The Team House - Navy SEAL Turned Aspiring Peasant | Dave Madden | Ep. 195

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Dave Madden served as a Navy SEAL officer and deployed to Afghanistan before getting involved in tech start ups and homesteading. Today's Sponsors: SLNT (Silent) ⬇️ https://SLNT.com/?rfsn=7107485.9bde8d SLNT® sleeves, bags, cases and wallets are all exquisitely designed to ensure your devices become invisible, untrackable and silent. Get 10% off your order by using this link or using the promo code "teamhouse" at checkout! https://SLNT.com/?rfsn=7107485.9bde8d Thank you for supporting the companies that support the show ! To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #navyseals #specialoperations #theteamhouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Team House know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out, and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream in well as get access to our. bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House with your hopes, Jack Murphy, don't know what to do without it, David Park. Is it even a Team House episode? We don't know. Hey folks, welcome to episode 195 of the Team House.

I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. Hopefully all of our internet issues are now sorted. Hello, Verizon. Bye, Spectrum. It was nice for a while, for a time. So hopefully we're back in business here. Our guest on the show tonight is Dave Madden. Dave served as a officer in SEAL Team 2 and then in the team's intelligence fusion cell.

and has a lot of other interesting experiences and, you know, life in general. So we're really excited to have them on the show tonight. Really appreciate you taking time out of your Friday evening, Dave. Oh, it's good to have a drink with the boys, right? Absolutely, man. What are you drinking tonight? I'm drinking Guinness tonight. It's not my default go-to, but it's cold out and that's what I had.

Okay. What's your default go-to? Oh, I've gotten really into, like, really good cider, which is like most people who drink cider or think about a hard cider, they like haven't had the real stuff. The real stuff is like, it's like herbal and dry.

And like there's this company called Austerity Cider Works makes the best cider I'd ever had in my entire life. And they do it in like this way that also restores the community around them. Like they'll go to old homesteads, like 100 year old homesteads and they'll find old,

these hundred year old apple trees just covered in blackberry vines. I completely neglected. Somebody's inheritance that they didn't know they had. They'll go. in, they'll clear it out, pull the apples down, make the cider, sell it, but also deliver back a couple of bottles. And all of a sudden, those people will be like, wait a second, this came from Grandpa's Orchard. We should take care of it. We should take care of it. And then they do.

And so like you have all these people kind of reclaiming their, their inheritance. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, it's incredible. And that's why I tried it at first. I was like, ah, chances of this being good. I don't have any idea. But I love, but I love what they're doing. They're restoring their entire community by making by making something. Then I tried it. It also happens to be the best that I've ever had. So, like, that's my guilty pleasure.

I'll take a look for it. Yeah. The cider has grown on me a little bit in time, you know, but I haven't tried that one. We're drinking Lagovoolin tonight. This is the Offerman edition. Mark Ocask. It's good. The man's drink.

Yes, right. Indeed. Plus, you're mixing it with the cigars, which I've noticed. Perhaps you're guilty. Pleasure Jack. Yeah, they are. This is Las Cavaleras 2020. This is actually the first time I've had these.

They're very good. I can't do cigars. I can't do them. I think I'm just not masculine enough. You're not a tobacco guy, I don't think. No, no. Well, you're a college grad, so you probably smoke pipes. Well, he's in Oregon, but so he's smoking something out of him.

Right, right. That's true. The nearest business to me is a dispensate. That is true. So, Dave, let's jump right into it, man. Tell us a little bit about, like, your upbringing and how you grew up and sort of like what your path was that kind of eventually took you towards the Navy. Yeah, so my dad was in the Navy, actually. He was a dentist that doesn't really count.

Sorry, Dad. And so we, you know, we traveled around a bunch. And, you know, I had a lot of, like, I was in the Philippines when Mount Pinatibu erupted and got evacuated on the USS Palau. So like, but it was it was comfortable upbringing. Like my dad was a dentist, so my parents both had vulbo. We lived on a cul-de-sac. You know, I went to a nice high school. And the thing, there was literally nothing in my past that would suggest that I was going to go be a team guy.

Then in college, a buddy and I were, we started a software company, a legal tech company in like 2006. And it started to do okay. Like we started to get customers, the state farm insurance company was using. it. And I was, instead of being, like, excited that, hey, this thing we built is doing well, I froze. I was terrified. It was like, wait a second. I am not ready to spend the rest of my life in front of a computer. I have to do something. I can read, write talk and write code, and these are literally my only skills. I can't, you know, pump, I can't put gas in a, you know, gas in a car or pump a tire. I've never shot a gun. I've never jumped,

I don't know any of these things. And so I just started looking for the hardest thing I could possibly find. And I saw the attrition rate at field training. I was like, oh, that's interesting. Also, it tests all these things I'm really terrible at. Like, I was 160 pounds nerd. I couldn't, like, I couldn't even talk to girls, man. I was definitely not the person that anybody thought was going to be a team guy. In fact, most of my friends in college made fun of it. They're like, no way. I had like one friend who's like, yeah, you'll crush it, dude. No worries. And so I, we kind of crash-landed that startup. And I spent the next year. I worked at the genius bar at Apple,

which is actually where I learned most of my people skills while I was training to go to buds, joined with 330 of my closest friends, and we ended with 17 originales, and the rest of the time I spent the next decade in the SEAL teams. I was going to stay in until it wasn't fun anymore. And so, yeah, that's my military career.

And I got out and did a bunch of startup stuff. What did your dad think of you, like, volunteering for the SEALs out, after your high school and college years and whatnot? Yeah, they were terrified. Both my parents were terrified. And my dad, I wanted to enlist originally. So I went in to OCS and Buzz as an officer,

largely because of the violence of their reaction against the idea that I might enlist. I knew the difference, but I couldn't communicate it to them, and I wasn't enough of an adult at the time to really like make, make that like hard, hard call myself. And so I was like, okay, well, I'll go in as an officer. It'll be fine. So he was mostly terrified that I was going to go on an enlisted.

After that, they were just, they didn't really know what to think. Yeah. Was he worried that, like, if you didn't make it, that you'd be out in the fleet as a Boatson's mate somewhere, like chip and paint? Yeah. Yeah. Just some, some Undez, like, Hayesgray underway. Yeah.

Yeah. That was definitely a concern. So you went right into that seal pipeline. We can skip past Navy basic training. I'm sure that was very exciting. But as we jump a little further forward into it. Wait, wait. Let's talk.

No, I just kidding. The Co-Ed Barracks. We've talked about that on previous episodes. Nothing Co-Ed Barracks. Tell us about, you know, you're a self-described nerd hitting the ground in Buds, the ultimate test of Alpha Males. everywhere. How, I mean, what was that experience like for you suddenly being in this environment where dudes are screaming at you and spraying you with a fire hose and all that good stuff? It was both exhilarating and like terrifying. And I admit I needed harder on

myself than I needed to because I was vegetarian at the time. I'm not anymore, but I was fidgetarian. So I did Bud's vegetarian. Wow. What? And that drew, I was like, that was basically me being a lightning rod. So all of the instructors when they found out it was, it was fucking over for me for quite some time. I basically that was dumb of me to even like say anything about it. Um, but, uh, no, it was great actually. It was super fun. Um, and there was, there were points

where, you know, break, you know, breakout on the, like, for hell week is absolute chaos. But it's so well organized chaos that even while you're in the chaos, you look around and you're like, oh shit, this is a machine. Like these are fucking professionals. Can we swear on this podcast? Yes, absolutely. Yes, we drink.

We swear. We get naked. Everybody wants to see your shorts or not. Yeah, they want to see my, yeah, they, I heard there were a lot of, a lot of dudes asking me to take my shirt off. I feel good about that, like I have options. It's probably not going to happen. It's a little bit cold. But, you know, Bud's, it's actually super fun for the most part.

Even the pain parts were like, you said, let's skip ahead, let's get past the, you know, the basic Navy training. There was a time when we were getting such a bad beat down in Buds where they, like, they stopped up the sinks in the classroom. And they made us push all the door, all the deaths and chairs to the side, flooded the classroom. We're getting beat for like two hours here, back to the beach and whatnot. So it's this like sandy, slurry dudes are, dudes are pissing in it. Like it smells.

It's the worst thing you could possibly imagine. Like it is the most violent bead down. Like I still have, I still have scars in my hands with this beating. And I looked, I turned to my buddy who was in OCS with me and we're like, dude, at least we're not folding our underwear to six inch squares. Like, and we both just started laughing. And just in the middle of the complete chaos, there's like dudes crying, like in client, like, the fetal position, like getting just the shit kicked out of him by the instructors. And I was like, this is actually pretty awesome. You know, when do you experience the sort of chaos?

Yeah, out of curiosity, because, you know, you recognize the order behind the chaos. Do you think that going into it as a nerd, sort of as a programmer, as a very analytical and tech-savvy purpose? person that you saw the patterns and that you sort of had a different perspective that others might not. So I think I definitely had a different perspective than a lot of my classmates who were, you know, there was a lot of guys that were just out of high school or out of high school in like a year. And I had a different perspective than they did. And I don't think it was because of any analytical skills or any like specific background. I think it was just like the difference between an 18 year old and a 23 year old is pretty substantial. I had had,

I'd been to college. I'd been on my own. I'd had multiple jobs. You know, I'd been in the world a little bit. And so I had, like, some context, whereas I think it would be a lot more terrifying coming straight from high school where you're, like, coddled into this. Right. Right. Makes sense. And you were going through one of the other things we skipped over is you went through OCS. So you were going through as an officer. Yeah, yeah, which is another, another way to get a lot of extra instructor attention. A vegetarian officer. With good cause. Yeah. It was bad. In addition to be, another way to be an other way to be an extra instructor attention. A vegetarian, a In addition to being the vegetarian, where you like wearing burkenstocks and wearing hemp shirts and stuff like that?

No, no, I didn't have any style back then. No. Nice. Actually, a serious question, though, going through that experience as a vegetarian, I mean, was there like a performance issue as far as, like, what you, I mean, the, like, stereotypes about being a vegan or vegetarian is you're like low energy. You're not can't, you can't build muscle tone. I mean, some of this is maybe not really true, but I'd like to hear your perspective. I think that you can loop one, I actually don't think a vegetarian diet is the best diet for like maximum human performance. So I definitely put myself at a disadvantage doing that.

But at the same time, I'm really certain it was Bill Russell, who like, you know, legendary NBA player was, I think he was actually vegan. Carl Lewis was vegetarian. So like there's like max, there's like high performing vegetarians for sure. you just have to be careful about you're getting your your your macros and all that you have to be careful you're getting the right amount of protein and your amino acids and all that but if you're careful i don't it's obviously doable i did it right um however i think if i did it again and i didn't do it that way i think i would have had an easier time um and i physically was like it's one of the faster runners i was one of the fastest runners always in like the top five running top three

swimming you know i i did well in all those things but the things that crushed me were the things that required strength like log BT and whatnot. I still did okay, but like, I carried my weight, but they were, they were bad and they probably didn't need to be as bad as they were. Now, were you, I mean, I know that one of the things about BUDs is guys gain, tend to gain a lot of weight, like a lot of muscle weight during Buds because aren't you guys eating like four times a day? Yeah.

So I think you have like a body composition change, but you don't gain a lot of weight. Okay. So I started at one, I started at 164. five and my body composition changed because I ran track in college so I was all quads hands and ass that was like my entire body and so I definitely redistributed weight to be more balance um but it's the big like massive like muscle gain for most team guys is like at like during sQT and after okay because buds you're burning so much you're basically eating four pizzas a day and two big breakfast burritos and four milkshakes just because you're shivering the entire time right

Right, right. Yeah. What was that like for you? Because water is sort of the great divider, right? I mean, water will take it out of you like nothing else will. Oh, yeah. Now, you were a track runner. Were you also a swimmer? I was a really strong swimmer. I wasn't a competitive swimmer since like grade school. But like when I grew up on all these Navy bases, the only thing to do. Like that was stationed in 29 Palms. so like a Marine Corps base in the middle of nowhere. What's there to do there? Well, you can either get in trouble or you can go to the pool. And my mom was a swimmer. So we just spent all day at the pool and we'd wrestle with the Marine Coast.

We're at the Marine lifeguards. So I was used from like the age of like seven to like almost drowning on the back of, you know, a six foot seven Lance Corporal at the bottom of the pool who was wrestling with me. Right. So like the water was never the water was never a problem for me. The temperature, I mean, it was just cold as fuck. But like I, you know, I did okay. There were guys that didn't worse. I had one dude in my class, Izzy.

