[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was, it was, I had all the red knives, all the, it was crazy. It was a, it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets. And so they, like you do, like a lot of guys with our experiences do,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Try to impart those experiences and impact on young people. And so they were doing the same with me. So I felt like I was mentored by these Green Berets. Uhm, once I went into a class, and my mom dropped me off, and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She came back an hour and 10 minutes later and I was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off cause she's like, I'm paying for my son. Why are you doing, why are you only having him stand there? It's like, it's an assessment. And I stared at myself for an hour in meditation. I'm like, what the hell? I learned a lot about myself in that hour. It's crazy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A lot. It was aggressive. A lot of dudes got hurt. It was just, I think it was a lot.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh yea, it was a lot of, I mean, there were jujitsu, I mean, ninjitsu has, uh, in, in it's Japanese form has a lot of traditional, uh, jujitsu type moves on the ground, but it's not ground game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's like a move. Yes. It's a singular move. It's a singular move. That's the problem. That is the problem. That's an inherent problem with that. And so I learned a lot about discipline from that experience, but it made me harder. So when I went to survival school,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was just prepped, man. I was good. And it wasn't a difficult thing, but I saw dudes fall apart. And when I went to survival school, it was the last thing that you did in the Q course. If you failed,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You failed everything. You just, you just spent two years of your life training to be a green beret, and they let dudes go. How many people fail that?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I mean, getting a, like, even just a hood, like, people aren't used to taking, if you, if you don't grow up in those martial arts, if you don't grow up in, uhm, impact sports and not used to making contact, when that hood comes off your head and you get slapped by a dude's hands who are like pickle fingers, McGee, and he slaps your face and, and you can't do anything,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I had, what, the interesting thing in this psychology was,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're playing, you have to be resistant, right? The whole game is you're resistant. I remember we were building, uhm, in the sand, a sickle that represented the communist, you know, scenario. And we were building a sickle, and half of us,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're sabotaging the sickle so guys would make it. And I remember I had a guy who I highly respected, he was a platoon sergeant in the infantry, had gone through training with me. I was scooting all the stuff out after they were building it, knocking it over.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Wait a minute. You realize that we're supposed to be subverting this whole circumstance. Like you're not supposed to actually be making this. And he's like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, and he was in the scenario, man. Freakin' Bridge on the River Kwai. Oh dude, it was insane. Some of these guys were like, the headlights, I mean it was, they had the deer in the headlights look, and they thought for real they were in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We've been working with them. Exposure is the way to deal with that, but it's, they had, I mean, it was, it was very, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and then they play the music, like crying babies, all kinds of different stuff. And a lot of people, uhm, they would transfer you into different boxes based on your fear. So if they saw the fear coming out of you, they were exploiting that fear. They're like, oh, this dude in a big box is getting scary.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, a long time. You lose track of time because you're sleep deprived. Here's one story, I- I-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thinking I was a smart guy, I, I was like, similar to the, I have to piss right now, but I had to piss really bad.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so I'm like, if I piss in this box, they're gonna hook me up. I can't piss in this box. So this is my- I'm thinking logically, I think. And I'm like, this is completely logical.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then I'll take it outside, and we're in the gravel, I'll dump the piss off. Forgetting about this whole thing called displacement, right? I pee in my boot. I take off my boot. You don't have socks, you're naked, got these bare pajamas on. I fill my boot with piss.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Completely. You're, you're, you're sedated, man. You're just going with the flow. It's, it's similarly to, I think about when you accept at some point when you're in water.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That bridging that gap and just accepting it is the, the first part of being successful in that environment. And then you, like you create your new happy place where you're like, man, as long as I'm in my head and I have this space that I'm comfortable with, I'm good. You can do whatever you want. There's nothing you can do to me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Doomsday, doomsday, doomsday. It's like dude, I'm on the beach drinking a pina colada eating a piece of chicken right now. I'm living my best life in my head and I'm good.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Being present within my own mind and developing this relationship with the conscious voice that's in my head, but also like this passive observer, this person who's kind of observing the narration of the voice in my head and sitting back and like measuring all these inputs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because when you're standing still for 21 seconds at a time before you take 21 steps, repeating it times an hour for a long walk during the winter hours, times four to six walks a day, you have to get real good at being comfortable with yourself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Time has always been an important metric. In fact, we should probably look at it more closely because that relationship with time, I think sets and establishes these gates and disciplines for your whole life. The structure of your life, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When I was a tomb guard, uhm, one thing that you had to train to do is count 21 seconds exactly and then turn and face for 21 seconds and get this rhythm and cadence down. But when you got into that flow state, it was unconscious.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So now I'm just on autopilot and I'm in a meditative state. There's times that I came off, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The mad after an hour walk and feeling like the best I've ever felt. Like super calm, super relaxed, super focused. And like I was doing meditation in my own head space. That translated throughout all of the uncomfortable, even the experiences in gunfights and everything else I did in my life.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, that, that high level, I mean it's theta and alpha and these, these wavelengths of like this neurological consciousness. When you're in that alpha state and you're taking that information, similar to like, uh, when you're in a shower or on a drive and all these thoughts come to you, this creativity comes to you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's when you're flowing in CQB and everything comes together and you're like, what just happened? Like we, we were just objective secure in 17 seconds. How did that happen? I barely remember anything, but I was so conscious because you run that alpha state of flow. It's, it's a, it's an amazing state to be in. And I think very rare for people to find these days with the distractions they have.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right out the gate, um, deploy with 3rd Special Forces Group on a mountain team. And then, uh, do 9 months in Afghanistan in a remote fire base. Just right off the gate, right off the gate. During Operation Red Wing. My company was involved in Red Wings.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When I got to a team, it was the traditional Green Beret mission.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're going to put you in a remote fire base on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan as an 18 Bravo at 150 Afghan soldiers that weren't even soldiers. This is before Afghan national army was even stood up and solidified, especially in our region of a Nuristan province.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What kind of operations were you conducting? Movement to contact, uh, we did SR, um, special reconnaissance. We did DA.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was this like a traditional ODA team of 10 or 12 guys? 12 guys with a small contingent of civil affairs for a period of time. One combat controller and a firebase.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, as remote as you can get. I mean, we were self-sustained. I learned a lot even fast-forwarding with how I teach survival and sustaining oneself and what we call just homestead as we teach it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A snowstorm in that area would shut us down for a week at a time where we get no air support, uh, no air support, no CAS, no resupply, no medevac platforms. So we are solely dependent on the men and their skill sets that they have based on their experiences.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's freakin' sketchy. It was the Wild West. Greatest time I had in SF, to be honest. We didn't have a flag pole. We had simple five W's for con up submissions. It was, it was a good time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I did, I had the introspect. I mean, I remember when I showed up and uhm, we landed at 10,000 plus feet of elevation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I was pissing Mellow Yellow. I mean, I was like, dude, this is insane. And I look, I remember standing in the middle of my firebase. We were along Conar River. Uhm, very small base. I mean, I could throw a football and hit every gate.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I remember looking around going, well this is my home for almost a year. Get comfortable with this because this is how it's going to be. And immediately transforming and using those cultural tactics and building relationships. But getting comfortable with time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What I assumed at war in practice and how it executed in real life. A lot of it was theory and concepts and didn't necessarily translate. What was the delta between the two?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's the dumbest tactic when you're receiving 107mm rockets that have a kill radius of 100 yards. And so you put dudes on the roof, which I did myself on the first direct attack, got on the roof with a 240 machine gun. And I'm like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Change rapidly when that kind of ordnance and munitions and firepower come to bear. Completely changes everything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This isn't like running through the wood line in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. This is a little bit different. And so that changed my perspective on


