The Joe Rogan Experience - #1885 - Mike Sarraille & Andy Stumpf

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

Mike Sarraille is the CEO of EF Overwatch, an executive search and talent advisory firm, and leadership consultant with Echelon Front. He is a former Recon Marine and retired US Navy SEAL officer with twenty years of experience in Special Operations, including the elite Joint Special Operations Command.  https://mikesarraille.com/ Andy Stumpf is a retired Navy SEAL, record-setting wingsuit pilot, BASE jumper, public speaker, and host of the popular podcast "Cleared Hot." www.andystumpf.com triple7.givesmart.com

the Joe Rogan experience so tell me about your problem tell us about your disgusting mouth is this how I start yes so you know you talked

about high school you did in high school I did it one time he's got to turn it on you you did it one time one time in high school and never touched it one time. He's got to turn it on you. You did it one time. One time in high school and never touched it again. Go ahead, Mr. 19 years.

Mike was just saying that he had to get his skin grafted. And he's like, you did it once. Well, I remember the first time I did it, somebody gave me Redman, Shaw, and it was over. I was just yakking everywhere. Where I started was in the Marine Corps. When we're in a hide site, you have to stay awake when it's your turn for security. But that could be like 3 a.m. in the morning after you've been hiking for like six hours. So eventually my team leader's like,

you're going to put a dip in to do whatever it takes to stay awake during your watch. Does dip keep you awake? Nicotine does. It should. But dip will? Yes. Absolutely. And so it morphed from there in the Marines and we lived I like to say we lived off of three things on deployment. Water, coffee, and dip. And even on a

patrol with these guys I would have a dip in, chewing caffeine gum, and drinking water. Jesus. Super healthy. I'm going to send this to Brendan Chubb because that motherfucker keeps, he has those little pouches. They're so nasty. He keeps four or five of them in his mouth at a time. He looks like a squirrel.

Like he's got a little, like he's storing nuts. Well, now you're going to get grafted. So you have to have skin grafted? So they take the tissue from the top of your mouth and then graft it to the bottom of the teeth because it's receded quite a bit. Hold on. One second. Sorry. Are you good now? Okay. So

what did it do to your mouth? I think after 19 years of... So I did switch from long cut to pouches. And then pouches are... Mike, that makes a fucking difference.

There was a logical progression. I switched from beer to vodka. It's totally fine, guys. I went from heroin to pills. So the intent was long cut to pouches and pouches you would wean yourself off and that did not work. So what is it?

Is it rotting your gums? It just receives your gums. It doesn't rot your gums, but it receives it. Wow. So you have yuck mouth. I don't have yuck mouth. Let me see. Let me see it.

How bad is it? First off, I'm here just to debunk or fact check anything that Andy says. Andy, people know you, Andy Stump. Mike, please introduce yourself. Tell you how you know that's degenerate. Yes, absolutely know you, Andy Stump. Mike, please introduce yourself. Tell you how you know that's degenerate. Yes, absolutely. I'm actually embarrassed. Mike Cirelli, born in California as well, enlisted in the Marine Corps, was a recon Marine and a scout sniper and eventually crossed over to the SEAL teams as an officer and retired after 20 years like Andy. We served at the same

place, but I've got to tell you about the first time I met Andy. Because people ask me, like, what's Andy Stumpf like? Because I meet people and they're like, oh, Andy Stumpf. I'm like, he is a real dick. Andy is a dick. It's always been nice to me. How weird. I don't

remember the story. Always been a good friend. Always been friendly. The story, he's about to tell. Yeah, I'm not sure. Handsome guy. A little reckless. So we're at SEAL Team 3, and SEAL teams are younger. The average age is what? I think like 19 to 23. At a conventional team?

Early 20s at best. Early 20s at best. And so there's a bunch of officers in the operations room at SEAL Team 3, and we're talking. There's a lot of group think going on. We're bad-mouthing the leadership on a decision that was made. And all of a sudden, this guy walks in who's got just a, he's in his uniform, which is rare.

He must be checking in. He's got this big stack of ribbons to our two rows of ribbons. And we're talking, he's listening. And we sort of see this guy in the background. And which was odd was he, you stepped in and you're like, I think you're all wrong. And he killed us with logic. logic because remember each of us has like two combat deployments at this point we think we have it all figured out and andy's coming in with his eight

combat deployments and just destroys us what was he what were you guys wrong about i cannot everything what was what were they saying i don't even fucking remember this interaction. He could be making this all up. No, it's not. So I forget the subject, but two of us left the room. And I remember, I can't remember if I looked at him or he looked at me. And he's like, was that guy a dick? And I'm like, yeah, he was a major dick. But was I right?

You were right. I think that was the problem that was wrong. What were you guys wrong about? So, you know, you get a little experience. It's like the Dunning-Kruger effect. You get a little experience under your belt, and you think you have everything figured out. And for a young SEAL, whether enlisted or officer with two combat deployments, you think you're the top dog. The way the conventional SEAL teams work is that's a lot of combat experience for the conventional SEAL teams.

But he was coming from a different side, a side we all knew about but knew very little about. And we held them in high regard because that's the 2%. He walks into the room and we knew once he stepped up it was wrong. But testament to Andy, he had a reputation for going against the group think. And the SEAL teams have a lot of group think. That's the easy answer, is just to get on board. We still haven't gotten to what you guys were wrong about, though. Do you remember?

I cannot recall. All I recall is the incident. Just remember being wrong? It was about combat, and we thought we had it figured out, and he came in based off of his vast experience, or vaster than ours, much vaster. You know what's interesting, though? Two combat appointments at a conventional SEAL team is four years.

Because you've got to do an 18-month workup, six-month deployment, maybe they'll push you out to 12, depending on what's going on operationally. The deployments that I came back with was like three and a half years worth. So the velocity that I was getting the experience was just crazy different in the compressed nature of it because it would be overseas for 90 back for 180, overseas for 90 back for 180, and just constantly going and going and going and going. So about the same amount of time, but four times the amount of experience. Wow. Yeah. I will say the guys, I left SEAL Team 3 and I went to where he was coming from.

When I called back because they were on deployment in Afghanistan, they're like, dude, that guy rocks. I mean, because he brought all this experience, all the planning experience, and you basically embedded in a platoon. It was amazing. I got a 300 Win Mag, a Javelin missile, and I just was laying heat down with both of those things. It was amazing. I got a 300-win mag, a Javelin missile, and I just was laying heat down with both of those things. It was awesome. They would say, what high ground position do you want to go to? I'm like, this one looks good right here. So the guys, and after I heard that, the guys loved him.

First impressions, I was totally wrong. But how often does that happen? Especially in the SEAL teams where you meet a guy for the first time and you're like, I hate that guy. Well, I kind of think everybody's like super alpha, hyper aggressive, and also a little bit of combat experience, full of piss and vinegar. And everything's a competition. Everything is a competition.

Almost to a detriment. Yeah. How do the teams balance out that with camaraderie, the competitive with each other but also camaraderie? Like how do you avoid the internal conflict? So I think there's a line you don't go beyond. But you look at the civilian populace. One of the things that they totally lack is something called shared adversity that we have in spades. And with guys you rolled with for years, you could not see them for 10 years.

You see them all of a sudden. It's like you saw each other last week. When you go through Buds or you go through the hard training, because Buds is not the end of the hard training, there's this homecoming belonging, this relationship, esprit de corps built that will never die. And so while we promote competition it pays to be a winner as we say there's a line at which if somebody wins if andy wins the question now is okay andy what did you do differently than us and share that that you know transfer that knowledge to us so that we can elevate our game as well. So we understand, you know, Proverbs, was it 2717?

Are you asking me? I have absolutely no idea. Iron sharpens iron as one man sharpens another. So you understand that. But we understand competition makes the world go round to a point. To a point. To a point. But at the end of the day, he's going to enter a room.

Well, first off, I'm an officer. I wasn't entering any rooms. He was for most of his career. But, you know, I might be on his back and he's trusting me. So if he's got knowledge, he's going to transfer that knowledge to me in training before we go to war to make sure that I'm the very best to cover his six. The thing about things like whether it's SEALs or any high-level military operation group, whenever you're dealing with people that have done something that's extraordinarily difficult,

there's like a rite of passage that you guys have gone through that a lot of people think is missing from particularly young men in our society and culture. There's no real moment where you recognize that you've done something incredibly difficult and you've actually become a man. It almost seems like society is pushing it the other direction where that shouldn't exist or it should be avoided. Even with the teams.

One of the things I hear is this narrative that it's too difficult. I think you've got to consider the source on that one. The most recent thing that came out, I'm sure you saw this, Mike, was there was a video of training that occurred. I'm pretty sure it was on San Clemente Island because that's where they CS gassed us. And there's guys who are outside and they're getting exposure to CS gas, which I remember before I joined the military. If you look at any movie, probably up to and including like Full Metal Jacket or if you even went into a recruiting office, exposure to CS gas is something that you do in basic training. Except, I don't know if the Air Force does it. Yeah, I don't know. Let's assume that they do. Probably they don't, but let's assume that they do. It was completely

standard and normal to see. And that room sucks. You go into a room, you have a gas mask on, and they make you take it off and they make you either do something or say something or talk so you can't hold your breath. That's the point of all that. So this video comes out of students that are outside, which one is actually a huge advantage because it dissipates quickly, especially if there's any kind of wind. And they're getting gassed. And there's already issues with the story that I'm telling because, one, who the fuck is filming this? I'm telling because one who the fuck is filming this like it just the fact that there was somebody there who was filming this thing and it made it onto the internet in any way shape and form is a is a mistake in and of itself so it couldn't have been someone who's in the program there's no

instructor it had to have been an instructor so the students the last four weeks of training you go out to San Clemente Island it's called third phase and you get a very basic indoctrination into small unit tactics, rifle weaponry, explosives, you throw some grenades, you do some underwater demo, but you're out there for like the last tight four weeks of training. The students, I mean, I don't even remember having a cell phone when I went through actually in 97. I'd be shocked if they're allowed to have cell phones on there. So it had to have been an instructor. But they're getting gassed. They're being made to sing happy birthday again, so you can't hold your breath. And it looks horrible. Because it is horrible. And the point of that training is, is it's supposed to suck. It's supposed to be difficult. You're supposed to be

exposed to that in a controlled training environment. People are like, well, this one person looked like they were passing out and there's mucus coming out of their face. Yeah, exposed to that in a controlled training environment. People are like, well, this one person looked like they were passing out and there's mucus coming out of their face. Yeah, it's CS gas. It sucks. But the first time you experience that, it shouldn't be in a combat zone. So it's a volunteer-only program. You can leave this particular training block if you want to at any given time. And oh, by the way, every branch of the military exposes their people to this. So although there are people who are saying, yeah, it's too difficult, I think you have to consider the source. I don't think they know what they're talking about. We expose people to it on Fear Factor.

Yeah. Again, voluntary. Police officers. And if they didn't want to, I bet you they can be like, you know what, Mr. Rogan, I'm done with this episode. Like, I'm out of here. So what happened with that particular video? It made its way onto the internet. And because of what it looks like, it looks like exactly what it is, a really shitty evolution where you can't breathe. Your sinuses are running more than you ever have had them run in your life.

You can't see. You can barely talk. You're choking. You're gagging. Some people throw up. So it made it onto the internet and people started saying, how could you do that? Like this is too

brutal of training. How could you possibly do this? That's weird that people on the internet had opinions. So they just had opinions? Did you just say it was weird that people on the internet have opinions? I'm joking. Clearly I'm being sarcastic. Okay. But the fact that anybody paid attention to those opinions.

It trended for a while. It actually, not only did they have opinions, it started getting shared. And then it started, you know, the next thing you know, it's on major news outlets. And then I actually think I saw an article saying that the Navy opened an investigation into it. They have to. At that point, you have to. They should open an investigation. Here it is.

Navy launches investigation toAL tear gas video. Newly surfaced video showing Navy SEAL recruits being tear gassed is adding to scrutiny, adding to scrutiny over elite military units training practices. But, I mean, you can speak to this, please, because you have to have brutal training. So you have to layer onto this. I've got to say this. Yeah, go ahead. I remember going through this in the Marine Corps. I cannot recall that evolution on San Clemente.

And I asked somebody, they're like, oh yeah, it happened. I can't remember it. We went out into a demo range and they had sprinkled in CS powder into the dirt. So we didn't actually realize we were having an exposure to it. And people were just covered in, I remember I'm sitting there and we were trying to do demo calculations or like cut debt cord and you're like dry heaving the reason i would say the reason that this is probably the bigger issue is that there was a high profile death in uh seal training not too long ago uh with a student who had just completed hell week and died in the hospital shortly thereafter um the young man's mother is a nurse and she's very vocal about what has happened.

And there was an investigation involving that. So it seems like not to, I mean, horrendous to lose your son in any way, shape or form. I don't want to take anything away from that. But from that incident, you know, this is like another layer on top of the onion on something that people were already talking about. And this is like another layer on top of the onion on something that people were already talking about, which you combine the two and it just seems like, for one, I wish SEALs could get the fuck out of the news in general. But since it starts, they're layering on top of each other, it can seem to be a bigger deal than it is. What did he die from? Infection.

Yes. So during Hell Week, you've got open sores. You're in the water, which isn't far from the Tijuana where it drains off. So that's always been a concern, and we mitigate it extremely well. And first off, my condolences to the mother because this kid was a stud. He was the captain of the Yale football team. He was going to become a SEAL. He passed the hardest phase. So was it like a staph infection?

It was a staph infection. And you look at the source. Bacterial pneumonia. You look at the source. Bacterial pneumonia. You look at the source. This is all New York Times. It's a string of reporters from New York Times that have just been, they've had a hard-on for the SEAL teams. They have been going out. In fact, they wrote a book, and you have the author, Matt Cole, Code Over Country.

Yeah. Code Over Country. Yeah. And they have just, for the last half decade, if not more, have made it their personal crusade to bring down the SEAL teams. And the Eddie Gallagher incident did not help. But here's what I'll say. One, Eddie is a friend. Eddie didn't handle all situations well.

But it's amazing how Eddie can have, and I think Eddie had like eight combat deploy's amazing how Eddie can have, and I think Eddie had like eight combat deployments, how he can serve honorably. And he was number one at the SEAL team, his SEAL team, I think for E6, I believe. He served honorably for 19 years in the last incident he's involved in, which he was acquitted for. That defines his entire career. The last sentence of his chapter as a SEAL defines all the 19 years and all the good work that he did in defense of our nation

for those who would never even think of serving. And he was acquitted. What was the charge again? It was something about a detainee? I think the charge was murder. Yes. It was an ISIS prisoner that had been wounded in a strike. And while rendering

medical aid, they, they accused Eddie of murder. But he was acquitted. Yes. But they still don't appreciate that he was acquitted. Like they still treat him like he's guilty. Some of the things I've seen in the press, and I'll keep reporters out of it. One, I can't remember their names, but a lot of the liberal news media just have painted him as a war criminal. Bottom line. And his life has been impacted. If you look even at, so first off, NCIS. Naval Criminal Investigation Service. The branch in San Diego was never held accountable for, let's just say, bad practices that they implemented while trying to bring Eddie down. They also had a hard-on.

NCIS is not always your friend, and they're looking to make a name for themselves as well. And in fact, I was investigated the day I retired by the same crew of people from NCIS San Diego, only six months previous to when the whole Eddie Gallagher thing sort of came on. But, I mean, they tapped or they put a bug into Eddie's lawyer's emails so that they could read all the documents coming into that lawyer. They did some pretty lame tactics, and they were never held accountable. Is it legal to do that? No. The initial lawyer was fired, relieved, and they replaced him rapidly. Was he relieved from military service, or was he laterally transferred?

