The Rich Roll Podcast - Special Forces Operators On Mindset, Veteran Mental Health & Extreme Challenges

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

My friend, coach, and frequent podcast guest Chris Hauth is joined by former Navy SEAL Ryan “Birdman” Parrott and former US Army Special Forces Alex Racey to discuss mindset tools for the new year, veteran mental health, the importance of doing hard things, and their impending 7x Project–7 marathons, 7 swims, and 7 skydiving jumps on 7 continents in 7 days. This conversion is equal parts inspiring and important, and I’m honored to share it with you all right now. So please hit that subscribe button, and enjoy. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Peace + Plants, Rich

The Rich Roll Podcast. Let's go do something gnarly and then reboot everything. So then we can start to truly showcase the basics again. On the pod today are three guys attempting a most impressive and meaningful feat. There could be skydiver base jump, land and run a full marathon, and then plunge into the water or swim on all seven continents in seven days. My friend, my coach, frequent podcast guest, Chris Houth is one of them. The other two are former Navy SEAL Ryan Bergman Parrott, as well as former U.S. Army Special Forces Alex Bracey. Together, they're

all here to discuss this insane, crazy, impending feat that they're about to embark upon. It's called the 7X Project. We got to go big. And after meeting Chris and doing some of these runs, I'm like, maybe I went a little too far or maybe a lot too far. I got a couple more things I would very much like to mention before we dig into this one. But first, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety.

And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs.

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and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, the 7X Project. More impressive than the actual feed itself is the goal behind it, which is to gather data on human performance and, more importantly, recovery from high-stress situations for the purpose of helping retired veterans learn how to recover properly

from the traumas they endured throughout a career of selfless service. We've never been at war like this for decades at a time. So when I think about who we can help, there are people out there that maybe just missed it as far as, hey, there's some really simple things you can do to take better care of yourself, just focusing on how you eat, sleep, move, and even mindset stuff. On top of all of this, they also hope to shed a light on and find a solution for a silent epidemic in our country, which is that five times more veterans have died by suicide since 9-11 than have died in combat or in active duty in any form,

which is obviously a huge problem in dire need of redress. And so, yeah, it's a massive problem, and that's just that community. You talk about first responders and you talk about civilians. Who knows what that number looks like? So this conversation, we unpack a lot. It's equal parts inspiring and important, and I'm honored to share it with you all right now. So buckle up. This is a good one. Hope you enjoy it.

And without further ado, please enjoy. So happy to have you guys here. Really excited to get into all of this. The how, the why, but let's start with the what. Who wants to jump in and explain this crazy fucking thing that you guys are about to do right now? I'm game in. So the backstory of this event is I've always been fascinated by extreme sports. And so doing things like skydiving, base jumping, flying wingsuits, anything that gets my heart rate going, I've been fascinated by. And I've been doing it, but I wanted to do it in a way that would

not only honor veterans for their service, but also be able to give back to them. So how do we raise capital? Well, we do crazy things, and then it brings money, and then we give that away. And in 2019, I got a phone call from a teammate that my sniper partner, one of my true norths in life, took his life. And for me, it was, I don't like when people say that sucks or I'm just going to mourn them. I want to do something about it. And so I said, what are we missing here? Why does this keep happening? I'm so sick to death of losing friends. So for me, it was, is there more to the story than it just being a brain issue? And my idea was that it was physiologically based because everything is part of the physiology. And if it's not all in unison, you're going to have problems.

Take a guy like Alex, who's done 25 years in the military. If you compound that effect of breaking them down over that career, of course, they're going to have issues when they get out. So then my idea was, all right, let's go do something gnarly and break our anatomy, break our physiology, and then reboot everything. So then we can start to truly showcase the basics again. How do you get back to true north or homeostasis? So the idea of coming up with 7X was who's going to care if we run in six states or seven cities or whatever, we got to go big. And after meeting Chris and doing some of these runs, I'm like, maybe I went a little too far

or maybe a lot too far. Chris has experience with that though. He has overly eager and enthusiastic athletes that approach him with audacious projects. And he has a very delicate touch in trying to, you know, kind of create a sense of reality around that. But you know, obviously you're here and this is happening, so. It is.

And so the idea was, could we do like the seal thing, sorry, but see air and land. So could we skydive or base jump, land and run a full marathon and then plunge into the water or swim on all seven continents in seven days? And I immediately asked some of my dear friends like Alex, hey, what do you think about this?

And it was instantaneously I'm in. And so we knew that we had a caliber of guys who had the mentality for it, who were willing to get to the athletic place they needed to be. And then we started developing the team, the scientist team around it to say, what are we gonna study?

How are we gonna do this thing? And everything we thought of except for like, are we gonna get coached? Like who's gonna teach us how to move this way? And Alex actually spearheaded finding us, Chris. Right, so part of your profession, Alex, is as a coach, right? As a sort of performance coach at large.

Yep, I do some personal performance coaching, but from an athletic standpoint, not at this level. So actually, I mean, you know, starting with the SEAL Army stuff where we bust each other's chops all the time, the only reason I'm at the podcast is because I've heard about him through your book. So I read your book and I was like,

you know, went from the couch to doing what he did. And I had to go back because it was on Audible. I had to listen to the, I'd listened to the book twice already. And I was like, what's that coach's name? What's his company? And then I did the cold email off of the website and got a call back, and here we are. Right. A few months later, so. Right. Yeah, so I found Chris through you.

Your story illuminated, you know, I knew enough about Zone 2 to know that we needed somebody who could get us there. With an endurance background. Yeah. You know, as opposed to the whole running in the gray zone the whole time and then being like, wow, we really tanked on the actual event. Yeah. So there's the actual endurance piece to this whole thing, running seven marathons on seven continents in seven days. And we'll get into, you know, where those locations are and what that entails. And then there's the extreme piece to this whole thing, which is base jumping into these marathons or parachuting into

them. And then there's the logistics piece, right? Which I'm sure you guys are really good at. Like, this is kind of what you're trained at. So it's a very complicated puzzle, right? It's a nightmare. It's a fucking nightmare. So the idea behind how are we going to pull this off is my COO is a Green Beret. And my personal belief is that Green Berets are the best at logistics. They're good at going into places and establishing a relationship, establishing a mechanism within that place. And so not only do we bring the Green Beret and Bryce Hansen to actually run the logistics piece, but then he brought in his Green Beret team to deploy around the world to really get these locations fortified, connect with the locals, make sure that we were set with everything. So it's been a process of

about 15 months of planning and we're about 80% there right now. Okay. So explain the locations and the specifics of the event itself, just so people understand what we're talking about here. Certainly, so we're taking a group of about 75 to 80 people on this. So that alone, right? We made the logistics even. When Chris first called me and he told me this,

I was like, wait, what? Exactly, wait, how many runners are there? Go ahead, sorry. They don't know that they're all doing it too. That was another question I had, but go ahead. So we'll all fly into Cape Town, South Africa, where we stage and that's where our plane will be waiting for us.

We have a- A 757. This is not like a little plane. It's a massive plane. Right. Apparently it seats 400 people. So we went overkill and it's just one of those things that can get us everywhere we need to go. It's quite expensive too. So I would imagine just the drama of trying to find the plane that we could actually use that was available. That was somewhat within reason of cost. That was difficult

enough just to find a plane. So we actually worked on that for about nine months to get a plane solidified. So once we get to Cape town, we'll get on our plane. We'll stay on that plane for the duration of the trip. And we go right from Cape Town into a place called White Desert, Antarctica. Very private place, really, really cool place, it's white-desert.com. And you can actually go there, but it's very desolate,

there's not much there. So our VIPs are going with us, they're gonna be doing like ice wall climbing and apparently one of the packages they get is they get to have a snowball fight with the special operations afterwards, which is really why everybody wants to go. Is this where people have gone in the past

to do their Antarctica marathon or this is a different part of Antarctica? This is completely different. Yeah. So this is runway, ice runway. This is going to be our location to run around several times. But it's really cool.

They have pods. They have kitchen. They have warm rooms. They have everything that we need should we have an issue there. Because weather changes pretty quickly. And if we can't get out, we're in trouble. So we're going to try to make it as quick as possible. So what will happen is when we land in Antarctica, we're going to start off by doing a skydive.

And the skydive, the second we leave the plane is when we land in Antarctica, we're going to start off by doing a skydive. And the skydive, the second we leave the plane is when it kicks off the seven days. So we could be there for 10 hours and not be part of the seven days. It's when we leap starts the seven-day window. So we'll do our deal. It's going to take him two hours to complete the marathon. It's going to take us 12. We're going to get it done.

Has anybody parachuted into Antarctica before? Yes, they have. Yes. Yeah, we're not trying to, I mean, what we are doing with this specific event altogether, it's not a world record because it's never been done. So it doesn't exist. Right. But that's not our vision here.

Our vision is we want answers. We want to really build something at the end. We'll talk about it later, but build something at the end that we can give to people to truly help benefit their life. So it's uncharted territory. So we'll do our jump and then we're going to get right into the run. We're still working out what that's going to look like. And then we're going to plunge. We're going to pull our plunge. They have those glacial lakes out there. So they're going to pound some of that out and we're going to jump in. How

long do you think you're going to be going in that water? Three minutes minimum, but I'm going to try to push four. Yeah, nice. That's cold. Do you parachute with your running shoes on and just immediately go into the run, or do you assess when you land? Yeah, we're going to actually be in cold, cold weather gear for the jump. It's going to be super cold way up high,

and we're not sure exactly what the altitude we're going to jump at, but way too cold for us to go slick. So we're going to have time when we land to change out, get ready, and then start warming up. Because one of the biggest complexities with jumping, especially in areas like this and wind, is you can turn an ankle or a knee really quickly upon landing. And if you do that, it's over.

There's no getting into the run. You're hosed, and you're hosed for the whole trip. So we gotta be very careful about how we do our landings, not just in that type of environment, but because we're gonna be tired, muscles are gonna be completely smoked after each day. The jumps are gonna get more and more detailed. They're gonna be more complex. So we have to really be careful about that.

And do you jump from a separate aircraft or you're not jumping out of a 757, right? Like that doesn't work. That would be cool. Yeah, I don't know anything about this. So yeah, but you must have some other aircraft for that. It would be a normal, what most jumpers we jump out of twin otters.

So we'll be jumping out of a skydive plane out there. Got it, okay. And there's four total veterans that are actually doing the challenge, is that correct? So there's seven in total, four veterans, seven in total that are gonna be doing all of the running. And then four of the seven will be doing the skydive run and plunge.

Got it, okay. And then the rest of the plane is filled with support team. I mean, on your website, you have this massive team. Like there's a lot of people that are contributing to this effort. But then on top of that, you have like VIPs, right? Who are kind of donating money or paying for the privilege of being on the plane

for part or all of this endeavor. So, correct? Yes. Every time we go into a little deeper mission planning, we find that, oh, we need this, or we need this and we want to be self-sustaining. So we have our medical professionals on the team. We have support staff for our team, for the VIPs, because we're going to go separate directions. The VIPs get to actually run a mile with us on each continent. They get a tandem skydive over the pyramids of Egypt.

I mean, they get to do some really cool things. But then they're off to do a very personalized excursion while we're completing each mission. I see. Cool. Yeah. So we'll have nutrition support. We'll have physical therapy, you know, PT support. We'll have our doc team and our emergency medical technician, you know, on the ground. We need to stick this guy with an IV. Patrick will be with us on on our part of the adventure and all of the admin piece of you know feeding us and just you know being able to react to anything that happens some of the runs will be laps others will be out and back so there'll be different admin requirements for all of that and you know even just uh you know running in Antarctica

we're gonna make a good guess at what we should be wearing. But luckily a few miles later, if we've completely boogered that up, we'll be able to have what we need right there with our team to fix it. Well, the good news is you have a massive plane that can handle a lot of equipment, right?

