The Pomp Podcast - #1096 Kaj Larsen Is The Navy SEAL Taking On Wall Street

Starting point is 00:00:00 what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off kaj larson is a former navy seal he's been a war correspondent at a number of different organizations and he's now a co-founder of guild financial in this conversation we talk about everything from navy seal training to the early days of vice what exactly his philanthropic work around water and environment protection looks like, and then of course, financial education and wealth building and what exactly that means for veterans

Starting point is 00:00:34 and those who support the military. I really enjoyed this conversation with Kaj and I hope that you guys enjoyed it as well. Once you listen to this episode, let us know on Twitter. What do you like? What do you not like? What did you agree with? And what did you disagree with?

Starting point is 00:00:46 I hope that you guys enjoyed this episode with Kaj. Let's get into it. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment

Starting point is 00:01:04 or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Kaj here with me. I thought a great place to start, Navy SEAL training is one of the toughest military schools

Starting point is 00:01:21 that someone can go through. It's brutal. I think over the last couple of years, more and more SEALs have started to talk about their experiences. People have seen folks like David Goggins or Jocko Wilnick and some of these individuals become very popular in the civilian world. But there's a lot of change going on. How do you think about your experience training and the things that you went through? Would that be cool today? Would they still do those same things or has it changed? Well, it's interesting. It's funny. You just brought up a couple of my friends. You know, the SEAL community is tight

Starting point is 00:01:51 community, Jocko was my first jujitsu instructor. And the, one of the best things about Jocko is like, there's no persona, there's no artifice there. Like with Jocko, it's like that old school computer language, WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get. That is Jocko like unadulterated. And I was, I was sort of reared. Literally, he was my first jujitsu coach. He was slightly, he's a slightly senior officer to me in the SEAL team. So I was a very junior, junior officer, and he was a junior officer at the same time. So we're of that same generation. And, you know, like, I like to think I'm, you know, slightly more refined, you know, Jocko can be pretty paleolithic at times. But yeah, in increasingly, like, I was in SEAL training, BUDS, basic underwater demolition SEAL

Starting point is 00:02:37 training on 9-11. On Yeah, I was in first phase of BUDS, I just completed a two mile ocean swim. And I remember that day very distinctly, because prior to that, you could kind of call the seal teams maybe like a shoot dive jump club right it was a good time right and people you know i didn't know much about seals when when i went in we weren't high profile in the media the way we are today uh but like you know pejoratively you could say like oh those guys they're just like this like small unit like doing their thing it wasn't as operational obviously september 11th changed all of that for both the seal community and for myself so you're in the water 9-11 happens and you get out and they're just like,

Starting point is 00:03:17 hey guys, somebody just flew a plane into the tower. Like, how do they tell you? Yeah, we were changing out in, you know, you're doing this like quick where you get rid of your rubber fins and you're taking off your wetsuit and stripping down and you're always rushed. And then those two mile ocean swims in the morning,

Starting point is 00:03:32 right after that, you run to the chow hall. So you start at like 5 a.m. or something. And by the time you finish, you're running over, trying to make it to the chow hall with your class before they close. It's another mile and a half run to get over to the chow hall. and as we were changing out you could sort of hear whisper rumors there's all these sort of

Starting point is 00:03:51 besides the instructors peripheral personnel who are like you know helping maintain medical personnel and stuff like that somebody was saying oh a plane hit the world trade center and all this stuff so as we were running over to the chow hall that rumor was kind of circulating at this point the class is still very large you know 200 plus guys right my class started with 246 guys we graduated 26 originals so we were still this big massive raging horde at this point running over to the chow hall on the other side of the amphibia space and uh people were sort of saying like a plane hit the tower i candidly thought that it might have been a ruse of the instructors because they're always doing things that fuck with you right and they're always playing

Starting point is 00:04:33 these little fuck fuck games and so i was like oh this is another one of their games and then we got over to the chow hall and there was tvs in the chow hall because that's where the regular naval personnel eat as well so there was tv it's not as austere people who didn't go on the two mile swim a mile and a half run to get there yeah they're just waking up getting their coffee you know we call it the shoe navy right uh as opposed to the boot navy uh so and then on the tv screens um we saw the images right and then i knew that this was real partially because like the instructors frankly aren't that sophisticated they could never pull off this right so we come back from the chow hall it's very obvious that something catastrophic has happened and the

Starting point is 00:05:13 instructors to their credit they had an incredibly clairvoyant clear sense of what was going on and they said gentlemen we're going to war and we're going to beat you until those of you who don't want to be here quit and that's what they did and that was a horrific day for us just a physically grueling day um and you know for us you're a bud student there's like lots going on it's hard to think through the strategic implications of what had happened but for these guys the instructors who their buds assignment is just a rotation just come from an operational seal team uh they knew really quickly what it meant and so they had an even more clarified sense of mission and purpose that day because they knew that guys us the guys in the class the students like we were gonna

Starting point is 00:05:59 rotate if we graduated we were going to be in platoons fighting right alongside those instructors so uh yeah they beat the hell out of us a bunch of people quit and uh and that's that was my entrance to the teams did they change the training at all in terms of trying to accelerate folks or was this a point where a lot of the units still had enough people where if they were sent out then hey we're good we don't need to actually change training accelerate the graduation of people or One of the things that's interesting about the SEAL selection, as you mentioned, is generally considered, you know, some of the hardest military special operations selection in the world is no matter how big they open the funnel at the top, they really pretty much seem to get the same number. exactly it like it's remarkable how unchanged and how similar it's been through since the creation of the the seal team since president kennedy created the seal teams back in 1961 yeah it's

Starting point is 00:06:59 crazy to me also i think um how celebritized uh the seal teams have gotten and uh the few that i know they are like hey that's like a weird thing that's not how this was supposed to to happen but it makes sense that uh whether it's hollywood the media whoever like what better story than like oh these guys are swimming you know uh in the dark of night and showing up with guns and like like it's a story that they want to tell but it is very uh in contrast i think to a lot of the ethos of the unit right yeah i mean this is a little bit seal inside baseball but you know when i entered the seal teams you know i was i was playing water polo at the naval academy i look back at my water team from the naval academy and something like of the 21 of us like 14 of us went naval special

Starting point is 00:07:44 warfare which is the seal team so it was a feeder a pipeline program that prior to that i had never really even heard of navy seals you know like i every back back when i back in the old days right it was all chuck norris delta force everybody was talking about delta force delta force right now delta force was like sort of like you know smirking at us like oh we're the real quiet professionals now and you guys are these like you know hollywood hair gel guys right um i think like many corporate institutions there was this inflection point in 2011 right where we went from having an ethos of what we called the quiet professional and then we had to transition to this very public facing role right the idea that we were going to continue to remain the quiet

Starting point is 00:08:30 professionals um and out of the spotlight after bin laden arguably the single most important mission operation since world war ii um to me that was untenable right like we were very firmly in the public spotlight and like any organization we've had sort of some real growing pains with going from a shadowed organization into one that's directly in the spotlight and i think we're still going through that today when you see the bin laden uh raid and and the killing of bin laden how much of the public's interest like obviously it's bin laden right so there's a lot of people who cared about it uh but the story of how it happened the helicopter goes down and kind of all these things that really i think put a light onto oh these are these professionals who are

Starting point is 00:09:14 prepared for any situation and uh most people if they were just sent to do something like this and the helicopter went down they'd like call their boss and be like hey what do we do right uh but The SEALs got the job done and were able to get themselves out. No one was killed from the American side, like all these things. How much of the story shined a light on it on top of it being bin Laden himself? I think what it exposed – and look, I'll – the better dude to talk about this is my friend Rob O'Neill. I'll introduce you guys. You guys are going to love each other.

Starting point is 00:09:43 Great dude. And Rob talks about this extensively from an operational perspective. I think part of the reason that besides just like you implied that it wasn't just that it was bin Laden, right? It was that pulling this off in Pakistan, which is arguably one of the most dangerous countries in the world, right? It's a nuclear-armed nation that we've had a very complex relationship with throughout the conflict in Afghanistan. Pulling that off despite all of the obstacles, right, is impressive, right? it was that's textbook like we had spent a decade sharpening the knife preparing for that kind of operation but it all goes back to what happens in seal training in buds right the ethos is you're

Starting point is 00:10:29 taught to improvise to adapt to overcome and to accomplish the mission like regardless of what obstacles are thrown in your face seal training is really about like one thing it's about who's gonna it's about figuring out who's gonna ring that bell right we say everybody wants to be a frogman on a sunny day right like yeah who wants to be a frogman when you're cold you're wet you're tired um you're hurting right that's what buds is it's like there's all these like tricks and tips and like there's uh been some some high profile media articles as of late about what's happening um in seal training uh but you can really boil it down to its essence is somebody gonna ring that bell or not yeah well again i've never gone through navy seal training uh i went

Starting point is 00:11:18 through basic training on the army side and in some of those schools uh and they're tough but as a 17 18 year old kid you know if you're half athletic and like not an idiot and don't quit like you'll be fine um but when i read the articles about the seal training on one side i'm like okay they write it in such a way where it's like are we killing the seals right you know like they write it as if it's literally the the worst thing in the world on the other side it's like hey these are the people that we're going to send to go fight our enemies on the battlefield like probably want pretty tough people right we want them skilled we want them to have some of this training how do you think through the critiques but also having gone through the experience of like well maybe

Starting point is 00:11:54 some of this is like by design or actually is helpful in sharpening the tools that the nation uses in war yeah look i i i think you encapsulated the dichotomy perfectly there right that as of late, there's been a lot of attention in spotlight. There was just a high profile New York Times article that came out sort of critiquing SEAL training. And when I read it, I thought to myself, wow, this is a real piece of shit, right? And like, I actually hold the New York Times in incredibly high esteem. Like I come from the journalism world, right? I spent a tremendous amount of time in my civilian career as a conflict zone correspondent, right? The New York Times has always been sort of the gold standard for for journalism in a lot of ways um and and i read

Starting point is 00:12:43 this front page article about seal training and drug use and culture of drug abuse and i was like oh this is written by somebody who fundamentally doesn't understand what's happening inside the wall and and the the root of that critique was there there was a death and seal training about six months ago the article just came out a month ago but there was a death and seal training a guy i feel bad butchering his name i think it's kyle mullen uh was his name he played football at yale came over to buds uh went through training and died post hell week right um and i think key pieces he made it through hell week and then like a couple days after yeah so you secure hell week on like a friday he was in the barracks that night and uh he i think it was sype it's sort of unclear

Starting point is 00:13:31 But essentially like he died as a result of injuries sustained in Hell Week, right? Super tragic and I feel for his family tremendously. Like his mom has been on a big crusade to hold people accountable and I think that that is understandable and just, right? And I think certainly that there was mistakes made. There's a med check process, right? I remember when I finished Hell Week, you basically spend two days in bed recovering, peeing in Gatorade bottles because you can't get up to go to the bathroom. But there are supposed to be people who are coming around and sort of checking and doing wellness checks on you. And I think some part of that process and system failed.

