The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 458: Johnny Joey Jones—Mind Your Wake

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

In honor of Veterans Day, Mike speaks with co-host of The Big Weekend Show Marine Staff Sergeant (Ret.) Johnny Joey Jones, who served eight years as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician in Iraq and Afghanistan—where he lost both legs in the line of duty. These days, he's on a mission to highlight those who serve, from American warfighters to first responders, which he does powerfully in his new book, Behind the Badge. It's a honest tribute to those who run toward the danger when others run away. With his trademark humility and humor, Joey talks about courage, purpose, and the importance of minding the wake you leave behind. 

Hey guys, Mike Roe here. This is the way I heard it. My guest today is the one and only Johnny Joey Jones. Chuck, why do people say the one and only in front of certain individuals, but not others? In all fairness, there probably is another guy named John Joey Jones out there. Probably. You would think with those three. But I think it's just too, they're the one that most people know. I think it's more. I think it's like of all the Johnny Joey Joneses that are surely out there. This is the one and only one that I'm going to have on the podcast. He's the one and he's also the real one, you know, and how you're the real Mike Rowe on Facebook.

If he were sitting right here in front of me, right this second, I would not describe him as an American hero because he's the kind of guy that would take off one of his prosthetic legs and hit me over the head with it for calling him such a thing. But he is heroic to me, not just because of the injuries he's sustained in Afghanistan and the way he's overcome them. But for the way he's really built an identity around the business of celebrating other people

in a way that's not icky or earnest or saccharin, but just honest and compelling. And it's really been fun to watch him become the one and only Johnny Joey Jones. I got to tell you that about five minutes into the episode, I wrote down one word and then I didn't write anything else down except for potential titles. and that one word was humble. Yeah. Yeah, if you can fake that, man. You got it made. Not only is he genuinely humble and gracious,

but you'll hear really, calamity might be overstating it, but this was such a rough morning for me personally, and I'm not going to wallow in my own self-pity, but we're on the fifth floor of a building in Santa Monica. And the one and only Johnny Joey Jones, you know, he's got no legs, left those over in Afghanistan. or Walter Reed.

But thankfully we have an elevator. Yeah, we have an elevator. Because, boy, if we didn't have an elevator, Chuck, can you imagine? That would be terrible. It would be terrible. Yeah. Now, elevators do go down for repair from time to time. It's very rare, though, Mike.

Very rare. Extraordinarily rare. And, well, you can imagine just how weird and awkward it would be to explain to the one and only Johnny Joey Jones that he'd have to take. You know what? I don't want to spoil it. You're not saying that that actually happened. You're just saying it would.

be weird. It'd be incredibly weird. Understood. Yeah. But if it did happen, if it did happen, it is the kind of thing I would probably discuss in the episode. Okay. And let me tell you, it was something that may not have been discussed in the episode. If it did happen, it's definitely my fault. Oh, for sure. Yeah, we didn't get into that. We'll get into that at a later date. I haven't been fired yet, but it's getting closer and closer. The book is called Behind the Badge. It's written by the one and only Johnny Joey Jones. It's so good. And we're going to talk about it at some length.

But we are going to discuss a great many other things as well. As is inevitable when you have a man whose brain is as facile as his. We're calling this episode Mind Your Wake. It's one of his dad's many witticisms, platitudes. He had a lot of them, yeah. Yeah. But this is a good one. And in terms of advice, somebody ought to put it on a t-shirt, man.

Mind your wake. Those ripples from your little dinghy make it all the way to shore. Hey. Not your specific thingy. Thank you. Whatever sort of boat you're in. Mind your wake. The one and only Johnny Joey Jones right after this.

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Get good ranchers now. I don't even know where to start. Obviously, the book is behind the badge, and we're going to rant and rave about it for a while. Johnny Joey Jones is in the studio. He's just giving me a challenge coin for the book. Yeah. And that's the first time I've seen a challenge coin peg to a book specific.

I have a drawer full of challenge coins. I'll cherish this one, but why'd you do it? So you'd put it in your drawer. That's why I did. So it lives safely in a controlled environment. No. People have asked me for years for a challenge coin. And the challenge coin for me is something that's like this military tradition.

And you get one from your commander of a unit or a metal bond recipient. Yeah. What am I going to put on a challenge coin? What did I do special as a Marine to go on a challenge coin? It has always been my mentality. And I come from a job field, the bomb technician world, where seeking glory is really bad. Frowned on. to the point that we charge beer if you get caught on television.

Oh my gosh. If you get caught, because we end up going out in town. Say they find an old piece of Civil War ammo at somebody's junkyard. We're going to go out and do it. If you get caught doing a television interview, any kind of media, you're charged beer. It's different when media is your job, so I get a little bit of a pass. There's going to come a day where I've got to roll up a Bud Light truck to the first DOD company over here on Pendleton and just say, have it, boys. I don't know.

Like would Bud Light even satisfy that? That obligation today. Budlight on purpose. For all the reasons. You know, for all, good and bad. Oh, the irony of paying a vet, a debt with a six-pack of Bud Light. It's kind of like paying your fine in pennies, you know. But anyway, the challenge coin for me was this book is nine different first responders,

and they adapt much military culture to include Challenge Coin. Most of them have given me a challenge coin. Yeah. And to have a book that's celebrated this, done so well that just tells their stories and lets them answer questions that are hard to answer. I thought a challenge coin for them would be really unique and cool. People are going to love it. Yeah.

They're going to love it. This book was just an idea, I think, in your mind the last time we sat down and talked. You had written your first book. Yeah. And we were talking about dirty jobs, I think. And I had said to you, you know, for me, the code that needed to be cracked on the mercenary side of things was the understanding that, My story was not nearly as interesting as most people's. And if you just get out of the way and let them, either let them tell you their story

or you find a way to present and react to their story as a guide. And that's what this is. And it reads, there are only nine profiles in it. But exponentially, it feels like 90. because as you go through these individually, and I don't want to do it right now, but I just want the listener to understand that there's a real power in a profile. The profile is different than a story. These are both, but the cumulative effect is really powerful.

It is. You know, it's funny you started off talking about, if I understood you correctly, basically the best way to tell a story is let it tell itself, kind of. And you're known as a storyteller. That's your job. But if you look at your career, the stories you've told haven't been your story. That's right. As a matter of fact, we might get the micro story one day, and we're all anxiously waiting.

But I feel much the same way. I tell people all the time the most interesting thing about me are the people I know. Like, that really is what makes me interesting, is that I can connect you to somebody that's as interesting as you are, and I'll get out of the way. Well, with respect, that's not a thing that you can take credit for. The thing you take credit for is the reason you're interested in the people you know, And that, I think, is just basic curiosity. Absolutely. You've been curious your whole life, man.

And it's got me in more trouble than I know how to count, but it's also the reason for success, you know, curious. And you're absolutely right. So to bring that forward, one of probably the most famous in the South, at least, sports announcers you can think of as a guy named Eli Gold. And he's made a million famous calls. But his most famous call was one of the first Alabama championships

in Nick Sabineiro, where he made the call to say nothing and to let the moment live for itself. And so when I wrote my first book on Broken Bonds of Battle that did really well, I felt this pressure to go in and almost re-explain things for people and to add me to it. And it did very well. So when I got ready to write this book, I thought to myself, what if I were just Eli Gold? What if I just let these folks not just answer my questions,

but through our conversation, come up with the next one they're going to answer. And so that's what we did. Brother, it's the hardest thing to do is get out of your own way. That's exactly right. I was just thinking the other day, I got a buddy in advertising who had the Motel 6 account for years, right? Years. And early on, there was a big conversation about, you know, how were we going to really

capture in video the essence of the value proposition that we're trying to establish vis-a-vis the customer experience in a certain key demographic, right? Through the lens of a single-minded proposition, all the usual crap. What they came up with was 30 seconds of black. So the commercial starts, the screen is black. And you hear Tom Bowdoet saying, what you're looking at right here is the inside of a motel six room in the middle of the night. This is pretty much what you're going to see in any hotel room in the middle of the night.

clean bed and they never go to picture. So it's just a simple story in 30 seconds with nothing but black. And if there's a moral to that story, it's that that was 25 years ago. And I'll never forget it. And the stories in your book have the same simplicity. They land and they hook you. And I can't say it yet with certainty because full disclosure,

I haven't read all of them. But I know that books like this, matter more over time. You can only do so much out of the gate. Yeah. You can put it out there. But the way they linger, you're going to be hearing from people years from now.

