The Team House - Mayhem in Ramadi | Lee Deckleman | Ep. 364

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

This episode features Lee Deckleman, a former Green Beret, Army Ranger, and private security contractor, who shares his experiences from combat zones like Ramadi. He discusses his journey from a high-stakes, violent career to finding peace and purpose through mindfulness, yoga, and walking the Appalachian Trail.Grab Lee's book here:https://www.amazon.com/INTERNAL-Where-Monster-Mindfulness-Become/dp/B09251YC1KSubscribe to our new newsletter!!!!https://teamhousepodcast.kit.com/joinToday's Sponsors:GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 10% off! Brunt Workwear ⬇️Get $10 Off @BRUNT with code TEAMHOUSE at https://www.bruntworkwear.com/TEAMHOUSE  #BRUNTpod-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured__________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️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/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 - Start 15:30 - Joining the military and Special Forces35:29 - Career shift to civilian security54:45 - First combat experience in Ramadi58:16 - The concept of "internal volume"01:00:03 - Walking the Appalachian Trail01:30:05 - Security work at Facebook and DEI01:52:54 - Discovering yoga for trauma02:00:05 - The book The Body Keeps the Score02:12:34 - Advice for veterans02:12:59 - Final thoughts on integrityBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your host, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey, everybody, welcome to Team House, episode 364. I'm Dave Park. Joining us tonight is Lee Deckleman. Lee is former Ranger, former SF, a plank holder at Triple Canopy. has done a lot of great things, a lot of wild things, a general man about town, international man of mystery, as it were. Thanks for joining us tonight, Lee. Thanks, Dave.

I appreciate you having me. I'm grateful any time I can unpack my life story and, you know, among my trod. It is a hell of a story, too. Lee wrote a book about his life. I mean, going all the way back. Actually, your birthday is only one day after mine. So you're a quarries. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. But the name of the book is internal volume. And as we get more into your story, you can tell us where internal volume comes from. Because it's really, it's not just a story about your life. but a story about, I don't want to say your dysfunction, but your trauma. And not just trauma from war or trauma from combat, trauma from security or whatever, but just the traumas of childhood.

Like your childhood was not a pleasant one. And sort of how that manifested throughout your life and things like that. You also founded Be Yoga Strong. and right Be Yoga Strong is the name of your right

well five years ago when I founded Be Yoga Strong COVID hit right after that and so I've struggled to kind of

hold on to the foundation and grow that and so where that's at right now is kind of on pause but that was outside of just getting

healthy and getting my own internal volume to a real low and good place. You know, the only other purpose I had was wanting to provide free yoga to my community, you know, as a form of free therapy seven days a week where people would have a soft place for free to land at the end of a hard day. Yeah. And so that that's the goal. You know, we'll probably get into it a little bit later when I can explain how that's kind of shifted. Sure.

Absolutely. So let's start from the beginning. We like to ask everybody, what is your origin story? What made you the man you are today? Well, I started out in life below average. So not even average. When I was born, I was two and a half months premature and I was cross-eyed and I spent months in an incubator in the ICU before I went to foster home. At about age six, my parents, my birth parents came back and got me and along with my other sisters who were also in foster care.

and we moved from Baltimore, Maryland to Tennessee a couple of years after that. And just a couple days after getting to Tennessee at age nine, my father died. So I was on another planet. We were Jewish in Middle Tennessee in the 1970s. I was nine years old. Had just come from foster home. I really hadn't even got assimilated with my new family properly and my dad was gone. So that was a really, that was the first trauma, I remember.

That was a real tough spot. And my mother was homicidal and suicidal. And so it was a very dysfunctional situation after that. It got worse instead of better once we moved here. and football. My father was really good at football, and I didn't know my father, but I knew he was a World War II veteran,

and he was really good at football. And so I wanted to be really good at football. The only problem was I was the smallest kid in my grade every year, and I talked funny because I was from up north, and, you know, a little Jewish boy, and everybody was Christian. So I did feel like I was on another planet, and that led to really focusing on football, and that's really kind of what saved me.

And when football was over, and I didn't have the size or the grades to go to college, that was a real low spot in my life right after I graduated high school. And so I decided to join the Army. I never wanted to be in the military. I didn't like discipline. You know, I was kind of a wild-eyed southern border. a rebel, you know, in my nature.

And so I didn't want to go in the military, but I did. And since I was going to go in, I decided, well, I'm not going to just go in. I want to do something special. Because when you grow up as a traumatized kid with nothing and you feel like you're nothing, you have to become something, right? So that's your ego. Like you have to attach yourself to something. I have to be something.

And so being a ranger, was important. That was my life mission. So, you know, you talk a little bit about the trauma of childhood. You can go into a lot of depth in the book, but I'd like to kind of rewind a little bit because when your parents came, you were with your foster parents for seven years, correct?

Well, for the first year, there was a lot of transition, so about six years, yeah. Okay. And the first year, you were one year. old. So. Right, right. Yeah, so you weren't really keeping a diary. But, but, you know, if you don't mind me talking a little bit about what's in the book, because I do want people understand sort of like the depth of the trauma and where it started and then, you know, because it gets, you know, it ends up with yoga. But your mother was on volume and a number of other things or whatever when you were born, which is why you're preme, premature, she went into a deep depression, and you were made wards of the state. You never, like, you never really lived with your parents. Your foster parents were your parents.

And, you know, you said that your parents came, your biological parents came and got you. But you, in the book, you talk about how they came and got you. And it wasn't just traumatizing for you. It was traumatizing for your foster parents. That's right. My foster mother was crushed. Rose was crushed. That's all I really remember leaving was that she was crushed.

Because they just showed up, right? They just showed up and said, here we are. Come on, kids. And that would, so this woman who had been raising you for six years as her children, just watched to walk out the door. That's right. And the unfortunate part is, You know, they tried to find me my whole life and get back in touch with me because my parents cut off any kind of, they never spoke of them, never mentioned their name.

And so it was through social media that my older foster and brother from that family finally found me. And it wasn't that long ago. It was around 2013. I was working at Facebook at the time. And they contacted me. And, you know, it was kind of magical to be able to talk to them and fill some voids, fill some gaps and get some, you know. And so I ultimately went and took my son and went and met them. And so that was nice, but Rose had already died. So I didn't get an opportunity to see her as an adult.

And, you know, if anything makes me sad about that, it's that. So, you know, you feel adrift. You get out of high school. You join the Army. What was that like for you, you know, joining the Army? You didn't want to be disciplined. You're kind of a wild one. And now, you know, you don't just join the Army, but you go to Rip, you know, you do all

stuff and then you go to battalion. What was that that like for you? Well, as much as I didn't like discipline, I hated being a nobody. I hated just being empty. And

so I had to fill that. So it's kind of like you do things you normally wouldn't do when you want something bad enough. And so I was willing to do and put up with whatever they put me through, I would have done practically anything.

And so the hardest part for me about becoming a ranger and getting into regiment was just getting there. You know, the problems are how problematic that can be when you sign up for the Army thinking that you're going to Ranger Regiment, and you find out that you're just going to an infantry unit, and you don't realize that until you're in basic training. And so that fight to finally get into regiment fighting against the Army in the original contract, you know, that was the hardest part. Yeah. Yeah.

So as your book kind of lays out fairly well, you're a bit of a scrapper. And you're not crazy about authority or people, abusing their authority or speaking to you, you know, in disrespectful ways. How did that mesh with, you know, being young Cherry Lee, you know. Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So when I was growing up in the 70s in the South, you could fist fight. Like that was just normal behavior. Like the teachers would just go out on the playground and they would gather and talk and you'd sort out

whatever you needed to. So being violent, being monstrous, behaving like a sociopath wasn't unacceptable. And so getting into the military, especially into Ranger Regiment, you're almost, it's almost an advantage to be a sociopath

or to be on that spectrum to be able to compartmentalize in that sense. And, And the difference between a good ranger and a bad ranger or a good seal or a bad seal is, are you wearing a white hat or are you wearing a black hat? Because we're almost all on the spectrum of being sociopaths. So, and every now and then you meet a psychopath. Right.

It's like, you know, it's like, wow, that guy has ice going through his veins. Like, I don't want to ever cross him. But, yeah, that was, it was a dream come true. And it was, you know, the 18 Delta course, graduating at 18 Delta course was definitely a highlight of my military career. But my time in Ranger Battalion and my squad in Ranger Battalion, Bravo Company, third and between second squad, you know, out of my military career, that's my most beautiful memory. Yeah. You know, I cherish that. And so it's kind of tough watching some of these GWAT special ops guys kind of make us look like idiots with lying and making up these stories.

You know, the best way to go about telling your war stories is leave a few things out. And that way you make sure you're not going to get in trouble or be called out for exaggerating too much. Yeah. So you did your time in Ranger Battalion. Are there any highlights that you want to cover while you're there? Well, I've got a pretty funny story. I had to do with my son being born while I was in Ranger Battalion. Please.

Other than that, no, it was it was peacetime. Yeah. So being in Ranger Battalion in peacetime was hard. It was just training. You know, when I finally went to combat, it was like, okay, it's only hard when it's hard. It's not just hard on purpose. You know, people aren't trying to make combat hard. Your leadership isn't trying to make it harder on you.

You know, so combat was a break for me. I thought peacetime Ranger Battalion was the hardest thing I had ever done. Yeah. So you, do you want to tell the story about your son? Yeah, so when I was in, when I was in a battalion, I had my second child and Josh, and he actually ended up going to Bravo Company, First Ranger Battalion after he graduated high school. But he was born there, and the way that happened, you know, well, it's not, it's kind of a long story.

Okay. So we might want to, it's in the book, but it's kind of a long story. So, All right. Buy the book. Oh, where can people find your book? Is it on Amazon? It's on Amazon.

Okay. Just if you put internal volume or put my name in, you'll see that beautiful art on the front cover. And that's the logo for the foundation, which again, it's on pause, not doing anything with it currently. But I have been teaching over the last five years for free.

Hey, guys, I want to thank a new sponsor that we have today. It's Brunt Workwear. They make great boots, great workwear. If you're a worker like me, if people who know me, no, I love to work with my hands like a man, my hands and my body. And when you work with your hands in your body, you need a good pair of boots. And honestly, I was so excited that we had Brunt as a sponsor because I bought a pair of boots a year and a half ago from them. Look at that.

These are used, worn. Love these. These are called the marines. I love them. Super comfortable. Waterproof. So if you're out there, so you could sit and stand in standing water and mud or whatever gets the job done. Brunt workwear.

