Part Two: Richard Marcinko: The Founder of SEAL Team 6

We continue the life and times of Richard Marcinko as he enters the Vietnam War and immediately commits numerous war crimes for the CIA. Then he gets to invent SEAL Team 6! See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that, again, I did the "You're listening now" bit. Anyway, I'm Robert. You know me. We're talking about Richard, the Navy SEALs guy, you know?

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:16Robert Evans?

  And my guest is, again, Andrew T. Andrew, how are you doing, buddy?

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Good. Still here, still alive.

• 0:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  It's a little, it's warm, but I'm alive. This is great.

• 0:26Robert Evans?

  It's warm, but you're alive, just like everyone else in the eternal summer that is increasingly gripping the world. Well,

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:32Robert Evans?

  let's distract ourselves from our problems by thinking about a man who lived a charm and mirthful life of constant war crimes.

• 0:42Robert Evans?

  The SEAL Team Six guy, old Dicky Marks, Richard Marsakeo.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Can I ask a question?

• 0:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Not to be glib. Why is SEAL Team Six, like, is there, I assume, one through five? Or is this like a James Bond situation?

• 0:56Robert Evans?

  We'll talk about that. Don't worry. We'll talk about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's actually a fun story.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:03Robert Evans?

  But yeah, at this point, initially, there are like two teams. But each team is like hundreds of guys, right? They're divided into platoons and stuff. So it's not, when you hear like SEAL Team Six, you might think like, well, that's like six guys or 10. No, there's like hundreds of guys. Like SEAL Team Six, there's a lot of Team Six guys.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Got it. Okay.

• 1:21Robert Evans?

  Okay. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Right.

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• 1:30Robert Evans?

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• 2:35Robert Evans?

  So when we ended last episode, the newly formed Navy SEALs, along with newly made Navy SEAL Richard Marsenko, had been shipped to Vietnam and started partnering with the CIA to carry out Phoenix missions all over the waterfront, right? And, you know, these are you killing informants and like informants bringing in for you're killing and capturing guys, you're having them tortured by the CIA, you're getting more info, you're going after other guys. You know, it's this kind of self-perpetuating loop of targets, right? That's what they create with Phoenix. And that's what the SEALs are. They're kind of fighting their own separate war that's occurring alongside the rest of Vietnam, but it's really just like the SEALs and the CIA murdering a fuckload of dudes, right?

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:22Robert Evans?

  And

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Based off of it, now that we know also, it's like, just because mostly because someone told them to.

• 3:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, because some guy said like, yeah, this guy's definitely a facilitator for the Vietcong or whatever, and often for less reason than that, as we'll discuss, right? Now, because SEALs report to themselves, they can kill for the CIA without any issues or without abiding by any of the rules of war, right? Like there's, the SEALs are supposed to abide by the rules of war. There's not supposed to be any units in the US military that are exempt from them. But practically, the SEALs don't have to abide by the rules of war, right?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:56Robert Evans?

  These guys are nearly always to go to into battle on Dexedrine, they will, they'll avoid sleeping for that speed. That's just like straight up old style speed. So they are wired as fuck on speed. They're usually operating at night and the fact that they're both high as tits, not sleeping For days, killing people at night means they screw up constantly. These guys kill the wrong people all the fucking time. Phillips adds, "The intel seals received was often suspect. A farmer might finger his neighbor over an old grudge. A corrupt official might turn in someone to whom he owed money. Fishing boats, the seals ambushed because someone said they were used by Vietcong. Couriers often turned out to be nothing but fishing boats. Purported Vietcong bases burned to the ground where sometimes just poor collections of huts inhabited by simple peasants."

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 4:41Robert Evans?

  So, you know, they're fighting a fun war. That's Richard Marsinko's baptism of fire, lighting a lot of huts on fire. In Code Over Country, Matthew Cole writes that from the jump, Navy brass were hesitant to embrace the SEALs. Because, among other things, they're not like working for the Navy a lot of the time. Like, the Navy might have a use for them, like they did for the frogmen. But the CIA is like, "No, we got something for these guys to do, actually. Don't ask, don't ask. They're going to show up onboard periodically when they need a break. And they're going to be like, they're gonna have long hair, they're gonna smell like shit, and they're all going to be doing illegal drugs on your boat, and just don't say shh anything, right? You're not allowed to. Navy brass don't like that all the time." SEALs often get a reputation of looking and acting like insane criminals.

• 5:26Robert Evans?

  Cole quotes a SEAL captain at the time who told him, "We had no status, no standing in the regular Navy. Some part of the Navy saw us as a sort of quasi-criminal element, not a respected profession that should only be used in desperate circumstances. And when you were through using it, you would stop forever, like it was some sort of a moral activity." So, the Navy kind of treated them like drugs, like the speed they were on.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Just one last, one last hit, one last hit.

• 5:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, one last hit, but then I'm going clean, I'm going clean from special operators.

• 5:56Robert Evans?

  The SEALs were seen like some sort of a moral activity because they often did immoral things. In his book, Alpha, David Phillips uses the terms, there's different, there's, this is, again, there's like a thousand or so SEALs in Vietnam, I think, at the height. So, and there's factions within them, they're not all the same, and they're not all doing the same kinds of missions. They're not all doing Phoenix missions for the CIA, right? SEALs do other stuff, too, obviously. To kind of describe the split. Between them in his book Alpha, David Phillips uses the terms Boy Scouts and Pirates to divide kind of the two broad ideological ends of the Navy SEALs. The Boy Scouts are more or less the direct descendants of the old style of UDT operator, right?

• 6:36Robert Evans?

  We are professionals doing a really insanely dangerous job, but the job is fundamentally there because it is supposed to save lives in the in the long run, right?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:46Robert Evans?

  The Pirates are CIA assassins, right? We're here to kill people.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:49Robert Evans?

  I don't give a shit.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:50Robert Evans?

  Right? Like, I'm just here for fucking blood, right? That's my only interest in anything that I'm doing. And the conflict between Boy Scouts and Pirates is still present today in the Navy SEALs, right? On one end are the quiet professionals and on the other end are the fucking maniacs. And the, you know, the quiet professionals are always the guys who have been in charge up until very recently in SEAL branding, because like the SEAL oath, there's a lot in there about like, part of why we train so much is so that we don't shoot civilians. You know, we can, we can target and very, you know, discriminately only get the bad guys, right? Like, that's why you send in the SEALs, is we're the most discriminating way in order to get your man, and we won't hit anyone that we don't mean to. And obviously, like, that's the branding. The reality is sometimes they're just, a lot of times, they're just killing people, you know?

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:36Robert Evans?

  Um, because it's hard to not kill people that you don't mean to in gunfights, actually.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:41Robert Evans?

  Um, when you're on speed, especially. It's a lot harder to not kill people in gunfights when you're wired to the gills on speed and haven't slept in four days.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:51Robert Evans?

  But, but, right, but even if you're one of the, the, the good guys, like,

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Good guys.

• 7:57Robert Evans?

  I'm not, I'm, again, I'm not trying to make an objective moral term. I'm talking about how the people within the unit see themselves and the breakdown in the unit, right? Um, you, like, you don't have to think of the Boy Scouts as literally good people. That's dependent upon your own belief about ethics, right? The Pirates just want to kill people, though, right? And that's, they, they believe that that's what the SEALs are for. They're there because they're really good at killing. We have an account by one member of an early Pirate Platoon, Michael Beenan, and his platoon was stationed in the Mekong Delta. And Beenan wrote later an anonymous account of his experiences in this unit that he published. Afterwards, this is how Phillips describes it in the book Alpha. "The job mutated from identifying and killing Vietcong operatives to tasks like sneaking into

• 8:39Robert Evans?

  a village at night to assassinate a village chief and making it look like the Vietcong had done it. When the intel told them to do it to Vietcong tax collectors, they would, according to Beenen, rob them of all money and of course, kill them and then report that all the money was destroyed in the firefight. The money would then be used to buy drugs and prostitutes." Beenen also wrote about the obsession pirates had for close quarters bloodletting, or getting wet. Per Beenen, this meant "cutting somebody's throat with your knife so the blood would go all over you. It was a ritual. His platoon leaders told him to do it to some villagers. He refused, but said that many others did not."

• 9:12Robert Evans?