Probably about a profile or a passage that you didn't think was going to land the way it ultimately did for different people. When you write a book like this, there are nine people in that book. Six of them I've known for the majority of my life. this point, at least my whole adult life, and a handful of them I've known, one since I was three years old, one since I was 15 and 16 in high school. One of them I went to war with, and they're all

first responders. Some of them were military before that. And so to tell their story, I thought I already knew it. I know these people very well. So the phenomenon that happens with this, writing a book like this is you write the book, then you read it a million times an edit, and then you read it again before you go to interviews because you're looking each time you read it you read it with a different purpose and what i've learned is so much of what i say explaining the book in hindsight i wish was in the book because i every time i read it i learn i learned about these people the dots start to connect for me better the words come to me better to explain why this book matters why these people matter why telling their story is important or how you can like why you should be interested in the

story, how it relates to your life. And it's so funny, I took quite a while to write the book. I could have took three times longer and maybe never have come up with those words, if not for this exercise, this tell me about your book exercise. Why should I care about this book exercise? And so for that reason, it's brand new all over again for me, and it's exciting, and I can't wait to tell people about it. Well, what an interesting way to think about the business of promoting a book to call it an exercise. It is. That I think is really indicative of the version of you, I think. And I think. And I think I know, you look at things as exercises. You look at things as, you know, if I do this, I get permission to do that. I wasn't going to get into it, but I can't help myself. The listener

needs to understand what happened an hour ago. In the service of a good story, Johnny Joey Jones and Courtney show up here at a five-story walk up. And my landlord promised that the elevator would be working by August 21st, Chuck. August 21st, yeah. August 21st, right. And so you were going to come in earlier than that. And we were like, no, no, I think we're going to wait. Okay. I mean, it's five flights, for God's sakes.

So we don't hear boo. I don't live down here. I come down and the elevator's still not working. You show up a half hour early. By the way, no extra credit for that. No, that was that all about. That was a, I was already on this side of town thing. I had nowhere else to go.

That's all that was. So if we could just bring this back to me for a moment, okay? Here I am. All right. I mean, I'm never early, rarely late, usually on timeish, but I learned this morning in no particular order that the elevator's not going to be working. The elevator tech is not going to be here when he's supposed to be here. And an Afghanistan war hero, pardon me, I know you hate that. Four letter words, man.

Conspicuously shy in the leg department to the tune of two is waiting to get up to the fifth floor. So, like with more grace. and more gratitude than my vocabulary permits, Johnny Joey Jones. It's like, hey, man, it's just a flight of stairs. I'll make it. And you walked up here. Now, I know you're going to give me endless shit about it on the five.

I know I'm going to hear about this. And I look forward to it. I want to hear about it. But I want, oh, and by the way, the first thing I do when I see you, because I'm in my head and I feel so bad about this, I start complaining about my dismal cross-country flight that took 12 hours. And I realize, wait a second.

Wait a second. You, Travis Mills, a couple other friends of mine who have similar stories to tell. I can't tell you about my troubles. I mean, what do you think of when the average Joe starts complaining to you about a rough flight or a bad day or a hair in their soup or some freaking thing that in the scheme of things? Like how do you help people like me get their perspective back? Well, first of all, I don't think of that. I don't think, let me educate this person on why that's not a big deal. You know, all the wisdom I have came from somebody else, which is a good thing. But a buddy in mind, Jake Schick, he always says something along the lines of never, I'm trying to phrase it correctly because he's really good at turning phrases. And I speak because I'm from Georgia very simply.

But he says something like never compare tragedy and always share in victory. You know, it's like, don't, I'm not going to discount the worst thing that ever happened to you because it doesn't. seem like it would be bad to me because I don't live your life. You know what I mean? Right. But, you know, just like back to this deal here, you're talking about complaining about flights. Well, you know, there aren't many people that live life the way we do in the air. So if there's anybody you can talk to about that that actually gets it, it's me. When does commiserating bleed into bichin? Like, where do you draw the line between a fellow traveler who shares your pain and a couple of bitter old dudes in an airport racing through a six-pack of Bud Light just to try and blunt the agony.

I guess the answer is I bitch too, you know, about those things. Like I'm standing here with no legs, but I'm also aggravated at this thing that's very menial and not important. You know, I consider it more of a gift that I have than a fault that others don't have. You know, it's like I've gotten the sea behind the curtain. And that's a gift. It's also responsibility. and it's a curse, but it's also a gift. This whole idea of post-traumatic stress.

Like, am I screwed up because I don't want to be drunk with a thousand strangers at a concert, or are you a little bit naive and oblivious, right? Is this really a negative thing for me, or do I just see the world from a few stories up? And you see it at ground level. And so it's all about perspective, right? It really is. It's about convincing yourself that the cards you have to play are good cards, even if the best thing to do with them is fold, right?

You're still in control. deal them. Exactly. But now you got them. Exactly. So they're your cards. It's your game and you get to make the decisions. And so when it comes to things like walking up the stairs, there's a couple things here. Number one, what's the most important thing to me today, right? It's to get this done. It's to do this. Mission. What's between me and doing this? Five flights of stairs. Right. Number two, what's the payoff? I get to tell this story in perpetuity forever. Like, never let pain and discomfort for a brief moment. take something away from you that you'll get to use forever. You know, like it's, it all makes common sense, man.

Look, I castrated a lamb 14 years ago with my teeth on international television. Okay. I wasn't proud of it. I wasn't ashamed of it because that's the way they did it. And it happened and all hell broke loose and, you know, PETA came after the network and so forth and so on. But a year later, it was the subject of a TED talk. And that TED talk became the basis for a speaking career that I never aspired to or wanted. Really?

Now I enjoy it a lot. And if I had to, I could probably draw a pretty crooked line to a lot of good things. This is exactly right. That if I'm honest, the proximate cause of which was me biting the balls off a lamb, right? So you don't always know what five flights will do to you. Do do do do do do do do Dumb Well are you sick of it yet

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It's filled with super useful information, and again, it's free at netseweet.com. That's net suite.com. NetSuite. I've got two Nigerian dwarf goats, and they need to be weathered. Yeah. You should explain what weathering means to the uninitiated, because otherwise they think you're a forecast. You bet they don't know. But I don't think it'd fit in my mouth.

I'd have to try a different tool. They've grown too much. Well, that's a whole other conversation. I guess you don't really know until you tried. That's right. You really got to get in there and give it the old college try. Oh, man. I'm getting nervous over here.

Good goat will do that. That's awesome. Do not tell that joke. We're not going to tell that joke, but it is worth a sidebar, and I bet it is relevant to the book in some way. More so than you know. Well, the real, like the real parapetia, the moment, like the learning moment in that castration episode we did was Pida had told me the right way to do it was, you know, banding.

You've seen that on the farm. You put the rubber band around the testicles and the blood stops flowing and then, you know, the nuts fall off and no big deal. It doesn't seem as violent at a glance, obviously. But the truth is in that segment, we did it that way. After the rancher, you know, cut the scrot him and bit the testicles off and spit them in a bucket. I yelled, stop that. You can't do that on the TV. It's against the laws of God and man and the FCC and so forth. And then we did it the proper way. And the lamb was absolutely miserable. As you might imagine, one would be with a rubber band around the testicle. For three days, it would be miserable.

