The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 256: Evan Hafer—Just Because You're Pooping Doesn't Mean You're Out of Harm's Way

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Former Green Beret and CEO of Black Rifle Coffee Company Evan Hafer talks combat, coffee, and what it's like to take a blast of bear spray in the face… on purpose.

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You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Talk. Hello, friends. It's episode number 256 of the way I heard it, and this one is called, Just Because You're Pooping, doesn't mean you're out of harm's way. Truer words, never spoken.

They're not the exact words my guest used, but he does describe in a fairly interesting detail the business of hunkering down in the jungle somewhere in the Philippines while he was serving our country. and suddenly found himself being shot at by insurgents. Heck of a thing. You know, you think you're totally alone. You're about the most vulnerable a man or woman can be,

sitting there with your thoughts. And suddenly you're getting shot at. It just, it really does kind of put things in perspective, you know. He said he hit the deck and I wondered about that. It's like, what deck did he hit and what was there? You know, we didn't go into those details, but it couldn't have been good. Poison Ivy, I suppose. We're talking about Evan Hafer.

Evan is the founder and the CEO of Black Rifle Coffee, my preferred brand, full disclosure. I'll drink virtually anything. I like McDonald's coffee, man. I had a cup of McDonald's coffee the other day and found myself in an argument with my crew over McDonald's versus Duncan Donuts. And it was pretty much a toss-up.

But when I'm home, I drink Black Rifle. I prefer the AK-47. and he's an interesting guy, man. I had a chance to be on his podcast about a month ago. Would you think of him? I think he's great. I think he's a really interesting cat. You know, what's funny is that he was a lot more serious than I expected.

Yeah. He's a serious guy, you know, and like part of his whole marketing strategy, which I guess really isn't his department, but he does some really, really weird videos that are super funny. He was very reflective and it's really interesting because he talks a lot about what it's like to, you know, serve this country and be under fire while you're trying to take a poop and et cetera, et cetera. It's not that he's serious.

It's that he's thoughtful. Yes, he's thoughtful. Exactly. It takes a minute to get used to that because we're so used to people talking over each other and having immediate snappy answers to whatever the question is. But he's in no great hurry to share his opinion. But his opinion is definitely worth sharing. For the record, Evan,

I mean, he did it the hard way. Grew up in Idaho, straight out of high school, into the Army National Guard, accelerated training, green beret, wound up in the CIA. CIA? For like nine years or something? Yes, dozens of deployments, Iraq and Afghanistan and all kinds of stories. But I wanted to have him on the podcast because we sing out of the same hymn book, at least in terms of work ethic and the importance of community.

and running an authentic business. You know, I find myself in violent agreement with much of what he has to say. I'm looking at his bio now, and here's my favorite paragraph. During his first year in business, Hafer sold everything he owned and worked two additional jobs in order to sustain the company,

running it out of his garage. It was Hafer's father, a logger and a mechanic who taught him the value of discipline and hard work. Anything worth doing was worth doing right the first time, as dad said, and Hafer has maintained a strong work ethic and an unwavering commitment to craftsmanship. So lots of good stuff. I believe that's entirely true. Having tasted his brew, I'm a member of the club. I get two shipments every month, and it's always different

and interesting. I mean, for the first time I tried this coffee at your house around your birthday, I was like, wow, this is a different brew than the normal pods that you would pull out. out of the wall and put in the currig. Out of the basket. Yeah, his coffee's a different brew. His company is a different kind of company. I mean, he really, it started with him roasting coffee in his garage. They have over 1,000 employees today,

a robust foundation that does great work in the veteran community, and a marketing department that churns out some of the most inappropriate, subversive, irreverent videos that you're ever going to have the, pleasure to find. It's a wide-ranging conversation with another guy I'm happy to say is going to be my friend for the foreseeable future. You're going to like him. Evan Hayfer. I recommend listening with a cup of coffee in hand, something black and hot. Just because you're pooping doesn't mean you're out of harm's way. Evan Hayfer, how are you? I'm great, man. I'm right where you left me when we last spoke three weeks ago, sitting here in my office, enjoying a sensible cup of AK-47 out of my

ember mug, not a sponsor. That is a good mug. It's not a bad mug, man. Chuck, what can we do about getting them? I've been plugging them shamelessly now for like a year to no avail. I guess we'll just have to reach out to ember mugs. That's what they're called, ember? Yeah.

Ember, yeah. They keep your beverage of choice hot for hours on end. I think Starbucks might have bought them actually I can't remember They're not buying you guys are they Good God no I'm like the exact antithesis to them

They would fucking hate me I've been watching what you've done for years now How much of that is real Like do you look at Starbucks to see what they're doing And then affirmatively green light And action plan Based on doing the complete polar opposite. No, I don't pay attention to what they do at all anymore, actually. I used to, but it's just,

I think I lived in Seattle for a number of years. I was definitely part and partisan to the coffee culture in Seattle, and I hated it. I hated a lot of everything it had to stand for because it was just really ridiculous, just absurd. And a lot of Seattle just in general is absurd. It's a beautiful city. I love it. It's a lot like San Francisco, obviously. We were talking about that. But I think it's just my natural inclination to go the opposite direction. You know, if you got a bunch of

idiots walking off a cliff, I'm like, I'm not going to do that. But then again, if you have a bunch of sane people walking away from the cliff, you just might be the guy who says, you know what? I'm going to walk off that cliff. Because nobody else is doing it. I'm wondering what's at the bottom of that thing. What did they use to call that when Vikings

used to send their elderly to the top of cliffs to have them jump off when they became burdened on the village. I forget what that was called. But there's an actual term for it. Socialism. Yeah. Socialism. Socialism. It was basically the precursor to bungee jumping, except they hadn't invented the bungee yet.

So it was just jumping. Slightly behind the curve. It was just jumping. It wasn't bungee jumping. It was same thrill, hard to replicate. It was not unlike the whole. evolution of the parachute. You know, a lot of people don't know this, but for years, people were just diving out of planes. And they eventually, they thought, you know what? If we had a way we could float

gently to the earth, we could probably do this over and over. Who was the coward that invented that necessity, right? So who was the coward of the county that was like, you know what? I think I'm just going to get something that's going to allow me to float to the ground. I don't know about you guys. you probably do have like an actual answer to that question though do you know who the first guy was to like really field test the parachute and what kind of experimentation might have preceded the moment where an actual human jumped out of an actual plane to float gently to earth so the answer to this question is

I don't know but I'm sure I could tell you a fantastic story about it I seem to recall the first people that were jumping out of planes were actually paratroopers. So from military or historical context, it was paratroopers that were jumping. So I would imagine the first paratroopers or parachutists would have been the pilots that were jumping from airplanes that were just always going down. A story that I do have that is directly related to this is my wife's grandfather. was one of the first original 10 Army aviators. So he flew a biplane.

And Losson Army Airfield was actually named after him because he crashed his plane. The interesting thing was not that he crashed his plane and died. It was how many times he had crashed his plane leading into the one that was ultimately fatal. It was a constant and ever-present theme in his journal. I crashed my plane today. Then again in this farm field and landed it hard here and did this.

And, you know, I had to take out some hose and take some tractor parts. And as you're tearing these things apart, you're realizing these people were flying experimental aircraft in a time in which they shouldn't have been because there's no way the safety requirements of today would have ever allowed them to do this. And they're just flying them around. No way. No way. Everything was an experiment. Every day was this constant state of fixing and experimenting while trying to survive, which I found absolutely fascinating. So putting myself into the thought of the first 10 Army Aviators where everything was broken all the time.

