#50 Chris / Kristin Beck - Navy SEAL Transitions To Woman Then Back To Man

Episode #50 is one of the most important interviews you'll ever hear. Chris Beck is a retired Navy Seal with 20 years service & 15 deployments under his belt. Even with his Bronze Star with Valor, Chris wasn't only known for his skills behind the trigger, but for his brilliance in technology and engineering. Chris pioneered the mission planning systems for all of SOCOM, revolutionized the future of warfare with the "Iron Man" Project, and contracted for the Pentagon with a $600 million dollar research and development budget. Despite all of his accomplishments, Chris was facing demons in private. TBIs, PTSD, and a traumatic childhood sent Chris down a path to find out who he truly was. Through trauma and misguided agendas, Chris transitioned to a woman and after years of being pulled into this ideology, ultimately started the long journey to transitioning back into the man he always was. This episode explores his journey through an abusive childhood, the trans agenda, and the nuance of sexuality & biology. Chris's fiance' Courtney joins us and explains how gender dysphoria can endanger and influence children and how society has reached a breakpoint with these issues. Stick around until the end of the episode to learn how Chris sparing a life in combat may have set the stage for him to save his own and how thousands of others will be. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://mudwtr.com/shawn - USE CODE "SHAWN" https://hvmn.com - Use Code "SHAWN" https://betterhelp.com/shawn Chris Beck Links: Instagram | Twitter Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shawn Ryan?

  Hey everybody, this is the most controversial episode I have ever done. And a lot of people told me I probably shouldn't do this episode because I might get canceled. I don't care. I do not care. I am tired of watching creators and podcasters all over the place filter their content in fear of cancel culture. I'm not gonna do it. I never have done it. I'm gonna keep getting bolder and I'm gonna keep getting louder on subjects that I think people need to hear about.

• 0:40Shawn Ryan?

  This episode has changed my perspective on certain issues with the topic and it also has solidified many of my views on the topic. But my views, that's not what matters. I'm just bringing truth to you guys and I hope you appreciate it. And if you don't, that's cool too. There's a lot of other channels out there. For those of you that do though, thank you for sticking around. I hope you guys like this one. Please leave us a comment, like and subscribe. Follow and subscribe to us on Spotify and iTunes. Leave us a review.

• 1:19Shawn Ryan?

  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Chris Beck to the Sean Ryan Show. I love you all. Enjoy it, learn something, spread it everywhere. Everybody needs to hear this. Alright, cheers. One last thing, if this video does offend you and you're part of that cancel culture crowd, before you have a complete conniption fit, go get a camera, turn it on, video your meltdown because nothing warms my heart more than watching the cancel culture crowd have a complete meltdown. Post your video on Twitter, tag SeanRyan762. I'd love to see it. Enjoy the show.

• 2:03Shawn Ryan?

  Chris Beck, welcome to the show, man. Thank you. Been a long time coming. Yeah.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  No, it's my life. I'm really talking about what's happening to be nervous about. Well, I am a little bit nervous, maybe.

• 2:16Shawn Ryan?

  I get nervous for every one of these things.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18Shawn Ryan?

  Every single one of them. I just want to make sure that I that I produce the best product, you know, that is the most accurate representation of you. And so I'll give you a quick introduction here.

• 2:34Shawn Ryan?

  Twenty year Navy SEAL, retired veteran, thirteen deployments, Bronze Star with Valor, Navy COM with Valor, Purple Heart, founder of Mindful Valor nonprofit. You transitioned to a female from a man, then you transitioned back to a male. You're a motivational speaker and your goal right now for coming on the show, which we spoke a lot about, is you want a platform to speak to the SEAL community. Do you want to go into that a little bit?

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I make mistakes in my life. I think we all make mistakes. We're human, right? There was, and you mentioned that I transitioned from a male to a female, and that's not really truthful, you know, that's not really what happened when I look back on it. And there was a time when I thought that was what I was doing, but it's definitely not the case. It was an imitation, you know, it was, um,

• 3:37Speaker 01

  it wasn't right. It was a mistake. It was something that, hey, if it was private, then yeah, whatever, you know? And it's something that shouldn't have ever happened. And I'm not a female. I was never a female. A male can't be a female.

• 3:54Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we're going to get to all of that and I want to understand it because I don't, I don't understand it. And I just want to be honest with you. My goal, my personal goal with this interview.

• 4:07Shawn Ryan?

  For the record, I think this interview has the potential to be the most impactful interview that I will ever do. And my goal with this interview,

• 4:15Speaker 01

  I hope not.

• 4:16Shawn Ryan?

  I hope it is. Because I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of things going on in the world today that there weren't 20 years ago.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:27Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, and I think it's building a lot of confusion. And so my goal is for any children who are thinking of transitioning,

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:39Shawn Ryan?

  or identifying as the opposite sex as they were born, whether they want to do it or not, that's not for me, but I just want them to have a full picture of what that process is like.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:51Shawn Ryan?

  What it did to you and what it did to your mental state. And I want that entire community to be able to come to this, this episode on this show and hear your story and help them come up with the, the right decision for them. If that makes sense.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:10Shawn Ryan?

  And so, Chris, I just, before we do start, I just want to say, I know you've been through a, a lot of shit. You've been through all the combat stress that almost everybody in that chair has been through. You know, unique to you. And then you've been through the transition stuff and I know that was extremely hard on you. And, um, so I just want you to know you're in a judgment free zone. There's no any of that going on.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  I hope somebody starts judging me.

• 5:39Shawn Ryan?

  But.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Sometimes we need to get a smack in the face, you know?

• 5:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Sometimes we need to be told to stop.

• 5:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Or cut that out, or hey, are you sure?

• 5:49Shawn Ryan?

  I've heard you can be quick to do that at times.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Who, me?

• 5:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I have.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Punch people?

• 5:54Shawn Ryan?

  I heard a story about you in Danny's pub. But I won't get into it. But hey, everybody starts off with a gift on this show. There you go.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 6:06Shawn Ryan?

  Open it up.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  We're not supposed to open it right now.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 6:12Shawn Ryan?

  Those are Vigilance League gummy bears made in the USA.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Gummy bears?

• 6:16Shawn Ryan?

  That's right.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  What are they?

• 6:17Shawn Ryan?

  They're legal in all 50 states.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  They're 420 bears?

• 6:22Shawn Ryan?

  No, they're not 420 bears.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Aw, man, come on.

• 6:25Shawn Ryan?

  They're just Vigilance League.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Can you get me the good ones?

• 6:27Shawn Ryan?

  Well, maybe we can talk about that after the show, but, yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  That's cool, man. Yeah, I make my own gummy bears.

• 6:34Shawn Ryan?

  Do you really?

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:35Shawn Ryan?

  What do you make?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Well, I... some good ones.

• 6:38Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, you make the magical gummy bears?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  They're all organic. So I take a one cup of fruit juice and a couple tablespoons of lemon juice, and then you put in the beef gelatin, and I think that's like a third of a cup or something. And you just, it's not very hard. There's like five ingredients, you know? And so all organic, you know, it's all the stuff natural, you know, nature. So it's not the chemicals and other stuff.

• 7:05Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. You do all kinds of stuff out there. We had a good talk at breakfast.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  The gummies, I, well, I'm into the homeopathic and herbal stuff. And so when I make the gummies, I always add in, I make these tinctures out of like, I make goldenrod tincture and nettle, stinging nettle tincture. I make all these different tinctures, and then I add those tinctures of various types to the gummy bears. And so that gives you all the nutrition and vitamins and minerals. You know, I have a drink that I can make that's like a thousand times better than Red Bull or any energy drink ever.

• 7:37Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 7:38Shawn Ryan?

  Really? What's in that?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a sea, no, it's not a sea.

• 7:42Shawn Ryan?

  Alright.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  It's basically some of the herbs and stuff I do. But a lot of it, the really big stuff is cinnamon and honey. So if you mix cinnamon and honey into a warm drink, just that alone is a huge energy boost. It'll last a lot longer than any other energy drinks, because it's not sugar. So Red Bull and all those other ones are real sugary. And sugar is like a real high that you get. It's very short, and then you get lower than you started out. But if you take honey and cinnamon especially, those two combined, they work together. And so cinnamon and honey together with some other stuff that I do for vitamins, and wild lettuce is really good because it's like a, it's a painkiller too.

• 8:21Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Which I help. But I take all these natural things, I put them all together, and it makes this amazing energy drink that you can't touch. The problem is, is you can't sell it. Because how would you take all these natural things, there's really good stuff, and then make it marketable and put it in a can and stick it on all these shelves and have the production of it? You know, it doesn't work. So it's scalability, it's production. So all the other stuff is not a moneymaker, so nobody wants to do it. But I can give you all these recipes of a whole bunch of stuff that I do, and if you use these things, you're gonna find they're way better than anything you can buy in the stores.

• 8:54Shawn Ryan?

  You know, this conversation, the conversation that we had at breakfast about sugar and all, every, energy, all that stuff, I can tell you are an extremely intelligent human being, very innovative, and, uh, and I know you were on some very special projects in the military, and I want to get into some of that, but let's, let's just start things off with childhood.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:19Shawn Ryan?

  Where did you grow up?

• 9:21Speaker 01

  So how did I get to here?

• 9:22Shawn Ryan?

  How did you get here?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  All this stuff. So I, uh, I was born in Long Island, New York. And then I was really, like, at four or five years old, we moved to Pennsylvania on a farm. And we had a hundred acres and, uh, cows, horses, pigs, chickens, and all the farm stuff, and a big old pond. And this huge hill I had to climb up to get to the back forty acres to, uh, you know, take care of the animals up there. And, uh, nineteen seventies on that farm. And, uh, I'm a middle child, which is important. Because, uh, I think that has to do with a little bit of it, and people might not believe it, but, um, the middle kids definitely.

• 10:01Shawn Ryan?

  I've read this.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Five kids, yeah, and I was in the middle. And so, uh, when I was growing up, I had a lot of fears because it seemed like I was always the one, you know, getting beaten or anything that happened at the house.

• 10:12Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think, why do you think, what do you mean beating?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  So if you, um, if something broke in the house, and it would just be a paddle on it or a belt or something. And then, um, it was, it was pretty much all the time, you know, and if anything went wrong, I'd get it. When I was in school, I was getting paddled all the time, you know, and went to Christian schools too. And so they didn't mind the, it's for all the rights, fear of their child, you know?

• 10:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  That was the other way, yeah.

• 10:37Shawn Ryan?

  So no matter? Who?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  No matter who did it, I would get beat.

• 10:41Shawn Ryan?

  You were the one getting beat?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:42Shawn Ryan?

  Nobody else got beat?

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Garden, I've, my brother got, got it a couple of times. But I would get it bad enough that then he'd feel bad and buy me a fishing reel. And I can't tell you how many fishing reels he bought me or some stupid stuff he would buy to kind of apologize, which hey, that's cool. Thanks for your fishing. I don't fish. I don't know why he kept buying me fishing reels. I'm not really a big fisher. But, um, I lived in fear, like, oh, growing up. I remember the only dream from my childhood is, uh, me on this huge chessboard with these giant stadium bleachers all around it and his big high walls like a hockey. And, uh, my dad was the only one that I recognized out of the whole thing. And he was yelling down at all the chess pieces on the board to attack me. That's my dream as childhood.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  The only dream I remember. I had a lot. Cause they all kept coming back. It was like, it was just fear, man.

• 11:36Shawn Ryan?

  When did the fear start? Like, how young? Can you remember?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  I was pretty little.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  I don't know. Like second or third, like real little, like young.

• 11:46Shawn Ryan?

  Very young.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Grade school.

• 11:49Shawn Ryan?

  Were your parents close? Your mom and dad?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  No.

• 11:53Shawn Ryan?

  Was your mom alive?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I think I saw my mom and dad, like, hold hands once in my life.

• 11:57Shawn Ryan?

  That's it?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:00Shawn Ryan?

  Were you close to your mom?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 12:03Shawn Ryan?

  Was, was she abusive too?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Almost, no. I mean, she perked some wooden spoons on me once in a while, the cooking spoons. She'd hit me with them and break them, but it wasn't. It wasn't really that. It was like, I don't think she ever hugged me as a kid. You know?

• 12:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  And I think that kind of affected me a lot too. That makes me kind of the same way. I'm not a real big hugger, toucher. I don't like to be near people.

• 12:26Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  So I think it's, I don't know if it's hereditary or something that got passed on to her and then she passed it to me. Was the fact that I just don't like to be hugged or touched or just stay away from you, you know? I'll do the, the burrow hug where you go.

• 12:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Checking for body armor guns. When I do that, when I was in a motorcycle club, I used to wear body armor all the time and I was always gunned up. I'd have a couple knives on me, at least two guns and body armor. That's how I rode all the time. Whenever you see my Harley, I'm gonna be gunned up. You know, I don't, not as much anymore because the stupid gun laws are so whack. But, um, armor and guns, you know, and that's how I ride. And, uh, it's kinda...

• 13:11Speaker 01

  And so I always felt, everywhere I go, I gotta be armored up. And only recently I learned that that armor is ineffective, you know? The armor of God is much more effective.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  You know?

• 13:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we had some discussions about that.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  And I'm not bashing my mom or dad, you know, I don't mean to, but it was the seventies, you know? And we were growing up on a farm with all those animals and my dad was a schoolteacher. And my mom was a homemaker with five kids. And so the food we ate was basically venison for meat and, and the milk, we'd do powdered milk and she'd water it down. You know, or get the, you know, other milk and do it half and half. And it was just, I got really used to drinking like really watery milk in my cereal. So eventually I just put water in it. I don't do milk in my cereal if I ever eat cereal. So it was very, very, um, you know, the working poor, you know? And that's what I think most of America is divided into is the working poor and the poor.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  And then the all the elites and there's not really very much in the middle. And that might be a conversation for later, that the division that we have in America isn't about race and color or any of that stuff. It's just rich and poor, you know? And that's the problem we have. Let's talk about that one later, though.

• 14:29Shawn Ryan?

  I would love to talk about that because I think you're right.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  The, uh, the biggest problem I had growing up was that isolation. Was I didn't feel I was ever touched and I never really knew what it was like to, to have love, you know? Of what it would really be like.

• 14:46Shawn Ryan?

  What about your siblings?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  It was different for them. I don't know what I did wrong, you know? I don't know what, why, you know? That, there's always a kid in the family who's like a black sheep. There's always a kid in the family who's like the whipping boy or the, unless you're an only child, or maybe there's two kids, you know? But if you have a lot of kids, there's always one kid that takes most of the abuse.

• 15:12Shawn Ryan?

  I'm just curious.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  I'm number three out of five.

• 15:15Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you, why do you feel that it's because you're the middle child?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Well, the oldest first. And you can see it just in photos and videos and everything that they took of the kids. So tons of pictures of my older sister and some of my older brother. And then they start going off and then almost none of me. And then the sister after me, you know, some photos. And then my youngest sister has a lot again. So it's kind of like they got burned out in the middle and then they realized, oh my gosh, they need to make it up. You know what I mean? I think that's it.

• 15:50Shawn Ryan?

  It does make sense.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  You know? And there was just so many kids and it was three of us and I was a young boy and I had a lot of energy. I mean, if there was such a thing as ADHD back in the seventies, that was me. And I got paddled every day in school. I'd go to the principal's office and he had me, it was marked, you know? And a football team.

• 16:09Shawn Ryan?

  What would you get paddled for?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Just being loud or making jokes or doing something. I was incredibly bored in school. It was the most boring time of my life. I hated it. I could take any test. I could take a test right now and I did it. Um, an air force person that was, had a real hard time passing these tests. And, uh, in a relationship with her. And, um, so she said, hey, can you take this test? And I was like, well, I don't really know the material, but yeah, I'll take it. And I passed the whole thing and she couldn't pass them. She took it like three or four times. And I didn't read any material, didn't do anything, took the test, passed it. So I'm really good at taking tests. I'm really good at analyzing and critical thinking and really look at this stuff. Well, then why did I mess up so bad, you know, 10 years ago? That should be the first question.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  If I'm that big of a thinker and I critically think and I really analyze stuff, how did I fall into the trap of transgender for me? Now, for some people, it might be good, you know, it might be the right thing for them to do. But it's not the right thing for probably more than half of them. And I can explain that later.

• 17:11Shawn Ryan?

  We'll get into that. We'll get into that. We'll get into that.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  It was rough growing up like that because I'd felt that I always had that pressure on me to make sure everything was perfect. Because if anything happened wrong around me, or if there was ever a mistake, or if I ever made a mistake, it was definitely gonna happen. So I was always trying to fix stuff and I was always trying to make everything right. And I was always making sure that I lived this perfect life and didn't have a mistake because I didn't want to get beat on, you know? And um, I think that was like a big part of why I messed up sometimes in the SEAL teams. It's because I could not allow a mistake. And I would do that even in the new guys. I was really hard in the new guys.

• 17:51Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  I mean, even Goggins would talk about that.

• 17:53Shawn Ryan?

  Let's rewind. Let's rewind.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Okay. Goggins made some comments about that in his book, uh, Don't Hurt Me. Dave Goggins, cool dude.

• 18:02Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Very cool guy.

• 18:03Shawn Ryan?

  I've never met him.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:04Shawn Ryan?

  But um.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  He was in one of my platoons.

• 18:06Shawn Ryan?

  Let's rewind a little bit, back to childhood.

• 18:12Shawn Ryan?

  Did you ever get to the point where you stood up to your father? As you got older? Sixteen, seventeen?

• 18:17Speaker 01

  I blew a bubble. I was chewing gum one time and I blew a bubble. And I got punched in the face and I fell backwards in the garage door and burnt the garage door. So I wasn't gonna stand up to him. He was like a football player, you know? A lineman in the sixties and was going to play with the New York Jets.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  So yeah, he had some skills.

• 18:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, sounds like it.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  I mean, I could take him now. He's like eighty-five. I'm just kidding.

• 18:43Shawn Ryan?

  Is he still up?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's around.

• 18:44Shawn Ryan?

  He's still alive?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  I uh, yeah.

• 18:48Shawn Ryan?

  Do you guys talk?

• 18:48Speaker 01

  And the only time I've ever gotten mad at him was the other day, like recently. And he's like eighty something years old and just like, I still don't understand him. I don't understand what he's doing. And even all through my whole life, I can't figure him out. You know? It's a...

• 19:09Speaker 01

  I'm just trying not to do what he did.

• 19:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  It's a lot of talk about love and a lot of talk about taking care of family. And then I don't see it in the actions. I mean, every example, just right now, he kicked my brother out of his house. My brother's a seasonal worker and doesn't work during the winter. You know, because he's union, so he can't work anywhere else. If you're part of the union, if you do another job and you turn in that and they find out, they're gonna kick you out of the union. You know?

• 19:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  And so my brother's not working right now. And then he just got kicked out of the house and he's homeless now. My brother. My dad did that. I don't get that. Why would you do that to your son?

• 19:50Shawn Ryan?

  If you asked him?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  That was part of the conversation and he started getting real, super angry at me. And then we started kind of arguing. And at that point, I was like, it started, I started turning back into that caveman from the old days. I don't want to punch him in the face so bad, just like he did to me.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  And I was like, I was so angry because what he was doing to my brother doesn't make any sense. Well, I'm trying to get him to stand up his own feet. Well, during the winter, how about you do it during the summertime when he's working and he has money? You know?

• 20:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  And I asked him that and none of it, and none, and everything that came out of his mouth, none of it made sense. And so I'm pretty much disowned from my whole family now, except my brother. Because he's living at my house.

• 20:32Shawn Ryan?

  Older or younger?

• 20:32Speaker 01

  I gave him a room. He's an older brother. I gave him a room at my house. I'm trying to find him something. I keep giving him money because he has nothing and now he has no place to live. And it's made everything harder for no reason. That's the family I grew up in.

• 20:45Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  You know? And it sucks because now I'm talking about all this on national TV. And it feels like I'm bashing my dad and throwing everybody under a bus. But I just want them to know how much this hurts and what they're doing just doesn't make sense.

• 21:00Shawn Ryan?

  You're just conveying your, your experience.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's how I grew up. I grew up with a father who would kick out his own son in the middle of winter when he knows he has no money. To teach him a lesson?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  When I was growing up in 10th grade, I left home and I lived in the woods.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  I bought a motorcycle and my dad, I guess, had an accident with a motorcycle, almost killed him when they were younger, my mom and dad. So she hated motorcycles, she still does. And so I bought a motorcycle, I didn't buy it, I actually worked for it. I was working construction in like 10th grade for this guy. And we were in his garage loading gear, doing whatever, I saw his old motorcycle in the corner. It was all dusty and covered with tarp and really messed up. And I was like, I was like, hey, Tim.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  How about that motorcycle in the corner, you know, how long would it take me to work and I'll work that off? And he was like, alright, that's cool. So a month of work and you can have it. So I worked for a month and got the bike and worked on it and fixed it up and got it running. Got it tagged and had it all done. And then rode it home.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  And then I was like, you will not have a motorcycle in my house for my mom. And I was like, alright. So I went back, I didn't even live in a house at that time, I lived in a shed out back. And I made a little bedroom with no heat, no water, no nothing. And near Buffalo, New York.

• 22:19Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit, Chris.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Cause I didn't, I didn't wanna live in a house, I couldn't live in a house. I isolated myself on purpose because I didn't do so much. So I was living in that shed out back of the house and I brought the motorcycle home. And she said, you can't live here. So I was like, alright. So I packed up a bag and I left. I was still in school and I was in wrestling at the time, it was like October time period. So it was snowing on the ground, I had a motorcycle and I was riding around in the snow. I'd go to wrestling practice and shower there and that's how I did everything. And there was a halfway house for prisoners up to road, for prisoners, ex-cons and some other stuff. And so I'd go over there and wash dishes and I could eat. With all these ex-cons and all these other people that were in this halfway house or this little shelter.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  And then I would get done eating, doing my stuff and I'd go back up in the woods and live in the trees. I had a lean-to I built, you know, in some pine trees.

• 23:12Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  And that lasted for a while.

• 23:15Shawn Ryan?

  How long?

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Until my dad, I think it was, it was a couple of months, it was through the winter. And then my dad came out and he told me, he said, mom's crying a lot and really wants to come back. And I was like, can I have my motorcycle? He says, yeah, you can have it.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  I said, all right. I'll keep doing the shadow. So, but that was, it was, I mean, that's part of who I am too. That I'm very stubborn. If I, if I know something is true, if I know something is right, I'm gonna do it. That's like an Admiral Olson story too.

• 23:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  When I started working on mission planning and SEAL teams. You know, I built a whole mission planning system for the SEALs.

• 23:54Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  In the nineties, in 1999, they were trying to automate the mission planning systems for the SEALs. And Cowboy Wells, he knew I was like in the intelligence stuff and I did a lot of mission planning and I was into computers. Cause I, in those days, I was building my own computers. So Cowboy called me up and he said, hey, I want you to come up to Warcom, the SEAL team headquarters, the HQ. And, and help me with this program because it's not working. It can't, I just, the company we hired, he told me all the stuff that was going on. He said, this isn't working. We need somebody to come up here and, and help us out. He said, I know you have the knowledge. And I was like, all right. I never asked for any orders.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  I was recruited to every command, even damn neck.

• 24:42Shawn Ryan?

  We'll get into that. Let's rewind.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  So they recruited, recruited me. I went up there and built it and, and they were arguing with me about the system I was building. They didn't like it or they thought it was, it wasn't automatic enough. It wasn't that. And they were gonna, they were gonna kick me out of, there was like, they just, they didn't understand it. And I was fighting with them and I was, the admiral was sitting there. I said, this is the right way to do it. I said, you can do it my way and the way I'm doing it right now, it'll be right. Me talking to my admiral and I was at E6 at the time.

• 25:11Speaker 02

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• 25:41Speaker 01

  So if I know what's right, I don't care who you are. If you're the president, I'm gonna tell you, you know?

• 25:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  And that's kind of what I'm doing right now. Is that even when I was doing all the transgender stuff, thought I was right.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Actually, I didn't really push it very much. All I was doing was defending people, just saying, hey, it's just a person. You know, I wasn't pushing the transgender stuff. I was just pushing the fact that that's a person. And no matter what they're going through, if it's a mental health issue, if it's a physical issue, it's a sexual, whatever it was, it's still a person. And you're all killing them and doing whatever and all this, you know, madness against transgender people. So at the time, I was thinking the same thing. And so I was defending them. I was saying, hey, that's a lot of what I was doing. And it's all I was doing. I wasn't really defending transgender. I was defending humanity. I was defending the fact that you're a human. You know what I mean?

• 26:35Shawn Ryan?

  I do.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  And it's the same thing I do all the time. And what I'm doing right now is doing the same thing. I'll defend transgender people. I'll defend non-trans. I'll defend anyone if you're being wronged.

• 26:45Shawn Ryan?

  That's, you know, that's, that's interesting that you bring that up. So let's rewind to childhood. You, you have a history of you, you stood up and you defended the country. Then you said you stood up and you wanted to defend the trans community. Now you want to defend Christians. Let's rewind to childhood. Did you want to stand up for your siblings?

• 27:08Speaker 01

  That's all I ever did, I guess. Yeah.

• 27:11Shawn Ryan?

  A purpose to believe though?

• 27:12Speaker 01

  I guess it was. Oh, I would purposefully do it too. I would take it. I'd be like, yeah, I did it. Cause I knew that they couldn't take it.

• 27:19Shawn Ryan?

  Did you ever have any identity crises with gender growing up?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was still, that's the problem. And I, I think that this whole thing is, um.

• 27:35Shawn Ryan?

  Cause this wasn't even an option back in the seventies.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't.

• 27:38Shawn Ryan?

  It wasn't, it was unheard of until, or what, mid two thousands? You know, so there wasn't any, you couldn't, there was no parents pushing this on their children at that time like there are today. There, there was none of that. So I'm just, it wasn't even an option. It wasn't even an idea that could be in a human's head.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:00Shawn Ryan?

  Um, you know what I mean? So that's why I'm, I'm curious, did you have any of that identity crisis growing up?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Especially for me, cause there's no internet, no books, no nothing. And how would I even think of that? Well, the reason I thought about it, or the reason I even started doing anything like that was like real young. So this would be like second grade, third grade, like young.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  I was, you know, how I was growing up was pretty harsh, right? I had an older sister. And uh, my older sister, because of how they treated her, because she was first born, she had everything. It was like, it was like,

• 28:33Speaker 01

  she was definitely taken care of, you know? And it was always inside and always just like sitting there taking care of herself, doing her nails or doing whatever. And then me, I was like carrying five gallon buckets of water up the hill to the, to the forty acres up on top to feed the animals. So I was going back and forth doing that, sopping out the pigs, cleaning everything, always working, always outside with, with shit all over me. And uh, she was always inside just taking care of herself and being taken care of and pampered and nice. And then anything that happened and I'd get beat and then she was still being taken care of and nice. And so I'd always look at her and I just wanted to be her because I didn't want to be me.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  So that's when it started, was the fact that I did not want to be me. I hated me. Like at that time, if I'd look in the mirror and I'd see me, I would just want to see her because if I could be her, I wouldn't get beaten on. If I could be her, I wouldn't have to be out there in a pigpen all the time, you know? Taking care of all that, or the chickens and, and doing everything. Even to this day, if I go visit my parents, my mom will have a list. And it's all the stuff that's broken around the house that I need to fix. You know, that light bulb or this switch or that, it's electronic or it's digging. I dug them out of this huge gardens or koi pond or, every like, all the time. So I was just labor for them, is how I felt.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  You know, it's not true. I mean, jeez, but if you're that little, you're a second grader, third grader, and all yours are labor and getting beaten on and always outside doing everything, you look up there and you see your sister

• 30:11Speaker 01

  wearing nice clothes, you know?

• 30:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Clean and pampered. And I'm getting beat on and I got hand me down clothes and it sucks. It was a worse life growing up for a kid ever, just because of who I was and how they treated me. I didn't want to be me, hated me. And that's why I isolated. I always lived in the attic or the basement. In one house that they bought, I just made a room in the attic. And another house, I lived out in the basement. The other one, I lived out back in a shed. I never want to be around them.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  You know.

• 30:47Shawn Ryan?

  This is already starting to make more sense.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  And that's where it starts, man. It's like a, it's a, and that's why I say that transgender is a mental health thing. It's not, it's not a physical thing. It might not even be a sexual thing, you know? And everybody's making all these accusations for saying this or that. And now if somebody starts talking about a problem, like I'm talking about right now, and then they're automatically, now in these days, automatically made into a transgender person. So I want to be my sister. I don't want to be me. It's not because I want to be my sister. I want to be female. I just don't want to be me, you know?

• 31:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  And then I graduated from high school. I immediately go to Virginia Military Institute. Why?

• 31:29Shawn Ryan?

  Have you ever told anybody this stuff?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Because I'm used to freaking beating. I'm used to getting beaten on. That's my life. If I'm not in an angst, if I'm not being beat on, if I'm not, and that's, I can't remember who told me, Nick Adams, I think. He said, I, um, God, I couldn't stand that guy for the longest time, but it was all a mistake. It was me just projecting myself on him. Geez, Nick, I'm sorry. But he said to me one time that I wallow in misery. I would, I did three platoons with him, I think. We're, we're tight, you know?

• 31:59Shawn Ryan?

  It's interesting because I-

• 32:00Speaker 01

  He said, I wallow in misery. And I think I really do. Because that's where I, I lived most of my life was in misery. And I've never talked about this stuff.

• 32:10Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't think so.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Because it hurts. It hurts my family. It hurts me. And I was like, I don't want to do that. But if you really want to know what's going on and why all this stuff happened, and all those kids out there are watching this, if you want to know what's going on, you know, don't let outside influences make you do something else. Don't let outside influences influence your life. It's your life, you know? I let a lot of outside influences influence me. I kept looking at everybody else and wanting to be that, you know, and the grass is always greener. And I never knew all the stuff that was going on in her life. She had a lot of stuff going on too, you know? What as kids and how we raise our kids as parents, we shouldn't be raising kids in our twenties.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  You know, my parents were like twenty five when they had me or twenty six, they were young. Like right now, I'm fifty six years old. I have a fiance and she has a thirteen year old. I'm trying really hard, I'm doing really good with that kid, I'm doing everything I can to make sure that everything is taken care of and he's good. Do you talk to him about this stuff? All of it. Some of it. I talk to him about mistakes all the time and when I make mistake and I tell him, I say, hey, this is what I was doing. Or if I see him doing something, I said, I said, hey, when I was a kid, I would do the same thing. I said, but now I'm a little older, you know, I'm older and I learned a lot of stuff. And that's not really the right way to do it. You know, how about trying it this way? Can you try it my way for a little bit? And he goes, okay, I'll try it.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does work better. I said, okay. I said, I have some other stuff I can tell you too about this same problem, some other angles of attack it from. So it's all about how you see it. Perspective. And then what kind of toolbox you have, what are the tools in your tool bag? And I just gave you another tool, some new tool. Do you want some more? And so I tell him about this is the problem, here's one tool, your tool wasn't working, here's another one. You want another one? Here's another one.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  And so I'm trying to have him do it that way and I make mistakes with him. You know? And the problem is a lot of times I'm a SEAL team chief. You know? And I treat him sometimes as a new guy in a platoon. And I'm a chief and so we have ten puppies at home right now, so they um, ten puppies is a handful. And so in the morning I I get up and I clean out their pen, so I roll on the newspaper with the poop and the pee and everything in it. And then I'd roll that up and put it in a can, I redo it, I put down water, I do this and I bring them in. And so I need the food at that time, now the food comes down. And he was bringing down the food and he brought down some water and the water is cold. I want them to have warm water because warm water for the stomach, I can go into that, it's a nutrition thing.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Our stomachs are hot organs, the dogs are hot organs, the stomach. You don't give them cold water. You give them warm water and it makes their stomach work better. And so they drink warm water first, a little bit, and then they eat their food. They're gonna have better digestion and then they're gonna be able to poop faster to make me clean it up right there, so they're not out there on the floor pooping. So it's all for reasons which I was not explaining to him. And I said, "This water's cold, we need warm water." And I handed him back the thing, I said, "Get warm water." And so when he was going back and he saw, you know, my fiancee was saying, "Chris is mad at me." And they started saying stuff and she was like, "Well, why?" And started talking about, and it starts spinning up into something it wasn't. And I was like, "Well, because I didn't communicate good."

• 35:38Speaker 01

  I was communicating like a chief down to a new guy about the water. I wasn't talking to him like a son. And I wasn't talking to him like a, like, "Hey dude, I can go into all this stuff and I can tell you why, but warm water is much better for the dog. It'll help them digest, so they eat their food and they poop, so I can clean the poop off, so they don't poop on the rug." So there's a reason for all this stuff and I just need warm water, dude. And that would have been a way better way to do it if I didn't do that and then we ended up with an argument. But every time something like that happens, I made a mistake. You know? And now I know that mistake that I made with him and I'm gonna try to do way better from now on.

• 36:14Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go back to VMI. It's okay. VMI, you said something interesting that you were seeking what you were used to. And I found that interesting because I did three and a half years of therapy, twice a week, um, after I left CIA, um, to better myself.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  CIA, tell you some stories about them.

• 36:37Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, when I was in there, she had mentioned, my therapist was a female, she had mentioned that human beings will always seek what they know.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Comfortable.

• 36:48Shawn Ryan?

  And so...

• 36:49Speaker 01

  See comfort.

• 36:51Shawn Ryan?

  Not just comfort. If you seek... She was talking about, with me, she was talking about post-traumatic stress stuff, you know? And, and, and why we always find ourselves in chaos. And if things are good... Somehow we convert good, calm, comfort into stress and chaos. And, and she was just conveying to me, you know, that it doesn't matter if it's, if you got it in war. You got it from an abusive childhood, you got it from, um, women who have a history of being abused by, by men.

• 37:32Shawn Ryan?

  They will always, you, you see this pattern in people, you know, you see, especially in women, you know, especially, you really see it in, in abused women.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:42Shawn Ryan?

  They go from abusive relationship to abusive relationship to abusive relationship. And it seems like that's exactly what you did when you went to VMI.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:51Shawn Ryan?

  You.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Then I went basically from VMI to the teams.

• 37:55Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  VMI, the first six months is called Rat, You're a Rat. And, uh, it's, it's tough. VMI is the toughest military school in the country, you know, by far.

• 38:06Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what was your thought process?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Uh, Norwich is pretty tough. They're both tough schools, but VMI was known.

• 38:12Shawn Ryan?

  What was your thought process going in there? You, I mean, how did you know?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Discipline.

• 38:18Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  And the fact that I knew all through school, I wanted to go to college. I knew that I, I wanted to have the knowledge. I knew it was something that would, that would propel me or, or help me advance in life. You know, education is, is a, is a gift that you need to keep getting, you know? It's a gift that you need to keep pursuing, you know, picking up, you know, any book, you know? And the good book is, is a great place to start, but there's so many, you know, so much knowledge out there. If you're not pursuing that knowledge, then you're stagnant. And I knew this pretty young, you know, I was a big reader. So I didn't do anything in class. I was definitely, I was, I was doing stuff in class and getting to paddling all the time. But on the side, I was reading a lot of books.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  So I, I was reading a lot of science fiction, but it was science fiction philosophy. Like, uh, Heinlein is a philosopher, you know? The Moon is the Harsh Mistress and, um, uh, Stormship Troopers. You know, those two in particular, Stormship Troopers, the movie was terrible, but the book and the actual philosophy for that book, it's about citizenship, it's about duty, it's about so much in that book. But um, Danny Do Moon is a Harsh Mistress. That's all about um, equality and um, value and slavery and usage. And then revolution and how to set the revolution up and how to succeed. And the whole philosophy of of all that is is amazing book.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  I was reading all those books in high school and junior high and high school. You know, and as I was absorbing all that and I would hear what they were teaching. And it just wasn't useful to me, you know? I could pass all those tests and I probably would have been a A student if I put a little bit of effort in it. I would actually purposely fail tests sometimes.

• 40:05Shawn Ryan?

  Why?

• 40:06Speaker 01

  I would, I would answer all the questions, but I would shift them by one so that all the answers would be off by one.

• 40:12Shawn Ryan?

  And you would do that on purpose?

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Big middle finger, yeah. You know, that I would just be like, you guys, you keep paddling me and you keep doing that. You're teaching me wrong yet. And I didn't know how to verbalize, I didn't know what to say. But I would just, I wouldn't really try very hard on the test. I would just do them real quick. Even in the SEAL teams, I would always do the test. I would do them real fast. I would finish in like 10 minutes and everybody would take an hour. Ask any team guy that was ever in the class with me about how I acted during classes. You know, uh, who's that one dude? Um, it was a dive, dive suit class. And we're doing over dive physics. And uh, the instructor made a mistake and it was about partial pressures and other stuff. And I, I knew the physics really good of it all, you know? I was already scuba diver in college.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  I was, I was a diver before SEALs. And uh, I, I had a lot of knowledge. And so he said something that was like, and I was like, and I raised my hand. I was like, well, that, it's not really right. And I said, and I started talking about what was right. And everybody in the class, all the other team guys were, were pissed that I even did that. I was like, yeah, but if they're teaching wrong stuff, then somebody's gonna die. You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna bring it up. I'm gonna, I'm gonna challenge that guy. And Brad, what the heck is his last name? Brad was in that class with me. If he watches this, he'll know I'm talking about him. To this day, he still holds that against me. He still says, you're always a jerk during class and like raising your hand and like

• 41:39Speaker 01

  challenging instructors. I was like, we should. If they're teaching you something wrong in diephysics, shouldn't you raise your hand and say that's wrong? Saving somebody's life that you just said that?

• 41:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Come on, dude. So hey, Brad, I'm just trying to save your life, dude. That's why I raise my hand a lot. And that's why I challenge stuff.

• 41:58Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go back to VMI.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 42:01Shawn Ryan?

  So you go to VMI. What do you, what's your degree in?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Electrical engineering.

• 42:07Shawn Ryan?

  Electric engineering?

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Electrical engineering, yeah, yeah.

• 42:10Shawn Ryan?

  How did you become interested?

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Algebra, differential equations, a lot of, it was thick.

• 42:16Shawn Ryan?

  So you're good at math?

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:18Shawn Ryan?

  Really good at math?

• 42:19Speaker 01

  I can be good at math.

• 42:20Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  I haven't done a lot of math right now, but I'm doing a lot of experience right now. And I'm doing electricity experiments and electroculture about growing plants with electricity.

• 42:31Shawn Ryan?

  Before we get into that, let's stick at VMI.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  That's a good one.

• 42:34Shawn Ryan?

  Let's stick with VMI. When?

• 42:36Speaker 01

  That's why electroengineering is, I'm so glad I did that. But I also goofed off a lot at VMI and I played lacrosse and I was just, I wasn't, again, not applying myself. The discipline didn't work for me.

• 42:47Shawn Ryan?

  How were you?

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Their discipline didn't work.

• 42:49Shawn Ryan?

  How were you at building relationships when you left home?

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Terrible.

• 42:53Shawn Ryan?

  Did you have friends?

• 42:55Speaker 01

  I have, I have some really close friends, the ones that get to know me. If you sit with me for, for long enough, you're gonna, you, you'll end up probably being a friend if you, if you talk to me enough. But if all you do is to talk to me for one day, you'll be like, eh, cool person, not, or kind of a dick or whatever, just that one meeting. But if, just give me a little bit of time. And I was like, hey, but I usually don't give people very much time. I'm very short, you know? And so the folks that I did get tight with, I'm still like best friends with them to this day. My, one of my VMI classmates, Ron, he was out in California, one of my best friends to this day, you know? And no matter what, Ron would be like, dude, if that's you, like 10 years ago, he called me up, he says, dude, if that's you, you know?

• 43:39Speaker 01

  It's hard with me, you know, whatever, just as long as you're okay. And that's all it was. Mike Martin, Master Chief, you know, right after I started doing that, he passed away a while ago. You know, rest in peace, brother. But um, he sent me a note like right away. He's like, Chris, known you for a long time, you know, and support you if, if you're, you know, if you're okay, if you're good, you know, and do you need anything? And after I realized it, yeah, I'm okay, I'm doing okay. I go, all right, all right, I support you. And that's all it was. So many teams, a lot of team guys, some of that would probably surprise you too.

• 44:12Shawn Ryan?

  I know that, I know you want to get there and we will get to that point.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  No, but it's, it's important to know that there's, there are, there is a lot of support and there are a lot of, I, I make friends and they're deep friends and lasting friendships. I'm also really hardcore. And so if you ever, like I said, I'm always living in fear of mistakes. If you made that mistake, I'm not gonna let you get away with it. If you're in class and you're the instructor and you're the general, you're the admiral. If you make a mistake, Admiral, I'm gonna call it out. You know, McCraven.

• 44:45Shawn Ryan?

  At what point during VMI, at what point during VMI did you become interested in the SEAL teams? And how did you even find out about it? Especially back, what was that, the eighties for you?

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, eighties. I was class of eighty eight at VMI. I was, but I didn't finish, I left. There's, I was in the Ranger Platoon. And I was pretty heavy into like the tactics and small unit tactics. And, and I have my first Ranger handbook was like nineteen eighty five. And uh, doing patrol leader orders, PLOs and um, doing all of it. And I was really good at it, you know? And uh, I just, I was scuba diving too. And then I also was interested in flying, you know, being a pilot. But the biggest thing was like, small unit, special operations, you know, that type of thing. Rangers, Rangers lead the way. Ranger handbook, I mean, it says it there, all the, you know, Rogers Rules of Order.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like, dude, this is, this is warfare. You know, these are the guys, they're professionals, you know? The regular army, they're not quite as professional, you know? Which is a failure that they could all be that professional. But the divisions of labor is, are wrong, you know? And I can go through some of that too, but it's, it might be, take too long. But. I wanted to do that and I was also scuba diving. And in nineteen eighty seven, I just saw the cover of the magazine and photo somewhere. In nineteen eighty seven, in All Hands, they had a SEAL Team special edition. The whole thing was SEAL Teams. And, uh, man, I was flipping through that and I was going, dude, this is like, it's like the Rangers.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  They scuba dive and they free fall parachute and they do all this stuff and these guys are awesome. I said, I want to do that. And so immediately after I read that magazine from All Hands in nineteen eighty seven, I was like, this is what I want to do. And one of my fraternity brothers, uh, we were both reading a magazine and, uh, Girat, Chris Girat. And, um, he says, yeah, I want to do that too. And I said, yeah, let's do it. So we were both going to join it up together. And, uh, I ended up being the one who did it though. I don't know what happened to him. I lost track of him. But I knew at that point, it was like, these guys do exactly what I want. I pay to go scuba diving. Why would I pay when they could pay me to go scuba diving? And free fall parachute and doing everything else? This is awesome.

• 47:04Shawn Ryan?

  So did you drop out of BMI?

• 47:06Speaker 01

  No, I left in eighty seven and out of my own will.

• 47:10Shawn Ryan?

  What happened there?

• 47:11Speaker 01

  I liked to go engineering. I was, I was, I'm glad I did it, but it definitely wasn't, wasn't for me. It was, uh, I mean, it could be for me now, now that I realize what I missed out on. You know, I would love to go back and do that. But at the time, I just wasn't, I wasn't buckled down enough. It was, I was only in to, to the Ranger Platoon and the lacrosse team. Those are the only two things I had a passion for. You know, and that's the problem is as soon as you get a passion for something, you just start digging in. And then it lets a lot of other stuff slide. And that's what I did. I let my grades slide. And so I ended up, um, have, having to go make up some time and get my grades back up to stay.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  And then I got a lacrosse scholarship to a way better school. And then I ended up going there and I graduated from another school. Alfred University.

• 48:04Shawn Ryan?

  Where's that?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  It's in upstate New York. That's where I am right now. So I ended up going back to Alfred for my master's degree in, uh, mental health counseling.

• 48:13Shawn Ryan?

  No shit?

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the journey for me to get out of where I am, where I was.

• 48:17Shawn Ryan?

  From VMI, you went to mental health counseling?

• 48:21Speaker 01

  No, no. From VMI, I went to political science and philosophy at Alfred.

• 48:26Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  And then at Alfred, I graduated and then went right into SEAL teams. But I just recently went back to college for my graduate degree, my master's degree in mental health counseling.