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A doctrinal, conventional answer and solution versus being creative and coming up with new ways and tactics as you evolve at the speed of war.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, but that's all we had. Uhm, the biggest weapon systems we had were munitions and, and caches that we found, and caches that we found.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Where we took them and turned them around on bad guys. We bought a Mark 21 107mm pod. We get one rocket from the bad guy. The SIT rep would read, you know, ODA 366 responds with 57 107mm rockets. 106mm recoreless rifles. We had mounted the ATVs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, was a test bed for creativity. Uhm, we built a mosque. Like I physically built a mosque with my hands. My ODA, brick by brick, helped build a mosque. Why? Because we wanted to build rapport with having a place of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah, I mean we've had, we had wounded in action, we had killed in action in our company, uhm, we, you know, during the mid range, uhm, which was, we just had the anniversary of Operation Red Wings, which was the 28th.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We got hit up for that mission task with that. Camp Vance, which was in Bagram.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But we just started over, man. The, the detriment to...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Warfare is this vicious cycle and when you take a playbook and you plan the playbook but you don't put in the same continuity pieces to establish a long term relationship, you just start the vicious cycle all over again. Every detachment commander, every team sergeant wants their


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What'd you do during Red Wing? You were on the recovery op?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Two of my companies in Asadabad and JBad, um, south of us got tasked to actually do the rescue of Marcus Luttrell.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah, uhm, look, green berets are known.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you're running a company of 150 Afghans. Yep, yeaah. I ran, so I was the, when I went I was the only Bravo. Typically you run a junior and a senior. I would have been the junior because I was a young staff sergeant.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Guys, let's, uh, let me give you an in-brief. Let's, we're gonna do assessments, I'll give them the plan.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So they challenged me immediately. One of the guys says to me, uhm, Mike, uh, they want to know if you're a good shooter. And I said, well, what does that assessment look like?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So we get in the prone and I said, so it's rifle, not its rifle AK 47. So, but no red dot iron sights. And I don't even know the point of aim or impact on this gun. There's no dope. Oh, it's a random random AK. So I said, so I say to the guy, I said, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Exactly. Exactly. Notching the star out of the county fair. So he sits down and he's a well respected nurse standing. These guys look like me. I mean, I look like I belong in that tribe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so rapport initially right off the bat is like accepted, but I have to prove myself. So this guy gets down on the prone and he takes a shot.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we go up and inspect it, and he's like an inch off of the pasty. So I'm thinking in my head, he's holding it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I try to contain my excitement because I'm like, yeaah, and I wanna be like, yeaah, what's up? But I knew it was part of this whole story, this journey. So I go up there and they bust out and they're like, yeaah, oh my god, and they're so excited. And from that moment, it's like I was their commander. And we have this relationship where,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I trained him every single day. I broke bread with him every single day. And it was a beautiful day, man. I felt like I had a company worth of valuable human beings who would lay down their life. And when I found out later, and this is in hindsight looking back and talking to different guys, when I left, I had those Afghan commandos. I handed them over to another ODA.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When third group came back in, they rotated in and there was a guy by the name of, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, uh, Rob, uh, Rob, I can't remember, Rob something. I can't remember his name. It's Horbo, I can't remember his name. And he rotated in with him as the 18 Bravo. So when he gets in that position,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So as this evolves later in the war, I find out that one of the guys that we had from third group that was killed posthumously in a gunfight running uphill with a machine gun.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, gets killed, earns the Medal of Honor, and dies fighting side by side with these same guys. In fact, some of those guys that I trained were killed in that action, where...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, you earn their respect, you operate with them. But when I left him, it was, it felt like the end of the world. And, you know, you talk to guys like John Stryker-Meyer, that's a common thing. It's something that we're not very good at. In fact, we're pretty horrible at.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] More likely all the intel has been leaked already. They already know who they are. And they're, they have their target deck built. And right now, I mean if you look at all the different places, especially the remote places of Afghanistan, which is very tribal, very geographically, regionally,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That means they're supposed to take over in some capacity anyway, but what that means to the rest of the men that we fought off all over the country, uhm, all these guys will be rolled up and more likely executed, which is a, it's a, it's a damn shame.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Those guys, just like in Iraq, uhm, just like I've experienced in Yemen, in Pakistan, uhm, in Africa, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's a vicious cycle that doesn't stop and we, we don't learn those lessons. Um, but I don't know the answer. I don't know the solution. I mean, making them citizens and bringing them up, taking the fighting force that's the most capable human beings there and doing that. I don't know what the answer is, but it's a, it's a horrible thing that I know is transpiring likely right now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yep, get done with, uh, Afghanistan, immediately come back and go to, uh, Sephardic, which is our version of advanced CQB, Haas' rescue, to be aligned with the DA company. You know, the, when I work with the, the SEALs in 06, 07, all the, the ladder rotations,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was mostly with a company called the Commander and Extremist Force, which has now been renamed the Crisis Response Force, which has been recoined, a deep underground, um, unit, uh, for, uh, tunnels and stuff.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Four. Four months. Home for four months. Two months of school.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nine months total. So nine months, get back, do Sephardic for two months, and then get about a month and a half before we burn out for Iraq, for Baghdad.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I actually got married right before this rotation. And in a courthouse, my grandmother passed away at that same time period. Didn't get a lot of time to have any kind of anything with the family. And then we were turning and burning for Iraq.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, so we've staged the Area 4, had a couple of mission sets, you know, working with Iraqi counter-terrorism forces, working with Task Force as a unilateral force, and then working with the, uh, ERU, which is the Emergency Response Unit, the equivalent of the FBI HRT that prosecutes targets in Iraq. Iraqi. That's an Iraqi.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah. Almost acting like the mic force until...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, the Mike Force strike unit until we get there and we started doing joint operations with NAVSOF and then the CIF. So it's, it's like a couple guys from my CIF company, which was B23, the third group CIF, working hand in hand with six or seven guys from a facility. And we would go out and at the time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We weren't, they weren't doing operations with Americans because, uh, a company, a contracted company was training them, but they weren't advising them, but they weren't doing counter-terrorism operations. So we actually took over and started doing the first counter-terrorism operations with them, side by side, uhm, using our assets to bear.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Basically nightly ops. Reverse cycle nightly ops. We had a cycle of, you know, red, amber, green. You're training dudes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, even if you're training dudes, you're probably gunning on trucks or...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Acting as a machine gunner on halfs on helicopter assaults, but every single night we're prosecuting targets, sometimes two, three targets a night, depending on what was going on. So we had a target deck, everybody else in task force had a target deck. And at the time, which was, um, in transition for the big surge, we were prosecuting at the time, uh, Shia based targets. And so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Mukhtar al-Sadr and his network of shitheads we were going after every night.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Pretty much all over the country. I mean, we halfed with Navy assets flying us out the 60s.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I actually was deployed with, uhm, at the time, Jeremy Wise. Jeremy Wise was a young


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and, uh, we were both breachers together. Uhm, so we, every night we did, did breaches, we, uhm, did unilateral pieces of our op, so a couple Americans, like me and another Sith guy and like three or five SEALs would go out and do our piece, we'd hit one building, and then the Iraqis we were with would hit another building. So, unilateral salters is basically what


