The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 063: Seattle. Steven Rinella talks with the beautiful and deadly Rorke Denver, along with Ryan Callaghan of First Lite, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.

Episode Date: May 11, 2017

Subjects discussed: the psychology of pansieness; Young Lions; Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training; universal service; Hells Bells as the soundtrack of Seal training; to "fall" in combat; "this is fishin' and we don't complain"; being in Act of Valor; shared misery; Camp Cancer; drinking coffee like a lunatic; Rorke's take on public lands; training in a purposeful way; stump shootin'; what all this means for hunters, and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right, we're here with Ryan Callahan and Janice Poudlis, otherwise known as Janice Poudalas, otherwise known as Janice Poutalas, and the beautiful and deadly Rourke Denver,

whose lips have never been graced by the taste of alcohol. Correct. I wouldn't mind getting into that for a minute. Now, Rourke, I'm just going to give you a brief intro, then we're going to do a better intro in a minute. Deal. Officer in the Navy, transitioned into author, writer of books,

and public speaking. And Rourke is going to explain, I'm going to ask Rourke a lot of questions about why most people are total pansies. And Rourke will explain the psychology. He's going to explain, among other things, the psychology of pansiness.

First, there's two things I want to deal with real quick. One, we get tons of emails in all the time from people who are like, man, you guys are talking about eating all this wild game and wild meat. I don't hunt. I'd like to check it out. And they're always kind of asking about buying, you know, buying wild game from stores. Now, real quick, when you buy wild game in the store, it's not wild game. What it is is when you, you can't like by law, you can't sell American wild game in stores. And this was like a landmark, you know, the series of laws and decisions that led to that are largely what was responsible for the fact that we pulled out of our nose dive into the decimation of American wildlife. So we made it that you can't market wild game because market hunters, guys who were shooting

game to sell to restaurants and into stores in the late 1800s, early 1900s, pretty much wiped game animals off the face of the country. And we spent the last 100 plus years digging ourselves out of that hole very successfully. But the holdover from that time is a ban on the sale of game meat. When you buy game meat, you're buying like a wild animal. Okay. You're buying like deer, elk, whatever, but it's just raised like livestock. You take an elk, put it in a fence, raise it like livestock. And then, you know, it's like a privately owned farm animal brought up and sold as meat. It's just not even like, it's not even the same thing, man. It's like elk that you buy in a store, deer that you buy in a store, the relationship would be like stealing a car

and playing Grand Theft Auto, right? Like store-bought wild game is just an approximation. So I never recommend it because the problem is raising wild animals in a livestock situation has caused a lot of problems for real wild animals through disease transmission and some other issues. And so when people do come, I've often in the past just said to him, man, just like, you know, there's a lot of ways to get good meat. I wouldn't suggest doing it that way. And recently we had started some relationships with a company that I would recommend to people who want to go out. If you're going to go buy meat and you don't have that sort of savage spirit to go out and hunt itself, I would highly recommend the boys at ButcherBox, who we've been talking to lately. They sent me some product to check out. It's a very good company where you go in and you're buying from ButcherBox who delivers to

your home 100% grass-fed beef, organic chicken, pork, you name it. And they ship out these boxes that come to you. And it comes in a whole, you can get like a whole assortment of high grade meat delivered to you, frozen rock solid in a beautifully packaged box. And you put that in your freezer and you can have that wonderful sense of elation previously known only to hunters of a freezer full of super good meat. I was wondering about that. So it came completely frozen. Rock.

Rock. In dry ice. Rock solid. about that. So it came completely frozen. Dude, rock. Rock. In dry ice. Rock solid. So like each, it's a subscription thing, okay? Each box comes with 7.5 to 11 pounds of meat. So it's enough for like 20 individual size meals. In the Rinella household,

when we're in our home, we eat a pretty strict wild game diet, but we did some experiment with our box. High grade, very good stuff. Bacon. They got ribeyes. You can even get like beef bones. Callahan's over here trying to think if they'll send them a box of beef tongues.

I don't know. You have to check with them about that. But so when you subscribe, it's $129 a month, all right? And it works out to like $6.50 a meal. And like I said, every box comes with enough meat for like 20 individual size meals. So if you're a dude who lives by yourself, that'd be 20 meals. I have a family of five, right? So you figure out and do the math. Shipping's free nationwide. Now they don't ship up to Alaska and Hawaii, but you can get anywhere

in the lower 48. You always hear people say the continental US, which gets confusing because we're on the same continent with Alaska, but we're talking about the lower 48. And this is free range, grass fed, grass finished, no feedlot, right? Antibiotic free meat. Good shit. Now, order today and you get a bunch of free ribeyes in your first box and you also get 10 bucks off. But here's the deal. You got to do it the way that helps us out because you freeloaders who've been listening to this podcast now that hasn't had an ad on it for like 18 months, you people, listen, butcherbox.com, butcherbox.com.

And here's the catch. You got to go slash meat eater. And it actually, if you do that, it helps us out in keeping this show coming to you. ButcherBox.com slash meat eater. Like I said, you get 10 bucks off free ribeyes in your first box. Now you guys already got a freezer full of elk meat. Just ignore this. But everyone else out there who's trying to find a good way to get high quality, healthy meat for you and your family, butcherbox.com backslash meat eater. Go on there and subscribe. I'm telling you, it's good, good stuff.

Yanni doesn't know how good it is yet. No, I'm waiting on mine. He's going to find out when he gets his special box and what'd you make so far dude i made everything i just grilled it all no there was some pork chops in there and i did the same thing i do with like wild pork chops as i uh brined them but everything else i just put on my grill when i'm cooking like if i cook for my kids well you guys just had some of my leftovers which is gonna like which is gonna contradict like, which is going to contradict what I'm going to tell you right now.

We generally eat a lot of like meat that is cooked on a grill and then vegetables, salad vegetables. So like I grill a lot, but yeah, I just gave you guys some of my leftovers, which was, which is not that. You had American goulash, which is made with buck meat

and then veal Parmesan made with moose meat. Um, but yeah, that's what I did with the whole thing. It was good. It was good. My wife who like just eats, she doesn't really ask what we're eating. She kind of perked up cause it was fatty, a little bit of fat on there, which is not something you generally run into on, on mule deer meat. Um, I use the grain finished beef versus grass-fed beef as a as a good like example of how wild game can be different it's like you know how a grass grass-fed beef tastes distinctly different than a you know grain finished yeah beef like that's kind of the difference for wild game.

Yeah, I got you. That's how I try to explain it. Yeah, no, it's a good avenue into it. Yeah. I remember before you started hearing about grass-fed meat in the US, I'm talking like 10 years ago. I mean, I'm sure it was around.

I'm sure there's people that liked it. But traveling down to Argentina, who would, at the time, would export a lot of beef. And it was like their stuff, the fact that they didn't finish on feedlots made it very popular in certain European markets where they were sending a lot of beef to France and stuff. And they kept talking about, oh yeah, cause it's grass finished, grass finished. You guys in the U S grain finish. And I was like, yeah, what the hell's the difference? And now that's all you hear about, man. Yep. Grass-fed. I think one of the things about it, like when people talk about grass-fed,

why sort of the main benefit of grass-fed is it's when cattle are in the feedlots that they're susceptible to a lot of different infections. And so that's when you're pumping all the extra antibiotic in them to keep them healthy in a confined, close proximity space. So by finishing things on grass, they're spread out more and that's one of the aspects besides flavor that people like more. And there's other thing,

there's a lot more, you should just check it out and read up on it. Like I said, I never have paid that much attention to it because of the fact that I don't eat a whole bunch of it. But if I was, I would go on the grass fed side of things. Kind of like something that's a little more flavorful, a little more chewy. I just like shit that eats grass.

Now, Rort. Never, so yeah. Every time you tell me this, I kind of forget that I re-remember. So like you're 17, right? Let's say you're 17. Yes. 18, senior year of high school, big party out in the woods.

And you just knew then at that impressionable hell-bent stage in life. Yes. The discipline. Yes. Is it discipline? I think so. I mean, it started before 17. I mean, not to air laundry, but I come from,

there's some big lads in my family bloodline that come from Irish descent and have more or less grenaded their lives going down that path. So I saw that a bunch as a, as a young man, I mean, very, very, very, very lucky and blessed. Not my dad, not, not people in my immediate family. I didn't grow up rough because of that, but some uncles and some other family members that, uh, I mean, truly destroyed themselves. And then my parents split up when I was eight. My mom then went on to date a mix of folks that I learned some tremendous lessons from,

both good and bad. And actually, the one I liked the most basically drank himself to death after he and my mom moved on. But I mean, somebody that I cared you know, I cared about was, you know, on some level, a father figure at a point when, right, actually about that point, when people start deciding if they're going to drink or not, those offers come up. Always loved playing sports, always loved competing. And I don't know, I mean, I should have, I guess, maybe a more potent story than that. But that really is it. My brother did the same thing. My younger brother's ever had a drop. and I think it's been a huge gift.

I mean, I look back on it now. Listen, I'm not about to challenge the logic of it. I think it's phenomenal. Nor am I saying you are. I don't think I realized how it's been an interesting experience, and it's actually reared its head within the last week, which I think is kind of interesting, that a teammate of mine, a fellow SEAL teammate of mine that's one of my best friends, one of my longest,

you know, running friends, he drinks, but very, very little. I mean, I've never seen him out of control with alcohol. You'll see plenty of SEALs out of control with alcohol or just going hard and doing that. And I think in particular, he's not, he's an officer as well. I think the fact that we haven't played so hugely on my ability to lead, and I'm not talking about not, you know, not being capable behind the wheel. I just never compromised myself in front of the boys in such a way that they would have currency over me to where they'd be like, well, we carried you out of the bar, sir, yesterday. So the fact that you're making us get up at 4am, like we're going to skip, never had that option with me because I didn't do that. I didn't compromise that stuff. And I don't think I recognized at the time, but the kind of potency of that. And so that was hugely powerful. And we also have some good, good buddies,

officer enlisted that I thought to be as emotionally and mentally strong as you can be. And they're falling apart. I mean, PTSD and some of the combat trauma that's come out of our experiences, which, you know, I try and keep pulse checks on. I just haven't experienced them. I sleep well at night. I don't feel bad about anything I did and I'm good. Um, some of those guys that, that, that are more kind of consistent drinkers. And I think have started medicating a little bit with it. It's been a bad path for them for sure yeah so it's been a gift man it's been it's been a good call on top of saving you know saving some coin and probably staying out of jail oh yeah oh yeah and tell some of the places you already alluded to your military career and and I don't want you

know I know that that's like a part of your life but let's just talk about that for a minute and then we're gonna get out of some other, but walk me through kind of how you went, like what you did in college, what you do with sports and then what your military career looked like. Yeah. I mean, you know, a lifelong athlete and a lifelong reader, horrible student. So, I mean, just no desire to excel in a classroom or classroom or put discipline towards academic rigor. That being said, my dad's probably one of the most well-read human beings you've ever been around. And consequently, my brother and I started reading at a very young age. So I always tout reading as one of the best things you can do for yourself,

just as both the enjoyment of it and what it kind of brings to your mind and opens your mind. So books have been a tremendous path to a lot of the things I've experienced. But when you say bad student, what do you mean? Like you didn't feel a need to impress your teachers? No, no, no. I just did. I mean, I, if I look at my report cards, like through, actually, when I got to college, I started excelling in the classroom because I started taking it seriously. I mean, I would not have gotten into Syracuse University hands down on academic merit. I sent my application to Syracuse to the athletic office because I was getting recruited to play lacrosse there. I literally sent my application to Syracuse University to the head coach of the lacrosse office. And I think he basically walked it

through, which is not uncommon with athletes. And I think there's some academics that probably, you know, that irritates them. You know, there's so many athletes that end up becoming high-end leaders, performers, and get past that. Because their team experience, their life experience playing sports has been, I think it's translated better to life and accomplishment than knocking out straight A's. Yeah. So what I'm saying is I would not have gotten into college if it were not for sports. And so that's what brought me to Syracuse. I got recruited to play lacrosse.

Why lacrosse? Did you surf as a kid? I surfed a little bit as a kid. I mostly learned to surf post-college. And your old man took you guys fishing a lot. A lot of fishing. Steelhead fishing, trout fishing, fly fishing since before I can remember.

Cold rivers, you know, Northern California and Oregon. Like how'd you hit on lacrosse? Did anybody play lacrosse back then? No, no. California was an unknown at that point. I mean, I don't think there was a day I went to practice where somebody didn't yell out a car driving by. What is that?

You know, holding a lacrosse stick. I mean, just not knowing, you know, what you had in your hand kind of thing. But lacrosse, it originated with like the Native Americans. The Onondagan tribes all around the St. Lawrence River and the Northeastern Seaboard. Exactly. it originated with like the native americans along the saint lawrence the onondag and tribes all around the saint lawrence river and and the northeastern seaboard exactly who's that artist used to do those amazing illustrations you know i'm talking about of like like outside the mill the old military forts yeah it's been 1600s yes no i know who you're talking about and i drew

these illustrations of uh like uh the not the iroquois, right? Iroquois. Okay. Yep. And very, very special game. Very, very special game. It's not a game to them. It's a religion, really. You know what I mean? A young Iroquois is born with a little mini lacrosse stick given to him, and then they'll take that into the grave. And it's a combative style of play.