• 48:36Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  And so there I started really digging in like psychology and the mind and the counseling aspects and, and coping mechanisms and all the other stuff. The DSM, which is a piece of garbage now, but it's a, it's a manual for all of the mental health, uh, issues and everything you have going on in your life. You can go through it and you can find out, you know, signs, symptoms, this, this, and what you can do and all the other stuff. So I was really digging in that and trying to figure myself out. So for two and a half years, I was at Alfred University going through mental health counseling, trying to figure out what, what's up with me. You know, why am I here? What is wrong with me? Why did I do this? And I figured it out.

• 49:22Shawn Ryan?

  Well, don't, we'll get there. Let's go to the SEAL teams.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  There's something about my childhood that happened in 10th grade though, that's probably pretty important.

• 49:31Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we better.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  That I've only spoken about once.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  And, uh, so you remember I was, I was living pretty isolated. I was isolated from my family and isolated from my culture.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  We don't have culture as white people.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  We don't have culture as white people in America.

• 49:49Shawn Ryan?

  We don't. How so?

• 49:52Speaker 01

  We're not allowed.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  So I was searching for a culture. And so I ran into this person who was Native American. And I didn't know that he was basically kicked out of his tribe. But that comes into play. But he was living out there with the English. And it's basically Amish, English is how they do it. And I lived in Amish country, too. So we're English. And they're Amish and they're Native Americans. There's three different divisions of people in America. And it's only three divisions. You know, don't start trying to divide it up into all the other ones by color and everything else. It's culturally wise. What is that more than that, of smaller cultures? They're...

• 50:35Speaker 02

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• 51:05Speaker 01

  So I was there, meeting with this Indian guy. And going there and just hanging out. And another friend of mine, Nick, we would go there with this guy. And we were learning a lot about this stuff. And we were making beads and doing this stuff and like learning about the culture and really digging it and getting into it. And the guy was living off reservation in his cabin. And he was a pedo. That's why they kicked him out of the reservation. They didn't want him doing that with their kids on their reservation. Let him go do it with the English. They didn't care. So I didn't know any of this stuff. I didn't even know what that was. I didn't know what sex was. I was a virgin until I was like 22 years old.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  21 or 22, 23. I'd have to really think about it to actually put a date on it. But I was a virgin. You know, I was scared of all this stuff. I didn't. I was very confused. Because of what was going on in my own head, too. All that fear. And um, so I started finding some culture. I started finding something I could really, I could sink my teeth into and be like, this means something. You know, the great spirit and the way you take care of the earth and all the other amazing things about the Native American culture. You know? The people that were here before them is even more wild, you know? Which I appreciate more the people that were here before them.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  It's amazing, some of the stuff. But, so I was there with him and for whatever reason, I was sitting there chopping wood and Nick left. And I didn't even, I almost didn't remember a lot of this stuff until like really recently and I was talking to another guy. And something happened to him really similar when he was a kid and he was telling me about it and then it all started coming back and I was like,

• 52:48Speaker 01

  "Oh yeah." So I was chopping wood and sure off in 11th grade or whatever. And uh, Nick is gone, so it's just me and it starts getting late and I said, "Hey, I gotta go" and jump on my motorcycle and ride back home. And she was, "Hey, you're all sweaty and all, you know, just, hey, jump in the shower and take a shower." And I was like, stupid kid. And so I was like, "Yeah, might as well, yeah, sounds a good idea. I don't want to do it when I get home at like midnight or whatever time." So it wasn't that late, it was probably like eight or nine. But uh, so I'm in the shower. Freaking guy comes in here with a big wood and and I start like backing away and I'm like, "Wuh!" And I'm freaking out and I fall through the shower curtain and scrambling away and I get my, I'm able to scramble away.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Got away, followed him off, pushed it, got out. You know, luckily, but it was enough. It was like, it affected me a lot. You know, so I was already afraid of all this stuff and I already had a lot of stuff going on with me. And then that happened and so that pretty much shut down all of it, you know, it's...

• 53:51Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit, man.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  And all those people on that tribe, and they all knew it. And if any of them think about the eighties, and they think about that guy, Patches, and they're all gonna know, and every one of them people living on that reservation know, they set us all up. All those English kids that were living out there near him, they knew it.

• 54:15Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  You know, I got away, but there's a lot of people that don't, you know? And it affects ya.

• 54:22Shawn Ryan?

  And you totally-

• 54:23Speaker 01

  It affected me greatly, and that's why these drag queens right now, they're dancing for all these kids, and they're half naked, and doing all the sexualization in front of these kids. That's why I'm so adamant about these drag queens right now, that they're out there dancing for these kids, and they're doing all sexual stuff. That's pretty much what happened to me when he did that, you know? It didn't go the full thing, you know, luckily, but it was enough. So it's very, very similar what these drag queens are doing. And I'll tell you what, what he did definitely affected me. And it's not right. You know, kids are very vulnerable, and kids are very influentable, groomable, or whatever word you wanna talk about.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  If you're sexualizing kids, you know what you're doing, and you know it's wrong, and you know you're harming them kids. And that's why when I'm talking about this stuff, everybody's all mad at me and saying that I hate drag queens, and I never even thought about drag queens. I have some, I used to have some drag queens that I might have called friends, that I knew and I was acquaintances with at least. And they were pretty good people, they're nice, you know? But I don't have anything against drag queens. But the second they started being naked in front of kids, or doing sexual stuff in front of kids, and it's all sexual. Burlesque is sexual. Do burlesque dancers dance in front of kids?

• 55:44Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Pole dancing is sexual. Do pole dancers dance in front of kids? No. So why do we allow drag queens to do the same thing in front of kids? That's what I'm talking about. If they didn't do that, I'd be like, "Yeah, do whatever you want. You're an adult theme area. You're at a bar. It's adult entertainment." If you were doing that, I'd hi, I'd give you a high five, whatever.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  You know, but as soon as you started doing it in front of the kids and I saw it and I was like, "This is wrong." And I start calling it out. It's exactly what happened to me and it affects every one of them kids. If you're a parent, bringing your kid to these drag shows, you're messing your kids up. Whether you think you're being all compassionate to the drag queens, compassionate to the gay community, or whatever you think you're doing. Because there are people too and we should just support them. Well, don't bring your kids. If you want to give that drag queen dollar bills, you go there and give as many dollars as you want. But don't give dollar bills to your kids. And if your kids stuffing dollar bills in somebody's underwear, that's... Are you kidding me? This is why I'm speaking so much.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  So, a little while ago, I did start speaking out. And I went on Robbie Starbuck and I went on a couple, not very much. This is all I'm fighting against. Because everybody else can take care of themselves. If you're an adult and you want to get surgeries and you want to do stuff, you're an adult, you know, go for it. But you're doing this with kids right now. And that's when I, I wear this purple shirt on every show. I had to remove everything and make myself in the most plain, maybe even dirty looking, so that you don't even have an inclination that would ever do that. You know what I mean? Yeah. And they need to stop. And if they stopped right now,

• 57:36Speaker 01

  all the pressure on an entire community would probably, it would be like a pressure valve, be turned off. And Robbie Starbuck and me and everyone else is speaking out against the Rainbow community right now because of what they're doing. And I blame the whole community. The whole Rainbow community is at blame right now because they're allowing it. If all those people, if every gay person, every lesbian, and the transgender people who, who are disagreeing with the stuff that they're doing to kids, if they would all just say, "Stop", it would stop. And then you would see everybody in the world, they blame the Christians too, and I don't understand that. The Christians only want the best for them. The Christians only want

• 58:19Speaker 01

  the best for those kids. If they stopped right now, they would see that the whole pressure valve would be released, and they would be like, "Yeah, we don't care. You have your bars, you have your adult entertainment. Go for it, man. We don't care what you're doing. As a Christian, I don't care what they're doing. That's you. If that's what you want to do, you can go for it. But again, leave me alone. If I wake up every morning and I read the Bible for an hour, let me do it. It doesn't do anything to you. If I go to a coffee shop and have a Bible with me, and I'm reading my Bible in a coffee shop, why do you have to tease me? You know? I'm not doing anything to anybody." That's the thing.

• 58:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Why are they attacking? It's like Goldenrod. If you have hay fever, everybody blames Goldenrod. Goldenrod is actually antihistamine. But the Goldenrod is sitting there real bright, and it's sitting there, super bright yellow flowers and all this stuff, and you have hay fever, you're sneezing, all you see is that Goldenrod blowing us through the pollen all over the place. The Goldenrod is trying to heal you up. Did you know that? Christians are Goldenrod. The Christians are just there, bright and shiny, and just trying to heal you. But we're not sitting there knocking on your doors, we're not sitting there, well, some of them do, but they aren't Christians. But we don't really do anything. We're just sitting there real bright, and we're saying, "We have a way to

• 59:42Speaker 01

  help you out, if you want it, but you have to take it. We're not going to give it to you. We're here." But everybody hates Goldenrod so much, because they think it's causing hay fever. Everybody hates the Christians so much, because they think the Christians are causing the hate. Christians don't cause hate. We're setting an example that now you're projecting on us. Your hate is projected on all them Christians. And a lot of it's your own self-hate.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Do you know how many Christians are killed per year?

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  No. Over 5,000, worldwide, over 5,000 Christians are killed per year because of their belief, because they have a Bible, because they believe in a moral code, because they believe there is something bigger than us, and we believe that I am created in the image of God, and we are. Our DNA code is the image of God. Our DNA code is a code written by somebody, and you can take all those evolution people, you can take all those atheists, take everybody else, and they can't figure that out. And you ask them, and I can study with Descartes, who was a great causal theory guy, and you study that, and you talk about first cause, and that's where they always get stuck. So who wrote the code?

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  So the Christians, you need to stop thinking the Christians are causing all these problems. Most of the problems are being projected on Christians. It's actually somebody else bringing that in and persecution. So when I say how many Christians are killed per year is over 5,000 worldwide. Do you know how many transgender people are killed worldwide every year? I don't. It's like 300 and something. In America, it's like 60, 65. Now, I'm not putting those numbers out that are meaningless. Every one of those numbers is a name. Every one of them numbers is a person, is a human, is a human that is worthy, is a human that I am grateful for that had a life, and I'm very sorrowful that they're gone right now, because they had

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  a life and they had things to offer, and I'm really upset that those people were killed, because they were killed for really bad reasons. The transgender people are being killed for really terrible reasons. Those Christians are being killed for really terrible reasons. Both groups are being killed for terrible reasons. But the thing that I ask you right now is who does our government care about? Who does the world care about right now? They care about those 300 transgender people, and they're making laws and they're doing everything they can to save those 300, and they don't care about those 5,000. Now, how many Muslims are killed per year worldwide for their religion?

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  In the Quran, Jesus' name is mentioned more than Muhammad's.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  I think. I know Jesus' name is mentioned a lot.

• 1:02:38Shawn Ryan?

  How many Muslims are killed every year?

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  But Jesus' name is in the Quran a lot.

• 1:02:40Shawn Ryan?

  Because of their religion?

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  I don't know. But I know that if you have a belief, I'm sure it's a lot.

• 1:02:46Shawn Ryan?

  Who would be doing that?

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Probably some people that think they're Christians, or maybe some people that think they're Jews.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  It's a Hegelian dialectic. It's a Hegel philosopher. He had this theory that the only way society can advance is through a dichotomy. It has to be through two warring factions, fighting to make everything advance through something else. And then with something else, you have to create something else to fight that new something else to create something else. And that was the whole theory. And that's the theory behind like critical race theory and a whole bunch of stuff. And the, uh...

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  There's some, I mean, I'm now thinking about that and I could go into a lot deep there. But the problem is right now is that we always try as human beings because we're so convinced that it has to be two. And they have to be warring. Same thing like Jesus and Satan, or God and Satan, or Lucifer, or whoever you want to say. We think that it has to be good and bad, good and evil. It has to be, you know, God and Satan, and it has to be this and that to do this. It's about Joaquin and Boaz, you know, those are the two pillars in Solomon's Temple that the masons believe in. And they always do that. And they make it black and white. And it has to be that dialectic to join into the one in the middle.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  And that's what they're doing right now with white and black people. They're making a racial thing. They're trying to make it into that two, a dialectic to war. But that's not the right dialectic. It should have been rich and poor, you know, that's way more accurate. But nobody sees it that way. When you have billionaires meeting in their billionaire clubs, do you think when a black billionaire is sitting there hanging out with a white billionaire, do you think they talk about race?

• 1:04:34Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Never.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  When I was poor and I was growing up, we had a lot of, you know, my dad was a football player too, so we were always exposed to a lot of, a lot of black people because that was the, that's the culture of football. You know, it was very mixed up. They don't care. When you're on that football team, do you care what color your lineman is or your quarterback or anybody else on there? Your team, you just play as a team. You know?

• 1:04:59Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they're definitely, they're definitely doing a division because

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  We're a broken society right now and I hope to break it.

• 1:05:03Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, just, everything is coming down to race. Everything is, you're a racist, you're, I mean, just this week, just this week in Memphis, there was a African American, I think he was 20 something years old, was beat to death by four African American police officers. And they're saying that the four African American police officers were motivated by white supremacists. They, that they are white supremacists. Now, how are four African American police officers, white supremacists?

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Well, how does a president?

• 1:05:39Shawn Ryan?

  And, and, and the sad thing, Chris, is that, and this is just my perspective, and I hope I'm wrong, but it seems like the majority of the US population that sees this actually believes that four African Americans are white supremacists. They actually believe that.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, what I can

• 1:06:03Shawn Ryan?

  They will believe anything that comes out of CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, whatever news channel is, is, is, is your cup of tea.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  That's the two, Fox and CNN.

• 1:06:14Shawn Ryan?

  They're gonna believe anything, if Tucker Carlson said it.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  All those people

• 1:06:20Shawn Ryan?

  It's gotta be true, right? It has to be true. You know?

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  If Anderson Cooper says it, it's true for those people. If Tucker says it, it's true for those people. And there are warring.

• 1:06:30Shawn Ryan?

  It's pathetic because nobody's looking at all the different perspectives that, and if you don't think like me, then I fucking hate you.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  Yep. You, I mean, you nailed all of it. I look at all of it. Even on my social media account, I have some, I have liberal account and I have my conservative account.

• 1:06:50Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't know you had two accounts.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  I have way more than two accounts.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  But the, but the echo chambers, if you enter in echo chambers is probably the perfect way to say it.

• 1:07:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Is that one of my accounts is definitely echo chamber. And I've changed it a lot too, because I had to, because it was way too far. My valid for us, social media accounts. So for, for that 10 years, when I was doing a lot of the speaking out and talking about stuff, there's a lot of things in there where I was like, I was way too over into, you know, that, you know, cultural Marxist type of way of thinking, you know, victim mentality and everything else. I was in there on that social media platform and it's not me. And so I have been being a little bit more harsh in that account just to try to bring it into a more of a, a generalized, uh, middle of the road echo chamber. So I can get a little bit of both sides into it. And right now I'm pretty much there.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  And so I don't really do very much one way or the other. I do speak out still on Drag Queen, some of my other stuff, but for that account now to valid for us account is kind of middle. But it's still, I still bash Biden and the administration, just like I bash Trump and his administration. Just like I said, if the Admiral made a mistake, I'm gonna call it out. When Trump did stuff, I would call it out. When Biden does stuff, I'm gonna call it out. I'm not either one, I'm an independent, you know? And I'm proud to be an independent because I'm not gonna let you talk me into who to vote for. Those political parties are, are packs, they're not political parties, not political at all.

• 1:08:21Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that's exactly, it's a,

• 1:08:24Shawn Ryan?

  an echo chamber is absolutely the correct terminology.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Shawn Ryan?

  You know, because, I mean, let's, let's look at it like this.

• 1:08:32Shawn Ryan?

  What was it, maybe five, four or five months ago, Kanye West, right? Was all over the news.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Shawn Ryan?

  Now, now they're saying he's a white supremacist. Or, or, I don't know, I, I don't, I don't watch.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  He wasn't talking about Jews, he wasn't even talking about Jewish or Jewish religion.

• 1:08:46Shawn Ryan?

  I think what the, what the point I'm trying to make is, is that this is the kind of shit that I've seen Americans fall into time and time and time again. You know, let's talk about the beginning of COVID. You know, when all these celebrities were speaking up about, The vaccine and the mask mandates and they they wanted everybody to wear the masks and I wanted everybody to do the vaccination and the conservative side of the house was saying, I don't give a shit, you know, I don't care what you have to say, you're a celeb, you're a, you're a musician, or you're a football player, or you're a basketball player, or you're an MLB player. I don't care what you have to say, get on the field and run the fucking

• 1:09:31Shawn Ryan?

  ball, or get on the field and pitch, you know, pitch strikeouts, get on the stage and entertain me. I don't care what you have to say about your, about anything with politics, COVID, are you a doctor? No. But the minute, the very minute that one of them switches sides and they speak out against the vaccine, or against the mask mandate, or, you know, as long as it falls in line with what you believe, then all of a sudden, it's okay. Now we want to hear what you have to say. And then we saw it again with Kanye West. What do, and, and, you know, I'm middle of the road too. I lean more on the conservative side. That's how I grew up. I have

• 1:10:16Shawn Ryan?

  conservative values, but I am middle of the road. And so I'm, I'm harder on conservatives than I am on liberals. Because that's kind of, you know, that's, that's where a lot of my values lie. Not all of them, but a lot of them. And then I saw this stuff with Kanye West. Well, what have we heard ever since, ever since the first presidential debate, which actually there was only one, I think, last time, but it was Joe Biden is, his mental state is off. He's not capable of being the president because of his mental state. There's nothing going on upstairs. He's got dementia. He's too old. He can't think. He's mentally, he's mentally

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  That was one whole time saying that.

• 1:11:01Shawn Ryan?

  Slowing down. You know what I mean? He's, he's lost his mind.

• 1:11:06Shawn Ryan?

  Isn't Kanye West like a diagnosed schizophrenic?

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  I didn't know that.

• 1:11:11Shawn Ryan?

  He may, I may be off, I may be off, but he definitely, I know for a fact, he's talked about his bipolar disorder.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:19Shawn Ryan?

  Which would be, right?

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Shawn Ryan?

  Right?

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  So bipolar.

• 1:11:22Shawn Ryan?

  So, so, but we, we can't listen, we're gonna go off and throw a shit fit about Joe Biden and how nobody should listen to him, and I agree with him. I agree with him. I do think that he's mentally off. But then when Kanye West comes around, who's, I'm sorry.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Who's diagnosed?

• 1:11:41Shawn Ryan?

  Not diagnosed schizophrenic, diagnosed bipolar.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:45Shawn Ryan?

  Another mental disorder.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:46Shawn Ryan?

  We're gonna, we're just gonna eat every fucking word that comes out of that man's mouth because it falls in line with exactly what the fuck we say. And, and when I see this shit, man, and it's, this is, that's just a couple of examples, but when I see this stuff and I'm like, this isn't my fucking party, man.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not, you, you see all these people, you know? These are all a bunch of hypocrites.

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:12:16Shawn Ryan?

  Every fucking one of them.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, um, Tucker Carlson, when I was on his show the other day, he, uh, I had a whole bunch of them on that side, the CNN group, who were just mad at me for doing that. And I said, well, did you hear what I said? They said, no, I don't listen to that. I said, well, if you heard what I said, you'd probably understand why I went on there. And I said, just listen to it. I said, I went on there, basically just said I don't wanna do this anymore. I basically talked about CNN and Fox, and I said, I don't wanna be here because everything I say on here is gonna be a lie. I said, what does that mean? I said, if you watch anything that I did on CNN, you know, for whatever years passed, it's all lies.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  I said, it's not me lying, it's the fact that they can edit and they do whatever they want with it. They can build narratives out of whatever, just like this show right here. If somebody only listens to a snippet that you put out there, depending on what snippet you put, you could paint me as an evil, bad, bad person, or you could paint me as a really good person. Or you could paint me as one of the coolest seals that ever lived, or the biggest jerk seal that ever lived. And that's what I'm saying is that when you do these things on CNN or Fox or wherever you're going. I don't want to do this anymore because I don't believe what you guys are peddling on either side. I said, but I do get a kick out of Tucker because he has pretty good humor and he does come up with some good points sometimes to make me think.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  I don't believe what he says just because he says it, he makes me think about some stuff. And then I have to go research and I figure some stuff out and I find out my own. That's what everybody should be doing, but nobody does that. Cause we live in like this McDonald's fast food society. That if I can get that Big Mac for a dollar, then I'm gonna eat that Big Mac. It's all I need. Says, yeah, but it's, it's, it's not good for you. There's so much stuff in that thing that's really hurting you that you really need to figure out. If you like the Big Macs, figure out why you like it. Okay, I like the salad. I like that Thousand Island dressing you put on there. I like this. I like that. Okay, well, go make it yourself and you'll make it better because you can use the organic or natural stuff you got from your farmer. It'll be a lot better for you.

• 1:14:23Shawn Ryan?

  No, it's just.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  But we just want it handy. We want it easy.

• 1:14:26Shawn Ryan?

  I think.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Nobody wants to dig.

• 1:14:29Shawn Ryan?

  The sad thing is.

• 1:14:35Shawn Ryan?

  You cannot fix stupidity.

• 1:14:38Shawn Ryan?

  And that's what's happening here.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Cognitive dissonance.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Is probably the exactly what it is. It's like they've been in echo chambers for so long. That's all they have. Well, we did it as a society, you know, for how many, even when you're in, when you're in grade school. And they give you the globe or they talk about the man on the moon and all the stuff they teach you in grade school. About stuff that I could challenge right now. You know, they teach us a lot of stuff that we hear over and over and over again that we just, we take it for granted. That's what happened. When did the Chinese land on the moon?

• 1:15:14Shawn Ryan?

  I have no idea.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  Two thousand thirteen. Did you ever see the video?

• 1:15:19Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  So the Chinese landed on the moon in two thousand thirteen. And they released a video for it. But pretty quick that video was taken down and they said, no, this is a joke. Because it was so bad. It was so fake. Because they didn't have, you know, a crew brick, you know?

• 1:15:36Shawn Ryan?

  Well. That's another discussion.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  You need a better, you need a better production staff and better cameras if you guys want to fake this.

• 1:15:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:15:44Shawn Ryan?

  That's another discussion, but, but do you want to dig into your career as a SEAL?

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we just did a lot of other stuff. I don't know.

• 1:15:53Shawn Ryan?

  We did. Let's, let's take a break and then let's get back on track. Go over your SEAL career.

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

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• 1:16:34Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Chris, we're back from the break. And I really, I want to dive into your SEAL career because you've had a very unique and you've had a very unique, successful career as a SEAL. And it's like, nothing that I've heard before. I don't know everything about it, but I know you've been on some very, some fascinating projects. You've seen a lot of combat, you know? And, and I want to show how accomplished you are as a SEAL and as a human to the community, so.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  So I'm supposed to talk about all the stuff I don't talk about?

• 1:17:14Shawn Ryan?

  You're supposed to talk about all the stuff that you don't talk about. Are you good with that?

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fine, yeah.

• 1:17:21Shawn Ryan?

  So let's go back to, you went from VMI to Alfred, and then you joined the Navy.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  Yep. So, so Desert Shield, Desert Storm, it was kicking off. And, uh, just like, you know, every, anybody who's a, you know, patriot would raise their hand because the war's going on. So I raised my hand and I went to war, you know, I joined. And, uh, when I joined, I went right into boot camp. I went into recruiting office and I told him, I said, hey, this is going on and I want to join and I want to be part of it. And, uh, I want to win the SEALs. And it was a Navy recruiter and he was like, well, nobody really makes it through that. And, uh, there's a lot of other things you can do. And I was like, no, I'm a Mag, it's, it's fine. And I said, how do I do it? And he says, well, go to boot camp. And then at boot camp, you can raise your hand. That was the time period I joined. And, uh, they'll give you a test at boot camp.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  And if you pass that test, then they'll give you orders that you can go. And I was like, okay, I'll do that. He said, all right, sign up. So I signed up, like right then, and I shipped out like two or three weeks later. And, um, so I went to boot camp and, uh, I was a RCPO, which is just like the leader of your boot camp class. They used to always kid around and call me RCOPO. Cause during boot camp, it was like the worst training I've ever been through. It was just a big waste of time for me. Cause I've already been through VMI, right? So I don't need to learn how to fold my clothes and clean stuff up and do that or follow orders or march or any of it. It's a huge waste of time. So I, you know, as I was there as a RCPO and I was leading a lot of stuff and I knew that I could lead. I knew I could do all the stuff.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  The, the company commanders, the guys that were running the boot camp, they kind of started laxing off on me a little bit. And they started like letting me do stuff. And so I told them, I said, hey, you guys are having those marches and sometimes you run and we do little workouts, but I'm getting really bad out of shape and this is just too long for me. I gotta work out. And so they said, okay. They said, we'll have blocks of time and you can do whatever you need to do. And so I had all my own time and I was doing pushups and work it out, you know? And it was pretty cool. So that's why they started making jokes in RCOPO. Cause it was like I was special. I could do my own workouts. I said, well, any one of you all that want to do it with me, you can. And nobody wanted to, cause it was hard, you know? And so I left boot camp like that.

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  And I was, I went in there as an E3 because I had college degree. And so I was already starting out as a, as a E3.

• 1:19:46Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  And I enlisted on purpose because I didn't want to be an officer. And, uh, cause I also was studying a lot of that. And I didn't see the officer route as something that I wanted to do. Cause I still was, I'm a, I'm a digger, you know? I, I work at all my own Harleys and I do mechanic stuff and I worked on the farm. And it's like, I'm not going to sit there in an office and push paper and just tell everybody what to do. I'm going to do it. And so I enlisted. So I'm an E3. So I go to BUDS. And, uh, in BUDS, I think I made E4 during third phase. I took the test during third phase. I mean, it was fast. Everything was so quick.

• 1:20:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  And so I'd made, I made the next rank. And I think it was right then, did I make E4 in BUDS? It was like really quick after. It was really fast. Now I'm thinking back 30 years now and I think about this stuff. But I didn't make E4 really fast. I went up ranks really quick. The testing, because I can take tests, I can pass tests. You know what I mean?

• 1:20:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you've been saying that the whole interview.

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  I could just take the test and I'd get the highest grade and I'd have, you know, I'd ace it, you know? So I made rank really quick in the military. So I graduated, I got in the, I'm in BUDs and I'm kicking butt and I'm, I remember the four mile run.

• 1:20:59Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Do you remember your time in the four mile runs?

• 1:21:01Shawn Ryan?

  I think it was like twenty-four minutes.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was twenty-four minutes too. So I was running in six-minute miles in this hand with boot on and I was pretty quick. And the OZO course, I was doing that really quick too. I think it was like six minutes or something. And then the, um, swimming, I was the fastest swimmer, you know, me and my swim buddy.

• 1:21:19Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  You know, plumber. So I was, I was crushing everything. And so as far as graduating number one, I graduated number one.

• 1:21:27Shawn Ryan?

  You were the honor man?

• 1:21:30Shawn Ryan?

  Do they have that then?

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  They did, but it was, they changed some of the stuff, the way they did it and Honor Man wasn't fully based on your performance for all that. They took the shooting section that we did on third phase out in the island and they made that like fifty percent of your Honor Man grade. And everything else was the other fifty. And so if it was, they did it the old ways or the new ways now, because I think they found out there was a mistake. Is you can't do that because the guns were shooting out there. They're just, it's guns that you get out of the armory. And like I, whatever I was doing, I'm a good shooter. And I was just shooting like crap and I was like, this is, it's the gun. And they would always yell at me that it's not the gun. And then I'd be like,

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  I'm a good shooter and this thing is just, it's a, it's a worn barrel. This is just a crap gun. You know, and it's, it's totally plausible because those guns are, they're just beater BUDs guns. You know, they're not good guns. And so there was this officer who was crap athlete that ended up shooting like super expert. The guy was a great shot and I give it to him and that the dude was an expert shooter. You know, and mine was like, I was a little lower. And so they said, well, that's the honor man because he's the best shooter. What are SEALs? We've got to shoot. That's what we do. So he's the honor man. And it was because I was always telling, I was always calling them out and raising my hand and saying, that's bullshit, and that, and that. And I was not easy to get along with. They didn't want me to be that man.

• 1:22:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  But I was number one in this team, so they gave me my choice of orders. So right out the gate, I had my first choice, SEAL Team One.

• 1:23:03Shawn Ryan?

  Why did you pick one?

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  It was the hardest team.

• 1:23:07Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean?

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  Perception. Perception was Team One and Team Two were the toughest teams. I lived in Virginia, I know all that stuff. I didn't really want to be in Virginia. I wanted to stay in California because I don't know anything about it. And it was just something different, you know? So I could pick Team One or Team Two, is what I wanted, was one of those two teams. Because they were the strictest, they were the hardest, they were the ones that were the historical legacy teams. And they were hardcore, those two teams, compared to all the other teams.

• 1:23:34Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it makes sense, you know, you pick VMI.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:38Shawn Ryan?

  Because the beating.

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  It kind of follows.

• 1:23:40Shawn Ryan?

  SEAL teams.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  And until just now, I never realized that. Until just now, I never realized that.

• 1:23:46Shawn Ryan?

  Until just now, in this moment?

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  When I, yeah, when I'm sitting there looking at it, I go, and then when Nick was telling me that I'd wallow in misery, it's like, well, what's the toughest one? And so I went to faculty's team, you know, Master Chief Faculty, you know? And he was tough, man. He would fricking, Tony Leena was wearing a ball cap and a pair of sunglasses one time, and he got like in trouble for wearing a ball cap. You know, that, it was like, if you don't do it the team way and faculty's way and right by the book, you're gonna get lit up. Especially as a new guy, they were strict, you know?

• 1:24:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  That's the nineties, 1990s SEAL teams were way different from what you have now. The 1990s teams are different than the 2000 teams even, when we started going to war. Everything started really changing. When I was at Team One, we used to go to DRMO, that where all the old equipment was given at Camp Pendleton for the Marine Corps. So the SEAL teams in the nineties, we were getting the old Marine Corps throwaway equipment. And we would take that equipment into the parachute loft and have those guys sew it all up, the guys that sew the parachutes. And I'm explaining a little bit for the civilians out there that don't know what a parachute loft is. But basically, there's a bunch of guys in there that sew the parachutes and fix the parachutes with these big machines. So we would take all the old equipment, this LBEs and this straps and harnesses and

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  all the stuff from the Marines, we'd bring this big pile of stuff into the parachute loft, and we would explain to the rigger what we wanted, you know, what to carry and how it would look and how it'd fit. And it was all custom built to us. This is before London Bridge, this is before all of the fancy equipment.

• 1:25:19Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  The fancy equipment happened because of the SEAL teams. All those guys and all that equipment because we kept modifying everything. Everything we did, we modified. And so the modifications were so intense and so good. Some of those parachute riggers and some of the SEAL team guys that were parachute riggers that were doing it. They went after the teams, they went and they built companies.

• 1:25:39Shawn Ryan?

  So there was literally, what was the? I mean, this is like the complete opposite of when I showed up. When I showed up, we had everything.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  We had no money, we had no nothing.

• 1:25:48Shawn Ryan?

  The Marine, the Marine Corps had more funding or the Marine? I mean, when I showed up, there was, there was no budget. It's, it, it appeared to me there was zero budget.

• 1:25:58Speaker 01

  Well, it was less budget than we, it was more budget than we had before that. So. The Marines had more equipment, better stuff because they're combat, they're like Rangers for us, for the Navy. The Navy SEALs were on our own and were funded through SOCOM and all the other stuff. The Marine Corps has its own funding, so they buy whatever they want. We get all our funding from SOCOM and the big Navy. The Navy hates us, they don't give us any money. So back in those days was before the glamour SEALs and before it was really like the Hollywood stuff and everybody thought SEALs were awesome. Back then SEALs were still pretty cool, but we never talked about being SEALs either. If we were in a bar and we're not in Coronado where everybody kind of knows, or Virginia Beach where everybody kind of knows. When we were anywhere else, we tried not to be SEALs.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  Nobody wore any SEAL team gear. If anybody asked us, hey, what are you guys doing here, what are you up to? There was always cover stories, there was always stuff we would say. And it was like balloon, uh, balloon pilot training, you know?

• 1:26:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  It was a good one.

• 1:26:54Shawn Ryan?

  Dolphin waxer.

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  We had weird stuff we would say and we'd talk about that. And then some guys would say, oh yeah, I'm a Navy SEAL and they'd wear this stuff and, but most of it, most guys didn't. We'd wear it around, around Coronado and some, or your team because we're proud of your team. You know, the hats and stuff, but not very much. It's nothing like it is today. And there was books, but there wasn't like a lot of books.

• 1:27:16Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  And so there was maybe like a, maybe 20 books. And everybody gives all the SEALs crap about writing all these books, you know? But they even give me crap about writing a book that I wrote. But the book that I wrote has nothing to do with the SEALs really, and it's not me bragging, it's me just telling. Like if I ever wrote, and a lot of books that SEAL team guys write is leadership and stuff. Jaco wrote some book and it's about some stuff and there's all these guys writing these books, but it's not a whole lot of SEAL team stuff. So everybody gives us crap for writing books is because. We write books because we have a lot of knowledge and experience and we did things that not a lot of people do.

• 1:27:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  And we're able to put it down on paper and make it make sense and it turns into a recipe for people to do better in their lives. What's wrong with that?

• 1:27:58Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing.

• 1:27:59Speaker 01

  And if you're a doctor.

• 1:28:00Shawn Ryan?

  It's the same concept as a show.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  It's the same thing. It's freaking ridiculous that SEALs are somehow under a microscope that you guys write too many books. Well, you don't give crap to all the doctors that write books or the lawyers that write books or anybody. If you have a profession that's very focused, all those guys that have that profession, they all write books. I just, I don't get that part of it.

• 1:28:19Shawn Ryan?

  I think, I don't think it has anything to do with people writing the book. I think it has more to do with they weren't the one to write the book.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  Or just jealous, yeah, just jealous. Pure jealous. Or the fact that somebody's making some money off of something that we all do.

• 1:28:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  Like the book that, most of the books that we write, guys write on leadership, even the McRaven book, when he starts going through all the stuff, it's like, that's all the stuff that we all do, you know? We just didn't write it down. That's all. So we all have the knowledge and, and the stuff that we do. Like I was telling you about polishing the turd. Back in the SEAL teams in the nineties, we did have to polish the turds. There was a Quonset huts in Nylund. Did you go to Nylund?

• 1:28:58Shawn Ryan?

  We did.

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know the building they have in Nylund right now? So I was there before that building and it was all Quonset huts and these old crappy metal buildings from World War II that were given to us by the army or something. But, so, and these things were like basically dirt floors and these old, those metal racks where there were bunk beds. And we had to have people sleep in the top and bottom bunk in those days. And it was just terrible. It was just crap.

• 1:29:23Shawn Ryan?

  What, what kind of, what kind of mission set was there pre nine eleven?

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  There was a lot of FED. It was a foreign internal defense was like one of the main missions, you know? And it's a valuable mission that we kind of laxed off on a lot.

• 1:29:35Shawn Ryan?

  Where?

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  Every country in the world, you know, SEAL Team Four would do South America, all those special ops in South America, SEAL Team Four. SEAL Team Two had all of Europe and Northern Europe. SEAL Team Three had the Middle East. SEAL Team One, we had the Far East, so the Philippines and Thailand and fun stuff. SEAL Team Three had Middle East with the other guys and they did a little bit of stuff in India and getting that far. So they went Middle East to India and over and over there. Sometimes they did Australia and some other places. But every team had a specific geographical location that we worked in. And then, which was great, because I went to Thailand a few times. And so the Thai SEALs, I got to know them. And we were working with them enough and it was all the same guys. And

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  it made it really good camaraderie between us and the Thai SEALs. We were giving them tactics and procedures and stuff that we could share with them. And then they were getting better at their job and they become better friends with Americans. So they no longer saw us as ugly Americans. We were like, hey, those Americans are cool. They taught us stuff. So FID was very good. And the world peace is not going to be done through war. It's going to be done through FID. It'll be done through us cooperating with other groups and communicating and working with them. That's how you make peace. You don't make peace by bullets. And that's where we were better back then, because we were very aware of all the stuff going on. We were there also, spread really far out. So if

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  something did happen anywhere, you could immediately have a SEAL Team platoon within like 20 or 30 minutes from being on target. And that was another one of the missions.

• 1:31:09Shawn Ryan?

  Did that ever happen?

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:11Shawn Ryan?

  To you?

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  A few times, almost. But then, the Dam Neck guys or somebody else, high speed, would come out and get it.

• 1:31:20Shawn Ryan?

  Oh.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  And so it kind of pisses us off.

• 1:31:22Shawn Ryan?

  Can you talk about what one of those would have been?

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  There was a rescue and stuff.

• 1:31:28Shawn Ryan?

  Panama?

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  I was a little bit, I went to Panama a couple of times. I was there a little bit after, but it would, Panama team guys were there and Dam Neck was there and it was, it was big. So that was a bigger one. But there was a lot of little ones that would happen. If it went on long enough, then they would get somebody else to do it. And the Marines would also get those missions before the SEALs sometimes, back in those days, you know? Because that was, it was more their mission to do that real fast stuff. Because they were an expeditionary force. Which everybody loses and they don't understand what that really means. What that means is the Marines are a package of everything. They don't need anybody. They have all the airplanes, boats, they have all the artillery. They have everything they need to fully go and be there, plop. And they're, they're, they can do all of it.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  SEALs can't. We need them. So we need the Marines more than Marines need us. We need the Army more than the Army needs us. We need the Navy more than Navy needs us. But we're a pretty awesome group because we did start specializing in stuff. And that's when you start going into damn it missions, some of the other stuff. Uh, the, um, beach reconnaissance mission from World War II is why we even started. Was about beach recon and about us doing water work. And we got away from that. Now the beach recon is what we've been doing since World War II and saving lives. So as a ship pulls up or an LCAC or any of the landing craft or anything that's going on, as they pull up to the beach, they would hit, um, the coral reefs or whatever. And they thought that now it's coral, that we're on ground. And they'd put down the ramp and everybody'd just run off the end of the ramp

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  and go into 50 feet deep water and drown. And so that was when they said, we need to have somebody out here. And so that's the sneaky peeky UDT guys. And so, and even them, I would raise my hand and say, this isn't the way to do it. So we've been doing beach reconnaissance in World War II. And when I was at SEAL Team One, I came up with a way to do, uh, the beach gradients. So do you remember doing beach gradients when you did the hydrographic recon through? So how did you figure out the beach gradients?

• 1:33:25Shawn Ryan?

  We had a lead line.

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  A three foot lead line?

• 1:33:31Shawn Ryan?

  I don't remember how long it was.

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm talking about the gradient. I'm not talking about in the water. When you get out of the water, you can't do a lead line anymore. So you have to figure out, when you get on a beach, a lot of these beach craft, especially the, um, the LCACs and the, uh,

• 1:33:45Shawn Ryan?

  I don't remember ever actually doing that.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  Okay, so we get out of the water, you hit the actual beach. Now the beach can be this deep and it can be this deep. It can be really shallow, almost nothing. Now, if you have an LCAC, an LCAC can't land on the beach that's more than like a one to four ratio or something. So it's one foot up and four, that way it's pretty shallow. It's not a real steep beach. Some of the other craft can want it's deeper ones because if LCAC tries to get on a real steep beach, it's going to go up there and fall off, go up and fall off. It can't do it. You know what I'm saying?

• 1:34:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  So that beach gradient is very important to to tell them what they can actually do when they get to the beach. So it's a very important thing. The way we've been doing it since World War II was what we trained during BUDs. We say, well, that beach gradient, and they tell you, and they show you kind of what they look like. And then we just kind of guess. And so I came up with an exact method to really show what the gradient really is.

• 1:34:34Shawn Ryan?

  Well, how'd you do that?

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  It's it's it's not very hard. I said, when we go up on the beach and you do it, what you need to do is you need to get your weapon and mark off. And it was about three feet was it a sight? You get a three foot marker. It can be on your lead line. It can be on a weapon, a piece of tape, or your spot in your weapon. And what you do is you kneel down and you sight that spot up the beach until you can see where the where the sand meets that mark. And you have somebody mark that mark. Then what you do is you go from that mark from where you sat, kneel down, you pace off from there. One pace is three feet, two paces is six feet, and you go all the way up to there. So you're doing a three foot measurement here, and then you're pacing off. And you just divide it. That's your beach gradient.

• 1:35:14Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  So if it's only if it's a if it's a one to 10 beach, you go, it was three feet and it did 10 paces. So it's one to 10. And it's almost an exact beach gradient. They never had that before. It's in the books right now in War Coming to Training Maggots as a Beck method for determining beach gradients.

• 1:35:32Shawn Ryan?

  And you came up with that?

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, because from World War II all the way up until I came along, everybody said, well, this is the way we do it. That's a one to 10, that's a one to 20, that's a one to 40. I go, yeah, but how did you measure it? How'd you measure it? They're guessing.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  I gave them an exact method.

• 1:35:49Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  So why didn't anybody think of that before? It's because I'm kind of a troublemaker and I raised my hand and said, well, we need to be able to measure that. And so I would sat down and I thought about it and I figured it out. I said, it's just this. And I said, we already do pace counts. Just use your pace count and measure it. Eyeball.

• 1:36:08Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  And the simple things like that, that people just take for granted because they say, this is the way we do it. Let's keep keep doing it. Well, there might be a better way out there, you know? Don't tell me how to do it. Tell me what you need. And that's the problem right now in politics and everything else is everybody's telling everybody. And nobody's actually looking at it and scratching below the surface. You know, okay, so that's team one, right? Did all that team one.

• 1:36:30Shawn Ryan?

  What was the?

• 1:36:33Shawn Ryan?

  We don't have to go through everything. You have a long career, but I am very interested.

• 1:36:37Speaker 01

  But I'm giving you like the reasons why I never had to ask for orders. I was recruited to every command was because of that.

• 1:36:43Shawn Ryan?

  You were specifically recruited to every single command that you went to.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  I never volunteered for anything. I was asked to go everywhere.

• 1:36:51Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So SEAL Team One, I did that. I picked it because they gave me a choice. So I didn't ask for it. I said, I want Team One. They gave it to me. When I was at Team One, I was doing stuff like that with the beach grading. I was also doing really heavy mission planning. I was doing all the photo and intel stuff. I was really heavy into it. I was really good at it. And everybody knew it. So if they ever wanted to have a mission, they had to plan a mission to get me. If they ever wanted to win an event for the Raging Rhinos, did you guys do, you were East Coast, right?

• 1:37:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  I don't know why I just did that. I knew you were East Coast. Did you guys do Raging Rhinos every Friday and have a keg of beer at the end?

• 1:37:24Shawn Ryan?

  We called them Monster Mashers.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  Monster Mash, same thing. Raging Rhino, Monster Mash, and a keg of beer at the end every Friday. So if anybody ever wanted to win that, if we had shooting involved or anything where it was athletic and shooting and everything all combined, if they wanted to win, they got me. Every officer knew that. If you were on your platoon, if I went to your platoon and I would take you from like a C or D rating and you would be an A1 rating as soon as I showed up. I had every qualification. And the reason I had every qualification is because I knew the SEAL Team platoon commanders knew it. We need this qual. If we send him Free Fall Jump Master, for example, how many SEAL Team guys failed out of Free Fall Jump Master? It's a hard course. And we needed that qualification for our platoon.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  So LT said, hey Beck, we need to send you Free Fall Jump Master. And I was like, alright, I'll go. And why did they send me? Because they knew I could pass. And we needed the qual. And it happened in every platoon. So we need the qual, that could go do that qual. And I would get it and I had it under my belt and the platoon is A1 now. We can deploy or C1 or whatever the number is. But they would automatically bring it up to platoon to deployable status.

• 1:38:38Shawn Ryan?

  It's weird, I mean, you're telling me this and I'm thinking like, this guy's arrogant to be telling me that he's the best at, you know what I mean?

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  Who, me? No, I'm just telling you.

• 1:38:46Shawn Ryan?

  And then, but it makes, what I'm saying is it makes perfect sense.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  No, but I'm test, I can test.

• 1:38:50Shawn Ryan?