  And this is something I want to get into. I've been reading a book about prehistoric warfare lately, and it includes a lot, because there was this belief that particularly by a lot of like European military historians in the early part of the 20th century, that primitive war was basically playing around, right? You'd have two sides show up and they'd throw some like weak arrows at each other, and then once a couple of guys got injured, they'd kind of back off. And they didn't really usually have the hunger for like real the the reality is the opposite. In fact, nearly everything that like every basically everything that we see as like special forces style tactics is all stuff that Europeans stole from indigenous warriors, right? These are all like kind of raiding and ambush tactics that literally Europeans learned. They called it the skulking method of war in the Americas, right? Because they weren't they hadn't practiced. That was not the way Europeans

• 9:57Robert Evans?

  fought at the time at which that they started coming over into the Americas. And you'll hear a lot about some of the different because like primitive warrior cultures, number one, war was often genocidal, right? If one tribe is going to you often wipe out the other side if you beat them if you can, because that's the thing that guarantees you the most safety. And there's a lot of trophy taking all over the world. This is in Europe, this is in Southeast Asia, this is in the Americas, and all sorts of it. You know, you have scalping in some areas, you have the taking of whole heads. There are some cultures that would literally, and these are in multiple parts of the world, take the entire skin. And in some places, even wear the skin of a defeated enemy like a costume sometimes. Oh, and when you read about this, it's often pointed as like, wow, the brutality of like ancient warfare. No, this is just war. It's still the same. The US military does this.

• 10:41Robert Evans?

  They were taking heads in World War II, they're taking ears in Vietnam and other body parts. SEALs are often described as taking ears, right? This is something that Beanen writes about in his account, is them like taking parts of bodies. And again, as a ritual, you're supposed to cut the throat of a dude who might, is often a civilian, right?

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:59Robert Evans?

  Eddie Gallagher killing that 16-year-old kid in Mosul, that was not a break with tradition. That was longstanding tradition within at least a chunk of the SEALs. According to accounts from Vietnam, right? And so this is, when people talk about like, oh, you know, war, you know, a lot of these, these indigenous cultures have really brutal methods of like warfare and like, no, that's just war, man. That's everyone who winds up agreeing to do the kind of warfare where you're just like ambushing a village at night and murdering everybody, if that's the shit you're doing. And we do that too, right?

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:31Robert Evans?

  It brutalizes the men who do it, right?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 11:35Robert Evans?

  And if you're gonna send men to do that, you really, it's very hard to stop them from taking trophies and cutting off and becoming very deranged by what they've done. And throughout time in history, different cultures have built in ways to try to like provide accountability or even, there were some ritual ways of like cleansing, some indigenous cultures even had this understanding that like, and there was a ritual way to ensure that we believe the people who go out to war is in something a different person than they are when they're at peace. And there's this ritual to kind of transition them back, right? And we don't, we never built that into our culture, so we just kind of pretend these people are always like, acting like heroes as opposed to cutting off pieces of dead

• 12:16Robert Evans?

  enemies and murdering civilians in the woods, but they often do, they often do. Beanen described the business of the Navy SEALs in Vietnam as terrorism against Vietnamese villagers. Quote, "Finding a loved one with a green face and stabbed in the middle of a road was incredible terror." In other words, the Navy SEALs would abduct someone in the night, paint their face green because they would go into battle with green faces, right? And then they would stab them and leave their corpse in the road for their families to find. And after abducting the victim, they would also often wire the door of their hut to explode, so when their children opened it to try to like find their dad, it would blow up, killing or maiming them, guaranteeing further death and terror. Like- That's no less like,

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:57Robert Evans?

  Like you, that's, that's no less brutal than the shit people were doing 10,000 years ago, in any way, shape or form, in any meaningful manner, right?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Arguably more because you don't have to do it for existential. You like, you don't believe that they're gonna come find you.

• 13:11Robert Evans?

  Right, right. You are not literally in danger of your culture being exterminated by this. You have no reason to be there. You could, you live 6,000 miles away. Like, why are you in Vietnam?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:22Robert Evans?

  Former SEAL Lieutenant Bob Carey later wrote about a 1969 raid he led to assassinate a target in a rural village on the way they encountered an elderly man and a woman sleeping in a bedroom with three little kids. To stop them from warning anyone else, they killed all five with their knives. Immediately after this, they fucked up and ran into a dozen women and children out in the open. And since they lost the element of surprise, they just gunned them all down with automatic weapons. In their after action report, they claimed to have killed 21 Viet Cong fighters in a firefight.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:51Robert Evans?

  Just women and children, stabbing babies to death in their, in their sleep, right? Enemy killed in the firefight. Yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 14:02Robert Evans?

  Now again, the first SEALs are hunters and trappers of men, and they grew to worship mastery over the killing arts. Any personal flaws were forgivable in a truly talented killer. One New York Times article noted that at a SEAL base downrange in Vietnam, operators hung a sign above the base bar that read, "People who kill for money are professionals. People who kill for fun are sadists. People who kill for money and fun are SEALs."

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:27Robert Evans?

  And reading that, I couldn't help but think of, uh, when I was in Erbil, which is in northern Iraq, it's the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan during the fighting against ISIS and Mosul. I was sitting up in like a coffee house that was like a couple of floors up. It's sort of this like grand bazaar area in the center of the city. And there's, like, I noticed like a couple of big white dudes like milling around in this market area. And they're like, you know, they're big, muscular, covered in tattoos, bearded. And one of them has a T-shirt on that just says, "I'm only here for the violence." Which is like, you could find them online commonly. I don't know if those guys were, might have been some form of fucking media, but they were probably contractors. I mean, they not necessarily combat. Most of those guys were doing like drone work, right? Like, most of the contractors I met were nowhere near.

• 15:11Robert Evans?

  But you still saw that kind of aesthetic on them all the time, right?

• 15:14Speaker 04

  I'm only here for the violence.

• 15:16Robert Evans?

  I'm only here for the violence, right? Like, that's, that's the same thing that, that, that sign at that base bar says, right? I'm here for the fucking violence, because it's fun, you know?

• 15:24Speaker 04

  Patrik, you bad.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  No, these guys are fine.

• 15:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, these guys are doing good. They're doing good. Richard Marcinko fit in perfectly among this crowd. As Phillips writes, he, quote, "went by the name Demo Dick and called his men Marcinko's merry band of murdering marauders. Village by village, his team destroyed rice supplies, blew up fishing boats and burned houses. Demo Dick liked to booby trap the bodies of those his men had killed before they moved on from a village. It made me feel good to hear an explosion after we'd left the area," he later wrote in his memoir. Over several deployments, Marcinko described his men getting spookier and dirtier as they "began to think more like guerrillas." He loved the freedom that he and his unit were given to devise new tactics and pick targets. He later wrote this about Vietnam, "a war that killed close to 4 million people.

• 16:13Robert Evans?

  There's something to be said about the purity of a small war. For the SEALs, it was instant gratification. You would write up a patrol order, go out there and shoot the bastard. It was black and white, no gray, and that's the music. That's the epitome of life for a warrior."

• 16:28Robert Evans?

  And like, here's the thing, the SEALs are very cut. When I talked about like ancient, prehistoric warriors and also like these kind of, I mean, going back to like a lot of these indigenous warrior cultures that have even been around up into the modern era, the SEALs very consciously pattern themselves a lot after particularly American, Native American warriors. That's like a major thing now, but especially later in SEAL culture. And so this idea is really common, right? That like, we're there, like, you know, we're, we're living the warrior's life. And it's this perfect, this like cycle of violence where we're just constantly going out and killing more people is exactly, that's, that's the purity of, of what we do. And it does nothing but lose wars, as far as I can tell. Yeah. Like, if that's the epitome of life, is if you want to say what you want about

• 17:11Robert Evans?

  the ethics of these ancient warriors in every continent on earth. To practice such brutal, often genocidal tactics. They had to, and they won.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:20Robert Evans?

  Or they died.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  This is like, this is just murder cosplay. That's the thing. It's like, we, we the taxpayer are just like.

• 17:27Robert Evans?

  Paying to these guys to cosplay as ancient warriors.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  We're like footing the bill for these psychos. And I guess the only.

• 17:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:36Robert Evans?

  Completely unnecessarily, and it never works.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:40Robert Evans?

  Like, they get, like, our side, like, they have a lot of fun, some of them. A lot of them get obviously very traumatized, but like, guys like Barsenko have a lot of fun, but it doesn't work. Right?

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:51Robert Evans?