You just learn to crash your plane over and over again. and then fix it, get it back up in the air. Well, one, how utterly terrifying. You're flying the equivalent of like a winged lawn tractor. It's exceptional. I mean, I can't even imagine that psychology of an individual like that. First of all, I bet you can because I bet there are a lot of metaphorical lessons in crashing a plane with crashing a business. And to me, the object lesson there.

is, okay, these planes crash all of the time. Right. And it's important that we figure out how to fly in a way that doesn't result in so many crashes, but we know that getting there is going to be painstaking, laborious, and fraught with more peril. So in the meantime, why don't we just try and perfect some way of ejecting out of this thing before the point of impact? And so the whole business of paratrooping and parish.

shooting just kind of begins as a completely rational way to hedge your bets. And every interesting person that I know of today, whether they're wearing a uniform or farming the ground or being an entrepreneur, is just trying to find a rational way to hedge their bets. I always have primary alternate contingency and emergency. I actually do. I skydive. So I think I talked to this point a little bit. I was talking to somebody about just data. How many malfunctions there are? How many annually? What type of malfunctions are there?

Why are there fatalities just in general in skydiving? I was down in San Diego not to want to go skydiving. And I was thinking about, okay, so I'm strapping these two pieces of cloth with string onto my back. And I'm jumping out of this airplane, which is, it's insane, but it's super. fun, but statistically it's safe because if you can train yourself, you understand how to do it, you know, it's like one in a million chance in order to have a fatality, give or take. But then I was like, well, why don't you have three parachutes then? Because if you have two, and it's like, you know, one in a million, well, if I have three

and they're all packed to requirements, you know, the law of, I guess it's, I'm exponent or what will we call that, but you're escalating. Exponential calamity based on whatever it is, right? And I was like, well, why don't we have three? So I started asking around, why don't what? Do you guys know why there's not three? Why do you only have two? Like, what I've determined was everybody would laugh at you if you had three.

So that's why you don't have three. Well, also, where would you put it? You know, you got one on the back, one on the front. Isn't this the reserve in the front? So in the new parachutes, there's two and they're essentially both in what the container on your back, which looks like a little backpack. There's your main and then your reserve. So if you had three, you'd have your main, your reserve, and you'd have one on the front. So you'd have a belly reserve.

But I've asked a bunch of people this because I was just curious, why don't we have three? Like if you know that you're going to have a catastrophic malfunction or there's a possibility of this and one out of a million jumps. and you know that you're going to have a malfunction, give or take one malfunction per 100 jumps. If he had three parachutes, and everybody's answer to that was, well, that would just look ridiculous. So it just looked ridiculous.

I mean, look, that's what Will Chamberlain said after he scored over 100 points in a famous basketball game because he finally got over himself and started shooting foul shots between his legs, started taking the granny shot. And he said every record there was. And finally, you know, the guy went from like a 40% free throw shooter

to 98 overnight. And then the next day, he went back to shooting at the old-fashioned way because people laughed at him. They just couldn't bear it. So, I mean, I know you're joking, but it is true. It's not wanting to be laughed at, but it's also, I mean, don't you think as a guy who's been in, some of the most dangerous places in the world routinely for most of your professional career,

that zero fatalities, it's kind of like zero COVID. That's not the goal. The goal is not to have zero calamities parachuting. Like, we could wear helmets and lower the speed limits to 20 miles an hour and save 40,000 lives a year. But we don't do that because we're okay with 40,000 deaths. Risk management. with it, right? I was thinking when we spoke last time that I really wanted to pick your brain about safety and homeostatic risk and just your whole thoughts on risk, not just as a green beret and

a former CIA guy, but as a coffee lover and an entrepreneur, let me ask it like this. Is there a more important four-letter word than coffee? I know you know many. It'd be cafe, but I was going to say risk. Is there a more important four-letter word to riff on than that? I mean, I can think of one. It starts with F and ends with K, just importance and just dialogue and usage because it has so much diversity. But no, I think, yeah. Black?

Funk. Funk. Yeah, clearly funk. You know, risk, it's interesting, the older I get, the more I think about it, and the more I try to put things into context as to the previous 45 years of my life, how important that's been. So it's interesting you bring it up, because it's been on my mind quite a bit. I've kind of come to some very definitive conclusions,

which is I have to have a certain amount of when you're pushing yourself outside of your comfort level and you're trying to achieve, from my perspective, I've always tried to achieve clarity from the experience, which is what does this feel like? What is this experience? Because through experience, you can drive wisdom. And oftentimes these experiences are very difficult, if not impossible, for a lot of people to go out and experience.

So risk is something that, you know, You always have to mitigate against it because you have to assume a certain amount, but you also have to make sure that you're mitigating. And you have primary alternate and contingency planning. You've pre-built some training in there to make sure that you can survive. And then you pursue the endeavor, not trying to completely eliminate all, I would say, the psychological and physical effects of it, because that's part of it. It's just managing them.

I remember this thought very early, probably in my early 20s, where I would go out and do, you know, climbing and whitewater kayaking and a lot of these high-paced adrenaline activities where you couldn't necessarily control, directly control every aspect of it. But it would allow you to put yourself into a situation where you had to mitigate risk through learning a skill, control your adrenaline, identify the problem and navigate the problem and navigate the, problem and what I felt was I was preparing myself for combat in a way that I could do these things and still have fun, but then also prepare myself for something that I could just only imagine. And then finding myself in combat early on, one, I realized that every idea that I had related to combat was completely false. Two, it completely disrupted and changed my brain development. So it changed me as a human forever and good and bad ways both. And then the constant repetition of combat for the course of over a decade of my life, what I was more interested in was

how am I using this experience? What am I gleaning from it? And then how do I transfer the knowledge to somebody else to increase their likelihood of surviving? So risk, just in general, going back to your point or your question, I think you have to assume not everyone. I would encourage everyone to assume a certain amount of risk to properly live the human experience. So to your point, you know, we're not wearing helmets and driving around at 20 miles an hour, but I think that you have to push the body and mind to develop skill to learn to be uncomfortable and then to assume a certain amount of risk in order properly experience this fantastic and beautiful life we've been gifted with.

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don't take a chance on a foreign ranch, get good ranchers now. E-Ha! What did you have wrong about combat? Like, what were the fundamental myths and misperceptions that you were disabused of when you finally found yourself over there in the thick of it? You have a narrative that is built falsely based on entertainment. So you have books and movies.

And some are accurate, but most depict heroism or some act of heroism. I found out very early, there's working the problem, but there's not heroism. It's way more complex. You will see it, but it's not depicted in reality the way that it's depicted in the movies. It's fucking hard work. And it's so difficult that it requires the feeling of being incapacitated with fear. over inundated with every experience you could imagine and then just trying to walk

can be difficult. So as you're going and conducting the art of war, you're trying to overcome your own internal, it's a feeling of, well, I'm scared out of my fucking mind. Sorry, if I keep cussing, I apologize, but I'm scared out of my mind, but I have to accomplish this task. So there's so much fear initially,

like the first time I experienced combat, there's so much fear, and there's so much adrenaline, and it's so fast, you don't actually have time to comprehend what's happening. You don't know. And the more reps you get in, the more you realize,

okay, you can slow the circumstance, stands down because of your experience in this, you can encourage yourself to overcome fear, but it's measuring and controlling and it's discipline every fraction of a second that you're living in that experience. There is no context to heroism until it's either you're looking at something or until you've had the experience and you've thought back on. on it. But in the context of the moment, it doesn't happen that way. You're just trying to accomplish your mission and then stuff it down, stuff all your fear down into a hole and weld it into a box. And hopefully it doesn't rear it's an ugly head. Where were you?

That first moment of scrotum tightening sphincter slamming fear. The first time I was ever shot at, believe it or not, was in the Philippines. This is a great story. And I didn't quite understand what was happening until after, but it's a super funny story. I was on patrol and we were just doing a kind of a training mission, but there's a group of communist insurgents around in the islands that we were working in. And I had gone off to go take a poop. And language. You're welcome. And I went off and I was like, had my pants around my ankles. And I was down in this little ditch area. And it was like there's kind of an overgrown jungle around me. And I was kind of open, but I was down in a little ditch area.