It was a combative game. They played it combatively, but it also was what was called a medicine game. So if somebody was dealing with something family-wise, they almost, the tribal shaman and stuff, would actually organize a game almost as a healing process to kind of, I think they thought, it would be a gift from the creator,

seeing them play and kind of revel in the sport that was given to them. It's a very, very neat tradition. And playing at Syracuse was neat because you're right in the, we the whole land man we went and played pre-games on the on a dog a nation and i mean you you cross over onto the nation and you guys know you're not on u.s territory now you're on sovereign land which is cool and uh so it's a it's a neat connection there and usually every few years a couple folks from the reservation play for

play for syracuse some of our greatest players have come from there you know there's a neat connection there. And usually every few years, a couple of folks from the reservation play for play for Syracuse. Some of our greatest players have come from there. Yeah. There's a story. Maybe, you know, it, if not, you should go find out and learn it better than I know it because of the combined, it'll combine your love of military operations and kind of like dirty pool type military and lacrosse. There's a, there's a situation that I can't remember whose fort it was but it was in the upper great lakes area where the european colonizers would like to as spectator

they would like to have the indians come play lacrosse and it was a way for them outside the borders of the fort to get a like a ton of young men there under a situation that would seem normal. Yes. So they had a lacrosse game and they got hundreds of young men out in front of the doors playing lacrosse, but not because the minute that door cracked open, yep. They slaughtered,

they were able to rush through the gates and slaughter everyone in the fort. Yep. Like a Trojan horse. Yeah. Oh, when I was thinking it was going to go the other way no no yeah yeah they're like i got an idea let's act like we're playing the cross that way there could be like 300 of us standing out front but not yeah yeah where they're running and clove their heads open i can't remember any of the details yeah yeah i'll look it up yeah i'll look it up, so that, so that brought me there in the spring of my senior year and it was great. I mean, we, we were a national powerhouse the whole time I was there. We won two national championships. Um, I got to captain that team my senior year. And then my senior year, my dad had sent me a copy of Winston Churchill's, my early life and autobiography. He wrote, uh, kind of in

the twilight of his life, but kind of cataloged his first 30 years, you know, being a war correspondent, being in the Boer Wars in Africa, prisoner of war, escape from war, frontier wars on, you know, what's now in and around Pakistan, Afghanistan, just these unbelievable adventures. On top of, you know, if you're a reader, you'll happen upon those few writers where it just feels like they're talking to you, right? Like every, every line is gold. And Churchill's one of those guys, which is not a small statement. Most what happened to those kinds of politicians, man? Oh, I mean, the saddest thing about that is he wouldn't survive in today's climate, right?

24 hour reporting cycle and, and Facebook and somebody using their cell phone, you know, he'd make some off color comment or be seen smoking a cigar, drinking whiskey and never get the job. It's a shame. We're going to kill ourselves with that. That's a good point. But anyway, I read that. Yeah, but like just that kind of sort of pedigree, man. Nothing like it. Nothing like it. There's no, yeah, there's definitely like no flies on McCain, you know, but there's a lot like, yeah, it's just like you used to hear about that or with. I mean, he's like exemplary even outside of that. Like no one has his background.

It's pretty phenomenal. Nor his vision. I mean, he predicted so many. I mean, he predicted he could see the things taking place in Europe that led to World War II. He, you know, the Iron Curtain is his phrase. He saw that the Soviets would, would you know draw that curtain and even though that they were allies in that fight that they were going to be the next big power he was a piece of work yeah we go back to your earlier thought like how far down that road would you

even gotten because he had like terrible money management loved uh he liked to pull a court loved to pull a cork probably stepping out on the old misses quite often it's precisely what I mean I feel like

in today's climate a person like that will not get to the front office or get any close to it because they'll get nuked before that but he was the man

for the time oh yeah we'd be we'd be in a very different world if it wasn't it wasn't for him you think so?

No doubt about it. So there you are. You're in college. Yep. Read it. Yep. All right. You've told me this.

I don't want to mess your story up. I want you to continue telling it. Yeah, of course. But let me back up because I know where this is going. What was your plan before this book fell into your lap? No plan. Okay. I mean, most of the guys that graduate-

You weren't going to play professional lacrosse because it wasn't such a thing. No, there is professional lacrosse, but it's not something that people make a lip. I mean, there's a couple of guys that graduate- You weren't going to play professional lacrosse because it wasn't such a thing. No, there is professional lacrosse, but it's not something that people make a living. There's a couple of guys that make a living off it now because it's grown and they have gear and apparel and endorsements, things like that. But no, most of the guys that play even currently,

they've got a real job and they play pro ball because that's the level they play at. But no, I did not have a plan. I was a fine arts major. I mean, I- Is that right? Yeah. What was that all about?

I just enjoyed art and literature much more than math and science. And it was a place I found a footing. Visual art. Yeah. Yeah. And, and architecture and history and you could fold kind of anything into fine arts, which was nice. And I took my cursory, you know, freshman class of biology and, and the things I need to take. And then from that point on, I got to pick and choose, which is why I think I actually ended up getting good grades and, you know, was on the Dean list. Cause it's something I wanted to study and enjoyed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah, I, I, I mean, I, I, I put that book down and absolutely new military service is the right place to kind of cut my teeth and keep playing rough. I mean, lacrosse

is a combative sport. I like playing rough. I don't drink, but I like, like scrapping. So, uh, you know, for me, it just was, you know, I thought, I thought being in the military would be a great place, uh, be an officer. Cause I like, I like being in charge. I mean, I don't think there's ever a team I didn't end up being the captain of. And I think people gravitate towards leadership leadership positions. So, um, I walked into a Navy recruiting office in Syracuse, New York and said, well, I knew I wanted to be an officer in the military. I read a bunch of things on special forces and Marines and all these different, you know, kind of elite teams because I felt like that's where I wanted to be. And I found so. How did you know that? I just probably the same thing on sports. You know, I could have gone and played at a different school of Syracuse and probably been a starter as a freshman and played all four years and been a high impact player right from the get go. Going to Syracuse from California, I knew I wasn't going to crack the starting lineup for a while, but I like being in that end of all special forces, green berets, air force, SOG guys in Vietnam. And there's one chapter I need to try and find this book because I'd love

to read it now because it was one of those things that became, you know, the fuel or the spark that kind of got me going on seals. But I'd seen, uh, or I, I, I read in this book how, you know, 80% of the guys that show up to seal training don't make it. And you're this commando that came from the water, and you could sneak up on people, attack ships, and land. It was just like, come on, this is exactly where I need to be. So I knew I wanted to be an officer. That's what led towards SEAL teams. And then I walked into a recruiter's office in Syracuse, New York.

I said, I want to be an officer, and I want to be a SEAL. And after the laughter died down, simply because they'd never had anyone recruit out of there and actually make it or go, we drew up the paperwork and they weren't wrong. It took me two years and two applications to get accepted because it's just so competitive as an officer to get a spot. Can I ask a question?

Yeah, please. When you say that, I went in and I said, I want to be an officer. Can you expand on that? What does that mean? There's two tracks in the the military you're either going to enlist you know in the navy or the marines or the army um which are you know the bulk of the military are enlisted folks that do the you know the kind of day-to-day job of of a grunt or an aviation technician or hull technician whatever that might be all the different jobs you can find in the military

and then the officers come from three tracks. Basically, you have the academies, you know, you went to West Point or Annapolis, and therefore you're an officer when you graduate. ROTC, Reserve Officer Training Corps, which is through a regular college, but doing some military service to build towards a commission, being commissioned as an officer. Or my pool was what's called OCS, or Officer Candidate School.. So four year degree, which you have to have. And then once you finish your bachelor's degree, you can apply direct. It was perfect for me because I got a normal college life. You know, I mean, I got to be with my buddies, play sports. There was no military connection to my time, you know, in college. And

then you applied OCS. If you get accepted, you go to, when I went through, it was in Pensacola. It's now in Newport, Rhode Island. 13 weeks of how to stand tall, polish your shoes and learn naval history and leadership. And then you're an officer. Just as much as the person that grounded out in four years of the academy. Just as much, there's no penalty. No difference, no difference.

But then he still had to go and do all the elimination shit for... Yeah, yeah. No, that's just, again... That's the beginning. To answer Giannis' question, that's to become an officer. But there's not like a boot camp part? Boot camp for officers is either the academy, ROTC, or OCS.

And the thing that was fun about OCS is you've got the... Kind of if you ever saw that movie, officer and a gentleman yeah with you know those marine corps drill instructors with the you know the smoky bear helmet you know screaming at you and lighting you up that's there that's fun i mean i enjoyed it you know there's some i don't want i don't want to be as audacious to say there's some parallels in our story because like the inspiration like the book that provided the inspiration like I didn't have any of that shit. But when I was in high school, when I was a junior in high school, I had in my head that I wanted to go into the Green Berets. So I started meeting with an army recruiter and they started calling the home and I went and took the test. So I took the test and they started recruiting very aggressively where they would even come to my home. Okay.

And my old man who served, okay, he was in the army, fought in World War II. He kind of like caught wind of this a little bit. And he was like, why in the world would you join? You don't join the military, there's no war. What are you going to do? Yeah. Because he signed up like, you know, Japs bound Pearl Harbor, as he tells it.

Yeah, yeah. And you go down, everyone joins the army, and then you fight the war, and the war ends, and everyone quits the army. Sure, yeah. And that's sort of his view of military service. And he told these guys, he's like, don't call, don't come over, you know.

And I was just saying, like, he'd be wasting your time. There's no one to fight. Yeah, yeah. Now, that was kind of your situation, though, but it wound up becoming very different. It's no one to fight. Yeah. Now that was kind of your situation though, but it wound up becoming very different. It became very different. Yeah. So, but you walked in during peacetime service. I did. And I would recommend it to anybody. Well, I don't know when we're going to see that again. Um, I think we may be a country semi-permanently at war. Yeah. We're like the Romans now. Yeah. We might, we might be like that until long after a year and my kids grow old. I think that's very, very reasonable to think that could be the case.

Yeah. So I feel blessed that I was actually in pre-911 military, no real combat engagement. But you did all your big training in that atmosphere. I did. I did, which is fascinating because I finished my active duty career running the training for SEALs, both basic and advanced out in California. And it was interesting because when I went through training, the Vietnam era guys were long in the tooth and kind of leaving. A couple guys left usually at the teams. But all the lessons had come out of the Vietnam guys. That's where the SEALs kind of made their name, in the Mekong Delta and coming out of those riverine areas of Vietnam and scaring the hell out of the vietcong and and really it was it was their coming out party our coming out party for how lethal and capable and creative those operators

could be but by the time i went through training you know none of the guys that were running the day-to-day training like you know kicking your ass at seal training were combat vets there just wasn't a bad guy to go fight but they'd give the speech you know like don't screw this up or you're gonna get your whole platoon killed or you're gonna you're gonna die and you just but it wasn't a bad guy to go fight but they'd give the speech you know like don't screw this up or you're going to get your whole platoon killed or you're going to you're going to die and you just but it wasn't it wasn't coming from no you take it at face value and you sure weren't going to give them a hard time and call their call their card on it but then when i ran training you know when one of my instructors told a young lion hey don't do that because and they could see that guy had like a silver star and like two purple hearts and knew what the hell he was talking about. It was pretty potent as an instructor. Very, very cool. So, but that's the, I want to

get to that because I want to get to your experiences as a trainer and focus on that because that's, that's the thing that I, and I'm going to make you do the, the not very huge leap of talking about that and how it kind of applies to what a lot of people that listen to this do recreationally as like hunters and fishermen and things about perseverance and focus and um being real tough but i i want to build more groundwork here before before we get to that uh hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law

makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your

hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. We're always talking about

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you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. So, we got you up. You go through your officer part. Yep. But there's still a big hurdle left.

There is. The hurdle. The hurdle. Like, break down the hurdle. So, the hurdle is called BUDS, Basic Underwater Demolition Seal Training. And that's the you know mythic course of instruction that takes place on coronado island san diego you know you if you visit san

diego you're going to walk onto that island and be like what do you mean they're training like hardcore commandos here i mean it's just beautiful weather and and and you know this idyllic southern california town which you don't realize unless you hop in the water is that the pacific current runs through there and so it's about 50 degree degree water most of the year in San Diego, which is what I always tell people when it comes at 80% of the people that quit training, about 90% of those do so because of the cold water. I mean, if they move SEAL training to Hawaii or Florida, you'd get a lot more graduates for sure.