  An army intelligence analyst later called the Phoenix Program, which killed at least 21,000 people indiscriminate murder. In 1971, the Navy pulled all SEALs out of action and made them pass a test on the rules of war. Right? Because there's so many reports that these guys are just murdering people. After the My Lai massacre, many SEALs refused to go to Vietnam entirely because, as the New York Times reported, they were scared of being prosecuted for war crimes that they were undeniably committing. There's this, a lot of them are complaining like, oh, after My Lai, I don't even want to go there anymore. Right? What's even the point if we can't fight the war the way that'll win it? And like, you guys got to fight that war for years and you, you, it just kept getting worse. You lost. Like, they won. Vietnam won.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's the only, the only tiny sliver of like, again, fucking like silver lining is like, this really doesn't work. They like, for all the like, you know, oh, your comfort needs hard men kind of shit. It's like, it never has once worked.

• 18:50Robert Evans?

  It doesn't. It, again, it does when, when both sides are like 100 guys. If you can kill all 100 of the other guys, then yeah, sure. Like, you actually can end that problem forever. Right?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:00Robert Evans?

  But modern war, these are nations of millions and millions and millions of people. It just, it doesn't work that way. All you do is piss everyone off and raise the level of brutality and anger and motivate the enemy to fight and to themselves dig in harder. Right? It does not get you what you want.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 19:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. 21 years later, after, you know, this period of time, in 1992, Marsekko wrote Rogue Warrior, which gave him a chance to whitewash his own conduct in that of the SEALs entire. And before I get into that more, I want to quote from this New York Times Review of Books review for an idea of, this is how they describe his writing style. Mr. Marsekko, 51 years old, comes across as less the genuine warrior than a comic book superhero who makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Deplaining for his first combat assignment, he writes, "He inhaled deeply and knew instantly I was going to like Vietnam a whole lot. He revels in the wonderful lethal odor of cordite wafting over me, and tells us that after one particularly hairy action, I dreamt of warm women and cold beer." And I want to highlight something I found kind of revealing here because

• 20:03Robert Evans?

  Marsekko talks about the cordite lethal odor of cordite wafting over me. You may have heard that, especially if you read, weirdly enough, Warhammer books.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:11Robert Evans?

  Cordite is a kind of smokeless bullet propellant that was developed in 1889. It had a very unique scent and became famous because a lot of Victorian era novels of colonial British warfare loved to describe the cordite stink of battlefields, right? Cordite actually stopped being produced in the mid 20th century and would have been out of production by the time Marsekko was having his gunfights. It also, most of the ammo that would have been in Vietnam was not made by people who ever used cordite in their bullets, right? I'm sure he would have encountered, there's a lot of weird bullet types floating around Vietnam at varying points. I'm certain he encountered cordite sometimes. But this was definitely not, like, this was something either his ghostwriter added because it's a common thing to put in books like this, or it's

• 20:56Robert Evans?

  something he stuck in because it reminded him of books that he read as a kid about like badass colonial warriors murdering non-white people, right?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  It's like a pulpy thing to say.

• 21:05Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, exactly. It's not a real recollection.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, honestly, it is like basically just like an updated like Conan the Barbarian novel.

• 21:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's particularly funny in Warhammer books because you're like, okay, so you're saying 40,000 years from now, we go back to using this shit that they decided was bunk in the 50s? Really?

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Well, that is a lot of the Warhammer aesthetic, to be fair.

• 21:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it does fit a little, maybe. Now, the combat scenes in Rogue Warrior are remarkably inaccurate, despite being pinned by a man who undeniably saw combat with the SEALs in Nam. The best example of this is a mission that occurred on March 13th, 1967. A SEAL team, including Marcinko, were inserted to Dung Island on the path of a Viet Cong smuggling route. This was a free-fire zone, which meant the SEALs would be free to kill anyone they saw out after curfew. In Rogue Warrior, Marcinko describes the mission as them waiting to kill a courier and recover intel, but, quote, "The killing was an important element for a couple of reasons. First, that's what we were in Vietnam for. Second, you never know whether you can kill someone until you do it.

• 22:11Robert Evans?

  I wanted to make sure each member of Bravo," that's his squad, "was up to the task. In other words, we didn't need to kill these couriers, but I wanted each of my guys to experience killing a human being."

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Jesus.

• 22:23Robert Evans?

  That was the point of the mission, really. Now, this is-

• 22:26Speaker 01

  This is like just a gang initiation.

• 22:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Or, sorry, like a fictional gang initiation.

• 22:30Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, but this is like just the Navy SEALs, our taxpayer dollars, it's funded them.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ, dude.

• 22:36Robert Evans?

  It's cool, it's cool stuff, yeah. I love quiet professionals.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:40Robert Evans?

  Now, this is important because Marcinco goes on to claim that after downing the courier and moving to recover his body, Bravo Unit came under heavy fire from all sides and had to radio for extraction. That's when Lieutenant Larry Bailey, who's a SEAL officer driving their boat, failed to rescue them, and the team had to retreat under, uh, heavy fire as bullets are slicing through the bridge. Because this lieutenant, this officer fucks up, my men are under heavy fire and we barely got out of there with their lives. And so, Marcinco writes that he attacks Bailey when they finally reach the boat. "I pleaded for covering fire, and you were so goddamn far upriver, you were out of goddamn radio range. Is that bad enough for you, you pussy?" That's what Marcinco says that he yells at this guy. Now, Cole, the author of Code Over Country-

• 23:23Robert Evans?

  Actually interviews Bailey and one other member of Marsekko's unit. And both of these guys were like, no, Richard was lying. That's not at all how it went. Bailey heard, first off, Richard was not on the radio. Bailey didn't hear anything. At no point was Richard like begging to be picked up because they weren't under fire. Right? In fact, Bailey eventually decided to go check on Bravo himself because it was weird that they hadn't radioed for so long. Quote, "As they crept inland, I could hear some guys laughing," Bailey said. "The laughing was unmistakably American," he recalled. "I could hear Marsekko hollering. They had lost all degree of military discipline in a supposedly hairy area." Bailey's radio man told them they'd turned their radio off for the ambush and forgot to turn it back on after killing not a Viet Cong courier, but a couple of fishermen. The radio man told Bailey.

• 24:08Robert Evans?

  "We have our first war souvenirs," and pulled out a bag filled with ID cards and a watch.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 24:15Robert Evans?

  See, they just killed some fishermen. They're not in any danger. They're partying.

• 24:19Speaker 04

  You're just murdering.

• 24:20Robert Evans?

  Playing with the corpses and laughing, you know?

• 24:24Robert Evans?

  Obviously, that's saying he was never in danger. They're Navy SEALs in Vietnam. I'm sure they've definitely under fire at times, but a lot of times they're just murdering people. Paired with the paragraph that I quoted earlier, it's clear that Marsekko wanted his team to notch some kills, and because it was a free fire zone, he knew that he was safe to murder the first men he saw. This is emblematic of his approach to war, and the Marsekko approach to war will linger among the Navy SEALs long after he leaves the unit. But you know who never abandons their men in the field?

• 24:55Speaker 04

  Me.

• 24:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Sophie, sure. But also ads, podcasts. Huzzah.

• 25:06Speaker 03

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• 25:35Speaker 05

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• 26:05Speaker 03

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her?, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 26:17Speaker 06

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 26:35Speaker 06

  They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her.

• 26:48Speaker 06

  No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Listen to What Happened to Her? on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario.

• 27:18Speaker 05

  I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Dario Hamad, Alex Carr, Fei-Fei Li, Palmer Lucky. Because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they fear, and where they think this is all headed.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  Silicon Valley is always saying the cliche thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us.

• 27:52Speaker 05

  But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people?

• 27:55Speaker 06

  People that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, whose imagination do we want to live in?

• 28:08Speaker 01

  This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity.

• 28:13Speaker 06

  Listen to The Builders on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:26Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So I give more anecdotes of Marcinko's experiences in Vietnam, but Richard lies about everything. It's worth noting that military historian David Andrade looked into Marcinko's claims for Soldier of Fortune magazine of all publications. And I would not, I don't, I don't tend to credit them as being a particularly credible.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  That's the other way to look at it is if fucking Soldier of Fortune is like.

• 28:53Robert Evans?

  Is fact checking your shit?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  We should probably check this shit out. Yeah, you are a liar.

