The Team House - Marine Sniper, LRS, Security Contractor, & Cybersecurity Expert | Ryan English | Ep. 160

Episode Date: August 27, 2022

Ryan English served as a Marine Corps sniper, a Long Range Surveillance Assistant Team Leader in the Army, and worked the Department of State Worldwide Protective Service (Iraq) where he was assigned to the Ambassador’s Protective Detail. After sustaining an injury in Iraq, Ryan turned his focus to a career in cyber security and continues to work as a firearms instructor. Today's Sponsors: Mad Rabbit Tattoo https://www.MADRABBIT.com/team They’ve preserved over 1.5 MILLION tattoos and right now, they’ve got an exclusive offer just for The Team house Project listeners. If you go to MadRabbit.com/team and use promo code Team you’ll receive 25% off. Take care of those tats! 👇 https://www.MADRABBIT.com/team To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed Subscribe to our Patreon! 👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #MarineSniper #LRS #cybersecurityBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Special operations, covert ops, espionage, the team house, with your hosts, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey, everyone, welcome to episode 160 of the team house. I'm Jack Murphy, joining you from our studio in Brooklyn.

Over in Area 51, David is joining us remotely, where they are studying him for medical science, for the good of society. Down below, Pirates of the Caribbean, you can see our guest tonight, Ryan English. Ryan is a former Marine sniper. He serves as a assistant team leader in a long-range reconnaissance unit in the Army. and today he works as a cybersecurity expert as well as a marksmanship instructor. So, Ryan, thank you very much for joining us today. Well, you know, thank you guys for asking, you know, you guys made it sound like I have a much busier schedule than I do.

But I'm really happy to be here with you guys. Yeah, I appreciate it, man. So you know what the first question I'm going to ask you on the show is about your origin story. And I'd like you to tell us a little bit about, you know, how you grew up. Oh, I forgot to mention that you were also a private security contractor with Triple Canopy. We'll get to that in a little bit. But first, we'd like to hear a little bit about your upbringing and kind of that path that took you towards the Marine Corps. Oh, well, I didn't know we're going that far back.

Yeah, we are. All right. Ancient history, man. Ancient history. You know, I, every male in my family going back was in a, the military. I'm sure it's a common thread every time you guys bring somebody on. Either that or it's like the judge told me. But no, you know, my my, my grandparents, World War II, you know, I, I was in the basement one day as a kid. I found my father's green beret and I don't think he really wanted me to,

but, you know, it went from there to like, I knew as a kid that I was going to be a Marine. Like, I don't know how or why or, but I know it, I. know it was something I knew before I was even a teenager. Maybe, you know, right around that time. And like I did the delayed entry program, man, they had me. I'll tell you a funny story, though. I walked into the recruiter's office. Staff Sergeant Roos was his name in Atlanta, Georgia, me and my buddy, David Coley,

great dude, walk in there and he's eating a sandwich. We go, hey, listen, I want to be an. 311. And there's nothing else that you can tell me that I want to be interested in. That's what I'm going to do. So me and my pal right here, that's what we want. So don't try to sell us on anything else. And this guy, I swear to, you know, he just, he's holding his sandwich up and he looks at us. And I remember him putting it on his desk. He had a newspaper, right? And he puts it on the newspaper on his desk. And he looks up at us and he's like, boys. Yeah, I can see that you gentlemen know exactly what it is that you need to do. And so, listen, I'm going to pull some strings and I'm going to get you guys where you need to go. I'll get you sorted out. But listen, you're going to have to start like pretty much right now in the delayed entry program here. I'm going to have to get you to sign this.

How old are you guys? All right. Come back when you're 17. So 17, man, like right out of my birthday, one year out, signed delayed entry program. And this guy just looking at this like, I made it work for you. I did it. I got you what you needed. Now you owe me something.

You know, you better be here every weekend. That guy must have been laughing so hard, man. So this is like the first success story that we've ever had on if somebody successfully like, you know, getting what they wanted out of their recruiter. Get one over. You know, it's funny because I only, I only, it's the irony is that the Army recruiter was actually a much cooler dude. and he took me and my buddy Dave up to Delanooga. And we got to watch guys going through because we're in Atlanta. It's a short drive.

And, you know, his buddy was like, the thing that killed it for me was his buddy goes, he's talking to his friend who was an R.I. And I could hear them talking to each other about like, hey, what's your next move and your career? Kind of a conversation while me and Dave are like watching guys repel, you know, off that big rock and everything. And he's like, yeah, man, putting my package for SF, man. I'm gone, dude. I'm at, I'm going to go SF. And when we got back to the, we got back to Atlanta, I go to the recruiter, I go, well, hey, so, you know, I want to know about SF. He goes, oh, son,

you know, you got to be an E5 before you can even put your paperwork in for that. And this is like, 1990. And, and I'm like, hell no, man, not waiting around that long. There's no possibility that that could happen. And I was like, I knew it. We were supposed to be Marines. That's what I need to be i'm going back over that guy's office and yeah and little did i know if i'd awaited 15 years i could have just jumped right through on the x-ray program right up the street just would have been amazing just just just hang out and wait yeah you could have gone and been a communist the college for 15 years and then signed up and you would have been good to go i would yeah i would have uh that's true i could have done that i could have also been an infiltrator within the communist in college though you don't

know you i could have been prepping myself i would have been the g chief I had that skill set without knowing. So you duly entered the Marine Corps as a willing candidate and as an infantryman, infantry Marine. Yeah. And you spent a lot of time at this was, you said 1990. So, you know, you spent a lot of time out at Fleet, right? Yeah. I mean, I actually, I got to boot camp the day of my birthday.

Like the morning of my 18th birthday. day, I'm on the yellow footprints getting screamed at. And it was, you know, I mean, you knew what it was going to be about. So in a way, it was like, it's intimidating for a kid, but it's fun. So then I got to the fleet. All these guys had just come home from the first Gulf War. And I'm talking a couple of weeks before because third battalion, fifth Marines got diverted on the way back from the Gulf War to do that humanitarian thing in like

Bangladesh. there had been a title waiver, some kind of horrible thing. And all these people got washed. And like 3-5 on the boats came back and like helped them out so that they were like the last Marines to get to the States. They had like the war had over like seven months prior. These guys are showing up now at Pendleton. And there's all these little kids there with their alphas in their paperwork in hand.

And we're all just like, we're. And that was the day I pulled my first hoodwink in the Marine Corps and got into snipers before. You know, because to get in the snipers in the Marine Corps, you usually have to get into your fleet unit. You get into the infantry for a little while and you get some seasoning, a little salt. And you get maybe if you're lucky, you get to go to a stay platoon in dock. Stay platoon was running an end dock like that week. And I watched a buddy of mine do some like some horrible, egregiously wrong thing, which was simply when he was, when he met his squad leader who was just sitting out in front of

battalion barking out names and this kid goes out and he sticks his hand out the squad leader some corporal and he had called jim fogle's name and jim just sticks his hand it's like jim fogle and the guy's looking at his hand and he's like oh i got something for you jim and i and i just the thing what happened next was pretty hilarious i mean we could skip it but it it induced me to take my serviceman's record book and look around for some other place to be at that time which i overheard the guys in the intel shop talking about yeah we need We need two more dudes from like Lima Company to fill out this thing for the stay-in, Doc. And I was like, yeah, that's me. Yeah, here you go.

Here's my paperwork. And they just, well, or whatever, dude. And the Snivers came over and like, do you even know what Snifers is? And I'm like, nope, it's Carlos Hathcock shit. And they're like, I'm going to fucking kill this kid. How's profanity on this show? We go off. Yeah, yeah.

All good. Okay. Yeah. You can go all balls deep with that, man. Just balls deep? Yeah. Hey, though, the good news, I'm still friends with the two of the gentlemen that Basically, my very first team leader, my very first chief scout, I still speak with on a regular

basis and work with them on different projects and stuff. So as much as they wanted to rip me into four different pieces and post me on the corners of Camp Pendleton as a warning to others, they turned out to be like great mentors for me. Yeah. So, yeah, then after that, I came, basically, I got a good chance early to go to sniper school. and because those guys ground me to death every day that they could before school started, I had it all squared away, made it through on my first try, which back then, back in my day, back then it wasn't common that you got through on your first try. So it was cool.

Can you tell us about that? What was for the Marine Corps and going to a staple between? Because in the Army at that time, I don't even know if they had sodic, but maybe they did, but like sniper wasn't like a dedicated MOS like it wasn't. Marine Corps? Well, technically in the Marine Corps, even today, I mean, it's a, it's a dedicated MOS even today, but it's not actually truly like 0-311 is a dedicated MOS. Oh, it is. Okay. My mistake. Right. It was, it was well, and that's a fight that we're, so I'm on, I'm in the Scouts Kniper Association. I'm on the board. And one of the things that we try, what we're trying to do in the future is try to help the schoolhouses and, and the greater community sort of remind

the organization as a whole how valuable snipers are and that it should be a dedicated MOS. Now like recon, recon, recon Marines get to go to the recon sniper school now. So it's sort of becoming this bifurcation. But back then, to your question, yeah, sniper school was like the boogeyman that lasted 11 weeks. And it was, it was this horrible. Every day you were told it was going to be your last before you even went. But I loved it because when dudes would quit. That's the day I wanted to quit. And some other guy would quit. And I'd be like, well, shit, I'm not quitting today. That guy sucks. But it was a secondary MOS. So the MOS, you'll see all the old dudes. It'll say like 8541 next to their name on their email and probably every one of their

pin numbers. 8541. There you go. You're welcome snipers everywhere. Hackers unite. Go get them. 0317. So it's still not technically your only job in the Marine Corps. You're still in 0311. You can still be, you know, not a sniper. It's like primary and secondary MOS and the Army, we'd call it. Yeah. Yeah, well, it is. It's PMOS and secondary. It's right. But it was, you know, if if you were lucky, you could stick around in in the community for a while. But in the Marine Corps back then, especially you needed to go into a, you know, after your second enlistment, let's say, or even maybe four your second enlistment, depending, you might be in a B-billet, which had nothing to do with it at all. And that was good for the Marine Corps to spread that

kind of knowledge around. But for the individual, I was jealous of like, you know, guys could stay in the Ranger Regiment or in group, like almost their whole careers, you know. And I thought that was something that was, you put a lot of money into those individuals in the Army. And I thought, yeah, that's what you do when you invest in something that well. But yeah, the school was great because it taught me a bunch of things as a young man just to get through the school. The mission planning that was incumbent upon you at that age was unbelievably detailed. I mean, you had to do every aspect of the mission was completely up to you. Like the battalion commander can only give you his general guidance according to the doctrine.

You need to, you select the FFP, you select the routes, you select the mode of transportation that you get to the drop. what's available is really what determines that. But you know what I'm saying? You get what I'm going. All that planning is on the sniper team leader, so you can't graduate the school unless you master that planning. One of the first things I learned in cybersecurity when I was hired by the guys that hired me was that that planning, that detail, that unbelievable, like 25 pages of the planning,

you know, that's how you conduct a penetration test. And if you knew how to do operational planning, if you've ever been a squad leader in the infantry and you've planned stuff out, you understand the five paragraph order. And you know that like in the E section, all that, that's where it gets big is, you know, actions on objective. And the detail and the secondary, tertiary, everything's, you know, backup everything. And all those things that you just know, any, any staffs are anywhere knows. You can grab a squad leader in the 82nd and be like, dude, here you go. You know how to plan this. That guy could be brought into this field that I'm in now and already has a really good idea of how something needs to be done holistically.

And it's a really important skill to have, you know. You can know everything you want about computers and not know that. Yeah, go ahead. Could you tell us about your final shot in the sniper course? Because I've heard it's very nerve-wracking. I mean, it's nerve-wracking. I mean, it's nerve-wracking. I didn't give the sniper schools.

but I've heard the Marine Scouts Kniper course, it's quite challenging. Are you talking about the general shoot? I may be referencing different time periods, like friends of mine who were, you know, my peers that went through the course. So they had to make a final shot in the course at the end of it. Yeah. It's like pass-fail kind of deal. Yeah, that was so every school would do it a little bit differently.

Maybe even every class would be a little bit differently. Like, you know, you might have like this whole. scenario where you've been in the field for a couple of days and you're going to get one opportunity to send around at at a target so and that might only be because like you were in the proper place with the proper you know you actually had eyes on the objective that you were supposed to have and reproached undetected and finally you see like the instructors are walking next to like a dude who fits the description that you're supposed to engage at how however many meters away, and that's the guy.

And so we used to call it the general shoot. And then you'd engage, but you'd hit it. You'd send it at a target, obviously, not. But, you know, that changed a lot from class or class. Sometimes the hardest part of everything was the last week of school was, you know, Hell Week was week eight or nine. You didn't even, the week where you don't sleep is like deep in school. very following week is field week where you do that shoot or you know you you didn't make it that far

but to me the hardest shot of all was the second day of qual uh because i had i i i had my observer was absolutely he was a sweet dude he was a gray marine but he couldn't call wind and he didn't know how and it was already in that far into school he couldn't call right right so my buddy Bill Merwin is a guy from my platoon and he and I you know I I you know his partner would make it so that like Bill shot when I shot and on the first yet you had three days to call you really only needed to get two the first day of quality didn't qualify I got 19 you needed 20 and I'm losing my mom I'm literally going to pull all the hair out of my head because I didn't come this far to get like I can't call wind right you know and so day two I'm I'm I'm waiting for Bill to make his win, or Bill's partner to make his wind call, and that's the wind I'm going to use. And these guys were, like, making their call a little extra loud so I could pick up on it. You know, my boy, Bill, he's like, say it again. Yeah.