  It's not arrogance, it makes perfect sense.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  I just, I just test, you know? And so because I had all the qualifications, I was requested a lot. And so now with the mission planning I was doing, I was the intel guy in the first two platoons. Then I went to first lieutenant, um, engineering for you guys. Then I did some air stuff, then I did comms and I did everything you could do in a platoon. All of it. I even did medical and I wasn't medical trained. I was a secondary medical with a, um, a corpsman, what's IDC? So we had IDC corpsman and I was a secondary corpsman.

• 1:39:22Shawn Ryan?

  Corpsman's a doc for people who don't.

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  So I did all that stuff and it was like, so I tried to do everything because I wanted to have qualifications. And I wanted to know exactly how to do everything any team guy could ever do. Even diving, I was a dive guy for a while and dive soup and everything else. But when they were doing mission planning, uh, systems, I did a bunch of other stuff too. But they were doing mission planning systems at the headquarters and it's called SWAMPS. Special Warfare Automated Mission Planning System. And a lot of you guys under your SEALs, you remember SWAMPS. So the war office that was in charge of the SWAMPS program gave this company, uh, California Microwave. And some of this stuff is coming back right now and going, holy cow, I don't remember that.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  They gave them like 10 or 12 million dollars to automate mission planning. And so they were building this system with all these computers and all this stuff. And remember 1998, 99, 2000, computers were not a big deal, you know? We didn't have any computers in the SEAL teams. We used a lot of dry erase, not even dry erase, it was, um, wax pencils with, um, the lamination paper over a blank piece, you know? And I'd made those special too and everybody worked with those.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  It was such a bad program and it was so terrible that I started on, because I built my own computers too on the side. I would buy all the parts and I would build computers and I would give them to people, you know, sell them to people. So I built all my own computers and they all knew I did that. They knew I was a freaking weirdo. So the warrant officer called me up down at SEAL Team One and said, "Hey, hey Beck, I'd like you to come up here to Warcom and work with me on mission planning." And I was like, "Well, I've been at SEAL Team One for nine years now and I was gonna go to another command anyway, so yeah, that's cool." And so I went to Warcom, I went to headquarters to do mission planning system. The admiral, everybody's sitting around the table and this is when I was building, every weekend I would go home and on weekends I was building a program that I was gonna try

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  to use because these guys were failing. So at the final thing, the final mark, when they were saying, "You have to make this thing work or the contract is void. We can't, we're not gonna continue this." So I built mine all up. And so these guys were sitting in a California microwave and they had windows up and it was like Windows 98 or the other one or it was an old window. No, it wasn't me 98, it was the special one they made for businesses. Can't remember what it's called now. But they had the stuff up there and they had the board up there and they're showing it and they're going, "Here is the mission planning system, Swamps, Automated Mission Planning System for SEALs." And they start the computer up and they start doing some stuff on it and then boom, blue screen to death. And they said, "Well, wait a second, wait a second." And they restart and they do all the stuff and they start doing it again and like five minutes later, blue screen

• 1:42:03Speaker 01

  to death. An admiral's sitting there and all the captains and all the, it was a huge, Gus Gusentine I think was there too and Gus was awesome. I gotta tell you a story about him. But, well, something he said that was very, very valuable. It reminded me that. But, so we're all sitting around a table and watching these guys just fail, fail brilliantly. And I said, "Hey, Warrant, Warrant Wells." And I was like, you know, "Can I, can I plug in?" And while they're trying to fix their stuff, they can go on the side and work on their stuff. Can I plug in and just show you some stuff? And nobody's seen it yet.

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  And so I plug in and I go, "Hey, here's a automated mission landing system for you." And I went, "bleep, bleep, bleep." And I started typing in, "What kind of mission you want to do?" And one of the captains was like, "Uh, direct action and use some explosives and have a boat insert and an infill by foot, DIA explosives, gather by foot, get picked up by vehicle." And it was, he just started rattling off a bunch of stuff. And I was sitting there just typing in and going, "chirp, chirp, chirp," pulling stuff down with mouths, just "chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp," and going, "Okay, uh, what are we blowing up?" He says, "Uh," and I said, "Let's use five thousand explosives." And went, "Poo," on the map. And I had maps and everything. And so map went, "Poo," this ring showed up. I said, "Here's a safety ring, there's a margin, make sure we're out of here by the time the countdown goes down." And all the stuff was just flashing up, they're going, "boom, boom, boom, boom."

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  I said, "Okay, ready for the, uh, let's do the, um, briefback." And that's a briefback is a briefing we give before the PLO, before the platoons to make sure that we can accept this mission to the high commands, the captains and admirals. So the briefback, I said, "Let's do a briefback." And it's like three slides, I'm like, "bleep, bleep, bleep," and I went, "chirp, chirp, chirp," and went, "Okay, let's do the briefback." And PowerPoint shows up, has all the stuff on it, and I start briefing the briefback. I said, "Okay, let's do a PLO," chirp, chirp, chirp. And I go, "Duh, duh, duh." And I said, "Okay, this is now 12 slides, because I have to do more stuff, because now we have to teach the platoon guys what the mission was to make sure they get all the stuff." I said, "Chirp, chirp, chirp, okay, warning water, chirp, here's a warning water, here's a briefback, here's a PLO, here's all the stuff." And I said, "Automated." And the company was sitting there just going, they were just like, they just couldn't believe it. And it was, it was totally dumb. And I said, "This is all," I said, "Oh yeah, we have a library too."

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  And I showed them a library of data. And I said, "It's all divided by, uh, the jobs that each platoon guy has. And I've done all these jobs, so I know what we need." And I said, "So each," it had folders, so it was a full system of folders. And each folder started out as first lieutenant slash engineering, and then you open that folder up, and it was everything you ever need in there for all the boats, maritime ops, all of it. You go to air ops, you go to diving, you go to comms, you go to each, each one of them had a folder and everything you ever need. There was a sniper folders, there was demo folders, everything you would do on a platoon was in a folder. And so they said, okay, um, the Admiral sitting there is going, what do we do now? So they killed the contract, the company was fired, they lost everything, and I think they folded pretty quick after that. And then we got all the money.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  And basically, I went here, $10 million to an E6, Chris Beck. And so I started running the program. And I ran the program, and I was hard on those guys. It was, uh, Master Chief Bill Hill. He used to feed me all the time because I would work through lunch. So he would bring lunch for himself and me. Because I would do, and I would go out to lunch, or I'd try to go to lunch, and I would just, he'd say, he'd say, Beck, just eat this, eat this peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

• 1:45:16Shawn Ryan?

  So you're like the OG tech guy for the teams.

• 1:45:19Speaker 01

  That's also why Damn Neck recruited me.

• 1:45:22Shawn Ryan?

  Damn Neck recruited you too, huh?

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, like I said, I got recruited everywhere I went. So the mission planning system was good. It was swamps. And then SOCOM saw it, and SOCOM was like, well, we want this for everybody. So they changed it.

• 1:45:37Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, you developed this entire?

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, in my garage at home on weekends. And then it was more of the concept and how to run it and how to do it. You don't want a fully automated system. You don't want AI or anything in there that's really automatic. If it's automatic, it'll fail. If it's automatic, you're gonna kill everybody. Because if it's automatic, there's programs, there's logarithms, there's something in there, right?

• 1:45:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  So I told him the whole thing automated, everything is just bad. You have to have a lot of people in between doing this and deciding. So while I was doing it, so I was typing a lot, was trying to feed the stuff that he was saying, plus what I knew and how to execute a mission, it has to be in there. You can't let a computer run that. The only thing I want the computer to do was take my data and signal it on PowerPoint so I can brief it. So I had a lot of macros and things all built for that. But, um, so work on Fire Damn, I got all the money, and then we started building the program. And Bill Hill and a few other guys, um, there was another Bill. And then it was, it was madness. And I was an E6, and I made chief when I was there.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  Because they gave me like an award for building the program. SOCOM saw it, they wanted it, so they changed the name of it and we buffed it out. So I made a whole system for Rangers. I made a system for Special Forces and it was all different because I had to study those guys and pull the whole Ranger handbook and do a lot of stuff. And so I built the systems, gave them to them, give them to them, give them to them, even the Air Force PJ guys. And then, so SOCOM was like, well, this is awesome, SWAMPS. And I said, well, and they changed the name to a Mission Planning Environment, something. Oh, Special Operations Mission Planning Environment, SOMPI. Did you ever do mission planning? Did you use SOMPI?

• 1:47:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  Well, on most of those briefings, if you really dug into metadata, my name was on every one of those because I hid metadata stuff. So even to this day, right now, 30 years later, my program I built in 1999 is still being used.

• 1:47:27Shawn Ryan?

  It's still being used.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:29Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:47:31Shawn Ryan?

  That's, that's amazing.

• 1:47:32Speaker 01

  But at that point then, I'm doing all that stuff. And then I'm sitting there giving the brief and how to mission plan to all the Master Chiefs and the entire SEAL teams, all of them in this one room. And they wanted to see what was going on because this is the newest, flashiest tech thing, mission planning. Bring out Chief Beck and have him brief mission planning. So I started briefing it and I was showing them all the stuff and these guys were blown away and they're like, holy cow, this is awesome. Because these are all the crusty old Master Chiefs, just like, they're amazed because I could get it so fast. So a mission plan would take four to six hours, I could do it in like 20 minutes, you know? Because it was all there, it was at my fingertips. So the Master Chiefs were just like, holy cow, this is awesome. And a bunch of them started saying, when you go for orders, you know, in my team? And so they all started saying that.

• 1:48:15Speaker 01

  And then they're saying, hey, Steve, because we're going to go over detailing and some other stuff that Master Chief, and you're a chief, so you should know some of this stuff. So I stayed with them in the afternoon during their briefing when they're doing the detailing, when they're showing how detailing and everything works. So the big Master Chief from Tennessee, from the big thing, he was sitting there talking about detailing and one of the other Master Chief says, well, do an example and show us how this works. He says, well, hey, Chief Beck, you might even, we pull up your data and then we show them all the stuff you have and we find out how can we detail you? And I was like, okay. And so he put my, all my data up on this, on the screen and started going through it. So they saw my ASVAB scores, which I aced. They showed all my stuff in BUDs, 24 minute run and all the other stuff. They showed all the stuff I've done and all my qualifications.

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  And all of them were going. Holy cow, this is, it's a hard charger. And so they started asking for me. And so Team Five Master Chief said, hey, I want you to come Team Five and take a platoon. I need a chief. I was like, okay. So they did me orders right there as I was sitting down. Cause I said, okay to SEAL Team Five Master Chief. So I went to SEAL Team Five. So I met SEAL Team Five in two, middle of 2000. And that's when I had Dave Goggins as a new guy and, and a couple of other ones. But so I was at Team Five as a chief. I'd ride my Hurley in a Team Five compound. I'd have somebody stand in there where if I could, I'd have somebody to open the door for me through the back gate.

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  I'd ride my Hurley right into the compound, take a right and go to the Quonset hut that we had. Oh yeah, we were in Quonset hut at Team Five at the time too. So we had the little steel buildings, the old crappy buildings before they tore them all down and built the beautiful buildings. Yeah. So I'd ride my Hurley in there and park it right in front of my, the door to my platoon hut. You know, every day I'd ride my Hurley right on base, right into the gate and in my, right by the door. So it was pretty funny. And everybody saw it and they were like, oh, that's just back, whatever. It was a kickstart, 1960 Hurley. It was a Panhead. The Panhead belonged to Rocky Karlock. Did you ever hear any stories about Rocky Karlock? I didn't. Yeah, he was a wild man.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  He was probably the cruelest, like hardcore, not cruelest, but the most hardcore BUDS instructor that probably ever lived. He was hardcore. They didn't even become a police officer in, um, El Cajon, I think, or over there somewhere. But it was, it was just the way I was running stuff. And, and it was pretty hard, even when I was at Team Five, you know, on the new guys. So David Goggins in the beginning really hated my guts because I would make them do stuff that they didn't really know what I was doing it for. So in, uh, in, in our area, we had lockers and stuff and I wouldn't let them use our lockers. So they had to live out of pair bags. I said, you guys can have pair bags in here and have them all there, but figure it out. You know, can't use lockers. You guys are new guys. You haven't earned them yet. And that was the only thing I'd say to them, you didn't earn them yet.

• 1:51:05Speaker 01

  But I wanted them to learn the pair bag stuff and how to do that. So when we had to do flyaway missions or do something really hardcore, they didn't know what I was doing, but I was trying to teach them the exact gear you needed and how to pack it and make it executable. So you can go out really fast out on mission. If you have those huge lockers like we have now. Tell the guy right now to go in there and tell him the mission we have to do and be ready in thirty minutes. They're gonna have a tough time.

• 1:51:28Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  Cause there's too much stuff. There's too much area. They haven't learned the discipline of packing the bags and have it there, set, and all your primary gear ready to rock and roll. So you can quickly throw it in the bag and go. Now, DAMNECK, they do it pretty good because we do have it set up pretty well like that. And we have to, because of our contingency programs, you know, but that's all like testing and stuff like that. So because DAMNECK is only a development group, they only experiment on equipment. So we just have to fly away really fast to experiment on stuff. So that's why. But, um, so Goggins was just, they were all pissed that I was making the new guys leave out of these bags. And so after, I don't remember, it was like a couple of weeks or a month or whatever. And I said, yeah, use your lockers now. And I said, you got, this is what was going

• 1:52:11Speaker 01

  on because we have to go do these missions. You gotta be able to go out fast. And then we had to go right now, pack up and get out. And the guy was like, alright. And the new guys are already waiting outside and all the old guys are in there looking through lockers and trying to find stuff and totally disorganized. An hour later, all the old guys are there meeting the new guys. And new guys are laughing. Now they know why I did it.

• 1:52:29Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 1:52:30Shawn Ryan?

  I know.

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  It was stuff like that. I would also make these guys do, um, ruck marches.

• 1:52:34Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it carried out because that's how I organized my locker and I didn't just come up with that myself.

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  You had to. You know, if you didn't, you were just disorganized and it would take too much time. And so there was things I would do as a chief that were kind of like, man, what a jerk. But it was like, it wasn't really to be a jerk. It was because these are things that I learned over the years. And it was like, this, you really need to do that. And you guys are new guys. You don't get it yet. And this is all new equipment for you. So learn the equipment, learn your bags, and get all organized and be ready to rock and roll. You know, that was the lesson.

• 1:53:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:04Speaker 01

  And it was a whole bunch of stuff like that. And I also had them doing ruck, ruck marches and ruck humps and stuff, you know, with thirty pounds a lot. And it was before the war. This is all before the war. And, uh, after it really kicked off, those guys were like, just saying thank you. It was like, cause we started doing ruck humps and we were carrying a lot of shit, you know? And so they were like, well, now we know why you're doing that. And I was like, alright. But now the teams were, we've been in a war salon and they do a lot of that stuff anyway. The nineties teams were, it was a little different. It was a little looser, you know?

• 1:53:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:35Speaker 01

  Cause it wasn't the mission. We weren't at war.

• 1:53:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:53:38Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it makes sense.

• 1:53:39Speaker 01

  So that's Team Five. I left Team Five and I went to a special, uh, projects group. And I was there for a year and a half, I think. And I was there doing sneaky peaky stuff. It was all, it was all plumber work, you know? And then.

• 1:53:53Shawn Ryan?

  Can you talk about it at all?

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  It was, it was bugs, electronics and video and surveillance and disguises and.

• 1:54:03Shawn Ryan?

  Is this like the ASAP program?

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:07Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:07Speaker 01

  ASOT, ASOC and all those. It was before the SEALs had a program, we started a special projects group to build the program. And I started doing it ourselves. Cause before that, we had to go to the army and use all their stuff. You know what I mean?

• 1:54:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so this, this program was, I thought this program was just, what year is this around?

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  This is oh, two, oh, three.

• 1:54:30Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I loved that project.

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was a lot of cool stuff.

• 1:54:34Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't get to at the level you were at, but I had heard about it and we started doing some training.

• 1:54:39Speaker 01

  It wasn't at a huge level. There was, there was a couple of guys there was definitely, they were better at it than me. And it was more because of, more because of me, more because of who I was. I wasn't always the best at that, at that time. It was because I was still coming out of the platoons and I still had that.

• 1:54:57Shawn Ryan?

  You didn't switch the mindset?

• 1:54:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't, I didn't do great. I did, I did great in pieces of it. I did, I, I had a couple of things I did there that were awesome.

• 1:55:07Shawn Ryan?

  Can you describe the difference between a, being in something like that and a, and a regular platoon?

• 1:55:13Speaker 01

  Okay, regular platoon, yeah. So if you go into special projects and, and there's a lot of them, special projects, you even be the triathlete guys. You know, that's different. It's a special project. So if you're in a platoon, all you are is a frogman. You're shooting and looting and you're working all the time in training and all you're training for is that mission. It's a mission of a direct action, a rescue, a hydro recon. It's the mission focus. Special projects are all the things outside of those mission focuses that are very specialized. That you still need that um, set of skills to even be able to do the stuff that we're doing outside of those skills. And so that would be like the um.

• 1:55:54Speaker 01

  They're real deep water stuff and sneaky stuff. Like if I was to destroy a pipeline that goes from Russia into Europe or something, I would be really good at that. I could do it so easy. It wouldn't even be, it wouldn't even be a thought in my mind. It would be done. Just tell me to do it. Two hours later, the thing's gone. Anywhere along there. If I want to shut down all the communications on the entire eastern coast of the United States, I could do that with one bomb. And it wouldn't have to be a very big one. I could do it with like two pounds of C4. That's special projects. It's taking our skill set and doing something that's so far outside of our skill set. And so when I was, before I even went there, I already went through some agency courses, CIA courses. I did target analysis and a few other ones.

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  So I was already introduced to CIA, which, which some team guys are and not all team guys. And so I started really getting into that, really getting into like that target analysis.

• 1:56:49Shawn Ryan?

  Did you like that better than the platoons?

• 1:56:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Cause I lived in the woods. I'm isolated, I'm alone. I always worked better by myself. Even when I was in Afghanistan, I would just go off with a turf and we'd do missions. It was me, you know, just, I always laugh when I watch that Blackout Down thing when the guy's riding a bicycle. And he's, do you remember that one scene of Blackout Down? He's a sneaky guy and he rides a bicycle off and he's doing his stuff and all, you know, wearing the local attire and a big beard. Like if you look at me in local attire, it's like, yeah, I was, I was good at it.

• 1:57:23Shawn Ryan?

  You have, you have pictures of all this stuff?

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:25Shawn Ryan?

  Can I put them up? Can you get them to me? I'll put them up.

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's some pictures I can give you.

• 1:57:30Shawn Ryan?

  They'll be up right now.

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  And like, and it does sound like I'm egotistical, I'm bragging about a bunch of stuff.

• 1:57:34Shawn Ryan?

  No, it doesn't.

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  But it sets up, it sets up kind of why I even made it to Dam Neck, you know, to experiment with all that cool stuff. And the special projects of why I even got there was like, you have a guy coming out of, you know, swamps and all the intel stuff and every master chief on earth knows me because of the stuff I'm doing. I go to Team Five. The biggest mistake I made at Team Five, I should talk about that because I really screwed up. It was bad. And I was in one of my platoons. And it's one of the things I'll never forgive myself for. Well, I forgive myself, but I won't, I don't let myself slide on. I'll never let it happen again. I was in Sri Lanka and I lost a AK-47. So, and I was the only one doing the mission. So I was there with all the Sri Lankan SEAL equivalents.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  And we're doing across the beach thing. And it was just crushing waves. It was like, it was, it was nuts. And I had AK that wasn't mine and had a, it had a sling on it. And you know, when you're swimming and you're in a really big ocean, you have to, your sling is your life to your weapon. And it wasn't my sling and it broke. And so as soon as it went, it was like, it went down in the ocean. And so I'm going up on the beach with all these Sri Lankans. And then, and I finally meet up with some of the guys and I'm like, dude, the AK is out there. And I said, I know kind of where it's at. And I said, I marked it from a spot on the beach. I know, so I know the parallel. I know kind of about how far out it was. And so I had a beach lane, I had a lane.

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  And so we mark all the lanes. We start marking as much as we can up on the beach so we can do a search. And so this is dark, it's the middle of the night. So the next day we start doing searches and trying to find it because it's an area we can search, you know, luckily. And I ended up like out of my own pocket, I rented scuba gear for the entire platoon because we didn't have dive gear out there. So we go into town, we find a bunch of gear and we rent everything. And we're looking for it. It wasn't a whole platoon. I think I only bought like, I rented like six sats, I think. A few dive pairs to go out there and start doing Jack's Day searches. So I'm out there searching also just with snorkel. And I'm just diving, I'm just panicked. I'm just like, oh, man. I was like, can't believe this is happening. And I was so pissed. And so days are going by and it's just so, so like, and a third day, I think. And I'm just like pissed at everybody.

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  I'm pissed at myself and the whole platoon is like, just like, I'm just scaring everybody because it's just so, it's so like, you know? And you're just, and it's starting to piss them off and it's starting to really get on them. And so they lose confidence in me. It's all like, it's just so bad. So I think I make up for that a little bit though, because I mean, everybody screws up. And so I've beaten them up and I'm just like really bad. But I'm down to a snorkel and I'm just doing this in dark black. And I felt something that felt like seaweed and was like, and I grab it and I'm like, and I wrap my hand up. And it's the, it's the one inch tubular that was the sling. So it's one inch tubular nylon, which is just a thin strap of that much. It's like a belt. So I feel that and I start tugging on it and get part way out of the ground. It's AK, still hooked on the other end.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  And so I get up on the surface and I start yelling, it's here, it's here. And I'm yelling out and a few guys start converging on me. And now the current's pushing me off of it. And so everybody starts searching right around where I was. And I say, the strap, it's about this far out of the water now. Just do this and you guys are gonna hit the strap and find it. So one of the guys finally hits the strap and they pull it up out of the water and hold it above their head. Got it. And I'm like, oh God. It's just such a relief and it's awe rusting and it's nasty, but it was under like sand like this far. It was just, if it would've been one more day, it was gone. Cause it was like, I felt the strap was probably like that much. I pulled it out to about there. And then the other guy pulled the rest of the way out of the sand. And um, but at this time, I'm like, uh, it was just, I, I destroyed a lot of confidence.

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  And I made the guys really look at me like I was a freaking idiot, you know?

• 2:01:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  And um.

• 2:01:22Shawn Ryan?

  I had a similar experience.

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  It just, and I didn't know what to do. And I was just like, well, that's the same thing that I had from growing up that those guys will never know. Maybe they know now, but it doesn't, it's no excuse.

• 2:01:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:33Speaker 01

  You know, I should've never let it get that much. And so my problem with my um, fear of failure, my, my abject, my intense fear of failing or making a mistake, it just totally killed me in that, in that whole platoon. It just made it, cause I just, I was so mad at myself and so angry that none of those guys could even talk to me barely. And I was just so like. Like I was like that all the time, like

• 2:02:00Speaker 01

  I couldn't let it go. And went on for a couple of weeks. And then we went back to Guam and then I shot over to Korea, I think. And then I was with all those guys in Korea with only a smaller group. And there was no officers there. It was just me in charge of the whole Korean expedition. And those guys were like, all right, well, Beck isn't such a jerk and I still do good stuff and I still. And so it started lighting up a little bit. But the officer in that platoon would never let it go. That guy hated my guts so bad. Cause he only has one chance at a platoon, you know, pretty much.

• 2:02:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:31Speaker 01

  And it was his platoon, it was my platoon. But I'm the chief of platoon. It's really my platoon.

• 2:02:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:37Speaker 01

  You know, you're a renter, you rent the locker. I own the lockers. I'm here for nine years. You're here for a year and a half. You know? Those officers have no ownership. The chiefs do. The chiefs own the teams.

• 2:02:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  And yeah, screwed up. But then as soon as I started recovering a little bit, he wouldn't let it slide. He just kept hammering me because he hated me. And then after that was just, I couldn't recover because now that officer talked to all the other officers and it burned me for pretty much any of the command structure of the team. You know what I mean?

• 2:03:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:11Speaker 01

  And it happened. It was one mistake and I screwed up worse after the mistake. But then I'm recovering, but now you won't let me? I asked for forgiveness and you won't let me? You know what I mean?

• 2:03:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:22Speaker 01

  And he wouldn't let it go. And to this day, that guy, like if I see him, I just shoot and punch him in the face. But the funny part is that guy went down in JSOC. And they figured out who that guy was and they hate him. They started having these really cruel, bad nicknames about this officer and really terrible. So that guy ended up muddying up his name so bad that he's just whatever, you know?

• 2:03:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:46Speaker 01

  So everything catches up. If that guy would have let it slide because he was a good officer and would have said, hey, punish me and do whatever. And then let's get on with it. Let's get on with the business at hand, you know? But he wouldn't do that. And so it just said what kind of um, person that person was. You know what I mean?

• 2:04:03Shawn Ryan?

  I do.

• 2:04:03Speaker 01

  And so if you're that kind of person deep in your soul, then it's gonna show sometime. What it did show finally for that guy about four or five years later. But for me, it showed the opposite because I'm not that person. It was just a circumstance I was in for a very short period of my life. Almost like all that trans stuff, you know? It was like I had, I had this, I had a hiccup and I had this time period where I was really messing up. But nobody helped me because I was a chief and the chief doesn't need help. And so all the guys were just looking at me just going, what the heck? And officers were just going, and I was in the middle just going, well, I'm chief and I should have done better. I didn't. I screwed up.

• 2:04:42Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:04:43Speaker 01

  What can I do now to make it up? You can't do anything to make it up. You're a chief. You should have known better. Well, dude, we're humans, man. Everybody messes up. You know?

• 2:04:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:53Speaker 01

  Even McCraven messes up. I don't want to talk about that one, but everybody messes up. And everybody that's, that's a man, if you can man up to it, admit you messed up. You can fix it. You can do better next time. But if you're like that officer and you won't let it go, you know?

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  I fear failure and I'm terrified of it, but if I do fail, I immediately try to, as fast as I can, I try to fix it.

• 2:05:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:18Speaker 01

  And then I try to do better. I won't do that again.

• 2:05:20Shawn Ryan?

  I, I, it always winds up coming back around.

• 2:05:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:23Shawn Ryan?

  You know?

• 2:05:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. So I'm at team five and I get a little of the tune. I do that and I start doing that. And then the E six, who I like a lot, Ernie, he made chief. So I've already been doing a full workup with the second platoon at team five and the other one, they're giving me two chief slots. And so I'm in my second chief slot, kicking ass and doing great and they all know it, you know, because I'm good. And I'm not that jerk, you know? And so this guy makes chief. And he makes it and we still have a lot of workup left and we have the whole deployment. And you know the way the teams spin, we spin really fast. And so if he doesn't get his chief platoon right now, you know, he might not, it'll be really hard for him to get one. You know? And so I say, hey, um, I'll step down and I'll do something. I'm in top of the master chief.

• 2:06:08Speaker 01

  And I say, hey, he made chief and we still have like three months left in the workup and we're deploying. I said, it just wouldn't be fair for me to take that opportunity from him when there's other things I can do. Cause I've already done a chief of a platoon, you know, I can do something else. He says, as a matter of fact, we're sending them squadrons and we need a task unit chief. We want you to be task unit Charlie. And so I immediately leave that platoon and then Ernie steps up, he's the chief and I step in to be tasking at Charlie. And a war starts.

• 2:06:36Shawn Ryan?

  This is my timeframe.

• 2:06:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So now it's 2001 and now I'm a task unit chief. And I'm also, um, the head of, uh, all of the crypto. So I'm the crypto custodian for the entire SEAL team.

• 2:06:49Shawn Ryan?

  For the entire?

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. For all SEAL team of five, I'm crypto.

• 2:06:53Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:53Speaker 01

  And I also have charge of all of the, um, all of the non SEAL deployable elements fall under me also as the, uh, they called it the systems officer or something.

• 2:07:07Shawn Ryan?

  Can you describe?

• 2:07:07Speaker 01

  Combat systems officer or something.

• 2:07:09Shawn Ryan?

  Can you describe what crypto is to the civilian side of the audience?

• 2:07:13Speaker 01

  So all communications, all of our radio traffic, all of our computer, everything, all traffic. If we have to send a signal out, it has to be encrypted. If it's not encrypted, it's just, it's, it's, you can catch it. We encrypt all the stuff, even civilians do it in companies between places. So that somebody in the middle can't grab it and get the intel. So the crypto for SEAL teams and for all of the military is incredibly, um, sensitive and it's incredibly classified. The equipment, it just like during world war two, when we got a hold of the Enigma machine. You know, that's how important it is. And world war two, um, a British guy got a hold of one of the German Nazi Enigma machines. Once we got a hold of the machine, we can start taking apart and analyze it and try to figure it out.

• 2:07:58Speaker 01

  So we can break the code. So if you figure all of the crypto equipment we have is incredibly sensitive. And so you have to keep really super track of it. You have to have a lot of other stuff. So it's double safe locked and all this other stuff. TPI, two-person integrity. And I'm the only one that has the combinations to define a crypto safe. Not even the captain of the team has it. I have all this stuff. Cause you can't let anyone else have it. The only person above me that has it would have been the group CMS custodian. The guy that takes care of the crypto for three SEAL teams and all the boat squadrons. You know? And that's the way we ran it. Oh, I also invented all the 3M stuff to automate 3M. Do you remember the 3M programs? We had to do all the maintenance, the Q1 checks and all that. So the big Navy has all these things.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  You have to do quarterly checks. You have to do weekly checks. You have the daily checks on equipment. So you have your camera equipment. They have batteries in it. So if you're using equipment a lot and a camera equipment, you have to do daily checks of your batteries to make sure your batteries are all plugged in and doing that and that and that. And how to secure it and clean it and all that. So they used to make us do this stuff. And so I invented a whole way to do it really short and automated. And then I also made it so it was digital. So you didn't have to do it with pencils. And if you erased a sheet, you had to throw the whole sheet away, even if you were almost done. So if you did 99 marks on a sheet and you have one mistake mark, the whole thing is done. Throw it away, start over. And so I made it automated and computerized the whole system. And that was another weird one. So I did a lot of this stuff and that's why people wanted me.

• 2:09:26Speaker 01

  Cause if there was a problem or something needed to be done, or something was just, it was hard to use, just give it to me and I'll make it easy to use. The CNO of the Navy had a problem they were working on for their drug introduction in, in the ocean was really, it's like, you can't do it. And a lot of it's coming from South America and these things. And so the CNO, they've been working on this problem for like two years. And so a captain that knew me, knew that I did a lot of this stuff and this weird stuff. And actually this was at Dam Neck though, so I'm jumping a little bit ahead. But this is a similar thing. So they called me in and they said, hey, you're, you're pretty good at this stuff. Can you, here's the problem. And he drew it all up on the board. He showed me everything that had to do. And he says, and this is in the middle of Pentagon.

• 2:10:11Speaker 01

  And so I said, let me go. And I get a couple of colleagues and let me think for a little while. And he says, all right, all right. And he says, well, how long do you want some time? I said, give me a couple of hours. I'll see you be back after lunch. And I said, just have another meeting and I'm thinking I can figure something out. And so I figured it out. I figured out how to do it and I've been working on it for like two years.

• 2:10:30Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 2:10:31Speaker 01

  And the, and the stuff that I did had to do was supply chain. So I had to inject something into the supply chain and I had to use signals and I had to use signals that were all around the earth. That you couldn't really detect because there was so much of it. I can't talk about it very more than that. But yeah, so it's a, it's still a classified project and it works.

• 2:10:55Shawn Ryan?

  Because of you.

• 2:10:56Speaker 01

  Because of what I told them how to do it. I invented a whole nother system.

• 2:11:01Speaker 01

  And it was, uh, it was micro Doppler nano and some other stuff and it was, it was some really cool stuff. And I did it and it's undetectable because it's using stuff that's, it's everywhere. So you can't find it.

• 2:11:16Speaker 01

  I kept doing this stuff all the time. Oh, the motor racks. I was first of 10 engineering guy taking care of all the motors on ARG. So we were on a ship, an amphibious ready group. And, and I was getting ready to go on the ARG and this is just before Christmas. We were deploying like January 3rd or something. So it was during Christmas break during that time period. And so I'm loading the ship up and I go on there and I start talking about the motors. And the racks that they had for the motors to be down in the well decks on a ship rocking and rolling the ocean. And they build them out of these two by eights and these four by fours and they build these things. And I was like, and they said, yeah, you'd have to be really careful with this and how you strap them down that net. And it's really big oceans. They sometimes break and your, your motors might end up in the well deck. So sometimes you gotta put straps on them and strap the motors to the wall of the ship.

• 2:12:00Speaker 01

  Or to make them not crash and wreck all your motors. And I was like, well, that's not a very good way to do it. I said, this is a six month deployment and I don't want my motors to be all over the ship deck. And I was like, well, I want to make it out of steel. And so I went back there to the engineering place and I said, I need a welder. And they said, well, we don't have that stuff. And I said, well, so I went out and I bought a welder. And I went out and bought all the steel and I brought it all back to command and I was there in the middle of winter. From Christmas to New Year's welding, because I had to get it there before New Year's. Cause the ship was being shut down and we'd go. So I had this drop dead time of this. I had to have the rack. So I welded up these giant motor racks and I built them like this and like this. And so there was no things and you didn't have to have up and downs and it made it so

• 2:12:45Speaker 01

  you can grab the motors off really easy. Do you know what motor racks they're still using?

• 2:12:49Shawn Ryan?

  Those ones?

• 2:12:50Speaker 01

  The ones I built in 1996. They use them today. And all the motor racks they build are built off of my dimensions and my build. And I bought my own motor, I bought the own welder and I bought all the metal because it was too fast. They couldn't do it. I got in trouble for that. The command said, "You can't be going out there and spending your own money and, and doing stuff for the team." I got in a whole bunch of trouble for it. And I told him, I said, "But it was, it's my auger and my motors. I don't want them breaking." I said, "I don't care if I spend a lot of money." And then the captain was finally, "All right, I'm done yelling here. Go see the supply officer and he'll write you a check." So he ended up paying me back for the stuff. But he yelled at me first. You know, I was like, "Come on, Captain." Can't remember if that was, um, it wasn't Fitzgerald. It was

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  just after him. It was, I don't remember. But it was like, it was like, dude, if you have a problem when you have to invent something. When we were, we were doing car interdictions. And I can talk about this one because it's not classified right now. So doing car interdictions. How do we interdict a car that's moving, going down a highway? We fly helicopters in front and try to stop them. They go around, they go out in the field. And it's hard to stop a car. We use, uh, the 50 cal. We try to shoot the engine out. When you shoot the engine out, the car is going 50, 60 miles an hour. It kills everybody. You know, because the car flips, everything else happens. We usually kill everybody if we try to stop a car going fast. And so, and they're drawing all this stuff up on there. And this guy, Hondo, is drawing up there and trying to do the UAV and, and he's trying to fly these things and

• 2:14:17Speaker 01

  trying to interdict these vehicles by UAV or something. And I said, I says, "Well, how, how are you getting in that car? How are you keeping up with them? What, what are you doing?" I said, "We're flying a little bird." And I said, "I've done this before." And I said, "What do you, we want it to be something we carry in our gear. So it has to be 40 mic, mic. It has to be something we can shoot at them." So I said, "What we do is, um," and I started drawing on the board. It just took me about an hour to think of this project. And they've already been working on this one for like months, trying to figure out how to interdict these cars without killing everybody. And so they gave me about an hour and I started drawing up on dry erase board and I said, "Do this, do this." I said, "We already carry them." And I said, "Plus, we have the ones that are, that have a lot of rounds on them. The forty mic mic, big one, it has, and you can shoot like four or five rounds real quick." So, and they were like, "Well, you can't do

• 2:15:02Speaker 01

  that out of a helicopter. You can't interdict out of a helicopter." I says, "Well," I said, "Give me a couple of days." And so I went back and I got a helicopter and I flew up there with a forty mic mic and I started shooting cars out of a helicopter. Cause I know people. And I wasn't damn next, so it was easy. So, we're, we're flying these helicopters or shooting cars out of the freaking helicopters and I was shooting practice rounds. So it was this, it was the orange stuff. But I was still breaking the windshield, so I was doing stuff.

• 2:15:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:28Speaker 01

  So I drew up on there. I said, "Basically, it's a forty millimeter grenade." I says, "What you wanna do is you wanna put a hardened plastic cone in the front and then you wanna have where the explosive stuff was and all that, you wanna have a real heavy, um, a heavy lead or have something heavy and have a projectile, but it has to be a tube. And it has to have sharp edges around a tube. And then the heavy thing, say when a forty millimeter grenade hits even steel and you wanna hit the roof of the car, don't hit the windshield, cause then you can puncture through the roof of the car because of the inertia of it, it'll go right through. Cause it's a hollow tube, it goes all the way through, whatever you have inside of that tube will then disperse inside the car."

• 2:16:04Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 2:16:05Speaker 01

  And you know what methyl ether mercaptan is?

• 2:16:08Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:16:08Speaker 01

  Nobody does. I do because I'm weird. But, and I said, "You guys can put stuff inside of here and they're gonna pull that car over real quick. They'll put the brakes on and everybody will get out. And as soon as you shoot it, you land the helicopter, they all get out. You got them. You don't kill anybody."

• 2:16:24Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:16:24Speaker 01

  If it's not the right people, they're outside of the car and they have some issues for a little bit, but you clean them off and they have a little hole in the top of their car, you give them a hundred bucks and you go away. Cause there's a wrong car. You're not killing everybody.

• 2:16:38Speaker 01

  That was one hour and they gave me a problem. I, there's about 10 other things I can say, but one was a little classified part. But the other one's like, dude.

• 2:16:50Shawn Ryan?

  Keep going.

• 2:16:51Speaker 01

  This is all easy stuff.

• 2:16:51Shawn Ryan?

  Keep going. This is fascinating.

• 2:16:54Speaker 01

  It was, it was bunches, the Iron Man project.

• 2:16:56Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, this is some of the most brilliant stuff that.

• 2:16:59Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I could tell you some of the classified ones, man.

• 2:17:02Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's just, nobody's sitting across from me is come up with this kind of stuff. I mean, yeah, there's been like phenomenal, phenomenal, you know, operators that have sat in that chair, but this is, this is.

• 2:17:16Speaker 01

  But none of those operators, even though I did it.

• 2:17:17Shawn Ryan?

  This is different.

• 2:17:18Speaker 01

  It was in the bowels of the Pentagon, down a lot of floors and in the deep, and they don't even know I did it.

• 2:17:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:23Speaker 01

  The hostile forces, tracking, targeting, locating, the entire program for DOD wide was a budget of like 300, it was almost 400 million dollars, DOD wide. And so I'm there as a chief and they know I'm really good at this stuff. They called me up to the Pentagon. I got in trouble for this one too. That was, um.

• 2:17:49Speaker 01

  Shit, I remember his name. It was one of the commanders at Dam Neck.

• 2:17:51Shawn Ryan?

  It doesn't matter. It would be best if we leave names out.

• 2:17:54Speaker 01

  He got so mad at me for doing it. But on weekends, I would drive my own car up to the Pentagon. And then the Pentagon staff that was in charge of the whole system, the entire portfolio, portfolio wide, which was a stack of, of programs like this much. And each program was only a quad chart, was one sheet of paper with four sections. It would show you the company, the prices, all the stuff. It would show you the mission, it would show you all the stuff real quick, a quick outline of what it was they were trying to build. And this is all future projects. So we're spending 400 million dollars on, and we're giving all the money to Northrop Grumman and all these fricking, you know, thieves around the Beltway, you know, Beltway bandits. We're giving them 400 million dollars a year to invent all these things for us to track people,

• 2:18:37Speaker 01

  to locate them, track them and tag them and do all the stuff. And so they started calling me up there and actually the reason they called me up there because one of them, I was going, I was going up there and I saw one of these things and I was like, this is stupid. We already have something better. And the guy that was in charge of the program was like, what? I says, yeah, this, I just, we have something way better than this. I said, why are you guys wasting all the money on this? I said, you guys are wasting like six million dollars on a stupid project that we already have. I said, they're double dipping. It's the same company. They already gave it to us. I said, they're double dipping. It's the left hand not talking to the right hand. And then the guy was like, well, I wonder how many other projects are in there. I said, well, let me see the book. So he brings me into the SCIF, the secret compartment. And then we start flipping through the books and I'm going,

• 2:19:20Speaker 01

  no, no, no, that's okay, but we already have that spec, that spec, that spec. All we need is this. So cut that program down by at least half. Only give them a couple million dollars and make them do that one thing. I was going through the whole book, flipping through pages. I did that for a little while. And the guy was like, hey, can you come up here and do this for, with all of us? Because I was only with him. He wanted more of a staff there so we can start flipping through and rewrite the entire program. So in about three or four, three weekends or four weekends, I went up there, driving from Virginia Beach up to DC to Pentagon. And I stayed at the Pentagon and just work like 12 hours a day, going through the books and looking at everything and studying and telling them and writing down all the numbers, how much it should cost. So I

• 2:20:01Speaker 01

  already know all the cost breakdowns. I can give you, if that's TRL six, uh, technology readiness levels, I can take you where the technology readiness level is right now for anything. I can tell you where it'll be and how much it'll cost and where it goes. I can tell you if we already have it right now. If you give me almost anything, a portfolio for Grumman or North, uh, North or Grumman, um, GD, any of them. I did it for 3M. So the 3M guys had me up there and they started asking about different things. I was like, and I said, well, the military never use that. But if you do this, this and this, the military would buy it like crazy. And so I went to 3M and I gave them all sorts of same stuff, rewrote the entire program, fired a lot of companies and changed the entire program.

• 2:20:45Speaker 01

  And that was with Richardson down at SOCOM. He had Doug Richardson, good guy, like smart. That guy was really good at it. He had a warrant officer working for him. He was magnificent also. He's probably running the program now. Can't remember his name, Army warrant. But give me the problem and I'll solve it every time.

• 2:21:06Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:21:06Speaker 01

  But it'll, it'll take me a little while sometimes.

• 2:21:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:09Speaker 01

  And that goes into the problem I have right now with all the trans stuff that I want to say that.

• 2:21:16Shawn Ryan?

  We're gonna get there.

• 2:21:17Speaker 01

  But I want to say right now that all of y'all out there are just saying this person, it seems like brilliant and has a lot of stuff going on. But it's also where I have a really big failing too. Is that I started going down rabbit holes and I start chasing it. I really dig in and I learn all about it. And then I get kind of stuck in it sometimes. Well, I was stuck in a lot of that for a while and I got trapped. And then it had to take me a long time to fight out of it. And that's what happened.

• 2:21:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:46Speaker 01

  That's that. Okay, so SEAL Team Five, I'm there, second platoon, task unit chief, crypto. I'm running all the systems. So any communications guy that's deployed overseas, they basically fall under my task unit, under Task Unit Charlie. And so I'm in charge of everybody overseas who are not a SEAL for the team and all the crypto, all the radios and all their stuff. And that's what I ran. And I also ran missions. But because I wasn't in a platoon and I wasn't attached to a task unit that was directly with the combat missions, the actual mission on the ground, I was in charge of all the stuff behind the mission. That why, when I was at SEAL Team Five, when I was deployed to Iraq, I attached to the agency again. Cause I was sneaky peeking and doing all the weird stuff.

• 2:22:31Speaker 01

  That's why if you, if you see some of the stuff I've given to the museums, the Golden AK-47 magazine in this museum. So I'm the one that had it. Golden AK-47. I'm walking around, you know, it's like, I was coming back with stuff because we were in places where nobody else was at yet. So I was in like, you know, these palaces. Before, a lot of times before it was even like. And done, you know?

• 2:22:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:58Speaker 01

  It was, it was wacky.

• 2:22:59Shawn Ryan?

  Like pre-war, pre-combat.

• 2:23:01Speaker 01

  It was nuts.

• 2:23:01Shawn Ryan?

  You were inserted.

• 2:23:02Speaker 01

  It was the craziest thing.

• 2:23:03Shawn Ryan?

  Before any of it happened.

• 2:23:05Speaker 01

  Everything happened, we were already invaded. So I was there in the beginning of the invasion force. So it was like, what, uh, March, April timeframe of, of oh, three, right?