Starting point is 00:14:08 In the six months since that has happened, I have been able to talk to the Naval Special Warfare Center and I've been able to observe that they have fixed – they've plugged those holes, right? And so total mistake, total tragic. But the indictment of the overall training process troubles me. And the reason it does is because when you look at it in aggregate, in grand total, there's been 11 deaths throughout the course of the SEAL history in training, right? Really? And 11 is a tragic number, right? But 11 since 1961, right, over the course of, you know, 50, 60 plus odd years, almost 70 years of training is not a staggering number to me. You know, a little over one a decade, right?

Starting point is 00:15:00 And this is with how many approximate classes are going through BUDS a year? These are gross approximations. Sometimes there's four classes. Sometimes there's five classes, right? But say 1,000 people a year. Exactly. say a thousand people a year going through training. So, and like, look, no death, no loss is desired

Starting point is 00:15:22 or even acceptable. And Bud's is actually a pretty safe environment, right? And they do, considering the intensity and the risk of the training, I actually think they do. And I am not like an apologist for the SEAL community. I would be the first to sort of, you know, critique where we can do better. And like that med check failure is certainly a place

Starting point is 00:15:40 that could be done better. But when I really scale back and look at the 50,000-foot view, it comes down to this for me. You're asking these men, and it's all men in SEAL training, to do superhuman tasks, and it's very difficult then to hold them to human standards if you're trying to do that, right? We want them to perform impossible missions, and in order to do that, we have to test their mettle. And we have to test their mettle in the most extreme close-to-combat circumstances we can. And that's the best we can do at Bud's. And the challenge for the instructors and for the SEAL community is to walk that right up to the line to simulate as close as we can the experience of being in combat and the rigors and stress of combat while obviously trying to keep people safe. And it's sad but to me understandable that in this one domain that occasionally there are accidents, occasionally there are mistakes. And I do think that there are places in the U.S. military in our national defense where we need those units.

Starting point is 00:16:48 We need units that are capable of doing the hardest, dare I say, close to impossible missions. And in order to, as you said, keep the knife that sharp, you really – you have to push the envelope in training. I think you see this in other communities too. Look at test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base, right? Every one of those wives, if you go back and read like great books like The Right Stuff written by Tom Wolfe about the early days of test pilot school. I was just actually out at Edwards talking to a test pilot family, and they live with this every day. They know those guys are out there punching holes in the sky on the edge of the envelope in order to figure out like, you know, to keep the U.S. military as the tip of the spear. So I think overall, considering how extraordinarily dangerous SEAL training is, they actually do a decent job.

Starting point is 00:17:41 Is that fair? I think it's 100 percent fair. And again, from an outsider's view, but understanding of the military, what I always try to do is try to draw a line maybe from, okay, so this training that is very intense. I mean, we're literally talking about there are people who are passing out in the water, being revived, going right back in the water. Like, that's not normal, right? It's kind of like Elon Musk is like, I'm trying to go to Mars. Did you think I'd be normal? I'm trying to do something as wild as that.

Starting point is 00:18:06 Do you think I'd be normal? But if you draw a line to Mark's Latrell story, right, and kind of that mission. And I think it's been, you know, really blasted out into the media with the movie and all the stuff. It's like, hold on a second. We're going to ask the people who are in that training to go and be one of the four guys who are going to fight on this mountain. And one of the four is literally going to be crawling on his hands and knees with a broken back. And like you go through it and you're like, hey, maybe we actually owe these people the ability to be prepared in these situations. Right?

Starting point is 00:18:35 Like to some degree. Yeah, flip the narrative. Yeah. It's like, are we really going to ask these individuals to go and not give them our best training? Yeah, nailed it 100% on the head. And, you know, life is a strange loop full circle. Marcus's identical twin brother, Morgan, was my swim buddy that morning on September 11th. So really, you know, our community is small, so it's, you know, not surprising.

Starting point is 00:19:00 But, you know, look, I'll say one more thing to bash on that shitty New York Times article, right? And why they fundamentally misunderstand the culture that you and I come from is the – and maybe this is more a comment on the media than the article in particular, but I looked at that headline and it said, you know, I have culture of cheating and drug abuse within SEAL training, right? and they cited like the the presence of steroids in uh like you know maybe you know some of the people who've had medical issues and stuff it's because they're using steroids and that they got some anonymous quotes or some quotes about people using you know steroids and in seal training and whatnot um like look i'm here to tell you like you know like a natural bodybuilder i didn't use steroids in seal training i performed quite well uh like only an outsider would make that mistake of thinking that steroids are an advantage in SEAL training. Because I think from

Starting point is 00:19:56 the outside, you think that these are physical evolutions and they're not, right? The whole purpose of SEAL training, to see if you'll ring that bell, is to test your grit, your mental fortitude, your mental toughness. It's a mental evolution, right? And steroids aren't going to help you. They might, maybe if you had Lance Armstrong's, you know, doping guy, give you some small performance advantage but in general like it's not physical it's mental and that's the fundamental mistake we haven't found the drug that makes you mentally tough right exactly and that's why i like that that article was laughable and so when i read a headline about you know um about you know culture of drug abuse i was like oh no no you fundamentally don't get it you know headlines

Starting point is 00:20:40 like that and i find this to be a problem sort of writ large in the media landscape these days is that the institution and it's not their fault they are incentivized for salaciousness and not for truth yeah yeah i i forget the exact numbers but one of the most interesting stats to me i think it's across all special operations the average uh height and weight it's like 511 180 or 190 right and i think people because of the media uh and movies and things like that they think everyone's six four 250 pounds and i'll rip your head off yeah like yes they can kill you but But it is, to some degree, you need people who are mentally tough and you need people who are versatile. It's not just about who's got the biggest muscles as much as it is who can solve problems, who can do some of these different things.

Starting point is 00:21:21 And I think that that gets lost a lot because it sounds great. Like, oh, Navy SEALs are all using steroids. And, you know, of course they are. Totally, right? And not that there aren't steroids. Of course there are. But when we're trying to paint an accurate picture of an overall community, the average age of a soft special operations forces operator is 34 years old with two children. Right?

Starting point is 00:21:40 It takes a decade to develop the skills of jumping, diving, shooting in order to conduct missions like Neptune Spear or Red Wings or any of these like high profile missions that you read about or more importantly, the ones you don't read about. Yeah. When we think of all of the missions that folks are aware of, is there one that you look at and you're like, that was some crazy shit? Like whenever you talk to somebody who's trained for something, who's kind of in a club, whether it's in business, whether it's in the military, sports, whatever. Most of the things I think outsiders are impressed by, people are like, eh, it's cool, but the insiders aren't impressed. But was there one where you guys were all like, yo, that was fucking cool? Like, I can't believe they pulled that off. Yeah, well, there's 100 that I can talk about and 100 that I can't, right? But I'll tell you something that stands out in my mind that's in the public domain is one that was sort of portrayed as a failure.

Starting point is 00:22:36 But I think if we look at it from a different perspective or a different lens, like imagine what happened. So there was an operation that went down to capture a high-profile, a high-value target in Somalia. So this was a terrorist leader, if my memory serves me correct, associated with al-Shabaab, which is one of the terrorist organizations that operates out of Somalia. It was on a beach north of Mogadishu. He was in a safe house. um the the seal operational unit uh inserted via water which is our maritime domain specialty inserted via water um in the early hours of the morning pre-dawn and got in a huge firefight with the guards there you know thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition dumped in both directions

Starting point is 00:23:22 um the the gfc the ground force commander uh made the decision to tactically withdraw back to the water um like any firefight it's messy right a few magazines few radios get dropped in you know in in the middle of this several you guys litter navy seals litter a thousand bucks a thousand bucks oh my god okay generally try and sanitize the beach but you know and so you know there was like shabab or the the somali offshoot group you know they posted some pictures like oh oh, these guys, you know, we got in this big firefight and here's the evidence, here's their radio, and here's, you know, the magazines that got left behind or whatever. And, you know, I guess sort of in terms of mission objective, the mission was a failure, right?

Starting point is 00:24:11 They failed to capture that high-value target, right? And so those are them the facts, right? That's what happened, right? Like they didn't complete the mission objective, right? But nobody was killed, right? And if you think about what really happened, I spent a lot of time in Somalia, Mogadishu. um somalis in general are actually pretty fearful of the water they don't swim very well right there's some fishermen and stuff who are comfortable but even like some of the somali

Starting point is 00:24:36 pirates that we rolled up like didn't know how to swim so here you have like a senior terrorist leader at his beach house in somalia right and in the middle of the night you know a seal commando unit scuba's in inserts from the ocean the dark ocean shoots up your entire house kills you know kills so many of your security guards there's an hour-long firefight raging and then poof they retreat back into the water in the middle of the night what's the psychological effect of that operation like yes on its face mission failure right this guy knows that we can reach out and touch him sort of anywhere. So to me, that's real interesting. You probably don't stay at your beach house that much. Exactly. Right. Right. And so those are, those are the kinds of things that

Starting point is 00:25:24 are happening on a consistent basis. And, and I think it really, uh, it really speaks to the proficiency and the capability of, of the force. Yeah. It, it, um, it's so much because it's a craft, right? Like this whole idea of, you know, shoot, move, communicate, but also, uh, when you add in the water, when you add in jumping and all these things, um, I don't think people actually understand how many hours go into it as well like uh uh there's a um i think it was a tv show uh called the unit i don't know if you ever saw this yeah and in one of the scenes uh somebody said it to me and and the guy i guess he was having trouble during training and shooting and so he went out on a weekend and he's at the range he's just shooting and shooting shooting and he shoots

Starting point is 00:26:01 so much that he's like tearing up his hand so he basically just wraps a cloth around he's still shooting he's still shooting he's still shooting and i remember them being like is this like what the military is like i'm like well hold on there's a very big difference between like special operations regular military but like that is something that i think people they associate with sports like oh you hear a story of kobe bryant in the gym at four o'clock in the morning or whatever but to be able to do what you just described and insert into the water swim for miles go up onto a beach get in a firefight and then disappear that's not luck that's not hey we just woke up this morning and decided we were going to be good at this it's not the first time

Starting point is 00:26:37 you tried that out yeah you had some reps yeah and and the reps probably were in situations where if you messed up you didn't get killed right right like i think that's the other piece is back to the training piece right yeah right yeah you don't simulate that in the pool right when you think of the training uh you went on after the seals to do a lot of stuff uh in the i'll call it the media just overarching but uh there were special investigations there's a lot of war correspondent work um you did a couple of different organizations talk a little bit as to like were you just addicted to it like hey send me to the craziest places uh was it like let's look around the room who okay well like you have the highest probability of coming back so you're going

Starting point is 00:27:13 whether you like it or not like how do those conversations happen when you first get started yeah well you know i accidentally fell into the media in my in my post-seal career um and interestingly enough this is in my post-active duty career but i was able to continue to stay in the reserves and continue to serve while i was doing war corresponding and while i was doing my my work in media. I like to say like I was a seal in the media before it was cool to be a seal of the media. Right. I'm sure all of your friends love that. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, you're welcome Goggins and Jocko for me paving the way for this opportunity. No, it so when I transitioned off active duty, I actually ended up going to graduate school and studying public policy and

Starting point is 00:27:56 and I are. Um, and when I was in graduate school, you know, we were discussing like all of these issues in this, like the lofty tower, the lofty ivory tower of academia. Right. Um, but it was, it was sort of abstract, right. And it was very sort of classroom oriented, even though my professors were extraordinary, had like lots of real world experience. There was this sort of insular bubble nature to the kind of conversations. Uh, and I had been a real world practitioner of it, um, downrange. And I really thought it was important from a mission perspective to be able to show people some of the experiences that I had downrange. And so that was the catalyst for media for me. They didn't get it. They, uh, they didn't want to understand what was happening.