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Insane. Completely different. I try to use some of the, you know, the similarities where we were training them in the back end. But these guys, if you saw them operating when they were a kid, you would think they were Americans. Like competent assaulters, snipers, Americans.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The combination of the Iraqi counter-terrorism force, which we pulled out of Iraq into Jordan and isolated and trained, and the ERU that turned into the Emergency Response Battalion were the highest, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Probably with close air support, meaning the JTAC piece, were the sole reasons that ISIS doesn't exist in Iraq today. So it was a long road ahead of them. We were just in the beginning stages of it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What did you prefer for, for the deployment? What did you like doing better? Man, that's a tough question. So different. So different, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the things that I enjoyed, like overlanding across Afghanistan in the wild west, uh, with not a lot of oversight and just winging it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And learning a lot of lessons in that versus that deliberate like land on the X, fast rope on top of the building and kill bad guys. I enjoy them both. I mean, if I could have, if I could overland to an objective and fast rope on top of it, that whole combination, it'd be perfect, man. I love both of them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Did you, did you guys take any casualties on that deployment? We did, we took.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So we were working with Joint Task Force, which included Tier 1 units and the Rangers, uhm, and us and the Navy. You guys were taking casualties. Uhm, there was EFPs that were affecting guys, gunfights. Uh, we took a casualty. One of my guys in my troop was killed that rotation. Tung Nguyen.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah, and that was on my team and my troop first, first dude. Uhm, didn't know him great, I mean I knew him, I was a new guy there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But one of the most respected members of that unit. I mean, he was the guy on the PDSS with his long gun.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Who ended up killing like three bad dudes on a PDSS. I mean, who goes TDY and kills a few dudes comes back after, you know, getting Intel. Like you got some Intel on target, you know, he, he, he was that kind of guy. Vietnamese descent too. So.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, me and him were the only Asians in that group and he took, he took, uh, uhm, uh, he, he took his job serious and when he saw me come into the company, he took me under his wing and, and he tried to take care of me. He experienced a Salter, belonged to C11, which is the first group, uh, SIF.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when and how deep in deployment was that? Uhm, man, right off the gate. I mean, it was only a couple months in. We still had four months of that rotation. And then at the end of our rotation was the surge. So we got super hot, super active.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] From gunfights? From IEDs? No, gunfights. I mean, I was on a, uh, a rooftop in solder city once, in a sniper overwatch position for a hostage rescue. Got pinned down to the roof. Uhm, I had a big army sniper team that was with me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That, that one and a half hour gunfight.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Small arms, RPGs, mortar rounds, all in the same, um, gunfight, all on our position. Um, I'll never forget. I was like, you know, laying on the roof, trying to keep my head flat and staying in the fight because we had a retreat option. We could have went down in the, into the building, into the third story that we were on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was, uhm, laying underneath a satellite dish. And we're three stories high. So we're above most of the city. But there's still second and third story buildings inside Saunders City. And he's getting this satellite dish disintegrated over his ass, a couple feet over his butt. And I'm like, oh, these guys are close. They have us dialed in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then I looked up in the sky, uh, cause I, something caught my attention. I looked up and there was RPGs air bursting above us and I'm like, this is not good.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So we, we, we basically started waylaying bad guys that were squirting into the objective, like trying to infill on containment, and then we're breaking contact out of the objective. And all black, mighty militia dudes, black pajama kind of guys.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A lot of it was command and control because we had CAS, I had control, uh, I had comms with a close air support F16 that was above us. And we were trying to relay and report all the information, but we were having comms problems.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So what lulled that fight, you know, in the long story of it, uhm, what lulled that fight was an F-16, uh, cause I had marked a VS-17 panel in the middle of that roof.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Came out of its rotation, its orbit and over 500 feet above our building did a pass and popped flares. I thought he was going to do a gun run and kill us all because we lost comms. So I popped that VS-17 and I looked up and he started banking in and I'm like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I yelled at my combo guy and I'm like, do we have any comms? And he came down and ran the perimeter road, which I think was, uh, used to call it home base where at the base of the leg of solder city from home base to third base, he ran that entire road at 500 feet, turned his wings. You could almost see his, his face.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And pop flares and it lulled the gunfight enough for us to get out, break contact into Bradley's and break contact.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a war going on between the Sunnis and Shias and typically it's like


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Dick's solder city versus everybody else in the country. And now the Sunnis are getting supported by the U.S. So we're going to war with, uhm, Iran back, Shias. And we get into that rotation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And our task force does a couple things. They have a mission set where they go, Hey, you guys are going to go and do bilateral operations, working with indigenous guys like ICTF, like ERU, like we, like we talked about, but there's another component our mission set.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Where we work with JSOC at Joint Task Force. So we were under, uh, Joint Task Force conducting, uh, counter-terrorism operations, hunting HVTs on a deck.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, for Jsoc as part of one of their action arms, that whole entire rotation. And it was, it was epic.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, yeaah, we're at, uh, Fernandez. MSS Fernandez. Uh, named after a unit guy that was killed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How, how big is your unit that you're working with? 20, so our troop is about 20 plus guys. And at the time I'm a sniper now, so I moved over to the sniper section, so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm a sniper team supporting to assault teams for hits every single night. So my job specifically was containment. So setting and establishing containment, a lot of building, climbing that rotation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, a lot of Overwatch, killing squirters, running out of buildings, killing bad guys, trying to get to the fight. And it was like, the gloves are off. I mean, the strategy that we got passed down in Rules of Engagement were