But we put these young lions and I was put in that water. I mean, I just don't remember not being wet for six months. You're just wet and miserable and sandy all the time and cold. And I mean, cold to the point, I mean, people listen to this show are going to know cold because they sit in cold places and rugged climates. But I think short of hunters and outdoorsmen, I think very few people would appreciate the type of cold we experience. And hunters and fishermen will also know there is a tectonic difference between dry cold and wet cold.

And wet cold falls into the worst category. No doubt about it, right? Like when you're wet and cold, you're going to find out how tough you are. You said to me once, it's probably annoying to have someone keep reminding you of things you told them, but you said to me once um it's probably annoying to keep to have someone keep reminding you things you told him but you said to me once about the cold you're like like we use the cold water to achieve you're kind of i'm paraphrasing you're like

we use cold water to get to something there's other ways to get there yeah and you're like the rangers use starvation okay talk just talk about that like yeah what Yeah. And you're like the Rangers use starvation. Okay. Just talk about that. Like, yeah, what are you, what you're, you know, what they're getting at and the tools that you use to get there. Yeah. I mean, I think military organizations have figured out this real elemental building block. The first of which is we get rid of the individual. So everybody has their head shaved. You put on the same t-shirt, pants and boots. So we all look the same. I mean, all four of us look different sitting at this table. But start shaving everybody's head, put a t-shirt and boots and pants on.

We kind of look the same at a distance. It's like a socioeconomic leveler. Yeah, and that's the other gift. And a cool leveler. Oh, I mean, I'll tell you right now, whenever I talk to somebody about the military, the gift of the military that I think our country could benefit from, which is why in my most recent book, I talk about the idea of universal service in the country. And I don't just mean military. I think that'd be a great way, but some type of required

mandatory service for young people would be a gift to this country because I don't think people leave their silos, right? You grow up in this part of the world and a lot of our country is real homogeneous in the different spots you come from. But in the military, you show up day one of training. You got a kid from the south side of Chicago, and you got a kid that went to private school in Connecticut, and then a kid that was breaking horses in Texas, and then you're all together working it out and figuring out how to perform and achieve and really, in the end, take care of one another on the battlefield. But all the services figured

that out. So you break people down to kind of the most basic building block you can. You don't have this personal identity or we don't care about it when you show up. We don't care about any gift you're bringing to the SEAL teams as a new person. We'll get that out of you eventually, but that's not what we're looking for. And that's not what any military units looking for. It's looking for subjugation. And I don't say that as a negative. I say that as a positive of getting rid of that individual desire and what you need to be happy and good and be thinking about the team and the collective and the greater good. And so all the units use a different system to figure out how to break somebody down to kind of the bone marrow. And, you know, I went to, I went to SEAL training. I was sent to army ranger school when I showed up my first SEAL team. So

I'm already at a SEAL team. I've made it through SEAL training and that whole crucible. My commanding officer was, was a member of what's called JSOC joint special operations. And so he wanted all his junior officers to kind of speak army. He's like, I want you to go get a little army indoctrination because at that point in our history, the army really ruled the roost. They ran all the, all the, you know, all the special operations. It was all army generals basically that ran special operations at that point because the seals seals were still just very new to that organization. So explain buds before you talk about high because that's the thing I think is fascinating.

If you had to go through all that buds bullshit and then turn around and go through the arms version of the same damn thing, almost as like a side trip. It was, it was, um, I have a quick question about the buzz when you're breaking people down with the cold water. can you fail because of your like uh physical limitations or if you always let's just say because obviously guys must just pass out and their body just quits themselves without them mentally quitting right they're just going they're going going and then they fall over yeah i'll if you if you wake up let me feel that in a way that's going to prompt you to say another thing is you spoke to me about that too.

As you said, we lost good guys. It would have been great. Yep. Accidentally. Yeah, it's rare, but the biggest fear of somebody that would otherwise make it is getting injured or having their body kind of betray them. Right. So guys got stress fractures or some overuse injury, or they couldn't kind of thermoregulate. Like there's like, we'd have elite level swimmers. That's a good example. So we'd

have elite level swimmers that you would think obviously would make good seals, right? We're aquatic maritime operators. If you're a, you know, sub Olympic swimmer, you're the perfect guy. The problem is I think a lot of those guys athletically have been training in like an ambient aquatic temperature of whatever a pool is 60, 60 degrees, right? And so we'd get them on land, they'd start running, their body just didn't know how to regulate itself when it started getting hot. So we'd have actually more, this, this is, I want to make sure I'm not statistically wrong. But I think we have as many if not more heat related injuries at SEAL training as we do hypothermic related injuries at SEAL training. So every once in a while, somebody's body would betray them and they

couldn't get through. And the worst thing was, as you would see, this is a story I probably told you is you'd see some kid that looked like Michelangelo chiseled him out of steel. He's got every attribute you could want to be a top performer. And he was just weak, just a weak mental person. He'd hit that cold water and quit. And then you'd have this little kid that, know, he's got baby fat on him, taught himself to swim two weeks before it came from like, you know, the flyover States. You're like, I wish I could rip the heart out of that guy, slam it into that guy. And we'd have some, you know, because unfortunately that guy was just soft. But to Giannis's question, now there, I mean, there's no exceptions, right? It's like everybody crosses this line. Everybody has to cross the same line.

And if you don't for any reason, you're out. That's accurate. What I'll say is we just don't drop that many people at SEAL training. Very few guys go out because we say you're not the right guy or you failed in performance levels to leave. I mean, we'll lose guys for that. There's guys that can't handle the stress of the underwater tests. And if they make it all the way training where they're shooting and we're

working with demolition and they're just not, they're just a rock. They're not bright enough to get it. We're like, I don't think you need to be dealing with explosive ordinance or shooting next to the rest of us. You're out of here. Very few of that happens. Almost everybody leaves that training program with their own volition. They just tree got to like ring a bell. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a bell on the grinder, uh, which is kind of where we do our PT, you know, pushups, calisthenics and all that stuff right in the middle of the training compound. A bunch of famous signs around there. It's, you know, it's kind of Mecca for SEAL training.

That's like the heartbeat right there. And that bell, bells in the Navy are a longstanding tradition from the Brits and the British Royal Navy where you'd be using bells to pass information on back to wooden ship days, where three bells means this, two bells means that. And so we adopted that as big Navy. I mean, if you go on a Navy ship today, I mean, a nuclear aircraft carrier launching the most state-of-the-art equipment on the face of the earth or a submarine, you're going to hear bells that will pass information on time and what's taking place. It's a long-standing tradition. So at SEAL training, there's a bell sitting there that's omnipresent. And if you quit and you go up to an instructor and like, I've had enough, I'm out of

here. You got to go out and ring that bell three times. You take your helmet off, which is kind of like your ID card at SEAL training. You put it down in this long graveyard of helmets, lines, lines, the grinder of people that have quit how many guys go in to the class i don't know if it's it's uh if it's limited right now when i was running training we actually limit it to 150 starting a class might start with more than that around 180 190 guys started my how many helmets are laying there at the bell we graduate we graduate 22 out of 180 yeah yeah that bell's ringing non-stop It's the soundtrack of seal training. That bell ringing a cool thing in your book before. Oh, let me tell you this because I almost

forgot this right before hell week, which is our most, you know, kind of famous week of training where you basically you start training on a Sunday night. It ends on Friday afternoon and you get about three hours sleep in that entire period of time with a nap on. I think your first nap comes on Wednesday for like an hour and a half. You get a nap on Thursday for an hour and a half and then you hopefully see the finish line. But leave the week before hell week, the senior classes that have made it through will be playing ACDC hell's bells like on a loop. You'll just hear the bell, you know, from that ACDC song, like just cranking all the time. It's, it's, it's a twisted place, but you know, the people that, the people that are made to get

through that place, they, they really know they're in the right spot. Are the instructors, the same instructors the whole way through? Like, I mean, are they maintaining the same pace during that hell week? Are they up the whole time? it's three shifts of instructors. They take a shift from day shift, half the night shift, half the night shift into morning and you split up. No, we keep our instructors. You're still smoked as an instructor

doing one third of a day for the week. Those guys can be out with their wife eating dinner at night. It's stuck in this weird hell that you don't even know what it is oh yeah super strange imagine clocking in for that saying goodbye to the uh when you walk into these guys and like the biggest like emotional psychological battle they'll ever be in there's a good story you tell in your first book damn few yeah what's the subtitle making of a making making

the modern seal warrior yeah you have a lengthy like anyone who's curious to hear about just sort of like what goes on in the buds class of the is it fair to say like the seal elimination class yeah yeah how do you guys describe like if you had to do buds in a second like what is it like what do you mean like how do you like if someone says what's buds yeah i mean it's it's basically three phases of training first First phase is selection training, which includes hell week. By the end of first phase, most of the people that have quit have quit. I mean, most of the guys- That's how long? That's seven weeks. Oh, so that 160 people that quit, quit during a seven week period. I would say they probably have the stat,

but call it 65, 70% quit right in there. Then you go on to second phase, which is dive phase, where you learn to do all the underwater stuff, drive, you know, dive a rebreather, a closed loop oxygen system. So we can sneak up, sneak up on ships and blow, blow them up or sneak ashore without somebody knowing it. Uh, we lose probably the rest of the guys in that phase because we do tests underwater where, you know, if Cal was the student, I was the instructor, he'd have a two-hose regulator, a twin set of 80, you know, scuba tanks on his back, and these hoses that come in are rubbery, and I'd basically shove him onto the bottom of the pool deck, pull that out of his mouth, and start tying knots in that behind his back, and then shove him, then you got to figure it out, and some people freak out and can't

handle the stress of the underwater stuff. That's a small percentage. You talk about too that they would put you at night with no light underwater to swim out in the ocean, but with shipping containers laying on the bottom that are open on one end. That's in the, that's the East coast. So that, that's kind of an insider story and I don't want to give it away because somebody's, no, somebody's going to run into it, but there there is a shipping container. I'm not going to say where but in a harbor in in Virginia Beach, Virginia and one of my buddies on a dive is just following a nav course and I'm sure the instructors like intended hoping somebody would go in and basically gets inside this shipping container. Now is his compass is like spinning around underwater and he just swam

into a box with one small opening in the dark water in the dark and and it took quite a while to figure out what he was doing to get out of it. My God, it's funny. So I think you tell good times. Good time. I think you tell a damn. I think you tell a damn few that I like is is it you guys are laying in the water right and everybody's freezing her ass, but you can like they incentivize ringing the bell with coffee and donuts. Yeah. So the, so the bell, which sits on the grinder every day of the year, other than when hell week's going on, they can detach the bell. And we have built this like welded, a rig arm, a boom arm on the back of the truck. So the bell

travels with the cluster now, cause they don't want it to be too far away. Should you you decide to leave so you can just kind of see it the whole time and then yeah i've seen instructors with you know a 24 pack of krispy kreme donuts and pizzas and coffee and just like all you gotta do is come on up you know and they get it too like if you quit at that point you're eating donuts and and you're on you're on your way and when when hell week ends i was like this is your book too. When Hell Week ends, right? And so you've lost all these, there's a horrible attrition,

there's 20 some left. I think you were saying you get a medium pepperoni pizza and a bottle of Gatorade. Yeah. And then you slept for 36 hours. The class that's going to go in next, they like prep,

first of all, you're in a white t-shirt with your name on it leading up to Hell Week. And if you finish Hell Week, you're in a white t-shirt with your name on it leading up to hell week. And if you finish hell week, you transition from a white t-shirt to a brown military t-shirt. And you would have thought somebody gave you like the cup of Christ when you get that brown t-shirt. I mean, it is like the best thing you've ever experienced.

But yeah, they, they buy you a pizza, a pizza and like a 64 ounce Gatorade. I remember wolfing that whole pizza down during that Gatorade and then you have your, your barracks is actually set up, um, for you to go in there and go to sleep and you have a 24 hour medical watch. The doctors and other students are walking around. Your, your body is so toxic for me. I mean, you think about when you sleep, that's your body's, you know, system and time to kind of redistribute everything and take a break, right? And you don't do that for an entire week. So all this, you know, lactic acid and name the alchemy of junk that's in your system from surviving being that cold and miserable and wet and going that

hard physically, when you lay down, I mean, if you're laying down on your bed and your arm fell off the bed, I mean, it could just go septic to the point where you'd be in real danger of damaging that arm. So, I mean, you're being observed the whole time. Yeah. And they give you some pointers on how to sleep. Yeah, they you set up the bed. So you know your legs are up high so you can kind of get that stuff draining out of your legs and heal.