Starting point is 00:28:40 What was your experience when you were talking to these and how receptive were they to some of your experiences? So this great professor in grad school who told this, this story, uh, about a a national conference of journalists. And he's, this isn't, this is a guy who wrote the definitive history of the New York times and esteemed Harvard professor. He actually ran the Shorenstein center at Harvard, which was for press politics and public policy. Uh, and he told this story that he goes to this national journalism conference every year and every year since, you know, 1955, I mean, he's, you know, he was pretty, pretty geriatric at the point that he was my professor, but really sharp, like sharp as a tack, and he was long in the tooth, and he said when they first

Starting point is 00:29:23 started this convention, they always start by parading the flag and the service flags down the middle of the aisle, and they ask anybody who had served to please stand up, and in the 50s, to pay respects and to honor the flag, the service flags as they came down, Army, Navy, Marine Corps um and you know in 19 in the 50s and the 60s when he went to these conventions and this happened basically every single journalist in the room stood up because they had all served in World War II because the entire nation had been mobilized and he watched like through Vietnam and through and then he said you know in in 2005 the the year that I entered Harvard uh he told me that that year he had gone to the convention they asked every journalist in the room uh who had

Starting point is 00:30:11 served in the military to stand up and nobody stood up. So you had this giant disconnect between people who sort of understood war at a visceral level and the people who were telling the American public about war. And so for me- In one lifetime. In one lifetime. Right. In one lifetime, he watched the evolution. And I think that was true. It's less true now. You have more and more veterans like ourselves, right? You have this great podcast, like you have more of us who are sort of talking about our experiences and helping shape the national narrative and understanding about conflict and issues of the day. But in 2005, you know,

Starting point is 00:30:53 when I got off active duty before I transitioned to the reserves, it just wasn't the case. There really weren't a lot of veterans working in the institution of media. And, you know, this is a it's a bigger problem than just in media or it's a bigger issue than just media. There was a book that was written that year called AWOL, uh, American elites, unexcused absence from the military. And he talked about, you know, the graduating class of 1942 at Harvard, um, 100% of eligible males went and joined the military. Yeah. Cause it was world war two, middle of world war two. And then he, you know, fast forward to the year he wrote the book. I can't remember 2004 2003 we were actually still in the middle of war right two wars iraq and afghanistan but

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Starting point is 00:33:08 actually fascinating as well i can't remember if it's uh maybe in the 60s 70s i'm gonna get the the uh time frame uh incorrect but uh at one point i think it was the fortune 500 87 percent of the ceos were military veterans yes and when they went and looked now it's not zero but it was significantly less it was like 10 or something and uh the paper that i read was basically making the argument like don't be surprised they weren't predicting it as much as just like uh because we have sent so many for 20 years in iraq and afghanistan you're going to then see these military veterans rise up in these organizations the difference was 100 right was going in in the in the 40s uh and now it's like one percent of the american population is engaged and and so

Starting point is 00:33:52 So, you know, there's pluses and minuses to it. In some ways, wow, how amazing is it that only 1% of our population has to go and fight and everyone else can enjoy, you know, the greatness of America. But at the same time, like, it is fascinating how different it is now. It is. It is a fundamental sea change. And look, I'm not a veteranophile, right? I don't think that, like, just because you served in the military, you are going to be

Starting point is 00:34:14 an extraordinary CEO or an extraordinary journalist or anything, right? We know that – you and I know all too well how non-homogeneous the military population and the veteran population is. But I do think that there is something to be said for that sort of cadre experience of experience. I do think that there's something to be said for – what is this? You probably know this better. Like what is being a veteran? It's like writing a blank check for up and to the value of your life to the United States government, right? Like there is something that is important in the national discourse and in the national leadership of having worn the cloth of the country.

Starting point is 00:34:56 And I think we, as the veteran community, do add value, especially now in these like turbulent times that were like highly partisan times that we're living in and stuff. I think actually sort of the value of uniformed service is even elevated right now. Yeah, it is very much if we go back to the early 2000s, right? What's the easiest way to get rid of all the partisanship? It's like there's some external threat. And if you go back and people have seen the clip, but I think it's George Bush is running out to do the first pitch at the New York Yankees game. I don't care if you're a white, black, brown, green, purple, if you're a Republican Democrat or you're, you know, some fucking weird thing that no one actually knows about. You were an American on that day. And that sounds idealistic, but that was only 20 years ago. Right. Like that was not that long ago.

Starting point is 00:35:51 And, you know, there's people now who, if you think about it, are like 18 to 22 that like literally weren't born yet. like i i recently uh uh we were working with somebody and we needed a date of birth for something and he told me that it was 2002 and i like i was like oh shit i gotta take a lap right because like you just forget but like uh so yeah some portion of people on social media and stuff like this like literally just don't remember that stuff um but i do think that it is possible and obviously we'd like to have more uh uh kind of cohesion without having to have the external threat but that's just how nature has always worked right is the external threat actually brings people together yeah i think about you know at a micro level i always think about combat um

Starting point is 00:36:36 this is going to be platitudinal in some ways but i combat you know is this thing that for me it's always had this like clarifying effect right it's not like you go to combat and like you go to war And then you have some grand epiphany like, oh, life is so sweet. I'm going to enjoy every moment. I'm never going to argue. I'm a Hindu cow. I'm a Zen Buddhist monk now coming back from war. It's certainly not like that.

Starting point is 00:37:03 And obviously with the trauma that some people experience, it's tremendously not like that. But for me, war has never had this grand epiphany effect. What it's had this effect of is like racking an aperture, like bringing things into sharper focus. So when I'm home and I get to take a surf or swim in the ocean or when I have a good meal, things are slightly incrementally sweeter. They taste better. They feel better because I've had this clarifying effect. And I hope that that idea is scalable, right, that whatever conflict is happening out there in the world for our nation, like it does bring some clarity and focus to like our national discourse and our national culture of like the things that matter, like the things that – the truth is like even in these highly partisan times and we've been through these eras in history before, we have much more in common than we are different.

Starting point is 00:38:00 Yeah. And the military helps teach that, which is part of the value of uniformed service. Yeah. It also I always say that it's a reminder daily, like in some weird, morbid way that like, hey, unfortunately, nobody gets out alive. And so, like, enjoy it. Right. To some degree is like basically what you're saying. Totally. And I think that people who don't have that experience, they're like, oh, these guys are fucking weirdos. right whatever but there is this element of uh uh yes there is the uh portion of the military who does have the traumatic experiences but there's also a portion of the military who they're much happier people they enjoy things they let things go that maybe otherwise they wouldn't if if they hadn't had the experience and so it's like very fascinating uh difference of response and a lot

Starting point is 00:38:42 of it has to do with the experience that they have in the military totally totally i mean it is like look this is this idea is an anthem to really say at a big level but i know stan mccrystal's a big supporter of it um i i have always been a supporter of national service to some degree right and even as like a unity principle and a unifying factor would it look like like everyone goes in the military or could it be no anything anything that could be national service right and And, you know, with one stroke of the pen in, you know, 1962, President Kennedy created both the SEAL teams and the Peace Corps, which are these two disparate elements of national power. Right. Yeah. I always like thought like, oh, you know, in my 60s, I'll like join the Peace Corps. Then I'll have like completed. Yeah. So, you know, in some way, they both are intended to keep the peace.

Starting point is 00:39:34 Just they take different tacks. That's right. And in some ways, and there are parts of the world where the only Americans that people might know are either soldiers or Peace Corps volunteers, right? So that's how extremely important that kind of ambassadorship is. But, yeah, look, I think it would basically look like, no, you can go into any of these uniformed services. It would look much like the military if you want to go right out of high schools because some people are not prepared for a college, right? This would be your sort of gap service year. You could go into the Peace Corps. You could go into Teach for America. Right. You could go into the military and you would be like enlisted cadre in that organization. Right. Or if you went to college and deferred your national service until post-college, then you would be as part of this kind of like junior officer leadership cadre.

