#100 Tim Kennedy

Tim Kennedy is a Master Sergeant and Green Beret, New York Times Best Selling Author, and Retired UFC Fighter. He is the Founder of Sheepdog Response, a tactical training company dedicated to preserving human life. He also helped create Save Our Allies in the wake of the Afghanistan withdrawal and successfully assisted in the evacuation of over 17,000 American allies. Today, Kennedy spends his time continuing to serve his country and community through his companies and ventures like Apogee Strong, an online mentorship program that has evolved into a brick and mortar academy that offers an alternative to traditional education. This release marks SRS's 100th episode. Shawn and the team are extremely grateful for the opportunity to engage, educate, and entertain you. Each episode has been an incredible journey and we appreciate all of your support along the way. Celebrate this milestone with us and enjoy the show. Note: While we strive for accuracy, some statements made by our guests may later be found to be verifiably false. We encourage listeners to critically evaluate the content and conduct their own research on the topics discussed. https://www.instagram.com/p/DL3zI0EMSpi Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://shopify.com/shawn https://betterhelp.com/shawn https://ziprecruiter.com/srs https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://blackbuffalo.com https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Tim Kennedy Links: Website - https://timkennedy.com Stars and Stripes Book - https://sheepdogresponse.com/products/scars-stripes-book Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/TimKennedyMMA Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/timkennedymma YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-gO6d2N_MiG5wVuL14okbg X - https://twitter.com/TimKennedyMMA Sheepdog Response - https://sheepdogresponse.com Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Mr. President? My company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is.

• 0:40Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 0:46Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:53Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 1:00Shawn Ryan?

  We are at episode 100. I can't believe it.

• 1:09Shawn Ryan?

  Took about four and a half years to get here. The truth be told, we're still in our infancy.

• 1:17Shawn Ryan?

  Lot more to come. And, um, but you know, as I reflect through the past 100 episodes, I've thought a lot about, you know, what does this show mean to me? What is the, what is the reoccurring message? The reoccurring theme? And, and for me, you know, what I get out of this and what I hope you all get out of this is, no matter how dark of a place you're in, no matter how bad it is, no matter how much you've messed up in life, there is always a way out. There is, there is always

• 2:00Shawn Ryan?

  a way to put that behind you and find redemption to become a better human being, a better dad, a better husband, a better countryman, just a better person all around. And the guests that have been on here have proven that time and time again.

• 2:24Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for sticking around. Man, that, that chokes me up to, to say that, but um,

• 2:32Shawn Ryan?

  our 100th guest really needs no introduction, but I just want to say that I found him to be an incredible human being. I'm proud to know him. He's done a hell of a lot for the country in service and continues to out of service beyond what anybody's ever asked him. And um, he just still does it today. He's a former UFC fighter. He's a former, uh, he still is Gurren Brei, actually. And, and uh, I can't believe I hadn't met him until dinner before we actually recorded

• 3:13Shawn Ryan?

  this show, but perfect guest for 100 and a new friend of mine. Ladies and gents, if you get anything out of this, please comment, like and subscribe to the YouTube channel. And if you're feeling extra generous, head over to Apple and Spotify, leave us a review, even if it's just one word, that really helps the show out. And um, and I want you to know that no matter how you've supported us, whether you've been here from the beginning in the gun review days, or you're just coming and this is your first episode, you're a patron, however it is, I

• 3:52Shawn Ryan?

  appreciate it. My team appreciates it and we love you. And without further ado, I'd like to welcome Mr. Tim Kennedy to the Sean Ryan Show. Here's to the next 100. God bless America.

• 4:19Shawn Ryan?

  Tim Kennedy, welcome to the show, man.

• 4:22Speaker 06

  Sean, thanks for having me.

• 4:23Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, long time coming. How have we not crossed paths before?

• 4:27Speaker 06

  I have no idea. I was, as I was throwing out names of good friends, former teammates, and you're like, "You're doing this with them, and I'm doing this with them." And we just, there was overlap, but I don't think any ever connection.

• 4:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:41Speaker 06

  In our like, circles, we probably have 200, 300 people that we both know. But this is the first opportunity I've had to sit down with you.

• 4:49Shawn Ryan?

  Well, it's an honor to have you here, man.

• 4:51Speaker 06

  An honor, mine.

• 4:52Shawn Ryan?

  I've been real excited to meet you, so thank you for making the trip. But, so, we're gonna do a life story on you.

• 5:00Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 5:00Shawn Ryan?

  It's gonna be super interesting. I know, I know. You think it might be boring, that's what you said in the text, but I guarantee you, it's not. I can't, I can't wait to get this out. And, no pressure, I didn't tell you last night at dinner, but you're gonna be episode 100.