And I'm telling you, when you wake up from that first block of sleep, you think you're going to feel good and it's almost worse. I mean, it's just like you have crushed yourself so bad that you wake up from that first block of sleep, you think you're going to feel good. And it's, it's almost worse. I mean, it's just like, you've crushed yourself so bad that you wake up and, uh, you know, you keep a Gatorade bottle next to your bed. So you don't even have to walk to the bathroom. Should you have to, should you have to pee or, I mean, it's, it's misery, but, but within days you're, you're back up and running, but it's, it's to see the guys at the end of that walk. And they, they look like they just finished the Batam death March. I mean, it's, it's something to see because all that all that chafing you think of the sand and grit and all the stuff that's getting in your pants and like the chafing just on your belt line i'm built like

a linebacker so my legs rub together i mean it was like put a put like a meat grinder in between your legs and walk around with that yeah you should ask my two year old you should ask my two year old about it because we just got back from mexico and uh try running around for a week in a swim diaper with a bunch of sand packed into it. Exact same thing. Dude was looking rough. Yeah, but he's looking real rough. That is the exact same thing that happens at training.

We should make people wear swim diapers and see how they like that. I'm still blown away. out how I would handle like checking in and out of my job and seeing all these kids like they have to look like they're in a far away planet mentally and how you like you check out go have dinner like Steve was saying with the fam and then being

like it's probably the same way that you know a brain surgeon is doing something that intense and doing that and then goes and leaves and gets a you know gets a Starbucks I mean I think all the guys that are instructors are seals. They all went through that training. Then they went on to the combat assault teams, then have come back to run the train. So everybody's hugely invested in the moment. So I mean, I, I, it's interesting. I've never really thought about it. I mean, it wasn't like I had a hard time separating from the two or coming back. And during hell week,

you just know the job is to make it that rough so the right guys are at the finish line. Yeah. Yeah. So walk through. There's a couple moments in your career I want you to touch on. Walk through real quick when you get out, when you finish all your training,

what your impression of life was going to be like. Yeah. Like when you enter like the special operations world. Yeah. So, I mean, this is pre 9-11. So this is like 99 when I finished SEAL training, I show up at SEAL team four on the East coast. You know, you're a brand new guy.

Back then you didn't have your Trident. The Trident is that gold Eagle that SEALs wear on their uniform. Guys that go through training now go all the way through for almost a year. They earn their Trident, which means they're a SEAL. And then they go to their first SEAL team. When I showed up, you finished BUDS and then you went to your SEAL team. You're on probation for six, eight months for them to kind of evaluate you, put you through a bunch of advanced training and tests to find out if you're worthy of the Trident. So, I mean, you're, let me talk about fraternity hazing. it's like the worst

thing ever showing up a seal train team no trident so that that's the way i showed up in my first team um but i remember thinking to myself you know i was going to show up at seal team four there'd be a laser retina scan you know the co would pull up or the master you'd pull up in like a james bond car and i'd get inside and i'd see all the guns we didn't know existed. And guys would be launching that night to attack targets, you know, domestic and abroad. And it's much less sexy than that when you first show up. You know, you show up and it's actually kind of an old Navy building with cool history in it.

Now I'd give anything to go back to that team. But it's much more utilitarian and then kind of, um, you know, learning the, learn the skills of a warrior. I mean, you, you learn this kind of cursory cursory level of it at, at seal training. It's gotten much better. Now the guys that are leaving seal training, they're, they're kind of ready to go. It's pretty unbelievable, but then you still do a tremendous amount of advanced training of that team to become a capable operator on the battlefield. It's just less, it's less high speed than you think. I think it gets better all the time because, you know, funding has built new, new, new training grounds and new, um, you know, new locations, but it was pretty Spartan when I, when I showed up and less,

less high speed than I thought. That being said, the operators are, are just, um, are just otherworldly. The guys you get through there, the guys you show up with at the team, it's just kind of that peer group that I feel like I was meant to go be a part of and be connected to. The friendships are just sublime that you make in that organization. Then you throw in now approaching 20 years of sustained combat and it goes to a pretty intense level. That's an interesting thing I thought about, man, is a couple years ago, I got invited down to Fort Bragg to give a talk in front of a bunch of the guys

of the 3rd Special Forces Group. And so it's a class of Green Berets, generally a little bit younger than me. Some of the officers were about my age. And I actually kind of had like a, uh, when I left there, I, I, I fell into kind of like a minor depression for a few days because something kind of like struck me in a, in a really profound way that made me feel, uh, just how like, like fortunate and selfish I am, or that we're allowed to be because here I am like sort of

my contemporaries, right? And I got out of high school, okay? And I went and had like this very self-focused college career. I then went on to go to graduate school and like get an MFA. And I remember I was in the middle of graduate school and waking up one day and like holy shit 9-11 right yeah and just being like catatonic about that but it was sort of you know just this thing we all experienced collectively and then went on to have this like really selfish life or you know have like this beautiful wedding and and have this kind of like romance with my wife we get married have children I spend you know i travel for work which my work is like kind of a luxury and it's very nice and spend all this time with my kids right and i go and meet these guys who have during that whole when all of that super good shit all that super good selfish

shit was happening to me all they had done for the previous 13, at the time, the previous 13 or 14 years, is all they had done is go back and forth between Afghanistan and Iraq. Yep. That's all they had known. Yes. And these are guys that went in just prior to, mostly, a lot of guys that went in just prior to and just after. Right after. And that had been like all they'd done.

I mean, they tried to squeeze in marriages and shit, right? Of course. And he one day has the anecdote. He says, hey, you know what? He opens up the yellow pages and shows me the divorce attorney section in Fort Bragg. Yep. All that fucking book is is divorce attorney.

It is. It's otherworldly how much stress it puts on families. And the family's the ones that pay the price. You know, as a warrior, and I don't know if I've talked about this with you or not, but I make a distinction a little bit between a soldier and a warrior. And I don't, I don't mean this disrespect. No, please. We've talked about this. I think you should tell it. I think there's people that, that go in the military and I respect every single person that serves in the military sincerely. Um, but there's plenty of people, if not most of the people in military are not going to be in a combat unit that's going through. I mean but there's plenty of people. If not, most of the people in military are not going

to be in a combat unit that's going through. I mean, there's just a lot of jobs in the military. You can be a cook, you can be an engineer, you can be, there's all these different jobs. There's only so many, it's not, it's not most won't be in combat. Most actually have been into the combat theater. There's only so many units that are going to be the guys are like, we are going to chase the worst dragons we can find. Like we want to go slay the top of the top and just go hunt bad guys. That's seals, Rangers, green berets, uh, Marine aggressive combat units. I mean, it's, it's the infantry units that are going to do that. And there's, there's folks that fall into this category. In my mind, I know for a fact, it's, it's just what my spirit is made up of. And that

is a warrior, somebody that wants to go turn those stones over on the battlefield and see what it's like to, you know, lay it all out there and compete at the highest level. Yeah. Like in the tradition of like Hector and Achilles, 100%. And so those are the guys that gravitate towards our units. Like our guys, none of our guys are like not wanting to go to fight. I see young guys going through SEAL training right now. And they'll come up to me like my generation that they know have just been nothing but banging heads with bad guys. They're like, God, I hope we didn't miss it. Did we miss it? I'm like, you didn't miss it. There's plenty of fighting left, but they want it. Our guys want that, which is a big distinction between

those two. Talk about the interesting mix of emotions you had on 9-11, if you're comfortable talking about that. Yeah. No, I talk about it a lot when I talk to kind of corporate America. I talk a little bit about it in the sense that- Yeah, because just to explain that, one of the several things you do besides working on your books is you talk about leadership.

Yes. You do lectures on leadership to a variety of audiences, including corporate audiences. Yeah, a lot of businesses, coaching executives and kind of working with, with both mid range to very, very senior executive level leaders on, on leadership and, and the principles of that and how my, my experience in, in combat leadership translates very much to, to leadership in my mind is leadership. I mean, if you're in charge of a boy scout troop or aAL team, the basic elements of it remain the same. The consequences can be very, very different, but I think regional responsibility, and my team was a Central and South America team. So anything goes wrong in Central and South America, a platoon or assault team from SEAL Team 4 is the one that's going to respond to that.

And so I remember I was on a run just getting my morning workout in. I come walking into this location where all my guys were holed up, And I arrived on that scene right as that second plane was crashing the tower. That's when I showed up kind of in that moment. And I love language. I love literature and the power of words. It was just strange. I can't come up with a better word than that. Because on one side of the coin, we were very, very aware of the horror that was unfolding in front of our eyes, right? By the time that second plane hit, you knew that wasn't an accident. People were making, you know, people had just lost their life instantly on the planes and where the plane struck. And now people are trying to get out of

that building. People are making decisions of whether they're going to burn to death or jump to their death. I mean, you just talk about the savagery of that moment. And then all these first responders that were coming, the families that were going to get the worst news they were ever going to hear in their lives. We were very sensitive to that, right? We were aware of that as we watched it and that we'd been attacked. The reason it was strange is on the other side of that coin, we were a little bit excited, a little bit excited. And bear with me so I don't sound like a sociopath when I say that. I don't think you should be. Yeah. If someone can't understand what you're getting at, they're just not going to understand.

Yeah, they're not. And I'll equate it to sports. Imagine you practice every day of your life to perform at a high level of sport, but you never got to play a game. You'd be a crazy person, right? You're not in a position where you're going to profit on this. No, no, no. We didn't go start the fight.

You're in a position where you're going to be like, this could very well mean my life. This could very well mean my death. Yeah. I think you could talk about the mixed feelings. I asked you if you were comfortable with it because I can picture in your mind how someone might take what you're saying the wrong way. Yeah, no, no, for sure. And so, and so we were excited because we knew our phone was going to be ringing. We were going to get to go respond. And I think it's, it's interesting to reflect on that moment now because that excitement was real

and we knew we were going to get to go through to the job. It's amazing to think how little we knew how long we were going to be in this fight. I mean, no way could anybody have predicted we'd be approaching two decades of combat. Now, that being said, just a tremendous gift for me. I mean, I think if I had gone my entire life, the guys that were post Vietnam, pre nine 11, that had those full careers, 30 year careers in their 25 year careers that never got to fire a shot at a bad guy. I mean, I feel like you'd be a lunatic. There's like Grenada, Grenada, Panama, a couple little events in there. Short of that, there was no bad guy. Some things in Bosnia, two day, little, little, little events. So, I mean, for me, I feel like

if I'd gotten through that whole thing and nine 11, nine 11 hadn't happened, I would have had to sign up with like, I don't know, somebody that was hunting Rhino poachers in Zimbabwe or something like that. And just be like, I got to go get in a gunfight with somebody, man. This, this is what I came to do. I would have had to seek it out. Now, now I've turned over every stone I wanted to want to turn in my experience. So, so we got, I think this may be the surprise people. Maybe it doesn't. We feel lucky. I mean, seals in particular, special operators that wanted to go to the fight.

You know, we, we knew our number was going to get called and, and it has been ever since. But at a big toll, tremendous toll. But I mean, I, you know, I'm lucky I'm on the lucky end of it. You know, I mean, I made out of there safe. I think both physically and spiritually and emotionally, I married the right gal who's tough as nails and can run our family without me. And we're crazy about each other. And we have a, I mean, just an absolutely, I think, enviable marriage compared to a lot

of folks I know. But that comes from a very tough gal that can do that without me and her knowing full well, she, she signed on to marry me. I mean, I was a SEAL when she married me. So she knew she was signing on to something where I might not come home from one of those times I leave the front door. Did you guys get married after 9-11? We – no.

No, we were – yeah, after 9-11. We did, yeah. Not long, about a year after 9-11. So she knew what shit was going to be looking like. Oh, she knew. She knew. She knew. She knew. If you ask her, she didn't.

Is attrition for you guys as high as it seems? It seems like helicopter crashes. Helicopter crashes are the bitch of the battlefield. You take three or four helicopter crashes that were connected to SEALs, the number, even with those, the numbers we've lost based on the mission sets and how far into bad guy country we've pushed it in sustained combat, it does not make sense how few people we've lost. If you take those helicopter crashes out of it, 200 years from now, they'll start talking about like this is otherworldly what that group accomplished in the damage they inflicted on the enemy and how few casualties they took in the fight. Yeah, because some of them, I remember one helicopter crash carried off 18.

Oh, yeah. We've had 20 plus guys, 23 guys killed in a single helicopter crash. 12 in another, four in a helicopter. You take those crashes away, our numbers would be, I mean, mythical. There's a term. Oh, go ahead. Just real quick because I've never really asked. I always feel uncomfortable talking to guys that are in the military,

because I feel like 90% of the time when they're talking to me, they don't want to talk about that stuff, right? They want to talk about wool. But would you mind just real quick the numbers? Does SEAL Team 4 have a specialty as opposed to, and I know there's odd and even numbers and that's East Coast, West Coast. Yeah, just a super simple term. SEAL Team 1 and SEAL Team 2 were the first commissioned SEAL teams in the Navy. This was in the 60s.