Whatever we want in there. Don't worry about how many bags you're bringing with you, right? There's that, but it's also, I mean, knowing what we're getting into and trying to pre-plan that. But I think the bigger story is around all these participants too, from a logistics standpoint, they're part of the experience to then help

in the documentary and sort of the information we're gleaning from it, that they're there firsthand to also provide valuable professional insight. Right. And we'll get into all of that in the why, but I just wanna walk through like the experience itself. So from Antarctica, you go where? We go to Perth, Australia.

So we chose the most, well, I should say this cause I'll take ownership. I've chosen the worst scenario of travel. So everybody, the World Marathon Challenge, all those other organizations that do things like this are like, why are you going that way? What do you mean? Am I wrong? So that just looked good to me.

So we're going Bass-ackwards, but we're going to Perth next. So that's a nice long leg for us to do some recovery, see how we feel after the first one. And then we're going to start thawing out midway through. And then we get to Australia and it's going to be hot. So we go from super cold, sub-zero temperature, all the way to super hot summertime. So that's going to be interesting in itself. We chose Perth. And really, I chose some of these locations because at the beginning planning of this,

we were still heavily in COVID. And so some of these places were locked down where it was an impossibility. There was one point where I said, this is not even going to be able to happen because Australia was locked down completely. And we were, I mean, we brought in state department reps and other entities to help us figure out how to circumnavigate. And I mean, they're like, we'll do everything in our power, but we can't guarantee anything. So I'm like, we don't have a program here. So it got really nerve-wracking, but we just kept pushing forward.

And then finally you started seeing things open up. It was a blessing. So Australia will be next. One of our pro base jumpers, Scott Evers, is from Australia. So we've got major connectivity out there. We're connected to Australian SAS. So they're going to lay out a lot of the red carpet. And we're choosing more of an area that's

more desolate, kind of looks like Australia as far as instead of city. I don't like spiders much, so I'm kind of, that's going to be my thing on this whole trip. Like if I see a spider, you'll hear me a million miles away. Well, there's lots of stuff in Australia that wants to kill you. Spiders concern me though. But you're going to base jump into the marathon from there? Let's see. So in Australia, we're also skydiving. I see. So there was only a couple of places. We actually originally wanted to do base jumping everywhere, but it's impossible to do base jumping in seven days on seven continents. It's just too hard. So skydiving is a lot easier. Everybody on the team skydives and very few base jump.

So we wanted to make sure that everybody who was jumping could truly jump. So Alex and some of our other guys did military jumps and it converts over. And our pro athletes are some of the best jumpers in the world. So skydiving, we're only doing base jumping in two or three locations of the seven. Right. But those are epic locations. So from Perth, you go, where's next from there? To Dubai.

Dubai. So there's an epic base jump happening there. So it was originally going to, we were looking at the Al Burj, and we heard that it was feasible, but for a price tag that we couldn't afford. Right. That's the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building there, right? No, it's the one on the water. The tall one is definitely an interesting one. The sail one. Correct. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's got the helicopter platform, but we've now gotten word that it's the princess tower.

So, I mean, you can junk a wingsuit off of it. So I'm thinking, hmm, maybe we're going to do wingsuits. So that'll be a base jump, but everywhere will still contain a skydive as well. It's for the guys that are not base jumpers. So we can still get that going. I mean, how many can do the wingsuit? You do that, right? But does anyone else on the team do it? I mean, you have coaches and stuff like that, but of the people that are running the marathons. No, we're the only one. You're the only one, right? Yeah. I should look at that and say, am I doing something wrong with my life?

Right, yeah. I should look at that and say, am I doing something wrong with my life? I know. By the way, my wife is obsessed with like bird suit flying. Like she's constantly sharing those videos. Like she's just like, I think in some parallel universe, she's like a bird suit person.

Like she just loves it. Like it's fantastic. It's such a cool, I wanna get into like what that's all about, but I don't want to derail what we're talking about. Sorry for the diversion. Absolutely. So it's neat.

Dubai, really cool place. And for me, I mean, he's traveled everywhere around the world. I spent most of my time in Iraq. So I haven't seen the world like he has. I have never been to any one of these locations, minus London. So I'm really excited.

It's going to be new. Yeah, so we go to Dubai and after we complete the jump, then we're going to run, I think that they've considered the marathon that they do out there, the marathon route. And then we'll plunge in the water and get back to our plane and we're out to the next location,

which would then be Cairo, Egypt. That one's going to be fun. Yeah, so you're going to parachute over the Great Pyramids. That one's going to be fun. Yeah. So you're going to parachute over the Great Pyramids. That's right. There has to be some logistical back-channeling with political bigwigs in order to pull that off, right? No one gets to do that. It's hard. It's been difficult. And yeah, sign this paper and then submit it. And we'll tell you in three weeks if you're good to go or not. It's been a lot longer than three weeks, so we're still working through it.

tell you in three weeks if you're good to go or not. It's been a lot longer than three weeks, so we're still working through it. But it happens. We've, you know, plenty of our guys have jumped it before, so not really worried about it. It's going to be an interesting marathon because some of it's soft sand. Takes me back to the days of seal training, which sucked. So running in soft sand is not the most fun. So it won't be all soft sand. And then we actually have to get into a helicopter or we're going to get into a helicopter or we're going to get into a plane and fly to a different location and jump in the water because the nile's really really bad there's a lot of bacteria in there and apparently americans are not allowed at all to go in the water so and what is the swim piece in all of this so what does that

mean getting in the water yeah so of course the athletes always ask that question where everybody else like oh you're gonna get in the water so it was just a plunge and the idea for me was sierra inland so let's just get in the water because i didn't think we were going to have enough time to actually do a swim on each location it's more so just douse yourself off from the marathon and enjoy so right yeah that was that was my first question when bird brought this up i I was like, when you say swim, what do you mean? Because that's a significant emotional event for some Army guys. Right. Right?

So me being one of them. There's a reason you went into the Army and not the Army. Yeah, there's a reason I went in the Army. That is absolutely true. Navy, Army. Yeah. So he was like, oh, just a plunge, man. I was like, all right, I'm good with that.

Right. I'm looking forward to swimming. Yeah, of course you are. Yeah. I'm looking forward to swimming. Yeah, of course you are. I'm looking forward to watching Chris swim. You're gonna have some lawn chairs parked right at the base and you'll see him going out. You all plunge, Chris is gonna go on a little mini adventure of his own, right?

Again, unique locations. When else am I gonna have a chance to do those swims? And Chris, are you gonna run all the marathons also? I'm gonna run all the marathons. And we have two pacers along, guys who run ultras and so on. So friends of theirs and they've been around them for a while.

But then when we were about a month into the coaching, six weeks into the coaching, they said, we'd love to have you along. And I was like, well, all right, twist my arm. So, although, you know, you go through the training and you're like, yeah, marathon for seven days in a row is going to be a little painful. A little bit. You're no stranger to these things though.

I am not. But this is a little qualitatively different, right? Yeah, it is. Base jumping? Are you going to jump? I'm tandem jumping in Egypt. That's right. You are.

Wow. At a minimum. Yeah, we'll see. Just, you're gonna just push Chris out the door, right? Absolutely. We're gonna get it on camera too. They've already said a few times, the fact that I've put them

through this training peaks torture, they're like, we're gonna get it all back. Yeah. In one single push out the window. We'll catch you, we'll catch you, but as your free fall and release the shoot. Right. All right, so from Egypt then to?

To London. To London. Yeah. And here's where it gets pretty cool, right? I'm super excited about London because I believe personally that I'm James Bond. So I'm super excited to go back to my homeland. So now London was just one of those deals where I'd work with some of the British SAS and I've got a lot of friends out there. So I said, this was going to be a really unique place for us to go. Initially, we worked on jumping the bridge out there and the bridge is very unique. It's called London Bridge. And a lot of people know it.

Significant. What people don't know is it was the place where they first did base jumps. And it was like in the 1800s, like late 1800s for military testing. So it has been jumped once since then. And it's very difficult to get done. Well, one of our guys on our team

is friends with the guy who makes all that happen. So we said, all right, let's go for that. And then we were going to jump into the water. So we would actually land, run the full marathon first, and then jump off the bridge into the water. We have had since then had to change it because getting a parachute wet in saltwater, it really taxes your parachute. We can't use it the rest of the trip so the idea now is we're actually going to land and we're going to run our marathon and then what will happen is at chelsea hospital we're going to park a crane and we're going to base jump off the crane right near chelsea hospital and there's water right there for the skydivers they will go on a helicopter to a new location and make their jump and then we'll all come back together. Wow, that's cool. Yeah. That's a bummer though.

They won't let you do it off the bridge. Well, let them do it. It's just because of the shoot. Oh, because of the shoot, right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Gotcha. We are still working on it. You know, we're just gonna keep going

until they say absolutely no. Can't you get a different shoot? It just becomes more money. Yeah. I mean, you got a 757. I mean, you're gone. You know, you might as well go the extra mile. Exactly.

Get a backup, get another shoot. Oh, if this logistics weren't enough. Yeah. Wow, cool. And then from there, Cartagena? Cartagena. And that's the last stop? The last stop will be America.

Oh, America. Oh, that's right. Yeah, okay, so sorry, walk us through the last two. Yeah, so we're gonna go to Cartagena. Originally it was gonna be Brazil. We chose Cartagena because it's right. Yeah. Okay. So sorry. Walk us through the last two. Yeah. So we're going to go to Cartagena. Originally it was going to be Brazil. We chose Cartagena because it's closer, gets us into town. We can do what we need to do. And then it's a shorter stunt from where we're going in Columbia to America so that we could get on the ground and rest for a bit and acclimatize before we start moving. So we chose Cartagena and it's really nice because they're super about working with us.

You know, we've partnered with the Colombian Navy. They're offering an experience of a lifetime to our VIPs where they can go out and shoot fully automatic machine guns off their boats at targets and just metal targets and plastic targets and things like that. But it's something that they don't offer to anybody. So that's what we were looking for with the VIP experience was,

could we do things that you can't pay to do, period. it's things that we are using our connections and our friendships to say we're doing something unique and this is for the greater good what can we really do because these these vips are benefactors they're the ones who are making this whole thing right for us so we're showing them an incredible experience while we are almost dying so yeah you guys are gonna be fine you're in good hands with Chris. You're gonna be all right. Yeah. I don't know about the chute not opening up or anything.

Chris can't help you with that part, but the running part, I think you guys are gonna be good. If he twisted his ankle upon landing, he would still run faster than us. Yeah. We're gonna get into the training, don't worry. All right, and then you to get into the training. Don't worry. Uh, all right. And then you end up at, um, at, at a, uh, in, in the United States at like the seal museum, right?