He's a brilliant guy and like really, really tough. But he has no body fat because he's like, when he takes a shirt off, it looks like a Batman suit. You know, he's just like just ripped. And so he had no body fat whatsoever. And so he would just hype out just constantly. Yeah. And so like they would pull us out because Izzy was hyping out.

It's a good way to get over. Yeah. So go through that experience and then move on to SQT. And by the way, what year is this? Oh, shoot. Let's see. OCS was 2008, so this is 2009. Okay, okay.

And then... Yeah, it's class... Go ahead. I was going to say class 277 and buds. And then what was it like for you starting like your dive training and small unit tactics and all that good stuff. Oh, dude, it was so fun. Yeah.

So it was just exhilarated because I never done anything like any of these things before. And, you know, like combat diving is miserable. Like, you know, four hours on bag. Like, you're just like, you're just like the highlight of your four hours other than the actual tactical thing is that time you have to pee and you get warm for about 10 seconds. And then like you're back to just the cold monotony of just like putting out and hoping that you hit the ship. But man, like, if you go on bag for four hours and you come up and hit a, like, hit your target ship, there are very few things that have been, like, more, more gratifying than that. It's, it is absolutely physically miserable, but it's also really fun.

And then small unit tactics, I mean, it's paintball. It's fun. And then you get to do some crazy stuff, like, you know, like try to trick the instructors and beat them at their own game, which is always the best part. How'd you do that? The best example was actually. not in SQT is we did a we did this combat tracking course in Fort Wachuka like right on the

Arizona-Mexica border and the our FTX was we had to carry this like 200 pound dummy like it was something like five or ten clicks or something it was a long way and we're like oh that's going to suck but we can do it and we were supposed to cover our tracks on the way so that the instructors

couldn't track us it was like the anti-tracking part but we realized that that was going to suck a lot and we might have and we might have a better way around it. And so we took two of us, carried the dummy, did a j-hook around a piece of terrain. The other guys laid down like a really, really heavy track. So the instructors would just get pulled that direction. We went basically doubled back and stole their truck from the start point. And then drove to the end.

And they were, dude, they were so pissed. They were livid. Like, like, I've never seen an instructor. so mad. And then, and then they're like, what made you think you could do that? And we're like, look at the rules. And they looked at the rules and like, damn it. So the next guys, the next guys that there was a rule like no stealing instructor vehicles. But we stole a pickup truck to carry a dummy five miles instead of us having to do it. So that was, you know, that sort of stuff is always super fun. Yeah, that's awesome. And, uh, and then finally, you know, by the end of all

this fun and misery scattered throughout you get your trident or do they still they do a probation period on the teams no they don't they don't anymore they give you a trident at your sqt graduation and you go to the team and then if your chief is old school they'll take your trident symbolically and put it in the bird cage until you've earned it my chief did that my first chief was awesome he didn't end up deploying with us for political reasons but uh at first yeah seal team two when I was there is extremely political and not a particularly great place to be. Would you say political, like, you mean like

internal infighting kind of thing? I mean internal politics. Right, right, right, right. But yeah, so they do, we did a probationary period, but not really. You get your trydent. Now do they, did you get it pinned? Yeah, yeah. You get your triton pinned on you at your No, I mean, I mean like pinned.

Oh, bloods. bike blood not all the way in. No. Now, do you guys do that? There are rumors. There are rumors that that still exists. Some might say. We'll say,

I definitely knew that it happens and you use a voluntary thing. Gotcha, gotcha, got you. Maybe at McPee's afterwards once you're allowed to go there for the first time. And while all of this is, all this mayhem is going on, got married during SUT. Yeah, yeah. My wife and I had been together for my girlfriend at the time.

They'd been together for a long time. And so we were, I don't know why we, I don't even know why we waited as long as we did. I think we were just, oh, I know exactly why. Because she was in chiropractor school when I started Buds. And she was in San Jose. And when I finished her week, she realized, okay, like, this is kind of a thing.

Like, we're either going to go in different directions or she was going to come down. And we had a phone conversation about it, and then she stopped going to chiropractor school and came down about like two weeks after Hell Week once it was statistically likely that I was going to make it. Yeah, so that's like when I knew, like, okay, we both kind of made a choice to like do this thing together.

And then it was just a matter of, like, we got married before I went to Seal Team 2 so that the Navy would pay to have her stuff moved. Like our timing, was directly dictated by like dependent benefits. Dave, you want to shout out to our sponsor for this show? For sure. So our sponsor for this show is Silent SL&T Faraday bags.

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you know anything that has RFID Bluetooth wireless connections tablets you know keep it safe put it in a Faraday bag when you're traveling when you don't need it, protect yourself. All right, back to you, Dave.

I like how the URL has all the vowels are silent. Yep. I was like, what's going on there? Oh, silent vowels, smart. Got it. So you get married, you get your Trident. What's it like showing up at SEAL Team 2 taking a platoon as a brand new officer? Yeah, well, I showed up with a completely messed up uniform, like my, my,

my ribbons were on the wrong spots. We never wore a dressed uniform in Buzzberg. We're just in Camies. I didn't know any of this stuff. And so I showed up. And the first guy that I met was a guy named Adam Shapiro, who's still in crushing it. Great, great dude.

But he pulled me aside. He's like, love, dude, you are all kinds of fucked up. And so this was my, I walked into the SEAL team building. And this is the first words that somebody said to me, you're all kinds of, I'm like, oh, he's off to a great start. I'm going to do great here. But yeah, so I had to fix all my uniform stuff.

And then, you know, my first platoon was like really chaotic. The chief and the OIC that I started off working for with for, neither one of them ended up deploying. And so like we had a whole head shed replacement halfway through the workup. So that was definitely, that was definitely, it was chaotic. but you know you make the hoot what what is the officer's relationship to their team uh you know as a new officer and and even moving on and did anybody like in buds or any time they're after like pull you aside and explained you like this isn't the line navy yeah so the it was pretty clear in buzz

there wasn't a line navy um and so things like fraternizing are very differently defined in you know in the in the fleet and in an in a stealth Like you can have drinks with boys after work. Like that is okay. They, during training, they actually did a really great thing that they're still doing. It was probably the best leadership training that I saw in NSW. This is a thing called JOTC, junior officer training course. And for us, it was between Buds and SQT.

And so they would take, you'd go through buds with your classmates. And they would see you at your worst, like your absolute bottom. And so what they do, they take the officers out, put them in a job. different class, put them in this JOTC course while your enlisted guys go ahead. So you do this training course. And then the next batch of the enlisted guys would come in and you would do SQT with them so that you got a fresh, you got to renew a relationship. And so like JOTC did a lot, talked a lot about the responsibilities of good officers.

There was a senior E6 that was there and a senior 03. So both with recent combat experience, basically, this is how you can survive, thrive, do well as a junior officer when you're rolling into your first platoon. So they actually did a really good job of that. And a lot of that was like, you know, you know your boys' limitations, but don't let them know they have any. And a lot of it is like learned to trust and lean on your chief. Yeah.

That's awesome. So they set you up for success before you get there. They did. They did a really good job of that. I was like, again, the entire first training pipeline was really impressive how professional it was, actually. I was expecting it to be just mayhem. And it was mayhem, but professional mayhem. Right, right.

Controlled mayhem. Exactly. Can you tell us a little bit about, like, what was your platoon? Like, what was it like when you got to meet these guys, whether on the job training with them or going out, having a beer with them? Who were these dudes? Yeah. So it was, I think, I think every platoon and every, every, every, every team is probably very similar in that there are some guys who if they weren't there, they'd be, you know, getting their MBA or like, you know, running for Congress. And maybe they do that later.

And then there's some guys who are like break glass in case of war, like if they weren't a team guy, they'd be in prison. And so there, there's definitely a mix of those. And coming in as, you know, coming as a junior officer or the bottom of the bottom. Like nobody like people understand that you're necessary, but especially on the east coast. There's like this really big difference I've noticed between East Coast or West Coast. So I did my first platoon at two East Coast and I did the rest of my career at the West Coast. And there's this huge difference and I think it has to do with proximity to development group. Because at that group officers are not well respected in the like broader culture.

They're a necessary evil but just bear. barely because of the Navy makes us do it or something like that. And so that was sort of the culture that I rolled into it, too. It was an offshoot of that. And so it was it was hard finding a place to like, to put your feet, basically, to get your feet underneath you. And I didn't, I don't think I did a really good job of it either. There's definitely things I look back and like, man, if I, if I don't need to be

just a little more mature, I would have handled that particular situation a lot better. Yeah. I mean, especially now you're dealing with SEALs who at this time, some of them have quite a bit of combat experience, right? And here you are a fresh-faced, you know, young officer who's in charge of them. Right, right. So the two caveats there, I would say, is that the guys in my platoon with combat experience were by far the most welcoming of everybody.

It was the guys who had gone to, who had gone to Europe and, like, trained to Latvian. and soft on their first pump and this is their second. Those are the ones that like really wanted to put the hammer down. And you could see that immediately. And I think that, you know, that's a pattern that we see a lot. It's just in everyday life, right? But the, shoot, I forgot what were the other thing I was going to say? But no, so like there was that.

Oh, yeah. Also, I wasn't in charge of the entire platoon. There's no I see when you, because when you roll in as a, for your first, first platoon as an officer, it's an assistant officer in charge. Okay. So in the platoon, there were two. two to three AICs, usually two, one for each, one for each fire team, basically. And then an officer in charge who has at least done one deployment.

Okay. All right. Yes. I mean, that's pretty leadership heavy because the seal platoon is like 16 to 18 guys. Exactly. Exactly. Something like that. And yeah, it is except that the AOIC role is, especially, again, this. This is like really talking to my West Coast peers.

It's very different on the East and West Coast. The role, the tactical role of the AOIC at ours for at SEAL Team 2 when I was there. It was very learned. Heavy on, heavy on learning and less on much leadership. You're not making any tactical calls. It's where you're not supposed to make any tactical calls. I ended up doing that, but that was because the E6s sometimes had, you know, challenge just making calls when they were both flying.

Well, let's start to get into that about, you know, when you find out that you have this deployment coming up, you know, you guys call it a workup like your pre-mission training. Can you take us through some of that? Well, so, yeah, I mean, the way the way it goes is you don't quite know what your deployment's going to be right away. So you just do, you start doing your generic workup. And then it starts to get more and more specific as you get closer and closer. So when I got the SEAL team, too, we had no idea we were going to Afghanistan.

We could have been going to the Philippines and doing J-Sets. So I was really actually like, I mean, you don't, you don't join the SEAL teams. You don't join the Green Berets to go train other people who go to war. You will join because largely you want to see what you have in you. And so when I found out that we were going to Afghanistan, I was psyched because I was going to get to find out. And that's like one of my big motivations is I wanted to find out what I was made of. And your wife was also excited about you, you wanted Afghanistan?

No, no, she was not excited, but she actually did like an incredibly, like, not shockingly, but just like in general, like she had a really, really good job of compartmentalizing. I didn't really feel like she was super stressed about it. And I don't think she let herself feel the stress until I came back. But she knew that this is like, this is what's happening. And so like, why why fight it, right? It's amazing. So what happened when you found out that you were going to Afghanistan?

Like what kind of train up were you guys doing and whatnot? So we have a, there's a, there's a six-month ULT period that is basically uniform across every platoon. And then after that, you have, you have some time to build up specific skills for where you're going. So we did, you know, high angle shooting and pack meal stuff in Montana. It's just really great training. And then we did some things in New Mexico for like more Afghan-specific things where they had like a mount town set up. They looked like an Afghan village and role players and all that. So we were reasonably well prepared for those sorts of things.

But the other thing, I guess I probably should have led with this, is that the mission we were going on was VSL stuff. So village stability operations, coin stuff, green beret work, like really, really interesting, but not the sort of thing that most of the guys in my platoon signed up for. They signed up to kick doors and, you know, and do frogman stuff. And so there is this cultural kind of backlash against what we were going to be doing. And that showed up, I mean, they definitely showed up overseas when, you know, when we, when we got there without supervision, like, guys are going to end up doing the things they want or focus on the things they want. They'll will those things into existence. And it may not be the best thing for that specific mission. Right.

So like, Frogmen want to break stuff. They want to shoot. They want to kick indoors and all that. And so VSO, which we did some VSO training, there was a. there was not a lot of people won't really get into it. We'll put it this way. There were a few of us who were like, okay, well, this is the job. Let's crush it.