Exactly. And meanwhile, the one we just castrate, it was just prounced around, not a care in the world, no blood. It's over it. So, sorry to hijack that, but the thing that you think you're looking at, and the reason you think you're doing a thing is like not really germane and that comes through in all kinds of examples in the book. I just need to take this moment to appreciate the fact that I get to go to nine of my buddies

and tell them how their life story is equivalent to bite and a lamb's nuts off. Well, testicles. You're welcome. And every person in that book, female included, would find that to be absolutely hilarious. And that's the type of people that these people are.

You're not wrong. There's a lot of places I can take this because you're like me. You live life an analogy, so everything represents something that can be applied somewhere else. And it's this idea for me in the book, everybody thinks they know what a first responder does. Everybody thinks they know, unfortunately, in this like a world what their motivations are. And almost everybody's wrong. And the biggest of ways and the smallest of ways, for example, the biggest of ways. that cop wants to kill someone because of how they look.

You know, you couldn't be more wrong. That cop wakes up every day dreading the situation where lethal force is necessary or even an option. And if you read this book, you learn that internal dialogue and struggle and conversation, that psychological battle that happens for them if they work in some places on a daily basis, that is torturous, not just on their mind, but on their soul.

in the smallest of ways, a fireman's job today is less than 10% putting out fire. Because we've spent a couple hundred years learning how to prevent fire. And the average cop never draws his gun in the course of his whole career. You're exactly right. So the misunderstanding here is, you know, every cop wants to use their weapon and every fireman just puts out fire. And the truth is every fireman responds to the death, tragedy, destruction. and terrible things that we do to each other and happen to us. And every cop is put in an impossible situation of treating every villain like the victim

that they're trying to save. I don't want to get in the spoiler alerts, but who is the cop? Who is the fireman who you write about? Yeah. I mean, obviously there's nine, but some of them I'm closer to than the others. The first two chapters, the first one's Clay Hedrick. And if you think that I talk country, he is pouring sweet tea over a banjo. listening to the music it plays, right?

That's who he is. He is one of the smartest people you'll ever know, but not one of the most educated. He's a blue-collar guy, and that's the difference between intelligence and education, man. It just shines through in this book. And when you have Clay as your first chapter and then a dual master's degree

is the next chapter, who's his best friend, Keith. But Keith and Clay have known my whole life. Keith is my brother-in-law, and Clay was my uncle's best friend. And so they work at the same fire department. Keith is in charge of most of the fire department. and Clay is in charge of a shift. And so they have very different careers

come from different worlds. Keith's dad's a millionaire. Sent Keith to college. Keith said, no, I want to be a fireman. His dad said, I know that son. Clay, going to the fire department, was the opportunity such as going to college. That was the opportunity out of it for him.

So Keith is kind of moving downward in society's perspective to be a fireman. Clay, this is his opportunity out of it. And they worked side by side for 25 years. and just the duality in that experience and the fact that they both landed at the same place with completely different perspectives. And the only thing they have in common is that they love the fact that their job is to risk something of their own to help other people.

The majority of a fireman's job in 2025 are medical calls. And the majority of those medical calls are accidents and, you know, bad things people do to each other, whether it be drugs they're taking or domestic violence. you know when you want the police around and when you don't. But when the crap has hit the fan, you call the fire department. You call 911 and they dispatch the fire department. Right. And so to give people insight into that and that when you think about like a car wreck on the interstate,

you pass by and you see a fire truck there, but you don't, you never really connect those dots. That that's what firemen do. And so the example I give that's somewhat in the book in different ways, but it's what really drove at home for me was in 2023, I moved back to my hometown where Keith and Clay work. And I realized one day in just regular conversation that Keith and Clay drive their kids to school on the roads and through the intersections that they've seen other people's children die.

And to think about doing that, like the easiest thing about war for me to make it make sense was I'm over here going through this so the things I care about don't have to. What's the opposite is true for them. They're doing it because these things. things happen to the people they care about. And I just wanted to give people that perspective. Do with it what you may. I've found mandates post-writing it that I didn't have going into it.

You know, if you really want to write a book that explains things to people don't have a hypothesis, have a mission, you know. Well, don't tell me. Show me. Exactly. Find a way to show me. And then on the law enforcement side, because there are various types of law enforcement, probably the most surprising and enlightening is a Maine game warden named Jeremy Judd. Now, game wardens have, you know, Department of Natural Resource Officers have different responsibilities for where they are. There's different geography, different. But if you go to the state of Maine, it's mostly a wilderness.

There's a lot of lakes. There's some coast. And a Maine game warden, a game warden in Maine is extremely tied into law enforcement because if a crime or any type of tragedy happens in that wilderness or on those lakes, he or she is the person with the knowledge to get there and get back. A cop from Portland, Maine, chasing a fugitive, is going to get lost in the woods. No, point. Right?

And so Jeremy Judge is the only main game warden to have to use his firearm in the line of work. He ended up having to use it to save his life and others. The story's tragic. Prior to that, he spent years on a search and rescue dive team. In his way, he says that with a chuckle. it goes, you don't rescue anybody underwater. Right. That's just a recovery mission.

That's just recovery. And so then you explore this whole idea of how he put his life in line because, I mean, it gets cold. Diving to recover someone's dead body, not to save someone's life, but to recover their dead body because their family deserve peace. And he was willing to risk his life and does and almost dies to find a young girl for her family because that's the only thing that's going to give them peace. And then this happens where he has to use his firearm in line of work.

It shakes him as it would any human being. And he realizes, I need a happy ending every now and then. Gets a dog to be a hunting dog, realizes it's a special dog, buys it on his own, trains it himself, realizes, hey, this dog's special. Takes it to their search and rescue school, and it passes all the tests the day they show up. It becomes the most recognized and awarded rescue dog in the state of Maine, gets national awards, the team, Jeremy and his dog, Tuni, Tundra, it's miraculous. It's God working. It saved Jeremy's life in the process of saving all these other people's lives

who otherwise wouldn't have been found alive. And that's why and how your book is both extraordinary and very relatable at the same time. Everybody listening has had a relationship with a pet that feels, I don't want to put words in people's mouths, but Godlike, supernatural, special. in a way. I'm fascinated by the bipedal relationship with the animal kingdom and how it's evolved over the years, but really specifically with dogs. And yeah, to be able to read about somebody who answered a call that you yourself would probably, I don't mean you personally, but the average person would probably not answer. Because let's face it, we don't live in a country filled

with first responders. These are exceptional, extraordinary people. who marched to a beat of a drum, I think, that really only they can hear, but they love their dogs, just like us mere mortals, right? What's awesome about this book? And you just sit on it, and I'm sorry, I didn't mean to distract you. No, not at all. I thought I could get there quicker, but... I'm just curious to see if you stumble across anything you don't recognize in your own book.

Fair enough. But read the title of the first chapter. Oh, there you go. Ordinary guy, extraordinary circumstances. That's your buddy Clay, the firefighter. At some point, this job is going to hit home. Something is going to physically, spiritually, or emotionally break you. That's the point of the whole book.

You're going to break. The point of the whole book is none of us can do it. These guys and gal couldn't do it. They did it. It broke them. Something early on in every one of their career made them question the fact that this is what they do. And there was something inside of them that said, but it's worth doing.

And I really do think that maybe we are a country full of first responders. Maybe we are a country full of people who can't do it until they have to. And I don't want you to have to lose your legs or go to war or choose a 30-year career in first response to understand that about yourself. Right. You know, it's like he considers himself, and I think it's true, an ordinary guy. He just shows up to work in extraordinary situations. Look, I'm not the first to have said this, but when it comes to awards and when it comes to bravery and when it comes to sacrifice and all these things that we kind of look back on and try to magnify in a way that makes sense, it's the role of fear that's most interesting to me.

Because on the one hand, we love to lionize men and women who are fearless. They're fearless. Maybe it's Audie Murphy, right? Maybe like, yeah. Right? But right next to him, you know, you got an ordinary guy who's scared shitless. Yeah. Who does the same thing anyway.