So we were initially trying for that and we ended up deviating to Texas. Now we're going to go just near, uh, Dallas, Texas. So it brings everybody back to where we're originally starting from. We can bring all our gear back. And then after we finish, we're going to have a couple of days of R&R and enjoyment with families in that. And then we've got brain scans for the athletes. So we partnered with the Center for Brain Health and they're doing pre and post brain scans just to see what happens

when somebody goes through something like this. Yeah. So be able to quantify some data. One thing is we focus on physiology. They focus really on the brain. So let's bring it all together. Right. Well, I think that's a pretty good segue

into the why behind all of this. I mean, you shared a little bit about your background and your colleague who took his life. I know veteran health, mental, emotional, physical, spiritual is really the backbone of this whole thing. So, you know, talk to me about, you know, the inspiration for this and, you know, maybe even contextualize it with some sense of, you know,

what's going on with veterans right now, what the problems are and how you are looking at the solutions to these problems. Absolutely, love the tag team this one with you. Sure, yeah. Let's do it. So Alex more on the mic here. Yeah, so it would be when I,

David Metcalf is my sniper partner's name and it would be like me and Alex. Alex is a leader. He was higher ranking than me. And he's a guy that everybody around him looks at as, hey, you're the go-to guy because you're always on point. You're always ready to go. You're the guy we look to for word and advice.

So that was David for me. And we have this suicide epidemic and it's not just the veteran community. It's across the globe. It's an issue, a terrible issue. But you never think about your mentor, your true north taking their life. You feel completely helpless when that happens.

And that's what I felt. I mean, I felt like I had no guidance at that point. And then I couldn't understand why he of all people did it because this is not David. Some people say that. David was the guy that we all went to and we never saw it. His wife didn't see it.

I mean, there's nothing up until the very end. And we've been dealing more and more with the post-traumatic stress of the wars, the TBIs, traumatic brain injuries. You're hearing about CTE within the NFL and that. And so it's becoming a bigger problem. Personal take, as we've talked about it, what we try to understand and try to take our minds

to where that could be to better understand it because it's hard. You know, I've been low before. I've had my dealings with depression and anxiety and I didn't get to that point where that was a thought. So I'm trying to get there for David's sake and for all the others. And one is being away from the tribe. That's a humongous thing.

You know, you're a part of something. I was eight years in. I did eight years in the military. 25 years, you've been in athletics your whole life. And then let's say that you can't be around that community anymore. You know, how does that make you feel? What do you do? And it's not easy to get through it. You got to figure out who you are deeper. And we're not trained to do that. We don't talk about that stuff. We're supposed to be tough, right? We tell ourselves that. So being part of the

community is something that we're trying to teach people is how you got to stay connected with the brotherhood, the sisterhood. You have to stay involved, even though you don't wear the uniform, because it's not the uniform, it's the camaraderie. That's what matters and what builds us to do the jobs that we do. So that's one of the biggest pieces. The second piece is they don't try to reinvent themselves. You know, we don't want people to live in the past. You got to move forward and you got to say, okay, I still am that person, but I want to add to it now.

So what's next for me? And I'm going to go for it. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think to just add on to what Birdman said, and I've been out of the military since 2016, so my experience is way different than what people leaving the military now are experiencing, My experience is way different than what people leaving the military now are experiencing, and I hope they're experiencing a much better transition than what was going on back when I got out. And I had a great transition, but I don't know that it was, you know, my unit did as much as, you know,

we were always kind of on the cutting edge of how do we just get better at everything, whether that was performance while you're in the job to, hey, we need to transition guys out better and gals out better. And we're always just trying to learn. As I think about everything that we're talking about, I'm fortunate in that I've never had someone very close to me from the military commit suicide. And I try to think about, you know, how do people get to that spot? And I just, you know, obviously anybody sitting here talking about it can't really relate to that, or at least in my mind they can't. What I've been thinking about a lot as part of this project and, you know, the things we're trying to help our community with and it you know and that's firefighters police officers you know people in the medical field that just have these incredibly stressful situations that generally people you know a lot of people in their common day-to-day life don't experience like the military so so i

would you know i kind of look at that whole group as our as our community that we want to be able to help affect mainly um i keep coming back to transitions and relationships and i'm fortunate and that i've i have i had great you know my big thing was i love the people i worked with and i was in the same organization for over 17 years last 17 plus years of my career was with the same people. And, and I'm, you know, I mean, it's, they're your family. You know, some years I spent more time with them than I did my, my wife and kids, my biological family. So, so it is, it's interesting to think about how that can affect certain people when they, when they lose that people when they lose that. When they lose that identity,

you know, you put all your eggs in one basket. Hey, I'm an Army Special Forces stud, I'm a Navy SEAL, I'm a MARSAC guy, I'm a SWAT operator, I'm a, you know, I'm the whatever, the best firefighter in my county, and then all of a sudden you lose that or you just age out. Right. How does that affect people? And how do we like, like Birdman was saying, how do we,

how do we maybe focus on keeping people from ever getting to that spot where they think like, think about that as an option because i don't you know i don't know who's ever going to figure out how to fix the while i'm already here but you know i like walking them off the ledge versus like preventing them from even getting that far down the line yeah i mean let's just keep them off you know away from the cliff altogether. It's a, you know, it's a great point and it's a much more complicated conversation about how you solve that connection piece than it is to talk about TBI or PTSD.

Like, I feel like, you know, we have come a long way in terms of awareness of these issues. I don't know how great, you know, the Veterans Administration is or what the care looks like for people in your situation when you're exiting out of that life. I'm pretty sure that there's a lot of work that still needs to be done

to properly attend to these issues, but at least we're talking about those issues. And there are sort of medical solutions to those on some level or psychological solutions to those, but the connectivity piece, the community piece, like when you exit out of this thing that was so intense where you're so bonded to this community of people and then overnight it's gone,

then that leaves you with this search for meaning in your life that can be existential. That's a much harder thing. I mean, Chris, when we were talking the other day about just, you know, I was trying to wrap my head around how to approach this conversation. I mean, you had some interesting thoughts about this as well.

Yeah, I mean, for me, and I can relate it to what we even talked about last year or two years ago with regards to athletes, right? You're playing in front of 100,000 people one Saturday, suddenly you're graduated or not even graduated and done. Your entire identity, your entire life since you're two, three, four, five years old is gone. And so relating, not understanding, but relating.

And we talk a lot about it. And you talked about it to me early on in this project about how just the tools and techniques are not available from, you know, nutrition guidance to supplements, to what kind of strength work or PT work you should be doing, or just, you know, in order to keep yourself healthy and sharp and with purpose. I mean, that's the main component we, as the group keeps talking about, and we just spent four or five days together in Scottsdale training and getting to know each other better before this trip

and sort of do the simulations that I like to do so much. But the constant conversation revolves around why is there not a better platform for these operators who are human performance specialists at the highest level that we as athletes are given that, right? And they're not given that in the same way, the education, the insights, the knowledge, and they're the front of the spear.

They're putting their life on the line and they're not given these tools. Yeah, this was- I'm swimming in a pool. And this was shocking to learn, right? Like you think, oh, buds and all the, you know, sort of rites of passage that you guys have to go through in order to become, you know, the elite of the elite

in our armed forces that you're being armed with the absolute, you know, best science, best tools, mindset, physical, emotional best tools, mindset, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, to equip you to handle the highest stressful situations that any human being could ever place themselves in, which would in turn later down the line serve you as you're exiting. But I'm learning through what Chris has shared,

and I'm interested in what you guys have to say about this, that there are significant gaps in that training or in that toolbox that need to be rectified. I'll just take it from my perspective, because we serve in two different, entirely two different units. So, and I was back at the beginning of the war, and I got out when the war I thought was dying down. So I did eight years. So I only had an eight-year glimpse into what performance was, and we didn't have it. So if you get broken, they're going to send you to a specialist, and they're going to help you rehab to get that brokenness back. But we don't talk about diet or nutrition.

We talk about sleep. It was purely let's just do the workout that the PT is asking you to do to rehab yourself to getting back to war. The problem is that we go and we do a hard workup where we train and then we go deploy and we do the work overseas. You're breathing in all kinds of crap. You're running over undulating terrain. You're asked to do the unforgiving jobs. And then when you get done on the back end, it's wash, rinse, and repeat. There's no stop, pause, and reboot.

And that was a big point. And I never knew any of this in my career. Up until doing this project, I didn't have a lot of this. The godsend is my wife. My wife, she got into health and nutrition a long time before me. And when I first met her, I went into her fridge and she had nothing but green in her room. And I'd never seen half these plants before. I'm like, where's the food?

And she's like, that's the food. We're going to eat that. I'm like, she puts it in my belly. I'm like, whoa, this is pretty cool. But I didn't know any of that. And that's the problem is they're not teaching that stuff and how vital, how important. I mean, just this last couple of days talking about the nutrition and the supplementation pre, during and post, how vital that is. Well, why didn't I do that overseas? I could have been a better performer. I am tired of relying on brain matter to get me through something. If I could be that much more of a performer

because I'm doing the right things, then I don't have to really push it that hard with my brain so that when I choose to, I can go even further. That would be the goal. And what does it look like from your perspective? So from my perspective, I look at it over the decades, and the bottom line is we don't have any – we've never been at war like this for decades at a time.

So I completely agree with Birdman, especially in the fact that everybody has their own experience, right? So some people get out of the military and they have the ability to transition into their civilian life with and maintain the same standards that kept them very high functioning while they were in the military. And others don't. So, I mean, when I think about who we can help, I don't know who all it might be, but there are people out there that maybe just missed it. Like they didn't hear it the way they needed to hear it as far as, hey, there's some really simple things you can do to take better care of

yourself, just focusing on how you eat, sleep, move, and even mindset stuff, right? My experience was just like Birdman's. It was like, hey, we're going to war. Oh, this is going to, you know, neat, finally. You know, I've been training for over 10 years in the military, and now we get to go do what we got hired to do. Fast forward 10 years later, after 10 years of deployment, that was an unknown. So even in wanting to affect performance at the individual and group level, there was no model for that. So SOCOM, all the special operations highest headquarters, which is in Tampa, threw a ton of money at this around 2013, 2014.

And it was called the Preservation of the Force and Family Program, or POTIF, is what a lot of people have had. It's been a very successful program. And the four buckets of care or focus were physical, mental, what I call social and spiritual. So how are you performing physically, mentally? How are you performing as a member of society and as a member of your family? And then the spiritual component. And all of the special operations units were able to take money out of this pot and bring in contractors to support in all four of those domains. So I was fortunate enough to be the first preservation of the force and family director for my unit.

And they were like, hey, we want somebody who actually, we want the customer that's, you know, the operator and everybody who's just going down range over and over and over again, just getting, you know, the wheels run off of them and their families. and the wheels run off of them, and their families. We want somebody like that representing us in these discussions and these planning meetings for who needs what and who gets what. And the fact that I wasn't an expert in any of those four domains made it really easy for me to just kind of go down there again as the representative and go, yeah, we want all of it,

and we want as much as we can get. So that's what I did my last three years in the Army for my unit, and I retired from that position. So I was personally very fortunate to start interacting with all of these next level professionals in the mental space and in the, in the, you know, physical performance space. Cause what, where we were trying to pull expertise from is, is professional and college level athletics and, you know, all of the top drawer performers in outside of the military space. We said, Hey, we want your expertise. We want to try to fix some of our problems with your expertise. And so I learned a ton. And honestly, that kind of led me to my current situation where I'm doing personal performance coaching.

Right. Did it help? Did it help the team? It's absolutely helping. And the program overall is still, I mean, it's still in existence. We're still pulling a lot of contractors in to support all of this. Again, kind of back to my initial point is at some level we're guessing. And I left years ago, so I'm sure we have a better picture of what Wright looks like now. But it's like, hey, what do you do when somebody has been going overseas over and over and over again for 10 years? Well, we have one guy on the team who's still pretty active.