• 2:23:14Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:23:14Speaker 01

  So I was there during the whole period and going there and I was flying UAVs. Oh, that's the other thing, I was flying UAVs. I have a ton of inventions with those things too. So I was one of the first people to fly UAV and do, um, call for fire for it observer. So I was forward observing with a mortar tube sitting right there with a UAV.

• 2:23:32Speaker 01

  That was pretty cool. Nobody else did it and I said you couldn't do it because the mortar is gonna hit the UAV. I was going, okay, my UAV is this big, the mortar is this big and the sky is this big. I said, if it does hit the UAV, we, fine. I said, it's a one in a billion chances. If it does, we wreck UAVs all the time, you know? So it's just one mortar crash. I don't care, throw another one in the air and go. The thing costs five grand. I mean, they're expensive. We don't throw them away, but we do damage them a lot, you know, because we're in combat. And so they were like, well, okay, let's try it. And so I started doing forward observing with the UAV. They were like, damn, that's cool. I said, we could chase people with this. I said, watch this, let's chase the mortar. And so we started doing it so we could hit moving vehicles with mortars.

• 2:24:15Speaker 01

  And I said, just call it in, you know? And it was never been done, out of sight, this is over the horizon. So I'm flying UAVs 12, 15 miles away and hitting stuff, you know? And they're like, damn, you know, I could shoot with a 50 cal with a UAV and a 50 and you won't see it, but we can drop bullets in and hit people, you know, long ways away. And I can walk it in, I can just correct it and go, okay, go. And cuck, cuck, cuck, just start going with the big Maldives, you know, walking in.

• 2:24:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:42Speaker 01

  You know, but we were doing stuff like that with the UAVs. And I did a bunch of other stuff with the UAVs that probably not allowed to talk about some of it, but it was some cool stuff, you know?

• 2:24:54Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's all Team Five.

• 2:24:55Shawn Ryan?

  What, what kind of stuff are you doing with the agency? Can you talk about any of it?

• 2:25:00Speaker 01

  No, not really.

• 2:25:01Shawn Ryan?

  All right, let's move on then.

• 2:25:02Speaker 01

  But I went, I, well, I can talk about some of it. I mean, it was, it was.

• 2:25:08Speaker 01

  It's going through the same stuff all the agency guys go through. You go through the farm and you do a bunch of the training, you do all their stuff. And then you get reattached to teams and you do this other stuff and you go on. It's you start becoming a liaison, start doing all the stuff. And then I finally went over to Afghanistan and I was at a SEAL team attached to the agency working all of the BCPs and stuff. So, and because the agency doesn't work in a war zone.

• 2:25:33Shawn Ryan?

  What's a BCP?

• 2:25:34Speaker 01

  A border control point, border checkpoint. It's a border control point, I think. But they are at a high mountain peaks that can look out across borders. And then so we can still engage and do the stuff we have to do. But we're the only ones can do it because it was under a different title. So it was Title 10 or Title, you know, 50. I'm starting to mix up some of them. But it basically, we work under different authorities. So it depends on who you're tasked to and how you have authorities. That's why the SEAL teams bring Coast Guard guys. Whenever we're doing ship interdiction, doing anything out in the ocean, if it has that, drug interdiction, ship interdiction, that stuff. If you have a Coast Guard with you, it gives you authorities that we don't have as SEALs.

• 2:26:13Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:26:14Speaker 01

  And that's why we do that. We bring FBI guys with us because the FBI has authorities that we don't have. So as long as they're attached, we can do a lot more. It's a game in the system a little bit, but it works because they have control and they have ultimate responsibility. And they know the systems and they know what they can do and can't do. So it protects us and it makes sure that we're not doing anything stupid. But we can still do the missions because it's a mission that has to be done because it's for national security.

• 2:26:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:42Speaker 01

  So I was doing those kind of missions. Where it just kind of mixes up and you're doing a lot of L and O stuff. And I started doing disguise stuff and like concealment devices and building things that I can put in places that nobody would ever know it was there. They would have cameras and audio and different things. This, the agency stuff.

• 2:27:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:01Speaker 01

  You know, it was, um, Bullwinkle. Who was that? It's a funny joke that, nevermind.

• 2:27:08Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know.

• 2:27:09Speaker 01

  Maybe only the agency guys would know that. It's.

• 2:27:12Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:27:13Speaker 01

  It's, it's this funny stuff, but. The black bag stuff is, is a lot of stuff that we should have been doing all along. Like really, that's what we're good at, man. We're really sneaky and we're very small. We work in two man groups, we work in three man groups, six man groups, not very many more than thirty-two. We're really small, you know?

• 2:27:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:35Speaker 01

  So if you want to grow off by yourself and do a mission in the SEALs, you can kind of do that. You know, you can't do that in any other, any other group. You know, even, I don't even think Green Berets would ever do that very much. And I think it's just because we're like, we're storm troopers with, with, um, you know, PhDs. It's exactly what they wanted to do with the agency when Cowboy, um, the dude that invented the, the agency from OSS. What was his name? I don't remember now, but he always says that the person we want is going to be a PhD that knows karate. You know?

• 2:28:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:12Speaker 01

  A PhD that can shoot a gun. That's who they want at the agency. And most of the SEALs I know, that's who we are. Yeah, not anymore. But that's who we are. We're thinkers and we're smart, but we also know how to use the gun, you know, we know how to fight. You know, and that's dangerous combination that we can think and fight. You know what I mean?

• 2:28:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:31Speaker 01

  So, and that's who we are, the SEAL teams, you know, and that's definitely who I was.

• 2:28:35Shawn Ryan?

  And I'm surprised you didn't get recruited by them after your career, or maybe you did. I don't know.

• 2:28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I did stuff.

• 2:28:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:42Speaker 01

  So, and actually, I got recruited when I left the teams too. Okay, so, so Team Five, I was doing all this stuff and then I went to that special project, I got recruited to go there and I, and I did good. But then, right in the middle of that, uh, Dam Neck needed some stuff.

• 2:28:56Shawn Ryan?

  So just for, just for everybody listening, he keeps saying Dam Neck. Dam Neck is development group, also known as Team Six.

• 2:29:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:04Shawn Ryan?

  So.

• 2:29:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So all the nicknames and it's all, we still use the nicknames because we're supposed to be all like sneaky, but it's so silly.

• 2:29:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:12Speaker 01

  It's like everybody knows everything.

• 2:29:13Shawn Ryan?

  Cat's out of the bag.

• 2:29:14Speaker 01

  Thank you, President Obama.

• 2:29:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 2:29:18Speaker 01

  He let the cat out a lot more than anyone up before him.

• 2:29:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:21Speaker 01

  When he said who, uh, the Obama thing. So I, I left the special projects because they needed that down, down at Dam Neck. And so I went there specifically for tech only. And I was a SEAL team guy that knew I could deploy, they knew I had all this knowledge and they knew I could do the tech.

• 2:29:36Shawn Ryan?

  So they, how did you get recruited though? So you, you didn't go through green team? You weren't a

• 2:29:40Speaker 01

  I didn't have to.

• 2:29:41Shawn Ryan?

  Operator or whatever over there. But um.

• 2:29:44Speaker 01

  I was born of, there's only been a few people that ever do that too.

• 2:29:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, how did?

• 2:29:48Speaker 01

  To not do green team.

• 2:29:49Shawn Ryan?

  What was that conversation like?

• 2:29:50Speaker 01

  A lot of, a lot of guys at Dam Neck are really angry about it and they really, they don't like me.

• 2:29:56Shawn Ryan?

  Well.

• 2:29:56Speaker 01

  They didn't do green team.

• 2:29:57Shawn Ryan?

  Whatever, they can't do anything that you're fucking doing.

• 2:30:00Speaker 01

  Hey, I'm sorry, I got smart with technology. But they needed some of that tech. They needed the stuff to get them buffed up, especially in the UAV section.

• 2:30:08Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you're like the only, you're one of the only people I've ever met who

• 2:30:13Shawn Ryan?

  who can

• 2:30:15Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you just, you're, you have a brilliant mind. And so that combined with with your experience and your knowledge as a SEAL, I mean, and you combine that shit.

• 2:30:24Speaker 01

  That's what they did. That's why you're.

• 2:30:25Shawn Ryan?

  It's priceless.

• 2:30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:26Shawn Ryan?

  You cannot find that.

• 2:30:27Speaker 01

  That's what I wanted. That was all. You know, I still kick doors, you know, I still did, you know, stuff when I was at Dam Neck, you know?

• 2:30:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:36Speaker 01

  So Dam Neck, basically you just deploy over because you become an expert in, in something. And so I became such an expertise that I was able to leave Dam Neck and go to a team and help them. And so that's when I went overseas with a team and that's when I went with the agency because they just, it just happens, man. You start doing LNO, we're gonna talk to those guys, so that and that. And so you end up doing some other work, you know? So I'm flying UAVs and I start doing some other stuff, I start doing some sneaky peeky and then just, that's what happens, you know? And so I always ended up going deeper into the dark, you know, with those guys. Almost every time. It was weird. I don't know.

• 2:31:13Shawn Ryan?

  What team did you go to? What squadron did you go to?

• 2:31:17Speaker 01

  Uh, red and blue.

• 2:31:18Shawn Ryan?

  Red and blue?

• 2:31:19Speaker 01

  And black, yeah.

• 2:31:20Shawn Ryan?

  And black? I thought you were gonna say.

• 2:31:21Speaker 01

  Did just little black stuff, you know, because I, I always kept, you know, needing whatever. And then I was running TSE. So that's a technology group at Dam Neck.

• 2:31:32Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:31:32Speaker 01

  And so I was running all that.

• 2:31:33Shawn Ryan?

  You were running it?

• 2:31:34Speaker 01

  I ran the whole thing, yeah. And, cause they put me in charge of it. And I was the senior chief at the time, so hey, run this program. And I think I had, I, the highest budget I ever had was 600 million. And I think when I was at Dam Neck, I had I probably only had like 40 million, I think. It wasn't that much. But it was enough to do the mission. And so.

• 2:31:57Speaker 01

  Buying and selling, working with the contractors and writing contracts that I had to do. So because I had to do all that, I had to go to school for that. So I went to, it's called Acquisition University. And so I had to learn the entire acquisition process, which I did. And I became an acquisition guru.

• 2:32:15Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:32:15Speaker 01

  Which also is kind of a weird thing. But it was how to write contracts and how to do, you know, IDIQ and, you know, sole source and do that and do that. And I can run through all the stuff with that. And the problem with acquisition, which I found, the problem is a horse blanket. And anybody out there that does acquisition, everybody at the Pentagon, you guys are full of shit. They're wasting so much money that I could cut the Pentagon budget. I could take a quarter of the budget off right now. I could walk in there right now and start cutting the budget. And then within a week, I could cut them by 25%. And it wouldn't affect them. Zero effect at all.

• 2:32:55Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:32:55Speaker 01

  As of contracting. Because there's so much scam, there's so much stuff going on, and double dipping and everything else going on. And it's all stovepipes. So the Air Force is stovepipe from everybody else, the Navy stovepipe from everybody else, Special Operations stovepipe. And you have a Special Operations stovepipe. And that's why all these companies can make us double dip. And they do it all the time. Their problem also is, is like, why are we the ones paying for all the R and D? And you guys are sitting there taking all the products? And then you turn around and sell them back to us? So they should have some skin in the game. Because everyone's gonna end up making all the money off it. Why are we paying all the R and D? We're taking all the risk that this thing will fail. You guys should be taking some of the risk. Because you guys get all the profit. That's how I would start cutting some of the budget.

• 2:33:39Speaker 01

  Was I would go to Congress as a Pentagon, as a Joint Chiefs, or whatever. I would go to Congress and I would make a new law. And you can pass laws easy and make everything happen up at Congress because it's all pork anyway. Just attach a little bit of pork onto some equality thing and it'll go through. And we'll make all those companies out there, at minimum, every R and D project you do, minimum it has to be 25% out of your pocket. Or 50% of your pocket.

• 2:34:05Shawn Ryan?

  So you were, you were also pushing bills through Congress? Little snippets?

• 2:34:09Speaker 01

  I was working a lot with Congress.

• 2:34:10Shawn Ryan?

  Little snippets of pork?

• 2:34:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, no, I would work with whoever was acquisition head of whatever division I was working with at the Pentagon. And then they would do all that.

• 2:34:19Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:34:19Speaker 01

  All I would do is get the money. And the products. So I would do the project and put it all together, quality charts and everything else. I'd say, this is a really good one to do. So I invented a two man submarine for SEALs. How fast do we swim when we're doing SEAL teams underwater? If you have all your gear on and you have to go do a sniper op, so you have your sniper bag on your back and all the other stuff. How fast can you swim?

• 2:34:43Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 2:34:44Speaker 01

  About a knot?

• 2:34:44Shawn Ryan?

  Slow, but I can't, I can't remember. Yeah.

• 2:34:47Speaker 01

  About a mile an hour?

• 2:34:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:49Speaker 01

  So I could get two snipers into my little manpower submarine with all of their equipment. And we can go six miles an hour, six knots, manpowered. All they have to do is paddle. You can have one guy paddling, can do about four knots. I invented that.

• 2:35:05Shawn Ryan?

  You invented that?

• 2:35:06Speaker 01

  Gave it to the teams.

• 2:35:08Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 2:35:09Speaker 01

  And the thing is, is I have it in such a way that I could hermetically seal it in the plastic. Put it in all the torpedo tubes of the, of the nukes. And so, because they don't use all the torpedo tubes, usually one or two of them are open to do stuff. And so usually we get a couple of them. So we'll go on to a submarine and get the torpedo tube. And we use that as a lockout chamber. So we have the sections and our section off. So I can take these submarines, I can put them end on end, so they're up like that. And they're, the length of them, about 20 feet. So it's a 20 foot long submarine for two people to kick out manpower to six knots. And I package them up and I put them in a submarines vehicle like that.

• 2:35:54Speaker 01

  And it can be on every submarine in the fleet. And then going six knots, we can drop you off 30 miles out off the coast. And then you guys can kick in and drop you 12 miles off, 15 miles off, and drop you off wherever you want. And just kick into shore with the submarine going really fast.

• 2:36:11Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:36:12Speaker 01

  And then what happens to submarine when we get on shore?

• 2:36:15Speaker 01

  It goes away. You know what it sounds like when it's underwater?

• 2:36:19Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:36:19Speaker 01

  It sounds like fish. So in a sonar, you can't pick it up.

• 2:36:25Speaker 01

  There's special things I did and I can't talk about it, but there's, there's stuff I did with that that just, just blow your mind.

• 2:36:33Speaker 01

  And that was one of the special projects I did. And I think they only gave me like,

• 2:36:38Speaker 01

  they didn't give me very much money for that one. I think I did that one only with less than a hundred thousand dollars. For all the R and D and getting all there and making, we made four prototypes, I think.

• 2:36:49Speaker 01

  And then I left that program, so I don't know where it is right now. And it's classified, so I don't know where that is.

• 2:36:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:55Speaker 01

  I had another one where I could

• 2:36:58Speaker 01

  put out a signal and um, if anybody records anything, anywhere in the world, I know the exact spot they recorded it.

• 2:37:08Speaker 01

  That was one of mine.

• 2:37:10Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 2:37:11Speaker 01

  I don't know if that's classified because the shit's so old and nobody, well.

• 2:37:18Speaker 01

  At this point, it's like, if we think of it, any amount of PhDs we have in America.

• 2:37:24Shawn Ryan?

  It's out.

• 2:37:24Speaker 01

  China already thought about it 10 years ago.

• 2:37:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 2:37:28Speaker 01

  Because you can look at it, it's just, it's math. If we have one PhD to every 20 of theirs in STEM, I'm not talking about the stupid soft arts, you know? The touchy feely stuff. I don't care about any of that. America has so many PhDs in like counseling and sociology and crap. All the STEMs, STEM is where you gotta be, STEAM actually. STEAM is where we should be at, you know, and it's all over there. We don't do it. And it pisses me off. And what are they pushing all these kids in grade school and high school right now? They're not pushing tech and math and engineering or any of this good stuff.

• 2:38:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:07Speaker 01

  They're pushing all the like, the touchy feely and let's talk and play patty cakes and let's be nice. You know, no, do math, man.

• 2:38:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:38:18Speaker 01

  Cause we're, we're done already. We're finished.

• 2:38:20Shawn Ryan?

  I think we're done too.

• 2:38:21Speaker 01

  As a country.

• 2:38:22Shawn Ryan?

  Didn't they, didn't they come out and say mathematics is now racist?

• 2:38:26Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I said that too.

• 2:38:26Shawn Ryan?

  That's a real statement.

• 2:38:28Speaker 01

  I heard also a real statement that if you're on time, it's racist. If you show up to something, if you're, if you're like.

• 2:38:33Shawn Ryan?

  Every, everything is racist now. Everything is racist.

• 2:38:36Speaker 01

  And that's why our country's done. Our country's done.

• 2:38:38Shawn Ryan?

  And nobody's speaking out about it. Nobody is speaking out about it. It's just, yep. This is where we're at. I'm not good at math, so it's racist.

• 2:38:48Speaker 01

  I blame it all on cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and the universities in America.

• 2:38:54Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's all, it's all, it's influenced from China. You know what I mean? It's propaganda, don't you think?

• 2:39:01Speaker 01

  No, I mean, it started way before that. It started before that. It started after Napoleon. Just after the Napoleonic Wars, when it started.

• 2:39:10Shawn Ryan?

  Let's get back to your career.

• 2:39:11Speaker 01

  Okay, so we're still SEAL Team 5. So I get recruited to Dam Neck, and I do that, and I do Green Team. All the guys in Dam Neck are mad at me because I didn't do that. And they call me, "Well, yeah, SEAL, but not really." You know? And that kind of crap. But then every time they need something, they all come to me.

• 2:39:29Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah. They're nice then, right?

• 2:39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I almost ride my Harley, and I got, it's a 1960 Harley, and I'm riding in the Dam Neck compound every day. Right through the gate, I'm parking right there. It's a Kickstarter. It's a, it's a bad motorcycle. And they're all seeing it, and they're going, and so they're all kind of looking at it too, going, "Well, pretty cool, SEAL, but didn't go through Green Team," you know? And they're throwing a finger at me. And so I'm isolated from the entire team. And my own team that I'm supporting those guys, doing everything I can for them. I changed the face of technology at Dam Neck, because I started doing something with all the techs that's never been done before. I was deploying them into like, real combat, because we were training them for combat,

• 2:40:11Speaker 01

  to do real missions. Before that, the tech group would deploy with the teams, but they were still like, "You're outsiders. You're not really with us. You're not trained well. If you don't have this, you don't have that." They would never let them really do any work. And so we started this whole, it wasn't me, but this program was started, to put all the techs through this qualification course, similar to Green Team, not as tough, but it was pretty tough, you know? It wasn't easy. And at that time, I forgot to tell you, I fell off a ship one time and burnt my back. And the guys were kicking me on the way up the ship, and I actually climbed the ship with it broken. On the shit work, but it was really hard for me to do pushups after that. And so for me even to go, I would never make it to Green Town, I would make it to Bud's right now. Cause my back is so jacked up.

• 2:40:54Speaker 01

  And so when I do pushups and all the pressure is right on all the bricks, it's really difficult. And so I'm crap at pushups right now. And even doing situps, I'm really bad at it. Cause it's really, it's like, if you break all those bones in your low back and you're all screwed up, you're gonna have a real hard time doing a lot of stuff.

• 2:41:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:10Speaker 01

  And so that's another reason why after that happened, I kinda started moving way more into tech also. So it's kind of like, I should have brought that up because it was part of the equation. Part of the equation where I went in so deep into tech was because it was, it was a better place for me. Cause I couldn't really do as much as I used to and I knew it.

• 2:41:28Shawn Ryan?

  That makes sense.

• 2:41:29Speaker 01

  As a team guy, if you know you can't do it, I don't want to be a detriment to the team. And so if I'm just flying a UAV and I'm doing that, I can still do the work. I just can't, I'm not gonna be as effective. If my effective went from that 100, I'm down to this 70 or 80 group. Cause I was, I dropped down, I'm not like a civilian, but I'm still pretty good, but I'm not, I know I'm not as good as I was. And I admit that.

• 2:41:51Shawn Ryan?

  Chris, I mean just.

• 2:41:51Speaker 01

  And so when I'm doing that stuff, the damn guys see me doing pushups and I'm crap at it. And they're going, and that makes me even angrier at me, you know? Cause they're like, well, you know, would have made it anyway. And they're like, they're getting all angry. I said, yeah, but I'm a senior chief. I'm 45 years old. I've already done it and now it's door kicking. I can show you all the time I did and all my shooting and firefights and whatever you want me to show you. So I do the job. And I said, when I'm in a kill house and they saw me in a kill house, I'm pretty good. And it's all they care about is a kill house. And when I went into a kill house, it's like, dude, I'm doing it. I'm taking care of business. And they also knew that, the guys that worked with me directly. So it was like, I just wanted to bring that up because all those guys are damn necked.

• 2:42:33Speaker 01

  They're so freaking eucrotistical about what they do that they shit on all the real, I was gonna say real SEALs. But if you think about the SEAL teams, that's the real SEALs is all the other teams, not damn it guys. Because they have a mission, have a very specific thing. They're not doing all the SEAL Team missions. You know what I mean? Except for during a war, everything got all mixed up. But if you want to go back to the old SEALs, the SEALs were the SEALs. And a damn that guys had a specific mission, that's what they did. You know what I mean? It was like, dude, I can do what you guys are doing. Especially if I was back in the old days, I would have kicked you guys' asses. You know?

• 2:43:12Speaker 01

  So give me a freaking break. I'm here to do a mission. Don't keep punching me in the face.

• 2:43:16Shawn Ryan?

  How long were you over there?

• 2:43:17Speaker 01

  Like, five years, I think. Long enough.

• 2:43:20Shawn Ryan?

  Did you enjoy it at all?

• 2:43:22Speaker 01

  Oh, it was amazing. I loved it.

• 2:43:23Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:24Speaker 01

  Even when all the damn that guys were punching me in the face, I would still love going there. Because the mission was so intense. When you're doing the mission, you know you're doing a mission? Dude, you guys can crap on me every day you want, but I'm doing a mission, I'm still helping. And that's what the techs, even at damn neck, the techs get crapped on all the time.

• 2:43:41Shawn Ryan?

  I've heard that.

• 2:43:42Speaker 01

  So when I got in charge of all the techs, I made them stop. And when I started doing the techs, they kept coming down to the space. Because I had my own space down there. It was like these huge rooms and all our equipment, all our stuff. And I would, I would say, what are you doing down here? Get back up to your squadron. And they're going, alright, senior. And so they would go up there and I'd say, and I'd say, I don't ever want to see you. I said, I want you here once a week on Fridays, just to check in and tell me everything's good and tell me what you need. So otherwise, I want you with those guys all the time. You need to drink beer with them, you need to be with them every second. And that's how you're gonna do it. When they're training, you train. And so if they don't let you train in the cowhouse, then just go over on the side and just keep drawing your pistol against the wall. And doing drills, and do drills, and have all the gear on, and just drill against the wall.

• 2:44:27Speaker 01

  And they're gonna see you. Eventually, they're gonna invite you in the cowhouse. And they did. And so after me really pushing all the techs to really be part of the squadrons, we went from one or two tech missions a year to like over a hundred.

• 2:44:40Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:44:44Shawn Ryan?

  You've done a lot for the teams. There's no doubt about it.

• 2:44:47Speaker 01

  I was just doing what I thought was right. And I, and they didn't like me because I kept pushing the techs up to them.

• 2:44:52Shawn Ryan?

  And it goes to show you, you know, that it. When she goes to show you, everything happens for a reason. Your back broke and you found your calling in the teams. So I'm a hundred percent.

• 2:45:05Speaker 01

  And it wasn't fully broken in half and it wasn't really bad. It was just the ruptured discs and fractures. So it wasn't like, you know, I didn't get paralyzed. I'm okay. It just hurts really bad.

• 2:45:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:45:19Speaker 01

  But I have all gray and black discs now from like all my lumbar, almost up to, you know, not quite, you know, it's thoracic up through my lumbar and the whole thing. The whole section is really dark.

• 2:45:30Shawn Ryan?

  Have you been blown up at all?

• 2:45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:32Shawn Ryan?

  What, can we talk about that?

• 2:45:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, yeah, we're in a damn neck guy, I guess. So I got, I got pulled into the damn neck and went through, did some, did a bunch of strainings. You kill house all the time, doing stuff all the time because I'm still a SEAL. So I was going out to the ranges and shooting. And the beauty about that team is they have 24 hour ranges. And so we can be out in town or you don't sleep. And so you just, you just swipe in and you go shoot 24 hours a day, which is pretty awesome. You know, and we have a pool you can swipe on and go to the pool 24 hours a day. We have anything you want 24 hours a day. When you're in there, just go to town, you know? And you have guys doing stuff. It's just like, wow. If you show up there at two o'clock in the morning, you'll see guys working. And you're like, damn, and it's like a weekend.

• 2:46:18Speaker 01

  That's why Craig Sawyer was so awesome with damn neck. Because at team one, he was like that. He was the guy that on Sunday, if you went in the compound for whatever reason, that's team, I was a team one with Craig. So if you go into the compound on a Sunday at team one, you'd see Craig there with his Pantra liners all over part of the, part of the grinder. And then he would be there with all his gear, every, every piece of gear. And he'd be sitting there with a toothbrush and he'd be organizing, getting it ready. He had all his guns out there and he was just doing his stuff every Sunday. It was dedication, man. That's hardcore. I added to when the techs were doing the same thing. When I was there doing the stuff. They were running with rucksacks on, techs. And doing this 10 mile runs, techs. At the end of it, you could see them throwing up all over themselves.

• 2:47:03Speaker 01

  Just puking all over their shirts and their pants and ah, just because they were so, working so hard. And it makes you proud. So I'm like, that's a, that's a IS, or that's an OS, or that was a photographer's mate. He's sitting there running 10 miles with a rucksack, kind of throwing up on himself.

• 2:47:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:21Speaker 01

  And the dedication, how hard, it was like, it was, it was pure heart.

• 2:47:25Shawn Ryan?

  Back to explosions.

• 2:47:27Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 2:47:28Shawn Ryan?

  It had been...

• 2:47:29Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, it was, it wasn't that big of a deal. It wasn't that bad. So I see the guys that like, like Jay, man, he has some real, Jay Redmond, he had some real terrible injuries, you know? And there's a lot of other guys with some terrible injuries. And, uh, so I don't really talk about it a lot. So when I got hit, it was pretty light. And even when I talk about a Purple Heart, it's like, man, you know? It was like a, uh, like Admiral Richardson, when he, Admiral Richards, when he got hit in Vietnam, and he had a bone sticking out. And he thought it was a bullet, and he thought about John Wayne. He says, John Wayne said, bite the bullet. So he said, I can't have that bullet in there. It started biting on his hand. And his, his fingers started moving. And all the guys started laughing at him. He said, dude, that's your bone. And he looked at it again and said, oh dang, it's a bone.

• 2:48:13Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:48:13Speaker 01

  It wasn't that bad.

• 2:48:15Shawn Ryan?

  So how did you get it? How'd you get?

• 2:48:16Speaker 01

  So, I was, I was at-

• 2:48:18Shawn Ryan?

  Or in your Purple Heart?

• 2:48:18Speaker 01

  I was at, uh, I was at one of the classified agency, um, firebases.

• 2:48:24Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:48:25Speaker 01

  And they were hitting us all the time. You know? And so we had a lot of mortars and rockets. And then the way they do it is, it's really ingenious, you know? What they would do is they'd set up, uh, sawhorses. And, uh, they would put the rockets on there. These are 107 millimeter Russian rockets. And, uh, they would use, um, washing machine, um, timers. You know, basically to And it would hook it up and that would fire it. And so they could set up these sawhorses and they knew pretty close enough and they knew all the stuff and they were good at it. As they set all these rockets up on the sawhorses, a whole bunch of them, and set up, set up the timer and it all go off this and it were gone. And so whatever spot they're shooting them from, we would, the, you know, the little birds would fly out or whatever would happen,

• 2:49:08Speaker 01

  we'd hit the spot. It would be, nobody was there. They were gone like an hour ago. You know, there was just washing machine timers. And it would hit here and hit there because they set a bunch of them up. So we started getting hit. And so it was one of the really big hits like that. And, uh, one of the guys got hit really bad and it zipped him right up the back and just, just destroyed him. And it was like, you could see it, you know? You could see the actual spine and everything just flayed and his skull and his neck. And it was just, he got hit really bad because he was right there with most of the blast. When the blast hit me, it just threw me and a lot of frag and other stuff. But I was able to, uh, run in and grab my gear and go fight. So it was not a big deal, you know? If you're able to fight, you know, after you get hit, you just, you know, you just brush it off. It's not a big deal. And then, you know, clean it up and then go on with

• 2:49:53Speaker 01

  business, you know? And then you just keep going, you know? And the next day, you're just, I'm good, man. Don't send me anywhere. But I did have to get x-rayed because I didn't know if there was any more frag in me. So I went to the army, um, uh, hospital and they did the stuff. Did they x-ray me there? It was later. When I did an MRI once, I still had metal in me and it pulled the metal out. It's that blood all over the MRI, which kind of sucked. But, uh, so you still have metal in you because it's this frag, you know?

• 2:50:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:22Speaker 01

  But, um, they pulled the frag out and then, you know, bandaged it up and then just keep fighting, you know? That's what it was. It wasn't a big deal. The other ones were, you know, even, you know, a lot of explosions for breaching, you know?

• 2:50:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:38Speaker 01

  And that's where the TBIs come from is the constant. So I had a lot of TBI, which I almost cured, you know? I helped a lot of the TBI. So it's totally, there neuroplasticity in your brain. If, I don't know if you know anything about neuroplasticity?

• 2:50:52Shawn Ryan?

  Not much.

• 2:50:53Speaker 01

  But it's something for, for everybody out there, for all of them, all the SEALs.

• 2:50:59Shawn Ryan?

  How'd you cure it?

• 2:50:59Speaker 01

  Every breacher.

• 2:51:00Shawn Ryan?

  How do you think you cured it?

• 2:51:02Speaker 01

  I think I cured it with microdose and mushrooms.

• 2:51:05Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of mushrooms?

• 2:51:06Speaker 01

  Psilocybin. Yeah, psilocybin. However you say that word. But magic mushrooms.

• 2:51:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:11Speaker 01

  So, the thing is, is the magic mushrooms, they've been on earth for millennia. You know, they've been here since the beginning of time. There's theories about the magic mushrooms, that's why we had it jump from basically the Neanderthal or whatever it was, up to Homo sapien. Was because it opened the mind up and it made the mind reconfigure and re-pathways and, and make it start working. And so what happens is, when you're doing mushrooms, if you're microdosing, you're not tripping. It's just super low doses. And you have to have guidance, you have to have a guide. And you have to have intention, you have to have, like, very controlled, be really careful. And do it for a long period of time. So basically, you take 0.5 grams and less, it's really small doses. And if you, if you start building up a tolerance, you can start bumping up a little bit. But never more than a gram.

• 2:51:55Speaker 01

  So it's very small doses. And you do it every 72 hours, for weeks and weeks and weeks, up to like 15 weeks.

• 2:52:03Shawn Ryan?

  15 weeks.

• 2:52:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I mean, think about that. You know? If you think about every three days. And, and it's not easy. This is not fun.

• 2:52:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:13Speaker 01

  And that's the thing that they, they're really making mistakes with. That, even like marijuana, you know, if you're not trying to smoke marijuana to get high and have fun with it, it's a really nice medicine that, that is, it does a lot. In our bodies, we have cannabinoid receptors, you know? And so if in our bodies, we have a receptor, is that recept, that they only will talk to cannabis? Why do we have that in human bodies? Unless that's something that we need, or something that's good for us. That's the question I got for you. Same thing with, with the magic mushrooms, the psilocybin, you know? If you don't abuse them, and just like any other pharmaceutical you have on your shelf right now, or the doctor gives you, if you take morphine and you abuse it, you're gonna be bad.

• 2:52:57Speaker 01

  And morphine is a pharmaceutical that they give you and it's good. It's not a bad pharmaceutical. Why, why is psilocybin bad? And why do they do that? Because you can abuse any one of those other drugs. I can kill somebody with aspirin. You know, aspirin's dangerous. You know, so they pick and choose because it's so effective. And because you can't make money off it.

• 2:53:21Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I thought.

• 2:53:22Speaker 01

  So I can grow mushrooms right now and do everything I need to do. I don't do it. I can grow marijuana right now. It's a weed. Mushrooms are a weed. You know, it's God's medicine. And so because God's medicine you can't make money on, it's illegal. Isn't that weird?

• 2:53:38Shawn Ryan?

  I don't, I mean, no, it's not. It's perfect. It makes perfect sense that the pharmaceutical companies would never allow that.

• 2:53:45Speaker 01

  Makes me very angry.

• 2:53:47Shawn Ryan?

  Would lobby to keep that illegal because there goes, there goes their sales. There goes their, their money. Because the shit is working. It's working with PTSD. It's working with anxiety, ADHD, bipolar disorder. Now they're doing studies with Alzheimer's and dementia.

• 2:54:05Speaker 01

  So if you take magic mushrooms.

• 2:54:06Shawn Ryan?

  It's helping all these things.

• 2:54:09Speaker 01

  Unbelievable.

• 2:54:09Shawn Ryan?

  And it's illegal.

• 2:54:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:11Shawn Ryan?

  It is illegal.

• 2:54:12Speaker 01

  It's amazing.

• 2:54:13Shawn Ryan?

  And we know what, we know what the alternative is with the benzos and antidepressants.

• 2:54:19Speaker 01

  Well, I was on all of those.

• 2:54:20Shawn Ryan?

  You know, so was I.

• 2:54:21Speaker 01

  And I was on the opioids and I had a really big problem. That was all during that 10 years when I had all these issues.

• 2:54:25Shawn Ryan?

  And they cure addiction.

• 2:54:27Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 2:54:28Shawn Ryan?

  And they cure addiction.

• 2:54:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, that's what I was gonna bring up, that there's programs down south, because you can't do it here in America, because we're such idiots. And you have to go down to Mexico. You have to go way down south, down to South America. And so if you do, every 72 hours, if you microdose, and you're alcoholic, like a hardcore alcoholic, the most bad alcoholic you ever could imagine, you won't drink anymore. And if you, you don't become an alcoholic, you're done. You might still drink a little bit, like soldiers were drinking, like a little bit, but you won't be alcoholic anymore.

• 2:54:59Shawn Ryan?

  That's what happened to me.

• 2:55:01Speaker 01

  I swear.

• 2:55:02Shawn Ryan?

  I did it.

• 2:55:04Speaker 01

  If you're a drug addict, I can, you won't be a drug addict anymore.

• 2:55:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I did it. I haven't drank in, like, February 14th will be a year.

• 2:55:13Speaker 01

  Same thing. So here's two witnesses to the world that psilocybin, I always mess up that word.

• 2:55:21Shawn Ryan?

  Psilocybin.

• 2:55:22Speaker 01

  Psilocybin in microdoses and small doses over some periods of time has proven over and over again, addictions and rewiring the neuroplasticity to brain. If you have brain damage, it would be one, if you had half your brain shot off, if you did that, you'd probably heal it.

• 2:55:41Shawn Ryan?

  You're regenerating.

• 2:55:43Speaker 01

  Regeneration and rewiring. It's unbelievable and we do that.

• 2:55:47Shawn Ryan?

  Man. Let's talk about your awards with Valor.

• 2:55:51Speaker 01

  Oh, I still didn't even get to my final teams. So Damn Neck. So I'm doing all this stuff at Damn Neck and it's just going crazy with all these inventions and all this and stuff. And so all the crazy inventors in the teams, they all know me. So Gus Gussentine is one of them and Bill Shepherd's another one. Shep Shepherd. So he's an astronaut, SEAL Team guy, the first one and probably one of the most famous SEALs until, you know, the war maybe, because he was very well known and huge respect and I still respect him. He's a mentor. And so he took over science and technology at SOCOM. Admiral Wilson, Admiral Olson is a SOCOM commander. He was my commander at Warcom.

• 2:56:32Speaker 01

  When I basically, you didn't like me a lot because I kept telling him no. How do you have an E6 telling Admiral no? I did and he was really mad at me and the master chief at the time, he always says that he was always getting me out of trouble because I was really hardcore against the officers because I was the only enlisted almost at Warcom. It was all captains and admirals. But I can't even remember the master chief's name now. So I'm at, I'm at, I'm there and I'm doing all this stuff. And so Shep Shepherd calls me up. Olson's a commander. Shep has all science and technology at all of the special operations.

• 2:57:13Speaker 01

  And so he calls me on the phone. He says, hey, hey, Chris, I, I know you want to stay at Damn Neck. And I told him, he knew that was like, dude, this is a mission. I'm never leaving here. And almost anybody goes there and never want to leave because it's a mission. Anybody that leaves Damn Neck is for a specific reason because it's a better job or they got kicked out or they don't want them back. So if you see any Damn Neck guys who only did four years, you ought to ask them.

• 2:57:41Speaker 01

  So.

• 2:57:43Speaker 01

  Usually two tours. After eight years, guys will leave Dam Neck, because they'll do a couple and then leave. But a four to year guy at Dam Neck, it doesn't make sense, you know?

• 2:57:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:52Speaker 01

  So Shep calls me on the phone, and he asks me, he says, hey, I took over Science Technology. I want you to be, to be, come down here and, and take, you know, be the senior enlisted advisor. I said, I want a senior chief. He said, I don't care. I says, well, I'm, I'm at Dam Neck. I don't really want to leave, and I'll have to move down to Florida. And he says, well, you'll, you'll have carte blanche. You can invent and do everything you want, and you can, you, you have a budget. I'll give you a budget. And he's told me all this. And I was like, okay, I'll do that. So he accrued me to SOCOM to be the senior enlisted advisor to SOCOM Science Technology.

• 2:58:25Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:58:26Speaker 01

  And so I was there, and that's when I went hog wild. So the Pentagon already knew me because I was at, a couple of years prior was when I did the target tracking thing. And so they all knew me because I was there. And so every time I showed up at the Pentagon, I had all these doors that were immediately open because they knew that I could help them. You know, I was, I was an advantage to their program. And so when I was at SOCOM doing S and T, I had a lot of access to a lot of other programs, a lot of money. Because as soon as I brought the Dam Neck programs or my programs into their programs, then we could combine money and then cut stuff and then advance the whole program way further. And so I was doing that a lot, you know, which, because I could, I could open all the stove pipes up. I knew

• 2:59:09Speaker 01

  the stove pipes. So I was part of the stove pipes now. Because we had Army, Navy, Air Force Marines at SOCOM. It wasn't just the Navy. Dam Neck's a stove pipe. They talk a lot good with the Army, you know, groups. Those guys do really good. But it's a stove pipe from them into some other areas. They opened most of them up now. I think it's all mostly fixed with, with LNOs, you know, liaisons. But, so it was just a perfect place for me. And so I moved down there immediately, bought a house and was there doing that. And I can't tell you about most of the stuff there, but-

• 2:59:43Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds like your dream job.

• 2:59:44Speaker 01

  It really is. And I was at, almost at my 20 years. Oh.

• 2:59:50Speaker 01

  I deployed twice when I was in S and T at SOCOM.

• 2:59:54Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 2:59:54Speaker 01

  Which doesn't happen very much. I also, I was a shooter down there. I was like, because he gave me kind of whatever and I was, I was like, nobody could control it. So I would just say, I need to go over and do some stuff. And they were, and so he, he tells me one time, he says, hey, you were doing some stuff at Dam Neck with all the tech stuff. And you had these, these, um, uh, boxes that you would bring over and we had ISU 90s was one, had drawers in it and I had all my stuff in there. I had my welder and a bunch of other stuff in there. So basically at Dam Neck, because we're a tech group and we experiment with a lot of stuff. We have to have a lot of equipment at our hands to build oscilloscope and all this and soldering irons and all the equipment to be able to tear us apart and rebuild it and test it and do stuff.

• 3:00:38Speaker 01

  So I built all these things at Dam Neck to make them be able to do this testing. I helped them build it. I wasn't the full builder because I think Rich did a lot of that too and a couple, and a bunch of other people. But I was part of that program that built the stuff. And in that was building up the concealment program and the audio and video program and the mechanical engineering program. All into these boxes. And so Shep found out about that. And so he says, hey, I want you to build, um, a system that can be for all of the other teams and, uh, uh, Green Berets and the Rangers and anybody special operations. We need a system to be able to deploy with all their teams that they can do the same thing you did at Dam Neck.

• 3:01:21Speaker 01

  So if they break something, they can fix it, they can weld it, they can vent it, they can do that. So you remember when the Humvees overseas, we had the, the rings, the, the, you know, the modus up on top? Well, so we started, my program is the one that take the modus on one side. And then we could have on the other side, the minigun on one ring. They don't do that stuff. And then we had to reinforce stuff and build this. And to walk batteries to shoot the miniguns. Like all this stuff, like here's a minigun. You had to get these giant batteries to do this stuff. And I said, why don't you just make it so just like the slap a battery and then shoot. You don't have to have wires or anything. Just have it a plug and play thing. And then I take that battery off. I grab some more batteries and you can stick those in charging or whatever. And always have them on standby, not one wire.

• 3:02:06Shawn Ryan?

  That was you.

• 3:02:08Speaker 01

  I also was the one that remote fired. Remember the crow system? So remember the crows in the MRAPs? We had MRAPs or pieces of crap.

• 3:02:16Shawn Ryan?

  This is after my time. This is after my time.

• 3:02:19Speaker 01

  No, oh yeah, it might have been. Well, the MRAPs are these giant pillboxes. And I said, it was Maginot Line on wheels. And I used to make them so angry to say that. I said, it is, it's a pillbox. It's a Maginot Line on wheels. I said, we're sitting ducks. We can't do anything. I said, I want the doors off and I want this and I want that. And I said, this is the vehicle I want. You know, and it was basically, uh, they have the vehicles, perfect vehicles down at Bragg. You know, the scorpions. And, um, it's not classified. The, um, so all that stuff. So, so Shep said, I want you to build these things that we can deploy overseas to do this. To make these weird additions and modify stuff for guys overseas in combat. I said, okay. So how much money do I have?

• 3:03:02Speaker 01

  He said, what is no money for that kind of a program? It's just a new program. I just, just see what we can do. And I says, well, how many people can help me do this? And he says, well, it's just you. I was like, okay, so I'm alone and I have no money. Within six months after he told me that we were deployed in Afghanistan with 12 systems. I had $10 million and I had 30 people trained.

• 3:03:23Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, Chris.

• 3:03:24Speaker 01

  I, I invented the training program. Their first part of the training program, how we started it. Cause these are all going to be engineers and retired guys. Cause this is all contracted now. So now I'm working in contractor world with all these contractor guys. And so we had to train them up to be not like I had to do with my techs at Damn Neck. But I had to train them up enough so they knew the mindset and knew how we worked. So I had this little room. It was about half the size of this room. I had 30 guys that were trying out for this first system deployed in Afghanistan. So this little tiny room and I had a heater and I turned, I cranked the heater up way before they got there. And there was, it was super hot in that room. I said, okay, everybody get in that room. And I, before they went in a room, they all had pieces of paper and pencils.

• 3:04:06Speaker 01

  And I gave them this test to do in a room, a pencil test. So thirty guys in a really hot room that big. Standing up, there's no furniture in the whole room, it's a blank room. Hot, hot. It was terrible. And then we were watching and seeing who's complaining and see who did it, see what they did and see everything. Watching them. And then when I said, okay, when you're done with your test, it was like a twenty question test. And it was like P equals NRT and that's pressure volume is our energy temperature. It's these little equations, all the stuff, because I really wanted to test them, see how far I got. Say if you're battering your car and we have to do this, we got twenty four volts, how do you wire it? You know, take two car batteries and do this and do this and ride it in series. It's all easy stuff.

• 3:04:51Speaker 01

  A lot of it, some of it was a little weird. That was hard. I really wanted to see where the knowledge point was. So twenty questions were important. Each one of them was hit, I wrote them, wrote the test. So I said, when you finish your test, you would come in that door, knock on that door and then come out into the room and then we'll do, we'll do some more stuff. And so outside of the room, we had garbage cans, a whole bunch of stuff and we had like sound, it was wild. And, and flashing lights. And so somebody would knock on the door and then we open up the door just enough to get the guy in there. And they, and everybody in the room would start seeing what was going on there. Look, what's going on? It was just weird, you know? I just wanted to see how far I could push them, you know, just like, are you gonna complain? Are you gonna just suck it up and just do it? Do the twenty questions and answer them as good as you can, knock on the door and just go.