Yeah. So without fear, what is courage? Right? Without doubt, what is faith? That's right. So the book is so dense with relatable topics. And the fact that you chose to write too about people you're right. personally know. Yeah. And maybe some not so much. It seems like it's a mixed bag. But, you know,

listen, we're talking about first responders. Somebody's doing their job right now. And in the distance. That's the kind of, not only do we ask our guest to walk up five floors. We ask someone to set their house on fire so we could get that. That's right. I didn't want to tell you, but the building is on fire and things are going to get, it's every man for himself, Chuck. It's going to get sporty. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Row gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues,

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Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month. At puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure Talk. The topic of courage is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about, somewhat passively and somewhat actively in the last couple of years. Writing this book really brought it in for me.

And, you know, I'm going to get very liberal with my definition here because these are the best placeholder words for the concept I want to put out there. It's like, what's this difference between courage and bravery? You know, they're kind of interchangeable, you know. But in my experience, we're all brave. if you're stupid you're brave we're all capable of jumping off a bridge

with a bungee cord behind us we're all capable of doing something in a moment for a split second without thinking or with just blind faith that feels scary we're all capable of being brave

for a moment courage is going back to do it the second time courage is knowing not just the consequence but knowing what it feels like and courage is getting shot and going back to war

You know, that kind of courage is this added layer of deliberateness. And that's what they all felt. They were all brave. They were all brave the first day they showed up on the job. Because they didn't know any better maybe. That's exactly right. Now you know. Ignorance, right?

The courage came five years into it, you know? And that's just, to me, it's such an amazing and remarkable thing that we have people that are ordinarily extraordinary. Childbirth? Yeah. Right? Yeah, look, she says, I think I want to have a kid. And then I have it. And during the delivery, it's the screaming and the no way. And oh, my God, this is what you have no idea, the pain. And then we should have another one. Yeah. It's crazy, isn't it? We should do that again. It's like you don't know what you're capable of until you have to go through it. And that's why I said earlier, like I don't fault people for complaining about what the worst thing they've been through is because that's all they have to compare it to. You don't know what you're capable of. I'm just laughing because I'm thinking of this thing.

A rancher told me once. Not the sheep rancher is another guy. Don't forget the spit? No. That's good advice. Well, that's how you... Teachable moment. You do it once and you learn.

No, the question was, what's worse? Getting kicked in the nuts or having a baby in terms of pain. And, you know, the answer without hesitation is getting kicked in the nuts is much worse. Why? Because in the history of that, no good. guy has ever said, let's do that again. I love that. That is so simple and so true.

Let's do that again. But your book is filled with people who did that fairy thing. That's exactly right. They sat on the hot stove. It hurt. So let's do it again. Not because they're sadists or is it massacus, either one, but because there's something on the other side of the hot stove that's more important than the third degree burn.

You have to look at it with eyes wide open because I was a Marine bomb tech and I got addicted to the adrenaline. The risk was worth the reward even selfishly. I so want you to unpack that. But there is a moment in everyone's career as a first responder in my time in Afghanistan where I'm still just as willing to do it. But the consequences are more real and I'm okay if you never asked me to do it again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But where does the adrenaline rush, the thing that you do. just said you were addicted to.

Is that possible to experience without a clear and present understanding of the consequence of Zigan when you should have zagged? No, it's not. And I think that's what makes it, like the best example I give is when you watch the movie Hurt Locker.

Everyone in my profession hates that movie because it's so unrealistic to how we do the job and what the job is and it's Hollywood. I love that movie because I can see past I can see past the literal and understand the metaphor. The scariest moment in taking a bomb apart is going from standing away from it to kneeling over it, right? Because the bomb is probably designed to function by something I do. So something as simple as a footstep is the most dangerous part.

If I understand it enough to be over it and have my hands on it, I'm in a pretty good spot. Like that means I have a pretty good understanding of what this is and what I need to do. It's not red wire or green wire. It's what is this? What are the components? How is it operated? How is it initiated? You can't put that into movies, right?

Because that's something that happens in my head. And so what do you have to do? You've got to go over to top to create that suspense so people can empathetically feel just a little bit of that. And so you have to understand the gravity of the situation. to go through the emotional roller coaster that brings some sort of high at the end. But then once you, once it's put in perspective, so two or three days in Afghanistan,

the truck behind me gets blown up. That's the first explosion in Afghanistan I experience. We run, we get the guys, none of them are hurt. They're in a truck, thank God. Put them in our truck calling meadowback. They're all dinged up, and we medivac them and then take a wrecker-ish and bring the truck back with us,

go on about the next day. that created the anticipation of man, that was kind of awesome. It's not until you get the call that Adam Perkins is dead, and Dave Lyons doesn't have legs anymore, and they're only a couple miles away from you, that you kind of the light bulb comes on and goes, oh, well, when it's not awesome, it sucks. And so there's just this maturing that happens in life,

for me, over a six-month deployment, for these guys and gals in this book, over a 30-year career. You reach a point to where it's like, okay, I've had enough. I don't want to risk everything every day, but I'm still willing to. What did you learn that you didn't know going in? Because, I mean, just not to put too fine a point on it, but you're a first responder. You've been there, you've done it, and you have, I think, not that you need permission, but your curriculum vitae more than qualifies you to weigh in on these topics.

but were you surprised by anything collectively from these nine? Two things. The short answer is I was surprised by the fact they all hit it from different angles. There wasn't a single thread that seemed to sew them all together. It wasn't like they were all, it wasn't like they all were the same version, different versions of the same person. They come from all over the country, all over the backgrounds, political spectrums, what have you. That was surprising. I thought it was more of a monolith of personality, and it's not, which is kind of ignorant on me,

because I can look back at my background and say, okay, we're all vastly different. Sure. The most surprising thing I can elaborate on that people can really take hold of is, and coming back from Vietnam, we have a country that is so tumultuous in its political understanding

that it wants to blame those that were drafted in the war for the war itself. Very, very much a child's perspective. And so we grow and we mature, mostly through the efforts of those that were spat on, that when my generation goes, war, it's the opposite. No matter how politically unpopular the war is, the warriors are celebrated more than they ever have been, probably more so than the tick or tape parades of World War II.

So, you know, that is growth, you know, and so that's what, from the 60s to 20, 40 years of growth. So then if you started in 2001 and moved forward to 2025, we have had this journey of understanding, appreciating, and supporting the mental health injuries of going to war. It really started post-9-11. So you could say we're 25 years as a society into this growth of understanding, supporting, and caring about the psychological trauma that our men and women in uniform in the military endure in order to protect us. We haven't made it to year zero with first responders. That was the most surprising and really daunting thing about finishing this book is that I have the Department of

Veterans Affairs. I've got any number of national nonprofits. I've got lay people who understand the term PTSD better than they ever have, partially because media has embraced it. It's a great story, you know, for a TV show. And partially because, you know, millions of people serve and everybody's connected to one of them and they won't understand them better. So what is the quality that insulates some people from what George Carlin reminded us used to be called Shell Shock. and now is PTSD or combat fatigue or, my God, we can get into the euphemisms of the language in a bit. But what is the quality that seems to insulate some people from that? I'm asking because I had dinner with a nurse last week.

Pleasant dinner, fun, we're eating crabs, Baltimore. She just kind of morphed into a conversation about telling me, it's one of the saddest things, a kid, basically. died in her arms the day before. Yeah. And then, and I asked her about it. She was, oh, gosh, there were this and this and this. And she was just talking about these little individual tragedies that I think probably

would have driven me, anyone would have driven me to my knees. Yeah. And that's just water off the duck's back, you know. And so what is that? Is it resilience? Is it denial? I would say it's a million dollar question. It's kind of like the term PTSD being a blanket.