Starting point is 00:40:22 So we would model the other service organizations or service institutions on that sort of like military pipeline and everybody would serve and, you know, college would be semi paid for or whatever. I haven't haven't done the math, you know, but like right now, there's a path to it making make sense. Yeah. Yeah. And especially in this polarizing times. Right. Right. What about the media? Like you keep mentioning polarized times. And I think people think of like, oh, my neighbor, like what are their politics? But the media has like a very unique perspective, but also role. Like you get to see so many different news stories. Right. And you specifically went to many of the most dangerous places in the world. You used to go with a rifle. Now you're going with a camera, which is like, you know, in some ways crazier than going with

Starting point is 00:41:11 the rifle. Um, how did you think about that as you started to get deeper and deeper into working with the media, telling some of these stories? Well, I think in the beginning I had a sort of semi naive sort of non corporate approach to media. I had had these experiences overseas. I thought they were on the bleeding edge of some of the most important issues, both nationally and both domestically and internationally. Um, and I, I felt like it was part of my continued legacy and service to have those kinds of conversations and to, to, to show sort of what was happening to the American public. Right. Um, you know, so I was the first Western journalist in Mogadishu in more than a decade. I was first person to have myself waterboarded on TV. You know, I was

Starting point is 00:42:01 in afghanistan um in 2005 doing a documentary series um all of those things kind of the common thread common dna was i thought these are important issues and like these are the topics that americans should be most informed on as as we're having national conversations about what to do whether it's is waterboarding torture should we continue the war in afghanistan um should we you know, being paying more attention to what's happening in places in East Africa and West Africa. So that was really the genesis. It was mission driven in the beginning, my media career. As I became more sophisticated and learned more about the institution, like I really started to understand the sort of corporate side of media. And my, you know, the brief trajectory of my

Starting point is 00:42:50 media career is I started at a startup called Current TV. Al Gore's TV network. Yeah. created the internet and current tv uncle al uncle al was was was pioneering um and uh so and and that was kind of like a short-form tv program uh ahead of its time non-linear cable programming format um and i went from i was then poached by cnn and i was correspondent for their special investigations and documentary unit i was uh ingloriously fired from cnn when they cut the entire department uh tell us the story you know it was it's it's a really weird story and i'll just say cnn's a different organization now under different leadership but basically i was i was uh i had been mobilized out of the reserves out of my reserve unit and i was in west africa um in

Starting point is 00:43:42 uniform in the middle of the jungle in liberia actually and i got a call from like my boss at cnn and uh he said hey they've they've cut the special investigations and documentary unit like you're under contract um you can come back and go cover like you know fires in la or whatever but like basically like that's it like you know half the department got fired so uh got let go and so i then made what is either like the most brilliant or the dumbest like career move uh when it comes to my immediate thing uh i get a call from uh from this guy with a british accent uh saying like hey i'm a big fan i watched your work and um you know i saw that cnn just you know laid off its um special and its investigative unit um i'd like to do a media piece about this and i was like who is

Starting point is 00:44:38 this again he's like oh there's like john oliver from the daily show and so then john oliver and I created for The Daily Show a piece called Investigating Investigative Journalism, basically skewering CNN for firing its investigative journalism. It does sound – like in hindsight, it does sound ridiculous, right, that like they would do that. At the time, obviously, there's money and economics and all this stuff at play, but it is hilarious. That's exactly what it is. And the truth is that long-form investigative international news, maybe news in general, has always had to be a loss leader because the media in general – and this is sort of the meat and the substance of it – has a real monetization problem, right? Like the current way, especially in the digital landscape, that media is monetized is through clicks, eyeballs, and ad revenue, right? It's always changing. It's always dynamic. But the basic thing is, you know, newspapers create content and sell ads against them, sell digital ads against them, whether that's on Facebook or wherever else. Right. In some ways, like all that news that's coming through on your Facebook feed, I call like faux gras journalism. They're kind of like stuffing it down your throat. Facebook, you know, until very recently was really monetizing against that.

Starting point is 00:45:56 And so the overall meta effect that it had – all puns intended – the meta effect of that is that – and we all know this. There's nothing profound about it – is that today's current media landscape, that information is incentivized from a monetary perspective for salaciousness and clicks, clickbait. They're incentivized for salaciousness, not for truth. There's not a monetization model around truth and investigation, at least not like a large monetization model. And this is actually the history, at least in television, the history of television news, right? The FCC gave the three big networks, the big three, ABC, NBC, CBS, this incredibly valuable broadband spectrum, right? When they started broadcast news, right? When they started broadcast cable like the old rabbit ear antennas, right?

Starting point is 00:46:50 The FCC gave them this spectrum and they said, OK, we're going to give you this valuable radio spectrum, right, that you can broadcast your television programs on and you can sell ads and all of this stuff on it, right? But here's the catch. We are going to mandate, right, an FCC mandate that for one hour a day you do programming that informs the American public. And that's the genesis of the nightly news hour. So, you know, Tom Brokaw and all those guys benefited from this clause that the FCC had that the big three had to do this one hour of like nightly network news programming that informed the American public. And that existed for generations until kind of the digital revolution and the advent of 24-hour cable news. And now we're in this era of sort of atomization of news and information everywhere, right? So, like, you know, back then CNN made, you know, everything's reinventing and transforming and eating itself.

Starting point is 00:47:50 Bundling and unbundling. Exactly, right? But back then, you know, like CNN disrupted the big three model, right? And now you have digital sort of disrupting that cable news model. And we're just in this incredibly fractured news and information ecosystem. I describe it as having the effect as if somebody hit mercury with a sledgehammer. and that's how our information environment is right now and all of the things that we thought were supposed to bring us closer together and connect us like social media platforms and stuff

Starting point is 00:48:20 what we're realizing now at least in this current iteration of it is that it's actually having the effect of siloing us and driving us apart right yeah one of the big challenges i think that we're facing as a society is this sort of tribalism that's coming from the ghettoization of news and information. And this is a tough problem to solve. There are not a lot of easy solutions for it. Um, and I think you see the permutations and the second and third order effects of that playing out throughout our culture, throughout our politics. Uh, and that's, that's where we're living these days, man. Yeah. When I think of your media career, there's two specific moments I want to talk about. The first is, uh, when you got waterboard on television. So, uh, we,

Starting point is 00:49:00 didn't know each other at this time but um i was in iraq when all of the uh um kind of the initial papers came out and the enhanced interrogation techniques and like all this and you can imagine we're like somebody had the internet right and it's like what happened and so the waterboarding stuff uh came out and uh i remember a guy walked in uh it's a little area we're all sitting and he was like what is it he's like well how hard could that fucking be and we went outside and like literally laid down and now it wasn't the same thing in terms of uh the feet above the head or whatever but we basically laid down put a towel over someone's head poured water how long did you go right then it turns into a competition and guys are like timing and of course no one lasts more

Starting point is 00:49:39 than like 20 seconds yeah right but it's like in our heads we were like idiot kids essentially i was 20 or 21 years old screwing around trying to pass time you know in the middle of our rock and then you did it on national television. And I think that at some point, like I don't think any of us knew who you were or that you were doing or anything, but like, I remember just being like, oh shit, somebody from uniform went and did a national television.

Starting point is 00:50:05 And in some ways it was like, like started from the bottom, now we're here, right? Like somebody pulled it off, but the media and like, I think the nation in general was like, oh shit, like somebody is actually going to show us what this is. And so like, how did that happen? that was my first big like breakout piece right and just you were viral before viral was a thing

Starting point is 00:50:26 yeah so early this whole thing is making me sound prehistoric you know still alive uh that and just to be fair that was the second time i'd been waterboarded i'd been waterboarded in seer training you know and it was so you knew what it was i knew what it was and that first time you know you know in seer which is this you know survival evasion resistance escape you have all this stuff you're not supposed to tell them or whatever they put me on that water board and i'm like i'm a seal seal team one what do you want to know what do you want to know it's pretty bad as you know as you experience well to be clear uh the watered down version uh no pun intended yeah is uh uh all it made me think was i forget the gentleman's name uh i think it was in guantanamo

Starting point is 00:51:06 they uh they waterboard my 182 times or something ksm khalid sheikh muhammad yeah and all i kept thinking to myself was like dude maybe i could survive one or two like if you had to do it 181 times like i'd be telling you anything you want to hear right side note they they are not sure that they ever broke ksm they like to find them as like a super resistor or whatever really interesting interesting dude still down there at at gitmo yeah architect 9-11 and all that stuff um so uh yeah so like how why um so your idea or somebody else's idea 100 my idea yeah i figured yeah um and there's like two funny stories that that come out of it like uh the first is uh at cnn that was the first time i was on national tv okay right and so uh anderson cooper you know

Starting point is 00:51:57 who i consider a friend good journalist um came from the same kind of like investigative dna background that that i did anderson called me up after the piece and he's like he's like gosh that's it's amazing that you pulled this off like i he asked me the same thing you did like how did you do it you know he's like because i've been looking into it for a while and you know all i could find was like these like you know weird s and m groups to do it to me and i was like it's the world you walk in anderson you know that's you should definitely have them come do it on national exactly uh but um no look basically the the impetus was this that debate was raging in the national security community guys like you and i and within the military it had sort of trickled

Starting point is 00:52:42 out and was bubbling up and people are saying like should we be doing this is it torture john mccain had actually kind of gone to war with the white house um i was a a big john mccain fan you know he came and spoke when i was a plebe at the naval academy i had read the book about him Nightingale song. Um, and I had tremendous amount of respect for what he had been through. And obviously they talk about McCain and those guys at Sears school, right? A lot of the stuff is modeled on what those guys went through at the Hanoi Hilton. So I thought he was a really credible voice in this debate. Um, and so this, this debate was happening and I would see the white house, like doing talking points. I'd see McCain kind of raging about them. And then I'd

Starting point is 00:53:19 see all the pundits, you know, sort of saying stuff. And I was like, this is the most surreal, bizarre debate because we're talking about this thing that nobody's ever seen and like doesn't really have any experience with except for guys like us so i was like look let's just let's just open the kimono and and show people what it is since we're having the debate and i thought that's how i could best be of service and and for me it was it was a moral position that if we're going to have informed debates like we need to know what we're talking about and that's where i saw my value of bridging these two worlds between the military and the media when you're like all right cool i think that we should do it on television uh and you call the producer or whoever like what's the

Starting point is 00:54:01 are they like hell yeah like let's do it or are they like let's call the lawyers and make sure that like you know something doesn't go wrong actually all everybody said no the lawyers everybody this is a story uh a story lost to history or whatever but you know who said yes was al was al gore really al thought it was important and he overrode all of the lawyers that that i think the ceo or the coo of the company definitely overrode the general counsel the gc of the company said like no this is too important like let kaj do it uh and that was the genesis of it i don't think i've ever even told that story like to anyone ever um but that's how it happened the lawyers are there they're supposed to be the risk killers right like hey this is

Starting point is 00:54:42 pretty damn risky and to some degree uh do you feel like it changed the conversation i do people saw it i do i do like you know uh in in journalism your wins are few and far between right especially these days right so i'll i'm happy to like you know hang hang my hat a little bit on on that one and say like i think that was fundamentally different it also sparked a whole series of of media coverage around it so there was there was a lot that happened from kind of like throwing that stone in the lake and watching the ripple effect. I mean, up to and including several other pieces, another Emmy-nominated piece that I did where I interviewed Jim Mitchell, who I consider a friend. He was the architect of that enhanced interrogation program. I interviewed him. He had

Starting point is 00:55:30 never spoken before. He had personally waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed those 180-odd times. He was the guy who did it. I interviewed him. And this is really important because I don't think people actually understand as part of the enhanced interrogation techniques uh there was the waterboarding which i think probably took the cake in in the coverage and it was something that uh it's easy to uh now see on television or on movies and and uh kind of gets recreated over and over again uh but there was also things like uh they told one of uh i think it was a one of the guys uh he's really scared of insects and so they told him they were like uh uh hey if this insect bites you it'll kill you right and they put them in a box uh which is essentially