• 28:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Andrade publishes an article called Pogue Warrior about him. And pogue is military slang for like a soldier in like the back, like a soldier who's like stationed far back from the line of contact. He doesn't actually do anything, but who like lies about having done cool shit, right? Like, that's what a pogue is. It's a pretty funny title for the article. Here's Cole's description of the article. "The article also found another instance from Marcinko's book in which he grossly mischaracterized what was supposed to be a seminal event in his military career, losing his first seal in battle and appeared to outright fabricate a scene in Vietnam." And there's something important for people to, who weren't in the military and haven't seen combat to understand, which is like, I think people are generally familiar with the idea that someone would lie about having served for like clout, right?

• 29:44Robert Evans?

  Or that a vet who never did anything cool might lie about having seen combat. But if you can confirm that someone's like a combat veteran, people don't tend to assume that they would lie about what they saw in combat. And the reality is that happens all the time. Guys who've seen heavy combat often lie about it in part because it's very common, especially in repeated combat actions, for even people who are trained and experienced to fuck up in panic under fire and screw up in situations that like, they have to lie about to themselves and everyone else because it's the only way they can go on emotionally. I like, yeah, it happens.

• 30:23Robert Evans?

  Anyway, uh, so remember that, both with Dick and anytime you see someone telling like war stories that seem like really crazy, I, I'll, I'll never forget a buddy of mine who was in a combat unit and saw a lot of combat. We were driving in like near the base in, uh, or one of the bases in, um, uh, Southern California outside of San Diego. And there's like a road named for some Medal of Honor winner. And I asked him like what the guy did. And he was like, oh, I don't really pay much attention because it's one of those like lone survivor stories. And I don't trust anyone who won an award. And it's like the only guy who survived. Like anyone doing that is probably lying about what happened. That was his attitude. Um, and I think that's generally a smart way to approach those stories, especially the story of Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, who wrote the book Lone Survivor, which is an account of his, him being the only survivor of a

• 31:08Robert Evans?

  unit that we know is largely inaccurate. Right? Right, right. Um, fun stuff. So Dick starts that tradition of being a fantasist and a huge braggart, while also like having actual qualifications that make it very difficult for most people to kind of argue with you or, or deny what you did. Right? Um, but he's also like, he's also someone who does have a lot of popularity in the unit. A lot of guys, particularly in the pirate end of the SEALs, really like him. As Orr Kelly writes in his book, quote, "Men who served under him in Vietnam say they would follow him anywhere. These, however, are the pirates." Again, other SEALs described him as a boastful braggart. So it's, it's, it's not like Right. universal, but he is popular within the SEALs.

• 31:52Robert Evans?

  He's popular with the worst guys, which makes sense. Yeah. And that's not a small number of them. Right? That's kind of an important thing is that he is hated by a lot of SEALs, but he's liked by a lot of them. Right. "When the war ended, he remained in the now shrunken Navy SEALs, and he spent the next decade watching the military he loved languish in post-Vietnam peacetime. Outside of a war zone, his behavior made more waves among his peers. Per the book, Brave Men Dark Waters, quote, 'He had a way with people that permitted him to get away with behavior that, as one friend said, 'would get me killed.' He casually called strangers by racial epithets and got a smile in return.' Rear Admiral George Worthington, who succeeded Marcinko as naval attache in Cambodia in the mid 1970s, recalls a reception

• 32:33Robert Evans?

  for General Lon Non, brother of Lon Noel, who had been president of the country. Marcinko was well-loved, if not revered, by the Cambodian officer corps and the troops, too. He had a sort of Lawrence of Arabia-esque leadership quality about him, Worthington says. Marcinko had never laid an eye on Lon Non, but he walks up behind him and grabs him with a big bear hug, and the guy loved it." And again, that's also very telling because the Cambodians he talks, he's talking about are the guys who lost to the Khmer Rouge. So he trained the military that lost.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, of course.

• 33:05Robert Evans?

  Is this becoming a pattern?

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, yeah, that's how we roll. That's how we roll in the SEALs.

• 33:12Robert Evans?

  He, he trained the brutal authoritarian military that war crimes so enraged rural Cambodians that it provided fuel for the Khmer Rouge.

• 33:24Robert Evans?

  So at one point in the 1970s, Dick panicked atop Navy officer during a visit to the Pentagon, when the officer noted that Marcinko had a pistol stuffed in his sock. Now, let me tell you something about carrying a gun, folks. You got, you got two, broadly speaking, two ways to carry a gun. One is just the firearm itself, either loaded or unloaded, but without a round in the chamber, right? A gun can be loaded and not have a round in the chamber. That means you've got a mag in, but there's not like, if you pull the trigger, it's not going to immediately fire a bullet, right? You have to cock it, basically, or you have to charge it, is the, is the term, in order to like, get a bullet in there, right? The other way to carry it is with a round in the chamber. Now, most good holsters are

• 34:06Robert Evans?

  like, made out of us, and they didn't really do that with holsters back then, but ideally, your holster is made out of a rigid plastic material, so that there's something hard in between the trigger and the rest of the world. So that if you carry with a gun with a bullet in the chamber, something can't just like, poke the trigger and make it fire? Two things. I'm gonna assume Richard Marcinko never carried a gun without a round in the chamber. And so I'm going to guess, he's just got a chambered hot pistol with no safety, shoved in a sock with nothing between that trigger and the world around it, but a sock? And I think that's beautiful. I think that's beautiful. Or adds that, quote, "Another officer invited Marcinko to present a briefing at the Pentagon and then called the session off

• 34:50Robert Evans?

  because he was so embarrassed by Marcinko's flamboyant profanity."

• 34:56Robert Evans?

  Now, this is evident in the book Rogue Warrior. Richard's favorite word is cockbreath, which he uses 11 times in his autobiography. I don't know if it's been used more in a book, but I probably not, right?

• 35:10Speaker 04

  Weird little guy.

• 35:12Robert Evans?

  You'd have to try. At one point, he calls his own men positively merry murdering cockbreath shit for brains assholes. At another, he claims to have shouted down a higher ranking officer who'd graduated from the Naval Academy and had Admiral relatives, saying, "Fuck you and all your fucking kind, you sorry shit for brains cockbreath pencil dick num nuts asshole."

• 35:37Speaker 01

  I know it's a different era, but...

• 35:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You know what I'll say here is like, there's a way to do that. See what you want about like Ari Ermly had fucking horrible politics. That's like the drill sergeant from a Full Metal Jacket, right? But he was at least really good at creatively cursing and dressing people down. Richard is not, right? Like, it's a lot of the same insults repeated, and they're not very creative. The bleakest moment of Marcinko's career before the end came in 1980, when Jimmy Carter had US Special Forces attempt to rescue prisoners at the American Embassy who were trapped in Iran. This is a very famous failure, and this is why I say like, you know, US Special Forces until the modern era had a much more mixed reputation. And this is a, this is a Delta Force operation, so it's not SEALs.

• 36:24Robert Evans?

  On the day of the mission, Dick was almost 40. He was a Navy commander assigned to represent the SEALs at the Pentagon. So he had a front row seat for the disastrous attempt by Delta Force, which is at that point, the, the preeminent Special Forces unit in the country, way more elite than the SEALs, to save the hostages. And the whole event was a clusterfuck. One chopper hit a C-130 while refueling, which caused an explosive crash, and the Delta operators bailed in time, but three Marines in a helicopter died along with five Air Force crew. The whole affair was a calamity for the Special Forces community, as well as the Carter. A lot of people will say this is why Carter lost.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:01Robert Evans?

  Right? And it's, it's definitely part of why Carter lost.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  And, you know, not to, not to do too much history. That is arguably why we're in the position we're in now.

• 37:12Robert Evans?

  Arguably why we're in the position we're in now is because Delta Force couldn't get their fucking. Well, I guess this is more on the air, the pilot guys, but yeah.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:21Robert Evans?

  So as a result of this horrible clusterfuck, Jimmy, first off, Carter calls for an immediate follow-up attempt, but he also calls for like the Pentagon to reform the way their special forces unit works. And as a result of this, the Pentagon decides to form the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, to coordinate between different special forces teams directly for the president. And this is the birth, weirdly enough, it comes from Jimmy Carter, you can trace, the birth of special forces not being, well, these are units that are part of the Navy, part of the Army, and they, they help with these special tasks to, the most elite of these units are like the president's direct guys, right? This is the president's goon squad, right? Carter really does start that in a lot of ways. I mean, this had been

• 38:02Robert Evans?

  happening before him, but he's a major part of that, actually. He was horrified, I'm sure, by like where this led. He was trying to rescue some hostages, but that is kind of part of what leads us where we get, or where we are today.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Well, it's also sort of why like you can't be the American president, no matter who you are, without being at minimum a war criminal.