Incredible product. So if you're a man who works or a woman, right? Who cares, right, babe? If you're a man or a woman who works with their hands and their bodies and you need a great pair of boots, you go to bruntworkware.com. You use the code team house for $10 off. that's brunt workwear.com with the code team house and you get $10 off they're going to ask you who sent you you know who sent you it's the team house bruntworkware dot com team house is the code for $10 off i love you

thank you thank you to brunt workwear for supporting the show so you leave ranger battalion and you leave the army right uh you ETS and you join no no so the first so the first time i was the army. I went to ranger school as an infantryman. Oh, okay. I couldn't get into regiment. I had to get out and then go back in. Okay. To get right to ultimately be in ranger battalion after desert storm after 20th special forces group. Okay, that's right. Because you went to desert storm with a conventional unit. With a National Guard unit. Yeah. It was a disaster.

Yeah, that's right. So then you, because you got out a couple times. So you, right? So you go to Ranger Battalion? I did. I did. I went in in 85 and ETS in 88. I got activated for Desert Storm in 90 to 91.

And then when I got back from there, I joined the 20th Special Forces guard unit. and then in 95 went back on active duty to first range of attack until I was medically retired. Hey Lee, I got a question because we never really have too many, a ton of people that talk about Desert Storm. What was that trip like for you? For my unit and for my experience, it should have just been, you know, considered a training exercise. You know, we really weren't. My unit didn't have a purpose there. And so when you're in a situation like that and you don't have really a functional purpose,

you're not really participating in the war, they have to make up something for you to do. And so that's kind of what our unit, that's the space our unit landed in. And so I think what I got out of Desert Storm was what the, news says about war can be a hundred percent opposite of what's really going on at the time. I think that's the first time I ever realized that because of what CNN was putting out versus what I was seeing with my own eyes. And the other thing I think I got out of Desert Storm was, you know, you just get that first combat deployment out under your belt.

You know, it's a little, unless you don't have. a center in your brain that gets scared, you know, the amygdala, unless you don't have one, like some of those cliff climbers, it's a little nerve-wracking trying to keep it together and, you know, your first time going into a war where it's just an unknown. It's a complete unknown. And so getting that out of the way really helped. So you come back from Desert Storm, you go to rain. Ranger Battalion. Because you didn't do the Q-course while you were in 20th group, right?

That's right. I just did selection. Okay. So you go to 175. That's right. Okay. Sorry about that. And then at the end of that time, do you get out again or do you go, do you roll right into SF from there?

I leave. I was going to, I became, I was in the first baton and became, a team leader and I wanted to stay and become a squad leader because you know I kind of wanted to go to the unit and um my baton sergeant at the time was a real dick and I'm not going to call him out on here um but uh everything else about my baton and everything else about battalion I loved except this guy and um so I just decided to put in a 4187 to transfer to the Q-Course since I had already been to selection

and I had already been selected. It was just time to move on. Okay. So you don't get out, you roll into the Q-Course. That's right. Okay. And how is that for you? How is that such a yes?

I spent almost 15 years total in the military. It was the best two years. of my military career. Yeah. San Antonio is that good? No, no. I was the first class at Bragg. Oh, really? I was the first class where it was all at Bragg. You had to pass the National Register paramedic course,

so So Sockham became this beast of a medical course to get through. And so it was very challenging. but if something's done right you know being challenged is a good thing you know a certain type of stress is a good thing right

you know in the right environment so great instructors very professional operation everything that was done there was you know respectable honorable there was

you know there was a there was a high standard you know, the opposite of anything that Tim Kennedy has been putting out there. You know, the Ranger Regiment, the Green Brace community, you know, those are really special places. Yeah. So you finish the Q course, like TopMedic, right, out of the 18 Delta course? Yeah, well, there was 18 teams. So out of my class, I think there were, no.

14 teams, 14 or 18 teams, but it was seals, green berets, that was back when the PJs still went there, the independent corpsmen, so everybody, everybody went to the short course or long course there. And so out of my class, everybody was divided up, and it was a 26-mile land nav course in every couple miles or kilometers. there would be a medical scenario, you know, and it was a pass or fail. And the fail added 15 minutes to your time, a pass, you just continue to move. And it's kind of like the Tour de France. The first group to finish with the lowest time or the shortest amount of time wins.

And so I was with the team that won. It was four rangers. So it was two guys from a third Ranger battalion, myself, and then a stud of a Ranger. I can't think of his name right now, but he was in Best Ranger competition. He placed in Best Ranger competition, but I can't think of his name right now. But, yeah, so we won the Best Medic competition. I don't think they did it. I don't think they do it anymore.

Logistically, I think it was real hard, and I think a lot of students didn't like it. Like the seals did not like it. I'm pretty sure the PJs didn't like it either. The PJs just had their own way of doing things. So I think that's why they ultimately came up with their own 18 Delta course. And so out of the 18 Delta course, what group did you get assigned to? Third group. Okay.

I wanted seventh group because it was peacetime. And seventh group was the only guys going down range with magazines and their guns. And so that's what I wanted to do. You know, I didn't mind J sets or anything like that, but I wanted to go shoot bad people. Sure. I wanted to be that guy. Sure. And seventh group was getting it on, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. With their second families down in Panama. Yeah, that could do a Netflix series about seventh group during that time that lasts about 10 years. So you go to third group, focused on Africa. How was that for you? It was a disappointment. So, you know, I can be a purist sometimes or I can be, you know, on my high horse sometimes. or, you know, I went through a lot to get there and I had a high expectation.

So when I went to Swaziland to Africa for the first time, I wanted to cure everybody. And, you know, if there was somebody in the village that was having complications with a delivery or whatever it was. And that was the scenario that happened that I was first upset about, you know, I want to be able to go and at least help. You know, not being able to do that, you know, having those kind of restrictions, you know, I just didn't understand it. It didn't make sense to me to have the type of restrictions. Just like in wartime, sometimes the ROE is geared towards favoring the enemy. And I don't care about the political or what the narrative is, you know, the guys on the ground know. and what's right and what's wrong.

And so, yeah, anyways, I get, get sides right with that. So it's interesting because you're not even complaining that you guys would get a creative MREs while 10th group was eaten foie gras and Bratworth. You were just more taken back by the fact you couldn't do your job. Oh, yes, yes. No, I thought the shit with the sugar was part of the beauty of being, you know, an elite operator was, you know, being able to take the shit with the sugar. I was fine with that. Not, you know, being lied to or being manipulated or ultimately being bullied, which would happen sometimes in your career.

Yeah, the part of me that wanted to be successful in the military couldn't control the part of me that wasn't going to put up with that. Right. And so, you know, I'm not the best example. If you read my book, I give some good advice, but I'm not the best example of how to be a great soldier. Well, advice comes from learning. You've done a lot of learning, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So what was it like? So what time frame, what years are we talking about right now? For which job? For SF while you're in third group. Okay. Okay.

So I joined 20th group in 91 or 92. I went on active duty in 95. I went to the Q course in 96. And so I got medically retired in 2000. Okay. So about four years bouncing around Africa. What was your mission? What was the situation like?

Because you talk about these restrictions. What were the concerns at the time? Well, we had be, you know how SF guys are. I mean, we went over there and everybody around us, you know, was in love with us. we went over there and won the arts and minds of people and not through just pure manipulation but through just actually caring you know i mean if you're going to be a great you should actually care about helping people because that's part of what your you know job is and so it's not just killing people it might be healing them and just helping them might be the mission so um

Well, what's specific, I forgot that specifically. That's okay. I'm just saying for you, because we don't hear about the GWAT as much anymore, or we don't hear about the time prior to the GWAT as much anymore. So in Africa at the time, you know, ISIS wasn't a concern. Like what was your mission in Africa? Training. Training.

Training. Training. Yeah, training. You know, you might do medical support. but it was usually a training mission or a J-SET mission and there was just a lot of downtime for the medics to do medical stuff. You know, I mean, I had one person in Swaziland bring their grandfather in a wheelbarrow like eight miles

through the mountains in Swaziland to be seen. And, you know, he had polio. So there was nothing I could do. but that was the environment I was in and I wanted to be a doctor. You know, that was a phase of my life where I wouldn't, it wasn't important to run around to shoot people. Like I wanted to heal people. Like I really loved being a medic. And usually when I love something, I'm really good at it.

So, and then I kind of lost my love for it over time. and just moved on. Was that burnout or was it due to bureaucracy, just the Army doing the Army thing? Mainly the medical field with the paperwork. That would be the biggest thing is the paperwork and the medical field has gotten so bad if paperwork or schoolwork or sitting still in writing

and thinking like that and behaving like that, if that stresses you out because you're too much like a chimpanzee like I am, then it wasn't attractive anymore. If I could go treat people and not have to do the paperwork, I would stand on my feet and treat people from daylight till dark. So that was the main thing. The other thing was the trauma. Right.

It is over time when I became a 911 paramedic, I didn't realize how traumatized I was. I didn't realize that I was walking around with an internal volume that was so high that I was constantly stressed out. My blood pressure was constantly up. And so I started seeing, you know, murder suicide stuff and, veterans coming home and you know dying and I just didn't want to see it anymore.

Yeah. Now are you talking about when you were after you were out or when you were Right, right. This was after Ramadi. Yeah. So this was after killing a bunch of folks surviving a bunch of attacks, feeling like Superman coming back home and realizing that you're nothing. Okay. Just yeah. So you got medically discharged in 2000.

Now, I don't want to go, the story of your medical condition is people have to buy the book. People have to read it. Like, it is, I had to take it in chunks because I could feel everything. It's amazing. It's amazing. Do you want me to give a sample? You can give a teaser, but I really want to...

Oh, no, no, no, that's right. That's right. We talked about that earlier. Yeah, we'll wait. Yeah, okay. Oh, is this what you're going to talk about in the... No, in case you did, but if you wanted to just mention it, I was medically retired from the Army because they did a surgery on my bladder that went sideways, and they had to go back in and do an emergency surgery right after the initial surgery. And when they did that, they ripped open the head of my penis. And multiple surgeries came after that.

I was discharged with incontinence. And, you know, I was still in my 30s and a green beret. And when all that was going on. So it led to a divorce with my wife and kids. And so it was the worst, most traumatic time in my life. and it's a story that, you know, I've never heard anybody else tell. Oh, no. From that aspect of having trauma to your penis,

short of that guy that had his penis cut off by his wife or girlfriend. Oh, Bob. Down the road and threw it out the window. He's got me beat. But he's the only guy I know of that's got me beat. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess he made a recovery because didn't he go on to do porn after that? Well, you know, with today's technology,

could put a big old black penis on you, you know, and you could be in porn and have, and have a make a lot of money doing that, I'm sure. Everybody's got a path. So, yeah, and what you just described is the perfect kind of teaser for it, but you go into some detail that, like I said, I could feel it. But anyway, so you leave in 2001. What did you do between that and 9-11? So, okay, so I got medically retired in May of 2000.