Starting point is 00:56:07 like almost like a coffin size box or whatever and they put the insect in there and it was not a poisonous you know killer insect but to some degree uh truth is what you believe right and so this dude definitely thought that they were gonna kill him right and so it brought up the debate of like actually not only is there the physical component of it but the psychological component as well and waterboarding is unique and it has both of them to some degree um and so like that whole time was like weird because i think it's hard for people to recognize uh something that um from the outside idiot we put you in a box and like there's an insect that can't do anything to you on the other end it's like there's a psychological component there that's pretty

Starting point is 00:56:48 powerful totally completely and and i think these were fundamental questions especially at that time like what techniques are appropriate to use like where do we draw the line right um obviously john McCain was adamantly against anything that that broached up to the line of torture um and and I think that that was important I think for you and I who who both served right deep to our sort of core ideology and sense of self that we served honorably right we both like on our DD 214 the paper you get when you discharge to have that making a giant assumption here that we both have honorable discharges I don't know about you but I do but yes okay yeah okay me too me too all right glad we got that out of the way right like that honorable discharge is really important to me and

Starting point is 00:57:34 i want my my time in uniform to be remembered honorably um and so things that can impugn that um sometimes they're they're necessary or things that have the potential to impugn that um so look there's there was at the time and still is like a robust national debate on how we sort of gain intelligence and information i think this was an important thing and as part of that ripple effect I put Jim Mitchell on TV for the first time talking from his perspective, and I think I gave him a really fair shake, although a weird shake. I interviewed him here in Florida on a canoe surrounded by alligators because I thought it was a great metaphor for how he saw the world. And that piece also got nominated for an Emmy, and that piece led to a movie with Adam Driver and Annette Bening called The Report, which was about this subject. So, look, 90% of the things you do in journalism kind of go out there into the ether and don't affect policy or don't affect the national discourse like anything else.

Starting point is 00:58:34 You just sort of keep plugging. I do think that one helped shape the national discourse, so I'm proud of it. This episode is brought to you by Sigma. The bridge between iGaming, online sports betting, and emerging technology such as blockchain, NFTs, fintech, GameFi, metaverse, and AI is loud and clear. The largest global summit of its kind is heading to Malta from November 15th through the 17th. Over a thousand exhibitors and 25,000 industry leaders will be there, including top executives from DraftKings, Bet365, crypto exchanges, betting software providers, operators, gaming affiliates, and more. Log on to AIBC.world and Sigma.world to see our upcoming global summits. See you in

Starting point is 00:59:15 Malta November 15th to 17th for the leading global event in gaming and emergent tech. This is Sigma. Go to sigma.world today. on the Canadian NEO exchange under D E F I. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit their website at valor.com. That's V A L O U R.com. The other, uh, moment, um, that, that I recently was reminded of, uh, Clarissa Ward from CNN was, uh, in Afghanistan during the Afghan pullout. Uh, and I think the nation, or at least folks that I talk to on a daily basis, they were very surprised to see a woman there surrounded by the Taliban. And she's, like, interviewing them, right?

Starting point is 01:00:21 And it was this weird kind of cognitive dissonance of, like, everything that they had assumed or thought about was being shaken. But also they understood that, like, this is a very dangerous situation. Why? Because she's literally like, oh, wait, they're shooting at somebody, you know, and she's, like, talking about this live. And what it reminded me of is you did a piece with Vice very early on, I think, where you were actually in, I think it was a plane. and it was uh in nigeria with boko haram and for whatever reason it was probably one of a bunch of pieces of early vice that i'd watched but i remembered this because you're like uh another shooting at uh boko haram there's like a guy hanging out to the side with like a uh machine

Starting point is 01:01:02 gun he's just like pkf yeah and you're like you can just tell like you're much more comfortable than i think like a normal journalist would be and so like in those situations like it's one thing with current tv and like hey we're gonna waterboard you but it's somewhat of a controlled environment and like it's on national television but like you know what you're getting yourself into going into these conflict zones very different like whether it's clarissa whether it's you uh doing some of the stuff like how did you think about like when to say yes and like did you ever say actually i don't think that that's one that we should go do for whatever reason yeah absolutely for me like the the great white whale you know the stories that got away are just the

Starting point is 01:01:39 ones that i i didn't get to do for for whatever reason uh you know anything any operation any mission any journalism assignment that i tried to do is always a risk benefit calculus and there are just some times where it's not worth it and then there are other times where you push the envelope i remember there was this former problem of somalis uh fleeing to yemen um during there's unfortunately now we're reverse migration because Yemen is one of the most dangerous places in the world. So Somalia is actually returning to Somalia. Um, but for a while, because Mogadishu and the rest of Somalia was so dangerous, they were, uh, there were Somali refugees like taking these boats across the, uh, the, the sea of Aden or the red sea, um, to the Yemeni coast. And they

Starting point is 01:02:28 were, somebody had told me someone, a friend from the humanitarian, from the human rights community had told me that you could go to a beach in Yemen and set up cameras and that bodies would just wash up on the beach. And it sounded apocryphal. It sounded like something like, yeah, right. People say that stuff, but they're being hyperbolic. No, I went there and it was like, absolutely true because these boats were so rickety and shaky bringing these refugees across. And Somalis, as we said earlier, don't really swim that well quite often. Uh, they were like, the boats were capsizing, they're drowning and you just set up a camera on the beach and you'd wait till morning till sunrise bodies would just wash up uh on on the beach so i was trying to get

Starting point is 01:03:07 a smuggler to take me on one of the boats to go across um and uh in the end it couldn't make it work yeah i can't remember i think it was like a two-day journey or something so you couldn't swim like you yourself wouldn't be able to probably swim well i wouldn't go that far given it was Yeah. No, no, no. Not swimmable. Yeah. Not swimmable. Quite sharky. All of that. All of that stuff. I think most of these people were drowning within sight of shore. And the reason being is that the Yemeni Coast Guard was patrolling at the time. The smugglers would jump in, would dump them and go. I don't think people actually understand this specific situation. I don't know anything about. But even on the American borders, right, when you look at some of these videos and I've talked to people who are Border Patrol and things like that around these rivers that they're crossing. Like if you were a person who didn't have a reason to go across that was life or death or you wanted to get to America or something like that, you probably wouldn't cross, right?

Starting point is 01:04:12 Like they're dangerous things to do. And we're talking about walking in many cases or swimming across a river that you can see the other side. You're talking about here of like basically going on a two-day voyage and like hope we're heading in the right direction. Oh, yeah, with like 300 people crammed in. The conditions were supposed to be atrocious. So and, you know, the reason that I wanted to do a story like that, obviously the story has changed many years later, is like, you know, there's a human component to that. And again, like we're talking about all of these policies and all of these ideas. And I think especially in policy, like I have a master's in policy, right?

Starting point is 01:04:50 I get the policy world, but quite often we lose the human dynamic and the human factor. And that's where journalism and cameras and filmmaking and storytelling can sort of bring us closer to the reality of a situation. I wouldn't ask anybody to cross the Red Sea in a raft with Somali refugees. But I do think that the power in its highest form, in its most altruistic form, that's what good journalism can be. How did you convince cameramen to go with you? Or did you sometimes just say, fuck it, give me the camera and I'll be back? Every once in a while I've done that. Like that was actually a hind helicopter that you're describing in northern Nigeria.

Starting point is 01:05:30 Every once in a while I've had to shoot it myself. Like the cameraman on that one went home. It was very dangerous. But, you know, in all these communities in the world, like I think for better or for worse, guys like you and me find like-minded people, right? So I was doing stunts on – water stunts on the Jack Ryan series, kind of like a side hustle, fun hobby of mine is to do stunt work occasionally. And I was sitting with this like crew of stuntmen like, you know, as we're preparing to do a stunt. And I was like, oh, these guys are just like frogmen, you know, if there was no rules about, like, you know, felony convictions or college degrees or anything like that. It's the same sort of adventurous, risk-taking DNA.

Starting point is 01:06:16 And I always thought, like, it's amazing. That's why I loved the SEAL team so much and so close to the guys that I served with. I love when you take that gene, that like adrenaline, chasing, you know, call it courage, whatever that ingredient, whatever that human quality is, and then you channel it for a mission and purpose. And I think that's the real secret sauce, the real secret power of the special operations community. And frankly, it multiplies out to the conventional services as well. Anybody who is willing to put themselves in harm's way or to take risk for a higher purpose, that goes a long way in my book. There's a story that I didn't know until recently. Dakota Meyer.

Starting point is 01:07:02 Oh, yeah. Dakota's great. So he told the story in a way where, for those that don't know, he was a warden of Medal of Honor. Him and a driver drove back and forth into a village under heavy fire, risked their life, all that stuff. but he told the kind of pre-story before those actions and basically he was going to be on a mission he gets told he was basically raising too many concerns and kind of giving people a hard time supposedly and said hey why don't you just go sit up there and let us go do the mission and when he gets in the truck he basically says to the driver hey shit may go bad today

Starting point is 01:07:34 when it does get the fuck out of the driver's seat and i'm gonna go save them and the driver who in many cases uh these you know humvees and stuff they're not actual uh just the driver right They have other responsibilities or whatever. He was like, you're not going anywhere without me. Right. And there's this element of, uh, I think a lot about like courage is contagious as well. And so, uh, when you see one person do it, all of a sudden, everyone is like, well, we can all do it.

Starting point is 01:07:59 Right. And I do think that's part of the beauty of the military in general, but also the special operations community is that like, you just need one person to be like, guys, we can do this. Yeah. Next thing you know, everyone's like, well, fuck yeah, let's go do it. Yeah. So true.