SEAL Team 1 just happened to be on the West Coast. SEAL Team 2 was on the East Coast. Every team that was born after that, SEAL Team 1, 3, 5, and 7 are all in the West. 2, 4, 8, and now, we weren't supposed to even be able to talk about this, but now Team 6 has become, you know, normal conversation

all on the East Coast. So East Coast teams are even-numbered teams. West Coast teams are odd-numbered teams. Pre-9-11, we were connected to a geographic region of the world. So the entire team

was responsible for Central and South America, Africa, Middle East. Well a geographic region of the world. So the entire team was responsible for Central and South America, Africa, Middle East. Well, that kind of makes sense, right? Because you specialize for that area. We did. Post 9-11, there was so much fight. There was so much, so many bad guys to go chase that we just reorganized the deck and said, you know what? Instead of sending one platoon to a geographic region, in case something happens, we know where everything's happening. Let's just send everybody. So now entire teams deploy to a region, the team behind them, like if SEAL Team 3 is deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, SEAL Team 5 is on deck. They're getting ready and trained up in the final end of their train to kind of go relieve Team 3. Team 3 comes home, takes a break. Team 7

is in the mix getting ready, and we just cycle like that. Gotcha. So now we have a little bit more of a focus where we deploy for purpose as opposed to deploying for presence. We still have a presence all over the world, more countries than you could believe.

We have folks kind of sneaking around and taking a look to see what the next fight could be and being present in case something happens. But most of the time our teams are now deploying for a specific purpose as opposed to just being a geographic region gotcha yep um there's a term you use maybe you can give me some background on where it comes from and you bring this up i can't i can't remember if you told me this you you bring it up in damn few but you were uh i'm gonna tell you what you said and then within damn few, but you were, uh, I'm going to tell you what you said. And then

within that as a term used, you were saying that you said to me, if I fell, yeah. And that's what I want you to talk about. You said, if I felt your primary worry was that your mother would turn that into anger with her country. Yeah. So talk about that, but talk about why the word fell. I heard you say that so many times. I don't know. Maybe it's just like a language thing from literature or writing or, you know, I think people talk about, and I've written a little bit of the kind of concept of the romance of war, the, you know, and I assure you, there's nothing romantic about being in war upon reflection. When I think of some of the things my teammates did, which were absolutely, um, just the stuff of legend. I mean, watching

what some of my teammates did, uh, I'm sure they'd say the same about some of the things I did, but you just can't think that way as a warrior. You're just hoping to not fail your teammate, but you know, falling in combat, being killed in combat. So when I say fell, it means, you know falling in combat being killed in combat so when i say fell it means you know being being taken down and so it's not a euphemism it's not a euphemism no it's not meant to sort of like make it seem less than it is i guess i could say if i were killed in combat i just don't think i ever thought about that way just something about it really hit me when you said yeah a couple times you said fell and i'm like why why that word yeah maybe that's why because it's i think it sounds better than just the- The railroad killed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But talk about that feeling about your mom. Explain that. No, it was twofold with my parents. I mean, I got a younger brother, and we're best friends, have been since the day he was born. He's a paramedic. Paramedic. Firefighter, yep.

And a writer and a musician, just a pure renaissance man. And tough as anyone I've ever met in my life. He would have been a phenomenal SEAL phenomenal seal. Um, but he, uh, you know, obviously I knew it would have broke his back and heart if I, if I, if I had fell in combat, but my parents in particular, I was worried about, and I was worried about, I was probably least worried about my bride than anybody on the list, just cause she's she's tough. Not because it would have been, obviously, it would have been crushing and worst case scenario in her life. That said.

Yeah, but you said she shied away. She stayed away from the teams. She didn't want to hear every time a helicopter crashed. She had no idea that three of my teammates had been killed on my last deployment until I got home and told her. That's how much she isolated herself from that, which was very healthy for her. And you're saying too, she waited a long, long time to ask you, like, did you ever have to kill anybody?

Yeah. Years later, years later at a dinner. I'll never forget it. When she asked you. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I think she knew, but I mean, it's not something we come back and say, Hey, you know, here's the notches on the gun belt.

This is not something, but she didn't want to hear like, Oh, a plane went down. Helicopter went down. Let's all wait around to see who they were. Nope, because look, there are wives on the wives network that would be connected to the team kind of leadership

back home. Yeah. And you know, when it gets announced, I mean, you guys have experienced this. When somebody gets announced, hey, three service members were killed in Afghanistan last night.

It's not Billy, Jimmy, and Johnny were killed. No, it plays out. It takes days because you want to make sure the family's here in first. So it takes time. So two days later, that's the thing that always gets me, man, is like, especially with guys in like the more senior, more elite people tend to be a little bit older. Yep. And when I see those, I'll always see it. And then you get

the story about who they were. And it's never, never a single guy. No, it's always like a single guy. So I was like, oh, he had four, a one year old, a five year old, a nine year old is like, fuck, never. It's unbelievable. But anyway, my mom is just a special, a special lady, but a very emotional lady. And she, I just was aware that I feel like if I, if I had not come back, if I had been killed in combat, that, that she would have just grenaded and just would have blamed the country, been pissed and just, I don't know this. I mean, I've never,

I don't think I've ever talked to her about it, but I just felt like, I remember having a conversation with my brother being like, hey, if I fall, don't let mom like just descend into chaos and hate this country. Make sure she knows I believed in what I was doing. I was with the people I wanted to be with.

There'd frankly be no better way for me to transition into the next life than in combat. I mean, that's, you know, I don't think you can die better than that. I hope I live to be very old and gray and smoking a cigar on my porch and watching my great grandchildren run around. But the guys that get killed in combat, you're like, look, that's a gunfighter's life right there. That's about as good a death as you can have. So there's a real, and that's when I talk about a warrior. That's a different concept than I think most soldiers. I think a warrior sees his teammate with that flag draped over that coffin and is like, that dude's the lucky one, man.

He went out better than any of us are ever going to go out, for sure. So I was worried about that for my mom. And then my dad's dad was killed in the Pacific Theater of World War II. So in my mind, I was real worried that like like what could be the worst case scenario in someone's life to have your life bookended by having your dad killed in combat and then have your son probably a gazillion times worse killed combat so i thought more about that than my own i feel like mortality or or or you know what what could have happened on the battlefield. That occupied some actual emotional currency. Talk about fishing with your dad when you guys would fish

and the idea of complaining. Yeah. So nobody that's ever fished for steelhead or has done it for any more than one season. I mean, if you fished one time for steelhead on a bluebird day, you don't know what I'm talking about. Most people that have fished for steelhead or salmon would know how cold it is to sit in a drift boat or wade into a cold river in the Pacific Northwest and just be freezing your butt off wet, cold, and miserable all day. And I remember being in those, those beautiful drift boats, you know, my dad, brother, and I sitting in the front and a guide, you know, rowing us down the Smith or the Trinity or some, some great, you know, Western trout stream or steelhead stream. And I remember, you know, you're up at three in the morning, four in the morning,

putting the boat in, it's freezing cold. Then it starts raining on you. And I remember looking up to my dad midway through, I think it was an Oregon, a fishing trip and just being so cold. I don't think I was that cold again until I went to seal training, being wet, my hands shaking, just sitting there. And I remember looking up at my dad and there was no discussion about whether we were going to, you know, go ashore early or take a break. It was just like, this is fishing and we don't complain. And that's who we are. And I was like, I guess that's who we are. We just don't complain. And so my brother and I have just always been tough. And I think it was those little, those little lessons watching that and how you mimic that. And, um, I think a lot of people

have those experiences, particularly outdoorsmen and people like that, that they saw, you know, their dad or their mentor out in a spot like that kind of suck it up. And you're like, okay, I want to be that. But that suggests to me that you feel that physical mental toughness, well, okay, I'm going to stack two questions together. That suggests to me that you feel that physical and mental toughness are learned and not innate. So speak to that and also speak to what is the relationship after all the things you've seen? And I want to jump ahead real quick. You went on to run Bud's, okay?

So you have your own set of experiences from going through it. Then you have your set of experiences watching how many classes go through. Oh, yeah. I mean, can you ballpark? Oh, yeah. I mean, I was there for about three years, all told,

and six classes go through a year. So you've seen hundreds and hundreds of people ring the bell. Thousands of, yeah, yeah. So yeah, hundreds certainly ring the bell. Learned or innate physical mental toughness? One, are they related? And two, is it learned or innate?

I don't want to give a cop-out answer, but I feel like it's impossible if you're going to answer that honestly without somewhat doing it. I do think it's a little bit of both. I mean, I think that's not a cop out because I think that everything I have three kids. I think there's a lot of learn shit and there's a ton of shit that's just you got to deal with. Anyone that's a parent knows this for a fact that your kids in my mind are who they are from the day they were born. I mean, I think the best parents

will help their kid become the best version of who they are, but me trying to get one of my two daughters be different than who they are, I mean, I'd rather sooner hold back the tide than get my girls to be something different than they are on kind of an elemental level. That being said, I know they're looking at me and looking at their mama as to how to behave and who we are and what we believe in

and how we just function in a daily life. So my sense will be is that I don't think my kids will probably complain a lot and, and, um, because they, they will see that and hopefully model that. Uh, so when I think it comes to being tough, I mean, I think, I do think there's some predisposed genetic stuff in there that, you know, you see some kids that fall down and they cry and go scream into mama and lose their minds. And there's some kids that get like bonk with a two by four and just kind of suck it up and power on.

I mean, so I think there's some part of that that's maybe genetic. And I think there's a lot of what you model and see and how you learn that stuff. So I do think it's both. I think it's both. I think leaders are the same way. When I talk to leaders about leadership, I'm like, look, there's all these X's and O's I can teach you about how to do things right in leadership, how to do things wrong. There's things that obviously fall into those two categories. And I think you could learn the good stuff and execute that as best you can.

I think you can do that though. And if you don't have some certain level of X factor, that's connected to that, something where people gravitate towards you as a leader, you're probably going to have a lot more trouble than those folks that have it. Yeah. And so I, so I think it is a combination. I think it is a combination. What about the physical and mental stuff? So I think it, uh, again, the same. I mean, I think, I think like Giannis asked earlier, my body never broke down a seal string. It hasn't really broke down to this point. I mean, I've had one shoulder surgery. Other than that, my body can take a pretty phenomenal amount of abuse and keep going on. I'm not the fastest guy. I'm not the quickest guy. I'm not the strongest guy or any of those things, but my body's like kind of like a diesel pickup truck. It'll just keep going. And there's guys that were very elite performers that almost perform like a Ferrari, but they're high tuned like a metabolic, you know, physical way, it can withstand a

tremendous amount of abuse now. So that was a gift for sure. But along with that, there's, there's your mental attitude going into the training or going into combat that, that has to be the strongest. Cause I think as your mind and kind of spirit goes, so goes the rest of your body. I mean, you know, I think that's what SEAL training offers up. We break everybody down to a point where you definitely have a legitimate reason to quit. You have a legitimate reason in SEAL training.

No one has ever gone through training and been like, this is a good day. I'm happy with every single day that went through. None of that was hard or whatever. Everybody will hit some point where they could easily quit and nobody would frankly fault them and they don't. And that's what lives up in between your ears and, and maybe in your heart, probably a connection between your heart and your, your heart and your mind. But you knew, like you, you told me, I think you told me you knew going in, you would not quit. No doubt about it. And I don't mean that arrogantly.

I don't know. I don't know people going in who are like, maybe I'll quit. I think a lot of people look out of the, out of the, this is one thing I share and I always kind of find it funny because I think I'm right when I say this, we had like 180, 190 guys start 22 guys finished. I bet one guy at graduation, one out of 22 probably was sitting at graduation day going, holy shit, I made it. I can't believe I saw the finish line. Like one, I bet surprised himself. I bet the rest of them were just sitting there, steely-eyed killers ready to go, knew they were going to get through.

Because most of the guys I know that I showed up at the team with were just that way. If you'd made that program twice as hard, if their body didn't break down, they would have made it. And if you made it half again as easy, I think most of the guys that quit would have quit as well. So I really think it does come down to, you know, your upbringing, your mentors, whether that was down to, you know, your upbringing, your, you know,

your mentors, whether that was a coach, a pastor, a parent that kind of gave you the, we don't give up or you develop that through sports. I mean, athletes do really well there because I think athletes are used to suffering to work towards a goal and want to compete and win. And so I think they develop this like hunters probably do the same. I would think good hunters probably do the same thing where even when they feel like they're out of the fight and things have gone south on a hunt, they're like, I'm just going to keep working. I'm going to keep working and see it through to the end.

And so I feel like my voice going through SEAL training was just like, I can do this. An instructor would get in my ear and try and make fun of my family and my bloodline and my performance that moment. And I'd just be like, F you, dude, there's nothing you're going to do to stop me. And probably all the guys that quit were hearing that voice or hearing their own voice being like you're not good enough you can't do it and that's got to be toxic as anything out there it's the thing i see all the time with hunting and fishing is like some people who there's like this attitude that they're like that's not gonna work i i tried i fished that

hole in that hole. Why would I go down and look for another goddamn hole? We already know what's going to happen. Here's one of the best lessons. I feel like it's an attitude. For sure, for sure. And I hope you don't think I'm in any way trying to equate that shit with what you've been through.