• 5:17Speaker 06

  Whaaat?

• 5:18Shawn Ryan?

  Hell, yeah.

• 5:19Speaker 06

  Nice.

• 5:19Shawn Ryan?

  So, pretty cool.

• 5:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 5:22Shawn Ryan?

  But let me kick this off with an introduction here.

• 5:25Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 5:26Shawn Ryan?

  It's a long one. Tim Kennedy, husband, father of three, three daughters, one son. You're a special forces Green Beret, special forces sniper, Ranger qualified, infantryman, and airborne. Former professional mixed martial arts fighter and two-time title challenger, having fought in the largest organizations in the world, to include the UFC, Strike Force, IFL, and WEC. Black belts in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and US Army Combatives. You're an author, New York Times bestseller of Scars and Stripes, and Unapologetically, American Story of Fighting the Taliban. UFC Warriors and myself. Number one audiobook in the world for more than 13 weeks.

• 6:11Shawn Ryan?

  It's very impressive.

• 6:12Speaker 06

  It's wild. It's a mouthful.

• 6:17Shawn Ryan?

  Chapstick connoisseur.

• 6:18Speaker 06

  Yup.

• 6:19Shawn Ryan?

  Co-owner of Ranger Up, CEO of Sheepdog Response, which is a tactical training and self-defense company, co-founder and board member of Save Our Allies. Can't wait to get into that. Opened in Apogee Academy, that's K through 12 charter school in 2020, and now you have more than how many schools?

• 6:43Speaker 06

  We're gonna open 15 new schools in 2024, and we launched online mentorship this year, and we have thousands of mentees, what's the plural of, yeah, that are all on this like sovereignty, freedom-loving, American element that I think, I wish every single American embraced, which is what it means to be a good contributing citizen.

• 7:06Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I love the motto, or you're, maybe it's not the motto of this, I don't know what it is, but it's your personal goal, which is to...

• 7:14Speaker 06

  Preserve and protect human life, empower people to provide for their families, and expand freedom.

• 7:19Shawn Ryan?

  And take down the Department of Education.

• 7:22Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, the end, the end state for Apogee is to abolish every useless, useless form of education, or whatever that word means, to truly give back sovereignty to the, to the family, so that children can be what they're, they're destined to be, which is amazing individuals and critical thinkers and contributing members of society, not, not slaves, not lemmings, not consumers, you know, not labor.

• 7:49Shawn Ryan?

  Tax meals.

• 7:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but I can't wait to dive into that, too.

• 7:53Speaker 06

  That'd be fun.

• 7:53Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I didn't realize, I knew you had started a school, I did not realize how much traction and how fast that took off until I started doing a little research on you, so, man, that's just, you got some super honorable things you're doing, and...

• 8:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's not me, though, I mean, that's, that Matt Boudreau, my partner, Michelle Myers and Lauren that run the school, like, they're 100%, all credit goes to them and to God, because if I was in charge of any of it, you know, they'd be like, there'd be swords on the walls, and there'd be axes, you see little kids running around with tomahawks, like, "Let's go!" You know, so fortunately, they, they, they put me in a corner and limit my, my influence.

• 8:35Shawn Ryan?

  And one of the few fighters to serve in the military and fight professionally at the same time.

• 8:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't know if that was the best idea, but...

• 8:44Shawn Ryan?

  Well...

• 8:46Shawn Ryan?

  Part of your story now.

• 8:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:47Shawn Ryan?

  So, um, but yeah, man, I'm, I am really excited to have you here. Everybody's pumped about this. We got a Patreon community. They're the reason I'm here. They're the reason you're here and that I'm able to do this. And so I give them an opportunity to ask questions.

• 9:03Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 9:03Shawn Ryan?

  And so this one is from Stephen Casey. In reference to the Hunting Hitler TV series that you did on the History Channel. Are there any things that didn't make it into the episodes that are worth knowing? What got cut, if anything, from the series that would help us understand better?

• 9:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. It's a hard question. Um, about half of what we investigated ended up on the edit room floor. So I'd say we overshot in 200% of the investigation that never went into. Yes, it was real truthful storytelling, um, but they're also following like this narrative that of a story that they wanted to tell and the arc of that story was, did Hitler get out? Um, the things that I cared about were, are around the idea of how did these Nazis get out? And more importantly, how did their ideas get ground and, um, you know, have legs into

• 10:07Speaker 06

  history moving forward? One of the, one of the hardest things that didn't make it into the show was us following some of the Nazis in the Middle East and North Africa.

• 10:20Shawn Ryan?

  What were they doing in North Africa?

• 10:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, uh, well, they were aligning with radical Muslim groups. And what do the Nazis and the Muslims have in common?

• 10:32Shawn Ryan?