Laterally transferred, and that's how they dealt with it. Jamie, go back to that article again. I want to say something. When you first pulled up the first initial complaints, because I want to scroll. Yeah, right there. So they were talking about the protocols. Here, let me be clear. We have absolutely zero tolerance for hazing, abuse, or deviations from safety protocols.

As Navy SEALs, we serve our fellow Americans. Uncompromising integrity is our standard. Our character and honor are steadfast. Most of all, we are expected to lead by example in all situations. So if that is like standard operational procedure for those kind of training programs, Why does he have to say that? It's not hazing, right? I mean, could you haze somebody with tear gas? Yes. What I'll say is this. As somebody who was a BUDS instructor,

there is an evolution sheet and matrix for every single thing that happens in training to include remediating the students. When they fall short of a standard, there are limits to how long you can remediate them for. There's limits to the exercises that you can use. There is an oversight matrix of who's in charge of the evolution. What's the ratio going to be student to instructor?

There is somewhere a matrix, an evolution sheet for exposure to CS gas in buds. There is absolutely no way that those instructors are like, Hey, uh, Hey Mike, you doing anything tomorrow too? Let's go gas these fuckers. Like that, that doesn't happen. Every single day in buds is templated. Why that person said that I'm not sure, but as somebody who worked in that pipeline with that curriculum, it exists. Um, and what they need to say is, yeah, there's a reason that we do this. And the reason that we do this is so that their first exposure isn't in an environment where their life might be on the line. That would actually shut it down. Because what that does is it leaves the door and it leaves question in people's minds.

Did they make a mistake? Were they hazing people? Do we need to do this? My resounding answer is yes. And also, I'll add to that. My answer when people ask me about students who have died in BUDS, and I think there have been 10 in the history of BUDS since the fifties, is that it needs to continue to happen. I don't want it to happen. I don't want anybody to lose their life. But if the training becomes so exceedingly safe that that's not a potential, then we're not serving people in that training and we're not preparing them for what the battlefield's going to expect. I'll push against you on that one. If you explain it to the American public, more than half still won't understand. They will still view it as brutal,

as unnecessary. But there's been a push to make the military a playground for progressive policies. And it is the last place politically that we want people playing. And I mean, you even see China has an initiative to actually make their men more masculine. Yeah, I saw that. And we're going the opposite direction. There is a diversity, equity, and inclusion chief at the Pentagon now who wrote a book that basically called the first responders menaces and basically painted them as white supremacists. And it's going a very bad direction. I will say this about the military. What people don't understand is it is highly professional. I've always been impressed. There are standards, there's doctrine,

and instructors know that they follow that playbook. They mitigate risk to the lowest level because you always have the risk of getting investigated for something like this. So who's letting these progressive policies infect the military? How is that ever an option? Is that just people who are blissfully unaware because they're on the outside? How does that ever get in to the point where you're considering things like elite groups like the SEALs having to deal with this sort of politically correct nonsense? Personally, I think the policy of transparency that was made or popularized by President Obama, and this is I'm not attacking President Obama. He was aggressive on the war on terror. He made a lot of aggressive decisions. But there are certain communities where transparency like the CIA

special operations is not the best policy, is they should remain in the shadows. And there should be just public trust that we are doing the right things. We don't want anyone to pass away in training. We don't want to get anyone hurt. But we also don't want to advertise our capabilities or our training or our capacities to potential military peers like China or Russia. So the transparency for me, propaganda, do it with the regular military, keep special operations out of the bubble.

But even doing it with the regular military, like why? I don't have an answer for how it started infiltrating other than it seems to be the groundswell. I mean the military is just a group of people from normal society. So I don't think it's uncommon to see things that our society is dealing with working their way into the military. But I do hope that there is a backstop against it. And in my mind, everything needs to be worked in a reverse direction. What is it we're asking these people to do in the real world execution of their job? Now let's work our training pipeline to prepare those people for that.

I don't know where the progressive ideology falls into that or how it infects that or how it got started. And I'm a little bit detached from the teams at this point. I've been out now for almost 10 years, but I still stay in contact with people. And what I am hearing, though, is that it is pushing at the corners and it is pushing at the edges, and it's not enhancing what they're doing. In their words, not mine, because, again, I've been out of it for almost a decade, in their words, not mine, it's not enhancing their ability to perform on the X. But I can't understand it.

The SEALs are filled with guys like you guys. How does it even get discussed? There's a bell curve even in the SEALs are filled with guys like you guys. How does it even get discussed? There's a bell curve even in the SEAL teams. You take even the command that we served at, which it's not impossible to get to. It's a little bit more difficult. But if you take a team of 50 people, you're going to have your bottom 10 percent, and you're going to have your top 10 percent and everybody else in between. And it is a melting pot. I mean, I served with people who were just devoutly religious, devoutly religious. And then people

who come to find out later were sociopaths and serial killers. We've talked about that on a previous podcast, but, and everything in between. So there is diversity of ideas inside of the SEAL community. People think, oh, it's only people who lean to the right. And I would say there are more people who lean to the right, but there are plenty who lean to the left. And we're talking, I mean, I remember team room conversations about religion, about politics, about sexuality. And there was never like, yep, that's it. And we all slapped the table. So let me say, well, to his point, I wrote a book about this called The Talent War, How Special Operations and Great Organizations Win on Talent. It was about performance and about building high-performing teams and how the special operations goes about it.

Because when you think about it, in the private sector, people hire you based on how much industry experience you usually have. Well, in our profession, I can't go to a high school or a college and say, who here has special operations experience? Nobody would raise their hands. So by nature, the assessment and selection process, which we're talking about, basic underwater demolition school is hire for character, train for skill. And that's why we push these men and women to their limits, their mental and physical limits, because that's where true character emerges. And that's what

we're looking for. We're looking for mental toughness, resiliency, the ability to work as a team. And that brings up a point. You know, one of the former commandants in the Marine Corps just wrote an article and basically was arguing, keep your hands off the military. The military runs off a different set of ideologies. Those ideologies are conformity to a degree, which conformity is not always a bad thing. You know, if you have a baseball team, you want some conformity to SOPs, standard operating procedures. But it's also to operate as a team. So in this training,

we break people down in their individual selves and we build them up as a team player where the public sector sort of, let's say they trend towards individuality, which is not bad either. We do want people to be people. Like Andy has a personality. I have a personality. And we almost breed this, I like to call it in the SEAL teams, a healthy disrespect for

authority to push back against my, I don't want to say my orders. I never gave orders. These are my orders. I've never said that. But hey, here's my decision. This is what we're going to do. If it's not a good idea and I outrank Andy, Andy's going to come back and be like, yeah, we're not going to do that. That's stupid.

And this is why. So he does it in a professional and tactful way. But I'm sick and tired. And, you know, I do place very high performing veterans into jobs. That's what I do for a living. But people, based off Hollywood, have these bad sort of perceptions of what the military is. It's because Paramount and Warner Brothers

don't paint us in a good light. We're not the Chris Kyles. This guy and all the guys I served with were the most lethal warriors in the world. I was not. I ended up there, and I was proud to be part of the team. I told Andy, always a bridesmaid, never a bride, meaning I was part of a good team.

We got that mission done. We got that bride married. But the most lethal warriors I knew, who no one will ever know in the public, were kind, empathetic, respectful, and they loved their fellow man. And they were husbands, they were fathers, they were sons, they were wives, daughters, mothers. And when they needed to dial empathy down and do the bad part of a job, they did it and they did it with lethality.

And then they dialed the empathy back up. But people naturally gravitate towards Hollywood and they paint this bad picture as veterans. And I will always, I mean, I came from Atherton, man. It's one of the most affluent towns in America. And I ended up amongst a lot of guys that came from nothing and their character far outweighs a lot of the people I know in the public sector. What is it about these movies? Like why, why do they paint veterans in that way? And why does it permeate our culture like that? You would think that depictions in fiction would not overwhelm the reality of what, what is needed and what gets done. But it kind of does. I think it's harder to tell the full story when you have a time compressed medium to tell that story. And if you want to have people put their butts into seats,

and it's the last 20 plus years of sustained combat operation, you're probably going to make a movie about things exploding, bullets flying over your head. You might dive into a little bit of the storyline on some people's lives, but it's an easier, unfortunately, story and narrative to tell than to truly unpack what it takes to live in that world for that long. And that's probably the only exposure, other than things like this, like a podcast where people actually get to sit down and talk. The only exposure these people ever have, if they don't know anyone that was in the SEALs or anyone that was Green Beret or Ranger or what have you, they don't know.

So, you know, maybe they read an article in the Times like, oh, these people are assholes. This is terrible. Look what they're doing to the recruits. We need to dial this down. We need to dial this back like I have to do at the office. Like they don't have a comprehension of like what is necessary to get the job done to what you guys have to do. Yeah. If I could rewind the clock back to 2010, my last deployment, and you take somebody who says that the training that we were talking about is unnecessary. Like, why don't you just get in my hip pocket for tonight? Why don't you just come

with me on target? And at the end of this, we're going to do a debrief and you let me know how difficult you think the training should be so you can perform at this level in an environment that might take your life. And they're going to go, okay, well, I don't know what they would say, but I would assume they would say, yeah, you guys can need to make this as really as hard as possible. And I'm totally good with you gassing people and maybe you should gas them for longer, many more times. And you should do this this it would blow their fucking mind what is actually required to be able to perform in that environment and I can't fault them for not understanding that because they just don't have exposure to it we've gotten comfortable we've

gotten way too comfortable here and if they saw the atrocities that we saw over there, they would understand why. You know, evil exists. And you've heard the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to stand by and do nothing. And that, I mean, we saw ISIS throwing gay men from seven-story roofs with the people in the town watching. There is evil. And unfortunately, sometimes you've got to go to hell to send somebody to hell. It's a famous quote.

It's an ugly job. I think you said it best. I watched an interview where you said, war leaves a fingerprint. It leaves a fingerprint and that fingerprint will always be a part of our DNA. And I question some of the things we did and the outcomes of the war. And I even went back as a BUDS instructor. I was the junior officer training course director for the SEALs that graduated BUDS. And my job in one month was to turn them into ground force commanders, GFCs as we call it. And I worked a Hell Week Evolution. was to turn them into ground force commanders, GFCs as we call it.

And I worked a Hell Week Evolution. And when I worked it, I was the – what do you call it? Not the phase officer, but the OIC for the evolution. Probably just like the shift lead or something like that. Yeah, the shift lead. And the first time I looked at the guys and I'm like, oh, my God, we're going to kill these kids. And they're like, hey, hey, Mike, calm down. We thought that the first time we saw this training as well.

And we've all been through it. But when you're watching it – It takes you back when you go back and actually – because. We thought that the first time we saw this training as well. And we've all been through it. But when you're watching it. It takes you back when you go back and actually, because you go through it the first time and it's so abstract because it's just day after day after day. And you go back as an instructor and there's not enough instructors to, in just first phase, which is where Hell Week occurs, they augment from all the other phases because it's a 24-hour training pipeline from a Sunday till about Friday afternoon.

And you watch people who are on the verge of death and they're there voluntarily. And even though you went through it, you sit back and you're like, holy shit. Like, did we look that bad? I remember specifically asking other instructors, like, do you think that we looked as bad as they look when we were in training? Because these dudes are the walking dead. It's gnarly. That's what I was just going to say.

And, Joe, you've got to understand, we've got medical personnel out there. We've got ambulances out there. Sometimes you have a psychologist out there. I mean, we are going through a checklist to mitigate risk down to the lowest level. But the interesting thing about the assessment and selection is, you know, we used to play a game. Who's going to make it through the training? And you are 90% wrong. I mean, we had a NCAA

athlete in one of the classes a starting fullback. Didn't last two weeks of the, how long is the training? Buds? 26 weeks. 26 weeks. Didn't last past the second week. And I, even going through it, because I was a prior recon Marine, so I thought I knew what they were

looking for, made a judgment on some of the kids that were going through BUDS with me. One of them was a little Asian kid who was sort of passive and unassuming. Is he an astronaut now? Yes. And at the end of Hell Week, I looked down the line. I think we started with 250. We ended up with 25. And there's this little Asian kid that weighs probably 140, 150 pounds.

I'm like, huh, wow, was I wrong assessing that kid as a fellow student to him? And we ended up in the same SEAL team. I watched him earn the Silver Star literally with my eyes. He did something that he was awarded the Silver Star for. Then he went back and became a Navy doctor and, yeah, became an astronaut all by the age of 34. And his name is Dr. Johnny Kim. And he's the most humble dude. Classic underachiever.

Yeah. So what is it when you're looking at them and they look like they're at the verge of death? Like what part of the program are they going through? I would say when you're seeing them at that phase, it's going to be the trenches of Hell Week. Because that is literally a 24 hour long from Sunday evening, somewhere between sun going down at 6 PM to whenever they started with breakout at 8 PM all the way through to Friday,

you're going to get about two hours of sleep on Wednesday. So it's going to be Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. They're, they're absolute walking dead by just by design. They're just barely getting any sleep at all. Two hours of sleep on Wednesday, that's it. That's it. You might get like some micro rewards because everything is like a team evolution. There's some really famous pictures of people running with boats on their heads. And if you win an evolution, you maybe get five minutes of standing there by yourself. Or the instructors might let you put your boat down and they'll not pay attention to you for a little bit so you can get like a micro nap. Other than that, they're just moving constantly,

evolution after evolution after evolution after evolution. How can you stay awake that long? Hypothermic. You're constantly being told to do things. I mean, the main tools that you have at BUDS is the beach. So you have sand, which is obviously an amazing abrasive, and the cold water. So you have sand, which is obviously an amazing abrasive, and the cold water. And the main tools at BUDZ are telephone poles, which are super low-tech, these IBSs, inflatable boats, small, which is an air-filled rubber boat carried by three on each side and an officer in the back generally because, as Mike knows from his career, they're just generally doing less than the enlisted. And that's it. I mean, those are the main tools. So they're always, they're racing, they're running, they're paddling their boats, they're crawling through the mud pits. They're just constantly moving. So the sleep deprivation is about testing your will or testing your ability to endure.

And your character. And your character. I would describe, and this is my description, not anything that I think the Navy would agree with, but I would describe, and this is my description, not anything that I think the Navy would agree with, but I would describe BUDS training as an ability to look at who somebody really is when you're at the lowest point you ever, ever thought you've been at emotionally, physiologically, psychologically. And when presented a choice, are you going to take care of yourself? Are you going to take care of the people that are next to you? That is what BUDS to me boils down to. Make somebody cold and make somebody tired.

And we're talking three days without sleep. I mean, when in your youth prior to that, did you ever go three days without sleep? Probably never. Ever, ever. And you see different people. You see people for who they are. And you can think somebody is hard as hell, you know, at the beginning stages of BUDS,

and then everything changes in that one week. And, you know, what we found, personally, this is my anecdotal sort of learning, is that people who faced a lot of obstacles early in life before getting to SEAL training usually have the scar tissue of resilience, and they do pretty damn well. And the thing about buds is you don't know anyone's story. You know when no one's – I mean, yeah, you may know that Andy's from the Santa Cruz area and Mike's from Palo Alto area, but you don't know their background.