• 38:23Robert Evans?

  Right. You're going to be party to some horrible things as the president in the very best case scenarios of like the most ethical guy in that job you can imagine. Which probably was Carter. Like he probably, in terms of like trying to be ethical, you know, not just, again, he did a lot of, there's a lot of critiques of Carter.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Grading on the presidential curve, he simply has to be the top.

• 38:46Robert Evans?

  He's got, he's got to be the guy who cared the most, right?

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:51Robert Evans?

  So JSOC is formed to coordinate between these different special forces teams for the president, and Marcinko is tasked with building the Navy contribution to JSOC, right? And this proves something else important about Marcinko, which is that he's very good at making the right friends. And for all of his hate of like officers and politics and all these connected people, he, he describes as like the whole problem with big Navy, he's great at politics. He's a political animal. He's really good at interfacing as an off- Officer in a political way in order to get what he wants, right? He's great at selling his ideas to command. It's a legitimate skill he has. Marcinko lays out and sells to them his vision of a new SEAL team with its own commanding officer

• 39:32Robert Evans?

  and six platoons dedicated to counter terrorist missions and hostage rescue missions. To make his dream team, Marcinko would have to reach over the heads of his fellow special forces officers to steal their very best men. In the book Brave Men Dark Waters, or Kelly writes that Marcinko was armed with a prior one, priority one, that permitted him to take the men and equipment he needed to from other commands. So he starts grabbing the guys he wants from these other special forces units. And by September of 1980, Marcinko was commander of an entirely new unit, which he named SEAL Team Six. This is where that starts. And this forms an important part of Team War, which you had brought up, right? Are there five? Were there five other SEAL teams at this point?

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:14Robert Evans?

  There were still just two. The name initially, though, referred to the fact that there had been six SEAL platoons that had taken counterterrorism training, right? So SEAL Team Six is made up of six platoons that had taken the specialized training. So that's why they start with the name. But because there's only two other SEAL teams, Marcinko decides he really likes the idea of naming them SEAL Team Six as a disinformation tactic to trick the commies. So they think there's more SEALs than there are, right? That may have been something after the fact. I kind of think it was just because they trained six platoons and then afterwards, oh, this is clever, right? You know? But I don't, I don't, I don't know.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's children. We're, we're, it's like, you know, at best like a 13 year old. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. Yeah, we're ruled by violent, violent 14 year old boys.

• 41:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, here's the thing about testosterone. It has its uses, but it, it, one thing it can do is stop you from ever growing past age 14.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:15Robert Evans?

  You really have to fight that part of the effect. So in an article for Rolling Stone, Matthew Cole notes, Marcinko sought men who, in his estimation, would otherwise be athletes or criminals in the civilian world. He wanted SEAL. Who had combat experience, he later said in an interview, who had a bullet go past their head with their name on it. Marsekko wanted men who were adept at all the traditional SEAL skills, shooting, underwater diving, skydiving, mountain climbing, but who also had or could develop tradesman-like skills. These men had to engineer solutions to any problem standing in their way to mission success, whether it required manufacturing a quieter piece of equipment or conceiving a quieter method for building entry, right? And that's very telling, but this is also not just Marsekko. If you remember when the SEALs were formed, there was some talk of like, I want them to be rogues.

• 42:00Robert Evans?

  And he's now taking that a step forward. Do I want guys, SEAL Team Six is guys who could have only been pro athletes or criminals, right?

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:07Robert Evans?

  That's Marsekko's idea, right? Now, there's a lot of sense to this, actually. You know, the whole criminal thing is going to cause problems immediately. But if you want to form a unit of dudes who can solve serious problems using out-of-the-box solutions on the fly, it does make sense to recruit guys like this, you know?

• 42:27Robert Evans?

  Criminal, cartels and gangs are famously creative.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, they get shit done.

• 42:33Robert Evans?

  They can get shit done. Yeah.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The downsides are they're not, they're not the type of people you want to do this. You could find other creative people, I guess, is what I would suggest.

• 42:44Robert Evans?

  You probably don't want to make more of these people in any society and give them like guns and the right to do whatever they want. That might be a bad idea.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:55Robert Evans?

  But, you know, this also does work really well in certain ways. It's a great way to, a lot of like innovative combat tactics and like special operations tactics are created by these Team Six guys because they're just kind of given freedom to do whatever they want and a bunch of money to explore and make gear and try new stuff, right? So there's aspects of what Marsekko does that are a really good idea. And I don't want to pretend like that's not the case, but Richard's good ideas are always married with his bad ones. For example, Dick is a hardcore alcoholic in 1980. And since he considered himself the-

• 43:30Speaker 04

  Oh, no. I'm so shocked to hear this. Wow.

• 43:33Robert Evans?

  Still an alcoholic.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 43:35Robert Evans?

  And since he considered himself the best operator ever, obviously- Any man who might hope to be his equal would have to drink at least as much as he did. So, membership in SEAL Team Six was thus mostly restricted to alcoholics.

• 43:49Speaker 04

  Does he think he's fucking Stalin? What is happening?

• 43:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we need to, you know what we really need in this team full of heavily armed badasses who are unaccountable to any laws is drinking problems.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:01Robert Evans?

  That's gotta be key. I want these guys to be hungover or hammered 100% of the time. The New York Times confirmed that. His recruiting interviews often amounted to boozy chats in bars. One team member told Orr that when he came for a 7 a.m. interview, Marcinko offered him a beer and said, "You might not fit in," when he declined. He did ultimately admit the man, but one of Marcinko's officers admitted, "To be with him, you had to drink, to be in the in-crowd. I drink when I want to drink." This went against the grain. And when he was interviewed by Orr for the book Brave Men Dark Waters, Marcinko didn't even try to deny this. Instead, he wrote Orr a letter explaining his alcohol preferences. "Especially gin, Bombay. Team members east coast weaned on rum coke at St. Thomas during annual winter training.

• 44:46Robert Evans?

  I polish these skills in attache training and converted to gin. Gin is powerful, but my safest drink. I can consume more. It demoralizes the opponent drinking mixed drinks or slurring while I casually rant and rave. I do play head games. I use booze as a tool." It's very telling, too, that like, people he's drinking with are his opponents that he wants to demoralize?

• 45:07Speaker 04

  He's like, "I'm not like the other girls. Gin Bombay."

• 45:12Robert Evans?

  Alcohol's a tool that I use tactically to defeat my enemies, who are also my men.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, your employees?

• 45:19Robert Evans?

  Cool.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  I mean, again, at least it's like, I mean, if their only job is to commit war crimes, at least they're sluggish and hungover sometimes.

• 45:28Robert Evans?

  At least they're fucking drunk, yeah? This is gonna cause some issues, too. To justify his selections to command, Marcinko hired a psychologist to evaluate his picks and rubber-stamped them. Per an interview he gave to Cole, it was a fallacy. "We were normal, according to me. If I was fucked up, then we were all fucked up."

• 45:45Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 45:46Robert Evans?

  He also-

• 45:47Speaker 01

  That is true.

• 45:48Robert Evans?

  That's true. He also told Cole this. "If you want to call them sociopaths, you can. That's how you get the enlisted in charge. They are the talent." So if you want the enlisted to be in charge, if you want the talented, you like you have to cater to sociopaths. That's who you're looking for in this job. He's very direct about it. Concentrating this specific group of men and giving them unlimited funding for weapons and training resulted in the creation of a uniquely skilled group of soldiers. And to give you an idea of the kind of proficiency these guys developed, Marcinko's SEAL Team Six fired more rounds training in their first six months of existence than the entire United States Marine Corps used in training for a whole year.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:31Robert Evans?

  That's how much these guys are practicing. They are really good with guns.

• 46:37Robert Evans?

  Marcinko saw his men as artisans of violence, and a shoot house was built to practice for incredibly niche hostage rescue situations. That's the idea is we're going to be, we need these guys to be able to, in order to avoid killing, you know, the hostages and what, and whatnot. They have to be able to develop these skills. Now, does Marcinko ever really care about avoiding civilian casualties? Is that ever a priority of Team Six? Highly debatable, but that's how they're billed, right? That's how they're sold to command. That's why he's able to claim this is necessary. I need this many bullets. The only way to develop the skills they need to do the kind of job that we have.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  It's also, I mean, it's also probably a lie you could pretty easily tell yourself. I mean, why else would you, you know, you do have to live with yourself.