The next day I went to work as a paramedic in Rutherford County in Middle Tennessee. in Murphy'sboro, Tennessee. The next day, I went to work. I was of the generation and the mindset that if you didn't have a job, you were worthless. You were sorry as hell. So, you know, when I realized I was getting put out of the military, the only certification I had

was being a nationally registered paramedic. Everything else that I had done in the military wouldn't get me a job doing anything. Yeah. So, you know, you can't even get a job as a cop anymore being a Green Bray or a ranger unless you have a college degree. Yeah. So I just did, I just went with it. And so the next day I was working as a 911 paramedic.

And I did that for the next two years until ultimately I went to become a federal air marshal because of 9-11. And I do, I want to say that we are skipping a lot. of personal stories and anecdotes and everything. Because while you were a paramedic at the station was the, I believe, second ass-kicking you delivered that is detailed in this book. In that year. Yeah.

In that year. Yeah, I think most people from our community either were like myself or, you know, their best friend was like me or something. We're not too far away from being that or whatever. And so, you know, I grew up fighting. I didn't like being bullied. And so I had just got put out of the military. The trauma from that surgery, the trauma from my divorce,

my best friend was having an affair with my wife. I let that go. And the divorce was going fine. And as soon as I started seeing this hot female cop, my ex-wife started causing drama. And my ex-best friend started causing drama. So it's very detailed in the book, but I just told him. I said, well, let's just meet and settle it. So my best friend in my life had become my nemesis.

And I put him in the ER. And so maybe six months after that, my hand had healed up pretty good. you know, being a paramedic, short of being an air marshal, being a paramedic was the best job I had for getting dates. That would be an appropriate way of putting it. And so I was getting all the dates I wanted. And this one nurse that I had contacted, one of the other paramedics, was seeing her. And so he had a problem with it. And I was cool.

I was like, I was like, I'm sorry. No, you said you contacted her, but she gave you her number and told you she was single. That's right. Yeah, that's an important part. Yeah. So, so anyways, she was just one of three or four nurses or paramedics I was messing around with at the time. And he was engaged to somebody and seeing people on the side. And so when that conflicted, you know, he called me up and addressed it.

And I actually liked the guy. Like, I liked him. And he was just being a real jerk to me, just talking down to me. And so within a minute or so, I just got mad. And once a fighting age male crosses me, all I want to do is kill him. Right. So I just become a chimpanzee. a sociopath. And so all I wanted to do was after that. So there was no rush. I was like,

okay, all right, that's how you feel about it. That's your woman. I need to stay away. I get it. So about two weeks later, I bump into him as shift changeover. And I tell him to meet me out in the garage. And we sorted it out. Hey, guys, our show is sponsored by GhostBed. Check them out. Please, they make awesome mattresses, awesome pillows, awesome betting. Ghostbred provides high quality of super comfortable award-winning mattresses crafted in the U.S. and Canada. Did you know that 60% of U.S. adults report being too hot when they're trying to sleep? That's me. I'm a sweaty little baby.

That's why we designed all of our products with cooling features so you stay comfortable and asleep all night long. Pair any of our mattresses with GhostBeds award-winning adjustable base and get the ultimate sleep experience. Ghostbred rules the family-owned business. 60,000 plus five-star reviews. They have sleep experts on staff with 20 plus years of experience. If you have any questions, you can hit them up and ask them, you know, maybe what kind of mattresses work for you. 20 plus year warranty.

That's two times the industry standard. Free shipping and returns on mattresses. Most of the products ship out within 24 hours. They have in-house customer support and sleep experts chilling in Plantation, Florida. It rules. It's the best. They give you 101 nights risk-free to make sure that these beds are right for you. If you don't like it after 101 nights, you could send it back full refund.

When you purchase a ghost bed mattress, your comfort guaranteed. I'm reading it right now and it's capital letters guaranteed. Okay. They do the right thing and they're a great company. If you're not sure which ghost bed's right for you, like I said before, you could take their mattress quiz online or you can give a call to one of their sleep experts and they'll help you. with exactly what you possibly could need, what works for you and what doesn't. And the best news about this is team house listeners and viewers.

You get an extra 10% off sitewide for a limited time. You just go to ghostbed.com slash house and use the code house at checkout. One more time, that's ghostbed.com slash house with the code house, H-O-U-S-E at checkout for an extra 10% off site-wide. I want to thank Ghostbed for their continued support. I want to thank all the fans that listen and watch for their continued support. Without you guys, we are nothing. So thank you for supporting the show.

And thank you for supporting the companies that help support the show. Ghostbed.com slash house for 10% off made in the U.S., made in Canada. Shout out to our brothers in Canada. They rock. Check them out. I love Ghostbed. Thanks, guys. Hey, guys.

I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching. that encompasses both the Teamhouse podcast, the Eyes On podcast, and the Highside News outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week. It's going to come into your inbox and you're going to get the most current podcasts on Aiz On and the Team House and whatever's topical or current on the high side. So it's another way for us to get the information out to you as social media algorithms are pretty iffy and you never really know what you're going to get. So this is a once a week email.

It'll slide into your inbox and it will have, you know, the greatest hits of that week. It's really good at that, you know, checking it out. The website for it is teamhousepodcast.kitt.com slash join. Teamhousepodcast.com.com slash join. You go there and you enter into your email list or you enter your email into the little thing on the website and you're good to go. and that'll be it. So we really appreciate your support and hope you'll consider signing up.

Where's the link? The link will also be down in the description if you're looking for it there. And that's teamhousepodcast. Dot, kit, kilo-India-Tango.com backslash joint. Yes. So from there, from being a paramedic,

and it's in the book, guys. Get the book. It's entertaining and sell. You'll love it. So 9-11 happens. There's that big surge for air marshals. And initially, before they started lowering the standards, they had incredibly high standards, right?

And a lot of former soft guys were going into it. It was kind of a network. And so you went through all this training. They have very precise shooting standards because you're an air marshal. apparently you also meet a lot of women on the job and what happened with you is what happened with a lot of the guys which I think is one of the reasons why the standards lowered was triple canopy starts up it's kind of word of mouth it's all like tier one tier two tier three guys it's all soft guys initially that's that's all they're taken the pay is what, $600, $1,200 a day?

Like, the pay is outrageous, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're exactly right. I mean, the two things that I think removed all the good people or most of the good people from that program or pushed them out was when the Secret Service took over

and kind of changed the way they ran that department. A lot of people were like, I'm not, yeah, we're not doing this. This isn't what we signed on for. And I was part of that group. And so there were so many opportunities, you know, because they recruited so high for the air marshal program, the standards were so high that a lot of people that became air marshals

qualified in that initial push in 2000. 2003, 2004 to Iraq in Afghanistan as contrasting, which was, you know, met that standard. So it was an easy transition. Because Triple Canopy, people may not know this, but Triple Canopy was known as the soft, like Triple Canopy was the elite security company. And they had a very rigorous qualification course. Yeah, well, I don't, you know, this is the part of my career that I think, you know, is more interesting to me. So, but I was there from the beginning. And I know all the key players very well.

And my last deployment with Triple Canopy, I started in February of 2004, and my last deployment with Triple Canopy was in 2012. So I saw the beginning and the ending of Triple Canopy. And the company that I started with, there's nothing I've done in my lifetime that compares to that organization. It was amazing. I mean, absolutely amazing. I was a very average guy that was very grateful to be there. 12 you know in 2012 when I went back it was the most budget bullshit company um I'd ever deployed with

yeah you know so um it it was a shell of itself and and so what happens is is they what triple can't be did in the beginning was they said we're going to have the best men the best pay and the best equipment. And for the first seven months, they did that. Right. The next seven months, they lost sight of that. 14 months into it, they started changing. And each year, over time, they got further and further away from what they initially started as. And because in the beginning, they cared about the guys on the ground. When you have a corporate office that, that, that, full of operators that knows that they're there to support the guys with body armor on.

It's different than, because I worked in corporate with the ODT later on, the corporate security culture thinks to corporation is the important part. And the guys on the ground need to listen up and do what they're told. And it's the complete opposite. If you want to operate the right way, if you want it to be non-toxic, healthy, if you want everything to be on the right frequency, Triple Canopy did it right for the first seven months. And now I'm not saying Blackwater,

because I worked several years with Blackwater, and Blackwater and Eric Prince was a great company to work for, but they still weren't Triple Canopy in the beginning. Nobody did what they did. Right. Well, and, you know, when you just think of, I guess the economics of it, you know, you have all the G-watch starts and you have all these soft guys that are within three to five years of getting out, right?

Maybe, you know, staying up on their skills, whatever else. Well, that pool dries up eventually. And not only that, but where Triple Canopy can pay guys $800 a day because they're giving like the cream of the crop. Their pitches, it's all soft. Like, these guys, they're all professionals. You know, they all know what they're doing. But then you have companies like Custer Battles and these other, like, shit shows. I haven't heard that name in a long time.

Right. You have these other shit shows. First off, you need more and more people and you need them faster. The second thing is you have all these other companies coming in going, well, you know, they say they're going to do it for, you know, $2,200 per mandate. we can do it for, you know, 1,200 per mandate. And we can get those same guys. They can't, but nobody ever checks that afterwards.

You're absolutely correct. It becomes what they call lean management style from a corporate aspect. It's just about the margins of profit. And it literally becomes just a business model. Yeah. And like EODT, like whoever thought it would be a good idea to take salary. Africans, white, South Afrikaans, and put them in charge of black Ugandans. But that's what they did and other companies followed because you were once paying an expat,

whether it be, you know, somebody from America or, you know, a qualified person from Britain or or wherever else. But you were once paying that person. And let's just say you're paying them $500 at the low end to do the security at the front gate or whatever. You know, shit work that nobody wants to do that needs to be done and it needs to be done by somebody that cares just enough to stay awake and do their job. And so when you can pay Ugandan's $500 or $600 a month to do the same job, and they'll actually take more pride in it, because it's so much more money than they can make. It's an opportunity worth leaving Uganda to be away from their family to be in harm's way. It makes that big of difference, but yet they're being managed by South Africans.

So I was actually involved in, I don't know if you remember, but in Baghdad, there was a South African that was killed by a Ugandan. And then the Ugandan killed himself at one of the bases. And I did the investigation on that. And it was it was that whole concept of just racism. You know, they had just harassed those guys so much. And all those guys wanted to do was pull security, make money for the family, go home. Right. Right.