And I'm just like, fucking write that down, bro. We're doing four weeks. And, you know, and now, so the second day, I quarre the last day, I'm like, I'm borderline, right? I'm coming down to, like, my last two rounds. and we're shooting movers at like, I don't know, we're at what, 960, 963 yards, I think it was. And I'm like, I'm down to my last shot. And now to this day, I do not, I cannot tell you for sure whether the dudes down in the butts were like,

that's English up there. He's a good dude. Because I was giving away all school long, I could stalk, I could stalk my nuts off. Like, once I got, I knew earlier in stalking that I was going to, I had already stalked every site on Camp Pendleton. And that's where the school is. And I knew every trick on penalty. So like I was giving away tens to people.

Like, hey, man, this is your spot. This is follow me. Like the last day of stalking, I stalked with a road guard vest on my hand of God. You could ask anybody who went through that class. I was like, fuck it. I'll do it with the road guard vest. I was that good. So like I had already traded away some good, you know.

G2. I had already, yeah, man, I had already given away some political capital within the class. So I mean, I tell you, like, it's not like I can't shoot. I love shooting. I mean, I, you know, for Lanzang tactical, I'm testing all the rifles. You'll buy that rifle and there'll be a three-shot group that's less than three-quarters of an inch. That was me, you know, and, and I can still shoot, really, even though I'm getting old,

but like, nobody's calling win for you. Yeah. I mean, going to shoot well. And I, yeah. And so coming down that very last round, moving target, targets like, I think about I think there were, you know, there were a cut down echo target, like an Ipsic target, but made out of a cardboard, cut down, put on a lollipop and walked. Everybody's walking in the butts.

And so you just see them going by. And it probably wasn't too hard for somebody to just stick a paper, like a ram, a spider in there. Yeah. I'll never, I'll never know if I made that last shot or not. Yeah, they keep those government bullport point pins back there to hook the, hook up up, yeah. What are you talking about, Dave?

Yeah. You're going to roll your eyes at me, Ryan. But as I relate this story from the Fort Benning sniper course, but the M24s at the schoolhouse were kind of shot out at those days. And the night sights that they had at the schoolhouse at that time, I can't remember the nomenclature, but it was like looking through a fish bowl. Was it the PBS 10? Was that what you guys had? May have been. Okay.

And so doing night shoots, I mean, There may have been pasties falling off of those targets down range. There may have been people making them up against the berm line. Even the instructors are looking at it. Like, oh, I think that's a burn on the edge of the target, you know? Definitely. Yeah. Yeah.

There's some chicanery taking place. Yeah. You know, it should be known to the greater audience that there is not a more lawbreaking disregarding of any rule set organization in either of any service than snipers. in fact i will you know the first day of school the chief instructor Todd perisi one of my mentors i loved Todd perisi as a human being like as a man he was i i called that dude up when i needed any advice right Todd was a great human being Todd stands in front of the classroom this dude was like the first dude to be the head instructor of first marine division school is just an E5 that's

the respect that people had for him right and he stands up there and he goes gentlemen I'm here to tell you something very important. Don't ever get caught cheating in this class. Because if you're caught cheating in this class, you will go home instantly and never be invited back. But I'm also going to tell you, you are going to have to cheat to get through this class. You go somewhere, some way during the class,

you're going to cheat. Robbie, and he looks at Robbie reads me. He's like, did you cheat? Right? All the time. Tim Schimmick, did you cheat? Schimmick goes constantly. You get caught?

hell no if we catch you you'll never you'll never see the inside of this building again and it's like wow it's intimidating but like there's a old thing that laws don't apply to pigs and that's i mean you know honestly in the hacker community like if you don't have that mindset of like oh you you got a rule set you got rule set that's good your firewall rule yeah cool yeah it doesn't apply to me i'm i'm going to look at that until i see where it doesn't work for anybody and then that's where it works for me and then and then that's where you go. You got to have that mindset, man. Everything is a, everything is, everything is attainable. Everything is possible. I'm sorry, it's that own mentality. If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying and if you get trying hard

enough. Well, yeah. And just last I, but before we sent the taxpayers into some sort of a panic, I'll just say that, you know, when you, we graduated the sniper course and in the, the sniper section and the ranger regiment we had top of the line equipment and we were not playing those kind of games like it was very we were training two standard and i know the marine scout snipers have very high standards as well um but when you have shitty equipment yeah maybe maybe you know the left the left and right limits open up a little bit right they do that happened to me at triple canopy that happened um i'm not going to name the manufacturer of the of the of the of the of the gas powered rifle that we were using.

But, you know, the barrel life on that thing wasn't what it was supposed to be. And during Kual, you know, everybody's shooting on these M24s that were pretty well maintained. And everybody's just shooting not holes. It's just watching professional dudes get there, you know, that everybody's just smoking the FBI qual. And then you, you know, you'd stuff the M24 in the bag and you'd pull out the other. rifle and and then you proceed to go unk like all the way down the line guys are flipping out and cursing and smashing things because I just saw myself shoot I know the shooting can happen

from me to I can do the thing right and then so yeah the the the state department overseer had to be like if it wasn't for that dude he he actually I can't remember you know that guy actually the instructors were like watch these guys shoot all of them will pass the call with a bolt action rifle. Then they'll shoot the same exact qual with a gas gun and like three quarters of them won't pass. So what do you want to do about this? And the guy was like, you got a copy machine? Go take those little

targets and blow them up 200%. Because I just want to see bullets go into the lines. Just, you know, and because common sense would tell you that individual can shoot. When I was when I was working at TC if you went on leave

and you had a bulk, if you were a DDM, who got assigned a bolt gun and you went on leave other dudes would be like hey brother uh leave bar your rifle while you're gone to do their qualls because you know you don't want to chance it that's you're shooting for your dinner and and uh yeah it's let me uh you know i could schoolhouse guns never live that well yeah go ahead let me give a quick shout out to our sponsor for this show it's uh mad rabbit mad rabbit makes this uh tattoo balm uh they are committed to reinventing tattoo aftercare founded by two friends with a passion for ink. And their product is this tattoo bomb that revitalizes and replenishes and proactively preserves tattoo ink.

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Vietnam War Oh I'm so sorry It's not your fault Dave You were you were in a bad way When I did that interview That's right that was after Yeah yeah You're in the concussed

You're their first contemporary Yeah Marine Scouts sniper So can you can you kind of give us A little bit of the Like when you talk about the guy Your spot are not being able to read wins Like can you tell our audience

A little bit about like How a sniper team works and what's important about the wins and reading trace and those types of things. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, Jack, I would challenge your description of me as contemporary anything. I'm getting kind of old, man. But the basics don't change. And reading wind is probably the most important part of getting around to go from point A to point B exactly where you want it to go, right? The rest of precision shooting is a mathematical equation coupled with fundamental mechanical things that you do like breathing, relax before you shoot, hold your point of aim, good trigger

break, you know, squeeze, you know, those are things anybody can be taught and they can repeat them and be perfect. So mechanically, you've got this thing, you just never get it wrong once you've done it enough. And then the ammunition, your, your assumption is that you've got really good ammunition, match grade quality ammunition, always goes the same place as last round went. But wind is really hard to do right because, number one, it's a variable. Nature's blowing and then it's not blowing so hard. It's gusting and then it's not. So how do you know what that wind is doing between you and the target? So the first thing you want to be doing is you want to look for all the little indicators that are on the ground or just above, like maybe several feet above

ground level, between you and the target, like trees, like little shrubs, like leaves on the ground or garbage, or somebody's, you know, somebody's hung their laundry out and you see like shirts blowing in the breeze. The first thing is important to know about calling with is, is it going left to right or going right to left. And my partner in school, he, I don't know if it was his vision or what, but we would look through the spotting scope and he would only be able to confirm for me

that it was, it was, it's left win, man. And he would say it in this very, as a matter of fact, kind of he'd be like, well, it's left to right. And that would be it. And I'd be like, well, okay, I can see that. I need to know how much, you know, left am I going? I feel that on my race.

Yeah. Yeah, I could tell. I'm watching the same places that you are. I know what I'm doing. And so there is an art form to it. Like, they'll give you a list. They'll say, okay, if it's three to five miles an hour and you're shooting this projectile that assumed they're all the same, this bullet weight going this fast, then you know

at that this distance that that's the time of flight from muzzle to target. So if it's in that time of flight, it's exposed to this five mile an hour wind that's going from left to right for this long, like maybe a second, maybe a second and a half. But in that amount of time, it's in a river of air, just like a river. It's like being in the water. So if you're trying to swim from one end of the river to the other end to meet your loved ones, your girl, and you have to swim, if you swim right at her, you're going to land, you come ashore like way over here to her left because you forgot to swim into the course of the current. So you got to pick how upstrily you want to swim to let the water blow you back on to her.

You come climb it out right in front of her, Navy SEALs, successful, handsome, you know, looking good, dripping wet, James Bond, boy shorts, rancher panties. That's the goal on target. So if you can shoot into that windstream and have it push your bullet right back into where it's supposed to be, it's art and it's science. But you can actually look and say, if you know it's seven miles an hour, let's say at the midpoint between you and the target, let's say, at 800 yards and that 400 yard wind is exactly 7 miles an hour. Yes, you can go look on that

chart and go, cool, I need to go 1.5 mil radians into the wind. And you'll dial that or adjust that in your scope and you'll be on target. But the art of doing it without looking at the paper and, you know, in between shots, your observer's job is, oh, by the way, you asked about how the Snyder team works. So the senior person on the sniper team is usually the observer, you know, because he's going to handle things like he's got the radio. He's got the greater, the bigger, more powerful scope. And he's looking in a greater area. Let's say he's focused on all the things that are happening around the sniper team. And he has the job. I mean, it's harder to call wind and call trace than it is. I mean, to learn the fundamentals of marksmanship. The sniper just has to put the put it on target and execute the fundamentals, right? That's right. When I'm when I'm teaching shooters or anybody, anybody ever has is teaching shooters, especially in this context, you tell that person like, hey, the shooter is your robot person. He's just a living robot. That's all he is. And you just, you tell him where to put the crosshairs. And he's going to let you know that they're on the place

you want. And then the rest of he's just, he's just going to listen. And it's your job to feed him information. Like, all right, man, you know, constantly evolving diatribe of like, the wind is this, or you could just be like five points left, you know, 0.5 left, 0.5 left, 0.8 left. And he's going to squeeze it whenever it's appropriate, right? But you just keep giving him that information. The trace that you talked about, what Dave was saying, y'all, the trace is interesting. Some people call it trace. Some people call it vapor trail. But given the right conditions, you're looking through a scope at a target. It usually it's going to have to be a few hundred meters away, like five or six hundred meters best. you know i mean you can see it at 300 but it's better to be farther and you see the the mirage of

the sun you know has has heated this air that's close to the ground and the mirage is is coming up off the ground this air is waving it's called a boil and it looks like water boiling in a pot remember and so the water boils and if it's if the wind is being pushed to the left then or you know shoot my left shooter's left then it looks like the boil is doing this A little hand wavy, look, right? And you can see that in the scope. If you take your, let's say you have a 20 power scope, you focus to where the target is perfectly crisp,

and then you dial it unfocused a quarter of a turn counterclockwise. So now you're actually looking at the air that's about halfway between you and the target. So if a person was there, he'd be in focus, not the target anymore. So now you're seeing this air halfway through. Pretty cool. But then you see the round cut through that air. And it disturbs that air and leaves awake like a speedboat going, you know, right down the middle of Lake Tahoe. You see that wake.

And the speedboat kind of curves. You can see it hook with the wind. It's like watching somebody throw a curveball at a far enough distance. It's really amazing. And you can see it either hit the target or miss the target or, you know, where in the target it hits. And it's phenomenal. Like if you can do that, then you can call. your observer on. So like he might miss his first shot, but if you know your job, your shooter will

never miss his second shot because you're going to instantly give him a perfect adjustment because you saw the trace, you saw the wind. And you just tell them two things. Give me another half right. Go. And then that person's good, ready to go. He sends it right away. It's still. And everybody's happy. But it's an art form. It takes a lot of time to learn how to do it right. And, you know, the guys I know, like police snipers that, that spend all their time on the range, they get this good, or military guys who, you know, again, spend all their time on the range shooting government ammunition. The only way to get this good or you got to spend like 10 grand on ammunition,

because it takes a long time to develop that the familiarity with the wind to be very good at it. Yeah. And my guy wasn't. Yeah. And it's like you say, you know, like if that guy doesn't read the wind, if he can't see trace, if you call your shot and you go, you know, where the crosshair snap, and you're like, bottom left, he goes, I missed it. Like, he didn't see the truth.

To correct you, like, ah, shit. Yeah, that's a, like, literally if you blink, you miss it. Yeah. Yeah. That round is, that round is never, may as well have never happened. Yeah. And if you're really good, you have a really good position, you could absorb the recoil of the rifle and be back on the scope as the shooter.