• 47:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and that's also, nobody wants to think of, most people don't want to think of themselves. It's just like murderers, right?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:24Robert Evans?

  But you know who are just murderers? No, no, no. Okay, well, don't think about that. Just think about these ads.

• 48:07Speaker 05

  Easy on your wallet, like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 48:45Speaker 06

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  Stories of survival.

• 48:53Speaker 05

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 49:03Speaker 06

  They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that.

• 49:18Speaker 06

  And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's

• 49:30Speaker 03

  a police uniform. Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Dario...

• 49:59Speaker 06

  Alex Carr, Fei Fei Li, Palmer Lucky. Because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they fear, and where they think this is all headed. Silicon Valley is always saying the cliche thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us. But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, whose imagination do we want to live in? This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity. Listen to The Builders on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

• 50:44Speaker 06

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 50:54Robert Evans?

  And we're back. And Sophie has informed me that none of our sponsors are ruthless murderers.

• 51:00Speaker 04

  I did not. I did not.

• 51:03Robert Evans?

  Especially, especially if the Washington State Highway Patrol ads or the Portland Police ads just ran.

• 51:08Speaker 04

  I cannot, I cannot, I cannot vouch for all of our sponsors because I have no idea who they are.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  But that's the level of trust you have in them.

• 51:16Robert Evans?

  That's the level of trust we have. They could be anybody. They could be anybody. Hitler could be running an ad. I would have no way of knowing.

• 51:22Speaker 04

  Literally.

• 51:25Robert Evans?

  SEALs also trained for high altitude insertion and every other cool thing they could find someone to teach them. Marsinko had been made a commander by this point, which put him above most of the other SEAL officers and ensured he pretty much always got what he wanted. He's received a lot of praise down on down the years for his creation. But even in the early days of Team Six, other SEAL officers looked at what he was building with worry. In Brave Men: Dark Waters, or quotes one of these officers, "You get a bunch of people, smart, strong, aggressive, and you require them to kill other people. You are requiring guys to do some really tough things. They are going to go in and find that terrorists are women, terrorists are children, anybody. You're up close. This is very personal. The psychologist looks at whether you can blow a hole in a man two feet away and why."

• 52:09Robert Evans?

  Watch his brains come out the other side of his head and do it. You give them this training. I'm talking about concentrating year after year on parachuting, making guns, sniper shooting, scaling mountains, swimming, diving. You give them all this training and require them to kill people, not from 100 yards away, not from 200 yards away, not from 30,000 feet with a bomb, but from three feet away. Can you imagine that group of people together? All of a sudden, in that group of 150 or 200 men who are so highly trained, all keyed up and required to do such hazardous things, you are going to find some amoral people. They're there because they're smart and aggressive and they have no morals. You have guys who have no morals, will do anything. That's how you get a reputation for being really bad. But the great majority are really dedicated, straight, hardworking people.

• 52:51Robert Evans?

  The reason the amoral man doesn't get his way more is that a lot of people watch him. He is controlled, but you are going to find that kind of person when you have a group of people required to perform with these people are required to perform. Right?

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:03Robert Evans?

  And I might argue that the great majority are hardworking, moral people. It depends. You know, some SEAL units do abide by the rules of engagement and don't commit war crimes constantly, and some don't. It does tend to seem to depend on like the ratio of the pirates to the Boy Scouts kind of in them at the time or whatever.

• 53:22Robert Evans?

  But he's making a good point, right? That as much as we want to condemn and should condemn Marcinko and individual and Navy SEAL guys who commit war crimes, all of their crimes are inevitable by their existence. You can't have these guys and have them, you can't have any group of guys who are trained to do this and supposed to do the kind of shit that we send Navy SEAL that to do, who don't turn into this. It can't be done.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  It's a consequence of, yeah, yeah.

• 53:49Robert Evans?

  It's a consequence. It's brutalizing. You can try to minimize some things, right? There is more that certainly should be done to control and punish. You can punish certainly when they commit war crimes to try to make it less common, but this is always going to be a problem. When you're concentrating the most violent and skilled men together and saying like, we want you to commit a bunch of murder for the government.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:13Robert Evans?

  Good people don't want to do that job all that often. And if they are good people, when they start, they don't stay that way long.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:19Robert Evans?

  They're shooting people in the head from three feet away every day. It's bad for you to do that.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to be a bad person.

• 54:27Robert Evans?

  After a period of time, it fucks you up in, in pretty profound ways.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:33Robert Evans?

  Another officer told Orr that when Marcinko came to him to recruit from his unit, he was surprised that he took not the best performers, but quote, "uniformly the scum." "The fact that these guys had so much attention and resources lavished on them certainly bred jealousy." And a mixed reputation, Team Six guys both get called Jedi by other SEALs, and per another SEAL officer, "a paramilitary fitness club."

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:58Robert Evans?

  Still, the officer who called them a fitness club wanted to join Team Six because they got all of the best gear and all of the best missions. And they also had no real oversight. At one point during the early 1980s, Marcinko billed the government for lodging his entire command in Washington DC. It was later found that the hotel he billed never existed, and the SEALs had bunked on a yacht in the Potomac owned by a buddy of Marcinko, or something like that, and he'd just taken the money he'd billed the Navy. And he did this all the time. This is normal, standard operating procedure for Richard Marcinko. We know he engaged in similar acts of financial fraud at least 37 times. During the like, three years he led SEAL Team Six. Sure. So about once a month. He's doing this like, monthly. This is like, very common for him.

• 55:44Robert Evans?

  Nobody notices at first. Marcinko's a rising star, and it's widely agreed that he had accomplished something great in getting a 100-man Special Forces team up and running in just three months. Within a year or so of Team Six's creation, many insiders regarded SEAL Team Six as being as good as Delta Force, if not better. But the skill they exhibited was displayed alongside their faults, including a team-wide penchant for apocalyptic drinking.

• 56:10Robert Evans?

  Team Six guys from the jump get in trouble for starting fights for like, like being just incredibly violent, rowdy drunks and causing problems everywhere they fucking go.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. But that's sort of the problem.

• 56:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  It, it's just that then the mythology for like the, you know, people is like, oh, we, we got, at least the Vikings are on our side.

• 56:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  And it's just like.

• 56:35Robert Evans?

  It's like, do we need the Vikings?

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:38Robert Evans?

  But is that really necessary to modern war?

• 56:40Speaker 01

  We actively don't need them.

• 56:43Robert Evans?

  I think this might be a detriment on the whole.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:47Robert Evans?

  Marcinko clearly saw this as more evidence that he was the good kind of officer, writing, "I played havoc with their system. I treated my lowest ranking seamen with more respect than I did most captains and commodores. I ate and drank with my enlisted men in chiefs. I threw loud parties. I said fuck to flag rank officers. I said fuck, I'm cool."

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:06Robert Evans?

  Like, okay, okay, Richard, okay, man. We get it, buddy. Now, there are good reasons Marcinko was a legend to many of his operators. During his time, Marcinko hurt his leg training overseas and decided he could manage well enough that he just kept working on it because he didn't want to take medical leave. And he avoided the doctor until 17 months later, he was diagnosed with a broken leg.

• 57:28Speaker 04

  Such a moron.

• 57:30Robert Evans?

  And again, yeah, it's really dumb because he had to get, at that point, it was so bad that he had, he had to get a special procedure that his fucking military healthcare wouldn't cover and he had to borrow money from one of his enlisted men in order to get like a sports medical procedure done on himself because he was such a dipshit. Yeah. Now, Marcinko's problems with the Navy began when Lieutenant William McRaven, and that's the guy who was running the SEALs, by the way, when Bin Laden gets killed, was transferred to Team Six as an officer. Now, McRaven comes from Navy royalty, and so Marcinko hated him immediately. For his part, McRaven was a by the book officer and seems to have been one of like the Boy Scout side of things. And as soon as he gets into Team Six, he notices a bunch of irregularities. And part of, I should, I should note here,

• 58:16Robert Evans?

  Marcinko has his pick of enlisted men, officers are assigned. To Team Six. So a lot of his conflicts come with the officers because he doesn't get to pick them.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:25Robert Evans?

  They are not his chosen guys, in other words.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Right. They're only there to either be like jumped in or to narc on him.