  They want to kill Jews.

• 10:33Speaker 06

  That's right. So, uh, you know, the founding of the Mujahideen to, um, the Grand Mufti, when Israel was first going to become a nation in 1944, they, uh,

• 10:46Speaker 06

  When it finally happened in 1946, the Grand Mufti was organizing every single neighboring country to attack. The Grand Mufti was being advised by Nazis. And every one of those Muslim based countries, the Grand Mufti, who was like the religious leader at the time over all of them, he was orchestrating and organizing strategically the connective advisors, which were Nazis that had been smuggled out of Germany and into North Africa, anywhere that they could go, that they were welcomed. So like in Argentina, for example, gigantic Nazi population, huge German settlements that were there.

• 11:29Shawn Ryan?

  Do you still see that down there?

• 11:31Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I went, this got cut. This is, we went into this Fight Club as I was trying to find out about these legacy heritage family owners, the landowners down in Argentina, like, we'd go to these rural, remote areas, and you'd walk into a coffee shop, you know, like Buenos dias, and they're like, Guten Morgen. I'm like, alright. I mean, you're in the middle of nowhere, and there's this blonde, 60-year-old dude with blue eyes, and he's correcting you, speaking Spanish in Argentina, because he wants to speak German in his coffee shop. And it's rooted in there. Going to this Fight Club as I was trying to find out who owned some of these pieces of property that we're getting on, there were

• 12:12Speaker 06

  dudes with SS tattoos on their necks, swastikas on their arms, palm leaves on their sides, you know, and all the way back to the

• 12:20Shawn Ryan?

  What does the palm leaf mean?

• 12:21Speaker 06

  The, the German campaign of North Africa.

• 12:25Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 12:26Speaker 06

  The, you know, it's like a palm tree with a swastika at the base of it.

• 12:30Shawn Ryan?

  Shit, I've not seen that. Wow.

• 12:33Speaker 06

  And I literally, like, see, and these are grandsons of, you know, men that escaped war, criminal hearings, to settle in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, North Africa, and the Middle East.

• 12:51Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 12:52Speaker 06

  Yeah. They got out. That's, that didn't make it into the show.

• 12:54Shawn Ryan?

  Go figure. One more question. This is actually from another patron, but I'm personally interested in this too. Her name's Amy Weaver. She wants to know

• 13:08Shawn Ryan?

  Did we get Hitler, or did he escape?

• 13:10Speaker 06

  Well, he died, for sure. Now, did he die in April in 1945 in the bunker? Or did he live a few more years? We know his health was deteriorating rapidly at the end of the war. Regardless of if he got out, we know his ideas got out. And the way that we did this investigation was, we looked, as we're looking at patterns of life, as you know, like as you hunt people, you first, every person has a fingerprint. And no matter where they go in the world, that fingerprint is how they live. Like, if you want to find me, you're gonna find me in jujitsu gyms, you're gonna find me in good coffee shops, you're gonna find me in cold water, you're gonna find me at

• 13:51Speaker 06

  shooting ranges, like, no matter where I go, I end up having this very similar pattern. Where I stay, the floor that I stand, the room that I stand. So as we figured out the pattern of life of these Nazis, we looked, you know, 2 through 10 escaped. You know, the Joseph Mangolays, the Skorzenyskis, the Adolf Eichmanns, those guys got out. So if, number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, if all, Martin Bormann, if all these guys got out, but Hitler then didn't, and was left there to die, was he such a fanatic radical that he wanted to go down with the sinking ship? Or, we know for a fact that the, all of the things they rehearsed, and all of the escape

• 14:34Speaker 06

  routes that they had practiced, were ultimately used by high-ranking Nazis. Could it have been Hitler? Absolutely. Did we find the smoking gun of, here is his body, here is his skull, here is the DNA proof? No, we did not.

• 14:51Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 14:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:52Shawn Ryan?

  Frustrating. Yeah. It's, uh, man, that had to be a fascinating project to be on.

• 14:58Speaker 06

  It was a ton of fun. Getting a call when you're in a... A weird moment in your life, be like, oh, you can fly drones. You know how to use ground penetrating radar. You can speak Spanish. You got deployments in South America. Do you want to hunt Nazis? And I was like, yes, yes, I do. First, I'm gonna hide this erection. Second, book me a flight. Tell me where to go. I cannot wait. You know, I've been hunting people my whole entire adult life. And now you're gonna tell me to hunt Nazis? The only thing better would be like zombies. Like this, this is like a moral free, um, no guilt opportunity to hunt people. I'm in.

• 15:34Shawn Ryan?

  Very cool. Very cool. Well, we're getting ready to get in your life story, but first, everybody always gets a gift.

• 15:42Speaker 06

  All right.