Point in case, Johnny Kim. I knew Johnny for 15 years, and then we finally hear on the Jocko podcast where he sort of goes into his background that his dad was killed by police. He's the one that called the police on that day. His dad had to stand off, and he blames himself. We never knew that about Johnny. But had I known that before making an assessment of Johnny, I would have realized that that kid at the time had been through a lot more in life than I had. And there's no other way. I don't think that there is. How else could you know what someone's capable of? I mean, unless you really test them like that, it doesn't seem like there's another way. Otherwise, like you were saying, you don't know who they are until they're under that kind of stress. And for clarity, the selection process is not perfect. There are still people that make their way through.

I have seen people who have been fully made it through the multi-year training pipeline, who have been awarded their trident. They've maybe even done a combat deployment. I have seen them quit. I have seen them give up, which is supposed to be what that training crucible is all about. Finding those people that in theory would never be able or would never allow themselves to make that decision. It's just not perfect, but it's as close as I think we can possibly get. I have a deep respect for anyone who makes it through butts. I think we could possibly get. I have a deep respect for anyone who makes it through butts.

Sure. You are part of a select few. But let me reshape this for you. Ultimately, in the career of a SEAL or Army Special Forces or 75th Ranger Regiment, they all go through very similar training. That's just the entrance exam. It's a long entrance exam. And it's the longest behavioral interview probably in the world. And to Andy's point, we still get it wrong, but that's the entrance exam.

And then the next part of your career, the next potential five years, 20 years, 30 years, it then sort of transforms into performance. Can you perform? Can you do the tactical and technical side we already know you have the mental toughness to the resilience but there's a lot of guys that graduate buds that just quite frankly and his to his point this this talent distribution this normal distribution the spell curve i mean we've got our top two percent and they're completely in a different realm and then you've got the 98 and you can split that into multiple tranches of the high performers, middle of the road performers. And then, uh, uh, we call it the bottom of the barrel. And when you get out of buds, what is the process? Like once you graduate,

once you're out of buds, what's the process from there out training? Yeah. I'm a little over my skis on this one because they changed it when i went through we did a bunch so the goal at the end of the day is to be awarded your trident it's a metal pin that you get handed and they change your nec or what does that mean naval enlistment classification it changed it to a 53 26 for an enlisted person which means you're a seal when you show up on like you're now officially a seal when i When I went through, it was BUDS. It was Static Line Jump School out of Fort Banning. We checked into our team and they put us through another six months to a year of training.

And then you went around all of the departments and you tested in front of your peers and you were doing calculations for a demo. You were planning a dive with currents. You were taking apart weaponry. I mean, you were talking about tactics. And it was a very, at the time, I was like, this is unbelievable. I thought it was just this robust test of knowledge. I look back now, I'm like, holy shit, those were the entry level. Those were just the chapters.

I didn't understand the words that were even on the page. So each team kind of did their own thing. And post 9-11, a lot of things got course corrected, and I think this is one of them. You know, post 9-11, a lot of things got course corrected, and I think this is one of them. They realized it's not a good idea to have SEAL Team 5, which is literally a nine iron golf shot away from SEAL Team 3, doing different training. Probably better if we all get the same product at the end of the day. So now when you graduate, Buds, you go to a program called – it's SQT, SEAL Qualification Training, which is going to be like another maybe two years depending on when you time it and you go through cold weather training jungle training uh desert training web like everything you know comms all of that stuff and at the end of that they graduate as a class they're all awarded

their trident so they all have the same baseline level of training and then you go to your seal team so you're two years into a pipeline before you show up for your first day on the job at a seal team and that's what I went through. Like broadly. There's going to be some outliers in that, but broadly that covers what they're going to do for the pipeline. Basically, we were better and smarter than his generation. They knew more, for sure.

Is it difficult to get people to... Do you have the same amount of people that are trying to become SEALs now as there was in the past? Or is it... I would say so. I would say so, if not more. It's more competitive to even get into the training. Yeah.

Because they've got thousands of kids competing for only 250 slots per class. And these kids are better athletes. They're smarter. So it's more competitive. So the process has worked. harder. So it's more competitive. So the process has worked. There is something to say for Hollywood and the Paramount Plus show, SEAL team, they are a funnel filler for recruitment, for high-performing kids coming out of high school or college that want to give it a shot to see if they have what it takes to become a SEAL, an Army Special Forces Green Beret,

Ranger Regiment, MARSOC Raider. And that's the whole point. The whole point is we hope the next generation coming behind us is better, faster, stronger than we were. It's interesting you ask that, though, because in one of those articles, and I believe it was around – I read it in an article. It was around the young man's death. It was talking about the attrition rate, the number of people that are making it through. And it would appear that the attrition rate or the number of people making it through is decreasing, which gives you an opportunity to look at that in two different directions. I know I have my take on it, and then there seemed to be

a more popular take that was being talked about. And the more popular take was, well, this training is too hard. Why are we doing these things? The way I look at it is, let's assume that the training has actually been the same largely since its inception. I think it was in like the 40s or 50s, but when they switched from being the, you know, the UDT into the SEAL teams, if the training has actually stayed the same and we're using the same fucking telephone poll logs, I wouldn't be shocked if we were still using some of the actual same telephone pole logs from back in the day, then what is it that is actually changing? And the answer is the people who are attempting the training. So instead of vilifying the training, maybe we ought to take a hard look at our society. And maybe the curriculum is just doing is doing

just fine. But as a society, we're getting softer and softer and softer with less resilience. But as a society, we're getting softer and softer and softer with less resilience. And that, to me, explains a lot more the differences in attrition than the actual curriculum itself. It's hard to argue that that's not the case in terms of the people that you see today. It seems like today people demand more. They feel like they deserve more. They feel like they're entitled to more. And they feel like they want to to more, and they feel like they want to work less. I mean, that's a narrative that you see pushed over and over and over again,

which is the exact opposite you want for any kind of extraordinary achievement. That attitude is going to keep you from ever being extraordinary at anything. If you think that the world owes you something, you think that you're entitled to something, you think that you're working too hard. world owes you something. You think that you're entitled to something. You think that you're working too hard. The people that excel in any endeavor in life are the people that are willing to work the smartest, the hardest, and the people that are able to get out of their own fucking way and realize that they're task oriented. They get the job done, whatever the fuck it is. People that concentrate on, and this is something that's enforced in our society, it is. People that concentrate on, and this is something that's enforced in our society,

people that concentrate on the negative aspects of things like the, like that, you know, why is it so hard? Why is this? Why does this person have something that I don't? You know, why do they get a chance and I don't? And that, that kind of thinking is encouraged in our culture today. It's like encourage that if you didn't succeed, it's more likely that somebody fucked you over. It's less likely that you're kind of fucking lazy or entitled or, you know, nobody wants to tell anybody

that today. Nobody wants to tell you. Well, you'll get ganged up on by the people who are used to being told like, it's not me, it's everything else externally. Yeah, I don't know where the end state leads to that, but I don't think it's not me it's everything else externally yeah i don't know where the end state leads to that but i don't i don't think it's awesome i don't i don't think it's the place where we want to end up it's only awesome for people who don't think like that because then they excel you know what i'm saying i mean for you know i had this conversation uh with someone about uh uh gordon ryan like why is why is Gordon Ryan so good and

I said well one of the reasons why so good as he works every day yeah it's 365 days a year it doesn't take any days off almost like he's dedicated his life to it yeah crazy right yeah crazy what a thunk crazy and you want everybody wants to be a bad motherfucker but nobody wants to do what it takes to become that in there in lies a problem I think so one I think the next epidemic that we need to confront and confront now is victimhood. It's permeating the United States rapidly. You're rewarded for it. But you look at Gordon Ryan, everyone who looks at him on social media thinks it just came overnight.

Well, he just got canceled on social media. I can't believe you brought that up. Yeah, what is happening with this victim? He doesn't even know why. They didn't even even know why. They didn't even tell him why. They said it was bullying. So he's literally in a business where elite athletes

that are trained killers try to bully each other. I think. That's what they do. And then they end up going to a mat and actually objectively working it out and then they generally high five afterwards and they fucking move on.

If you look at the photos of him and Andre Galvao after he strangled him, they're like hugging each other. He's holding Andre's hand up, they hug. I think, and I heard this from somebody else, that he... Let's be honest, Gordon gets a little wild from time to time. He'll say some shit. Of course he can. Of course he does, rather. That's why he's who he is. Because he does think like that. I think what I was told is that he essentially told someone that they should go kill themselves.

Which, again, that was told to me second or third hand, but that would fall into the bullying policy. Did he tell another elite jiu-jitsu fighter that they should kill themselves? I would be shocked if it wasn't another elite jiu-jitsu fighter. And I'm not even positive that's what happened. But to me, in my head, I'm like, okay, that would probably make sense if they were to take that action. How many times did we tell that to each other when you do something embarrassing? I told that to you when we were out there. I mean, what does that mean?

Is it literal? No. It's clearly not literal. Yeah, it's a figure of speech. It means embarrassing. You should be embarrassed. Yeah, you should be embarrassed. It's like. It means embarrassing. You should be embarrassed. Yeah, you should be embarrassed. It's like Sebastian Manisocco.

You should be embarrassed. Should he say that? Is that okay? Fortunately, he has a backup account where he basically posted it. I know. The screen was like, RIP to me. Well, yeah, he kind of knew. But my fear is that they go after his backup account now.

Yeah. Which is kind of fucked because I actually fear is that they go after his backup account now. Yeah. Which is kind of fucked because I actually had a conversation with Zuckerberg about him. He's like, do you like the way he talks online? I'm like, it's fun. No one's getting hurt. The people that he's doing this to are also people like that. Now, you could be that person who wants every martial artist to behave like a noble warrior who's out there testing

their skills respect and dignity or you could be the guy that fucking fills up arenas because people got want to come to see him that's what Floyd Mayweather is that's what Gordon Ryan is like the elite of the elite who talk a ton of shit and there's a psychological warfare aspect that I don't think I think non-competitors don't understand that. There's a thing about that guy. He gets into your fucking head. When you go to sleep at night and you think about the fucking Instagram post he made about you, you're like, fuck!

There's part of that. What were Zuckerberg's thoughts on the way that he communicates? He doesn't like it. You know, Zuckerberg is a respectful martial artist. He's doing martial arts now, and I think he's a nice guy. And I think he wants other people to be nice guys. And he doesn't want that kind of harassment and bullying on social media networks. But I think that's censorship. And I don't think censorship is ultimately good. I think you have to like if people don't like the way he's behaving, you should not follow him. You should not pay attention to him. You should not support him. You should not go to see him. Or if you do like it, and you're like me, and you don't have a problem with it at all, and you think it's funny,

you should follow him. He's not a terrible person. He's not a bad guy. In fact, he's exemplary. He's a guy who's doing something that's very extraordinary. He's what Goggins likes to call uncommon amongst uncommon men. And that's what he is.

He's as uncommon as you get. He's the fucking best ever. Like, leave him alone. It worries me, though, that, you know, obviously Zuckerberg, maybe replace him with somebody else because that guy literally could probably throw the switches at these companies. But what does it matter whether or not I like the way he conducts himself online? Like I'm super appreciative of the rights that we

have in this country, but I've yet to come one that says you have the right not to be offended at any point in your life. You should be offended at some things. It's not bad for you. You should be offended. They should figure out why you're being offended. Well, you also have the choice, like you said, I don't know if people know this who are on Instagram or Facebook. It's really easy to click the same button that you click to follow that person and not have to deal with that. You can block them and you'll never see anything they post ever again. That's bullying.

We're now in an age where facts have feelings. Facts, in fact, have feelings. But there's an element of showmanship in anything you do. And he understands that well. Even in the SEAL teams there was an element of showmanship in anything you do. And he understands that well. Even in the SEAL teams, there was an element of showmanship. If you don't know what you're doing, just look good.

That's one of the rules out of their fight. I'll give, like Jocko. There's an element of Jocko that I highly respect. He's got the showmanship piece down. And he won a lot of fanfare because of that. He does that well. But you look at our industry, the highest performers

are also the wildest variables. To attain that level, to get to that level, there is an imbalance amongst those guys. Look at MMA. Look at Jon Jones. He's the wildest motherfucker ever. And he's the best.

There's a reason why he's the greatest light heavyweight of all time. He's the wildest motherfucker ever. And he's the best. I mean, there's a reason why he's the greatest light heavyweight of all time. He's fucking wild. He's a wild dude. I mean, when he was fighting Daniel Cormier and they were doing the press conference, he said, I beat you when I was on coke. You know how funny that is? That's fucking funny, man, because that fucks with a guy. When the guy's getting up in the morning and eating oats and drinking distilled water

and fucking jogging up hills, and this dude's doing blow. Looking in the mirror as you're brushing your teeth like, fuck. Partying, dancing, kicks your ass. Will he be back? Yes. Yes, he'll be back. Yeah, he'll be back as a heavyweight.

And, you know, it's a lot of exciting challenges for him at heavyweight. I like the fact that he decided to do that. It's interesting. I think he's still the best light heavyweight. I like the fact that he decided to do that. It's interesting. I think he's still the best light heavyweight in the world. And he can still make the weight. I mean, he's not really a heavyweight. He's deciding to become a heavyweight. He's doing it through deadlifting and squatting and, like, serious powerlifting.

You know, he's put on a lot of weight. He's put on, I think he's like 253 now or 255 now. He's fucking, he's a big fella. Still with the same gas tank i don't know it's i don't know how you could honestly you know i mean how how do you have the same gas tank you don't see heavyweights operate at the same pace that you see welterweights or lightweights yeah there's a reason for that i don't think you can and if you look at someone like demetrius johnson who's a fucking a whirlwind there, he's 125 pounds.

You know, you don't have a lot. The demand for oxygen is very different than Francis Ngannou. You don't see a guy like Ngannou that fights at that pace. They literally cannot. These variables need to be taken into consideration when you apply tactics and strategy and how you choose to, you know, obviously he has a different amount of force in each shot. And that is also the case too. I talked to Max Holloway about that once. We were talking about Jose Aldo and I was, I was asking him like, like he knew that Aldo was

fading after like one or two rounds. And he said, it's power. He goes, those guys have more power than me. He goes, they're hitting harder, you know, and that shit takes up a lot of energy. And he was kind of laughing about it. He's like, I don't have any power, me he goes so they're hitting harder you know and that shit takes up a lot of energy and he was kind of laughing about it he's like i don't have any power man he's like those guys have so much more power he goes i gotta hit a guy a lot of times to take him out but these guys these one-shot guys they're all like that's connor connor mcgregor who's got that incredible power but that power when you throw that explosiveness, you're essentially sprinting, whereas other guys are running marathons. A guy like Max Holloway is putting that volume on you. Nick Diaz puts that volume on you.

It's a different type of fighting. I got nothing but respect for those guys. How much would you have to get paid to get in an octagon? A lot of money, and I would not last long. I don't think there's an amount of money that I would do it. Those guys are out of their damn minds. You would do it for the right price. No, I would not.

I like to do safe things. Shut the fuck up. This is the guy that has a world record for a flying squirrel suit. I used to have the world record. Oh, who's got it now? Does it bother you? No. Not even a little?

No. I was doing it for fundraising.? Does it bother you? No. Not even a little? No. I was doing it to try to – I was doing it for fundraising. I think it bothers you. There's nothing worse than it has been. That's true. Are you speaking from experience? I would kill yourself. I would kill yourself.

Oh, my God. We're going to get kicked off of Spotify. Luckily, Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify, is an MMA fan. So I don't think that's happening. I have nothing but respect. I'm dead serious. Those guys, to me, they're out of their mind. Yeah, well, that's what they want to do.