And the brush started like breaking apart around me. And I was like, that is so weird. What is that? What is that? Is that like a little bug or something? What is that? And then what felt like 10 minutes or whatever, I was having this thought of like, what is that bug?

You know, what is that thing? And then I realized, those are bullets. These are rounds coming in. And I dropped down in the ditch and the Filipino counterparts went out and snatched up the dude that was shooting at me when I was taking a poop. But I didn't realize that I was actually... You know what, though, dude, that's more than war. Bad form. Yes, I was going to say, more than war, more than fear.

This is a story of bad manners. Is there no dignity in battle anymore? Can a man crap in peace? No dignity. dude was trying to put a hole in my head while I was taking a poop. That was the first time and I was like, whoa, not a lot of fear, not a lot going on. And then the first actual time, I'd cross the Berm into Iraq early on in the invasion from the southern, from Kuwait. And it was a week or so before our first engagement.

It was south of Baghdad. And then it started with a fairly big explosion. then kind of a big chunk of fire that went in behind us, behind my vehicle. And that's kind of how it started. And it was like a Volkswagen-sized piece of fire that just like went behind us. And I was like, well, I don't think that was an asteroid. I think that might have been some type of, you know, explosion. Unition.

Yeah. And the building next to us had kind of broken apart. and then we were checking to see if our vehicles, if all of them were up. So we had four vehicles in this movement. I was on the radio. Actually, I was on the radio. My team leader was on the radio. It was like vehicle two, are you up?

And we couldn't get them on the radio, so we thought they were gone. And I was driving. And then we had a 50-call gunner on the top. And I had a passenger who was my team leader at the time. And I was turning over to him, and I was like, hey, man, we have to get the f*** out of here. And he was like, you think? And I was like, hey dude.

And I said it again. I was kind of yelling at him. We were locked in like really aggressive traffic. And the whole thing was kind of tearing apart around us. And I kept turning over to him and telling him the same thing. And then after we drove through and everybody came out of it alive and we didn't have any vehicles that were down or anything like that. And my team later told me in it. I'll never forget this, but it was sage advice.

He was like, if you don't have anything to offer that will solve the problem, just don't offer it up. And I was like, yeah, okay. That was the first actual engagement that we were in, but it happened fast and slow. The interesting thing about this is it's really fast and it's really slow at the same time. It's wild. It's like time changes. And the other piece is that other people remember it differently. So, you know, vehicle two remembers it differently.

Vehicle three remembers it differently. Like other people from different perspectives, they look at it differently even today. And I think, you know, one of the most prominent engagements later, which was six years later, but it was in Mosul, I was pursued from the north edge. And Mosul's basically about the size of L.A. And I was at that point working for the CIA

and I was in what we call the low-vis vehicle. And I was in a black BMW. And I was being pursued and shot at from the north edge of Mosul to the south edge of Mosul through the entire city by about 50 vehicles. as I'm trying to get to the Southern Bridge

and then ultimately into Diamondback in Mosul. So we were in a sustained, not engagement, but ambush while trying to flee for our lives in a very precarious situation for an extended period of time. By that point, I'd had six years of multiple different engagements. my heart rate probably didn't go up above 75. That was my next question, Evan. That's what I'm trying to get at.

It seems like everybody I've ever talked to who is open to risk or who engages in activities, I mean from soldiers to stunt junkies, whatever, they all talk about a point where they get bored of being scared. Yeah. My words, not theirs, but in some way, shape, or form. that sentiment always comes out. And I get it. I mean, how can you drive through the totality of L.A.

being shot at and not eventually just get to the point where, I don't know, it must have been halfway funny. These guys must be terrible shots. This chase scene has been going on for an hour. You missed again. Missed again. And it just becomes a problem you have to solve. It becomes very analytical.

It becomes very transactional. It's just, this is a problem I have to solve. I'm going to solve it. And if I don't, I'm going to die. And it's just that simple. Now, what I didn't want was I didn't want, like, my head cut off, right? And I didn't think that was necessarily like, ever-present thought. It was just like, oh, man, like, you know, these guys, it was the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police.

They were going to do it. They just mistook our vehicle. But you can't, like, stop and go, hey, guys, mistaken identity. Hey, they were pursuing to kill. And the only thing that saved us, I was on a radio talking to a helicopter above us for quite a while trying to talk them in. Eventually, I was like, well, there's a line of about 50 cars. Just look for that line of 50 vehicles. You're going to be able to put the skids, like, close, close and drop them down on the hood of the car.

But that was it. My last shot, like, they had the bridge shut off, and they had me, like, checkmate. But that helicopter came in and put its skids on the top of the car, and that saved our ass. Wait a minute. On the top of your car? The car you were driving? Yeah, the helicopter came in and just dropped right down on top of us, and they had rocket pods on the Kiowa.

There was a little Kiowa helicopter. And I knew they were going to come in, but I was like, gosh, man, man, I hope they aren't late. Because once they got us earmarked, I think we were good. This is the cavalry. This is the last scene in every famous Western. The cavalry comes in, lands on your vehicle, and the enemy says, okay, you know, enough. Enough, yeah. That's a good one.

Sorry, I'm not seeing the full picture here. The thing is coming down on top of the car and then what? Just shooting at the guys behind you? No, no. Once the American helicopters show up, everybody knows what the deal is. Oh, and they back off. Gotcha. Before that, they think that we're just nefarious actors that are going through town, you know,

that they're trying to pursue and kill, they don't realize that, hey, we're actually Americans because we're doing a good job of hiding. We weren't trying to be seen or known as Americans. We were trying to blend in. Well, we did such a good job of blending in that they were like, these guys are up to no good.

Let's go. These guys got to get dead. We've got to get these guys. Yeah, that was my last stop. I had nothing left. That was my last, there was the bridge. Like the last bridge I had,

I had no other exits. They had me cut off, like, front and back. That was it. So I can't remember exactly what I told and I talked to my buddy that was next to me. I was like, I hope this works out. Now, is your buddy, was he also in the CIA? Yeah, we were all there. We were all at the CIA at the time.

He's a former Green Beret, too. Great dude. Super funny. And then it became, you know, it became just a funny story. And I think, you know, that went to Afghanistan after that. And I think the last thing I did in Afghanistan as I went out, I had my rifle, I had a plate carrier, and I put an extra magazine in my back pocket. That's how loose things got.

I was like, I'm going to wear blue jeans. I'm just going to throw this magazine in my back pocket as I go out and go out the door and go get that guy. That's how kind of loosey-goosey things got towards the end. I was like, you know what, I might be able to like, I should probably find a different profession, because this one I think might be riding the line on just a little bit too complacent. I'm not sure. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting. and I guess inevitable too.

I mean, how long can you stay, you know, to the earlier point? How long can you be in a constant state of high alert? How long can you constantly check every box, every protocol? Yeah, complacency is always the killer. How many tours were you into at this point? I counted them up. You know, we do like 90-day rotations. A lot of people didn't realize that.

The CIA do like 90 to 120-day rotation. So you do three to four months. And I kind of went a bunch of different places over the course of 2000, between Green Beret and CIA time. I think I did 43 trips, give or take, most of those in Iraq and Afghanistan, some in like Southeast Asia, some in like Israel. But it's interesting from the context of I had like a, really wide variety of interesting experiences that I like just absolutely cherish even today.

Very few people have, and I've been very fortunate in this, which is very few people have had the experience to go out and, you know, lead indigenous armies doing direct action or doing things like that where, you know, you're going out and pursuing the enemy. super super fortunate to have been able to do that and there are things that that i've been able to do either in southeast asia i think you know and i've talked about it a few times where taking fan boats up a river in southeast Asia in pursuit of the enemy i don't care who you are that's cool man this is cool the experience of being able to live in another country and then work in the art of war

and pursue the enemy with your host national force it's incredible I mean you have a dexterity at least I do right where I have a profound amount of respect for the men that I've worked with both Americans

Iraqis, Filipinos Israelis it's regardless I have this I think a unique understanding as to we're all basically the same like we want the same things. We want to be able to raise our families.