And so, you know, they would do things like have them up all night running from one guard, to the other. Five minutes later, you know, run again. So they would just run them. So they couldn't fall asleep. You know, just real brutal kind of thing. So again, I can get off track on that and get into a whole different chapter of life. So it was pretty awful.

After 2004, 2005, in 2006, I went to work for uses with the ATA program. And that was other than being part of Team Miami and Ramadi Iraq with Triple Canopy, you know, an original member of that team. This was the next best job I'd ever had working with the anti-terrorist assistance program. It was wonderful. But after that, I started bouncing to SOC. I went to EOD corporate. I went to Blackwater.

You know, I've been with Tiger Swan, with Olive Group. And I may be missing a few, unfortunately. I can't remember all of them. But most of it was shit. Yeah. Most of it was shit. Blackwater, when Eric was there, they had it right.

They did some cowboy stuff. But I'm not, you know, I'm not going to judge how savage people are going to be in a scenario because I know the scenarios I had to be in. What I criticize people and what I can't stand and what I'm against is people lying about what they did or didn't do, especially to profit from it. So I don't have a problem with people that trained all their life to go kill folks, and they go over there and kill folks because that's what we sent people to do, and we should support that a little bit more.

than what we did. Let's talk about your time because, you know, you talk about being in combat. And for anybody who thinks that you weren't in combat because you were working for Triple Canopy, let's talk about your time and, you know, T. Miami, Ramadi at that time. How many, how many ambushes or contacts would you say you were in during that like three or four year period? Okay. So in 2004 in Ramadi, and not just in Ramadi, but we were the team assigned to Ramadi, we were attacked over 20 times. And when I say attacked, it involved an RPG, a machine gun.

We were attacked. It wasn't like somebody walked across the street with AK-47 and looked at us hard. You know, we were attacked over 20 times. And so our principle was a. attacked even before the team got there in Ramadi. And his limo was down hard. And there was a DC reporter in the vehicle as well. And it was after that event.

I think that was January or February 04. And I don't know that a news reporter after that ever went to Ramadi. They would go to Fallujah. They would go to Camp Fallujah. but I don't know of one single report or anything that after Remodi, I mean, nobody wanted to go to Ramadi. Yeah. Now, in the book, you tell a funny story about your principal, the ambassador, right?

It needed to be at a lot of the same meetings that Mattis needed to be at. And that he was, I don't want to say he was your canary in the coal mine because basically you guys wanted to get out, you wanted to get out ahead of him, right? Yeah, it's a funny story now. But, you know, when you start realizing that every time you go to a meeting that General Mattis is at, he gets attacked going or coming back from every time.

And so when you realize that pattern, you know, operating at the tier one level, you have the freedom of going, we're going to change tactics. You know, when you're in the conventional military and they say the convoy speed is going to be 45 to 50 miles an hour. You can't come in and say, hey, dude, we're doing 120 today. We're going to have a kilometer in between us. By the time you make contact, I'll be rolling up far enough back where I can dismount, take the attention off. You know what I mean? We started doing things different, and it worked.

But with Mattis, you guys started making sure that you always left before his convoy did. That's right. That was our primary launch indicator was we had to leave Camp Ramadi. We had to leave the government center. We had to leave Camp Fallujah. Wherever it was that we were meeting, we had to leave before General Mattis because he stopped and fought.

So in protection, you're taught to run. Right. To go against your instinct. Well, for some people, it's their instinct to run. But, you know, when you're attacked, you're supposed to fight back. You're supposed to be trained to that level that your instinct is to fight back.

And General Mattis, I don't know if he'll ever write a book, but, you know, tell me another two-star general that you know of that every time he got attacked, which was regularly, they stopped and fall. And he was right there with his Marines doing that. So, and I've got a story of General Kelly also, you know, we took him down the hill of and he told a story about, you know, the first guy he killed over there from his Humvee. And so, you know, these are general officers that are getting out there with their men and participating in the war. And so I have nothing but respect for General Mattis. But yes, we got attacked a lot, but he got attacked every time he left the base as far as I can remember.

What was that? Because, you know, you had been in Ranger Battalion, you had been an SF, all sort of in a peacetime military. What was that first contact like for you? Um, the first contact I was in, it went great at first. So when we got ambushed, we had the principal with us. I was in the follow vehicle. And I saw four gunmen out my window. And so, and we were going pretty slow.

And so the call came, you know, RPG gunners. reverse out, reverse out. And so one guy, the video's online of this attack, but it's from one vehicle. So you're only hearing him on the radio in his vehicle because it's being recorded by the camera. There's five vehicles totaling five different versions of what's going on. But unlike with Tim Kennedy, everybody basically tells the same story just from their perspective. How many grenades did you guys throw that day? I want to know how many grenades you threw, personally.

Well, out of the 50 that I had, there was only three or four. I'm just kidding. I had one grenade, and it was strapped, you know, to my kit. But I never used that in battle. Amateur hour, amateur. Just one? But I was literally taking the sluging. lack. Now, we're an armored vehicle, so if you're going to crack the door, you better know

what you're doing because you don't want to unbutton your armor unless you really need to, and you've thought that through. I had them dead to right, and we were starting to turn around, and I literally have the perfect scenario if you're right-handed cracking the back door on the left side looking back at three gunmen on a porch and one in the yard and they're both, you know, kind of at the, they're all at the low ready. So I kind of had them deads of right. So I'm taking the slack out and then he hit the gas. And that slung me.

And so now I'm sliding across the seat in the BMW in the leather seat to get to the other window so I can keep an eye to so I can still see them because now. we're turning around, and that's when the RPG hit the road and shattered my window and flattened all the tires. Yeah, and so, I mean, I assume you guys had run flats. You didn't need to do a recovery. You didn't have to do a recovery or anything like that. You could like...

We would have been, Dave, out of all the scenarios I've been in, and from a protection standpoint, I've been in a lot of scenarios from a protection standpoint of how to play these things out. And if any of our vehicles that day would have stopped rolling, everybody in that vehicle would have been in trouble. Yeah. Would have been in trouble.

They had us on both sides of the road. It was a major ambush that they were setting up. And it just looked like we caught them off guard. Yeah. So, you know, you talk about internal volume. And you had mentioned it a couple times, like, before this, before this incident or before this time of your life. Can you tell us what the internal volume meant for you?

Yeah, so if you, I guess the best way to explain this, if you go sit in a room where it's quiet, turn your phone off, turn the TV, it's just quiet, there's nothing. and sit there for 15 minutes. Now, if that seems like torture, your internal volume's probably high. Right. You're probably gritting your teeth.

You're probably right. Well, what animal in nature can't just sit it? Right. And be calm and relax and quiet. So if you can't do that, which I couldn't, that's an example of, you know, so we've got all these lies and excuses and these biases we tell ourselves to justify our behavior.

Our self-talk can justify almost anything we wanted to. And so what I realized was my internal volume, it wasn't whether I had a new car. It wasn't whether I had a great job. It wasn't whether I had the beautiful hottest girlfriend. What made me happy was how I felt on this. inside that internal volume. And when it was low, those were the best times in my life.

And it was like, so how do you have a low internal? It's like, oh, you have to be mindful. What does that mean? Well, so then you start down that road. And so I took the path of mindfulness by walking the Appalachian Trail. And that was when I woke up to what, to actually recognize that what's going on inside me is my life. What everybody else thinks and whatever thing else is going on is something totally different. This experience, whether you believe in the Bible, whether you believe we're a

computer program like the Matrix, no matter what you believe, you know, at the end of the day, how you feel about this experience, you know, how you feel in your container. You know, we all look a little different, some fat, some tallus, some gifted, some not, whatever. It's a temporary container made up of bacteria, fungus, all kinds of stuff from the universe that we're in right now traveling through this experience and how you feel is what mattered. And I discovered that on the Appalachian Trail, walking that, spending that four months by myself, you know, I found organically how to just be pre-examination. present. Like I got to a point, Dave, where I couldn't think about the future or the past. Now,

imagine going to sleep and not thinking about what happened today. Imagine going to sleep and not thinking about your childhood. Imagine waking up and not worried about work. Like, I got to a state of nirvana naturally by just being in the woods. And if you look historically at mythology and, and And all teachings from the east, people go out into the forest. They go out into the woods. They go out to the desert. They go and spend time alone as something happens. And that's something that happens is real.

And it's a detox. So your ego is toxic. And the bigger your ego, the more toxic. And so I want to mention this. What I love about your podcast, Dave, you and Jack, is you guys are the real deal, but you guys don't have an ego. Like your platform,

your mannerisms, your attitudes, the way you guys do things isn't from this egotistical place and I dig that. So, killing the ego is what my life is about now. And the hard thing with killing your ego

is the most painful thing you'll ever do. because to kill your ego means I'm not a green beret anymore. I'm not a ranger. I'm not some badass fist fighter from back in the day. You know, I'm just an organism in this universe and how I feel is what matters. How I, the energy I put out, the frequency I operate, how I interact, how I interact with animals and humans, all that matters. And so it's a paradigm shift. It's a complete awakening where you just search for truth.

There's no more manipulation. There's no more room for lies. Like it's the truth. And that's all you want. So it's very interesting. And I look forward to when we like get into sort of that journey of self-discovery. But one of the reasons I asked you about internal volume is because I think I think that, you know, there are a lot of, like, ideas or terms around it, but I like the idea

of internal volume. And I think that for a lot of guys in the soft community or a lot of people, not guys, but girls, a lot of people who join the military or high-performing types of jobs, that they have that drive and they have that internal volume, and they're always kind of like seeking, right? and I think one of the things that many of us loved about war was that finally the external volume massed the internal volume and finally...

You got the green light. Right? Finally we're operating... Finally, the world has come up to our standard. Yeah. And it's not screaming anymore because now there's equilibrium. And I think that so many people when they finally find that

and then they lose it, it's worse than not having found it. Yeah. I like that. I think, I'm glad you kept talking about this because what I failed to connect with the militaries, we're familiar with inflate and deflate. You got to be able to inflate and deflate. Be a tier two guy, especially operated tier one level.

You've got to be able to inflate and deflate well. And so what does that mean? So internal volume, think about a volume knob set on zero or set on 10. When you set that on zero, just peace, just calm, just stillness. And that's what we really want. We all deep down want to feel safe. We want to feel value, you know, worth. We want to be calm.

