who the fuck is this dude? Like they've never told us that in the past. You know, it's always,

All right, let's work, let's build this package and maybe we'll pass it off to some interagency, whatever, they'll handle it. Not so in this case. They're like, say your fucking load out and say, say your, say your fuel. Oh, shit, it's on, dude. I don't know who this fucking guy is, but all of a sudden, everyone's very interested. So I continue to track this individual. and then they launch a relief bird

to swap out places with us. They come in, they take over on station, we roll back to where we were staging from. We land and I'm like, what the fuck is going on with this dude? This guy was like on the FBI's most wanted list and he's been on it since 1998 for questioning based on his, I guess he was one of the senior planners

for the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings in 98. I guess he was like one of the fucking head honchos that planned that shit. You know, they drove these suicide, these VBIEDs into the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. So this guy's been on the run since then, basically. And, you know, he was like, the FBI had like a bounty out for him and everything.

So we just fucking stumble across this dude. Many years later, I'm talking to a buddy of mine and from an interagency partner. And I'm telling him this story, and he was like, wait, Nabon? I was like, yeah, dude. He was like, I tried to find that fucker for years. I was like, should have done better.

I rolled in and fucking got his ass right after you. But again, I jest, but there was a giant fucking team behind it and the crews that I was working with and so on. I just happened to be the fucking guy working the gear. So we land. This guy is a fucking head honcho. And so there's an entire effort that starts spinning up to figure out how to prosecute this guy. And it's not an easy problem because his location is on the coast of fucking Somalia. Holy shit.

I'm pretty sure we've talked about this up before on this show. Yeah. Did they swim in? No, not that one. Okay. Yeah, we'll get to how it all went down. Now, many years later, I'm listening to Jocko. You know, I got his shit honed in the kitchen.

I'm like making dinner or some shit. And Admiral Craven's on there. and he starts talking about this op in Somalia where they found this guy Nabhan and I'm like, what the fuck? And I start listening to his description of what was going on. And on that Jocko episode, McCraven

basically describes all the shit that was going down from his perspective as the CG with the president and Secretary Clinton and all of this shit. He's at the White House and he's playing fucking 4D chess. And I'm like one for one mapping it with all the shit that was going on downrange. And he's telling me the other side of the story on this podcast.

So that was really fucking wild to put the two pieces of information together and get like this full picture of what went down with that thing. So we, so McCraven, after we we find the initial hit on the dude so we like it like the initial find fix the dude like disappears like so the second bird comes on and the dude just fucking goes dark right and now everyone's pissed they're like go fucking get them like go find him again we're going to launch and relaunch you guys until you fucking get his ass again while that's going down mccraven is playing 40 chess with the White House, and, you know, he's going to say it a lot better on the Jocko episode, but he's basically convincing POTUS and Hillary Clinton to forward stage a helicopter

assault force off the coast of Somalia. But he's doing it in a way that's couched through the lens of counterpiracy, because Captain Phillips had just went down. You know, you had Pete Scoble on the show recently. All that shit went down. So there was a lot of credibility for the task force at the time and its ability to operate in that AO, right?

So McCraven kind of rode off of that Captain Phillips thing and he's like, you know, and everyone is thinking, you know, Black Hawk Down, part two. Like we don't want, we don't, no one wants Mogadishu part two.

And that and that's the concern on everyone's mind. and he's like, all right, you know, we don't have to put boots on the ground. We, and they're like, I don't, per McCraven, the president did not want helicopters to do the final hit. Like they wanted like a kinetic strike, like a long-range kinetic strike. So we furiously on the other side of the equation start trying to fucking find this dude. And so we're just trolling the coast of Somalia back and forth, back and forth, trying to look for this fucking guy. And I'm looking, you know, I'm looking out the windows and, you know, I'm looking at the imagery.

So I've got like an imagery operator that I'm working with. And we're very tightly in sync. Like if I see some shit with my data, I'm like telling him what to look at down there. And we're trying to put these two pieces of intelligence together and have it be actionable in some capacity. And we're looking down there and we're, you know, we're seeing downtown Mogadish, you know, you can literally see the corners where the, like, Durant's Helo went down, you know, because I've got GRGs, you know, I can see where all this shit is. And I'm like, this is really fucking wild. I remember watching Blackhawk down when I was a, I was a teenager. And I was like, and now there's all the fucking, there's all the fucking sites down there. And in the meantime, so they park like an LHC off the coast of Somalia. It's like a flat top, flat top amphibious vessel. They put, you know, heloes on it.

They put the assault force on it. And everyone's just waiting. Everyone's waiting for us to fucking find this dude. Now, one thing that happens with some of these manned platforms is they start to treat you like predator drones you know you got guys that are 10,000 miles away trying to tell you like hey go here go there go here go there um and i don't like being treated like a fucking predator drone because i'm not um i have you know i i know the area i've studied the fucking gergis i know exactly which roads lead out from mogadishu to which town i know did like there's a coastal road over here

there's villages over there and i i generally know like what this dude has been doing in the past. And I'm able to extrapolate that out into the future. I say me, again, I'm the one being interviewed sitting here, but it was definitely a crew of fucking people, all of whom, some of whom will be watching this episode. And, you know, all of them were instrumental in making this happen. And we're circling overhead one day,

and then we get a hit on this fucking dude again. and he pops back up, but we don't know where he is. Like, he's, it's a big fucking urban area. And I'm like, all right, I'm like, a pilot, you know, put us over, put us over the southern end of the outskirts of Mogadishu. There's only three roads that depart coming out of there. And I had a feeling he was going to move south. you know I can't get into why I felt that way but you know there were there were indications that he had business down south and so I was like there's only three

fucking roads that that go out of this town towards those southern towns on the coast like let's just park overhead and what we need to do is wait until we can correlate what we see on the imagery with what I'm seeing on on my shit and so then the fucking geniuses back at HQ or wherever the fuck they were are like oh well we need you to move to this other tasking over here i'm like no no no there's no other tasking like give me some more time like i'm i'm gonna figure out like where this dude is i just trust me i have a feeling i'm an intuition here like no we need to move to like western like inland or whatever I'm like, just give me 30 fucking minutes, okay?

Give me 30 minutes and I think we can make this happen. And then, and then we see it. A lone little SUV starts driving down one of the fucking three roads down south from Moog. And then my imagery guy is like, yo, black SUV, got it. What do you got? I start looking at my shit. And the idea here is, is my shit saying that this dude is moving south? Because if it does, we got him. We got his fucking vehicle, right? He's moving

and he's moving south. Fucking correlation between the two, you know, piece of the kit. So then the whole fucking machine like just gets amped up. They start figuring out, okay, what are we going to do? We start constant, like just continuous Overwatch. And the plan is McCraven has somehow convinced the people at the White House

that, okay, we're going to do a long range kinetic strike from this platform we have. But let's just send in one or two birds to do like an analysis of like a PID.

of the dude, right? Like, it would suck to have this guy be on the FBI's most wanted list, and then we go through all this effort and then not even confirm that it's him, right? Like, guys, wouldn't that suck? Yes, it would. All right, so let me put some guys down real quick. We'll do the PID. We'll fucking get out of Dodge. So then it turns into this very tight, synchronized maneuver that needs to go down. And basically, it's like, wait until the dude gets to a location where we can execute the strike and then 30 seconds later lead helo is going to come in drop the guys you know and nobody wants boots on the ground in somalia like at this point it's 2009 right um some of that other shit that you were talking about hadn't happened yet uh and you know

they're in and out in less than 10 minutes all right so by this point we i've run out of fuel and uh or my crew has run out of fuel. So pilots, like, we got to, we got to fucking get back home. We go back to the staging area. Other relief crew comes in, takes over, is watching the guy. And then he triggers all the criteria to make this thing go, right? And by this point, we've got some combat controllers that have basically come forward with us. They're going to call in the final fires. So then, I don't know if you've like spent time in East Africa, but the, you know, the idea is, okay, lays, lays this fucking thing and then put a, put ordinance down on it. Of all the fucking days for a cloud deck to roll in from the Indian Ocean into the East Coast of Somalia, this was the fucking day. And so by this point, I'm back in the talk and I'm watching everything go down on the screens, fucking, you know, ISR TV.

and the guys are getting ready to release. And you can see the target down, he's just booking it down this coastal road in Somalia. And then the fucking cloud deck comes in. And the cloud deck comes in these bands, right? So it's like one band of clouds, it'll pass through. Another band of clouds, it'll pass through. Every time one of those fucking bands comes in,

the CCT is not going to let that, you know, warhead go. So this is happening. The crew's calling it down. You know, negative lock, negative lock, negative lock, because the fucking clouds are coming in. By this point, the GFC on the lead helo, they've already, like, launched,

because they're expecting us to fucking hit this thing. And they're coming in over the ocean, and they're like 30 seconds out from the coast. And the GFC calls McRaven, who's sitting at the White House. He's like, I need fucking authority to, like, abort the strike can come in with guns and McRavens like talking to the president and he's like no like I want this I want the kinetic strike you guys only do the the PID clouds come in like lasers lasers in lasers out lasers in lasers out shit's not happening combat controller on board's like the shit's not happening

we're going to abort GFC is like boss I need fucking authority to go in with guns we're fucking seconds out from this target McRaven's like, fuck it, switch to guns, get them. We'll deal with the fallout later. Lee Healo comes in. Us guys at the talk are watching all the shit go down, but the crew that was overhead is kind of talking them in.

They come in, they blast the guy, and then they set down. Then ISR moves off because, you know, you got to clean up, and they move in, do the PID. and then head back to the ship. And they get back to the ship, PID confirms, solid nabon, fucking jackpot.

So all of that to say, it was a complex operation that in Iraq or Afghanistan would have been just another op on any other night. But for it to go down off the coast of Somalia in 2009 required this choreography that I've never seen before in my life, right? It's like you need to convince the fucking president

to let you put an LHC off the coast. I think there were a couple of other I think we had some carrier strike group over there and it was all because of the counter piracy shit that was going on back in the day. The core, the synchronization between the platform and the Hilo

assault force last, like literally 10 second out switching to fucking guns on the lead helo and making it happen all of that was really really insane to watch go down and i was like this is this is i feel like i'm part of something that is just important this is a fucking group of people doing important shit all around the world all the time and i'm humbled to be a part of it i'm proud to be a part of it after the strike went down i go outside i sit outside the uh the talk and it's nighttime and uh as the crew comes back um the the pilot drops the the bird down and does like a little top gun

maverick fucking tower buzz right like 50 feet above the talk and um i was like this i just felt like whole you know fucking badass and we sat around had a little bonfire that night and um and and that was that was cool a couple months later i get a phone call sitting in the office back at uh back of squadron and they're like hey uh cg's coming in and he uh he wants to you know he wants to like have a meeting with you guys or whatever i'm like what the fuck for i'm like Whatever, dude. I'm in civilian clothes, and they're like, you got to change in the uniform and get your ass over here.

I'm like, God damn it. I put my flight suit on, and I go to the other building where this is going down, and I see the crews from this op, like, all lined up and shit. And they're like, bro, like, get the fuck up on stage. Like, McCraven wants to, like, give all of us a thing. I'm like, okay, cool, man. So he goes and he shows, and he shows.

shakes everyone's hand and he's like, you know, this, this is a prime example of us being able to reach out and touch people in complex AOs where, you know, we don't have the footprint that we do everywhere else. And, you know, he's congratulating. He goes to pilots. He goes to the, the loadmaster. And then he gets to me and there's one, there's one dude next to me. And he's the fucking imagery operator. And we call this guy magic man, because, like, He used to like really like doing like magic tricks and shit. And you just like pass the time doing that. He's kind of a skinny, like nerdy looking dude.

So we'd make fun of him a lot. And so McCraven gets to me and he puts his hand out and he's like, so which one of you was the trigger man? Like which one of you was a sensor operator that was the trigger man? And I was like, this is a really awkward question. I don't want to say it's me because it was like a team effort. you know and so I'm hesitating because I don't I don't want to be that forward magic man over here speaks up and was like it was me must have been a Navy guy yeah so

mccraven McCraven's like he like loses interest with me like fucking goes to this dude and he's like and then he gives him like the fucking CGs coin and uh I like whatever you know in the grand scheme of things. And so then the ceremony concludes, we get off stage, and I turn and look at this fucking dude. I'm like, and he's like, what? And I'm like, bro, you got something for me? And he was like, oh, you should have spoken up, bro. Sorry. But good ceremony, right? And then he just fucks off with his fucking CGs coin. I was like, oh, you son of a. Are you serious? Holy shit. Wow. Well, that's still pretty fucking badass. Yeah, that was...

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You bet your ass you do. Our newsletter brings you the latest SRS news and critical updates. Get instant alerts on. on the newest episodes, never miss a beat. Exclusive Intel briefs from counterterrorism expert, Sarah Adams. You've seen her many times on the show. She's going to give unfiltered insights on global terrorist activity. For Patreon exclusives, you're going to get epic range days with me and damn near every guest that's come in the studio.