Right. Is active. And you know, there's saunas, there's cold plungers, there's state-of-the-art facilities, but he's asking me what to do. Interesting. And how to apply the protocol and why it works. They're making these things available, but it's not connecting. I remember And how to apply the protocol. Yeah. And why it works. It's true, they're making these things available,

but it's not connecting. Exactly. I remember like I went to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado, Otter Springs, and they have a whole like mindfulness program there, but none of the athletes do it or sign up for it, right? Like there's a gap in that. And if it was, I mean, it's great that this program exists and hopefully it's, you know, growing and improving,

but the mental health statistics and the suicide statistics tell the real story of outcomes. And on the website you, or in your deck that I went through, like there's some pretty dire, it tells a pretty dire story. I don't remember the numbers, maybe you do, but they're, it's not great. The last statistic they released,

7,500 soldiers have been killed in combat and training since 9-11. Since the same date, we've lost just over 30,000 to suicide. That's an unbelievable number. Yeah, it's almost five times. And so, yeah, it's a massive problem. And that's just that community.

And you talk about first responders and you talk about civilians, who knows what that number looks like. Yeah. So in a, you know, in an alternate universe, if you found yourself in the seat of the, you know, being the secretary of defense and you had a massive budget at your disposal to deploy, to address these problems, you know, what do those solutions look like for you? Like, what do you think needs to be done? Where are the blind spots? How can we better address this crisis

and create a better path for all of these veterans who are exiting into civilian life? It's a great question. Well, since I'll never be offered that job, the first thing I'm gonna do is legalize base jumping in America. That'd be great. That would be my number one plan.

Is that within the purview of the Secretary of Defense? I don't know if that's his job. Keeps people very energized and on alert. So for me, my vision with hopefully what would come from this project, and it's a lofty goal, but it's a goal, is can we put a human performance program together for every workup? Not just for the special operations, for the military, for the first responder communities, for the education system. It's mandatory.

It's not just something where you have the ability to go to the gym and lift weights, or you can go run. This is a protocol that happens for, let's say we get back from deployment, we have a couple weeks of post deployment leave where we get to dial it down, reboot, see our family, our loved ones, put all the gear away. And then when we get ready to start back up the first week of training or two weeks, whatever it may be,

is humor performance only. Let's get you back to homeostasis. And here's the protocol on how we're going to do that. And you're going to do it as a team. That's something that doesn't exist in our community. And I think it's super important. I think that it, there's things that are mandatory that don't need to be mandatory or don't even need to be there, period. And they're not this. And if I were to say anything as a secretary of defense was mandatory, if we're supposed to be in charge of national security, we need to be at optimal levels. And the only way to preserve that is to continue to go back to the basics. That's what we do in training. When we get on a gun, we go back to the basics on a pistol, back to the basics on a rifle. Doesn't matter how good we are. I was a sniper. Still go back to the basics. Even though I know I can make

the shot, I need to bring it all the way back and simplify things to make sure I know exactly what I'm doing, or maybe I just need to readjust. Right. So in this context, getting back to the basics from a wellbeing perspective means how's your sleep? Like how's your mood? How's your temperament? How's your relationship with your family? Like all of those kinds of things, like making sure that there's a baseline

and protocols around, you know, sort of a prizing that from time to time to making sure that those buckets are all being adequately filled. I mean, it's so crazy, right? Like, cause this is the world I live in with regards to health and wellness, like wearables and like breath work and thermal regulation and all the things we do. HRV and-

And HRV, yet this is, they should be the ones doing it. Right, I would have thought that like the special forces were pioneering all of this stuff and like beta testing all these things that ultimately find their way to the consumer markets. And it's sort of shocking to discover that this isn't being taught or these aren't protocols that are part and parcel of your daily routine. Well, the special operations are doing a lot. Don't get me wrong. But you think about big Navy, big Army, they don't have the budgets that we have. They don't have all the opportunities we have.

So they are truly struggling. So this would be more of a play for them. But the things that we do will transfer to them. So if special operations adopted, it bleeds into the military. So it's sad. Yeah, you know, and it's like a lot of things if it's not mandatory and i'm not saying any you know everything needs to be mandatory that i think is um good for personal performance but there's you just kind of have this like shoulder shrug kind of yeah we got all that but

that's not my thing you know and i didn't you know i oh i sauna i got in the sauna for 10 minutes i didn't like it didn't do it you know i didn't notice any't, you know, I, oh, I, sauna, I got in the sauna for 10 minutes. I didn't like it. Didn't do it. You know, I didn't notice any difference. Yeah. Whereas, you know, if you look at the protocols of, if you look at the science behind even just dry saunas, right, you know, and the protocols that all the different talk, you know, all the, there's a ton of performance podcasts out there that talk about, hey, it's

this simple. Do this, this many times a week, this temperature, this duration, and here's what the science shows as all-cause mortality goes down by. And it's just like, ah. You kind of have – and I had it for a lot of years, so I can speak to it clearly. You don't really think about your demise. You don't think about being – Sure. You know, you don't think about being,

no, you're, what's gonna be good for me. Oh, I'm, you know, I'm in my fifties. You're 25 years old. What's gonna be good for me when I'm, yeah. And you're like an alpha, you know, highly trained. You're like, I don't need that. Like I'm invincible. I don't know.

But even, but that's the interesting thing. Like I like the word homeostasis because it's an interesting dynamic if you think of it from exercise physiology, that the fact that this is what it feels like to feel good, right? That when my nutrition is right and I'm sleeping right and I'm fully alert and I'm strong and I'm capable and I'm rested and wow, this is my baseline. And now before I deploy, right, that I know, okay, these are my values. I mean, cycling, we have biological passports where they know everything, right? Like I can go through any sport and they have homeostasis.

They have values and numbers so that you know, okay, when things a little bit off, therefore you might not be as sharp. You might not be as durable. You might not be as capable in what you guys need to do, right? And so having this sort of mental, physical recharge reboot where nutritionally, you're like, you're getting all those things that'll last you for a few weeks, right? Like, or months, or you set a baseline of, okay, these are clearly foods I need. And we can get them when we're deployed or not, but at least I know what I'm missing. Again, constantly optimizing yourself so that you can be of better service to others.

Coming back for more, but first. Back to the mental health piece. What is the ambition with the 7X Project and how it can sort of address these issues in terms of veteran well-being? How are you creating some connectivity there? So the full outlook of this project is at the end, we're going to make a documentary and that's going to explain everything from the trials and tribulations of how this was, the fact that each one of us have had our injuries or learning curve to what we're doing and the completion of it and then the science behind it. But ultimately, all this is going to be comprised in a manual. And the manual is something that we're going to sell publicly across the world. And 100% of that proceeds are going to veteran causes to continue their mission to help support. I believe that's how the mental side works is I'll just give you a real, a real test subject here. So we have a person on the team who at the

beginning of this project, I called him because he, if not the best, he is one of the top five base jumpers in the world. He's certifiably insane. He's unbelievable too. He's just got this gift of gab. He's an Australian dude and he's got this, I love those accents. And so I called him and I said, Hey, I need you on the team because I always put safety advisors. Everybody on this team is so good that I don't even know why I'm part of this team. I kid you not. It's just, it's amazing to me. Well, I asked him to be a part of it and he would, I didn't know that he was struggling and it's amazing, right? We don't know what people are going through. So he called me a couple of weeks later after he said, you know, I love the mission here. I want to be a part of this. I'm in. A couple of weeks later, he was in Brazil. He's

sitting on the beach and he's a surfer. And he's like, I'm at the lowest point in my life right now. I don't know what I'm here for. I don't know what I want to do, or I don't even know how to move forward. And all I said to him was, well, get up off your ass and go run a mile. That's it. I said, and then call me when you're done. And I'm no expert in anything, so I just threw that out of my ass, right? And he called me right after, apparently did like a 5K or something. He has a tendency to overdo it. Yes, he does. But he did it. And he called me right after, apparently did like a 5K or something. He has a tendency to overdo it.

Yes, he does. But he did it. And he called me after and he's like, great. That was just great, mate. And since then, he's like, all right, I've just seen this switch in him where he's just that one little step forward was everything to say, okay, somebody cared about me to call me. Somebody told me to go do something.

And that's all we really need to nurture people is to get them moving forward. Just one step at a time. If somebody told me when I got out and I was having a bad day, I need you to go eat a meal right now. And then I need you to go, you know, rest for a second. And then I need you to get up and I need you to go run and then journal and then call me afterwards. Check. I know that. And that's not just military. That's anybody. Like, thank you for giving me some guidance. I'm gonna go do that right now and then you're gonna feel a little bit better.

Like, man, I just accomplished something. And that's something that we're losing sight on is the accomplishments. You know, we don't have to be the first class and best in the world or anything. It's just gotta be our best version of ourselves. Yeah. And it's those simple things, right?

Like in recovery parlance, they say halt. Like if you're feeling like that low or down or not great, halt is hungry, angry, lonely, tired. Are you hungry? Are you angry? Are you lonely? Are you tired? And the solutions at all of those are pretty simple. Like eat a meal, take a nap, like move your body, call a friend, things like that.

But we're always looking for that behind the velvet rope thing. Like, where's the secret that I don't know when the solution is kind of self-evident and it just, all it is is a friend reaching out and saying, hey, go run a mile and call me afterwards. Like that idea that someone cares and you got that person to move his body.

It's cool. I think the piece that I wanna explore a little bit further is the community piece, like this notion of when you're in the military and then you leave or you're a professional athlete and you're done with that career. And it's just gonna be impossible in your civilian life to find that kind of heightened experience

where you're so bonded to people because you're doing hard things together. And the best that we can do is to recreate some version of that through like these 29029 experiences, or a lesser version of this extreme thing that you guys are about to do that can bring those communities of people back together so that they can maintain some kind of cohesion

with those people that were so important to them for that, you know, formative period of their lives. And that's what we're looking to do. I mean, that's what we've talked about, but before we get to that, also the part that Ryan and the team are looking to do that it just, it's not a solution to the mental health, but it contributes, right? Physical activity, good nutrition, good sleep, good recovery,

and also having a purpose and aim towards something, something, whether it's outside of myself or greater than myself or with my group or with my team. And that ties back into your question just now. Yeah, this project that we're on sounds very audacious and it is gonna be very difficult and complicated. And that's not necessarily the answer, but it's to highlight that next time we do this, we do this as a greater community, more approachable, do an annual thing that allows many veterans to say,

you know what, I had a chance once a year to see my brothers and sisters, to get together, to do something hard, to grow, to learn, to calm down, to be with each other, the people that get it, and that filled my cup. That filled me up and it allows me to say, snap out of it or somewhat snap out of it. Again, nothing permanent solution,

but more like a reprieve. And whether it is something like a 29 on 29, where it's all veteran based and you have an opportunity to bond and get closer and be healthy and feel good and learn and nutrition and mindset and breath work and you put all that together and then off they go and hopefully that carries them for four, five, six months. Yeah, it's crazy that something like that

doesn't already exist. It does in some ways. Maybe something does. I don't know that I'm not aware of. Warrior foundations and there's many veteran foundations that offer a lot of activities, let's say mountain biking excursions and so forth. And there's a lot of veteran owned businesses that offer a lot of activities, let's say mountain biking excursions and so forth. And there's a lot of veteran owned businesses that offer these things,

but almost like an annual like Sturgis or something like that, right? Well, if you can get a hundred thousand motorcycle riders in North Dakota. Itinerant motorcycle, yeah. You should be able to get it. The military, yeah, it should be a lot easier. But that's why I've been bugging Ryan a lot about this,

about like, let's just use this as a catalyst to create something where annually it's known as the human performance project, but it's not, let's say seven marathons. It's something that's approachable, meaningful that they have to train for. So you're getting ready for it for a few months and that creates community and bonding already, right?