You can be back on the scope in time to. see the round impact or splash maybe in the target or to the left or to the right, like in the dirt. If you're lucky, if you have a good position, and usually you're a little, you got, you know, inside drainage yards, you're not going to recover that fast, right? But outside, you can because the amount of time it takes for the round to travel. You can call your own splash sometimes, but you don't want that, that's not your job. You're supposed to be thinking about getting the crosshair back on the target, not looking

for impacts. That's your observer. If you're out there alone, you've got to do all that. But that's not the way the team works, right? You want to have that teammate taking all that work off your hands to make you that. That's why the team works so well. That's why sniper teams are so affected. One's the brains and the other one's the machine.

So, Ryan, after you graduated from the schoolhouse, what was it like getting to your unit going out with the tweet? You started deploying. I mean, what was the life like at this time? It's a different life once you have the, you, you know, once you graduate school, you're a different human being. And a few years back, I still, I'll never understand. So I met a bunch of the guys at the Army Schoolhouse. This is back when like Justin Vitato and a couple of the other guys that we were still friends with the guys that were there shooting or instructing. Dane Lentz was there. And a couple of, other cats. Yeah, they're younger, so you guys might not know them anymore. But, but they asked me, they said, listen, look, if you could be a guest speaker here, what would you say? And I would tell them, you know, and they eventually had a guest speaker drop out. And I, and I said this, now that you've graduated this school, you have this little piece of paper. You're entitled to walk

into anybody's office and say, look, I'm a, I'm, I'm, I'm Ryan English. I'm team leader for a three, five staple tune. And I need some of your helicopters for some training. So, you know, when can I get something? You know, and you just walk in. You're a corporal and the Marine Corps carries a lot of weight, though, right? So, you know, if you want it to, it's not like being E4 in the Army. Like, you walk in as a corporal, you're like, hey, hey, who's in charge here? Yeah. I'm a corporal English. I'm in three, five staples. I'm a sniper team leader. You don't say it's too, that's way too dickish. But you'd be like, yeah, I'm one of the team leaders in three five stay. Yep. And I'm going to need some of these Hueys for some aerial shooting.

So when, when can I get them? And they, and the, and the, and the, The audacity usually is like, oh, well, well, let's go see the training schedule here. And, you know, yeah, we've got some time here. You, two birds? What area? And you're like, yeah, cool. And then you leave. You've just coordinated your own helicopter.

You have the authority to go into places and be, if you're respectful, and you tell them why. I would go down to the artillery guys. You'd like, listen, man, I need to know more about what actually happens here. Like, how do you make the thing go that far and land on the place? And like, who are you? And I'm like, oh, I'm Corbellian. I'm a three, five stay. I'm one of the snipers.

Oh, well, yeah, that's cool, man. We're doing a shoot next week. You want to come out? Yes, I did. I want to watch big guns go explosion time. And I want to know what you're doing here that makes that work. You know, and so that's the, you know, if you have the credential to ask a person what his job is and how, how, you know, you can interact with him better. That's the biggest thing about graduating that school.

The other thing that's really cool about graduating that school is nobody can say shit to you anymore. in your own battalion. Like, you're now one of the anointed. And like, you can, you can. Yeah. You know, it's like in the ring corps, once you graduate the school and you have the hogs tooth on your neck, you know, you, you, you get all, you get a lot. They cut a lot of slack to you. Like, you get to do things that you, you're out of the microscope a lot. You know, you don't have to answer the detailed questions about what you're doing today. What is what is the difference is between the army and the Marine Corps, you know, the army, you have a lot of bling on your uniform and all these badges and everything. And even Marines who graduate from ranger school, they have to, they're customary, they can't wear their ranger tabs.

A lot of them wear it under the flap of their camis. Yeah. So, so when you graduate the scout sniper course, that hogs tooth is a big deal. Do you want to tell people who don't know what that is? Yeah, the hogs tooth is a big deal. The, the day you graduate,

there's a couple customs that happened on graduation day. only one I think I'll discuss today is the hogs to the hogs tooth is the thing though here's the thing about the hogs tooth on your on on you on the nights when you want to quit the hot having that hogs tooth on your neck is the thing that one of the many things that keeps you kind of in the game what they do is they'll pull a projectile out of a match grade 308 round or today you know be a 300 win mag but um they'll pull the projectile out of a match grade round drill it and and and and hang on a piece of 550 cord with double fishermen's not on each side and present it to you on graduation. Just a bullet on a string, right? But the only guys wearing that are other guys who have graduated the school.

And the word, the phrase hogs tooth comes from a misunderstanding that was clarified many years ago. I'll give you the rumor is, it's like, you know, when the legend becomes true print. a legend. So here's what kind of I'm thinking, I'm pretty sure happened. And if there's other hogs out there listening, please, you know, let us know. But for the longest time, students at all the Marine Corps schools were not called by their name. Well, they were, but like they were mostly just called pig. Pigs. That's what you are. And that's how you're getting treated. And the idea since the beginning of time was to do anything and everything to the students that would make them not want to be there anymore.

And the idea was to continuously challenge your equanimity, make you want to lose emotional control over yourself and lose your bearing and become irritated and annoyed. The idea is that like if you're asking somebody to spend days and days out, you know, crawling on their belly to get to some place and have total discipline and expect them to come back with either intel or having, you know, engaged something important, that's an amazing amount of discipline. And so if something bothers you like somebody calling you a pig for 11 weeks or however many weeks it is now, like maybe you shouldn't be in this job.

I mean, it's nothing personal. It's a non-gendered word. It's not like pig ass or pig. There's a lot of other shit they're calling you. But pig is what you are. And one day there, and I can't remember obviously everybody wants to take credit for this. I don't know if it was, you know, the Quantico school or the First Marine Division school. some senior officer in charge of division schools

overheard the instructors calling the students pigs and when they call you pig it's not like you're not Wilbur you're not the cute pig you know Charlotte's not spinning a web over you you know it's it's like you're being referred to pig and it's like the ugliest word in the English language it's all the ugliness it's like you figs and everything all the time and you know if you let it get to you

just pack a shit well somebody like I guess in a you know, Colonel, Lieutenant Colonel, somebody at that level, you know, asks to, you know, come into the instructor's hooch and demands to know, why are you calling these Marines, pigs? Those are Marines. Those young men are Marines. And you're calling, I hear you calling them pigs. That's not what they are. They're Marines. You need to tell me why. I've heard this all week. And every time I come by here is pig this and pig that. No, those are Marines. You need to explain me what that is. And some enterprising gunnery sergeant says, listen, sir, sir, That's not a farm animal. That's an acronym that means professionally instructed gunmen, okay, PIG professionally instructed gunmen. So you see, at this phase of their evolution, sir, those Marines, they're just professionally instructed gunmen.

And that's not what we want to turn out at the school. What we turn out at this school, sir, is hogs, hunters. of gunmen. See, so we remind them that they're just swine, professionally instructed gunmen until the day they graduate and then obviously they accredited hunters, bless you off, hunters of gunmen. So the hogs tooth, you know, had always already been the hogs tooth, but it actually was given like that name, name, you know, like, but it's something you wear with a lot of pride. You don't leave it hanging out. it's under your shirt, you know, because it's copper jacketed, it turns your chest kind of green. And, you know, but it just doesn't matter, though, because when you have it, it's, it's like,

you know, the people in your unit, it's like they, you know, they're going to cut you slack. And you can get things. You can get stuff done for your people. You know, you got a team now. And, you know, you go into admin and you're like, I want to know why my guy's not getting his paper's done. And, and, you know, the day before you graduated, you're just another guy. And they're like, yeah, you know what, take a number. I'll fucking tell you when your guy gets his leave. He'll know, but he'll be, I'll tell you. I'll tell you, I'll tell him, then I'll tell you.

You walk in there as a sniper and you're like, you know, he's still got to be respectful, but you're like, hey, look, I'd like to know why my guy doesn't have his shit. And suddenly it's a different conversation because you have you, the word we're looking for here, the most important word in the Marine Corps, the phrase is, do you rate? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, does he or she rate? He don't rate.

Don't talk to them. You don't rate. How does that work in the Marine Corps? Is it because you were, I don't know how you're set up. Are you attached to an infantry product? Yeah. The reason I'm asking is because obviously the Marine Corps, by and large, frowned on recon and force recon, because everybody in the Marine Corps special, they're not special, right? And you sort of run ahead and stepchildren where snipers are fully embraced and given that clout that, you know, other units might not get.

Well, you're right. The thing about, so I think it was General Al Gray was the commandant, and this is in the 80s. And Al Gray was an awesome human being. And that's, he was a commandant when I enlisted. But they, they at some point in the 80s, the Marine Corps was offered to let Force Recon guys be part of Socom. And he said, no, I'm not going to create a division in the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps is an elite organization. So I'm not going to create that division.

All Marines are elite. Right. Okay. I mean, you know, you know, I, you know, I, I'll, you know, honestly, man, like, after contracting and going to Benning a lot and being around the guys in the 7th Ranger Regiment, man, you know, the last 20 years that nobody gets the training and the amount of work that the Ranger Regiment has had, I don't think. But prior to that, and maybe in the end in the future, I'll, dude, I'll take a platoon of Marines anywhere in the world because they really do get a lot. of training and it's the discipline and it's the esprit of corps that that they know what every marine before them did going back to like the dawn of time and that's something that like I always give the army guys in my life shit I'm like when's the army birthday you don't know no one cares like nobody

gives a shit and nobody ever will right but everybody on earth knows when November 10 comes around because every dude who even the guys who hated their time in the Marine Corps walks around and like you know right you just listen everybody out there like on November 10th open your ears up and you're going to hear guys going back and and yeah yeah that the the Marine Corps sniper ecosystem yes it lives inside the infantry battalion for now and it and it has in the past and that's but they're it may shift um they live in the battalion because they they are the battalions, essentially, they do surveillance and reconnaissance for the battalion commander. So they actually, in most cases, live in the S2 shop, which is the Intel shop. So they're isolated

a little bit. Some battalion tried to put them in weapons company. That doesn't really work. You've got a bunch of free-spirited guys. You're going to put them in heavy weapons company. You know, it's like it's never been a good fit. But the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, battalion has always benefited greatly from having that asset right there in-house. And, you know, it's a force multiplier. And it always has been. And the Marine Court does this every after every war, they try to get away from this stuff. And, oh, we don't need them here. We'll give them, we'll put them all up at regiments. And then the regiment can dole them out if we ever meet them like that. You know, okay. You know, that could still work if it's the same number of

individuals. But you know what? It doesn't help when I need to go down to Lima Company and talk to Lima Company commander. And like I might belong to him for the entire deployment. You know, I want to get to know him. I want to know what his voice sounds like on the radio. He needs to know me so that when I tell him what's up on the X, he knows it's, ah, dude, English is a good dude, man.

If he tells me this is happening, it's happened. If you stick me up at Regiment, I don't get that FaceTime. And, you know, it's interesting because like there's those parallels too in cybersecurity where like, I need to tell the information security apparatus needs to tell the rest of the organization like, look, we're here to do this work for you. You need to know me. You need to trust when I say something is good or it's not going to be good that, you know, you know, and that selling yourself is a never-ending thing in cybersecurity. It's a never-ending thing for snipers and recon guys. Rangers don't have that problem. I know, Jack. But, you know,

the Rangers once upon a time, there were snipers, two-man sniper teams that patched each Ranger company. And then it wasn't until later on that they were. consolidated into sniper sections. So they, I think all of these units have their own kind of growing pains and evolutions and every, all of them have come a long way since 9-11, of course. They have, but then I start seeing signs of this today when we have like our meetings and we do these things where, you know, we hear from guys that are at the schoolhouse today. And, you know, they're like, well, you know, the Corps doesn't really, you know, they're going to

redo, they're going to re-ach up. You know what it always comes down to? I hate that shit. You know what it comes down to whether it's, you know, somebody, it's always some major trying to make Lieutenant Colonel in Quantico or at the Pentagon. It's reinventing the wheels. Oh, sir, I got this great idea. Here's what we're going to do.

We take those assets. We're re-repackage it and we're going to call it that. And it's like, why would you do that? You know, did you not just watch the 20 years before you happened where Snivers were like working it, like just stacking it everywhere they went? Rangers, Marines, don't matter. Like, guys are just stacking shit.

And now you're going to... What? A good idea, Ferry, trying to put 10 pounds of shit into a five-pound bag. Yes, this is so common. Yeah, I need to get promoted E3. Let me come up with a smart idea

that, like, gets me there, you know, or, you know, or... You know what? You know, like, yeah. It's the guy who's trying to make 06. You know, he's like, that's a brilliant idea. Very dangerous.

I'm going to take a giant shit on what worked. And I'm going to call it something different. You know, I've invented something completely new. Look what I did. So, you know, if I was trying to make colonel, I would say, hey, guys, here's my great plan. I just studied the last 20 years of warfare. And we totally stomped ass when we did these things. So I'm going to leave everything alone.