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I got too excited about the interview. So just two things crank out here real quick. One, I got a Patreon account. It's a subscription account, and we've turned it into quite the community. I think it's like 125,000. strong now. And they're the reason I get to sit down with you today. So they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. And this is from Jesse Meadows. Where is the real line today

between cybersecurity and mass surveillance? Who decides when it's crossed and what assumptions or blind spots in these systems still exist that citizens should understand before the infrastructure becomes irreversible? Yeah. That's actually a great question. So I think the lines are easily blurred between cyber defense, cybersecurity, and surveillance. And we can start at a very small scale and then extrapolate up to national scale, if we wish. So if we take a small company or a medium-sized company, and if you really want to do cyber defense in the best possible way that you could do it, then ideally, you have as many sensors and taps and collectors of data that you can possibly have spread

throughout the organization. Now, that is a massive privacy violation if you go too overboard with it. So I think as with many things, and then extrapolate that out to national scale, right? It's like all of the things that Snowden was up in arms about many years ago were, a function of people trying to do, people trying to do the right things for the right reasons, but going about it the wrong way, let's say. When I was the chief information security officer at Androl, I could have probably gotten leadership to buy off on, all right, we're just going to put key loggers on everybody's

machine and we're just going to record everything that they do. But we didn't. And the reason we didn't is because there's a conscious decision that always needs to be made with these sets of tools that comes down to, are we turning into fucking assholes or not by using these things? It's like that's a fuzzy way of putting it, right? But ultimately it comes down to that. And with all things human, I think it comes down to people. in leadership positions that are willing to stick their fucking asses out there and draw lines in the sand in accordance with their own morality and say, okay, here's what I think are the left

and right limits for how to use a technology like this in a proper and ethical way while achieving the objectives that we've set out to to achieve, which is in Andrews's case, the security of the enterprise and the weapon systems and the employees and all of it. Without going overboard into authoritarianism, I think all roads except very few lead to authoritarianism. Given any kind of tool, technology, capability that humans have access to, I think all of them at the limit can be. be used for just evil shit and the application of control over others. So all of that to say, cybersecurity tools are tools. The humans that are using them need to make good decisions about how to use them and

achieve the goals that they're trying to achieve. And it's easy to get carried away by saying that the means, or what is that fucking saying that the ends uh i don't know this one it's like you know the ends justify the means right that's that's what i'm trying to get at it's easy to say that and just go overboard but i think one thing to keep in mind is china said that too and they have a society where everything is under the surveillance umbrella that they've set up as a state, every person's actions are run through that umbrella, turned into an algorithm,

and used for very authoritarian purposes. And whatever the actions are in front of us that don't set us down that path, that's at least a good first step, I think. Does this stuff all worry you? yeah dude worries me a lot yeah I mean

technology is capable of some insane things these days I mean I'm honestly very surprised that we don't have a social credit system in the United States that is driven by the experience and the trans unions

and the fucking credit reporting agencies because that would make their lives so much easier. It's like if they just had more data on you and what you're doing on a day in a day out basis, that made a lot easier for them to understand, you know, whether you're a good citizen with good credit or not. I think without checks and balances in place, we certainly have the capabilities to get there. I think the only thing keeping us back is the pillars that are basically holding us up as a Western society. Some of those people are,

pillars are crumbling fast. Some people would like to see them crumbled fast. But I think the reason that we don't have such an authoritarian system in place as the United States of America is because that just goes against our spirit and ideals as a society and as American citizens. Other countries have no such compunctions. So you can say all the shit you want about America and all the evil shit that it's done. And maybe we have. Maybe we fucking have. We're the only country that's dropped nuclear fucking bombs on people, right?

But at the same time, I mean, look at the picture of you on that helicopter over Afghanistan, dude. Like, if there were, if you landed on the X and you saw some fucking kids and you got, you guys did your job. and you know, you were trying to figure out what to do with these kids, you know, you're not going to just take them out back and smoke them, right? Maybe the fucking Russians would have done that. Maybe the Chinese would have done that. But one thing I think that is an invariant is that a fucking dude wearing the stars and stripes on their chest, it's just very difficult to imagine that dude doing that.

You know, there's something about the morals that we have as a society and that we carry with us into all these shitty, complicated situations that speaks for itself. Those men are men of the people. You know what I mean? Yeah. Explain. Those men are doing something that they truly fucking believe in. Yeah. That 100% or close.

aligns with their values, you know, 100%. You know, the ones that start to think otherwise, they leave, you know, the people that we're talking about, you know, that have the ability for mass surveillance, stuff like that. I mean, those are powerful, powerful, elite, rich, wealthy people. I think those are, that, that, that, should It wouldn't be, but seem to be more easily influenced by more power and more wealth, but mostly power. Yeah, I agree with you.

I think at a societal scale, I think it's... For example, the Epstein files drop. Yeah. Yep. The spirit of America once those fucking files released now, the elites of America are doing everything they can to fucking hide this shit from everybody yeah because it was a power structured thing yep yeah i agree man i think at national levels and at societal levels i think there's there's a dark undercurrent of elites that really don't fall on any one side of the

partisan spectrum. I feel like they're in it to sustain their elitism. Goes back to good and evil. Yep. Yep. So to answer Jesse's question, yeah, it could very easily go sideways. It could. What do you think would happen if it does go sideways? How do you think people will, I mean, they'll always find a way around it. We go on primitive? At national levels? Like at societal level. Your societal level. How do you find privacy when it does run away? Yeah.

I think if we want to have true privacy in the future, we need to think very carefully about the sovereignty of the data that we emit as part of our daily lives, right? Like, one of the questions I was answering out there for some of the Patreon folks was you know, what are your recommendations for cybersecurity as a society in 2026? And one of them was take the fucking pictures of your loved ones down from the internet. Like these AI algorithms can do anything they want with those pictures. You basically put those out into the wild fucking forest of the algorithms. So start taking that shit down. The olden days of like sharing pictures on Facebook and social media and all that shit, consider that.

that gone. Like take pictures of you down, take pictures of your loved ones down. And the reason for that is what you want to start doing is preserving sovereignty of the data that belongs to you. And it's a foreign concept to us as human beings, right? Because we're not wired to think about our digital exhaust and our digital footprint and all this shit. But we better start thinking about it because when we don't, someone else is going to suck that up and have their way with it. One of the reason I'm wearing this hat is because Josh Clenny, the founder of Levels, he started Levels, which is a metabolic health company to give people the ability to control their own medical data, not siphon it off to some fucking insurance company or some lab or

some whatever. It's like, this data is coming off my body and I own it and I get to do whatever the fuck I want with it. I can put it into chat and AI if I want and I can get it to tell me to do it, you know, change my lifestyle or whatever or I can choose to freely send it somewhere else. But the point is, it's one example of the fact that we need to start thinking about how we control the data that's emitted from our own lives. That sounds like an interesting company levels. Yeah, the founder and CEO, Josh Clemente, he worked on the life support systems on the dragon spacecraft for SpaceX. So he spent a lot of time working on those subsystems and then took that skill set, transferred it over to basically human metabolic.

quantification essentially. So the things that you do on a day-to-day basis, the pack of chips that you just ate, how can you extrapolate that out into what that's going to mean for your health five years from now, 10 years from now? And that's a perfect use case for where data security is essential because you let that data get in the wrong hands. Okay, the instant you eat that pack of chips, well, TransUnion just drops your credit score 20 fucking points. So that's not a future I want to live in. But, yeah. Wow.

All right, let's get back to your story. Yep. All right. So we... Your son. Yeah, my son was born, 2011. You know, it was... It was something that I wish I could go back and relive.

What I should have done was... think very introspectively and deeply about how to not subject my son to any of the same shit that I had to contend with as a kid and as a teenager. And I've tried to do that. You know, certainly I've been, probably the worst thing I've done is, to just be away a lot. I was constantly deployed. Like months after he was born,

I got the call from NSW, and frankly, a very personal, like, selfish decision was made. Like, okay, I started my military career out at fucking 40,000 feet on these tin cans flying around the sky. Over the years, I got closer and closer and closer to the fight, and I got really fucking good at every, every one of those levels and now I'm being asked to be out on the ground with these dudes. And I was like, there's no way I'm passing up on this.

And was that the right decision? I don't know. If I could go back, I wish I would have spent more time with him when he was young, when he was just a few months old. Instead, I, you know, went to NSW, got seconded there. The history leading up to this was the fact that Task Force at the time, there was a lot of demand for active duty military members who spoke different languages and had all of the skill sets that I was coming to the table with.

and my Signal Squadron had a lot of those fucking people. And one thing that I would try and do, so by this point I was a tech sergeant E6 in the Air Force, one thing that I would try and do is convey to Air Force headquarters that the things going on in this place are important. And the skill sets that we can bring to the table for this place are impactful. So don't hold us back or hamstring us and tell us this isn't our mission. This is not what we do.

We don't roll out with these dudes. We don't do that. We don't do this. We do whatever the fucking CG needs us to do. That's the reality of it. And the other reality was, unfortunately, the squadron at the time was sort of hamstrung by like three or four different lines of authority. You had task force, you had AFSAC, you had this archaic Cold War agency called the Air Force

Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency of FISRA, this bureaucratic, bloated organization that all, you know, their bread and butter was flying fucking SIGAN missions during the Cold War, right? Great. You don't know shit about counterterrorism or find fix finish or all of the shit going on at this at this organization here and they would um you know they would they would they would serve to just be a bureaucratic blocker to us all the time and around halfway through my time at task we finally broke through and we're like nsw came to find out some of the stuff that we could do and they

were like hey we got a need for you know some of you guys and um And so I got told, hey, be out on the ramp. We're going to have a plane coming for you, and they're going to take you up to Virginia Beach. Okay, cool. So I walk out on the ramp, plane comes and gets me, go to Virginia Beach, and I sit around, and there's a bunch of team guys. And I go through, like, sort of a screening process. I ended up getting seconded there.

And now I was coming full circle. I had spent my whole career wanting to get closer and closer to the fight. Now I was going to be in the fucking fight on the ground with the guys. So the mission for the next few years was essentially do the fucking shit that you did in the air, but do it on the ground and do it in very, very small teams, lone wolf if you needed to. Sometimes that was a kiss. And I fucking loved it, dude.

And like, should I have been back with my son? Yeah, probably. One thing, one regret I have is I would, you know, this character fly. I have is when I'm on deployment, I'm on deployment. Like, I don't like... You compartmentalize everything. Compartmentalize everything.

I don't want to... Shut it down. Yeah. I don't want to be on deployment, and I'm thinking about my family back home, and I'm, you know... It's like pollutes different sides of your brain, you know? So one way I dealt with that is, you know, I would just spend weeks at a time just being in fucking deployment mode. which was cool man I mean like some of the capabilities that we we got to bring to bear were like not organic to NSW like the fact that I could speak different

languages the fact that I could work some of the spec A gear that that only a linguist would know how to work right I remember one time I walked into a joint and you know the team team area and there was like some kit in the corner and I was like, hey, is anyone using that fucking thing? And they're like, no, we won't have anyone that speaks, you know, that oblaws. So I was like, I'll fucking get on it. So then when I wasn't rolling out in the high luxes,

I was on that fucking thing with cans on and just all the time. I was either out or on that thing with the cans on. And I felt like I had just, all my career had led up to this opportunity here.

Now, I sacrificed, you know, I sacrificed communication with my family, my ex now, with my son, with my stepdaughter. And that's something I would go back and change. It's just I wrestle with this question to this day. Like was it all fucking worth it, dude? Like all the cool, cool stories and like all this shit that I got to do with

with NSW, all the work on the ground. Was it worth it for the sacrifices, for the things that I did to my family in order to make it happen? Like just all the deployments, all the being gone all the time. Man, I would get home from something from some trip. Dude, you know how it is. Get home from a trip. And you just want to sustain that crack high, right? And so it's like, all right, what's up next?

All right, driving school, cool. Laundry, pack, fucking, let's go. some other fucking, I don't know, shooting. Yeah, let's go. Over and over and over again. And so then you just get into this cycle that you don't know how to break out of. And you're heading into a brick wall because you can be the coolest fucking guy on the planet with, you can be Mr. Air Force dude assigned to this NSW squadron.

But that doesn't last forever. And then you leave. The machine goes on without you. And now you're just a dude on a street. Okay, great. What has all of this been for? You know? Yeah.

So that time with NSW, I mean, those guys treated me... If you come to a conclusion? Was it worth it? I don't know, man. It's tough. You know, the biggest... The biggest impact I had when I was with them was we were working these target packages to interdict this EFP smuggling ring.

And it was targeting diplomatic personnel in the AO that we were in. And so, you know, you justify it in your mind, right? You're like, I'm focused on this shit because I'm trying to say. the lives of these embassy personnel that are at risk because of this shit. And then looking back at it, and it's like, okay, a bunch of people could have done that. You know, I was no one special. I don't know. I don't know is the answer.

I think it all happened because I was meant to say. sit here and be introspective about these issues with who the fuck knows watching and talking through it. I've been asked my question on that all the time. I didn't even have a family back then. I think a lot of guys think about this. You know, it's a tough fucking question to ponder. Yeah.

I mean, you're talking about Somalia. Would we just uncover in fucking Minnesota? Yeah. How many billions of dollars getting smuggled right into fucking Somalia? Well, we've probably got guys right there right fucking now. Yep. Is it worth it? Yeah.

Yeah, I know, dude. I wrestle with that. And, you know, a lot of these, a lot of these AOs, you know, we were talking about this on the drive over here. We pump money and fucking zodiac boats and equipment and guns and ammo and $87 million a week to the Taliban right now. Every fucking week delivered in cash. What happens? We do the same fucking thing. saying every time we're going to, what is the doctrine that we have for? It's like nation building,

right? Dude, we suck at it, okay? We're just not fucking good at it. Why don't we just not? Why don't we not do it? So it's a question I wrestle with all the time. I don't know. I feel proud of my service. You know, these are experiences that not many people, people have. I certainly felt a loss of identity when when I left. You know, I remember walking out of the NSW compound for the last time. And, you know, there were fucking dudes in the killhouse and they're doing their thing and there's like fucking heloes flying around and like there's dudes running from one building to another. Like there's dudes like cleaning the Mark V's out in the boat area. And you're like, this fucking machine is just going to go on without me.

And it's not a good feeling. And then you're just a guy on the street. So, yeah, the last few years, active duty, those guys took me in. They treated me like just one of their own. And my goal was just to represent my service well, the Air Force. Because, you know, from their view, they knew Air Force dudes in their world came in one of two flavors. PJs controllers, PJs, CCTs. Now they got like special reconnaissance dudes and whatnot.