Because you're looking for people in your community or even your former teammates and so forth that you can say, hey, are you training for this too? Like, how are you doing? And just another platform to get closer and bond. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's a pretty cool thing. You mentioned the human performance project.

So that's your like sort of umbrella company. The 7X project is just but one project that lies underneath that umbrella. So what is the broader like human performance project mission, what's that all about? Well, so it all umbrellas under a company we call American Extreme. And so they'll be broken into three components. One being extreme live sports stunts, because we know that that's something that people want to see. I think it's that people want to see me crash and burn. I think

that's why people follow it. I hope I never give them that opportunity. But it draws people in it. It draws our younger generation. And that's something that we need to really focus on is, yes, this is applicable for everybody, but we got to start making these kids and getting these kids to understand it right from the get-go. So that's why this manual that we're creating is for a 14-year-old kid and up. So they can truly understand, like, I want to live with True North to start. How do I do that? And I don't want to go to Google and find all these biohacks and all these other things when I don't even know the baseline. So we'll have that. We're going to have the human performance department that we're going to continue to add to by doing different types of hard things to develop human performance, both on the mental side and the physical side.

And then we're going to have event. So that way it's a community because a short story on the community. So when I got out in 2010, I moved to Dallas. I started working in a job that I didn't want to work for. And I had no community around me of my community I considered. So I was by myself, I didn't like the job I was doing. It became very difficult. And I did it because you're motivated, you get out.

All right, I gotta work hard because this is what I'm disciplined to do. And over a couple of years, it really started to weigh on me. And I felt like it had zero meaning or purpose in life. It was terrible. A friend of mine said, hey, you need to go back to San Diego and see your teammates. And I was like, you know what? You're right.

I need to. And he's like, well, let's book it right now. And I was like, okay. Booked it. I went back to San Diego. I got into San Diego before I even texted the guys. And then I said, hey, I'm in town. Does anybody want to show up tonight and have a drink?

And the whole platoon came out. And it was just this unbelievable feeling of acceptance again that I shouldn't have had to have thought I didn't feel because I thought I left the tribe. And it was just ridiculous that I put it in my own head. But ultimately, nothing had changed. And it was mostly hearing stories of me and some of the fun stuff that I used to do that they still have in picture. and it was mostly hearing stories of me and some of the

fun stuff that i used to do that they still have in picture but it was just everything and that gave me not just a refill for the the time it recharged my batteries forever so now i make it a point i'm going to continue to go back to the community because the better served i can be for myself inside now i can start helping everybody else out. And when did the base jumping and bird suit stuff come in? Cause that was also sort of a curative thing that you found after, right after you left the military. Yeah, absolutely. So it's not just one day you wake up and say, I'm going to jump off a cliff or I'm going to with a parachute. Let me just make sure to say that, uh, don't do the other thing. And then order to fly a wingsuit.

Now, everybody thought, well, I'm Birdman, so initially that's what I'm supposed to do. I was actually terrified of everything growing up. I didn't like heights or anything, whatever. But you get into skydiving and it becomes a progression. I always wondered why the base jumpers were leaping off of cliffs, and I wondered if I could do that, if I had it inside. And I remember getting trained in it years after I started skydiving and I remember being on the exit point in Switzerland

in the Swiss Valley looking down and saying to myself what the hell have I gotten myself into this is insane I'm standing there probably 180 beats a minute not doing a thing and I'm like I can't believe this and you know of course you don't want to let your guys down. So you're like, I'm going to do this. And you breathe. And when you jump, what happens is you initially start falling and then you go head down until your body picks up enough speed for you to actually start gaining air underneath you. And then you start flying if you're good at body position and it puts you into a flow state. And it was so incredible. It's like meditation. It, you don't focus on anything else. I don't care what's going on in your life. It's gone.

And you're right in the moment and you're super alert and everything means something. So when you pull, if you have a problem with your canopy, you have to be on it in a split second or you're dead. So that's not the exciting thing to me. That's the stuff that I just like switching my brain on and having to make quick decisions fast and making the right decisions and everything's on you. So this is the only thing that I do as an individual sport yet. It's always with a community of base jumpers. So that progression led into, I didn't get into it because I just wanted to do it for fun. I didn't get into it because I wanted to make myself a profile on Instagram or whatnot. I purely got into it because I knew that people were watching it

and I saw the number of likes underneath it. And I figured maybe we can do this in such an extreme way to hook people in the younger generation. And then we can use that hook to now engage them with the right things. Right. Like that gets people's attention, but that's the Trojan horse for the bigger conversation that you wanna have.

The obvious question, you probably get this a lot, is that you're finding a way to, you had this extreme experience as a member of the SEAL teams. You exit that, and then you find this other super extreme you know pursuit activity that satisfies your kind of hormonal baseline right like it's sort of like well i don't have that other thing that was so you know intense and you found this other really intense thing the question being like short of you know base jumping in the that swiss valley like is there a way for a more normal

person to acclimate to you know a more kind of sedated civilian life without having to go chase extreme pursuits like that's the bigger question that most veterans are are facing right so i mean my answer is find homeostasis at home. That is my number one, because I think we put a lot of that off. Like I look at, I have two wonderful children, mostly wonderful. And then I have an awesome wife and me trying to engage and move forward so fast and do all these things. And I'm like, what, what's the real meaning here? And the meaning is I'm a dad. That's my number one. And I have to be a husband. So helping people engage with their families again is really could be the catalyst for everything.

Extreme sports for me was never a thrill-seeking thing because I just love adrenaline. I'm actually quite terrified when I jump. But I know that the bigger push is if we can do these things as a team we can engage people and then we can really with the experts around us give them the information they deserve yeah so yeah we're making it about service right yeah sorry yeah i had um no desire ever to get on a cliff and jump off so when he's like i wonder what why they do that i never I never uh I never crossed my mind um but and and like him jumping you know I jumped my entire career literally from February 1992 to retiring in August of 2016 just the first few years static line and then free fall the rest of my my career um I'm back

to jumping again for this project and it still scares me like it always did. And in an enjoyable way, if that makes sense. Like I feel very alive prior to, during the jump, and obviously once I've safely landed on the ground. But the transition piece out of the military for me at 25 years, I kind of, I mean, I'd been in the same place for, you know, I feel like I grew up in the Army, obviously. I retired at 45. So I spent 25 years in the Army, more than half my life. And then, you know, I kind of, as I was transitioning out, I was like, well, you know, am I who I am? Like, can I be a productive person outside of this organization? Like, it kind of, I was curious, right? And then I get this opportunity to go all the way to Colorado from North Carolina.

And my wife agreed to it. All four of our kids had been born right there in North Carolina. We pulled them all out of everything they'd ever known and moved to the Denver area. And it worked out, actually. I could be a productive citizen, at least at some level, in Denver. But it was having something to focus on, going, oh, I was really good at this. Now I'm in this corporate environment.

I'm rebuilding this security program for this company. And can I be successful at that? And that went fairly well. I got, um, I got bored of it pretty quick and that's where I started a side coaching business. Um, but, but to speak to this project, when I heard about the project and I didn't hear initially from Birdman, I heard it from one of the other athletes, Danny P. And the first thing that hit my mind about this whole thing, it was fully like me focused. I was like, I couldn't do that.

Seven marathons, and I just went right to the marathons. Seven marathons in seven days, I couldn't do. Like thinking about moving on an airplane from location to location, I was just like, I'm thinking the time involved and the recovery. And my immediate thought was I couldn't do that. And then, of course, the next thought was I would love to do that, like having that. Just like we're talking about.

Something in the distance that I would really have to get to a whole new level on for being prepared for and to be able to execute that. Barring any Murphys in an accident here or there or a sickness or something. level on for being prepared for and to be able to execute that, you know, barring any Murphys in an accident here or there or a sickness or something. And if we can get a lot of attention doing this crazy adventure or what I tend to call the expedition to get people to then realize, well, you know, I can, why am I not doing a little bit of movement? Why am I not doing a little bit of movement why am I not eating a little better why am I not focusing a little more on how how to sleep better you know I'm gonna start and see what happens I

think that that's gonna be great so I mean it's funny because running jumping off a cliff and running seven marathons in seven days I don't know why one was more appealing to me than the other. But for some reason, I picked the long slog to get excited about, I guess. Well, I'm interested in what your experience has been pivoting into this world of endurance and taking on a challenge where you have Chris kind of guiding you with some training principles that are probably new and different from what you're used to in the military. And then conversely, Chris, who's had a career coaching endurance athletes and aspiring endurance athletes, what has it been like to now train

and coach military athletes? Like how is that different? So I don't know who wants to start. Go ahead, guys. Throw me under the bus. I'll start. I'll start. I knew enough to know that I didn't know enough.

I'd been a general physical preparedness guy. Like, hey, I want to be fast. I want to have a little bit of endurance. I want to be strong, powerful, all 165 pounds of me. And then I started running as we talked about this. And I was like, oh, let me grab this book and that book, and I'll start reading. And oh, here's what a perfect week looks like for a marathon 16-week plan. So multiply that times seven.

Okay, this is not answering the mail, right? Chris is laughing over there. So where I was in the military, if we wanted to do something good, we found whoever we could get a hold of that was the best person in the world that we could get a hold of, whether that was shooting a pistol, driving a car, driving a truck, driving a, you know, whatever, parachuting. Find the expert. Yeah, we were like, hey, let's find the expert. And, you know, I'd obviously run a ton over my lifetime, but nothing like this. I ran one marathon in my life in 2011, and it was very ugly the following 24 hours. and it was very ugly the following 24 hours.

So I, again, yeah, your book, I found Chris through your book, and I said, and listening to your story, I was like thinking about four military, you know, special operations chuckleheads, for lack of a better term. I was like, this is the guy that's probably gonna be able to get through to us if anyone can.

Yeah, I mean, I've had, it's been an interesting experience. I have some experience with working with former operators and guys trying to get into it. And then I worked with a couple of guys getting through ranger school and so on. So the protocols and so forth were familiar, but you're putting something together that you have four different people doing something

that they've never been on before. And 184 mile run week, however you slice it, whether you're an endurance runner or not, it's still a huge week. So it's been a fun experience on putting it on paper and then seeing how four people apply it in different ways, where they are in their lives and how they train and how they sort of retain the information. And so we've been, we've been progressing quite nicely. We had a specific training plan in mind. And so what we

started with is that we just started running for a little bit, but then I'm a simulation guy. Yeah. And so, as you know. but then I'm a simulation guy. Yeah. And so, as you know. Yes, I'm familiar, Chris. Exactly. And so we started and I always said, you don't need to run seven marathons in order to prep for this.

We'll build up to, let's say five or close to five. That's plenty. If you can do five close marathons, you're ready for seven when you're rested. And by the time the durability and the endurance kicks in. So we literally started in June with five by eight miles one week. And then we went back to marathon training and general stuff. And then we went to five by 10 miles. And then a month later, we went to five by 13 by one, right? And so constantly learning in that

process, what do I need for fuel? And you don't really know that yet at five by eight and five by 10, but at 13.1, you're starting to pay attention to what you need to eat during the week and recover. And then we went to five by 16. But as we discovered at five by 16, the rails started getting a little screwy because people just weren't able to do that type of volume.