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, kill them all. And that's what we were doing. And so it was an epic rotation. We had a lot of HVTs, a lot of foreign fighters, a lot of gunfights, uhm, a lot of casualties on our side, and a lot of dead bad guys.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, if we had to go to solder city, we took, uh, tanks that would lead the way into solder city, suck up all the EFPs. We called them team rock. They would get blown up for us. Even to the point where these guys would get blown up, they'd pull over to the side of the road and we'd just bypass. They were just a breach point.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They were the hammer we were going through and hitting our surgical targets and it was a great rotation man. We lost a guy, one of our team guys, Justin Monschke was killed, stepped on a pressure plate IED. We had about, uh, in my company we had about 15 Purple Hearts. So a lot of dudes injured, shot, blown up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I'm a, I'm a 2IC, so I'm right behind my cell leader, uhm, as a new sniper. Uhm, so I deal with my cell leader at the time Jason tells me to do. And most of my role is because I was pretty lean and a good climber.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Me and a couple of the other guys were on the climbing team. And so if we had a containment set, we hit a building, we use ladders or even building climb.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Traverse ladders, uhm, from building to building and set containment from a high position called high team to be able to contain the objective from top down while the assaulters hit a deliberate target set. So traditional countdowns, five, four, three, two breach goes off at two and then, and we hit the target.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sometimes yeah, sometimes a couple more than that. Yeah. A lot of this, this time period was.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, taking advantage of SSC. There was an emphasis on sensitive site exploitation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Doing a lot of post analysis on the objective. A lot of tactical interrogation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To lend itself to taking advantage of the opportunity on a target and flexing to other targets to take down networks. So it was super aggressive. You know, the combination of 2-2, uh, SAS, Ranger, Battalion, uh, CAG, us, and death.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] His big, uh, machine of war. What it was was one of the most significant, I think, most significant strategies in the war. Especially of attrition of taking out bad guys.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Doctrinal would have guys stand down, have a moments if not days of mourning, uh, a process. Uhm, I remember when we lost tongue.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, in 06, our immediate strategy at the tactical level. So you're talking cell leaders and troops aren't majors.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Said, listen, we're not waiting. We're hitting targets tonight. And we got aggressive. And we went out, uhm, in, in 06 and 07 we had a vindiction, uhm, vindication board.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This vindication board was, uh, filled with team guys that we lost and there was dozens of them on one side.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when you killed a bad guy, cause you took that call sign patch and then, you know, if it was Tony Yost, who was a third group team sergeant that was killed, you would carry T Y on your left shoulder under your call sign patch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We understood that getting killed was a part of the job. Comparatively, and you know this, you're very schooled in this history of warfare, including the Vietnam War.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thousands, 60 plus thousand Americans were killed. Sometimes hundreds in certain battles were killed. Entire MACV SOG teams taken off the planet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They accepted that risk. So when we lost guys in our community, there was no warning. There wasn't time no more. We get back on helicopters. I remember, uhm, something that really stands out to me from the 07 trip. We lost two, two SAS guys. They were killed on target and there was two or three of them that were killed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The task force commander had us come outside and the 2-2 SAS commander briefed five different task units.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he spoke to warfare and he spoke to the importance of understanding the fight we're in, how this works and getting back in the fight. It was a 10 minute spill.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we're all sitting there in kit with guns in our specific units.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And at the end of the speech, he gives a hand and arm signal and all the little birds and all the 60s spin up. And we load five different task forces up in little birds and MH-60s and fly away and smash bad guys. That whole experience was what the task force was. Depending on what unit you were.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, you might have that experience, but if you're on task force, that was the experience every night. We accepted that risk, we lost guys, and then we got back in the fight because we had no time to mourn. It wasn't a time for mourning.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At the time was a, a CAG commander, and he was our commander. When we got to that country, we had gotten used to the way that we did business. Breaching, blowing every door, shooting bad guys in the face. And he briefed us and he said, man, we're gonna start this new tactic this year. And it's called call-outs. And we laughed. We joked.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was comical to us. We even, we even wrote, uh, drew cartoons about how comical this whole tactic was. So, let me get this straight, you want us to go to a building, land little birds offset, surreptitiously approach, and then knock, essentially knock and call them out. Yes, that's, that's what we want you to do. So the whole time we're like, this is ridiculous, this is insane.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Until we hit a foreign safe house that had Libyan foreign fighters. And the war in Iraq.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Positions two and four out of the top four guys killed on the battlefield that were killing Americans, formidable foes, were from Libya. Two and four. Number one was Saudi Arabia. Number two was, uhm, Libya.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Out of these, uh, foreign fighters, uh, they were training in the green mountains of Libya. They had gear that was comparable to ours, uh, solo boots, sun toe watches, chess rigs, suicide vest, proper guns with red dot optics, and all the tactics to bear.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We hit a foreign safe house offset on infill, which was about a 4k, 2-4k offset, which is offsetting away from the objective so you don't get compromised.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We get compromised by a early warning position. Our little bird attack helicopter kills six dudes right off the bat on infill. Birds get straight, the bird I'm in, the 60 I'm in, feet hanging off the 60, uh, takes incoming rounds, um, in between us and the chalk in front of us.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We land, we make movement, we think there's a couple of foreign fighters, there's 13.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they're all suicide invested out. Uhm, you know, long story short, I have a dog saved my life. Uh, uh, a CAG dog by the name of Vinny. Been a suicide bomber 15 meters in front of me. Uhm, sacrifice his life for mine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After objectives secure and realize they have PKM machine guns barricaded in sandbagged positions, a threshold deep away from the reach point.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If we had breached that, like every target set we breached prior, we would have all died. We would have got, the first assault element would have been zipped up, they would have broke contact out of the back, and we would have been fighting for our lives. We were fighting for our lives in containment. We had offset containment, called them out, and we were in a hand to hand, um, uh, range.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We did, yeaah. We did, we did exactly what he trained us to do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and even in that, I mean, I threw six hand grenades on the other side of a berm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In direct engagement and contact with the enemy. I mean, the hand grenades I was throwing with my teammate were landing in bad guys laps on the other side of the berm. These dudes were ready to get it on. We decimated the target with 105s from a Spectre gunship.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We recovered Vinny's body and then, uh, we dropped a, a, a JDAM on it, on Exfil in daylight and we got back.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, Vinny was covered in an American flag. The whole task force there was there to salute us. And we're, you know, we got blood on our shoes. Uh, some dudes are injured and we're like, this makes sense. And I realized from that experience, don't be in a rush to die.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So many guys want to get on the X and they want to do this thing called kicking in doors and shoot bad guys in the face. But they don't understand.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, the tactics and techniques procedures evolve every single day at the speed of war. And it was the realization where I had the coolest guy, cause he's the coolest commander of the coolest unit telling us something that didn't seem cool. And then that realization coming home and going, damn.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, now we gotta change tactics. We gotta think outside the box. We can't get, uh, we can't conform to convention and to routine and think it's gonna be the right solution every single time. Cause times change. And that was a huge impact on my career moving forward.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, it was their MO. I mean, look, guys often think about warfare and they think the opposing side are these shadows and these entities and these paper targets. These are creative human beings.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because it's ever gonna get. Yeaah. I, I, I had, uh, multiple conversations with guys in the team room, in the kit room. Getting loaded out, like, it doesn't get any better than this, guys. Remember every single moment of this. Because you'll never get this again. How old were you? Twenty... six, seven. Yeaah. So that's your third deployment, though. So you knew it. Yeaah, I know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you got to relish in it. I was comfortable in war. That was, that was, I was getting, I was fixing mistakes I was making and honing this craft. And I was getting pretty good at it. And you know, there was opportunities inside of my unit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To do whatever I wanted to do and I took all those opportunities and it was, it was a great playing field for creativity and we, we did a lot of cool stuff man. It was, it was amazing. It was a, that task force, Crystal's task force, uhm, was awesome.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Colonel or Sergeant Major Command Sergeant Major Nacy was the unit Sergeant Major at the time. And, uh, I remember we had a team patch and a brief and our team patch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sergeant Major Nacy's going to see this and he's going to be pissed. So during a brief, we're doing a brief right before we load helicopters and he looks at it and I see him side eye one of the patches and the patch says kill them all on the patch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he kind of side-eyes it, and I'm like, oh shit. And I go to, uh, my cell leader, I'm like, Jason, dude, he side-eyed in that patch, we're screwed. And this is the unit sergeant major. And so, um, he, he comes over and, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he goes, um, let me see that patch and he pulls it off his shoulder and I see this go down in the hallway. I'm like, oh dude, this dude is like, Jason's going home. Like we're not doing this up. And he hands in the patch and Sar Major reaches inside of his pocket and pulls out a handful of JSOC coins. That's a, uh, uh, task force. It has all the numbers. It's a skull on the backside. It says, uh, uh, something like operating at the speed of war.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he hands him the coins. He goes, this is the coolest patch I've ever seen. And he slaps it on his arm and he walks out. I'm like, dad did not go the way I thought I was going to go. I was like, we're in the right place. This is, this is where it's at right now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Wrap up that deployment and then, uhm, start doing advanced training. I mean, I have a lot of catching up to do, so uhm. Because you've done four back to back to back deployments. Yes, yeaah. And every break, every month or every day of break is get, get more honed. You know, like, you need to get more trained.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I think that year, in between those rotations, I went to sniper school, I went to free fall school, I went to JTAC school.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, all to, again, become an asset, more of an asset on my team. So I went to Special Forces, Sniper's Course.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm. A couple months, it's pretty long. I think it's uh, two and a half months. A little bit of technical, a lot of tactical, a lot of long gun.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, but it's evolved over time. Uhm, Rangers go to that same school, CAG Snipers go to that same school, and Special Forces Sith Snipers go to that school as well. Uhm, great experience, learned a lot. I think out of those, out of that break, what I learned most,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, was the difficulty of close air support. I was one of the few guys that got picked up and tasked to go to school and I'm like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm going to SOTAC with SOTAC, Special Operations Terminal Air Control School. I'm like, dude, I don't want to go to SOTAC. They're like, look, if you're a sniper and you're doing sniper operations,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You want to keep the team small, so somebody has to have that skill set so you can drop bombs. I'm like, well, that makes sense. All right. Does that mean I'm tethered to a radio? Likely, but it means you'll kill more bad guys. I'm all about that. So they sent me to one of the most difficult schools I've been to is SOTAC by the way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How long is that school? A few weeks, I think three weeks. A couple weeks of ground.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The technical aspects of speaking big military language, like lat long. I mean, I could speak MGRS and braille, like I'm good at MGRS, but then they said lat long and I'm like, what the hell is lat long?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I've never even heard the term. Like what's lat long? Like I have to learn this. Like it's all that long because you have to communicate to the aviators and they speak lat long. I'm like, Oh no. And so I was doing the homework late at night. I was a senior E seven. I was a class leader.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I passed out and I got my air, uh, close air support, uh, certification and then rotated back into Oh wait, another war. And what are you doing this last, this last