• 3:05:34Speaker 01

  You know, don't be scared, it's just like, stuff is happening. Don't worry about it, you know?

• 3:05:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:39Speaker 01

  And then went out there and then they had to actually wire up the batteries, they had to do some welding. They had to get on a mill, you know, we had lathes and mills, that's how deep I went. You know, I had to do all of it, you know? And then we had a car, we had two by fours. And I said, build a small wall there. And I went to cut up two by fours and a bunch of nails and hammers and everything else. I said, build a small wall over there. And I said, build a mini wall this high, this big and do that. And we also had this thing, I built a shape out of wood and I had some other stuff on it. I said, duplicate that with all the stuff over there. And so I had to do some real precision cutting and some stuff. I want to see how mechanically they were, how skilled they were with their hands. It's a really cool test. And then after that was about a two hour long period of time just testing them all. And we're grading them on all of it.

• 3:06:24Speaker 01

  And then after that, we start putting them through like a, a long training period on how to actually use all the gear and how to do all the stuff. We taught all these guys how to use a mill and a lathe, how to weld, like professional welders. Like all of it. Intense training. And then I built these boxes, ICU 90s with two of them with fold down sides. Did you ever see those things?

• 3:06:45Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 3:06:46Speaker 01

  No, no, this was, um, 2010, you know, were you in it 2010?

• 3:06:51Shawn Ryan?

  I was out in 2006.

• 3:06:53Speaker 01

  So you missed all this stuff then?

• 3:06:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:55Speaker 01

  So in 2010, before I deployed and got all this stuff done, like everybody in special operations worldwide just know exactly what I'm talking about. I built all those things from nothing. And we ended up calling it a mobile technology complex, MTC. That's what I named it. Then, um, because of money stuff, cause I was still searching for money, um, there's a whole program in the army that does all the repairs and the engineering of all this equipment. I think it's at RCOM or no, no, RD, Redcom? No. It's a group. They have a huge, huge bucket of money for doing all the repairs and maintenance. It's basically a 3M maintenance on all the equipment. And so we could, we could get that money because we're doing tons of repairs on all their equipment.

• 3:07:38Speaker 01

  Something breaks, we repair it overseas in combat, but doesn't even be sent back home and then fixed and then sent back over. We're saving the military, you know, thousands of dollars a day to some broken equipment that we're fixing. And so what we did was we rewrote the whole thing. We renamed it and rewrote our mission statements to include repair, not just innovation and all the other stuff. So now we got tons of money. And so now we're up to, uh, this is way over like 400 million dollars now.

• 3:08:06Shawn Ryan?

  Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

• 3:08:08Speaker 01

  And then that program got handed off to, uh, our real, um, leader, cause I was just an enlisted, you know, EA senior chief. Then a bunch of officers took it and it went to a bunch of GSs. Now I think it's run by like a GS 15 or something. That was before I retired. So 2011, I deployed with all this stuff and we did all the stuff. And then I came back in October and I retired in February of 11. And now I'm retired with all this and all the experience in the Pentagon. So now I have a phone call coming from Pentagon. And he said, hey, um, we know you're retiring. I want you to come do some work for us. And I says, well, I'm not gonna be military. I wanna be civilian. I said, when am I gonna be it? Uh, fifteen or SES?

• 3:08:54Speaker 01

  Fifteen, okay. So I got right from EA to like, but they didn't make, I ended up going civilian route as an interpersonal agency transfer from an agency into the Pentagon as a contractor, making a little over two hundred thousand dollars a year.

• 3:09:11Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 3:09:11Speaker 01

  So I went for the money, still doing the same job, but I'm not in uniform, I'm not government, I'm not GS fifteen, I'm not a SES. Actually, it was kind of SES one equivalent at the end, is what they made me, was an SES one equivalent.

• 3:09:23Shawn Ryan?

  What is an SES one?

• 3:09:24Speaker 01

  It's an admiral.

• 3:09:25Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:09:26Speaker 01

  It's a one-star admiral.

• 3:09:27Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I thought.

• 3:09:28Speaker 01

  The SES is when you get into the admiral ranks.

• 3:09:30Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:09:30Speaker 01

  A GFOs, general admiral. And so I was off there working at Pentagon now as a, as an admiral equivalent, running huge programs and doing stuff. But then

• 3:09:42Speaker 01

  I did a lot of really good projects. But at the same time, I was doing that whole transgender weird thing, cause now I'm retired, you know? So now the chains are off me. Now I don't gotta worry about anything.

• 3:09:55Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's um-

• 3:09:56Speaker 01

  You know, I can smoke a joint and I can do other stuff. And I'm done with my government military stuff. So I'm not worried about anything. So I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna start living a bit right now and trying to figure out who I am. And part of the figure out who I am was part of that isolation, always wanting to be my sister as a kid, just like I said. And that very confusing. I was a virgin until I was twenty-two years old. You know? I've had, to this day, I've only had sex with like eight people. You know, eight women, you know? And it's not something I'm proud of or brag about, but it's something that I'm still very naive and I'm still very prudish and I'm still very, you know,

• 3:10:41Speaker 01

  anti-sexual stuff, kind of. Cause I don't think it needs to be so far and open of what we've done with society. And so how I see it and how I saw myself, you know, was not sexual, but it was my identity, was me trying to escape who I was to be something better. You know what I mean?

• 3:11:01Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:11:03Speaker 01

  And that's a whole nother story.

• 3:11:05Shawn Ryan?

  The Iron Man suit.

• 3:11:06Speaker 01

  Oh, Iron Man.

• 3:11:07Shawn Ryan?

  Heard you talk about this on another podcast. And I want to, I want to go in detail on this project because I believe you got cut off.

• 3:11:16Speaker 01

  So if you want to hear a really wild podcast, I was on Joe Rogan, uh, June last year and, um, I, I dug, like, I told you that I'm very, um, I, I want to know. Like, you're not going to tell me the sky is blue. I want to, I want to know why it's blue. You know, and it's about reflections, reflections, some other stuff, but if I, I just, I'm curious about that. And I'm not going to take you and I'm not going to take it for granted that stuff is going on, you know? And, um,

• 3:11:47Speaker 01

  I went in a lot of rabbit holes with Joe, you know? And then for whatever reason, I started, he, I don't know how it happened, but I talked about the Iron Man project. And he was like, Iron Man? And I was like, yeah, like the Iron Man movie, you know? Hey, Serge, what's up, buddy? The Iron Man, come on over here and sit down. Come on, come here, over here, sit down.

• 3:12:09Speaker 01

  Blatz.

• 3:12:14Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 3:12:14Speaker 01

  If you speak German to him, he does everything right away. So he, he was, um, trained in German to do the big stuff. And then he's out of that program and now he's like a civilian dog. So I talk to him in English all the time, but if you ever speak German to him, he's like,

• 3:12:32Speaker 01

  the, uh, Iron Man. So he asked me, it was, it was the Iron Man, like the movie Iron Man, that guy, what's his name? I can't stand Hollywood.

• 3:12:40Shawn Ryan?

  Tony Stark?

• 3:12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that guy. But the actor guy.

• 3:12:44Shawn Ryan?

  Oh.

• 3:12:44Speaker 01

  But I don't care. He's an idiot. So all over her. They just, I don't, I don't understand.

• 3:12:52Shawn Ryan?

  Chris, you can call a lot of people idiots after what I've just heard you talk about.

• 3:12:56Speaker 01

  Well, they're, they're freaking millionaires and they could do so much good.

• 3:13:01Shawn Ryan?

  Robert Downey Jr.

• 3:13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the guy.

• 3:13:03Shawn Ryan?

  He's a billionaire.

• 3:13:03Speaker 01

  Actually, he's, he's a pretty cool guy. He's one of the good ones. I think he's one of the good ones, though. I shouldn't have said that. I'm sorry.

• 3:13:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:10Speaker 01

  I shouldn't do that anyway. That was just really bad. But it just, it drives me crazy that they have so much potential and they do so little with it.

• 3:13:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:19Speaker 01

  It really makes me angry. I don't get that.

• 3:13:22Shawn Ryan?

  It's great.

• 3:13:23Speaker 01

  So, Iron Man, we started working on Iron Man and like really hard, like really digging in on Iron Man in two thousand four or five, it's been a while, maybe later than that.

• 3:13:38Shawn Ryan?

  Who was digging in on Iron Man?

• 3:13:41Speaker 01

  I'll leave that one alone.

• 3:13:42Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:13:43Speaker 01

  But I was, I had a lot of access to-

• 3:13:45Shawn Ryan?

  But you're not on the movie set, you're-

• 3:13:47Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, I'm talking about the real.

• 3:13:48Shawn Ryan?

  I'm-

• 3:13:49Speaker 01

  We don't do anything with the movies, that's all fake-

• 3:13:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that's why I'm, I'm just-

• 3:13:52Speaker 01

  It's junk.

• 3:13:52Shawn Ryan?

  Making it very apparent to the audience that this was the real thing, not, not animation.

• 3:13:58Speaker 01

  The full suit's gonna weigh a thousand pounds, it's huge, and that was when I started saying, this is stupid.

• 3:14:02Shawn Ryan?

  What is it, like a exoskeleton suit or something?

• 3:14:04Speaker 01

  Well, that's when I started going into the exoskeleton and everything else, and I said, what you guys are trying to do is just, let's do this and this and this, and then build up to that when we can do that, because right now, if you have the suit on, you can't use any of our vehicles, you can't get on an airplane, basically. You can get on a cargo plane and you'll be almost the only one on there, standing on the back ramp, getting ready to go. I said, and that's ridiculous, I said, how do you deploy these guys? You know, how do you get on a ship to do anything? How, you can't do anything, you know, right now, until they start building the vehicles or start building the stuff or the airplanes, and the parachutes, you're talking about parachuting in heavier than, well, no, it'd be about the same as, as some of our boats. But that takes three G12s, you know?

• 3:14:47Speaker 01

  So you're gonna have a guy, one guy flying out with a G12? That's a giant parachute, a parachute's as big as this building, you know, it's giant parachutes. So, there was a bunch of stuff that I was really hitting them on, I saying, this is, you can't do that, can't do that. So now I started going to the national labs, like Sandia and Lawrence Livermore, and all the laboratories that did the Manhattan Project. So now I'm inside the Manhattan Project, I'm working with all these guys, like real deep. And I can't talk about most of that, but-

• 3:15:15Shawn Ryan?

  Then what the, what is the Manhattan Project?

• 3:15:18Speaker 01

  The nukes in World War II.

• 3:15:19Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, never mind.

• 3:15:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:15:22Shawn Ryan?

  Sorry.

• 3:15:23Speaker 01

  The, um, oh man, some of the projects I was in would be really wild, but- You need to be there and in all of them to do some of the programs I was doing. Because a program like that is gonna take in the comms and the visuals and the ballistics and the ergonomics plus the mechanical. And then if a battery goes down or something goes down, then how's the guy gonna move? You know? And so that's when I started going into the ancient times. And that's when I met the dude that was doing a shark fighting. And he wears a shark fighting suits, Neptunik. Um, cool guy, man, really cool guy.

• 3:16:06Speaker 01

  Can't remember his name, and I wish I could meet him again. But he invented the way to make shark suits. And he does it. And so that's where I was going. Was in a shark fighting and it's like bullfighting. They don't really fight the sharks. All they wanna do is get the shark to them and they grab, hold their dorsal fin and ride it. That's shark fighting. It's like they call it bullfighting, but they also call the clowns in there, or more the bullfighters than the cowboys that are doing it. If you know that. So I was doing what the clowns do with the bulls, you know? And the shark fighting and everything else, you know? I was trying to figure out how to be, how to be real mobile. Cause if you think about the rodeo clowns, they're more heroes than the cowboy ever was.

• 3:16:50Speaker 01

  I mean, those guys don't wanna save them, the cowboys, you know? And they're also getting gored and really messed up. So if you think about a rodeo clown, that's who the seal should be. You know, they're everyone saving everybody and they have to move way better than the cowboys do. So the cowboys can wear their armor and really heavy stuff and do the stuff, but the clowns can't do that. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so I'm going in that direction, you know? And they're actually the bullfighters, the clowns are, it's not the cowboys. And that's why they call them, it's bullfighting. The clowns do. So, and that's the direction I was going into. And so I was working with a group called, um, Moashi, which I kinda failed at because that's when the craziness was also going on with all of this stuff.

• 3:17:34Speaker 01

  And as soon as I came out and I said, hey, I wanna be Kristen. It just went, I had nothing, you know, it all fell apart. And so then I lost track with Mawashi. And the way they figured out the exoskeleton was from overweight people. If you think about somebody who weighs three or 400 pounds, and you think about what the weight, the amount of weight that they're carrying around, and how they carry that weight, and then also think about the strength of that person, you know, put them on a leg machine, have them squat, put them on a leg machine and see what they can actually push with their legs. I can push way more than they can, but I weigh like 190, you know? They're weighing 300 and carrying a lot of weight around. Well, how are they doing that? Well, that's what they figured out.

• 3:18:17Speaker 01

  And it's not powered, it's an unpowered suit.

• 3:18:20Shawn Ryan?

  It's an unpowered suit?

• 3:18:21Speaker 01

  Not, not now. But the one I was trying to build was gonna be an unpowered bullfighting suit. Would have been like the shark fighting stuff, would have been like, it would have been magnificent. And they kept going in their direction, just like that idiot. You can't do that. Cut that out, please. So, so, so just, so just like that guy that was trying to fly UAV to interject a vehicle, you know, you're trying to go super high-tech to do something that doesn't need to be high-tech. So we don't need this thing to be a robot. We don't need to be Iron Man like they have in the movies. It's a movie. Eventually we'll be there, but that's, you know, I don't want that.

• 3:19:04Speaker 01

  And it's only gonna be one or two guys in a platoon with another 100 guys supporting those guys in the suits. So it doesn't make sense. So if they would have let me go with my program, I didn't need that much money. And I could have done this for, they're doing hundreds of millions of dollars. I could have done this for tens of millions, you know? And it would have been a better suit and everybody wouldn't have used it. The entire Marine Corps would have been outfitted with my suit.

• 3:19:28Speaker 01

  Instead of one or two Marines. You know?

• 3:19:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:31Speaker 01

  So which suit do you want?

• 3:19:32Shawn Ryan?

  And so this, this.

• 3:19:34Speaker 01

  So they started going way down the movie Iron Man route because they want the movie Iron Man.

• 3:19:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:39Speaker 01

  The movie Iron Man is ridiculous. Right now. Cause we don't have the infrastructure. We don't have the vehicles. We don't have anything. You know, it doesn't work and we're not going to have that guy flying around. You know, for very far. You know, we have that one suit the guy is using right now. You saw him do the ship boarding and the stuff, but. There's other stuff I can do that with. We don't need the suit for, you know?

• 3:20:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:01Speaker 01

  So I can do that with a, well. That's probably classified. No, there's some, there's something similar to that though. That there was a guy that made, uh, had a project where he was taking beetle wings. And he was taking the beetle wings and he was moving them in such a way that he could actually levitate them. If he, if he crosses the. Pattern of the structure of the wings. They would somehow. Uh, it's, it's weird science.

• 3:20:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:28Speaker 01

  Look up, look up a, a beetle wing, um, flying machine. I think that should be enough to Google.

• 3:20:34Shawn Ryan?

  Beetle wing.

• 3:20:35Speaker 01

  Beetle wing flying machine.

• 3:20:37Shawn Ryan?

  I'm looking it up.

• 3:20:38Speaker 01

  So I think just that should be enough words to figure and you might end up with a video of the guy doing it.

• 3:20:42Shawn Ryan?

  If there is a video, it's actually playing right now. So.

• 3:20:46Speaker 01

  Somebody might be.

• 3:20:47Shawn Ryan?

  We're gonna, we're gonna splice it in.

• 3:20:48Speaker 01

  But there's, um, there's so much stuff like that. And the problem is, is they get so in, in, infatuated, enamored. With the technology. That they don't understand that there's an easier way to do it. You know, and there's a better way to do it. Rather than trying to have all this stuff.

• 3:21:05Shawn Ryan?

  Think smarter, not harder.

• 3:21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, always, you know? And so I gave the whole thing to him and I said, and then it turned into carnivore. And carnivore with, with, um, Vogel. Vogel's brilliant too. You know, he's amazing. And anybody out there that works with him is, is, is gonna know. You know, and he was on carnivore pretty hardcore. And there was a bunch of other guys and, and anybody on a carnivore project right now, I would hire them. You know, cause every one of them, we were working with almost no money. And we're working with like a wide open field because we had no lanes. And that's when everything happens. And we did a lot of good stuff. So that's probably a really unknown project too.

• 3:21:46Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 3:21:46Speaker 01

  The carnivore. But it's, you can't let acquisition people run projects.

• 3:21:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:56Speaker 01

  And that's the biggest problem we have. It's so common right now is you have, and I was, I'm an acquisition person. By learning it, but I'm not an acquisition person. So I know acquisition, but I'm not an acquisition person. I don't care about the horse blanket. I don't care about your procedures and how you get from here to here. Cause I can go, I don't need here. I'm already here and I can get to there. Or if I'm already here and I can get here real fast, it's 70% of what you're trying to get for a hundred bucks. So why do I want to invest $5 million from here? I'm already here for a hundred dollars. I don't care about your final project. Cause I don't need it. You know? And if, and it's going to take you 10 years to get there. If I'm already here for a hundred bucks and I'm 70% in 10 years. I'll be way past your hundred.

• 3:22:43Speaker 01

  And that's the problem. Acquisition people, they're beans and bullets and all they're doing is counting everything. You know? And they, and they also have uh.

• 3:22:52Speaker 01

  Triple P, pre-planned preventive, uh. Pre-planned uh maintenance. It's, it's a planning they have and how they're going to do it. And how they run these programs. It's a five year cycle, all this other stuff. I could tell you all the shortfalls they have in the Pentagon and I could cut their budget by 25%, I swear I can. Cause they're doing it wrong. They're so messed up and how they, how they enter stuff and how they do it. And they keep starting back here to get here, to go that. And they keep trying for that 100% perfect thing after that five year cycle. And one year I can give you 50% and three years it's going to be 80%. So don't worry about your thing in five years. Can't stand it. The whole program is terrible. The Pentagon is the most broken machine in the world.

• 3:23:36Speaker 01

  And it drives me crazy. Cause you know what they're paying all that? It's our tax money. You know? And it just drives me crazy that they're wasting so much of the American people's money. On stuff that just, we don't even need it. You know?

• 3:23:50Speaker 01

  And so, we need the Iron Man thing, what they want, in about 20 or 30 years. We can't even use it right now. All it is, is flashy.

• 3:23:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:00Speaker 01

  But it's just like NASA doing their Apollo program.

• 3:24:02Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it makes perfect sense that we don't have the infrastructure to support it.

• 3:24:06Speaker 01

  Nobody talks about that.

• 3:24:07Shawn Ryan?

  You know, but...

• 3:24:08Speaker 01

  So NASA, when they're doing the NASA program, to do all the stuff they were doing to try to go to the moon, was, it made plastic glass, it made this, it's all the stuff that they invented. Because they're going for really hard projects, but they had to do this. They invented a whole bunch of stuff along the way, that I'm greatly grateful for. I mean, it's amazing. So was the juice worth the squeeze of their $700 million a day? I think that's what it is. NASA, right now, is spending $700 million a day of our tax money. Where's it going?

• 3:24:46Shawn Ryan?

  I have no idea, you know?

• 3:24:47Speaker 01

  It's not going to anything we can use.

• 3:24:51Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 3:24:52Speaker 01

  You took a picture of a galaxy, you know, 1,000 light-years away. Good job, NASA, thanks.

• 3:25:00Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. Well, let's, let's take a break.

• 3:25:06Shawn Ryan?

  I want to take a minute to tell you about Vigilance Elite Patreon. Patron support is what makes this show possible, and gives me the ability to bring these one-of-a-kind stories to the public. Go to patreon.com/vigilanceelite and support The Sean Ryan Show today.

• 3:25:27Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Chris, we just took a long break.

• 3:25:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:25:32Shawn Ryan?

  The lasagna's ready. But, um, we gotta talk about, you just, you're retiring out of the military, and you're getting ready to transition.

• 3:25:41Speaker 01

  2011.

• 3:25:42Shawn Ryan?

  2011.

• 3:25:45Speaker 01

  So, and two thousand and eleven retired. And basically, that's like the chain's off, like I was saying, you know? Now I can start living my life and do whatever I want, you know? So if I want to smoke a joint, then I'll smoke a joint, you know? Like I said, I mean, it's the cannabis, I have a real problem with the way America's treated that. You know, if they would have outlawed booze, that would have been way better for our country, you know? So, yeah, I'll smoke a joint, you know? And it's, I got off all the opioids and all that stuff, you know? But I was on them for a while, you know, and I was still stuck on them.

• 3:26:22Shawn Ryan?

  Why were you on them because of the back?

• 3:26:23Speaker 01

  It was pain, yeah, I just have, I just have a lot of pain. And now if I, if I, I take wild lettuce now, which is, I forage it for, that's a good painkiller. And a few other things I'm using for pain now. I'm also doing, so it's, there's, there's herbal remedies and there's ways to do it to control pain and to really work with it. And I think the opioid problem and what they're doing to veterans right now is just criminal. You know, if you ask me, yeah. And then I also got, like, they diagnosed me with a bunch of other stuff and they had me on some, some mood stuff. This thing called Cymbalta. And, which nowadays are proving it, that all these things are doing for anxiety, or what is it? They, they proved that it doesn't do anything, you know?

• 3:27:06Speaker 01

  They proved that all these drugs that they're giving people, a lot of stuff, it just doesn't, it's not really doing what they think it's doing. It's not helping, it's masking.

• 3:27:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:14Speaker 01

  You know? And if you really want to know what the problem is, you know, if you mask the problem and you're just sitting there just living life like that, like a zombie, you know, you're not living. And I think that's what the VA likes us to be. They want us to be zombies.

• 3:27:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, I have my own theories about that, but it just doesn't seem conducive for the US government to keep a bunch of people alive that they're having to pay for.

• 3:27:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:27:38Shawn Ryan?

  It just makes sense.

• 3:27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:27:40Shawn Ryan?

  You know, drug them up and get rid of them.

• 3:27:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, or at least just make them, you know, not dangerous.

• 3:27:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:47Speaker 01

  You know, and so that's, that's what I was, I was stuck on a lot of pharmaceuticals, you know, in, in that part of my life. Cause at that time, I also wasn't really worrying about, you know, the military. And I think the military is much better about it, active duty, about a lot of that stuff. Cause you can't have zombies in the military.

• 3:28:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:06Speaker 01

  You know, you can't be giving them all this stuff, you know? They'll tell you to work out and take some Motrin, you know, or do this or do that. But at the VA, you retired, you're a civilian and they don't care. You know, what they do care, but they just, it's like a misplaced care almost.

• 3:28:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:21Speaker 01

  You know, they care about the, the structure and the administrative part of the VA, not really as much about the people. It's a huge machine. It's the biggest healthcare system probably in the world, you know? And that's why everybody starts talking about socialized medicine and everything else for a country. It's like, we already have socialized medicine and you think it's working very well?

• 3:28:41Shawn Ryan?

  I know, I don't.

• 3:28:42Speaker 01

  The VA.

• 3:28:42Shawn Ryan?

  I've said that, I've said that several times and, and I just, I don't understand how people can be for socialized medicine and then look at what the VA is doing, cause it is the model.

• 3:28:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:28:54Shawn Ryan?

  And it's, it's.

• 3:28:56Speaker 01

  Makes no sense.

• 3:28:56Shawn Ryan?

  It's never worked.

• 3:28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, never. So I had the psychologist I knew that was just like, if you're a psychologist, and I was going through for my master's degree, right, mental health counseling. So I could have, if I kept continuing that program, I would have had the certifications to go to the VA and counsel veterans. But, uh, the program is really messed up, you know? And the VA could be fixed right now for all the counselors with a stroke of pen by, uh, Congress or the, the, uh, the VA itself. If you had the secretary of the VA, all you had to do is make one change. And right now there's a line about counselors in the VA that they must be K-CREP certified.

• 3:29:38Speaker 01

  And K-CREP is, uh, it's a counseling accreditation system. It's a group, it's a civilian private group that accredits the counseling, um, courses and counselors themselves for continuing education and everything, cause you can't just become a counselor and just drop it. You have to keep working on stuff and you keep studying and advancing. So that's what that group is for, K-CREP. And so. I call it crap kick or something. It's just, it's the worst thing the VA did. They basically hand strung themselves. What they did was they said that you have to be this certification in order to be a counselor at the VA. So what that does is it took the entire pool of counselors in the United States and cut it in less than half.

• 3:30:22Speaker 01

  Because not every counselor follows K-CRAV. And not every counselor has to be K-CRAV. I think if you had a whole bunch of senior NCOs, and as long as you're a senior NCO, and you go through just part of the stuff I went through when I was going through the courses at the grad level, are some really good courses that it really goes through all the different things, and it goes through the legalities and what you can talk about, what you can't talk about, to make sure you're not hurting people, you know? And make sure you're not giving advice that you're too far. You have to kind of, you have to be careful sometimes, you know, as a counselor, about what you actually give them. You can hear everything you want, because the client talking to me, I want to listen as much as I can. But what I say bad to that person, I have to be a little careful of, because you can actually cause damage. That's what you have to go through.

• 3:31:07Speaker 01

  But if you had senior NCOs like myself and like all the other ones, there's millions of us, you know? And you put us through a six-month course, that would be enough. Because as a senior NCO, you already have the mentoring, you have the coaching, you have all those other leadership skills. You have a ton of stuff that we have to go through as a chief to be able to talk to it. We do those personality tests, all those things, what they do is letters and all that stuff, and I don't know why I'm not remembering all of it. But we do that stuff too, where we know when I'm talking to someone, I know kind of what their personality is, so I know kind of how to deal with them. We have all that stuff as chiefs. And if you take me, for example, with all the ASOT-type skills, when I'm sitting there across from a Taliban guy, and I'm interrogating or I'm working with him, I'm doing all this

• 3:31:50Speaker 01

  stuff, that's counseling, that's mental health counseling. And when I go in there, especially when I start doing this sneaky peaky stuff, like agency work, when I'm working with Taliban directly, but I'm trying to win them over and get them to work with us. How do you do that? You're a pretty good counselor, right? So why they make us requirement, you have to do K crap? Now, what I think and what I proposed to the entire VA is that you require K crap to be like the administrator, like the boss over all of it. Or you have a couple of K crap qualified people that you know they went through all these huge amounts of courses, like almost to the PhD level, it's really intense. And then all these practice sessions, all those other stuff and how to counsel, how to be effective. They had it every VA at that top level, you have that K crap, one or two or three of

• 3:32:35Speaker 01

  them, whatever it requires for how big your VA is. And under each of those, you would have a veteran, coach, mentor, you know, you have to call them a counselor. You say, hey, we want you just to work with our, one of our veteran coaches for a little while, you know, and you're gonna do five sessions with one of our veteran coaches, you know, and just, and just work that. And the veteran coach would also be taking notes and doing the stuff. And if it gets to a point where it rises to the occasion, or it rises to the level that that veteran coach is, you know, is too much, you know, then you're gonna hand it up to one of the K crap qualified people. But for veterans, for the most part, we don't need a psychologist. We don't need a K crap qualified mental health counselor. We need a veteran coach. We need somebody to talk to us about nutrition.

• 3:33:19Speaker 01

  We need somebody to talk to us about what are we doing for working out? We need somebody to talk to us about life skills, about just like, what are we doing? The problems veterans are having out there right now, and the biggest thing is like just like money problems, is like family problems, relationship problems, these problems, that and that and that. A veteran coach can do all of those. So you're going into the VA and you have a problem and you need a counselor. And they says, well, we can set you up an appointment and you come back in a month, two months, six months. What is it waiting right now? Because we're waiting for these qualified people. And if you're K crap qualified, you're not gonna work at a VA for crappy money. Not very many of them, unless they're not very good. You're gonna go out there on the outside and you're gonna make big money.

• 3:34:00Speaker 01

  So the VA right now could fix this entire problem with mental health issues within the VA systems that you don't have veterans going to these VA parking lots and eating a bullet in their parking lots.

• 3:34:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:34:14Speaker 01

  Because they're saying, no, we don't have time for you. You need to go do that. But all I wanted to do is just talk to somebody. Well, we don't have time for you.

• 3:34:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:34:21Speaker 01

  They could change all this right now. And that's what makes me so upset. I was going through all these courses. I learned all this stuff. And in the middle of it, I was like, you know what? This isn't what I need to be doing. This isn't even close to what I need to be doing. They keep doing what I'm doing with my nonprofit. I need to move more into the counseling, more into the coaching and do what I'm doing. I don't need their crap. I already know most of the stuff that they even tried to teach me through all the ASOT and through the teams and through being a chief. I was walking in there and I was already probably surpassing some of the instructors. I had this one instructor, this professor, who was a third grade teacher. And she went through and did all the courses while she was teaching third grade. All this is time.

• 3:35:03Speaker 01

  All you gotta do is just sit there and buckle down and read the programs, read the books, and write some papers and you'll get the certification. And I didn't have that kind of time. I'm 56 years old and I don't need the money. I don't want the money. I have a nonprofit that I was trying to help out. I have the VA and all my veteran buddies who I'm trying to help out. And if I wasted another two years doing that program, it's a two years wasted. I don't know how long I'm gonna be here. And I want to try to do some work now and try to do as much good as I can do right now with what I have because I don't need their stuff. The problem with what they're teaching in the universities now, it's all a Frankfurt School. It's all the, it's all the, you know, compassionate narcissism.

• 3:35:46Speaker 01

  It's, it's the frickin', it's, it's the socialist agenda. It's the, it's, it's all terrible stuff. And they start going into all this stuff where it's like, no, this isn't, it's victim cards. It's, it's all stuff that doesn't even make any sense. People don't need that, but that's what they're teaching these counselors, to have the counselors teach us or help people in that kind of way. They're teaching critical race theory.

• 3:36:12Shawn Ryan?

  In the VA?

• 3:36:13Speaker 01

  They're teaching at the university. No, I'm talking about the university when you're doing your K-CRIP certs.

• 3:36:17Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, God.

• 3:36:18Speaker 01

  So you have to figure that everyone at the university, if you're university trained, you're a Marxist.

• 3:36:25Speaker 01

  Straight up, every university person trained right now, especially counselors, because I saw it, I witnessed it myself, I'm a witness to it. And what they're teaching right now is hateful, what they're teaching right now is wrong, what they're teaching right now is going to cause more damage in the long run than they ever helped.

• 3:36:43Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's talk about-

• 3:36:44Speaker 01

  And that's what makes me super angry, and a VA is stuck in that program. The VA needs to wake up. You need your senior NCOs. So they have messed me up really bad with their drugs and with their talk. And for me, just like anyone in the military, we get kind of institutionalized. That when you have a doctor, or you have the captain, you have the admiral, you know, even though I would question them when it was something wrong, I would, I would ask questions and I would point it out. There was still a huge amount of respect for those positions because we know it. Because that's the chain of command that's beaten into us from day one at boot camp, that respect and command, and then you just follow the orders. And so when I was at the VA, I was still following orders. I'm like a couple of years out of the military, and this is what they're telling me, and

• 3:37:29Speaker 01

  you're the experts, and I believe you.

• 3:37:31Shawn Ryan?

  What are they telling you?

• 3:37:33Speaker 01

  It was the drugs, is that this is the way to do it. And when I tell, talked, started talking to them about some of my childhood, and like some of the things that I was feeling, they, it pretty much automatically went to transgender.

• 3:37:45Shawn Ryan?

  Can you get into some specifics?

• 3:37:47Speaker 01

  The specifics are that if I start telling them that of my jealousy, and my want to be my older sister, and my, my entire life was living in that kind of fear of punishment and mistakes or anything else. And I would always look at her, and she never did anything wrong, she was perfect. And I wanted to be her, and all of that stuff. And I started talking about getting dressed up, and like feeling better when I was dressed up. Because if I got, if I put something on that was feminine, that I felt, or even felt feminine in, I would feel better. Like psychologically, it would make anxiety or depression or anything I was feeling at the time, it would make it kind of go away.

• 3:38:30Speaker 01

  Because going back into my childhood, the same thing. It's like I could escape away from the punishment, and I could put something on and make believe I was my sister, and make believe I was that person that was being cherished. I could make believe I was that person that was being taken care of. I could make believe I was that person that never got punched in the face, make believe I was that person that never got paddled, never did anything wrong. And I would say that to a counselor and it was pretty much transgender. And this is a problem right now with the DSM and counselors with all of them is that they refuse to accept the fact that gender dysphoria exists, that not everybody's transgender. The fact that autogynophilia exists.

• 3:39:15Speaker 01

  So gender dysphoria is exactly what I'm describing is the want to be a different gender for whatever reason. So my reasons was an escape and my reasons was to not be me and the only option I had that I could look at that I modeled, that I saw as the way out was my older sister. If I had an older brother that was the same way, then maybe I would have been, maybe that jealousy and maybe that dysphoria was just to the same gender, but something a little different, something that was like, I just want to be him. My older brother is only like a year older than me and not somebody that I would model because he was very different than I was. Like I was, I was a little more studious and I was a reader.

• 3:39:58Speaker 01

  He was an athlete and he was very popular and I was not popular and he was a little more natural athletic and I was not, I had to work at it. So he could do all the stuff like pretty easily naturally for football, we were playing football together. And for me, I would have to work out on weekends and I would have to get down there to the tackling dummy and I would just keep blocking over and over again on block and sled until I could move it, you know, by myself. And that was the only way I got good at football. It was the same thing pretty much with the SEAL teams too. Like I wasn't really that natural runner. It's just that I was so stubborn for my athleticism that I made me an athlete and I created it out of perseverance, out of just keep doing it. So when I talk about all this stuff to a counselor, I'm transgender.

• 3:40:42Speaker 01

  They will not say that I have some gender dysphoria. I have some misplaced.

• 3:40:49Speaker 01

  Like my sexual identity, my gender identity, my identity, all of it went over somewhere else. And so this is something I had kind of a breakthrough with my fiancee Courtney was that she showed me this one interview with this guy and he's talking about autogynephilia, not even gender dysphoria, not transgender, not anything.

• 3:41:10Shawn Ryan?

  What is that? What is it?

• 3:41:11Speaker 01

  Autogynephilia is where I started talking about that sexual misplacement, about sexual arousal. What happens to a person is we all have sexual arousal cues. So whatever yours is, it, most people, it would be an exterior cue for you to become sexually aroused, for you to see something or someone or whatever, and you go, ooh, wow, that's hot. You know what I mean? That's, but it's something for most people, it's an exterior arousal cue. And for some people, it's an internal arousal cue, but it's an arousal cue internally from the opposite gender. And so for me, because I was always looking at my sister and I was also so sexually,

• 3:41:54Speaker 01

  we were a very religious family also, so I was in a religious bubble of no sexual talk, nothing. I never heard about the birds and the bees, probably, I don't know if I ever heard about the birds and the bees. I'd learn it all on my own. And so that's why I said I was a virgin until I was 22 and I was very afraid. And it was like, and this is like the most embarrassing stuff you could ever talk about to anybody. And this is why I would never talk about it. And I think this is why all the other people that I have, gender confusion, will never really talk about it. Even to a psychiatrist, psychologist, you rarely ever talk about everything.

• 3:42:27Shawn Ryan?

  So are you saying that sexual arousal comes from within?

• 3:42:32Speaker 01

  For me.

• 3:42:32Shawn Ryan?

  So what is that? Can you describe that? What was that?

• 3:42:37Speaker 01

  Not anymore, because I figured it all out. And when I figured it out, all of it, so part of my sexual arousal will come from myself, because that's all I had for a few decades. And so for me to put something on as a little bit feminine, and then I look at it and go, wow, okay, that's kinda, and I get some arousal out of that.

• 3:43:00Speaker 01

  But that all ended at like a thousand percent, it totally won eighty on me. So there is a way for you to go through like some really hard digging and really investigating your internal monologue and your internal that it goes deeper than intellect. It goes down to like where your soul actually exists almost. It's like everything. So I, I, I look at my childhood and have to go day by day and year by year. And I'd look at it, where did it happen? What happened? Where is this? Where is that? And I kept doing it. I was doing it a lot, like I was talking about the Salasalabin. When I was doing that is when it opened up the most. So it, it opened up memories for me of what was going on. And that was when I figured out the memory in 10th grade with that guy.

• 3:43:45Speaker 01

  It made me figure out my sister and my relationship to her and how I saw her. And it made me look at why I was so sexually, um, I'm such a prude also where I'm so afraid of sexuality. So when I do see those drag queens doing that, it, um, it gives me, it's not a phobia. It's not a fear, but I'm not afraid of drag queens, but it makes me fearful for what they're doing and what is happening with the kids that they're exposing them to. Cause I know what they're doing is gonna be the same way that it happened to me. You know, it was similar in, in many ways. It's so dangerous. And, um, this isn't something, the psychological community is making a giant mistake right now and they're letting it happen.

• 3:44:28Speaker 01

  And that's why I had to quit going through that course because I saw the errors. I saw what they were doing. I see how they're changing definitions. I see how they're erasing out entire, um, issues within their manual of, of, of issues. So, and I want to say their diseases, I want to say that their sicknesses, cause it's not always a sickness. Sometimes it's a misplaced, um, just like I said, it was a misplaced, um, cue. It's a misplaced.

• 3:44:55Shawn Ryan?

  Like a diagnosis.

• 3:44:56Speaker 01

  Things happen. No, I'm talking about my internally. I had a mis- I had a misplaced cue. I had a misplaced, um, sexual identity because I was, I was, it was so.

• 3:45:08Speaker 01

  It's so hard to talk about all this stuff because it is so incredibly personal and very embarrassing too. Because I mean, how do you talk about this person that was like this Navy SEAL? Who was a virgin until I were twenty-two years old? Who had a sexual identity that was misplaced to the point when I found sexual arousal within myself. I was so isolated, that was all I had.

• 3:45:30Shawn Ryan?

  When did you find that out?

• 3:45:31Speaker 01

  It was incredibly embarrassing, incredibly hurtful. And it makes me like, I don't like talking about this. But I want people to understand that all transgender people are not transgender. Some of them probably are, a lot of them probably are. But I bet you half or more are not. Half or more have gender dysphoria and/or autogynephilia. Or in- in intense anxiety or depression. And they get dressed up and they get love bombed. And when you get love bombed, everything changes. And love bombing is a term invented by a cult about what the cults do to their members.

• 3:46:13Speaker 01

  So as soon as you walk in a church, you're gonna have people hugging you and loving you and giving you anything you want. And being so uplifting and then the choir and everything's so good. So your anxiety and your depression just disappears. So if you have somebody that has intense depression or intense anxiety. And that person might be gay, might not be gay, might be confused, might be anything above. But enough of their life is, is into that realm, close enough, just like myself. Like some of the first times I ever got dressed up, I had people saying, "Oh my God, you're so beautiful." But I was like, it was, it was, it was madness to say that was beauty. It's madness to say on top of that building, that weird sculpture, that gold thing, on top of that courthouse with the stuff.

• 3:46:58Speaker 01

  Anybody that calls that thing beautiful is just, it, they're, they're, it's not.

• 3:47:04Shawn Ryan?

  Where would this, when did this start?

• 3:47:07Shawn Ryan?

  The dressing up?

• 3:47:09Speaker 01

  Well, it started sometime in like, I don't know, seventh grade, eighth grade, somewhere.

• 3:47:15Shawn Ryan?

  That young?

• 3:47:16Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, it was always.

• 3:47:19Speaker 01

  I say it was grade school, but when I really start thinking about it, I think I said a few times, I was like, and it's confusing because it was one time, maybe that young, because I had older sister and then I have my younger sister. And then just kids playing, you're gonna, you're gonna put on your sister's Easter bonnet and you're gonna, we're gonna do, you know, kids. So there were a few times there that I did a kid thing, you know? But it had nothing to do with sexuality, had nothing to do with dressing up, had nothing to do with transgender. It was just kids being kids. But that was always a memory. And then I always had that jealousy of my sister. And so when I was in eighth grade, ninth, I don't, it was, um, I'm trying to remember like the exact time. It was in Lynchburg, Virginia, when I was at Lynchburg Christian Academy with Jerry Falwell.

• 3:48:04Speaker 01

  You know, I was, I went to school with Jerry Falwell, Jerry Falwell Jr. They called Jonathan is his real name. I went to school with him. During that time period is when it probably really happened. You know, because then I was more isolated, I was more into that religious thing and sexuality. If you crush sexuality, then you're crushing a part of humanity. We are sexual beings. And so a problem that a lot of religions do is they crush sexuality down to a point when they cause problems. And it, it happens. And I think that's part of what happened to me was within a religious institution where sexuality was foreboded and it was like, you don't even say the word.

• 3:48:48Speaker 01

  And that's why my parents were treating and that's what was my home life. You know, that's why I never saw my parents ever do anything affectionate. Like I said, I think I saw my parents hold hands one time in my entire life. That they showed some affection to each other.

• 3:49:03Shawn Ryan?

  It was an indoctrination for generations.

• 3:49:05Speaker 01

  I think it was, yeah. It was, and then it finally dropped the hammer on me. You know, that all of it coalesced, it all came together and it just dumped on me. And it was because of the abuse, it was because of some other things were happening, it was because of the Older sister and an older brother and me. And then I was taking all, everything went downhill on top of me, you know? And they'll say, yeah, you know, if you talk to my brothers and sisters, they say, yeah, Chris got it the worst. And even in BUDs, I probably got it the worst because I was, I was, I was outspoken. When I was in, um, for, you know, FNG in my first platoon.

• 3:49:50Speaker 01

  There was only two people that got hazed overseas. We were deployed in Thailand. And this is why I never went to damn neck when, after my second platoon, I tried out, a third platoon, I tried out. Never went to damn neck because I beat somebody up that was that damn neck before me. Because they were hazing me in Thailand. A dude was just messing with me, Bucky, and he was just in my face. It was just, it was getting too much and I was angry. And I'm, I'm pretty strong, you know, and I have like that farmer strength because I can throw those eighty, eighty pound hay bales, you know, up on hay wagons and I have farmer strength. And so I don't look like I'm very big, but I have some farmer strength. And so he was doing that to me and I was in Thailand and we were on this boat ramp

• 3:50:31Speaker 01

  down into where we're getting ready to launch off and on a cement boat ramp. And he's sitting there giving me crap doing that. And he was on the lowest side of the boat ramp. So he was downhill from me a little bit. So I grabbed him like that. I lifted him off the ground and I threw him. And because he was on the boat ramp like that, and he went down the boat ramp up in the air. And they said that he took his first free fall parachute with no parachute. The guy was in the air and it hurt him bad. And so I tried out for damn neck and I was, I was a top charger and I was good. And, um, did everything. It was all right in front of the Massachusetts board when I asked us all the questions. And it was fine. And I was like, I want to go to gray team because I, I live on a sailboat. I lived on a sailboat for like six years. I used to swim out to my boat. I'd take all my clothes off and put them in a plastic bag and swim out to my boat.

• 3:51:16Speaker 01

  So I was really into the nautical stuff. I was working on my 12 pack and I was working on my 100 ton maritime license. So I was doing a lot of stuff that would have been perfect for gray, you know? And those guys said the same thing. They're like, yeah, you have, yeah, cool. But then if you get one-

• 3:51:32Shawn Ryan?

  Gray's the mobility unit.

• 3:51:33Speaker 01

  One dude. One guy can say no at the team. They have all the pictures up of whoever tries out. And if you get one mark across your, across your photo, you won't go ever.

• 3:51:47Speaker 01

  So, and I was just like, dude, I was that person that I got hazed overseas. Why? Cause some of those older guys that had a couple of platoons on their belt or whatever. It was like, if they were doing stuff that was dumb or it was like, I was, I was the one that was like, even though I'm a new guy, I was older because I already went through all the college and I did all this other stuff. And I went to VMI and I was a Ranger platoon and I knew the Ranger handbook better than any SEAL I probably know. Except Nick, cause he went to Ranger school, but I did all the recondo stuff.