We want to be able to have our kids walk down in the store and buy loaves of bread. We want to be able to send our kids to school. Like we want all the same things. But there's fractions of a percentile of people that always want chaos regardless of where they are. And the logical aspects of our society that seek unification and stabilization, we're bound internationally. We have a love for stabilization and encouragement,

positivity, and there's always going to be these fractions of our society that are just built to cause chaos. And it doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter where you are. It's always the same. Whether you're in Southeast Asia and Abu Sayyaf or whether you're at Middle East

and you've got, you know, name the terrorist faction or if you're here and you get, you know, wing nuts that, you know, want to throw Molotov cocktails at federal buildings or whatever they're doing. There's always a section of people that are crazy. So everything on your resume, I mean, at a glance, it's obviously you're a patriot. Obviously, you're a warrior. Obviously, you're very good at what you've done and what you do.

But I think... Debatable. Debatable. I still have all my fingers and toes. Like, these are my best trophies. I still have all my fingers and toes. I guess that's, you know... You did something right.

I did something right or I just got really damn lucky, which could be both. I did something right and I got really damn lucky. You also did something weird, dude. You embarked upon a mission to bring the best coffee in the world to the most dangerous places on the planet. So while you're doing all of this, ostensibly, while you're getting shot at while you're taking a poop in the Philippines, while you're driving through L.A. in the CIA getting chased down by, right? You're always thinking about your next cup of coffee. And that, I mean, it is weird. And it's super interesting.

And what I would like to talk to you about is how all of your experiences, both in the Green Berets and the National Guard, and growing up in Idaho and taking all of these chances as an adventurer. And then realizing in Afghanistan, you're getting complacent, it's time to get out before somebody punches your ticket. And now you're running a company. That's a better story. I kind of got fired. Not to cut you off, but yeah, I've got basically let go from there. I like to emphasize that with people. Like fired like court-martialed?

No, like, you know, my last year there, my last couple years, I was really burnt. Like, I was really burnt. And there's a group of us. We kind of put in a lot of hard miles over there. And we were fried with kind of bureaucracy. And I'd kind of like, for a lack of a better term, I'd eaten enough of the shit sandwiches, right? And I was really just kind of not pleasant to be around. And I just wasn't pleasant.

And I went in and I kind of, I determined that this was kind of the last gig. I was at a training element out there when they said, you know what, I think it's time for you to go and find something new. I didn't really fight it too hard. I was like, yeah, that's probably fair. You're right. I would already committed to leaving. You know, I'd had my first daughter at that point. And I think it was, you know, how they describe kind of self-sabotage to a certain degree.

I had my first kid. I wanted to see her grow up. I really hated the profession at that point. Like I was not in a good place. You know, not depressed or anything like that. I just, I had these fears that were scaring me more than anything that I had been put in in any circumstance in my life at that point. And the biggest fear that I had was because I was numb, right?

my whole emotional aspects of my being, I was numb. I was just numb. And I had cut everything off emotionally for so many years that what I was facing was a fear of not being able to love my children. And that terrified me. It just absolutely terrified me. And it was just time to leave. And it took me, oh,

I think it took me to rebuild and replenish and be able to truly connect. It took me two years, three years, the first three years of my first child. By the time number two came around, it was completely different. But the repetitions in war, they don't come without a cost, right? And we talked a little bit about it, which is your survival instincts kick in and you have to become a, in order to survive and then think and work through a problem, you have to chop everything off. You have to be very analytical. You have to think about how we're going to solve the problem. But that requires trimming emotional baggage away.

And when you do that year after year after year, what happens is that isolates your emotions, at least for me. I don't know if it happens with everybody. And it takes a while to start building those emotional connections back to where you can really actually connect with people. Because the other piece was you get used to losing friends. You get used to losing people that you love dearly, that you love. that you love so deeply that you can't imagine your life without them, but you also have to accomplish your mission. So you're not only trimming back your emotional baggage to accomplish your mission,

you're also not connecting with people emotionally as a preservation method to make sure that those emotions don't affect you through mission success. So you start to feel a lot like a robot. And that just scares the living hell out of me even today. All right. So you identified the fear, decided it was not for you, took steps, came home. There's an adjustment period. But at some point, you've got to pay the bills.

At some point, you know, I know that you're entrepreneurial as kind of a default. And I know the story of your partners and your friends and how you came together. but I'm fascinated as to what happened that led you to go from a guy who was just brewing coffee in his garage because he liked the way it tasted to running a company with a thousand employees right now and tending to a foundation that looks after. I mean, it's a hell of a spot to be in right now, and the road had to be crooked. Shameless plug. Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble.

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noblespirates.com. K-N-O-B-E-L-Spirits.com. Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. Well, it was necessity. I think a lot of it was necessity. When I left the CIA, I wrote myself a mission statement, which was my mission was to transition out of government service and live a happy and fulfilling life had nothing to do with finance or business goals or anything like that. I didn't understand happiness and I didn't understand those types of connections. And what I needed was I couldn't work for anyone else either. So I knew after several years of working within a government bureaucracy, I couldn't work for anybody else. I absolutely could psychologically bring myself to work for another incompetent bureaucrat ever again.

I was like, oh, my God, I can't do it. So I told myself, okay, whatever you do, you have to work for yourself. Don't accept a substandard culture. So you have to build it because you have to build what you want. And then three, I had this passion. My wife was actually, she's a coffee person too. So I'd had this passion. I was roasting coffee in my garage and taking it with me overseas.

And it was just a hobby that I loved. I would roast pounds and pounds of coffee and take it with me in Iraq or Afghanistan. I was experimenting and doing all types of different coffee when I was off. I'd go to coffee festivals and, you know, conferences. It was just something I really got into. I geeked out of it. And my wife had a coffee shop, or she'd managed a coffee shop in Denver. So she kind of unpacked the economics for me.

She was like, oh, well, this is how it works. And I was like, oh, okay. Well, let's go try to start a coffee company. And she thought it was a little bit crazy at first. And to pay the bills, I was actually out teaching. I was doing advanced pistol carbine. I was teaching courses for, like, law enforcement and things like that for how to be more tactically proficient. So I was making, you know, our rent by doing this.

during the day and then roasting coffee at night. And we couldn't afford starting a coffee shop. So I started building my own websites or my own website, taking my own product photos. And then I met my buddies who were also really good at making funny videos. So I was like, well, shoot, if we combine my love for coffee and your love for content, we put these two things together. We might just have a business. And my goal was just to be able to pay the rent.

That was it. I just really was like, hey, I want to be able to pay the rent. I want to be able to make sure that I have my mortgage covered and put my kids through college. I'm good. After the first couple years, I realized, well, shoot, we can make a big impact. We can start to hire veterans. We can start to build what I call an ecosystem. We can put a dent in the universe that is impactful, not just paying my mortgage or my rent anymore. We can put a debt in the universe.

Evan, I think it's important to point out, when you talk about buddies who have a proclivity for making videos, if people haven't seen these videos, they're not going to understand what you're talking about. Forgive me, but I tend to try and distill things in, you know, analogies. But the first video I saw, I think you were squirted in the face with bear spray before attempting to shoot out a target. And of course, the big one, I think it was 2016, I saw it, how to be an American. Yeah. I mean, you guys made some videos that millions of people looked at, and it was a weird combination of jackass meets South Park, only with real special operators, highly trained warriors, just really embracing their inner eight-year-old and their love for things that go boom. Right.

And their appreciation of the absurd. of life. And I just want people to understand this is not your granddad's video. Well, and initially what we were doing, Matt and Jared, so Matt Best and Jared, my partners, they were entertaining the veteran and military community. That was their thing. What I was doing was I was roasting coffee for the veteran and military community. When we got together, when we put all of our heads together, even today, the stuff that we come up with is, to your point, it's absurd. And that's what it's supposed to be. It's over the top. It's supposed to be funny and irreverent. It is built to entertain people, but we're telling the story.