It's a misnomer at some point. I've been in search of the answer to this question for a long time because you've heard of survivor's guilt. So I have survivor's guilt in a sense of somebody died myself on the IED. But the biggest survivor's guilt I live with is why am I not more effed up than I am? Because my buddies are. You know, why am I not a mess? You know, I probably should be.

So why am I not and am I wrong for that? Am I betraying them by not being a mess? And I wish I had the answer. I look at my own life and I think, hmm, you know, I can apply some things that create this very unique equation that ends with me as the answer. I don't know those are applicable to anybody else's life. I mean.

But the externality of it, Joe. Like, what if, I guarantee there are people who grew up in a similar situation with similar parents. similar part of the country who endured a similar injury who punched their own ticket you know what I've learned is it's the butter five effect it's at some point in my life the right little things happened that changed the trajectory that changed the coordinates of my journey just a little bit a degree here a degree there it really is it's that nuanced it's that small it really should absolutely scare the shit out of you yeah my

My dad said a lot of things. Wisdom, so much wisdom and so simple words. Just a faucet of common sense. Yes. And I think we've talked about some of those euphemisms, what you call them. But one of them, I attribute to him, and I don't really know where I found it, because I had two uncles and a grandfather that lived next door, and they were all my dad. But it's this idea of mind the wake you leave.

And so, mind the wake you leave. The wake that you leave. So if you're on a boat and you're in the middle of a lake, when you're driving through that lake, that wake goes all the way to shore. It affects the people at the house that you don't know exist and everyone else on the water. So mind the wake you leave.

And it's this idea that like we think about our responsibilities. I have a responsibility to raise my kids. But what impact do I have on my nieces and nephews when they're over for a day? You know, what impact do we have on people's lives that becomes a core memory or changes, how they see everything and they don't even know it. We do nothing but learn. I mean, that's what we do for years and years and years. We learn if this then that, if this then that. That is,

we're a computer. Everything we know about survival beyond instinct is if this then that. And the if this, then that experience can override instinct. And so we're at each person is this unique chain of events that led to them responding to trauma and negative things and hurt and and pain in the way that they do. For me, I think it was I learned to survive early on so I could survive anything. I learned that being the positive one in the situation yielded the best outcome.

It was very simple. It wasn't like this, you know, willful, like I got to ignore the negative to find the positive. It was, you know, my mom's got these problems. My dad has those problems. I'm going to be the one that's happy. And when I am, everybody else is too, and we all calm down.

Do do do do do do do do dumb Is it weird to love people but despise human resources? If so, well, color me weird. It's not to say I don't respect the millions of people who work in HR departments and companies all over the country. I do. It's just that I don't envy him. That's why MicroWorks doesn't have an HR department for better or worse.

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Maybe that's true. I don't have the answer to that question. I was just doing an interview at a local news station. The lady comes in and she goes, it's really great you came in today and we just need more stories like this, you know, positive. And I'm thinking, well, number one, it's like when somebody goes, man, those legs are awesome. Well, they're not as good as the original. I was like, thank you for thinking this story.

is good and positive. Yeah. I'm here for you. Anything else I can do? Yeah. But number two, it's like, listen, if people would reward television news for reporting on babies being born, that's all we'd do. That's right.

It's not like we're in, we're not programming you. You're programming us. So people are drawn to sad stories and tragic things. And I don't know. Maybe they're yearning for conditioning. Maybe they want to develop their armor. Maybe that helps them. Maybe they don't want to feel.

feel so alone. Maybe it's all those things, but it's absolutely true. I couldn't tell you why, but it's absolutely true. Well, personally, you know, I've always been suspicious of earnestness by itself. It's, you know, in its best form, in genuine sincerity, it's a reflection of curiosity and humility and a lot of terrific virtues. But, you know, it's also the quality that a good con man relies on. Yeah. You know, I'm watching this. thing on Netflix now. I think it's called Sneaky Pete with Giovanni Rubisi, who's amazing, by the way. Always. Better and better and better. He's so good. But at the end of each episode, which is entertaining, I kind of feel like I need a shower. Yeah. Right? Even more so than

Dirty Jobs, which is the ultimate shower show, right? Dirty Jobs, speaking as though I had nothing to do with it, left me feeling good about the species. Yeah. This show, entertaining though it is, just constantly reminds me of our bottomless capacity for guile. That kind of brings me down. Your book is full of impossibly sad circumstances. And yet, each one of them makes me feel more grateful to be a part of the same species as these people. So I don't know if it's a gut check. I don't know if it's perspective.

In a way, personally, I think it's a bit like how I felt watching you walk up five flights of my stairs. Because I couldn't make the circumstance right, and that drove me crazy. But you didn't care. Or if you did, you hit it so well, which made me feel even worse, you bastard. But it's like to see grace and to see sacrifice in your fellow man, I just think it makes people, you know, feel better, perversely and weirdly and counterintuitively. I think it's easier to trust negative emotions than positive ones because in the back of your head, you know you want to be happy, so am I happy? Does this make me happy or am I forcing it?

Right, right, right. When it's visceral and negative, you trust it because you didn't want to be there to begin with, but here you are. And that's what Vice does. It gives you enough. The booze gives you enough of something that could be confused with happiness. Yeah. The porn gives you enough of something yeah that could be confused with satisfaction. Yeah. Right? They're all just shadows of something that's actually good. Yeah, back to my net, nothing worth doing is ever easy. So we do a lot of things sometimes that aren't worth doing because they are. And that's the inverse of that saying. Anything worthwhile is worth doing right. So we do a lot of things half ass. I don't know why it's part of our nature, but it is. It's better to know it than to ignore it. It's like anything else. You're not always

looking for the answer. It's just sometimes self-awareness is enough, right? All right. Well, with respect to self-awareness and Kierkegaard and the unexamined life and all that stuff, what are you, who do you suspicious of today? And I don't mean just as a, as a Marine who paid a certain price and an author, but as a sharer of news, as an influencer, as somebody who's become a familiar face and a trusted voice in a lot of homes, what worries you? So what I have to do is I have to tear down the shroud of optimism that I keep forefront in order to answer this question, right? I believe that's probably true.

You know, what worries me, well, from a very personal perspective, what worries me most is I won't be there to protect my kids from something. You know? To answer your question, I'll worry about the world I leave them. I'll worry about the world that they're inheriting. And I worry that I'm too arrogant to see that they're also building it. It's not all up to me. I try to say optimistic, but I don't really have to

because sometimes it's just the only choice you got, you know. What worries me most is that we're so wrapped up. in this is going to go in a weird direction and just humor me here I spend a lot time hunting and animals in the wild that don't have the ability to communicate communicate through action rather than words right they need to be in a pecking order so they know they have a place in this world they don't have to be the dominant buck they don't have to be the young book des ostracized but they need to be a buck in the pecking order they need to know what their role is

Every animal out there needs to have an existence. They need to know, maybe it's that they matter, but maybe it's just that this is the space you occupy. I think human beings are the same way. I think it's harder and harder to know that, and we look for it in places that it doesn't exist. We look for it through cloud or social media or to present ourselves a certain way,

when really all it is we just want to know that we have a place. We just want to know we have a spot in society and that community exists for us in some way. I worry the more, and I just sound like every other crumagin out there, put a hat on me and call me a boomer, you know, that veteran hat that says I can be a curmudgeon now. Get off my lawn, you kids, you crazy kids. Exactly.

Exactly. But I just worry that we're sacrificing so much, like the best example I can give you is when my grandfather or dad's generation came home from war. If they married the prom queen and took over dad's hardware store, they were the king. of the world. They were, that was success in the grandest of ways. Now you can be in that same small town and care about what some celebrity couple in LA is doing and feeling like you need to compete with that and you need to be there and you need to create this, this community around this extra world that doesn't exist in your hometown. So my biggest worry is that we

lose our identity because we've lost our community. So we lose our ability to know what our place is in this world. What caused the world is too big to have a place. And if everybody in a town is looking at the world and not their town, the town doesn't exist anymore. Or maybe, too, if there is a hierarchy in the species the way there is in the animal kingdom, then we ought to have an honest conversation about, well, where do the people in your book rank? Where do we put them?