So some wacko, like, cryptologic linguist coming on board and being assigned, like, some very high-level areas of responsibility was new for them. And so I had a lot of pressure to fucking get it right. And I hope I did, you know, a large part of why I'm kind of glossing over all that piece of it is because, you know, I don't want to get into areas that that would, you know, divulge TTPs and all that shit for those guys. So, but it was good. My girlfriend always gets mad at me because, like, to this day, I haven't come up with, like, a clean, like, arc for, like, what the fuck I did in the military, you know? So, like, one of her family will ask a question, and I'll be like, oh, well, you know, I was in the Air Force, but then I was at this, like, joint place. And then, like, I was at NSW. And then they're just like, what the fuck are you talking about, dude?

like are you a poser like what was your buds class i was like i didn't i didn't i wasn't a team guy i didn't go to fucking buds um but it was it was great man i i had a really good time they you know they put me through um you know all of all of the shit that they put their own guys through for screening and whatnot so it was like cqc uh you know driving you know fucking maritime shit um jumping no jumping no jumping no no um yeah not needed for the the stuff that i was doing but um yeah it was it was good i actually pulled uh i pulled two other guys in with me uh air force dudes to go through the the sequence of of training courses because those dudes had blown out on some emergency operations, let's say, in the Indian Ocean because they spoke the

language. And I thought they could just use the fucking extra skill sets, you know? It's like they didn't appreciate that too much. They got put through the fucking ringer. But, you know, they got some good stories out of it. but yeah that was that was fun a lot of it was you don't talk about the fp ring yeah yeah so there was um there was a cluster of uh of foreign fighters let's call them that were sort of interfering in the affairs of the uh of the ao that we were in at the time and this is an ao that you're very well

familiar with. In fact, I discovered this morning that we were highly co-located at one time. At one time. And basically, they were trying to smuggle EFPs, so, you know, shape charges, basically, and use them to create IEDs or other incendiary devices to put diplomatic personnel at risk that were in that particular AO. And so our job was to basically figure out, you know, who the fuck is all involved? Who are they? What do they do? Who do they run?

It's like that scene from heat, you know? It's like, who the fuck is this guy? I want to know who he runs with and who he eats with. I want to know who they run with and who they eat with. And I want it up tonight and I want it going. That was our job. And we did it. We did it quite well.

A lot of it is around, you know, how do you execute fine fix in complex urban environments? Stuff I was talking about earlier. He's on that floor and that room and the bathroom on that wall. Yeah. And it's like, well, how the fuck do you know that? Well, I'm not going to get into that piece of it. But I know. and I'm going to tell somebody I know

and that somebody is going to go fucking take care of business. Yeah, there was some shit. Yeah, there was just some dumb shit that would go down. A lot of it was just like, well, there's not a lot of backup here, so we're just kind of hanging our asses out. You know, obviously some mutual, you what are you talking about you had us yeah yeah i remember um i remember one time uh an individual that i actually respected highly came down from elsewhere in the ao and we were going to work

with with you guys um on uh on something and our job me and this individual was you guys were going to work with the clowns in action Yeah. Well, in this particular, I was the fucking clown because, you know, this individual comes in and they're like, hey, dude, you know, you got a great reputation, really psyched to work with you. Like, let's go fucking get this thing done, you know, represent our organization well with these guys over here. And I was like, cool, let's go. So we plan it all out. We're like working with your guys. And our job without, you know, getting too much into it is to be at a particular location. at a very particular time looking out for some stuff. And we roll out and, you know,

I'm checking, I'm obsessive about fucking TOT and like being at the exactly precisely right places at the right times. I want to be there. I want to get it right because you, you know, you guys are relying on us. And

fucking three minutes into this thing, I get fucking T-boned by some indage dude Like just smashes into the car Right after this person says Hey man you got a great reputation And like you're known for like This flawless execution on these

Three fucking minutes in I get teaboned by this fucking guy I'm like God And I'm watching the The TOT burn down right I'm like oh okay we're We're off base All right so

I'm like Stay in the car I get out I start negotiating with this fucking dude. I like, no one trains you on how to deal with. It's not like there's Geico insurance in this fucking place, right?

So it's like, what am I supposed to do here? So I do my best. I bust out some op fund cash. I'm like, yo, just take this. Get the fuck out of here. He like slaps the cash out of my hand because like he's, now he's offended. And I'm trying to pay him off and shit.

I'm like, I like talk him down. Fortunately, the damage wasn't that bad. But by the time all this hat, I'm like convincing this dude to like not make this a big deal. How do I put this? You guys are in your own vehicle and we're supposed to be way down the fucking road somewhere else and we're not. And you guys drive by us and you're just like, what the fuck are these two morons doing on the side of the road here? And you're just like staring out the window and I'm like god I fucked that one up pretty good um it's just like dump shit like that would happen another time uh my buddy were like driving down this like really tight

section of um of the city you know you know which place I'm talking about this really tight section of the city and he's like I need you to turn down this way and I look down that way and the road leading down this path or this section of the city is made completely of garbage. It's a fucking garbage road. Like there's no pavement. There's no nothing. I'm like, hey, dude, I don't think that's a good idea for us to drive down that way. He's like, no, no, no, I need you to drive down that way because, like, you know, that's where the fucking dude is.

Check. Drive down that way. Halfway down the fucking road, the truck sinks through the fucking garbage. were like stuck and then all these and it makes a like makes a fucking noise because I'm trying to like get the wheels turn in and get us out of there so I'm like revving the engine that's like making noise the locals are all like what the fuck is going on so they like all come out of their houses and my buddy is like yep it's one of these fucking dudes that's surrounding our car right now Holy shit.

I'm like, okay. And so there's a team guy in the car with us. He's a great fucking dude. But he's also kind of like just let's fucking get it on. And he's like, what do we do, man? Like, let's fucking. I'm like, dude, calm down. Like, let me talk us out of this one.

So somehow I get out of the car. I convince the locals that like, you know, we're trying to head to the beach or some shit. And, like, they help us get the car out of there and we roll out. But that one was spicy because I was like, if this fucking dude gets a whiff that, you know, something's off. It's not going to go well. One of the neighborhoods we went into, the guy did get a whiff. And it wasn't anything crazy that happened, but he walks in front of it.

And you must speak really fucking good. Holy shit. You know what's fucked up about it, dude? When you go to DLI. I mean, the fucking place you're talking about is like so cultural. Yeah. And we, lose, we didn't understand that. I mean, if you're wearing the whatever on the wrong side, they know.

Oh, yeah. They fucking know. Oh, yeah. You're having to talk to them. Oh, yeah. Yep. Yeah. on a fucking trash road

on a fucking trash road like the poorest part of the fucking city yeah um yeah so it got it would get dicey um of one of the poorest places in the world yeah it would get dicey

um yeah there was one time where we were in a neighborhood and the dude walks in front of the vehicle and he just looks at me kind of like what you were just saying he looks at me and I look at him and he just knows

that I'm not. I could look like whatever, but I'm not from there. And he like bolts to his vehicle, and I think I hear him like calling out to some of his buddies. I'm like, oh, fuck, here we go. And then I like reverse fucking J-turn out of there. I'm like, oh, I get to use the fucking J-turn. That's pretty fucking sick.

And then like we book it down. And then we see them from the rear-view mirror. like they're like it i mean it's like keystone cops dude they're like turning down these alleyways trying to like get to us um but we got out of there uh just dumb shit would happen like that uh in between you know all the all the high stress stuff um eFP boy we uh we eventually got him um one thing that was not so fun is you know sometimes you know you're expected to get up close to these dudes, you know. They might be S-vested up.

You don't know? They think... That's a suicide best for the listeners. Suicide vest, yeah. They think something's off. They're going to fucking clack that shit off. And so I was always hyper-cognizant of what was going on around me, you know,

and like, you know, the way that I would conduct myself and all of this. But I was never really scared. I was like, this is the greatest fucking opportunity anyone could ever ask for in my position. I feel like I'm contributing directly to, like, critical needs of the organization. And so I'm going to fucking get after it. Actually, one time kind of hilariously, we hung our asses out there and got, like, really good shots of some dudes. And we were working with you guys to do it.

and we pass it off to you guys. And then two days later, it comes back with, like, circular reporting that, like, hey, these dudes, like, built this target package and, like, here's the, here's the fucking, you know, shots from the, the recie. And I'm like, bro, that was, that was us. That was not. I was like, okay, whatever. But, you know, no one's in it to take credit for anything.

It's just like, all right, whatever. Let's just fucking get the thing done. And then, you know, one of the very last, I mean, I must have done hundreds and hundreds of those ops over the course of my time there, which was really fun. You know, you just get into a rhythm, you know, you, you just know how to be in that area, man. Like, and, hey, okay, you want me to walk down a fucking alley in the poorest part of town in this fucking place and, like, if I fuck something up, like, shit's going to go sideways. Cool. I'm comfortable with that. You just kind of like, you go native.

It's fucking awesome. So, like I said, it's my favorite fucking place. Yeah. To work. Yeah, to work. So my very last op We finally After never having had one

Across all the deployments and ops and shit Got a bird chop to us And so they're like Hey you're gonna have a bird on station for like 45 minutes There's just like Sloppy seconds You know like they're off doing something for somebody else And they're like all right

I guess they can support you on their way home. I'm like, cool. Thanks, man. I'm like, all right, here's what I need. I need to dial them up and be able to calm with them in real time. And they're like negative. You're not authorized to talk to them. I was like, I'm not authorized to talk to a fucking aircraft overhead. That's supporting me. And my guys, like negative, you got to run the comms through this stupid comms loop that ran from where we were at all the way state side and then all the way back to where we were at

this is like fucking 20,000 mile loop of a comm. I was like, that's just not gonna work, dude. Like, you know, when you're... Why in the fuck? When you're out there, like, you know, microseconds matter. I was like, I'm not dealing with this.

So I'd look at our comms guy. I'm like, hey man, we got a green radio. Yeah, dude. I'm like, fire up this frequency, please, if you would, and hand me that radio. and and so I fired up. I get comms with the bird. I'm like, hey, I'm checking in with you guys.

You guys will be working for us tonight. Now, that was interesting for me because I used to be the dude on the bird, like helping support all these fucking dudes on the ground. I knew how to talk. I knew what they would do. I knew all the procedures they had. I knew how they would be working the gear. I knew how they would look at the imagery.

I just knew it, right? It was like I was one with them, and at the same time, over the course of hundreds of reps, I was one with these guys that I was on the ground with too. And so it kind of was really cool because my career came full circle on that op, right?

I was able to fire up the radio, talk to the bird like I was one of them, talked to these guys like I'm one of them, fuse all of it together, and like navigate fluidly through this urban environment in order to get the work done. And that was really cool. I was just able to bring it all home.

That is fucking badass, man. Yeah, you were definitely meant to be there. Running a business sounds great until you're buried in payroll, tax forms, onboarding docs, and HR issues at 10.30 at night. I've had those days where paperwork completely eats your time and you think there has to be a better way to do this. That's why we use Gusto. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses.

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talking about this earlier, when you spend too much time coloring outside the lines in the military, whatever bureaucracy or like personnel machine that operates your service will come get a hold of you. And like, where the fuck you've been for the past, you know, X many years? Like, you need to come back to the fold and go back to Big Blue Air Force and go take an instructor billet somewhere or what have you. I was like, I'm not going to do that. After having done the shit that I've been doing for the past, you know, almost decade by that point, I wasn't going to go back to all the stuff that Big Blue Air Force normally does. Like good, like awesome people doing all of those jobs, but I had just seen too much, you know.

I had seen too much. And I went to the leadership at NSW. I was like, is there any fucking way for me? to like be here full time i was like i'll get out i'll fucking do an inter-service transfer to the navy they're like i mean we got pulled we don't have that kind of pull you know if you do an inter-service transfer you might have to go be on a boat for a few years um and then and then we'll pull you i was like okay it's not going to work um and then i had one of the leadership go to um headquartered headquarters Air Force and like go brief me by name and be like the ideal situation for you guys

and us is for Nick to have a bullet at this at this organization. Air Force was like, nope, not our thing. Damn, no shit. So I was like, okay, I got no options here. So I left the service. because there was nowhere for me to go. I had gotten to the end of my career track. Like, as a cryptologic linguist, there was nothing else for me to do while active duty. So I left.

Again, it was just a feeling of, dude, this train, this machine is just going to keep functioning without me, and it's a terrible feeling. one day you're you're the guy one day you're the fucking guy you're the fucking guy that made admiral mcraving

rerout fucking LHCs and helicopter assault forces to prosecute a fucking high value target that you found you're the fucking guy that like you know people are relying on

you're the guy that can like that bring capabilities to bear that that other people in the organization cannot. And then to go from that to, you're just of another fucking dude on the street with taxes and bills to pay and rent, get your fucking resume together,

start applying for jobs on fucking indeed.com. Dude, that broke me. And at that moment where your identity was completely nuked all in the matter of a few seconds

you know you're done you walk out that compound you're done I knew what it was like to be my dad and to go from the fucking dude who had escaped the boarding school he went through and become this highly

respected individual that got to do amazing things around the world, you know, in his own way, you know, in the, in the merchant marine. To go from that to work in a fucking styrofoam cup job at a factory in Jersey, that's the feeling I felt wash over me. And it was tough. The first, the first year or two out of the military was tough. I landed a contracting position with the SOCOM element.

to be an instructor for some of their initial training cycles. So this was a SOCOM element that specialized in doing the things that I had been doing for the past few years. And so I went on staff as one of their instructor cadre. And that particular organization tends to be quite isolated. They tend to work in their own little vacuum. They're kind of like you guys in that way. You guys, your former guys. And so me coming from one of the other, you know, task force components,

they're like, all right, cool, but we need you to just like check some boxes and teach these dudes how to do stuff and whatnot. And I did, but during the course of it, you know, I gave some feedback to them. I was like, hey, man, some of the shit that these guys are doing is going to get them killed out in the field. Like, I don't want to get into any of the TTPs, but I was like, you know, here's where you guys need to rethink some of these TTPs that these guys are doing. Because having just done like hundreds of these fucking things in like low permissive, semi-permissive environments, I was like, you try that shit out there and you're going to get got. In retrospect, I could have gone about it a different way. I could have been more diplomatic about it. I could have tried to, you know, change it from the inside.