We're having fun. To my perspective and what I'm trying to accomplish is we want to have fun. The point of this exercise is like, how do we entertain ourselves while we're here? How do we learn? How do we develop? How do we entertainer solves. For us to go out and put some of these things in video was just an exercise in our own kind of creative and artistic endeavor, but then putting a product I dearly love on top of a form of entertainment. People used to always ask like, how in the hell does this sell coffee? And we're like, I don't know, but it is. So I guess. I've got a question too. How in the hell does it entertain you to get squirted in the face with bear spray? It doesn't entertain him. It entertains me.

It hurts like hell. I mean, that video, when I see that video, it's like your hair, just the force of the spray is enough to just jam your eyes open. It has to be. No, I did. It went, my eyes were closed, and it went under my eyelids into my eyes. I'm sure. So the way that I came up with this was I was interested to see if my wife, because at the time, she wasn't very proficient with firearms, and we weren't living in the greatest neighborhood.

And so I wanted to see if she could protect the house with bear spray. But I was like, can bear spray work on humans? I don't know. It seems like it should. Like, it's a big cloud of, you know, mace or whatever this is. It seems like a rational thing to be able to use in a home defense way. And so I was having this conversation with myself, right? I was like, does this work?

Well, the only way I'm going to get to use this in an effective way to figure out if it works is by doing it on myself. So I'm not going to waste the opportunity to discover if this works without filming it and putting it a piece of content that might help me sell coffee. It's science. It's research. Yeah. It's research. It's research. It's science.

I don't like to. It's science. Where we were at was how do we build. and make videos that we think are funny that also sell a product that we love. So I'm the coffee guy. Matt and Jared, we're the content guys, so we just teamed up and we're like,

all right, well, coffee and content. And then now, you know, fast forward eight years. We're publicly traded. And I don't know. I think we've done a billion impression views, give or take. And we still find each other extremely funny.

I was just in Texas. and the three of us were filming a video that we thought was hilarious. And you know what? We might be the only people on the planet that think it's funny, but it's still working. Evan. It's still working. First of all, let's not flash forward too far,

but let me make the point. Chuck's heard me say this a gazillion times about a lot of different things. But the idea, like what really comes through when you watch these videos, and I want to encourage everybody go to BRCC on. YouTube, just Google it, and you'll see what I'm talking about. These guys, first and foremost, are clearly trying to amuse themselves. Then they appear to be trying to amuse their brothers and sisters in arms. And then maybe, maybe they're trying to sell you some coffee. And this is what I meant initially when I said, you must look at everything Starbucks does.

and go the opposite way. You were daring people, daring people to drink your coffee, daring them to watch these videos. And the more you dared them, the more they watched. And the more they watched, the more they drank. Yeah. Well, I don't like the way that corporations or companies market to people, just in general. I find it boring. And there's not a value proposition here. You're polluting my time with something that creates zero value. It actually takes away from my day. So what I'm trying to do is create value. So entertain, inform, and inspire.

And all I'm trying to do is create value in somebody's life, where they return the favor and purchase the product versus, I don't hire marketing agencies. I do all this stuff in-house. I still design all of our products. I design or drive design on shirts and hats and coffee bags, you name it. I design everything. My entire value chain is not built on the way that I think a lot of companies try to sell people stuff.

They're listening to marketing agencies and they're listening to people that have been convinced that this is the way that you do commerce, whereas I just don't think that's the way we do it. I think if I create value in your life with a piece of content and you're entertained by it or you're informed by it, whatever that might be, you should trust me to also roast your coffee and create value for you there too. So I'm trying to build trust in companionship from the get, not just give you an ad and hope that you convert based on some big-braid marketing guy. Like, it typically don't even like marketing people. They just bother me, just in general. Well, it's the curse of the focus group, right? Yeah.

Something tells me you've never focused grouped anything. No, I don't think so. I mean, not that I'm aware of. I'm sure, like, some corporate executive below me has paid for some focus group somewhere, and they just hide it from me. Focus groups are really good at getting rid of the really bad ideas and the really great ideas

and leaving you with the soft, squishy stuff in the middle. And there's nothing soft or squishy about your approach to marketing, which is the other reason that I... You know, I wanted to ask you, that video, I think it was how to be an American. So this was back in 2016, and Chuck, I don't know if you've seen this one. It went completely viral. And it kind of blew their business up. And I remember thinking, well, there you go.

They're not going to be able to service the distribution. So I want you to talk about that. It just occurred to me, listening to your earlier stories. It's kind of like in combat when technology gets so far in front of tactics that you wind up with a whole series of problems that you just couldn't anticipate. You were creating marketing materials that were driving a level of interest in your product that you couldn't possibly fulfill. No. And I want to know what that felt like when you realized. holy crap, how are we going to ship 30,000 cases of coffee in seven days or whatever the numbers were?

You're right. And I think, like, how to be an American, and there's a couple videos in there that really took off. You know, we did Christmas Steel or we were shooting Christmas Carols on Steel, too. It was like 55 million views. No, explain what that means again, just so people really understand visually what you were doing in that video. It's like a gun range xylophone, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what we did. We took suppressed 9mm rifles, and we went out to the range,

and we dressed up like Santa Claus, and we played Christmas music on... And we're like, this would be funny. It was. I had said it like six months before that. I was like, guys, we've got to do this. It'd be super fun because we're... My partners are really musically inclined.

They play a lot of different instruments. But we got to do it for a video because I think it'll do... well and I actually just want to see it and so that's what we did it took us like four hours i don't know how long it took us took us like no time and uh it went to like 55 million views and then how to be an american was before that and we were cruising around we filmed all that on an iPhone so everything that you saw in that video was on an iPhone we edited it in i movie and we just released it and we shot that over the course of like here and there like every other other

week or whatever. We put it together over the course of a couple weeks and Matt was doing it. And we thought it would do well. You know, this is going to be funny. It would surprise me about a lot of this that shouldn't have surprised me is how many people don't have a sense of humor?

It's surprising. They're committed to just like being so literal that it's so absurd where you're like, why are you so literal? And then it's also surprising on the other where, to your point, which was the logistics being able to catch up, because that coffee is CAF, and it's caffeinated as...

Got it. Yeah. Funk. And I've got pictures of people at church drinking calf, and, you know, the priest or the minister making it for everyone. And they're like, we just love this calf so much. Thank you for giving it to us. And I'm like...

And I was talking to one of the ministers. I was like, do you know what that means? He was like, oh yeah, but I love it. Oh, I love it. I'm like, okay, just checking. I just wanted to check. And we shot that commercial, and I think we didn't quite understand, to your point, which was technology had surpassed our ability to fulfill anything manually.

And so we were using these, like, very explosive growth formulas, and we didn't quite quite comprehend the power. It's kind of like a teenager jumping into a Formula One car. Like, I think this is going to turn out great. We had to turn everything off. So we had to turn everything off in the store for two to three weeks, I think, where we couldn't sell anything more because we had sold and then back sold, back ordered and sold so much that we were, we turned everything off and we were sold

out for three weeks. And all we could do was, you know, roast, pick, pack and ship for weeks. And then that would happen about every quarter. We would do that until I built my new roasting facility just outside of Manchester, Tennessee. I finally built something that could not outrose my capacity without, or rewind. I thought I had built something that wouldn't outrest my capacity and then something new will happen you know like bass pro called and said hey we want to put you in all the bass pro and cabellas and then we're like well i thought i had enough capacity oops it's been eight years of we can't put content out because we'll sell too much

when we do put content out we have to turn everything off then we have to build more and then we can put content out and then we can it's just like it's interesting because it's constant state of flux between building more capacity, putting content out, increasing this, decreasing that, increasing. It's been like working at 20-headed scale that you're always putting, you know, weight on.