Yeah. And that's it. That's the tweet. Feed up on the desk, drinking a beer. Yeah. So, Ryan, what led to you, you know, getting out of the Marine Corps then? You know, two things. You know, I, after watching what happened in Somalia in 1993, a lot of guys,

you know, it's like two of the kids in my class were in the, they were the only Marines ever to be pulled out of class and then dropped back in. You always start over from day one. But Grant Reynolds and Andrew Lopez went to Somalia with the first, they went with, the first, I can't remember what knew they were in, but they were the first dudes ashore. And then when they turned it over to, was it, a Gaelic serpent happened? Yes. When the Rangers and Delta and everybody took over the humanitarian mission, and, you know, 10th Mountain everybody, when NATO took over the, or the UN or whatever, took over the humanitarian mission,

that disastrous day when the American military apparatus basically said, all right, well, that's sucked real bad. we're just going to leave. I think a lot of guys looked at that and said, I'm out of here. Well, I'm not going to, I'm not going to be one of those guys, you know, get roughed up one day. And then we just walk out of there. That's not my style. I'm going to leave. And so I thought, I'm going to go to college. I'm going to come back as a pilot. I'm going to be flying heloes. Because I thought, I looked around the Marine Corps, you know, in all my experience, I was like, dude, I'm going to come back as like a warrant officer and like fly helicopters and then like just surf the last however many years of my life as that guy. You know what I mean? Like I'm, I'm,

I really, I thought, okay, I'm just going to go pick up a degree or come back as an officer or warrant and just never have to talk. I don't have to listen to anybody's bullshit. You know, I'm not going to stand in formations. I'm just going to go back to this type of thing. And, but in the Marine Corps, I'll just, I thought that's cool. I'll be a pilot. And then I took a, took an excruciatingly long time in college to get through college on purpose. But I didn't have any student loans. To do that. Nobody else should do that.

No. But the war started in my fifth year. September of my senior year in college. Yeah. The war started. And I was leaving my house. And my roommate was from New York City. I was from Jersey, but he had lived in New York City for a long time.

and he had the horrible accent. He's like, hey, fucking, some dude just crashed the plane in the building, bro. You want to come and see this? And I'm like, nah, I got to go to class. He's like, it's on fire. And I'm like, okay, cool. You know, whatever.

And I look at it. And I'm like, yeah, that's really burning. That sucks. I wonder what kind of plane it was. Like, I don't know. And he's sitting there. You know, I go to class. I had just bought a cell phone like six months before.

My dad calls me as I'm parking the car. and he's like son they hit the other one and i'm like the fuck you talking about man and he's like the other building they hit it with a plane they flew it right into it he goes i he goes son i took you there once when you were three years old we went up in there and we saw that there could be 50 000 people in there right now and i'm like holy shit i walk into my class political science right walking to polysci and the instructor had already i guess he had heard and he's like okay everybody you know, and I'm just sitting there listening to this guy talk and I'm like, I'm fucking out of here. I got to go.

So I immediately like I go home. I grab my shit. I can't. I start calling the recruiting office. They're not answering, you know, the phone. So about a week and a half later, I finally get in front of a recruiter and he's like, dude, we don't want prior service guys. We got plenty of guys, you know. And I'm like, but I'm an 8541.

I'm a scound sniper. You definitely want me. It's like, man. No, dude. We don't need you in the Marine Corps right now. you know it's not going to happen we can't i can't write enough waivers to get you in and i was like man okay so you know i i finished up school in may that year uh you know the war was over essentially so it's like what are you going to do you know you're not there's no that's it you all killed

it you guys stomped ass three weeks that's all you know cool that's it and we're okay i'm like well i guess i'm just going to do whatever now i guess well i guess well Well, you know, then all of a sudden everybody starts talking about, let's go to Iraq. I'm thinking, oh, that's interesting. We should, really, you know, you know, you remember the first time you heard it? You're like, what? Really? Saddam?

What? Saddam? Yeah. And then it was over in three weeks. What are you going to do? You can't get in fast enough to go to these things. Where it's over, Ryan? You missed it.

You missed the war, Ryan. It's over, bro. It's over. You know, up until, up until guys went, up until like dudes were like, well, we've, we've, we've, we've, we've, we've, uh, positioned Marines into the forward area in Kuwait and blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, nah, they're not going to go. Three weeks later, it's over. So I'm just, all right, man. But by 2004, when I start contracting, uh, I, you, everyone knew this is not going to end anytime soon.

Like, you just knew. You could read the newspaper, then you would know, you could read between the, lines and say to yourself, well, I've read all these history books about Vietnam. I'm pretty sure they said this exact same dumb shit. Every time somebody asked them how it's going. And I remember correctly, those Afghanis are kind of like guerrillas. Everything's going great. Everybody's going great. There's a light at the end of the tunnel. We're making progress. Our metrics are good. Right. And you're sitting there reading that shit. You're like, right. Yeah. Metrics. Like, what do we need to do to win this again? Like, how do we find a degree?

Yeah, atmosphere. Yeah. Yeah. It's it. Atmospherics. Yeah. So contracting was your way into the fight, Ryan. So tell us how that went down. So actually, the way it started was a buddy of mine went into, he had graduated school before me and he was a little smarter than me. He was in the Marine Corps with me in our first go around. He actually, he went, he got into the Air Force into their combat controller pipeline. So I was like, well, all right, I don't necessarily want to go active duty, but there's a combat controller unit in Kentucky that's in the guard, right?

And I'm like, I'll go up there, do the qual, right? Smoke that. And then I'm like, cool. And then I get done. The guys like, all right, man, could be eight months. Could be a year. And I'm like, whatever, dude. This is not going in.

So I had a buddy of mine from the Corps who was working for a company called USIS, United States Investigative Service at the time, just called. use this. It doesn't even exist now. But they had this contract where they were trained in Iraqi police and Iraqi dignitary protection. And they were in, they're in Baghdad. They're at victory, at Camp Victory, the big camp, which was adjacent to the airport, if anybody knows where that's at Biaap, Baghdad International Airport. But it was just above area, was that area four, area five, where the SF camp was. And that's where our camp was, was Camp Dublin, right? So we had this huge camp. My buddy gets me on the gig, and it's like the middle of 2004, and it was really cool because we're training these Iraqi police, how to just basically be effective with firearms.

And that's an adventure. I don't want to talk shit about my students at that time, but like, some of them have an athletic mindset. Some don't. And then we would let them loose on the world to try to do good in their own country. And they would be better prepared for the insurgents that they were dealing with. And it was a really good job. They paid really well. I really, it was a great camp.

I had a wonderful time. And I met a lot of really old school people that were really just, I mean, just serious guys with serious knowledge. I had a wonderful. I learned a lot. But the coolest thing was every Thursday night, everybody from MNFI, the multinational forces Iraq, because the DOD element of the contract ruled the police. thing and then the State Department guys were worried about the Dignorant protection. So they would come down to our cookout every Thursday night because this is the only

place on biap where there was alcohol served. Now, I'm not going to say to you that there were uniformed Army officers drinking booze on our camp every Thursday night because that would mean that they were in violation of what was it? General. General. Yeah. So I wouldn't I wouldn't presume to tell you that our officers would be that, you know,

flagrant to break those rules. But every Thursday night we got smashed. And I got to sit with people who were like colonels. And we're on the Monday morning brief with, you know, sec death next Monday or last Monday and sit there and listen to these guys vent. And like, you know, I had the intel reports that they would get. They'd share with us. And it was anything that wasn't above a certain level of classification, I could read, you know. And it was an amazing place to be. That camp was an amazing thing. And it really kind of switched me on to a lot of stuff. And then in the middle of 2006, my buddy, one of my other buddies in Marine Corps was in a Lerce unit in the, in the guard.

And I had, let me tell you something, I had a good life in Baghdad. Man, I had, I had two cell phones. I had a VoIP phone. I could call home for free. Voice over internet protocol. Look it up. That was fancy shit back then. That was fancy shit.

Yeah. Yeah. I had, you know, I had like, I eventually had Wi-Fi in my room. That's another story, but it was amazing, right? Like, my buddy calls me up and he's like, hey, my unit's going to deploy Iraq in August. And I'm like, that's awesome. Dude, you get here. You let me know what you need because I've been here for two years and I can get you anything.

Like, you've been in Baghdad in the same place for two years. You know enough people. You can get anything. Like, I'll get you. I get you burner rockets. I get you burner guns and grenade. I just, you know, doing deals, man. And I was like, and he's, and he's like, no, dude, no.

I was thinking maybe you'd like want to come with me. Like, you know, like, reenlist. You should come on this deployment. And I was like, are you kidding? Making $650 American dollars a day. Why do you want me to leave this? Oh, yeah. And then the Air Force had called.

And they were like, hey, we got your spot. And I'm like, nah, $6.50 a day, a day. That was a huge mistake. I should have taken that. But my buddy is my best friends, you know, and I'm like, and I had seen all these Intel reports and I had seen how all these things were shaken out and how guys, you know, this, a sniper team got ambushed in Ambar Marines that, uh, they, they were listening to their S2 officer who told them to meet, uh, their, their connect in the middle of a wadi.

You guys might remember this. This is like late 05, early 06, right? And they were to, they listened. You're not supposed to fucking. listen to anybody but you you're the if you're the team leader of a sniper team you decide right the the battalion can jump up and down say i want you in this spot but if you don't look at that you look at the map and you're like that's not tactically what i want to do it doesn't look good and you just go okay sir we yeah okay roger that you're right back i need another beer for this

you know what's that i just need another beer for this i'll be right back right right so well you know so obviously i've i've been made aware of all this stuff you know And I've seen these things happening and I've seen these intel reports. And I'm like, oh my God, dude, my best friend, you know, is is going to be subject to this nonsense. Like he's going to go in. And I'm like, well, you know, Lerst is a pretty cool part of the army. And they are the descendants of Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol in Vietnam, LRPS. And man, if you read up on LRPS in the history of like, you know, the Rekondo school.

Yeah. And Lerps in general. and the part that they played like, you know, those guys went and worked with MacB. Saug, those guys did the things, right? Lerps was an amazing thing and the Army should have never got rid of it. It was the, it's forced recon for the Army, essentially.

And I thought, well, shit, you know, there's worse places to go. And it's my best friend. So I'm not going to, I knew one thing was true. I'm like, I'm not going to be ambushed in a Wadi or have some dudes falling asleep and in my Iraqi counterparts like, you know, green on blue me or whatever.

Like, I'm not going to let it happen. And I'm not going to let it happen to my friend. And I'm not going to let it happen to whatever team I'm on. And the one thing he told me is like, look, dude, you know, the company commander already told me, man, if you come here and you reenlist, you and me are a team. And I'm like, well, shit, dude, this is a cool thing. You get to go.

And it's going to sound real weird to anybody listening. I'm going to sound like a monster when I say this. But you get to go to a place like Iraq with your best friend. Right. You know, he, you know. And do what you've been training for. for your whole life. Yeah, your whole life. Yeah. And, you know, it's you and your best friend against the world, man. It's a, you know, those, you'll, I'll take those odds, man. And I'm like,

you know, I wasn't going to, you know, I was just going to look back on my life and say I let let something happen like that. And my friend went and I didn't. And, uh, yeah, so I came home, uh, on my next rotation and signed the papers, man. And I was like we were, you know, we, we trained up. We went, we started off in Kirk Cook for, few months, a couple, like, no, like one month in Kirkuk. And then we just threw everything in trucks and hummers and drove to Talafar for like a year. And it was, we got there and at the end of 06 and stayed there for basically almost a year. And we did all of our missions up and down the border of Syria. So from the top of Anbar, all the way up into Kurdistan, we would do surveillance

and try to, the goal was to be catching guys coming across the border with, like, obviously, we're trying to catch guys with bomb-making stuff. So, you know, caught a lot of dudes, you know, with, like, a lot of fuel oil for info, ammonium nitrate fuel oil bombs that you make IEDs out of, you know, missions would last anywhere from, like, three days to five or six days or more, depending on the weather. you know so we were you know we were we were able to do things that I thought were you know pretty cool at the time and and and then we got to hang out in Kurdistan a lot and we got to hang out with you know well seeing what happened in the Sinjar mountains when ISIS took over to the Azidi population

really hurt because we spent a lot of time with those people and they were very cool with us like the Yazidis were almost as great as the Kurds as far as like, you know, you didn't let your guard down per se, but like when you're around the Yazidis, you saw people, people were smiling and waving at you. And that's what you thought it was supposed to be the whole time. Yeah.

You know, at the beginning of the world, like, they're smiling and waving at us. We're the liberators. Well, the Yazidi people were like, yeah, yeah,

they're cool. Yeah. You didn't see that anywhere else I had been in Iraq prior to that time. I'd been up like two years. The Yazidis were the only, the first ones in the Kurds to be like, Habibi, you know.

Brian, you got to Tlaffer kind of just after I was like when in 375, we're going in there in 2005 doing hits. And it was a shit show. I mean, we got into firefights every time we went into the city. And, you know, for people who don't know out there, the Yazidi are a ethnic and religious minority in northwestern Iraq. And, you know, the United States, yeah, we were a good thing for them. We, you know, we kind of protected them. And the Yazidi were great people. When I was back in Iraq in 2009, they were my interpreters, a couple of those dudes who immigrated to Nebraska with their families, thankfully, before everything went down with ISIS.

But the stories of what happened to the family that was left behind to their parents. It's really like too horrific to even talk about on YouTube. Like beyond description. I don't think the real story has ever really been told about. how bad that was. I mean, it was a genocide. But anyway, that's, that's another story for another time maybe. Yeah. So as you were a assistant team leader on a worst team and you were out there, did you get to do some like long range reconnaissance ops while you were out there? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We did quite a few. In fact, the very first, yeah, the very first mission we ever did was like real cool

straight up like humping in 10 or more clicks with a week's worth of gear on your back, surveilling, you know, this particular village that we thought was the previous guys had told us was probably a good focal point to, to see who the bad guys were in that village. So, man, we had a good spot, man, I had a really inventive, my hide was really inventive. I had a really, I stole a couple of the, as you are want to do as a sniper, you start stealing. ship from other places on base to make your life easier. So I stole a bunch of the camo netting and a bunch of those little pop-up little supporters for the camo netting.