• 3:52:18Speaker 01

  It was, it was just terrible. So it felt almost just like I just, it was my place. I'm just gonna keep getting beat on, you know? And it just, what? You know, why? So was that, is that a, is that an institutional problem? Is that my ancestors and all of that old, um, you know, passed on, hereditary of this grief of this? And there's a word for it and I can't think of the word. It's a passed down, um, mental health stuff and all this anxiety and all this other stuff. It's, um, generational trauma.

• 3:52:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:55Speaker 01

  You know, that's the word for it. If you look up generational trauma, it's real. And we hold on all that in us. And so I feel like I probably had all the generational trauma from my entire family going back, whatever, however, gener- it seems like it all dumped on me.

• 3:53:09Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that can be broken?

• 3:53:11Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I broke it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm continuing and trying to break it, but I make mistakes sometimes with my fiance and her son. You know, not huge, but I do sometimes make those same mistakes that my dad was doing to me. You know? And then I get corrected pretty quick because my fiance is awesome. But it's one of the things, you know? And sometimes it's really hard to break those things, you know? And you have to keep working at it. It's a constant struggle. So I think all of that in about eighth grade was when that first started happening. And so, and that's because puberty, you know, ninth grade, it was in that timeframe.

• 3:53:47Shawn Ryan?

  Hormones are coming in.

• 3:53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it started happening. I started getting puberty. So I started, I had some wet dreams, you know? I didn't even know what that was. I was like, what the heck? And I was like, that's how bad I was. That's how naive and how terrible it was, how I got raised. You know? You can't raise a kid totally in the dark like that and totally isolated. You know, what's gonna happen? You know, and this is what happened. And so I found that and be because I had no girlfriends in high school, but I liked to want to girls. And I found out later in life that some of them liked me too, but I was too afraid to even like ask them out. So I never did anything, you know? And that's what happened to me. And so as I was getting dressed and then I started figuring it out and then I started being aroused when I was dressed because there was nothing else.

• 3:54:34Speaker 01

  You know, there's no porn anywhere in the house for sure, but the porn problem is even worse than what I was doing, I think, you know? And that should be a conversation that I think porn is one of the reasons why we are where we are right now.

• 3:54:48Shawn Ryan?

  It is.

• 3:54:49Speaker 01

  You know, it's a, it's a, it's a slow degradation of your own moral compass inside of you, everyone that does it. If you're constantly on porn or you keep looking at it, you're degrading yourself every time you do it, you know, and you're making it worse and worse and you're pushing yourself further and further back. And so the only outlet I had was just like, I did it once and it was like, oh, wow, okay, this is cool. And then you do it again, so it reinforces what you had. You do it again, it reinforces, do it again, it reinforces. And so all those constant reinforcements of my own self pleasure, because that's all I had, got kind of stuck on that train.

• 3:55:23Shawn Ryan?

  Were you doing that through your entire career? I mean, all the way from eighth grade all the way through?

• 3:55:28Speaker 01

  Very rarely, I mean, even, even then, like in school, like when I was a kid, it would be like very rare. So I would basically like steal my sister's something and I would keep it for like a day maybe or just that night. And then maybe they're at school, I would fake being sick the next day to make sure I can put everything back, you know? So it was always like very short periods of time and very seldom. But that was all I had. And so if I did it once every six months or once every month, month of month or whatever, not to mean that much. Later in life, because it started, but in the SEAL teams, it was almost never because we were always in like these open barracks and it was the showers and we had group showers, you know?

• 3:56:10Speaker 01

  And because still all of my focus was still on feminine, I'm not gay, you know, it was always still the female.

• 3:56:21Shawn Ryan?

  You were always attracted to females.

• 3:56:22Speaker 01

  The attraction was always feminine, but for whatever reason, it turned into feminine towards myself, which made all of this kind of really hard to figure out. And psychologists will deny that autogynephilia even exists almost, and they deny that gender dysphoria exists. It's just all transgender now. They want everyone to be transgender.

• 3:56:45Shawn Ryan?

  Why, why do they, why?

• 3:56:46Speaker 01

  It's money driven now. So if you're, if you're, have gender dysphoria, all you need to do is go in and see counseling and do it once in a while and you can recover from it. You can heal yourself, you can do this, just like I did. If you have autogynephilia, you can heal yourself or you can redirect a lot of that. And so my redirection for that right now isn't really fully complete either. So I'm still, and my fiance, God bless her, is just the most patient person and she knows what's going on because she actually has a lot more intelligence for a lot of this than I do even. I wish she was here talking. She would be much more coherent.

• 3:57:25Speaker 01

  But um, she's patient and she knows that the, the final outcome is giving me an incredibly compassionate person with a lot of knowledge about the feminine species and about a lot of things that most men don't understand or can't even partway comprehend. And so if I did ever become a marriage counselor, I'd probably be an amazing marriage counselor because I can talk right now about a lot of things that women do that they should work on to be better with their men, you know? For example, women reward bad behavior and they punish good behavior all the time. And it works like this.

• 3:58:07Speaker 01

  So if a dude is doing really good and buying her flowers and being awesome, she'd thank you and really awesome stuff and it's really cool. But it's more of that normal plane of just we're living together and we're having a great life and it's really wonderful. But if that dude starts doing really bad stuff and really stupid stuff, she's gonna start really kicking on the love and she's gonna really start doing extra stuff to try to get him back on the good side. She's rewarding bad behavior. And so what they should be doing is when the dude starts being kind of a jerk, she's say, just say it, call it out, saying, hey, you're being a jerk right now and I don't

• 3:58:50Speaker 01

  really wanna be with you right now and I'm gonna go sleep on the couch. You know? And then he goes, what was I doing? You know, let's talk about it. Then you have a conversation, you speak about everything that's going on and then you work it out. And then he starts being, doing really good stuff again and she starts rewarding him then. That's when you wanna say, hey, we've been having the best time right now and I don't think we've had a fight or an argument even in like this whole week. You know, let's go out on Friday and have a great time. Let's go have some fun. And then when we get back home, I have a surprise for you. Like if women would start doing that, they would find a drastic change in behaviors. That's just one. I have a whole bunch of stuff like that.

• 3:59:33Speaker 01

  There's so much that I can do right now because I did live on that side. I didn't live on that side, but I was imitating that side. And so I was trying in all the different ways to try to be my sister, you know? And that's what happened in the opioids and all the depression and my anxiety about everything else and the PTSD and TBI and everything on top of it. You're talking about a big ball of mental health issues.

• 4:00:01Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:00:02Speaker 01

  You know? And that's with a lot of veterans. And I pray that those veterans out there didn't have the childhood they had to make all of the other stuff start happening, because they're gonna end up in the same boat that I was in. You'll end up going there. If you had everything it had in my life, it's a recipe for everywhere I went, you know? And that's all the stuff that I had to figure out. I had to figure it out the hard way, because none of those psychologists were helping out. They all wanted to make money off me. They wanted to write a book with me and be a millionaire. That was the book. It was a book that I hired a lawyer to try to stop. I didn't want that book to go out there. Partway through the writing of the book, I figured out what she was doing. And so I started fighting it and I started, half that book is her making stuff up.

• 4:00:47Speaker 01

  And nobody really knows about. You know, half the book is me because I was giving her information, I was working with her. But then when I realized what was going on, then I got that lawyer to try to stop the book and try to do something else, or at least have me have the final say. You're a contributor, but it's my book, it's my life. What turned out was she wrote the contract and I signed it under the influence of booze and drugs and everything else. There was a chapter that she actually wrote that never got put in a book, about my drug use and about how bad I was. Because she knew where I was, she took advantage of it. You know, and I'm not saying I'm a total, you know, um, kid that you're gonna take advantage of in really easy way, especially right now. But at that time in my life, I was in a really bad place.

• 4:01:30Shawn Ryan?

  Lots, lots of veterans get taken advantage of when they're in that state.

• 4:01:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:01:33Shawn Ryan?

  Because it's not you.

• 4:01:37Speaker 01

  It happens a lot. It wasn't me at all.

• 4:01:38Shawn Ryan?

  It's benzos, it's antidepressants, it's mood enhancers, it's painkillers.

• 4:01:45Speaker 01

  So the first psychiatrist took advantage of me. And she knew exactly what she was doing.

• 4:01:49Shawn Ryan?

  It's traumatic brain injury. So, so had you ever vocalized that?

• 4:01:56Speaker 01

  No, I couldn't. I didn't know all this stuff.

• 4:01:57Shawn Ryan?

  That was the first time you vocalized it, when you, after you retired to somebody?

• 4:02:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, so what happened was, I was at this huge meeting. And it was, it was kind of in one of the areas where the Pentagon works in Crystal City. Like, we have skiffs all over the place. So, we're in this place, I'm giving this big brief and I'm sitting up there with, um, who's the guy that wrote Accidental Guerrilla? Really good dude, famous dude. Um, he gave a talk on Accidental Guerrilla. And then we had one of the, um, SES fours or five, he was way up high, like, big. And he was giving a talk. And then he had me giving a talk. So three of us were up there talking to this whole audience. And so, at the time, it was like 2012. I was talking about 3D printing. And I was talking about the failure of the FBI and a failure of ATF and a failure of everybody,

• 4:02:48Speaker 01

  because you guys are missing a point. You guys are doing all these laws and guns and all this other stuff. And I said, in about 10 years, I'll be 3D printing a gun in my basement. I said that in 2012. Thirteen, somewhere right in there for that. No, it was, yeah, it was end of thirteen. Cause it was just before I came out. So it would have been sometime in that time period. So I'd have to really think about it. I could probably give you the exact time. But um, and I told him a lot of other stuff and I said, this is the future. I said, if you guys aren't starting to look at where the future is going and what we're doing with technology and you're starting to do it right now, then you guys are gonna miss the boat. And I gave him a lot of things like the 3D printed gun and I was talking to him about 3D printing pharmaceuticals and about this. And I said, I could do all that stuff into my basement.

• 4:03:30Speaker 01

  And I said, pretty soon. I said, I've already 3D printed. I'm doing all this other stuff. And so this stuff, it's not rocket science. You know, if I can 3D print, I can load up all these tubes with these different things. You know, I can load them up with pharmaceutical, you know, grade this, and I can do them down in the micro stuff, you know, cause we were already doing some super micro stuff that I could talk to you about. That's like, um, if you take the battery out of your phone, I can still listen to you. In the old days, when we took the batteries out, you'd take the batteries out and think you're good and you go in there and skiff and you can talk about whatever you want. Oh, I could still listen to you.

• 4:04:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:04:10Speaker 01

  We were doing stuff that you could never find what we were doing, ever, and you never will. And it's in every piece of equipment right now, in every chip, right now, there's, there's stuff. And where are we buying all the chips from?

• 4:04:24Shawn Ryan?

  China. Taiwan.

• 4:04:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, and, and I was talking about all this stuff back in like 12, 13 time period. So I was with my buddy and he's a, he's a D boy from Bragg, a really good dude. He passed away a little while ago. But um, one of my best friends, you know, and Dave, he's, you know, Hugh was awesome. And he was one of my mentors and I was kind of one of his mentors sometimes too, is, cause we were just, it was simpatico and we would help each other out and really do stuff. It was, it was the best, like, tech team. And it was me and him and it was about five other people on our tech team. And he gave us, that little group, that's carnivore group. If you give our carnivore group any problem in the world,

• 4:05:12Speaker 01

  we'll solve it. You know, Steve Vogel is one of those guys, you know, and there's a bunch of other guys. But um,

• 4:05:20Speaker 01

  He was, he saw the psychiatrist and he knew this person was a PTSD military expert in PTSD. This psychiatrist, that's what she does. And he talked to her and says, hey, my buddy there, you know, Chris, he's been going through a lot and I'm afraid for his life. And, and he started going into some of the stuff about what Mina talked about slightly, the soft, you know? He never knew about the other stuff. And so the psychologist started talking to me and I was like, yeah. I said, I have a lot of stuff going on. And I said, I, I definitely have some PTSD and I have this and I have that. I said, but there's, there's this too. And I showed her a picture of me dressed up.

• 4:06:00Speaker 01

  And she was like, and she was like, hey, let's meet tomorrow and talk about this more and let's do that. And then the next day is when she started saying, you know, we could write a book and we could be millionaires. And that was pretty much it.

• 4:06:12Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 4:06:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:06:14Shawn Ryan?

  One, just one conversation?

• 4:06:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, it was the next day, so that, that night during that thing, it was a huge event. I had people all over me because I can't, I got, like, as soon as I give one of those talks and I realized that I could fix their stuff or I had, I talked about something, they say, that was really interesting. You know, let's talk about that more. I did Iron Man stuff and the nuclear batteries and a lot of other stuff that I was working on, you know?

• 4:06:40Speaker 01

  It was, it was fission, which was the problem. Uh, we're doing other stuff now, so we fixed it, so it's not a big deal. But when I realized that I work on all this stuff, they want to talk to me and they want to say, and set up further meetings and figure some stuff out. And then even bring me in and say, hey, just want you to consult. So at that time I was doing consulting five hundred, five hundred dollars an hour, you know? If you bring me in for a couple of hours, it was a grand for me. You know, two hours is a thousand bucks for me. In those days, you know, if I was doing any consulting for any of those other groups and, um,

• 4:07:11Speaker 01

  It all fell apart at that point because then I showed her that and then she started talking to me and started doing all the other stuff. And then I was like, I was like, I don't care. I said, I'm probably gonna be dead soon. And the way I was living and everything was going was I was very short-lived. So at the time I was in a motorcycle club and my hair was on fire, you know, riding across bridges, standing on my seat at a hundred miles an hour. You know, across Coronado Bridge, they clocked me at a hundred and forty on my seat, you know, it's just that's the kind of stuff I was doing. So when I said they'd lost track because they said it was way over one twenty, they said they'd lost. They said, I don't know how fast you're going, but it was definitely in a pretty high range, you know? I have another motorcycle right now that I could beat that.

• 4:07:54Shawn Ryan?

  So was this, was this, what was she, a psychologist or a psychiatrist?

• 4:07:59Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't even care.

• 4:08:00Shawn Ryan?

  It doesn't matter.

• 4:08:00Speaker 01

  They're both the same. One can prescribe medications, one can't.

• 4:08:03Shawn Ryan?

  So was she, was she co-authoring the book with you and treating you as a patient?

• 4:08:08Speaker 01

  No, the, the treatment was pretty much during the writing of a book, kind of. Cause it was, and when I went through mental health counseling, then I realized all the stuff that she was doing, you know? It was basically counseling sessions, you know, and then getting information and working on stuff and digging and that's counseling sessions. But the thing was, it was like we, you know, the idiot me signs a contract, you know, when I was on, you know, all the off-lanes and everything else. And I was doing other stuff too, you know, because even when you're in a motorcycle club, you're going to get access to a lot of stuff. And so I've been known to do lines of coke off a Health Angels bar, you know, back in those days, you know, I was, I was, I was, it was loose.

• 4:08:50Speaker 01

  You know, and it had to be really good friends with me because I was riding a nineteen sixty Kickstarter, you know, motorcycle. And one time I was riding and I crashed when I was riding with those guys. And it was me and the president of HA's Pete, Dago Pete. And we were in front of a pack of about three hundred motorcycles. And then he started racing and he started really going and we were leaving a pack. And I was riding on a bike motorcycle that I built and it had kind of wide tires. It was FXR frame, which is a really good bike. But I just couldn't do what he was doing. And so I eventually was, was way over in a turn. And I was like, my floorboards were scraping so bad. I was throwing sparks everywhere. I was almost at a point where it was like a race bike, like with the knee touching. And that was on a Harley and.

• 4:09:36Speaker 01

  The reflectors in California, they're above ground, they're above the asphalt. So they're up in the air, they just stick them on with glue, you know? And then, so when I was sliding across, I hit that reflector, my back tire comes off the ground just enough to and threw me high side. And so I high sided and it turned. And broke my foot, dislocated my shoulder, and messed my bike up a little bit, but I was sliding on top of the motorcycle. And I was able to roll off it and I didn't get hurt real bad. And so the rest of the pack finally catches up to us. And I, I'm sitting there against a tree and a bunch of guys are wrenching on the bike and I rehook a few things off to get it so I could ride it again. And so the P comes over and he kicks me in the foot, the broken foot. He says, hey, let's go. I was like, alright, bike's running. So I get over there and I'm getting up like this.

• 4:10:23Speaker 01

  Cause my arm was dislocated, but I didn't know it was. And so we get back to the bar and they say, hey, let's ride through the bar. So I might be one of the only non-Helsinki's that ever rode through the bar. So we go to the back door and we ride through the bar and everybody's like hitting us on the back and I'm burning out and stuff. I ride off and I jump off the curb and park the bike. And then I get off the bike and I'm hurting bad, man. My shoulder's down to like here. And so it's, oh, it's messed up bad. So I walk into the bar and I got my hand tucked in my thing like that. And a New York HA guy, Hammer, and this dude is an old Vietnam guy and he's about 6'4". Just a huge guy, probably weighs 300 and you can bench for us a car. The guy's a big dude.

• 4:11:04Speaker 01

  And he was like, hey, cave man, you know, what are you doing, man? What's wrong with your arm? And I was like, I don't know, man. I was like, back when I wiped out, I think I hurt my shoulder. He said, take your cut off, you know, and let me see what's going on. And cause he was a corpsman too, which was awesome. So he says, dude, your arm is dislocated. And he was like, you just rode another 30 miles with a dislocated arm. And I was like, well, 20 miles or however far it was, I could probably figure it out. Cause I know where I wrecked. It was up in the mountains, up past northern San Diego. Way up in the mountains. Where all the race bikes go, that's what we were doing. And then. He put me on a pool table, wiped all the balls off and people got mad, but he was like, and everybody's like, so he put me on a pool table and relocated my arm and I was like,

• 4:11:49Speaker 01

  hey, somebody get me a, you know, I asked for Jack Daniels. I said, hey, let me have some Jack Daniels, man, I got it. And so one of the people got back around the bar and he got me some Jack Daniels and I was chugging Jack. And then, I'm good. I'm like, dude. And then, uh, he gave me a poster, he signed it, he wrote on there, um, Chris, you're a hell of a man. Um, you're a friend till the end. Um, Pete, um, Daigle, H A M C. And, uh, that's like the life I was living. And so I figured I was dead. And so this person started doing, I was like, yeah, whatever. I was living so far on the edge that I would be dead almost every day.

• 4:12:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I get it.

• 4:12:26Speaker 01

  Cause I was riding so hard and living so hard. I'm swimming out to my sailboat or whatever I was doing back in those days too. It was a crazy life.

• 4:12:33Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 4:12:34Speaker 01

  So, I, um, I was pretty far out.

• 4:12:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, sounds like it.

• 4:12:40Speaker 01

  And she was counseling me. She says she wasn't, but she was. I went through the courses, I know what she was doing.

• 4:12:47Speaker 01

  But, I mean, at this point, I don't care, but I want everybody to know out there that I fought with a lawyer against that book. I didn't want that book published. It should have never been published, you know? But at that point, the book went out. And then like three days later, I get a phone, I'm getting people knocking on my door in my house. After that book came out, people are knocking on my door in my house and asking to do interviews. Like news trucks were in front of my house. You know, cause as soon as SEAL Team Six, transgender, the whole world was like, ah. And then all the people that support that whole narrative just saw their first champion. Cause I mean, it was so far out that it's easy when you look at like, if you're like this, somebody who's like a hairdresser, it turns out to be transgender.

• 4:13:31Speaker 01

  That's like, okay, hairdresser, okay, cool. But when you have a Navy SEAL from damn neck? The whole world went crazy. And so they're all sitting in my front yard. And I keep saying no, and I'm knocking on my door and I have to put signs on my front yard saying, you know, get away, no interviews. And then finally I get CNN, Anderson Cooper calling me. He says, hey, I want to do an interview. And I said, I'll be respectful and we can do this and do that. I was like, well, I'm not going anywhere. I said, if you guys come down here to my house and I'll do an interview. Next day he gets on an airplane, flies down to my house. And there was like, there was a storm, huge storm watch going on, which was funny. Cause then, um, when he lands at the airport, cause it was such a quick thing. He just jumped on a civilian plane and just flew. He shows up at the airport, he's walking through the airport and the storm is going.

• 4:14:16Speaker 01

  So everybody thinks he's there for the storm. You know, it's pretty funny. But he was there for my storm, you know? And that was the biggest mistake I ever made. Cause I was just sick of all those trucks in my yard, everybody knocking on my door. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna do one interview and I'm done. As soon as I did Anderson Cooper, then it was like the floodgates were open. And I got even more people asking, cause then it was like, some of the stories out there. And it was a very short one. And then CNN calls back again and they say, hey, we want to do a documentary. So it was Kristin Kristen, because that lady, cause I was suing her with a lawyer. We couldn't use the name of the book. Lawyer Princess. They would have used the name of the book on that CNN special. Because I was fighting with her with a lawyer and it was this crap, everything was going on.

• 4:15:02Speaker 01

  She would not let us use the name of the book for the CNN thing. So it had to be, they had to title it Kristin Kristen, you know? So, I mean, this is all, this all helps with the story to tell you that I'm, I messed up a lot. Should have never done Anderson Cooper, should have never done any of that, it never gonna happen. When she was talking to me about that, I should, I didn't know anything about psychology. And when you talk to psychologists, a military person, cause we're institutionalized. We think they're trying to help, we think they're the experts, we think that they're the captain trying to make us good, or they're master chief trying to do something. But that wasn't the case at all. I don't think that's the case with very many of them at all right now. Because they're getting rid of all the terminology out of their manuals.

• 4:15:44Speaker 01

  They're erasing a whole part of that book to try to make everybody a transgender. And that's why I quit doing the counseling, because it's criminal what they're doing. They're teaching all these people all, like, it's, it's not right. You know, they're making people transgender. And that's what, they didn't do that to me. I did it to myself. Cause I just fell into it. And I was just like, I don't care. At that point, I didn't care.

• 4:16:09Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, you were in a very vulnerable state, you know, and then it took advantage, it sounds like.

• 4:16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:16:16Shawn Ryan?

  When, so how did these conversations go? You know, it's, it obviously started with you showing the picture. And then.

• 4:16:25Speaker 01

  Well, then the next day we met, and then we met more. And then it was just, the questions were the questions that I would have been asking myself if I was a counselor. You know, the digging and trying to figure stuff out. It's a counselor work. I want to know about your childhood. I want to know about your military. I want to know about, where did the PTSD come from and all this other stuff? And where did that? And so all the stuff she was doing was, it was counseling sessions.

• 4:16:48Shawn Ryan?

  At what point did, did it come up to actually transition?

• 4:16:53Speaker 01

  Oh, pretty quick after. Yeah. Real fast after.

• 4:16:58Shawn Ryan?

  What did that initial conversation sound like?

• 4:17:01Speaker 01

  I don't remember. I just remember that pretty soon after I was getting dressed all the time and I didn't care anymore. And I was like, I'm gonna do it. And I don't care what anybody says. And, uh, I'm just gonna try to figure something out. And I said, if this is the only way I can find happiness for myself, then this is what I'm gonna do. And so I still had that job, you know, that really good job that I really messed up. And, um, when I walked into Pentagon like that, it was like, it was nuts. And then they can't fire you for it. But they sure can't stop calling you on the phone. They sure can't stop sending emails. They sure can make it really difficult.

• 4:17:44Speaker 01

  And, um, and it wasn't all on purpose. Cause at that time, man, I was a mess. And so I would have done the same thing to me. And I deserved it. You know, and I didn't deserve that job. And so because I started getting less and less communication, less and less contact and doing my projects. For me, I was like, I was like to the guy, I was like, I'm not doing as much work anymore. So, I want to cut my work week down in half and just half salary, you know, and, and just, just do this. I says, okay. Immediately. And so I'm at half pay now because I'm not doing the same work. I volunteered that. And then after about six months of that half, I was just like, I went back in there and I says, you know what? I said, I'm not, I'm not doing what you guys hired me for.

• 4:18:28Speaker 01

  This is not at all what you guys expected or what you hired me for. I said, it'd probably be better just to let this contract go and just, I'll just, I'll just go away. And they're like, okay.

• 4:18:40Shawn Ryan?

  Did you ever take hormones?

• 4:18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, for a little while. Yeah.

• 4:18:45Shawn Ryan?

  How long is a little while?

• 4:18:46Speaker 01

  So, a couple of years.

• 4:18:49Shawn Ryan?

  What did that?

• 4:18:49Speaker 01

  Not even, not even cause it probably wasn't even a couple of years total.

• 4:18:53Shawn Ryan?

  Couple of years?

• 4:18:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I would say a couple of years, just to, I don't know how long, because it was on and off. And I wasn't, I wasn't very good with it, you know? About taking it and doing it on time and making it all work. And it was, it was patches you had to put on. And then some pills. And I wasn't, I didn't really, I didn't, I don't think my heart was in it like fully. And that's probably why I didn't really, like really chase it.

• 4:19:16Shawn Ryan?

  I mean.

• 4:19:16Speaker 01

  And I, I don't know why. I was looking back and I was like, I don't know why I was so like,

• 4:19:22Speaker 01

  I was never really part of that community either, because they even knew it. That whole transgender community never accepted me, really. You know, I was always like kind of on the outside. I was never invited to their parties or their stuff. And they have this whole list of people who are like the influential transgender people, it's called. And it's supposed to be this list of all the, you know? And it was like, everything that I did and that CNN stuff and in that movie and all the other stuff that I was doing, I was trying to help people. It's like, I was clearly like one of those people that would have had on that list, but they boycotted me. Cause they all hated me. I think a lot of them knew that I just wasn't really like them. You know, inside they all kind of had this suspicion, you know?

• 4:20:04Shawn Ryan?

  What was the

• 4:20:05Speaker 01

  I was thinking it good.

• 4:20:06Shawn Ryan?

  What was the hormone treatment like? Did that alter your mental state?

• 4:20:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:20:12Shawn Ryan?

  I would, I would think it would, I mean.

• 4:20:14Speaker 01

  It does. The, um, it's basically a blocker of testosterone. Then they add synthetic estrogen. And that's what they do. And then for the kids, when they start talking about hormone blockers, what they're doing is they're blocking all of it. You know, they're doing like a really big one. And that's gonna be the same. The hormone blockers they're giving kids right now is the same pharmaceutical, same drug that they give to prisoners, to pedophiles when they wanna chemically castrate. If you wanna chemically castrate a prisoner who's a pedo, they can't do that anymore 'cause it's inhumane. I think it'd be the best thing for them. But it's the same drug they're giving kids. That's criminal. That's what they're doing.

• 4:20:57Speaker 01

  And every kid they start doing that to is money in their pocket.

• 4:21:01Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they're doing it right here in Nashville, Vanderbilt University. Vanderbilt University.

• 4:21:06Speaker 01

  It's criminal.

• 4:21:07Shawn Ryan?

  Is doing it.

• 4:21:08Speaker 01

  Is criminal. Now, some of those kids will turn out to be transgender. Some of those kids will turn out to have genitals for you. Some of those kids will turn out to have autogynephilia. And so if you take, let's say, a hundred of those kids, you know? If fifty of those kids are transgender, the other fifty, they're hurting. And they're not talking about that.

• 4:21:27Shawn Ryan?

  I know.

• 4:21:28Speaker 01

  You know? And that's what I think that where their biggest mistake is right now is even with those drag queens and even with all this push they're doing on these kids. It's like, well, if they're transgender, we just want them to be happy. It says, yeah, but what if they're not transgender? What if they're only transgender because they're going to school? And when they sit in their classroom with their teachers, all they're seeing is rainbow flags and all they're hearing about is gender stuff. And all they're getting fed is that. And then as soon as they show up and they say anything even closely resembling being transgender, they get love bombed by the teacher and by a whole bunch of the other students. And because they're just a really lonely, depressed kid or whatever's going on. But let's just say it's a little girl. Let's say she wears glasses, that she had, she has red hair.

• 4:22:11Speaker 01

  And she's a little awkward 'cause all girls are awkward at that age, you know? They're grown and they're going through puberty and stuff is going on, you know? And I can tell you that almost every female I'll talk to. They will say that when they were growing up, you know, they hated their body and they had this and they have all this. Girls have the hardest time, especially nowadays because of the Kardashians, all their crap. You know, we're making these girls hate their own bodies. And so what do they do? And especially for that little girl who's having a really hard time. And she sees all those boys over there and she sees what's going on. She's go, well, I'd rather be a boy. You know, they're having a way better time. If I'm a boy, everybody's gonna like me. And so she does it a little bit. She starts being a tomboy. They push her into transgender.

• 4:22:57Speaker 01

  And then next thing you know, she's on hormone blockers. And next thing you know, she's a double mastectomy. Just like Chloé Cole. At fifteen years old. She had a double mastectomy. She was a tomboy. And now she's like nineteen or twenty. And she's on, she's talking to people and she's saying how big of a mistake it was. And she's saying how she got love bombed, how it all happened to her. And what happened to her. And now she's a woman, a young woman with a double mastectomy. And she has the deepest voice because she was on testosterone for a long time. And she has a lot of other issues going on. So you're going through puberty. And you're getting chemically castrated. And then you start taking any hormones and all that. You're going through puberty. That's the introduction of all these chemicals to your body. You know?

• 4:23:43Speaker 01

  And so your body is already in this huge struggle and that's why puberty is so hard. And you're adding all this other stuff on top of it? They, doctors, have no idea what they're doing. The data they're using. To give these puberty blockers out is a prison data from all those pedos.

• 4:24:00Shawn Ryan?

  That's what they're using?

• 4:24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. They're using data for being transgender for all this stuff. Is by that dude. Um, what's his name? Freaking, he was a pedo and he was experimenting on little kids. He was experimenting, Kinsey, Alfred Kinsey. The Alfred Kinsey experiment that he did on kids. He was masturbating off a four-year-old kid. I think it's in, uh, table seventy or seventy-one. Look it up. Alfred Kinsey, table seventy or seventy-one, whatever it is. He, he masturbated a four-year-old kid. In a day. And the kid, um, was masturbated twenty-six times and he ejaculated like, um, half of them.

• 4:24:42Speaker 01

  That's what they're using for their data is this Alfred Kinsey guy. And it's clearly bad data. It's clearly data that was manipulated. You know, and that's why they say that children are sexual at birth. And that's why they say that a baby is sexual. Cause they were also doing it to babies. They, they, they made it happen. I mean, everybody, it's like, it's. It, it makes me hurt so bad for all these kids and all the stuff that's going on. If you take that hundred kids who they're making transgender. I guarantee you at least 50 of them are not.

• 4:25:23Speaker 01

  Well, I don't guarantee you, but I will tell you what, because of my experience and what I know is happening and how hard to push is. And how effective love bombing is to somebody who's depressed and somebody who really hates himself. If you really hate yourself and you're really, all that's going on and you get love bombed. Because you're wearing a dress, you're gonna wear a dress. Cause that's your only pleasure in life. It's your only happiness. It's the only time you're, and that's just like I said earlier. That when I was having a really tough time, if I put on anything even slightly feminine, it would make me feel better. And it wasn't because of the dress. It wasn't because of the femme. It wasn't because of all that. It was because I was trying to escape my life that I was in.

• 4:26:06Speaker 01

  Nothing to do with the femme stuff. And these are all the mistakes that are being made that nobody wants to talk about. Cause automatically as soon as you put any of this up online, you're probably, you're gonna have so much hate. And I'm gonna have way more hate. I'm gonna have more death threats. After I was doing the Robbie Starbuck thing, it wasn't, you know, uncommon for me to get death threats. And I do believe that probably me doing this right now, it'll probably happen. You know, and I'm gonna try to protect myself, but I don't have a doubt. That me talking about this much stuff and talking about it, I'm taking away a lot of money. I'm taking away millions of dollars from Vanderbilt right now. They have gender teams, and this is why I said it's the why they're doing it.

• 4:26:52Speaker 01

  It's all money. Because as soon as you make a transgender kid, you have a client for life, you have a customer for life, you have a patient for life. There's complications, there's constant pharmaceuticals all the time. There's constant updates, and there's a lot of surgeries. So they created these gender teams with one doctor and his anesthesiologist and all the nurses, everything else that does it, to do the gender surgeries. They make $450,000 for one surgery. And it's all paid for by insurance. So it's a huge scam between insurance and the administration in the hospital. It's not the doctors. The doctors are caught between a rock and a hard place. If you go to any one of them doctors at Vanderbilt, there'll be some of them that are really fired up about it because they're convinced that they're helping these kids.

• 4:27:38Speaker 01

  And that's that, that total narcissistic compassion I'm talking about. They're only helping themselves, and they're getting a lot of money doing it. So $450,000 for one surgery, and the surgery takes about four hours. And they're doing these things, pumping them out.

• 4:27:55Shawn Ryan?

  Did you do any surgeries?

• 4:27:56Speaker 01

  The administration, breast only, and some facial stuff. And I regret every one of them. And I'm fighting back to go back to at least a little bit of who I was before, physically and mentally, but mostly spiritually. Because it was a spiritual hole that I went into about, I don't know if you know very much about the Hermetics, about Hermes,

• 4:28:24Speaker 01

  about how they see humanity and agnostics and all that. So human beings and the way they see us is we are the temple, we are the highest or the apex. And everything we do is man's pursuit of man's perfection. Nothing to do with God or a spirit or a creator or the code of DNA that was actually in us. They think they can do better. They're rewriting the DNA. They're rewriting humanity to try to be a better human. And this is transhumanism. And that's the full extent of where it's going into is transhumanism. And that's why the Neuralink and everything they're doing is part of the transhuman agenda, transhumanist agenda. It's all part of it.

• 4:29:10Speaker 01

  I mean, I could go into this stuff for a long time, but you can track it all back in Hermes and agnostics and going into a lot of the way we see ourselves, that we are not special, we're just a rock floating through space, spinning at a thousand miles an hour and going about a million miles an hour towards the center of the universe. There's a bunch of other stuff going on. The vortex calculations, everything else, how we're spinning. There's, it's intense calculations, which pretty much proves why we're not doing any of that, you know? But if we're that third rock spinning through the universe, that means nothing, we're just lucky, evolution and all that, then none of this matters. That's the end goal of what they want. But if this is a temple and this is special, this is created for a purpose, it is, the

• 4:29:54Speaker 01

  earth was also the same thing, then we, we have to do everything we can to care for this. And what they're doing right now is nothing but damage.

• 4:30:03Shawn Ryan?

  So there was, there was no, everything was encouragement to go through with this. There was no, maybe we need to think about this, maybe we need to think about the trauma.

• 4:30:12Speaker 01

  Jim Campbell, a SEAL team guy, that he wanted, like, there's a few SEALs that challenged me on it and they really, but it was, it was more like a fight challenge. It wasn't really a mental challenge or intellectual challenge or a spiritual challenge or any challenge that made any sense. Like if it was a psychological challenge, that they actually started digging into it, like actually happened to me later in life and thank you, you know, to anybody that did that, and I know a couple of people, but it was mostly my fiance. It was, it was a hardcore intellectual challenge to me, you know, for me to really start digging in and COVID helped, you know? It was a fact that something happened on this earth, that they were putting out data and there was evidence that the data wasn't really right, you know?

• 4:30:57Speaker 01

  And there's a bunch of other stuff and it was like, this isn't really adding up. You know, and so that started making people think and waking up, you know, and looking at it. And that's what I start taught you earlier about the apocalypse, you know? The word apocalypse in Greek and Latin and all the other ones, derivatives of it. The word apocalypse and what they said in the Bible and what it really meant was awakening. It was about the lifting the veil is actually a more direct interpretation. But the veil is lifted and the veil is lifted right now because of what happened in 2019, 20. People are starting to realize what's going on. We see the Rockefellers, who they are. We see Rockefeller, Rothschild. We see Gates, we see all of them. I know what they're doing.

• 4:31:42Speaker 01

  And when I see anything to have to do with 33 or one eye or anything above Joaquin, Boaz, all the temple stuff. I know all this stuff because I studied it, you know? I know everything they're doing. And the thing is, it's a, it's a very evil agenda. And it's exactly what I said. It's about transhumanism. It's about the human being the top of that pyramid. And there is nothing above us. It's about making us the perfect thing. That's when you have to take Joaquin and Boaz and that. You have to go to the third and that's a combination of the two. And that's transgender too.

• 4:32:21Speaker 01

  Baphomet.

• 4:32:24Speaker 01

  You know who Baphomet is? No, I don't.

• 4:32:29Speaker 01

  It's Lucifer. It's a, it's a worship being, you know, you know, all of them, you know? There's, there's an agenda that is so deep and so entwined within all of our societies. There's not very many places on earth that doesn't have this really deep, you know? So I'm talking about like an international world deep state. Whenever Trump was talking about the deep state in America, you know? It's, it's pretty bad and they're all connected. And that's why when you see a picture of President Obama sitting on Bush Senior's lap as a kid, that's when you start really seeing that they're all connected. When you see Bush Junior debating as a presidential debate, debating against one of his brothers,

• 4:33:14Speaker 01

  you know, from the same fraternity, you know? So it's ridiculous how entwined and everything really is. So pretty much exactly after Bush Senior, every one of them has been connected, except Trump. He was the only one that was kind of off, you know, out of that, that he could actually say things that weren't controlled, you know? And that's the problem right now is that every president is picked and placed to do exactly what they're told. They have no freedom. They have to answer exactly to the one person.

• 4:33:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:33:48Speaker 01

  And I don't know what you know about the Catholic Church, but there's also a really twisted thing going on inside the Catholic Church. The Library of Alexandria is in the bottom of the Catholic Church. It's not lost, it wasn't burned. You know, that was his cover story. If you go down four levels under the Vatican, that's where it's at. But you have to get pretty deep in there, it's all locked up. They won't let anybody in there.

• 4:34:11Shawn Ryan?

  How far, how far were you prepared to go with this?

• 4:34:15Speaker 01

  Well, that's the problem is I've gone so far right now that all of them now are gonna be looking at me and I don't care though, because the thing is, is the veil's lifted and I wear the armor of God.

• 4:34:24Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, with the transition, how far were you prepared to go?

• 4:34:29Speaker 01

  All right, as far as you ask me questions, you ask me anything.

• 4:34:36Shawn Ryan?

  Were you gonna dismember?

• 4:34:38Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 4:34:39Shawn Ryan?

  Were you gonna dismember?

• 4:34:40Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 4:34:41Shawn Ryan?

  No?

• 4:34:42Speaker 01

  No. So I didn't have any full surgeries, if that's what you're asking.

• 4:34:46Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 4:34:47Speaker 01

  So there's, um...

• 4:34:51Shawn Ryan?

  Were they trying to convince you to do that?

• 4:34:54Speaker 01

  No, because at that time, they already knew that I was such a loose cannon that nobody was really talking to me at that point. So I would have to do everything and make it all happen and really start pushing in a direction, you know?

• 4:35:08Speaker 01

  So there's, um...

• 4:35:11Speaker 01

  And it's also a surgery that's just... It's not experimental anymore because they're pretty good at it. But there's a lot of complications, you know, with a lot of folks.

• 4:35:20Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I would think.

• 4:35:21Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I know some of them where the anal cavity actually connected to that new cavity they put. And so it's pretty much, it's just, it's really bad. And I know another one that had it all done, and the depth is about a half inch. And it hurts really bad when she, you know, she pees. So there's a, there's a whole bunch of stuff, and they're all in constant pharmaceuticals, all of them, and constant maintenance. So there's a lot of money in that. So they get $450,000 just for that one surgery. The breast augmentation would be about $20,000 to $50,000, depending on the insurance and the complications and everything else. Plus, there's, there's a lot. Facial surgery, you're talking about up to $100,000 to do anything with your face.

• 4:36:04Speaker 01

  Um, when you start talking about, uh, voice, uh, coaching, and then all the other therapies and everything else. You're talking about, you know, a few million dollars per person going directly into the pharmaceutical and the medical administration, not always doctors. That's why I said the doctors are in between a rock and a hard place. The doctors are in between insurance and the administration of the hospitals. That's why Vanderbilt, I feel sorry for all those doctors, because most of them probably don't want to do this.

• 4:36:32Shawn Ryan?

  Well, then they shouldn't do it.

• 4:36:34Speaker 01

  They know what's wrong.

• 4:36:35Shawn Ryan?

  You know?

• 4:36:35Speaker 01

  But if they, if they voice out their opinion, then they're immediately fired.

• 4:36:39Shawn Ryan?

  Well, sometimes you just have to stand up for what's right.

• 4:36:42Speaker 01

  If we had some doctors that started having that integrity and started having that, and their Hippocratic oath, if they knew what that oath really meant, and they knew that out of half of the people you're doing this to, I'm telling you, at least half or more is a lot of other stuff, you know? Or it's just someone who's gay, that just, it's easier for them in society. And that's why I think a lot of the gay community and the lesbian community are saying that transgender people is actually homophobia.

• 4:37:09Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 4:37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of them. But they don't voice it because as soon as they say that, like they'll say it to me because I'm pretty loud and they know where I stand. A lot of them tell me that stuff. And a lot of females, you know, real females will tell me. For the fact that I just said real females, I'm gonna get a ton of hate. But I don't know, because it's hard because they keep changing the definition. Biological female. Biological female. I wish we could use the word female for females and use woman for every other group. Because woman is more society driven, maybe. But a female is more biological. So if they would have at least given us the benefit of doubt that we're smart enough to know that if I say the word female, I'm just talking about biology and I'm talking about the person.

• 4:37:52Speaker 01

  Because you can't say biologic a transgender person is a biological, is a female. Because they had to have all the surgeries, they have all this stuff done. And the same thing, if you have an obese child, you don't take their large or small intestines and cut it in half. So, I mean, I know someone, you know, like someone who was so caught up in that, that this is a sexual attraction and problem that they are also not approaching. It's a Kardashian influence for all this. They're making all these women get all these extra surgeries because they want to be more sexually attractive than their partner. And so it's a sexual arousal thing for a partner. Because their partner looks at all the Kardashian stuff and see what they're doing. So it's big butts, big lips, and all the other stuff that they're doing. And then the makeup and all this other stuff and all these surgeries and boobs and all this stuff.

• 4:38:37Speaker 01

  Well, that's going down to these kids. So you have teenagers getting breast augmentation because they're looking up to that. And so this is the same as gender dysphoria. It's a, it's a gender dysphoria, woman to woman. It's in their own selves and it's not transgender dysphoria. It's a, it's a same gender dysphoria. And the Kardashians are pushing that because it's a lot of money. It's the same thing. So all these women are getting all these surgeries and getting breasts and lips and butts and all these other things. Even a dude's getting calf implants, all this stuff and Arnold Schwarzenegger stuff. That's gender dysphoria.

• 4:39:16Speaker 01

  But it's, at least it's in the same gender, so it's not as bad. Actually, it's celebrated. If you have giant calves, you're in a weight room and they say, "Oh, leg day, man, you do legs." You know, they're praised for that, they're love bombed for it. But nobody knows that they're actually, you know, fake calves, you know?

• 4:39:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:39:32Speaker 01

  So the love bombing is, goes within its, their own genders for this whole same agenda that they're doing cross genders. It's all the same agenda and it's all money driven. It's all ego driven. It's all sexual arousal driven. Do you see that?

• 4:39:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:39:49Speaker 01

  That I know someone whose husband was seeing hers overweight. And so she went and got one of those surgeries. And she was like, you know, not overweight. She was like 170 or 1, probably 160 max in her entire life. She's like five, six maybe, you know, blonde haired and really pretty. She's had like three boob jobs and then she had her entire intestine cut out because her husband wasn't sexually aroused enough to her. And so she had it all done. That's gender dysphoria. And it's also sexual arousal, misplacement and all the other stuff. They should be in therapy and never would have had surgeries. Because we could have talked to them and said this and this and really worked with them. And then no surgery, don't worry about that, you don't need to do that.