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, and B two three, uh, fifth group, uh, SIF and third group SIF pulled these guys into Jordan, isolated them, train them, and then infiltrated back into the country, smashing bad guys. And the ICTF, the young operators of the ICTF.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They stay in warfare, and they, through the culminative years of war, got the most experience, and were some of the most experienced operators I've ever served with. So I advised a whole troop.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, the entire, the entire summer. So probably March, April timeframe until, you know, six months into it, almost to Christmas. Yeah. And this is smashing targets. All, all, we are calling them true bilateral operations, right? And we're trying to work ourselves out of a job. A lot of guys were bummed out by it. Um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Things were getting political in 08. Uh, I was signing shooter statements if I was admitting that I was killing bad guys, which we stopped doing. I mean, we stopped admitting we were killing bad guys because at that time, if you killed a guy, you wrote a shooter statement and it went to the DOJ in Iraq. Uh, I actually remember one time I came back from an op.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What do you mean investigate it? Like, well yea, they had to do a trial process and they took it to trial. They did the shooter statement with witnesses and everything else and then you're good. I'm like, what? I went to my team store and I'm like, dude, what is going on?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All the other times I've been insulated by cell leaders, team sergeants, good leadership who knew that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They just keep all that shit away from the guys and let them do their job. And it's the first time it started trickling down and I'm like, Oh, Oh, wow. Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the ops weren't as aggressive? Like I remember telling my new guys, cause I was a cell leader at the time and a troop advisor, I remember telling my new CIF guys, bro, it's about to be on. Get your stuff ready.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We- we're gonna get back into it and we're gonna go kill ba- and they- then we get- went out again and I'm like-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's nothing happen- what is going on? And because of the-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, at the times, the Sunnis and the Shias were doing a ceasefire.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And any time they killed Americans, they would pay for it politically. They started pulling back and just, just isolating, building their, uh, their infrastructure and their castles and not do not be an aggressive, but all the things that we were hitting were dry holes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We, we got in a few gunfights, killed a few dudes, but it was, it was not what I expected it to be. And it was the transition of what became a, I think the transition out of that, that fight.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, it was pretty mad. I remember that time period, uhm, so I was a sniper at the time. So in between my troop being up, I did stay behind sniper operations. And we actually took, from what I understand, we took one of the missions that you guys had. You guys were doing daylight Overwatch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For the guys who were building the T-Barriers around Slaughter City. And you guys killed a whole bunch of people. When we came in, they switched it to night ops.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we couldn't kill anybody. Like I sat on a rooftop for like days and weeks going, where the hell are the bad guys? And guys were joking like the Navy killed them all. Like where are they at? They're like, they're not coming out. They all gave up there. If once you did reverse ops, uh, that tactic worked because they were getting smoked in daylight.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so I, and I think Chris Kyle at one point had that op. And uhm, so I remember, we remember hearing about his name and some of the guys and like, Oh dude, they have a high body count. We were so excited and we infilled day one. It was like crickets. And I'm like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What is, and they had a drone, I remember seeing a drone overhead.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they were low flying this drone during the building of this wall and the completion of it. I'm like, no wonder there's no bad, like all the bad guys hear this drone on purpose, uh, as a tactic that we applied, but they're all keeping their head down and we couldn't kill any of them. And I was like, oh, this sucks, but the stay behind stuff was fun.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A leadership role in troop advising the sergeant major, because I was acting as the ground force commander for every op. So I started learning


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A lot about processes. You know, like, before I was just a nugga-salter. I was called a ghost-assalter. Just there doing my little narrow piece of the pie. Now I had to step back.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Get the big picture. I had to control air assets. I had a flex to different targets. I had a strategize on the fly with my troops aren't major deploying his troops. And we had a whole bunch of incidents like where.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And even though it wasn't as active, I mean we were doing, I remember we had intel from a soccer field.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They had a couple handsets that correlated to the soccer field, and I was like, alright, we gotta get to the soccer field. So I said, hey guys, we're gonna move to the soccer field. So we started walking. I'm like, I need you guys to move out. And they wouldn't move out. I grabbed the EOD guy, we sprinted to the soccer field. As we ran around the block, we were in ambient street light.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They see us and we're sprinting across an open field trying to shoot like ten dudes who move in ten different directions and we miss everybody. And, and when we get back the, uh, everybody in the jock and the talk is laughing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cause they're like, dude, that was the best shit we've ever seen. Cause we saw you guys break contact from the main element and they're like, screw it. And you start sprinting, but they all went 10 different directions. So we couldn't track any of them and we're running and shooting and we're standing there in the field like, damn it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I run a joint interagency task force of, uhm, interagency organizations with JSOC to do reconnaissance over the entire country of Iraq. Uhm, I was, I was undercover as a lieutenant colonel, so I was an OIC, young OIC, nobody believed it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Put it in that position to see to and control all the things that were going on for reconnaissance assets in the country.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Really slowing down. In fact, the reason they brought me in is because reconnaissance is obviously another way we get involved without involving packs on the ground, people on the ground.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So we still had to have eyes on, but we had to use technical means of reconnaissance and that just depend on dudes and hide sites. In fact, during that time period,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, there was a restriction of one or two Americans per target, and you had to stay in containment. So if you're moving to a bad guy place, you leave behind the Americans, they'd stay on containment with the vehicles.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I, I, I had daily VTCs with, uh, SEAL Team Command, NAVSOF, mostly which was the main effort by the way. There wasn't a lot of SF guys in the country at that time. So I had daily VTCs with the Navy and supported their operations and technical reconnaissance means.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I got recruited, I went to selection, all successful, and then, uhm, my background, my entire life, my background in special operations was mapped for that, that field of expertise.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the transition coming back from 08 to 09, I went to JSOC's technical reconnaissance course, which was like 6 months.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, Gat back, and then, um, Gat with another squadron, and at that time, we hadn't been in Iraq, uh, since we killed Zarqawi. The task force hasn't been in Iraq, uh, really since, I mean, intermittently. Um, we, we owned Iraq.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But Afghanistan, we completely gave up. So our eye wasn't, uh, on the ball in Afghanistan because we were too busy in Iraq. And then all of a sudden we had a change of heart.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Look, Al Qaeda was on the run. We didn't even know this thing called ISIS existed. And we decided to do a surge, uhm, as an organization to Afghanistan. And I was on the first thing smoking. Uhm, so my first