And that definitely happened. But there was a, we had a bit of a dearth of leadership by the time we were getting rid of deploy because my, the good chief, the only one with like real legitimate Afghanistan combat experience had been fired for standing up for the guys too much. It was kind of a dysfunctional situation. So like, we had, we had this like, you know, you see the SEAL teams hit the newspapers and you're like, oh, there's some cultural problems there. Like, I definitely experienced some of those in my first platoon for sure where, like, we have this mission that is valuable and important.

And maybe it's not what you signed up for. But guess what? We're supposed to be silent professionals. Let's go get it. And so there was a lot of, there was a lot of backlash against that for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I can understand, too. I mean, it's, I think a lot of the military went through that, right?

That you were trained for one thing. Yeah, for sure. Now they're asking you to do something completely different. It's like, oh, what? Yeah. No, it is absolutely understandable at the same time. It is what it is. Yeah.

It is what it is. Like, what are you going to do? Yeah. You're going to quit? So where in Afghanistan were you getting sent? What was your understanding of the mission when you guys deployed? Yeah. So the, it gave us a book called, I think it was called the Village about Marine Corps doing basically the precursor of VSO in Vietnam.

Oh, the cap guys. Yeah, yeah. It was a great, great book. And like, so, like, that was my understanding as we're going to go and sort of go indige and, you know, try to understand what they were after and try to find a way to take, you know, the ground truth and meld it to the mission goal. and find a way to like get to that point right and then yeah so we went to sort of we went to south east afghanistan we were in arousgon we started off at a when we got when we got to the ground in arousgan my platoon went to a place called kushkadir which was like a teeny little a teeny little outpost that was supposed to be tactically or strategically significant because it was going to be next to

this big road that never ended up getting built and so there was literally really nothing going on there. Like we took over for an ODA team and they're like we have like there's nothing here. There's nothing going on. And so the first thing we started doing is like, okay, where can we go? Can we move somewhere? And so I took three guys down to this place called Chora, which is as far as I know, it's the like and the homeland of Mullah Omar, kind of one of the places between us in, you know, within within a reasonable drive of where we were that we could maybe go actually do some real work. And so we set up a, we built a new VSP there, did that for a couple of months, like while getting rocket attacked and all that. It was, it was probably the most interesting

construction job I've ever worked on. It's like suicide bombers, all, all those things while we're trying to build a base. And then the platoon came out and we, then we finished off the deployment there. So while you were there, I know that there were guys on the team that didn't want to do that, but how did they adapt while you were there? It depends on the day. The guys that really wanted to smash things, played a lot of video games. And then they also ended up turning, taking one person's word. Let's say they're working some intel.

They would take one person's word. word at perhaps give it more validity than it necessarily deserved in order to have a target to go check out. And so it was a lot of fishing with dynamite, basically, which actively undid a lot of the work that we had done while there was just four of us there building the base. Like we had actually like made inroads with the local, with the local tribal chiefs. And that sort of got erased pretty quickly once the rest of the platoon showed up, which was, which was crushing, absolutely crushing. Was that because you were hitting the enemy,

or was it because you were hitting dry holes and just pissing off the local population? Exactly. Just dry hole after dry hole after dry hole. And it didn't always say that way, but the vast majority of the ticks I've been in have been us getting ambushed by them because somebody was too impatient to just sit.

And so, yeah, it was mostly dry holes just stirring up hornet's nest. And then we would get a 107 rocket over the wall, you know, an hour after we got back to base. Right. As a young man, a young officer who had, you know, left a, you know, a startup that or, you know, you left the startup industry and the wealth therein because you wanted to, you know, prove yourself and find out what you were made of. And you went to the Seals, what was it like for you that first tick? And for viewers you don't know, tick is troops in contact. What was it like for you that first tick?

The first, like, actual tick, yeah. Yeah, the first actual tick was way more disorienting than I thought it would be. Because nobody, the thing I wasn't prepared for more than anything was that, like, when somebody's shooting at you, you don't actually know where it's coming from. Right. It's not a video game where there's like a red directional thing, like somebody over here is shooting at you. It's just some like bullets are like snapping by you, but you don't know which, which direction. So you're laying down trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Everybody's having a different reaction.

In my first take, nobody in that fire team had been in combat before. This is all of our first time getting shot at. And the people that were supposed to be making calls were among the most terrified. And, you know, it ended up being a situation where I picked up the squad leader and they tried to physically move move him to get us to get us moving it uh so it was it was mostly just really really disorienting and then um there's a there's a there's definitely a bit of like post tick disillusionment like wait a second what this is what this is war what the hell what the hell kind of what the hell was that yeah this is not what i was prepared for right um yeah so and and and

most of the like i said most of the ticks have been because like we set up And then we hear something going on over there. And instead of us staying where we are, somebody would get itchy and be like, oh, we got to, we got to go there now. And then we would end up, like, getting caught, getting caught on the way. So there were a lot of, I mean, there was, yeah, there were, there were a lot of takes where, where it was, it was, it was us getting ambushed. So I've been, I've been ambushed far more times than, than, than I think anybody should be. Yeah. And this, this deployment, you were, we were talking a little bit before.

show you said it got like extended way longer than a normal special operations deployment would ever be yeah um so naval special warfare and s w the steel teams are really good at some things but logistics is not one of them um and so what happened was they wanted to get us on the same rotation schedule as the odas as the army guys that we were like basically trading in and out with Right, right, right. Which makes a certain amount of sense, except that they didn't account for the fact that there weren't enough planes to do this. And so it used, it was on like a like a staggered schedule. And then they brought it together. And all of a sudden, like the load on the planes, like there's a massive spike right here and then it drops off.

And so instead of us, so there were like logistical challenges with it. But then there was also the fact that we had to. if you want to bring these back into, back into sync, somebody's got to stay extra long. And that happened to be our deployment, where we went from, you know, a regular, soft deployment of six months. And we were there for 11, 11.5 months.

Not quite a full year. But like you said, like you said before, makes you really respect the conventional guys that go over there for 12 or 18 months. Yeah. Guys get wacky after seven. Get real wacky after seven. And so like those,

all hats off to end. anybody that stays longer than that. Yeah. How, like, were they, did you guys know you were going to be that long? Or were they extending your deployment like month by month? No, we knew. We knew, well, we knew it was going to be about 10 and a half. And then the logistics ended up tacking on like an extra like 25 days or something.

Yeah. Yeah. And so we knew, we just didn't know, we just didn't really know, you know, we knew here, but not here. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing, too, I think, is. like special ops guys are like wired pretty tight and i mean i can't imagine like deploying rangers

for 11 months like we would eat each other alive not because like we don't like each other but when you have like really tightly wound young guys who can they always have to be close to each other and they can never kind of you know get away from one another and go do their own thing like i can see yeah guys getting loopy yeah and then and then you throw into the fact throw it through it the fact that like it's only dudes for that entire time because you're walking around at a rural Afghan village and you don't see women.

You see guys and you see like, you know, black knikabs. You don't ever see like a woman. You don't interact with them at all. And so it's 11 months. Just do. It's just a massive sausage fest. Yeah.

Now, being that you guys were doing VSOs, did they set you up for success? Not just the Navy and not just the SEALs, but the military and general. did they send you guys like PRT teams and other like support elements to to help with that process? So the only interaction I had with the PRT was because we moved, we moved from where we were down south into Nick into Troa. And there was an Australian fob there, Fob Mirrorwise.

And at that Australian Fobb, there was an Army PRT team there. So that was the only reason like we had had that connection. It was just a pure like geographical line. luck. No, no. I don't think, I don't think that the, I don't think that anybody really understood exactly what we were doing. It was kind of one of those situations where we're given sort of the mission, sort of, and not really a reason for it. And just like, okay, now, now go. Like before, I remember this very clearly. I would never forget this. Before we deployed, we were, it was the the Wardroom was having a conversation about this.

And so all the officers together and the XO was leading it. And somebody asked, why are we going? Like, what are we, like, what is the reason? What's the reason for the mission? Like, it's the question, right? Like, what is the motivation behind all of this? Like, what is our goal? And my XO said something to the effect of,

because we're already there and if we don't keep going we will lose face yikes he was honest he was honest though is that for naval special warfare or the military in general was he speaking for

he was speaking for us the platoons that were deploying from the SEAL team to to the war zone but when you go in and I actually I actually think that the problems my platoon had in combat, you can trace directly to

what the XO said. Like he wasn't wrong in retrospect, unfortunately. But when you frame it like that, and then you're put into a situation where bolts are crossing over your head and you have no idea what's going on, and your reason for being there is to save

face, whatever the fuck that means, right. It robs you of courage. It robs you of purpose. And I think that that was part of the problem. What was, one, for people who might not know, we've talked about this on the show before, but can you tell us what village stability operations are?

And can you tell us, like, what you guys were, outside the general definition, what you guys were supposed to do? Yeah. So village stability operations is basically, as far as I understand it, and there are people out there who understand this a lot better than I do, it's going into a place that is unstable, is unfriendly, hostile area, and winning over the locals. It's, you know, a part of the coin strategy. It's one of David Petraeus's genius things that at the time was considered. the gospel. This is how you do it. And the idea was we go into a, we go into a place that

doesn't want us to be there, show them that we're cool and that we're actually there to help. And then somehow they think that the national government, which they don't recognize really as anything other than corrupt, is good. And what that, what that turned into was us doing presence patrols and having like sure as you know meetings with tribal elders and like the district governor and that sort of thing to try to talk about stuff um but and i say it glibly because that is basically the that's basically the only goal like it didn't get any more specific than that it didn't get more strategic than that it was being put into a situation where there's like there's really no winning I don't know what wind criteria that it looks like other than like all of a sudden the Afghans giving up self-respect, which they will not do.

Right. Because they are, they are some hard people. And I respect, I respect the crap out of them, actually. Like some of the best people I worked with while I was in Afghanistan were Afghanis. And that's like not, that's, yeah, that's, that's no bullshit. That's very true. And, yeah, so we didn't really have, we didn't really, like, like we basically are like choose your own adventure choose your own mission and when you combine that

with the 11 month appointment and the purposelessness and then the guys that really wanted to be direct you know wanted to be kicking indoors but you can see these things sort of like mixed together the incentive structure like you're set up for um for for for failure basically right um no i it's sorry i i didn't mean to interrupt you i was just going to say you're good the war was kind of set up that way right like there weren't met metrics for victory. Like a VSO would be great if there was any metric to measure how much success. There has to be like we want, you know, there's an overall campaign plan for 10 years.

We want Dave's platoon to accomplish this little chunk of it and then hand it off to the next platoon that does their little piece. And if that isn't there, then yeah, you're out flapping. Yeah. And there's, I mean, there's a couple of things that come to mind there. One is like the handover, every platoon is like very, very. was like very different the people that you would turn over with would be like oh forget all the stuff you've been doing we're doing this thing instead right of different ideas and so like there

was no progress it was just a churn just a six like a just a churn uh and then like Dave you brought up you brought up metrics well uh I'm sure you've seen this too like the metrics that move up the chain like the math doesn't add up ever ever I so I spent the last two two months, two months of my, of my Afghanistan deployment at Cedish Sotaph, like working in the jock. It was a great place to have like a nervous meltdown, which was like, basically what happened. I like crashed hard. But while I was there, it was like there was like an army, an army major came in to like be a, like, he was reservist. He was on staff there.

And his entire job was to measure the like number of Afghans that signed up for ALP and then brief the colonel every day on that that was his job he was there for a month and a half and when he left he got a fucking bronze star right but like but also the numbers that the numbers that he was reporting like none of those were real and then they get inflated there and they get inflated there and they get inflated there and like when people ask me and i i don't have any deep like on the ground knowledge about this but when they asked me about like hey how did like how did i withdraw from afghanistan made you feel like how did like why did that happen what do you think I'm like well I don't know all the things about it but I do know that that I wouldn't necessarily blame the people at the very

top because they were getting some garbage fiction information you know like right they were probably told that everything was fucking perfect and it's because the incentive structures in place right right incentive is to deliver good just deliver good news right I think there's a yeah there's this bizarre situation where there are a lot of people including very smart people who I respect who thought the Afghan government was going to hold out a lot longer. But as I said at the time, I was like, man, you could have talked to any private who was deployed over there and they could have told you exactly how this would have went down. I mean, why are you surprised, but not them? You know, something is really, really wrong here. Yeah, that's, dude, that is almost exactly what I, like, my short answer is like, were you surprised?

I'm like, no, anybody who has Afghan who still has Afghan dust on some of the, on a pair of their boots? like not a single one of those people is surprised at what happened. Yeah. And so as time went on on this deployment, you mentioned a little bit about the guys getting loopy and stuff. And I'm not going to jump right to Apocalypse Now analogies. But I mean, what was the effect like on your platoon and on your boys as time went on? Yeah.