• 15:43Shawn Ryan?

  Any guesses?

• 15:44Speaker 06

  Um, chlamydia, I already have it, no. Um.

• 15:47Shawn Ryan?

  How many times?

• 15:50Speaker 06

  Gummy bears.

• 15:52Shawn Ryan?

  Those are legal in all 50 states.

• 15:54Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 15:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so feel free to dive in at any moment.

• 15:59Speaker 06

  They're, uh, these are very nice packaging, too.

• 16:02Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. Thank you. Okay. And, uh, yeah, I don't know if you've heard of that book.

• 16:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 16:10Shawn Ryan?

  It's a fascinating book. It'll be linked in the description if you want to pick up a copy.

• 16:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, but there's a, then a really ugly dude on the front. That needs to get a haircut. And, uh, that obviously is a range body armor. I mean, yeah.

• 16:24Shawn Ryan?

  Stars and Stripes, ladies and gents. New York Times bestseller for 13 weeks on audiobook. And I don't know how long for the book, but.

• 16:33Speaker 06

  That's crazy.

• 16:35Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, yeah, so you don't have to read that all now.

• 16:39Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 16:40Shawn Ryan?

  Little light reading material for the ride home.

• 16:43Speaker 06

  When I read the audiobook, um, you know, you're in a studio like this. It's completely silent. It's like sensory deprivation and.

• 16:53Speaker 06

  You're reliving as you're reading your own book, like the worst moments of your life. Like, this is not a war story of like, here's all the awesome things I did. It's literally all the things that I failed at in my whole entire life. Failed title fights, failed as a teammate, failed as a Green Beret, like fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. And, um, and you're like, sitting there in shame and embarrassment and humiliation by yourself in a sound studio. And, uh, dude, it took me, it was so hard to read this book. I'll bet. It was hard. How long did it take you to do that audio book? They said, you're probably knocked this out in like five days if you just like sat there. It took me a month. A month? A month. Wow.

• 17:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, like the, I'm 15 years old, my best friend dies in a car crash and, uh, you know, like the, the youth, the, the, my childhood ends. And, you know, when you're sitting there, reading, walking up to see my best friend's mom, who there's, she, she's not the same woman that she was two days ago. There's no life behind her eyes. It's literally like a shark's eyes. There's just deadness behind there. And my best friend's older brother, Jordan, um, he couldn't even see me. Like, he couldn't look at me because I was his brother's friend. And so like now I'm isolated and I'm living all of that stuff as I'm reading this book, but I'm remembering back to things that aren't even in this book.

• 18:20Speaker 06

  You know, your mind just travels so fast, especially with, with emotions and memories. It was so hard to read this, you know, when you got blown up and I lost teammates, when I, you know, like that brings you back to some, some hard, hard moments. Well, I hope to cover a lot of that today. So, um, Well, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. The paperback just came out. Did it really? Yeah, this is, uh, this is like two weeks, two, three weeks, uh, release here. It's cool.

• 18:49Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's get into the interview now. So where did you grow up?

• 18:54Speaker 06

  I was born in San Luis Obispo, California, and my dad was an narcotics officer and my mom was, they were like the opposites. She was a counselor at the church. She is a piano teacher. You know, she ultimately homeschooled us and you know, this is as a child that was born in the eighties and raised in the or born in the seventies and raised in the eighties. You know, she'd walk around with a wooden spoon in her back pocket. You know, I think my, my little sister's first memories were like in the movie Twister where like chunks of wood were flying past her head, which were,

• 19:34Speaker 06

  which were these spoons that my mom just kept breaking. And so I was born in San Luis Obispo and raised in the central coast of California. Pastoral was Atascadero, Cambria. That was like my, our hood.

• 19:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Cool. Middle class?

• 19:51Speaker 06

  Yeah. Single income father of.

• 19:56Shawn Ryan?

  So your mom was all volunteer?

• 19:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 19:58Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow. Okay. Living off a cop's salary.

• 20:02Speaker 06

  Off a single income of a police officer in California in the eighties. We were poor. You know, we did, we had one bathroom in the house. We always had somebody living in our house with us as well. You know, somebody from the church on hard times or like, I can't remember a single moment growing up where my brother and I and my sister were sharing a room or that there was somebody else sleeping. You know, if there's a girl that she was sleeping in the room with my sister, you know, she was struggling with an eating disorder or whatever, or like abuse at the house. They come and live with us because like the Kennedys were the safest place you could

• 20:44Speaker 06

  possibly be. You know, if you're in Mike Kennedy's house with Paula Kennedy, my parents, like you're safe. And that projection of my parents and that essence of being a protector and a provider, like obviously heavily influenced me and how we grew up. You know, by the time, you know, my sister's in elementary school and my brother and I are. You know, eight, 10 years old, I'm, I'm already ready to throw down with somebody that sends a weird look towards my six-year-old sister. Like, it was just, this is who we are as, as men, is we're protectors first and foremost of our, of our family.