• 58:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And McRaven narcs on him because he notices a bunch of irregularities and how operators are filing their travel vouchers. And he complains to his superior officer who says in essence, like, hey, dude, don't ruin this for us. Like, we got a good thing going here, right? And so this guy then tosses McRaven's gear out of their cabin. And when they get back from training, Marcinko fires McRaven. Decades later, he still claimed the man had been sent to Team Six as an infiltrator. McRaven got his running orders from the West Coast, is something Marsenko writes, right? That this guy, he was a spy sent by the West Coast SEALs to infiltrate my elite East Coast unit because they hated me.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  This is, it is, it is telling that, like, like all things in a petty criminal enterprise, there's East Coast, West Coast beef.

• 59:19Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. And he is the biggie in this one. And I guess McRaven is Tupac? I don't.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:26Robert Evans?

  That doesn't seem right, actually. But, okay.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Well, they, they all said the N word just about the same amount, just with a real different tone.

• 59:34Robert Evans?

  Marsenko sure does.

• 59:38Robert Evans?

  I don't know McRaven, but Marsenko for sure does.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel pretty confident about that one, too.

• 59:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. In Code Over Country, Cole gives a good explanation of how many other SEAL officers and outside Navy officers saw this. As having, as Marsenko having upended the chain of command and sent a signal to his men that no officer beside Dick mattered. He credits this with the decisions senior officers in the Naval Special Warfare Division made a few months later, which was to replace Richard Marsenko. Right? So his total period of time commanding Team Six after forming it is like three years. And they never like, I don't think they really do much while he's like, they're training, they're getting up to speed. Like, he's not there for any of like the shit that makes them famous. But he leaves a mark that is pretty much universally agreed to still affect the unit to this day.

• 1:00:26Robert Evans?

  The officer who replaced Marsenko, Captain Robert Gormly, found the. In awful shape. He found that Marcinko had quote constantly misled his superiors in the chain of command under the guise of operational security. Right? In other words, he lied in order to like steal from the Navy and said that the reason why he had to lie was opsec. Yeah, can't file accurate finance reports because like I, I, uh, yeah, the commies might find out that I'm stealing money to buy drugs. Um, and Richard is alleged to have had a pretty serious cocaine problem. A lot of team six guys are alleged to have had pretty serious cocaine problems that they were stealing from the Navy.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Robert Evans?

  You know what happens? A decent amount up to the present day is special forces guys, particularly at Fort Bragg, selling military weapons to criminals for money to buy drugs. Anyway, cool stuff. That's not a team six thing, but it's just good times.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Just a thing that we all pay for. Yeah. Why do we pay taxes again? This is crazy.

• 1:01:23Robert Evans?

  You know, I, I love paying taxes and knowing that it goes to this shit. Gormley also found widespread alcoholism among the team to be a serious problem. He wrote, Dick insisted upon everyone drinking with him whenever he wanted and as long as he wanted. On exercises, they seldom finished the entire scenario because as soon as things got tough, Dick would step in, abort the exercise and take the troops drinking. And so in Gormley's view, like, yeah, the SEALs, like Team Six did some cool training stuff, but also they weren't very, as good as they could have been because Marcinko didn't really care about training as much as he cared about drinking after a point. Like he's ending X, fuck it, fuck it. Let's just go drink.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  All right. All right. You guys did enough. Come on.

• 1:02:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And you, you see this kind of casual attitude to the things that are supposed to be serious. Then Eddie Gallagher is accused of like, one of the first weird signs some of his younger unit mates got is during training before they headed over to Iraq, when they would like do the shoot houses, he would just be shooting the civilian targets that he wasn't supposed to hit and like joke about it. Like, haha, yeah, it's funny, you know, like, and people would be like, but you're not, you have to, doesn't he have to pass training? And he would just like clear it with his friends. So he didn't have to actually pass, like, because he didn't care about not hitting civilians, you know?

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 1:02:36Robert Evans?

  Allegedly, this is what some guy, I wasn't there. I don't know. I'm not a Navy SEAL. I'm just saying what some guy said to another guy who wrote a book, you know? A book called Alpha. Very good. You should read it. So despite the praise that Marcinko gets for creating a team with unique skills, he likely had the very low operational tempo of the early 80s to thank for the fact that his men were never tested too hard while he was in command. His last hurrah came in June of 1983, when he invited Gormly to drink with the unit on Virginia Beach. It was an awkward night. The operators were insubordinate to Gormly. So he left, but Marcinko kept drinking, as Cole writes. Marcinko decided to continue drinking elsewhere. He had a command aide drive him in a modified Mercedes-Benz sedan, one of three he had custom-built and shipped to the United States, which he frequently

• 1:03:21Robert Evans?

  used as his personal car. That night, Marcinko's driver fell asleep in the early morning hours and rear-ended another car, causing significant damage to both vehicles. I will just say, it is sort of remarkable that-

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Great warrior. This type of guy always drives the dictator Mercedes, like, kind of across any culture.

• 1:03:40Robert Evans?

  It's the only car they want. It's the only car they want, right? The dictator Mercedes is a true human universal.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so wild.

• 1:03:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it is. It is kind of beautiful. We're all really the same, deep down, even our psychopaths.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Every culture.

• 1:03:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, every culture.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Every culture, throughout, you know, as soon as Mercedes were around, there was a psycho who-

• 1:04:02Robert Evans?

  Oh, this is a psycho asshole car.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  A cult of personality, a violent cult of personality who got driven around in it.

• 1:04:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, it's just like if you show up drunk to a car dealership, they don't even ask, they hand you the keys to a Dodge Ram, right?

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:16Robert Evans?

  We'll figure out the financing later. You need to be driving this 2500 right now. Get on the road immediately.

• 1:04:27Robert Evans?

  So in true dick fashion, he ordered his staff not to report the accident, but they refused to cover it up because, again, he's about to leave. So like, I'm not going to commit a crime for you. You're out the door. So, and this says a lot. Marcinko, a big part of what he establishes in Team Six is loyalty. That's part of like the Team Six, you know, the oath the SEALs take. And, and the way Marcinko establishes this is like, you don't rat on, on your boss. Your fellow guys, if they commit crimes, if they're stealing, we're a wall. We don't talk to anybody. We don't talk to big Navy. We don't talk to the NCIS investigators. We don't do any of that stuff because we're a loyal warrior brotherhood. Richard talks about that all the time. As soon as he gets sent to a captain's mast, he rolls on his driver and blames him for the accident.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  That's about right, too.

• 1:05:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So he gets a slap on the wrist for this. Anyone else in Dick's position would have been forced into early retirement, but such was the awe with which Marcinko's rogue warrior pirate personality was held by some Navy admirals, that he was given another chance to create another elite unit, this time with even less oversight. He gets the same job again after blowing it.

• 1:05:38Speaker 04

  How?

• 1:05:39Robert Evans?

  Because people just think he's cool.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, because people's brains are poisoned by like fucking you. Because again, like, oh, you need dirty men to protect, you know, your fucking life. That's like, sort of sounds good when it's dirty hairy, I guess.

• 1:05:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  But like, what the fuck are you talking about? But whatever, this is how we run our world.

• 1:06:02Speaker 04

  What were those shirts you saw, Robert?

• 1:06:05Robert Evans?

  I'm just. I'm only here for the violence.

• 1:06:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Robert Evans?

  And fucking, Marcinko talks all the time about like these big, these admirals who come from these admiral families. And that, but those are a lot of his big backers, too. There are admirals that love him and they're usually guys who like didn't do anything all that cool. But like, they really buy into everything Marcinko says, right?

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  But that's the thing, he doesn't hate officers for real. He just needs.

• 1:06:29Robert Evans?

  He hates accountability.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  A cudgel with which to beat office, you know, like, oh, you're, I thought you were cool.

• 1:06:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he needs an excuse for like, why people are always giving him shit for like fucking up constantly. And it's because these officers don't understand what real warriors do. And it's like, well, real warriors don't need to like steal money from the government and ram their fucking Mercedes into the back of a civilian's car because they got drunk. That's not really key to the warfighter ethos. I don't think this is going to help the US win anywhere.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  It's war, it's warlord shit.

• 1:06:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's warlord shit. It's not like a soldier in a democratic nation shit. I mean, it is. I mean, objectively, but it shouldn't be.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  It shouldn't be.