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Real good deployment with that organization, with the special missions unit, was in Afghanistan. And when we got there, uhm, the rangers on the battle space, uh, Colonel Carrillo was in charge and we were the redheaded stepchildren. And I was like, what? How is an SMU the stepchildren? Like when I got there, I was taking showers with bottles of water in an open field. And I'm like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, good rotation though. And you were, you were still overseeing recce at this point? Yeah, I was, I was that squadron's reconnaissance NCO, which just specialized in recon. So everything from OPs to technical recce to, uh, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can't really get an idea or understanding of that talent and capability when you, when you focus on individuals. But when you see it come together in a single combat operation,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Where everybody's so efficient and effective, you really see the benefit of the selection process, the training process, and the support mechanisms that make that unit the most elite unit in the world.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's the big leagues for sure, and what I realized in that unit, even being a very confident shooter, respected member of special forces, and being a PT stud at the time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, there's this thing, this machine. And like you said before, uhm, these guys...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So what came after that? So at a very young age, actually at the age of 29, I made E8. How's your wife handling all this by the way? She's good. She's a champ at the time. I don't, she's not married to me now. So it didn't last.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But she's handling it well, man. I mean, I mean, look, she, her, her perspective.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, my support and made sure, cause you knew I was coming back and in that unit especially, those boys don't have any downtime. It doesn't exist.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Even when you're down, you're not down. You're up on a, uh, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A call cycle for being able to quick respond or you're in a down cycle in your training. You're always gone. I was gone more than any part of my career in that organization. So uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When I made the E8 list, I made it on the black side. There's a black list. And the black list is just, it's not advertised. And I was the, just to give you, I don't know the exact numbers, but for that year, it was something like 160 guys were promoted.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was 159.7 on the blacklist cause the blacklist, like you're like a intermittent number. That's not advertised. I was the last guy on the black side, which includes the Navy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That was promoted to E8, which means I was the last guy to get picked up and I was 29 years old as an E8. As an E8. E8. And so I, I, you know, it was mainly because of the combat experience I had and then in E7 school, which is for us is called ANOC, I won the leadership award.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In that unit, you're not, it's called blue chips. You don't get blue chips because you have experience. You could be a 20 year special operations guy. When you show up to that unit, day one, you earn your blue chips one day at a time. And so me starting, I was starting, starting from zero.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Leaving the unit and going anywhere I could've gone.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm a team sergeant, I'm a god in the special operations, right? And it's the job that you want because you're controlling and operating with your ODA, with your detachment. I had no, look I wanted to go back but I was like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If I go back, they'll put me on a regular ODA, and not meaning that in a derogatory way, but just not a CIF company, not a specialized company. Randomly, a gentleman by the name of Command Sergeant Major Bob Irby, who's a legend in Special Forces Command,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He communicates to me that he heard I made a EA and he heard about my experience and he wanted to recruit me to stand up a new CRIF, a new Commander's Response Force for the continent of Africa. We didn't have one because we were so busy fighting in the Middle East, we didn't have one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Jsoc approved that and long story short, I stood up a CIF as a plank holder from scratch. We went into a company in 10th group. Me and another guy from the unit stood it up from scratch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Full power to train anything we wanted to with our guys, uh, reconnaissance guys and build this unit from zero. Uh, as we built the unit, we got vetted and validated and then Benghazi kicked off.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We literally get tasked to go to Libya. We start developing Intel and then Benghazi kicks off. And when that happened, I was actually in a special missions unit compound doing cross KLE briefs with Libya.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then this thing happens. And then, uhm, a few weeks later, I'm in Tripoli, Libya, going, building out a counter-terrorism force going after Abu Qatala, the guy responsible for it. Did you run it? We didn't run any of those ops though, did we?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, there are other Yusasak elements with us and they positively identify that dude in a short period of time. I was there in the meeting when we proposed it to the country team, which included the ambassador Chargé, Alexander Pope, who was appointed and he denied it. He said the political climate won't allow us to do this. The representative from Yusasak, senior E8.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Fighting to kill bad guys, to do our job as the commander's response force, but also representing USASOC. And they wouldn't let us do anything. It was horrible. It was the worst political, military experience that I've faced.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Three weeks after I got back, I was out of the army. I dropped my paperwork as a senior E8. With how many years in? Uh, at the time, 16. 16 years. When I was downrange, I got recruited by the CIA. Uh, and I was going to take a job called paramilitary operations officer, which is a, you can go on US, or CIA.gov and apply for it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I wanted to be Mike's man. I had, I had just finished my college degree, which took me 15 years to accomplish, um, which is a prerequisite for government service and federal, federal government. And I decided at that point, I wanted to step aside and work for this agency because I saw the good things they were doing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At the time, after I got back and out-processed very rapidly, where people were like, my troop and my, my, the main element wasn't even home yet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I was already out processed. My independence was July 4th of that year of 2013 and immediately started contracting. Went straight back to Libya. I was in Libya on terminal leave back in Libya as a civilian.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then, uh, started contracting with the agency, uh, for the lat, for the next two and a half years while at the same time, uh, in a reserve component, uh, special operations, um, and where I was a team sergeant in Texas, then made sergeant major in Texas. And so I was.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Contracting, deploying with interagency. Coming home.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then... Deploying again? Deploying again. Yeaah. Put on my uniform, jump on a plane. I mean, one time I came back from Yemen, a week later I was back in Niger, Africa with a Sartre major uniform on, doing a counter-terrorism staff operation. Or staff exercise that turned into an operation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's nothing sexy. Uh, I was babysitting case officers. I mean, my job was to protect them overseas. Uhm, I was outside of the, what people would normally refer to as industrial contractor. So I actually worked directly for the agency and, and babysat case officers and protected them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When you're a case officer and you come out of school, uh, you got a 500 pound head, lots of experience in training, but it's all concepts. When they go overseas, we only have enough time to repair the biggest and brightest minds on the planet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To do what they do. And so we, we are the.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's a shooting call. You shoot and you meet the standard or you leave. My class, we had probably 10, 10 dudes that are senior level dudes, operators in the most elite units. Half of them probably went home.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because the shooting quals. You're competing for a six for your job, also. So the pressure is high. And the shooting standards are the...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The hardest shooting standards I've seen, apparently in federal government because you're a federal law enforcement instructor after you get through this experience, it's the toughest federal law enforcement qual.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's informal, it's not actually doctrine. Uhm, and when I went down range with that organization, I was confident that even me and my riding partner typically were SEALs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With our little Glock 17P shooters and a waistband that we could do some work, uh, enough to fight back to our vehicle or back to the machine gun in our vehicle, um, and do some work. But it also taught me about, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just driving around randomly doing your thing and like, that's all? Like, what's the nearest task force? Oh, they're about three hours away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so we're out on our own. That changed everything for me. I mean, that changed everything I thought in


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, that I potentially knew about Singleton operations and Lovis operations. We think Lovis, our guys thought Lovis was like putting a shemagh on, you know, and hiding their chest carrier or plate carrier underneath their, their dress, their man dress.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I wanted to be a staffer. I wanted to be a Blue Badger. I wanted to be a full-time employee. And I had a change of heart when I was in Yemen. Uh, Yemen was super political. The Houthis, the political climate, all these things that were transpiring was...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Doing what I didn't think was possible in that interagency, which was, uhm, debilitating their ability to do their job. And I saw great guys that were on operational side, on the operational side, that were getting, uhm, uhm, stagnated.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I couldn't believe it. I actually, I remember thinking to myself on one rotation, wait this doesn't happen to these guys.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's, there's no way. These dudes, there's no way these guys are getting, there's gotta be something going on. Cloak and Dagger.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it wasn't because, uh, the oversight of how the interagency, the IC works in the intelligence community, with well over 17 agencies now, there's so much direct, uh, directorate national level oversight.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And micromanagement, they can't do their jobs. And so I had, my whole thing with getting on the military was, if I can't kill bad guys, I don't belong here. So I left.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they, they still were in some capacity, but where I was in the situation I was in, they weren't.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I went, dude, I have to make, I have to have a change of heart here. I have to figure something out because the war for me is over. There's no more killing. I mean, eventually ISIS popped their heads up and there was a whole new cycle of killing that I missed, which I, I, uh, I wish I was part of, but I had to make a decision to get out. Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then that was it. That was it. I was in Pakistan, and I made that decision. I, I brainstormed. Uhm, my, my ride partner, who was a seal, his brother was a dev group guy that was killed on a raid, trying to rescue a hostage in Africa. And uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He's one of my best friends and I said, Hey man, I want to start a business. He's like, what's the brainstorm? And we had course of action development, man. We sat down after work and mapped out some plans and, and sat at many conversations over dinner, trying to figure out like what I could do. And, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With our background and expertise, the obvious route is a tactical something, right? But I didn't want to do that, man. I, I saw these dudes who were getting out and they were dealing with all the


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Backlash of coming out and saying, hey, I'm this guy. Cause at the time I didn't have any social media. And I'm like, dude, I don't, I don't want to be a tactical kind of guy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And developing like this modern survival take on preparedness of training citizens, not just military and law enforcement, but citizens to be better prepared in their culture. What year is this? This is 2015. Damn sir, you were ahead of the curve.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is 15, and I'm like, there's something here. And I wrote a mission statement, I did a con op, I wrote a whole five paragraph op order on the whole business plan, and uh, resigned.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's like we're about to activate the entire unit and you'll be a staff sergeant major sitting in the talk for a year in Afghanistan. There's nothing going on. Do what you want to do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I said, how hard is it for me to resign? He goes, I'll, I will type the paperwork. That's how easy it is. And then I'll just send it to you and you sign it for, for your position and your rank. You don't have to do anything, but technically resign and you'll go into IRR status in active ready reserve. And that's it. And I remember I did that. And the next day I was like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Holy crap. Like I just cut the biggest umbilical cord known to man in the history of man and now I'm out here flapping and I have to make it make shit happen. And are you still married at this point? I'm not. I'm, I'm, I'm three years removed or two years removed from a divorce and, um, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They call it the thousandaire club because you make it in a thousand a day and you're bank rolling. Most guys go home, blow it on Harleys and trucks and come back and start the vicious cycle again. Um, but I took that money. I think it was 25 K and invested it and started my business. What was the first move?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The first move was education. I had no idea. Educating yourself. Educating myself. I had no idea about marketing, about uhm, like I have a degree in homeland security. What's that gonna translate to? Not much in my new field of expertise.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I took my business plan, started doing uhm, trying to build fidelity on the correlation between a concept and then the execution of that concept trying to use historical data and there was none. There was no good case studies or examples of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Businesses in that genre that weren't very narrow in their field. Primitive survival. Yea, sure you can find a hundred business plans. They all suck. And they're not doing very well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But what is this cultural thing of like this genre of called preparedness? Where mindset, self-awareness, uh, technical training, uh, you know, all the things that we did in our culture and purpose in Special Operations.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How does that translate to citizens? And how do you scale verticals in business? That was intense for me. It's something I still learn today.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The big was, uh, tactical training. Cause I could make a revenue stream. So I'm like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Wait, uh, figure out like a 12 to 24 people, $500 a slot, pistol carbine, let's make some revenue. Then I built the website. Then I started marketing. Social media for me was brand new. And I think at the time was new for people to see special operations guys doing it. I know at the time there was only a handful of us doing that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And people were like, oh, and they gravitated towards us. Uh, I remember Tim Kennedy, I was his boss. Uh, Tim Kennedy was a, is an MMA fighter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, uh, successful entrepreneur. I was his boss at the time and I'm like, dude, how are you doing this? He plugged me on his social media. I got 10,000 followers. I'm like, this is how it works. This network building. That's how easy it was. And so I started building it. I designed a, um, a survival kit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As a contractor, I went to, uh, the luxury of doing the interagency direct contract position. I can go to any training I want to. And they sent me to a whole bunch of high speed schools, including a survival school where they had high speed contractors who developed this like Ziploc bag theory.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's this guy right now who works for me, Kevin Estella. He's in the field right now, day two, doing a 72 hour Ziploc bag challenge on Fieldcraft Survival on our Instagram. And we're updating it. And the idea is,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you're in a foreign country that's semi-permissive, non-permissive


