No One is Ready for This Coming War - Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf

Andy Stumpf is a former U. S. Navy SEAL, extreme sports enthusiast, public speaker, podcaster, and author. What will the future of war actually look like? As AI accelerates and warfare rapidly evolves, the stakes feel higher than ever, but how worried should we really be? Expect to learn what surprised Andy about how warfare has developed over the past few years, if we are overhyping AI in warfare, what the biggest misconceptions civilians have about “hard men” and discipline are, what role hardship should play in a person’s life, the one lesson from SEAL Team that every young man should learn and much more… - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get 10% discount on all Gymshark products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠⁠⁠https://chatgpt.com⁠⁠ - 0:00 The Surprising Danger of Fighting Under a Full Moon 0:51 Is Technology Making Warfare More Dangerous? 2:46 Can We Predict Where Warfare Is Going? 5:00 Should AI Make Life and Death Decisions? 7:18 Is Ghost Murmur Technology Just a Myth? 10:28 What Really Happens When You Eject From an Aircraft 14:51 How Soldiers Are Trained to Survive Capture 18:51 Is Pulling the Trigger Harder Than It Looks? 23:20 The Dark Virality of Charlie Kirk’s Death 26:00 Are Special Operations Glorified By the Public? 29:48 The Unique Learning Points of a Special Operations Instructor 37:20 How Much Does Failure Cost You? 38:27 The Most Expensive Lessons of Andy’s Career 41:46 Why Walking Away is So Difficult 44:21 Don’t Make Yourself the Victim of Your Own Life 46:41 The Reality of Marrying a Special Operator 51:07 Was Bin Laden’s Raid Truly a Success? 57:40 How America Really Sees Its Military Today 01:08:32 The Dangerous Divide Inside the US 01:13:20 Is Guns For Hire the Way Forward? 01:17:01 Why Do People Quit? 01:29:12 The Most Important Traits in Life or Death Situations 01:31:08 The Brutal Truth About Drownproofing 01:34:40 The Top Scaring Tactics Used in Training 01:40:05 Are Deaths in Training Necessary? 01:41:40 Why the Grind Is Everything 01:44:24 The One SEAL Lesson Everyone Should Learn 01:48:48 Why You’re Never Truly Alone 01:52:22 The Truth About Making a Real Impact 02:02:45 Andy’s End Goal - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna play a little trick for the first time ever in this studio.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:03Chris Williamson?

  To make you feel a little bit more at home. So you're a man who operated largely in the dark. When you are doing raids, when you would have been operating, I imagine some stuff would have been by day, but other stuff would have been by night.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Unless there was an extremely compelling reason to do so exclusively at night. Oh, nice. Here we go. Transitioning evening.

• 0:25Chris Williamson?

  And now we're in a blood moon.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  We usually didn't go out at full moon.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Because there's too much visibility.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Illumination. So, you know, even though you can see at night with night vision goggles, we constantly were looking at the illumination, the external illumination, because at some point, people can almost see you as well as you can see them with the technological advantage. So we would avoid the high illumination nights and obviously aviators and things that fly that could be backlit against those, they try to avoid it as well.

• 0:51Chris Williamson?

  What are you surprised by with what's happening with warfare over the last few years? Like, I can't work out whether technology is making things more humane or more dangerous.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  I think an equal measure of both. I've had a lot of conversations about this with guys during the time period that I served. I'd never for a single second thought about the danger of drone warfare. And I don't mean drones to us was predators or reapers or overhead surveillance platforms that had great, you know, sensor paws and they could pipe stuff down and you can have the ability to look at what they can see. It's great for situational awareness. I never once was concerned about somebody essentially ordering a drone on the internet. Not that that's how it's being built in or made in Ukraine, specifically in Iran has some smaller ones as well. But having that be a kinetic option on the battlefield, didn't think about it a single time.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  And I am glad that I am not a part of that because, I mean, I have an internet connection just like anybody else. And I don't go searching for those videos, but sometimes they find you and people running away from basically a DJI drone that detonates.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  The hard pass, the hardest of passes being involved in that.

• 2:03Chris Williamson?

  I read that field medics are not getting the same sort of trauma training that they used to because the kind of injuries that soldiers are getting on the battlefield are totally different now.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Well, towards the tail end of Afghanistan and Iraq, it was very IED heavy. So it would be explosive wounds, which are really gnarly. Uh, not that any kind of wound is particularly great. Um, but it just, it just tears things to pieces. And most of the stuff I'm seeing with the drone warfare is kind of the same. It's explosive base. So maybe, I don't know.

• 2:39Chris Williamson?

  I'm not sure. It might be more aggressive. It might, it might be able to be more powerful. I don't know. But, uh, yeah, I, well, what have you been surprised by? Would you have been able to predict the direction that warfare was going to go in?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  No, because at the same time, like let's take Ukraine as an example. At the same time that they're at the cutting edge of what's going on with electronics, there are videos of guys running through trenches, fighting at distances between you and I, like just putting AKs around a corner, which by the way, kind of a fan of clearing a corner that way, like, hello, is anybody here? God, not advisable, honestly. I mean, maybe like, I know.

• 3:15Chris Williamson?

  It's a high risk strategy.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  It is controversial. I'm not here to tell anybody how to party, so you do you. But I mean, so we're talking back to World War One and World War Two, but at the same time, the leading edge of electronics in the same battle space. What? So it's this blend of innovation and evolution and then humans getting it on like eye to eye.

• 3:37Chris Williamson?

  Do you think we're overhyping AI in warfare? Cause each technological development is basically touted as the end of one era and the beginning of something different.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  I don't know. The way it's been described to me is that there's phases that AI is coming in. Um, right now there's a human in the loop, meaning a human in making the final decision may be assisted by AI. Then there's human on the loop, meaning kind of just overwatching the AI. And then the phase that I think terrifies everybody is human out of the loop. And I think that's where a lot of the stuff when it came to mixed clot, is it anthropic? I think that I want to believe that they stood their ground. Um, and again, I only have information based off what I could consume on the internet, which, you know, take all that with a grain of salt. But it seems like they stood their ground morally from a. Intelligence perspective or the ability for mass surveillance and then getting to that

• 4:31Speaker 01

  point where humans being off the loop. Cause if we take humans off the loop, I don't know how you combat that as an adversary without doing exactly the same thing. Cause if it can think and make decisions faster than any human that's any of those earlier phases, then you're already at a tactical disadvantage. And then we end up working for robots for our daily water ration. And I don't think that's great. I don't want Terminator to become a documentary, which we might be on that trajectory.

• 4:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I uh, coming from a SEAL background, how do you feel about AI basically being involved in life and death decisions for operators?

• 5:07Speaker 01

  I don't know how it would be at the level that we operated at. I mean broadly, to speak broadly. And again, I am dated, so I don't know exactly how they are interfacing AI right now. The job was to, at some point, a lot of other entities would find fix, locate an individual, fix them in a location. And our job was to get to that location and then finish. And that doesn't mean kill. Sometimes it does. It largely depends on the actions that the individual would take, but solve the problem, which means cross the threshold of a door somewhere. I don't know how AI does that for you. I think AI can do a lot of stuff, especially in the electronic spectrum.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know. I mean, I guess you could, you know, those Raytheon dogs or whatever they are, the robotic types. I mean, maybe it gets to that level and maybe that removes the operator from that or they're controlling him like the, the drone operators are now, but I don't think it's at that level yet. So I think it helps more in the planning and analysis process than anything. But as long as there are people still crossing thresholds of doors, I don't know how much impact AI is going to have.

• 6:12Chris Williamson?

  Could choosing to cross the threshold of that door or not, or the time to do it or not, and targeting and planning.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:19Chris Williamson?

  The fact that that's done by AI now puts operators at the mercy of the decisions that maybe humans weren't involved in.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  It'll, it'll never make the decision as the go no go criteria. It will spit like intelligence. The intelligence uh, community can present packages.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  And you can, you know, in your mission planning process, you are looking at every phase of the operation, you're planning mostly on contingencies, but you're looking at all of those things. The go no go is not based on an intelligence package. It's based on essentially the ground force commander saying this meets the criteria. Now, there are exceptions to that, I would say. Let's say if you are looking for somebody and there's a trigger, a cell phone pops up on a network and you've been looking for that thing like that's like, hey, we might need to go like right now. But other than that, the decision is going to be based off when you think it is best suited for you and least suited for the person that you're going after.

• 7:16Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Tell me you saw this ghost moment thing.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Oh, you mean how we can find heartbeats from space?

• 7:23Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure Missing Hikers would have appreciated if that got used for them as well, too. You know, like

• 7:28Chris Williamson?

  This is the wildest shit.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's because you found it on the internet. I saw Bigfoot on the internet one time, too. That doesn't mean it's real.

• 7:36Chris Williamson?

  You don't think that this is what they did?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  No.

• 7:38Chris Williamson?

  Wow, okay.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  No. Does it sound awesome? Yes. Would it, do I want that tech to exist? Well, now, was it from space or was it supposedly from an aircraft?

• 7:47Chris Williamson?

  Supposedly from an aircraft.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Um, I do not want to tip my hand. Again, I am very dated, but I don't want to tip my hand on any of the, like, to me, it is essential to maintain the TTPs, tactics, techniques, and procedures. There are ways and means that I think aviators have to identify their location that would be picked up by aircraft and probably the higher you are, the better you'd have for line of sight and things like that. Do I think it's capable of doing it at a heartbeat? Maybe, but I don't think we're there yet. I really don't. There are other, less complex ways to do that.

• 8:24Chris Williamson?

  You mean instead of quantum electrodynamics fixed to the front of an Apache helicopter detecting a heartbeat and getting rid of all of the gerbils and dogs and enemies that are out there zeroing in on this one guy from 40 miles away to pick him up and extract him?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  So when the episode comes out, can you just dub me saying what you just said?

• 8:41Chris Williamson?

  But, oh.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Because, yes, that's exactly.

• 8:44Chris Williamson?

  I don't know why you think that this is unrealistic. This is just sends fun.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Here's the thing, I want stuff like that to be true, but can you?

• 8:50Chris Williamson?

  The funnest story is the truest story. That's the way.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Can you imagine how pissed people would be who had lost family members in the back, in like back country? And technology like this existed and we didn't use it for our own people. Cause we were trying to, it's like.

• 9:03Chris Williamson?

  We wanted to, we wanted to wait for this one guy. What's he called? Like dude forty four Bravo or something? What was his code name?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 9:09Chris Williamson?

  Dude forty five Bravo.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  That was too good of a code name to be honest, or a, a call sign. Most of them, you'll notice they're, they are from mistakes. Or things that the person who the call sign is associated with are not proud of, which is exactly why they need to be what they are. Like if you make a galactic mistake in training and they can associate one word to that, that's what you're known for, for the rest of your military.

• 9:31Chris Williamson?

  What was yours?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  No, it was only aviator wise.

• 9:33Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  I was just Andy.

• 9:35Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Fucking lame. Super lame. What is some of the most stupid ones that you've heard?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Oh God, you hear people, you know, when they're trying to make them up. Cause and most of the time this is involving alcohol to be like, oh yeah. Yeah. My call sign was bone crush. I'm like, you're a hundred and forty two pounds soaking wet. Shut the fuck.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Stuff like that, you know what I mean? Like, you know, Reaper or just like, take it easy, dude. Take it easy, you know?

• 10:00Chris Williamson?

  So you did, you think that this ghost murmur thing, at least the explanation of it's bullshit and the way that they managed to find this guy in the middle of the desert was something a little bit more.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  I think there are easier ways to do it.

• 10:10Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  And when, uh, when pilots eject, they sound like they're ejecting with no tools. So, um, part of, you know, there's entire department, like the aviators don't maintenance the aircraft, right? So there's people making sure that the aircraft is good to go. There's people making sure that survival equipment is good to go, all of those things. So when you, first off, I've never punched out of an aircraft. I've talked to some people who have, it seems to be a spicy ride.

• 10:34Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Um, well, I had a guy on my show who ejected at about three knots under the speed of sound about a.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  So, and I might be, I might be getting this uh, exact detail incorrect, but he was doing a maneuver and was nose down in a hornet, looking at the Atlantic Ocean rushing up and punched out. And it basically, how did he describe it? Took all of the bones in his body that weren't broken and did the opposite of that. And the only reason he's actually alive is because the water was so cold. He was in the hospital for months. Keegan Gill is his name.

• 11:11Chris Williamson?

  Why would the cold water help?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Because it uh, shunts your blood vessels. He was gonna bleed out otherwise.

• 11:16Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, so the force of ejecting?

• 11:20Speaker 01

  A few knots under the speed of sound.

• 11:23Chris Williamson?

  Because the air that was, that immediately slammed into, okay, so it wasn't the force of the ejection. It was the?

• 11:28Speaker 01

  I don't think that feels good either.

• 11:30Chris Williamson?

  But I was gonna say, cause people, people can get concussed, I think, just by doing that.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Oh, I think if you do two, you're done. I think they medically retire you if you get two ejections. Oh, do you know, it'll shorten your vertebrae. I mean, it's, I think you go for this.

• 11:43Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I used to be five eleven, what's with now?

• 11:44Speaker 01

  I think it goes zero to double digit G's like that. Um, and so, yeah, he was, um, and he was flying.

• 11:52Chris Williamson?

  That was a real one-two punch.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:54Chris Williamson?

  Those, the jab was the ejection.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  He basically said he almost got liquefied on departure from the aircraft.

• 12:03Chris Williamson?

  I'm like, okay.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then, and it's his aircraft, aircraft just vaporized when it hit the ground.

• 12:11Chris Williamson?