Starting point is 01:08:10 And so inspiring. Also the contrapositive is true. like i uh so is fearfulness right and i remember in buds like you know so many lessons are sort of forged there on the sand um guys rarely quit alone wow i didn't know that yes you'll be sitting there in the surf locked arm and arm middle of the night everybody's jackhammering because their body's so cold it's trying to generate heat or whatever and the bell that alluring like gold bell is right over there and you'll see like guys whispering like hey like i'll quit if you quit kind of thing. No way. And then they just start sprinting in twos for the bell. Right. So I, I,

Starting point is 01:08:49 I, I, I, I, I totally heed your point and honor it. And I'm adding an additional point that it works both ways. Yeah. I never thought of it that way, but that is fascinating that nobody wants to quit alone. And so what's the lesson there, right? Like, like careful who you surround yourself with. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Do you see, um, Jack Carr's, uh, terminal list? Yeah. What'd you think of it uh i thought it was good right like look i i'm happy whenever anybody is able to take their experience i tried to do this myself take their experience and evolve into a new chapter and be in the sort of creative industries like do i think the plot line like as like you know a still you know you know lieutenant commander in the seal teams right like do i think that lieutenant

Starting point is 01:09:34 commanders are going rogue and like killing their own platoons like i do not like that part's a little preposterous but in terms of like makes it for a good book makes for a great book yeah yeah yeah i just want to say like we are not doing that like the dudes that i served with the admirals that i served with like are some among the finest americans i've ever met in my whole life um but yeah look it's so awesome to see jack pseudonym is to see jack uh to see him thrive and succeed in the creative endeavors and you know have a that's amazon right that's what yeah yeah on you know to have like on a big streaming outlet and like all of these accolades and um uh yeah like good on you man one of the things that i took away from it was uh i knew that a lot of uh

Starting point is 01:10:22 military veterans were doing uh training for movies and things like that and um i always joked that like if you ever watch a movie and like somebody's like holding a gun the wrong way or whatever you're like yeah um and and now there's even a whole vein of i don't know if you've seen a lot of uh seals and special forces guys whatever they do reaction videos on youtube oh yeah no that's just not real yeah um but this one was one i thought very well done but also two i was like oh shit like i never thought about all these lived experiences that people had for 20 years like they are going to come to books they are going to come to movies they are going to come to these uh media platforms that i think most americans haven't seen that stuff in a long time now is the time right

Starting point is 01:10:58 There wasn't, like, a bunch of great Vietnam movies, right? Apocalypse Now, like, didn't get made until, you know, a decade after Vietnam, right? Like, there takes some cultural maturation that has to happen for all these products. And, I mean, some of it is just, like, us getting out of the service and finding our legs in the civilian world. But, like, I think that time period is now happening. And it's also, like, a time of reflection, right? In some ways we've wound down – we've certainly wound down Afghanistan and like we've wound down the global war on terror. In fact, I just read that the – I think the national defense ribbon as an automatic – I remember that sort of like participation ribbon that everybody gets, the national defense ribbon because we're in a time of war.

Starting point is 01:11:46 I think that's going away as an automatic signaling that we are ebbing from the global war on terror. Um, and so I think now is a time for reflection on the two longest wars in American history. Um, culture, pop culture are some of the best ways to do it, you know, and I'm proud of, of guys like, like Jack Carr, um, you know, being able to use the creative industries to do that kind of storytelling. Like we're certainly not the only voice and the only lived experience in America. Um, but you know, over, over 2 million of us in uniform during the, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, like we're, we're a part of the fabric of American society.

Starting point is 01:12:27 When you think of kind of your post, uh, military career, uh, you did a lot of what I'll call the, the war correspondent and media work. Uh, now you have, uh, I would, from my outside view, uh, kind of three different legs. You have, uh, some humanitarian work, things like team Rubicon and, and others. You still go to some of these areas. So I believe you've gone to Ukraine a couple of times now. And then you also are participating in building technology and products and stuff like that that kind of shadow the line between great tech products but also help the military community. I thought maybe we could just kind of talk through each one of those.

Starting point is 01:13:02 And the humanitarian piece to me is, uh, something that isn't surprising, but, uh, you have a very wide variety of, of, uh, things that you participate in, uh, from, uh, swimming to, uh, the team Rubicon stuff. So like talk through a little bit as to like some of that work and like why choose some of the things you've chosen to do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I will just caveat that like Ukraine was a total aberration. Okay. I did not intend to go to Ukraine. I, you know, I got out of the SEAL reserves in 2017. I thought I was done going to war. I made this transition, as you indicated, from the media into money, right, where I have this fintech company that I'm super proud of. Um, and I really thought I was done. In fact, I was two months into my startup, uh, when I had the really wonderful conversation with my co-founder, like, Hey, I know we just launched this, this great new startup guild. Like things are, you know, humming along, things are awesome, but like

Starting point is 01:14:01 we're so early stage that we've never even talked about vacation policy, but everybody gets vacation, right? So I'm going to take my vacation and take a little sabbatical and go to Ukraine because I feel morally compelled to do so so but what it does the the ukraine mission uh does fit into this like kind of my portfolio is really divided in in half it's my and and the venn diagram overlaps a lot there's the humanitarian um service oriented work that i do my philanthropic work and i did that for a decade it helped start an organization using my combat pay called the mission continues that led to and served on the board there uh that was about giving veterans a sense of purpose and, and giving them an opportunity to do public service. And then that

Starting point is 01:14:48 led to us giving a grant to Team Rubicon to start Team Rubicon. I also sat on the board at Team Rubicon, again, humanitarian work in disaster zones. So I spent, uh, and now I'm part of a team called Force Blue, which takes former combat divers, repurposes their skills for ocean conservation. Uh, it's awesome. It's actually based right here in Miami. We're all, we all became scientific divers for the frost science center downtown here in miami so we go out we do coral restoration we do um turtle rescue missions um it's it's pretty it's pretty awesome like as a frogman it gets me back in the water with a sense of mission and purpose so i have this i've for for the last decade concurrent with my media career in parallel i've been really oriented in the

Starting point is 01:15:34 veteran service space. And I've spent a decade trying to give veterans a sense of mission and purpose. But what I've come to realize in this next chapter in my life, and we started this company this past Veterans Day. We launched on November 11th. And so we're coming up on our, that was our beta, but we're coming up on essentially our one-year anniversary. What I started to realize is that sense of veterans purpose is really important. and it's what economists call necessary but not sufficient oh interesting if we are not just giving veterans a sense a renewed sense of mission and purpose but we're not also paying attention to their purse and to their sense of financial security their sense of financial stability

Starting point is 01:16:22 their long-term financial health and wellness like all of the mission stuff in the world isn't going to matter. Right. And all the problems that we hear in the military community and the veterans community, um, a lot of those are magnified by this lack of financial stability and planning like, um, and financial health and wellness and lack of financial literacy. So basically the way it started for me is like, you know, the, the analog here is like, you know, people talk about, you know, meditation and there's a lot of talk in the wellness space, like you and I are big fitness buffs, right? Like I do a lot in the fitness space. I, owned a CrossFit gym for many years, right? Like that's like, that's how I keep my knife sharp,

Starting point is 01:17:04 you know, is by, is by pushing the envelope physically. Um, and even a lot of the veterans events are like, you know, swims around the Hudson and all of that stuff. It's all part of like keeping my, my mind body sharp. Um, but when I think in the wellness space, there's all this talk about mindfulness and meditation, really important stuff, really valuable stuff, but you can go meditate for 30 minutes in the morning. And then if you come back to like a trove of credit card companies right telling you how much debt you have like all of that mindfulness and all of that zen is out the window and in the military community i don't know what your transition was like but in large part the military community has been left behind by the private wealth

Starting point is 01:17:43 community without a doubt right when you got out of the service right did you do taps yeah uh transition program uh i think when we came back from iraq there was like a yellow ribbon program yeah and it was like a day yeah and it was like bring your families and like everyone like showed up and was like all right we sat in like an auditorium uh they tried like to be fair it was uh very well intentioned but uh it's hard when you're talking to a room full of i don't know a couple hundred people uh and every single person is literally completely different like how do you talk to uh the commander and the you know private first class about the same issues like it's just different and it's it starts at day one when we enter the military right the uh i'm sure you're

Starting point is 01:18:24 where they've changed the retirement system in the military, right? So you enter the military, you're 17, you're 18 years old, you know, you're a recruit, you're going to boot camp. And then you get to your, you know, your first training station or your first duty station, right? And it's hard in general to get 17 and 18 year olds to think about their long term financial future, right? I bet I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say you either have a personal story or like some friends who did some pretty stupid things with their money i remember being in iraq uh and there was i don't know how the kid was he was young and like he was like i have no money and we were like dude like everything you're earning here is tax-free up to whatever

Starting point is 01:19:08 point you know 87 dollars whatever uh what do you mean you have no money and he was like walked you through his financial decisions and you were like if you wrote down like everything not to do like this kid checked every single box and like thankfully the military was giving him food and a place to sleep and like all this stuff but i was like wow and it was just like very egregious things and then you realize like yeah this kid has never he's never been in this position before and no one's ever told him not even uh what to do to grow wealth just like how do you understand to spend less than you make right right i mean like it's simple simple stuff simple budgeting, right? And there is that financial literacy gap is huge. And I think we

Starting point is 01:19:48 saw it over and over. And the bad news is that there are a lot of forces aligned against military members when it comes to finances, right? So explain a couple of them. Well, you know, just first and foremost, there's a pay gap relative to their sort of civilian counterparts. You know, The second is there's been a change in the military retirement system, right? So what used to be a defined benefit system has gone to a contribution-based system, so the TSP, right? That's not necessarily bad, but you're asking 17- and 18-year-olds now to make complex decisions about their financial future without the preparation and the financial literacy that's required for it. And then there's just like a predatory environment.

Starting point is 01:20:33 So I went to jump school back then the army owned the air pipeline. So I went to jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia. Were you ever there? Like, uh, you never got to Benning. Okay. But it's like every other military base with a Ville on the outside, you know, the Ville, right? So you walk outside the gates and there's, well, what is it? Strip clubs, uh, tattoo parlors, some payday loans and a used car dealership and bars, right? So I mapped from Fort Benning, Georgia, where I went It's a basic parachutist school to the first, from the main gate to the first used car dealership with an over 20% interest rate, 0.7 miles. You can walk, if you don't have a car, from the main gates of Fort Benning, Georgia to that first used car dealership and get your new Mustang because you have like a regular government paycheck. Got to get that Mustang, right?

Starting point is 01:21:24 20% interest, right? And people have no idea. They don't understand compounding interest, right? They don't understand what that effect is. So there's also this predatory environment out there, right? There's cultural, there's predatory headwinds. And even in like today's day and age, like we look at inflation, right? Inflation has hit the military community harder than the civilian community, partially because

Starting point is 01:21:45 our pay raises, our pay rates are set by Congress, right? And that takes a political process to change our sort of economic equivalence. Blue collar workers who might be in unions and stuff can pivot. they can chart change their contracts they can do things to adjust with the pace of inflation faster than the military did right in addition to just a sort of lower wages in general and the size i think a lot of people forget the size of the military uh uh kind of base when you make one two percent adjustments it's a lot of money swing you know the swing of amount of capital that is now going to be allocated from a budget standpoint is very large right so actually you

Starting point is 01:22:23 The administration and Congress passed a 3.7% military pay raise this year. Sounds good, right? But inflation is running at 9%. So the military, to my mind, got a 6% pay cut this year. And so you see this environment, and it's translating into all kinds of things, right? 84% of military families cite financial stress as the number one household issue. Wow. You know, the Army is going to miss its recruiting goal by half this year, by half, right? So there's all these second and third order effects of it. And luckily, DOD is waking up to

Starting point is 01:22:58 this reality. In fact, I just saw that, I think it was the Joint Chiefs helped, you know, push through this augmented bill that will help keep military members above the poverty line. Wow. This is a sad day when our uniformed members are living below the poverty line. So the environment is tough. The DOD has not sufficiently prepared young military members and veterans, the military community, in terms of financial health and wellness. So because I had spent all this time in veteran service and with this mission of helping veterans, I realized that my, my new calling, my new purpose was to really embark on this path to help close that wealth gap, right? The best way to do it is, is, or one of the good ways to do it is through financial education and

Starting point is 01:23:54 training and the other is through investing. So I created this platform along with two other naval officers um two navy intel officers actually because you know we needed some big brains and not just a paleolithic knuckle dragger you know you need it all to be successful right yeah intel drives operations you know um so no my co-founder is 20 year wall street veteran um we we looked at we looked at this pay gap or we looked at this this wealth gap between the military and civilian community uh and we saw that there was no company out there serving the military for private wealth You would have thought that USAA traditionally had that market locked up. I'm a USAA member.