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The worst case scenario for you is it loses its sovereignty, a coup happens, and now you're on your own. The first star in the 50s that was applied to the CIA board was a guy who escaped and evaded from China.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And got killed in Tibet by a random security guy, shot in the chest with one round, with like a 32 British pistol revolver.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's a thing, and there's dangers of it. So the idea is like, a Ziploc bag is the things that you can carry on your person, your physical body.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, I took that and I literally in the course went,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Everything you guys put in this bag, how did you guys come up with it? Well we did R&D, like the best things that we could put in the bag and you're gonna live out of it for 72 hours. Which happens to be, uh, appropriate amount of time to escape, evade, uh, and then carry the appropriate amount of stuffs in reconnaissance, like not overbearing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's something here. There's a product thing here. There's a training thing here. There's these revenue streams that I'm seeing and we built it from very small, diversified and built up all the verticals.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's demand. There is demand. I'm creating a new demand signal, but there's demand. Uhm, that, that starts off. What year is that?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Six, the very beginning of sixteen. The very beginning of sixteen. So, five years ago.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think part of it was I have to develop a culture here. Like there's a, there's this thing that exists that I'm trying to redefine. Uhm, most people who think, or have seen us on the surface even, think that we're a primitive survival company. Cause survival is synonymous with primitive survival. Like rubbing sticks together in the woods.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so I'm not a big fan of that. I'm not an expert at that. There's guys that are talented at that. I hire those guys now, but that's not me. I'm the guy who understands.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That, you know, 20 operators can go out and deliberately hit the worst case scenario and come out on top. And so in my hypothesis, like, why is that happening? Why do, why do intentionally men put themselves in harm's way?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To kill the bad guy and why statistically do they come out on top?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so if you start looking out and laying out all the reasons why, it's not because of one widget, one school. It's because the culture they're immersed in. It's, they all got selected together. They train together. They pay attention to all the details. They can do contingency based planning. They have service support. They do course of action development. They rehearse.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They pay attention to their equipment and everything they do and ultimately they're conscious to their culture, their world. They're here right now paying attention to what they are doing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when I look at citizens and everything that's happening in our world that we never learned the lesson from.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're completely complacent in freedom as a benefit of freedom because we're comfortable in routine. And that happens to be our MO as Americans, which is beneficial.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That you live in sovereign societies, you get all the luxuries and freedoms of all the men who go out to war and, and do this thing. But what is it to the detriment? Well, it's the, if you look at statistics, and this is what I did. This is, this is the greatest start point is doing this research.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I started realizing there's no understanding of what this even means. There's one guy that I found, there's a couple guys, but one guy significantly by the name of John Leach, who did a study on survival psychology. He asked the question, why do people live and why do people die specifically in catastrophes?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He has this theory, uhm, based on this case study analysis of mostly natural disasters, some of them man-made, that there's a breakdown of about 108010.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 10% of the population happens to be making the right decision, and they survive. 80% probably broken in half, 50-50, make sometimes the right decision, sometimes the wrong, and then 10% are the bottom of the barrel. They're, they're like the guy who runs, this is in a survival


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is a catastrophe, a disaster. So all of the things coming together, uh, typically associated with, uhm, compressed timeline, high intensity stress.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, the bottom 10% is the bottom of the barrel. And children happen to be in that bottom 10%.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so the, the, the question is why are some people at the top 10 and why are people at the bottom 10? And how do we get the people who are at the bottom, even children, into the top 10? And that was the premise of my business and answering that question. We need to figure out why people die. Um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What is their background and experience? What mistakes did they make? And how can we put them in a bracket, in a 10% bracket to make sure they survive? That was the question that had to be answered.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The most impactful thing that I've found, which I see a lot of correlation in what you're, whether it's discovery or just dissemination of your books and all the information that you're doing,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Self-awareness breeds situational awareness, right? So there's this lack of awareness. There's really a lack of understanding. Uh, the analogy I like to use is, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I have a Land Cruiser. I'm a big fan of Land Cruisers. So, I take my Land Cruiser, which is a 94 Land Cruiser, which is FCG 80, if you're a Land Cruiser nerd.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Head gasket problems are notorious for these things. They overheat, their head gasket blows, and then it's catastrophic.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the question is, when you're driving down the road and you see smoke, how do you address smoke?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Most people see smoke and they go, oh crap, smoke, let me pull over, right? Uh, I'll call AAA. So they have a dependence on something else, an institution, uh, an insurance company, whatever it may be. And so they don't source, sole source the solution.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Another course of action is you keep driving, cause you don't understand what's happening, so you just push through. And you think that pushing through, hey, cause it's only 10 minutes away from home, is the answer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you saw the smoke, you didn't have a answer. There's a void, a darkness in the back of your head. So you just do something random. It's randomized behavior. You drive, you get home, and before you get home, when you get down on your street,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Your car could catastrophically, uh, implodes. You hear a pop, you hear noise, it starts to debuck, you pull it over the side of the road, you lift the hood, and you realize you have a blown engine, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That analogy is, uh, representative of people's brains and the understanding of the brain. So, a lot of things that happen to us, uh, in our lives, uhm, mostly affected by stressors. Which happens to be a catastrophe, by the way. A stressor is just, uhm, either low grade or high grade, uh, catastrophe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We take in stress, we start filling these things, and then we don't know how to control it, we don't know how to diagnose it, we don't understand mechanical processes, and then so we ignore it, until it becomes catastrophic.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because you don't understand, uhm, how to break glass. You don't understand, uh, the fortitude that's required to push past the pain and break the glass. Or maybe if you understood technically that you could just crack off this wire antenna and slap it, that you could shatter the glass.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or if you even had more, uh, forethought, maybe carry a tool, like a breaching axe, a winkler, a breaching axe, and you smash the window. But then you let that person burn to the ground. Hopefully it's not a family member. Hopefully it's not you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But this happens. And this little thing happens to everybody in some kind of circumstance. And what I tell people is, if it hasn't happened, it's bound to happen.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The difference between us and our experiences and civilians is that we've seen the detriment of not following these basic processes and the understanding of what take places when you don't understand them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So what I want to do is lend these processes an understanding so people can self-diagnose, be aware of what's happening sympathetically, parasympathetically, and then give them more awareness. So when they see smoke, they go,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, I'm going to pull over. I'm going to let the car idle and sit. I'm going to let it cool down. Oh, I carry gloves and a rag in the back of my car. I'm going to pop the radiator cap. Oh, I realized because I looked in the reservoir, there's nothing in the reservoir. I carry coolant because I have a 94 and it eats coolant.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I get coolant, put it back in it, top it off, sit it, let it idle, everything seems fine, and I'm on my way, and I just survived.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That whole thing is not done in a very tactful and intelligible way, and I think we need to change that. Uh, so it requires processes, it requires progressive learning, it requires a diff- a lot of different paths that haven't been created, which is the- which is the business challenge. Cause it's easy to articulate.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To do a podcast, to do a book, all those things. But to create a progressive path for civilians who are disinterested in the first place, it's the best, in my opinion, business problem to have. Because it lends itself to a new challenge, which I'm all about.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's three progressive paths to this. The first path is Phil Craft Survival. PhilCraftSurvival.com. It's the website. It's physical training. It's like physical things that you can do. It's gunfighter pistol, gunfighter carbine, it's first aid, tactical combat casualty care.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so there's a difference. So you said website, but then you said physical. So you go on the website, you get signed up for the training, right? And then the, the in-person physical training is one component of it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Look, we're not the, we don't own the monopoly on medical gear, but I'll, I will sell you the best medical gear that's made. Uh, North American Rescue, the same CAT 7 tourniquets or CAT tourniquets that we used, we've seen them save lives. So we sell tourniquets, survival kits, all the augmentation for enabling people to be better prepared. That's Phil Cross Survival.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The second component is progressive learning. You have to be able to learn progressively at a start point and understand the path. I realize that deficiency years into this whole thing. Cause people go, oh, I trained gunfighter pistol, what's next? And I'm like, uh, gunfighter pistol two? And they're like, well, outside of that, what's next?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I need a wholistic path to this. So we hired a girl, uhm, her name's Amber, stay at home mom.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, nurse, somebody who understands LMS systems. We actually teamed up with Osmoor, which is a learning management based system. The same thing we did with online learning, for your masters, for my bachelor's, where we take