• 21:19Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's great. You don't hear that a lot these days, you know?

• 21:23Speaker 06

  There are some. I wish it was a little bit more common.

• 21:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, me too. So you guys, you had a tight-knit family?

• 21:29Speaker 06

  Very tight.

• 21:30Shawn Ryan?

  Still close with your dad?

• 21:31Speaker 06

  Incredibly close.

• 21:32Shawn Ryan?

  And your mom?

• 21:33Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 21:33Shawn Ryan?

  And your siblings?

• 21:34Speaker 06

  Yep. I'm flying, my brother's getting an award next week in, um, his partner was in a really, really bad shooting. And, uh, my brother's just an epic hero. Uh, as my sister is brilliant, she's incredible. Uh, there, there's a photograph of my, my, my brother running, so like covering fire as he's moving his partner off the X from the shooting.

• 21:59Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 21:59Speaker 06

  And, uh, it's an incredible photo, but more importantly, like in that moment, my brother is the ground force commander of the shooting where, you know, a great community hero gets shot up by a criminal. And, um, my brother's taking this dude, getting him to safety to medevac him out to save his life. So I'll fly to California so my brother can get his award next Friday.

• 22:24Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 22:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 22:25Shawn Ryan?

  Well, congratulations to him. That's, that's incredible.

• 22:31Shawn Ryan?

  So what were you into growing up?

• 22:33Speaker 06

  Fixing fences, fighting Mexicans. Um, like this is, this is rural California. When people hear California, like, yeah, I surfed. I was not a surfer. Um, Hollywood is four hours south. San Francisco is four hours north. You know, we, uh, there was avocado trees, there were the beginning of wineries, not a lot of wineries. So there's garlic, there's onions, there's strawberries, the, the orange trees are further south and inland, you know? We, um, I'm working on the Sklerie Ranch, um,

• 23:08Speaker 06

  I did martial arts, I shot, I hunted, and I worked. We started working young. What did you really, I mean, what do you think you really excelled at? Getting into trouble.

• 23:23Speaker 06

  I, man, I started like throwing down early. You know, somebody would say something slick to my sister and I was like a pit bull that had been starved and locked in a cage for too long. And I would just go, I just needed an excuse.

• 23:41Speaker 06

  The first time I heard my brother-in-law, who married my sister, he's Asian, and his brother also adopted. He was black and we're at the California Midstate Fair in Paso Robles, California. I heard two words that I'd never heard before. Did you just say your brother's adopted? My brother-in-law is Korean and adopted, and his other brother is also adopted. There were six like white German kids, Koenig, and then there were six adopted kids, a family of 12. And the races of the adopted kids were varying of, you know, black and Asian. And we're at the California Midstate Fair, which is like, again, really rural. And, you know, I hear two nasty racist words.

• 24:27Speaker 06

  I didn't even know what they meant, but I knew what they're intended to mean. And I was like, here we go. Like, that's all I need, you know? So I'm like over here fighting three, four dudes, men, men. You know, like I'm a teenager with cowboy hats on and Levi's that are nice and pressed with good boots. And like, I don't care. I'm just, I'm just going for it. So it was really early when my dad recognized that I have to do something with that middle born, second born child. Cause he's gonna go to prison forever if I don't figure out what to do with him. So he put me into martial arts, boxing, kickboxing, jujitsu.

• 25:04Speaker 06

  And, and I really, really liked that. What age did you start that?

• 25:10Speaker 06

  I was probably six, seven, eight when I started the Shodokan Karate, then Taekwondo, then Taekwondo, to Japanese Jiu Jitsu, Japanese Jiu Jitsu, to Hawaiian Kempo, Hawaiian Kempo, to like, I just kept on playing with different styles. It wasn't until like Chuck Liddell and Jake Shields came into my gym. And I was like the, you know, I was 16 years old, big fish in a little pond where I could do really well against everybody in all styles of fighting, stand up. And I was competing, I was traveling around. So I thought I was a big deal. Until Chuck Liddell and Jake Shields came in and they mopped the match

• 25:50Speaker 06

  with me like I was a petulant, useless child. And I was like, I don't know what just happened, but wherever they train at, I need to go train with them. So I started training at the pit with John Hackelman and Chuck and Gann and Scott Adams. And that was Glover Teixeira, you know, the guys that became UFC Champions.

• 26:12Shawn Ryan?