No, no, no. But I don't think that hunting and fishing would think that like hunting and fishing would inform your experiences, but I think that your experiences could inform hunting and fishing. No doubt about it. And we'll get there. The one story I'll share that I think was really potent for my SEAL training,

I wrote about this in my first book. I did this little like two page about it. And it was this, it's this phrase, this is mine. I kind of coined this when I was running training because I didn't recognize it until I ran training. But we had something that I would call, I kind of coined it random acts of instructor violence. Okay. Random acts of instructor violence. And this is the way that would work. If I was the lead instructor and let's say you, you know, Steven Rinella are in charge of

the class. And I said to you like on a Tuesday, Hey, Wednesday morning, you're in charge of the class. I need you to be at the pool deck at 6am.m. on the dot. No, no later than 6 a.m. You need to have your fins, you know, your dive fins at a 45 degree angle. I want your mask to be mirror clear. I want your knife to be sharp and we're going to start training at 6 a.m. Got it? Beat it. And then you go and take off. If you showed up at SEAL training, which is just savage from the day it begins till it ends, and you showed up at 6.04, you could pretty much guarantee what your day is going to be as a class. Like forget getting in the pool. We are just going to crush you for the next 18 hours because you effed up a simple directive that I said be there at six. And so we'd beat the class mercilessly if they showed up late.

But every once in a while, the class would show up. They'd be 10 minutes early. We'd come walking in as instructors. You could even see them smiling. I mean, everybody's fins are in the right place. Their mask is mirrors. They're knife sharp. They're raised. You can even see the students kind of like a little shit eating grin being like, yeah, we got it. We're here. We're ready. And we'd beat them worse than the day they failed twice as bad. And I remember a lot of guys would quit in those moments. Like guys going through would be like, this is unfair. I'm out of here. Go ring the bell.

And the lesson is you can do everything absolutely right, particularly on the battlefield, and it can go catastrophically wrong. And you can do everything wrong. I mean, I saw guys do the stupidest things you can imagine and walk out of there unscathed. And I saw guys do things perfectly and get blown out of their boots and lose it. In combat. In combat. Every one of those guys in the helicopter, the best operators in the world with the best pilots in the world, and it just went wrong that way. They didn't do anything wrong. They were doing it right. It just went wrong. And so you got to be comfortable with

doing everything right and have it going wrong. I think hunting is very much the same way. You can do everything perfectly right. Buy everything we've all amassed in a knowledge base of how you go pursue an animal, do it everything perfect and just come up goose, goose eggs, right? Nothing. And you can have a guy come from, you know, I'm not going to beat up any state. Some guy comes from New Jersey is 50 pounds overweight, never carried a gun in his life, sighted in the day before walks one step off the trail and takes a six by six, like half hour into hunting light, no skill, no nothing just boom. And it walks right back to New Jersey and puts a trophy on his wall. Didn't do anything. No, no like talent to get to that point whatsoever. So I feel like as a hunter, you got to be okay with both. You know, the fact that you can work

your tail off and, and, and have it go wrong and nothing, nothing happened. You can, every once in a while, you're going to walk out and you're going to get hooked up. In the case you're talking about, of beating people for doing everything right, when you do that, are you looking for the guy that already gets it or are you trying to actually teach a lesson? To be honest,

you're more so looking for the person that's going to quit in that scenario. You're looking for the guy that's going to say, this is unfair. You're trying to find the guy. This is unfair. Who would feel outrage over unfairness. Exactly right. And it's time for you to go. Cause you're not in the wrong. You're not in the right line of work, but the guys that are, you know, the guys that like when we had a couple of those initial aircraft go down, those helicopters go down, like, like during,

you know, the lone survivor event and then extortion 17 went down, we lost 20 people. I'm telling you right now, people were in almost fistfights to be on the next helicopter going in. And that level of kind of cultural resilience that it's like, it's going to go wrong and yet we still want you to press forward and go do it, that is taught through lessons like that. And that's what you

need from your operators. We can't have guys that are like, oh, it's going to go wrong. I'm out of here. I'm going to quit today. We don't deal in that. We don't deal in that. You took a long, long, like you grew up fishing with your dad and spent a lot of time outdoors. And then you took a long, long break for your service and didn't do really anything recreationally nope started a family and served yep and didn't do anything kind of fun i'm sure you had moments of fun moments but pretty not not like dedicated days to no i mean we fished multiple times a year since before i can remember and i joined the navy in 99 the next time, brother, I went on a fishing trip was 2006. Yeah. Yeah. When now that, that, how do you look at like, how do you see hunting and fishing now that you're done? Uh, it has become just an other worldly kind of pillar in my life

at this point. And I'm still a complete rookie to like, you know, big game hunting for sure. I mean, I, I, I feel like I jumped to the head of the class because I got to go on my first big gay hump, big, big game hump with you guys. So, I mean, I got, I got to jump, jump and do an Alaska, you know, float plane trip to go after bear for my very first big. Yeah. And I'll point out Rourke cried the whole time. I wanted to quit, kept trying to quit. But I mean, so I, so I work oatmeal. I jumped at 6am. I jumped the line. Um, but I feel like there's these, there's these, these choices you can make in life about what you're going to do with your time, right? Like what you can do with your leisure time. And I've seen this written before. This isn't mine, but

like how you see somebody like you evaluate what they do with their leisure time. You can kind of take the measure of a man. And I think there's a couple of things that are much bigger than a hobby, right? And hunting resolutely falls in that category. Surfing is another one. I mean, surfing is one of those things that if people get bit by it, it becomes a path. It becomes this like journey whose destination you might not even know where it's going to go, but you are just constantly, it's a pursuit. You're just constantly pursuing some level of that experience, whether it's the perfect wave or the perfect moment or your skillset. And I think hunting is the same. I think anybody that takes hunting seriously, not, not, not the

guy that goes out once or twice, I don't know, maybe gets a kick and shoot hunt or something with some buddies because they wanted at an auction. But I mean, people that have made hunting a big part of their life, it's, it's, um, it's far, far bigger than, than just going to pursue an animal, at least it is for me. So, I mean, the thing I found when we went on that first hunt, that was so such a gift and why it was an instant love affair and something that I will never not be doing until somehow I can't do it anymore is I remember Yana sending me a gear list, right? So just emailed me a gear list and what I had to do. Now, all of a sudden I'm in my garage laying out all my kit, my gear and getting it ready, which is exactly what we did when we prepared for a

deployment or a mission. And he's like, this is where we're going to be going. So now I'm doing a map study and taking a look at the terrain and what the weather will be, which is exactly what we did when we went on a mission. And then I show up and meet you guys at, you know, SeaTac. And then we fly up into what, you know, we land in Anchorage and kind of get ready. All of a sudden we're hopping in a float plane and, you know, packing gear, we're testing weight. We know how much weight's in that aircraft. That's very familiar. Then we land in this remote location. And at that point, it still hadn't struck me. The moment that struck me, and it's even on the episode, is when we first put that backpack on. I've got a heavy pack, capable boots and gear, and a rifle on my shoulder.

And I remember we waved by the buck and start walking off into the country. And I could see big mountains. I was like, well, this is pretty familiar, like walking around with a heavy pack and a gun. And then we're going to go chase something. So I tell anyone that's a veteran that isn't hunting is doing themselves a disservice, particularly if they're in a combat unit, because it is an unbelievably healthy transition from what we did in our last life. I mean, now, now I get to go walk around rugged terrain. And what I kill instead of being a two legged animal, it's a four legged animal that I can bring home and eat and

provide good food for my family and still get off in these beautiful remote places and suffer a little bit, which I think one of the biggest mistakes we're making as a country is not suffering. We just establish these very comfortable lives. I think suffering's where all the growth is, man, all the good stuff. There's a thing I talk about and I've written about it is, it's the thing that's important to me with my kids and it's a slow process, but like learning to be comfortable being uncomfortable. No doubt. We even had, there's so many ways to achieve it.

There's a guy we work with Rick Smith. Who's been doing yoga for a million years. And, um, he talks about, you know, like hot yoga, right?

Where you go into a room, it's 104 degrees and you're going to hold these very uncomfortable things. He says, you walk in there and you get into an uncomfortable position and it's 104 degrees and some part of your body is like, get out of here, get out, run, run. And he's like, you're okay. You're okay. It's hot, but you're okay. We're going to concentrate. We're going to be in this real, this space and hold an uncomfortable pose and we're okay yeah and then you learn later you know what i was okay totally no it is those are the big building blocks for sure i mean i remember when my kids were first i'm just even trying to zip up a jacket

i mean you go to any playground usa and you see some kid like struggling to zip a jacket you'll see like seven moms rush in to try and help them get their jacket i'm like get the f away from my kid my kid. My kid's got to learn to put her jacket on. So she's just going to wrestle with that zipper for a little while. Could at some point the child be in a situation where they would have to zip their own jacket? It's possible. It's possible.

So no, no, I'm for it. So, I mean, hunting has just become, I mean, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about it now. But there's a tranquility to it though. Oh yeah. It's very different than what you experienced serving overseas in combat situations. Of course. Of course. I mean, you know. How do you view that?

I mean, like, I know you feel it like a physical beauty, a peacefulness. And from your perspective, there has been an element of like, this is my space that I fought for. Like a thing you mentioned to me one time is you mentioned to me that like, that coming up as a leader, coming up as an American citizen, as someone who is going to have opinions

about how we run the country, how we should behave. You said something about that. You always felt that you wanted to earn your seat at the table. Yep. Right? So now here you are. And I imagine you have to look at a lot of these places

and have sort of a refined sense of ownership. I think I enjoy it. About the natural world. No doubt about it. I think I enjoy it. And when you look at like the great writers and even the great readers of this country, I mean, Teddy Roosevelt and some of these folks, I mean, everyone knows, I mean, I know

they've studied this in detail, that time and wild places out of doors is just good for you. And so few people are doing it, but all of us know it like, like it's like a Dick and Jane book. Well, of course go out into some beautiful spot, breathe that air and do something worthwhile, you know, out of the confines of what now is just, Cal and I were joking about in the airport. I mean, it's like, if you don't think the zombie apocalypse

has actually already arrived when you look at cell phones and everybody just staring at that phone as soon as a plane lands or in a Starbucks, I mean, it's here. The zombie apocalypse is here. If you live in cyberspace and on your phone, you have, you have achieved the zombie lifestyle. And when you get away from that and you're off, off the grid, it's just, I mean, I just think it, it just feeds some part.

It definitely feeds like the, the conscious part of you, but you also know it's feeding some place inside you that comes from a very primal, primal place. And I think when you do it for the purpose of taking game and then providing food, you're even more connected to this thing that we've been doing a lot longer than we haven't, right? Like as a species, it's much more natural to go out and do that than it is unnatural. And I think warriors kind of know that too. I think we believe people fighting and fighting for what they believe in and who they are is probably more natural than it is unnatural. I think the folks that don't understand combat and want to put their head in the sand and believe the world's a happy place, we're all going to get

along. It just, it just isn't, you know, And I think if you have any sense of history, you will recognize that there have not been large pieces of time when that's not the case, but no hunting. I mean, it's, uh, it's just become an otherworldly part of my life and, and, um, uh, dominates a lot of my time for all healthy, good reasons. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers. You're irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in on x are

available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps waypoints and tracking that's right you were always talking about uh we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership,

you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Give me the quick, tell people your two books.

Kind of the what's what with them. Yeah, the first book's called Damn Few, Making the Modern Civil Warrior. That one's more autobiographical with kind of how I grew up. Um, not, not so much. I, I, I, in the book, I try not to do, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of seal books that are, you know, I killed this many people. I killed this person and I got, I got, I'm not, I'm not trying to beat those guys up. It's much more. This is what led me to this level of service and, and, and pursuing some of those things that I wanted to experience in service. And then why we do it, what we do it for, and then a little bit outward looking on maybe how the country can see what combat and what fighting and being prepared to fight anyway does for our position in the world.

My second book is called Worth Dying For, A Navy SEAL's Call to a Nation. And this one's much more forward-looking and kind of, again, it covers some of the higher ideals I learned in SEAL training that apply to leadership and managing your life. And it's also real outward-looking on how I think we can make the country a stronger place. Like I talk about universal service

and how potent I think that would be. And military service could be one way. I also think it could be, you know, your kid finishes high school and they got to go give just, and there's plenty of, you know, some Eastern European Israel where military service is compulsory. I think that would satisfy that public service, but I think everybody should do service. Military is not for everybody. And so, you know, a year out of high school, I think you should go out of your hometown and give back. Like you just got to go work for either an NGO or a government program or something that kind of gives back on a subsistence wage, suffer a little bit, don't be comfortable

and really think of somebody other than yourself for a block of time. And I just think it'd be a game changer for our country because I think we are so self looking and self-centered on kind of our desires when we want things to be to be that I think thinking of others and kind of thinking of the collective would be a good thing. Yeah. What are you going to, oh, do you mind telling people quick about your, the movie you worked on? Act of Valor? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the funny thing about this- This is a hilarious story. Yeah. So 2012, Act of Valor came out as a major motion picture. Dude, I hadn't hung out with you.