So there were a couple of scenarios where I sort of being a young officer, like I lost the popularity contest and that was the only thing that a J.O. had to stand on without the express endorsement of the OIC. So I sort of, it did become a little heart of darknessy in that all of these things were sort of sparring out of control and there was like nothing that I could do. And you know, I still blame myself for that,

but i also recognize like i there's nothing i could do um but like the guy like the uh you know i'm not i'm not going to go into like crazy detail but uh you know the the local pharmacy was definitely visited quite a bit um there was a lot there was a lot of alcohol i don't even know where it came from um and and mostly it was like those things mixed with boredom that let us on some like some completely made up, like, there was completely made up, like, storylines in, like, what's going on in the valley. And I had no idea where it was coming from. I was also the only person in my platoon that learned how to speak the language.

Like, by the time I left there, the Pashto was okay, but my, uh, my, my Dari was actually, like, quite, quite legit. Like, I could act as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a turp in a pinch, um, with our, with our CMRG, just because I spent a lot of time with them. I spent a ton of time with them. I ate dinner with our with our partner for us like every night. I got to know, I got to know them. I got to know about their families.

And that was like one of the most rewarding parts. And if I could go back and do it again, one of the things I would do is I would, I would learn more from them. Yeah. I would spend more time. I would spend more time there and I can invest more. But yeah, so like I had more of an ear to ground than anybody else just because I could because I had, I had the only one who had ears that were actually listening. and some of these storylines that are, you know, human guys were coming up with,

I don't think they were real and I don't think that they recognized that they weren't real. I think they were just really bored and looking for a story. You know, like, humans are making for a purpose. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you look at the clouds and you can see, you can pick out a dozen different animals, right? You can see Mona Lisa in a cinnamon roll. And so they were seeing Mona Lisa in a cinnamon roll except for that it was bad guys. you know, is that the real bad Talibs are over here.

And there were some, there were some, like, low-level combatants in our area, definitely, for sure. Like, Mullah Omar wasn't there. We were getting any HVIs where we were sitting. You know, there's been a lot of talk about culture problems in the SEALs. And that, there might be some influence there. But also, it's also, I think, important to, respect the fact that what you've got on the ground there are pipe hitters right dudes who have

gone through some of the wrong place yeah they they've gone through some of the most arduous training that the u.s has to offer that the world has to offer um and and they they like you say they're a lot of them are break glass in case of war type guys and then you put them in a place with a nebulous mission with not a lot of support and they want to do their job. Yes. No, that's that's a hundred percent right. Like it is, I don't even though, even though some of the many of the failings were the people, you know, the men on the ground.

I'm a parent, right? And like, what do you do? You know, that's a good like paternalistic about this, but like that's what, what do you, what do you do? for your kids, do you put them in a situation where they're guaranteed to fail, or do you set them up for success? Right. And I don't think that anybody inside NSW knew how to set up the SEAL teams for success for this particular mission set, because nobody had done it.

Right. And it wasn't anything that we had ever really trained for. It wasn't anything that people are like, you know, if you go be a green beret, you know that you're going to be doing fit. That's what you do. Like, you know that that's part of it. And so even if it's not your favorite part of it, you it's it's taken as a as a given and you know the seal teams are all about you know uh you know

special reconnaissance direct action and maritime ops like those are the things that guys become frogmen for right um and and i that's why i became a frogman because i want to do those things because those are fun um so yeah no it's it's it's it's like a the incentives we're just aligned the incentives we're just like poorly aligned and to be fair even a lot of the Special Forces guys in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't want to do the FID mission, the foreign internal defense. They wanted to be door kickers too. Like, door kicking is sexy.

That's what everybody wanted to do. Good metrics. And it also looks good. It looks good metrics. Like, you can definitely brief how many bodies you stacked, right? Much better than you can. How many people join, what was it, the ALP or? Yeah, right?

Yeah, it was the Afghan local police, right? Yeah, no, it's 100%, which is why you would also get fake data going up about the ALP stuff. It's like, what else do we have measure? Like, we talked to some people today and tried to get them to, you know, talk to these other people. Right, right. Yeah. To snitch on on locals who would kill them as soon as we left. I'm more familiar with the Army side and obviously you're way more familiar with the Navy side.

But I'll just say this based on, you know, a lot of the people. people I've talked to that this isn't to excuse bad behavior. You know, grown men make decisions and some of them are bad. But the flip side to that is that we deployed a lot of soldiers to a lot of bad places and just sort of left them out there flapping. And did that over and over again, they would lose some teammates out there and firefights. And those teams just got left out there.

And that right around that time is when you start getting problems with the fentanyl and things like that going on. And truth be told, a lot of commanders, a lot of commanders built their careers on the backs of those guys who were just rode hard. And now, you know, we all know these guys, you know, Dave, who are really struggling and having a hard time. And that's the other side of the story that needs to be mentioned, I think, when we talk about the war. Yeah. No, for sure. Yeah, you know, you're totally right. You're absolutely right.

And like, I don't think anybody comes away from a situation like that, like being left out to flap unscathed at all. The guys that were doing these, like, that were like making up ops or like trying to find it. It was because they were trying so hard to do the job that they were trained to do. Right. Like it's it's just like, you know, it's just like taking, taking an attack dog and like asking them to be a family pet. Right. You're not.

Yeah, you're in a war zone and you want to, you want to get some. Yeah. I mean, the thing that you've been training for for years for, you know, close to a decade in some cases before like having had the opportunity, you get there and you're like, this is way too nebulous. I don't understand it. I'm going to try to make sense of this. And I'm going to, you know, put this round, you know, square peg in a round hole. So for sure. And I think, Jack, like something, something you said about the, you know, the guys that come back and have trouble.

Like, it's not always, it's also not always the guys that you think. Yeah. Which, which is like one of those things that catches, catches you out of guard real, like, really hard sometimes. Like, I can't, I came back and, like, truth be told, I was really, I was pretty messed up for a time after, like, from some of the things. that happened there. There's a, you know, a 10-year-old kid blew himself up and we were, you know, pulling pieces of his bones out of the, in Australian civilians, like, body before we metabacked them out. And then I got, and then I got written up because we did that in, in PT gear, because we were working out in the, when the kid blew himself up, and we ran outside of Favremerwise

in our PT gear because we were in the gym. And then we got, got ridden up for having been outside the wire and out of the wrong uniform. So like these things where it's like completely traumatic and then like your team, like their response, their only response is like not, hey, good job. You saved this dude's life. You know, you got all these guys met in fact when the Aussies couldn't leave the wire. No, the only response to that was like, fuck you. Fuck you for doing it.

Yeah. Fuck you for doing it in shorts, Dave. What? Yeah. So like you come back from that and you're like, I don't even, I don't even know what. You just drink a lot. out of curiosity, was that NSW that wrote you up or the Army that wrote you up? Because that sounds like an Army right now. Yeah.

It does, doesn't it? Yeah. That was my, that was my, that was my very own command. That was my very end command. Yeah. They, uh, my, the CEO had been at the White House. He was like some sort of fancy fancy High Fleet and fellow there for a couple of months, I think. And, uh, he's like at my last job, you know, he's, you know, he's. You have to do everything as though the New York Times is there. As in the New York Times can take a picture of you. David Phillips is out on patrol with you guys.

Yeah, dude. And you know what? David Phillips had been out on patrol. You know what the fucking headline would have been? Like, steals save Australian civilian lives. Like, that's what the head time. That's what happened. We were in a short.

It's right. Right. That would have been the, but in his view, it was irresponsible to be outside the wire. not in the proper uniform, regardless of context. And so Dave gets a non-punitive letter of caution and, you know, all of these things. Oh, my God. That, yeah, so like, that must have been a soul crushing, though. Dude.

Yeah. No, I, that, between that and a couple of other situations where, you know, friends, you know, friends of mine died. And then, yeah, between those, those things, I came back and I was like, I was also not well. And nobody really, really knew talking to people afterwards. But there were some dark times when I was driving way too fast or we were jumping and I was pulling way lower than my skill set, like said was wise. You know, testing fate.

Yeah. Yeah, chasing that dragon. You said there are these teammates or Afghan teammates that you were talking about? in that case Afghan teammates yeah yeah you know

it's important to point out too because I think a lot Americans don't understand for those of us who worked with Afghanans closely

like how closely like you shared meals with them you were they were they were like your friend like any other person and to lose them was the same as losing

any of our friend yeah yeah no it was it was it was it was no different. It was no different except for the one, the one aspect was that I knew these Afghans a lot better than everybody else did because I literally, every meal, I would be over there, I'd be over there between meals, having tea with them talking because I was with my notebook

trying to learn the language. This is like what I, you know, this is the mini, you know, this is the mini task I gave myself. Like, okay, what is part of the ESO? What's part of coin? Like, well, I can't do any of these things if I can't communicate with the people. So like, but let's take this time it's it's it's free immersion right um and so i yeah i was over there all the time and so when when like um mohamma canvara died one of one of my friends um uh i also felt like i was the only one of us who like knew how to mourn him nobody else knew how many kids he had nobody else knew what his wife's name knows nobody knew how he took his tea like i knew all these things. And so, like, you know, I almost took more of it on myself because I knew nobody

else would care as much as I did. And like, maybe that's not, that's actually, it's not emotionally, but it's not like healthy, a healthy response, but it is absolutely what happened. So yeah, like, I, it was just as hard as losing any other friends. Yeah. Did you, do you have some good times over there in those, in those 10 and a half months? Totally. Totally. Totally. And again, go ahead. I was just going to say, can you tell us about it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

So some of the things were, I mean, they're like the good times and the bad were mixed in a lot. But honestly, the time I spent with the Afghans learning how to cook, you know, learning how to cook okra the way they do, learning about like how they're growing the poppies and the almonds. Like I'm a big agriculture nerd. I'm a pretty, pretty passionate gardener. And that was like where I kind of picked up the curiosity. about that because I started asking questions because like what else is there to talk about like in this place. It's beautiful, but like tell me about what's going on. And then I started seeing like how sophisticated a lot of things were. So there were a lot of, I think the best parts of it were one,

knowing what happens, what I do when I get shot at. Like that was one thing that I had like, I wanted to know for myself. And I would say that's a, that's a high point to find out that like you can actually perform when you're being shot at, right? But the rest of the rewarding stuff was getting this like really deep exposure to like a really different kind of people and finding the things that are like really really impressive about them like afghans don't complain i remember this one time we were on like a seven hour drive and this entire valley we were going down looked like the moon like it looked like mars from from from from it looked like mars there was not a single living thing and we're driving for basically all day and we're just like miserable in the back of our high lux is doing this And halfway there, there's this old guy, old Afghan guy with a sheet thrown over his back with some stuff in it, just walking. Like, we've been driving for five hours. We're going to drive for another five hours, something like that. And there's nothing in between those two spots.

So you know that that's where he's going. He might be walking there for like six days. And was there like pity, like, or like misery on his face? No, he was just doing what he was doing. And like, I will never remember, like, I'll never forget driving by that kind of seeing seeing his face. He was just like, no, this is just what I'm doing. I'm like, man, that old man is harder than any of us will ever be. Yeah.

And we think we're tough. And you look at them and you're like, no, we're nothing. We're nothing. And there's a like other perspective shifting moments where we were there during Ramadan. And so like during the day, the families and basically everybody would just be kind of like sitting out on the walls in the village, socializing, blankets down, tea. Like, no, not T. But, like, you know, blankets down just hanging out, socializing in shade. And we were walking by, and I remember one of my guys goes, like, starts talking, talking shit about how lazy they are.

I'm like, lazy. They're living a beautiful life right now. They're sitting around hanging out with the only people in the world that matter to them, worrying about nothing. Like, there's like moments where I was like, oh, shit, like these people actually have some, has some things figured out that we could probably learn from. Like we could take we could take some of these lessons. So like I think that those and like and the relationships I built with the Afghan, with the Afghans that we were working with and also like with my illegal interpreter that like we're really wonderful. Like and by say when I say illegal interpreter, this was the guy that got pinged by the CI by army counterintelligence and like he got blacklisted and I was trying to figure out why because it like it happened before we got there. Turns out Max, my interpreter, had had some physical relations with the CI guy's girlfriend.