I don't know. Reasonable people, I guess, could disagree, but I know if you go in a bookstore, if there is such a thing left anymore, for every book like this, you'll find 10 about the influencers you didn't know. Behind the influencer. Not behind the badge, behind the celebrity, behind the fame, behind the music,

which was a fun show. I admit, I watched that. But, you know, we get to choose which curtain we want to pull back, which layer on the onion, we want to pull back and see what's underneath there. And there's a curiosity in the country about what makes Chloe Kardashian tick. We want to know. Like, there is that thing. I don't know that that's inherently bad.

I just don't think it's at the top of the food chain. Or at least it shouldn't be. And that's why I like your book. We have pursued the common denominator. We have pursued in music and culture. we have pursued what can be done to appeal to the most amount of people and in doing so we lose everything that is unique and individual about us these people exist in small towns they exist in worlds within themselves they exist to defend their hometown they exist to defend the people

and things they care about they would never have a book about themselves most of them i had to talk into being in a book a chapter of it was about them sidebar who had to talk you into a challenge coin with your name. Yeah, it was, they were coming up with a lot of ideas on how to put something unique attached to this book. And I said, well, we could do a challenge coin for the book. And they said, yeah, but you have to be on the back of it. There needs to be something about you because you're the author. And the only reason I was okay with it is it's impossible to put nine different people on the back of it.

And for some reason, it does matter to people. You know who talked me into it? the guy at the fence at the Fox Plaza when I'm out there doing Fox and Friends in the morning and I'm doing a cooking segment and when I turn around, his whole face lights up and it made his day that I said hello to him. It shouldn't be that way. For some reason it is. And if handing him a challenge coin next time gives him something to take with him, that's okay. I don't love it. And you bet your ass it's going to have something more important on the other side like behind the badge. But think of the role of talismans in your life, in the military.

Think of the way the military makes sense of that same hierarchy you described in the wild, whether it's a private to a corporal, to a sergeant, to a lieutenant, to a captain, to a major, to a colonel, to a general, to all the different, the iconography and the medals and the badges. And this, I mean, man, I've done enough shows with enough military people to know that in a recreation, for instance. Holy crap, you get a stripe wrong or you get an insignia wrong. You'll hear from people. Like, you'll hear fast going, hey, man, those corporal things, and this, and that ball,

and the color of that. And so people are very, very, very tuned in to almost to the point of pedantry about getting the appearance of a thing right. And that must be a reflection of something else, some desire to create. maybe order out of chaos or sense out of anarchy or something. But that's all just to say the cover of the book matters. The back matters. The challenge coin matters.

Your rank matters. Your tattoos matter. They're all choices. Yeah. Right? And we're all making them. And damn, we're complicated. We are.

We complicate the simplest things. The uniform thing is really easy to understand. If you're not willing to take the time to get that. right, are you willing to take the time to get the other things right? That's all it is. It's the same reason we do drill, which I hate because I'm uncoordinated. At some point, I think like your physical ability should also be taken into account. It's like not just can you drill perfectly, but are you trying to? That should matter, you know, A for effort. But yeah, the uniform, the military culture of perfection that probably exists nowhere like it does in the Marine Corps, which is my experience,

is all about if you're not willing to do the little things that kind of don't matter perfectly, are you willing to do the big things that do matter as perfectly as possible? Like if you show an element of that's good enough here, then will you show it there? Messy desk, messy mind. Think about it. I mean, like when you're in war, you know, you make it, being a warrior in war is a series of decisions. It really is. That's what it is.

Like I'm going to charge this hill. When do I shoot back? When do I cover my friend? When do I, you know, is there a moment where? that guy was trying to kill me and he's got an A.K., but now it's on the ground, so do I still shoot him? You're always trying to breathe

these complicated decisions and make them automatic and simple. And so if you can't do that with adjusting your uniform, how are you going to do it on the battlefield? That ever happened to you, by the way? Like that exact scenario? Not that exact scenario, but things of that nature, the whole

time. Because my enemy didn't wear a uniform. Right. And, you know, do I need to blow someone's house up to make sure they don't make IEDs in here anymore? That was my version of it. There are 50 IEDs in this person's house. Did they put them here? Do they deserve to lose everything because they're here? If I don't, do I risk my life moving them out of this house?

Ultimately, he doesn't have a house anymore. That's a decision you make. You really learn that, you know, the true victims of war are not the war heroes. It's not, you know, those of us that the true victims of war don't have purple hearts. They have resentment in their heart because there was a war fault in their home. My guest today, Tom Olbenice, is an American giant, and I'll tell you why. Tom understands on a fundamental level that the business of mining, is a non-negotiable prerequisite of our civilization and our economic independence, just like the business of making things.

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American Giant American Made. With Sherman? A psychopath? Or was he brilliant? I think it was Sherman. It was Sherman. The only way to end the war is to make it all the hell and bring it to the people. Sherman was a war hero and a war criminal.

I'm from Georgia. So. I knew that. Yeah. It was a softball. Sherman is one of the most complex individuals that I've ever studied because if he did that anywhere but Georgia, I would regard him as. You know, the guy willing to make the tough decisions to end the war, but because my mom grew up in a Civil War hospital

that was spared miraculously because it was across the street from a natural spring, but everything around it was burned to the ground. There's some resentment in my heart for a man that's willing to torture the lives of citizens to end the war. But ultimately, what did it result in? It resulted in hundreds of thousands, if not million. of Americans keeping their lives. So, you know, in that way, the people of Georgia paid a heavy price to end that war,

and I'm proud of them for it. Truman, Nagasaki, very similar. Hiroshima. Very similar. Right, right, right. A war hero and a war criminal. Yeah.

Terrorists and a freedom fighter. Yeah. It's sometimes it's that thin of the line. You mentioned something earlier about like the slightest change in a California. You can have a huge impact downrange, right? When your trajectory changes, it reminded me there's a sniper that you write about here.

Tommy Whirl. Yeah. Tell me about Worley. Yeah. Tell me about Worley. Well, number one, he's been my friend for years before he told me how to say his last name right. So I promoted this book for a solid six months, calling him Tommy Whirl. And he goes, well, you got such an accent. I just didn't know if you knew and didn't know how to say it. I didn't want to be rude.

Yeah. I mean, it's not like he has to walk up five flights. flights. I know, well, he's, we went hunting together, so he's definitely put me through it. Tommy's a fantastic guy. What I love about Tommy is he says it like he means it. He doesn't sugarcoat it. He enjoys his job. He enjoys being on a SWAT team. He enjoys the art and the skill and the craft of being a sniper, but he doesn't enjoy taking someone's life. Was he a sniper in the service prior, or did he learn it through SWAT? What's fun about his story is, my brother-in-law, that's a fireman.

people ask him like you always want to be a fireman and he goes yeah I had too many friends to be a cop you know I didn't have anything to prove that's his like you know so Tommy is kind of the opposite he wanted to be a fireman went hung out at a fire department and realized that his his personality was much better suited as a cop and and so he's a great guy but the story of his career is exactly what you're saying it's making these split second decisions the one point he drives home that a lot of people to understand is that when you're a sniper, you don't call in for somebody to give you permission. It's all you. Once you're on the job, you've already been given permission. In the Marine Court, we call that small unit leadership. Authority is delegated to the lowest rank

so that no one dies waiting on permission. God, where was that with the withdrawal? Yeah, Abbey Gate. Exactly right. Where the hell was that? Small S-U-L? Small-U-L? Small- unit leadership? Is that what it's called? Small, small, small, small, small unit. I made it an acronym for you, given your extensive military. Everything's an acronym. We have a weapon called a small. So I was like, I thought maybe you were getting confused. No, which ends in W. And when you talk like me, you don't know if it's a W or 2L. You don't even know how to say your best friend's name. I'm telling you, exactly. And so, yeah, so small unit leadership. The ad is they'll tell you. They'll tell you. They'll

you in boot camp, and this is Marine Corps pride showing through, but they'll say you put two soldiers in a room of the same rank, you put two privates in the army in a room, you have two privates. You put two sailors of the same rank in a room, you have two sailors. You put two Marines of the same rank in a room, you have a leader and a subordinate. That's the culture. We're much smaller a service, so we're going to have smaller groups of people out there, and everybody needs to understand their role as a leader. But there's your, there's your hierarchy again coming through. Yeah, and I'm sure that...