I knew I went and saw that. Yeah. So that's where I even knew you. Everyone in the military, everyone in that movie that's in the military was actually in the military doing their job. So we were actually put on Navy orders, which I have kept in case there's ever like a congressional inquiry as to, you know to why we did this movie. But the Navy put us on a set of orders saying to make this movie Act of Valor, which-

And you get called in and said, here's what you're going to do. Well, we got called in to get interviewed by these filmmakers that had been green lit to make a movie about SEALs. Yeah. So we got called in really just to do interviews with those directors so they could learn about seals. Their plan was to go back to Hollywood and cast, you know, Vin Diesel or somebody like that to be a seal. And they got done with those interviews and went back up to Hollywood and started thinking about, they're like, I think it's gonna be easier to teach

seals to act than actors to be seals. If we want to get this right and make it authentic. And then, um, and the Pentagon was cool with it as a promotion. It was like a promotion all the way through. It was totally cool until it came out. And like when And the Pentagon was cool. It was like a promotional piece. All the way through, it was totally cool until it came out. And when it came out, and all of a sudden there's commercials on the Super Bowl, and it becomes the number one movie in America, people start flipping out in the front office.

Yeah, so I think some heads rolled. Not ours, but... No, I mean, everybody that got asked to do it... Was that because... I mean, it is kind of taboo to try to turn a buck off of some of this stuff. And that all was pretty clean. We didn't get paid to make the movie.

I mean, I didn't make a dime off being an act of valor, you know, in that. That's the part that cracks me up. Yeah. You were on your normal three hot meals a day and Navy squares a day and my regular wage. So, no, we didn't profit out but that was the the rub is they thought wait a minute why are we pushing assets or actual military personnel and and material to help make a a movie like once people at a certain level looked at yeah yeah it's a fun it's a fun movie to watch yeah it's like inspiring and

fun one thing that a lot of people don't realize the reason it's called act it's a fun movie to watch yeah it's like inspiring and fun one thing that a lot of people don't realize the reason it's called act of valor is every big moment that happens that movie is something from actual seal history like one of our chiefs was shot 27 times he killed like the four bad guys in the room and walked to the helicopter and survived and one of my teammates in 2006 jumped on a grenade to protect his teammates and, and, you know, paid the ultimate price for that. Uh, and we capture that, you know, another guy was hit by, I mean, everything that takes place in that movie is out of our actual history, actual history. Yeah. Yeah. Without giving a playbook to Al Qaeda. I mean, that was the big thing about

doing the movie is we'd, we'd look at footage and say, you know what, let's cut this one, you know, the way we wrapped around this corner with a gun, you don't need to show that. And it wasn't some like crazy advanced tactic, but we're like, we don't want to give the enemy a playbook based on watching this movie. So we're like, here's what it'll look like and feel like if you get rated. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No. Okay. So what, like, what are you going to do now? I mean, right. For 13 years, you knew what you were doing. I mean, now that you going to do now? I mean, right? For 13 years, you knew what you were doing. I mean, now that you don't know what you're doing now,

but like, what's the plan? You got a 10-year plan? No, I'm not a great strategic thinker, admittedly. Like, I'm not like when somebody's like, where do you want to be in five years? I just don't do that. I'm not good at it. Are you going to continue to do books?

Yeah, but I don't want to write them just to write them. I feel like you feel the same. I could write 25 leadership books starting tomorrow with building a system of books that I could make very commercial. I just want to write them if I have something to write about. And I think I'm circling in on what the next one will be. So I think I'm going to start grinding on that soon. I do a lot of consulting on leadership and for high performance teams. I'm really looking to do consulting. Yeah, not just not just speaking.

I do the speaking and now I'm starting to offer up, you know, executive kind of coaching sessions and leadership and talking to teams with like new folks in organization, how those new folks in organization can perform and kind of think of the organization above and beyond themselves, which I think I can speak to. And hey, have you have you watched? I've actually recommended this movie. And have you watched, I've actually recommended this movie. Have you watched Some Kind of Monster? I don't think so.

This movie would melt your brain in a bad way. Okay. But it's a documentary about the band Metallica where like into it, they're grownups with families and shit and they can't get along anymore and they hire a consultant who's kind of like half shrink half consultant who's who specializes in helping teams yep oftentimes athletic teams helping teams like find a way to work especially

big personalities find a way to like work together on a goal but he takes a very soft approach um it's a fascinating movie i'll check it my brother he said the problem the metallica is having isn't interpersonal it's just that they suck now and they used to be good but um no it's an interesting movie yeah if you were in that role, I feel like you would have walked in and beat the shit out of all of them and then said, well, let's start now. Now let's get up and start. It's possible.

I mean, I do talk about this a lot. When organizations ask me for some advice on how to make themselves stronger, I do think you got to figure out a way to suffer a little bit and do it as a group. I mean, I feel like if you do that, I don't care if it's even just going out on a hike, but do a hike for the group that most people will be uncomfortable with. And when you get to the top of the mountain, have a little,

have a little talk and then come back down and debrief it over the next couple of days. It's just, again, everybody's so comfortable all the time. And the reason I have those unreal relationships with the guys I have from the SEAL teams is because of that shared misery. When you suffer with somebody and are miserable doing something, I mean, the hunts that you two guys have had will make you better friends than most people will ever be friends with somebody. Because of going to do that, I don't think that just happens at a coffee store. No, there's something that clicks, man. There's something that clicks. For sure. Like a little bit of just dealing with something yep yep it does it you know it does it makes you really really love someone yep or it makes you not like them at all i mean that's

the thing that's the thing i like about it is crucial yeah yeah right talk about the camp cancer oh yeah and you take it so serious right like the people you're actually going to go hunting with that's a small list of folks that you're going to want to like spend that cherished time with and if somebody's not on that list or like black balls them i know you're not inviting them to another hunt we used to call it otc yep out of the club yep for sure you know like i think steve and i and uh have talked about in the past it's like it makes you really think hard not for necessarily having a bad time in the short term with a new hunting partner yep but being like i may never look at them the same again for sure because chances are it's not going to go that great yeah you can ruin

you can ruin by going on a on a difficult hunting or fishing trip you can ruin, by going on a difficult hunting or fishing trip, you can ruin what might have otherwise been a fine 10-year friendship. Absolutely. You'd be like, if we hadn't have done that for three days, I might have drank beer with you. Not Rourke. I might have drank tea with them. I might have drank tea with them for 10 years.

Yes. But now I can't. I can't even look with them. I would have drank tea with them for 10 years. Yes. But now I can't. Yeah. I can't even look at them. I think because it does go, it does run very much parallel. Like, like I said, to military service where it's, it gets to those like primal things when you go hunting, like whether it's just, well, it's just showing up on time, right? Like if I, if somebody tells me, Hey, let's meet at 6am and they show up at 545, they're pretty much off my list. They're like OTC.

I'm like, I was there at 550 because you said be there at 6. That's just what I do. You being there at 615 is unacceptable to me. And then where are you going to set up camp? Are you cold? Are you going to complain about being cold? Are you going to do your part of the workload within camp? Are you just going to be a leech?

All those things are big things in my mind about the character of someone. So when you go on a hunt, you do like a one or two day hunt, you're probably going to have the complete like character breakdown of who that person is. And it might be false, but it sure feels real. Yeah. It might be that you pushed it too hard, too fast, but it feels real enough where you can't undo the damage. There's probably a danger there. Yeah. Because you might be like, yeah, maybe it would have been better had we just,

maybe I should just forget that and then have the 10-year beer drinking friendship. Yeah. Are you going to go into politics? I've been asked a lot about it. Why do people ask you that? Well, my hope is that they think there's a big gap in the folks that are leading this country and probably want the right people to be doing it. I'm not sure if I'm that person. I know I could do that job. I mean, I know how to lead. I know

how I would do that. The 2018 governorship is open right now in Colorado, but it's just too early. Is that something you want, though? Do you want to be in that crowd? I think I'd probably be miserable. I mean, I think I'd probably be miserable. I also very much- Why would you be miserable? You like challenges. Hell, you got to-

I think because the construct of that is- I think a governorship would be interesting because you do get to run a smaller version of the greater country system in a little more insulated environment, you know, and, and, and kind of get real tangible results. Like, okay, if I implement this, let's see what happens. And you're probably going to see pretty quick what you, what you can do and can't do. I don't know the jury's out a little bit. I mean, I still have this sense. Again, it is very much akin to Churchill. I mean, he went into combat and kind of got all that out of his system. And then the end of that book worth my early life, which is that book I read that led

me to military service. That book ends about the time he entered parliament, started his political service. And he saw that as yet another vehicle through which he felt like he was earning his seat of the table. Now he had family history with, he was the right man for that season in world history and won the day. I don't know. We'll see. Not now. I mean, what I can definitely say is I have a lot of adventures

to get on before that happens. I think I'd be better at it down the road. I don't want my kiddos to experience that social calendar and the scrutiny that goes into that. I mean, you're not going to find skeletons in my closet. That's why I feel like you should like it because I think a lot of people have to agonize about their infidelities. Yeah.

About how they used to get too wasted. Yeah. No, I wouldn't be worried about that stuff. But like, yeah, if you go dig into like Rourke Denver over the years, you're not going gonna like start finding

all kinds of weird shit no i i do pretty good i do go down the pentagon and find out 90 percent of where you've been there's no doubt to a day-by-day basis i think that becomes the scary thing is i feel like we're watching the political climate right now and a lot of that i think is just driven so much by media and social media and what people how people are digesting their information but i think everyone can agree that far from the most talented people in this country are running this country far from it. Whereas it was absolutely the inverse at the beginning. I mean, when you start talking about the founding fathers, you're talking about some of the most talented, intelligent, capable human beings that have ever walked the earth. Yeah. But even now there's this

bad habit of, uh, there's this bad habit of dissecting them relative to social norms at the time. Yeah, yeah. Relative to social norms at the time that would have been like, it would have been unfathomable that there would be another path. But now we sort of like take like

contemporary senses of morality and social justice and hold them up to that lens and be like, oh, can you believe it's like, okay, it would have been like, you might as well have gone and talked to him, you know, about concepts of outer space and infinity and see what he thinks about that. Cause he wouldn't know about that either. Yeah, no, no, for sure. But I think we are just, yeah, you're right. I think that, yeah. Yeah. With those guys, visionaries.

Visionaries. And they spent, the other thing too is, I think this is another thing about hunting that appeals is hunting gives you these big swaths of silence, of time to kind of be quiet. I mean, it's a tactical imperative, right? To actually be quiet and not scare your quarry away yeah i think being silent and having that time to think is just not something that a lot of people do they're just filling that time with either drugs alcohol social media watching tv and and and so you kind of avoid these things that that folks from that era couldn't avoid i mean got you know guys like our

founding fathers they were at study like nine hours a day on top of like founding this country. And I don't know how many people that aren't actually in school study much anymore. All the friends I know that I like to talk to are readers and that's where they're digesting information, taking this thing in. But the pure silence that you get to experience hunting is another gift that I think you give yourself, hands down. And even being silent with a buddy, you know, like being silent with the person you even like spending time and like talking to a campfire around.

That's one of those unique things. I feel like if you sat silently next to somebody in a Starbucks without watching your cell phones at the same time, they'd think you were an effing lunatic. Whereas you go with a hunting buddy, you could be quiet for four days and then just kind of like, well, okay, let's debrief now that we're out of here. When I'm on an airplane, um, I will judge in a very negative way. Yeah. Someone who sits down in their seat and reads the in-flight magazine, because I think? Because I think to myself, so you knew you were getting on a plane. Right.

You had no plan. Yeah. You're like, I'm going to fill my brain. I have such low levels of discretion. I'm going to fill my brain with some product that's been placed here in anticipation of some dumb son of a bitch like me picking it up and looking at it.

Yeah. Like that's sort of how I envisioned my time. Yeah. But a guy that could sit next to me, a person that sits next to me in quiet contemplation of the plane ride. Right. I look at him. I'm like,

God, man. Yeah. I wish. Yeah. I wish I could like find that. I mean, I can't. It's one of the two racked with like find that. I mean, it's a- I can't.

It's one of the- I'm too racked with like- Yeah. I need to be, if I see a guy play the video game, I judge him negatively too. Yeah. But a guy that just is like being- Yeah. I'm like, what does that take?

Yeah, yeah. No, my bride showed me this Facebook post the other day that was just, most of my Facebook I get from somebody else showing me something, but it was one of those. It was like this girl was saying, I'm going to butcher it, but she said something like, I watched this guy walk into Starbucks today, orders coffee, sit down and just drink it like a fucking lunatic. You can't imagine what it would be like. Nobody's just sitting there drinking coffee coffee like thinking to themselves. Sending that baggage claim. Yeah, man. You used to sit at baggage claim

and just wait for your bags. Fuck that now. Yeah. No one sits at baggage claim and just... I think it was like a cycle. Yeah, you get your bag, you get the baggage claim,

you pull out your phone. Yeah. You fill every second of every day. Security's going to come get you. I think it was like a psychopath. Drank his coffee like a psychopath.