  Yep, well, water.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the water. There happened to be, I believe it was a Coast Guard vessel nearby that his, he was flying with his boss. They were doing like some early air combat maneuvers and he literally, he's like, I initiated a maneuver outside of the envelope that I should have, put the aircraft into a position where it was not gonna recover. And can you imagine that visual? So he was probably at like six hundred miles an hour. And he said a second and a half from impact. Can you imagine that visual coming up here?

• 12:42Chris Williamson?

  Fuck.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then if you miss the little ejection handle.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  You didn't take the safety out. Yeah, yeah. No, thank you. Hard pass.

• 12:53Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  But when they go out, not in that situation, you have you have tools with you. And so the ejection seat itself has some stuff that comes with it.

• 13:02Chris Williamson?

  Like a little life raft, but for existing in a.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  For sure. You're gonna have a fire probably. You're gonna have a radio. You might have a beacon type system.

• 13:10Chris Williamson?

  Maybe some food.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Probably, yeah. It's not gonna be awesome. And people forget that aviators, so that we go to the same school, the basics year school that aviators go to. They're specialists. That guy was a weapon systems officer. So he was in the backseat of an F-15, I believe. So he wasn't flying. And I actually don't even know if they're pilots. My guess would be that they're not. So the guy up front is completely responsible for manipulating the controls. I don't even know if they have controls in the back, actually. I've never been around an F-15 cockpit. So he's doing all the weapon stuff. Their world is very high off the ground. And so I've done a backseat ride in an F-18 and it was, I'm like, this is ridiculously uncomfortable. Like my head was bouncing off the canopy, was sick for about two days, felt nauseous because of the Gs we were pulling.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  But then earlier in my career, I went to SER school and I was paired up with an F-18 pilot. And you want to talk about a duck out of water? Like, how do you read this topographical map? Like, how do you, you know, now, to me, I'm like, oh, yeah, we just will celestially navigate or this is east and we're just gonna do that. And they're like, where's my airplane?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Right? It's the complete inverse. Like, if you were to throw your average special operations dude in an F-15, they'd be like, oh, my God. So just imagine the reverse of that. When these people punch out and now they're on the ground.

• 14:25Chris Williamson?

  It's supposed to be in three dimensions. I'm now in two dimensions.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's it's real, you know, you could maybe see in your sensors, people looking for you, trying to shoot at you at 25,000 feet. And now you're at 250 feet and those same people are down there and they're looking for you. I don't know if anybody got that close to him, but I would like to believe that tech exists. I think that's a far stretch. Probable, I don't, well, possible, not probable.

• 14:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's crazy to think that these guys that have been, will they have training to be able to evade?

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Limited. So like I said, we go to the same school. It's about a week of in-classroom stuff. And a lot of it, at least when I went through, was based off of Vietnam. A lot of studying the Hanoi Hilton and the POWs there and the, you know, the tap codes. But they, they created an alphabet system that they would teach each other through doing it. And it was a five by five. And a lot of it is what to expect if you're captured, how you're going to be questioned. You need to, you know, stay, you're supposed to do the best that you can to stay inside of the boundaries of releasing particular information. But the reality is with enough pain, people are, they're going to break, you know? And then you go out to, the one I went to is in Warner Springs, which is in east San Diego by not very far.

• 15:41Chris Williamson?

  The one you went to?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  The SIR school, Survival Escape Resistance Invasion. You go out to the, and it was, this was aviators and largely people who might find themselves on the ground. So special operations personnel, anybody that might find themselves on the ground in like a theater of war. I don't think you would need to send like traditional Navy people who are going to be on a vessel to SIR school. Very unlikely, but that would be, that'd be a rough day if they ended up getting rolled up. I don't know. Like, wow, they swam out here and took you out of your bed.

• 16:11Chris Williamson?

  Really far from home.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah. God, that would suck. And then you would really wish you had gone to that school. But, you know, you got to play the odds on that one. So it was a couple of days of group navigation. And then they, they start off a simulation where now you're on E and E, escape and evasion. And you're paired up and you were trying to evade an enemy force that is looking for you. Probably very similar in concept to Iran. And then everybody eventually gets caught because you spend about two and a half days in slappy camp where they slap you around and they introduce you to being, I don't know if they would say interrogated, but it's essentially what it is. And you're in this little, you know, it's this, it looks like dog kennels that human beings are in. You know, and they're way too small to be in there. So you can't find a comfortable position. There's music playing all the time.

• 16:58Chris Williamson?

  Must be very hard for you to get comfortable with the erection that you had.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Just stay hard. You know what I mean? Just the whole way through.

• 17:05Chris Williamson?

  That's, that's actually a great way to warn the terrorists off you. Like, we can't go in, don't go in kennel number five. Like, he's just, he's permanently erect.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  That's the, that's, that's the problem. And some people, they let it go. The, the key is go hard, stay.

• 17:17Chris Williamson?

  Always got to be on.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  I mean, if I put myself on the other side of that coin, I'd be like, just leave that dude alone. Clearly, there's some psychopathy there.

• 17:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I'm terrified of him. You're going right.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  But it's a couple of days. And then those people go back to, if you're an aviator, your job is to aviate. And so they're going to go back and master that craft. And I don't think.

• 17:37Chris Williamson?

  Don't keep on top of their handguns.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Probably not. I don't know what like level of minimum training that they're required to do. It's probably currency at best. Competence in currency are not the same thing. But again, they have to be competent in current and flying a multimillion dollar aircraft in a place.

• 17:53Chris Williamson?

  Prioritize your training appropriately.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, so I can only imagine that that guy, he had a hell of a day and a half or two days, however long he was on the ground.

• 18:02Chris Williamson?

  Someone said, I can't wait for Mark Wahlberg to play this guy in a movie.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's possible.

• 18:08Chris Williamson?

  That's basically what you're doing. You're like, I don't want to be, I don't want to be picked up after 12 hours. If I get picked up after 36, then there's a movie. Mark Wahlberg gets to play me.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Especially if he's like 48.

• 18:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, now we're talking.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, don't turn your beacon on.

• 18:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Like looking.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Really keep him guessing.

• 18:24Chris Williamson?

  Wouldn't it be cool if you had like a little chart? And on the chart, it's the different actor levels. And for the longer that you stick about, you go, it's 36 hours, but at 36 hours, I only get Marky Mark. But at 48, I get Brad Pitt.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  How did you get such insight into how the US military?

• 18:38Chris Williamson?

  At 72, it's Chris Hemsworth. I'm like, God, I'm going to make it to 72. I want Hemmy to play me.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  He's a handsome man.

• 18:44Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Better in person?

• 18:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, unbelievably handsome in person. Yeah, that actually was where I got the permanent, the erect idea from.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:50Chris Williamson?

  It's terrifying. So technology in war.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:53Chris Williamson?

  Is it making soldiers more fragile or more effective? Do you think?

• 19:03Speaker 01

  I think two things can be true sometimes. I don't.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  I don't think you should outsource killing. And killing through a screen.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Even though I think that that's the way that the world is probably headed. I think that removes the burden associated with that. But at the same time, some of those tools can help you kill people a lot more effectively.

• 19:26Chris Williamson?

  So you mean there shouldn't be a flippancy with pulling the trigger or the equivalent of on another human?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  No, I don't think so. I think it should scramble your eggs for maybe the rest of your life. Not like destroy you, but it should change your optic on humanity in the world.

• 19:45Chris Williamson?

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• 20:28Chris Williamson?

  So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use with Neutonic with Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to Shopify.com/ModernWisdom, all lowercase. That's Shopify.com/ModernWisdom. Wasn't there a stat around the number of soldiers who either didn't fire their weapon or fired their weapons in a direction that wasn't basically toward the enemy in World War II?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, S.L.A. Marshall did a study on this and it's why they went from shooting at circular accuracy targets to silhouette type targets. Now, there's some issues with S.L.A. Marshall and his data collection though. So as they've looked at this in hindsight, he claims to have interviewed a substantial number of people. And somebody finally just got out a calendar and a piece of paper and said, "How many did you say that you did? And how long were you over there for?" The math doesn't math on that. So there, come to find out, there's some BS involved.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  That section of military history as well. But that is a lot of where Grossman got his on-killing information as well too. And walking through that, they claimed that there was a...

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Statistically, very small amount of people that would actually aim their weapon at another human being and pull the trigger. And they associated that probably with two prongs. One, just the morality of humanity, but two, only practicing shooting at things that didn't look real. Not that a sil- like a green type silhouette doesn't look that real, but it looks more human than a circular bullseye. So they swapped that out. And then I believe S L A Marshall and Grossman, their theory was that the percentages went up. I don't know how you actually measure that. You know, I talked with some guys who served in Vietnam. They're like, god damn it, I was shooting at everything I could give. Well, one thing that stopped me is I ran out of bullets. I'm like, whoa, dude.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  You're at a 12. Can I get you back at an eight also? Are you okay? Have you talked to anybody about this in your life? Are you just like waiting for me 60 years later to ask you this question? As my dad, by the way.

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  Jesus Christ. Well, and look, I mean, the technology might enable people to get around that if that is an issue.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  And should we allow that, man? Killing is so romanticized in so many ways, and it is something that I, god, it should be a measure of last resort. And I don't know if you should remove the complexity and difficulty associated with that.

• 23:07Chris Williamson?

  With certainly the flippancy that people can find around that. It shouldn't be that.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Well, look at it, you can, if you're on any social media platform, I mean, did you see Charlie Kirk's death?

• 23:22Chris Williamson?

  Uh, how would you say, uh, unconsentingly? Yeah.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  So all, so all three of my kids did too. That was the hardest conversations I had to have was with all three of my kids.

• 23:34Chris Williamson?

  Especially knowing what that dad did.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  They, I am the most resolutely uninteresting human being to them. I think they had maybe asked me about my old job. Five times. I don't I don't know what they know or don't know. I don't talk with them about it. I have nothing military related at the house. It's just, I'm just, I just try to be their dad. But all three of them, in formative years of their life, scrolling on social media, because their generation is of course almost terminally online at this point, saw that. I saw it as well, too. And on any of these social platforms, if you go deep enough down a rabbit hole, there's no way that these filters can be as effective as we want them to be. You're going to see people who are dying online. And that is not something that most people

• 24:19Speaker 01

  ever actually see in their real life. And I don't know if that reduces your, you know what I mean? Like, it's like this, this barrier that I'm very thankful that almost nobody is willing to cross. Like, people might talk a big game about that, but almost nobody is willing to cross that barrier. And I'm very thankful for that. Because it's not something that we talked about flippantly. I don't think we should remove barriers to making that easier.

• 24:45Chris Williamson?

  That was really, I mean, that's see it into my brain. Think about how many videos on the internet you've seen, like, tens of thousands of videos that I've seen on the internet.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Lucky numbers.

• 24:54Chris Williamson?

  I know. Fucking baby numbers, dude. Up your game.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  We're talking a week?

• 24:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. That's just porn, huh?

• 25:01Chris Williamson?

  And that one, it's not the, it's not the main angle that everybody saw. It was the second one that was much more graphic.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:08Chris Williamson?

  And I didn't mean to see that one either. That's not my idea of a good way to spend an afternoon to see that. And yeah, I didn't, I didn't mean to. But then you're contending with, what does freedom of speech mean? And freedom of exposure? Is that the same thing as freedom of speech? Freedom to be exposed to these things? And how much should we, there's certainly things that we don't want to be insulating people from.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:31Chris Williamson?

  But then there's stuff that almost universally, like a guy being killed in a really, really graphic way.

• 25:41Chris Williamson?

  That's one of the ones that, who needs to see that as a part of their human development?

• 25:46Speaker 01

  I completely agree. And the fact that that stuff exists and will for the foreseeable future, I don't know, I don't know what that does to the psyche of people who see that when they're in those developing ages.

• 26:00Chris Williamson?

  What's something about special operations that you think civilians glorify that's completely wrong or misconstrued?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  The people legitimately. So I, I truly served with people that I consider to be just tremendous in every regard. And not like a person that was tremendous in every sense, but I could look at somebody and say, oh my God, I wish I could do what you're able to do to fill in the blank. I could find inspiration in those people and look at them and say, okay, I know what's possible. And if you can get to that level, I can at least try to get to that level because I want that to be the standard. You could apply that across the board. But they're all exceptionally normal people. The special operations community is not comprised of people that put a cape on and go to work. They are very

• 26:53Speaker 01

  normal people that are tasked with doing some exceptional things at times, but they suffer from the same ailments of life that everybody else does. And you can easily create this unrealistic expectation that they can do anything, that they can tolerate anything, that they are impossible to knock down. And that isn't the case, man. They're normal, exceptionally average people. I wish I could take people and introduce them to the first day of Bud's training where you'll have a couple hundred people lined up and just like, just look at the physiology of these people. There's gonna be like a D1 college athlete, which guess what? That fucker's not gonna be able to swim. So see you later. Right? And there's gonna be a marathon runner and that guy's gonna have a really hard time

• 27:36Speaker 01

  swimming. So that stuff kind of sorts itself out. The rest of it, you would look at their physiology and anatomy and just be like, really? Like you look like the dude who was checking me out at the grocery store. And it's like, yeah, that dude's a savage. But still also a normal person. And I think that's forgotten often.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  And you can actually lie to yourself when you're in that community because if people expect that from you, you start expecting it from yourself and then you're headed into a really deep, dark place.

• 28:05Chris Williamson?

  You've got a line, "We are not as unique as we think. We just struggle in different ways."

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:11Chris Williamson?

  I'm guessing that's what you're talking about here.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there you have more in common with a guy who's bagging your groceries and a special operation soldier than you could possibly think. And nobody wants to believe that.

• 28:23Chris Williamson?

  Why not say, "Why did I want to believe it?"