You know, like you feel when you're romantic or having a nice meal, that parasympathetic part of your brain. We don't want to live in that chimpanzee part of our brain, that sympathetic response, that fight, flight, you know, freeze, fawn, you know, high. You know, we don't want to live in that. So learning how to inflate and deflate properly is something we learned well. And since they promote a monstrous side of us, so when you have that rage, that internal volume, that unpacked trauma from your childhood, you know, all this stuff that you're suppressing so that you can be successful.

because if you couldn't suppress that, you'd be in prison. Right. Right. The guys that can suppress it become cops and military guys, the guys that can't suppress it, become criminals. You know, and so, yeah, when you think about that knob, you know, it's like, okay, I'm flying into the objective. If I'm mindful, I'm at a two.

I'm focused on my breathing. I know my job when I step off. I'm going left. I need to make sure I don't do this. next phase we're going to be here i need to make sure i don't do that you know you're calm you're thinking it in you're ready you're ready for anything you're ready to flow and go right but when that guy comes through that door you know you need to go from a two to an eight you don't need to go to a 10 you don't need to freak out but you need to get on it right and then you need to come back down

go back to your breathe and go so that's a mindful approach to being an operator in combat and um So I think when you get the green light to be monstrous, that monster, and everybody has it. And Carl Jung, you know, talks a great deal about the shadow, you know, the monstrous. Jordan Peterson talks about, you know, the monster or like us, monster killers, you know, when you get the green light to do what you've been trained to do and the freedom to do it, Um, it's intoxicated. Um, it was the highlight of my life. Yeah, there's a purity in Ramadi with triple canopy was the highlight of my life. If I would have died there or died when I've got home, I would have lived a complete life.

So everything I'm doing now is, is extra. It's a cherry on top. Okay. But like you said, once you come home and you don't have that, it's tough. And it was, man. You know, I spent. a couple years homeless. You know, it hasn't been hugs and singing sweet songs.

You know, it's been tough. Yeah, so let's talk about that then because, you know, you spend that time in Ramadi. And then you do more of the J-SET, right? You do more of the training, the supervision, the corporate stuff. And, you know, and I think one of the things that you said hits, on why a lot of veterans have a hard time dealing with their trauma and not just trauma from war, but trauma that's been carried forward

and then just sort of like condensed in war is that it was the highlight of your life and it's hard to find anything. And so, you know, guys and girls come home from that experience. And it was the highlight. And now they have to deal with paying bills. They have to deal with, you know, taxes. They have to deal with, like, social etiquette, all this other stuff.

And I think a lot of them, for a lot of, you know, like it all gets lumped under post-traumatic stress. But I think for a lot of them, it's like, I think for a lot of them it's like, I did what I wanted to do. Like, what do I got now another 30, 40 years? Like, what am I going to do for 30 or 40 years? Right. That's a great point. I think it's all under the umbrella of PTSD. I agree with you when people talk about it.

But like you're saying, there's lots of subcategories that fall under that. And, yeah, I can tell you from experience that part of the reason why veterans are blowing their brains out in the VA parking lot is because the way they're treated at the VA. I can tell you that when you come home from killing folks and almost being killed several times and everybody on your team makes it home. and you're so grateful that that's your story, that everybody on your team came home after all that. And you struggle to get medical care and dental care and end up not getting those things, but then illegal people, like it's being promoted on television, and like half of America or a third of America supports illegal people in this country getting full medical benefits and combat veterans aren't.

You know, if you're not 100% disabled, you don't have dental care in the VA. And so unless you have a job that provides dental care after that, which, you know, there's problems there. So from a mental health standpoint, when you're looking at, okay, I'm getting older. And getting old is not for 60s. Like, it's tough getting old and not being able to do what you used to do when your mental. You know, your mental health is challenged as you get old. And so it's a lot tougher when you turn on the news and you see Americans fighting, politicians fighting for illegals. and you've been left out there basically to rot,

it makes you question everything. So during this high part of the GW, not just your time in Ramadi, but when security is still like a very thriving industry, right, they're still throwing money at it. The pay for the individuals have gone down, the equipment's gone down, but the contracts are bigger, right?

and you're, you know, finding your way through this. What are you thinking? Are you looking for a career? Are you looking for satisfaction? Are you looking for a rush? Like, what are you doing? Well, when I was with Triple Canopy in 2004, I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with them.

And then just, you know, Blackwater won the contract. And they offered me like $300 less to do the same job in Vermont. I was like, no, this was a new team. I knew how dangerous survived. I was like, no, I'm good. And so, you know, that's the only reason why I turned it down. And so when I left there and went to EUSA program, I was like, I'm going to spend the rest of my life doing this job. I mean, I loved it.

And it was sustainable. Like, it wasn't dangerous. It had everything that you would want. except, you know, not being shot at or blown up like I was in Ramadi, which I enjoyed. But long term, you know, that's not, you don't want to keep doing that long term. So it was a great, you know, I did what I wanted to do. I proved to myself that I was a man. You know, that's what we want to do, right?

We want approval. We want to be somebody. You know, at the end of the day, if you really slow down and look in the mirror deep enough, there's still a little boy in there. You know, and so if you don't bring that little boy with you along the way, he's still in there somewhere curled up and, you know, that traumatized little boy. So, you know, all that came to fruition. Everything culminated in my life.

And so it was like being a professional football player and winning the Super Bowl. Like I know what it feels like now to be that person. It's the same internal feeling to be at the top of your game and the top organization in the most dangerous little city in the world doing what you do at the highest level. Yeah. And then to walk away from that and have another opportunity was great. So after, but I'm getting sidetracked. My ex-wife sent me an email and said, if I didn't come home, what had happened is she had got pregnant with her, my ex-best friend, and they were going to get married. And so now everything changed.

So the deal I made with her for child support, my deployment rotation, everything was perfect. Everybody was happy. And then she got pregnant and decided to get married and everything changed. And so I had to resign from that position, come home and be a full-time parent so that I wouldn't lose custody of my children. And so I left that job, probably the best job I could have ever had because I didn't want to give up custody of my children. And I know a lot of guys with our background would have kept working. But I just, you know, at that time, my kids meant everything to me. Sure.

Can you tell us a little bit about the job? because, you know, a lot of people may not be familiar with UIS or ATA. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's nine week deployments for the bomb teams or the incident countermeasure teams. So what we would do was we'd go into a place like Indonesia or India, a place where friends of our country and this program had been. around at the time for 20-something years.

And it's just kind of a rapport builder with nations, a nation builder. So we would go over and teach the Indonesian Special Operations Bomb Unit, how to build and how to disrupt IEDs of all different origins. And then after they learned how to disrupt those. IEDs we would teach them post-blast scene analysis you know how to come in so like when we were in Indonesia uh Bali had the second attack and I was actually in Kuda and Bali at the time of that attack and so for that team to go in there after the Raja restaurant was blown up you know they would go in and look for evidence of bomb parts and things of that nature so we would teach you

them those basic things and then just go to another country so you would set up, get your equipment set up for a week, and then you teach them for eight weeks straight and fly home. And it was great money, great work environment, great mission, and I could have done that until retirement. But again, you know, life takes you where it takes you. and you got to meet life where it takes you, and that's something I've definitely learned now. So I really fought it at the time.

If it was to happen again, I wouldn't have. I would have just, you know, went along with it and not got so upset and tried to, you know, work from that from a more mindful place. But I just said, okay, I'll just resign and go home and just sit at home to Spider because now that I'm at home, I don't have to pay $2,000 a month. Child support. So she just cut her nose off to spite her face, and so did I. So you come back to the States, and what's the job market like for you here?

What is the future for Lee when he looks at it? If I don't deploy, see, I was in demand. You know, I've just come out of Ramadi for 14 months. There was a lot of things going on in Israel and other places. There was a lot of opportunities that I turned down because I couldn't deploy anymore. I mean, really, really good obocheats. The agency stuff, a lot of stuff, and I just couldn't do it. So luckily, when I was in 20th group, a buddy of mine, John Nettle,

was working with Alan Brawson. Allen owned T's in West Memphis, which became Olive Group, and then Olive sold it back to Allen. But where was I going with that? Like your future? Right, right. So because of my relationship with John,

and because John knew, We were over in Iraq at the same time doing different things. He knew I had been in Ramadi and Fallujah shooting folks while doing protection work. So they got a contract to teach pre-deployment training for the SEAL teams in West Memphis. And so they contacted me to be the lead instructor for all their pre-deployment of PSC. work, their protection work, high threat protection work. So I put together a live fire, eight-day live-fire course from scratch, specifically for the seals.

And if it weren't for that, I wouldn't have been connected to the community at all anymore. And so I was working part-time as a paramedic again. Luckily, I left there on good terms, and they welcomed me back part-time. And so I was teaching part-time, doing paramedic part-time. And I did that for a couple few years until things had changed enough to where she allowed me to start deploying again. And, you know, it's interesting because you mentioned, like, high-threat PSD, like personal security detail. That's, that was something new that came out. that came out of the GWOT, right?

You can't go to executive international or whatever, whatever those schools are and learn how to be a bodyguard in that kind of environment. Like you have, you almost have to have a military background in order to do that job. You have to have a soft background, I think. I'll go a step further and say you have to have a soft arm. High threat PSD is a thinking man's game.

doing PSD in a combat zone is a tier one mission. And so you're 100% correct prior to GWAT. I know maybe Dev Group did some stuff like that, but Delta was the only guys really doing PSD. You know, like they did Schwartzcofts detail. So Mad Max that ran the first two selection class, for triple canopy. So if you were in the first class or the second class

in the original triple canopy in the beginning in 2004, you had to pass Mad Max's standards. And they were very high. They were Delta standards. And they were no joke. Anybody went through there to tell you they were Delta standards. They couldn't get enough people through the pipeline. So they removed Mad Max and put him in another capacity

so they could get larger. classes through because the contract grew. And that would be the second, that would, then that's when you start looking at the second seven months of triple canopy in the beginning. And that's when you start talking about things you talked about too. You know, you start getting a different level of guy in 04, or from 04 to 05, from 05 to 06. you start the pay gets less higher level guys go do different things um lesser qualified guys replace those guys and by the end in afghanistan and iraq you had guys that didn't have soft

backgrounds some guys that just had law enforcement doing jobs that once were only held by soft guys and there's a reason um now i'm not saying let me be let me caveat this. My experience in Ramadi, the two four Marines and two five Marines that infantry did more than the special ops and what we did ever did.

So these infantry guys that we send the war to a place like Flusia and Ramadi that fight day and night every day in their deployment saw a lot more and did a lot more than anybody like me ever did. So I'm not trying to say that.

