Somebody somehow, something...

i can't point to an incident i can point to a realization in my life within the last few years that i just want to try to have a positive impact that's really i don't know how i'm going to do that but that is what i would like to try to do with the remainder of my life is just to do my absolute best to try to make the world 0.00001 better than when i came into it i did my fair share of uh destroying plenty of things along the way hopefully for at least a net neutral not a net negative but What got me there is my military background, it's not unique to me.

It's ingrained in who I am, so it's not interesting to me.

The people that I grew up, almost 20 years of very formative years in my young adult life, it just, you know, it's cool.

That's what I did.

I know all the stories.

Other people, though, are far more fascinated by it, which I understand, of course.

Oh, here we go.

in the flathead valley do you wake up one day your dad's amazing mom's working in the tech industry you wake up at 17 and you're like i don't feel like going to college i'm i'm joining the the military

i never felt like going to college i barely graduated high school and if i look back now it wasn't because of aptitude it was because of interest My father on my dad's side or on my father's side of the family has military history.

Actually, so does my mom's.

My mom's was Army and my dad's was Navy.

So my dad served in Vietnam.

He did a one year rotation in the first squadron of patrol boats that went to Vietnam, the Brown Water Navy.

So he wasn't a SEAL, but he was an insertion or extraction platform for them.

You're not worried about what you're not, like, what tips would you give? Let's pick three things from your life that we could share with folks out there that maybe are lost, that might help them.

[laughs]

It's, to me, I'm sitting there, and I didn't realize this at first.

This was after I got to spend time with the students that quit, which is not something you get to do as a student.

And as a student, I would describe BUD/S as an individual team sport.

You want to graduate, and at times, you are partnered up with somebody else or a boat crew.

But your goal is to graduate because you will be handed a certificate upon graduation, and then you will work your way into the community, but you need the team to be able to do that.

The attrition being what it is, the training doesn't stop, though, when you go through.

Yes.

Yeah, so the book, Drown Proof, why did you write this?

You know, we were talking about it yesterday when I asked you, are you more proud of the things you did in the military or the man you've become afterwards? And without hesitation, you answered the man you've become afterwards.

I feel the same way too.

I'm very proud of my services.

I think I can probably speak for both of us, correct me if I'm wrong.

You can.

More than being proud of my service, I'm humbled by the people that I got to serve with.

Was it a hurdle? The idea of

Do you wanna give our listener, uh, just a little view over what's included? So the book is called Drown Proof.

Yeah.

Um, I mean, the SEAL books have all been written, and I know most of the people that have written them.

And I was never on, you know, the combat operations or doing the things that they wrote those books about.

And if people wanna hear that stuff, the, the medium already exists.

So I did have a very direct intention to not write another one of those types of books.

I say that without judgment of that types of book, and that's, that's just not the book that I wanted to write.

So share with me your observation just of if life itself is becoming a competition, why is that a bad thing for a competitive person?

... and stamina, and I think that is part of that truth that we were referring to that is the audience is so ready for.

for.So I'll answer in reverse.

I'll talk about the evolution last because when I explain it to you, you're not going to be nearly as impressed as you might think the evolution actually sounds like.

The reason I wrote the book, when people find out about my military experience, which I don't lead with, I actually play a game with myself and I-- when I go out with my wife, I play a game of how long can I actually talk with other people before saying a single thing about myself or they find out that I used to be in the military.

Because if they find out I used to be in the military, what do you think that they want to talk about? They want to talk about what's it like when things are blowing up and whizzing past your head.

And I understand why they want to talk about that because that's most commonly what is shown in media, whether you find it on your phone or an IMAX TV screen.

In those conversations, it is almost always that people will say, "Wow, those experiences seem so unique, and I'm never going to be able to have them, and they must have been so impactful for you." And the last part of that is incredibly correct.

... what was the one thing you wanted them to ultimately adopt or shift their perspective in?

Can maybe walk me through that day, what happened, and how you chose to respond?

Yeah.

I wish I could say there was something exciting about that day or out of the normal.

In 2005, we were very busy, so every night we were...

You know, during the daytime, we were mostly sleeping.

We called it being on vampire schedule.

We'd get up as the sun went down, and we would work until the sun came up, essentially.

Wow.

What did that teach you about earning a seat versus being handed one?

Oh, that just showed me the military advancement system was broken.

As soon as I got the notification that they selected me, I was like, oh, you guys aren't paying attention to anything.

If you're going to make me an officer, you guys are idiots.

I'll try to break this down very briefly for people unfamiliar with the military system.

So on the Navy side, at least, the enlisted side on the ranks, E1 through E9, and then officer O1 through O9.

The big jump between what I'll call mid-level management and senior leadership on the enlisted side is between E6 and E7.

So what does actually staying afloat mean when everything in your life is going under at once? And I'm telling you, I just came out of this very recently.

What?

Yeah.

I don't know where the SEAL community is with that, but I bet you they're close.

The numbers will eclipse for sure.

So it is an issue.

It, it is an unavoidable issue.

Every situation is different to a degree.

Yeah.

What?

Yeah.

I don't know where the SEAL community is with that, but I bet you they're close.

The numbers will eclipse, for sure.

So it is an issue.

But it, it is an unavoidable issue.

Every situation is different to a degree, but they share s-some similarities.

Yeah.

How do you deal with that?

You got to take the time on the front end.

I wish it was, you know, I wish it was as easy as, you know, we'll just hope for the best.

You know, that's part of the sentence.