• 28:25Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Because then I think it makes it easy for people to say, "Well, I could never do that because that person's different." And I'm not saying take the grocery bagger to Iran, you know? Maybe, maybe take the guy.

• 28:37Chris Williamson?

  See if you can fucking survive. Actually, we really want to make a movie about you with Mark Wahlberg.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  You can put whatever you want to in this brown paper bag, but it's all you have is survive.

• 28:45Chris Williamson?

  Think 72 hours, yeah.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Only if you want Chris.

• 28:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, it's easier to, if you can say, "Well, they're different," then you give yourself an excuse, "Well, I can't do that." I mean, and I went back as an instructor for 18 months and I watched these kids and I'm sure the instructors watched my class and said the same thing, like, "God, I work with retards."

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Clearly what they were saying about my class, but it, it was not a group of people that are on baseball card decks. It was people from all over the US, from the Midwest to coastal cities, who would probably have politics align a little bit more blue and some align a little bit more red, and people who joined the military to get out of their socioeconomic position because they had no upward mobility and legitimate people who had probably generational wealth and they're all there. And they're all so ridiculously, the differences are on, it's just, it's a roundoff error. The similarities are. Yeah, they're just average people.

• 29:48Chris Williamson?

  What did you learn as an instructor looking at selection that you didn't learn being part of selection?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, let me just tell you, it was a different experience.

• 29:59Chris Williamson?

  Right, because you were warm. Did you, did you play into the fact that when you went through it, you saw some bastard with a big anorak on, holding a hot cup of cocoa? You're like, ah, now it's my turn.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Well, with all generational trauma, the goal with it should be to pass it downhill. So at least that's what the military uses. Um, no, there are definitely people who play like roles and caricatures. I was, I went back about 10 years after I had been in and I was rehabbing from getting hurt. So, and also we were well into the global war on terror. So when I went through in 1997, the concept of the real world application of the job was exactly that. It was a concept. I volunteered during peacetime and there was a generation of SEALs that had served post Vietnam all the way up into that point that had never seen any combat. No, but I mean, that doesn't change though, how hard they trained and how much they focused on the job. It's either good luck or bedlock, depending on the optic that you're looking at it.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  And people will tell you it's both like, oh, it's good luck. I didn't get that. Or I had feel like I have horrible luck because I didn't get those experiences. So it was a different world for me going through training. A lot of this stuff as a student, it's really weird. You see, my class started with 180 people and we graduated 18 of the originals. So every day you're peeling people off, mostly in the first phase of training. That's where the vast, vast majority of people are going to disappear. But you don't get to talk to them because your training day continues and they're just, they're gone. And they are shifted over to another division and they're housed in a different area. And this, and that's not demeaning by any stretch. They just, they lift and shift them from the class that is going through training. And you're back to the needs of the Navy.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  You can come back and that's something that people don't often know. You can, uh, you'll have to go back out to the fleet for a couple of years. You're going to have to re-screen to come back in. But some of the most legendary SEAL operators are guys who didn't make it through BUDS their first time. And I don't know why people don't understand that like, oh, you failed one time. I have to go, you know, my life is over. And I'm like, I don't, you know, I don't. If I had a list, my successes and failures, let me just tell you the failure list is multiples, magnitudes of order greater than my success list. But when I went through as a student, nothing made sense because you would have an instructor one day, he would, you would do something that they would ask and they'd be like, good job. And the next day you do something that they would ask and they would just hand you your ass. You're like, what is going on here?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  So it was very chaotic and it didn't make sense. Like, why are we so focused on some of these things? It was always attention to detail, attention to detail, attention to detail and follow procedure regardless of how you feel and what is going on around you. As an 18 year old kid, oh, some of those things are very difficult concepts, right? And I also, again, the lens of, I mean, this is just training, right? Like, nobody's been to war in a really long time. Like, you guys take it easy a little bit. And then like, God, then I go back in 2006. So we're five years into the GWOT at this point. And I looked at the curriculum and I saw what we were doing and I, it was constant aha moments of like, oh, this is why we do that. Attention to detail has nothing to do with the knife that I'm inspect, inspecting to see

• 33:03Speaker 01

  if it can cut hair before you go for an ocean swim or the CO2 cartridges that you twist into a life jacket that was produced in 1918, that I don't even know would save your life if you fire the cartridge off. But you're sitting there as an instructor and you're looking at each one of the, you know, the, the screws and all, all the little crevices. Is there any rust in there? Is there any sand in there? It's not going to matter when it comes to functioning. You're focusing on attention to detail above everything else because that's what's keeping you alive when it comes to following a tactic when your entire world around you was falling apart. Um, so that type of stuff, time management, emotional control, decision making, all of those things, going back as an instructor, like, okay, now I get it. And the way I viewed it was this.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  I'm all gonna be instructor for two years, maybe on the far end, 18 months, and I do want to continue my career. And if I do so, I'm gonna go back to a SEAL team. And guess who I'm gonna end up serving with? All of these people. So it is probably even to my own benefit and perhaps survival if I try to pour as much knowledge, information into these people as opposed to treating them like the redheaded stepchild that you'd like to forget, which is a technical description of how my class is treated. Not that I harbor any resentment and bad feelings.

• 34:18Chris Williamson?

  You think you had a particularly bad one?

• 34:20Speaker 01

  They hated our class. They hated the leadership of our class. We did, so Hell Week is the fifth week of training and it opens with like M60s firing blanks and smoke grenades. It's supposed to be like this intro into combat.

• 34:33Chris Williamson?

  Sounds like fucking Coachella's opening party or something.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  I've never been to Coachella, but I like where your head's at. And probably less alcohol at this party than Coachella and Molly. But for our class, they just walked out to the beach because they put you out in these huge general purpose tents. And they just walked out to the beach and with a bullhorn, they're like, hit the surf, which just means run out of the tent and just go get into the water. That's all we got. They hated our class. They beat the shit.

• 34:58Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think they hated you so much?

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Here's the leadership.

• 35:01Chris Williamson?

  Do you have a leader during Hell Week?

• 35:04Speaker 01

  You have a leader at all times.

• 35:05Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  So they did not like me.

• 35:09Chris Williamson?

  Were you the leader?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 35:12Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, I totally understand them if so.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  No, no, I failed in my leadership roles much later on, after I had enough knowledge and experience and just not the technical capacity to do my job. It's not everybody's, and there's another thing that a misconception that people have. Well, you know, if you come from special operations, you're just naturally this leader. You're gonna be awesome. You can lead in any situation. And it's not true. The best leaders that I ever was around was in that community. And in the same breath, the worst leaders that I was ever around was also in that community. But nobody can tell that from the outside because we still will be successful.

• 35:47Chris Williamson?

  Get the job done?

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Right. And then so people look at that community then, they say, well, okay, if you guys always get the job done, then your leaders must all be awesome. Why don't you go ahead and canvas the group? And you'll find out right quick which leaders are liked and appreciated and are actually doing the jobs and which ones are lucky that they might not have a dick rubbed on the inside of their coffee cup.

• 36:07Chris Williamson?

  So you had a strong headwind?

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Does that mean a dick on my coffee cup?

• 36:11Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  I did the best I could. I've never claimed to be a good leader, man. I have made, I'm not joking, I've made more mistakes in my life than I've had failures.

• 36:24Chris Williamson?

  This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. I've tried pretty much every brand of gym wear over the years. Most of it looks good on the website, but very little of it survives real world training, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Gymshark. Their hybrid shorts, especially in onyx gray and navy, are basically my uniform in the gym at this point. They move properly, they don't bunch, they're super lightweight, you can wash and dry them in an afternoon. The Geo seamless t-shirt is what I train in almost every single session. Breathes properly, holds its shape after you wash it. Everything that Gymshark makes is lightweight and sweat wicking and easy to wash and dries fast. And if you're still on the fence, they offer a 30 day free return. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't like it, just send it back. Plus, they ship internationally. And right

• 37:06Chris Williamson?

  now, you can get 10% off everything site wide by going to the link in the description below or heading to gym.sh/ModernWisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM10 at checkout. That's gym.sh/ModernWisdom, a ModernWisdom10 at checkout. You have this line about failure being tuition payments.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:24Chris Williamson?

  I've reframed how I view failures. I now consider them tuition payments. Some of my tuition payments have been relatively inexpensive and some have taken me to the brink of bankruptcy.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's just an easier way to get comfortable with consistently failing, you know, just lying to yourself and reframing that, hey, maybe this is a good thing.

• 37:43Chris Williamson?

  Cost of doing business is a great way to look at this stuff, though, dude.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:46Chris Williamson?

  It really is.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Legitimately, I didn't view it like that for many, many years in my life because you want to sit there and blame every external circumstance. And maybe you do fail because of an external circumstance. But by reframing it as a lesson that I learned then that I can apply moving forward, the tuition payment that you really don't understand the cost of. I mean, I'll take a, if you put it in business terms, I'll take a $5,000 mistake that would save me $500,000 later on, you know, and that's, that's really all it is. It's, failures are rough. I mean, it doesn't make it any easier by reframing it to that, but I also am sitting here today, the person that I am, because of the failures and hopefully what I've learned from those as well.

• 38:27Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the most expensive lessons that you've paid for?

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  So earlier in life,

• 38:36Speaker 01

  my entire life was based around this concept of being somebody who was incapable of quitting. Because that's the community that I came from. And because of that,

• 38:52Speaker 01

  I put my children and myself through probably 10 extra years in a relationship that I'm still working my way out of and the impact of. Because I would look at myself in the mirror and say, today's the day, huh? Pussy, you gonna quit? I literally talked myself into staying in something that demonstrably and objectively, almost everybody from the outside, after I made the decision to leave was like, hey, man, good job on that one. Wish you would have done that about a decade ago. Because of how I viewed myself in that situation. That shift, and I write about it, it's, I'd actually, at this point in my life, rather see people fall a little bit short of their goals

• 39:38Speaker 01

  and know when to walk away than destroy themselves because they don't ever want to quit and they end up having nothing in their life.

• 39:47Chris Williamson?

  There's a fine line between resilience and suppression with this. And a lot of the time, I think we are, we compute, confuse suppression for strength. And I'm kind of fascinated about the line between

• 40:07Chris Williamson?

  giving up too soon, leaving it on the table, sandbagging a workout and stopping because you're about to get injured.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  That is a tough one because how do you measure that? That there's no external tool that somebody can look at you and say, hey,

• 40:22Speaker 01

  you should keep going because they don't actually, you know, like, they don't know how your body is.

• 40:26Chris Williamson?

  What your limit is.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and especially if you need to use an exercise as an example, like the tension that you're under, like you, you're actually getting physical feedback. I was like, no, no, I'm not gonna put that down so I don't blow my, you know, my spine out.

• 40:38Chris Williamson?

  But the emotional one's even more difficult.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 40:41Chris Williamson?

  What does it mean to say that you went past your emotional limit?

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:44Chris Williamson?

  What does an injury? relationally or karmically or psychologically mean compared with, yeah dude, I I put three eighty on the bar and tried to do twenty back squats and I blew my MCL out. Yeah, that was a bad idea. But what does that mean? Because it's you erode psychological wellbeing in small chunks typically over a very long period of time. So you can always go one more day. You can always go until you get to the stage where you've accumulated sufficient damage.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I wish I would have been able to recognize that point earlier in my life. It would have saved a lot of hardship for myself and I think for my my children as well, too. But if I'm like anybody else, I'm almost always my own worst enemy. You know, my mastery of negative self-talk, I I have no education beyond a high school diploma that I barely got. I think they gave it to me just so I would get out of there. But a PhD in negative self-talk.

• 41:46Chris Williamson?

  How does that encourage you to stay in situations that you should leave earlier?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  The reason I stayed is because the entire currency of my life up until that point was being known as somebody who wouldn't quit. And that's very common inside of that special operations world. Again, you know, what what are you, what are these misconceptions that people may have? And and that's why, to me, it's so important to at least try to pull back the curtain a little bit and just explain that these are absolutely average people. Like, yeah, and God, so many guys will say this, I hate the term always and never. But most guys would tell you, like, listen, the job will always suffer last. The boys will always suffer last. But the family will absolutely suffer before your job performance does. I mean, you put everything for that pursuit of who you are and what

• 42:31Speaker 01

  you're doing on a pedestal. And everything else around you in life is falling apart and you still have to deal with that at some point. And it's just that unwillingness to let people down and that unwillingness to admit like, hey, man, like, I'm falling apart at the seams here. Like, I might be performing at work, but absolutely every other metric in my life is is trending in the wrong direction. The guys won't say anything. It's dangerous. I think it has a lot to do with what happens when, you know, guys get out and the struggles that they have when they get out as well, too.

• 43:02Chris Williamson?

  I found out that of professional athletes who get divorced, fifty percent of the divorces happen in the first year after they retire.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  It's a different universe when you stop going to work and you actually have to physically be there. But the world I came from, two hundred and seventy days a year on the road, easy. I mean, you're living independent, but make hopefully parallel lives. And then you switch to three sixty-five home. Hey, honey, do we know each other? Do you still like me?

• 43:37Chris Williamson?

  And you've lost your purpose. I think that's a big one. Like you are trying to deal with the deceleration of your own identities.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Hopefully, you guys put the brakes on a little early, you know, lift their head up a little bit, realize that however long you want to stay in the military, the end is coming. So you can kind of keep an eye on the horizon, on the future. The longer people wait for that, I think the tougher the transition can be. But yeah, it's a shock, man. You got to be careful that it's not who you are, that it's just what you do.

• 44:05Chris Williamson?

  Given it's so all encompassing, that's got to be difficult, though.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  Extremely. And I think that's why, I mean, the stats don't lie. Statistically, veterans, special operations as well, suicide rate is statistically anomalous in comparison to the rest of society.