So we dug a pretty decent hole in the ground deep enough for, I think we had six guys and wide enough. And because, you know, we couldn't, there were no trees where we could build like overhead covers. So I had enough of that camo netting to basically lay it in with the spreaders. I was able to create a really convincing hide site on a on a on a place you know not the hilltop but the military crest where you'd normally be kind of skyline but I was able to to hide it really well in that first night so by daylight you know you couldn't you if you had to come right up on us to see us and and it was it was you know it was a good site we were going to spend five days in that hole we we got discovered on day four by a goat herder day three I saw a predator in the sky and I'm like I get on the radio and I'm like hey there right there right and they're like what no and I'm like no I'm looking right at it you can

hear it it's a lawnmower in the sky you're like no I'm on my back you know I'm like I'm looking right at it you know and and then so many at the other end's like break uh yeah that's no there's no predator up there for you that's not just don't worry about that anymore. That's not there. You just do your, you do your mission. I'm like,

oh, okay. They're doing like the Jedi hand wave. There is no predator. There is no predator up there. And I was sitting there in that hole and I'm like, you know, man,

I'm sweating so bad out here. I'm itchy. I mean, you know, I'm peeing in a bag. You know, I got, I got to wait till nighttime if I want to,

you know, the rest of my constitutional. And like, I'm not the happiest guy in the world at this point. Middle of day three. you know yeah and I'm like what am I doing out here if there's a bread that could do my job for me right you know there's some there's some like guy in an air conditioned somewhere yeah back in the states flying that thing yes and it's and it's it's a funny story

about that we'll talk about that we might have talked about another time but like it's funny a story about why that guy was in the states and not in Bahrain like but that guy's in the air conditioning wherever he was and like I'm like you know I don't need to be here anymore. This sucks. But, but it was good. We got to learn what it was like to get compromised by goats. And, you know, that's everybody who's been in a position long enough in Iraq,

somewhere you get compromised by goats. Yeah. And you don't. Yeah, you can't do recon. Yeah. Out there. Uh-uh. You're not looking at anything worth seeing.

You're not in a place to look at anything worth seeing and not be somewhere where there's goats. And not be compromised. And not be compromised. You're going to get compromised by goats. Yeah. You know, it's a question of when. And what do you do? You know, it's like, I'm not going to, you know, we're like, you know, red wings had already

happened. We're not going to, you know, we're not killing these goat herders. We're not capturing them and tying them up. What we're seeing, what we're observing wasn't valuable enough to even do that. Right. And those goats popped in the area. We're just like, shit. That goat's looking right at us.

And I'm like, hey, goat. Tell your mom. Hey, goat. Tell you mom. I said, hello. The marketing, hey, goat. How's your mother? But yeah, it was like there's no, we're out of here.

You know, and that night we had to, we just booked it out of there. And before anybody could come out of the village and, you know, maybe roll us up or anything. So it's funny too because one of the other teams did the same thing like a couple, a few months later because we knew that village was dirty. And instead of booking it out of there, they just were like, hey, why don't you bring the QRF up to like right here? Did it work? Did they? Oh, it was. Yeah.

Yeah. Like when those dudes came out hunting from that village, yeah. Like that was, yeah, they picked the wrong night. Like, that was not, yeah. When you're in a hide, I mean, you can tell us, because this is kind of my, like, when you're in a hide and you're, you know, you're like in stealth mode and maybe guilty down a little bit and doing this and camoed up and then somebody comes across you and you're looking at each other, it's sort of like your parent walks in while you're

watching porn. It's sort of like, oh. Hey. Hey. Hey. What are you doing in there? Nothing. Nothing. Go away. Gosh. Yeah, that's a real weird feeling, you know, because you're caught. And you're in the, in the, in the C word is you're compromised. You know, and that's the dirty word. You know, it's not like by the enemy where you're just hitting the Claymores and yeah. The hell I. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the nom guys had a whole different problem when they were. were compromised because it was like five alarm fire like everything was happening um you know we had all these advantages that they did they never had you know we had the air i had vehicles that could get to me fast you know we had all the apparatus you know to to be there for you and there's that safety blanket that comes with that you know um you're never far from the apparatus to come and get you or you know put hate down and fix your problems that that was a debate the contracting you know was

weird because you didn't always have that. And it was driving around, you're like, shit, you know, this could be the day, you know, and there's nobody to help. But yeah, it was, it was good. That picture you put online of me and the kid with the vote for Pedro shirt was one of my, I mean, we were, so we got up into Kurdistan one week for missions up there because we knew that there were, that on the border, on the Turkish border, were slipping over and they were trying to cause havoc up in the Kurdish region. So we were doing

some missions up there, try to snag people doing that. And, you know, if you guys have been to Kurdistan or anybody listening, like, once you go into Kurdistan proper, like there's usually a checkpoint and there's some Kurds and they're going to stop your truck. And, you know, your, you're, you know, your, you're, you know, your, you're, you know, your, you're, you know, your, you're, you know, the officer in charge of your group and the head and list of guy are going to come out. And they're going to start talking to the head curds and then they're going to come back to the trucks. And invariably, it's always this, all right, boys, take off your helmet and your flack. You know, we're rolling the rest of the way.

And guys are like, wait, no. And yes, the Kurds have you. They're taking care of you now. You can, you ditch your helmet. You take off your body armor, you know, and they don't need you walking around in that posture because they've got this. Like the Kurds always had it. And like, if you're walking around in that, in that helmet and body armor, posture, then it's like an insult to them.

Like they're, you're questioning their ability to take care of you. Their hospitality was that assured. Like that's how legit the Pesh were. And they just, we just stop, you know, go ahead. I was just going to say, I'm not saying that when we rolled up the Do Hook with two MRAPs that they weren't packed to the ceiling with booze on the way back. But that could be true, you know, theoretically. It could have.

Hey, man. You know. those you know we would do these missions at these border forts and don't i'll say it man it's outside this you know you can't bust me for it now man well i had a racket going a racket you put me at a border for it for it for a week and let me do my missions out of there don't check the humvee when i come back in because i'm sending one of those iraqi police out with three or four hundred bucks i'll be like go into that next village wherever the fuck it is and get me all the booth bro have you ever had

bourbon made in Syria you haven't lived until you've had or scotch Jordanian scotch what was the world do you remember the brand white horse white horse no we had it was like Chavez it was like some sort of weird

knockoff it was it was like drinking turpentine but it'll but you'll get right you know what you'll get right you'll get right oh man don't Don't you, dude, we, it's funny because it started off with like a very, I was like, fuck it. I got all this cat. I was a contractor first.

I knew you could just, you asked for people, you asked respectfully in that part of the world and you show a bunch of money. You'll get whatever it is that you're asking for within reason. Yeah, yeah. And you tell these guys, look, man, here's $300. I want $300 with a booze. Here's $100. That's yours.

And that guy comes back with a trunk full and you're just like, all right, wait till dark. Pull your car up next to that home V. And yeah, man, it's, and it's, it went, it started off real slow, like, you know, a handpick group of guys in the platoon you'd share a bottle with. And then it was pretty much like everybody had booze. You do a mission for a week and you come back for a week. What do you think is going to go on on that week at home? Yeah. It's just there's a reason.

The EOD team that we were attached to there, they changed their call sign to bartender. Because we use, we use the EOD camp as like. like headquarters for the any partying that we did because if you weren't EOD had a guy at the gate. It's like, what are you doing here? Nobody can come in here. You know, but I would, you know, that's the, and nobody can come looking for us in the EOD camp. So as that deployment kind of rolled, uh, or wound down. Yeah. You went back to contracting and we're on the, uh, protection detail for the ambassador, right? That's correct. Yeah, uh, we came home at the end of 2007. I spent a year just basically getting, I just drank for a whole year.

I bartended at a place that I had worked while I was waiting for my contract clearance to come in 2004. And they were nice. They were like, hey, man, come back to work. And I was like, all right, but I'm going to drink like every night. And they're like, yeah, that's fine. Just don't screw the money up. And I'm like, oh, yeah, okay. So, but in 2000, at the end of 08, I was like, I got to get back to this sucks.

You know, civilian life isn't great. You know, I'm drinking all the time. So Triple Canopy had taken over BW's contract. I knew a lot of the BW guys. And because we were back and, you know, we would see those guys a lot in 2004 and 2006. And I knew a lot of them. And I was able to secure employment there. And it was a great contract because I think what they did was they grabbed a lot of the guys who had college and they put them on the ambassador's team.

And that was really cool because I was the advance for the. the ambassador for like the next three years. And it was an awesome job because I went all over several countries with that man, or two different kinds, two different guys. But like anywhere he needed to go, I was going to, you know. So we it was, it was, you know, Ambassador Jeffrey was a fearless individual. He had been an artillery officer in Vietnam. And that dude knew everything.

Like he traveled, he had, he had a Glock, I think. I'm pretty sure he had, he had his own. rifle. I mean, I know that. That dude wasn't taking chance. He didn't, he knew everybody's job. Like, you know, when he, when I was on the advanced team, I started off as a DDM and that was a lot of fun. I'm bump up on the roof. You know, I'm doing my job again. You know, that was interesting. I got hurt and, and then they made me the TC. So I'm, you know, like now I'm like front seat of the lead vehicle. And, you know, I'm the guy greeting him when he gets. out of the car and taking him to the person he's meeting.

You know, so, like, I'm walking that individual into see the prime minister of Iraq. Like, I'm face to face of those dudes. And let's say there were dignitaries coming in town, you know, you know, congressional delegations come in. You're taking them to places. You know, the vice president of the United States comes in, the president of the president, you're like, that guy steps out of the vehicle and you're pointing him and saying, sir, please follow me.

And it was pretty interesting for those years. until I had screwed up my back so badly. It required surgery, you know. But it was great being there at that level and watching things go on. I was the day that they were negotiating the handover in 2011. I was sitting there. It was, you know, in the corner of the room. Just listening to it all.

Like, dude, we're doing history today. You know, today's history. You know, it's happening right now. It was a really interesting job. Yeah. You said you messed up your back. You fell through a stairwell or some crazy shit. Yeah, man.

Yeah, dude. I think we were either the, we were taking the ambassador to one of the other embassies. And we were on an adjacent building. And I was on the roof. And he was doing it. He had a function there. I was coming off the rooftop when they were getting, when, you know, he gets back in his vehicle. And he's gone.

And we fold. The advanced team becomes the follow. And so we're folding it up. I'm coming down this shitty, rickety staircase, third world, you know, building inspectors don't really follow code. And the staircase just split. And I just went into like the just fell right through. And there's a part of your back that you think is your spine, but it's kind of not. It's where your hips come together.

It's called your sacro-yricylic joint. And I wrecked it. And I was able to keep it going because, you know, on the camp, There's dudes who were former 18 deltas. There's guys who were doctors in, like, big surgery wards in the states. You know, there's, I mean, there's real serious medical talent at some of these camps. And I had guys working on me for like a year straight, keeping me upright, you know. But when your leg goes numb.

Yeah. And you can't carry the weight that's no longer an injury. Like, you're not, you're not playing hurt anymore. You're just hurt, you know. And it sucked. I had to have surgery. But, yeah, man, I mean, it was better than, getting blown up, man. The day that the, the MOI got blown up, we, we had postponed our trip to the MOI,

and another team had gone instead, and they got nuked, and it was ugly. It was an enormous explosion. And the next day I was there, and it, like, melted, an 18-inch thick concrete wall poured with rebar. It melted this wall. It blew off just outside of it, and it looked, all you can see was the rebar. It looked like metal hair sticking up out of the ground. and you're like, dude, everybody in that building was ruined. Like guys,

one dude, like it had a detached retina just from the explosion. You know, there was, it was a lot of ugliness that, you know, use your imagination,

everybody. It was horrible. Yeah, they were making the IEDs bigger and bigger and bigger. Yeah. Truckloads. Semi trucks.

Yeah. Yeah. The first time I saw that there was TalaFAR. They blew up the market in maybe the beginning of 2007. I remember it was kind of cold out. 2,500 pounds in the back of a U-Haul.

And they just drove it in the middle of the market and sent it. And the crater was like 15 feet deep, you know. And they're like, send Larson there to check it out. Okay. At 30 miles an hour looking at them. Yeah. Big hole. Lots of bad stuff.

What do you want to do? Well, come on back. Okay. Thanks. I'm not sitting around here. Uh, ugliness. Yeah. Before, uh, we get into the next thing, I'm going to hit you up with some of your

questions. Uh, John Pierre says, really cool to see you guys feature a LurSky. On top of that, a core sniper. Sure, he's got stories. Well, he does. Uh, Dan Keenan says, John Jawi. Uh, John Jui. Oh!

You know that? My man. My man, Dan Kenanan. John Jiam. Yes. Okay. Yes. He asks if he can post links to embarrassing Ryan English picked.

I'm okay with it. David Maynoy. Thank you for your contribution. Really appreciate it. So generous. Dan says English, you're using way too many big words. And let's see here. Costanza.

Maybe threat actors these days are having to evolve techniques to bypass modern security controls like EDR. What are novel techniques you've seen? I don't even know what the fuck he's talking about to you. Yeah, I do. Okay. That's great. Hit it up. Well, geez.