But it was a very insular organization. And it's like, unless you came out of that place, like, they weren't really interested in what you had to say. So, you know, I wrapped up with them. It's interesting, right? It's interesting how they don't want to hear it. You can't blame them, right? Like, they have, like any of the task force components,

They have a long history of successes and they have their own culture. Yeah, it's human. It's human nature, I think. And me being, you know, young at the time and not politically savvy, you know, I just, you know, to me, it's like, I'm just going to be a fucking straight shooter, dude. Like, here you go. Here's what I think. It's like, well, that's not really the best way to go about things. Are you at like my sister, Klimpani?

Is that where you're at? I'm trying to play within the lines here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Kind of. Okay. So very politically correct. You're coming from a unit of fucking savages.

Doesn't end up. Yeah. Okay. It's a hard transition. I get it. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Yeah, they call, they have different terminology for everything. call things differently they um yeah so i are wrapped up with very gentle you have to be gentle in these organizations you can't be direct you have to beat around the fucking bush you have to play the fucking game yeah and it it it did it it be it's a problem for for people like you and i who come out of organizations where there you just don't there's no there's not much bullshit to sift through yes just you fucked up. You're going to get fucking people killed.

Don't fucking do it again. And if you try bringing that bullshit, man, you're going to see your ass out the door real fucking quick. Then I was completely out on my ass. So like... Oh, so did you get... Do they kick you out? No, they didn't kick me out, but the, you know,

there was some contract shenanigans. You know how it goes. Like someone comes in, outbids the incumbent. Oh, you didn't get invited. Oh, okay. Outbid the incumbent. You know, the new contract incumbent. is like, you know, we're going to cut your salary by such and such.

It's like, well, I'm not really invested in this fucking place, so, like, I'm out. But it was an opportunity for me to, you know, convey some of the lessons learned from the field. Like, I know we're being very general here with the type of shit that we're talking about, but at the time, there weren't very many organizations doing the kind of shit that we were doing, like at the organization I was at. And so anything that I could do to convey to these guys, here's the realities of working in these environments and the things that you need to be cognizant of and so on.

I tried to do. There was one point where they were going through their initial training cycles, and it was like one of their ending exercises. And the scenario was a hostage rescue, basically. And so these guys were out there, and their job was to, essentially locate the hostages, right?

And once they do, that triggers, you know, a series of things. And culmination exercise, and I could tell that, like, it hadn't really clicked for some of them, right? Like the type of serious shit that they were going to get into, because these are people that came from anywhere, everywhere, you know, traditional, like conventional military and, so on. And so I go visit one of the teams out in the field with some of the other active duty cadre. And the active duty cadre is like, hey, where's everyone at? And the students are like, well, we got some dudes going to get subway right now. And then we got one team just like trolling around like over here. And I lost my shit. I was like,

Hey man, let me tell you guys something. This scenario that you guys are doing here for this culmination exercise is one of the most critical scenarios you will ever encounter in the real fucking hostage rescue, right? Especially the pre-assault portion of a hostage rescue. It could very well be the case that two weeks from now, after you guys graduate this training program, you guys could be in front of the fucking CG, for real, downrange somewhere,

briefing him on what the fuck your plan is to find these people, right? If you get put on an actual op. And I'll tell you right fucking now that telling the CG that you got some fucking dudes getting food and then you got another set of dudes just trolling around some random location in town with no

hypothesis behind why they're over there or any leads whatsoever is not gonna fucking fly. So tighten your shit up. This is your culmination exercise. You're gonna be doing this for real in two weeks.

And then I said it and I was like, fuck dude. Like I shouldn't have said that. I'm just a contractor. I'm not part of this organization. I didn't come from this organization. So I looked at the active duty cadre and I was like,

Hey, you know, sorry if I overstepped any lines. Like, I'm just trying to convey to them the reality of, you know, what they're going to be facing. And they're like, dude, no fucking problem. Like, they need to hear that shit. Like, it's all good. And so I kind of, that was, that was kind of the last thing I did. I kind of saw that culmination exercise through. And then I left.

And then now that was kind of my off ramp from. from anything to do with any of this shit. And then now at this point, I was just a straight fucking civilian. And, you know, the savings that you have as a fucking E6, you know, they dwindle quick, right? And I'm out here. I'm trying to land somewhere in the civilian world.

Months go by. You know, I'm not really able to make anything stick. my resumes are just fucking disasters dude like I look at some of my old resume I still have like weapons qualls on my fucking resumes that I sent around I'm like are you fucking stupid the hell are you thinking savings are dwindling one day I wake up there's you know three digit dollar amount in the bank I'm still with my with with my ex at this point. You know, my son is... Three digits? Yeah. Yeah.

Three digits. My son is two and a half or so. My stepdaughter's... She was 11 at 12. I'm like, I got to make some shit happen. And right around then I... Here's the problem, right? When you're working the work that I did for the organization,

you only kind of get to learn shit at a very superficial level. Like, you know, whether it's the EW side or whether it's like the cyber shit or whether it's something else, right? CQC, whatever. You never get to go into anything at the level of specialization of like a dude that just focuses on that. You don't get to do CQC like a fucking team guy. You don't get to do EW like a full-time tacky W guy.

You don't get to do cyber as a full-time. cyber dude. So you dabble in this shit and you kind of synthesize it all and you go do the mission. But you're handicapped because you transition out to the civilian world and it's like, all right, well, let me try and get a job in cybersecurity. Shit, I didn't think about that. Well, I kind of know how this shit works. I know, you know, if you go tell me... You're a jack of all trades. Jack of all trades. I can be told where to go plug the fucking USB drive in, but I don't know what the fuck that

USB drive is doing when I do that. I don't know how all that shit works. Like, what machines are clicking and worrying, like, when things begin operating. And so I had to do a couple of things very quickly. Number one, I had to just deep dive into something. And I was like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to deep dive into the cyber shit because I can finally, like, fully transition into the civilian world. If I stayed in, like, EW and all that shit, I would still be in the, the orbits of, you know, the old organizations. I just wanted to make a clean break. I'm like, if I'm out, I'm out.

So I fucking dove deep into the cyber shit and data analytics. And I basically put myself through like a civilian hell week, basically. And for a week straight, I would watch like Harvard lectures on data analytics and cybersecurity and all this other shit on like, 3x speed and just like osmosisize all the fucking things that these people were saying all these professors you know doing giving their lectures and um i did that for a week straight and so you're you're legitimately just trying to fucking download as much information as fast as possible down into fucking one week so that so i can start interviewing for wow for jobs are you understanding

all the lectures no but but i'm picking i'm picking things up here and there. I'm not understanding the major, like, I'm not deep diving into any of the concepts, right? But I'm learning the language and I'm learning the concepts and I'm learning like the breadth of things. Right around that time, there was a time article or like a fucking business insider article that came out about this company called Endgame. And it was run by a guy named Nate Fick, who had been a Marine officer, Marine Force Reconnaught officer. And he wrote a book and they made like a fucking HBO show about his platoon. But he had gotten out a few years previously and he had become the CEO of this company. I was like, that sounds like a cool fucking company to work for.

and, you know, the CEO seems pretty legit. And what they did was they created essentially exotic cyber warfare capabilities for the U.S. government and for commercial customers. They hadn't quite figured out the commercial customer angle yet, but U.S. government knew exactly what they wanted from them, and it was a bunch of former Intel community guys, DOD guys, that focused fully on cyber. I was like, here's a place that I can go.

I can fucking learn from these dudes. I can figure out how all this shit works, and then I can use that as a launching pad to move forward. Problem was they didn't have any fucking job openings except for a data science position. And I was like, I don't know, what the fuck is data science? And so I started looking into it. And I come to realize, okay, well,

a lot of it is around the type of shit that I had to do before rolling out on an op, right? You're looking at data, you're crunching numbers, you're taking your analyses and then you are translating them into something that has to happen in the real world, right? In my, in the old jobs case, it was translate that data into how the fuck you're going to plan your, you know, surveillance operation or whatever. So I put together this like PowerPoint deck. I apply to the role and I put together this PowerPoint deck that they wanted for this presentation. and I didn't know shit, dude.

The title of the PowerPoint deck was because I was trying to translate shit from my military career. It was like fugitive recovery utilizing data analytics. And it was all about how you can use data that you would get from various sensors and basically sift through it

using machine learning algorithms. I was just saying shit that I had seen in these goddamn part of the lectures, right? How you can use machine learning in order to drill, down on where this fucking fugitive was at any given moment and, you know, execute a recovery. You know, trying to use language that civilians would understand. So I go, I go, my first interview is with this, like, data scientist guy.

And he's a fucking smart dude, like PhD from like Ivy League school, like all this shit, AI machine learning expert. And he's like, he draws a thing on the board. he's like, what is a type of graph that you can't get caught in a loop in? And I was like, bro, what the fuck are you talking about? I have no idea. But I try making some shit up. I know the answer now. It's a fucking directed acyclic graph.

But at the time, I was like, I have no idea what this dude's talking about. I'm going to fail this process and I'm not going to make it. I guess they saw something in me. don't know what it was, like just like the earnestness with which I answered. They could probably tell I did some preparatory work or whatever, but they kept moving me on in the process. And then I get to the panel presentation and, you know, I start walking through it. They have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about. They're like fugitive recovery. The fuck is this dude. This is a cyber company. There was one guy that walks in and he's my friend to this day. I'm trying to get him

to join the company actually. He came from your friend. former organization and he's like sitting in the back and he's like looking at this shit. He's like, yeah, I know what this dude's talking about. He's like, where did you say you came from? I tell him the fucking squadron. And he's like, standby. He like walks outside. He makes a phone call to one of the dudes at the squadron.

And he's like, you know, this guy, Nick? You know, that's the first thing any of us do, right? Fucking call people and be like, is this guy full of shit or what? And the guy on the other end of the other end of the the line. He's like, yo, whatever happened to that dude? Like, is he still active dude? Get him the fuck back here, if he is.

And this guy... This new guy sucks. He's like, that guy was fucking awesome, man. And my friend John is like, fuck you. I'm taking him. So he hired me after that. And that led to

I worked at end game for a while. Shit, man. I learned a lot about how the civilian world thinks about cyber warfare capabilities and cyber defense and because, you know, we're building these exotic capabilities for the U.S. government, but at the same time, we're trying to figure out how to translate that expertise into some kind of defensive capability for the private sector, right? And so when I joined the company, we were going through this phase where, all right, we can do all this cool offensive shit.

Now, how do we use that to protect companies and in private? private sector entities. So I just got, I was able to be immersed in all of it. And it was a really good, it was a really good springboard for me. So I would do shit like, you know, I would put out posts on social media about my, my thoughts on cyber security and shit like that. Just cringe-worthy stuff looking back on it at this point. And one of the things I wanted to do was eventually start my own company. I had no fucking idea how to do any of that shit, right? I had zero concept. But I would go to these like meetups,

like these veteran meetups, you know, these small, here's how to start, your small business or whatever. I was like, all right, I'll go to this one. And it was up in New York, took the family, drove up to New York, and it was at the Goldman Sachs building. And I was like, it was pretty fucking cool. You know, one world trade is across the street. and I go to the event and I'm supposed to be paired up with this mentor who's supposed to teach me

about the world of Silicon Valley and tech and all this shit. Well, come to find out the fucking dude I had been paired up with got shit house the night before and woke up hungover and didn't show up. and so I'm sitting at this table. I'm like waiting for this dude to show up. No one shows up. And this guy from Palantir walks by and he's like, hey man,

did your guy not show up or like, what's going on? And I'm like, yeah, I don't know what happened. Like he didn't show up. He's like, I think I know what happened. He's a fellow Palantir guy. And he's like, all right, just come talk to me. And he's like, hey, what are you got going on?

What's your background? And I'm telling him, He was like, okay, and you're at endgame? Yep. He's like, okay, interesting. Well, you know, fuck starting your own business. Like, why don't you just come over to us at Palantir? I'm like, I don't know much about you guys.

I don't really know what you do. So I started looking into him. And I was like, that place looks fucking legit, dude. I would love to work there. And, you know, at the time, it was very secretive. It was like any article about Palantir was like CIA backed company secretive CIA backed data analytics company does blah fucking blah I was like CIA backed I'm in let's go fucking yeah fucking get after shit so it turns out that they needed a dude

with that that was just like that could just speak you know like just be put in front of customers and like could speak to some of the tech shit but you know also be good at speaking to customers that believed in the mission and um and so this guy uh put me through the process but here's the problem i had already applied to palatier a couple of times before like before i knew a lot about them and that's part of the reason why i was hesitant i was like i don't know i've already like applied to you guys a couple times before and um the hiring process there at the time this was 2016 was fucking insane like there were some people that went through 11 12 rounds of interviews with only shit your engineers like the bar for hiring

was so fucking high and I know you're gonna have sham here in a bit and you can tell you more about that one thing I really respect about sham and a lot of the early pound tier people was that somehow they not only built this culture of high fucking performance at all times, but they sustained it over the course of X many years, you know, and that's work. Like, that is institution building. And that's the culture that they had built at the time. That culture didn't necessarily have a place for Nick Seatherom and former fucking

task force dude that is a jack of all trades, doesn't really know a lot about any single one, didn't come from an Ivy League school, and is trying to get a job at that. at this fucking place, right? Like, on paper, there's no way I'm getting past a first round recruiter. So what this guy did was he's like, all right, there's a kind of internal process we got. And if we think someone can truly hack it here, but they don't really come from this traditional background that we look for, we're going to put them straight in front of Alex Karp, Palet Air CEO.