So Max got blacklisted because he was too charming. That'll happen. Yep, that does happen. And so I paid him off the books because he was really good. And I could tell. So, yeah, like lots of really wonderful perspective altering. things. I think that's like, that's the, that's the biggest thing is there's a lot of, a lot of really foreign experiences that I was able to integrate while I was there that I really

like appreciate still. So how did that mesh with a community? And I'm going to talk about seals, but kind of any direct action element, you know, I speak 556, right? That's, that's the the mantra. I speak 556 and 7662. Like, were you sort of an odd duck or did you? Yes. Okay. There were a couple people who kind of got it but didn't really like invest in it as much. And then there were a lot of guys that were completely uninterested. So I'd be spent, I'd spend all day over with the CMOG, the Civil Line Reduction Group guys are partnered for us or 12.08 force.

and you know they'd be playing playing video games getting ready for the thing that we're going to go do that night and so i think i think mostly the guys just missed out on some like really extraordinary experiences and and but yeah it was i was definitely i was definitely the like an odd duck for for that at least in in my inside my context yeah and in terms of missions i know you you said that like guys were going after whatever they could get and we we've we've all seen that before where ops are driving intel and you know where we just we want to get outside the wire did you guys did you guys have any successful missions or missions that you would consider successful um we did we did a couple of things um i think the biggest actual impact that we that we had while we were there was um

was part of the valley where where all of the hostile activity was coming from guys putting out mostly guys putting out iEDs but also the guys the guys were shooting at us etc they would and so we took a bunch of we took a bunch of Hesco's and we basically built a wall across a narrow point of this valley this area called Niazzi and put ALP checkpoints there basically to control you know personnel movement up up and down the valley Um, and the moment that got, well, actually the moment it got started, but definitely the moment it finished. Um, it was a massive, massive change in the amounts of ideas being found, amount of hostile activity that was going on in the area of the area we were. Um, there's a book called, I think it's called something like in the warlord shadow.

Um, there's a chapter about this. Yeah, uh, in his book. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so he came, he came out, um, and, and saw, saw the great, the great, the great, Wall of Chora. So I think that was probably the platoon's most successful contribution. But at the same time, I'm also quite certain that a year later, like, it was no longer. It was probably no longer

a thing. Like a transient victory, but definitely something in the right vein. And so how did this deployment start to wind down as you get towards the end? You said you got extended because the logistics issues. I mean, what was it like, you know, as we wind down that last month or so? Yeah, so the last month or so I was already at C.G. SOTA. The SOTF, yeah. So I, I didn't see, I didn't see like the, the platoon, the platoon take down, the the platoon handover. So I, I, I couldn't say what the platoon was like.

I could say that I was, I was just working out to stay sane and that was like all I was focused on. Because what you're trying, because what you were seeing. And trying not to get all that was. a little disturbing. Yeah. Well, yeah, there was there was the starting to sort of process or not process the things that I had seen before and like the things that had happened. But then there was also, you know, watching live feed of guys, you know, really well, Hilo getting shot down.

Right. And then seeing that, seeing the, you know, the parr is go in and check them out and just holding your breath, ready for them to say that there are sort of. survivors and there aren't. Yeah. You know, Dave Worson and Pat Feeks were two friends of mine. I went to Bonds with Dave Worson and, you know, his, his 47 got shot down. And I was like, I had to go wake up guy who was in his platoon, who was like my nighttime counterpart to go tell him that, hey, they, Dave and Pat are gone.

And so, yeah, like the SOTF was a, C.J. SOTOF was an odd place. I read for the first time, I read Catch 22 there, which was an interesting choice because, like, there's this line in catch 22 where he goes, you know, the work we do here is not very important, but it's extremely important that people know we do quite a lot of it. And like, doing after action PowerPoint slides so the colonel can see what the tick was shaped like, like, definitely like there was a little too close to home for me. I probably wouldn't recommend somebody to read catch 22 working on a like a jock staff like that.

And also also also it's run by the army and uh sergeant majors and I, um, see very, very differently when it comes to, uh, military regulations like sunglasses on the head, sunglasses in the head, wrong colors of socks. These set of things. I'm like, you guys are, you guys are, you guys are, you guys are, you guys are green beret sergeant majors. You're not, sergeant's major. You're not supposed to be like this. And like, uh, we still went to sergeant's major school. Like we had to pick a thing. Right. Right. Right. And fuck and fucking with seal jo's. That's our thing. Right. Yeah. Uh, that's why I wondered about your write-up because it very much sounds like

an army write-up and not a, you know, how is your relationship with naval special warfare and the military in general at this point in time, and particularly after you getting written up like that? Great question.

My relationship was fuck all these guys, I'm getting out as soon as I can. And so when I came back, when we got back to Virginia Beach. Well, we went to, we stayed for, they made a stop over in like Atlantic City, Maryland or something, uh, for, for a day for our decompression stop. And all of us were pissed. We're like, our families are four hours away and you're to make us stay here, right? Um, so we, we did that and I came, I came back and basically like spent the, my wife picked me up. She didn't recognize me because I, when I left, I was 170 pounds. And when I got back, because I'd been lifting so much the entire time. I was 225, 2.30. Oh, he's like, I put, I, I, I, I put on a large dog over the, over the deployment. And so she, and between that and like, you know, the, the change in here that lasted for years, she didn't even recognize me.

I got off the bus and she, like, looked right past me, waiting for me to get off the bus. But I basically, like, my relationship with NSW was I slept on my buddy's couch for three, four days until I could get all my gear turned in, signed off. And then I drove immediately across country to get away from that. place before everybody before everybody got back and my plan was to go but I took hard fill orders to this place called support activity where like nobody wanted to go because it was like an Intel operation it was not door kicking it was explicitly not door kicking and nobody wanted to go there and my only goal was to get out of Virginia and to San Diego because I need I need to I need a

fresh start for the for the last bit of my career and so I took these hard fill orders to go to San Diego and my plan was was to just do my, I owed 14 months or something like that. So my plan was to just get out, get out at my like minimum commitment and like move on with my life and pretend I'd never done it. And then right before, so I had my letter of resignation and right before that was going to take effect, a new CEO came in to support activity, a guy named Mike Wisecott, best officer I've ever worked for my entire life. like he was spectacular right humble and like he was wonderful and absolutely incredible leader very soft touch but extremely extremely high EQ and uh I I went into introduce myself because I had already

taken over this this tech shop at this command and after five minutes of talking to him like hey sir I know I have my letter of resignation in he's like yeah I heard I heard I was like I'll pull it if you want me to keep doing this because I'll work for you. And so I did and ended up doing, ended up staying there for five and a half years on two year orders, which is unheard of an NSW. I basically stashed myself into a warrant officer billet so that the detailers would sort of leave me alone. And then had like the best, this was like when I got there, when I got the support activity, I was I was done. I wanted nothing to do. I didn't want to wear. I didn't wear a uniform. I don't want to have anything to do with an SW.

And the next five years were the, were so good. The time there was so good after Mike showed up and started transforming the command and being a really, like, a really exemplary leader. It was the best job I've ever had, like, hands down. And the best part was like, you know, sometimes the stars align.

You know, everything from our 06, down to the like my E6 LPO everybody was like the best at that particular thing that I've ever worked with and I'll never I'll always be grateful to my chief this guy named Chuck Broadway who's actually an IT chief so like he had been doing he'd been doing like tech ops stuff at at at that group at Gold Squadron and then came over to SA to lead the tech ops troop where we were which is what I was I was in charge so he's my chief and he's like guys like soak this in because like this is this is a, this is a, this is a lightning striking. This is like a once in a, once in a

career opportunity, like enjoy this because it will never be this good again. And he said this on a regular basis. And we always like, Chuck, Chuck, come on. I am so grateful to him for having said that because I did. And it was, it was hands down, like it, that, that stint, building tech with a bunch of ETs and ITs for NSW was, was the highlight of my career and completely changed like the the valence of my opinion of my of my of my time spent in NSW. We talked about. I was just going to say, if you can dive a little bit deeper into that and tell us about what the intelligence support activity in this Intel Fusion team was like what were you guys doing?

What was the job there? And what was it when you got there and then how did it change under the new CO? Yeah, those are. So the command is now called Special Oconsonist team, and it's an Intel Fusion command. I'm going to get this wrong because it would always change. There's more than a dozen different rates there. So basically every branch of intelligence, there are, so there's Huminters, SIGN, UAS, Intel guys, and women, really, really incredible intel capability. Me Talk, and then Seals, and a bunch of all.

the rates, all kind of ETs and ITs that were working for me, all come together, build up their individual skills, and then they joined together a couple from each of these disciplines, each of the pillars into this cross-functional team, which then does a workup and deploys forward and builds intel packages. When I got there, it was essentially a place where team guys would only go to. It was the place to go because you weren't going to do any work, and you would park old guys on their way out while they're doing their medical. Right? Like, they would do terminal leave out of SA because that was that was just the only people you could get there. At one point, the CFT deployed in Iraq was responsible for something like something insane, like 95% of all the successful kinetic strikes in Iraq during their deployment.

So like it trend, it went from it went from this place where you park old guys to like this incredibly high performing team that is now it's a screening command. And it's actually really difficult to get there now because it is such a great mission. It's like the, I consider it kind of the future of NSW because Frogmen are not going to like, you're, you're not going to go sit up on a hill, oh, like, in a peer, peer conflict and like poop in a bag and send like radio messages back, back home. Like that radio is going to get picked up immediately. They've got, there's imagery and all these sensors that are, well, I'm going to do a better. job of reporting what's actually there than you are. And two, like what you, you'd never risk a human for this for this op. So like it really became in my mind like the future of that would be like

seals are, I almost feel like seals are not the past, but they're not necessarily like the tip of the spear future because of the way the world has changed. And so this place became that. And it was you credited it pretty much to this. CEO who came in and changed the culture. So there were, so there were, there were, there was a lot of context and a lot of like other, other things that also had to happen. But I would say without the, the, without without the, without without, without his exo, Dave Dukes out, who's all, again, again, he's by far the best exo like that I could have imagined for that point.

And the next. So that came off to after him, Chris Kelly was also spectacular. So we had like this trifecta of leadership. And the enlisted leadership was also incredibly, like incredibly high quality. And so all of them together, yeah, it completely transformed the command. It became, it became a place where, you know, the CEO would actually like walk around. He had this, he had this thing where he would walk around and he had a notebook with everybody's name, with everybody's information in it so that he could kind of keep, almost like an internal CRM so that he could make sure that he, like connected with people that needed it. Like you would, here's a perfect example.

My daughter, my youngest, my youngest child, was turning one. She was big into Peppa Pig. I'm not sure if you guys know Papa Pig. Oh, yes. Okay. All right. So she was massively into Peppa Pig. Well, Mike and his wife showed up to the birthday party.

We didn't invite them because it was like kind of inappropriate, but they swung by to drop off a present. And it was a Papa Pig book. And they knew this because he had overheard me talking to somebody else about how my daughter loves Papa Pig. But he took it. He took that. like overhearing conversation and turned into just like really wonderful gesture that like like man once you should once once once you show that like you care about my children like that's that's it for me that's like my one bar like if you get over that bar like I'm willing to forgive a lot of things

for somebody that like somebody that cares for my kids because like that's you know we're dad we're dads right and so imagine that but like it wasn't that I was special it was that he did this a lot in a lot of different cases. Somebody graduated college. He would call it out at commit like at quarters like it was it was very human and so people feel felt seen and connected to the mission and when you feel seen connected to the mission given the resources to do your do your job well it it sort of lights things on fire and for a while there it was like it was like writing a rocket ship for all of the things that were going on at the command because of this because everybody felt like empowered and like they belonged

And I'm sure you guys have seen this. In the teams, there's this tendency, like, frogmen are here. Texan enablers are here. Second class, third class citizens, maybe. For a while there, it wasn't like that. It was just like team. And that was, I think that was really the secret. Like that was the end result there.

It was that everybody was just part of the team just polling. It's interesting, too, because it seems like you explain. experience like the two extremes of the military, right? That so many people have, they have, they hate the military because they had bad leadership. And, and, and then you have people who loved the military because they had great leadership. And even if they were in the same units, their experiences were completely different. Yeah.

Yeah. I know, I, I actually, like, really grateful for, in a way, grateful for the negative experiences because it's one of those things like until you've been down really far like you can't really put a found you have to dig before you put a foundation down right right i dug i dug and then we put in a pretty solid foundation and like i don't think that i would be the person i am without having gone through the really bad things um you know there's post-traumatic stress disorder but there's also post-traumatic growth right and like sometimes one comes out of the other um and i feel I feel like that the fact that the second half of my career was so incredibly restorative

gave me, like gave me the context, the strength, the perspective to sort of to understand the first part better. So you're running this tech shop before he shows up. Yeah. And then you're running this tech shop after he shows up. What did that look like for you? How did that change? How did that tech shop change?

the tech shop changed it was partly partly because of him and partly because of the like I said the the new XO that came in the there was a I think that what happened was that there was a change of the entire character of the place where all of a sudden the things that we were trying to do the suggestions that we were making about hey we could do this op instead of doing it with that guy why don't we do it with this thing that we can build like We became an equal seat at the table. And that showed, that gave us the ability to prove, the opportunity to prove, to prove that what we were doing was actually valuable. It was sometimes better to send, you know, a piece of technology than two guys on a jet ski with a backpack. The risk calculation there is not the same. And if you can show that you can get the job done with one, why risk, why risk two guys? Honestly, though, two guys on a on jet skis with backpacks has so much cool factor that the guys who want to do it are going to argue for it all day long. 100%.