• 44:21Chris Williamson?

  You've got this line, until you view yourself as the author of your life, you'll be the victim of it.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:26Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 44:28Speaker 01

  It means until you stop blaming everything else around you for the course and trajectory of your life, you're just going to be a flag in the wind, going with the direction that the wind is blowing. And for clarity, you have almost no control over what happens in your life. But you have complete and total control in how you respond to it. And that is being the author of your life. So life sucks sometimes. Cool. Are you going to suck with that? Or are you going to take control of who you are and work your way through that and maybe even be better at the end of that, right? And that's the difference between somebody who will sit there and externally, instead of doing anything about what's going on, they'll sit there and complain about what's going on and point fingers at everything.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  The author of your life, not that it's any easier, you accept what's going on and you focus on what it is that you can control, which is largely going to be your actions, your thought process, your internal monologue, and what you do with it.

• 45:23Chris Williamson?

  I suppose an interesting, an interesting challenge that you have here is you are the author of your life and that means that you need to take responsibility for how you have contributed to the problems that you're facing. But that also includes how your traits, even the ones that in a different world or a different environment were strengths.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:44Chris Williamson?

  You are having to pay the price for now too. That's also you are your own responsibility. Your traits are your own responsibility.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  If you take a no quit attitude to everything in life, you are headed towards failure. You have to control those tools as well too. And again, that from coming from a community where that was the currency and equity is your ability to never quit. Let's apply that to alcoholism. Like I have a drinking problem. I should not never quit. Okay. Maybe I should just pick up heroin then too. See how far I can push that one. Like, you know what I mean? Like you, there's easy examples of where that can get completely out of control. And it's just, God, it's so, God, it's so dangerous. And that's why I say I would rather have people fall a little bit short of their goals and understand that not everything

• 46:33Speaker 01

  is worth destroying who you are or killing yourself for. There's just so few things in life that I think actually rise to that level.

• 46:41Chris Williamson?

  What's the classic avatar mold of a special operator's relationship like with their wife?

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Man, that really varies. I don't know if there could. Some guys like to marry strippers.

• 46:58Chris Williamson?

  You know, so. I mean, this is, we're not even talking about the sales community anymore.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  So I mean, that's, that's a weird avatar and I'm not here to tell anybody how to party. But I mean, that relationship dynamic often involves Chinese food getting thrown at you for some reason. I don't know why, but I've seen it.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  I've seen it. It's weird. Um, so it really depends. The divorce rate in special operations, I would say hovers at eighty to eighty-five percent.

• 47:25Chris Williamson?

  Fuck.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  That's an estimate. Like, I have no, that, that it's anecdotal based on my experience. But the other side of that is, so let's say it is eighty-five. Fifteen percent of those people are making it. And I have seen it where it's been high school sweethearts, legitimately high school sweethearts, and they, they have the ability to grow together, even though they're apart and they can reconnect. I mean, a lot of it has to do with too, the, the what was modeled for you when you were young, right? Because a lot of people will replicate the avatar of what was shown to them when they were growing. That's what they think a relationship looks like. That's one of my regrets for staying ten years longer than I, than I think I should have is. And I got to the point where I was asking myself, like, would I want my own children to follow my footsteps in this?

• 48:05Chris Williamson?

  Relationship?

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Yes. And if the answer, like.

• 48:08Chris Williamson?

  And you are imprinting them.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Yes. And like, what am I modeling here? I'm saying, you know, I am the most influential person in my children's life, especially at that point in time in their life. What am I modeling? And it's like, that is a tough conversation here to have, like, oh, my God, I'm actually, even though I, I view myself as somebody who can never have quit, and this is the only currency that matters. I am actually modeling something. I would never want my children.

• 48:31Chris Williamson?

  Would you want that for your kids?

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Before we continue, I wish someone had told me five years ago to stop overthinking nutrition and just find something that works. I've simplified mine down to one scoop a day, and it's made hitting my nutritional bases an awful lot easier. AG1 includes seventy-five vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food ingredients. And that is why I've been drinking it every morning for over five years now. And they've taken it a step further with AG1 Next Gen, the same one scoop ritual, but now backed by four clinical trials. In those trials, AG1 was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, boost healthy gut bacteria by ten times, and improve key nutrient levels in just three months. They've been refining the formula since two thousand and ten, fifty-two iterations and counting.

• 49:11Chris Williamson?

  And I love the Next Gen because it's more bioavailable, it's clinical validation, which is unbelievably rare in the supplement world. The older I get, the more I realize that the small stuff compounds, and this is one of the smallest things I do. That makes a massive difference. If you're still on the fence, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee in the US. So you can buy it and try it for three months. And if you do not like it, they'll just give you your money back. Right now, you can get a free AG1 welcome kit that includes a bottle of D3 K2, AG1 flavor sampler and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. Heading to drinkag1.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinkag1.com/ModernWisdom. I mean, I spent a good bit of time with Jaco over Christmas.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  He's an autonomous robot.

• 49:55Chris Williamson?

  Dude, he was just extolling the virtues of his and his wife's relationship.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:00Chris Williamson?

  He's like, yeah, we.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  That's an example of one that did work.

• 50:02Chris Williamson?

  I think we've had about one and a half arguments in 35 years, however long they fuck.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Oh, that just means they lied to each other.

• 50:12Chris Williamson?

  Or she's too scared to do it.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Jaco's a teddy bear.

• 50:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he's cute. He's been, he was nice. I saw him fucking roll on the floor with Mark Zuckerberg. That was a scene that I never thought I would observe.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  That's not, why is it Mark?

• 50:25Chris Williamson?

  No, no.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  That, that, no, that's not.

• 50:27Chris Williamson?

  He's about half, half the weight and size and about a tenth of the experience of Jaco. But it was fun. It was fun to watch, especially while they were on their feet. It was really fun.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:36Chris Williamson?

  It was like watching UFC one happen.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Is Zuck wee, is he wee? Is he a tiny man?

• 50:40Chris Williamson?

  Not small. He's definitely packed on some muscle and size and he's been training a good bit.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  How tall, how tall do you think he is?

• 50:45Chris Williamson?

  Uh, five nine.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  I would check for one, but.

• 50:52Chris Williamson?

  Look, I mean, it was, it was good to see Jaco lie on top of another man. That was, that was a great way to spend it.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  It's the best part about you.

• 50:58Chris Williamson?

  Morning. Yeah, getting to lie on the man.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Or have them lie on top of you. You know, we're not all tops.

• 51:05Chris Williamson?

  Sometimes we're bottom, sometimes we're bottom. Dude, um, what happened with this Rob O'Neil conversation? Cause Mimi were texting about it and I saw an absolute tsunami of bullshit occur.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Man, um, I don't know how to accurately answer that because I don't know. It's the first time he and I ever had sat down and talked. When we opened the conversation, he reminded me that I had taken him for his first tandem when he went to the tandem course. I didn't remember that because on that day I was there as an instructor. You probably take six or eight people for a jump and that's how.

• 51:35Chris Williamson?

  That's strapped to you.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 51:36Chris Williamson?

  You're a bottom.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  They would be the bottom.

• 51:40Chris Williamson?

  Ah.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  They're, they're front riding.

• 51:41Chris Williamson?

  Power position.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes. How, actually it is power bottom, yes.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  PBA, Power Bottom Actual. Yeah. Um, I didn't remember that because I'd always said I'd never met the guy. And he was just like, dude, you took me for a first hand. Like, fuck, sorry, man, I didn't remember that. I've taken 1,500 people for the first hit. So it definitely wasn't intentional. I have never seen a military operation that has more tentacles going out with divergence in relayed experiences or stories, whatever you would want to call it, than that particular one. And I don't know what to make of it. I know a lot of people that were there. I was not.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  And not all of their stories align with the most common narratives as well, too. This is the Osama bin Laden, right? Correct. Yeah, the operation was called Neptune Sphere. So, dude, I don't know. Um, he didn't deviate from his story. You know, he added some things in there that that definitely surprised me about what they included in the debrief and what they left out of the debrief. What were those things? Uh, from, again, I was not there, so I'm relaying this. There was the first floor, the second floor, and then bin Laden and his wives, and I believe a few children were on the third floor.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  The stories or the relayed experiences seem to start deviating at the stairs that go up from the second floor to the third. And very, very few people were actually on those stairs. I don't know how wide the stairways actually were, but stairways can actually be really dangerous from a tactical, you don't want to get a bunch of people in there. It would take one guy to pull a pin on a grenade and roll it down a set of stairs and you're having a real shit day. So you want to have enough people, but also the minimum amount. And the way you described it is that they were getting a little bit thin on bodies. But the first person saw movement, took a shot. They went into the room.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Rob encountered bin Laden, shot bin Laden. And then essentially before they went to the debrief. And then after that, I mean, Rob said that as he was getting ready to take pictures, a guy walked up and shot him in the face multiple times right in front of him.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Essentially, before they went down to do the debrief, that the people who were on the third floor got together and decided what they were going to include in that and what they weren't going to include in that. And again, the conversation was a while ago, so I don't know the exact specifics of it, but it was the initial shots and then the follow up shots from that as well, from Rob and the man who was in front of him.

• 54:24Chris Williamson?

  Why is shooting an enemy combatant that's dead in the face?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  It's a worker.

• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  Mutilation of an enemy combatant?

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah. Not. Not advisable.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  And if you are going to do that, and I mean, it's just.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  That stuff happens. I mean, bottom line.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  You also sometimes, I mean, there's a difference between, the way he described it is there was an immense amount of time between essentially the target being called secure, which is where you can kind of unwrap a little bit from a tactical perspective. But you'd like that call come over the radio and then you start a process of basically gathering as much information as you can. That's where you get the cameras out and you start looking for stuff and bagging things. You know, when you're clearing, you don't want to, you don't want to leave uncertainty. If you engage somebody, you don't want to leave uncertainty as to whether or not they're going to resurrect themselves and come. So it's, and so you, what you end up doing is you inflict wounds that are incompatible with life. So if you can put the inside of their head on the outside of their head, that's usually a good indication that that problem is solved.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  There's a difference in doing that as you were clearing instructor in his structure and actively engaged. And then after, you know what I mean, after that happening.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  It happens. It's a, it's a fucking ugly occupation. And it will show you the best of who you are and the worst of who you ever thought you could be. And some people get lost in that. And you put people on the front lines who have been sharpening their teeth for decades, fighting the same people in the same places. It happens. But.

• 56:10Chris Williamson?

  Does that feel like righteous retribution in the moment, perhaps?

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Probably in the moment, but.

• 56:15Chris Williamson?

  And almost immediately regret.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  I don't know if there's always regret. Um.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Sometimes I don't think there ever is. To me, my personal opinion, and I always speak for myself. We need to be better than that. If we want to be a beacon to the world, we need to be better than that. And that's tough.

• 56:39Chris Williamson?

  Because it means that you need to play by rules that other people are maybe not going to.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  You need to respect certain boundaries. You need to play, I mean, Warfield, you know, the Geneva Convention, get it? Totally understand rules of engagement, totally understand law of war, rule of war, totally understand. There is a lot of flexibility inside of all of those things. You can do everything that you need to do and be accomplish the mission you need to and dominate people on the battlefield inside of those things. Just imagine, I mean, in a lot of times, all you have to do is flip the coin. How would the American people react if, let's say, pilot in Iran, right? We'll go to modern day, got captured, got killed. And then they put on the internet, a guy walking up with an AK and unloading a magazine into his face. That's not going to go well.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  If we do that to other people, oftentimes that'll move the barrier for what they're willing to do to us as well. And I think that our country and our flag needs to stand for more than that.

• 57:40Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's already a level of contention over the US entering conflicts at the moment. And I don't know what you think this does to how attractive military service looks at the moment. But at least for me, you know, in the UK, for instance, you've spent a good bit of time in the UK. There is no, we would like to invite first responders and active military personnel to board the plane early.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  How come?

• 58:06Chris Williamson?

  Because no one gets a fuck about our military. I've never, I've flown hundreds of flights around the UK. I mean, they may have changed it now, but I have never once.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Do they have a special group that they invite on early? I'm fascinated now.

• 58:21Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, maybe your friend that ejected himself out into liquefied, perhaps he would get to go on first.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Being Gil, look him up, man, holy.

• 58:29Chris Williamson?

  Can he walk now?

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's like running half marathons.

• 58:32Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm not saying his gait's good, but like.

• 58:37Chris Williamson?

  Loping down?

• 58:37Speaker 01

  A little so worse.

• 58:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, just so the UK doesn't revere the veteran community in the UK. I have no idea what that. To me, it's the sort of shit that I just learned about in American movies. And then since coming here, I, for instance, I once was wearing a Black Rifle Coffee t-shirt and I think it had the American flag.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:55Chris Williamson?

  And it's a sort of a military green kind of color.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  OD green.

• 58:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's really nice t-shirt. I wore it until it was fucking Fred that. And I got on a plane and a gentleman who was sat in one of the earliest rows said, thank you for your service to me as I went past.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  What did you say?

• 59:12Chris Williamson?

  I was like, as I'm like being fucking conveyor belted along.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  The movies, you say, you're welcome. I did it for you.

• 59:21Chris Williamson?

  There's enough about stolen valor already for the British to come in. Not only stolen valor, it's stolen patriotism. Holy fuck.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  It's stolen passing valor. You were being pushed along.

• 59:29Chris Williamson?

  That's correct.

• 59:32Chris Williamson?