They want to be that guy. They want to be the top of the heap. They want to be that fucking warrior standing on a pile of heads. And there's no other way to do it. If you want to be the top dog in MMA, that's a weird desire. But a lot of people do it. You know, if you want to, if you want to be the top dog in MMA, you know, that's a weird desire, but a lot of people have it. It's, it's a extraordinary accomplishment to become a guy like that. And there's very few people that are capable of doing it, you know, and there's a lot of talk at MMA about like fighter pay and whether they should be paid more. I think they should, but I'm not a fucking businessman. I don't understand. I don't,

I don't sit down and crunch the numbers. I don't understand how much it costs to run a promotion. It's a lot. There's a lot of money involved. I don't. But also, I know that they get paid more than boxers. When we talk about boxers, you talk about elite boxers like Floyd Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao, the top of the heap guys who make a shit ton of money. And they do. But the undercard fighters in those fights, they don't make shit.

They barely get by. But that's because they don't make shit. They barely get by. But that's because they don't put asses in seats. There's a direct correlation between how many people are coming. They're plopping down money. Oh, Volkanovski's fighting? Fuck yeah. They put that money down. Why do they put that money down?

Because Volkanovski's a fucking animal. And they want to see that guy perform. He's being paid for what he's done. And if he's not being compensated fairly at that level, that's a different conversation. And I don't, I mean, there's contracts, there's negotiations, there's managers, there's a lot of shit involved in running a business. That I'm not, that's not my world. I don't understand it. I don't put any thought into it.

So I can talk about it from respect and the way I feel about fighters. I feel like they should be paid a lot of money. I feel like you should be able to retire. and, you know, your body is essentially broken. By the time these guys are 40 years old and they're getting out of the game, their fucking knees are shot. Michael Bisping has two artificial knees now. He's missing an eye. His one eye is dead. I mean, it's a, it's a fucking hard world. It's a hard world. And I feel like you should be able to retire and that should be, you're good. You should have enough money in the bank

so if you don't live like an asshole, you should be able to take care of yourself forever. Educate me here. So the NFL has a players union. Have the MMA fighters for the different leagues created sort of fighter unions? There's been discussion about the problem. The difference is

MMA fighters are individuals competing against other individuals. It's not a team sport. I could see the merit in having a structure like a union. I just don't see fighters going along with it. Because let's say a big fight's coming up, right? Like Alex Pejera is fighting uh is israel at asania if behera gets injured and he can't fight at asania and you know there's a bunch of people that are saying like i want to fight and then there's well you have to get paid the same amount

as behera this is our union dues and then someone comes along says listen i'll fucking take that shot for half that money because i want to be the fucking champion and I want that opportunity. You're going to get fighters that cross that line. And if there's no union, that makes it easier to do. Could you conceivably form a union where people would get paid the correct amount? Yes, I think it could be done. I don't know how to do it. I don't know how it could be structured.

But I think there's some arguments. There's some arguments that a union would be a good thing. And then there's some arguments that it's better to have a group like the UFC, an organization that cares deeply about the fighters and tries to compensate them fairly. Do they? You know, again, it's not my world. This is my world. I sit down. I put the fucking headsets on.

I understand what these guys are capable of. I know their history. I know what they're doing. I talk about what's happening during the fight. I try to give honor and respect to it. That's what I do. Other than that, all I can say is I want them to be compensated fairly. How many fights have you called at this point? Thousands. I have no idea.

What's the wildest shit you've ever seen go on in there? Broken legs. Like the shin on shin? Shin on shins are the worst because those guys are never the same again. Never the same. No one breaks a leg and is ever the same again. Yeah, I have a hard time watching those. I can only watch it

once. I cannot watch it when you guys start doing the slow motion replays. KOs are rough, but guys have bounced back from KOs again. Bisping, like that fucking KO against Dan Henderson was one of the worst KOs I've ever seen in my life. He got flatlined, and then Bisping is out cold, and Henderson leaps through the air and smashes him in the face while he's unconscious. I mean, it's like he literally has Henderson's logo is an image of him flying through the air delivering this haymaker to an unconscious Michael Bisping.

Find Henderson's logo. I mean, this is like Henderson's fuck you to Michael Bisping. He literally made a logo of him hitting Bisping when he was out cold. It's a power statement.

That punch right there in the left corner, that's him. That is him. That is that. That's his. That is him. That is that. That's his most historic moment, his most brutal, legendary moment. Look at the one with the red coat. I mean, you know how crazy that is?

The red coat one is hilarious. But you know how brutal that is? The guy's fucking logo is him delivering a flying right hand. And he had one of the greatest right hands in the history of the sport. If you ever hugged Dan Henderson, he feels like this table. He's made out of wood. There's certain dudes, they just have a different composition to their body. I talked to his massage therapist, and she was like, his fucking body is like, you can't get in there.

Like, she'd be like trying to, you're not going anywhere. He's so fucking dense. And when he would deliver a right hand, it was just preposterous. And he would load that fucking thing up and just always look for it, always look for it. And when he landed it, you're fucked. He knocked out Fedor. That fucking guy is a middleweight. And he knocked out one of the greatest heavyweights

of all time in a fight where he was in trouble. He got caught in a bad situation. He was on the bottom. Fedor is cracking him and he escapes. He sneaks out the side and cracks him with an uppercut and then lands a couple follow-up shots and puts him out. That motherfucker could punch

and imagine his logo is him flying through the air, hitting an unconscious opponent. It's quite the boss move, for sure. That is like pulling your dick out and laying it on the table. And having a big old hog. Big old hog. Big old donkey dick. Have you ever been hugged by dudes where you're just like, don't ever hug me again?

Yeah, all the time. I fucking hug all those guys. Insane. Yeah, man. I mean, look, when you meet Brock Lesnar, you're like, what the fuck are you? I had a joke about Brock Lesnar. I'm like, I'm not worried that Brock Lesnar would fuck me. I'm worried he would use me as a condom to fuck something way bigger.

Break it into the zoo. Like, where are we going? Shut the fuck up. Okay? Okay? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's different kinds of humans in this world.

Tim feels like that. Oh, yeah. I was fucking, to my own poor decision making, was rolling around with Tim this morning for a little bit, doing wrestling practice. He feels exactly the same way. Yeah. He's a giant chimp. That's what he is. That's how I was going to describe him. He describe he's an ape for sure he is a giant chimpanzee with a psychotic

mind yeah beautiful human being and a great american i was gonna say he's one of the kindest people i've ever met and he is so ridiculously capable and dangerous when i asked that question that's exactly who i was thinking of because when i moved to austin in 2015 there was a workout going on and on it where they were raising money for some veteran charity and we had a mutual friend who I was thinking of. Because when I moved to Austin in 2015, there was a workout going on at Onnit where they were raising money for some veteran charity. And we had a mutual friend who basically had told Tim about me

and, hey, he's in the military. And he just comes up and he wraps his arms around me. And I felt so uncomfortable. I'm waiting for it to end. And it would seem like he was just sinking it in Almost like hey good to meet you

I was taking a picture with him today And he was alternating between grabbing my balls And biting me on the shoulder for the picture So unprofessional There's different kinds of humans But what am I going to do about it I'm like Tim please stop You're going to have to get on steroids

Have you ever met Yoel Romero That's the freak of all freaks That's the freak of all freaks. He's the freak of all freaks. Out of all the freak athletes that I've ever met in my life, you know, I talked to Luke Rockhold about him, and he's like, even when you hit that guy, he's like, he's made out of metal. Like, you know, Yoel Romero is a famous story. I've told it before. Forgive me if you've heard this.

He went to a doctor because UFC sent him to this doctor after one of his fights and because he had a fractured orbital and the doctor examines him and then calls the UFC he goes where did you find this guy and he goes yeah he's a fucking amazing right he goes no no no you don't understand I've never seen a human like him he goes I have been studying medicine and practicing medicine for more than 40 years he goes i've never seen a person like this he goes the ligaments and the tendons in his eyes are three times larger than a normal person's like the structure of his face is different he had a fractured bone in his orbital he said they brought him in a few days later. He goes, it's already healing. That's Yoel.

I mean, he was on the Cuban Olympic wrestling team. And just, he was a part of that program. And, you know, he came on the podcast and Joey Diaz translated, you know, he was speaking Spanish and Joey's also Cuban. And, you know, and they were, it was a beautiful thing. And the way he was saying, the way he was describing it, he was like, when you go to that program, he goes, you become a fucking machine. You become a machine. Because, you know, the elite wrestlers get better food. They eat more often. Eat wrestlers get better food.

They eat more often. And so it motivates the people below him who they're training with every day to beat them and get better. Yoel was a freak. And you've got to understand, Yoel's still elite. And he's like 43 or 44 years old. He's a fucking freak, man. He's a fucking freak. By the way, cheated against Tim Kennedy. Let's just say that right now.

Tim Kennedy had him really badly hurt, cracked him, rocked him, and his corner did some sneaky shit and kept him on the stool. What do you mean sneaky shit? Sneaky shit where he didn't come out at the beginning of the round. They get one minute, right? They get one minute, and he was still sitting down, and Tim Kennedy's walking around standing up. He's like, what the fuck is going on?

And it rattled Tim, and Tim to this day said that he made a mental error getting upset and flustered about it, and it really cost him in the fight. But also, he fought Yoel Romero, and Tim wound up losing that fight. But he's got a legitimate argument that they should have stopped that fight. He was not ready at the beginning of the round after Tim had him bad. See if you can find that. Because Tim had him badly hurt, rocked him. And one of the worst times that Yoel had ever been rocked in a fight.

Like probably almost barely made it to the chair at the end of the round? Barely made it. Barely made it. And he got to the corner, sat down, and the corner, look, they did their fucking job. Just like Angelo Dundee did with Cassius Clay when he fought in England. What the fuck is that guy's name? So a gentleman in England who caught, it's not the tip of my tongue, who caught Cassius Clay when he was young with a vicious left hook and dropped him.

And Angelo Dundee cut his gloves and they had to change his gloves. Like, oh, his gloves are broken. We got to get new gloves. It's going to take a few. Yeah. And they kind of did the same sort of deal. See if you can find it. Did you find it? They did the same sort of deal with Yoel.

Yoel, they kept him sitting down and Tim's walking around going, what the fuck? Like he got an extra like, I want to say 20, 30 seconds. Henry Cooper is the guy with Muhammad Ali. He caught him with the left hook. So here's Tim. Tim cracks him. He hits him with his uppercut

and another one. Tim's got a BAM! Look at this. Left hand, right hand. I mean, he's got him badly hurt. Look at that. Right hand, left hand. So this is the end of the round. Goes back to his corner. Tim's got him fucked, right? Look at him. He's really bad. Now, at the end of the round, the round's over and Tim's there. And he's still of the round the round's over and Tim's there and

he's still sitting down the round's supposed to start he's still on his stool they're wiping him off they took all this extra time and then finally I want to say it's a legit 20-30 seconds later Yoel gets up and Yoel eventually catches Tim with that right hand and and finishes him wow and Tim lost that fight. But there's a real argument that he should have won that fight. There's a real argument that they should have stopped that fight when he was not ready and getting up at the beginning of the round. Because if you don't get up when you're supposed to,

you're basically quitting. You're saying, I'm not ready, which means you're not ready to fight, which means the fight's over. God, I wish I had gotten into this stuff, like paying attention to this earlier. I've only been watching UFC for the past few years because it now makes sense to me what the hell they're doing. Dude, you got to come with me.

You got to come with me and sit next to me. I mean, can I have a headset and say shit that's not happening? No, you can't say shit. He is going for an inverted fucking... You can sit there. Well, you'll know the jiu-jitsu. You're a brown belt. You know the jiu-jitsu you're a brown belt now i know

i had no appreciation for it though until i started training i actually had no interest in watching it because and this is how fucking stupid i am i'd be like well why doesn't the guy just stand up what just stand up what why are they up against the cage that's boring how hard is that yeah then you get you get somebody who puts their hands on you a little bit. You're like, oh, I can't stand up right now. Yeah, you ain't going nowhere. And I also can't get off this cage. Yeah.

Well, that's a boring part of fighting that's necessary. I am a big advocate of never removing people from a cage and never standing people up. I think if a guy can hold you down, the round is five minutes long. If he can hold you down and you can't get up, tough shit. And a lot of people say, no, you got to have stand-ups. Otherwise, people just take you down can hold you down, the round is five minutes long. If he can hold you down and you can't get up, tough shit. And a lot of people say, no, you got to have stand-ups. Otherwise, people just take you down and hold you down. I'm like, so what? Then they take you down and hold you down.

Yeah. That's part of the fight. It's still less boring than baseball. So shut the fuck up. I mean, obviously not everybody trains, but once you start training a little bit, you have an appreciation for how hard it is to actually hold down somebody your size, probably the same skill level, that wants to get up. Like the cage work, it can look boring, but again, once now they understand what's going on in the fight for the underhook and the head, you're like, oh shit, this is badass. You know, there's another argument too that I think they should add weapons.

Like there's a lot of shit that you can't do on the, not weapons, like knives and shit. Hold on, I was going to say, are we talking a golf club? What are we talking? I mean, knees on the ground, knees to the head, knees to the head on the ground, kicks to the head on the ground. They're doing that in one FC and they're doing it in a cage. And a lot of people think it shouldn't happen in a cage because there's times where you can't get away and you're trapped and someone could soccer kick you or stomp you.

But that's a real fight. If the problem is the cage, I think they should eliminate the cage. I don't think they should eliminate those weapons because there's positions where guys go into where it appears like they're safe. Like if a guy's in a turtle position and you've got like a head and arm and you're above him, there's an amazing option to knee someone in the head and stop the fight. And you saw a lot of that in Pride.

Like Mark Coleman stopped a lot of guys in Pride because he would get to that position, he would drop knees on their head. Because you should be able to. That's a legitimate position. If you can knee someone standing and you can knee them in a clinch, why can't you knee them when they're on the ground? You should be able to. It's a legitimate move.

And if knees are legal, if a knee to a head is legal, why isn't it legal on the ground? Why are we making it safer to fight with strikes on the ground? I don't think you should. It's the same reason people are in an uproar about tear gas and training. Yeah, but this is fucking cage fighting. This is the last bastion of chaos in combat sports. It's like this is the last bastion of chaos in combat sports. And to eliminate certain weapons, I think they eliminated some things initially in the beginning because they felt like those things were too dangerous. That's the reason to this day you can't do a 12 to 6 elbow, which makes zero sense because it's not even the most strong elbow. The most powerful elbow is actually an elbow where you drive down to the side. The most powerful elbow i

believe is like this it's not like this because this is not necessarily the best move like kinetically i think kinetically the shoulder comes back and it's a downward elbow probably has more force and i'd like that measured because this is still illegal in 2022 it's so dumb and the reason why it was illegal, and Big John McCarthy talked about this. Big John, in the early days, he was a martial artist, black belt in jiu-jitsu, and he had to go, and he was the referee. He had to go in front of these athletic commissions and talk to them about the sport and try to convince these people to approve it. And one of the things these fucking normies, they didn't like the fact that people could break bricks on TV, like on ESPN. You see the karate demonstrations. And you're like, well, we can't have that. People could break bricks like that. They could kill people.