And then when you put weight on here, it goes up and you just constantly do this for eight years. And you're like, let's throw a public offering in there too. You know, John Rich, the country music guy? Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's a Fox News correspondent too, right? Well, he's on Fox a bunch. I ran into him. He's got a show on Fox. And we had a crazy conversation. The pursuit. Yeah, the pursuit. We wound up recording a song together last year. Santa's got a dirty job. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. I was talking to him. He's got a line of whiskey called Redneck Riviera. And I've got new whiskey called Noble, named after my granddad. And, you know, I asked him a couple months ago, you know, any advice in general as I jump into this.

And he said, yeah, service your distribution. That's all this game is. Right. You know, he said, you got a little bit of celebrity, people like you. You'll probably be able to get your whiskey on the shelves. But when you do, you will need to service that distribution. And you will be surprised at how much work you'll need to do. And the more shelves you get on, the more servicing you'll need.

the less, right, it's the same point you're making. And I just think it's such relevant advice to any business that I've ever seen. And really, it's kind of relevant to the art of war. Your reach can't exceed your grasp. And the thing that interests me the most is that your team loves making videos. Like, leave them to their own devices and they'll make three of these things a day. And as a result, they'll run you out of business. Right. If you don't put sides on it. That's interesting to me.

It's interesting because there's one section of the company and they're entertainers. They're storytellers and entertainers. And I've built a pretty large apparatus of people that are content creators. I have 138 people in my marketing and media department, which is astounding. My God. That's unbelievable. Are you kidding me? 138 people in your marketing and media department.

And you're saying that you've got to slow them down because otherwise they're going to well, no, they're going to set everything off the rails. He's saying he hates marketing and he has 138 people in a marketing department. I don't call it marketing. It's branding. I don't like marketing. Marketing is too corporate and transactional to me. It's like I'm creating like what I feel as a community.

A good for instance is I have 25 people in what I call coffee or die. I don't know if you guys have seen any of that. But coffee or die, we just took three awards for overseas journalism from, we were competing against Reuters, New York Times, like everybody. We won all the three big awards for reporting in war zones. We were competing against national publications. We swept it compared to the people. There was only six awards. We won half.

Nobody's ever done that. So I have 25 journalists that are constantly reporting. I had more journalists on the ground doing more reporting in the Ukraine than Reuters, for instance, doing more sophisticated, detailed reporting from the front lines because I feel, from a veteran's perspective, from a guy that spent a huge percentage of my life overseas, nobody can report on conflict, what guys that have been in conflict. And I'm very interested in these things because from a veteran and from a guy that's, you and served the majority of my adult life overseas, I want to know what's going on.

So it's just a sidebar conversation, but we're trying to put objective lens in a veteran voice out in the field participating in these things, and we're competing and winning against big publications. So the value proposition there for coffee subscribers or people that, you know, get into Black Rifle as well, I'm going to log into their, you know, blog for a lack of better term. I'm going to see a report from the front lines of Afghanistan with an embedded reporter that's with a special forces ODA. Right? Or I'm going to get front lines reporting from Kabul Afghanistan as the airfield is being seized by the Taliban. But I'm going to get that from a retired Ranger regimental first sergeant that was also on Fox News and CNN and everyone else, Jericho Denman.

So I'm going to get all this stuff. and I'm going to get this at the price of what I'm spending on my coffee already. So I think about it, like, how do I create exponential value within the customer where I think about these things all the time? Before I had this company and I had all these people that I'm blessed to be able to manage or lead, I'm a news junkie too. So I would be constantly figuring out, okay, what's going on here and why? I wanted to know.

So that's like 25 plus people. And then I built another one called Free Range American, which was about putting people in the field. So how do I encourage the veteran community to go out and participate in hunting and fishing and things that require you to go out and be part of your environment? So that also includes conservation. So I'm building these value pieces that are around media, you know, entertain informed inspire,

but they're also outside of black rifle. but they're part of the value chain. And then I want to put people in creative position. So veterans, part of the rehab is not just coming back and getting a job in a cubicle. It's how do I come back, make a transition, how do I create value with a mission-based organization, and then go out and be a creator?

Like, how do I tell stories and create for people? So it's part of the whole thing. Whether or not I'm getting it right, I mean, that's to be to be, baited. But it's fun. It's a ton of fun. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure. But if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local

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I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S. U.S.S.S.A. I think maybe it's important to point out that what you're talking about is not new. Like most big companies today,

understand that their customers want to see something beside the widget that is for sale. But what matters is what's authentic. And what you guys have done, the ecosystem you're building, the foundation that you run, the product that you make, the videos that you put out there are all really consistent around some sort of value proposition. I think what makes you unique is that, look, Nike does the same thing. They just put Colin Kaepernick up on a blackboard or a billboard. Starbucks does the same thing, but they do it around equity or inclusion.

You're doing it around something else. I don't quite know if it's gratitude or if it's, you know, we few, we band of brothers kind of thing. Right. But, man, it obviously works. it's going to be interesting to see what you do in the next 10 years. I call the center of that love. Believe it or not, it's love.

No. I love... What? Yeah, it is. That's Subaru. That's Subaru. You can't take love. That's Subaru. Sorry. I can't. But I'm unashamed in my love for my community and my country. I don't hide from that. Like, I don't care who knows it.

I talk about my community, like my veteran community, my country, what we've built, what we should really cherish and love, like our communities. When I talk about America and everything it means to me, it really traces back to what I feel is the center of my soul. I love it. And so exemplifying the American dream, being able to go out and serve the country, come back, you know, hire and employ my fellow veterans and then give back to my community, and then serve them. something that I'm truly passionate about.

Like all this stuff is like, I have a love for coffee. I have a love for my veteran community. I have a love for my country. I don't care who knows it. And I'm never going to hide from it. And I don't think that we should ever do that. I think there's so many corporations that want to placate this notion of we've done something wrong as a country, whereas I'm trying to talk about all the things that we do right.

and all the things that we should be really proud of what we've done and get out of a negative conversation around, well, this or that or whatever it might be. I think that this is like, I hate saying this because it's going to sound like Fox News, but it's like not in a negative way. It's like the coastal elites, right? But it's true. You go and you talk to corporate America from their ivory tower in like Seattle and San Francisco and Los Angeles. is they don't want to talk about how great this country is.

They don't. They're embarrassed at times. I'm like, it really irritates me. It makes me angry because I served the country because it was my profession. I was passionate about it, but it was really a love for country. When I think about all of the different places that I've been and the world in this country, like there's no place like home. and there's no greater sense of community than going into, you know, a small town or a big city

regardless and sharing meals with the people that you love. It's amazing. These are the experiences that make us uniquely human. And I just hate the negative conversation around aspects of our community or our country where we should absolutely be celebrating them and thinking about how many great things we have versus talking about all the crap. And I don't like it. That's just my diatribe, Mike. I apologize. No, no. Look, I'm going to ask you some of the same questions you ask me on your podcast, which, by the way, how is your podcast doing? And why do you do it? Oh, the podcast is great. You know, just from a numbers perspective, if you measured it from downloads, I think it does relatively well. I think that's been great. And the reason I do it personally is as a guy that started the

company as a CEO, I want people to hear directly from me. I don't have somebody typing up my news wires and talking for me and like dressing it up. Clearly. I don't have any of that. Like clearly. No, you do not. Exactly. I do not. And we'll never do that because it's so disconnected and so in a And it's like part of this corporate culture that I just despise. And I want my customers to know who is running their company that they buy their product from. And it's really important for me for people to hear my voice for representing what we do as a company and be able to tune in every week and be able to get that unfiltered. And sometimes, you know, probably like it or love it or hate it. but people never have to work too hard to find out what I think about a certain issue either.