So, well, I guess we're going to have the part of the conversation we talk about cybersecurity, huh? Okay. What's one more thing before we roll into that. Isaac asks, by any chance were you on Darknet Diaries? Oh, so I just found out about Darknet Diaries at DefCon this last year. And that's an interesting thing for me because my friend Wendy Nather, she's kind of, if you were going to look at the Mount Rushmore of cybersecurity, she'd be on it. And she introduced me to some individuals that were like, you know, OG cybersecurity practitioners while we were at this last DefCon. And somebody told me about Darknet Diaries because one of the things I'd like to do at the organization I work,

for now is, you know, the thing in the Marine Corps that makes a Marine Corps really good with very little money and not a lot of people is the esprit of corps. And what that really means is that every Marine literally gets pounded into his or her skull, the history of any great thing that any great Marine did in any battle anywhere, right? Even if it wasn't bad, like just awesome achievements, you must memorize them. So I kind of think that that would be really important for the cybersecurity security field. And like we, you know, but it turns out like I'm not the first guy to have this idea. So Darknet Diaries is you, it's a podcast where somebody has taken the time to really go in deep on like famous and not so famous attacks and defenses. But you talk about, the individual

asks about, you know, bypassing endpoint detection, EDR stuff. It's like, you know, the evolution of that came from like somebody sidestepping your perimeter in a certain. certain way. And maybe the organization that either got compromised by that or defeated that, maybe some of those individuals are willing to discuss it. Right. And so Darknet Diaries, that guy goes out and finds some, he's well connected enough or she. I haven't started really getting in depth. But if you want to, that's where to go. They're finding those individuals who are there that day, you know, and they're getting them to talk about what it was that happened. Maybe they attacked something successfully.

Maybe they defended it. But this is good stuff because it's going to give you the background for what we do today. And there's another individual. His name is actually Jack Daniel. And that's his real name. And he is like the grand old man of the Marine Corps. He's the grand old man of cybersecurity apparently. He's a really interesting person, very nice guy.

He'll make time if you meet him out of the blue. One of those individuals that doesn't have a lot of pretense. But apparently, rumor is that he's. kind of culling together and authoritative history of things like this also. That's very cool. For the next generation. Yeah. I,

I, you know, coming into cybersecurity late in my life, you know, my, my first boss and my first two bosses were like, yeah, you don't know anything.

So we're going to teach everything you know. Just be quiet and listen. And, uh, and here's some books. And like one of them was a really cool book called, uh, uh,

owning the network or hacking. I got over there in my bookshelf. But it was a fictionalized version of like really cool things that actually happened. And somebody just fictionalized them to make them more readable. And it gives you the idea of like what's possible. Like this guy did this amazing thing with a dial-up phone. And then that girl did this amazing thing by going out to the, you know, the green tree at the end of your block and like hacking phone numbers and making long distance calls. And all these things still have a parallel to what you do today.

So, you know, just like saying that Dan Daly took, you know, took it to the Germans at Bellow Wood and used a bolt action rifle, but you don't have, you know, you're using this advanced state of the art stuff, but you still have to do that stuff. You still got to go into the, you still got to get in the wadi and clear that, you know, the same way somebody else did. You know, those dudes who took Riva Ridge did it so unconventionally, you know, they climbed an area. The Germans stopped were unclimbable. That's cybersecurity too. You know, like I've got to enumerate everything about your defense. And I've got to know enough to see where you think that nobody can just, nobody's going to get in here. And that's the spot I'm going to try very stealthily first to, to acquire a foothold in your network. And it's that mindset, that spirit of, of, look, he doesn't see him. He doesn't think I'm coming there.

So I'm going there. You know, I'm not going in the front door. Ryan, what was your entry into this field? I, you know, when I was home getting surgery on my back, it's in 2012, and I met, I met a dude named David Maynard. He's one of the guys that just asked one of those questions. And he, you know, I had actually met him a few years before while I was home on leave. And I didn't know anything about it. Like, I didn't really know what he did or anything.

And then so we were, we were going to the range and shooting. He's like, hey, man, you know, I want to pick up some, you know, pretty good rifle skills I'd like you to teach me. And another buddy of mine was working with him to make him a really good pistol shooter. So one day, you know, he keeps quizzing me on stuff that I was doing downrange. Like, well, how do you do this at work? And what do you do then? And then, well, how does that work? And tell me about the, and I'm like, well, you know, it's not like everything I do is like top secret. So I'm telling him the framework of what it's like to protect a human being in a high threat environment and make him safe from a known safe, built up location, transit him to a place.

that is also assumed to be known and safe through it through an area that we do know for a fact is horribly unsafe right and I'm explaining this to him and then one day one day he says well how'd you like another job doing what he's like what do you know about cybersecurity and I'm like dude I can change my password every 90 days as per the state department like that's what I know about cybersecurity I know that it's got to be a lot of letters and numbers and stupid things I'm I'm going to forget. I'm going to, you know, he's like, no, that's, that's not, that's not cybersecurity. I'll teach you cybersecurity.

I need a project manager. I need somebody who, who can, you know, handle the jobs that we have and deal with customers and stuff and keep us on track. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't know anything about cybersecurity. I think we've established that. And he's like, that's, you're going to work for me and Robert Graham. You're going to learn everything you need to know, trust me. And I'm like, okay.

And, you know, sometimes some people approach. you and they tell you like, dude, I'm the guy. I know what needs to be known. I know the places that need to be gone to and I know the people there and I won't get you in. You know, and every now and that you remember when you're in the army guys, oh yeah, bro, I know I know everybody at that club, man. I'll get us in the front door. You go there and you're like, the line's 40 people deep and he doesn't know anybody there. You know, there's those guys. And then there's, and you just sometimes you meet somebody who he's like, yeah, I know everybody in Bakersfield. We're going to meet all the chicks. And you go to Bakersfield and you meet all the chicks.

You know, and that was David. And he was teaching me things that I thought were like science fiction and really impressive stuff. But these were low, he and Robert Graham were just low-key individuals that knew it all. And didn't make you feel like shit for not knowing anything. And that's how you want to be coming into an environment like that. You want to learn from those types of guys. So I did.

And it was amazing, right? It was life-changing because I knew I wasn't going to be going back to work anytime soon. The rehab process was so bad. You know, next thing I know, I'm doing something probably cooler than carrying a rifle for money. So a mutual friend wants me to ask you about Chris Costa. You know, there's, you know, you're not supposed to say anything about people that might make them seem. You're not supposed to put people in unfavorable light if they're not around. I will say this. Chris Costa knows a lot of stuff.

And one day, we were at Chris Costa's camp, and he was teaching something he didn't know anything about. And he admitted it. And he still charged everybody full price to be there. But he was gracious about it. He was like, I don't know anything about this shit. So we're going to just do it live. And it was a precision rifle with ARs.

And he wasn't used to heavy IRs. It's not the kind of shooter that he was growing up and stuff. So it turns out, though, that one of his other instructors was one of my unit section leaders at Triple Canopy. This dude named Stony. Great guy. Hates everybody. Everybody. And like, I see Stoney sitting over in the corner.

And after the introductions were over, I go, hey, Stoney, what's up, man? It's me, English. She's like, what fuck are you doing here, dude? And I'm like, my boss said that we're going to take this class. and it's like, you know, I'm at work. I'm at work. I do cyber security now. He's like, he's like, you know, we're going and you're going. And look, I'll pay for you to go.

I just, you know, just want to go. And then we're not working that week. And you're not working that week. So you're coming with me. So I'm like, oh, God. You know, Chris Gost is a unique individual. So to have the stones to put on a class long, long distance shooting with a with an AR with 308s and above and not have ever done it in your life.

There's a lot of stones and putting that class on, right? So, yeah, we had a good time that week. And that's where John Joid came from because we're driving around in trucks, you know, just totally ignoramus is running around Florida. The same friend, and I don't know what this is a reference to, but he wants me to ask you about the fake penis. You know, it's a good thing that we don't, yeah, so the fake penis. fake penises, otherwise known as dildos.

All right. So there was a valid device, sexual device, that had made its way throughout several deployments and was usually used to implant into somebody's gear when they were getting ready to fly home. So you would do your best to put this dildo into somebody's gear without them knowing it before they went through customs or before, you know, you redeployed home so that when the gear was inspected, in one case, it was duct taped into a rifle case. So when the case was open, this thing stood straight on. And I managed to, you know, I had custody of said object. I had the, I was, I was the maintainer of said object. And,

yes, a certain individual found theirself on the receiving end of this object. at that camp. So, yeah, I don't think Chris Gosta knew about that one. There's another question. Tell us the story, and thank you, Dan. Tell us the story about when your team lead punched a monkey. Okay. Philippines, 1992, my first trip anywhere outside the United States of America. I'm in Stapleton, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, and we get sent down to the Philippines because the United States is going to close down the nuke base where the subs were were running into and out of right we're leaving our military presence in the philippines was was at an end and they were concerned that the insurgents would try to get

real crafty towards the end of the time that america was going to spend there and catch us sleeping and get on the nuke base and do something stupid so snipers and a detachment of recon and i believe some first group dudes were were yeah it was first group obviously but uh we're all down there doing missions and stuff. And so it was cool. You'd go out and do, you know, whatever stuff sneaking around, try to catch guys. A lot of good learning was had. But in the daylight hours, you, me being a very boot-ass marine, like just shower shoe material, me and the other two shower shoes were in charge of taking the garbage to the dumpster on a regular basis. The dumpster on that dumpster on that camp. It was an old Navy camp and we were living in these big

quonset huts and the dumpster was centrally located and it was right at the edge of this jungle. And in the jungle are all kinds of animals. And among those animals are these really, really like these pretty decent, like maybe about three foot tall monkeys with big, big teeth. And I can't remember what kind of monkeys I were, but there was a cool video of some Marines not long ago. I think they're in Korea actually. And they're coming up on these two monkeys like having sex on top of a shed and these devil dogs are getting up closer and then the guy the monkey turns

around and sees him like rips ass after him and sees these dude squealing and running away right well every morning that the trash needed to be taken out either me or my buddy O'Rear or my other buddy Jenkinson were going to be taking that trash out and getting the trash past the monkeys and into the dumpster was a test of courage because the monkeys were in the dumpster every day looking for food and they were not this was their territory right they they peed on it that was theirs and they weren't trying to share it even though you were bringing more shit to the party they didn't want it like they would chase you and chase and so i got we we started thinking of things like all right we got to kill these monkeys that's what we're going to do so we go out into the vill and we're

buying shit like fucking homemade arrow bow and arrows and like blow guns and we're sitting around practicing like trying to get good with blowguns finally my buddy O'Rear so the main monkey was the dude we had dubbed him Kong obviously he was the king of all the monkeys in this band and he was evil Kong was the I mean he wasn't gonna the predominant he's Kong the dominant male he was everything you could imagine about dominant just feral everything horrible big teeth tear you apart and he shot Kong in the he we so we got a ham slice remember when ham slice was the worst MRI a slice of ham. Yeah, it was horrifying. So we took a ham slice, opened it. We managed to get it down there one night when the monkeys weren't there and basically like, you know, put our bait out.

And then the next morning, Kong is sitting there eating the ham slice. And me in O'Rear, I'm spotter, and he's like the shooter. I'm like, all right, dude. You know, I'm like, okay, you know, it's a dart gun, right? So he fucking hits Kong in the dead nuts, dead in the center of his chest with his dart, blow dart. Boom, sticks him in the chest. Kong scream, and he drops the ham slice and he's trying to get this thing out of his chest. He's not dead.

He's just mad. So he can't get out of his chest, grabs the ham slice, disappears into the jungle. We take the garbage throat in the dumpster. Big victory, right? We're so happy. Next day, Kong's there. No dart in his chest, though. And he's mad about it.

So he chases us the fuck off that pile of garbage. Like, we didn't, we're like, dude. So, you know, and then Tim Parker's, the chief scouts, like, what in the fuck are you dudes doing? Like running out, like, screaming like children? He was not the one to disappoint. So he's like, listen, you tell me you don't have the balls to go down there and throw the garbage away. It's just a bunch of monkeys. We're like, yeah, you go to, you know, you don't want to say this to the, actually, the head, the senior enlisted guy on your plane.

You don't tell him that you go do it. But it was like, you go to it. Go down there, man. I'm not going down there. It's too hot. It's too hot. LZ's too hot. So he's like, okay, all right.

You know, Tim wasn't a large guy. He's not a large man, but like he absolutely, so he goes down there and he gets the monkey to chase him. And he rounds this corner of a Kwancent Hut building, and he stops and he waits. Monkey comes around the corner. And Tim's got his weight back on his foot. And that monkey, like, leaps into the. air like going to sink his claws and Tim just

one times that dude right that monkey right in the face stops him cold like dead nuts stops him cold and the monkey shakes his head and looks at us and just all right man walks away and we were able to throw the

garbage away successfully after that like it was like all right well now that the you know we've broken the seal on this we crack the code violence is the code We've shown to the biggest mammal. Yeah. Go through the biggest mammals. Yeah.

Prison rules. Prison rules, man. And that was, that's, that's, you know, I learned a, I learned a tough lesson that day. You want to take the trash out sometimes you get your hands dirty, you know. So, yeah, that was, that was, it was, the Philippines was a really interesting place for me because I learned a bunch of different things. And my last lesson in the Philippines was, you know, you know, you know, drinking out in the village was a was a pretty nice endeavor. And I everybody was using a fake name and nobody told the boots to use a fake name. So the first weekend, we were allowed out. I get to this bar

where all the senior dudes are drinking. And, and one of them that said, hey, man, just call me Jake when we're out in town. Don't call me by my name. And I was like, all right, whatever. I didn't, nobody said, oh, by the way, you guys need to have fake names too. It was just like, okay. whatever and I come walking this bar and his bartender's like, can I have a beer? My buddies are all sitting. She's like, what your name? And I go, oh, my name's Ryan.