So they go, okay, all right, we'll make that move illegal. Okay, fine. So the 12 to 6 elbow is illegal to this day, and it's a remnant of ignorance. That's all it is. Doesn't make any sense. That's a fucking legitimate move. if you can elbow someone on the ground Why can't you do it that way you fucking most certainly should be able to do it that way It's so dumb doesn't make any sense I want to see all of that and I also want to see in the third round of garden rake

Shit's gonna get wild. Well, have you seen those crowd can vote in can vote in a weapon? Yeah, the crowd gets to vote on the tool. It might be a pipe, garden rake, fucking nine iron. They're probably already doing that in Russia. In Russia, they're probably already doing that. Have you seen the phone booth fighting? Yes. Yes. They do it in cars now.

They're buckled into their seat, and they start the fight while they're in a car, and they have to get out of the buckle and beat the shit out of each other. They're in a convertible. I have a deep respect for how crazy Russians are. I know. You know one thing I like? Cold race. In America, they start off sitting in a fucking convertible

and then they're beating the shit out of each other in a car. It's not ideal. Well, it's not ideal for kickers. You basically take all the kicks out of the equation. It's such a silly way to fight, though. It's really dumb. Well, it's not ideal for kickers. You basically take all the kicks out of the equation. It's such a silly way to fight, though. It's really dumb. The phone booth is better. There's no escape.

They can barely turn around. This is so silly. And if you're going to have a phone booth fight, you should definitely have headbutts. Like David LeDuc, he would shine in phone books. In phone booths, rather. Because, you know, David LeDuc, who's the king of Letwe, that's that bare-knuckle Muay Thai style. Have you ever seen that? No.

They fight in Myanmar. Yeah. David LeDuc, he's been on the podcast before. He's a fucking savage man. And his style of fighting, they incorporate headbutts. So he practices headbutts with the mitts. So his combinations involve headbutts. So he practices headbutts with the mitts. So his combinations involve headbutts. It's like crack,

one, two, bam, headbutt, elbow, headbutt. He throws them in in technical combinations. So that would be good for him in there. The headbutts were a big part of Mark Coleman's early career too. Because he would get guys on the ground and he would get into their guard and fucking headbutt them in the face

and punch them in the face. When did they make – This is David. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. He's a fucking animal. He's breaking coconuts with his head. All I can think of when I see that video – Look at him.

Look at him. Is I want to see him misjudge it and come in right under that and just hit the tree. Well, he'd probably break the tree too. God. Dude's got a hard-ass head. You know what's amazing is the evolution of fighting or fight training in the military. Because you came in in 96.

I'm sure it was some random system and I don't want to name names. Yeah, I'm trying to think about how I could discuss this

without ending up in a lawsuit against me. Let's just say it was wildly ineffective and pitched as the solution you'll never believe this to everything. What style was it?

Was it like a Bullshitsu, style was it? Was it like a— Bullshitsu, I would say. Yeah. Was it like trapping hands and stuff? What was it? We've got to be very careful here. Let's just say as the evolution of UFC took more substantial weight— People realized what was effective.

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Yes. Oh, yes. And especially, you know, actually Tim Kennedy as well probably was very influential in the military saying, hey, listen, this sort of mixed martial arts approach to our job in the military is absolutely applicable even to prisoner handling. It actually probably saved lives. It would save lives because I've seen situations induced, and I think this happens sometimes with law enforcement as well, where you reach the limit of your tools. And you know as well as I do, it's, you know, if you apply too much pressure in certain places, people are going to freak the fuck out. And you probably could get compliance with a lot less force if you knew what you were doing. Right. And so I've seen

people lose their lives because the person trying to control them switches them into a legitimate flight or fight state. They think that they are going to get killed by what's happening to them. So it induces a reaction from them and then they end up getting shot because the person is at the end of their tools. And I don't know how it was for you.

I got zero, what I would call combatives or hand, I hate the term hand-to-hand training before I got to the East Coast. And then in the shooting phase of selection in the morning, we were either getting hit in the head or doing kill house runs, and then it would switch. So I'd either have a headache in the morning or I'd have a headache in the evening. And it was looking, and again, I hadn't, I have not been training long from a jujitsu perspective, but looking back at it now and understanding more and seeing more, the only way that I can describe it is it was nonsense, but it was being taught at the highest level.

Because they just didn't know. We didn't. Well, certain people understood, but there's also, you have to understand with the government contracting that each person is selling their system and there's some politics, but it got better and better. I mean, where you were at, they were bringing in Rasputin.

Now there's like a Matt Space dojo Rasputin? Full-time coach. I'm sorry. Where did the name Rasputin come from? I just stopped thinking the Russian guy. The Russian guy with the big dick. Dave Carrillo, I believe it is, the gorilla. Camarillo? Camarillo, thank you.

Full-time coaches, dedicated Matt Ayers. So they bring them in to train. And, I mean, my last troop chief was heavy combatives. But, dude, I always got my ass beat when we were training. It's probably one of the biggest misconceptions. People are like, so can you kill somebody with your pinky? It's like, no, it's this one right here. Actually, I'm not left-handed, so it wouldn't even be that one. But it's like, no, we're not. In the 17 years, one month shy of

17 years that I was in, it was not an emphasis. And again, I wish it had been more of an emphasis because I feel I'm so late to the curve finding jujitsu at 40 you know i'm like i see these little kids we're training today and there was a black belt rolling with an actual like child and i'm sitting there like how soon until that little kid can whip my ass that son of a bitch well how about the rotolo brother 19 years old they're fucking everybody up and for clarity full jealousy on my part that these people found it at that age because I wish that I did. But it wasn't an emphasis. And people think, oh, you came from a special operations background.

You must be deadly. I'm like, if you give me a gun, I can hold my own. But I don't want to get in a bar fight with anybody. And let's step back. Some people talk about knife fighting. Oh, God. There isn't a seal that I don't know that didn't cut themselves with a knife. Every knife I've ever owned, I've cut myself with.

Very peculiar parts of the body as well. But there is, have you ever heard this story? So, you know, the strength of the SEALs is we travel in packs. And when there's 20 of you in a bar, there's a pretty good... Overwhelming fire superiority. Pretty good probability that you're going to win whatever fight. But that didn't happen in a little town called SLO, San Luis Obispo, where Chuck Liddell.

So we used to train in an area in mid-California, and that's where we would go to have fun on the weekend when we weren't training. And as the story goes, and Tim knew this because Tim was close, and a guy named Tyson Mendez here in Austin, which runs Archetype Boxing. So 20 SEALs were in a bar, and they probably were talking a little bit of shit, and the people behind the bar were part of Chuck Liddell's crew, made some phone calls, and some SEALs were laid out in the street,

sort of catatonic and arms up, knocked out it's so not it got banned it seals were not allowed to go there during their time off but it was it was an embarrassment um was it though it should have been a reality check like you wrote that you wrote that check somebody who knows what the fuck they're doing cashed it shut up yeah like i mean violent altercations let's say like 99.9% of the time, are completely avoidable. Yeah. You know, just shut your fucking mouth. But how often have you seen, and there's some dudes that come into teams that are all about

MMA, and they make horrible seals. Or when the rounds start flying, being able to step into a cage does not totally translate to when you're getting shot at. But I would also say being a team guy doesn't correlate to being able to step into a cage either. There might be some crossover, but they're very different things. That is a good point. Well, you have to treat each thing individually. Just because you're really good at this one thing doesn't mean you're going to excel at the other.

You have to put the same amount of effort and focus into the other. There's no other way around it. They're different things. And then there was guys that were good at both. They just had that mentality. It's a very, very unique community, man. Even like, you know, Dr. Johnny Kim is not exactly

a guy who's training in fight training at all, and he was exceptional on the battlefield. Exceptional. And he's the most... His humility is off the charts. Like, the guy, you can tell he has self-doubt, but off the charts,

and he is the sweetest man you'll ever meet. Didn't he go to Harvard to get his medical degree? He did. I wrote about him in my book, and funny enough, and I know Johnny well, and we, again, came through buds, went to SEAL Team 3 together, we're together. When I wrote the book, I put a 4.0.

He got a 4.0 in mathematics at the University of San Diego. And he called me. He's like, Mike, it I put a 4.0. He got a 4.0 in mathematics at the University of San Diego. And he called me. He's like, Mike, it was actually a 3.98. And I'm like, I always had this like Johnny. Hey, Dickhead, you can round that up. Johnny, shut up. I rounded it up.

Just don't let the truth get in the way of a good story. But, you know, by all rights, he could have returned to the SEAL team as an officer. Oh, God, yeah. Yeah. But he said, no, I want to become a doctor, and the Navy needs more doctors, and he got into Harvard. Is he training for a Mars mission? Oh, Jesus. He's in the pipeline for a mission right now.

Like, he's a legit astronaut. Please make him go second. Don't be the first group that goes to Mars. I think there's going to be a lot of mistakes made. I don't know. If their stakes are made, that's the guy you want. Freeze and run out of oxygen a million, billion miles away or whatever the fuck it is. Not interested.

Wouldn't be my chosen way to go if I got to choose for sure. You have to have that guy on. I would love to have that guy on. You would be blown away by Houston. Does he live down here in Texas somewhere? Houston? That is Texas. It's close enough. I'm not great at geography, but...

Yeah, there's exceptional people in this world, and the only way to find out if they're exceptional is to go through exceptional difficult scenarios and really tried and true. No one's just exceptional for no reason. You have to do

something. And it's hard. It's hard to do those things. That's why this disparaging of elite combat groups like the SEALs is so disturbing to me. It's because it's done by people who aren't exceptional and who don't understand what's involved in something like that. I'll push back against that a little bit because sometimes their criticism is correct. How so? What have you read that's correct it's not necessarily that what i have read in print because what i have in my own personal experience mike i'd be curious to your thoughts on this often oftentimes in the

print medium i find that they're coming at it from an angle. And they may, I don't know what necessarily their motivation may be. Sometimes I would even describe it as they have an ax to grind. And I don't know where that motivation comes from, from the ax to grind. But I think that transparency from the, like the SEAL community is not perfect. And I can only speak to the SEAL community that I served in. We could have done things better. We could have evolved faster early on in the war. It's tough to evolve at the speed of war. Like it's very, very hard and we were behind. I think it's, I don't think that criticism is a bad thing. And I don't think that you have to be a SEAL to look at a program and say, hey, maybe you could look at doing something like this to

improve it, but it should be positioned that way, not a hatchet job that's trying to hobble the legs of the community because you haven't, you know what I mean? So it's almost as if the motivation from the person who has that criticism matters almost as much as the criticism. The motivation to improve it. If they have that, because some people, and that's what I'm saying, a lot of the things that I read, there's no motivation to improve it. It's a that. Because some people, and that's what I'm saying, a lot of the things that I read, there's no motivation to improve it. It's a motivation to chisel it away or to hobble it with an ax. And I don't know, maybe they had a terrible experience with a seal. Guess who else has had a terrible experience with a seal?

Fucking me. Mike. Like, I have wanted to kill some of the people that I worked with. And I've told them that to their face. And they're also some of the best friends that I've ever had in my life. It's not a perfect community. Is there any perfect community of human beings? No.

But that seems to be what people forget. They're like, we will pick a social media post. And again, we already talked about like that video should have never existed in the first place. Like do your job as an instructor. Don't film the fucking students for your personal highlight reel. fucking students for your personal highlight reel but you know that training needs to exist but somebody can weaponize that and then begin to try to like hobble the community as opposed to looking at it for why we do it the reason behind it it's some of the motivations and the axes to grind they're very deep and it just it's not helping the community it's actually hurting it and i don't know

if that's what those people want. I don't know if they want notoriety for writing those. I don't know. It's sensationalism. For every thousand things we do right for the one thing we do wrong, it ends up on the front page of international news. And then they focus on that one thing despite all the great things that special operations or the military has done for years. Right. It's a lack of a balanced perspective.

So here's my perspective of the military, and I don't come from the military lineage. I don't think you did either. Really, yeah, my father served during Vietnam. Mine did as well. Yeah. But the military, at the end of the day, if you look at it in contrast to the American public, it is a leadership incubator. When you go through boot camp or OCS, regardless of whatever service, it's like the greatest onboarding process there is.

And they want you to succeed. Even in SEAL training, if 250 kids start, the ultimate goal is 250 graduate. But is that a reality? Absolutely freaking not. We want as many to graduate as possible. And let me be clear with the training, how people are dropped is it's a policy of called DOR, drop on request. They self-select out of training. Rarely do the instructors. Or fail standards.

Yes. Rarely, though, do the instructors in first phase have to launch people. Most people predominantly are DOR. And we see them out in a very professional and tactful way. And we make sure, hey, what did you learn from that experience? What do you want to do in the Navy? And sometimes the Navy will just let them exit out of the military. But, dude, we put a precedence on leadership even then, even though, I mean, the two organizations

that wrote the manual on leadership are the Army and the Marine Corps, not the SEAL teams. We copyrighted or plagiarized everything from the Marine Corps and the Army. That's the more correct term. We didn't copyright shit. Yeah, plagiarized. We get it wrong. It's an organization run by humans. And, you know, the funny part is every kid that comes out of BUDS has the potential to be a great SEAL.

You know, the next step is who do they end up under as a mentor? Because we sometimes allow bad actors to stay in the community. And guess what they do? They impact the young SEALs below them. And the young SEALs, whatever they learn from them, believe that that is the standard and that's acceptable within the community. And that leads to to bad seals but i mean there was a name up there admiral uh keith richards that guy's a stud man is he perfect no but he is a he's a good good man and he's in charge of the community now as was wyman howard who just retired who was beloved the guys would do anything for wyman howard and wyman howard wouldn't ask them to do anything illegal. That would get them in any trouble whatsoever. I mean, these guys are ethical

leaders, but that's overlooked in the media and they just go for that one thing. Well, it's almost impossible to balance the narrative too. Like, I mean, so how do you combat the video of somebody getting CS gassed on the Island? Do you put up 20 videos of training going exactly like what it's supposed to look like? I think you should have someone come on like you that can explain why that's necessary. I think that's the way to combat it. I think that's the only way to combat it. But it goes farther than that too. You know, there, what has been asked of people in the military, like the execution of their normal job, and I'll speak only from the special operations perspective, you're operating at what I would describe the limits of the gray area, oftentimes, where decisions are going to be made in a super

time compressed environment. Now I'm talking about like on target, super time compressed environment with extremely limited information and mistakes get made. And what I'll say is in every, I've worked with at least every military branch and probably every one of the special operations communities. If you spent only your time looking into the shadows for things that if you were to measure against, are these above the board or below the board, did they meet the standard? And you were only looking for things that were below the board that didn't meet the standard. You're going to find a lot of them. A lot of those stories are written about or told, and it's hard to, again, balance the narrative. It can make it seem as if that is the way, that is the ethos of the community. This is who we are. This is who we breed. And it's almost impossible to balance it because I don't know how we talk about Neptune Spear, right, the raid that killed bin Laden.

Like that was very public. That was a success. That's a way to balance the narrative or show the success of what the U.S. military is capable of. But how do you show that when you go on a deployment and you're banging out 90, 120 targets, doing everything that everybody would want? There's no way to, and you shouldn't talk about that. You know what I mean?

It's like this negative, the negative aspect of it, which does exist. I'll be the first person to say that, you know, not everything is perfect, but it's impossible to balance that with, hey, look at all these things where we did, because it it just you don't also don't want to share those things. Yeah. You know, it's a really it's a fucked up metric system and scale.

What's the general attitude about people like whoever did kill bin Laden? Because I believe there's more than one person that's taking credit for it. Is that correct? Who? Mike? I'm proud of them all. I'm proud of them all. I'm proud of them all. No challenge to that.