  So you were, you were a protector. I mean, it's carried on throughout your entire lifespan, obviously, you know, but it started, protected your sister and your family and your friends. And then Special Forces, Save Our Allies, Sheepdog Response. I mean, there's an ongoing trend here. But what you had mentioned earlier in the interview about a, your best friend died in a car accident. And that was the end of your childhood.

• 26:41Speaker 00

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• 27:11Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped moving? You stop, you freeze in there. That's what...

• 27:32Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 27:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, the, um, I don't know. You know, I wouldn't, I had an amazing childhood, but it was also wrought with, um, disaster. There was death in my life always, you know, like Christmas Day, my grandma dying, watching my grandpa die slowly of emphysema. You know, he's a World War II Greatest Generation guy, so watching him slowly shrink and, and pass.

• 28:10Speaker 06

  Our, my, my mom played the piano at church. Carol Lee Stewart was the worship leader at that church and she died in a scuba diving accident. Her son Nathan was like my best friend through grade school and, um,

• 28:25Speaker 06

  her other daughter was my sister's best friend. So Nathan and I, and, um, so when she died, you know, I think I was maybe nine, 10 years old and having somebody that was such a staple in your life just gone. You know, she was, she was there every Sunday. I'd see her three or four days a week as she's dropping Nathan off to our house as she'd go run the errands in town because they kind of lived out a little bit. And, um, and then I don't see Nathan anymore. And then, you know, that, that, these are formative memories of like, okay, how do, how do you, death is so prevalent and life is so finite. Um, and then when I was 15, we were, uh,

• 29:09Speaker 06

  these are great kids. When I say they're going to parties, they're like going to Christian after Bible study parties. Like there was no drinking. There was no, they're young men behind a steering wheel, which is a very dangerous thing and, uh, trying to pass one of their friends on, uh, on a turn and somebody came around the turn and they had a head-to-head collision with another car, you know, and Jordan was giving his little brother Jared CPR and, um, that was the last night I saw Jared, obviously, and I didn't see Jordan for a decade. You know, we couldn't see each other. I couldn't, I didn't want to see him. He didn't want to see me. Like it was literally just the end and walking up, you know, carrying

• 29:50Speaker 06

  that casket as a pallbearer and knowing that like my childhood friend is here and, you know, pushing the back of that. Go take it up to the top of the Atascadero Cemetery and you know, the that dirt going on the top of that coffin, not just literally sealed him, but like sealed childhood, like the age of innocence is over.

• 30:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 30:15Speaker 06

  And from that moment, for the next 15 years, I was a a force, a thing without purpose and a thing without direction, which is a really dangerous thing.

• 30:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 06

  A young man without purpose, man.

• 30:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we say that a lot today too now.

• 30:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:36Shawn Ryan?

  In all aspects, but what got you, what got you interested? I mean, your dad was a, it sounds like he was a very good narcotics cop.

• 30:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, a peak war on drugs. You know, this is Pablo Escobar and the cartels, the syndicated criminal organizations have finally like legitimacy in a way that we are just now understanding where, you know, they're bribing people. As lobbyists have influence over people, the cartels had influence over governments. You know, so they controlled Colombia up to Mexico, all through Central America and North, South America. And in an operation very similar to like Fast and Furious, my dad and his team, this narcotics task force, steal an entire plane of cocaine from Pablo Escobar, Costa Rica.

• 31:29Speaker 06

  They bring it to the United States, they distribute the cocaine pallets. These are pallets of cocaine. And I remember walking into San Luis Obispo, my mom, my brother, sister and I went to Madonna Inn and grabbed some pies. We walk into this storage area and there's two pallets of cocaine and my dad, who's a giant and all of his colleagues are giants, they're all like 6'5", 6'6", 300 pound dudes. They're sitting there with MP5 suppressed, you know, there's a Porsche and a Lamborghini sitting in the storage facility and there's two pallets of cocaine and I just hand off these pies and then we go back home. This, this is like, all of my memories are like this growing up.

• 32:15Speaker 06

  They took that cocaine and they gave it to regional distributors. Those distributors then gave it to like, street dealers. And then in one week, they went and arrested all of the distributors and all of the dealers. Like, they arrested hundreds of these people on the whole entire west coast. They didn't lose a single gram of cocaine.

• 32:32Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 32:33Speaker 06

  You know, this is, um, they're good.

• 32:36Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 32:37Speaker 06

  And this is also when meth was starting to really explode on the west coast. And my dad had a background in chemistry and he started recreating different ways to cook meth. Like, we had like, big, huge glass beakers, like huge chemistry sets in my house. I'm like, if only people understood that my dad was cooking meth. And the laws that we know now about how much NyQuil you can buy, all came from that era of law enforcement guys figuring out, well, if you have this much NyQuil and you have this much, like, if you're using Smurfs to go and buy all these different ingredients. So they added limitations as to how much you could buy of what type of chemicals to be able to produce or mass produce meth.