Starting point is 01:24:35 In fact, I just bought homeowners insurance through USAA this morning, right? I actually love USAA. I think they're awesome. But a couple of years ago, they sold off their investing arm to Charles Schwab, right? So you literally go on the USAA website, click invest. It'll redirect you to the Charles Schwab website. No affiliation with the military community. So we saw a need out there for a company that had military ingrained in its DNA to help increase the financial health and wellness in the military community.

Starting point is 01:25:08 So our big over-the-horizon North Star goal is to raise $50 billion in wealth for the military community. We do that by getting several million military members and their families investing with accounts worth – if we can get all of those families to get $10,000 worth of an investment account, we'll achieve our goal. The way we do it is the same way we do it in the military, right? Through training and education. And we actually believe in this so much. So we've created a curriculum on our platform, a knowledge curriculum, and that has simple things on it like savings versus investing. What your buddy who had no money in Iraq really – the video he really needed to watch. I don't know if I want to claim buddy status.

Starting point is 01:25:51 I want to say colleague. Your battle buddy. the what you know what that 58 second video you if he had watched that and answered two simple questions on savings versus investing we'd put five dollars in his brokerage account to start to invest so what the platform is essentially is a self-directed investing platform fractional shares zero commissions and we're trying to get people started on that investing journey right so that they can build long-term financial health and wealth. And what's fascinating is, one, just telling someone, hey, you can do this, right, is incredibly empowering. But the second thing is

Starting point is 01:26:31 understanding the perspective they're coming from. I think it is an underrated thing in these scenarios because people are like, oh, okay, the military, whatever. There are certain things that these people will go through. Divorce is an incredibly high rate in the military, especially with young military members versus kind of their civilian peers. And when you start thinking about all of these components that actually are financial aspects of their life, realizing that and being able to build a product, it makes sense that, of course, people are going to flow there. They'll say, hey, you understand me.

Starting point is 01:27:06 You have the products that I need. And if you can just get in front of them and get them there, then why wouldn't it work? 100%. And look, to be clear, our platform's open to anybody. Like by investing, by holding your portfolio on the Guild platform, you support the military community. And one of the ways you do that is our curriculum, that knowledge curriculum I was talking about, is literally some of it is good general financial advice. But we have a whole tab called Military Money that's designed specifically for the circumstances you just mentioned. Like, you know, how to read your leave and earnings statement, right?

Starting point is 01:27:38 You know, how to invest in the TSP. Or what happens if you PCS, if you change your station, right? You know, a lot of military folks are being moved to a different area, you know, 18 months, 24 year, three year cycles, like much more frequently than their civilian counterparts. And those have, as you said, those are really have economic implications, right? So are we have an entire section of our knowledge, curriculum, training and education devoted just to military specific circumstances. Yeah. And so the platform is completely open. it's a fintech platform that anyone can use. So whether you are a service member or you're not,

Starting point is 01:28:15 you can use it. And really the idea is for the service members, there are now all of these different features and products that other fintech applications have, but they are specifically designed with you in mind and kind of serve the needs that you have. But also if you are not in the military and you simply want to support the military, you can go ahead and use this application and some of the resources and time and energy of that team and stuff is going to help the military as well. That's, that's exactly it. And, um, you know, we like to say, and I fundamentally believe that money moves at the speed of trust. People will invest their money. They'll hold their money. They'll let other people be custodians of their portfolios, um, with people

Starting point is 01:28:55 that they trust. And for me, there's a large trust gap in the financial market, especially with the military. And look, I don't expect anybody to invest on our platform just because we wore the uniform and our our military folks trust doesn't work that way trust is earned right what we do think is that through through our experience and through the platform itself you'll see that trust and one of the things well well i'll put our platform up against any of the other you know apps and companies out there where people there are lots of places to hold their that people can hold their money right and and some of them are are quite excellent and that Because we have a social mission just to help the military community in general, like the most important thing for me is to get military personnel and veterans investing in their future.

Starting point is 01:29:46 Whether you do that on our platform or another platform is fine. One of the things that I believe increases the trust of our platform is not just that we all served in the military and we have this shared experience, but also the platform itself, right, is built around trust and transparency. So if you think about the two biggest barriers to entry for investing, it's people think they don't have enough money. And even if they did, they don't know where to invest their money. You know, you break down that we don't have enough money by doing fractional, by allowing fractional share investing. So you can start investing with as little as a dollar, right?

Starting point is 01:30:20 And so that sort of takes that out of the equation. And then the other piece is the knowledge piece. And we talked about the knowledge curriculum. But the sort of third leg of the triangle there is trust and transparency. And so one of the features, the way our platform is designed, is that everybody comes on, they get an anonymous username, and actually you'll see they also hashtag, so you'll see people grouping by like hashtag army, hashtag Navy SEALs, right? So you can actually check out on our platform how the army portfolio, how all the hashtag army folks are performing, but you get this- Just tell us, who's outperforming who? I mean, you know it's Navy, of course.

Starting point is 01:30:57 It is not. you know that was like a softball so you could tee off but it's not true you know the answer it's the air force of course because they have all this time to like when i was in iraq i remember we walked by some air force guys and they had very very very nice uh area to stay in and uh one of them said a comment that just i will forever never uh forgive anyone in the air force they were like oh yeah if we had to stay with you guys we would get hazard pay and i remember being like literally like that does look to be the truth here yeah well i mean And you know, the reality is like, it's easy to get those stock tips on your nice golf

Starting point is 01:31:30 courses, right? Absolutely. So, but there is this grouping by service. There is. That's one of the many ways that you can organize. And there's actually some interesting data around, you know, how these different communities are performed. But more importantly, you know, so full trust and transparency, like everybody gets an anonymous

Starting point is 01:31:49 username. I'm Gilded Frog One. You can literally like be on the platform every day. we rack and stack people and i took this straight out of straight out of crossfit like a whiteboard or straight out of a peloton um you know we rack and stack the top performing portfolios in the platform by day week and month so you can literally go on to this leaderboard right and you can say oh there gilded frog one uh he's number three on the leaderboard i want to see what he's holding you can click into there and you can see not by dollar amount but by percentage what they're holding in

Starting point is 01:32:19 their portfolio and you can see like wow this person you're like you know like the market was down on friday right because of all this stuff about fed rates and all about interest rates being raised by the fed and stuff markets down but you go wow this portfolio is up 11 that's that's incredible gains how like how did they do that click in and you can see like okay he's holding you know like yeah xyz of this percentage of investment right and so you can actually see what these people are holding so that not only increases trust and transparency it's it's also a learning tool it's a peer-to-peer mentorship kind of learning tool and if you think about how most people are getting their financial advice like reddit right or you know i'm fascinated with

Starting point is 01:33:00 the tiktok 22 year old who is uh dropping uh uh the knowledge of uh how that how they're going to retire by 35 yeah no like all of these financial you know youtube reddit you know tiktok all the 300 percent gains all of this stuff okay that may be true or it may not be true and that to me is like one of like one of the real problems with this like ecosystem of of financial information out there is that we don't actually have any verification processes on what's happening on Reddit. We don't know how true that is. Somebody could claim they had these giant gains, but on our platform, you can see in

Starting point is 01:33:34 real time with real conviction what people are investing in and how they're performing. And that kind of transparency doesn't really exist, right? And like, you know, if you have a financial advisor, right, the old, like, if you're such a good financial advisor, how come you're not rich, right? I prefer to use Warren Buffett's Wall Street's the only place where people take, I think they're Bentleys to take advice from people who ride the subway. Yeah, because if Warren Buffett says it, then you're not a troll. Then you're just really repeating the financial gods comments.

Starting point is 01:34:06 Totally. I was, you know, I was actually a guest of the Buffett's at Berkshire Hathaway conference this year, you know, what they call Woodstock for capitalists. And he said a similar thing, like, you know, he's got themes, right? Yes. And and he said, oh, yeah, it financial advisors are people who know, you know, it's like people who know nothing about the stock market being advised by people who know even less. You know, exactly. So and that's part of the reason that we think one self-directed investing is important, that people have to take control of their their financial future. And two, that we believe that this transparency piece is really important. The ability to look at real-time, real-time conviction of how portfolios are performing, about how people's portfolios are performing, and to use that as a model and a mentorship tool.

Starting point is 01:34:54 Of course, it requires research. Of course, it requires people to be educated about what they're doing. But it's sort of a start, and we think that differentiates us. We also have a really interesting thing that came out of Naval Intelligence School. So my co-founder, naval intelligence officer, was at DAMNEC going through naval intelligence officer training school. They studied this case of the USS Scorpion, which was essentially discovered in 1968 using a collective intelligence approach. Goldman Sachs has a very similar thing called the Goldman Sachs VIP Index where they use this sort of aggregation of top-performing stocks. Lots of sort of financial products use this kind of approach to collective intelligence.