I just want to make sure I make that distinguish. But for these skill sets, these tier one type jobs, you know, you need to have a soft background because you need to be able to lead a team

or be the bottom man on the team. You need to be able to do, you know, you need to be able to inflate and deflate to the full spectrum of whatever might happen because like when we were protecting Ambassador Stu Jones, going to Hillo, going to Baghdad, going to Fallujah, going to downtown Ramadi,

crossing the border into Jordan. We didn't have military support. We were five vehicles, 15 men with one principal roaming all of Iraq. You know, and a lot of times we got shot. I got shot at four different times by friendly fire, and somebody from I was on a podcast once and I said this wrong

somebody from Cornell I said Stanford but it was Cornell somebody from Cornell that was doing their doctorate or whatever on Fratch aside contacted me because they had heard

that I had four different incidents where I had been shot at by friendly fire and they so they wanted to talk to me about that but Yeah, it was, it was 04 during that time really was, it was a, it was a crazy time. Oh, yeah, a friend of. Oh, I got to point this out. I got to point this out because I don't want to forget it.

It's in my book and it's driving me crazy. The devil of Ramadi sniper was not Chris Kyle. Okay. In 2004, the devil of Ramadi sniper was killing Marines and army men and, contractors left and right. And the devil of Ramadi was Juba. And he ultimately killed one of the replacements, Bama, that replaced me when Blackwater took out, replaced us.

He ultimately killed him about two weeks later. But Chris Kyle was not the devil of Ramadi. That was a sniper that was killing Americans, not an American that was killing bad guys that was a bad guy that was killing Americans was the devil of her body. Thank you for clarifying that.

So, sorry, I lost my train of thought. Okay, so you start to work for Olive Group or you get him with that, you get him with Tiger Swan with some of that sexy pipeline infiltration. Yeah. Well, yeah.

So I was, I was living like John J. Rambo. You know, I was homeless working for cash, you know, on construction jobs or whatever else. You know, that's where some of us did, you know, end up. And so a guy from Blackwater reached out to me and said, you know, there was this dapple protest at Standing Rock. and they were paying like $500 a day to pull security. And I was like, heck yeah, man. I was in bad shape, you know. And so that was a chance for me to try to get straightened out financially

and get my feet back under me. And I went to work there in a few months. So if I go somewhere and I like it, it's something that one of it. it usually goes well. And when I go somewhere I don't, it usually does it. So I went there and it went well. The next thing I know, I'm the deputy project manager for Tiger Swan running the entire state of Iowa, where the pipeline ran through, where the valve sites run through.

And during 2017, there were two females that were leading this band of domestic terrorists who were doing millions of dollars of damage on the valve sites. with the pipeline, the control centers and putting holes in the actual pipes. So the FBI finally closed in on them and they finally arrested them and that job just went away. So, you know, I had been promoted up to a deputy project manager, JP, who I worked for, who was the program manager. Like, I was like, okay, like, this is going to work out. Like, I'll stay with these guys. This is another Delta operated company like Triple Canopy.

Like, I'm doing well. I fit in well. They like my leadership style. And I'm happy. And I really was. My mental health was great. And so people like us, if we're in a position where we feel good about ourselves, we release good hormones.

We thrive. we lose our belly fat, you know, we get off our ass. We, you know, and when we don't, when we're in a job where we don't feel like we're high enough or we're in a job we don't want to do and we have to do or whatever, you know, we have a lot of negative energy and negative self-talk. And we can lie to ourselves and ignore that, but it can make us, you know, not a good version of ourselves. and that's where addiction and separating from our suffering, that's where all that stuff plays in. And that's where yoga and mindfulness, you know, that's where I was able to wake up to just how monsters I am

and just how much in denial I was about all of that. So after Tiger Swan, like that goes away, was Facebook next for you? No, Facebook was. Before that, Facebook went away because of two reasons. And I'm going to say the first reason, because I don't want to sound like I'm making any excuses, they politely asked me to leave. But the secondary reason for that is DEI.

So Facebook was operating by DEI before there was DEI. They just didn't know it, but I did. You know, so they didn't want, they wanted guys like me and guys like Steve that, I won't mention his last name because I don't know if he would like that. But Steve from up in Washington State came down from Paul Allen and Bill Gates' detail to work at Facebook. And I came there at the same time. And I worked a day shift and he worked a night shift. And our job was developed Facebook's how to operate as a particular. action detail. And they didn't want to, we helped get them to kind of a basic level, but they didn't

want to really do things right. Right. And after 2004 with Triple Canopy, I was going to do things right or I was going to bitch about it and leave. No, I couldn't not do things right anymore. I couldn't, I couldn't not do it. So I made things kind of hard for some people. and they were frustrated with me. And they, you know, they asked me to leave. And so, you know, that was part of that not being a good place. If I wouldn't have went to Facebook and they would have said, the way you are is exactly what we're looking for, which is what Tiger Swan did, which is what Triple Canopy did, which is what Blackwater did. If I would have got that reception, I'd still be at Facebook.

Yeah. Yeah. A lot of times, you know, those companies, you know, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Adelson, Adelson is his name, right? Out in Vegas. Like, you know, they want the soft guys, but they want more of a cop mentality. Well, yes, yes, in a way, like McDonald's details, some of those details are very cop, secret. service kind of oriented.

Right. So you're all right. But, but, but I don't mind saying this. And I know what I say your channel doesn't represent. But what Facebook wanted was gays and lesbians and blacks and whites and Koreans. They wanted their protection detail to look like Facebook. And that's what they did. So there was, there was lots of unqualified people that I vetted coming into the team that were voted in that were not qualified of they weren't qualified to be on a local a little local garden you know like a Verizon cell phone store you know much less you know protecting billionaire um CEOs and COOs of corporations that have the intellectual properties of Facebook in his brain right you know.

you're protecting that. And so, and not to mention the embarrassment. Like, who wants to be on a protection detail? And the only thing guys remember is you're the guy that let that happen to Zuckerberg? Like, I remember that. Everybody in the world remembers that. You know, so you don't want to be working with idiots. And so my standard was high and it still is.

So if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it right. If not, you know, just do it without me. I'll go do something else. Right. But yeah, they wanted, and they did. There was one black guy that was gay. We had one female that was a lesbian openly. They were all young.

And it was just chaos. People didn't, you know, you would drive at the client to San Francisco with no backup vehicle. So we literally had Cheryl Sandberg, the COO, a self-made billionaire herself, on the side of the interstate broke down with the shift leader because the shift leader came from safe for service and didn't

even have the wherewithal to have a backup vehicle, but I've been screaming that stuff, you know, having ghost vehicles, doing things right. Right. You know, the money was there. Let's do it right. But it's kind of like the government. Like people just

just get along, everybody behind. happy and if something terrible happens just point fingers and then fix it. Right. It's like, well, let's be proactive. Yeah. You know, let's be a little proactive. And you know, and I think that like a lot of people misinterpret like the idea of it doesn't matter if somebody, if a guy is a black gay guy or a woman as an open lesbian,

if they know how to do the job, the problem is when you start hiring because, you're of who they are instead of what they know and what they can do. Let me clarify that because I know that could be sensitive to people. You're exactly right. That's what I meant. You know, I grew up a poor little Jewish boy in Tennessee. Like I don't have some kind of racism towards, you know, anybody. I've been bullied and had my own experiences in my own life and my own problems.

I'm about being qualified. So yeah, everybody on the team could have been a gay or lesbian if they were qualified. If they had the qualification, but these people didn't. And so the motivation, just like with DEI, the whole problem with DEI is do you, and here's what I ask people. You're in a bad car accident and you look up and there's a paramedic. do you want a paramedic that is highly trained or do you want a paramedic that is hired because of the way they look and their ideology? Now, if you ask anybody that's in a life or death situation, what do they want?

If you're on an airplane and it's getting hijacked, do you want somebody like me that's going to stand up with a pistol and do whatever I got to do to get between you and the threat and get busy? or do you want somebody that just looks and believes in a certain audiology in that position? Because I went through the Federal Law Enforcement Academy with a black female. Now, I've worked with black females that could outdo me in a lot of things, but this black female couldn't get out of a first-class seat. That's how big she was. She couldn't pass the basic shooting standards that were dropped to the F-class. standards from the initial

it was the TPC, the tactical pistol course reduced down to the, whatever the federal standard, the TCT, the practical pistol force. So it was a much lower standard as she couldn't pass it. So, but guess what? She graduated.

So people can think whatever they want to, but when you're on an air, when it's a job, a fireman has to carry you out of a, burning building, you've got to ask yourself, you've got to stop all this fighting and ask yourself, what would you want? Who would you hire to do those jobs? Do you want them to meet a standard? Or do you just want them to look a certain way? And so, you know, I grew up with common sense. And I'm going to hold on to that. Yeah. So face, so, Facebook was before Tiger Swan.

So Facebook and then and then the yacht detail, right? Or the... There was... Man, you know, we could do a podcast with just one of these. Like, there's so many things when you mention them. I'm so glad you read the book, Dave.

You know, because there's so much in there that never gets to. Once again, I want to say it is highly entertaining. Like, your personality shines through. It's an enjoyable read. Yeah, so the yacht thing was out of desperation, and it turned into the Facebook thing.

So to go to the yacht thing, we have to back up before the Facebook thing. But let me tell you, doing yacht security and protection is shit work, man. It's shit work. If you have to live with the crew, just watch a couple episodes of Below Debt. it's a it's a tough life for somebody like us to go spend a couple months on a yacht but I got to work with several billionaires in my life in that capacity

I got to see them with their you know literally with their you know their shirts off or they're you know drunk with their guard down and you know I got to see personal sides of them. You know, you get to hear them in the backseat talking business with other people. You know, you're just privy to things that I won't obviously share of those type of things.

But it's really interesting. You know, I got to meet the father of the DVD, Liber Farr. He was the father of DVD, and he spent about a month on the yacht. You know, he's good friends with Kevin Costa. and he just had, you know, you get to hear all these amazing stories from these people and exposed to different things. And then you get to see that, you know, billionaires can be miserable. You know, there were some people that I work with and I won't point out who because I work with several, but there were some of them. Like Cheryl Sandberg is one of the probably the best human beings I've ever met my life.

I've also met some of the worst in that group. So being a billionaire doesn't mean you're happy. There's no correlation between being a good person and being happy. There's no correlation with those things. Putting these people on pedestals like we do is ridiculous. Like when you get to see them who they really are, most of them, you wouldn't hire to mow your yard.

Most of them I wouldn't hire to babysit my children. Like, you know, so, yeah, it helped me wake up to a lot of things. So the yacht, Facebook, Tiger Swan, and then Tiger Swan goes away. So what's next? So I work overseas a couple gigs during the hurricane disaster. Nothing noteworthy there. Just typical armed security, shit work, 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. Good pay, shit work, shit leadership, you know, good pay.