• 33:22Speaker 06

  I was like, my dad.

• 33:23Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 33:23Speaker 06

  It's sick.

• 33:24Shawn Ryan?

  Did you realize the significance of all that?

• 33:27Speaker 06

  Not at the time, no, no. I was, I am dumb and I was even more dumb back then.

• 33:33Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's really, that's interesting. I'll bet he's, I'll bet your dad's got some really good stories.

• 33:39Speaker 06

  Dude's a wild man. Like, we were just at SHOT Show. You know, he's like, the most gregarious. This is not the dad that I grew up in the eighties.

• 33:46Shawn Ryan?

  Right.

• 33:46Speaker 06

  Like, the grandpa that he is to my son, where, you know, he's teaching my son how to shoot his precision rifle. And he's, my son puts his finger on the trigger a little bit early. Doesn't have a sight picture yet. And he's like, hey, hold on there, Rolo. You know, your middle name's Michael, you're my namesake. We never put our finger on the trigger unless we're actively engaged in a target. I was like, wait a second. You kicked me in the head at this moment right here? I remember you kicking me. And he's like, well, it's different now. And I was like, I got it, dad. But knock it off. Now he's just like, the most, he and my mom are the sweetest.

• 34:25Speaker 06

  Like spending time with Mike and Paula is, nobody comes away with that. Like if you go to their house, they're cooking for you, a gigantic huge meal. You know, as you watch Tully Elk come onto the property. You're going to the back patio and shooting out precision rifle a few hundred meters. You're like, that is just the most inclusive family environment. And now they're just the sweetest people.

• 34:47Shawn Ryan?

  You know, you had mentioned also that you became pretty crafty because of your dad.

• 34:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:53Shawn Ryan?

  As a kid.

• 34:54Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 34:55Shawn Ryan?

  Breaking into cars, using Slim Jims.

• 34:57Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 34:58Shawn Ryan?

  What age did that start?

• 35:00Speaker 06

  I mean, I had Slim Jims like in my room. I was, I was probably 10 or 11 when I went into the church parking lot during a week Bible study. And I opened up every single car in the parking lot. I, just for the act of knowing that I could break into every car in there. And I took things out of their glove box and I set it on the seat. So the pastor, Tom Gaddis, he and Woody Shoemaker, who is the youth pastor, they're like, everybody comes out, they see that all their cars are broken into. And you know, I'm just sitting here like,

• 35:40Speaker 06

  you know, like, I don't, I don't know what happened. Like, I don't know what happened to these cars. Like a ghost broke in there. And Woody Shoemaker, who is a former Navy SEAL, he's like, my youth pastor, he's like, Tim, come over here. I was like, yes, sir. He's like, you break into these cars? Like, yeah. He's like, what'd you do that for? I'm like, I just needed to know that I could.

• 35:56Speaker 06

  Like my dad taught, taught me how to do it. Like this is 10. Me and my friend Augie Gah would take

• 36:04Speaker 06

  our rappelling gear. We're like, we're teenagers. We would cut holes into roofs of commercial buildings and rappel in there to figure out that we could steal stuff out of there. The statute of limitations, I'm fairly certain is expired. So like, I'm not breaking the laws now. Just for the act of doing it. And you know, my, my dad teaching us how to go up and talk to anybody about anything and be able to like break down barriers of like, how soon you can like, you know, make contact with somebody, actually touch them to, to break down another barrier. You're like, to find out things about them and to build rapport. Like he.

• 36:40Speaker 06

  Could walk up to a stranger and as an undercover police officer convince that stranger to sell him drugs that would send him to jail for forever. That's a skill that he taught all of us. And the skills of breaking into vehicles or breaking into houses or like how to get a warrant or how to like change a narrative to tell a certain story. Like these were things that we grew up. We're also a very Socratic household. My mom called us living room lawyers. We would sit down. My dad would pick a topic and we'd argue. You'd force you to pick a side and then you'd have to defend and argue that side. Whether you agreed with it or not. No kidding. This is us at like six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years old.