Then the other part of that sentence is comma plan for the worst.

And it's funny, the military career I came from, there's a bunch of books and TV shows and movies, and it's all basically stuff blowing up and bullets whizzing by.

Right.

Is that what makes us unique? And is it the one thing that we can teach or can you teach that?

Yeah

... essentially, plus or minus a couple inches.

Why do you do that? Because those are, those introduce wounds that are incompatible with life.

I think it was 140 yards, which is a pop shot.

That is not a long range.

You don't need to be a sniper to make that shot.

I could get a 10-year-old who has never touched a firearm to do that repeatedly in under 10 minutes.

Uh, well, look, there's so many theories, right? And with, with your mindset and your, your background, what are the most plausible theories that are out there as far as lone gunman, you know, a state conspiracy? You know, what, what, what-

Mm.

And it didn't make sense.

Like, why are we so focused on some of these things? It was always attention to detail, attention to detail, attention to detail, and follow procedure regardless of how you feel and what is going on around you.

As an 18-year-old kid, some of those things are very difficult concepts, right? And I also, again, the lens of, I mean, this is just training, right? Like, nobody's been to war in a really long time.

Like, you guys take it easy a little bit in there.

My God.

Then I go back in 2006, so we're five years into the GWOT at this point, and I looked at the curriculum, and I saw what we were doing, and I-- it was constant aha moments of like, "Oh, this is why we do that." Attention to detail has nothing to do with the knife that I'm expect-- inspecting to see if it can cut hair before you go for an ocean swim, or the CO2 cartridges that you twist into a life jacket that was produced in 1918 that I don't even know would save your life if you fired the cartridge off.

You did winter, right?

Oh, so he fell off a ship?

Yeah, they, so they were approaching a vessel.

I mean, there's a couple ways that you can get on a boat.

You can come from a boat and you can climb up, or you can go to, from a helicopter and fast rope down, or they could land, depending on how big the boat is.

So they were coming up alongside, it's called an underway or a VBSS, Visit, Board, Search and Seizure is the technical military term for it.

And on the climb up the ladder, um, the guy peeled off, fell off the ladder, and another one went in with him as his swim buddy.

If they immediately...

Yeah

Do they talk about hotspots, or they just talk about mission, the mission or the objective, or do they talk about countries and challenges?

It's a combination of both.

The mission sets that you train for have broad applicability across, uh, theaters of war.

And for those not familiar, I mean, Iran sits right in between Iraq and Afghanistan, so the US is familiar with operations in those environment.But the generalized training that you do, you then turn that generalized training, and you can specify it once you...

For example, a WMD target.

If you were to identify that, you would have your general level of training, and then you would orient towards specific training for that in the time leading up to it if you had intelligence driving you in that direction.

So you just take that general templat-template and kinda just sharpen the razor blade before you go and execute something like that.

When did you realize some of the things you learned as a Navy SEAL can help the everyday people? Because that's what you have, eight life lessons to keep your head above water.

Yeah, I guess lucky that you didn't die, I should say.

You know, yeah, it's, you know, I'm not a war story guy by any stretch of the imagination.

People ask me what it feels like to get shot, and I was like, okay.

Do you know who Jose Canseco was? Usually they say yes.

I'm like, all right.

Do you remember when he and Mark McGuire were on the A's together and they were the Bash brothers, which was full peak, everything you could inject into your body, even though I'm sure they were tested and were clean.

They were specimens.

Like what was that process like for you after getting out of the military?

And where, where, where were you? What happened?

Uh, so we were in Iraq, um, and honestly, it wasn't some crazy objective that would've made the news.

To the best of my recollection, this is 20 years ago at this point, so to the best of my recollection, we were, uh, hunting down, or not hunting down, we were looking for a kidnapping cell.

They hadn't kidnapped anybody yet, but we had gotten some intelligence that they were planning to do so.

And, uh, military intelligence is sometimes good, but there's also a reason why it's sometimes made fun of, 'cause it can have a lack of accuracy at times.

[laughs] So we were, I will just describe it as meandering around through a neighborhood, literally just traipsing down alleyways and around corners, and we make noise when we move.

I, I wish I could say we were ninjas.

... a skill set that you could implement there?

Yeah.

So that makes sense.

What's shocking to me is that the United States hasn't declared war in since World War II, but we are still in the middle of this type of operation, war-type activities, war-adjacent activities, whatever you want to call it, and I actually will argue with people online all the time about this, and I think they confuse why I do.

I get really stick- I get, I become a stickler around the, uh, the definition of being at war because I think it needs to mean something.

Because we have constantly been skirting the definitions through the authorized use of military force, which has been in action since the global war on terror and keeps getting kicked down the road.

So it allows us to do this without actually declaring war as a country, and I don't think we should be able to do that.

As somebody for 17 years of my life who was the action arm of that, we need to take a look at this.

Yeah.

Mm.

"Countless hours hiking through some of the most beautiful terrain on Earth, having multi-hour conversations about life, our past, our futures, and everything in between.

We shared fear, fear at exit points together, exhilaration in landings, and tears of laughter when one of us did something stupid.

I've always had a few friends-- I've always had few friends, but he was one of them.

In June of 2018, I was camping with my family for a weekend in an area that did not have cell service.

As we were driving out, my phone exploded with notifications as soon as we reached coverage.

I remembered stopping the car and looking at the locked screen of my phone.

Um, the-- how long did it take you to recognize, "You know, I'm probably not BASE jumping again"?