• 1:07:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Marcinko was initially transferred to teach at the National War College, but he got lucky. On October 23rd, 1983, a truck loaded with TNT was detonated outside of a marine barracks in Beirut and killed 241 Americans. Admiral Lyons, who was one of his biggest backer in the Navy, who's the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, suggested that the Navy create a special team to test security in their facilities and says, "I know the guy for the job," right?

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  Dear old Dick? Is it, is it Dear Old Dick?

• 1:07:41Robert Evans?

  It's Dear Old Dick, yeah.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  It's always, it's always like, it, it, the, the problem is, it's just always some like, "He's so crazy, it just might work" shit. Like, people think that's like, real.

• 1:07:52Robert Evans?

  Well, I mean, there's an element that it is. There are real things called red teams that exist to this day and everything from like, actual like, military operational security to like, like, a corporation will hire a red team to see like, is our website secure?

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 1:08:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right. Like, that is like, a, a thing. You do want to do this, right? But you don't necessarily need them to be completely immune to like, all laws? That's not necessary, right? But Dick argues, in order to really be able to work like the enemy, we have to be completely classified and completely free from any kind of oversight, right? Because the enemy is not gonna, there won't be oversight of the enemy, right? So if you want me to know, do what the enemy could, you have to give me this kind of freedom, right?

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  It's also like, this is play acting, motherfucker.

• 1:08:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you're, you're cosplaying now. You're not even in danger. You're, well, actually, he is going to wind up endangering his men somehow in this job.

• 1:08:49Robert Evans?

  So the Red Cell is a super classified unit that was tasked with breaking into US military facilities and even kidnapping officers and civilian employees to demonstrate weaknesses and security protocols. They are kidnapping people.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Robert Evans?

  Now, depending on who you ask, Richard was either very good at this or deeply irresponsible to the extent of criminality. Dick's ultimate plan was to carry out mock terror attacks on 50 bases, spending $125,000 per attack. Advanced warning was given, so these, the officers at these bases and the security people knew they're like, there's going to be an exercise, but you won't know the form it takes, right? And when Marcinko told, showed up to explain what was going to happen to them, he, he tried to psych them out. His job was to scare these people and he took a lot of pleasure in that. One veteran recalled, he'd go into a briefing and say, "We won't break any skin. We won't draw any blood. No broken teeth. Everything else is mine." He would tell women, "We're not gonna pull the skirt over your head and tie your hands

• 1:09:48Robert Evans?

  behind your back." He wanted to get attention. He enjoyed twisting tails, right? You don't like tell women in an office, "Don't worry, we're not gonna rip your clothes off and bind them tight." If you don't want them to think that that might happen. It's like a weird thing to say if you're not trying to scare people, right? Yeah.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  It's also like, what, what is this fucking, it accomplishes, he gets to do his thing, of course.

• 1:10:11Robert Evans?

  Again, the basic idea, sure, you want some guys to test, and that's, aspects of this need to happen, but not the way he is going to do it. No. He also saw the red cell as his chance to get revenge on the Poindexters who'd screwed him out of Team Six. So he made sure to recruit his best guys there, from Team Six for the red cell, along with some of the best dudes from other teams. Since his new unit was classified, he basically had Team Six sign for everything he wanted to buy and wound up purchasing enough gear to operate multiple full SEAL teams. Now again, these guys don't need guns, but he's buying tons of them. He's buying, because his hope is that, once he's exposed all the security flaws and the regular Navy that big Navy doesn't want them to think about, he'll be so beloved, they'll

• 1:10:56Robert Evans?

  make his team the new tier one guy, right? They'll be like, "Wow, we really need your guy. We have to send you on special missions now. You're so good. You've proved that we really need you, Richard."

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  Like, this is like some Barry Zuckerhorn shit. He's supposed to just sneak in and like tag someone with a Nerf gun and just be like, "Could have been, this could have been bad, bro."

• 1:11:15Robert Evans?

  It's gonna, it's gonna be so much worse than that. So one of his first acts- Was to chat test security at the Charleston Navy Base. And brave men, Dark Waters or Kelly, describes Marcinko's team as showing up to areas that stored nuclear weapons, quote, "dressed in scrouchy clothes, unshaven and with long hair," and that they spent several days rummaging about through which they were never challenged. And so he's able to show that, like, yeah, we just had some guys like show up in this nuclear facility looking like shit and nobody like asked what they were doing there or tried to like stop them from rooting around. So this is kind of his proof of concept, right? And it does probably show a real security, like this is the fucking post Vietnam US military. I have no trouble believing that he did, in fact, find security was shit.

• 1:11:59Robert Evans?

  And so the fact that they prove that like where our operators were able to get this close to nuclear weapons, right, without even trying is what secures him the job. And so from this point forward, Richard Marcinko is in charge of yet another elite, unaccountable military unit. So we'll talk about what happens with the Red Cell. And we'll talk about what happens to the Navy SEALs and Team Six after that next week. How are you doing? How are you feeling, Andrew? Good?

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  God, I mean, the only thing that makes it not as bleak is like, I guess life has more or less functioned with these fuckers roaming around.

• 1:12:33Robert Evans?

  Sure. Not well, but yeah.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but right. Every, every second of this is infuriating, obviously.

• 1:12:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. There's so much, among other things, like one of the worst cartels in Mexico was formed from Mexican special forces guys who were trained by like US Green Berets and then took that training in order to like make a cartel that worked really well. And it's very common, by the way, even in the US for like cartel and like, like people who are running large criminal enterprises to recruit from former special and current special forces guys, including Delta guys. This happens. There's documented cases of this.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  It's like, it's the private sector version of this public sector thing.

• 1:13:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  It's the same job.

• 1:13:16Robert Evans?

  Some of them go into fucking, you know, Blackwater and it's, I mean, the modern equivalent of Blackwater. And yeah, some of them work for a fucking cartel, right? It's not everyone who gets out of that, but it's not none.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's the same, importantly, it's the same job.

• 1:13:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Is why this could happen is because we create this job that doesn't do us, doesn't create, do anything for us, except cause problems.

• 1:13:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  Before and after.

• 1:13:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. All, all I was ever, my job was in the military was just to kill people, right? That's like, like all they wanted me doing is just going and gunning down strangers every night. And that's all the cartel is going to have me do, right? Like, I'm ready to do this job, you know? If you're still physically and mentally capable, if it hasn't, if the work hasn't run you through.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  Just occasionally use pliers in an interesting way to fucking make a, make a different kind of tripod in the field or whatever.

• 1:14:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  Other than that.

• 1:14:12Robert Evans?

  Anyway, it's cool stuff. Uh, yeah, I, uh, we'll, we'll talk a lot more about this, uh, about all this good stuff. But first, you know, another week has to pass because you're only legally allowed two episodes of Behind the Bastards a week. Sometimes we give you a third, but every time we do that, it's a felony and we have to throw one of our employees under the bus and they go to prison for life, for life. So every time we do a three parter, just think of that, you know?

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  You got them out of it. Get them out of it, Robert. Just call up.

• 1:14:42Robert Evans?

  No.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:14:43Robert Evans?

  I don't believe in being unaccountable. It's important for us to be accountable, you know?

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  That's right. You'll do the crime. Someone else does have to do the time.

• 1:14:51Robert Evans?

  Someone else will pay the time. Yes. Not me, but someone else. Uh, good stuff. Anyway.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  That's the episode.

• 1:14:58Robert Evans?

  You got a pluggable to bug? Are we done?

• 1:14:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Plug, plug, plug, plug your pluggables. Yeah.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Star Trek. Uh, it's my new Star Trek podcast, uh, with Tony Newsom, Jesse Gender. It's on the same, uh, feed as Yoz's racist used to be. We're having a lot of fun. Come listen. Everyone here probably loves Star Trek enough.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm new to Star Trek. That's the thing. So don't feel like you gotta be a Star Trek fan to get into it.

• 1:15:23Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm. Yeah. Uh, but you should be a Star Trek fan. It's good, you know?

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  I'm getting there.

• 1:15:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Anyway, uh, I don't know. Don't, don't join the military. Uh, avoid that if, if you can. Um.

• 1:15:38Speaker 04

  We're done.

• 1:15:41Speaker 04

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit "Remind Me" on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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• 1:16:45Speaker 05

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal. How do you know that Claude won't become manipulative? This is a constant worry. And you can actually catch the model thinking, "I think X is actually true, but I'm going to tell the user Y."

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  I'm Walter Isaacson. On my new podcast, The Builders, I'm going inside the minds of the people shaping our future. Listen to The Builders starting October 13 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.