100%. And they, and you know, not everybody was a huge fan of the new, of the new direction of NSW that we were pushing. And I understand that. If I had an opportunity to go do some cool guys up on a jet ski, I'd be like, hell yeah. I'm going. Right. It doesn't even matter. I'm going.

I'm going. Is this stupid? Yes. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. Right. Right.

Could you talk, I mean, to the extent that you're able about, like, some of these, like, new technologies that you're able to integrate into the force. You know, I've been told, for instance, that NSW has actually developed a really robust drone program and something they've gotten very good at. Yeah. So that could be one of one of two things. One, there is a UAS capability out of the command. We're, you know, Scan Eagles mostly. And then if you're talking about, there's also a tech company that started by a former team guy officer and his brother who is an AI guy called Shield AI.

That is like basically got to start at the innovation director at Warcom. It's a special work on that's our like, that's our two-star command. and you know got i believe they're funded by like andrewson harowitz now and you know all of those things so it's a it's a large company a lot of guys that i used to work for they used to work with now work for them um so i i'm not sure which one of those two things you're you're referencing i'm not sure which one i don't know maybe maybe both um i've been told in general that they the command has gotten pretty good with it yeah the uh the scanneagle debts um they come out of sot are extremely good, like really, really, really good and really, really valuable.

And while we were there, they were having such success that one of the admirals at the time was talking about how he wanted to take some platoons down from the teams and use that headcount to build more UAS debts. And that was like, let me tell you, like the seal admiral telling the seal is like, hey, you guys are going to support the new UAS capability, not the other way around. that definitely caused some heads to spit. But I think he was right. Like that's how you get the missions.

As a, you know, as a former tech guy going to Seals and now coming back into tech in, so, you know, in support of the United States missions, I imagine you had a bit of a different perspective because you had that background and you were an operator. like what were some of the changes that you saw and that you see coming forward i think that i was like the at the beginning of this like kind of cohort of people that have like there are a lot of guys now that have played with you know raspberry pies in college or in high school and so they bring that knowledge forward and they're not they're not thinking necessarily about about what they get to do but like what's the mission and what's the best way to solve it and can I, which of these things in my quiver can I use to solve it? Like, what's the most effective thing? So I think there's a lot more of that simply because of the, how, how widespread

things like raspberry pies and, you know, learning, learning to code to some extent, like little electronics projects, how prevalent those will become. And so you get, you just, we started as I was leaving. There were, it started to be like a lot of new guys who were like, oh, this is awesome. what about this what about this what about this and then they would come back like the next day and bring this thing that they made and be like hey what do you guys think about this we could do something like like just kind of spitballing ideas and we got some like really good operational ideas um out of those conversations but it started once it was known that it was a thing that would get kind of that was like blessed off as like a realm of like this is a weapon that you can use um

guys started coming out of the woodworks that were like playing with these things and their garage. Those guys that were more passionate about it that I was. That's cool. I wasn't actually like massively into the tech. I was into the team like the people and enabling these really brilliant guys that worked for me to like do the best expression of like their best work. That was the thing that lit me on fire was not the actual tech, but there were guys coming in after me like I knew about it.

There were guys after me that were really passionate about it. And coming up is like E5s, E6s and the teams. And that's like more and more prevalent. So I, you know, the children will save us, right? Do you see the special operations community at some point, you know, like where everything used to be so physical, right? And there would be teamwork and some logical problem solving stuff. But do you ever see special operations, including almost a tech portion to their selections? You know, I don't know.

I kind of think not. I think that the way these things have happened in the past and you guys have much much deeper like military knowledge than military history knowledge than I do. But it seems like units don't tend to morph too much. They tend to be like usurped by other things. And so it's a, I don't see like buds having a programming challenge. Like I don't think that that's a thing that's ever going to happen.

I think that if there comes a point where we're like, okay, we actually have too many frogmen, but we need more techs doing this thing. That'll come out of the organic capability. And it'll come with that load balancing of like head counts based on what's needed. And that's how the change will happen, less that seals will, you know, learn how to do commercial off the shell electronics manipulation. Interesting. When Jack and I went to DefCon, you know, like, one of the villages or one of the rooms was like taking over a ship.

Oh, yeah. Via, you know, cyber. And there were multiple ways to do it, right? And the goal of the CTF teams was to crash the ship somehow. Do you see, do you see like this handshake between like seals and the tech world or integrated units that are slowing down ships so they can do their shipboarding and stuff like that? Yeah, I think that's totally. realistic. I think that's like a natural outgrowth of the sort of like Intel fusion things that are happening inside NSW. And I know the tier one unit's got like similar things going on. So yeah,

I think that that makes perfect sense. Like that's just another tool in the toolbox for for sure. It's fascinating. Yeah, using cyber to enable the kinetic actions. Yeah. No, no, my personal fantasy being a sci-fi nerd is a section nine from Ghost in the Shell where you see, these people who are like, you know, their government, you know, black bag operators, but at the same time, they're heavily into cyber and sabotage and all these sorts of things, disinformation, all sort of blended into one team, which is hard to do, but it does seem like we're headed in that direction. It does.

It does. I, uh, I just wonder whether there's much crossover between, uh, the, the pipe hitters who are like down for the physical part and the people that are drawn to like, yeah, yeah. exactly because the people I know that are like heavy hitters when it come to DevOps and cybersecurity are would definitely not be mistaken for being a team guy right um you know in any context um so I wonder what the crossover is yeah might be like a Jason born thing but like definitely like if that job were available I would be like yeah I'll do that yeah it sounds awesome you know and it's interesting too because making the parallel connection you know I don't know how it is now

but there was a time when you were in trouble with Johnny Law, you know, because you were a rapscallion, you know, you could enlist in the military and often you ended up, you know, in the special operations community because you already sort of had that sort of in the gray zone mentality. And yet for the kids coming, I mean, there are obviously a lot more opportunities for kids in cyber now with CTFs and hack the box and, you know, things like that. but the ones who are good at it still want to get out there and break shit. And we still haven't come to the same sort of relationship with them, I think, and that, okay, yeah, when you were a kid, you did some stuff you probably shouldn't have. And now you're in front of the judge. And here's a cyber route for you. Yeah, honestly, the only thing that jumps into my mind when you say that is, one, like, that would be really awesome.

but two, um, that there's so many, there's so many things like you can't have a criminal anything on your background to like go to butts now. Like like this background. Like it actually like we don't, we can't do that anymore even if that's valuable because like,

you know, guys have to lie about having having had weed in high school one time or right. You know, these sorts of thing in order to get it or like I had an ankle sur, you know, I covered up an ankle surgery when I went. They're like how you need any any joint surgeries? Nope.

Yeah. And I was just praying. they didn't like, they didn't like wand my ankle with as a screw. Yeah. So like, you know, doing that with criminal situations, like, it, it feels like it, it could be a good idea, but it also feels like something that we're not going to do. Yeah. And five and a half years at this, this, um, intelligence team, you decided to get out of

the Navy. Uh, what was it like transitioning out of the Navy back in a civilian life? Yeah, it was, um, I don't think I did a really good job at it. I think a lot of guys do, I had a lot of pride that because I had done like the, you know, I'd done the startup before and I had multiple jobs. Like I was going to get out. I was going to be fine. And I actually don't think I did a very good job at it.

There are a lot of things that had sort of, and I sort of had ingrained in me. Like I joined when I was 22 and I got out when I was like 30, 33. So like, I joined as a boy, left as a man. And like, you, you kind of absorbed the water you're in. Like those are very, those are formative years for all. us right that's why we're still talking about it um yeah but uh so there were there were things that really really caught me off guard like the first thing i did was i started a startup um and the the actual startup is irrelevant um it it was just it was a bad idea and i did it poorly

but the the thing i noticed is that like inside a soft community there's a rep there's such thing as a Like if I tell you I'm going to do something and then I don't do it, even if you and I never interact again, like you know something like you and I know 500 of the same people, right? And so like people will know very quickly that you backed out on something you said you would do. Well, the wide world is so so so disconnected, so wide, so to, you know, dispersed that like people will regularly say like, yes, I will, yeah, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, So we had one company who was like, yeah, we'd love to try this, but we would want it to have this one more feature. So we spent the next two weeks crushing it to build this one more feature. Got it done. And it worked great, exactly like they wanted. Couldn't get an email or a callback from anybody, the company ever again. And I was like, you guys should have just said you weren't interested.

Right. But like, if they didn't want to, they just wanted it to sort of go away. And so I started to learn that when people tell you something in the wide world, like it is not, the same as another team guy saying, yeah, I'll do this. And the other thing I noticed is like one of my, one of my jobs, um, in some ways resembled the one of my one of my software development jobs. In some ways resembled the steel teams in that now, it was extremely high quality people all around. Um, you know, like the, the,

the cream of the crop is highly selected. Um, but the thing that caught me off guard. I didn't recognize for a while is that, they're thinking about performance and not support. Like if you're doing a workup with a platoon, right, or with a team, and one guy's having trouble with, you know, two-man room clearances, what do you do? Like you stay late. Yeah, you stay late and you take care of them, right? Because like all of you are together, right?

That's what you do, like without even thinking about it. And not a lot of places are like that. It's like their coworkers, not teammates. And so like these like those are the big like cultural shifts. And I didn't even recognize it until I went back to San Diego. And I was I was up late with my former LPO, who's now senior chief, which always makes you feel good to see your boys like move it. But it was like one o'clock in the morning. And I was getting ready to getting ready to leave.

And I asked him for some windex to clean off the windshield and the car I'd borrow because it was dirty and it was hard to drive in that. And he's like, I'm not giving you windex. I'm like, I'm like, come out there and clean it with you. And then we shot the ship. shit for 10 minutes while we cleaned up the car and gave the whole car like a little detailing for the person to let me borrow it. And like, oh, I forgot about this. I forgot about this team orientation. Like it was it was like it was like being able to like have full capacity of your lungs again. And so I think those were like the two big like things with transition. Oh, I think the

the other thing is when I got out like what actually when I was in you can see but you can judge by the by the pictures I sent for the thumbnail. Although Dee did choose the shirtless one. So that's not, not. Yeah. The thumbnail for this video is a war crime in of itself. A sexy war crime. Yeah, very sexy one.

I know, right? I know. So I didn't have a lot of pictures of me like working because I like internalized maybe too much the whole silent professional thing. So when I got out, you have to, you have to talk about yourself. Sure. If you don't talk about yourself, then people won't know who you are, won't know what to expect from you. But it feels really, really, really, really. awkward talking about yourself at first at least it did for me it took a long time for me to get

comfortable with even just talking about basically yeah it was a that was i was i was a seal not the most important thing about me but it is something um so i think those like those three things were like the biggest like weird transition things we talked about that a little bit before the show how you know you know guys you know people coming out of the military i don't want to just say guys because but the people coming out of the military they tend to go one of two ways a lot of times especially in the special operations community they either make a living on their background which is fine like if you went to Harvard you would make a living you would tell people you went to Harvard right I mean there's nothing wrong with that but they go

into leadership or tactical or whatever they do and that's who they are and then other people try to create a new persona like they divorce themselves from it for a while and maybe it's it's because those people are maybe we're wrestling with yeah you know who are we after this um you know or or like well i don't want to say in your case because you had great experiences after bad experience but some people have really bad experiences and don't want to talk about it anymore um but whatever it is, they divorce themselves and they feel, and like you say, they take the site on professional too far where it's like, this is a part of my pedigree, it is a part of my past, like maybe not the most important thing, but it's something worth mentioning.

And it does open doors at times. Yeah, I definitely, I overcorrected the wrong way with that. I was terrified of being the guy who's like still trying to. to be a CEO when he's not. And I've developed some empathy for that position now. I'm certainly not going to do it because it's not, it doesn't, it's not, it doesn't feel true to me. But I definitely spent years trying to sort of like draw a line and completely reinvent

myself. And it wasn't until I went back. So I went back to San Diego because Bobby Ramirez, who was the CEO of SEAL Team One, died. Unexpected. And this man, this is like a man of, incredible character. Like universally acknowledged incredible character. In fact, you said, you mentioned like cultural problems and said to SEAL teams.