You know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a big run week and keeping these guys healthy and durable for the day, the week will be the primary objective. And so we just got together. We progressed to technically on the timing to five by 20. That was going to be this past week. And we pulled the plug on that, mainly because we don't wanna get injured and different people have progressed differently. Like Alex, for example, he's fully ready for five by 20. He did the five by 16, felt good.

We have another guy, he built up some good volume, but he got some niggles and injuries along the way. And I don't wanna put that load on him right now. We've got Ryan, he's been in and out some injuries and trying to keep his body in one piece, same thing, pulled the plug. So right now we're sort of pulling a thread from now until February and trying to figure this out.

But meanwhile, these guys are masters of self-discipline. They know how to sort of follow a chain of command. Like there's not a lot of excuses and wimping out and like that's gonna be a little bit different, right? So one, that's a problem, right? Yeah, because for over-training or not. I put it on the training piece. They're gonna figure out how to do it

just by being broken, right? And so this is the whole coaching thing once again that they're not very familiar with. They're receiving commands, but they're like the whole, I need feedback, tell me how you're feeling, what you're observing, like, are there any niggles? How was yesterday's run? Like silence, got it done.

Right, it's like executed. Yeah. Check, that's what I get back. Or I don't get anything back. And I hear like a month later, He's like, executed. Yeah. Check. That's what I get back. Or I don't get anything back. And I hear like a month later, oh, don't worry about him. He's getting it done.

Yeah. All right. So it is- These guys are like, what's with Chris and all his touchy feely stuff? Like I know, you know, he told me to do it and I did it. Yeah. So it's been a interesting journey and here we are.

And again, we're gonna figure, now it's individual, but everybody has their individual. There is no group plan in the beginning. And I knew that we talked about this early on. I knew that we would go our separate ways with regards to everybody having an individual plan and keeping it together for as long as we can. Problem is when you're in a team, in a unit,

like these guys are, if the one guy hears, hey, what, you did 20 miles? Next thing you know, he's out the door doing 20 miles. And I'm like, dude, you're supposed to stop at 14. Like, we wanna keep you healthy. So it's been fun in that respect of just giving them a hard time, but there is a, you know, I'm concerned,

not in a negative way, but I'm concerned and paying attention that, hey, we've got 10 weeks to go till we fly to Dallas. And I need you guys to sort of, now we're now in the dirty part and everybody needs to go their separate ways with regards to this is your training plan. This is your training plan and let's stick to it.

separate ways with regards to this is your training plan. This is your training plan and let's stick to it. Yeah, and with a puzzle this complex, the chances of it going completely smoothly are pretty low, right? Like there's gonna be obstacles and shit's gonna get fucked up and not go correctly. But you guys know, I mean, you guys are masters of navigating that kind of thing, right?

Yeah, I mean, and I'll answer into this part because Alex even asked me the other day with regards to like how you feel about the team and they know their world, but getting into this space of just being that exhausted and broken down and from a physical activity like this and just going to have to run 26.2 miles the next day even letting go and walking some of it right we just got to execute there's going to be so many

dynamics in this that because i don't know them in past experience of doing an event like this i'm more worried of like how that shit's gonna hit the fan. I know that there'll be fine and they'll bond and they'll be like, yeah, isn't this hilarious? Like my femur is broken, but look, it's pretty funny. I don't want that. I don't want that. So there's my nerves, right? Like I'm in it, you know, my conversations with,

whether it's at home or with Alex is like, you guys, I'm very nervous because I want you guys to have this positive experience, this amazing experience versus go through misery for four or five days. Is there anything particular that you guys are like top of mind worried about or what's the, yeah, like the one thing that is waking you up in the middle of the night about the whole thing? I know what you're going to say already.

The next training pizza that comes in tomorrow. Always comes in at 6 p.m. Like, oh, I saw that email. I'm going to check that later. So the big thing for me when I started to put this team together is I knew that I needed experts, but I wanted them to have good attitudes. That was the biggest thing for me. It's like, great, I know a ton of experts in different genres, but you've got to have a good attitude.

And so that's why I chose the individuals on the team because I know it's going to get hard. 2014 or 15, I did a 100-mile run, and you hit those walls where you just hate, or at least I did. I hated from mile 65 to 80. I was on this terrible wall, and it was just so miserable, and I didn't have positive attitude always around me. It made it even worse. And so I know that we're going to hit these walls. Going through Hell Week and SEAL training,

it's five and a half days. We were up just getting crushed the whole time. And so you've got the positive side of the house, where there's people that want to be there, and the psychopaths that are laughing at you with the femur exploded out of your leg and they're just like this is awesome and you're holding it like it could be a war game or something like that and then there's the ones quit so for me like he said it's keeping myself durable enough mentally i know that i can do something like this if i were forced to do it or tasked to do it but physically will my body hold up because again we're not trying to prove to ourselves that we're you guys, that we're these awesome athletes.

We're trying to prove that a normal human being like myself can do this so you can too. Right, but you're not a normal human being. I mean, I don't think he's a normal human being. But I'm not an ultra distance runner. I get that part. I get that part. I get that part.

Maybe that's a good opportunity to ask you guys about, you know, the experience of being in the armed forces, being part of special forces. There is, you know, now we're in a culture where there's a lot of books out there. There's a lot of kind of internet influencer, podcaster type people, like we know a lot more about what that experience is like, but I think the normal person also projects an idea of what that experience is all about that probably doesn't exactly match the reality of it. Like, how do you, you know, kind of characterize,

like, how do you think about that experience and, you know, how people might, you know you think about that experience and how people might sort of get it wrong or have a different wrong-headed idea about what it was all about for you guys? I mean, I talked to a lot of kids that want to go on the program, and I specifically talked to them about SEAL training because I don't know anything else. And I asked them why they want to be a SEAL. And there's not a perfect answer, but I want to see where their mind's at because I didn't know anything about being a SEAL

when I went in. I knew about being a student in training. That's what we could see publicly. But 90% of the job is either miserable or it's boring. So it's that 10% that's just absolutely amazing that drives you to continue to do it all the time. And it's the people that really make it worthwhile. So, I mean, the job of putting all the gear together to go actually do the mission, it takes a long time and a lot of prep and it's not fun and it's not sexy. And then,

for instance, in the SEAL teams, let's say you skydive at night where you can't see anything and then you have to land in water and you know that it's the ocean and there's sharks and they love to eat things that look like SEALs. And And we got to dive underwater for a four-hour exhaustion dive and you can't see anything and you keep getting vertigo from the algae out there and you're just looking at a tack board the whole time and you finally get to your place for two minutes of glory and then it's over and now you got to get out of there. That's not fun, especially when you're doing it day and day and day again.

It's just, so it's about how much do you want it. And for me, that's, there's a huge misconception. And they also think that we're just these unbelievably unique people. And I don't believe that. And I think it's that you either have to be super stubborn to get through the training or you have to want it so bad. And that's something I don't think people give themselves enough credit for. I think there are a lot more people that can make it into the special operations community.

It's just not their thing or they're not interested in it. But for those who try and attempt, I just don't think they give themselves enough credit to be there if they want it that bad because we could have a bigger populace in our community. And what is the difference between the person that is able to make it and see it through and have a successful career versus the person who flames out? I think the big thing is like not setting your aperture on what you're trying to complete close enough. You know, it's not, yeah, I'm joining the military and 20 years from now, I'm going to be in this perfect unit doing this perfect job, you know, looking like this perfect special operator. I, it's more like,

can I get through the, you know, Hey, what if I make it, what if I make it to lunchtime? That would be pretty cool. Let me, let me focus, let me focus on getting to this next stop point successfully. I mean, and, and you know, that if that's not, I'd talk to my kids about that all the time, whatever they've got going on, right. It's, it's, it's about just kind of keeping your perspective smaller on, you know, eating the elephant one bite at a time on what people get, get it wrong. You know, if you watch a movie, it looks like it's super exciting all the time. And, and, you know, even in, even in like And even in the chaos of a busy rotation overseas, there's not a whole lot of that.

It's not like you're doing that every – you're having these amazing, these significant engagements. At least I never – it wasn't for me like you have these significant engagements every night you know for four months in a row it's it's um just every you know it's a lot of a lot of operating just like you do in training and then occasionally there's this wow wasn't expecting tonight to be like that kind of experience and and and then you come back and you you just go right back to what you've learned to do in training with regard to finishing up the night and preparing for the next, you know, getting ready to go out again for what may be an, you know, some people would consider an exciting night or a boring. And not knowing when you're going to go out again, right? Like there's a lot of waiting around. Yeah, there were definitely rotations like that. And then there were some rotations where you knew even before you left the States,

it was just going to be a super busy rotation. But the training is, there's not this magic where it's like, well, when you get to this level, tell me the secret. And the secret is there's no secret. It's like, hey, the stuff you learned from day one, just keep getting better at it. Shoot, move, communicate. Get better at it to the point of being a master. And like, hey, I used to be able to shoot a gun really good and laying in this one position to now I can do it,

moving through three-dimensional target with three-dimensional environment with targets who knows where and successfully finish that type of training. There is no magic. It's just getting better at the basics. And Chris, is there anything qualitatively different about working with these guys or these types of guys that you've seen and learned from,

that distinguishes them from the other just sort of civilian endurance athletes? No, actually. They're humans. You know, they're humans like everybody else. They have a desired outcome. They're looking to You know, they're humans like everybody else. They have a desired outcome. They're looking to achieve a goal, a pretty audacious goal,

and it's out of their comfort zone. But overall, the human side and who they are comes forward and you're dealing with the same sort of versions of humans. I mean, the only thing is you, and that's maybe a mistake. You make assumptions of, oh, well, they won't, they're mentally this, or they're not gonna quit on this. And that might be true,

but you can't necessarily assume that on everything. You gotta treat them just like any other athlete because they're breakable too, right? And they can overtrain too and so forth. We have a sort of a tradition here on the podcast that we kick off January with some special forces guys. We've done this a number of times. And because I have you guys here, I think it would be cool to talk a little bit about habit change because that is, that just happens to be on everyone's mind at the beginning of January when people are thinking

about their goals, their dreams, their aspirations, their new year's resolutions, what they want this new year to look like, overcoming past bad habits and replacing them with healthier ones. How do you think about goal setting and habit change? Like what practices have worked for you, which ones haven't,

and what are some kind of words of wisdom that you can impart to that person who's trying to put the pieces together to create something different and more exceptional than their previous lived experience? There's a lot there. This next year is gonna be different for me because I'm still gonna be focused on getting through this one.

So I'm going to be very focused in training peaks. But ultimately, I think for me, because I've done this 2022 as a self-reflection, am I happy and do I love myself? That was my biggest thing. And so for me, I would say instead of focusing on, okay, what are the new objectives for the year being like more internally how can I actually focus on myself to make myself feel much better how can I love myself again and be human and be happy again then I can start to project all the cool things I'm gonna do because if you love yourself everything else is easy so that's something I had to do and take a deep look in and it it's not easy, but it very well may be the hardest thing,

but the best thing you can do for yourself. How about you, Alex? I like the, I mean, I think there's always, there's never a better time than right now to have a habit change that's for the positive, right? With the people I work with and with myself, I try to, you know, I used to, if I couldn't, if I lost my window to go to the gym for this perfect workout,

I just wouldn't go at all. And I've realized that as a dad of a bunch of kids and husband and a guy trying to make money in the civilian world, you know, sometimes I just got to accept, you know, B minus work, right? So my biggest recommendation for anyone trying to move into a set of better habits is start small. Don't boil the ocean. Take any

positive progress, you know, day to day as a win. You know, kind of the army, the military has task condition standards, right? So you can be like, oh, the standard is, you know, here's the task. Here's the conditions. Here's the standard. Did I pass? Yes. Well, make your standard, you know, make it a window, but have the bottom of that standard where you can say, did I pass? Yes.