And you're working with good guys usually. guys you've worked with before. So just another gig, no big deal. You learn what not to do, usually on those type of gigs. And that led to, I'm not doing this no more. I'm going to, there's an Air Force Base in my hometown, Arnold Air Force Base, Tallahoma, Tennessee's my hometown. It's mainly civilians that work there.

They work on, you know, rockets and weapons systems and things like that out there. So it's mainly civilians. And I'm going to get a security job out there. They pay $20 something dollars an hour. It's easy work. There's never been a threat there. It's my hometown. It's no big deal, right?

I'll just do that. They have good medical insurance. And so I did that. And about a year and a half into it, it turned out it was shit work, terrible work. One of the worst jobs I've ever had. And from a security standpoint, the leadership and the tactics and the mindset was the worst I had ever had up until that point.

And it was a military base, an Air Force base. So what are you going to do? Right. I just show up and get your paycheck, and it's a joke, it's a joke. And so about a year and a half into it, I hurt my shoulder from an incident in Iraq and then an incident in Africa, and then I heard it again during this job. And so I took leave. and as soon as I took leave

Workman's call them they started trying to fire me well when you're trying to fire me or you're trying to do anything to me and you don't have a good reason you're going to bring out my monster and I'm going to feel like I'm getting bullied

and when I feel like I'm getting bullied I don't care who you are I don't care what it is I'm going to fight back and so I got a lawyer and I fought back and they decided that they didn't want to fire me anymore. And the day I was supposed to report back to work, I resigned because I was going to resign all long after that because of that ordeal. It went on for a few months.

I was going to resign all along after that. And I got contacted about protecting the president of Haiti in 2019. and so I jumped on that. And that's the last job I ever took except for becoming a yoga teacher. So 2019, the deployment to Haiti, it turned out to be the worst deployment of my life. And I resigned.

Yeah. What was so bad about it? Was it the leadership? It was the leader. So the mission was real. like President Javanelle got assassinated like a year later. Right. So the mission was real.

The threat was real. I knew it was real. I was brought down there as the senior, not the senior leader, but the senior expert on protection. I was the person that dealt with the president and his wife. I was the only person, including on our detail, and including on his detail, the only person that was allowed to be with the president with a weapon.

So that was my role. I was the AIC, the agent in charge, but I wasn't overall in charge. I couldn't make the ultimate decisions. And so we were doing some cowboy shit when all we really needed to be doing was keeping an eye on him and his wife. And we were doing everything but that. and it was some of that cowboy stuff. It was some of the stuff that, you know, Blackwater got accused of in the early days. It was some of the stuff that Custer Battles was accused of back in the early days.

Just some cowboy stuff. And this was a mature group of men down there doing this mission. We had the right people. We just didn't have the right mindset, the right leadership, and we were focused on the wrong part of the story. And I'm glad that I resigned and left there because one of the guys that was on my team, I fired because of how bad he was. And he and another guy that I had worked with a couple months later killed a couple in Nashville for money. And they're doing life in prison in Tennessee right now.

Two Marines, one force Marine and one, what's the other organization? Marsok. One Morsock and one force guy. And, yeah, I've worked with both of them. And so that was the kind of people, some of the stuff that, yeah. And I was just like, no, I'm leaving on my terms. I'm resigning. I'm going home.

You guys can have this if that's how you're going to operate. So I'm glad I did. So through all this and through, you know, all these years, you have this internal volume. You have this trauma that you haven't dealt with. I don't even know if you've recognized it. What started you on this path first to walk the Appalachian Trail? And then what took you to yoga of all things? I was going to kill my boss.

I'm glad you brought that out. I left that out, I think. I don't think I brought that up. So when I walked to Appalachian Trail, I felt healed. when I got back off the Appalachian Trail, I slowly became me again. The busy world, the noise, the stress, it all worked its way back in. And I had forgotten how to be, to just be. I had detoxed and now I got back on the heroin, so to speak.

Sure. And so the other pivotal point was, is I had it. I was finally done. I was done with the stress, the high blood pressure. I was done with being told what to do. I was, you know, by stupid people. I was done with all this stuff. Now, I'm not saying I was right about anything.

I'm just answering your question. I felt like I was just completely done. And when my boss, who was a little retired Air Force officer, when he tried to fire me, for using inappropriate language at work. That's what they were trying to fire me for. A bunch of security guys and cops at an Air Force base, and he's trying to fire me for inappropriate language.

So, of course, when I got my lawyer, so anyways, but when he called me in the office and told me he was going to, you know, fire me, and when I left there, I was so upset that I decided I was going to wait for him to get off work. I was going to follow him home and kill him. And that's what I was going to do. I didn't have another, there wasn't another thought on my mind.

And, you know, we didn't, you know, we didn't cover this. It's in the book. But when we talked about those two fights you had in that one year, the first fight almost ended that way too. The guy was saved by families showing up in the, the park. That was the first time in my life. So that was after being a green beret, but before Ramadi and Triple Canopy, it was in between there. That was the first time, that wasn't the first time in my life I'd chased somebody with a gun or something like that. But that was the first

time in my life where I knew I gave myself the green light to kill somebody. When you get, when you're somebody like us that have all these skill sets, all these abilities, all these experiences. But you obviously keep those things in check.

When you give yourself the green light to do whatever the fuck you want, it's liberating. It's liberating. And when you feel like it's just because it's a really bad person that was trying to do something bad to you, it's just like just because

the rest of society won't fight back and and teach you a lesson, I will. So when I hear about a coworker goes to work and kill somebody or like when that guy killed that insurance guy in New York, I don't go, oh my God, go catch this guy or whatever. I go, I wonder what the story is. Because I bet half the time the person getting what they got might have had it coming. That's how, you know, That's how I look at those things. So I was in a scenario where I was going to be that guy. X, everything goes and kills his boss, and I'm going to be the bad guy. You know, his story, are my story's not going to be the narrative.

His story is going to be the narrative. He's going to be the government. He's going to be the media in this scenario. And I'm going to be on the shit end of the stick. And that's how those things work. So you were, so this was your plan or this was your thought. And what changed? So in 2014, when I worked at Facebook, the guys that came down from Washington State from Bill Gates's detail and Paul Allen's detail, they were used to smoking and doing marijuana because it was legal.

and the corporations don't have a policy against it. So Facebook was the same way. So it's legal in California to do weed if you have a medical marijuana card, and it's legal to do weed if you work at Facebook. I mean, the campus at Facebook, each section has its own bar. You know, I mean, it's a very liberal kind of, it's interesting. It's fascinating kind of the dynamics out there. But back to the point, I got back to my camper.

I was living in a camper at the time. And I got back to the camper and I had been doing Oshetanga yoga. It's a type of yoga. I won't get into it because it's not important. But I was doing an Oshetonga practice. It takes about 90 minutes. So I thought, okay, if I do yoga, I usually feel better after yoga. If I do yoga, maybe I'll feel better because my internal volume was out of 10.

Right. Like I was going to kill him. And I wasn't just going to kill him. I was going to hurt him. And then I was going to kill him. I was as upset, everything in my life that had ever pissed me off. Everything in my life that I wanted to do or say to get back at somebody he was going to get. Right.

And I knew it. You had just hit your ranking points. You had hit your breaking point. I do it. And since I had, you know, once you kill a few people in a few different scenarios, you realize how easy it is. Right. That's not the hard part. Killing people is not hard.

It's giving yourself the green light to do it. Right. And so that's the hard part. And getting away with it. Yeah, I did. Well, that's where the conundrum came in. So I did 90 minutes of yoga, and I still wanted to kill him. And I started thinking, okay, if I go kill him, at that time, there was about three people or four people I wanted to kill, honestly, that had done me wrong in my life.

And, you know, if they made it legal, I'd go kill those people and sleep like a baby. So I started thinking, do I go kill? those people. If so, in what order? So my mind starts getting really busy. And the only thing that ever worked for me was weed. And so I called up a friend of mine and I got some weed. And I smoked a bunch of weed and I got really high and I did some more yoga and I felt like giving people hugs. I didn't, I didn't want to hurt him. but I didn't want to go back to that job. I didn't know what to do.

I thought, you know, maybe I should commit myself. You know, I need help. Like I noticed in that moment, like, I got to do something. Like, you got to do something, dude. Is this the- And so I decided to become a young teacher. I want to ask you real quick before you move on. Is this the first time?

You know, because a lot of the spiritual development happens after, or potentially, but a lot of the spiritual development happens after, I don't want to call it a nervous breakdown, but after people, like, after the ego is destroyed, right? Once, when the ego blows up, it gives us some clarity for a little while, or it can, it doesn't always. But was this the first? first time that you had, I mean, I know you'd been angry before, you know, you jacked up those guys in the fight, stuff like that. But is this the first time that it got to that point to where it was just like, like a bubble bursting for you? No, I had been that mad before, but it was before

I'd killed people. So going and killing them wasn't like, you know, in your multiple choices, It just wasn't a choice. But what I mean is this the first, was this, go ahead, go ahead, please. But what you said is a very valuable point for everybody. When you have an ego death, it's the hardest, darkest thing. And that's where I'm at now. Yeah.

So that was the beginning. So that was the beginning, the segue into the enlightenment, the awakening, the higher consciousness. There's a lot of ways of talking about it, the darkness, embracing the darkness, becoming one, becoming the real you. You know, because most of us don't want to admit, you know, I'll say something funny, simple, but it can be profound. Like most people don't want to admit they masturbate, right? So they'll lie about it. Well, there's a lot of things that people don't want to admit that to lie about. But once you wake up, only the truth can work.

And so when you kill your ego and you only operate with truth, there's no facade. I'm not going to be this fake person. I'm not going to go try to act. I'm not going to try to make this person happy. Like when you eliminate all those, you know, it's a game changer. But when you kill your ego and I'm in the process of doing that, the depression or what feels like depression is that

stuff that you have to go through. And when you end up on the other side of an ego dead, you're free. You don't live in this material world in a load. You don't respond to the news

and the ups and downs and all this nonsense in this fake world that's been created. You're grounded in your body. which means you're not in the future of the past in your mind. So when people say, what do you mean grounded in your body? Of course I'm in your body.

It's like, no, you spend 95% of your conscious day unconscious. Or in the subconscious mind. So, or in the unconscious mind. You know, there's about 5% of the time the average person is in their body. And what I mean is grounded in right now. Right now, this podcast, is forcing me to be grounded in right now and pay attention to you. But how many times during the day are we thinking about something else,

driving down the road, thinking about the future past, laying in bed, thinking about you're not in your body. Once you're grounded in your body, that's mindfulness. You're present. And people read all these books and do all these things. It's like, that's all you have to do. You don't have to read anything. just start being present.