  Like desperately trying, I needed to get my British out of the way first so that I could apologize for him getting it wrong. I'm like, I'm so sorry that you, you, you seem to be mistaken. Allow me to say my word. But even within that, like it's just so, there's a reflex response in this country.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Not always though. So my dad served in the Vietnam. They didn't get that. Most of my dad's generation that served in the military, they'd be the last person to tell you that they actually did. His experiences were completely different than the, yeah. Yeah, than the modern era veteran. How do you think it would change in the UK though? Like let's transport nine 11. Do you guys have twin towers? Are you guys allowed to build that high? Are you capable of it?

• 1:00:12Chris Williamson?

  I think we're capable of it. I mean, look, Christopher Wren.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  I thought five stories was the maximum.

• 1:00:15Chris Williamson?

  Christopher Wren was, dude, we had seven seven. We had the seven seven bombings.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  So but let's say it was something, okay, for whatever the analogy would be, if nine eleven had occurred in the UK and the UK had responded in the way that the US had in Afghanistan, or like obviously taking into fact differences in size and all that. Do you think it would have changed the mentality, though, of the citizens in the UK and how they viewed it?

• 1:00:40Chris Williamson?

  Perhaps. I mean, look, are you saying to me that the turning point around how the military was interpreted and the level of warmth towards people who were veterans was 2001?

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  I don't know if that was the, I don't know, I can't claim causality, but correlation certainly exists.

• 1:01:01Chris Williamson?

  That seems to be a prior to then, not quite so revered, after then, pretty revered. But, okay, so maybe it's just recency bias for me talking, that what I know from my memory of how people respond to American veterans is that it's, thank you for your service, special dispensation, a variety of different days and parades and all sorts of other stuff with rainbow flags. And then you get to now where I don't know if the same thing's quite so true. I feel like there's a lack, there's a dearth of.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Pendulums always swing.

• 1:01:37Chris Williamson?

  And? So maybe it's going back to what is more typical. Perhaps that was the aberration. Perhaps that was the anomaly, the last 30 years or so, 20 years. Perhaps that was what was strange.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  I would say 20 years is the anomaly. And honestly, I think the, again, to go back to misconceptions.

• 1:01:56Chris Williamson?

  Ah, sorry.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Please.

• 1:01:59Chris Williamson?

  World War II.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Chris Williamson?

  Guys came home, that was a big part of the baby boom, was off the back of dudes that were just revered by every single person who hadn't been to war and all of the other people that had as well.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Revering a community above all others can also become incredibly dangerous as well. It becomes a manipulatable system. It becomes a system that you can game. And then poor examples or expressions of that start that pendulum going back in the other direction. I think it's a naturally correcting thing. But yeah, I think it has more to do with the previous 20 years than anything else. That'd be my guess.

• 1:02:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I did just, you know. If you are, if there's the potential for boots on the ground being needed in the Middle East, which every day it just, however low the likelihood was or is, that likelihood increases each day.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  I have absolutely no idea what is going on. It is pretty wild.

• 1:03:00Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  I thought that we were in the like, end the wars phase of politics. And, uh, you know, don't start any new ones, even though technically we're not at war, right? Of course, there's that lovely little caveat of how the authorized use of military force has been completely bent by every president that has been in office since it was created.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  I don't know how well the checks and balances are currently working. I don't, I don't know the conscription thing, like registering for the draft. I mean, there's a difference between registering people for the draft and then like executing a draft. I would actually really like to see two years of mandatory service for young men and women. It would give people such a different context on, on the world around them. As opposed to just experiencing world through Instagram at that age. You'd go out and just, if you could leave where you were at and go to an area that was perhaps more impoverished or just get a different view of it and, and serve something bigger than yourself for two years. I think it would help a lot. But, I mean. I don't, I don't know. I get really wary when there's no definable end state. And that's on my own experience in the global war on terror.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  But I mean, we accomplished our military objectives in Afghanistan. And this is people way more steeped in military knowledge and understanding than myself in about 90 days.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  We saved for 20 years.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  Our exit.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  Probably could have been better. We left a few things behind. Did you see the video of like the day after we left? They were flying a Black Hawk with a man hanging from his neck underneath the rope underneath it, literally the day after?

• 1:04:41Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Narly. We left a lot of stuff behind. Iraq. You know, what's our definable end state?

• 1:04:49Chris Williamson?

  How long? Sorry. How long ago was the official withdrawal? Five years?

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah. We have to look that one up.

• 1:04:59Chris Williamson?

  My point is, however long ago that was.

• 1:05:03Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. It's like you and a toxic ex. You're just not able to stop going back. I, she's not good for me. She wasn't good for me for a long time.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  I've had a few cocktails, though.

• 1:05:14Chris Williamson?

  So, dude, I had to send the you up WhatsApp.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  You know what's wild, too, is, uh, where was it?

• 1:05:20Chris Williamson?

  August 30th, 2021. So not even five years.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  And here's what's wild. We're talking, the talking point now is that Iran has been our enemy for 47 years. Which I'm not going to argue, but death to America is a thing for a certain segment of the population and ideological belief there. Got it. Why are we choosing now over the 47 years? Where was people? I mean, we had a robust. For people who don't know where Iran is, it sits in between Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  We had Oreo'd that fucker. They were the delicious creamy center. I was like, oh, this analogy is getting wild fast of the US military.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  But what we did is bailed when we had an immense amount of infrastructure there. And now we're going to go back and I just.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Give me some, give me some metrics by which we're measuring our, like, what are we using as our metric here? We destroyed their entire anti-air system, but we just lost two F-15s and two A-10s. We just nuked four of our own AH6s and the C-130s that they flew in there on. Like, I thought we had airspeed already. Can't get, we can't let them get a nuclear weapon. Well, then what did we strike for last year? Because the President of the United States got up there and said we completely annihilated their ability to enrich uranium. But now we're saying we can't let them get a bomb. Like, were you not telling me the truth then? Are you not telling me the truth now? Or are you never telling me the truth? That's probably the better question for politicians. I just, it's such, it is such.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  A horrific thing to ask of people to go do those things, but I wish the people that made the decisions, to some degree, I wish they had more skin in the game. I wish they had to go with them, you know, which it's never going to be the case, but.

• 1:07:04Chris Williamson?

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• 1:07:46Chris Williamson?

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• 1:08:32Chris Williamson?

  What's that line about wars being chosen by old men so that young men go out and die? There's some, yeah, some pithy aphorism around that. But I mean, I think what's been fascinating to me is watching the commentary and the supporters and the critiques, criticizes on both sides, like contort themselves into knots, trying to work out what their position is on this. People who didn't like Trump still don't like Trump. Yeah. And have more reason not to. Lots of people who did like Trump also now don't like Trump. I don't know of anybody. Who has been converted over to the support, and I think this is shown in the polls. Like, he has, he has had, over the last two years, check this out, Jared, I'm pretty sure over

• 1:09:15Chris Williamson?

  the last two years, what, what's happened to Trump's approval numbers? I think he's had the fastest decline in approval numbers, maybe in American history.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  Historically, when you tell people to go fuck themselves on Easter, that may happen. Or what did he end the Easter post with? Praise to Allah?

• 1:09:36Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, what the fuck was going on with that? I was, this was-

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  You're asking me what's going on with that?

• 1:09:42Chris Williamson?

  In the last two years, Trump's approval has followed a pretty clear pattern, a modest bump, then a steady decline, now persistently low and polarized. Forty-six percent approval and forty-three percent disapproval in January 2025, which was higher than 2017. Keep going down. Recent polling shows fifty-five to sixty percent, so a net negative approval of fourteen to twenty points. Yeah, maybe that's not as low as I might have thought. But I mean, still not great, but that's a big drop. And what was the fucking, I was in Australia for this. I kind of saw it third hand. Why, why did he say the Allah thing?

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  I love that you're asking me for an explanation to that.

• 1:10:29Chris Williamson?

  Can you psychoanalyze Donald Trump for me for a second?

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, good, there you go.

• 1:10:34Chris Williamson?

  Psychoanalyze. Right. I have a theory about why Donald, hey, look.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Oh, is it glasses time?

• 1:10:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, put these, put these on, and now that you've got.

• 1:10:48Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so why did Donald Trump say praise to Allah?

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Because we elected a TV star to be the President of the United States.

• 1:11:02Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to condition myself to use this.

• 1:11:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I don't know what the fuck is what you can say the current US administration's plan is.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  I don't know if they have one, and I think that might be the scariest thing. I, people get so wrapped around the color of their team's jersey and I just, I want whatever administration is in office to do the best they possibly can. So that we all can benefit from that. And I don't know where it leads us when people forget that the goal should be like, hey, like thriving of this country, but they'll choose alignment of their color jersey over, but to the exclusion. I don't understand that. I don't know why it got that way. I don't also don't know how to get out of it.

• 1:11:52Chris Williamson?

  They'd rather their side win, but the country lose.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  I don't know if they would verbalize that, but their actions seem to be in line with that. And I don't, that's not great.

• 1:12:02Chris Williamson?

  It really does. At the moment, dude, it really does seem just like, I know, own goal after own goal. And then even inside of the Republican Party, like the whole thing that J D Vance ran on was America first. Like the whole, the whole, his whole philosophy was that.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  The next Republican candidate for president is going to have a very interesting character.

• 1:12:19Chris Williamson?

  Trying to fucking unwind this.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Well, they're gonna have to run at a time while he is still president and answer for a lot of the policies.

• 1:12:28Chris Williamson?

  You mean throwing him under the bus?

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  I don't think they'll be able to because I think he would cut his own nose off despite his face when it came that I think.

• 1:12:35Chris Williamson?

  And not support them.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 1:12:37Chris Williamson?

  So you've got to walk this tightrope of.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  And how do you do that?

• 1:12:41Chris Williamson?

  Well, this was the issue that Kamala had, right? Where she was being asked.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  Putting it down to a single issue or to throw.

• 1:12:48Chris Williamson?

  She was being, she was being asked to under the bus Biden while still being his VP.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54Chris Williamson?

  And that was something that she struggled with.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  I mean, something I thought about, you know, did the Republicans win the last elections? Or did the Democrats fuck it up so much? You know, like, hey, we're not even gonna let you choose which candidate you're gonna vote for. All because of all the money we would have to give back and not be able to fundraise with. So, yeah, we're gonna strip away your choice and like, this is the person you got. Get on Team Blue. Like, what? What?

• 1:13:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What do you think about the, um, the future of mercenary organizations of sort of guns for hire? Increasingly, I'm seeing.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  Depends on who you ask. Some people are saying it's the way forward. Um, usually those people own those companies, but

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  that's a tough one. I don't think you should be able to rent the American flight. I think it should be issued on your uniform and that's it. If you wanna do things, if the military is not capable of doing the things that you're filling those gaps with, then do me a favor and restructure the military and develop those capabilities instead of outsourcing it. Because there are some ways to cut corners, outsourcing it and paint outside of the lines that the military isn't supposed to be able to do. And I think that's a dangerous thing.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  I think if the military isn't certain of the role and isn't capable of doing it, then let's solve that problem.

• 1:14:14Chris Williamson?

  Because you're using this buttress performance enhancer thing to

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  And outs- I mean, it

• 1:14:21Chris Williamson?

  Compensate.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, uh, and there's also risk in that, too. I mean, it, the Iranian pilot as an example. Dude, we knew some assets to go get that guy, which, by the way, people complain about the price of that. But to go back to like, being issued a flag on your uniform and being asked to do exceptional things, it kinda helps to know that if shit goes sideways, like, the chariot will be lit on fire. It might not be pointed in the right direction, like, you might see it go off a cliff, but like, we're gonna come do something.

• 1:14:47Chris Williamson?

  Send another one. Send more chariots until we get you.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  It, uh, it's, that doesn't exist in the contracting world. I mean, if you're out there and, and you're doing a contract and, you know, a kinetic contract in an environment that is maybe less newsworthy, but you're still, I mean, there is no like, red button, like, hey, send everybody. It's, so there's a lot of risk involved in that as well, too.

• 1:15:08Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. I didn't know that.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  How could there be? I mean, the the the the CSAR Combat Search and Rescue Response, that was all military based, right?

• 1:15:17Chris Williamson?

  I thought that there would be something that was a part of that ecosystem inside of it. I suppose it's it's much closer to a market. It's just a capitalist entity.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah, I mean, they're talking probably minimum manning at times, you know? I mean, how many bodies do we need to be able to do this? What can we charge? They're not gonna have like the assets that we, no pun intended, metaphorically and literally, burn to the ground. Those organizations don't have a stable of those things to be able to do that. So, yeah, it's, I don't like the idea of outsourcing military type roles, specifically when the underlying motivation behind it is to skirt rules that prohibit military behaviors and activities.

• 1:16:03Chris Williamson?

  What are those sorts of rules?

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Rules of engagement, meddling in affairs that the US military is not supposed to be meddling in.

• 1:16:12Chris Williamson?

  Because it would cross some kind of diplomatic or legislative.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Yep. Right. I don't think we should be doing that stuff. I think that gets real murky, real fast. I'm not saying there's not a role for private military contractors, PMCs, which are most of those organizations.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  I don't think outsourcing work is a good idea.

• 1:16:38Chris Williamson?

  But it suddenly opens up the problem of who's got the biggest bank balance and who can continue, who who is going to pay the most?

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:45Chris Williamson?

  And if allegiance is basically to whoever's got the biggest paycheck.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  That's a problem. I don't know much about Bitcoin, but.

• 1:16:54Chris Williamson?

  There's a lot of people out there with a lot of Bitcoin. Yeah. Why don't we have our own private military contract? That'd be nice.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:01Chris Williamson?

  People quit when they focus on how far they have to go.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:05Chris Williamson?

  Where'd you learn that?