I think the cat was out of the bag. And you could not put that back in. How so? Because of the notoriety of the mission and who they took out. There was I mean, Disney tried to trademark the name of that unit. I think the government stepped in and said no, no, no, no, you're not doing that.

Yes. What? I think I'm pretty accurate on that. Is that real? I think so. That's gross. To your point, though, there are competing narratives as to what actually happened there. Yeah.

I believe I've heard more than one narrative. Correct. But when people discuss that operation publicly, when they give interviews, when they write books about it, what's the general attitude in the teams about that? Man, I mean, we were just out doing some training with people that were directly attached to that unit. And I'm not going to say that this is the opinion of everybody, but I have some very close friends that were there that night. And it's not positive. And that's the politest I can put it.

Is it not positive because it has a detrimental effect on the team's ability to perform similar operations? Is it not positive because it goes against the ethic of what the teams are supposed to be about? It goes against the code. Both of those? Yes. And the question of legitimacy and truth. So I'm trying to think about it. Colonel David Hackworth was the most decorated soldier in the history of the Army.

And he said you could have two people in a foxhole and they tell completely different stories of what happened. Right. And he said they're both true i disagree with that they both have their own experience yes but you don't get your own facts so we nor any nor i were there and i was there in spirit in spirit yes we will never know and you know that's a discussion for those guys to have. And I think the fame grabbed a hold of some of them. And again, I think the world of all the guys that were on that. And time, I've seen this. You remember the Band of Brothers from HBO?

Yeah. I guarantee after 10 or 20 years, like those guys started to drift apart or so-and-so didn't like one another and that stories sort of got embellished or sensationalized. And there was probably some animosity amongst those guys as years went on. Time does not make things better. And people, for whatever reason, some people warp what happened in their mind. It's contentious to say the least inside of the community. So guys who get out and write books, it used to be those guys were kind of ostracized. I think to a degree, some of them still are, depending on the angle that you take.

Jack Carr, good example, mutual friend. He is like a 98% nonfiction writer, writer two percent fiction and it's beautiful because it falls into the fiction category but it's so precise in so many ways which i think is what people like about the books there's that sense of realism it's like this gun and to the point where i'll be like hey jack man like i like your books but shut the fuck up about the serial number on the gun all right like jesus christ just tell the fuck up about the serial number on the gun. All right. Like, Jesus Christ. Just tell the story. I love that he does that. You love it because you didn't live in that world.

I'm bored out of my goddamn life. But for someone like me who didn't live in that world, it's, it's, I get a better, more robust picture of what it's like. And, but to my knowledge, he hasn't gotten any negative pushback, nor do I think he should because he's not trying to write the book of, hey, no shit, there I was. It's truth layered with fiction that tells a fucking fantastic story. And again, opinions are going to vary depending on who you talk to when it comes to people who write books. Jocko is another example. he is writing leadership books based on his experiences,

not, hey, there I was, no shit on target. I think where people who start flirting with some negative reactions are the ones who are like, it's all, hey, no shit, there I was.

Surrounded by grenade pins. Surrounded by grenade pins. And then in their book, they start to have a very, what I will call, casual relationship with the truth. That has an impact for them in the community. Here's my observation.

A lot of those guys didn't serve 20-year careers in the community. Well, neither did I, Mike. You did. I know you got medically discharged. But I'm saying a lot of the guys that write those books, there I was, and I single-handedly won the war, usually serve two to three combat deployments, maybe four. And Jocko and Leif did a good job with extreme ownership. They were trying to do something. They were trying to do, again, a knowledge transfer of what they learned that worked well leading organizations.

And it was the same with my book. I hate the fact that it's so cliche I wrote a book, but actually the book I wrote was more about the Army Special Forces community and the process they had created. But when somebody writes a self-grandizing book about how great they were, that's where it goes wrong. And I've got a second book coming out January 10th, The Everyday Warrior. And it's a self-help book, but it's not about me, nor was the first book. To say guys can't write books that will benefit other people, like Dave Goggins wrote a book,

whether you love or hate Dave Goggins, the community is conflicted there too. That guy has impacted a lot of lives. So good on him. Yeah, millions. Good on him. Millions. I think ultimately like, hey, people ask me, dude, you must have loved

all the SEALs you served with. I'm like, absolutely not. It's so true. Did I love them? It's so true. Did I love them? I loved every single one, whether I liked them or not. And

regardless of whether we liked each other, and there's guys that didn't like me, on Monday, we came together. We looked at the board and said, what's the mission? We're overseas for four months. What's the mission tonight? We're going to operate as a team with professionalism intact. We're going to accomplish a mission. We're going to bring all our boys home. And then at the end of the deployment, they went their way and drank with their buddies. And I went my way and I drank with my buddies. So I loved all my brothers. And again, this is another thing that people in the private sector get wrong. I usually, when I talk to companies, they ask, how did you lead? I led through love,

man. I led through love. I loved, and it took me a while to recognize this. And I went through some rough time here in Austin, freshly divorced, just left the SEAL teams, and it got dark. And I was doing a lot of reflection. And I came to realize I loved the men and women I served with, my left and right, a lot more than I hated the enemy. I don't care about the enemy. But if somebody was going to threaten one of my brothers or sisters, then God help me, I was going to step in and do whatever it took to annihilate them. But it's the same thing with your kids. You know, the highest form of compassion is accountability.

And you've got kids. If your kids do something wrong, you correct them because you want them to become competent, good human beings. And that is love right there. That's accountability. And it's driven through your compassion for them to do your job as a father or a mentor. Absolutely. And no one can argue that. I mean, that's carved in stone.

All I would add to that is sometimes you can shit in their kit bag when they're not paying attention for the people you hate. Have you done that? Oh, yeah. Actual shit? Do I need to check my kit bag from this last train session? No, we never served directly together. If you haven't stirred somebody's coffee with your dick at least once,

I mean, do you really have any friends? How hot is this coffee, and what's wrong with your dick? You can put ice cubes in it, Joe, or maybe you just rub it on the edge just to give it like, you know, it's like the little dusting of pumpkin spice on the top of the latte. I think that's what they were writing about when they were saying hazing. I don't think that's good. I'm not saying it was good.

I'm not saying I'm proud of it. I'm just being honest. Mine took the higher ground. I took a middle path. I didn't always take the higher ground. I mean, if it was your birthday, watch out. Don't come into work if it's your birthday. If you're overseas and it's your birthday,

make sure you're not seen. First of all, if it's your birthday and you make a big deal out of it, shut the fuck up. Well, we know. Agreed. We know. I am so tired of people and their goddamn birthdays. You had one birthday. Nobody advertises.

You were born on a day. Yeah. And that's it. If you're like, it's my fucking, you didn't even call me on my birthday. Nobody advertises their birthday. Maybe some idiots do. Correct. Everyone knows. it's a common Knowledge, don't advertise your birthday But everyone knows because we have everyone's records

Oh boy, that's true And calendar alerts These Fields of Honor shirts Folds of Honor, excuse me What's going on with that? How did this start? Actually, how did you and I end up getting connected? I think I randomly got a call from him, which is my favorite kind of call.

Hey, man, do you want to do something? And I'm like, yes. Count me in. Without him even finishing talking. I had a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation. He's like, I just got back from skydiving into Everest. I'm like, yes. I'm 100% coming on the next one.

Which was awesome. Which was epic. You skydived into Everest? Yeah. You should tell that first cause it ties into what we're trying to do. So, uh, you know, I, I had to take a break. I retired in 2018 and my hip was bad. Um, and so I got a hip resurfacing, which is basically like a hip replacement for young

people. And dude, I was just going through depression sitting on the couch cause it's a, it's, that is a lot worse, the recovery recovery, than a traditional hip replacement. And a buddy of mine, Fred Williams, who runs Complete Parachute Solutions, they basically train a good portion of our special operations in how to parachute. And he's a former SEAL himself. They equip them as well. They equip them as well. I was going to Everest and I'm like, hey like hey man i need to get on this for for

for my spirit and my emotional well-being and uh he's like okay this is the cost and uh i suck at fundraising and went and found some sponsors that didn't cover the whole thing so i had to come out of pocket but nine months to the day that i had that replacement we were jumping into uh some of the highest drop zones in the world so we're in a group of probably 20 people in the world that have jumped into drop zones that high. And it was spiritual to say the least. That terrain makes you feel so small. Have you been to Nepal? No. You've got to go. Just even if you hike the trail, it makes you feel so small in a good way. It's almost like a wake up call. Like I need to do more as a human being. And so I had created this proof of concept called Legacy Expeditions, because I believe R. Fallen, who I will speak volumes about,

and in fact, I got a book for you that's coming out in November about Michael Monsoor, who was a SEAL who was awarded posthumously the Medal of Honor for jumping on a grenade and saving two SEALs. The SEAL to his right, three feet to his right. Is that their legacies die the second we stop telling their stories. And additionally, I also raised $200,000 for the kids of Extortion 17. Extortion 17 was the largest loss of life, single incident loss of life in Afghanistan. 31 Americans were killed. Most of them were SEALs, and they were our former teammates. And so I think something like 25 kids were left without their fathers.

And so even though their families get a $400,000 check, I think that's after or before taxes, that money doesn't last long. Carrie Mills is a good example. She lost Matt Mills, who was freaking awesome. How does it stop for a second? Why do they have to pay taxes on that? I don't think they do. I believe the death penalty of it is tax-free. And if it's not, whoever wrote that, fuck you.

Fuck you. Every penny of that needs to be taxed. I don't think it's taxed. I agree. I could be wrong. Yeah. There is a lump sum benefit upon the death of an active duty service member. I think the number can vary depending on what insurance you choose when you first join. So that's like the Navy Mutual Aid Association.

Yeah. If you've been paying for that, yes, that's a separate death benefit. But that's – you elect to pay for that over the time. And I could be wrong, but it's like retirement. Why is your retirement for military tax? Disability is not, I get that. Yeah. But I don't think military retirement, that's a whole different subject. But Carrie Mills was on a Saturday morning, she got a knock on the door and her son, Cash Mills was 18 months old, can't remember his father.

And all of a sudden she's on her own with an 18 month old. And so that 400,000 doesn't go far. So one of the things beyond honoring their legacy and keeping their stories alive is honor their memory, educate their legacy. And we raise and with this, what we have coming up, a triple seven expedition, which has never been done. Seven continents, seven skydives, seven days. Folds of Honor educates the spouses and children of disabled and deceased military service members, as well as first responders. And so we're trying to raise that seven million to give scholarships to those kids to go to college, to go to trade school, things along those lines. But Andy and I, you know, man, I'm just so bored.

I have fun with my job, leadership development and executive search, but there is just – you miss that thrill. And that's why I called Andy, who had also raised money for the SEAL Foundation on his record attempt. Which is actually how you and I met. No kidding. With Tate. Yeah. on his record attempt. Which is actually how you and I met.

No kidding. With Tate. Yeah. It's really hard to figure out what to do with any skill that you learn from our previous job that has any application in the outside world. Like the leadership stuff, I totally understand that. But if you look at the vast majority of like the rote training that we did, I don't know, what the fuck am I going to do with that? You know, outside of the military.

You could apply it to law enforcement for sure, some contracting. For me, that never seemed appealing. So I took a 17-year chunk of my life. One of the things that I absolutely have loved though since I started doing was skydiving. And so it's not even – and it's not even a useful skill. I think it's been used a half a dozen times for real or something like that. Maybe more. But the reason they don't use it in large

group nighttime insertions is it's dangerous as shit. People get hurt all the time. But it's something that I learned from my past that I still can enjoy today which is a singularly useless hobby unless you can get people to pay attention to it

and then use that attention to try to educate them on organizations like Folds of Honor. I mean, it sucks. I mean, is that brass or copper? I know it changes your skin green, but like, I don't know how many people, I have so many of those, but I never chose to wear them that much.

And those are the names of people left behind and all of the people that we serve with and we worked with it's so easy to look at the guy who's kitted up who's boarding the helicopter and think that that's the only the only person that's impacted with the death or that

person who when they get on target you know the only reason they're successful is because of the training that they went through. And then from my own personal experience, that's not the case. It's a support network of your extended family. It's a support network if you're married your significant other who are playing pickup basketball when you are on the other side of the earth in limited communication doing shit that's really dangerous and then if you don't come back at least from what i've seen the military does a a good job for a short period of time but the military's job is to be forward thinking not looking in the rearview mirror so eventually the wheel continues to move on and i can't think of a better way to a honor the people that we

serve with but b continue to pass their legacy along by elevating what their kids are capable of doing through education. So that's, when he explained that to me, basically what he said was, hey, do you want to go do this jump? And then he told me all this other stuff later. I was in on the jump, but conceptually,

it's a good tie for me. And I would say probably for you and everybody else that's involved, it dips a toe back into our old world. Like we're planning, it's going to be into our old world. Like we're planning. It's going to be logistically very challenging. It's going to suck. I mean, we're going to fly economy,

try to get all over the world in seven days with the skydive in between, going through customs and all this stuff, sleeping in hotels. But that's kind of the shit that we used to do. I really enjoyed the hardship of the job. The skydive, easiest part for sure, except for Mike.

He's kind of trash in the air. I have plenty of videos to support this. I love putting them up on Instagram. Trash in the air in the air oh fuck yeah i don't think i've ever heard that but he's half the words this yeah what's the other part trash because that's what you're just it's a great tie-in and uh even already in the training we did a week of training out in arizona just getting ready for it it reconnects you back with people you haven't seen in a decade. And then everybody gets online because it's for a focus. And at the end of the day, I find it to be cathartic for me, but super helpful for people who are left behind.

Because I'm telling you what Mike said is correct. Like when you stop talking about these people, that sucks that their legacy is gone, but their families are still. I can't imagine having a child who is 18 months old who never knew their father. I mean, yeah. So this is why we've named this organization. We're fundraising on this one for Folds of Honor, but our organization is Legacy Expeditions. And where Andy and I want to take this is set up these type of expeditions.

Because when I went to Everest, a buddy of ours called me. He was like, hey, man. And we were leaving in two weeks. He's like, hey, I need this right now. How can I get on this? And I'm like, fuck. Like, first off, it costs this much. And he's like, yeah, there's no way I can afford that.

But there have been multiple guys that reached out like, hey, how do I get involved in this? So we want to set up expeditions where we're taking veterans for that spiritual experience but you're right it's it's you know where the spiritual part comes in is when I'm surrounded with these guys again if there is like this camaraderie there's this homecoming and belonging and we like whether some of the guys didn't know each other they start making fun of each other and it's just like you're back with the tribe. You're back with the boys.

And then we also want to train veterans who have never jumped, even amputees, the gift of flight, and get them trained up and dedicate a parachute to them so that, you know, whether they live in Omaha, Austin, L.A., they can go on their own. They've got an outlet to just, as we say, air it out. Because, I mean, when you're jumping from 13,000 feet, it is the best view in the world. You put terrain around that, like Everest or where we're starting out in Antarctica, that is – it's ridiculous. I'm not looking forward to that one. The high yesterday was negative 36. And I want to correct you.

There will be no hotels. There will be zero hotels. Like, purposely, we're making these guys sleep on the ground. If they have to sleep on the ground, it's in the airport waiting for the next flight. You're going to sleep on the ground in Antarctica? I think they have lodging arranged there because you would be DED dead. But literally, I was looking at the temperature the other day. It's negative 36, the high.