Stop being distracted. Stop being, you know. And so that's my little spill on that. You had already been doing yoga up to this point. Was yoga just initially was it just, you know, a way for an older guy with a beat up body to kind of stay in shape? That's a great question that we didn't talk about. So when I finished the Appalachian Trail in 2015,

a friend of mine bought me the book and every veteran should read this book. Everybody with childhood trauma should read this book or listen to it. The body keeps the score by Bessel Bandercove. I read that book, started reading that book in 2015 and I started crying. I wasn't ready.

And so in 2019, I was ready to read it. And when I read in that book, Vessel van der Koke or some of his colleagues or people in that realm did a study in 2014 with traumatized, sexually assaulted, abused, raped, incest, women. A large group of that, they did an extensive study in 2014. And they found out that yoga does more to help trauma than any medication on the market. And so I'm a very logical, critical thinking type person in this space of my life. And so it was like, oh, okay, well, I need something to do.

I need a passion, a purpose in life. Cheryl Sandberg's foundation, Lean In is this beautiful thing. She's this beautiful person. Well, I want to be a beautiful thing. I want to do beautiful things. So I'm going to have this foundation. and I'm going to teach yoga for free. And it started out great at first.

And COVID hit. And COVID, which I truly believe then and now was a false flag attack, COVID crushed people that were doing things like me, hairdressers, people that own gyms, MMA. They crushed people that were doing things like that. So I was trying to give back something free to the community. I was teaching six times or two times a day, six times a week at the American Legion. And so that's where I got that idea.

It was from that book, somebody that could speak our language that had dealt with veterans for 40-something years. He invented the term PTSD. So we're better to learn about what that means. Where does that come from? What's that about? And so you want to talk about why we act the way we do or why people act the way we do. It's like if I'm present and you say something, there's a gap between what you say and how I respond. If I'm not present, somebody beats on that door right now and starts screaming.

Boom, I'm not present anymore. That 95% that chimpanzee part of my brain is now in charge. And now I turn and I react to the door. And if it's trouble, I'm ready to meet it. I'm ready to inflate to 10 just like that. Well, you can't operate in a civilized society like that. So that's what we're dealing with. That's what we're dealing with.

It's that simple. It's a part of our brain that operates how we behave. And if we're not mindful and stay in that other part of our brain, the part I'm in right now, that's when those things are going to happen. And so practicing through neuroplasticity and through time. What is neuroplasticity? It's the same thing Ivan Pavlov did with his dogs. He would ring a bell, they'd salivate, and then he'd feed them.

It's conditioning people. That's what they do to humans. You know, we were conditioned to act a certain way during COVID, right? You know, it's a conditioning. So you can condition yourself to do good things as well. as bad things. So what you do and what you think about on a daily basis will change you through neuroplasticity. And the younger you are, the easier and faster that change will happen. But you still can be my age and change. Do I think at 59 years old, you know, I'm going to be as, you know, have zero

violence inside of me and be this totally different person? No, I'm always going to. You know, I'm always going to, you know, have zero violence inside of me and be this totally different person. No, I'm always going to be me. I just need to be mindful. And that's the purpose of my book, you know, where a monster and mindfulness become one. You know, that's the subtitle of the story of my book. So when you had this moment, you're like, something has to change. And you had already been practicing yoga.

So you are already aware that, like, obviously you knew that you had, trauma in your past, but it's coming, it's bubbling up and becoming, you're more aware of it. How has your practice of yoga? How has anything else you've been doing? How has that, or I should say, has that, have you worked through some of that, have you purged or cleansed or even, you know, made friends with your past or with that trauma? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I've been at this five years.

And in the last year, I would say, has been the biggest breakthrough. I'd say in the last year, two years, but more of the last year, I would say I'm really feeling the effects of the ego debt. you know, I practice meditating. You know, I have animals and a hobby farm. And, you know, I don't focus on, you know, doing great things anymore, you know, getting attention anymore. And, you know, earlier, you know, especially last year, you know, it's like I'm a minimalist. I got on social media to try to promote my book because if the book does good, I can have the money for a free. yoga studio and pay instructors to give yoga for free.

You know, it'll all come to fruition. But what I found out was chasing that was wanting something. And that's my ego. You know, and you start going, well, hold on. It's like, no. Like if you really want to get down to it, if you really want to do this right, that's what it's about. It's about just being.

Just being right here. just being calm, being mindful, not letting everything else affect you. And I'm not there yet. Like I still deal with anxiety and depression and I have really bad day sometimes. But what I'm doing right now, I'm at the part of the ego death. If you look into what Carl Jung or a lot of the experts talk about the ego death, you know, and it was great that you understand that and we're talking to that. you know when you get to that there's a anti-social isolation

quiet stillness aspect of that that can make you not want to be around humans and so I kind of realized it in my quest I was being a little hypocritical I was talking about being you know killing my ego and I'm out here trying to get on podcast and trying to promote my book and on social media and whatever. It's like, I'm lying to myself. So that's where you have to back up.

And with those biases and that self-talk and that justification go, hey man, you know, if my book's supposed to do well, it's just going to do well. I wrote it and that's karma. And karma is not punishment. Karma is what you do.

And so if you do great things, great things are going to happen in your life. You reap what you sow. It is a cause and effects. It's a real thing and I believe in it 100%. I think when I die, everything that I did to somebody else, I'm going to experience.

And that's karma. I'm going to experience myself what I did to people. Everybody I killed in Iraq, I'm going to experience what it was like to get killed by me. I mean, every girl that I ever lied to or cheated on or hurt, you know, are monstrous towards, I'm going to experience what I did to them, you know, and that's what hell is to me. You know, that's how I look at things. And so, you know, when I look at karma now, it's serious. And I want to make sure that whatever I'm putting out and whatever I experience with animals or humans or other.

living things is as beautiful and kind and as loving as I'm capable of. But there's no guarantees, I'm still me. And if I'm not mindful and things get crazy enough, I'm going to act like an alpha team leader in Ranger Battalion or a, you know, a shooter in Iraq. Yeah. Thank you so much, Lee, for sharing. Well, first off for writing this book. It's amazing.

And also for coming on and sharing your story with us. I really appreciate it. It's my pleasure. You know, out of the, there's some great podcast out there within the special ops community. But, you know, within that realm, you know, you guys have been my favorite for a while. I just like your style. I like the way you guys do business. Very respectful.

There's no ego, even though you guys could. You guys have incredible. backgrounds and what you're both doing right now is still doing great things. So, you know, I appreciate, you know, I'm nobody. You know, to be somebody in our community, you got to do something that gets in the news. I'm nobody. You got to do something for Valord. Yeah.

And so I'm just grateful that I could unpack, that I could have an honor, an opportunity to say that you can be a below average person. and then find a way to catch up to the group and spend the rest of your life just surrounding yourself with good people and try to work above average even if you started out below average. You can manifest whatever you want,

but you got to start paying attention to your internal narrative. If you're talking negative and talking shit but acting nice to people, you're full of shit. You're too different. different fucking people. You know, the outside's got to match the inside.

And if it doesn't, you need to look in the mirror until it does. That's so true. Internal volume. Find it on Amazon. You know, you guys, it's a hell of a read. I'll just say that. It is quite exciting. Is there anything that,

We missed anything that I failed to talk about or ask you about that you... We're probably gone a long time, so I don't want to drag it out. I just want to say a shout out to Joe Price. I hope that we can get justice one day for Joe Price and John Chapman and folks like that. I hope we can clean up the special ops community a little better, like with what you guys are doing with Tim Kennedy, you know, guys like, me really appreciate that. It's really triggering for things like that to happen in our community.

So seeing people policing that up quickly and holding a standard, it makes me proud again that I was a Green Beret and that I was a Ranger. So I really appreciate that. And I just want to say that if anybody, you know, I just finally got 100% VA after 20-something years of fighting, I got a great guy if anybody wants to reach out. at Lee Deckleman at gmail.com. I'll hook you up with a great guy.

He got me and my sister 100% you know, in about a year or a year and a half. And so I know a lot of guys are fighting to just get the basic care. And if you need help, please reach out. And tunnels to towers, that's where I give my money. They're doing great things for homeless veterans. And so I just want to shout out to them.

you know anything we can do as veterans to help veterans lift them up and the veterans that have been lifted up by lies let's bring them back down and let's bring that harmonious balance back to our community and that'd be a great thing to see happening before I die. It would be amazing. Dee, do we have any questions? No? Okay. Where can people, are you on social media at all? or where can you know no if somebody wants to reach out to me about anything um i'm living small you know i'm not going to be a public even if this book does real good you know i just want to kind of do my thing but if i can help anybody or if anybody has any questions or you know lee dekelman d-e-k-e-l-m-a-m-n at g-mail dot com you know i'd help anybody in any way i can but you know my book's about a traumatic life that has a little bit of war in it It's not a war story. Oh, it's a war story.

Like, the whole book is a war story. Yeah, well, in a way, it is kind of, yeah, it may not, there may not, it may not be in Iraq or Afghanistan, but it's a war story. Well, the last thing I want to say is I'm no hero, I've never done anything heroic, but everything in that book is true. Yeah, and I think, you know, you know, a lot of our viewers are history boss or they like the military or, the intelligence community or special operations community. This is a book, honestly, because it's not just about the military, it's a book that everybody can relate to in one way or another. You know, it's your story.

So, you know, I really hope people do pick this up and read it. We're going to go now. we are going to do a team house after dark for our Patreon subscribers after this so if you're a patron subscriber and you want some spicy tails that's where you'll find them

so thank you everybody we really appreciate it Lee thank you so much for your time thank you so much thank you so much hey guys I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Teamhouse podcast, the Aiz On podcast, and the high side news outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week. It's going to come into your inbox, and you're going to get the most current podcasts on Ais-on and the Team House and whatever's topical or current on the high side.

So it's another way for us to get the information out to you as social media algorithms are pretty iffy, and you never really know what you're going to get. So this is a once-a-week email. It'll slide into your inbox, and it will have, you know, the greatest hits of that week. It's really good, man. I'm checking it out. The website for it is teamhousepodcast.com.

Join. Teamhousepodcast. Dot kit.com slash join. You go there and you enter into your email list, or you enter your email into the little thing on the website, and you're good to go. And that'll be it. So we really appreciate your support and hope you'll consider signing up.

Where's the link? The link will also be down in the description if you're looking for it there. And that's teamhousepodcast.com.kitt, kiloindiatango.com backslash join you.