When he got announced as the CEO of SEAL Team 1, I called him because I wanted to congratulate him and tell him like, this makes me happy because even though I'm not in the teams anymore, I care very much about the community. Like it is, it's part of me. And so I called him to say, hey, congratulations. Like, this makes me feel good because if there's somebody I know who can help the teams turn the corner for, like, in the way that we need to right now, you're the guy. Like, you're the guy. So, like, good luck and, like, I'm cheering for you.

And so, like, when, yeah, when he died, we, there were a ton of people that came back to his funeral, to his, or to his memorial. And it sort of conversation around beers at McPeas, like the seal bar on Coronado, talking about Bobby, talking about like how life is out. We had all sort of like tried to find some way to kind of like carve up our lives. And we all sort of like realized at the same time like the answer is not carving that part out, but it's sort of like reintegrating it. And so like that that whole that whole experience of. going back and, you know, paying our respect to a guy to a man we loved. And then, like, feeling, feeling how deeply ingrained the traditions of NSW are and how good they feel to take part in them to, like, be able to show our respect for a man

like Bobby. It reminded me that, like, that is actually a really, really important part of me and that I should stop trying to carve it off and that I should. in fact, just like let it sort of reintegrate it and become like a more whole, complete, honest with myself version. In fact, um, D had been after me for like, almost a year probably to like come on, come on your podcast. Aren't faculty said, yes.

Yeah, you guys, you guys were, uh, for assistant, but I appreciate it because this is great. Um, but, uh, the reason why I said, no, I find it's like, okay, yeah, like, like, let's, let's do early March was right after Bobby's thing. I was like, I need to know, like, what I didn't want to do. I didn't want to talk to you guys about being a team guy too much because I didn't want that to be me. Right. I didn't want me to be like, also I felt self-conscious because you could have some real badasses on here. Like some crazy badasses you guys talk to.

And then there's like me like my big bottle of water and my real short shorts. You know, so like, but that reintegration I think was like really valuable. And I would I would say to people like guys that are getting out to like not try to draw the mind too hard. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Merging those two personalities is difficult.

You mentioned, I, you know, I don't remember if I was during the show before, but, you know, you mentioned it you went through some sort of dark periods afterwards. Yeah. Can you tell us sort of your dark night of soul and how you found your way out of that? Yeah. I actually think that this is that I wrote a thread about it on, on Twitter. once and I think that's how like Jack and I first like knew that the other one existed because it went it was like one of those things that kind of blows up on you you know I had like

800 people who followed me on Twitter and then I wrote this thing about like my combat like about all the different ways that people had seen me throughout my entire seal career and it just exploded I was like I was talking to like there were like five people that would actually talk to me before and all of a sudden like I shared this like intimate thing and all of a sudden it just exploded and I was like really really uncomfortable with this whole situation I almost deleted it a couple of times. But the, yeah, I got back from, I got back from deployment and I didn't, I was conflicted about a lot of things about whether any of it mattered, about whether I did the right thing when things were hard, about whether I could have done something better and prevented some of the really bad things from happening. I was drinking too much.

I was drinking way too much, like two bottles of wine a day. like it was it was ridiculous um and like right this point like when i started spiraling downward my wife had her first kid so like you can imagine how shitty a father how shitty a like a lack like a lack of husband i was i was a black hole over here like and and like i i will always regret that even though like i recognize the reasoning like i recognize why but like there's that this something i will i'll go to my grave regretting how how poor a husband and like father i was when my son was first born um but i i had all this like unprocessed everything um and didn't know how to didn't know what to do with it um and they you know like i said there were points where i

was taking too many risks and and and all these things never never tried to kill myself but like i definitely was like rolling the dice a little bit because i was like rolling the dice a little bit because i too much of a coward right or maybe I knew better like part of part of me deeper down knew better and it's like I don't want to but like I feel like I want to and there was this I remember like the first the first time when I realized something was off because like that's just your life like you just like kind of sink down and like everything around you is dark and you just think the world is dark like you have no perspective um and there was this moment by the way like that feeling the fact that I've been down in that like dark place I think a lot of us have been

Like it is the thing that without that experience, I would not understand why people would kill themselves. Like why we have a suicide problem among veterans. I wouldn't understand it unless I had that gone through it because I'd be like, what the fuck is wrong with you? There's always Thailand. Like, like, you can always just like go AWOL and go do like, go like just go hedonism for like three months. And then you'll probably be fine. And it's whatever happens is better than being dead. Right.

Like that would have been my reasoning before. But now like I recognize like you don't. see that. It's like you're just sinking in the whole world is dark. And people ask, like, should NSW have done something better when you, when you came back? And I could tell you that, like, NSW does everything you can. Like, they make you talk to, like, six different psychs on the way back in, and you lie your face out to all of them. And, like, that's not their fault, right? So I don't think, like, it's a systemic problem with, like, the VA or the military in general,

necessarily, like, in that context. But the thing that made me realize that something was off was we had started a garden in our backyard in San Diego, kind of on an aesthetic lark. We're like, we got the spot in the yard. Like, what are we going to do? All right, let's put some raised beds and plants and vegetables. Like, fuck it. It was a purely aesthetic lark. And I was down in the garden.

I would come home from work and I'd go down in the garden and just kind of like take care of it. And, you know, with tomatoes, you pinch off the extra growth. So they put their extra energy into the actual fruit, not the plant. And I was pinching off tomatoes and like the smell hit me. And all of a sudden I was just like right there like present. And I could breathe for a second. Like the garden was the thing that made me stop thinking about all of these other things. And it became like this meditation for me.

And I realized, oh wait, like there's there's something more here in the world that's not this dark shit. I should start. I should maybe start working on that. Like, I don't know how. I don't know, like, what that even looks like. But you get the inkling that there's, like, something other than the dark place. And so I sort of started digging out, and I thought I was dug out, but I wasn't.

Like, this has happened like a dozen times. Like, it's multiple steps and you always think you're done and then you're not. I think that's probably the entire story of life, right? Like, you think you're digging out and then, like, you're not actually. There's another thing to do. I had a psychiatrist who probably saved my life by putting me on sleep pills for a little bit. Like I don't recommend sleeping pills for like normal situations, but like to put the, to put a net on the bottom of like to arrest a fall, like a just a dead fall, which I was in. Like that was that was helpful.

But he suggested I do like some mindfulness meditation. I was like, fuck you. I'm not doing that. That sounds stupid. And then I finally gave in, and I went to this thing at Balboa, and I left after about 20 minutes, because the dude next to me was there for this, like, mindfulness course because he was scared of the showers and the ships. I was like, I'm not, I'm not like you, man. I don't want that. I don't want to feel like you and I are this, like, dealing with the same thing.

And then I finally, like, heard it from enough people that I just decided to, like, go off the deep end. And I went to this 10-day silent retreat, the Passenor retreat, 10-day silent meditation retreat. it was miserable. It was absolutely miserable. Horrible. The entire time, like, I'm convinced. And at this point, by the way, like, to give you a timeline context and, like, how much of a saint my wife is, we had two boys at this time, and she's eight months pregnant

with my daughter. So I go away for 10 days to, like, the Joshua Tree Desert to do this, like, meditation bullshit. And she's at home, like, managing the two boys while she's like, I'm, like, I'm incredibly pregnant and like all of these things. So I am convinced the entire time. Like I'm sitting there like trying to meditate and I'm convinced, absolutely convinced that by the time I go back, if I stayed this whole time, she will have taken the kids and left. And what's more is that I will not hold, like, I wouldn't hold it against her because I was like I said, I was a I was a garbage husband and a garbage father for like the first for these years when I came back.

And so I had to learn to sit with that because I knew that she would call it. she would call me out if I didn't do it. She's like, oh, you're not even gonna take care of yourself? Like, all right, all right. Like, I'm gonna sit with this. And like, so I had to like make my piece with the fact that they might lead because of things that I had done

and I would deserve it. And I realized that the only thing that, the only thing I had control over was that the fact that I loved them and that anything else was me expecting something in return, which is like by definition not selfless. And so like I sat with that for like 10 days and it was, there were,

it was there were points where like your body would hurt and then all of a sudden that pain would dissolve and then all of a sudden you get this taste in your mouth you're like oh that's the taste of shame like it makes no sense sounds completely woo I am not that guy but like that is the thing that happened to me it tasted like shame and I got back um drove home drove home at the speed limit from Joshua to San Diego like I had never driven I hadn't driven the speed limit in half a decade right like I drove home at the speed limit it was cool with it which I was like that's weird, but I didn't really feel different because I like these like changes that sort of integrated. I got home, we sat down on the couch. And after about five minutes, my wife said, hey, I want to stop you real quick. I just want you to know that this last like 10 days was hard managing, you know, managing the kids while she's super pregnant and all that. She's like, but it's already been worth it. Like the change in you that I can tell in five minutes is already been worth it. And so like those two things like the garden and that they're the garden and then.

that meditation retreat were like these two huge handholds for me like kind of pulling myself up out. And even the garden, you know, you talk about the vassana meditation, but even the garden itself, that moment was mindfulness, right? 100%. It was, I didn't know. I didn't know what it was. But yeah, it was absolutely like I was present. I was experiencing things with all of my senses. I was doing something physical. Also, I think there's part of it has to do with like when you're raising a garden, when you're growing a garden. I still, we grow a huge garden every year. You know, I have to be experiencing things. you know, have chickens and all, all that stuff because it's been so formative.

Like it's part, it's like part of us now. But like you deal with a lot of death in, you know, our former jobs. And there's something about a garden that is like helping create the conditions for life. And it feels healing, restorative in that way too, I think. Balance. You know, you mentioned, you mentioned how when you're in it like you don't know. And I think that's one of the things that, you know, whether you're former military, and you have this post-traumatic stress or you're a civilian and you have post-traumatic stress

for another reason that it's very insidious, right? Like you say, like you not only probably, like not only were you lying to the shrinks, but you're probably lying to yourself about how you felt. Oh, yeah, 100% because you don't want to be that guy. Yeah. Like you don't want to be that guy. You want to be the guy that can like push it down and be stoic about it. Like, nobody wants to be the guy that, like, is a hot mess.

But, like, there were, there were definitely, there were definitely points. I think the thing, the point that I realized, another point that I realized something was wrong was that I apparently chewed somebody out, like some bosun's mate at the command. And somebody told me about it the next day and I had zero recollection of it. Like, there were weeks that are, that were just complete blackout for me. And it wasn't because I was like drunk at work. I was never drunk at work, ever. It was just like the cortisol, just hijacking my brain. Like it was like my head was in a microwave and the microwave was like on 10.

Yeah. And you and like so you don't, you know, memory is fallible under the best circumstances, but like your own perception of the world and your place in it can get so, so ungrounded that nothing makes sense and things that don't make sense are the only thing that you can think of. Yeah. Yeah. And there's also in maybe, I don't know if this. was your experience, but you can also look at somebody who had worse, the people in Afghanistan,

the people who, you know, were no longer living, the people who lost limbs and say, how can I bitch about it when I'm whole and healthy? 100%. 100%. Like you don't want to take that, like, you don't want to take that away from them. Right. Like you do. And so like, I think, I think that there's some part of the, what one of the things that, that causes

people to consider. like suicide is that they are almost scared to get help because they don't I think that's a really great point and like it's it's also that like They're scared to get the help but then they also don't want to be the guy Who has you know committed these committed these sins or had had these problems and didn't show any any way of way of atoning for it. So there's almost like a like I'm sorry like I feel bad about this but I can't do anything so so like this is this is the only thing I can think of to do. Do we have questions for Dave? Let me see.

Dave, also check your Twitter because I know people probably ask you questions there. Mostly they ask me to take my shirt off. Well, if you want to show the pepperoni's off. I mean, it's been, it's happened before. Next. Next time. Go ahead.