I talk about it all the time. Well, here's something I wanted to ask you last month that I didn't. How much of what you're doing today do you think is an attempt to in some way get back to that time in Idaho when you were working with your pop and fly fishing and growing up? We talked a lot about work ethic, and I'd appreciate it if you'd riff on that a little bit because I just get the sense, for me anyway, my mom just said it the other day. She's like, your whole career, your whole rap as an apprentice, your whole, everything you're doing is a reversion to the 15-year-old kid that I was trying to nurture back in 1977. And she was right.

And I wonder if there's something in there relevant to you. Definitely. I don't know how many times have said that. I've said that I left Idaho. I used to say it, now I'm older. I left Idaho 20 years ago, and I've spent the last 20 years trying to get back. And my identity is tied into work ethic. So everything about me, good and bad, right, is tied into how hard do I work and how much value am I creating within three streams. My family, my business, and my community. I find zero self-worth outside of how hard do I work to create value within those three aspects of my life. And most of this is all tied to the people that directly influenced me growing up, which is my grandfather. We talked a lot about this. My grandfather, you know, he was the TV repairman,

He was the chainsaw repairman. He was a truck driver. He was a grave digger. He was the sheriff. He literally did every job in the town. And people loved him. But he worked constantly. He built his own house.

He fixed his own cars. He fixed other things for other people. He was a positive influence on other people's lives. He was humorous and jovial and interactive. And like, people were. loved him. He lived in a very small town. I have the actual town green sign that one of my friends bought an auction, 441 people. There was one person that he didn't touch. He kept his bronze star from World War II on his keychain for his entire life. So it was on his keychain to every Toyota pickup

that he ever drove. Every Ford or every Toyota or everything. So it was on his keychain. I remember looking at it from the time I could comprehend or ask a question as to what it was and it was there until he died when I was 21, 22. And I remember looking at his uniform in his closet from World War II. I remember looking at his air metal because he was a highly decorated World War II veteran. And my grandfather was

the he exemplified transition with humility in contribution to community. And that set the template for everything that I am. And so to answer your question, that's what I've been trying to do. I just serve and then transition and then continue to build value. That's it. Well, you pivoted, that's for sure. But I am struck, too, Evan. You talk about family, business, and community, which really, it's a pretty great hydra.

But it's all small, right? I mean, it's all attainable, right? Yeah. Personal. And yet the biggest chunk of real estate on your resume is country. Yeah. So have you reverted to something smaller? or did you feel like when you're out there?

I mean, when people talk about patriotism, it's inexorably linked to a love affair with the country. But most of what we've talked about today is your love affair with family, business, and community. So make sense of that. Well, it's hard. I do. I still have a love affair with the country.

I do. I've always felt that it's continued to get greater. the older I get. And what I've learned, though, is that within serving in the government and the military, sometimes it feels like you're just not making an impact because you're part of a really big machine. And so in order to feel the impact, I truly believe this, is you have to make these smaller incremental gains that you can feel in smaller aspects. So from my perspective, when I look at my family, there are little things that I do every day that I think about every day.

And I have to be a present and loving father for so many different reasons, not only because I want to, but it's also for the friends that I had that don't have the opportunity to be present and loving fathers. So my kids get extra hugs literally every day because there's a thought that goes through my head and through my body every day, every day. It's seven days a week, 365 days a year. When I have the opportunity to hug the kids, I do it, not only for myself, but I do it for my friends that don't have the opportunity to do it.

So that means I have to be extra patient. I have to be present, so I have to be patient, So I have to be patient. I have to be present. I have to be completely and 100% involved. It can't be an exercise about me and I can't let the business overrun my capacity to engage and directly involve myself with my family and my kids. So whether that's my wife or my kids, either one, I have to be present for those that are not here to do that. I have to participate in this.

Then the next piece is, and I've wanted to create this ecosystem where I love my, kids and I love my family and I'm very appreciative of the fact that I have this. It's humbling that I have this. It's truly humbling. And then I get to go from this incredible, loving, and encouraging relationship with my wife and my kids into a building or buildings with a company that I built with people that I love and respect. So I get to go from one place where people love me to another place where people at least tolerate me and I love them. Right. And then as we impact that, then I can take that out into my community, which is my veteran

subculture, my post-GWAT veteran community, and then when we go community to country. So it starts small. It goes family, business, veteran community, community, like bigger, you know, country community. So it just keeps going bigger and bigger. But I can feel if I make the impact on a small. smaller level, I can feel it, and I feel like I'm making incremental gains towards the success criteria that I've laid out. Yeah, that's a great answer, and it's a version of an answer I've

heard a lot that led me to conclude a long time ago that I think sometimes our country's too big to love, to love in a move the needle kind of way, which is probably why so many people who have served, have said in some way, shape, or form. 9-11, you enlist. Love of country, blood's pumping, patriotism, and everything else. But when the chili meets the cheese, it's really the man or woman to your right or you're left. It gets real small, real fast.

It becomes the platoon, the squad, your buddy, your CIA pal and the black sedan riding through Mosul. What else matters at that point, except for the dude in the helicopter? or who might save you. Right. Real small. Real small. Right there next to something real big.

For me, it starts with just one person, one piece at a time. I have a couple really close friends that I dearly love and admire that have lost both their legs in combat. I spent a lot of time checking in and making sure that they're taking care of it. The other thing is I'm also trying to figure out from their perspective. how can we impact their community because it's even smaller, right? It's not just the veteran community. It's also those who have been physically modified by war. How do we directly impact their even smaller communities? Outside of the business, the things I'm really connected and

and trying very hard to make the impact in is within the people that have been wounded specifically in combat, because that's where I feel like I can also make the greatest amount of impact because it's a smaller community that guys that have lost limbs. You know, it's several thousand, but it's still a lot smaller than the overall veteran community. So you can make an impact there as well, and you can see the impact.

It starts from a smaller perspective. What does your foundation do exactly? And by the way, sidebar, but do you know Travis Mills by any chance? I don't. Who's at? Travis is an old buddy of mine. He was one of

four people to survive. the loss of all four limbs out of Afghanistan. Right. You know, he's got books. They made a movie about him, but today he runs a foundation that you would love, called the Travis Mills Foundation up in Maine. And he's basically taken,

I don't know if it's the Estee Lauder Estate, some big old estate, and he and his wife have opened it up. It's just amazing. I shot a show up there a couple years ago, and the number of veterans who come with missing eyes, horrible burn, missing legs, and suddenly they're out there in the field,

they're kayaking and modified things and ropes courses, archery, all this stuff. Does your foundation dabble in that space? Yeah, so the reason I started it was I wanted to be able to drive the results or at least have more of a direct impact to those who have been physically affected by war. There's a lot of really good 501s out there. So the differentiating factor is this one's BRCC, so it's, the BRCC fund. And the guys that run it are both amputees, which is, you know, one has the left leg and the other one has the right leg. So between the two, they've got two legs, which is super,

for us, it's kind of funny, but kind of not. But it is true. They've done a great job to directly impact their community. And what that does is the funding for that goes directly to the veteran or the veteran family member. And Black Rifle Coffee pays the compensation. for everyone. We're paying for their compensation and they're funding the initiatives. So it could be, we've funded so many different initiatives. The things that we get into are the guys that we know are service-related issues that we can directly impact. So it could be building gems for guys that have lost limbs inside their homes. For instance, that's one of the initiatives that we took on because we want these guys to maintain physical fitness so they can accelerate their activity when they have

the ability to do it. We've been funding some research directly related to burn pit exposure for the last couple years because that's been a big issue for the veteran community. We've funded additional vehicles for people because the VA, if you've lost limbs, they'll provide you with one vehicle, but they don't provide you with multiple vehicles. Or it could be flying entire families to funerals that just don't have the funding to do that. So we hit multiple different semi-related or related issues, but it's really where we pursue is how can we make the greatest impact for the dollar. The guys that run that, do an incredible job. I like to put those guys in charge that because they understand where the dollars go the furthest into what type of organizations or what type of initiatives. They're tied in.