• 4:40:32Speaker 01

  Because what she did right now is she shortened her life by a lot and made everything complications about, because your intestines and our bodies are amazing, amazing machines. But she has a waist like this big right now because she got rid of all of her guts. You know, their intestines are totally gone, so everything went in. She has a waist like this big now. But it turns her husband on. That's gender dysphoria. Nobody talks about that. The Kardashians did that and their entire ilk. The, the makeup industry, all of them, they push it. And it all goes down on the teenage kids, these teenage girls. That's why they're all transgender to trans men, trans boys. They double mastectomy into a boy. Because they can't keep up with the Kardashians, you know?

• 4:41:17Speaker 01

  And so they're better off over there, living as that boy rather than trying to keep up with all that stuff. And they do it to themselves within the girl clique too. Because as soon as you have that group that has the money. And it happens to the poor kids more. It won't happen to the rich girls because they have all the clothes that they want. If you're a kid in a small town in the country and you don't have the money and you're really struggling, you have hand me down stuff, you're going to become a boy now. This is what's happening. And it's the transhumanism agenda. It's all attached. The less they make us respect and value ourselves, our biology and the gift that we're given, and the beauty of the machine that we're given.

• 4:42:01Speaker 01

  I told you that my food intake is probably about one tenth of what yours is. And it's also one of the things I read in these really old books that the food intake is, it's making your system work really hard for a bunch of stuff that you're gonna poop out later, that you don't even use any of those vitamins or minerals, or any of it. You pee and poop them all out. You don't even use them. It's too much. And so what it does is makes all your systems work so much harder. And it wear and tear and all that. You're making your life shorter because you're eating too much. You're taking too many vitamins. You're drinking too many of them Red Bulls and all them special drinks that everybody's making nowadays. They're garbage. You know? And drinking the cold water and the ice is causing more of the issues. And you should be drinking warm water.

• 4:42:46Speaker 01

  And then everything that I'm talking about, and I can tell you all the nutritional stuff that I've been learning over, over time. It's just, everything that's happening right now to us as humans is for the same reason. It's an agenda. It's to make us not like ourselves, for us not to respect ourselves, for us not to see the gift, to see the beauty of it all. The machine, the beautiful machine. To make us destroy that machine into something else. And it's something that's man-made. That's the full thing that they want is the top of that pyramid. It's not God, it's man for them. It's horrible. It's evil. It's an evil agenda. I'm not saying transgender people are evil because they bash me on that all over the place. The transgender ideology

• 4:43:31Speaker 01

  and a transhumanistic agenda is evil. And it's the transgender agenda, it's transgender ideology. It's not the people. There's a lot of people getting trapped into it. A lot of people are pushing way into that because that's what they're being told is the right thing. Just like with me.

• 4:43:49Shawn Ryan?

  At what point did you come to the realization that this wasn't you?

• 4:43:56Speaker 01

  I don't know, starting about four years ago, you would notice there started being some social media posts and some other stuff. And you'll see in pictures when I'm like a long haired, kind of a cute guy, and that's all. Oh, but then there's breasts and some of the clothing, oh, it's a girl. So, but it was just, it was, it was a while ago I started getting the inclination, but it was way more when I started having some really deep conversations with Courtney. You know, that's when it really coalesced, that's when it all came together. And I was like, lightbulb went off. This is, this is all wrong.

• 4:44:34Shawn Ryan?

  How, how long have you?

• 4:44:35Speaker 01

  I've been wearing flannel shirts in the summertime. You know, I've been wearing these flannels for every interview for a long time.

• 4:44:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:44:42Speaker 01

  But, and even in some of those other interviews, like on Joe, when I was on with him, I was trying to cover it off and trying to be as less as I could, you know? I had all the long hair, it was all like in these braids, real tight, and my flannel shirt, and I just, it's like, I, I, it wasn't me, but it is still part of me. You know, if you have gender dysphoria, or autogynephilia, or the transgender to go the full spectrum, the full, you know, thing, is, um, it never leaves you. And if you want to call me transgender for life, then it's like an alcoholic being called an alcoholic for life. You know, I don't really believe it, but there's always that, the thoughts are there.

• 4:45:23Speaker 01

  It's like, I can't make the thoughts fully all go away. It's almost totally obliterated, it's totally gone. But there's always that thing, because it's still like, I look at pictures and I go, oh. Every time I look in a mirror, I see my face, and I, and, and she's caught me a couple times when I look in a mirror and she says, you're okay, you're beautiful, just like you are. I go, yeah, but I damaged myself so much. I don't look like I should look. When I look in there, I don't see myself. I see something that I destroyed. And she and she'll just give me a hug and hug me until I stop, you know? And I'm like, thank you. I mean, I I still I still don't see it. I still see so much damage. You know?

• 4:46:02Speaker 01

  And it's not damage that like getting blown up or it's not and I I shouldn't have said that because then I think about Jay when I I looked over at Jay's sign over there on the wall and I go, well, it's not damage. But when I look at it, it's not me. And so I see that as damage. You know what I mean?

• 4:46:18Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 4:46:18Speaker 01

  So it's not something anybody else will ever see as damage. You're gonna look at me and go, wow, you're you're handsome and you're this, you're that, and you're good looking person. Cause I don't have like, you know, I'm not quasi moto, you know? But when I look at it, I see quasi moto in a mirror. You know? That I shouldn't have done that is this and this and this. You know? And this is the thing that Chloe Call, a fifteen year old, who is now nineteen or twenty, who's seeing it? And how many more kids we have to do that to? They're gonna be in the same place that I am. And now here you look at me as a fairly intelligent person. I think about a lot of stuff and I really try hard to do the right thing. And I fell in this. What's happened to the teenagers?

• 4:47:03Shawn Ryan?

  Chris, you're an extremely intelligent person. I mean, we just went through your career.

• 4:47:07Speaker 01

  No, I just.

• 4:47:08Shawn Ryan?

  It's phenomenal. I mean, I'm I'm serious, you know? So this can happen.

• 4:47:13Speaker 01

  It's persistence.

• 4:47:14Shawn Ryan?

  To you.

• 4:47:14Speaker 01

  If it happens to me, then those teenagers don't have a chance.

• 4:47:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:47:18Speaker 01

  You know, and they're pushing the age even earlier. So do you know that there's actually laws and people are really pushing for the age of consent to change?

• 4:47:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I do.

• 4:47:26Speaker 01

  So the age of consent, they're trying to push it back to like ten or eleven years old. Do you know what happens when the age of consent changes? Then those parents have no say. That kid can go in there and do whatever they want.

• 4:47:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:47:38Speaker 01

  You know what else happens when the age of consent changes?

• 4:47:41Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 4:47:41Speaker 01

  F scenes list becomes moot.

• 4:47:46Speaker 01

  So Epstein, doesn't matter, what they're doing is fine. It's okay. That's where they're going.

• 4:47:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:47:56Speaker 01

  That's what they want. Cause all the people on Epstein's list are pretty powerful people. Lot of them.

• 4:48:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:48:02Speaker 01

  You've seen the flight logs. There's flight logs, you look at those flight logs that went to Epstein's island. If they were there for more than an hour after they stepped off the plane and saw what was going on, they were to get back on the plane. None of them did. They all stayed there for a long time. What were they doing? So that flight log is basis of the list.

• 4:48:22Shawn Ryan?

  We know what they were doing.

• 4:48:24Speaker 01

  So it disgusts me. Everybody knows. It disgusts me that we still allow it. It disgusts me even more, they're trying to push the age of consent lower. Do you wanna make a ten year old? An adult, that's what you're doing. So that ten year old should also be able to have, sign up for the military. A ten year old can get tattoos, a ten year old can drink. So you need to change the drinking age. You need to change all of them. If the age of consent is changed, you better change drinking age. You know?

• 4:48:56Speaker 01

  But they don't think about this stuff. They don't underst- or they do understand, a lot of them do. But the general public? That's a problem. And general public needs to wake up. And if the general public stands up?

• 4:49:10Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think, do you, do you, do you think the general public is not awake, or do you think it's stupidity?

• 4:49:15Speaker 01

  They're not aware. No, they're ignorant. And ignorance is no big deal. You know, I've been ignorant about a lot of stuff. Ignorance is something you can fix. Ignorance just means I don't know. You know? The general public is ignorant to all this stuff. The general public doesn't know. If they do know, they think it's fake or something, or they think, oh, somebody's making that up. So well, if somebody can make this up, then why can't somebody make up the other two? So why don't you at least look at all of it? They won't even look at it.

• 4:49:44Speaker 01

  So here's an example, in Brazil right now, perfect example. In Brazil right now, ninety-two percent of the people are saying they don't want, is it the mask mandates? Oh, it's the vaccine. So down in Brazil right now, it's ninety-two percent of the Brazilians, the people, the Brazilian people, ninety-two percent say no vaccines. You cannot mandate these, you can't do anything. No. And the government said, no, we don't care. If you don't take the vaccine, you go to jail. You speak out about the vaccine, and you say anything bad or negative about that vaccine, you go to jail. So ninety-two percent of the people say that. So what happens in the jails when you start filling the jails up? Do you know who they let out? In California, they just let out all the pedos.

• 4:50:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:50:29Speaker 01

  They released them to the wild.

• 4:50:33Speaker 01

  Why aren't they still in jail? They should be, because they're filling the prisons up with people that just have a problem with the government. Saying, I'm not, I'm the best person the government would ever have on their side. I'm, I'm like, I'm all about leadership. But if leadership is failing, I'm gonna call it out. That's what we're supposed to do. You know, it's in the Constitution, we're supposed to be calling them out.

• 4:50:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:50:55Speaker 01

  Is it in the Constitution? It might not be, but, but I mean, basically, it's written into there, that's why we have Second Amendment, that's why they wrote it. To make sure that tyranny doesn't happen. And right now, we have a tyranny of the masses, we have a tyranny of a small group of elites, and that's what we should start fighting. Tyranny of the masses is more dangerous than a tyranny of the elite. Tyranny of the masses is dangerous.

• 4:51:16Shawn Ryan?

  How long, when did Courtney come in the picture?

• 4:51:19Speaker 01

  Courtney came in the picture, uh, two years, a little over two years, maybe?

• 4:51:25Shawn Ryan?

  Two years ago?

• 4:51:26Speaker 01

  It's been a little while, yeah. It's been a little while. But, um, started out just conversations, you know, meeting on social media, and just like a smart person, makes some comments, and I go, wow, that's cool. Or somebody makes a comment, says, I recognize that, and if you want to talk about that. I, I went through a lot of the same stuff, and I'll talk to you about it. So we started talking about stuff. And then after talking about stuff, then when we finally met, and after meeting, it was like, wow. You know, it wasn't love at first sight. It was love before that probably, but it was, it was. No, it wasn't. I'm just making that up.

• 4:52:01Shawn Ryan?

  Were you Chris or Kristen when you met?

• 4:52:03Speaker 01

  Kristen.

• 4:52:04Shawn Ryan?

  You were Kristen when you met?

• 4:52:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well legally right now, my name got legally changed because a bunch of lawyers volunteered to me. They said, hey, we'll do it for you. I wish I didn't. If nobody volunteered to change my name, I never would have changed it. But they said, they said, hey, this is something that we want to do for you and we're lawyers and we're the best lawyers in America and we'll do this for you. And so they did it all and I wish I didn't. It was the worst thing to do. So my name legally is Kristen. That's why it's Kristen on documents and social media.

• 4:52:32Shawn Ryan?

  Were you identifying as a woman?

• 4:52:34Speaker 01

  No, I was kind of in between probably. I was more like in that middle spot.

• 4:52:38Shawn Ryan?

  Leaning more towards?

• 4:52:39Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I mean it's curious. I mean, I'd have to ask her that, you know, what she really thought, but I think that she. It was a little bit of both because I was still kind of stuck in the Kristen role because it was really, it's so hard to get out of that. Because people are counting on me and I have so much other stuff going and it's already like when you jump into the water headfirst off that diving board, it's really hard to get back up on a diving board.

• 4:52:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:53:00Speaker 01

  And so for me to get out of all that took a long time. So I was partly out, not all, not even close to being.

• 4:53:07Shawn Ryan?

  Do you want her to come on?

• 4:53:09Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 4:53:10Shawn Ryan?

  Do you want Courtney to come on?

• 4:53:13Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, I think overall it'd be very beneficial. I think it would be good because the, the amount of.

• 4:53:22Speaker 01

  What I've been going through, I can never get through it on my own. Not at all. Without her, I wouldn't be here right now. Without her, I don't know where I would be. It, it wouldn't be anywhere. I'd still be just hiding. Because if you notice, like as far as like the news and the media and all that, like when was the last time you ever saw me in the media until all of this? Like very rarely. I, I don't like the media. And I even said like Robbie Starbuck, you know, great dude and um. That interview, and I told him, I said, I don't want to do any more interviews. I said, I'll do this one interview and I'm done. But then when I started seeing what was going on with the interview, I was like, well, I can't be done because people are still like really misinterpreted and really confused or they don't get it. You know, or they're thinking that I'm saying something, it's like, no.

• 4:54:07Speaker 01

  Like the bumper stickers, you know, that you can take a little snippet out of CNN, out of Fox, and it's gonna be whatever they want it to be. And so it's the same thing. People took a lot of stuff that I said on Ravi Starbuck, and they're making me into this Christian wacko, you know? And it's also even the stuff I said on Joe Rogan. It was very, I was strategic about the stuff I did on Joe Rogan. And about a lot of stuff I actually put online is that I am trying to make my one post, um, my social media account has a lot of stuff on there that all I'm doing is asking a bunch of questions. I'm looking at stuff and it's about flat earth and a fake moon and about, about all kinds of stuff. And it doesn't mean I believe all of it. It means that I'm looking at it. I'm really interested because I'm really curious, you know?

• 4:54:49Speaker 01

  And I don't know why so many people would look at that and they show me all these proofs and all these other things. It makes me even more curious about the shadows. So if you look at the moon landing, you see the lunar module and all that, and you see the shadows, and there's multiple shadows, you know? And so why would they bring these kind of huge lights up on a moon with them to do the moon landing videos?

• 4:55:11Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's not get into that.

• 4:55:12Speaker 01

  It's the sun. No, all I'm saying is that I do a lot of wacky stuff. I do it strategically because there are questions that I didn't want answered, that nobody's gonna answer. So I put it out there and say, I just wanna know, you know, is, what's up with that?

• 4:55:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:55:24Speaker 01

  You know, so my, my presence on a lot of stuff is gonna, is gonna look very, pretty far out. And it's purposeful. And I probably can't tell you all the purposes, but there's a couple of reasons why. But I am pretty wacky. I was asking a lot of questions, you know? I'm trying to figure stuff out. I don't know. I don't have all the answers and I probably never will. But I wanna know some of those answers.

• 4:55:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:55:48Speaker 01

  And that's all. And I wanted to know all the answers about being transgender. I wanna know all the answers about, about what happened to me, you know? And what happened to me in Something that anybody should go through, you know?

• 4:56:02Shawn Ryan?

  Are you still on counseling?

• 4:56:05Speaker 01

  No, I gave up on those people.

• 4:56:06Shawn Ryan?

  You did?

• 4:56:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I can do it myself better.

• 4:56:09Shawn Ryan?

  It's all internal?

• 4:56:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I just read. If I can read, I mean, not always a good book, but like I said, we have a library full of books from the 1800s. You know, because I don't believe anything written 1900 and past.

• 4:56:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:56:21Speaker 01

  You know, after Rockefeller, you know, and all that, I don't believe any of it. You know, medical or anything. So if I do anything medical, it's gonna have to be 1800, you know, right at 1899 or previous, maybe 1850, I like better in previous. But it can't be a 1900s data.

• 4:56:38Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's, um, let's take a quick break, and if Courtney wants to come on, then she's more than welcome to.

• 4:56:48Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to The Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes, and leave The Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through, and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 4:57:09Shawn Ryan?

  Courtney, welcome to the show.

• 4:57:10Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 4:57:11Shawn Ryan?

  Totally unexpected, huh?

• 4:57:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, a little bit.

• 4:57:13Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I really appreciate you coming on. But, um, so me and Kristin have had a, I think, close to a four-hour conversation now.

• 4:57:24Shawn Ryan?

  And, um,

• 4:57:28Shawn Ryan?

  how did you guys meet?

• 4:57:30Speaker 03

  We met, um, well, I had a class, um, before we actually started talking, where I did a project on, um, a presentation on masculinity and femininity, using the backdrop of Judith Butler's idea of genderism that it's performative. And so... That was the topic of the presentation. And to start it, I played Kristen's video for the class. And then I just went into just different forms of masculine expression and feminine expression. And wrote a paper. And then I emailed Kristen and said, hey, I just did this project for my class. I don't know what I said, like, you're cool.

• 4:58:14Speaker 03

  Like, I, you know, I just felt it was respectful if I'm talking about someone and using their material to at least let them know, like, I just used you for a project. And then I got an email back that was, you spelled my name wrong, which was so embarrassing. But I spelled it E-N instead of I-N, and I never did it again after that. But, um, yeah, we just kind of, it was like, kind of a joke. And then there wasn't really much communication after that. And then there was a post on Facebook that Kristen made about being in a hole. And maybe like a week or so, not long before that, I had made a similar post about being down and, you know, and just climbing out of it. And this is a veteran post. And so I said, oh, hey, I just made a post like this just recently. And then, um...

• 4:58:59Shawn Ryan?

  So you're a veteran too?

• 4:59:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did 12 years in the Air Force, air traffic control.

• 4:59:04Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 4:59:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so we kind of had that. And then we just started talking in like the DMs. And then Kristen said, call me. So I called and then it just went from there. And I, you know, I have a background in women and gender studies. And so there was interest, you know, in kind of what that was all about. I didn't have any preconceived notions about anything. It was more of just, you know, what is, what does this look like? You know, I've learned academically what it is, but I didn't have that personal connection with anybody. So there was a lot to talk about, just, you know, we had military connection and then my academics. So there was just a lot in common and we just started talking and hit it off. I mean, we were friends at first, and I think that's probably why we're so successful now

• 4:59:48Speaker 03

  is just, we just didn't go into it thinking anything, just getting to know each other and hearing about each other's lives and then it just...

• 4:59:54Shawn Ryan?

  So this didn't start out as a romantic relationship?

• 4:59:58Speaker 03

  No, not at all.

• 5:00:00Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. And it developed into one?

• 5:00:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it did, yeah.

• 5:00:04Shawn Ryan?

  How quickly?

• 5:00:05Speaker 03

  Um, I think, I think probably after my first visit, like, the first time we met face to face.

• 5:00:15Speaker 03

  There was a lot of probably other interests there, but not real prominent. It was more of like, I don't know. I would say it was two people who had a lot in common and were both missing love. And when you bring two people together like that, and they're both giving and compassionate and caring, I mean, that's just what's gonna happen, you know? So that's really what just happened. We just hung out and were friends and talked about a lot of stuff. And, you know, talking really is what spawns a relationship. I'll just say this as a little tidbit because we were talking about Instagram. But when you start communicating with someone, whether you're just like chit-chatting or whatever, you start forming a bond. And so I guess that's what happened.

• 5:00:58Speaker 03

  And so we just, I don't know, we bonded in that way, I guess, just with our life stories and all that.

• 5:01:06Shawn Ryan?

  Did you come from a traumatic childhood as well?

• 5:01:10Speaker 03

  No, but, well.

• 5:01:16Speaker 03

  Trauma is a difficult word. I don't know. I guess my childhood was not as favorable as people, but it wasn't as bad as others.

• 5:01:25Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I guess what I'm kind of getting at is where was the common ground?

• 5:01:32Speaker 03

  Oh, we had a lot of common ground. The military is a huge common ground. And then, and then I think with the gender dysphoria was a huge common ground.

• 5:01:43Shawn Ryan?

  You've dealt with that as well?

• 5:01:44Speaker 03

  I have, yeah. When I was 15, I lost all of my hair to a medical condition from stress called alopecia universalis. It started off as alopecia areata, which is like a spot of baldness, like on your head. And then just it progresses. And I eventually lost, I eventually went into totalis, which is like all of the hair on my head, really from my neck up. And then as it progressed, I went into universalis, which is hair on my whole body. So I'm 15 in a new school. And lost all of my hair. And so that was like a, you know, a time in puberty when I was coming into my womanhood. And I'm like, oh, my gosh.

• 5:02:26Speaker 03

  The, in my mind, the one thing that makes me a woman, my hair and my eyelashes are gone. What do I do? Who is gonna ever love me? Who's gonna like me like this? Who's gonna think I'm pretty? And, and just like Kristen was saying, like, there's this horrendous expectation for women to look a certain way to find a mate. I mean, our, our, you know, part of our whole goal in life is to, to procreate and to, and to reproduce and, you know, um, keep the earth going. And so if you feel, whether you are a man who is a transsexual and cross-dresses and you feel like you have to hide that, or you're a woman who is hiding alopecia under a wig, it's still hiding a part of yourself that you don't feel anyone's gonna love.

• 5:03:10Speaker 03

  And so, um, I think there was a lot of common ground there and, and a lot to learn from each other about womanhood. I mean, here I'm seeing someone do hair and makeup and all these things and, you know, I lost my hair at 15, started wearing like crap wigs, joined the military when I was 20 in a predominantly male career field. You, I couldn't wear nail polish, all this other stuff. So until I got out of the air force, I really didn't, you know, I'm not really that good at doing those kinds of things because it just wasn't a part of my life. And so now I'm seeing someone doing those kinds of things. I'm also fascinated by like the, I would say like the, the hyper feminine aspect because

• 5:03:55Speaker 03

  I didn't have that either. So there was mutual understanding and mutual learning in some ways too. And I hate to say that because it's like, I'm gonna use biological here just for ease of conversation, but I find it repulsive to have to like identify myself as something else, but it's better than the word cis, so I'll just use biological right now. But there are, there's this kind of weird space where trans women do things in such a hypered state that sometimes women can look at that and, and in times learn, right? Because it's a male.

• 5:04:34Speaker 03

  Basically showing what they want women to look like. And so in some ways, I was kind of like, okay, well, maybe is that what's like super attractive, or maybe that's how I should look, or that's how women should. There's just like a lot of complications, like a lot to unpack. But we had so much in common, and I think just mutual respect. Just like you've been through a lot, I've been through a lot.

• 5:05:00Speaker 03

  What can we learn from each other? You know, we, we might not agree on everything and, and all this, but if you can communicate that, just like, you know, just in this conversation you had with Kristen, like you now have a different opinion on trans people, or maybe an opinion, but different perspective. You might, you might look a little bit differently instead of like, ew, why are they wearing that? You might think, oh, that's, that's a bummer. I wonder if they're going through something really sad.

• 5:05:24Shawn Ryan?

  I have a completely different perspective.

• 5:05:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:05:27Shawn Ryan?

  At this point.

• 5:05:28Speaker 03

  And that doesn't happen unless you have conversations, and it's not going to happen unless you have really, really difficult conversations. Otherwise, you're just, you're just riding the surface in life. So we had really deep conversations, like a lot, a lot. That helped me therapeutically, and then I think helped Kristen therapeutically as well, mutual.

• 5:05:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:05:49Speaker 03

  So we both like lifted each other up.

• 5:05:51Shawn Ryan?

  I can say that.

• 5:05:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:05:54Shawn Ryan?

  So you, how long have you guys been together?

• 5:05:57Speaker 03

  Couple of years now.

• 5:05:58Shawn Ryan?

  Couple of years?

• 5:05:59Speaker 03

  Two years.

• 5:06:01Shawn Ryan?

  So you met Kristen or Chris?

• 5:06:06Speaker 03

  I say Kristen still, and I still use she pronouns, just because it was just a habit at this point. And if I'm honest, you know, even though there's the detransitioning,

• 5:06:20Speaker 03

  society has just pounded into our heads, like if you don't use the right pronouns, someone's going to go kill themselves, right? And if you've ever felt suicidal, if you've ever felt sad or depressed or anxious, the last thing you want to do ever is make someone feel that way. And so when we first met, like, I think there was maybe like once I slipped up and said he or him, and I just was like, I'm never going to be able to face her again. Like, I can't even live with myself. And no one should feel that way either. You know what I mean?

• 5:06:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:06:50Speaker 03

  Like, women should not be in a position to be forced to call someone else a woman that's not. But then also not want to hurt someone. You know, so it's just like walking on eggshells. Um, and so when we first met, yeah, I, I would say Kristen was Kristen and I really didn't care and used whatever pronouns and, and all that. Um, and I think I was a little bit more naive at the time to like the whole big push of all this. To whereas now, I'm a little bit more reluctant.

• 5:07:25Speaker 03

  Not because I don't care about how someone feels, definitely not that. Just because by using those pronouns, I'm also then hurting biological women who are being, what I feel like being erased.

• 5:07:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:07:39Speaker 03

  And so it's like, how do you love someone and want to support them through this and not hurt them? But also like not want to hurt society and see how this is going in the same direction. So, I mean, we, we navigated through it.

• 5:07:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:07:56Speaker 03

  You know?

• 5:07:58Shawn Ryan?

  Can I ask if you're attracted to women?

• 5:08:00Speaker 03

  I'm not.

• 5:08:01Shawn Ryan?

  You're not?

• 5:08:02Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:08:02Shawn Ryan?

  And you fell in love with, with Kristen?

• 5:08:05Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:08:06Shawn Ryan?

  So what was the conversation like when?

• 5:08:12Speaker 03

  But that answer to that is I,

• 5:08:17Speaker 03

  uh, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings by saying this. I don't see trans women as women.

• 5:08:23Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 5:08:25Speaker 03

  You might put on, like if you right now put on a dress, I'm not going to think you're a girl. No matter what you tell me, no matter what you do.

• 5:08:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:08:34Speaker 03

  Your mannerisms, your hobbies, your habits, the way you talk to me, the way you move, the way your hands are. Like, everything about you is dude, is a man. So no matter what you do, I'm, a biological straight woman is still going to feel that. Is still going to sense that. It's not.

• 5:08:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not, it's not, I don't, I don't know that there's a lot a man or a woman could do either to change that's really gonna be like a thousand percent convincing. I just don't, you know, it's more, I think society is more just catering to like, let me just be kind and happy and, and, and treat you well and cater to your dysphoria.

• 5:09:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:09:19Speaker 03

  There's no one really that's like, I hundred percent believe you, you are this. It's more of like, I'm gonna say that to make you feel really good because I don't want to hurt you. And I think that's where most people in society are at, but it's starting to turn, I think. Because this has gone too far.

• 5:09:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. What, what did the initial conversation go like when, when, when Kristen decided to become Chris again?

• 5:09:47Speaker 03

  I don't think it was like, I, I don't remember us having like a, well, today we're gonna talk about de- transitioning. It just was like, you know, you know, like Kristen said, there was, when we met, it was, I don't, I don't know that it was fifty fifty. I'd say in my mind, it was probably more seventy thirty, like Kristen, Chris, seventy percent Kristen, thirty percent Chris. But on some days, it would be a hundred percent Chris, less Kristen, you know what I mean? But I think overall, maybe more seventy thirty fifty, I don't know, I don't know. But maybe in my mind, I was just seeing Kristen, you know?

• 5:10:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:10:31Speaker 03

  But yeah.

• 5:10:33Shawn Ryan?

  How, has it affected your relationship at all?

• 5:10:36Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:10:37Shawn Ryan?

  Has it?

• 5:10:38Speaker 03

  We're like, honest, like, people could not understand us unless you recorded, we are like best friends.

• 5:10:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:10:44Speaker 03

  We talk about everything, nothing is off the table. I mean, when you, when you, you can love someone, right? You know, I, I've said I love you to people before in my past relationships, but...

• 5:11:00Speaker 03

  It's different. And I don't know that a lot of people will ever really ever reach that or feel that. When you, you know, Kristen could, could, could cut her arm off, his arm off, whatever. And I wouldn't care. Shave your head, I don't care. I don't, you know, the problem with society and what this trans stuff is highlighting is how so disgustingly superficial we are. That's why this is damaging women. Because you don't see trans women a lot of the time in the news or whatever, just wearing sweats and, you know, why did you have to get boobs? You know what I mean?

• 5:11:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:11:42Speaker 03

  Some women have a flat chest. But it's, the trans women are only wanting to be a certain type of woman.

• 5:11:51Speaker 03

  You know what I mean?

• 5:11:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:11:53Speaker 03

  Because, you know, very, you don't, you don't see it, you don't really see that. A trans woman with a flat chest, so am a woman with A cut boobs. So is that one, so is that one. Or, I don't have boobs because women, some women don't, they have a mastectomy, you know? But it's, the, the trans women push into the stereotypes. Which really starts to negate the validity of the dysphoria. Or, or the trans issue. It's like, are you really trans or are you a man playing hyper stereotypes? You know, that's kinda what it starts to look like a little bit.

• 5:12:26Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's an interesting conversation.

• 5:12:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:12:29Shawn Ryan?

  Very.

• 5:12:34Speaker 03

  And people will hear this and I don't know, they form opinions, but there's just so much. Like, I challenge anyone who ever wants to have a conver, call me, have a conversation with me. You know, don't just hear five seconds of this and make some, you know, opinion about me. Like, talk to me, because you're, you'll find that you like me more than you dislike. And I like you more than I dislike. You know?

• 5:12:53Shawn Ryan?

  Did you find Kristen attractive? Or did you only fall in love with the?

• 5:12:59Speaker 03

  Oh, no, wildly attractive.

• 5:13:01Shawn Ryan?

  Really? Well, how do you feel now then?

• 5:13:04Speaker 03

  Same, if not more. I mean, you're married, right? I don't know how long you've been married, but when you, when you met your wife, did you find her attractive?

• 5:13:12Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely.

• 5:13:13Speaker 03

  Do you find her more attractive now?

• 5:13:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 5:13:14Speaker 03

  There's no difference than this, than this relationship. It's exactly the same as any other normal relationship. It's just one, it would be like, it would be like me asking you, or like me saying like, you know? Or it would be like, uh, maybe you asking Kristen. Did you love Courtney when she was bald? Yes. Do you love her now that her hair grew back? Yes. Did anything change? No.

• 5:13:39Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I think, I think what I'm, I think what I'm kinda poking at is, did roles change at all? I mean, who?

• 5:13:46Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:13:46Shawn Ryan?

  With the masculinity, you know, being more prominent now than it, than it was.

• 5:13:51Speaker 03

  It wasn't.

• 5:13:51Shawn Ryan?

  Two years ago.

• 5:13:52Speaker 03

  It wasn't.

• 5:13:53Shawn Ryan?

  It wasn't.

• 5:13:53Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:13:54Shawn Ryan?

  It's the exact same.

• 5:13:55Speaker 03

  Like.

• 5:14:06Speaker 03

  What I observed in my studies and in my personal life is,

• 5:14:16Speaker 03

  you can't make a dude a woman. And you can't make a woman a dude. Okay? No matter what you put on, there's going to be things that these people do and say and like and hobbies and all this stuff that, that, that go in one direction. So no matter what Kristen did or how, however she presented at the time, the, the,

• 5:14:36Speaker 03

  the underlying persona, vibe, energy, whatever you wanna call it, was masculine. There was no like, you know.

• 5:14:48Shawn Ryan?

  I can see it.

• 5:14:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not like.

• 5:14:49Shawn Ryan?

  I can see it.

• 5:14:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, yeah.

• 5:14:51Shawn Ryan?

  I've seen, I've seen the photos, I've seen the motorcycle photos, I've, I've seen.

• 5:14:54Speaker 03

  It's all the same person. Just with the different exterior.

• 5:14:58Shawn Ryan?

  Well, what was it like to deal with the hormone? The hormonal changes when he decided to come back? I mean.

• 5:15:06Speaker 03

  I didn't notice any.

• 5:15:07Shawn Ryan?

  You didn't know, there was no hormonal changes in mood or anything?

• 5:15:11Speaker 03

  Mm-mm.

• 5:15:12Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 5:15:12Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:15:13Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 5:15:14Speaker 03

  If you're constantly loving on someone and being loved on, are you really gonna have mood swings, bad moods, bad days? Anger, frustration?

• 5:15:23Speaker 03

  Depression, anxiety? Are you gonna have any of those things?

• 5:15:27Shawn Ryan?

  I think so. I mean.

• 5:15:30Speaker 03

  But very minor? Are they gonna be super noticeable?

• 5:15:32Shawn Ryan?

  I'll give you an example. My wife, you know, when we just had a son, you know, and there was some postpartum depression afterwards. And that was tough for us to get through. And that was, that's hormonal changes.

• 5:15:44Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 5:15:45Shawn Ryan?

  And so, you know, I'm unfamiliar and I'm just asking, you know, did you see a lot of?

• 5:15:49Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:15:49Shawn Ryan?

  Was there a lot of?

• 5:15:51Speaker 03

  No, nothing.

• 5:15:52Shawn Ryan?

  Mood swings or?

• 5:15:53Speaker 03

  Nothing.

• 5:15:54Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 5:15:55Speaker 03

  I saw nothing. But then again, like, I don't, I don't know when, like, the hormones and stuff. I never saw Kristen give hormones or take hormones or anything like that.

• 5:16:06Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 5:16:07Speaker 03

  I would say, you know, what I've noticed as far as like mood and, and things like that is just

• 5:16:17Speaker 03

  balancing all of this, you know? How, how do you, how do you talk about the trans topic?

• 5:16:26Speaker 03

  And not hurt people when you don't want to? And so that is what I've seen with the mood and like, is just the problem of like, how to talk about this without hurting people and taking your words the wrong way? So like, there's been a lot of like,

• 5:16:41Speaker 03

  you know, emotions with that, but not anything like medical or biological, like as far as like taking something or having any adverse reactions or coming off of hormones or nothing, I'm not seeing anything like that. More so just brought on by these conversations, not wanting to, you know, say the wrong thing, but then also tell your truth, regardless of if that truth might hurt somebody else, like it's your story. So there's been a lot of that with that, but.

• 5:17:08Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, you know, there is a saying, the relationships are a lot of work. What has been your guys' biggest challenge?

• 5:17:20Speaker 03

  I would say getting Kristen comfortable enough and secure enough to talk about a lot of this, because I would say a lot of my confusion in the beginning was this, it's hard to ask someone, and then, like, obviously, there's a mutual likeness that's beyond just friends, and I can imagine, like, I can only imagine, asking someone something so personal, like, why do you cross-stress? Like, is, are they really gonna wanna talk about that in, like, a year or six months if they really like you and are afraid that talking about this is gonna make you leave, or they're embarrassed? So, a lot of the struggle in the beginning was just communication, like, really trying to gently get to the bottom

• 5:18:04Speaker 03

  of this, because I can't help, or I can't understand if I don't know the information. So, getting a lot of that out was difficult at first, really difficult.

• 5:18:14Shawn Ryan?

  Do you find it easier to be more direct, you know, as time went on?

• 5:18:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I still tread lightly, you know, I still, like, I push until I know I've probably pushed, like, I'm getting to the edge, and then I just back off, and I'll think, okay, well, at least the questions, at least I vocalized it, and the question's there, so whenever you feel comfortable answering it, or if the topic comes up again, we'll talk about it. But, yeah, the communication part was hard at first.

• 5:18:44Shawn Ryan?

  Do you guys know of any other, do you have any other friends that are in a similar relationship?

• 5:18:50Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:18:51Shawn Ryan?

  Have you, have you ever thought about seeking that out?

• 5:18:55Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:18:56Shawn Ryan?

  To find common ground?

• 5:18:57Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:18:58Shawn Ryan?

  No?

• 5:18:59Speaker 03

  No, because, you know, I mean, everybody's experiences are different, and I think sometimes in relationships, if you have a problem in your personal relationship, and you seek advice out elsewhere for somebody else in a relationship, I just think it's really easy for stuff to get convoluted, and you get bad advice, or... I don't know. I'm kind of like an in-house person. If there's like a problem, I'd like to deal with it in-house instead of airing dirty laundry. I mean, I could go to a friend and say, oh, we're having this problem with this, this, this. And then the next day, Kristen and I are like 100% on cloud nine. But now my friend knows that there's a problem that we had, and I don't want my friend to think anything bad. So I just like to keep, you know, that kind of stuff personal.

• 5:19:43Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 5:19:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:19:44Shawn Ryan?

  That makes sense.

• 5:19:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I mean, it would be with any relationship. You don't want to go and as soon as you start talking about your problems in your relationship now, it's like somebody's got ammunition on you. I just don't, it's not my thing.

• 5:19:56Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I didn't mean, I didn't mean just that. I meant being able to relate.

• 5:19:59Speaker 03

  Relate, yeah. But I mean, I think a lot of those questions would be so personal, you know, so like intimate, you know. And I don't know that there's anyone, I mean, does anyone else have a transgender SEAL partner that I can talk to?

• 5:20:17Shawn Ryan?

  Not that I know of.

• 5:20:18Speaker 03

  I mean, you know what I mean? Where am I going to get advice from?

• 5:20:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:20:20Speaker 03

  So.

• 5:20:25Shawn Ryan?

  This is so interesting to me, but um.

• 5:20:29Speaker 03

  I think it's interesting to a lot of people. It's very fascinating. I mean, it is, it is for me still, you know, still trying to figure out how, how do, you know, how does this, how does it get this far? I mean, there's some questions I think I won't ever know because I don't have gender dysphoria on that level.

• 5:20:47Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:20:48Speaker 03

  You know, so I can empathize and I can try to understand, but are we all ever going to get the answers to this? Probably not. Unless we had like years of intimate conversations with each individual person to know their, you know, trajectory. But it's impossible to kind of lump everyone in. And that's, that's the problem. That's, that's, that's what's demolishing the United States is that the trans umbrella has taken in everyone. Everyone.

• 5:21:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:21:14Speaker 03

  I mean, I could right now be like, uh-uh, I'm going to be trans tomorrow because I feel this way and I felt this way and, you know, there's no.

• 5:21:25Speaker 03

  There's no checks and balances for it. It's just a free for all. And so it's just

• 5:21:32Speaker 03

  to understand each person, it would be so time consuming.

• 5:21:36Shawn Ryan?

  You have a 13 year old son?

• 5:21:38Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 5:21:39Shawn Ryan?

  How was, how was that?

• 5:21:41Speaker 03

  That's a really good, you know, that's really good to talk about. Like, how do my son, so let me talk about this a little bit. My son was in middle school. And in the public school system right now, this trans thing is hot. Being gay is hot in school right now. Rainbow flags everywhere. If you're, you're kind of like, you know, and I saw a post about grooming and about how if your teacher has rainbow flags in your room and you're not gay or, or trans or any of this, but you see that your teacher is favoring those who are, you might become that. And in that sense, that teacher is in a sense grooming. Because it's, it's favorite, it's placing favoritism or, you know, whatever that favoritism look, looks like to the child that's trans or gay or whatever. So my son, you know,

• 5:22:29Speaker 03

  I don't want to be careful because my son is 13. I don't want to, but he was getting kind of lumped, drawn into a, a rough crowd. A, a crowd that was like depressed and kids that were anxious and, and not doing so well. And my son is a bit different, you know, he, he's not had a masculine figure in his life for a while, a positive one. And so

• 5:22:53Speaker 03

  because of that, he, you know, wasn't really athletic and sports and all this kind of stuff. And so he's more games and theater and, and those kinds of things. And so he kind of found a friend group of other kids that didn't fit in to the popular group. And in that group, the trans thing started to become really popular. Like two of his friends changed their names. And now I think this year they're not. But I was starting to worry, like really worry. And so academically, I started really focusing more on that. Because like, what if, you know, what if my son's gay? Can I, do I know enough about this? To be able to help him and understand this history? So I took queer theories, so I know all about that. So I started kind of like

• 5:23:38Speaker 03

  making sure I was prepared to handle that. And what, what, you know, what I come to understand was it was circumstantial for him. You know, it, and you hear him now.

• 5:23:54Speaker 03

  And I can say this because he's a kid, but you know, I hope nobody takes offense, but, but we were in the kitchen the other day and he was like, wow, remember that time when I was almost gay? Like, think about that.

• 5:24:07Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 5:24:08Speaker 03

  That's not something he was born with. That's not a person who's a homosexual and never born that way.

• 5:24:14Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 5:24:15Speaker 03

  That's, oh, remember that time when?

• 5:24:17Shawn Ryan?

  That's a pressure.

• 5:24:18Speaker 03

  That was a pressure. And now he looks back and he was, you know, doing things he definitely would not do now. Not do, but more so wear, you know, like he had a, a pink hoodie that had strawberry milk on it. And he's like, no, I would never do that. But that's the kind of crowd, you know, and those two of his kids were, two of his friends were changing their names and like Alex or some, you know, non-binary and all this stuff. And so,

• 5:24:46Speaker 03

  again, when you're lonely and you meet other lonely people and those people start loving on you because you wear a pink hoodie and you might be them. And of course he's going to want to wear pink hoodies every day. You know, I mean, he's his, he's his, he's his own other topic. Like children who have experienced this, it's like a whole other issue. And I think that's why people now are starting to talk about this trans thing in a negative way. I feel like if the trans community just would have been trans and lived their lives and,

• 5:25:21Speaker 03

  you know, whatever, as adults, no one would have batted an eye. I mean, the whole United States loves queer people. Every company is obsessed with rainbow flags. Every, you know, it's like, it's a big deal now. It's called pink washing, actually, but, um, you know, it's a big, you don't see this happening for any other group of people. And it's, it's, now it's, it's, it's coming on to kids in a really unhealthy way. And so now, I, I feel like, or even myself included, where I could care less if someone called themselves a trans woman and did all these things, I could really care. Now I'm seeing this, whoa. This was, this is really bad. This is going in a really bad direction.

• 5:26:05Speaker 03

  There's women getting raped in prisons. There's public spaces now, you know? And it's like, what's the big deal with a trans person going into a women's restroom? Well, here's the deal. That trans umbrella can include anyone who says they're trans. That includes a pedophile.

• 5:26:23Speaker 03

  Where do children go to the restroom? Who do they go with? Their, their mom. Up to a pretty, you know, sizable age. I mean, I was taking my son into the bathroom with me, into the women's room, because I didn't want him to go in the men's room, for god knows what he could be exposed to in there. So he comes with me. But now that space, now, if he goes into a different stall, I'm like, well,

• 5:26:48Speaker 03

  who else is in here? You know what I mean?

• 5:26:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:26:51Speaker 03

  And I'm not saying that men are rapists or pedophiles or this. I'm just saying that is open, that, that umbrella has opened to now, they can identify as a female and go into those spaces and have easier access, easier predatory access.

• 5:27:06Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 5:27:07Speaker 03

  At the expense of someone else. And that's where it's gotten really ugly. And that's where I started to really be nervous, kind of. And I think there was, we, I think Kristin and I did have kind of a t- a tenuous point where I started seeing like, all this really negative stuff happen. Even to the point where we can't even define what a woman is. And I am one.

• 5:27:32Speaker 03

  And so then I'm like, you know, geez, as if I don't have enough as it is. The very foundation of my being, you know, taken away? And so then, I never saw Kristin in a negative light, but I did start to see the negative aspects of, of transgenderism, and whatever that means. You know?

• 5:27:55Speaker 03

  Most people don't even know what that means because the word didn't even, it's just kinda new. It just has taken on every single ailment that a person could have and they're like, oh, you're trans. You don't have anything else. You're just trans. You don't have anxiety or depression. You don't hate yourself. You're just trans. And that can be anybody.

• 5:28:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'm beginning to realize that is what's happening with, with, well, that's at least what happened with, with Chris.

• 5:28:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:28:23Shawn Ryan?

  It seemed like.

• 5:28:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the, and the love bombing part is, is like the biggest part of it because, you know, like Kristen said, that was established by the Mooney Cult. Like that's an actual recruitment technique that this cult would do. Like that's where it came from to get people, to recruit people. And so how many people right now in the world can say that their, their love meter is at a hundred percent? I would love to meet those people that are a hundred percent. I mean, I feel like I'm pretty high right now. I just love my life and I'm in love with Kristen and I feel like mine finally is getting high. But a lot of people are, are, their love meter's low. Everyone is susceptible. Everyone.

• 5:29:07Speaker 03

  It doesn't matter if you're a, a SEAL Team Six or you're the president or whatever. Like if you do not feel loved in this world, you are going to do whatever it takes to find it. End of story. Like it doesn't matter what you have. Like everyone deserves and needs to feel loved. And most of these people who tran, who transition, just from my observance, that's, their love meter was like rock bottom. You know, in my, in my.

• 5:29:40Shawn Ryan?

  Is anybody arguing that, your point that?