So they have this pretty robust gear. You can't even jump a helmet that moves up and down the visor because that's likely all going to fail given the extreme temperature. And I was asking him, I didn't know this, like, hey, how high are we going to jump out at Antarctica? I'm totally fine getting out at 2,000 feet

and getting on the ground into a sleeping bag as fast as possible. He's like, oh yeah, 13,000 feet. Subtract two degrees, if not three, for every 1,000 feet you go up in the air. So what is 13,000 feet like? What is anywhere from negative 30? It'll be colder than when I did that.

Negative what? Well, the time of year we're going to be there, negative 30 to negative 50 Fahrenheit. For how long? How long is the drop? If you go from 13, it'll be a minute. If they do what I want to do. Derek is outfitting the guys with a pretty good load. Even if you have a good load out for cold weather, there's nothing to...

I mean, you're still feeling the elements. Which is why I want to get out at 2,000 feet and get a sleeping bag. That's a total cuck move. I'm fine. I'll be a warmest cuck you've ever seen. It's just like... Are you guys... So you're dropping down and then you're just going to set up a camp once you hit the ground?

No. So there is an established... It's well established. So we'll start at Union Glacier Camp. In fact, we've got to fly out to Punta Arenas, Chile on December 30th. So the whole group, and there's 11 of us, plus a film crew, and I'll get to that. Even

Eric Prince, a former SEAL, founder of Blackwater. He's on it. Jericho Denman, 15 combat deployments with the 75th Ranger Regiment. Logan Stark. Both those guys are from Black Rifle. We even have a 73-year-old, former Marine back from the Vietnam era, and the

guy, we're going to jump him in. A guy named Nick, who's helped set this up, is going to tandem him in. But this guy has set multiple records since he was 70. And I hope I'm doing the cool shit he's doing when I'm that age. But Union Glacier Camp is an established camp. We'll jump there, move on to Santiago, where we're going to jump with the Chilean special operations. Barcelona, Spain. Egypt. On to UAE, where we're also going to jump with the UAE

special operations because they lost a lot of guys in Yemen, onto Perth, Australia, where we'll probably jump with Australian SAS, and then from there to Tampa, Florida for the final jump. But the film crew led by Dan Myrick, remember the Blair Witch Project? Yeah. That's Dan Myrick. And that guy broke the Blair Witch Project? Yeah. That's Dan Myrick. And that guy broke all the indie records and that will probably never be touched. And he's been awesome. Him and Christian Kremple,

uh, we're close and we're going to be doing more work with them as we expand this. Uh, my only ask is that Dan doesn't make it weird. Um, like Blair Witch? Like Blair Witch. Yeah.

Like, is he filming this? He's filming this. How can he make it? I mean, what. Is he filming this? He's filming this. How can he make it? I mean, what is he going to do? I don't know. Get inside your sleeping bag with you. My head's going in a million different directions right now.

Yetis, shit. He's done it before. He created a genre of horror films. Well, there's one thing to do the jumps, which will be cool, but actually capturing everything that goes into it, I think it's way harder. Right. The jumping, in my opinion, we haven't done this yet, is the easiest part.

Like, oh, okay, gravity works. Checked it many times. Get out over the DZ, land on the DZ. But then everything else that goes in between weather, aircraft, like that's actually the hard part. And then there's each other. I mean, when you're with each other in close quarters for seven days, we're going to kill each other at times. So we're going to fuck with each other when other people are sleeping.

The shenanigans are going to be off the roof. And are you guys doing this for a documentary? There will be one associated with that. I think that'll – I've never made a documentary. I do know that it takes time to do that. I've never made a documentary. I do know that it takes time to do that. The whole purpose of it, though, is, again, like I said, kind of like the first time I met you, to get eyeballs on something. I will tell you, everything that I've ever done in my life, up to and including combat operations, raising money is by far the hardest thing.

It is unbelievably hard to separate somebody a dollar from their wallet, and it should be, especially in the economic times right now. So it's a challenge. I mean, I think $7 million is a super lofty goal. Is it possible? Yes. Is it probable? I don't know if I would necessarily say yes, but that's the whole point is to do something like this. Like everything, the hardships around it is exactly what I love. But at this point, I just want to be able to pass on and do things for other people who gave far more than I did.

I mean, it's just, it's impossible to describe the impact that it has when people get the literal knock on the door, which is still how they do it. Yeah. And it's, yeah. So $7 million would be $1,400, $5,000 scholarships. And that's not only military families, that's first responders as well. And, uh, I mean, Andy has raised money for special operations organizations. I have, it's, you know, dude, the one thing we can do when we come back and there is, you know, people talk about PTSD and that is a when we come back, and there is, you know, people talk about PTSD, and that is a real thing. And some people deal with combat differently. For some people, one combat deployment fills their cup.

For other people, I mean, we've got one buddy with 22 combat deployments. It's like the guy had no life outside of his adult life. And there's a whole conversation around that. And I ask a lot of guys that I have served with whether or not they should limit combat exposure to people. The service member would always push up against it. But if you look at the actual long-term health of the individual and what does the rest of their life actually look like after that, I think it's worthy of at least a conversation. But there is an element of survivor's guilt when you come home. The boys you were with didn't.

And I think that sits with us and that will always sit with us to your comment about that fingerprint on your soul. But $7 million is a lot of money. And we're offering one tandem seat to somebody who will pay $1 million. And we've had some interest there. And that alone will fund, you know, uh, like 200 scholarships. So, and if somebody wants to donate to this, is there a website they can go to? There is. So it is triple seven, the word triple the number seven dot give smart.com or text

triple seven to smart the word smart, uh, in the, the smart. And the donation link will pop up. But, yeah. Yep. I'm the one that looks really good in free fall. So you see those people who are actually oriented correctly up top, Joe? That's how you know it's not actually Mike. I'll show you some videos that I have on my phone after. What is the difference between someone who's good at it and bad at it?

These videos will clearly display this. And I put them on Instagram and I tag him in it too. It's fantastic. First off, I'm inverted. I'm inverted. Not by choice. And that's the thing too, is I can fall safely,

but our guys, what we're training them to be very good at is to land on very small DZs. So canopy control and confined DZ skills is what we trained on. And we'll have another training camp December 5th to the 8th in Arizona. Here's a video of it. Yeah.

I'm going to try to go to Everest with him next year and take Leah for a tandem at the base of Everest. I think it would be pretty awesome. Tough to beat, though, is the problem. Now we've got to bring Jordan. Good job. Wow. And Dave Bautista is also assisting with this to support the cause. And so why did you choose to parachute into Everest?

It seemed like the biggest challenge. And I mean, so the canopy, because of the air density at that elevation, your canopy is screaming. Screaming. And so we went through training for a week in Leadville, Colorado, which is the highest elevation. When you say screaming, what do you mean? Just the speed. It's high speed. Because the air is very thin?

Yes. And so this is me and Andy in Iceland, which I've never seen a grown man cry after Andy yelled at him. Andy yelled at somebody? Oh, Andy's got that video. About once every 10 years, I will have a moment where I fall short of who I want to be, Joe, and that occurred in Iceland. I had some choice words for – it was all based around safety, not my safety or Mike's safety. I mean, jumping in austere locations is something that I've done for a really long time and I helped write the book on how to do it. But it got to a point where I, yeah, the cup boiled over or the kettle boiled over a little

bit and I'd forgot my GoPro was on. So they got a good laugh about it at dinner. And the guy he yelled at, it wasn't his fault. He was a nice guy. He had a good heart. I didn't yell. I had pointed and choice words. Yes.

It was almost like you yelled at a special needs kid. Yeah. It was rough. What was the problem? What had he done wrong? Oh, Andy, go ahead. Is there time for a bathroom break? Yeah.

Do you need to pee? Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, I can talk about it. Go take a leak. I'm trying to think about the best way to describe it. We were in a situation where experience matters in anything, right? Like would you ever throw somebody in an MMA cage on their first day?

No. It would be unreasonable, right? So skydiving is the same thing. Most people do their entire skydiving journey at an airport, which is really linear like this table, the plane. Skydiving in San Diego is a perfect example. The plane takes off to the west. It always comes back towards the mountains. And most days, depending on the wind, it is going to be going back towards the west.

And it looks the same. You land the same. The landing pattern is the same. People still get hurt in that. There was a group, a large group of people who paid a substantial amount of money to go to Iceland. And it was pretty readily apparent that the net, if you will, the safety net that existed was non-existent or barely there. Things, you know, an inability to talk to an aircraft, an inability to talk to the jumpers once they were on the ground, varying levels of experience from low hundreds, like low 100s jumps up into, I think one of the guys there had like 20,000 jumps. And I have been around enough people and have done enough jumping and watched people getting hurt that, again, I wasn't worried about my safety and I wasn't worried about Mike's safety because I knew my background.

But after watching what happened the first day and then somebody getting hurt on the first jump of the second day and then some stuff that transpired in an aircraft and we jumped into a location where the altimeter settings were incorrect based off the information. So I got to the ground and my altimeter read negative 750 feet. Not awesome. How does that happen? They tell you to set it improperly on the ground. So sometimes you will take off from an altitude that is above or below where you're going to land. And you need to set your altimeter for where you're going to land, not for where you're going to take off. And are you doing this with like a wrist computer? It can be digital

or it can be analog, but either way it has to be set correctly. Otherwise what you're looking at, whether it's analog or digital, is not going to be giving you the correct information. So the first jump or the second jump of the second day, we were told by the person running our aircraft that we needed to offset 750 feet, which is not that big of a deal. And also, by the way, on the reserve parachute, there's a computer with a small pyrotechnic charge that has essentially a razor blade that cuts your reserve parachute if it senses a barometric pressure, I believe, barometric pressure speed and altitude criteria. And these things have like hundreds of documented saves. Unconscious skydiver, the thing goes off, your reserve comes out, and at least you land under a reserve parachute.

They can be offset as well. But if you're going to be jumping into a place, let's say you were supposed to land 750 feet higher. And now all of a sudden, you're going to land somewhere that's 300, you know, sea level, which is essentially what we ended up doing. Both the computer in your reserve parachute and the altimeter on your wrist are presenting information to you that is incorrect. So when I thought I was at, or if somebody thought they were at their normal pole altitude of say of 3,000 feet, they're actually at 2,250. Let's say they have a malfunction and you normally will give yourself a certain amount of time to work through that.

You could easily burn through the criteria for your reserve to fire. And the next thing you know, you have dual entanglement with both canopies out and that's how people die. So we landed, I looked down, it said negative 750. They audibled in the aircraft and just pull out a phone and said, Hey, we're jumping in here. Nobody had ever seen it. There was no real wind indicators on the ground. And at that point after, I mean, Mike went and picked a woman up out of a field with a broken leg on the first jump of the second day. So that had already happened that day. We got into the plane. I'm glossing over a lot of things to try to be as kind as possible to paint a broad picture, though.

But it had reached for me when we got onto the ground. Like my safety go, no go. I was absolutely just done with what was happening. And, again, I was just I didn't want to see anybody else get hurt. It's a dangerous enough activity as it is. So one of the organizers happened to be there and I had one of my, you know, about every decade falling short of how I should actually talk to people. And yeah, let them know exactly how I felt. This, so Mount Everest was run by us. Same guy running that is running 777, Fred Williams, who's the president of Complete Parachute Solutions.

We outsourced this one, and we had a bit of trust. And I think within the first five minutes, we were looking at each other. When they briefed, all the skydivers were like, something's off here. And we quickly recognized it. But funny enough, when they were showing that phone, Andy sort of, which Andy's a paying customer for this, they made him the jump master. So they basically made him one of the staff. And he's looking at me, shaking his head. And I remember, I'm like, you're a call dude.

And at one point I'm like, just don't do it. I'm always getting out. Just don't do it. So he's like, fuck it. And he jumps. And so i go out after him it begs the point like if your your mom ever asks hey if your friends jump out off a bridge or perfectly good airplane are you going to do it like hell yes i am i mean i'm gonna look out the door first to make sure but but that's loyalty uh and that's tribe but that was atrocious and um we'll never outsource.

We'll run every expedition from here forth because we just do it in a way. That's the one thing I love about the military is we just mitigate risk, man. We go through the checklist as mundane as that may seem or prescribed as it may be. But that's why we have so very few fatalities in our operations compared to let's say the civilian skydiving world yeah it's dangerous enough as it is yeah so yeah that doesn't sound good so had this person done this before yes so how'd they fuck up so hugely 750 feet's a lot narcissism 750 feet is enough to kill people i mean mean, it really is. Narcissism?

No, it wasn't narcissism. It was... I'm talking about somebody else. Yeah. Yeah. The reason... And so to come to find out that there actually should never have been briefed an offset for the DZ,

the altimeter should have just been set for zero, it highlighted the lack of structure and communication in the chain of command of that organization. Each individual aircraft load was largely operating on their own. And there is some inherent danger in that of having something that is actually set, briefed.

This is the standard. And again, it's one of the beauties. I mean, the military can get very overkill sometimes with briefing and risk mitigation, but there's a reason for it. And the reason is they've hurt people by not doing that. So yeah, it was – Did you talk about day one and how 75% of all the first four loads missed the DZ? Yeah.

So we were on the first aircraft. The second aircraft, I think the closest jumper, landed three miles from us to include people landing about five miles away over a river that had a water temperature that was one to two degrees above freezing because it was glacier melt. Get some. that was one to two degrees above freezing because it was glacier melt. Get some. So Eddie and I are on the drop zone because we're the first two out of all the 60 skydivers spread across four passes.

And three hours after the second pass had landed, some Icelanders pull up and there was some Icelandic personnel. And they came up and they're like, hey, we think you have three skydivers on the other side of the river. And it's been three hours. So the way we run it is there's a manifest. As people land, we mark off to make sure that we have a headcount, that we're controlling all our personnel. And no other jumping occurs until you have a full headcount.

our personnel. And no other jumping occurs until you have a full head count. And somebody could have landed on a, they could have had a compound fracture bleeding out for three hours. And we, we fell on the ground laughing. I know I did. We were laughing and it wasn't because it's funny.

We, you know, we cared about those, those three people, but it was almost comedic how bad this thing was. Yeah. We'll go back to Iceland. We'll go to Norway as well. We'll set up those trips and we'll do it our way. Yeah. about those three people, but it was almost comedic how bad this thing was run. Oh, boy. We'll go back to Iceland.

We'll go to Norway as well. We'll set up those trips and we'll do it our way. Yeah. Well, now you know. Well, soup to nuts control, having people who do it, I mean, it just... Soup to nuts?

Soup to nuts. Flash to bang. Beginning to end. We will control everything from... You say that a lot? Soup to nuts? Sometimes. You've never said that?

No. You're welcome to use that term any time you want. I don't think I ever will. What does that mean? I can't even find an analogy where soup and nuts go together. Flash to bang, however you would like to describe it.

Flash to bang kind of makes sense. Soup to nuts is a... Is that not a common term that we use? No, it's not. It's a military... Soup to nuts. Yeah. What does it mean by soup? Well, now's not. It's a military... Soup to nuts. Yeah. What does it mean by soup? Well, now that you're asking, I don't fucking know.

Here it goes. Soup to nuts, Wikipedia. Soup to nuts, an American English idiom that conveys the meaning of from beginning to end derived from the description of a full course dinner.

Oh. Nuts at the end? That's a shitty dessert. What kind of dessert are they giving? For clarity, I did not know that. It's just something

that I heard somebody else say, so I'm repeating. It was in a 1986 episode of Mama's Family, whatever the fuck that is. Oh, it was on That's So Raven. Yeah. I swear I heard that in the teams. Oh, no, no, it's used a lot. Oh, look, it's an old movie from Laurel and Hardy. From Soup to Nuts.