Low. Right. So, yeah, I want to have this optimal day tomorrow where I eat perfectly. And, you know, my salad, the chef, like, sang to the greens before he put them in the bowl that I – or whatever, you know. Like, that's perfect. Well, have perfect as an ideal, but accept – accept, like, a day as a win if you get some movement in and you eat pretty decently. And you get a little bit of basic focus on sleep done so that you're not just a train wreck every day.

And then even when you don't make that minimum standard, give yourself a little grace and get right back on the horse. Because the problem is people are like, oh, this is how I'm going to live my life. I'm going to change all these habits. And then they miss a day and then they miss two days. And then they're like, well, I'll start again next year. Yeah. You know?

Yeah. Yeah. What's interesting about – it's great advice. I think that's really good advice. But as you're recounting that, I'm thinking, you know, guys in the military, they're so disciplined. Like these guys have, you know, their habits dialed in. They know what they're doing, but you're also in this highly regimented environment where accountability checks are built in

and you have an agreed upon goal that you're collectively working towards. Like there's systems in place to kind of, these guardrails, right, that are directing you towards a certain kind of outcome. And then in the civilian world, it's kind of just up to you, right? Like you have to create that accountability for yourself.

Like you have to try to recreate whatever, you know, kept those guardrails up in the military in your own personal life. And that's a different type of skillset. Did you find that challenging when you, you know, left the military? Has that, has, or do you just have like, that's so ingrained in you that you kind of know

how to do that for yourself? I mean, for me, I saw it right away that people around me weren't operating at a standard that I would have felt was sufficient, but it didn't change how I operated. But it became difficult because they weren't operating. So yes, that's very difficult. So that's why you form a team around you. So that way you can put out word and you can better serve like, hey, I want to help you with this, but this is the way that I'm going to do things. And this is what I expect in the military. When a senior leader would come by and say, okay, here's the word of the day. This is what we got to get done. Check, check, check. And then by the end of the day, all he has to do is say, bird, check. We're good. He knows it's done. And in the civilian community,

if you did that in the corporate, how are we doing? Well, let's talk to HR real quick. It's going to be a long time. So that's personally why I form a team around that are better than me so that I'm held accountable, even though I'm creating these things, because it's a lot. And it's not easy. It's definitely not easy being a civilian. It's very difficult. It's not just because of the military.

It's difficult. Tough times out there. There's a lot at stake's not just because of the military, it's difficult. Tough times out there. There's a lot at stake. I mean, you wanna build a family someday, you wanna retire someday. So you gotta put the work in while you're younger and fortify yourself. Chris, you always have a lot of wisdom around habit change.

Well, I'm about aiming at something, right? Like it doesn't have to be the perfect goal, but aim at something. And along that journey, you're gonna discover a lot of things about yourself, but also what you don't like and what you do like. And we know that the human being is most happy when they're making progress.

Even if it's miniature little progress goals, like Alex was talking about, we get a little dopamine hit. We get some validation that we're on the right path towards what we're aiming at, right? And standing still leaves us somewhat unhappy, actually digressing, makes us very unhappy. So find something to aim at. And so when it's around something, whether it's New Year's or something that you're missing a direction, aim at something that fulfills you, that gets you excited, that makes you curious.

And from there, start taking small steps and actions. And again, it's the small things that we keep saying that keep adding up. And everybody that I talk to is, when we come up with adventures, with a lot of athletes that I work with, they ask me, well, what should I do? What's the adventure I should take on?

What do you think I should do next? And it's more diving into what they're curious about or what invigorates them or what they've always wondered, hmm, I wonder if I can do that. And if there's a string to pull there, that's the direction to start heading in because then you're satisfying a deeper need, curiosity, a deeper why, and that's the direction to start heading in because then you're satisfying a deeper need, curiosity, a deeper why, and that's fun.

There is something magical and mystical about what happens when you just string a few sort of actions together that are self-esteem building or moving you towards a certain goal, even if they're super tiny, right? Like you create this momentum and that momentum builds, suddenly you're more enthusiastic about taking that next step than you were one step prior,

because you did these two, it could be tiny. It could be like, I brush my teeth, you know, in the whatever it is that you're struggling with. And then you do that. It's like, you know, this, this idea of self-esteem is a function of doing esteemable acts and doing esteemable acts. And those esteemable acts can be on behalf of yourself,

right, and when they're small, but those things like they really like build in this compounding kind of way that can really redirect your life. So it is really important to start small. It's that idea of like atomic habits, right? That James Clear book, like finding those little things.

If you do those small things, you look back and you go, man, I've come pretty far, even in a short time, because I've strung those little things together. And I think that's also an accelerator to where you wanna go. There's one thing pulling you to, or you're aiming for, but you're also moving away from something and you combine those two motivations,

that's a pretty powerful tool. Meaning I no longer want to be this person, whether that's in a health way or in a personal way or in a career way. And you're moving towards something you're striving towards or you're aiming towards, that's pulling you, that's pushing you away. Now you have double momentum. And when you're in that sweet spot and you've identified that you can do both, it helps you on days when you're not that excited to move in that direction, but you're reminded,

I no longer wanna be that version of myself. So it gives you that little bump that you're talking about, that little extra step forward. Yeah, I think that that, to Ryan's point, it begins with that first question, which is like, how do you feel about yourself on the inside, right? Are you happy with who you are?

And if you're not, it is reflecting upon, you know, the past, like who have I been in the past and how do I wanna show up in the future as a solvent to that notion of like, I don't feel good about who I am right now. And that's an exploration of your values, right? Like you have to be clear on like your values because your values paint the portrait

of the person you aspire to be. Like how well are you living up to these values that you feel are important, right? And then dissecting that into actions that you can take that will move you towards that more aspirational version of yourself that is living up to that value set that fundamentally you feel like is important and a reflection of the person that you wanna be.

And it's dynamic, right? It's constantly moving where you're in with regards to your values, right? And it's, and who I don't wanna be and who I do wanna be. And so there's that, that's constantly sort of in this little flux state. And so if you're kicking that forward a little bit, I think that's when you're also finding it easier

to do the hard things. Yeah, and that idea that if you're not feeling good about who you are, it's probably because there's tension between, you know, how you're showing up in the world and know, how you're showing up in the world and how you wish you were showing up in the world, right? That makes you feel like shit. And then you beat yourself up

and you go down that shame spiral of, you know, making the second mistake that compounds in the negative direction. Well, that's especially when you think of new year, right? We create those expectations. We created that story of who we wanna be. Which is just a story. Exactly, so then we're stuck

and we give ourselves a hard time for something we created that we wanted to be. No one else is giving you a hard time. Exactly, and so the hardest judge is on ourselves. And so that's why I talk to a lot of athletes too. It's like, wait a moment, you set that expectation to do X time or do X distance or take on X goal.

It's like, we can modify that. Like, well, I gave my word. Okay. That's a very important thing. And it's, it's meaningful to a lot of people that they gave their word, but you can still move towards that by sort of creating a little bit more leeway around that expectation. You still can achieve it, but give yourself maybe a different timeline or give yourself some, you know, a different path towards it. But expectations are hard, hard, hard drivers of how we judge ourselves.

And that's one of the nice things about this project. We have no expectations on how we're gonna do it. We just know we are going to do it. It's not like, am I gonna run a 3.30 marathon everyone? No, in the Antarctic, we're gonna walk. Absolutely not. We'll be walking a lot in the snow, right? So it is what it is.

And you're just gonna achieve your outcomes and don't judge yourself on the expectations you created for yourself. The other really important piece there is sustainability, right? So we all know people set these new year's resolutions and two weeks, two months, three months, whatever, flame out, here we are again.

I said I was gonna go to the gym every day or whatever it is and it's unsustainable and they lose interest or they miss a day and do that thing you were talking about where it's just like you throw the baby out with bath water. Well, I can't do it. And so I just, I'm giving up altogether. So how do you think about and communicate around this notion of sustainability to create these habits and practices that, you know,

conserve you long-term because it's not about what you're gonna do over the next two months. It's like, where are you going to be next January and beyond? Yeah, I think something that some people, you know, one way to maybe change the thought process for people is, you know, hey, I want to lose 40 pounds. Well, that's great. You want to lose 40 pounds, but let's not focus on that. Let's focus on the behaviors that we can measure, right? You know, like, hey, every day I'm going to,

I'm not going to have any food until this time. And then, you know, this is what my first meal is going to look like. And I'm going to do all the stuff we know to do from a nutrition standpoint based on my lifestyle. That's going to move me towards that goal, but I'm not measuring, I'm not getting on the scale every day to see if I lost 40 pounds

because that's just like punching yourself in the face, right? Right. okay did I did I eat the way you know did I eat within my protocol did I keep my food well the time the amount of hours I ate throughout the day uh in in the in my you know my target range did I did I get my baseline protein requirements and did i stay away from added sugar and all the you know highly processed and highly refined foods that caused me to gain this weight like you like i'm not yeah i have this goal but i'm gonna keep track of of my of my behaviors and measure those and yeah and base success on that. And maybe not even set losing 40 pounds as the goal, but set living your life as a healthy person as the goal, where the 40 pounds comes off as a byproduct of the goal

of adhering to the habits that a healthy person would, because being a healthy person is a value that I want to manifest in my own life. Well, that's an identity question too, right? 40 pounds is a projection, whereas I want to be the type of person who is active or who is leaner or healthier. Now you have a wider runway to achieve that.

Your goals along the way, your mini objectives and how you're progressing towards that give you a lot more leeway from a sustainability standpoint versus, oh, I've only lost two pounds in the last month. Well, that's disappointing. But if you're sort of saying, well, I am already living out the lifestyle of somebody who I'm looking to become, who eats healthier,

who's more active, who gets a lot of sleep and who cares about how they're caring for their body looking to become, who eats healthier, who's more active, who gets a lot of sleep and, you know, who cares about how they're caring for their body and their health and wellness. Now you're already that identity. And along the way, you're going to get those benefits. I'm the type of person who, well, I can do that. I can do that in two minutes from now, walking out this door, I can be the type of person who lives like that. And now it's just, all right, that's already who I am. It's non-negotiable.

It's an identity of mine. And I can be that person. The other thing I always look at is, how am I progressing from yesterday? So it's many steps. Like, I don't, maybe I didn't eat perfectly. Maybe I didn't do that workout, but I thought about it. And I took care of myself in other ways.

So I'm a little bit better than yesterday. And again, I'm moving towards, I'm the type of person who, because then now we're dealing with identity versus judgment. Why do you think most people abandon their New Year's resolutions? Because it's the end of the year they're probably eating the worst they eat most you know over the whole year they're probably already uh not treating themselves the right way um i mean if if i had to think about you know we're as busy as we ever are

it seems like as a family so oh i'm as busy as i'm ever going to be and i'm going to make this i'm not even going to take time to think about my new year's resolution and an actual execution i'm just going to throw it out there and then you know january 1st you're like what was it yeah that's it's a weird time too because everything in my dna is telling me to you know hibernate and go under the covers like Like it gets dark early. I don't have the energy that I have in the summertime. Like, we're sort of programmed for this time of year to like slow down and kind of stop doing things.

And yet it's the time of year where we have more social obligations and expectations around holidays and social, all this kind of pressure on top of it, that like, it's like, this is not the time of the year that I want to do these things, you know? And throw big goals at myself.