Like not saying anything because it's true. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. And that same quality is something that we find very valuable up on the mountain. Right? Yeah. Six words exchanged the entire day.

I think also to hunting in the military and combat, it is very much the same. It's not inappropriate to like draw tremendous parallels because the other thing too about that silence is it's not just silence because you don't have any to say. It's a choice that you know the language of what you're doing out there so you don't need to say it. I mean, the best thing about me

getting around SEAL teammates of mine is there's just, there's actually little that needs to be said with those guys. We know, like we know. We just know what we're thinking. I know what my buddy Sonny is thinking before he says something. And if some, I mean, if we were at a barbecue joint in, you know, Louisiana and something went down, I know exactly

what Sonny's going to do. He knows what I'm going to do. We know how we're going to survive that moment. If he did something I didn't expect, I'd probably know why that was coming around, how to react to that. And that's the same thing with with with hunting and with hunting buddies and and kind of teammates out there is is the same thing you know and you watch you know you watch you guys on a show or you watch you watch folks and they're what they're doing and they can kind of you know even through just like mind melding like okay i'm going this way and sometimes it's some hand signals but in general i bet if cal went around the corner you'd have a pretty good sense of what to do it's gonna surprise you every once in a while but yeah man it's awesome the way like awesome yeah the way when you hunt with someone a lot they kind of veer off you're like oh he's

yeah i know what he's fucking he's gonna wander back up this way like i know what he's doing you know there's a gem there's kind of a gem of a moment hidden in the movie Red Dawn, which is a very influential movie for us as kids. Yeah, for sure. Where one of the guys goes to one of the other guys, and he's just sitting on a mountain surveying the landscape. Okay, this is Swayze Red Dawn. The Red Dawn. The Red Dawn, yes.

And it's just this beautiful mountain, and one of the guys comes up to the other one, and the one's whispering. And the other guy's like, why are you whispering? And it's just kind of like, why do you feel like, why do some people know that you whisper on a mountain and some people don't? My brother took his little daughter caribou hunting.

And I think she was 10 when she went, took her caribou hunting. And he gets back. I'm like, well, how'd it go? He goes, you know, it's interesting. Knowing that you whisper when there's an animal real close apparently is not like innate yeah apparently that's a learned thing right because a carrot would roll up she'd be like hey dad yeah he's like whoa it's whispers so uh cal you got any uh what's on your mind concluders big picture little picture well i i think it would be

important just this conversation has been so much about like high high level elite performing folks but you know i definitely think a lot on on the physical mental things like it can always be learned i i think and i think about that uh hunt that we did with uh helen and britney you know when helen and i fished earlier that year she couldn't hardly walk across the river rocks to the point where i was like is there something physically wrong here she's like listen you do this all the time i walk on pavement yeah all the time yeah right and that was it but then a couple months later you know they put up with a lot of mental shit you know that was a mentally tough tough hunt as well as being physically way out of the, you know,

your normal stuff that you're exposed to every day. And, you know, we saw some major, major growth and real toughness that week, right? Yeah. But then you're coming with people who are already, you know, stellar individuals, you know? Yep. Like if I had questions about them, you know yep like if i had questions about them you know about their like what makes them up what was in their heart i wouldn't have wanted to get into that situation

not that i haven't but in that situation i guess not that i have done that i have had questions about what people are made of and then brought them into situations where you could anticipate them failing and watch that happen but with those guys it's like you know they were like kind of hungry and ready for a challenge yeah yeah but it was it's just you watch it happen yeah then you also watch it go like should i start complaining now or not because it's fun to complain oh absolutely everybody likes that's that's commiserating some guys are good at it and it's funny to complain oh absolutely everybody likes that's that's commiserating some guys are good at it and it's funny some guys do it and you're like shut the

fuck up like hey bud take a look around everybody's wet okay yes um i was gonna ask for your time while like getting your spot at the table. Do you have any thoughts on the whole like public lands thing? Like if you are you up to speed on that whole like the possible divestiture? Yeah, I mean, I don't I definitely will not speak to it on the level that I feel like you guys understand it. But I mean, my sense is giving public lands or federal lands back to state sounds like about the worst idea we've come up with in forever because in general you have like do you have like a pretty good outlook on just like how like the federal government runs like not just what you were involved in but the whole country a lot of people are like well how can you let the feds run your

land in montana yeah you know the way i look at the government is, is, is the least amount they can do the better. So there's very little I want from the government, but there are a couple, you know, non-negotiables that I think they do exceeding the wealth security, like running the military security. Yeah. Running security, the military and monetary policy that goes worldwide and how that, you know, affects your daily, you know daily bank account and ability to pursue excellence. It strikes me that the system of them holding on those lands to where, if I understand it right, if states all of a sudden own those things and it goes onto their balance sheet and now all of a sudden they're running their state like a business and you can sell that to China to keep yourself good. That's, that's bad business. Right. But I can't talk into, into great,

great detail, but I'll listen to you guys and what you have to say about it. You know, one thing that we didn't talk about that I forgot and I feel like we should have talked about it as your concluding thought. Okay, perfect. Go. Does that mean I don't have one? Oh, yeah, you're up. Is it, you know, like, I feel like you're supposed to like do a synopsis of what you said, but I'll broach just a subject that I think applies so much from military, particularly in what we do in the seals and the hunt. You feel that right now you're supposed to do a synopsis. No, when you finish like what you're saying that like you'd come up with some like, this is what we talked about. No, no, no, no. Okay, perfect. Yeah. You talk about whatever the hell you want. So about

your favorite kind of pop. Yep. I love root beer. Okay. Is the idea of training and when it comes to hunting, how much I'm realizing again, when I'm talking to people that are all on the microphone right now, this doesn't apply because you guys realize the training should be purposeful and it should be realistic and authentic to what you're going to go do. I think there are a lot of people in hunting that don't realize you should be training in a very purposeful way for what you're going to go do. Yeah. That's good shit. I never thought about that. You know, for me, like when we, the very first time I got into a gunfight, the very first time I shot a bad guy, and I won't talk about the details of how many people are shot and how it works, but like the very first time a bad guy

popped up with an AK 47 started shooting at me and I shot at him and won that engagement, it was very mechanical and as if I'd done it a thousand times because I'd done it about 50,000 times in training. The training we do in the SEAL teams is so visceral and real that we make it like we don't shoot at big circle targets. We shoot at human silhouettes because that's what we're going to see on the battlefield. So you have a lot of practice in identifying your target and making that very real. And, and, you know, before we run into a house and blow the doors off at hinges, we'll, everybody will do like 50 burpees or 50 pushups and some squats. So your heart rate is going through the roof. Now get the door open and go in because you're going to shoot differently when your heart's pounding compared to when you're sitting

on a bench rest, taking a shot. so my recommendation to hunters in particular no matter what they're hunting with what weapon system whatever it is make your training purposeful you know you can be at a range it's nothing to go out and do 10 squats do 10 burpees get your heart rate going now get back on the gun and look how different that optic now looks when when you're rested and comfortable because when you happen to be in the Grand Tetons or like somewhere running around in Idaho or the Rocky Mountains, in particular, like when you came from sea level

and you go shooting up a little draw to find that trophy, you're not going to be at bench rest situation in that moment. And so practice shooting from- It's so good you bring that up because when I'm shooting, like a lot of my shooting comes down to me trying to shrink from a bench, trying to like shrink that five shot group down, down, down, down, down. But I happen to live a life where I get to do a lot of real world hunting.

So I kind of like, I practice by doing. But yeah, I think that if you were just in the head like, yeah, I'm going to go hunting. So I'm going to go sit at a bench and just shoot shit loads of rounds at a paper target and just get that group strong down. It really has like, you know, I've seen a lot of game get, I've seen a lot of game fall. I've seen a lot of game get shot and it's typically not like that. That's right. Different angles, high angle, low angle, different ways you're going to hold that rifle,

different angles you're going to be up on that optic, you know, how you get that gun level, whether you're in a tree. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. All that stuff, you know, and be ready. I mean, the hunting partner I have back in Colorado,

he's, you know, he's like a billy goat. He can run. He's fitter than I am. And I like that because we can go hard, but I'm like, I I'm going to take my diet seriously this summer. So when we go running up into the Rocky mountains, man, I can crank, you know? And so you gotta, if you don't take that seriously, I think you're being disrespectful to yourself. And you're also going to just degrade your ability to have success. Whereas the guys, I think that put it and gals that put in the training to make it real so that

when they show up that moment, it's not the first time they're prepped for it and can be like, okay, I know actually where I'm sitting. I can use my foot to balance the muzzle of this gun because there's not a perfect V in a sagebrush here. I need that to get this shot off. You do yourself a huge service doing so. Yeah, Giannis talks a lot about walking through the woods shooting stumps with his bow.

Yep. Just stump shooting, you know, which is different than when I shoot my bow, which is generally like in my yard, flinging arrows like between the house and the fence. Yeah, for sure. Well, yeah, stump shooting, just to jump in real quick, is I think quite valuable because it forces you to pick a spot,

whereas on an amorphous blob. Yeah, and on a target, there's so many spots, like right there for you. Yeah, you got to make your brain work a lot. Yeah, exactly. That's the thing, man, is like in reviewing,

I've messed up a lot of bow shots, but as much as you go to shoot an elk with your bow and then you review the, not the footage, like what we're thinking of when we talk about filming, you review your mental picture. Sometimes you don't have a clear mental, you don't have a clear recollection of what just occurred, but sometimes you're like gifted this,

like I remember exactly what I was thinking and what I was looking at. And what I remember is all I saw was elk and I let the arrow fly, right? And you're not going like, oh, that little tuft of hair. I like that little tuft of hair right there. You know, you're just like ribs, shoot yep and then bad stuff occurs yeah buddy bad stuff occurs yeah because the same way you might miss that little uh tough to hair

uh if it's just the whole ribs you might just miss the whole ribs and you learn your gear too you know a lot of people gear. They spend a ton of money on a beautiful optic and they don't know how to use it. Yeah. They just haven't put in that time. They're like, they don't know what that turret does. They don't know what, you know, the different systems on it. And you can't be wanting for that in the moment

when things are happening fast. Oh, and it happens. Like you don't know to come off safe right now. You don't know to be like, I mean, it's just, that's all stuff to be practicing in almost exhaustive repetition so when you are fired up and see elk like you said you can zero in and do what it takes to you know you know take that home i would say that's like very complicated end of the

gear spectrum like i there are so many people i see that literally don't know how their boots really work yeah like oh well that thing really pinches my laces so i just skipped that one you know like it's it amazes me i think so many folks are they're uh they let kind of the bravado or the excitement lead the way before they slow down go boy i should probably figure probably should have figured out this pack before i put a couple hundred pounds of meat on the ground yeah you always gotta be aware of the dude that like is getting at the trailhead tearing tags off his stuff yeah you're just like this ain't gonna end well man

how's this thing work uh-huh that's that was another great i don't think you we actually named it as a parallel but it is a good parallel is the um uh you said that one guy's chiseled like michael angelo drew him and then you got that kind of pudgy kid from the farm and uh he outperforms that guy there's a lot of that going on that we see the dude just rolls in you're like man that's a good looking son of a bitch right there but can't hike. You know what? I remember this cartoon. I played paintball a little bit when I was in high school when paintball was like first kind of coming up. My mom thought for sure like paintball was going to lead me to like become a mass killer.

So she stopped it and I was like, well, you didn't see the you didn't see the finish line because I actually ended up, you know, going the full Monty with this, you know, force on force competition. But I remember a buddy of mine gave me like that, a paintball magazine. It's one of my favorite cartoons I ever saw drawn, but everyone that's a hunter will know exactly what I'm talking about.

The magazine had a cartoon that showed a paintballer, right? And like the progression of a paintballer. So it had the beginner and the beginners in like a pair of jeans, decent pair of boots and like a t-shirt and like a paintball gun, but just kind of looks like a rookie. And then the, you know, the intermediate has like a bunch of like cooler stuff, a better upgraded gun and like a little more cammy than the advanced or expert was like just ninja it out, right? Full ghillie suit, the like best high pressure gun there is. And then it said master and it was the same picture as the beginning yeah because he just doesn't need all that extra stuff

you know he's just like got the goods and it was totally true and i remembered that as like when i went into the seals i was like yeah i don't need all the ninja out stuff i think my skills like when you look at my skills to be good right exactly yeah guys like he went through everything and came out the other side a pair of blue jeans blue jeans and like some tennis shoes he was walking around up there it's awesome yeah for sure all right man rourke thank you very much thanks for having me hit the book titles one more time uh damn few making the modern seal warrior and worth dying for uh navy seals call to a nation or call rourke for some consulting. Boom.

You do marriage? Marriage consulting? My bride and I have been talking about that a little bit. Alright, alright. Thanks, man. Thanks, brother. you Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips you canadians the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season now the hunt app is a fully

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