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  Uh, so interestingly enough, going back as an instructor, I was there for 18 months. I did not want to go back. It was global world terror. That's a sure duty command, non-deployable, meaning regardless of what's going on, your job is to be an instructor. Which if you are in a profession of arms and arms are being used in your profession, you're probably going to want to be over there. Not at a schoolhouse, wipe the noses and asses, right? We didn't actually do that. We let them do that for themselves because they're adults. But it ended up being the most rewarding 18 months of my entire career. I look back on it and I learned a lot about myself and it gave me an incredible understanding of the community and I realized it was like the world's best laboratory.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  On why people quit. Like all of this, there have been so many, millions of dollars and I don't have an exact. I'm going to say it's safe to say millions of dollars have been spent trying to figure out who makes it through SEAL training. Psychological assessments, looking at your sporting background, did you come from a nuclear family, a broken home? Where'd you come from? Socioeconomic status, all of these things. Pre-training programs that existed for a couple of years, the attrition rate just hums right along. All of this stuff, it might have bumped it at a percentage point. And for people who don't know, the attrition rate in the summer months is about 75%. So three out of four students aren't going to make it. Winter months, a little bit colder, so more exposure to the elements, 80, maybe sometimes 90% attrition rate. You did winter, right?

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  Winter hell week, yes, for sure. My class was the last hard BUDS class that there ever was.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Documented, it's written somewhere, probably in my handwriting, but.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  The winter, the winter is just, it's just colder and the cold sucks more. As a student, when you're going through, you don't get a chance to talk to the guy who is next to you who quits because they're gone and your training day continues. And especially in like hell week, if that's a five day evolution, starting on Sunday and ending on Friday. If they're gone, most of the quitting occurs between Sunday and about Tuesday morning. They're already moved out of the dirt, like you'll probably never see them again. So as a student, you're just like front sight focused. As an instructor, they're there for a couple of weeks. They have to process out, they get put over in a different birthing place. A lot of times they have medical issues that they're working their way through. And you are around young men who.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Probably a week before you have a conversation with them would have told you that it is their singular goal and focus in life. And that there's nothing that you could have done to make them quit and that they were going to be there on graduation day and that this is the only goal that matters to them. And then eight to nine out of 10 of them quit and you can sit there and you can talk to them about why. And I tried to be very kind in talking with them because most of the people who have regret is that largest emotion that just is kind of outpouring. It uh, they want to go back. It sucks. I've met students decades later or people who have quit BUDS. I'm like, hey, man, I'm not trying to be a dick, but I'm just curious because I have a theory like, how do you feel about that decision? Regret every single time.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  They wish they had been able to see it through because it leaves a really large question mark in their life going forward. So in spending time with the students, I would ask them, you know, well, why did you quit? And in that kind of fragile state, they were really honest with me and they kept saying the same things. There, there, there was a couple of categories and one of them was huge. The small one was like life happened. My dad died and I gotta get the fuck out of here. Like dude, I wish you the absolute best. You know what I mean? Like that's not the data set that I'm looking for. Injury is another one. Can't control that because that wasn't necessarily a consensual choice. So boom, they're gone. Everybody else who rang the bell. Why'd you quit? And they would all say the same thing.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  I couldn't be as cold as I was for as long as I thought I was going to be cold. I would say, well, how, who told you how long you were going to be cold for? Well, nobody, but I told myself I couldn't be cold for as long as I thought I was going to have to be. Or tired or hungry or the combination of all of those things or in physical pain. Or it was too hard. What they're all expressing is a moment where they became overwhelmed by the situation that they were in. And they started looking at time, literally time.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  How they viewed time was the determining factor on the decision that they made. If they could only see where they were, like this is the start of BUDS first day. And this is graduation on average 180 days. And the only thing that they can see is the, the gap between my two fingers.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  Dude, that's a lot, especially on your first day when you get your shit absolutely kicked in. And let's say you had a three N stack of little notes and the first one it said 180. And at the end of that day where you're barely able to walk back to the barracks, you rip that off and it says 179. How pumped are you? Not that pumped. So that's a person who became, they're creeping towards becoming overwhelmed. Hell, week the same thing. Starts on a Sunday, ends on a Friday. But if all you can see is this gap and how far you are from your goal, you're getting into a really susceptible position and a really malleable position from an instructor state. And that, that was literally like, that's the secret sauce. This is the most important thing that I

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  learned in my entire career. If you can identify that that is the main reason why people give up on their lifelong goals, you should be able to reverse engineer that. So how do you do that? You think about everything other than that. So instead of trying to get from here to here and only looking at that distance, you slam these two together. So there is a microscopic step that you can take and you only focus on that step and then the next one and the next one. And you don't have to keep track of your steps because as long as you keep making forward motion, this bridge will be gapped at some point in time. The muscle that fails at buds is not below the neck. It's between the ears. So they focus on that distance. They become overwhelmed and they make a decision and

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  they'll regret for the rest of their life. So the key to that is to chunk your goals into the most digestible piece that you possibly can. And then consistently put those one on top of another. Is there a difference between stress and overwhelm? Can somebody force you to be overwhelmed is a better question? I don't think so. You can't actually, and I would, I would have some interesting conversation with this dude, like, well, instructor so and so made me quit. Standby, please. I have additional questions. What do you mean? Well, they made me quit. I'm like, so they, they, they interlace fingers. Like the movie Ghost where they were doing pottery and they put your hand on the bell and rang the bell. Like, no, no, no, that's not what I'm saying. But they

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  were like in my face and they weren't going away because it told me they weren't going to go away. And I couldn't take it anymore. So I quit. Okay. And again, these are people in a fragile state. So I'm not like trying to have an argument with them. But I would try to, you know, maybe reinforce a little bit like, listen,

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  That instructor facilitated an environment for you where you became your own worst enemy. And you made that choice. And here's how I know that this works. As soon as I understood that concept, that the view of time was the most dangerous thing for the student.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  I gave up on all physical tools that I had, whether it was the ocean, or the watch, or food, or physical exertion, that I would just talk to students like you and I are talking right now. I do. What's going on, man? It's like you're having a shitty day. This is only the first day of Hell Week, and it would be like the third, but they're already hallucinating. And I had set my watch to the incorrect day and time.

• 1:25:07Chris Williamson?

  You lost it.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  How? You look like you're really cold. How long do you think you can be this cold? I'm on shift in the next 12 hours. I'm going to sit here with you for 12 hours. I'm going to keep you in this water for longer than you thought was even possible. And you could see it in their eyes. The students are like, just whatever, dude. I know the game. Fuck off. And so what they're chunking in that moment is just surviving the interaction with me. And I can recognize it too. I'm like, lame. Next. Then you go to the other student and you can, you start seeing the self doubt and you just water the self doubt. It was the single most effective tool to get people to quit training. Had nothing to do with anything in the physical world.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  So you can reverse engineer that.

• 1:25:50Chris Williamson?

  So by reminding them how much further they had to go.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  That's all I focused on, is I tried to get them to focus on where they were, how much more work they had to do to get to their goal.

• 1:26:03Chris Williamson?

  It's not just going to be the next minute.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  No, I tried to get them to think of anything but that. The kid who was thinking about the next one, I'm like lame. Get out of here. You're going to be fine. Good. And like, as you're walking, you're like, good job. You wouldn't say that, of course, but you think it.

• 1:26:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You outfox me. You saw the game that I was trying to play.

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:26:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  That's, I mean, it's for clarity for people who are hearing this to like, yes, I'm going to start doing this. And everything in my life is going to be easy. No, it doesn't make anything easier. It makes it more digestible. Pain still hurts. Suffering still sucks. But little bites of suffering, focusing on that little bite and not letting yourself get overwhelmed to make an emotionally poor decision, that's going to make a huge trajectory distance in your life.

• 1:26:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the being paralyzed by indecision thing is something that I've been pretty fascinated by. And I know it's something that you are too.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:51Chris Williamson?

  It's that line, uh, many a wrong move was made by just standing still.

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  It's the worst thing you can do. I wrote about that too. Uh, you get ambushed. The actually, the worst thing that you can do is just stay in place, which is a really hard one because sometimes you find awesome rocks to hide behind. They're like, hey dude, get over here. This thing stops bullets. And your body will be screaming at you. Stay behind this rock because it currently is stopping. It's ballistically, it's cover, right? Cover is something that stops bullets. Concealment is something that hides you. Both work in hide and seek. Both do not work in a gunfight. Don't confuse the two. I've actually seen it happen. It's pretty gnarly. Mostly it was the enemy combatants thinking that bushes were cover. It was not.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  And also I can see you because you keep peeking your head up. So like, dude, you suck at hide and seek.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  If you stay there though, because you're scared, because you don't want to die, both of which legitimate emotions. And your enemy starts to come around the corner, it's gonna be where you die. Your indecision and inability to control the fear that you are experiencing and being shot at and somebody trying to kill you is scary. It's another one of those misconceptions people have that there's, there's this fearless nature of people in that community. That is not my experience. I actually don't want to work with somebody who is fearless. Because that either means you're not paying attention or you're a sociopath or a psychopath. Neither of which are a good model for that world. So if you just stay there because you're scared and your enemy starts to maneuver on you, it's gonna be where they find you. It's actually where they're gonna be there, they're gonna find your dead body.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  What you actually have to do is even knowing that you could potentially absorb risk. You could get hurt. You have to move and you have to switch that on the people that initiated the ambush on you. The fastest way to get out of an ambush is to either, depending on the type, there's linear ones that look like lines or Ls. Oftentimes is to punch through it or to flank, but that requires movement. That's, and that's the same thing as that indecision, right? If you're paralyzed by indecision, you're not gonna do anything and the world's gonna continue to shift around you and then you're even farther behind the eight ball. I'd rather have see people take, maybe even take a step in the wrong direction, but get some momentum going. Obviously, correct for your mistake as quick as humanly possible, but do you get the wheels running? Like, get the wheels spinning on the road.

• 1:29:11Chris Williamson?

  What are the other traits that matter in life or death situations that people overestimate or underestimate?

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  Emotional control, as ridiculous as that is to say, because it is an emotionally scary event. You have to be able to detach your emotions from your decision-making process. You have to be able to function, and that is what the test I administered in second phase was a diving test. And it was 20 minutes long, you're tying a bunch of knots in the student's gear. And they have to get the knots out in an appropriate procedure. If you deviate from procedure, you fail, will pull you out of the water. You get four attempts at the test.

• 1:29:48Chris Williamson?

  So even if you do the knots, but you do them in the wrong way?

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  You have, if the, at a broad level, the mouthpiece that you were breathing out of, if it is in your mouth, and I leave it in your mouth as I tie a knot, you have to start from the mouthpiece and work your way back. If I rip it out and tie a knot, you have to start all the way from your manifold and trace it up. And some people will just reach up and put the mouthpiece in their mouth, like, dude, you just, it's like, fail, right there.

• 1:30:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  But they can't breathe. And I know that because I can see the inhale and exhale. And if you want to be a dick instructor, you wait till all the bubbles come out and go, my mouthpiece, right? If you don't want to be a dick instructor and you want to teach the students, you just tap them on the mouthpiece, because it's a one-to-one ratio, this is a one-to-one test. Tap them on the mouthpiece, let them get a big breath. And then I take the mouthpiece and I tie knots. And there's a variety of different ways that you can do it. And I'm sitting there as an instructor, just floating in a wetsuit with a mask and snorkel on. And you start to see it, they start like, like, it's insane. And it's like, cool, I've been there, I know it sucks. Are you going to follow procedure? And at the end of that week, if they pass that test, you sit them down, you know, like, for the love of God,

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  please do not go recreational scuba diving, because you guys don't know a fucking thing about it. This test had absolutely nothing to do with diving, everything to do with stress management and following procedure, regardless of what's going on in the world around you.

• 1:31:08Chris Williamson?

  What's drown proof?

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  Drown proof is an evolution that does not make you drown proof at all. Plenty of seals unfortunately have drowned. You get introduced to that in first phase. The final evolution, which the picture on the front cover is where you have your hands tied behind your back and your feet tied together. And I believe this is 30 years in the rearview mirror. You bob up and down for an hour. You then have to transit the pool.

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  All the way to the end and then back.

• 1:31:38Chris Williamson?

  After now?

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  After, which if this is one of the most relaxing. Hold on.

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  What I'm about to say is not a recommendation for people to do in their own personal pool. What I'm saying is as a student, you can only hear them yelling at you as your head is above water. So if you're comfortable, if you're comfortable in the water.

• 1:31:56Chris Williamson?

  I get if I stay down here, I can't hear Andy shouting at me.

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, well, I had a bullhorn. So it's like talking in a normal voice with an extremely high decibel level.

• 1:32:04Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  Which talking to somebody from six inches from their face with a bullhorn, let me just tell you. It's pretty fun.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  What are you thinking about right now? They're like.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  Again, generational trauma, it has to be passed downhill because instructors did that to me. It is for an hour. I played water polo in high school, so for me, I was comfortable in the water. And although on the picture on the book, their hands are tied, their feet are tied. But this is also a one to one ratio. Half the class is watching the students in the water and there are instructors in the water for safety. So.

• 1:32:39Chris Williamson?

  You try not to kill people.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  We do our absolute best, even though I will say it is essential people diet trading from time to time. And we can touch on that if you want to after I describe this. But the first time they do this, their feet aren't tied together and they're just holding their fingers behind their back. It's a crawl, walk, run approach. Then we'll use like some Velcro, right? Or maybe just do the legs and then the hands. If you bob up and down, it's honestly, you bounce out the bottom. Take a deep breath. And you slowly exhale to become negatively buoyant and you bounce. It's really not that bad. The swimming isn't that bad either. Then you get back and they throw a mask into the water and you have to go down, bite it with your teeth, come up and then bob with it for a bunch of times. And then the test actually ends.

• 1:33:18Chris Williamson?