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, an online learning approach to get people involved, including families.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you can go online, you could sell up, you could sign up on, uh, wetherprepared.com and sign up for an LMS component that includes like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Stop the bleed. So you take a class where you receive a tourniquet, you apply that tourniquet, and you have an interactive experience virtually. It's online learning, but it's for the preparedness minded. It's for people who, you know, who don't have the time or money to fly from North Carolina to Utah to take a physical class in person.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So there's a progressive learning path that touches all the fields that we break down in what's called pillars of preparedness, which I can go over.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like everybody can get, if you're a liberal in San Francisco or a conservative in rural Montana, you can get on board that you need this idea of preparedness to make you better prepared for the worst case scenario, generally speaking.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So when I have classes in person or online, I see this community building built based off of this one thing that's not segregating people, or that doesn't have toxic, uh, underlying things about it, right? It's not fringe. So we started


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's, look, there's a bigger picture, right? The breakdown of the family unit. Breakdown of, uh, communities. When we, me and you grew up, we knew our neighbors. We knew our neighbors, friends and family.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now if you see your neighbor and he's checking his mail, you're like, you're like, who's that guy? Like, why is he looking at me? Like, that's her neighbor, man. Like, what are you doing? Like, for the first time in history, you could be in an apartment complex with thousands of people in a vertical and not know one person and be disinterested in knowing anybody.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But what do you do when you have to band together because a hurricane just destroyed the infrastructure of your town? Well, American Contingency, we actually have a members.americancontingency.com that allows people to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Group and network. We have hundreds of groups that are interoperating now, that are like-minded, that train together, that work together, that build assets and their capabilities together, and then to break bread together, which is building relationships. So in every tier,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And this just happened, which uhm, you know, look, I think the,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The most impactful thing that you've done in your career, in your, in your life, is what you're showing in, uhm, in what you do and your actions outside of the military, right? It's somebody for me as a young entrepreneur, I look at you and go,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These are the right things. Writing a book in publication that exposes your ideology and your thinking to impact young people who don't have anything to lean on in purpose is the most impactful thing that a human being could do, especially from our backgrounds. So I said,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Years, they thought I was French. I mean, I've been called everything from right-wing extremists, which is bizarre because I'm half Asian, uhm, to, uhm, you know, neo-Nazi, to all this weird stuff because I'm, I'm talking about this idea of being prepared.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, just two weeks ago, I signed a book deal with a major publisher that vetted me for two years, which means they just paid attention about writing a book on preparedness. And I'm like, that's big, that's huge for me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One, to be able to impact somebody via the written word which I grew up with is impactful. But two, a publisher that published Michelle Obama and also Jordan Peterson on both sides of the spectrum is taking a chance on me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I am allowed, I'm humbled by the opportunity, allowed to have the opportunity to pass this word and mainstream to people who might be thinking about this but don't know how to contextualize it, is a sign to me that this is making sense to people.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Look, it's a hard genre because it's so, uh, it's spread so thin.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the time and the place that we live in, our society right now, we're...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People's cell phones, their virtual realities are more important and significant than their actual reality at the detriment to their physical and mental health and wellness.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It needs, we need to be bringing this to bear in conversations to get people involved in something outside of their cell phone. So, it's my mission, but it's become something so different than I thought it was going to become as far as scaling a business vertically.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, yeah, I appreciate it. The lessons learned that we found is exactly that, that most often


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People aren't exposed. They have limited exposure. So when they have the opportunity to do something like, you know, a five day experience, like we have, you know, we do corporate training, we do, uhm, we've done it, I've consulted for Oracle and some other companies. It's not about, like you said, the technical experience.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The bottom line is they're not going to learn enough reps to build that technical expertise unless that's on their own. But the life lessons they learn and taking it back and processing stress, like you said, is so important and valuable. I think what's happening with this introduction of technology in our lives is it's limiting our ability to be exposed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So uhm, one of the advices that I give for people who are like, how do I change my mindset? You know, a lot of people say mindset, mindset, mindset. What the hell does that mean?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In our field of expertise, it has to do with resilience. Your ability to bounce back. Your ability once suppressed to bounce back and to be stronger. To thrive instead of just survive and get by. So,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When we expose people to new challenges, it doesn't have to be extreme.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You could just, I mean, we have extreme versions of this. We do seer school. We have a civilian seer school, which is fun to run. But those guys will come back from that experience, from a five day seer experience, survival, escape, resist, evade, and they'll go, this is the most impactful thing I've ever done in my life. And I'm like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Really? I'm like, okay, let me reflect on my impactful experiences. Oh yeah, ranger school. When I was in ranger school and I'm exposed and I'm, I'm vulnerable, it's impactful.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because it's something different, and we understand this obviously about even single-celled organisms. If you're exposed to trauma,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That is the first stage in growth because no growth takes place without exposure to trauma. And so whatever that form factor is, getting pummeled on the mats in jujitsu, you are learning as you go. You're breaking to build. And so, uh, what's fascinating about this whole movement that I think is preparedness is that it's positive. There's not a lot of negative.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Things that take place in preparing people to be prepared for that worst case scenario.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With relationships, uh, with people's understanding. And for me,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, getting, getting all this collective of information and making sense of it and being able to clearly disseminate that is the biggest challenge. But it's the funnest thing about the business. I mean the LMS for example of creating this idea that you can learn online and you can learn about these life saving things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The naysayers came out and said, why would you teach somebody how to apply a tourniquet online? Like, don't you think that's kind of like a, it's high in liability and it's neglectful? I'm like, dude, you could build a rocket ship.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Inside of your garage, off a YouTube video. So I could think, I think I could teach somebody how to stop the bleed with a technical tourniquet applied to their body to help them survive. And so I'm fascinated by it, it's my passion obviously, but uhm, I think you're right. I think, especially when it comes to leadership,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, there's a breakdown in our, in our societies with guys not willing to get off the bench and do anything for themselves. Uh, I was doing a podcast with Pete Blaber. He was a former, uh, CAG commander.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, wrote The Mission, The Man and Me, and work, uh, just wrote part two of that, which is The Common Sense Way. And one of the things he talks about is this idea of collaboration. When you collaborate with somebody, when you have communication and you have reciprocation,