Oh, shit. you're going to have five minutes with carp and if he likes you in those five minutes then you'll probably get the job and if he thinks you're a piece of shit then he'll walk you out of the building or he'll have his assistant walk you out of the building

I got nothing to lose right I'm like well I've already applied to this place a couple of fucking times like yeah I'll go I'll go talk to carp so I go to their Washington DC office and they take me up there they take me to a carp's office dude is wearing like blue Russian

track suit, bare feet walking around the office, just like he's the fucking man around there, right? And he comes in, he like kicks his feet up. He's like, why the fuck do you want to work here? I was like,

I looked him dead in me. I didn't know he's going to ask me this. So I didn't really have a canned answer. I look him dead in the eye and I was like, same reason I want to work at SpaceX one day because I want to have an impact on our society and our country

in the same way that I did when I was active duty as close as I can get anyways and you squint at me and he was like okay and then he calls his assistant over he's like get this guy a fucking job offer are you shitting me yeah that was it what that was it it lasted like two minutes

and get the fuck out no i'm not joking dude like that was it um and he didn't know shit about you didn't know shit about me and uh so he's like get this guy a job offer and so she like scuffles out and goes to like you know coordinate all that shit and uh he's like i'll i'll walk you out he's like so what do you want to do here i'm like dude you just said like get this guy a job offer like does that mean you don't How are you going to give me a job offer and not know what I'm going to do here? And I didn't realize at the time, but like, this is the kind of shit that happens, right? Like there's no structured process for how to have an interaction with Alex Karp, right?

There's no, like, here's the interview flow, and here are the data points he'll want before you get an offer. And like, here's what has to be nailed down and shit. It's like, it's all based on human to human vibes. And whatever vibe I was putting out in that two fucking minutes I had with him, he was like, okay, you're, you're going to fit in here. I don't know how he knew, but he knew. So he walked me out, got the offer like 30 minutes later, like, hey, some fucking recruiter calls me.

I went and had a burger in Georgetown. And then recruiter calls me while I'm trying to eat this fucking burger. So I walked out. And I'm like trying to negotiate with this guy. I don't know how to fucking negotiate salaries. I got fucking burger in my mouth. I'm like stock options. I don't really know what that means.

Okay. Well, I guess I'll go with like, I didn't know that you could push back with any of this shit. Right. I'm like, now if someone were to come to me and give me like this here, here's your salary options. and here's your stock option options. I'd be like, that's great. Double everything. And then we can have a conversation.

But back then, I didn't know shit. I was like, cool, I guess I'll go with option two. You know, grateful for the opportunity. He's like, cool, we'll be in touch. And that's how I ended up at Palantir. That's fucking crazy. Dude, just a lot of times, I'm just like, I have no business in any of these fucking places.

I had no business at NSW, right? I had no business at Palantir. So this pattern in my life has basically been like, find a way into rooms that you have no fucking business in, earn your place in the room, and then figure out the next fucking room. Palantir was cool. It was a,

I'd never been exposed to a tech company before, and everyone was just so fucking smart. everyone was just world class at what they did. And the culture there, there's sort of two, there's like different departments at Palantir. There's the core product team. There are the teams that sort of maintain

the long-term, like customer deployments. And so, you know, a bank might have signed some five-year agreement with Palantir, and these guys go and like, sustain that account over the course of the five years. And it's got engineers on it. It's got like business development people on it and so on. Then there's the pilot teams.

And that's what I fucking wanted to do. Because the job of the pilot teams was basically, hey, carp or whoever the fuck at the very senior levels of the company have gotten this Fortune 500 organization to agree to some Pallentier pilot, right? We're going to do it for free. Here's what's going to happen. You're going to pick some guys. You're going to parachute in, metaphorically, and you're going to do anything and everything you need to do in order to convince that customer to convert that pilot to a long-term Pallenture contract. And for me, that was the greatest fucking challenge anyone could have put in front of me at the time because it felt exactly like being back at the old

organization. Like, here's an ambiguous, high impact tasking, go get some fucking dudes and make it happen, right? And no one's going to tell you what to do. Send us some fucking sit reps. Perfect. This I know how to do. It's what every fucking business is looking for. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, I can't believe someone is giving me this latitude. At least that's what I'm looking for.

Yeah. I hope you find it. There's, you know, one thing I... A bunch of them. Yeah. Yeah. One thing, one thing I've learned is... I'm always looking for more. Yeah. Yeah. Something has happened to the work ethic, like, across the American workforce in the past few years. I don't know what the fuck it is, man. Maybe it's since COVID, but, like, there's just, like, a downward trend and, like, the desire to want to work hard.

and contribute to something and be a part of it. I don't know if that's true. You don't think so? I don't know. I mean, I'm like you. I spent the majority of my adult life in special ops and intelligence agencies, and those are fucking hard charges, the majority of them, you know, and everybody's the best of what the fuck they do. Yeah.

And then I got out and tried some shit and I noticed it immediately. Yeah. These people don't fucking want to be here more than, you know, They don't want to be here past 5 p.m. Yeah. Most of them are out before 5. Most of them don't want to come in. You know, and it's just, I just fucking noticed it right off the bat.

Yeah. And I mean, that's not how fuck we operate here. Yeah. That's, I think that's just, you're used to working for people that are always pushing the bar higher. Yeah. You know what I mean? And all of your peers are pushing the bar higher. And it becomes fucking competitive.

Yep. And everybody's a perfectionist and everybody takes you. takes their job seriously and then you get out and you're with normal performers. Average people, below average people. And I think a lot of them probably live happier lives than you or I. Oh boy. Yeah. I mean, that's something to be said.

They're not the ones that are out there complaining about not having enough time with their kids and shit like that. Yeah. Sitting there and fucking eating potato chips watching the Super Bowl on their Like, I just, I'm not that person. Yeah. You know, you obviously aren't either. And nobody that's, nobody that builds something like what you're building or what a building or any of that. Like, it's just, it's not in the fucking DNA.

But then you get exposed. Yeah. To the average DNA and the below average DMA and people with the fucking no drive. And, and they, hey, they got their place in society. Yeah. I don't belong in that. Yeah. here do I man and one reason that we have you know the things that I learned at Pounce here

hiring bar the just fucking every day bring your fucking A game to work I've tried to establish that here with my co-founders at Wraithwatch and I think we've done a pretty good job we got a fucking stellar crew of just stone cold hitters I can put any fucking tasking in front of them and they will just deliver without complaint, any, any tasking. But all of that to say, it was a unique opportunity for me to apply, like, if not the engineering skill set, because I didn't have it at the time that I learned over the years,

just the whatever the fuck it is, right? Just the get after it mode. and and we did um but i'm i'm never satisfied right so like i'm i'm always i'm like how does that work all right you guys are deploying this like data pipeline and like okay how's a data pipeline work how does this shit go from one place to another why does it why does it work that way what's the big fucking deal oh well the big deal is when there's petabytes of data it takes time to sift through all of it. And you can't just have someone sit down in front of all of it and do a search and then shit just magically crops up. Like there's a lot of instrumentation and pre-processing and algorithms

and everything that's involved. So I learned, I started picking up all of it. I started learning all of it. I tried building some of it on my own. So I tried contributing to, to what the engineers on my team we're doing. And then over time, the scope of responsibility is just crept upward and upward. Right. So I started out with this commercial account in, it's a department store that's like a household name. And that was my first account. I was like, well, I've gone from fucking tier, tier one, uh, fucking reconnaissance dude to, uh, this department store that I'm responsible for. okay, that's cool. But I did my best, you know. And I think you just do that enough times and you get put more shit gets put on your plate. And eventually I found myself working like more critical

and more critical accounts. And Palantir eventually moved me to Sydney, Australia to handle their APAC region and some of the accounts that we had there. So move the family, packed them up to go to Australia. It was awesome. And it was an opportunity for me to just apply, like, basic fucking leadership, dude. Basic leadership, like to these kids, like, these kids straight out of Stanford, like, would come on board my team.

And they would just look at me like, all right, what do we do, boss? and then I had to I had to figure it the fuck out. It was interesting for me because it's not like I was a fucking officer in the military, right? I didn't go to leadership. I didn't go to officer school.

I didn't go to leadership training or anything. Especially in the jobs that I was working, you're working in very small, tight teams. And there was not a lot of opportunity for me to, like... How do you deal with that, man? I'm genuinely curious because I don't either. I don't have, I have zero former leadership training

and I'm trying to run a fucking company. And, you know, in the, I'm not good at getting in the weeds and fucking tell every little fucking thing they need to do. Yeah. I'm looking for exactly what you described. Somebody that can, this is what I want built. This is the vision. Yep.

I'm going to give you everything you fucking need to do it. But you have to figure out how to do it. Yeah. And then they do it and they build a fucking mini empire under what we're trying to do, or they don't. Yeah. And they don't last. It was a process.

I didn't know how to get it right from day one. But what I think I'm pretty good at doing is finding myself in ambiguous situations and then relying on initiative, I guess, to figure it the fuck. out and one way I would figure it the fuck out is I mean dude like watching Jocko was very helpful like in the early days reading extreme ownership like I was talking about it with Jeremy why did Jock resonate with so many civilians there's been hundreds of fucking military dudes that have come out of the military and talked about leadership lessons and so on but the way that he expressed the ideas in his book, I think were done in a way where it just like, it clicked.

It was like, okay, this is something I can tangibly apply to my job tomorrow when I go into the office, right? I can take ownership for stuff. I can, like, instead of antagonizing people and trying to build fiefdoms, I can, like, think about the team first. Now, there are limits to this because the, you know, the. the game theoretic structure of a civilian company can disincentivize, like, if you go too overboard to the other side of the extreme ownership spectrum, then like, you're going to have

fucked, right? So it's a fine balance of figuring out, okay, where and how to apply those skills, and you can do it. Like, you can apply these tactical tidbits. And I think that's why he landed so well with so many people. And that helped me out a lot of the, lot back in the day and honestly a lot of it was I've got 15 fucking engineers looking at me for guidance on what to do and I I was like when I was in and I looked at leadership and I wanted to know what to do from them like what did I expect from them and I just kind of inverted it on its face and I tried to be the the leader that I always wanted to work for in the military now did I get it right all the time no fucking way I'd fuck it up all the time um

but it's a process. It's a constantly evolving process. Definitely being surrounded by really smart, motivated, driven people forces you to like amp up your own game. And it's like you're living in a crystal, in a fishbowl, basically. And it's like, how do you want to act so that these people are not just, inspired by you, that's, that's like kind of self-serving, but like, are you making these lives, are you making these people's lives better through the way that you were behaving and acting?

So that was like one heuristic I used. I wish I had a simple answer for you, man. I don't. You're saying all the right things. It's a lot of the shit I think about. Yeah. I think, you know, I think it's important that you inspire your people. You're the fucking, you're the leader of the pack. I don't think that sounds cliche at all. They have to be inspired to fucking work for you. Otherwise, it's going to be shit work. If they're not bought in on the fucking mission, what the fuck are you doing here?

Get out. Yeah. That's the nine to fiver. Yeah. That's the fucking, the, let's not move the bar up person. Yep. You know, I have to feel like you have to, you empower your people, you look for the people to have the fucking drive that you have. And you empower them. You give them everything they fucking need to succeed. But if they don't take the ball and run with it,

yeah, fuck out. Get the fuck out. Yeah. And some people haven't. Some people don't. Yeah. Most don't. Most don't.

Most don't. This is true. You know, a lot of people, we experience this all the time, all the time because, you know, people have this idea of what a startup is. It's been sort of made into this. legend, you know, this, the tech startup, right? It's a thing. They've made fucking movies about it. What it really comes down to is just grinding it out, day in and day out, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with no end in sight, right? And you just fucking, you're making shit happen all the time. And people think they want that. And we'll interview candidates. And they're like,

well, you know, I'm not really cool with like working weekends. cool man I understand go work at a big company because a startup is going to demand different things from you it's like it's like going to fucking task force and being like yeah well don't page me on like Fridays because I'm not into that

okay well it's not what the organization needs um now One thing I had always wanted since I was a kid was to be involved with like something space exploration related. And, you know, after enough reps at Palantir on the pilot teams, I had just gotten the routine down. You know, it's like, okay, parachute into this fucking organization bank, you know, big Fortune 500. pharmaceutical, whatever it was, make friends with everybody.

You're basically doing like, you know, recie on the ground and just making shit happen. I had gotten the reps down and I was like, okay, I can go do, and I learned enough about the ins and outs of all the engineering that was going down at these places.

And, you know, we had built out entire cyber defense programs using Palantir for a lot of our customers, including, entire countries. Like I was the team lead for a cyber defense program that we built out for an entire country in one particular region of the world. And they were built on the Palantir platform. So by this point, I had developed a good sense of what it takes to build a solid cyber defense and cyber defense engineering function.

So I was like, all right, I can go do this and not just be flitting around the world doing it for Palantir's customers, which I love doing a great company, great organization. But I wanted to apply that to defending something tangible. And, you know, when I was a kid and I was going through all the personal shit at home, I would bury myself in like Star Trek. books. And also I have some fond memories of watching Star Trek with my dad, like, you know, when, when things were still stable and the shit hadn't blown up and gone nuclear in the household. Like, I've good memories of that. And when I was a kid, I wanted to grow up and, like, be the dude that invented warp drive. You know, you know, the fucking, the engine that they have in Star Trek that lets them, you know, travel around the fucking star.

stars. You know, obviously that, first of all, it's not fucking physically feasible. Second of all, it's like that's not really where my life trajectory took me into advanced physics research. But I was able to build out a pretty fucking baller cyber defense program. And I came across a job posting at SpaceX. And I had my eye on that fucking place for a long time. And I saw an opening for a lead position to run their cybersecurity operations team, send my resume in, and the recruiter reached out to me like 15 minutes later. Are you serious? Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know, dude. I mean, I say this shit out loud and I don't know. It's like I'm making it up. Actually, I was just talking to that recruiter the other day because I was trying to get him to come to Raithwatch. recruit for us but he's like nah dude I'm I'm happy I'm like you know why I remember you because I hit submit and you fucking called me like 15 minutes later I was like I was overseas at at one of the pound-tier customer sites um interestingly during one of the driving courses that I went to with Tasswell you remember Griffin group down in Florida I did you know sending you guys

down there but they would do this like driving course and you do all the fucking shit like you do the pit maneuvers and all that you do the rollovers and you do the break contact the break contact after the rollovers and all that shit and uh in 2010 i remember going down to a griffin group course in florida and it was a couple of miles their uh their racetrack that they were doing all the shit on was a few miles away from cape canaver and so we had just gone through like one evolution of like pitting everybody and all the cars were up and we pull them all over to the side. There's like fucking oil beacon around everywhere.