  Cause that limits the ability for you to breathe or it's just a fucking awkward thing to do.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  I feel like it's the latter. I have no explanation as to why. And I think there's honestly a somersault in there somewhere too.

• 1:33:28Chris Williamson?

  Scientifically, this isn't justified at all.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  No, it's not at all. Again, this is just a rolling rock of generational trauma. It's going downhill. And so that is drown proofing. The concept being though, like before thriving, let's learn how to survive. It's about control and comfort to the best of your ability in an environment that you can't control and probably shouldn't be comfortable in if you have your feet tied together and your hands tied behind your back. Some people are like, oh man, this is so like, if you guys are taking hostage on a boat, you can just go do like a dolphin off the side and port poo sound. I'm like, ah, no, that's not what that's for at all. So I'm up like, it's so crazy. And again, I didn't, I didn't understand a lot of this as a student. This was just the evolution of the day. Like, okay, cool. Let's go through it. Let's get it done.

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  One of the evolutions of a 50 meter underwater swim, like, why? Why do we do this? Cause it freaks people out. And that's exactly why we, is it, do you really need to be able to do a 50 meter underwater swim? I don't think so. I hope not. That would suck. I don't want to do one, but you do it in training because it scares the shit out of the students. And it's again, it's a one to one and the instructors are doing the best they can to make you nervous beforehand.

• 1:34:40Chris Williamson?

  How are they doing them?

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  We have many tricks and tools.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Well, here is it 2026. Okay. Statute of limitations has probably expired on this. So we would often grab the foreign students first that were augmenting training.

• 1:35:00Speaker 01

  They were paid to be there by their host country and we couldn't really get rid of them anyway. And so like the diving test, when you're, so the 50 meter underwater swim is a great example. But the diving test or even the tread is even better. We have scuba tanks on your back. You have your fins on a weight belt on, and you have to tread water with to the wrist or about where the watch would be with your hands out for five minutes.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  Five or six students are going at a time. Everybody else is on the pool deck, but their back is to the pool. So you can only hear it. So if you were to grab a subpar performer and they were to lose their shit. And everybody else had to hear that, wondering what in the absolute fuck was happening? Knowing that they have to go next, thinking that they were prepared, sounding like, and then somebody sounds like they're just like talking to a dinosaur and then is being pulled unconscious out of the water and being slapped back to life by a dude with seven years of medical school. That's one way.

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  The noises, you could just see people are just like, God, you're like, God, I'd love my job. It just, it warms your soul like a candle that starts a forest fire, you know?

• 1:36:15Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh. And what about the underwater swim? Same thing, just people struggle with that. They make the noise when they come out.

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  Well, only when they pass out. Of all the evolutions in training, that is the only one I'm aware of that if you pass out, so you jump into the water, front somersault.

• 1:36:33Chris Williamson?

  Front somersault.

• 1:36:34Speaker 01

  I don't know, I don't know. Well, it's just, it's weird. It interrupts because anybody could like run and jump and dive and carry the momentum, right? And it like screws with your ability to hold your breath, like just enough, right? Like, we know you can do this, but can you do it the way we ask you to do it for no reason other than we're asking you to do it? So you jump in, front somersault, the smart students dive down to the bottom of the pool because it compresses your lung a little bit more. It makes it easier to hold your breath than maybe six inches above the surface or below the surface. You get the other side, you touch the other side, you have to do another fucking front flip. And I think that's just so you can't push off, actually, now that I think about it. You start coming back. This is also a one to one instructor ratio. So anytime it's one to one, it's considered more higher risk.

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  This is the only evolution that I'm aware of, that as you are, if you can stay down there and do like this last Herculean breaststroke in your four momentum, your head touches the wall as you are unconscious, we will pull you out and you go to the pass line. But the noises that students make when they come out of the water.

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  I don't know how to scrap it. And it's like a drunk elephant trumpeting or a blue whale surfacing.

• 1:37:46Chris Williamson?

  Is you're trying to get water out of them?

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  No, because they're just unconscious. They're only unconscious for a few seconds.

• 1:37:50Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:37:51Speaker 01

  But they're just like, and meanwhile, all the other students are just like, oh, my God. It's wild. And yeah, because people like, oh, man, they make you hold your breath in training until you pass out. Right. Like now, actually, in every evolution in the water, if you pass out, you're going to fail for not following procedure because there's a hand signal you can put out if you need us to come down and get you.

• 1:38:12Chris Williamson?

  But does that not mean you fail too?

• 1:38:14Speaker 01

  It means you fail. So if you get to that point, it means you either didn't follow procedure or you didn't control your, you know what I mean? Like something went awry and that's why you don't get just one and done. You get four attempts at the test. Most people pass on their third attempt, the dieting test that I administer.

• 1:38:30Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay. Yeah.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  You get two attempts on one day and two attempts on the next day.

• 1:38:34Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  With a really probably great night's sleep.

• 1:38:36Chris Williamson?

  That's fucking rough that you have to know that you've got to go back and do it again.

• 1:38:41Speaker 01

  As somebody who passed on their third try, you don't sleep very much. It sucks. And then that night I slept way better. But to go back to chunking, the reason I failed the first two times, the first night I remember, God, it's 30 years ago. I remember there's a knot where your head can get turned to the side and it's just an exhalation knot. Meaning you can still inhale and get air, but your head is crimped to the side and you can't blow. It's a regulator much like Jacques Cousteau would die with. It's two rubber hoses that come to a bit, essentially. So your head is yanked to the left and all you have to do is breathe out of your nose. But down there, you're like freaking out because this happens within 30 seconds of starting.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  And a little bit of water is coming into your mouthpiece too, because your head is to the back. And I remember the first time that happened to me, I started thinking about the exact thing I was telling myself. I can't do this for 20 minutes. All I started thinking about was the gap in between the two. Same thing on the second test. By the time I got in the third one, the only thing I was thinking about was the problem that was introduced at that time, which again was the head yanked to the left. Like, whatever, no problem. Just went back to crawling, meaning as the student, you accept the malfunction. It's not a critical malfunction. You're ready to continue with the test. And like, why didn't I just do this first? That's the only thing I changed was I was like, one problem at a time, we're going to work it. And that's the only thing that exists in my life is that one problem at a time.

• 1:40:06Chris Williamson?

  Why is it important to have a proper attrition rate for people to actually die?

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  Because the job is very dangerous and I don't want people to die, but if nobody ever died in training, you are not training hard enough. The training has to be a reverse engineering, downstream, real world requirements of the job that you are expected to do, and it is a dangerous job. You cannot prepare for that by avoiding danger in training.

• 1:40:34Chris Williamson?

  Except if no one ever died, there wouldn't be anything on the line. Ultimately, there wouldn't be a sufficient risk for the guys to know that this is-

• 1:40:40Speaker 01

  You wouldn't be pushing it hard enough.

• 1:40:41Chris Williamson?

  There's a reason to fear it.

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  Yep, you wouldn't be pushing hard enough.

• 1:40:46Chris Williamson?

  What's the most common way that people die? Drowning?

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  Uh, that is not uncommon. Well, the last one, I think, in the pool was somebody who vomited and then aspirated it while they were underwater. Um, the last soon to die a training was post hell week. Um, and I don't remember the exact medical term, but it was fluid into the lungs. And yeah, he made it to the hospital, but still expired. It's a, you are destroyed at the end of hell week. It's the only week afterwards where they let you walk in tennis shoes. I mean, you're like, you're wearing life jacket, like you are, sand is abrasive for people who didn't know this. Imagine just basically wearing sandpaper for a week because you're wet and sandy the entire

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  time. It does things to the body. Uh, and yeah, you're just absolutely destroyed. And most people are nursing an injury anyway, uh, throughout training, but yeah, that one gets you.

• 1:41:41Chris Williamson?

  What role do you think hardship plays in people's lives?

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  I'm at a place now, as I'm getting closer to 50 than 40, that I actually think the pursuit of an easy life is a mistake. I think that the grind is actually what life is all about. It's, it's not a matter of whether you're going to have a, a hard life or an easy life. It's an ability, your ability to determine how well that you can suffer along the way and trying to enjoy the journey.

• 1:42:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So as somebody that has either endured or doled out quite a bit of suffering, how do people deal with suffering more effectively?

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  First, by acknowledging that sometimes the answer is you are going to suffer instead of looking for a way to avoid it altogether. You know, you don't have to nerf all the corners on tables. Maybe you shouldn't. Maybe it's okay to bend your knee every once in a while in the middle of the night. So I think it's actually starts with accepting that- If you really want to accomplish something in your life, there's no hack to hard work. I, I think you should hack as many, like for efficiencies, like hack your Gmail inbox, but totally, go to town, hack your business systems. There's no, there is no substitute for hard work. Do you have anything in your life that was truly given to you that you didn't work for at all? But you accept, yeah, right. And then I look at the things that I worked the hardest for and the goals that I set where I'm like, am I out of my mind?

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  Like, can I actually do this? That's the stuff that I value the most. And then I'm trying to, trying to, emphasis on this, learn how to enjoy that journey more. Because it's hard and enjoying hard things is, it's difficult.

• 1:43:18Chris Williamson?

  What gets in the way of enjoying?

• 1:43:20Speaker 01

  Usually just myself. You know, I, my, my biggest enemy throughout my entire life has been myself. You know, waking up, knowing your day is going to be difficult or more difficult, or choosing to have it be more difficult to do the hard work upfront. So maybe you can enjoy an easier day later in the week. It's not, you know, it's challenging. I think that's where people struggle. That's where I struggle.

• 1:43:43Chris Williamson?

  Strange to think that as you get older, you try to make things harder, not easier.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my goal in life for sure. Up until, let's say, exceptionally recently was, was making things as easy as possible. Everybody's searching for that. And then you just edit, you know, you realize that all the stuff that you got easy, it just doesn't matter. It's the stuff that sucks, especially if you could share that with your friends. That's the biggest thing I would say I probably miss about the community is that we would do the dumbest, most painful shit ever and laugh about it while we were doing it.

• 1:44:15Chris Williamson?

  Because you were doing it with somebody else?

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. It would suck by yourself. I mean, you could do it, but watching somebody else suffer with you and finding joy in that, you know.

• 1:44:24Chris Williamson?

  If you could take one lesson from the SEAL teams and force every young man to learn it, what would it be?

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  Hmm. One lesson?

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  Be cautious and make sure you know what you're willing to die for, because not everything's worth it.

• 1:44:45Chris Williamson?

  Same.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Many times in my life, the things that I thought were the most important ended up being inconsequential. Because I didn't put enough thought or time and effort into understanding why I wanted to do them. And killing yourself from sacrificing everything in your life and trying to achieve that, you might get it at the end of the day and be the most hollow shell of a human being known to man.

• 1:45:16Chris Williamson?

  And how do you do that assessment without having to go through?

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  I think you have to slow down a little bit. We seem to be in a world where speed is one of the most important metrics. And I think that's important at times. But do all decisions have to be made in a moment's notice? But for me, it's one of the things I really like. If your house is on fire, get the fuck out of your house, right? If your house isn't on fire and you have time to make a decision, think about the decision, think about your available options and make the most educated one at the time. And then on that journey, keep asking yourself, is this, you know what I mean? Like reinforcing it along the way as opposed to just one decision and then your full back dive straight ahead.

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  I don't think you can get to that point though, without making some mistakes on your own. Like people always ask me, what would you say to your younger self? The truly honest answer is buy Bitcoin, you dipshit.

• 1:46:12Chris Williamson?

  Yes, buy Bitcoin and do 531, that's it.

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  But here's the problem though, if I was 18 and my 48 year old saw my back, I'd be like, shut up dude, I got this figured out.

• 1:46:23Chris Williamson?

  All right, granddad, sit down.

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. I'm pretty sure I'd like to invest in new cars. I'd like to buy high and sell low. It's not a big deal. It's a new investment strategy. Yeah, I wouldn't have listened to myself, but I also probably.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  Would not remove the mistakes. I wouldn't remove some key mistakes in my life just to make sure that I learned the lesson from them. I would remove some for sure because they were unneedless, you know, pain and suffering and don't worry. I mean, they were repeats of mistakes that I was already making.

• 1:47:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  But you have to have those mistakes.

• 1:47:04Chris Williamson?

  The fascinating thing about the question, what would you tell your younger self? What advice would you give your younger self? If you answer that, it is almost always the exact advice that you need to hear right now. For in the same way that you've got the same feat that you did thirty years ago. You have the same patterns, the same fears, the same coping mechanisms, the same responses when things become stressful or overwhelming.

• 1:47:26Chris Williamson?

  And that means that you're going to be driven by those unconscious, un-alchemized trends. Those are going to be the things they're going to be. The shit that you dealt with when you were eighteen and you got cut from the baseball team or the way that your first breakup felt and how you coped with it after that.

• 1:47:46Chris Williamson?

  For the most part, those are going to be the dynamics that are going to drive the rest of your life too. So when you think about, so for me, will be fearless. Like just stop fucking fearing so much.

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  What do you fear the most?

• 1:47:56Chris Williamson?

  Not doing it right, not getting it right.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  What do you use as your yardstick for that though?

• 1:48:01Chris Williamson?

  No, it totally, superfluous, ethereal fucking fluffy big cloud of like something going wrong. Things will go wrong and you'll be in the wrong and something will be taken away from you. I don't know what, I don't know by who, but not doing it right, not getting it right, not being enough. I don't know who for or why.

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  All that's gonna happen though.

• 1:48:23Chris Williamson?

  Of course.

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  So isn't the juice then in just preparing yourself for that and working your way through?

• 1:48:29Chris Williamson?

  And then overcoming it. Yeah, of course, which I've done throughout my entire life, but.

• 1:48:33Speaker 01

  I'll be the judge of that, sir.