Yeah, big goal. Yeah, like I want to sleep. Yeah, exactly. Gather the chestnuts. I think another interesting thing, and I think about this from the military in general, and I'll just tell a story that maybe will paint the picture,

but I would get my new guys from training as a leader and I would immediately take my new team guys to the O course that we had access to every day of the year, knowing that they hated the O course because they- What is the O course? The obstacle course, excuse me. So I'd take them down to the obstacle course, knowing that they probably hated it because every time they'd run it to that point, they were timed. And it was a test. And they either passed or they failed.

And if they passed, maybe they were first. And so they loved the O course, but maybe they were last in the whole training group. last in the whole training group. And just, and it was just a super stressful thing that when they heard, when they saw it on the schedule, they were just like, oh, great. I've got to go run the obstacle course and, and see how bad I do. Um, I would take them down there and I would be like, all right, uh, everybody give me your watch because we're just going to play on the O course. We're not going to do the O course as a timed event and try to immediately change their aperture on what the O course was because it was an amazing training opportunity that just, I mean, it was just amazing.

You're in all these different dimensions of moving across ropes and different planes of momentum and stuff and learning transitions in that environment and stuff was amazing. People get out of the military. So, hey, let me take something that you hate about the last little bit of your life and change your perception of it. I think a lot of people get out of the military and they are like, man, I spent 20 years having to come in every morning, five days a week or three days a week and do these stupid runs in formation and call cadence. And then I had to do these stupid pushups, whatever the case may be. So they get out of the military and like, I'm not having to do that anymore. I'm not, you know.

They're like, I'm not having to do that anymore. And then because of some angst they had about something they hated, they lose the ability to identify that as part of a healthy life maybe in the future. And, of course, that's catastrophic, as we all know. I think New Year's resolutions are kind of probably the same thing. I mean, it's like, oh, I have to have a New Year's resolution. You bring up a great point, and that's what I was just thinking when you were saying that is like, wait, you're forcing a goal into this window where you're not really thinking about a goal.

Like if it comes to you naturally where you say, oh, I wanna do that. I wanna achieve that outcome. But we put January one and we go, okay, I gotta think of a goal. I gotta think of a New Year's resolution. It's not natural. It's not your natural rhythm of figuring out a goal.

Instead, maybe a short-term, like I like to do, who do I want to be on February 1st, right? That gets me, all right, through the holidays. Well, who do I want to be on the Q1, when Q1 ends? So that now I'm just thinking for the next 12 weeks versus this whole annual thing where even you have to sit down and think about your year and reflect on your past year, that's overwhelming to me.

And I live in the goal space. It's fabricated and artificial. Like you feel this pressure, like you have to come up with this thing. How are you gonna stick to that? You're not gonna stick to that. Now, but if you say, once again, I wanna be in six months, somebody who looks like this, okay, well that why? Well, that's because X, Y, Z, I'm going on vacation. I'd like to look

good. It means a lot to me. Whether it, it, that should be something that means a lot to you or not is a totally different question. It's more, if it's important to you, good. Now we have a goal that's important to you. We have a timeline and we can gradually start moving to it. But this whole forcing a square peg in a round hole, just because it's January one, seems like doom for failure in the first place. And to Alex's point, how can we reframe or tell a new story

around the pursuit of hard things so that it's more like play or fun than regimented in this artificial kind of performance construct, right? Like remove the timing for, I mean, especially like as we're getting older, right? Who gives a fuck? Come on, you know?

Like, can we just do this for the joy of it? And, you know, be nourished through community and the collective pursuit of doing hard things, as opposed to qualifying for X, Y, or Z, or meeting some kind of artificial performance goal that we may or may not achieve. And if we don't, we feel less than about ourselves when honestly it doesn't really matter.

As long as we're staying healthy, progressing forward so that we feel good about ourselves, nourishing, exactly. Nourishing ourselves. That's the part. If you can figure out a new year's resolution where you're nourishing your soul and yourself from a physical standpoint in a positive way, it's going to be so much easier. Yeah, that should be our word, nourishing. Nourishing, there you go. All right, well, for this 7X insanity, are you feeling the pressure, Chris, to keep this thing on the rails?

Yeah, I am, I am. You guys are making great mess. Look at these guys, they're like, wait a moment, he's worried. Yeah, I know. They're stressed out. Are you? I did see on the Instagram account, though,

there's this woman, Katie Hernandez, who's going to do a mile in a bomb suit. Like, tell me about that. I want to hear a little bit about that. She's an officer EOD, which is Explosive Ordnance Disposal. So she's a bomb tech. They're the psychos.

They're the ones who take bombs apart. We like to blow stuff up. They like to take the stuff apart. So she's awesome. She's a world record holder in doing a mile in the bomb suit, the fastest bomb suit can weigh anywhere from a hundred or 90 to 150 pounds. Wow. So she is an awesome, awesome person. She's a great human being, good attitude. And she really wants to challenge herself, continue to challenge herself. So she's raising money for this cause. And as a function of that, instead of her doing the marathons,

she's gonna go a mile on each. One mile on each of them. She won't be cold in Antarctica. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, she's right, right? Yeah, I just, I'm thinking of like Jeremy Renner and the bomb suit in the movie, of course. Yeah, a hundred, I didn't realize it was that heavy yeah you imagine a bomb going

off you want something to protect you it probably won't do the job but i think they're running joke is that if you mess up you'll never know so right i guess that keeps them at peace they'll be they'll all be in one spot if they mess up right the bomb suit's not really saving you no but after after she's done with it and i get out of the plunge, I'm jumping right in that thing. Well, I'm really excited about this for you guys. I can't wait. Are we gonna be able to kind of watch it in real time on the internet somehow?

How can people support what you guys are doing? What are some of the charities that you're supporting? Where do you wanna direct people so that they can stay up to speed with everything that's going on? I appreciate that. So it's 7xthatproject. You can follow it on social media.

And americanextreme.com is our website. We'll be giving updates and we will be doing live segments and we will be putting everything online at americanextreme.com and we'll continually blast social media through this event. Yeah, cool.

There's gonna be news coverage and all the jazz with it. And then we are going to build this into something that people from any genre can come and participate in after. Right. And what are some of the nonprofits that you guys are supporting?

So we focused on a plethora of different organizations. We didn't wanna double tap. So they could be anything from mental health related to physical ailments, so injury, Gold Star families, organizations we didn't want to double tap so they could be anything from mental health related to physical ailments so injury gold star families helping veterans transition they're all veteran and first responder focused and not just american but elsewhere so every one of our charities is up

on american extreme.com we have 14 organizations globally yeah we'll link that up in the show notes i saw that like the beneficiaries that page right that's correct that's what it is right um final thoughts how you feeling um i feel pretty good i mean again once uh once you get the professional in and he's telling you what to do and you're going to execute it um and knowing that you know it's more to task, not to time. Yeah. I think it's going to be a hoot and it's going to be the hardest. In some ways, it's already the hardest thing I've ever done just because of the hours of, you know, training requirements, et cetera. And like playing this out over the next few months, it's going to be awesome. Lots of Murphys. I'm sure we're going to have lots of, oh, we weren't expecting that to happen.

But yeah, I think it's going to be very exciting in a run a marathon every day kind of way. So we're recording this in early December. This will go up at the beginning of January. And then the event kicks off in late February, February 23rd, is that right? February? Mid February. Mid February. February 13th is where we're congregating. And yep.

February 16th is actually when we'll be out in Cape town to get ready to go. And if people are listening and they live in one of those respective regions, can they come out and be boots on the ground to support you guys or run alongside you or any of that kind of thing? Like what happens if people are listening,

they're in London and they wanna watch this all go down when you guys are there. Bring it on, share it with your friends, tell everybody, tell the queen or the king now, tell everybody. And we do have a few seats available. You gotta figure out this London Bridge thing, man. You gotta jump off the bridge.

So to his point of he's feeling good, I'm the opposite because I'm also on the logistical side of the house. So we're still in all the planning. So there's a lot to still accomplish. We still have a few seats available. If there are those who love adventure who want to go along with us. How many seats on the 757? It's like 400 seats.

400 people. I think it's an Airbus, actually. It's an Airbus. It's it's an Airbus, actually. It's an Airbus. It's a wide-body aircraft. Yeah. It's going to have more seats, way more seats than we need, and will actually turn part of the aircraft into more of a...

Recovery lounge. Yeah, I mean, you want to sleep, right? So you're not going to sleep in normal airplane seats, right? No, we'll have a whole athlete section of hopefully even some soft side hyperbaric chambers and stuff like that. And then back to do a little bit of recovery work in. But the other interesting thing from an admin point is for every X amount of seats you keep on the aircraft, you have to have a stewardess just due to regulatory requirements. Flight attendant.

Excuse me, flight attendant. Sorry, wrong word there. So we're trying to, from an admin standpoint, as I listen to all of those calls occasionally, there's even those issues of trying to really be precise with how we keep the air aircraft set up sure but as a wide body i think you know over 400 seats would potentially be the capacity i can't help but think when we when in talking about like customizing an airbus for an endurance adventure i'm like looking at your all day running company hat. And I'm like, we gotta get Jesse Isler to just buy this plane when this thing is over.

Call it the all day running company Airbus, just put sauna and cold plunge. And it'll just go from one 29, 0 29 to the next. To next all day running event, exactly. I think there's an outcome there. Yeah, paging Jesse Isler on that. Exactly. But I think we're,

how many seats do you still have available? We have six. So we're only allowing 30 right now. And that's big. And it's a high ticket item. If people are, if some baller out there is interested in contributing and participating in that, they just go, they go to the American Xtreme website

and they can get information and contact you that way. Yeah, you'll contact me directly and we'll just run you through everything. Yeah, and have you met your sort of fundraising goals just to execute the adventure or are you still looking to raise some money? I mean, obviously you wanna be able to give back to these nonprofits and beneficiaries, right?

Yeah, so we've met the goal for this to actually happen, but there's going to be that oh shit effect. So we're still raising capital so that we can cover down on everything. And then how we're splicing this is 100% of the net proceeds from the documentary and the manual that's sold go to these charities in perpetuity.

So it'll be that everlasting gobstopper for them to continue to fund them. Cool, yeah. Right on that. Final thoughts, Chris? Well, I've never done something like this before, so I'm pretty- Nobody has.

That's true. But I'm doing the scariest thing I've ever done, which is jumping out of a plane. It's one of those things where I've always said, you know what, not for me. And so I'm happy to go to the edge of my comfort zone a little bit, but yeah, it's gonna be an adventure for sure.

And final thoughts would be, I just wanna get back on boots on the ground in Dallas. Everybody's safe, healthy, had the experience of a lifetime. And then I can sort of exhale. Yeah, cool. Final thing you mentioned, you're putting together this manual, which I think is great.

Like, is there an ETA on wrapping that up and making that available or is that TBD on the website? It is TBD on the website, but 2023, having it completed. And we're not sure on when we're gonna debut it, but we're gonna get to work on it pretty soon. Cool. Well, I appreciate you guys. This is, in addition to just being an epic adventure that you guys are about to embark upon, the broader mission of addressing veteran rights

and just mental health issues at large, in this very strange and kind of difficult time that we live in, where a lot of people are suffering unnecessarily is really important work. And I applaud you for that and wish you guys well. I'm at your service. If there's anything I can do to support you

or help you guys out, please hit me up. Thank you. Can't wait to hear about it. Thanks for having us. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Here we are. We did it, we did it.

Good, happy new year, everybody. Happy new year everybody happy new year happy new year right on that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation

to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show

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Peace. Plants back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.