That's like your metaphor for living. Where do I fit? Where do I fit in? And then we have other things like lead from the back, you know? Like, it's every action you do influences somebody else. Mind your wake. Yeah. That's exactly right.

And so Tommy's job as a sniper isn't to kill a bad guy. That part's easy. He has that skill set and those tools down pat. He can, you know, he can make two adjustments and take someone's breath away with the squeeze of his hand. He also has to believe in his heart that the bad guy is a bad guy, I would think, and he has trust. He's been called, in other words. That's the angle that you have to think about.

He doesn't have to believe he's a bad guy. He doesn't believe he's capable of doing bad things to good people. It's not always a bad guy. In order to pull the trigger. Yeah. Think about it. Half of Denzel Washington's movies are him being a bad guy, but you'll like him anyway kind of thing, right? And I say him because probably the most beloved actor, you know, unilathing.

There is. That's what you learn we read this chapter is it's not about his opinion of that person that he may delete. It's about his calculation of that person's next actions. So when he's called in, like what's a typical scenario? Yeah. I just know the ones from the book, right? So generally what happens is local law enforcement is engaged in something usually I'd say the majority is like kidnapping hostage situation or someone is armed and dangerous and held up in their home

and there may be innocent victims involved. So you put a sniper in an overwatch position. You try to get them elevated to where they can survey. They can see the guys are protecting and the guys are protecting them against at the same time. So you're trying to get them elevated further away. The further away you are for something, the more perspective you have.

And so what usually they're calling, in is to do what's called Overwatch, which is to make sure the guys on the ground taking action don't have a vulnerability behind them beside them in front of them they don't see and to eliminate that threat before it becomes a harm. But it can also happen in a more kinetic way. One of the great examples he gives is a guy that was a police officer snapped, took his kids and I think his girlfriend on a high-speed chase, they're being chased, gets away, ends up like now that they're looking for them. And the ex-wife calls and says,

I think he's going to hurt them. I think he's going to hurt the kids. And so I don't remember the story exactly, but basically the decision was made to use Tommy's team in a way that basically what they were afraid of is if the guy was directly intercepted by Boots on the ground police,

he would do the bad thing. So give Tommy's team the opportunity to do it, covertly to basically get a sneak attack on him, catch him walking out of the hotel room. And they weren't given that opportunity. Boots on the ground, police intercepted him, and he killed his kids and his girlfriend himself.

So Tommy lives with the regret of, let me do my job, let me get in that overwatch position. You know where he's going. Let me get there first. And let me do my job. And it's tough because somebody had to make that decision. And somebody was trying to save four lives, not just three.

You know? Dude, it's so, I mean, it's the minority report. It's pre-crime. Well, it's not pre-crime because he already did the bad thing. He kidnapped. Yeah. He's exhibited all these things. Yeah.

And now you have to decide, is he on a trajectory? Exactly. To do the big bad thing. You ever watch the Mothman prophecies, the movie? Oh, yeah. There's a great analogy in there that I always look back at when I think about overwatch and snipers. And it's, he says, are they really, they're not, are they seeing into the future?

Or can they just see from the top of this skyscraper what our future looks like? Right. And it's that same kind of thing. Are they good or bad or do they just have perspective? And so it's the same thing with like these snipers. By getting perspective, by getting higher, they can literally see our future. They can see what we're walking into. Oh, boy, it's still, though, man, it's still, I thought, you know, it was flawed.

But the minority report as a movie. Yeah. Just the basic notion of what do you do with a question? criminal who hasn't committed the crime yet. Yeah. Do you go back and kill baby Hitler? You know, it's that kind of thing. And so Tommy's job, just to go back, is to make that decision. Is to make that decision. What is the likely outcome here? Who's baby Hitler? Yeah. It really is like the best way I know to explain it is the cops on the

ground, the person that made that decision to intercept that guy in the car was trying to save four lives when Tommy could have saved three. You know, that's the difference. So the guilt that Tommy deals with comes from not pulling the trigger. Yeah. That's exactly right. As opposed to everything you would think you would, like, I have to live with the fact that it's the nurse. I mean, it's just like. And, you know, there's another instance where he does pull the trigger on someone who displayed a weapon and come to find out it was like a nail gun or something.

It was, he did have something in his hand that he was using to present as a weapon that was not lethal. Yeah. He can't worry about that. He still made the right decision. You ever read Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carry? It's a Vietnam book, and obviously it's about what's behind the uniform. It's about all the weight that you carry. But metaphorically, since I know you're a fan, it starts with a detailed analysis of everything in the rock.

And what it weighs. That's the prompt question for these guys and gals. When you come home at the end of the day, you can take off the uniform, you can take off the kit, you can hang the weapon up, you can hang the duty belt up. How do you hang up the trauma? How do you hang up your hang up? Yeah. How do you set that aside and get in the floor and play with your kids? If I'm at Fox News and I report on floods in Texas that kill these little girls, do you know how hard it is to go home to my little girl?

It's incredibly difficult, not because I don't want to be there, but because I feel this overwhelming sense of greed. and guilt because I know there are these other little girls and these other families that are experienced in the opposite. I couldn't imagine seeing it on the ground level. I couldn't imagine being one of the many first responders recovering those little girls and going home to my little girl. How important is empathy to the human condition and how much empathy is behind the badge? It's a blessing and a curse, isn't it? Yep. You know, it's like, I wish I didn't have it sometimes. I bet these guys and gals feel like life would be a lot simpler if they just didn't care, you know. But also, if you read like Steve Hinnigan's chapter, it stops him from doing

what he's justified and doing. Which one's Hinnigan. Steve Hinnigants, because of where we are, LAPD, became L.A. Bomb Squad. And so I know him because he helped trained us to go to war, because he's older, so he's been around longer. And early on in the days of IEDs, we're looking for training from anybody we can get it from. So I met him. He was in the Marine Corps, ironically, but he was not in the bombs squad. From the Marine Corps to LAPD, all through the riots and everything, and then becomes LAPD bomb squad. But in his early days as a street cop,

he really gives several stories where, and I don't know if he did it on purpose, or they're just the ones that stood out to him, where he was justified in essentially pulling the trigger and didn't. And it turned out good. You know, and he says it only took one of those to not, and I'd never have the opportunity to do it again. and I'd been wrong.

He's like, but I trusted my intuition. And there's a couple of things you glean from that. One, is there a right way and a wrong way, right? We talk about the difference between a hero and a villain is who gets to write the story, right? You know, so had he not, had he, if any of those instances, when he could have pulled the trigger, literally, that person killed him and went on to kill somebody else

is he now responsible for their death, you know? So it's like, it's this whole lot, it taps into the psychology of doing this job that people give no credence to whatsoever. There isn't a right way or wrong way. There's just the way you do it. In the moment. Yeah, and the outcome it yields.

And we can overlay this on any number of incidents that have made the news. Daniel Penny or don't know the cop's name, but the guy in Ferguson, Mississippi. Oh, yeah. It really started the 2020 wave of riots. Hands up, don't shoot. Exactly. And so, or even Derek Chauvin. And, you know, you could take both sides of,

it. You don't sugarcoat things. You don't steer away from bad decisions. The truth is it's an impossible job, especially on the law enforcement side. And we don't tell the stories of the ones that get it right. We tell the outrage of the ones that don't. Here's a chance to read none of them that do. Well, I can't encourage people more to take that chance. You know, read the book. I mean, And I tried on dirty jobs to get out of my way. Yeah. You know, it's hard. It really is.