• 1:48:35Chris Williamson?

  Interestingly, we have a, we have a pool and a bunch of knots for you to get stuck into after that. Um, you know, all of the things, everybody that's listening, whatever the challenges that you thought was going to destroy you by virtue of the fact that you're listening to this, it hasn't.

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  Can I add one thing to that too? And this is one thing that I wish, I know people hear this, but they don't believe me. Whatever it is you think you're going through. Please do not convince yourself that you are the only one struggling with it. My God. If COVID taught us anything, that it should be that isolation, or even perceived isolation, is one of the most damaging things to the human brain. We are, every person I've ever met in my life is more defined by their similarities than by their differences. And it is so unfortunate. Again, statistically, the world that I come from has a much higher suicide rate than many other occupational fields. And for those that have chosen to leave things behind,

• 1:49:33Speaker 01

  oftentimes, there are deep sentiments of being isolated and alone and feeling like they were dealing with something that nobody else would, or was, or that nobody else would understand. And it's not true. You're, you can't, nobody knows what's going on behind your eyes, right? Like, I guarantee you and I are probably,

• 1:49:53Speaker 01

  spend our mental bandwidth worrying about the vast majority of the same shit. But in my mind, I'd be like, cut your nails. But like, who could I possibly talk to about this? Because I'm the only one on earth dealing with this. And the reality is, almost everybody is. So we lie to ourselves. You isolate, you don't say anything, and it ends up getting worse.

• 1:50:10Chris Williamson?

  And it's interesting, you said, I don't think that I can do the thing that I need to do for as long as is going to be required of me. And that's not too dissimilar to one of the most common thoughts that people have before taking their own lives, which is that the world would be better off without me.

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  Or I can't take this anymore.

• 1:50:29Chris Williamson?

  The people around me would be better off without me, and I can't continue.

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:34Chris Williamson?

  And it's the combination of those two things. It's the isolation that's in there, too. And the wonderful line, "The feeling of being alone is one of the most dangerous lies we tell ourselves."

• 1:50:43Speaker 01

  I have never asked for help and not received it. And I have been, like, in tears, overwhelmed with a number of people who saw that I needed help, but didn't say anything because they were waiting for me to ask.

• 1:51:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, this is a curse of being competent. The sort of people that listen to this show and read books like yours. They're the kinds of people who usually in their friend group are the ones that have got it figured out. You know, they they're the ones that are working on their diet, that are thinking about their sleep pattern, that are reading and doing meditation.

• 1:51:22Speaker 01

  Their looks maxing.

• 1:51:23Chris Williamson?

  They're everything maxing.

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  Like Thor.

• 1:51:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he did. He just genetics maxed. And um.

• 1:51:31Chris Williamson?

  What that means is that if you're the friend that always seems like you've got your life sorted. People tend to not want to come to your aid because, oh, fuck, like, you know, Andy's the guy that that I go to. Like, who am I? Who am I? Who am I to help him? Like, he's he's got it sorted. Like, it's not it's not on me. Like, it's gonna be embarrassing. It's gonna be whatever. And um, it's a weird inversion of things that are good.

• 1:51:58Chris Williamson?

  There are lots of ways that competence is great, but this is one of the ways where competence can hold you back. And uh.

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think it's.

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  It goes back to the misconceptions about special operations. Defined by their competence. A country calls upon that community to solve problems when they can't figure out another solution. And by the way, they're not looking for a negative result. They're looking for success.

• 1:52:22Chris Williamson?

  I wrote this essay. This came to me when you were talking about the fact that you stayed in a marriage for longer than you should have done. And that you'd used a skill that had got you a lot of accolade in your military career. But it had damaged you when it came to your relationship. The curse of psychological strength. Everyone has a limit. An end to the amount of discomfort that they can cope with. This is obvious physically. Some people can lift more and run further than others. But how much emotional pain, upset or disappointment a person can endure is subtler and harder to detect. It's not apparent in the size of someone's arms, but the capacity of their nervous system. It's not a weight that you can see on squat rack. It's their ability to carry a heavy emotional load.

• 1:53:06Chris Williamson?

  This psychological strength can be a good thing. You're able to handle more than most. You don't bulk at pain. You keep pushing through regardless of how you feel. But too much strength can be a weakness. High performers are particularly vulnerable to this trap. Psychological strength is rewarded almost everywhere. In the gym, it's discipline. In business, it's grit. In public, it's composure. You become the person who can handle it, who doesn't complain, who pushes through when others would quit. Your ability to ignore how you feel and keep moving forward earns admiration, builds your career, and creates momentum. But what you are praised for in public, you often pay for in private.

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  Oof.

• 1:53:42Chris Williamson?

  Relationships don't reward endurance, they require attunement. If your default strategy in life is to absorb discomfort and override warning signs, you will do exactly that when someone repeatedly hurts you. You'll rationalize it, reframe it, decide it's your job to make it work. And the stronger you are, the longer you can stay. What looks like strength from the outside becomes self-abandonment on the inside. You've trained yourself to believe that struggle is noble and difficulty is meaningful. So when love feels destabilizing, it doesn't register as a warning. It feels like a challenge. And challenges are your thing. But a relationship isn't a marathon to be endured. It's a place to feel safe.

• 1:54:22Chris Williamson?

  The qualities that make you formidable in the arena can quietly make you miserable in your own living room. Let's say that you're dating and feel like a side character in your own relationship. You put them first and they put you sixth. The rupture is regular and the repair is absent. Lower resilience, less stubborn people, would have broken long ago and said, "I'm out." But not you. You're the Jocko Willink of psychological suffering. Forget carrying the boats, you'll carry the whole fleet forever. In these situations, you're faced with a much tougher problem. Not how much can you tolerate, but how much do you want to tolerate? Perhaps this is what you had to do as a child. If your needs weren't noticed, your sadness was ignored, and your feelings didn't matter,

• 1:55:04Chris Williamson?

  then you become accustomed to pushing through disconnection in order to make those relationships function. If child you learns, "I need to work hard to be loved," then adult you believes, "If I am not loved, I just need to work harder." You've achieved 10,000 hours of ignoring your own needs. You can't tell people how you feel without first worrying about how it'll make them feel. You unconsciously believe that suffering is the price of connection and that silent subjugation is noble. You basically think, "I should be able to tolerate the intolerable in order to make this work."

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  What inspired you to write that?

• 1:55:39Chris Williamson?

  Thinking about some of the ways that I'd denied myself prioritization, that I'd pushed through discomfort because I could, because almost everything that was valuable in life had come on the other side of working hard and going through difficulty. So there's just this implicit belief that, well, if something's hard, that must mean that there's something valuable on the other side of it. But there is such a thing as kind of pointless suffering.

• 1:56:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:14Chris Williamson?

  It made me think about, you know, the curse of psychological strength and made me think about what you were saying.

• 1:56:18Speaker 01

  Sounded very self reflective as you were writing it.

• 1:56:21Chris Williamson?

  Massive, massively.

• 1:56:22Speaker 01

  I could have easily, you have a better grasp on the English language than I do, probably because you guys, you guys don't use it properly, but you guys might.

• 1:56:30Chris Williamson?

  Kind of invented it, yeah.

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  So, yeah, no, that's a.

• 1:56:34Chris Williamson?

  Say more.

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

  It's good, man. That's, I can hear a startling amount of myself.

• 1:56:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  In that. It's tough. Yeah. What people see from the outside isn't always what's going on on the inside.

• 1:56:48Chris Williamson?

  I like that line, you know, what you are praised for in public, you pay for in private. And it's one of the reasons why when you look at anybody that's a high performer or somebody that's in the seals or, you know, whatever.

• 1:57:00Chris Williamson?

  Anybody that's got unusual results typically has unusual inputs and an unusual environment internally too. You know, normal people get normal results, weird people get weird results. And the most successful, popular in the world, you shouldn't, your first response shouldn't necessarily be envy. A lot of the time it should be pity. Like what happened to you that caused you to do that to yourself?

• 1:57:27Speaker 01

  Or at what cost?

• 1:57:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:29Chris Williamson?

  What did you have to go through in order to get there?

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  Man, that message is so not.

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  Put out there that be careful what you wish for and you know envy may not be the first thing that should cross your mind when you see somebody last something you want.

• 1:57:44Chris Williamson?

  It's the it's the question that I've been most fascinated by on the show for probably about five years now. Unfortunately, it's an anti meme. It's if you tell people that the view from the top of the mountain that they are still climbing maybe might not be worth the rest of the journey. It feels to them like you're sucking the oxygen out of the fuel tank. Because it is, it is, fuck your feelings, just work harder, you will get there and glory is waiting for you. The total addressable market for that is ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of people. The people who get there or got close to the top and said, I think this is a false peak. I don't think that what's up there is going to be worth it. Or they got there and said, no, there's a very small number of people who got there

• 1:58:28Chris Williamson?

  and went, ah, it's two mountains. That's the problem. As opposed to this entire game is kind of rigged against me. And I actually need to look deeper. I'm not going to fill an internal void with external accolades, etc., etc., etc. It's an anti meme. It's an anti meme and it's always going to lose to a much more simplistic, no, no, no, it's just more. The answer is more. You shouldn't push for more.

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, especially in a society that celebrates more.

• 1:58:56Chris Williamson?

  It's radical to say that you're satisfied. The most radical thing that you can do in a meritocracy that's capitalist is say, I'm good. It's to be in Montana as opposed to downtown New York City. It's to, um, I kind of like my life. It's kind of enough for me. And, uh, yeah, dude, it's, it's, it's fucking fascinating. And what's more fascinating to me is how many guys have come out of special operations and, uh, turned their hand. There's still always the fucking glint in your guys' eyes, the little, yeah, that one.

• 1:59:32Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 1:59:32Chris Williamson?

  The

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  Tell me more.

• 1:59:36Chris Williamson?

  I'm scared you're gonna pin me down after we finish up, which actually is my request.

• 1:59:41Chris Williamson?

  It's the, the, the turn to fuck, like, I really did a lot physically, kind of in these three dimensions. And then, you know, this is you trying to turn that mirror around, I guess, on yourself and then start to show it to other people too.

• 2:00:02Speaker 01

  The most common thing people say to me when they find out about my background, they'll say, first off, dude, you must be crazy. So I skipped that part of it. But they'll say those experiences must have been like unbelievable. And the reality is they were, and they are statistically out of reach for almost everybody. But if I end up doing nothing with that and only it only impacts my life and I'm on my deathbed, I will regret not doing something with that. And I think that there is a way to take those experiences and package them in a way

• 2:00:44Speaker 01

  that can help people because at this point in my life, all I really actually want to do is make the world a little bit better than it was when I came into it. Like that's literally money is cool. I like nice things as well, too, but I'm also at a point in my life like, okay, I get it. Like I might want the nice thing, but there's no actual happiness from the nice thing. Teaching somebody something or giving them a tool that they can use to just attack a problem in their life. That's fucking awesome. And it is so much more rewarding than a thing that you write a check for. And that's what I'm trying to do with that is to take experiences and tools and lessons that people think they don't have access to. And I will be honest with this, too. You can learn or be exposed to those lessons in organized sports.

• 2:01:27Speaker 01

  It's not like the milit- there's no unique creations inside of the military. Yeah, a lot of things are reinforced to a higher degree because the consequences of the environment can get pretty gnarly pretty quick. But if things work in that pressure cooker environment, you're telling me that they're not going to work in your personal and professional life. It'll help you just crush whatever it is that you're trying to do. And that's, I resisted writing something for many years. One, because I talk so much shit about other guys who were SEALs that wrote books and now I'm well deserved and deserving of the other people who are talking shit on me. But I just.

• 2:02:04Speaker 01

  I want to try to take those to create tools to give people a foundation and a framework to throw it at whatever it is is going on in their life. So that they can maybe suffer better. I don't know if that's a great way to put it, but just to attack whatever it is is going on in their life.

• 2:02:22Chris Williamson?

  Suffer better is a wonderful tagline, dude. If the world went completely sideways from a zombie virus outbreak and we had to put together a militia to save the human race, Andy Stumpf would be my top draft pick. Can you imagine how retarded the rest of the militia would be?

• 2:02:36Speaker 01

  Oh, exceptionally.

• 2:02:38Chris Williamson?

  You're the first guy?

• 2:02:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:40Chris Williamson?

  The tip of the spear.

• 2:02:41Speaker 01

  Well, the base of the shaft, bro.

• 2:02:43Chris Williamson?

  Ah, of course. Andy, you're a fucking legend, dude. I appreciate the hell out of you. Congratulations on this. It was awesome. Worked real hard on it.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a... I don't know if you get emails like this. I'm sure you do. Because the internet's a weird place, right? We hit upload and I don't know where anything goes. Your platform is massive and I could not be more proud for what you have built.

• 2:03:08Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 2:03:09Speaker 01

  But I bet you get emails from people that you'll never meet and they say, you know what? Something I heard you say, or a guest say, changed the course and trajectory of my life. And that is, I don't... I save those emails. I have a folder. About a dozen people have reached out and said they chose not to kill themselves because it's something they heard on the podcast. Books are measured by bestseller lists. Fuck all that. I want to hear about people who changed the course of their life because it's something they got from a place that they never thought that they would have access to, but picked this up and realized, holy shit, we are way more simpler and I can use this and I will use it.

• 2:03:54Speaker 01

  And you're still gonna make mistakes and I hope you do because you need them, but it'll help you suffer better. Fuck yeah. Dude, you're awesome. You're awesome. Congratulations. Thank you, man. Appreciate it. All right. Goodbye, everybody.

• 2:04:06Chris Williamson?

  Dude, fucking go. So good. Unreal. Unreal.

• 2:04:11Speaker 02

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