And we're getting out. We're doing a debrief. And then we hear a rocket launching behind us. And we're like, that's fucking cool. Like, didn't have that on the schedule. So we turn around and we look at the rocket. And it's coming up off the deck from Canaveral, which is just over the horizon a bit. And it was like no rocket I had ever seen before.

It was long, spindly, it was completely white. It looked kind of futuristic. And I was like, that's a very strange looking rocket. I've never seen anything like that before. I was telling that story to my girlfriend many years later. And she was like, that was the fucking, you know, CRS 1 mission from SpaceX to the International Space Station. That was the first mission that we had launched to take supplies to the International

Space Station for the first time. And she's like, what are the fucking chances? that you got to see that shit while you were in this random ass driving course in Florida. Shit just happens, dude. I don't know. So,

SpaceX was amazing. It is the fucking, you know, Elon used to say it is the special forces of tech companies. I always thought that was dumb, like having come out the community. I was like, you don't know what that means. But then I got there and I'm like, yeah, I get it. You know, he's trying to, he's trying to rally everyone and inspire people and

get them to understand that they're working at a company like no other. And everyone was just locked the fuck in to the company mission. If you, you ever been to the headquarters over there? So when you walk into the headquarters and you go to the chow hall upstairs, they have one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen in my life painted as a mural on the wall of the chowl. And it is a sequence of images displaying Mars through various phases of terraforming. So you see Mars as it exists today, as a completely dead red planet. And then you see it as like with some green and some water. And then you see it with more green and more water.

and then you see it as this lush, beautiful Jurassic Park-looking planet at the end. So there's like four stages to that mural. And you walk past that fucking thing every day to get food. And you're like, there is no question what we're trying to do here. We're trying to make this happen for humanity on timescales that we're not wired to think about as humans, right? It's going to take us hundreds of years to have that vision come to fruit. but they somehow managed to encapsulate that into this mural that they painted on the wall and when you would walk by it there was no fucking question about what the fuck you were doing

at on any given day it was support that that's why you're here that's why you gave up everything else that you were that you were doing and you decided to sign up for this for this grind at space x and it was a grind but you walk in there you look at the factory floor there's one section of the chow hall that's over overlooked mission control and it's overlooking the factory. And you remember that feeling that I told you about the NSW compound? And there's just like shit going on. You know, you feel like you're part of a big machine, a big impactful machine.

It feels like that at SpaceX 2. Just rockets being like moved around from one side of the factory to another. There's engines being manufactured over in one corner over there. There's footage from some capsule that's in orbit right now being piped into mission control. It was just, you're in the center of the world as it pertains to human spaceflight. And at the time, we were getting ready to send humans up on the first crew dragon spacecraft. Because before then, it had all been cargo. So we had crew raided the dragon spacecraft.

And the whole company was getting jocced up to send, we called them Doug and Bob. I forget their last names, but there were these two NASA astronauts. And their faces were plastered everywhere in the sense of everything you guys do is to support these two gentlemen who have families, kids to get to the space station safely. Any fuck up is going to fuck them up. And it's going to fuck their families up. So get it right, get everything you're doing to every layer of attention and level of detail right all the time. Cool. High performance environment.

This I can deal with. And my job, my team's job at the time was to basically be on the front lines of the cyber defense function. At the time, we had stolen a bunch of market share. We had captured a bunch of market share. the Russians, right? So Russia used to make a big deal about, you know, one of that, like the head of the Russian space agency was like, if you didn't have us, you're not getting into space unless you have a big ass trampoline or some shit. And then I think Elon was like, well, we're about to make a big ass trampoline. So stand the fuck by. So the Russians were none too happy that

a private company like SpaceX was about to reinvigorate. human space flight on behalf of the United States of America. Finally, there was going to be a rocket carrying the fucking stars and stripes, carrying humans to the space station, which hadn't been the case since the space shuttle got retired in 2011, right? We had nothing to back us up. All of the NASA astronauts had to ride share off of the Russians, which is like a really interesting thing.

You know, you can be these geopolitical enemies. and some small portion of your two countries' governments can work together to get people up into space and then get back. Now, there's obviously a shit ton of politics around it, but as far as, like, the engineers on each side. Anyway. That's interesting. I actually didn't know that.

Now, the team I inherited when I landed there, Um, it was this like rag tag group of just randos. There were like two guys that were on the security analysis side and they were just like drowning in like alerts every single day from like people trying to hack into the network. And they would work like just two of them, 24 hours a day. One would work a 12 hour ship. The other one would work a 12 hour ship. The other one would work. work 12 hours. Other one comes back for 12 hours. Just two guys over and over again for years. It was that way. Then there were a couple of other guys on the engineering side that were building a lot of the kind of strategic controls around everything. And then there was my girlfriend,

Grace, who was running the insider threat program at the time. So she was responsible for the technical insider threat and counter espionage program over there. And the idea was, so all of them were kind of working independently. So like these guys were working over here, doing all the alert analysis, and these guys were like doing all the engineering shit. And she was kind of lone wolf, you know, doing the insider threat counter espionage piece. And they were lacking in like a vision for like what this fucking team was supposed to be. And I was like, okay, I can do this.

I can come in here. and provide some leadership. So, like, morale was low to because, like, three days into my tenure there, I just moved from Australia back to Southern California to work at this place. And three days into my tenure, they call in all hands,

and, like, 1,500 people or some shit got laid off for whatever reason. I'm like, what the fuck is going on here, dude? Like, I just moved here from the other side of the world. I could easily stay in Australia and just hung out, you know. And so morale was, morale was in the shitter. And generally, like, the cyber defense function there was this kind of, like, offbeat off the wall, like,

team that no one really paid attention to. So I came in there. I was like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to fuse all these capabilities into a cohesive unit. and we're going to apply what you guys are doing to this counter espionage shit over here. We're going to walk over to that physical security team that's on the other side of the office here.

And we're going to train them up on some of the shit that we're doing and seeing on this side because at the end of the day, those guys are on the front lines of shit. Because if some Russian dude walks in and is waving a USB stick around, well, who's going to be the first line of defense? fence. It's like I got six people on my team. It's going to be the 50 security guards that are

floating around the various areas of SpaceX. So what I tried to do was to fuse and propagate information about how this team worked, what it did, and what the goals were in order to ramp this fucking company up and get it ready for this human spaceflight. And we were subject to attack all the time, dude. Like, you know, name your fucking adversary country and they were after us, like all the fucking time. And not just digitally over the network, like, they would send dudes like on site and shit. We would get tippers from our federal partners all the time. Actually, like, a week into my tenure there, I get a call for my boss. He's like, hey, you know, we got a, tip that there might be some fucking North Korean, like, implant on one of our device. I was like,

I'm on my way home. It's like 6 o'clock in the evening. Fucking U-turn. Roll back into the office. And then we just start cranking through. We start pulling like every fucking laptop from the building that we can get our hands on and like running forensics on it to try and figure out. I'm like, all right, how can we find this fucking thing? Amongst many other actions that we took for that one.

But we would establish relationships with our federal partners who weren't used to really working with the cybersecurity team. and they would send us tippers. We'd have all kinds of shit go down. Russians would be jumping the fences and shit, trying to break into the building, plug in malware, plug in USBs. Holy shit. convincing employees to take them around

to various places in the building. One really cool thing was as we started turning the flywheel a bit more. Again, I don't mean to say, like I was the one responsible for all this shit. But I did come in there and I kind of looked at the lay of the land and I was like, all right, these people need like more about why the fuck? Like why and what?

Like what is it that we're doing here and why are we doing it? And I think I was able to energize their activities with those things. And as the team started to get a little bit more prominent and we started to get FaceTime with more of the employees, it started paying off. It started paying off because you would have SpaceX employees that were sitting around and they would just start reporting stuff to us proactively like, yo, this dude was like asking me some weird questions at the parking garage across the street. Like, here's what he looked like, all this shit. And we'd pass that to the physical security team. One time, a dude with a Slavic accent and a very Slavic look

about him, got into the building and approaches an engineer at the chow hall. And he's like, hey, man, I'm looking for the printer room. And this engineer is like, how do you not know where the printer room is? Like, everyone knows where that shit is. He's like, and then this dude starts getting nervous. He's like, well, I just need to like, you know, plug this thing into the printer. And this guy who, like, we had managed to train. as part of our, like we, we started this outreach program and we're trying to train the company.

Like, all right, here's how the adversary is going to try and come get us, right? So this dude had sat through that training. And he was like, oh, cool, man. Yeah, I'll walk you over to the printer room. And he walks him straight out the glass door and then locks the fucking door behind him and then call security. And that fucking dude got taken away. and then another, and then the security guards, we trained them up and we kind of made them feel important, right?

Because these are contract security guards, and they're all jocked up and shit. Like, you know, SpaceX did a good job of, you know, making it clear, like, don't fuck with these dudes because it's in the middle of Hawthorne, California. It's like kind of shit area of L.A. And we told the security guards, all right, look, here's how these people operate.

Here's what they'll try and do, and here's why they'll try and do it. And those guys felt jacked up. dude, they were like, oh, this is awesome. Like, no one's tried to, like, involve us in any of this shit. Like, we just stand guard out here, you know. And so then one time, uh, the guards spot a vehicle and there's like a dude, like, holding a fucking antenna out of the vehicle.

And the guards are like, hey, this vehicle drove by, some dude was like holding what looked like an antenna out of it. I was like, perfect. Hey, let's get on the network and figure out, is there any weird shit going on on the network? Let's figure out what happened to that vehicle. where it went. So, you know, it started paying off because now it wasn't just my six guys, right? Now I had a whole fucking organization that was serving as a force multiplier for me. Yeah, so that was interesting. And on the counter espionage side, we got so good at some of the like minority report type shit that we were doing that one thing we came to realize was the following.

people's behavior manifests in what they're doing on the fucking keyboard, even if they're at work. Like behavior manifests in bits is the phrase that we came up with. So a lot of time, this old school counter espionage, like counterintelligence, tradecraft, you know, you talk to some old school counterintel guy.

What's he going to tell you? It's like, look for the expensive car in the parking lot. It's like, dude, this is a tech company and our share price is X. Everyone has a fucking expensive car, okay? That shit is just not going to work around here. So we need to think outside the box. It's fucking 2019.

How are these people going to try and do their shit? And so we would discover, I mean, through the course of lots of trial and error. Hostitution. Yeah. Yeah, well, that too. Through the course of trial and error that if you start piecing together indicators from different sources, that you could predict with a very high level of action, that some dude was going to be up to some shit in some X period of time. So like I'll give you

an example. Let's say a dude all of a sudden starts buying extra swag from the company swag store and around the same time starts extra double checking his stock options in the stock option system. Okay. Those two indicators right there are like, all right, this dude's getting ready to he's like double checking his shares. He's getting souvenirs. He's like, getting ready to pop smoke, right? So that's a very small example of indicators that we were able to piece together and we had many more of them

where we could be able to predict with a high level of accuracy what was going on. Now, this speaks to your question from your Patreon audience member from earlier, right? What is the, what's the line? And that was always on the forefront of our minds, right?

At no point did we want to go all the way to the end of the spectrum where we were dropping like key loggers on everyone's machines? But at the same time, the same tools that we had to detect the Russian hackers and the Chinese hackers and all that shit with just a little bit of repurposing. And looking at the data through a different lens would surface this kind of shit internally. And so we were able to stand that up pretty successfully. And then all those lessons, of course, translated to Andrel.

Not three-fourths of my way through. Why did you leave SpaceX? Anderl was well known to me even when I was at Palantir. So Brian Schiff, the CEO of Andrel, he was a very renowned engineer at Palantir. He actually did my onboarding at Palanty. He came in and gave us a big talk on a lot of the engineering subsystems. And when he left to start Andrel, there was like whispers floating around. like, yo, Brian left to start this thing, like, must be legit, dude.

But no one knew what they were doing, right? So then I got an email from an Android recruiter, and they're like, hey, we got your name from the Poundeer, like, Bro Network. We want you to come be our first, like, cybersecurity engineer. I was like, yeah, let's go. So I didn't want to leave SpaceX, but by this point, we've talked about this a lot. right you get in the ceiling you get into a routine it's like you you make the machine turn and then you start like what's next figure out what's next right where can I have more of an

impact so and roll knowing that they were working on well after I went and met him on site knowing what the vision was going to be that they were going to get involved with you know producing the next generation of advanced weapon systems I was like like, okay, this is an opportunity for me to take all the lessons I've learned over the years, both on the people side, on the leadership side, on the technical side, and then bring it all home into this kind of one final act before I start my own fucking company, right? So Andrew all the time was 100 people. Everyone knew each other. We would like order pizza and like sit around and bullshit over lunch. Now take that in,

initial list of 100 people and add that list to the company roster every single month for 48 months straight. Holy shit. That's how many. That's how fucking fast we scaled out that fast. Wow. Wow. So to build a cyber defense program in that landscape was one of the most challenging

problems that I had to endure in my career. One thing I don't like doing is I don't like taking an easy way out and saying, all right, I'm just going to come in and fucking hire a bunch of dudes. Give me budget. Give me headcount. I feel like you have to earn that first. And I got in there and I wanted to earn the head count, right? So I started doing all the fucking engineering.

myself. I started like deploying out the cyber defense controls and like working with the customer. At the time, our main customer, I think, was CBP. So we were deploying these autonomous surveillance towers to the southern border. This was around like Trump, Trump won towards the tail end of Trump one. And so he wanted this like virtual border wall essentially down there. And the Anderall surveillance towers were a core component of that. And several hundred of them were deployed. for CBP down to the southern border. And one of the threats that we were trying to defend against was, okay, what if some criminal element walked up to one of these fucking things

and was able to hack into it or shut it down in some way? You know, there's always a thing, well, why don't they just put a fucking bullet through it, right? Well, maybe they want to be a bit more stealthy than that, depending on their objectives. Okay, so how do we harden these fucking things? how do we track who has the ability to remote access into them, like which engineers at the company have access to remote into them? How do we audit what those engineers are doing? Because if one of them gets flipped by one of these transnational criminal organizations,

that could be a problem. And so we're thinking and coming up with all this shit, and most importantly, we're translating this to the customer. So we're sitting with the CBP people, and we're saying, here's how we're thinking about this threat model, here's how we're thinking about defending it. And they fucking loved us, dude. But I don't think a vendor had, like, ever sat with them and tried to collaborate in that way with them.