You know, when you're a veteran amputee, it seems like everybody knows each other. They're tied into what organizations are doing the best work. What can we do that can create the greatest amount of impact? So that's what we concentrate on. I funded it with shares from the company once we went public, and those will continue to fund the fund, for a lack of a better term, the foundation for the next decade. And it's always going to be directly related to veteran or service-related injuries.

Gary Sinise, Tunnel to Towers. Yeah. You know, they're all doing such great work. and obviously you're right there with them. You know, it really is a 360 thing, man. I'm not telling anything you don't know, but you got a great product, you got a great community, you got, what, a thousand employees now,

a foundation, a podcast, a line of clothing. And you know what? You're deeply irreverent, very subversive guy who clearly loves his country and is still trying to stay true to the basic mission. What do they call it, mission creep? Is that a concern? Yeah, it is.

It's a concern with every entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs love shiny objects. They like to pursue the fanciest, shinniest thing. I constantly have to remind myself not to do that. It is easy to stay focused because when you're in charge, people will keep you honest in the context of you have to maintain your focus in order to hit your goals and objectives. I've got really good people that continue to have honest conversations with me too. My dad works for us. And, I mean, he ceased to be impressed with me a long time ago.

So he continues to maintain a level of candor with me that doesn't make my ego spin out of control. I still have a lot of my friends from the military that I've still spent a lot of time with. And those guys never miss an opportunity to bring me down a few pegs. I think the reps that I had on maintaining mission focus over the course of the last couple decades allowed me to just continue to do that versus a lot of entrepreneurs that didn't maybe have those reps in mission focus. They can easily get distracted and start thinking about like Bitcoin or some other crap that they're into. I don't know. Whereas like me, I'm just trying to roast a good coffee. That's literally like I'm trying to roast a good coffee.

I'm trying to put it out to, you know, the community and then continue to try to build that. I've had really good mentors to you. Johnny Morris, he owns Bass Pro and Cabela's both. He's been a really good friend of mine for the last couple of years. It's amazing. When I go to spend time with Johnny, you know, he's just an old country boy from Missouri. And he's given me a lot of confidence that us old country boys, we can actually make some stuff happen and still maintain authenticity. we don't have to conform to the corporate Manila bureaucratic culture.

We can just kind of really be authentic, connecting with the people we care about. We don't have to change. We just don't. And Johnny's told me so many stories about guys like Jerry Jones and Sam Walt and all these kids. They knew each other. And they're all from Missouri. It's pretty incredible when you start thinking about those types of people and what they've done in business. and then how authentic they were for so long, to include today,

even if they're worth billions of dollars, they're still good humans, doing really good things. Yeah, it doesn't have to change you. Have you crossed paths with Jack Carr? He's one of my best friends. Is he? Yeah, he's one of my best friends. Well, that explains the shameless plug.

I was just listening to the terminal list. And, you know, James Reese doesn't just grab a cup of coffee. He grabs a steaming hot cup of black rifle coffee. Yeah. He's one of my best friends. He's a freaking awesome guy. He came down doing some research for his book and watched me make coffee at my house for like a day and a half when we just like hung out. He lives right up the road in Park City.

So he's up here. And we do a ton of stuff with those guys. Like he's truly one of my closest buddies. Well, do me a favor. Tell him I'm a fan. and I'm sure he's going to be busy. Chuck, you know this. Amazon is doing a full-on series based on his first book.

It's so great to see a Navy SEAL who can actually write, get something made with Chris Pratt of all people. I mean, he crushed it. It's such a great story. Yeah, and all his books are really good. I was not into that genre before, but because of him, because of my friendship, I've been turned on to a totally different world. I didn't realize those books.

Like, I'd read Tom Clancy and stuff like that when I was a kid, but I hadn't gotten into that genre. But then I called him as at the airport, like, I don't know, two months ago. I was like, okay, I've read all your books. Who else? Who else he got for me? He's like, okay, this, this and this, you know. And so now he's like put me down a rabbit hole

on this other line of fiction that I had really no insight into. To your point, actually, Sam Walton and Jerry Jones, just a couple of guys, you know, who stuck by their code, stuck by their mission, and went on to do what they did. Your mission-oriented dude, Jack Carr certainly is. But now here you are making coffee and here he is writing books. But you're still the same basic people, it seems to me. That's the American story, right? That's the next chapter.

To reinvent yourself without changing who you are. has got to be like the neatest trick you can pull. Yeah, I've always felt like if you had 100 lives or 100 different lives you could live simultaneously, I thought about that for a while where you're like plugging in a bunch of wires and you get to experience all these different lives at the same time. I've thought about that a lot for whatever reason because you can't live enough while the short time that we have here.

It's just not possible to experience everything. you have to reinvent yourself, I hope at least, like people are reinventing themselves, at least in a capable rate. So you can try to look at things from a different perspective. I'm glad that I've been able to like achieve at least part of that because it's way more interesting. And I've been able to like really dive down the rabbit hole on some things that I just would have never had context into if I would have stayed at the CIA or state of the Army or whatever it might have been. You're living proof that it's possible. Look, that's a great. great lesson and probably a good place to land the plane, but I'll tell you, honestly, the thing

I'm hoping people really take from this whole conversation, aside from the importance of packing your own shoot, but not strapping on an extra third one because people will laugh at you. Because they're going to laugh. It's the simple, unassailable truth that just because you're sitting down having a poop, doesn't mean somebody won't shoot you, right? The bullets are flying everywhere. So I don't know who's got your six. But just because you're pooping doesn't mean you're out of harm's way. Actually, Chuck, that's not a bad title.

It's not. Just because you're pooping doesn't mean you're out of harm's way. I love that. The last segment of the current tranche of dirty jobs is happening in a week and a half up in Salt Lake City. Really? Yeah. There's something about, I don't know, Beaver Reclamation Project. I agree to do.

Sounds like a UFOism. You know what? I hope it's a euphemism. Actually, no, I hope it's not. I'm not sure what to hope for. But I think we're going to be working with literal, actual beavers. That's crazy. But when we're done, if you're bored and you've got time, I'd love to swing by the... I would love that.

It'd be great to meet you in person. Yeah, this would be awesome. I would love that. I will make sure that I am here. So if you send me dates or whatever windows, I'll be here. Like, I'll make sure I'm here. Excellent. I'm thinking it's going to be the Wednesday after next.

But people who are smarter than me will tell me for sure. Perfect. Thank you guys. I really appreciate being on the show. This is cool. It's been awesome. Like the last couple of shows, like I got a ton of great feedback from our show. People loved it.

People loved you on the show specifically. So thank you for doing that too. I really appreciate it. It's my pleasure. At the risk of shameless pluggery, are you still doing the subscription thing? What's the best thing people can do to really get a blast of black.

rifle straight into the pick line. You just got to go and black rifle coffee.com and sign up for the subscription. That's the best because we're rolling out all kinds of cool stuff with that thing. It's truly a passion project within a passion project for me. Last I checked, every sale benefited the foundation, which benefits armed services in some way, shape, or form. Yep, that's fantastic. And if you want to check out the foundation, it's BRCC fund.org.

That's right. And if you want to see a video that's absolutely going to change the rest of your day, I would recommend you start with Charlie Sheen has AIDS. Right. It's called the safety brief. Safety brief, yeah. It is, I mean, here, look at this, dude. You and I have been singing out of the same hymn book for so long.

Safety Third is the whole working premise of dirty jobs. It's now on hats. It's on swag. But, yeah, your safety brief is right up to. with it. Slightly more subversive, but you know, same street, different house. That's right. Well, awesome. Thank you guys.

Thanks, ma'am. We really appreciate it. See you guys. All right. Be well. Thank you. This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on so long, but if it made you smile,

then share your satisfaction in the way that people do take some time to go on the surrey I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge But in this world the advertisers really like to judge You don't need to write a bunch, just a line or two All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review

All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review And not three All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review Definitely not to do. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. We need five. All you got to do is leave a quick... Even if you hate it.

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