Wow. Jesus. Okay. Yeah. So don't let that person ever organize shit again. They've already got another one planned. Oh, boy.

They do? Same people? To the best of my knowledge, yes. Oh, boy. Well, whoever is listening to this. Like I said, I'll leave it at that. I don't want to... I was just about to say

piss in somebody's Cheerios, but I'm afraid Joe's going to be like, what the fuck does that mean? I get piss in Cheerios. I get that one. That one seems clear. Yeah. Stir coffee with your dick.

I get it. Half the shit that comes out of my mouth, my wife's like, what the fuck does that mean? Yeah, for sure. My kids say the same thing to me too. No, it'll be wild. But again, at the end of the day, Joe, I love it because it ties me back into that world. No, it'll be wild. But again, at the end of the day, Joe, I love it because it ties me back into that world.

I know too many people and have seen the detritus that's left behind when Chick goes south. I'd rather make an impact in their life. I consider what I personally did overseas to be utterly and meaningly useless in the grand scheme of things. But I think helping those people out has a greater value than I can describe. I was just happy to be there with the team and watching these guys and these guys display selfless valor on a nightly basis. I still smile at it, but with the documentary, it's not for us. We are also jumping in memory of one to two veterans on each continent. And so Dan Myrick and Christian Kremple controlled the documentary. We know nothing about how to do that.

All we asked is that you focus on the story of those guys we jump in honor of. And so hopefully it'll show a different side, as we talked about in Hollywood, painting us a certain way. It'll show different side of the the military veterans and the special operators we know and who they are and show the professional side the again the empathy the respect that's that's important to us that this thing comes out and and tells those stories the right way that something their families could be proud of beautiful all right All right, so one more time, the website? 777.givesmart.com.

And if somebody wants that million-dollar seat, contact us at lrobinson at foldsofhonor.com. That's lrobinson at foldsofhonor.com. And, hell, we're still taking sponsors to fund this thing, but it's a go. December 30th, we leave, and then we fund this thing, but it's a go. December 30th, we leave and then we have to sit in Antarctica for a little while before we can get the jump in

and we're still trying to contact American Airlines to get assistance or get FedEx to fly in a plane and pick us up in Antarctica. I think I'm having dinner with the CEO on Friday or Thursday. If we get that tandem slot, do I have to do the tandem? Yes, you do.

We're doing it at Euro, which means facing. It's non-traditional. Most of the time you go belly to back. Why would you go face to face? It's a once in a lifetime experience, Joe. You want to look at the person? I mean, I don't even know if it's legal to do it, but I'm going to offer it. Clothing optional in the more tropical locations.

We've got some good shit. So have you ever seen the space diving? Alex Baumgartner? No. Felix Baumgartner. Felix, sorry. It was a Red Bull study. He jumped.

Oh, I did see that. Yeah. Yeah. And then a guy named, I think it's Alan Eustace came behind him, who's a Google exec. Correct. He beat Felix' record. So I want to kick Andy out at above 40,000 feet to reclaim that record. The wingsuit one.

The wingsuit. Maybe even higher. And then I want to strap Andy to me and break Alan Eustace's record. This is the first I've heard of this. That's a hard pass. I'm working it. Contacting SpaceX and Blue Horizon or whatever it is

So after your hip resurfacing There's no issues like landing So The hip was so bad That It was masking the right hip And then about a month after I had the surgery I'm like wait a second

Your right hip is killing you So I after I had the surgery. I'm like wait a second Now you're right. It's killing you so I've got to have a surgery probably in February for an arthroscopy to see if I can get three more years and Then it's gonna be a hip resurfacing again And then I'll just do the backside of legacy expeditions and let these guys do all the crazy stuff is the resurfacing where they? Drill the hole and they put the post in and put a new cap on the top of it Yeah Surfacing where they drill the hole and they put the post in and put a new cap on the top of it? Yeah. So they take half the femur head instead of down at the femur so they retain as much bone as possible. Is that better?

It is. So a lot of hockey players do it and return to the sport. It's like the young man's hip replacement. Yeah. I think Frankie Edgar just had that done. Go to Frankie Edgar's Instagram page. I think he's got a photo of an x-ray. I think he had that done fairly recently. And he's still fighting.

So they go through the glute. They cut the muscle, the glute muscle. And that's why the recovery is a lot longer than a traditional hip replacement where they go through the thigh and they just move the muscles apart. How come they have to cut the – The way they – Here's Frankie. I think there's photos of the actual That's it. So they

just chop the top off, put that sucker in. They do that from the back? Yes. So I can't get into the specifics but eventually if he wears that out and that's lasted now it's relatively young a new procedure only the last few decades.

Some people have lasted 25 years. But if he's still fighting. Yo. That's harsh. So, did you guys want to see the scar? No. It's not on the screen. Just so the people can see that.

It's pretty graphic. So that is, it's like a steel. Good call, Jamie. So it's a steel cap. Is that what it is? Basically. And it fits into, do they change the top as well? So they put a metal receptacle in the acetabulum.

And how long is that supposed to last? They've seen up to 25 years. It's a relatively new procedure. And at 25 years later, do they have to redo it? So you can't redo that. It's a relatively new procedure. And at 25 years later, do they have to redo it? So you can't redo that. It's prepared bone. They can't redo it. So that's when the full hip replacement takes place.

Oh, boy. So this is just one operation that will lead to possibly another operation. So it says prepared bone, arthritis removed. So that's before they put the cap on. So they have a hole drilled in the top of Frankie's. Is that his femur? It is. It would have to be.

Femur head. And then the next one. Oh, boy. So he's got no. Frankie had no cartilage in there. Complete wear of cartilage. Yo. Complete wear of cartilage.

Yo. Dude, the procedure was well done here in Austin by a guy named Jake Manuel. So the procedure was great. The recovery sucked. How long did it take? Basically about six months. You start rehab, right? I mean, you're doing the in-home, you know, small movements for about a month and a half.

And then you go to physical therapy. But they want you to stay away from any, like, running or major, like, deadlifting or things like that for about four to six months. And then after that, you can run? I'm not running, dude. But you are landing from the sky. If you do it right, it's like stepping off like a three-inch step. But I don't do it right. That's the problem.

That's not good. I have videos. And is it supposed to be as tough as a regular hip once it's finished and done? So you can do everything. You can kick the bag. You can do jiu-jitsu. You can do all that stuff. Mike doesn't do jiu-jitsu.

So guys have returned to MMA. Guys have returned to skydiving. A lot of cyclists haven't done hockey players. So it can take some punishment, and that's why I just sort of keep it for skydiving, and I'm not going to run. Running is – I remember trainers at some point later in our SEAL careers were like, hey, guys, get your five-mile run in, and then that's good for the week. Focus on higher-level training and save your joints. Tell that to Cameron Haynes. Yeah, seriously.

You can tell that to Cameron Haynes. He'll just be like, yeah, cool story. Have you seen a lot of joint injuries in jiu-jitsu? Oh, yeah. That would require something like that yeah yeah because guys are taking it too far or just well they just train injured that's the big one yeah guys train injured and they keep re-injuring things i feel like i've actually been very lucky so far it uh you know talking with tim this morning he's like i'm on my fifth knee surgery

and i'd like that would turn a lot of people away. Like, no, okay, that's great. I don't want to do that. Tim's got another knee surgery that he just went through? I don't think recently. It was a few months ago. He had an ACL done just about less than a year ago, I want to say. Dr. Kirk Parsley, who was a SEAL that became a doctor, and he was the doctor to the West Coast,

so the Navy made him a doctor similar to Johnny Kim. He said the average SEAL, and this sounds extremely high to me, throughout a 20-year career goes through 11 surgeries. How many did you have? Well, when I got blown up, I had the shrapnel removal, and that was like two or three surgeries. And then I had this hip operated on. They released me from training, and I had an arthroscopy to see if they could heal it. And then it was supposed to be a six-month recovery. I ended up in Afghanistan, and a troop commander got hurt. And so I slid right into his position prematurely and probably

did just reverse whatever they had fixed. But it was worth it. It was a great deployment. Zero for me. Zero. Never had a surgery still. Zero for me. Zero. Never had a surgery still. Original combat chassis. Yeah. That's incredible. That's what I'm saying.

I feel like I've actually been very lucky. That's very lucky. A lot of Jiu Jitsu guys, it's a neck and back as well. I know so many guys with like artificial discs. Is that from getting stacked? Yeah. So my theory on that is if you start stacking me,

I'm going gonna let you right the fuck past yeah because i care more about my neck and honestly who gives a shit about what happens on the mat it's one of the yeah it i like i like it like i realize that i'm never gonna master it i super i enjoy the training it's physically healthy for me healthy for me it mentally helps me i can tell that there's no end to the journey. Nothing that actually happens on the mat matters unless you choose to like make it matter and derive your self-worth from that, which I think would probably lead to having pictures like that out there because you're going to take stuff too far. Well, that's a lot of young men. You know, the thing is you getting into it when you're in your 40s is better because you have a better

understanding of your vulnerability and also your ego. And this doesn't matter in that you're really just about – training is about getting better. It's not about winning each and every interaction. And, in fact, if you try to win each and every interaction, you probably won't get better because you'll be so defensive and you'll be so focused on trying to protect yourself and win that you'll never learn new skills because you won't open up enough and i want to do it when i'm 60 it's uh yeah well pros and cons to picking it up

in my 40s that you know origin camp i think we talked about this last time so they're opening that camp up to 500 people this year it was 350 last year and it's the coolest thing ever because you get to see people in their 20s who have been doing jujitsu since they were four and they laugh at you and you're just like, motherfucker. And then you see dudes who are late. So you have an example of both of those things. But I think for me, the safest bet to continue forward – and I try to take this approach even when they're – because they're – you want to talk about unknown looks. There's no way you could – well, I guess you could probably roll with everybody who's there, but you would be really, really exhausted. You get to see all

of those looks, but at the end of the day, none of it actually matters if you're just there to learn. And that's the approach that I take to it. Like I'm like, spoiler, I just turned 40, what, uh, 45 last week. World champion is not going to ever be on my, you know what I mean? Like it just, it doesn't matter to me, but I really like to have like 60 year old still on the mat and can still be competitive to whatever degree would be expected at a 60. Is the love of the sport,

love of the knowledge getting better? That to me, all trumps whether or not you win or lose. Cause I think the number one way to lose would be sitting in an operating table like that. A hundred percent. Having that ball and socket joint. You're not doing it to compete. I have competed.

My coach has said, you know, when you get a new belt, one of the best things that you can do, because I can tell you this from personal experience, that imposter syndrome is super real. super real. So if you get a belt, go and enter a competition because you're going to have somebody likely at your age, at your weight, at your belt, and you can feel it out with somebody who is not in your gym because you know the game for most people in your gym. Imposter syndrome, pretty much my entire SEAL career. Same here. You said you're doing STEM locally. I just did CPI with Ed Clay and Scott Nelson in August. Tijuana. Tijuana. It's funny. All the jiu-jitsu guys were neck or spine.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. They're doing a lot of great stuff, though, with neck and spine now. They can go into the actual disc itself and inject stem cells, and they're having a fantastic response from that. People actually regenerate disc tissue, which is really amazing. So it alleviates a lot of impingements and a lot of pinched nerves and a lot of like bulging discs and shit like that. Yeah, it's a great time now for biologics,

for the intervention of stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells, injecting them to areas and getting some pretty fantastic healing that just wasn't available in the past. You think they'll ever let the stuff that happens down in Chipsa happen in the U.S.? I fucking hope so. They should. How ludicrous is it? Oh, we can't do it here. We'll get a flight to San Diego.

And we'll cross the border. It's fucking nuts. Is that a religious? I don't think so. No, I think it's an FDA issue. I think it's probably, there. I think there's probably pressure from pharmaceutical drug companies that would lose money if people developed methods to treat people where they didn't need painkillers and didn't need anti-inflammatories. I mean,

it would affect the bottom line. I mean, that sounds gross and evil, but I think there's a legitimate concern. Sounds true also. Yeah, also true. I mean, that sounds gross and evil, but I think there's a legitimate concern. Sounds true also. Yeah, also true. You know, I mean, the idea that they're doing it to protect people is nonsense because you don't have a lot of people that are doing this overseas and doing it in Columbia and where have you and getting fucked up from it. That's not the case. It's not dangerous. In fact, it's extremely beneficial.

You know, I know a lot of people that have gone to Panama to Neil Reardon's place and they've gone to Columbia, the biotech place, you know, bio accelerator place rather, you know, and then in Austin, there's ways to well, they do it here. It's just the things that they can do in other countries is more extreme and it should be available here. It really should. And it's kind of fucked up that it's not. You actually was encouraging is ed had his parents going through it the same week we were going through it and then rafael levato was also there prepping for his upcoming competition yeah no it's real i mean it really has uh helped a lot of people uh you know i know many many many people that have done it yeah so that's a good thing if

you ever do get injured you know there. There's ways to avoid surgery now. I've had a lot done, injected into my shoulders, my knees, everything. Fixed my right knee. My right knee doesn't bother me at all anymore. It was fucking with me for a long time. The NAD+, which was relatively new to me, that was awesome. Yeah, that's controversial, that stuff. NAD is controversial.

There's people that believe it in wholeheartedly, and there's people that say it doesn't really get in your cells. All of it is—the problem with all that stuff is a lack of studies, you know. And there's stage three studies that Dr. Reardon, who has an office in Dallas, and he's the one—he's been on my podcast before. And I sent my mom down there to Panama a couple times to get injections. I just know a lot of people that have had great benefit from stem cells, and me personally too. I'm a big believer in it. Have you had NAD?

Yes. Did you feel it in the chest? I did. I have had NAD one time. I had to slow that drip. It feels like you're having a heart attack. You've got to smoke weed. I did in 11 minutes once. He he's a pussy i was racing the guy that was next to me yeah and it's rough it fucking hurt i was vision questing for a little bit and then i just went back to right yeah but i've also heard that that's not good that like that feeling is just you're

i don't know it's i don't understand that yeah the mechanics i don't know enough to you know it's like i said it's controversial and I've done it many times. But stem cells, not that controversial. Stem cells I've had great benefits from. Gentlemen, one more time. Give out the website for the last people. Yeah, 777.givesmart.com, and everyone makes you for your service, and we appreciate that. But when you ask them to make a sacrifice, that's when people usually take a step back.

We're asking for help here. $7 million, which will be 1,400 scholarships for these kids, both military veterans and first responders. And when the documentary is filmed, any idea when they're planning on trying to release that? I think it's a long time from when they filmed to actually get something out like that. Like a year, something like that? Probably. We're going to do, obviously, we'll do as much social stuff as we can do along the way,

limited by connectivity, but I think there's a plan for that as well, too. But hopefully between the combination of the actual event itself, the documentary, and it's just, I mean, it's really just a matter of eyeballs, you know, as many eyeballs as you can get on something. Okay, and Andy, give out your social media, too. It's just, I mean, it's really just a matter of eyeballs. You know, as many eyeballs as you can get on something. Okay. And Andy, give out your social media too.

It's just my name, Andy Stumpf, the number 212. Some asshole has Andy Stumpf. Spell your name because it's a... It's totally normal. S-T-U-M-P-F as in Frank. I would have never guessed. And Mike? It's at Mr. Cirelli, S-A-R-R-A-I-L-L-E.

All right. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for-I-L-L-E. All right. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for being here. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Bye, everybody.