And I knew that the future held more exotic shit, right? I knew we were going to get into the drone business. I knew we were going to get into, you know, probably one day we're going to make fixed-wing aircraft. And one thing I wanted to get right very early was I wanted to tie together all of the functions that I was responsible for at SpaceX. into one roof to include the weapon system security angle of it. So let's say you have a submarine that you're building as a company and the fucking adversary gets their hands on the submarine. They're going to do some shit to it, right?

They're going to try capturing it, reverse engineering it, breaking in, hacking it, seeing how it works. Is there fucking data on it that's useful for their operations? So a large part of it is, all right, how do we secure that fucking thing from the Chinese dude on the Chinese SIGANT boat that's going to scoop this submarine up from the water and then plug into

its debug port, right? Which they will do. But you can't look at that in isolation because there's a whole litany of shit happening to the left of that. Long before that submarine gets in the water, long before that fighter aircraft gets in the air, long before that drone launches

downrange, that counter-UAS system, well, that stuff talks to something, right? There's communication backcalls coming off those weapon systems. There's communication termination points like that sit on servers somewhere. There's engineers that have access to those servers. There's ground control stations. So it becomes this mesh network of shit that becomes, you basically encounter this combinatorial explosion of just complexity, essentially,

for every new system you add to that graph, right? But so we had to get ahead of all of that very quickly. And it was challenging because the company is growing by 100 people every four weeks. Like, whole is insane. So every decision that you kick the can on, you're going to pay for it when the company is plus 500 people, plus 1,000 people. That's a thousand times the complexity that you're going to have to contend with. So it's not a function of, hey, can I do? all this stuff now. It's what are the things I can't get to right now that I can be okay paying for

later when the complexity ramps up asymptotically goes vertical. These were the tradeoffs that that I encountered in the early days. So I brought, I brought Grace over from SpaceX. You know, we hadn't started dating yet. I brought over a couple other dudes I knew from SpaceX. We built out the program. We scaled the program to like 85 people on the security team. And then it ultimately became Chief Information Security Officer. It's just one of those things, right?

It's not a thing that I was shooting for, but you fucking do good shit. Keep your head down. damn dude it fucking happens and then same thing with the CIO so then I got all I got IT

I got business systems I got everything and the challenge there is there's a couple different types of CIOs in the world right one of them is this blow hard

that doesn't know shit and that's constantly talking about digital transformation this and like you know AI that the other one understands that your sole job as a CIO is to make the company run more efficiently.

Like every fucking bullshit piece of friction that an employee internally has to encounter in the course of doing their job, is there a way that that can be abstracted off and automated with software? So you're basically building like these internal startups at the company to deliver software that's making the company more efficient. So that was the job with the CIO. I mean, certainly it was an acquired taste for me. I came out of the security world. And now I'm like having meetings about like,

how do we make our manufacturing software more efficient? I'm like, okay, so I'm like reading books on like ERPs and like manufacturing software and shit and like product lifecycle management software. I'm like, Jesus Christ, I don't know how any of the shit works, but I'll figure it up. Damn, dude. That's fucking impressive. Holy shit.

All from a fucking recruiting fair, huh? All from the recruiter reaching out, yeah. Good thing you had those weapon squalls on your resume. I know, right? Yeah, good thing I had the fucking GLM on my resume. Back in and then there. Let's take a break real quick. Yeah.

Hi, I'm Sarah Adams. The host of Vigilence elites, The White. where we highlight what matters. It became a permissive state. Explain to you why it matters, and then aim to leave you feeling better informed than you were before you hit play. Terrace, hostile intelligence agencies,

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They're called SciOps. Is now available to you for free. There's no question that it is mind control. Hear from whistleblowers. Why have I got a letter from the CIA? Shocking insights from experts. If you've ever wondered who's really pulling the strings, it's time to find out.

Target intelligence. SIEA, an Ironclad original, hosted by Sean Ryan. Listen today wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the enhanced version on YouTube at This Is Ironclad. All right, Nick, we're back from the break. I forgot one other thing, too. Everybody gets these at the beginning, but we'll wait until damn near the end for you. Vigilance League gumbearers.

Thanks, man. Made in the USA, legal in all 50 states. There you go. She's fucking candy. just gummies that's it that's it sick thanks man appreciate it you uh Jeremy was telling me you got you guys are making like a phone yeah tell me about uh well we're not making a phone so here's so the backstory on this um I get fucking paranoid you know just like we were talking about I think we were talking about it at breakfast but I

I just get, I get fucking paranoid, man. You know, last year before the election, I interviewed half the administration, which means I'm connected to half the administration. And sometimes I get calls when they're angry at me. And, and, but now, not only that, but I mean, you know, I told you about the Colleen Georgesky thing when I went to Romania and then I was approached by some former or maybe still current intel folks when I got back home because that that that that that election was that was a fraudulent election and the EU was meddling in that

election and we had a hundred and something thousand people fucking show up in front of the parliament when we left because of a selfie video that I posted yeah I mean they were already up in arms went and I mean I know you you you have to know working for the companies that you work for, you'd know how how fragile the Taiwan-China situation is. We went over there and interviewed Baushikim and, you know, the VP. And so through my own paranoia and also just living in this fucking world, you know, in my former life, and I was like, we got to find a black phone. Like, this shit is not cutting it. And, oh, and I wound up on the Taliban fucking hit.

list for uncovering the fact that we're giving them $87 million a fucking week. They didn't like that. And so anyways. Can't imagine why. So yeah, I started calling around to a lot of former or not former friends of mine that, you know, that I worked with in the past at the agency. And I was just looking for the black phone, a real one, you know, not a consumer grade, like kind of one, a real one. And I got pointed to this company called Glacier that was

founded by some former NSA guys. So I made this phone and it's it's fucking awesome. It's right here. Oh, is that thing? Cool. Yeah. But I mean, it's an iPhone, but they've hardened it. Yeah. And how, I don't know, dude. That's like speaking Chinese to me. But But it keeps everything from getting sucked out. It's got end-to-end encryption messenger. It tunnels your organization in. So, you know, the leak, the signal leak at the beginning of the administration, then they accidentally texted the wrong fucking John or whatever.

It wound up being a news reporter. That's impossible to do. You can only text people within your organization, glacier to glacier. Even if your company has a glacier phone and my company has all his glaciers, from like everybody here's on glacier we can't text each other through glacier it's it's it tunnels your organization and um what else endless amount of burner numbers so i mean you know for guys like us that really would have come in handy but even just for normal people you know you donate to an election campaign you fucking whatever sign up for the wrong thing your number gets leaked then you get

they can you you just use the burner number you know and then burn it You know what I mean? So nobody has your real number. And, you know, the guy's kind of educated in me on how you can, you know, 100% disappear through digital numbers and not even really have a fucking phone number at all. And so there's a bunch of cool things about this phone. It's fucking, I mean, it's great for high net worth individuals that are worried to have to worry about kidnapping and shit because the phone pings a lot more often than the regular phone. And there's so many features to that. And so when I was looking for that, and we got in touch,

I wanted to see if they wanted to advertise. And they did. They were like, fuck yeah. And I was like, well, maybe they want to do equity. And we talked about equity. We were going to do it. And then as I got more knowledge of the actual product, It's $8,500 a phone and $12,000 something for the service.

I mean, it's fucking expensive. And then, you know, I was like, I just, we're shooting for this much, you know, and nobody can afford that. We have to go after Palantir, Anderal, SpaceX, US government. I was like, and, yeah, I mean, I obviously have reach into there because I've interviewed, almost everybody, you know, but, you know, that's a, I don't, that's not the thing, but for me, yeah, that I want to, which is not my, you know what I mean. And so I said, if you had a more consumer-friendly product that wasn't that expensive, I would be very interested. And they said,

well, actually, we have an app that we've been working on and we're close to being finished, but we don't want that to compete with the phone. And I said, well, that's what I'm interested in. I'm interested, if we're going to do business, I want something that everybody can use. And so for about the past, it's been about a year now. We've been developing this app and turning it into what we needed to be. And so it's actually releasing, we're doing the beta test.

friends and family stuff in two weeks March 1st we release it to friends and family congratsman thank you and so yeah it'll be it'll be a data blocker you'll have the burner numbers and then all American VPNs the VPNs I mean I'm sure you know most Israel's bought a bunch of VPN companies China's bought a bunch of VPN companies it gets marketed like they're fucking American VPNs they're not and so these will be all American VPNs and then if it goes good, which I know it's going to because there's nothing like this out there, then we will add the secure messenger component to it because it's everything I'm seeing now is a signal has been

signal's been compromised. So this will be it. You know, and so I'm really fucking excited about it. really excited we put a lot into it and so yeah it'll be like I said March 1st they'll be coming out for friends and family and then once we work through the bugs then we'll kick it out to you know a little bit bigger group we're gonna we're gonna do it in stair steps yeah not just gonna kick it out to everybody right off the bat because I know it's gonna take off so we need we need to work we we need to work through some things before it hits that's cool man tens of thousands hundreds of thousands potentially millions of people

One of the challenges we had at Andrew was to figure out the mobile device security posture, you know, because what do you do? You issue everybody in an iPhone. It's a lot of overhead, a lot of maintenance. Yeah. A lot of fees. It was challenging for sure. And we had a giant threat model to contend against too. Good. Yeah. No, I gave, I gave Tray one when he was here. I don't know if he's using it or if he likes it or what. But, uh, But he got in touch as soon as I gave it to him. I know they went out and trained him up how to use it. So he was definitely fucking interested. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I'm excited, man. And then I probably shouldn't even be talking about this, but there's a group of us that are getting together.

And I mean, my, just like you, you know, what's the next thing? I think it pretty much hit the podcast ceiling. There's not much more to develop here. So I've definitely made my mark in the podcast world and definitely made it to trend to up production quality and all of that kind of shit. I've made my mark here and now I'm interested in other things. You know what I mean?

And so through the podcast, I've gotten my new passion is kids, man. And helping sexually abused kids, whether they're trafficked or exploited or abused or whatever. I've covered that subject so many fucking times. Nobody else. I shouldn't say nobody else, but a lot of the big guys, you know, in this game just don't fucking talk about it. And the problem's getting worse and worse and worse. and I've made some of my best friends now today I've met on this show

trying to save kids and so now we're we're going to develop an application that's going to educate and save kids, man, from sex exploitation, being trafficked, all that kind of shit and yeah, I mean, it's just like what you're saying, man,

you hit a fucking ceiling and you've done the thing and you can sit there and fucking try to be king the whole time or you can fucking move on and get good at something else. Yeah. Now your empire building. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you know, when I built this, I mean, I didn't know what the fuck I was doing, man. When I got out, I was teaching fucking tactics, you know, and shooting and stuff like that, which is, it's cool. But even that, I mean, I pretty much hit the ceiling on that right. off the bat i did train kiana reeves for john look three and then that created a bunch of hate and what i was just like this is whatever man most of this shit is like 55 year old men trying

to fucking play army because they didn't ever want to go to war and i just so i started the podcast and i think i've you know i love doing this i'll probably never stop uh i may slow down uh because the pace is it's tough to build other things when i'm at this pace but um but it's like it's just time to move on and master something new and build something else and uh so that's that's what i'm doing yeah that's great man um yeah i'm sure i'm sure the andro see so joe is going to be watching this and interested in what you guys got oh fuck yeah well i hope so yeah but uh yeah thanks for asking it man yeah no worries yeah joe's a good dude he uh we came up together at androle back in the one hundred

person days of the company. And when I left to start Wraithwatch, they were like, who do you want to be, you know, the replacement C-So basically? I was like, there's only one fucking dude, Joe McCaffrey. He's former Marsock communications officer, just a fucking humble guy. The humblest guy I've ever met. Nice. Just a fucking great guy.

So, yeah. I'm sure I want to check that out at something. Oh, fuck. Well, thank you for the plug. Yeah. So. I appreciate that. I really do, man.

So what are you doing in cybersecurity now? You started your own company. Yeah. So Rathwatch is really a product of every fucking thing we've been talking about for the past few hours. Where did you come up with it? So the co-founders and I have talked about various components of this. product forever. And it was really a fusion of all of those conversations with them. So Grace would always talk about, I need a command of control layer, like how Anderol has lattice for physical

shit and sensors and fusing the sensor data on telemetry together. We need something similar for cyber defense teams that can fuse data together and serve as a command of control layer for executing operations and making decisions at speed. Because right now, that's That's the biggest thing cyber defense teams suck at. They just are unable to make decisions at speed, not because they're not good, but because the tooling is lacking, right? Same problem you guys are solving with the glacier phone.