She goes, what your real name is? And I'm like, my name's Ryan. She's what your last name is? And I go, Ryan English. She's like, you have your ID? And I go, yeah. She goes, you give to me. And I give it to her.

And she reads it. And she goes, okay. That was my girlfriend for the next four months. My buddy, my buddy, Walters, who was, He had been putting the moves on, just doing his suave everything over the last week. And furious. He's like, dude, I had to working on this for a week.

You come in here with your stupid real name. And I'm like, I didn't know. You know, I didn't know any better. I have a great picture of us in a long-upo, man. I used to have to wear glasses and it's hilarious. So, like, the girl just saw me for like a sap. And she's like, whatever. But it was the best four months of my life, man.

It was awesome. Like she took me home every night that we were in the field. Scott asks, are the pen testers from a civilian background very different from you? How do you learn all the computer stuff and would you learn it differently if you could? Would I learn it differently if I could? Yes and no, because, or the civilian pen testers different? Not necessarily, no. They wouldn't necessarily be any different at all.

the rules, the things you need to learn, the way you have to digest the information is all the same, and the information doesn't change. And, you know, when you're looking at networks, those are the same. So it's not any different. The only difference might be whether or not somebody came into the field with that, you know, that hacker mindset or that security mindset that maybe guys coming out of the mill, whatever they did in the mill, that order and that structure that they were used to might be a helpful thing to them. But coming into cybersecurity from a civilian background, you could be the best, most of the people in cybersecurity came from a civilian background. And if you think about the people who have been doing it for the longest, most, if not,

like a significant percentage of them are all people with civilian backgrounds. They just are, many of them are self-taught. They're all very smart and they all have, you know, that, that curiosity. So really, if there's one thing that you probably need more than anything else, is the curiosity, right? Because you don't, you run up against something that you can't understand. And you're like, well, you know how in the mill we have self-aid, first aid, buddy aid. They keep harping on that. But the thing about self-aid, first aid, buddy aid,

what it means is if you're injured in the middle of, let's say a firefighter or something, you try to attend to your injury as best you can and let's say stop the blood or do whatever you've got to do. You've got your individual first aid kit. You maybe throw your pressure bandage on your tourniquet and you get back into the fight. If you can't handle the injury,

you'll ask, hopefully you're still conscious maybe, but then you'd ask for a medic. And that guy comes out of what he's doing in the fight and comes and helps you out. but you want to attend to your own self-for it. But before you ever got to the point where you could do self-aid, somebody had to teach you what was in the bag. Right.

How to apply the things in the bag, right? So you had to be taught. So everybody needs to be learned up a little bit. But then it's the curiosity of, well, this pressure dressing could work here or here, but what if I use something else? Was this going to be good enough? So in cybersecurity, it's like, you know, you could go bother your friend for the answer to this networking problem that you're having.

Or you could just, all right, man, I'll go buy this book. Or I'll get on Google and Google the living shit out of this thing. Even the guys that I first learned from who have been doing this for like 30 years, one of them the other day was on Twitter like, hey, I checked Google and I went to the ends of the internet trying to find the answer to this network problem. But I couldn't find it. Does anybody know how best to iterate or how best to integrate this particular wireless setup that I want to do in a Linux environment where there's not like a good, you know,

platform already handy. And then the answers come in. Right. But that individual probably spent hours looking for the answer before they asked for other people's help. And that's an important thing to learn. I think, yeah, go ahead. I was just curious, you know, you haven't been in, in the Marine Corps, which is a lot of us, Frida Corps, and it's in miscreants, and then the snipers, which is even a level above that when it comes to, I don't want to say degeneracy. more like, or malfeasance, but just more like, you know, sort of the Brighen mentality, right? Did you, you know, one of the things that's hard for vets when they transition is to sort of find that camaraderie and that same type of mission driven, you know, that mission drive. Did you find that in this cybersecurity hacker community?

Yeah, that's a big part of it. The community, it's not like the community, you know, it's not, people get to know each other in, you know, they started off in chat rooms and forums, exchanging tips and things, getting to know each other that way. You would know an individual and never have met them. You're corresponding with people and never have met them. Like there's a, there's a Slack channel that I'm in where like the people who post the most important stuff and helpful stuff, I've never met, but I've met a few of them I have. But like, I've never met him. And then one day you're at a conference, somebody's like, hey, that's that stick. You go introduce yourself to him right now. And this is a guy whose name you've seen like 400 times, you know, and that dude's like out there crusading to stop, you know, the evil in the world. So then you start thinking about the bigger fight, right?

And so one of the things that we all miss when we get out is that sense that I'm a purposeful being. Like I'm doing something for the greater good. I think that almost everybody who enlisted at one point probably thought, I'm going to do something for the greater good. You know, I'm going to risk all this for the love of country or whatever, you know. And you have that somewhere until you hate the core and you hate the army and you get out. But you still started off wanting to be on the, you want to wear that white hat that you want to be the good guy. But the thing about the hacker community is like everybody thinks traditionally the word hacker is associated. with bad guys, but hackers are doing the most good. And hackers aren't really just, it's not like

hackers are doing the most good. Individuals trying to find flaws in programs and applications and in systems and networks and then turn that information over to the people who made them or the people who are using them, like the company you work for, let's say. And those are people with that cowboy mentality that helps them find flaws. And then they're saying, hey, look, I found. this you need to know about this this is going to make you safer and that's a sense of purpose that guys in our old line of work can identify with you know you wake up you go to work you start looking for problems to be solved and you you you turn them over to the people for the greater good and and even if you're just helping your team and your organization be safer you know uh you have a purpose

you're doing something every morning you know at the end of the day you did research or you hatched something the right way or you just there's so many ways that you could contribute in this field and just being able to contribute every day that's what guys like us wake up for when you don't when you don't have that that's when the depression sets in and that's when that horrible feeling starts to creep up right right and they're in so much in the cybersecurity world it's the same lingo as the military you know a lot of it a lot of it right the fd the Intel cycle. And then, you know, you have your red teams like you're talking about, which are essentially the opt for. So, yeah, it's a really fascinating, is like overlay between military

and, and really this new battle, battle domain. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Like network defenders, like blue teamers, you know, red teamers, attackers of network, like, you know, it's, it's a team environment. Like you're delegating tasks to other guys based on their strengths. And, you know, you got somebody trying to do social engineering over here. You got somebody trying to, you know, look at packets coming over the network there. And somebody's doing something in the wireless spectrum here. And then you're over here, you know, trying to map out somebody else's whole network environment. And then you guys come together and you, you know, it's just like a recon team would do.

It's amazing. It's so the parallels are. incredible. But, and then there is a lot of camaraderie. And you guys got a chance to see that when you went to DefCon. Yeah. And it's, it's like homecoming every year for people in the industry that maybe only see each other

once a year, but they're talking to each other every other day. And then you get there and it's like the, the sense of like togetherness. And, you know, it's a unique feeling when you go to one of these conferences and you see people that, oh, bro, I've been watching. watching your blog for six years, dude. I'm so having me. You helped me out. You didn't know this, bro, but you helped me out with this problem that I had. I read your blog and I was able to successfully do this thing. And that goes, oh, come on, really? It's like, oh, yeah, man. And then now everybody's like, you know, you just met a friend for life. Yeah. Now, you know, that happens in the

core. It's like, hey, man, you know, your team was on this deployment and we went to go do this thing and you guys were in the adjacent thing. And I heard you on the radio doing this. You're really cool on the radio bro, you kept your shit together. I'm really impressed, you know, and you meet this guy somewhere years later. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, you mentioned, yeah, go ahead, Jack, sorry. Well, I, I want you to tell us, you know, what you're up to today, where you're working in this field, who you're working for, uh, what, what have you been up to recently? So I, I, I had, I had, I had, I had worked in, you know, I had, had, I had worked in, you know, a couple different jobs.

And I kind of went back to do an executive protection for a little while. And then, once again, Dave Maynard calls me up and he says, look, you know, I've been hired by this company called Cyberry. And I said, oh, yeah, I've heard of Cyberry. They're an instructional platform. They provide like nuts and bolts knowledge of the cybersecurity world from like beginner all the way to like highly organized teams that want to come in and then learn in an environment. that their organization is specific too, right? And they can take you from zero to a career path. You know, all, and you can learn on this platform any and everything that has to do with

cybersecurity from, you know, what is networking to what is this programming language all about and why do I need it? And the opportunity was there to come on board here and have an intelligence cell that will and use modern, you know, Dave is out hunting for things that nobody else can really find, and we're sharing information with other organizations. And then we turn that into training labs where somebody, usually at this point, when you're looking at one of these labs, you've already got a pretty good knowledge and you're working somewhere. And you can watch step by step on how to, let's say, how to mitigate this problem that's very new and it's

causing havoc in this area. So you could read about it or you could watch one of these. labs and somebody is basically going to go step by step in this environment that you can recreate on your machine and then now you have a detailed understanding of how to mitigate that problem, protect whatever it is that you've got to protect. Cyber has been around since 2015 and, you know, the company has evolved a lot over the last several years and they're, they're kind of changing evermore and the threat intelligence cell that that I'm part of is is going to be a major part of that there are not a lot of training companies actually do their own intel and create their own stuff so it's kind of a big deal and I'm really proud to be part of it you know

teaching people stuff is you know once you've done a few things and you kind of want to teach it it's you know it's it's pretty exciting yeah it's a lot of fun yeah it's awesome it's not very stressful either because like, you know, if you're doing a penetration test and you're trying to get into somebody's stuff, it's stressful. Yeah. And, you know, or you're protecting somebody's stuff. It's stressful, man. I would not want to be the chief information security officer of a big organization. Yeah. That's hard work. I don't know how those people go to sleep at night. But this is a really good place, man. I kind of feel like I'm in a training cell back in the core or something, you know. Now in this cyber security world, I'm sorry, do people ever have to you back?

because, you know, you were a sniper and you were alerts and you're like, oh, well, let's just, let's just fucking attack these guys. We know how to attack them. Let's just like bringing their system down. And like, now, like, Ryan, like. You, you know, one of the first things I learned was, you know, it's funny because you talk about snipers being like renegade mentality, you know, anything goes as long as I win. Yeah.

The most important thing that I learned early on was ethics matter here. And if you're, you know, you got a buddy who comes up. He's like, listen, dude, I want, you know, I'm not sure what my girlfriend's up to, but can you get into her email? Because I want to, and you're like, you know what? I cannot do that, bro. I cannot do that for you. You know, you know, people might ask for you to do these things.

And even if you were capable of it, if you want a career in this field, you just don't do that. Because this is your name is all that you have here. and if you start screwing around like that and doing those things, you're not going to get hired by somebody down the road if you've got this attached to your name. So yeah, man, like, and there are people who do this. They're just not good guys. Yeah.

You know, I'm not a bad guy. I mean, you know, say what you want about like wanting to go down range a lot and do those things. Like, I did those things for the people that were with me and my friends. Right. I did that, you know, I'm not trying to do messed up shit in this field. You know, I just emailed you some links.

If you could pull them up on the work computer here, on the Zoom computer. I'm somebody who is friends or maybe enemies of Ryan has some pictures that he wanted to share with the live stream. And so we're going to, I'm going to have Dee pull them up. Oh, man. I got a feeling there's going to be some body parts.

I'm trying out to show. No, no, no, no. I pre-screened. There's no body parts. there's nothing that's going to get as banned. All right, here we go. Okay. Well, you know, sometimes there's...

Give us some commentary on this. Yeah, you know, I want to say that was at the, that the, that might have been at the Chris Costa shooting and drinking extravaganza in Florida. That's, in 2014. My understanding, my source says 2012, but continue. 2012 then okay well you know you you guys are the journalists i trust you to find those those and you vetted those sources i'm sure that's a thoroughly thoroughly rigorous rigorous vetting i totally did not receive these links 30 seconds ago no i wouldn't imagine that you would post something

up yeah yeah of course i'd just be inappropriate wrong and what what's going on here so listen here's a thing scroll down deep what what what is with they wouldn't have let you show that on television in the 1950s. Gentlemen, listen, ladies and gentlemen, if you don't understand flexibility is a major part

of good shooting. And in fact, I'm a regular yoga practitioner because flexibility is, you know, positional shooting is dependent on flexibility. So I like to warm up a little bit

before I do a course of shooting. Sometimes I do some hip stretch, you know, in that case there. It's very provocative. I well you know I mean I could jack that's that's that's you know Snivers worldwide agree you know it's you know it's it's it's it's you know the physical form is usually very attractive you know it helps you identify targets in

in environments or draw them in this case perhaps or draw them in this case that's correct uh okay I haven't seen that picture in a long time last last last two questions uh Isaac asks Dear Mr. Ryan, very formal. I'm in my second year of university going for computer information systems bachelors. I plan to get my master's in cybersecurity or ethical hacking. Most of what I know from self-study, but recently I had to drop the minor for cybersecurity because of money. And I found I put more time into bachelors, did I make a mistake in dropping it? Or should I stay the course and just keep self-studying?