Starting point is 01:35:36 We've taken that model. we've put it on the guild platform. We, we aggregate the top 30, uh, holdings on the guild portfolio. And it's this idea, this James Sir wiki idea of the wisdom of crowds that, you know, um, none of us is smarter than all of us. Right. And what we've seen, even in this down market where the S and P is, you know, still off, you know, 13% on the year, um, that the guild portfolio, this collective intelligence portfolio that we have is outperforming, uh, the S and P pretty substantially. So anyways, that's sort of like nerding out about the tools and the wickets and the design of the platform. Um, but the, the meta point is that, you know, I think we have built the

Starting point is 01:36:16 most trusted and transparent investing platform out there. Um, and it serves, it's open to anyone, but it also, it fund, its fundamental mission is to serve the military community. And you could make the argument uh that there's no community that's sort of more deserving to you know participate in in the growth the wealth growth of the united states yeah this episode is brought to you by bullish they've reinvented the digital asset exchange they give you access to d5 features like automated market making and liquidity pools in a regulated environment it's a whole new way to generate alpha bullish's total trading volumes have exceeded 25 billion dollars just in the seven months since it launched and the industry leading order depth means you can trade confidently when

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Starting point is 01:37:45 customer service is available 24 7 more of your favorite chains are on the way so run don't walk over to exodus.com slash pomp to download the exodus web 3 wallet right now again exodus.com slash pomp go check them out today and it feels like there's a lot of people who they simply just want to support the military right like there's people who say hey uh um in like the crypto world people always ask me like uh uh where's the decentralized twitter like no one's leaving twitter for decentralized twitter right like it has to be a 10x better product here actually though uh buying stocks you can do a lot of different platforms but i do think that uh uh even if that's all you did right you didn't even build something better which i think you guys are building

Starting point is 01:38:25 something better but if you didn't do that there's still a lot of people who'd say i'd rather just support the military and do it on a platform that understands how important that organization is to our country yeah you know as a as a as a tech entrepreneur you know this well you have all these wild ideas all these theories about how things are gonna work right and then then you hit the bat with jocko you know and jocko you know armbar crucifixions you and like your reality comes crashing down. At least that's my lived experience, right? But no, you have all these like wild ideas as a tech entrepreneur. And then every once in a while, you get sort of proof positive data points that some of your hypotheses are true, right? So we launched this company

Starting point is 01:39:05 in beta on Veterans Day last year. We went live January 1st. And we really did it pretty front site focused with the military community in mind. But we had this sort of inkling of an idea that people, supporters, that there's this patriot affinity market out there, people who want to support the military community and will sort of put their money where their mouth is, not as a donation, like I know this very well that people do that from a donation world, but from an investment perspective that they will invest on platforms like ours.

Starting point is 01:39:41 And as we have gone out and we've, you know, I was speaking to 350 Marines at Camp Pendleton the other day, like I'm speaking to the ROTC unit at Notre Dame and in, in two weeks, um, as I've continued to go out and stay focused on this, this core audience of like raising the financial literacy of the military community. Um, I've learned, I've seen more and more evidence that that is true, that there is this community of supporters out there, this Patriot affinity market, whatever, whatever you want to call it, um, uh, that is really, really keenly interested in investing their dollars on places that supported the military. The evidence I have is, uh, you know, one of the

Starting point is 01:40:21 best anecdotal pieces of evidence I have is I was on, uh, my friend, Carl Higby, who I served with in the SEAL teams. Um, he is a morning host, morning weekend hosts on Newsmax. Um, and, uh, so I, I told Carl like, Hey, there's this issue. Inflation is really eating into military salaries, pay decrease. Um, you know, we've, we've started this, this platform, uh, to, to help military people with their financial future interested in talking about he said yep please come on so uh sunday morning i got i was in california at the time so like 4 30 a.m hit you know 4 30 a.m in at 4 30 a.m late august sunday tv hit on newsmax right uh and i'm talking about guild and uh the not only did we get you know like 100 people signing up within five minutes of the segment

Starting point is 01:41:13 we had a series of people who had actually transferred their portfolios over from Robinhood to us right now I think partially Robinhood is its own story you know they certainly were innovative in the space but you know they're it's been pretty rocky for them now if you look at revenue and stock and and all that stuff and so and I think there's still a little bit of a trust hangover in the market but literally we got emails that morning from Sunday morning late August you know on newsmax saying like hey please transfer my portfolio from x company to you guys i want to invest on a platform that's more aligned with my values yep and this was like the water board like you do all these pieces and then every once in a while something actually comes true and

Starting point is 01:41:56 we had been sort of like projecting this in our mind for a long time that you know non-military people just supporters of the military community um would would want to invest on guild simply for for this fact and then that email literally this morning like they're literally that same morning you know several of those like please please transfer we want a company more aligned with our values and that that that for us was a huge win yeah i mean look it it uh it makes sense and i think also um it goes back to uh courage is contagious i i think there's a whole group of people in the united states who uh they feel kind of uh weird about uh voicing uh support for various causes uh but then when they see their neighbor or their friend or somebody they follow on social

Starting point is 01:42:41 media or whatever say hey i care about this stuff and and i'm willing to take action even if it's just transferring my assets to a platform if i'm going out in the community doing something then all of a sudden it's like oh cool i got air cover like yeah i care about that too actually and you start to see that build over time yeah and i think there's like this easy sand trap that we could get caught in on this is that there's this political ideology or political lens like You know, because everything's become so polarized, like we could think that like, oh, that's just right wing stuff, right? Like the anecdote that I just told you, you know, from Newsmax, right, which like leans right, you know, as a news institution or whatever. And like but like really what I think that this is as apolitical as it gets.

Starting point is 01:43:22 And I think it's the same as we thought about in Iraq or Afghanistan when we were going to kick in a door. We didn't ask if the person in front or behind us, you're Republican or you're Democrat. Who are you voting for? Go, go, go. Clear, clear, clear. Right. No. Like and I think one of one of the best parts of the military and why we still largely enjoy like, you know, public support and institutional support as as an organization is because we have been able for the most part to operate independent of that political lens, like the independence of the U.S. military that we serve. whoever the commander in chief is at the time is extraordinarily important we've tried to bring that ethos to the guild platform like you know supporting the military is not a political act it's not an ideological act right it doesn't mean that you're partisan in any way shape or form right i you know we were talking about you know al gore's innovation earlier today you know coupled

Starting point is 01:44:22 with uh you know my appearance on carl higby's newsmax segment there those are opposite sides of the political spectrum well i always uh joke that uh uh most people forget uh a republican or a democrat every four to eight years uh becomes the leader of the military right like like right now exactly democrat you should be republican like it'll keep switching and so the if the leader uh has a different political ideology uh back and forth like that's probably a pretty good thing yeah and i and you know this might be a bridge too far or whatever but i there are all of these like extraordinary lessons that i think you and i have tried to extrapolate from our military experience to bring to the civilian world. I think some of the popularity of, you know,

Starting point is 01:45:01 of Jocko and some of these Stan McChrystal, other like sort of storied military leaders who are now giving, you know, corporate speeches and stuff like that is that there is wisdom that is requisite in the military that adds value to our country and our culture. And I think this is one of those examples, the nonpartisan nature of the military. If we can extrapolate that out writ large to society um i think we'll all i think we'll all be better served and uh that's certainly the ethos that we've tried to live at via guild yeah i i love the idea and i think a lot of people who watch this will uh will love it as well where can we send people if they want to download the app or participate yeah uh iphone app store uh look up guild financial and come right up download

Starting point is 01:45:47 the app um the uh and same with android all of the platforms our website guild.financial um and And, yeah, we love having, you know, new people on board. It's great. If you're watching this or listening and you like the military, Kaj is being nice. Go download the app. Where can we send people to find you on the internet? You know, I have my own website, KajLarson.com.

Starting point is 01:46:15 It's got a repository of my media work and stuff on there as well. I do the gram. I love the gram at Kaj Larson. just imagine if instagram was out while you were a seal oh my god i feel like we barely like like we couldn't even take photos in those days you know so guys have all like you know like the the platoon guys these days they got all these glamour shots right like us we weren't even allowed to have cameras you know so i don't even have that like great stash of like kaj team guy photos yeah i think i have like maybe 12 or 15 photos uh but like actual photos right well so

Starting point is 01:46:51 but here was the thing is, uh, I was there 08, 09. And so like when I got back, Facebook was just now like breaking out of like the, uh, uh, the college world. And, uh, I remember feeling like a freaking badass that I got to upload some photos on Facebook. And then I had like, now I'm like, I have no clue what, where, where photos are, any of this stuff. But like, there's those 10 photos on Facebook. So like you have physical photos, which I think is for, I mean, for decades, that's what people had totally totally i actually do still have like a like a shoe box it's like a cliche but a shoe box of like photos from you know buds and you know my first seal team and and all that stuff but yeah no but i i love the gram i'm big on the gram you know i'm pretty

Starting point is 01:47:34 responsive for the most part like if people you know dm me or you can always contact me through my website my my trigger warning is that most of my my gram photos you know are like frogman friday or like spearfishing or like, you know, there's, there's, it's almost always, it's almost all underwater. Yeah. Well, that's, that's, uh, uh, now we have, uh, the technology where you can have a cameraman go with you to take the photos. Totally. God, I needed, I needed those guys in the teams. Can you imagine at, uh, at Bud's to have, uh, have cameraman? Like I, I do think a lot about, uh, like the vlogging culture. Like you see all these kids on, on, uh, YouTube and stuff like imagine when somebody starts to go into the SEAL teams like yeah I'll come but uh

Starting point is 01:48:18 my cameraman is get the fuck out of here it's gonna happen it's gonna happen it's a new it's a new Navy I I actually think it's probably one of the best things the uh Navy or Army could do right is like uh go find one of these like influencer people who has somewhat of a big audience and say to them like hey you want to go through buds and again the overlap of people who have an audience on the internet and want to go through buds is like probably not that big but you could probably find one person and say hey here's what we're going to do is come out and do it it's a recruiting video yeah i mean and maybe it's basic training and not buds or whatever but like you could figure something out i mean they did this essentially right they had this documentary

Starting point is 01:48:55 about class 234 on discovery channel and they followed cameras like all through and i've gone back and and watch it some of those dudes actually rolled into my class they got hurt or whatever um and i've and i've watched it and it it's good like that's that's the best part to bring this whole thing full circle like there's no secret to buds right there's no like all the secret stuff happens after buds yeah and you graduate buds you don't even know that much about being a seal you do a lot of push-ups right but it's all right there in plain sight you know you're gonna go to buds you're gonna be in the water you're gonna lift some logs right you're gonna run around with a boat on your head like no mystery no steroids required right just be tough and don't quit

Starting point is 01:49:35 the the last thing i'll say is uh we had a a gold bar lieutenant show up uh in iraq and uh e7 platoon leader uh i just clear his day we'll never forget this moment uh he said something in the e7 system he goes hey man in here you're the boss out there i'm the boss yeah and i remember being like there's levels to this shit right and and i think it is it's like look there's a training is obviously very important but then there's the real world application of this stuff and uh the Navy SEALs are some of the best in the world at both. Well, thanks, man. And thanks for being such a advocate of the, the military veterans community that we, that we care so much about and being one of these guys, like, like our buddy Jack Carr, who has, has found his footing,

Starting point is 01:50:18 you know, in the, in the civilian sector. Now it's, now it's our job to like lift our military brethren up with us. Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive

Starting point is 01:50:46 three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends

Starting point is 01:51:08 and I'll see you all for the next episode.

The Pomp Podcast - #1096 Kaj Larsen Is The Navy SEAL Taking On Wall Street

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