The tooling is lacking. It's not because people aren't trying to secure their communications. And I had talked a whole bunch about the fact that, you know, if you zoom out from cybersecurity, what the industry really is, is it's this cat and mouse. game of a stimulus response cycle between attacker and defender. What happens is the attacker will come up with a new way of doing shit. They'll come up with some novel new attack. They'll come up with some novel exploit or whatever. And then the defenders will have to react to that, right? They'll have to

figure out, okay, how do we develop defenses against this exploit? Or how do we develop defenses against this new attack technique that we just read about that these guys out here came up with? But these guys out here don't share everything, right? Definitely. Definitely China is not sharing their latest and greatest attack techniques with, you know, the, the cybersecurity community. So over here on the defensive side, you're basically left reading open source information about what's going on on the attack side. Or you're left to read through the breach reports from organizations that already got hit. And then you basically have to make these mental leaps to figure out, okay, how might this apply to me and how can I defend myself and prevent. and prevent my organization from getting hacked in the same way.

So this is a fucking backwards way of operating, right? At the beginning of this podcast, we talked about artificial intelligence has the capability, and this has been empirically proven by the frontier labs. I can point it at a system like an iPhone or a code repository for an application that's running on an iPhone. and I can say, don't stop until you have found me vulnerabilities in this application or codebase or device or whatever.

And you can just let them crank away at a pace that no human can match. DARPA came out with a competition a couple years ago called the Cyber Grand Challenge, and the goal of the competition was to understand, okay, can we instrument artificial intelligence systems that can reliably find vulnerabilities at scale autonomously without humans involved. And the answer is yes, the teams that came out on top from that competition have technology that can autonomously find weaponize and exploit vulnerabilities at industrial scale, dude. So what you're seeing is this mounting attack pressure from the guys with the offensive tools. augmented by artificial intelligence.

You're not seeing any of that shit on the defensive side. It's not like there's some mounting defensive counterpressure that's being provided by somebody. And that's why we built Rayth Washington. Oh, shit. We provide the defensive counterpressure to offset the attack pressure that is mounting very rapidly on the offensive side of the house. because the only way you're going to get ahead of this

is to have something continuously in here predict, imagine, simulate all of the novel new shit that these things are going to find, right? And this is like a fucking immune system. This is crazy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's essentially what it is.

You're simulating. These cells attack, these cells defend. It's fucking wild. Yeah, that's right. In 2026, if you're an organization like SpaceX or Andrel or any of these fucking companies, right, and you have anything hanging its ass out on the internet, it's going to be subject to this mounting attack pressure from the outside.

And you need something that is trying to preserve hull integrity, for lack of a better term, for the organization. And to preserve hull integrity, you need to, as you said, simulate all the possible ways. Shit's going to go sideways in here. before these guys figure it out and then proactively get ahead of deploying the mitigations.

So defensive counterpressure is the name of the game here. And we do that by acting as a sensor fusion layer and command and control layer for all the tools that already exist in an organization. We stack AI at top of it and then they pull everything together and then apply that counterpressure that I'm talking about.

Unless that happens, and it doesn't have to be us, right? Someone else fucking come along and do this shit. Like, if it doesn't happen, basically we can no longer maintain trust that our society's most critical institutions actually have their shit together when it comes to protecting our data or to maintaining organizational integrity, right? Because these things are just going to come at you in continuous swarms and they're not going to stop. This is the future that we're entering into.

Anthropic released a report the other day that said their latest model, their latest AI model is capable of finding zero-day vulnerabilities very rapidly against code repositories it's never seen before or never been trained on in its existence. You throw something brand new at it, it'll find a zero-day in there. Holy shit. So imagine the firmware that's running on your guys's glacier phones. You know, if you put that thing on a system and then you dispatch a swarm of these offensive AIs at it, they're

going to find issues. The best case scenario is that we execute that process. By we, I mean, you know, someone on your guys aside executes that process of vulnerability, discovery, mitigation, and remediation before the bad guys ever get a chance to do it in the real world in the wild. So that's, we're not only trying to provide a capability to do that for organizations. We're also just trying to evangelize the fact that this is the future that we're moving into. And unless the industry gets it shit together, gets a shit together, we're going to have some serious problems at hand. Holy shit. I mean, do you see a world where we backtrack from digital? I mean, are we going to go back to fucking pen and paper?

because the vulnerabilities are just, I mean, they just, it's like, this shit's just getting better, better and better every fucking day. Yeah. Every day. Yeah. You know, and it's, I mean, thank God for companies like you, but where does it end? I genuinely don't know the answer to that question. I think, I think the only thing that we can guarantee is there is, there is,

now a continuously running arms race between attack and defense. It's an arms race that's going to be powered by AI. Hopefully on both sides right now, it biases towards the attacker. Hopefully we can change that. And I think, you know, we're going to live in a future where these things are just constantly battling each other, data center on data center. And we're going to live right in the middle of it. So do we revert to pen and paper? Maybe. I've certainly reduced my, you know, consumption of things on the internet. Like what? Just, you know, doom scrolling, Twitter all day or X, constantly reading on what, reading up on what's happening in the news. I'm trying to reduce my cognitive load for what's out there as a practice run for reducing it permanently.

you know, maybe I exit Wraithwatch one day. You know, the company does really well. And do I ever want to see a fucking phone again? I don't think so, man. I don't think so. I fantasize about the day where I can walk to a pier, walk to Santa Monica Pier, and just fucking chuck this thing in the water. I can't fucking wait for that day too, man.

I can't. I fucking fantasize about that day. But until we get to that day, right, we have obligations as executives and business owners. And, I mean, how do you keep track of your kids, right, in this day and age? I don't know. What I do know is that the instant you put a screen in front of them, you're going to lose them. You're going to lose some portion of them to that screen.

There's a writer by the name of... There's a writer by the name of Paul Kings North. And he lives in Ireland, and he, he, he lives in Ireland, and he, he, he, he, he, runs this substack and he writes a lot about this environment that we find ourselves in and it's basically an environment where we've bootstrapped this all-knowing all-seeing machine right and it's not a singular machine it's a distributed machine of which we are all a part of right we can't escape the fact that we need our phones to do our jobs as executives and CEOs we need the internet to get our message out there we've developed

this need to interface with all of this technology. And I don't think there's any walking back from that. But there is something to be said about holding in your mind and being present in any given situation and saying, do I really need to be on this fucking thing right now? And if I am, am I? becoming a better person by the things that I do on it? Or am I not? Am I just doom scrolling and turning into a fucking ball of anxiety?

And if I do turn into a ball of anxiety, you know, that's going to have an effect on the people around me. It's going to have an effect on my loved ones. That's going to propagate out and have these second, third order effects. It's a fucking weird future we're walking into, man. That's all. That's all I can guarantee. I just, I don't see how we don't go back to pen and paper.

I mean, it's just, there's so many times where I'm talking about shit and I'm just like, I don't want to talk about this over the phone. Yeah. We have to do a face to face. Yep. We just have to. Yep. You know, nothing, nothing is secure.

Nothing is secure and you can't trust anything you see anymore. Like the ease with which any fucking body can produce any image, text, anything, movie. These days, I mean, you know, I was talking with Jeremy and Darren about it earlier. If the first biblical flood was a physical one, the second one is going to be an informational one. We're going to be hit with a volume and velocity of information, the likes of which we are not prepared for with our evolutionary programming. And I think we all have to reconcile what that means for us individually and what that means for our family. and our communities and our society. That's why I bring up Kings North

is because his contention is, okay, if this machine really is going to take off, right, and it already is and has and will continue to, well, it's the goal. Well, maybe the goal is to, it's to establish the success that we all want, right? Like with vigilance and with the podcast and all the projects you've got going on

with Wraithwatch for me, you know, other, other folks have their versions of it. But once you do, let's figure out how to take that and translate it into making the little worlds around us better, our families, our communities, our states, our countries, what have you. And maybe if we start small and we do a good job, then maybe we'll earn our way into building our way back from this place. that we're in i i don't know never going to happen yeah i agree simplicity yep that's the way we're

supposed to live yep simplistic and we don't fucking live that way i know especially guys like me and you i know we have high bars to set we have we we're on a mission man yeah and uh we we like to accomplish it and that does not create a simple life i know it really really he doesn't but these are things i think about a lot me too me too i think about yeah i think about him all the fucking time i mean yeah i can't remember who i was in here talking with but you know i mean you're talking about a wave of information i mean i can't remember the number i'm going to be off but you know i think it was like the human brain can maintain 150 relationships or something i think it was less than that you know actually maintain you know 150

relationships or something. It's something like that. Yeah, approximately the size of a rifle company. Dude. And look at fucking X and Twitter and you got, you know, thousands of people you're following, everybody's fucking hitting you up. People you don't even know, you can't, you can't, you can't. You got text, signal, Glacier, Instagram, Twitter, fucking Facebook. it's just email, personal email,

company fucking email, it's multiple company emails. It's like you just can't get the fuck away from any of it. Yeah. It's everywhere. Yeah, I agree, man. And it's only going to get worse because, you know, now all the bot armies

that used to post bot army shit, like, you know, they resemble humans now. And whoever's puppeteering them from the back end, they can basically dispatch these armies that can swing things one way or the other, depending on what the goals of that person are. So I don't have the answers, dude. I'm in a position where I can put some guys together. And I feel like along with my founders, I put a crew of fucking hitters together.

And we're out there building some cool shit. It. Your wife's a founder, right? Girlfriend, yeah. Excuse me, your girlfriend's a founder. Girlfriend, yeah. How many founders are there? Two other ones.

Two other ones? My girlfriend and my third founder, Carlos, Cuban dude, escaped communism from Cuba, came to the States, didn't speak any English, but he was so fucking hungry. He had that immigrant hunger. It's fucking awesome. He landed at a bank in New York. Morgan Stanley, and he taught himself English by getting on the IT team over there. He was couch surfing on his brother's couch.

He taught himself IT and shit, got a job at this bank. And then he didn't speak a word of English. So people would call the IT help desk and he'd be like, hey, can you send an email? That was like the most of single sheet. You got to be kidding me. Then he would get the email from him. And then he would translate the email into sports. and they would figure it the fuck out and then he would send like an English response back.

Rinse and repeat, you know, over a thousand reps. And that's how he taught himself English. And then he, you know, went from there. He landed at Google after that and then SpaceX after that. When he left SpaceX, he was one of the senior most security engineers there. At that point, he had been responsible for building a lot of those security architecture around their most critical systems. Starship vehicle, you know, some of the other. critical infrastructure they have in place.

He's just a fucking hitter, dude. I don't know how we got on that. I mean, what do you think this is going to grow into? I mean, just for example, I mean, we're talking about where's this going? I'm talking about, are we going back to fucking pen and paper? What we're probably going towards is neuralink where we just fucking thought share and we don't even need English. We don't even need language anymore.

Yeah. I mean, how the fuck do you, like, how? Alex Wang came in here. Do you know who Alex Wang is? Alex Wang came in here and said he doesn't want to have kids until Neurrelink is fucking fully online for everybody because he wants his babies that fucking Neurlink in their head. I'm like, holy shit.

All right. That's excessive. But I mean, but what it would, but it's it's like fuck, man, there's a chip that can be hacked into your fucking brain. Yep. I've talked to Ben Carson about it, you know, Huberman, Huberman, Andrew Huberman, I mean, you can inject an entire false reality into somebody's, I mean,

they're talking about this is going to help the blind see. And it's like, well, shit, if it's going to help the blind see, then it'll probably make you hear shit, taste shit, feel shit, obviously see stuff. You could create an entire false reality into somebody's mind that they would never know it. We could be in a false reality right fucking now. We wouldn't even know it. How fucking crazy is that? How do you defend against that shit?

Indeed. Indeed. I think it's very possible that that's already happened. It's probably already happened billions and trillions of times, honestly. Who the fuck knows where in that chain of reality we might be in right now? You know, and people will have their religious convictions and say that doesn't square with Christianity and Hinduism and, you know, name your fucking religion. I think it squares perfectly, dude. I think all of those religions are trying to tell us that the ultimate purpose of all of this shit is to evolve ourselves and our souls and our minds in order to navigate infinity, essentially.

because that's what we're talking about here, right? In the limit, if you give it long enough, take Neurrelink, mash it up with LLMs, mash it up with virtual reality, give us senses, and then now we're in the matrix, right? Repeat that a million times.

So it's this infinitely fractal, like reality that we may be inhabiting. And if we're inhabiting an infinitely fractal reality, then one of the biggest, one of the most useful skills that we can have is without being told, without biasing towards one side or the other based on some shit that people are telling us, with our own personal discernment

and ability to navigate chaos and bring order to that chaos, how the fuck do we get our bearings? And how do we move out after having gotten them? I think that's what we're here to learn how to do. It's a damn good point. Maybe. Maybe I'm full of shit. I don't know.

I don't think anybody really knows what it's, you know, just be a good fucking person. That's really all you can do. That's it. Well, Nick, fascinating conversation. Amazing life story, man.

Amazing life story. Like, holy shit, dude. Your fucking life arc is just wild. Thanks, man. It's great meeting you in person. You're super humble guy. And it was great to be here. Thank you for the opportunity.

A little bit surreal being in the studio. Man, thank you for saying that. That means a lot. You know, I asked you earlier, there's one thing you could say to your dad, what would it be? I want to ask you, if there's one thing you want your son to know, what would it be? I wish I could have spent more time with you. And I'll say a message to my, to my stepdaughter.

I wish I could have spent more time with you guys. You guys deserved it. And I thought I was doing what the country needed me to do. And that was to deploy over and over and over again in the capacities in which I deployed. And if I could do it again, I don't know what I would change. but I would make spending time with you guys a priority and not a thing that I regret many years after the fact. One thing I'll say too is, you know, my two-month-old son, Maximus, is going to watch this too, 15 years from now. And he's going to wonder, you know,

the fuck was wrong with you. Like, why weren't you there for my brother and sister back in the day? And, you know, I hope this interview can shed some light on what the fuck I was out there trying to accomplish. Well, I definitely think this is going to help them understand it. Nice, man. God bless. No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything.

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