No, keep self-studying. You know, the most important, I don't know, everybody's going to have an opinion on this, but if you don't need to sit in a classroom to learn this stuff to be really good at it, and there's a lot of different books out there that will bring you up to speed on things. But if you were going to learn, I mean, obviously the first thing you want to understand is networking, right? And then the next thing you probably want to start looking at trying to figure out is like how to look at packets and see what's in them. You don't need school for that. You need you need wire shark for that. You know, you can teach yourself those things. There's a book. Let me see if I could bring it up here. There's a book that that David Maynard just showed me. And if you're listening, David Maynard, you know my address. I believe that book should be Amazoned over here. most Ricky Tick because you keep talking about it.

But one of the things he said is there's a book called Dive Into Systems, a gentle introduction to computer systems. Ooh, that sounds nice. Yeah, the authors are Suzanne Matthews, Tia Newhall, and Kevin Webb,

for those who are keeping score at home. If, you know, when you look at the table of contents here, some of it might seem pretty advanced, but, you know, to hear somebody who's,

you know, my boss has been in this game for, he doesn't like to say the number of years, but let's say it's more than 20. And his quote was, if you have this book and you did a chapter a week after 17 weeks, you know as much as a computer science major. Like you're that good. Like this is that good of a book. And it's not over the top difficult. That book combined with, you know, a good understanding of networking, how to look into packets. And, and, And then understanding the tools that you're going to use to see how to get into networks,

things like Metisploit is still popular. But like, you know, everybody uses these frameworks like Cobalt Strike and even those are going to merge into other things. You don't need to know that. You don't really need to know that. You just have to understand these basic fundamental things. And a book like that seems to me like it's a great starting point. But then there's Linux basics for hackers, you know, no starch press. Yeah. Great, great book, right? Hold on, man. I got fucking, I have that book. Look.

Yeah, that's not going to learn. No, here we go. Linux basics for hackers. You know, like, you go get that book. You know, it's not, it's not cheap, but it's not, it's not horribly expensive. Well, for no sturch, don't they do a lot of specials on Humble Bundle? Doesn't No Starch? Or maybe I believe it's right. No, I don't. Yeah. Humble Bundle is a, It wasn't no starts it does it. It's packed, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But the answer to your question was, you know, was I making a mistake dropping that class? No, I think that you'll find that a significant number of the people in this industry, especially the ones who have been around a long time, are self-taught. Or they went to a lot of courses that they paid money for and went to a lot of conventions and paid attention to different things that are being taught, followed people's blogs, you know, getting out there and reading what the experience people are writing. I mean, every day that I wake up, I read several different thread intel blogs like I'm reading the newspaper just to see what's been going on. Not every day, each blog is not updated,

but I keep checking the same bunch of them. And, you know, I want to see what these guys are putting out there. And then when you read how an attack happened and they give you the nuts and bolts of it, then you start really understanding the scope of how something happened and you read it enough times and you start making those connections in your mind. School's great. School's a great thing. I went to college, but I didn't think I was going to use it, and I don't. But, you know, computer science degree is awesome. Problem is a lot of jobs want you to have one and you could spend all that money in time a lot more effectively going to courses that really, I mean, there's there's a lot more out there than what's in that university and you don't have to go in debt for it.

Last question, Isaac says, I'm 29 years old and I feel like the clock is sticking faster because I want to become a federal agent and do offensive hacking operations for CIA, DIA or NSA or FBI. What steps should I be doing to increase my chances of getting accepted into these agencies? Oh, I think we could answer that one as a group, huh, boys? you know, you want to start working for those agencies. First thing you want to be asking yourself is like, is there anything in my background that might be adversarial to me getting a security clearance? You're not working for any of those agencies doing anything like that if you have a problem getting a security clearance. So you want to make sure that your past is, you know, unimpeachable as much as you can.

Having said that, it seems to me, and, you know, some of the people listening, out there could correct me. But in my experience so far, a lot of the federal jobs, you know, there's people who go to work for, you know, they go to Fort Meade or they, you know, they start working at Langley and they're picked right out of college, you know, that's true. That happens a good bit. And then there's people who start off in the industry and they get a lot of certificates. And even, you know, the guys I know who have been like police officers who've gotten in cybersecurity and now are working federal, it's only because they went and got all those certs. The certificates don't always matter in like the civilian world of cybersecurity.

They're good. They're great knowledge. They're good to have. But years ago, they didn't matter at all. And more and more they matter. So if you were going to go, you start off, you get certified ethical hacker. And then you go get, you know, CISP. And then you get more certificates.

Some of the certificates require you to have been in the industry for a certain amount of time before you can take the test. It's like a vetting process that. doesn't always make sense. Like you have had your apprenticeship. Now you can go get your plumbers, you know, I don't know. But some of them you can't get for a while, but the entry level ones you can get on your own. And, you know, we have those courses.

And I want to plug my company, sure, but we have really good courses for CISP at Cyberia, where, you know, you'll go through 15 hours of instruction, another 20 hours of labs. And you get a, and you get another three hour like how to take this test course. You know, and you could get that certificate in, you know, I'm not saying it's going to take you 60 hours to get it because it's going to be a lot to actually break it down and learn it.

And you wouldn't want to come in off the street and do that. But this is how you start. If you're nowhere and you're trying to come in this industry, you're going to want to get some certificates. Yeah. You know, you're not. Nobody's going to get lucky. I got lucky by getting to go to work for somebody who was established and could teach me things. that's not going to happen from everybody, you know.

The other thing is a lot of guys get into this industry because they got a job on the help desk, you know, and they just set and people were calling in and you're just going down the list of, yeah. Well, not necessarily a geesewad, but like, you know, you, you find these companies that are willing to hire you on a help desk and give you an orientation and then you're getting phone calls and you're starting to think and react. And then you're starting to like look into the, you know, you're in real time fixing problems for people. That's another good place to start. But for the individual has that question, yeah, I hope you do end up in those places doing those things because we need the next generation of people to want to go and be there. The fight that the guys on the, you know, me, Dave and Jack had is more kinetic and less, you know, the digital evolution was going on abreast of that. And now we're in an environment where the digital war is going to take precedence over the kinetic war sometime very soon. You know, you'll be knocking the drones out of the sky that are

trying to drop little handmade grenades into your buddy's tank. That's what's happening now. You want to learn something? Learn about RF hacking. Like, learn the wireless spectrum. Learn how to dominate the wireless spectrum. There's, there's companies like Hack 5, H-A-K-K-number-5, app five, like they make gear that top of the line gear for you to start learning how to get into the wireless spectrum and they're willing to share that knowledge. Hopefully they'll be working with us trying to make modules, you know, like trainable stuff. But these are, these are, they're out there. They have gear. You can learn how to use it. Next thing you know, you're picking off wireless signals and hopefully you're not getting in your neighbor's Wi-Fi

or their Bluetooth, but like that's where the war is going to be in the next 20 years. You know, you think we're fighting China. You better learn how to knock 300 suicide drones out of the sky before they smash into the bellow wood 50 miles away from Taiwan. And you're going to be the guy that you have to do. You're that guy. I'm not that guy. I'm not going to do that. We'll be old.

And I can't. You know, yeah. Look, man, don't think I don't have those. Like every now and then at the end of a long day, I'm like, oh, God, blue blockers. We have one more comment. It's from Garrett Kennan. Gary. So,

Genese, he says, I wasn't there, but hi from John Dewee Jr. Hey, Garrett. Yeah, there's another individual who's kind of worked his way

into a pretty good job. And Garrett said, you know, it's funny, like, there's a lot of people you'll meet in this field have a lot of really,

like, native intelligence. And they just, it's probably the most important thing that you can have is that curiosity and native intelligence. And Garrett is one of those guys.

He definitely has that. But you can be anybody. You know, that's the thing. You know, you can come from any background and come here. You know, I had somebody tell me a long time ago that like one of the best, one of the best backgrounds for cybersecurity, library science. And then I start meeting people at these conferences. Like, yeah, I went to school for library science.

I'm like, it's true. Like, in library science, you think it's like a librarian sitting there with those glasses telling you about the Dewey Decimal System. No, it's about how to research. Like library scientists, that's an actual degree. And it's about how. Yes, how to categorize information, how to do research. You know, it's stunning.

The number of people you'll meet in this industry who have unbelievably disparate backgrounds. Like, I like, I really hope that veterans are listening to this conversation tonight and want to get involved in this because I think that guys from our old line of work have a really good mindset that fits in here. You just need to be told that the tools are different. You know, when you take a break on a patrol, what's the first thing you do? You set the 240 in, right?

Why? It's the most casualty producing weapon, right? So somebody simply tells you, okay, well, when you're setting up a network, what's the equivalent to the most casualty produced? The most protective weapon is the first thing I want to set in. And the order in which you do things, you just need to be told that this is a different thing. you know, this, you know, this, this way that you do mapping of a network is like a set of binoculars, you know, use your binos. It's like a range sketch, right?

Like a range, like a range card, you know, and then learn how to do it so that the glare doesn't reflect and give your position away. Right. You know, I, you know, this is, when you said, what's the first thing you do when you stop on a patrol? I thought rucksack flop. So I. I'll call me. Rucksack too heavy. Guys, thank you for everyone out there for joining us tonight.

Next week, we're going to have Amy Forsyth on the show, who was with the cultural support teams, amongst other things she did. I'm really excited to have her on the show. And otherwise, thank you for joining us. Ryan, do you have any final thoughts? Any final wisdom now that we've thoroughly embarrassed you with these candid photographs, Anything you want to throw out there or plug before I don't even think those weren't super thoroughly embarrassing. No, you know, I really, I do want to thank Cyberry, my employer, for letting me come on and run them up with you guys for a couple hours and, you know, swear and drink booze.

But, you know, I wanted to really tell people like, we need people to get in this industry really bad. And it's like 2005 or 2006 when I reenlisted, they were like, hey, what's that scar on your back? And that was for my first back surgery. And I'm like, it's nothing. And they were like, cool, you're in. You know, this is something that, you know, they just needed bodies so bad. We need people in cybersecurity that bad. And, you know, I didn't get into cybersecurity until I was like 37 years old or something like that, 38.

You know, Dave, when was the first time you got switched on, right? Like, they won. I mean, a year ago. right so so right i have a question because we're if we are talking to veterans or even people who aren't veterans but right yeah you're saying that there's a need for their skills in cybersecurity and a veteran like me comes out and goes i don't know anything about computers like i know how to turn one on you know or whatever um i i don't want to go to college for it i don't have 17000 dollars for a boot camp um what what would there when it's when it's when it's when it's

seems like there's such this vast gap between, you know, a veteran, you know, having these hard skills or soft skills or whatever else, and then getting into cybersecurity, like what would be the first steps for somebody looking to do that? There wasn't a big investment. You know, if you, you know, the VA will give you money for school. So if you qualify for that, you want to use that if you can. But you know what? I have been talking a lot of veterans lately that the classroom environment is actually really good for a lot of veterans, right, at first. You know, you learned everything you learned in, you know, in a classroom before you went on, hey, here's how the Claymore works.

Where'd you learn that? Under a roof somewhere in a classroom with an instructor. So that's beneficial. You know, I would even, I would even say, look, man, I wouldn't go to a big university. I'd rather go to a technical school. I'd rather go over to DeKalb Tech right over here in Atlanta and take those entry-level courses. while I'm taking those courses, if the VA is going to give me money, I'm taking those courses and I'm, I'm nerding out on these other books or I'm getting a subscription to a training platform like ours and taking everything else that I can in parallel. And yet, you do benefit from having somebody slowly, patiently explain to you why this works, that works.

You know, I do. I like going to, you know, say something I'll throw out there that I've talked to these people in the past. And maybe a good place for some people to start. There's an organization called Code Platoon out of Chicago, and they offer a lot of free classes to veterans that are paid for. There's scholarships. There's all kinds of stuff like that. And you can go and apply right now.

You can take in person or remote classes. I don't have any affiliation with Code Platoon. I'm just saying, like, I've run across them in the past. And that might be a – that's probably a pretty invaluable resource for a lot of veterans out there. I was hoping that sometime during this conversation tonight, something like that would come out. Something like that would pop up. Either somebody would call in or one of you guys and say that. That's really cool. Yeah, I would definitely get that because having somebody guide you through just out of code helps a lot. And so for Cyber area, because you guys have,

you guys have all these classes that have virtual labs that you can actually do them. So it's not just like reading a book and going out, I'm not sure if I understand this, that your labs walking through, it. And they're actually career paths that people can follow that can take all these classes, right? Yes. Or it'll basically give them the way to go. And that is cibrari.it, c-y-br-r-a-r-r-R-Y-Y-D-I-T. If you guys are interested in this field, like check out, like get on their platform and do a class or two and see what you think. Yeah, there's a lot of free you could buy a subscription or you can take a lot of the free classes. They used to be a significant amount of free classes,

but some of them are advanced enough to where you have to be paying for. But yeah, there's a lot of free stuff that you're going to be able to access here on this platform and you will learn a lot just on the free stuff alone. Yeah. And a lot of platforms do that. Yeah. That's not uncommon in the cybersecurity. There's a lot of...

Near as good as yours. Let's look. I mean, I like to think so. Yeah, we're plugging your company right now. Thanks, buddy. Yeah, appreciate it. All right. Well, thank you guys.

Thanks for joining us tonight. Thank you, Ryan. And thanks Dave for joining us and D for producing. And we'll see all you guys next Friday with Amy Forsyth. So until then, have a nice weekend, everyone. Cheers. Cheers.