• 5:29:45Speaker 03

  I don't know what people are arguing about this really. I don't know. I think the main, I mean.

• 5:29:55Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't know what the main argument is or what the main, you know, I think it's, I think maybe perhaps it's, no, I'm just trans. I was born this way. It's not because of any other thing. I have loving parents, I have this, you know, and maybe that's like a rare case. But in just what I've seen, it's not the case.

• 5:30:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:30:13Speaker 03

  You know, I took, I took a class. It was called the Queer Art of Drag. Um, and it's just learning about drag culture, where, how it stemmed, what it means artfully. All, all this is, is as deep into it as you can get. And in that class, we had a few, um, drag performers just talk in the class. Two of them were, were male trans women. Both of them in that class said, the first one I remember, he said that he didn't, he was in a bad relationship with someone. Um, it was, it was just not good. He didn't feel happy, all this stuff. He was really depressed, went to his friend's house, who was a drag queen.

• 5:30:55Speaker 03

  And the friend said, hey, let me just, let me just put you in drag for fun. Like, let's just change your mood, let's just have a good time. And so he said, okay. And his friend put drag on him, put makeup and all that, got him dressed up in drag. And they went out and he was love bombed. Girl, you look so good. Oh, my gosh. How, how is that gonna make him feel? Amazing.

• 5:31:14Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 5:31:15Speaker 03

  That's when he started to tran, that's when he thought, maybe I should transition. He had never thought of it until up until that point. And this was, I don't remember what his age was, like twenties or thirties. Another guy, drag, drag guy, teaches at a well-known university. He, um, said, ah, I, I don't, I don't really know if I'm trans yet or not. So in university where this transgenderism is being pushed, you're in like the most hypocritical space ever. Because

• 5:31:51Speaker 03

  You can't say, "Well, he just said he wasn't sure." No, it's he's trans. It's just he's trans. Or, "Well, this person just said that they really weren't until this happened." Nope, they're trans. Like, there's no real dissection of like, what is causing this or why people are doing this. It's just, it is. You just accept them, and if you don't, you're transphobic, or you're homophobic, or you're racist, or you're a bigot, or you're any of these other things. But there's two clear examples of two men over the age of 20, who, one is, you know, maybe transitioning, and the other one transitioned because they were extremely unhappy and put on drag and got love bombed.

• 5:32:34Speaker 03

  So, you know,

• 5:32:37Speaker 03

  how in the world the medical community could think to do this to kids is so disgusting. They don't, did any of them go and take these classes? And hear these people talk?

• 5:32:51Shawn Ryan?

  Where's the line for you?

• 5:32:53Speaker 03

  As far as transitioning?

• 5:32:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:32:57Speaker 03

  Um,

• 5:32:59Speaker 03

  I mean, I mean, no professional, I'm not a doctor, but, you know, there are studies that say the brain development is not into your twenties.

• 5:33:09Speaker 03

  I would say just don't do this to kids. I don't, I, I have, I personally,

• 5:33:16Speaker 03

  am on the opposite spectrum of thinking about age, where I feel like our age for everything is way too low. You know, and, and this is just a weird experience I had. I looked back at a picture of my mom.

• 5:33:28Speaker 03

  She was, I don't know, 20 maybe? Three kids, and I look at her face in the photo, and I was like, "This is a little kid." She is so young to be out and having children and like, you know, but it's like 18, you're out the door. But really? I mean, is that just something that we've become so normal and accustomed to that 18 is an adult? You know, so you've got, you've got, you know, part of the world that's saying, "Let's lower the age of consent." And I'm thinking, "Maybe this is an issue." We're sending 18-year-olds out into the world who are getting student loans, credit card debt, car loan debt, all this other stuff, because are they really adults at this point?

• 5:34:12Speaker 03

  If the brain is not developed until you're 25 years old, then where did 18 come from? You know, it's it's more than just, um, you know, when thinking about children transitioning, I started thinking about a lot of things that we allow children or even eighteen year olds, twenty year olds to do that's really, really young without the proper brain development to understand the full consequences of of of what they're doing, whether it be good or bad, you know what I mean? And so I think for me, if I were to just go along with society, I would say, don't do this to kids, do what you want to do when you're eighteen. If you feel like that's going to change your life and make you feel less stress and less

• 5:34:55Speaker 03

  unhappiness, then then then that's for you, you know? That would be like someone, don't wear a wig. Well, I'm going to because it makes me feel good. You know, do what makes you feel your best self. But don't start pushing this on children who who cannot make this decision for themselves. You know, that's where I draw the line. No puberty blockers. I don't agree with that at all. I think, you know, before I was a women and gender studies major, I was a biology major. That's my actual passion is biology. And so

• 5:35:28Speaker 03

  as a society, we are so uneducated about how our own body works. You know, we don't know, we don't, we don't know every single thing and it would take a lot of study, just like it took me a lot of study, learning about the human body and every single function and every single thing that it does. And when you realize how specialized your system is and how one little thing can set off, you know, a cascade of events of of, you know, atrocity to your body, you would not, you would really think twice about doing that. But right now, we're in a society that's push, push, push, look this way, look this way, look this way, you know? I am super scared of like, like, I don't want to put anything in my body that's bad. You know, I'm cautious.

• 5:36:12Speaker 03

  However, when it comes to my looks, I'll get Botox in my face. That's food poisoning. Botulism toxin injected into my face so I could look a certain way to please people. It's this like

• 5:36:25Speaker 03

  We all have it. As a society, though, we have to start understanding we're human beings, we all look a certain way, and love on each other for however we look, because it's affecting all of us. It's affecting everybody. So I guess if I draw the line, I don't agree with puberty lockers at all. I don't think children should be medically transitioned, surely not removing body parts. I mean, I heard, I heard a thing with Chloe Cole, and she said, I might, I might, I'm, I realize I'm not gonna be able to breastfeed my children. And I felt sick, like, I felt like I got punched in like, the deepest part of my womanhood. Because I felt pain for her that was just unimaginable. Because she has to live with that now.

• 5:37:10Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 5:37:10Speaker 03

  You know? She's gonna have a baby, maybe, and think, what have I done? That's a lifelong, you know, thing for her that somebody else did. And that person that did that is...

• 5:37:25Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:37:26Speaker 03

  I don't...

• 5:37:26Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's an...

• 5:37:31Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's almost an irreversible decision.

• 5:37:33Speaker 03

  That actually is.

• 5:37:34Shawn Ryan?

  I just sat there and I listened to Chris say that...

• 5:37:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:37:37Shawn Ryan?

  Or maybe it was you, I can't remember, but him looking at himself in the mirror saying, "I've destroyed myself." And he can't go back to exactly the way that he looks. And that's a 56-year-old man, you know? I think it would be good to see not just encouragement from the mental health community, and maybe, let's dig in and actually find out what's really going on before we move forward to this, whether it's a... I mean, definitely, it shouldn't be happening to kids, but, you know, as an adult, I mean, it was pushed on him.

• 5:38:13Speaker 03

  Should it be happening as an adult? Like, that's a...

• 5:38:17Shawn Ryan?

  That's, that's, that's what I'm getting at is

• 5:38:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:38:20Shawn Ryan?

  There was, there was, I don't know if discouragement is the correct terminology or the correct word, but you know, there should definitely be some more looking into and not only encouragement to do it, especially when, I mean, we just dug into Chris's childhood and, and everything that took place there and that none of that went into accountability on of, or the PTSD, or the traumatic brain injury when he got blown up.

• 5:38:46Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 5:38:47Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they didn't look into any of this to see if any of that, you know, play, maybe might have played a role in this.

• 5:38:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:38:55Shawn Ryan?

  And, and it did.

• 5:38:56Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yeah, huge role. And a lot of the times, there's, there's factors in people's lives that are, that are greatly influencing this. And if you, if you lessen those, you know, if you allow the, if you give the person the tools to cope with those things, that might be, not be the, you know, the avenue that they take. Because now, you know, what hap, okay, so there's this push, right? It's all over the news. It's in Vanderbilt. It's everywhere. There's push, push, push to, to allow kids to transition, allow people to transition. Well, now we're starting to see, um, accounts of detransitioners. So now society's going to be left with people who didn't feel, didn't love themselves, so they transitioned.

• 5:39:40Speaker 03

  Then they detransitioned and they have scars or regret. So then did they go back to not loving themselves? Like, was the problem ever really fixed? Cause now it's just another, you know, added layer of, of guilt or regret that the person didn't have, you know, the person wasn't managing well before.

• 5:39:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:39:58Speaker 03

  Then you add on guilt, regret, fear, all this other stuff, because a lot of people that detransition, which is another thing, that word is not mentioned in women and gender studies. Detransitioners are unheard of. It's like they don't exist. They're like the fake, like they never really, really trans if they detransitioned. You know, that's the problem with trans. If someone has gender dysphoria, they can heal from that, right? You can go and get help for gender dysphoria. You can get therapy for that. If you're trans, you're trans. If you're an alcoholic, you're an alcoholic for life. It's like the best example. And I don't believe in that either. I feel like people aren't alcoholics for life. They can quit drinking. And if you quit, you quit. You're not an alcoholic anymore. You're not doing it anymore.

• 5:40:43Speaker 03

  But with that trans label, by getting rid of those labels, those terms, you know, in psychology, you've put a permanent label on someone. And so now, people who are like, "Well, you know, I fell in love and got a new job and my life's great. And you know what? I'm not really dealing with all those issues I was anymore. I don't really feel the need to do this anymore." They're stuck. And if they detransition, they are so shunned from that community, like, "Death threats, you're fake, you were never real trans, you're not one of us." And it's like, "Are you serious?" Like, you know, like, I see this stuff that people send, Chris, in that community, the community of love and welcome and peace and "love is love" and all that. Oh, no,

• 5:41:26Speaker 03

  it's not. It's only that way if you go with that narrative, if you agree with everything they say. If you're a woman who loves yourself, nah, forget it. You're transphobic. You know, if you're a detransitioner, well, you were never really trans in the first place. You're fake. You know, get out of here. I mean, just go look on the comments. You'll be blown away.

• 5:41:49Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 5:41:50Speaker 03

  By like, this. So then, you get people who are healed, but maybe all of their friends, because they were trans for five, 10, 15 years, all of their friends are in that community, now they feel like they can't detransition or they can't heal. Why? Because misery loves company. And if you're happy and you're detransitioned or you've healed yourself, well, you're not one of us anymore.

• 5:42:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:42:13Speaker 03

  You're not self-loathing and wishing you were something else and all this other stuff. You know, you're just happy and content with who you are.

• 5:42:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. How long has this, how long has this been going on with children?

• 5:42:26Speaker 03

  I think for a while, but it just

• 5:42:28Shawn Ryan?

  How many years? Five years?

• 5:42:29Speaker 03

  Seems like for like, the past, probably 10 years, maybe?

• 5:42:32Shawn Ryan?

  It's gonna be real interesting to see what happens in another 10 years.

• 5:42:35Speaker 03

  Oh, it's

• 5:42:36Shawn Ryan?

  When these kids become adults.

• 5:42:38Speaker 03

  How sad. How sad.

• 5:42:40Shawn Ryan?

  It's gonna be interesting to watch the relationship between their and their parents as well.

• 5:42:43Speaker 03

  What about the parents? What about a parent who...

• 5:42:48Speaker 03

  Was told your kid's gonna kill themselves if you don't allow them to transition. What parent is gonna be like, hmm, just go kill yourself? No, they're gonna be like, do whatever you need to do to stay alive. I'm gonna keep you alive. You know? And then the child's out of school where they're not being bullied and, you know, like all these other things that happen in high school. They're out of it, they're on their own, they maybe meet someone and they're like, ooh, I don't, what did I do? I'm not this anymore. Then imagine the parent.

• 5:43:18Speaker 03

  When the kid's like, Mom, Dad, I don't, you know, I don't, I'm not this anymore, I messed up. And then the parent's like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. Like I, I, you know, I can't even imagine, I cannot imagine that. I cannot imagine Chloe Cole's parents, like how they must feel. Being told by a doctor, your, your daughter's gonna kill herself if you don't cut her boobs off. And now the daughter's like, huh. And then the parents are like, huh. So that's another thing, you know, people are like, how could a Navy SEAL get, get convinced to do this? How could a parent get convinced to let their kid cut their boobs off? It's all the same pressure. It's all, it's all the same fear, it's all the same pressure, it's, it's all, it's, it's all the same. You know?

• 5:44:02Speaker 03

  And now we're gonna have all of those people. So all the parents who allowed this now needing mental help. Because they, they feel guilty and, you know? Because now their kid is, you know?

• 5:44:17Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think a lot of parents are pushing this on their kids for attention?

• 5:44:22Speaker 03

  They're doing it for, uh, they're, yeah, they're social justice warriors. It's just all, um,

• 5:44:29Speaker 03

  it's fake. Yeah, it's, it's virtue signaling. It's because right now, like, if you... I don't know how it is right now, but I've seen this in the news where people are losing their jobs. Okay, Jordan Peterson, prime example, prime example. If he's not using pronouns, he's gonna lose his job, right? So if you know that, and you love your job, and you love your paycheck, you're gonna use the pronouns. You're gonna do whatever it is that they're wanting. You know, it's gotten tyrannical at this point, because now you don't even have the choice to agree with it or not. If you don't, I'm gonna either, I'm gonna cancel culture. That's, that's the, that's the weapon, that's the weapon of mass destruction that the left has.

• 5:45:14Speaker 03

  It's cancel culture.

• 5:45:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:45:15Speaker 03

  They'll ruin your job, ruin your account, ruin your everything, because you don't agree with whatever. So now, you know, you have people that, that can't,

• 5:45:29Speaker 03

  that are so afraid of being othered, that they're gonna go along with it and want to be accepted by the crowd that's doing the damage. Right? If you've got someone, some big, huge person standing next to you, and they're looking out at a crowd, and they're just swinging an axe, and just cutting whoever doesn't agree with them, where are you gonna stand? Out in the crowd, or you're gonna stand right next to the person that you can't get hit with the axe? That's what society is doing.

• 5:45:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:45:54Speaker 03

  They are clinging to the person with the axe. And the axe that's swinging is transhumanism. And like, I'm just gonna go along with it and be on the good side. So you know what? My kid's trans. You know, you've seen, there's videos out of, you know, there's, there's, there's one out where this little boy is, mom and his brother are on camera, and they're talking about like, pride praise, or pride, or whatever. And the little boy says, well, my mom doesn't care if I'm gay or lesbian or whatever. She just, she just cares that I'm a part of it. And then, and like, what do you mean? And, and then the little boy, and it's all like, I don't know how it got out, like, I don't know why the mom released this, but

• 5:46:34Speaker 03

  he goes, well, unless it was live, and she, she's like, well, she's just, you're just gonna make me do it if I'm not doing it, or something like that. Like, the mom was forcing the kid to be a part of this, even though...

• 5:46:48Speaker 03

  He wasn't, you know, gay or anything. And so it was like, it's more or less, you're, it's not, it's not, I'm gonna make you gay or make you trans, but I'm going to make you support this. Because if you don't, you're not gonna make it in society. Because right now, society has no tolerance for people who have opposing beliefs.

• 5:47:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:47:07Speaker 03

  So I'm going to, you know, it, it's like.

• 5:47:11Shawn Ryan?

  It's like that, and it's like that in everything right now.

• 5:47:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:47:15Shawn Ryan?

  It's like that in the, in the COVID arena. It's like that in the trans arena.

• 5:47:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:47:20Shawn Ryan?

  It's like that in the race arena.

• 5:47:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:47:23Shawn Ryan?

  It's, it's, it's running rampant.

• 5:47:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's a line, right? A very clear line. You're either on one side or the other. And you wanna make sure you're, and, and if you think I'm going to survive on the side that's supporting this, then you're gonna, then people are gonna do it.

• 5:47:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:47:43Speaker 03

  And then there's gonna be people that's like, I'm gonna die on this hill. I'm not gonna support this. Like, this is not worth it.

• 5:47:51Shawn Ryan?

  So having been through, you know, what, what you guys have been through as a, as a, as a couple, what advice do you have for somebody who is thinking about, whose partner's thinking about transitioning or detransitioning?

• 5:48:06Speaker 03

  I think with, with transitioning, I would really ask, like, what is it about you that feels, you know, this way? What feels like, if I'm, if I'm, if I were, you know, part of, some of the things that I used to ask Chris, and I'm like, what feels like a woman to you? Like, what do you do or what do you think? Like, what are you, aside from anything you could put on or any kind of appearance, what are you doing and thinking that you think is more woman-like than, than man-like? And that is where the trip up, the hang up happens. For I think for a lot of people.

• 5:48:45Speaker 03

  Because, you know, like was mentioned, it's more of like an observing mimicry than than like, I want to feel like that. I want to be that. What do I need to do to present like, you know, and so you look at like Dylan Mulaney, for example. It's 1,000% stereotyped. You know, like, oh, I I went to the ladies' room and like the girl next to me asked me under the toilet for a tampon. Like, that didn't happen. It's just a stereotypical thing that you that men think happens to women in restrooms. And yeah, might or it has, but to act it, you know, it's this all, it's it's all.

• 5:49:23Shawn Ryan?

  It's pretend.

• 5:49:24Speaker 03

  Pretend. It's all pretend. It's all pretend.

• 5:49:28Shawn Ryan?

  At what point do you think you go into a supporting role?

• 5:49:43Speaker 03

  That's a different now. See, that's that I I I don't know that I could answer because I've not, you know, when I met Kristen, she was already Kristen. There was no, I didn't have to like go from like man to support you into being a woman. You know, I don't know how that would look for me now. Two years ago, when I was

• 5:50:12Speaker 03

  a little bit more under the influence of like leftist ideology, I might have answered that totally different. You know, more of like, oh, OK, well, just kind of laissez faire, blase blah about it. Not really thinking, just riding the surface. That's probably the answer I would have given now.

• 5:50:39Speaker 03

  I think with Kristen is different because

• 5:50:47Speaker 03

  it's already been established, like the feminines already have been established. But if it was just like, if I was just in a relationship with, you know, a male for 10 years, like a dude dude male and like no inclination, no, no anything of this. And then they're like, I, you know, I think that, you know, I would still support them, but not maybe, I don't know, probably the intimacy would lack. Intimacy would go down. So maybe it would go into more of like a friendship supporting role. You know, because probably that person would be pursuing other things, would want to really change their life and pursue things, different things anyways. Um, yeah, that's, that's difficult.

• 5:51:28Speaker 03

  It would be problematic for me now, for sure. Seeing what's happening to women just in general, that would be really problematic for me to be in a relationship with a man now who transitioned into a woman. With Kristen, I already, I don't know, I don't, I don't,

• 5:51:42Speaker 03

  I don't see her as a woman, but I don't necess- I, I don't know. It's almost like-

• 5:51:51Shawn Ryan?

  You never saw her as a woman, so you were, you were already somewhat in a supporting role for the detransition.

• 5:52:01Speaker 03

  I was in a supporting role for both. Like when we met, I was buying women's clothes, I was

• 5:52:07Speaker 03

  doing whatever, because like I said, like when we met, it was two people who had a lot, a lot to share with each other, who just shared it. And so that wasn't, I wasn't looking to like, get anything out of it more than just like, hey, you're cool, you've been through a lot. Hey, like maybe we can talk and like help each other out. Like it wasn't ever, I had no like ulterior motives or any kind of intention, so

• 5:52:32Speaker 03

  I immediately was in a supporting role.

• 5:52:36Speaker 03

  You know, and so that role is, you know, it would be much harder to be in a supporting role from one person going into a new gender than just going to the one they already were. You know what I mean?

• 5:52:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I can understand that.

• 5:52:49Speaker 03

  Kind of. And because, and because like, I think some of the transitioning has, had already happened, like in everyday life, you would not know, probably. You know, other than like boobs or something, but like just general like mannerisms or, you know, it's not like, it wasn't like,

• 5:53:10Speaker 03

  I don't know. I wouldn't say it was hanging out, it was like hanging out with a girl or a guy. But there were some really cool aspects of it, for sure, like fun aspects, like, you know, how many women get to be like,

• 5:53:24Speaker 03

  can I,

• 5:53:26Speaker 03

  okay, this is, this is really actually funny. Like, I, I, I didn't wear a lot of makeup, I still don't. I didn't have a lot of like feminine, like real, like wild feminine, like I've just recently also come into a lot of my femininity. I got out of an abusive marriage that was really horrible. And now I'm just kind of like exploring. So like with Kristen, I was like, hey, like, you got really good makeup, like way better stuff than I have. And so like, how many people get to have that relationship where I'm like, hey, can I get that lip liner? Can I try that? Like, I, I never even wore lip liner before. You know, so there are some like really fun, there is a fun, like happy side too, that's not like weird. You know, like how many people get to say that? Or, you know, like, whatever, like little tips or something that I, I didn't know.

• 5:54:11Speaker 03

  You know, that's just because someone wanting to be a girl and examining a girl so much might pick up on stuff that me just being a girl didn't even notice. Because I just ann it. You know, so I was, there was a lot of like, you know, fun kind of things like that.

• 5:54:30Speaker 03

  There was a lot less pressure about my hair, like for sure, like wearing wigs. Because trans people wear wigs, drag queens wear wigs. So there was a lot less of like, you're gonna judge me for how I look. Which was cool. That was like a big part of it. Lot, lot going into a relationship with no judgment. Like, how can you judge me? We both have something that we, we have insecurities about, you know? So that was good.

• 5:54:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Interesting, I never would have thought of that.

• 5:54:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:55:00Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Courtney, I really appreciate you coming on and, Good luck with the wedding and with everything.

• 5:55:07Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 5:55:07Shawn Ryan?

  I appreciate it. Thank you.

• 5:55:08Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 5:55:12Shawn Ryan?

  I want to give a big thank you out right now to all the Vigilance Elite patrons out there that are watching the show right now. Just want to say thank you, guys. You are our top supporters and you're what makes this show actually happen. If you're not on Vigilance Elite Patreon, I want to tell you a little bit about what's going on in there. So, we do a little bit of everything. There's plenty of behind the scenes content from the actual Sean Ryan Show. On top of that, basically what I do is I take a lot of the questions that I get from you guys, or the patrons, and then I turn them into videos. So, we get, right now, there's a lot of concern about

• 5:55:54Shawn Ryan?

  self-defense, home defense, crimes on the rise, all throughout the country, actually all throughout the world. And so, we talk about everything from how to prep your home, how to clear your home, how to get familiar with a firearm, both rifle and pistol, for beginners and advanced. We talk about mindset, we talk about defensive driving. We have an end of the month live chat that I'm on, at the end of every month, where we can talk about whatever topics you guys have. It's actually done on Zoom. You might enjoy it. Check it out. And if Zoom's not your thing, or you don't like live chats, like I said, there's a library of well over 100 videos on where to start with prepping, all the firearm

• 5:56:38Shawn Ryan?

  stuff, pretty much anything you can think of, it's on there. So anyways, go to www.patreon.com/vigilanceelite, or just go on the link in the description, it'll take you right there. And if you don't want to, and you just want to continue to watch the show, that's fine too. I appreciate it. Either way, love you all. Let's get back to the show. Thank you.

• 5:57:08Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Chris, we just had your fiancee Courtney on to get her perspective on everything. And I want to kind of wrap this up. So I think one of the most important questions I'm going to ask you is, for anybody that's thinking about transitioning genders, do you have any advice for them before they go through with it?

• 5:57:30Speaker 01

  Wow, yeah, it's tough. I would say, um, there used to be these protocols, and it's a Harry Benjamin per girls. And now they do this W path and some other stuff. But that's all been changed to meet the current, um, narrative or ideology, whatever they want. So they're pushing people through really fast. And so they took, the protocols have all changed. And the protocols I'm talking about are the amount of counseling sessions you have to do before you can start any hormones or anything else. It's the amount of, um, time you spend living as the, uh, it's like a real life experience is what they call it. And so if I was going to transition from male to female, I would have to do 30 mental health counseling sessions and have that signed off that I did 30 sessions,

• 5:58:15Speaker 01

  talking about all this stuff and really digging in deep. And I would also have to, um, live the real life experience as a, as the gender you're going into, male or female. So I would have had to live as the female gender, as a woman, trans woman, for a year. And then at that time, then you would get the paperwork and all the stuff. Then you can start doing the hormones and all the other stuff. Now, all of that has changed. And they basically can do no sessions. You can walk in there and just say, I'm transgender. And then you start getting hormones and everything else, pretty much. Or it's one session or something, it's a signature. But the problem with that also is that they're scamming the whole system. Is that you can get whatever paperwork you want for money.

• 5:58:57Speaker 01

  So you go into those, um, crooked psychiatrists or whatever, or whoever would give you the paper. And you pay them enough money and they're going to say 30 sessions or whatever. So there's a lot of gaming going on. But they don't even require 30 sessions. They don't even require any sessions. You can walk in, on session one, you'll be on hormones. And then a week later, you might be getting surgery. So it's just so incredibly fast and you're not really investigating with a professional. And that's why, I mean, I kind of bash the psychology, um, the whole, you know, group pretty badly because of what they're allowing to happen. Now, just like I said, the doctors are kind of stuck in the middle between insurance and money and the administration. It's going to be the same thing with a psychologist. So there's something going on that they will not admit to.

• 5:59:40Speaker 01

  The doctors want a minute, the psychologists want a minute. And if those folks start standing up, then this will change. If the doctors start standing up and telling the truth, this will change. Psychologists will start standing up, telling the truth, this will change. But just like everybody else, we're all afraid. The cancel culture and losing your job and everything else and fines. You'll be imprisoned, you know? It's just ridiculous. So one of these days, if somebody starts standing up and they start doing it, and I feel like I'm almost the first one, like really talking about some of the deep stuff. And Courtney is the same thing. Like we've both said a lot of stuff today that's not really out there, I don't think. You know, and if it is out there, it's kind of hidden or they just kind of, they mark

• 6:00:23Speaker 01

  it with those stupid little labels talking about how bad this person is because they're, and it might happen, this one too, that we're going to be marked as haters and as phobias and all the other stuff, which is totally opposite of who we are as people. And the fact is, is you're transgender and you're a good person, you did it all as an adult and whatever, and you're not doing all these rainbow flags and love bombing and doing all that stuff, then I would never have a problem ever and you would probably be a friend of mine. You know what I mean? It's like, I don't have any problem with that. But when they start doing all the things with all those love bombing, all these rainbow flags, all this push towards it. And the push, like I said, is not the people, it's not the doctors, it's money.

• 6:01:06Speaker 01

  You know, and like I said, these doctors have these gender clinics and making $450,000 per surgery, which is just ridiculous. So in every year, you have these gender clinics with one doctor making millions for their hospital. They're pulling in huge money and they're really big hospitals, the university connected hospitals, the ones that are really big, like Johns Hopkins and all the rest of them. They're pulling in, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars for gender stuff. Now are they gonna give that up very easily? No, they're not. And they're gonna push these doctors. And these doctors are caught. And if they don't do the job, they're fired. And another doctor will take their place. And that's the problem. These doctors start speaking up.

• 6:01:51Speaker 01

  And I have a lot of connections with doctors because they have heard me speak up. And speak just like I'm speaking right now. And they call me and they talk to me. And they're giving me some of the inside info about their cost and about this and about how the shortcuts are being taken. These doctors need to start standing up. You took a Hippocratic oath. You know? And you should be hell yielding people, not damaging them. You know, and just like I said, out of those hundred transgender people with all these surgeries and all the other stuff, just like Chloe, and we keep hearing Chloe call up because she's one of the first adults that are coming out really hardcore as detransitioning and all that. And I can't stand that word because there's no such thing. Never happened in the first place and it's not a D.

• 6:02:34Speaker 01

  You know, it's not a detransition because it didn't happen. The, um, the thing with Chloe though, she's one of the first adults that had at 15 years old a double mastectomy. There's gonna be a lot more of these kids that had it happen when they were kids. And as they grow up, they're starting to learn this stuff. Now in Sweden, you can see it, you can look this data up if you want to. There's this Swedish J curve with all this gender ideology and all this gender stuff. The Swedes saw it going like normal for decades, just like this, because the Swedes are about 20 years ahead of us. They've been doing this for a long time. It is Sweden yet it is. So it goes like this and then suddenly it goes, and shoots way up. And it was like 1,500% increase, or no, that was, might have been non-binary. But there's these huge increases, like ridiculous.

• 6:03:18Speaker 01

  And then the Swedish government were going, what is going on here? And they put the brakes on and they started doing, re-looking at it and really studying and finding out, because this isn't normal. For them to go from a line like this for decades and then something happened. And that's what's happening in America right now. And so why can't the American government look at this and take a look at all this other data and know that this is happening right now in America? And if we don't put the brakes on it, it's gonna get worse. And you're gonna have all these kids gonna be damaged and really hurt, all these parents. You think we have some problems right now? Ten years from right now, five years from right now, you're gonna start seeing what I'm talking about.

• 6:03:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 6:04:00Speaker 01

  And that's the problem. So, and the wrap up is that I don't have, I don't have fear of transgender. I don't have homophobia, transphobia, or any of those phobias. That is a tactic being used. It's a ridicule tactic to make us stop, make us shut up. I'm not gonna shut up. And the more they push me and try to make me shut up, I'm gonna talk louder. You know, I'm gonna talk more. And like I said, I don't wanna do these podcasts, and I don't wanna go on the news. I did that thing with Tucker Carlson one time, and it was pretty quick. It was like four minutes, or it was quick. And basically what I said there, I'm still standing by. Said, "I love people, and I love humanity, I love people, and I love our world. And, and I respect our world, and I respect us as human beings and this body that I have that was given by the grace of God."

• 6:04:45Speaker 01

  And I think that we need to stop all this damage. You know? There, there has to be something. And like I said earlier, it's like, yeah, I'm a Christian, but it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about right now. I mean, human being went through something. And went through something that damaged me. And I did it all as an adult. And now I'm looking at what they're doing now to the kids. So it has nothing to do with religion or anything else. Take that off the table. If you're a human being, and you had something happen to you as an adult, and now you start looking down there and you start seeing kids, and the same thing is happening to them? Wouldn't you wanna speak up? You know, it's just, it's just, it's, it's, it's the right thing to do. You know? And so what I'm doing right now is I'm trying to save all those kids that are pulling into this. That are not. They have gender dysphoria, they have all kinds of other things.

• 6:05:30Speaker 01

  They have depression, anxiety. They're just teenagers with hormones, and they're just not liked, or they hate your bodies, or they're just growing up. You know? They don't have a chance. And so, this reminds me of a story that will give you a little more, um, view into who I am, and, and how far I will push stuff. And how far I stand by my word, and what it really means. So I was at, um, the team, and we were doing missions, and we were going after some real big, bad dudes. And I have a ton of those stories, but I only tell like two of them. But, uh, this one story is, is, is important because... It's who I am. So we're going to this house, we're doing the clearing, we're walking through and we're doing all the stuff.

• 6:06:14Speaker 01

  And we're doing it real quiet because we haven't gone hot yet. So it's all like the cover, you know. We're just going through it, super quiet. And I get up through this room and I get up these stairs and I take this right. And at the end of this hallway, I didn't know how fast I was going, I was going pretty quick. But we usually were pretty good about that and checking stuff. But for whatever reason, I went through the door and it didn't have the number two. So I was going out there alone. And out on this rooftop, so there was a door that opened out of the rooftop. And you know in Afghanistan, they sleep on the roofs all the time because it's really hot in there and they just want to be out in the cool air. And it's the stars, it's beautiful to sleep out there on these rooftops. Plus it's the security points. So this guy was up there on security, pulling security for his family and for the compound. And hit the AK and he's sitting there.

• 6:06:59Speaker 01

  And so basically you see me. I have all the best equipment, you know, the lasers, the nogs, the night vision, all the stuff. And I'm using some terminology that, but night vision, the lasers and the gun and just totally prepped out my body armor. And we have our radios on the side with the antennas and all that stuff. So if you look at me with this green glow in there and there's all this tech and this lasers and all this stuff, I'm like an alien being, you know? Looking very high tech and very alien looking. And then I look at this guy and, you know, in retrospect, I know this guy and he's down here with bare feet and dirty and just raggy hair and his beard. And just, he had his one, you know, that thing they wear. I used to know all these things, I used to speak some language, but it's kind of washed all that out.

• 6:07:40Speaker 01

  But I see this guy up there and he's laying there at sleep and he's just starting to wake up because there's some noise and stuff that's starting to happen. Because even the animals start waking up in the compound, you know? So eventually people start waking. And the guy's just getting up and he sees it and he starts, and he's reaching up and he's got his AK, starts coming up. But I'm already off safe and I'm figuring, I'm going. I, it was a split second. I mean, I set a record in, at Shah's shooting, you know, camp, you know, the plate shooting. I'm on that top 10 because I'm a fast shooter. And so I'm sitting there just wait, I'm just there and.

• 6:08:13Speaker 01

  Dude's getting up and he's swinging up and I'm going, don't, don't. And I'm just looking at him going, don't do it, don't do it. And I'm in my head and I'm just praying. It's like all of it's going, all my energy's going to that guy. Drop it, drop it, drop it, drop it. And it's like such a close. And if he was just like this much further with that barrel, I was just like watching all of it. Why was I doing that? No rules of engagement. I could have taken him right when I walked out on there because he was up there in security and had a gun next to him. Done. But I didn't. I was going towards him, I was still walking towards him, closing the distance. And then the guy just like right there goes, and he drops it because he saw it. So it was alien versus caveman. And I'm sitting there for about whatever seconds it took me, walking towards this caveman as an alien. Different language, different religion, different culture, different everything.

• 6:08:58Speaker 01

  Super high tech and this guy with dirt. Why, why was I doing that? For seconds, I was walking towards this guy. Didn't shoot, I could have, I was allowed to, should have. I actually got in trouble because there was guys on other rooftops and there was other stuff going on in the compound. And one guy, and I can't remember who it was, I could if I really thought about it. But he saw what was going on on my rooftop. He saw across, because it's only maybe as wide as this room, it's not huge distances. So he saw what was going on over there, he saw it. And when we got done with the whole thing and the guy was cuffed, because basically he dropped the gun and I, and I kicked it away and I cuffed him up against the wall. Because I did all the bit, I did all the interrogations. So because I was ASOT type guy and I did all that stuff. So I was also the interrogator. So I'm talking to this guy, I threw my turp.

• 6:09:43Speaker 01

  And because I was like that agency ASOT guy, I always had a turp. Because I was always doing this stuff, so he's my turp. And so interpreter. So he was the guy that did all the local Pashto and I spoke some of it, but not all of it. He, um, I don't even speak very much at all, so team guide, you know? Hands up and where's the bomb and this stupid stuff. But, um. I was talking to him and he just seemed like a pretty good dude. This is after all the action, after everything was done and everything. So I'm just talking to him and I'm getting intel. I'm trying to work with him. And he didn't know anything. And the guy was like, he was not anybody we'd ever want. And I was like, just leave this guy. And then one of the other guys was like, no, we should take him, you know? Get one, you got a guy.

• 6:10:28Speaker 01

  And he had a gun, he was security. I was like, no, man, I was gonna leave this dude. And so because I was had enough voice over it, cause I was the interrogator and I was I doing all this stuff. But I was also the guy that ran source operations. So I was the field officer, you know? I was a recruiter, you know? And so I told him we need to leave this guy and they did. And so we took off and and I, you know? It was good, done.

• 6:10:54Shawn Ryan?

  He spared his life.

• 6:10:55Speaker 01

  Spared his life, but it was second to me walking up on him. Two weeks later, I'm walking through a bazaar. And if you've ever seen pictures of me, I have this big, bright red beard. Unless I dye it. And over there, I dyed it a lot cause I had to get it darker. But if you see me, I had a really red beard. And he used to call me Red Beard or Caveman. So there was always something about that. So two weeks later, three weeks later, it was a little while later. I'm walking through a bazaar and I got this guy running towards me. He's saying something in Pashto. And so I start drawing my pistol, cause I had my long gun in the in the truck. And so I start drawing my pistol out. Cause we're in a bazaar where it's like, it's not a big deal. So and it was right there on the base. It was one of the bazaars kind of attached to the base. You know what I mean? It was protected and there was guys all over and we had security towers like right there. So we just brought pistols in there.

• 6:11:40Speaker 01

  We just wanted to be, you know? And so I start reaching in and getting my pistol out and Terry puts my hand down. I says, no, no, he's saying thank you. It's like, and I was like, and me and him have been working for a long time and had some for trust. And it's the dude, it's the guy. And he sees me and he's saying thank you and he hugs me. He said, come back to my shop. And so I go back to his shop, start talking to him and we become friends, you know? And I get a really great discount on a rug, you know, cause he had his really cool shop. It's a good story, huh?

• 6:12:07Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 6:12:08Speaker 01

  That's not the whole story.

• 6:12:09Shawn Ryan?

  It was the guy?

• 6:12:10Speaker 01

  It was the guy. And so what do you think I did with that guy? So it became this amazing thing who I actually gave him over to another agency. But it was amazing.

• 6:12:21Shawn Ryan?

  You referred to him.

• 6:12:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm talking to the guy and it's amazing and good stuff. And cause the guy was very aware, cause he ran that business. He was always there, he's always traveling around, saw a lot of stuff. So amazing. And. We became friends. And so the point of the story is not all that. The fact that he became a friend, or he ended up being good for us. But the conversations I had with him was about, I don't want to be here. And I know that y'all don't want us to be here. So what can we do to get all these foreigners out? And you know, if you've been in Afghanistan, it wasn't really the Afghans that were doing most of the trouble. You know, it was everybody else. It was all these jihadists coming in there and trying to kill Americans. Just like when I was in Iraq, I got shot by more Iranians in the beginning than I did Iraqis. They were shooting at us all the time.

• 6:13:04Speaker 01

  Because they were paying money to go on the border, right there with the fence, and shooting across the Chata La Rab, and trying to get us across the river. The tigers through Fades and they come down, and you have that one strip. Well, the Iranians were shooting across at us, and all the time. But we weren't allowed to talk about that. But they're jihadists and they just want to kill Americans. It's a bonus for them. They get bonuses, I guess, when they go to heaven or something, which is ridiculous. You know, it's an Abrahamic religion, you know? We're also part of the Abrahamic religions, why can't we all get along? Or something like that. But the whole point of the story is the fact that I didn't shoot right away. And the guy was, yeah, I was in trouble. They were like, why did you do that? You brought us all in danger. I was like, no, I was right there. I mean, I was controlled situation, it's not a big deal.

• 6:13:46Speaker 01

  And plus, now I met this dude, who's a really good guy, and we're getting good intel off it. But the point of the story is about here in America. You walk around America, and everybody's fighting. Everybody's talking about phobias, everybody's calling everybody Nazis. It's all this huge fight. You walk around the street, and you're lucky if you don't get beat up, if you're late at night, and you're white, or black, or Asian, or this, or that. If you're different, if you're an other, and Courtney brought this up. If you get the term "othered" put on a you, you're gonna get it. Because that label is that dangerous label. And that's America right now. And so every time I talk, when I give these speeches out in front of these huge groups of people, and I do that, you know, like five to 10 big speeches a year,

• 6:14:31Speaker 01

  which is pretty good for me, because I'm just living off my disability and stuff, you know? So if I can give a speech, and I can make a little money off it, it's a pretty good deal. And I give leadership stuff, and I do motivation stuff. But this is one of the songs I talk about, is the fact that in America, we're all walking around, and we never give anybody a chance. I said, I'm walking in there as an alien, and a caveman on the ground, with nothin'. I gave him three seconds. I said, "We don't do that for each other." Automatically, if you saw me as a transgender person, and you would just wanna fight me, or you wanna do something. And I had team guys start trying to pick fights with me, and doing a lot of stuff, and it was just like, I didn't do anything. Well, I actually did do something with all that, and I feel bad about that. But we do that for everybody. For black and white, for Asian, for Latino, for all of it. We're all fighting.

• 6:15:15Speaker 01

  We never gave each other even three seconds to have a conversation, or just look at you and say, "Hey, you're a human being." You know, "I'm not gonna walk up to you like this and just start punching in the face." "How about you give me three seconds?" And so I ask everybody out there. I say, "You'll never, on anywhere around the world mostly, very rarely will you ever see, you know, somebody as far apart that has that alien in that cave man on that rooftop." I gave him three seconds. So why can't you do the same? You know, just give everybody you meet three seconds. How about you start with a smile instead of a grimace? There's this one rapper that said his whole life changed when all he did was just change his eyebrows. I can't remember who it was. But he was always like that, and always like, trying to be that tough guy, just always like, and you do it, you're verbally squint like that, and I can look really mean, and I can go up to you,

• 6:16:00Speaker 01

  and I can mad dog you. And most of those rappers are all doing that mad dog stuff. He said all he did was lift his eyebrows. And he did that, and everybody changed. Everybody started talking to him differently, and he started treating everybody differently, and his whole life changed. And I ask everybody out there, "Three seconds." You know, I was able to do it in the most critical, like, whack, life and death situations.

• 6:16:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 6:16:25Speaker 01

  You know, and it's not a big thing to ask. It's that we all start smiling a little bit, just like that guy did, and changed his life, just lifted his eyebrows a little bit, and started being, "How about a smile? How about open your hands up out of them fists, and talking to each other?" Now, how you see transgender people right now is the way I hope a lot of other people start seeing them. There's a lot of folks out there that are hurting. And the thing is, is every time you are scowl, or you talk to a transgender person because they're looking just whack, or whatever's going on, you make fun of them, do anything like that, what you're doing is you're pushing, you're punching them. And then as soon as they get punched, they're gonna sit there and they're gonna talk to their trans community, and their, the whole community, and they get hugely love bombed. And all it does is just make the gap wider. So every time you're all out there in public, you aren't smiling

• 6:17:10Speaker 01

  with those transgender people, just give them a break. You know, they don't need to be beat up, they're beating themselves up enough. You don't need to beat them up, they're getting beat up by everybody else. So if you can do it, if you're a human, and you have just the slightest bit of compassion, how about you start being a little nicer? How about you give that person a break, and start trying to close that gap up a little bit? How about if you're black or white, you give it a break, and start closing that gap up a little bit? If you're Latino, or Asian, or whatever, how about you give it all a break? We're not all racist, most of us aren't. Most of us are poor, and most of us are rich, and that's the division. It's not, and nothing about race, and nothing about religion, or nothing about gender, nothing about any of that. The only enemies

• 6:17:52Speaker 01

  right now is rich and poor. You know, and always been that way. We're the slaves to them, and it's all we are. And so if we start looking at each other and start saying, hey, we're the same. Hey dude, you're, you're good, you're a good dude, I'll talk to you now for three seconds. Alright? And we shake hands. It's black and white, there's man and woman, or gay and straight, or trans and not trans, and whatever. If we start closing those gaps up, because we don't shoot, and we give them a few seconds, we might start finding out that America's a pretty cool place. But right now, it's a cesspool. Right now, it's all fights. And CNN's doing it, and Fox is doing it. And all we're doing is fighting. And we gotta stop that. You gotta start offering your hand out. When

• 6:18:36Speaker 01

  you see that transgender person in that, in that grocery store, just leave them alone. You don't need to make fun of them, they already get enough of that. They get enough of that in a mirror. So please, I always say, if you listen to this whole thing, and you make it here to the end, Just, would you chill out a little bit? Would you start being a little friendlier to people? I don't hate anybody. I want everybody to do well. You know? And I want everybody to find happiness. I want everybody to find love. I did. I found love and happiness. And I give everybody at least three seconds. All the time, no matter what. No matter how they're coming at me, until they're like right there and I start feeling some danger, I'm still trying to give them some time. You know?

• 6:19:19Speaker 01

  And I just, I plead with our country right now. We're at the precipice right now of a civil war. And you know it, and I know it, and a lot of people know it. We're at the precipice right now. We don't have to fall over. We don't have to go there. We don't have to have another civil war. But we're gonna, if we keep going in this direction. I beg of you. Give everybody three seconds. That's all I ask.

• 6:19:49Shawn Ryan?

  You're a good fucking human being, man. Thanks for coming.

• 6:19:54Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm trying, man, I'm trying. It's not easy. I'm trying, thank you.

• 6:19:59Shawn Ryan?

  Proud to, proud to know you. It's an honor.

• 6:20:04Speaker 01

  Thanks, brother.