I'm sorry. I was going to say that's another team guy cliche, like going to a bar. Like, how do you know somebody's, in a ball like guys is a seal like oh because he took a shirt off in the bar um I was going to say that next time we have you on and you're in studio uh we'll make sure that you're lacking

lacking the good you're you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna get me intoxicated so I strip I understand okay that's fine I we don't have any super as I don't think, but, uh, no, uh, but let's ask about the homesteading because that's, you know, that's what is that? What does that mean? And, and how did you get into that? Yeah. Well, I mean, full qualification, I would not consider myself like a full pledged homesteader. We don't, we're, we're on an acre here. So we're like, we have a large garden, a bunch of fruit trees. We do a bunch of like, uh, you know, we, our food scraps go to the chickens

who make compost. Then they use that compost and put it on the go. And so we we try to like minimize our resource flows more than more than like doing like practical a home setting because like you said, we're not we're not on enough space to do that. Hopefully soon we will be, but we're not right now. So that's mostly it's mostly about it's a combination of the like connection to like the real rhythms of the world, like the seasons, the rain. Like these things mean different. It mean different things to you if you're growing a bunch of. your own food. If you're a gardener, your relationship with the moon and the sun and the weather is very practical and it's very immediate. And there's there's something about that kind of

grounding because like life could be really, really comfortable, almost too comfortable. And I like the fact that it gives you a spot to put your feet. And so the other thing is that like food supply chains are incredibly incredibly fragile. As you saw when like people were making all the Twitter jokes about like, hey, look at these eggs I've got. I'm a billionaire. We were never short on eggs. You know, we're never short on greens. Like there's a E. coli outbreak at this thing.

It doesn't matter. You know, we get our, we get our meat from somebody down, somebody down the road who raises the pigs. Like, his name's tin. Like, I know the guy who raised the pigs that we're, that we eat. and we go direct to him so we get a good deal he gets a good deal and uh then we have a freezer freezer full of pork so like we try to keep our inputs and outputs um as as minimal as possible uh and like are you does homesteading include generally and then for you specifically include like your energy like you are you on the grid off the grid how does that work are you collecting

rainwater, that's what we really want to know. See, I think in Oregon you're allowed to collect rainwater. You are. Like, I know in Colorado you're not allowed to, which blows my mind. Yeah, wow. You can't, yeah, you can't collect rainwater there. It's, yeah, it's absolutely nuts. You can't dig ponds there in a lot of places because you're disrupting the water flow.

When actually, if you look at it, like, we disrupted the water flow by killing all the beavers, and like, people building ponds are actually doing something good. But, like, you know, so we're not off-growing. So we're not off-grid. We can operate, like, we have a generator that can connect to the propane, et cetera. So, like, we can keep our power on and all those things. And we do most of our heating with a wood stove. But we're not, we're not, like, really legit off-grid.

This place is an old schoolhouse built in, like, the 1880s. So it's not well insulated. It's creaky. It's got all that character. But, like, it would be difficult to take this place off-grid, especially since there's 200-year-old Doug Furze to the south of us. So that blocks most of the summer sun on the house. So like we can't do solar or anything like that either.

So it's minimal. We're resilient but not off-grid. Gotcha. We do have one super chat that just came in. It's from Nunn. Thank you very much. Dave, thanks for sharing and keeping it real. Also, please take your shirt off.

I'm going to put out a thing. here. How about one, just one, uh, five, minimum $5 super chat for Dave to pluck us a few bars of his favorite song on the yuk. Oh man. That's a good one. You make me perform. That's a good one. That's a good one. Amateur shit here. Let's man. While we're waiting for someone to man up. Euclalies are classic. Uh, I got a, my mandatory, uh, self-promotion. Uh, remember to like a, share and subscribe to the channel. And check the link down in the description for our Patreon.

If you want to get access to all these episodes, ad-free. Jimmy Trimble, thank you very much for the Super. What's your assessment of the DoD Innovation ecosystem, especially the new Office of Capital? Any chance you venture into that. Because, yeah, you're kind of back in that realm a little bit, right? I am. That's actually a really, that's a good question.

So for people without the con without like the background context here the biggest thing preventing the military from adopting like modern tech is the acquisition process it's long it's slow there's a shits on the paperwork pretty much everything is piped through like a couple of prime vendors who have these like pipe contracts that they can like run as much money through as they want to um it's not competitive it's like it's actually really it i understand why it is the way it is because they have to There's so many laws they have to follow to keep track of all the tax dollars. But at the same time, it's absolutely insane.

There's been a lot of like sort of side runs around this, like building contracts that can then be done through. There's this place called GIU, Defense Innovation Unit. It was in Palo Alto area, Mountain Park area. And so they basically will give you a contract that's like a pipe. And then you can get money from anywhere and it can go through that pipe and go to the company. And that seems to be, that was nascent when I left. It was like just getting started when I got out.

But it's actually the company I rent code for now is actually on a bunch of contracts through DIU. And it's still a process. But compared to what it was five, six years ago, it is day and night difference. And that is like blazing speed of adaptation for like the DOD. So I think that a lot of the end runs that they're making for for the contract. team to give you the ability to like a unit can go out and say I want something made by this company. I want them to do it in X way and here's how we pay for it. The mechanism is there now. So I think I think DOD is actually doing a reasonably good job of adapting to that.

Before what would happen would be like, okay, I want to buy this, but the money's not going to clear for 36 months. And like what company has 36 months of just like free runway where they're not going to cash flow anything before they're going to take their tech and they're going to go take it out into the stealing world. Like so if you want something to be, even if they want to like provide their tax to DOD, like they can't. And that is like that like that's down a lot. Like you, I've seen contracts get like companies get money in like 30, 45 days,

which is absolutely nuts. Like way different. So I actually think the DOD is doing a really good job at that. Yeah. There was a time. I mean like we're talking about like the 90s where what the military gave, what the military had on their shelves compared to what you. could just go to REI or someplace else.

And I'm not even talking tech now, but just basic gear. It's still like that, man. If they want to acquire a new rifle and new machine guns. Let's just talk about a sleeping bag. You know, the technology of a sleeping bag, right? That when it comes to tech, you know, it used to be that off-the-shelf purchases down at, you know, Radio Shack or whatever, were better than what you could get, you know, through the, military procurement system for a lot of stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, it's been solved for technology. It's specific, specifically. But I mean, when I was at two, all the guy, we all went out to go get multicam cries because the uniforms they gave us were one, like some weird digicam that wasn't, didn't work for the place we were going. But two, the crotch would tear out after about two weeks of wearing them. And so everybody bought cries on their own dollar. And those are cheap.

Yeah. But like they got outbid. And we do have a taker. All right. Let's see your skills as a musical bar. Ian Hutchinson, thank you very much. I'm going to let you slide with your $5 Canadian because I don't know what that is in the U.S.

I feel like we're getting ripped off here, but I don't know. He's bidding with funny money. That's right. It's like monopoly money. It's 47 cents. I just did the math. There you go. All right.

Yeah, shit, I don't know. I can't tell us. Is this coming across? Yeah, yeah. This coming across? Okay. That's not. Yes, stand up.

So maybe you're in front of the speaker. Okay. Oh, no. My speakers are in my ears. They're getting noise canceled. Oh. Let me try to play this. Oh, no.

I was going to say, stand up. Let's see those shorts. I'm wearing pants right now. All right. All right. No, it's still not coming true. Can you hear this? No, no.

All right. I guess I need to, next time I'm going to have to get my audio situation score. Like, you can hear my voice up. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Were you doing the fake strum thing? Hold on.

I'll go right up against the computer. Yep. Yeah. You hear that? Yeah. And nothing. Are you playing? Because we don't hear anything.

Yeah, I'm playing. Oh, my. gosh. We tried. We tried. Thanks for your 43 cents. We deeply apologize. Technical issues.

Just what we think we're all set up for audio and video. Reach out to Dave at Aspiring Peasant. And maybe he'll send you a Twitter video. A Twitter video. And then DC Photo 4. Thank you very much. Who do you think is better suited in the present and future to partner force build maritime soft capabilities, the SEALS or MARSAC.

Oh, that's a little spicy. Ooh. That is spicy. And my answer is going to be kind of sacrilegious, is I don't think it matters, honestly. And I would say that each of them is going to have their strengths. Seals get better, at least when I was exposed to Marsok, Seals got more and better training. And the MARSAC guy is like, because the Marine Corps doesn't want them to be too special. However, I would say that the Marsac guys that I met have been incredibly, incredibly professional

because they're Marines. And I actually think that that professionalism might give them the advantage when it comes to training partner force soft because Marines have a lot of discipline and in my experience have been more even keel than my seal brother. So I'm going to give it to Marsock actually. Do you feel as though, because seals generally go straight from boot camp to the seal platoons. And look, they're hooligans or brigands, right? They're an offshoot of the Navy.

Like, you know, they don't have officer country. They don't have a lot of this sort of top-down military sort of structure that, like, young Marines or young infantry do. do you feel as though they suffer from that? 100%. 100%. I hadn't really thought about this until actually after I wrote that thread, there was a reporter who reached out and asked me what my opinion of it

because he was writing a long form thing about the culture of the SEAL team. So I'm not sure if it ever got published. But yeah, that's 100%. I think that is a major, that's a draw for guys that don't want to go do like the 80-second airborne first. But at the same time, I think we're poor. for it in a lot of ways. I think we don't, I think there's a maturity thing. There's a bit of a prima don't thing because you came out of nowhere and now you're hot shit. Like, okay, cool,

you're tough. And you know, you can shoot straight. But like, there's a lot more to the job than those like, than those like flashy skills. We're really bad at logistics. And just understanding that like logistics win wars, like those sorts of things. Yeah, 100% I think we are worse off for that. And if they started doing something where you had to, let's say, let's say you get your trident, but then you have to go do your first deployment like attached to a Marine unit or something under the command of a Marine officer or something like that. Like I think there's potential there. I don't think it's ever going to happen, unfortunately, but I think that the teams would be better for it.

Yeah. And look, this isn't on a seal bashing system because They're pipe hitters, you know, and, and, you know, in the circumstances they're trained for, they're very good at what they do. Right, right. But it's, it's when you, you know, it's when you try to use the, you know, the, the, the scalble to spread butter on bread, like you're going to, you're going to mess the bread up, right? Like, that's just how, how it is. And I think that, I think that in some cases, there's enough, there's enough maturity, like, that exists there. certain platoons are going to be like are going to be absolute rock stars at all of these things. But I think a lot of the problem, a lot of the cultural problem does come from some level of

immaturity and like an overgrowth of ego. And so, yeah, no, I think that you're totally right. They're pipe hitters. But like if you want the pipters to be able to do more things than like finding ways to instill some perspective and some maturity or and some humility, like those are. Those are not bad ideas. Dave, I really appreciate you spending your Friday evening with us and sharing your story with us and merging the two Dave's,

talking about the entire person. Three days. Really, really good perspective. And we'll be back next Friday. We're going to have Vivek Jacob on the show. He served in Nine Para with Indian Special Operations, one of their Special Operations units. So really excited to have him on the show.

Yeah, that'll be amazing. Dave, where can people find you? Most active on Twitter at Aspiring Pousent. I also have a blog that I just started, and I haven't actually put anything up on it. It's aspiring peasant.com, but there'll be stuff there. Mostly it's going to be, you know, parenting and homeschooling, gardening stuff, resiliency in terms of like the homesteading things. And then definitely some war stories, too, but it won't be just,

like talking talking about how cool i am it'll be mostly talking about things that we've learned and things that work for us cool and is there anything that uh other than those that you want to plug right now uh okay no i want to plug i want to plug you guys you guys are awesome thanks for having me on the town i guess you're we talked about at the beginning but uh like seriously jack i'm gonna send you a bottle i'm gonna send you each a bottle of the uh the posterity cider we're cider so you can like i would love to i would love to i'm gonna send you guys each a bottle because like Like, if I got to pinch something, it's that. All right.

All right. Those people are doing exactly what I wish, like, everybody in the world would do, which is, like, giving back to their community by making a thing and, like, making people realize that what they have right there is, like, already wealth. Yeah. That's the magic. That's the magic in life. And, like, so, yeah, I'm going to send you guys each a bottle.

All right. Yeah. Thank you, Dave. Yeah. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Fios for enabling this to be live tonight. Yeah. Please like and subscribe our channel.

go to Dave's Twitter Aspiring Peasant and then check out our Patreon get ad free links down below episodes and yeah man

kick it we're out there so yeah thanks again we're getting ready for our episode 200 bash too that's coming up at the end of the month in the planning phase so yeah we'll see you're just one more badass to add to the list of badasses

we had on this show And we really... I'm the most hairless badass, though. I saw everybody was commenting on that. It's like just low tea, man. It's not my fault. I have like seven chest hairs and they all have names. You're vegetarian at the time.

Nobody can blame you. You have good hair. You have good hair. You seem like a nice guy, Dave, but fuck Dave's hair. Again, low tea, right? High testosterone pushes it off and then on to the body. Right here, baby. That's right.

We know who the alpha is, Dave. That's right. Even if nobody else in my life... does. We got you, bro. We got you. All right, guys. Thanks again, Dave.

And we'll see everyone else next Friday.