I'm glad I did it. I'm so glad you wrote this because honestly, I don't think a lot of, well, I wouldn't have given permission to most people simply because I'm wary of earnestness. Yeah. And simply because I don't need to have virtue sold to me. Yeah. Right? Like it's a book.

Like it's a, I don't want, I totally, I don't want virtue to be transactional. Yeah. But I live in the world. We all live in. Yeah. You know, so this is a, it's a wonderful book. They all decided to do it under the pretense of if this helps somebody else. You know, if telling what I went through helps somebody else feel okay about feeling the same way or getting help or help someone understand why that cop they're intercepting today.

is in a bad mood, but isn't a bad guy, if it inspires someone to take care of themselves a little better, because now they know when they act stupid and do bad things, it can ruin someone else's life that's there to save them. Yeah. You know, all those are positive effects that have nothing to do with those individuals. You'll forget their names, but you'll remember those lessons. Right.

And that's why they wanted to be in the book, or why they allowed me to put them in the book. Is there any explanation in here as to how Gutfeld wind up with the non-examination? number one late night talk show? No, the explanation is these are real people. These are real people. You know, and so, and that's who watches his gut fell. The last topic, and it's not a topic, but it's just if you would, if you could riff for a moment on the role of humor and how it's kept you saying.

And what role, if any, it might play in this book, I think that would be a good place to land the plane. Well, I'm going to get as deep as I can with it because you gave me the opportunity. I think what makes humor so effective is it reminds us how small everything really is. No matter how much it hurts you, no matter how devastating it is to you, it can still just be a punchline for somebody else. when I was in Afghanistan and a man that I would die for that's a peer, maybe he's a rank above me, gets killed in action and I get the news,

I might say something like, well, shit, that opens up a spot for promotion. Right. And what does that do? It puts it in perspective, man. It means that this is a big world. Hierarchy. Yeah.

There you are again. You know, that's what, and so we use humor with my legs. I use humor all the time. The best thing I can give you is, it became a Facebook, meme and I said it, I don't remember how I said it the first time because now I only say it in telling the story, but someone asked me, how do you stay so positive after you lost your

legs? And I say, well, how are you ever negative? You have yours. Like, if you're going to reduce me to just this thing, then I get to do the same thing to you. Yeah. And it's just, it helps us feel okay about things that are inexplicable. I mean, arguably religion is appealing to people because it helps us feel okay about things that don't make sense. Humor works in a similar way. It lets the air out of the tire, that's for sure. It allows you to feel okay about something that hurts. Hey, look, man, this is so small.

Forgive me, but I, you know, I was so pissed off last night about this elevator situation. And I literally said to Chuck and Mary, who you just met, I'm like, look, what the hell are we going to do, man? The guy flies in to do the show. And I can see, I'm going to invite him to take his legs off. I'll throw him over my shoulder and walk him up the stairs. I'm not sure he'd be cool with that. Do we get a leader? Do we have a couple guys?

Help? Can he do it? I don't know that. My friend Manju runs the hotel down the street. And she's dialed into every first responder here in town. One call, five firemen come over. You're up to stairs at five seconds. And at some point, just a whole series of totally teard.

tasteless out on a limb jokes. Just, you know. And it happened because I was so frustrated. Yeah. And I just felt so bad about the whole little thing. And that's really just life. People just trying to deal with whatever is in front of them and make it okay somehow. I did a TV show that Jeremy Judd was in called Fox Nation Outdoors.

The Game Ward. Yeah. And so he guided me on a moose hunt. And in the show you see, moose live in swamps and Maine has swamps. You just don't realize they're swamps because they freeze over. And you think swamps only exist in, you know, Louisiana. Right. They're in Maine too.

And so you don't trek through a swamp with robot legs, but I'm up there to kill a moose and I'm not going to like bait it in, you know. And so there's video and clips of him carrying me on his shoulders and somebody behind me carrying my legs and we're going through a swamp. There's he carried me on a litter with another guy, Dave, to get me across a creek so we could hunt this moose. Because the thing is like, I'm going to honor that animal and do it the hard way. But there's a moment where the camera, you know, we just had a guy with the camera on the shoulder running around when we were at camp.

Right. And I've dropped my pants and I've pulled a leg off and I'm doctoring a sore on my skin graft. And he turns the corner. I go, oh, damn, he caught me with my pants down. You know, it's like, but you have to have that kind of humor, you know. You got to have that opportunity to not just make fun of your stuff. but make fun of the terrible things that happen to you and that you're going through. And I think to a degree make fun of this universal dread that we all have of saying the wrong thing

and doing the wrong thing and causing offense when we don't mean to. It's all just so fragile and tragic. Yeah. And you know, whatever it is, um, thank God we can laugh, man. I mean, that's exactly right. I just don't know. I really don't know what the point would be if we couldn't do that. You know what humor does. It allows us to exercise our minds on the difference between intent and execution.

You know, do you intend to me harm? Like, you know, when you say something, when you say a joke, is it because you want to offend me or because you find this situation as ridiculous as I do? It's why the cancellation was so tragic through the comedy world. it totally took intent out and just reduced the sentiment to the words. And that's like if the only thing that mattered about this book were the words and the way you grouped them up, it'd be so less interesting than knowing who wrote it and why. And who were the heroes and the courageous people in that are the ones that were willing to sacrifice their career to bring us what we wanted.

I think we should leave people with Kat Tim. ultimate rejoinder, who sat right where you're sitting, in fact, not even a year ago when her book came out. Yeah. And she, of course, has had a hell of a year, and she's come back. With all the ups and downs. Yeah, man. What was the exact exchange?

So she and I are old colleagues on Gutfeld's show. That's something that I've done, I think, since about the first month of his show, and Kat's been on there. So we know how to make fun of each other, and we enjoy it. and she had to have this round in the chamber for weeks before. When I finally went on the show in that first couple weeks after she came back, I was ready. Like, I knew what she was doing.

So my round in the chamber was, how dare you steal the empathy card? That's all I got. Right. You really went and got cancer just so people would feel sorry for you? Like, that's my whole stick here. I got blown up for it. So I used, you know, I sent my salvo, and her immediate response was,

hey, you're not the only double amputee here anymore. She knew what was coming and she had a defense for it. It was awesome. I mean, it was a wonderful moment. And the question, of course, that we can't answer is how was it processed from sea to shining sea? How did it land? How many laughed? How many clutched their pearls?

How many chose? And I say chose to be offended. How many chose not to be offended? All these things are choices, I believe. And, well, that's life, isn't it? Trying to figure out whether you're a sniper or a game warden or a cop or a fireman. You know, you still have to find that ability to laugh. And they do.

The book's full of them making fun of themselves and each other. A lot of them I know because we're going hunting trips together. So there was some camaraderie that kind of permeates in the book that isn't on the nose. Several of these people in the book I've introduced on hunting trips because that's kind of like my side project. as I take first responders and veterans on hunting trips to get to know each other and and probably a catalyst for the book larger than I've given it credit for. But they do. They make fun of themselves. They make fun of the terrible things they've gone through and they do it so they can go do it again. You got to rationalize it, you got to shake it off.

Stoics, one and all. Absolutely. The book is called Behind the Badge. You'd be a fool not to pick up a copy for yourself and some additional copies for anyone, anyone who is ever laughed in the face of adversity, done the hard thing, simply because it's such a better choice than doing the easy thing. Johnny Joey Jones, if there's any justice in this world, the elevator will work and take you down, but at this point, I wouldn't count on it. We'll let gravity do the work. Thanks, Bell. 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 a lie

And leave us a review I hate to ask, I hate to make, 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. Not four. 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 too. 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. Five-star... Especially if you hate it.

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