• 37:21Speaker 06

  Wow. So, critical thinking was was definitely celebrated in your house. Very much so. And by the time you start figuring out kind of who you are, at 18, I became, I went to EMT school and the fire academy to become a firefighter. And dad is still shaping. My brother now is a police officer. He's 21. I'm 18. I am working at the Attacqueta Fire Department. My brother's working, I think for his first one was San Luis Bispo PD. And still being shaped. Like, we're not men yet. Like, frontal lobe is

• 38:06Speaker 06

  not developed. And my dad is, first time that I came home from a mass casualty incident, you know, I'm covered in dirt and blood. I'm shaking. And, you know, he's like, hey, go hop in the shower before you talk to your mom. I'm like, I'm fine. I'm just gonna go to bed. He's like, go take a shower. I didn't realize that I was covered in blood and shaking and crying and couldn't even talk. I didn't remember any of this. I remember just walking through the door and my dad telling me to go take a shower. And, you know, he'd already seen everything. He already knew what what hell was like. And he was preparing his family for a real world that

• 38:45Speaker 06

  That he knew would ultimately have to experience. You know, he didn't know that nine eleven was gonna happen.

• 38:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. What it so you became a firefighter at age eighteen?

• 38:53Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 38:54Shawn Ryan?

  How long were you a firefighter for?

• 38:55Speaker 06

  Three years until I could go to the police academy.

• 38:58Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 38:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:59Shawn Ryan?

  So you so you knew, did you know when you became a firefighter, it was gonna be temporary?

• 39:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 39:04Shawn Ryan?

  Did you enjoy it?

• 39:06Speaker 06

  I I did. It was um, it was really hard work. Uh, not in the way that physically hard. I love that part of it. I loved being um, on a vehicle rescue and, you know, cutting doors open and uh,

• 39:25Speaker 06

  building fires. I loved the the violence of fire. Um, I made a lot of mistakes because I was young and dumb. You know, got some people hurt because I wanted to push, push more than I should have. Like melted, literally melted my helmet. Uh, my helmet, if you go to the task there, fire firefighter forty two, that was me. Um, you see, like, I heard these pops and bubbles and that was my my helmet that was melting and popping the plastic on the top.

• 39:55Speaker 06

  The thing that was hard was, you know, going to a domestic violence call and finding, you know, a kid in an oven and not being able to, like, that guy did it. Like, I know that guy did it. And like, my job is not to be a witness to what's happening. My job is to provide medical aid to what's there. It's the police officer's job. So I always felt constrained and my hands tied as to what should I should have been doing. But similarly, had I been a police officer, I my

• 40:27Speaker 06

  view of justice would be for me to beat that dude to death. So that probably wasn't in alignment either. I don't know. I still figuring it out.

• 40:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 40:35Speaker 06

  There's a serial killer in San Luis Obispo, California named Rex Krebs. And I was growing up when he was kidnapping women and they were just disappearing. And I was working at a bar called The Library in San Luis Obispo, like Chuck and and and Scott, they're running it. So you literally had the best fighters on the planet as bouncers and then.

• 40:59Speaker 06

  And then this idiot like bar backing and carrying out trash. But I remember at the end of the night, these girls, like I could smell fear from them. They were so terrified to make that walk home from the bar back to their homes, not knowing if they were going to be the next girl that would just disappear. And I thought that that was the, you know, there's an area of Silence of the Lambs, where Jodie Foster is hunting this unknown murderer. That was the embodiment of evil. Like, that is what evil really was. And it wasn't until 9/11 that I saw what evil could be at scale. And so I wanted to hunt these type of serial killers.

• 41:42Speaker 06

  I wanted to hunt this type of evil because I thought it was the most evil thing that I could see that could exist. And then, then I saw a girl in a polka dot dress look out a window of a building that's on fire, that she went into early because she was a single mother and she wanted to get off early so she could pick up her kids from school. And she's trying to make this decision about if she's going to jump to her death or burn alive. And her last act of conscious thought is to hold her dress down as she jumps to her death. And I wanted to kill everyone that had anything to do with that. That changed everything.

• 42:25Shawn Ryan?

  Man, man.

• 42:28Speaker 06

  Remember that? Remember that falling man? That guy that just jumped out headfirst? Like he was a professional skydiver in a delta position, just tracking down towards the ground?

• 42:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I do. So how old were you when 9/11 happened?

• 42:43Speaker 06

  I was 21.

• 42:46Shawn Ryan?

  21, so you're just about to go into the police academy.

• 42:50Speaker 06

  I was in grad school and, yep, going to the police academy.

• 42:57Shawn Ryan?

  You were in it? What, so what happened then?

• 43:01Speaker 06

  Finished school and...

• 43:05Speaker 06

  And over the course of 18 months, I went to the recruiter's office on 9/11. There were a thousand people in line, thousand people standing there trying to talk to recruiter. And nobody was there, you know, so I came back a few times. It took 18 months for me to ultimately get a 18 x-ray contract to go and try to, it was a fast track to become a special forces guy. And looked at every branch, you know, is trying to figure out how to get to Marsoc, how do I get to BUDS, how do I get to Green Berets? It was what is the fastest route to get me on a plane to the desert.

• 43:47Shawn Ryan?

  So you picked, you picked special forces?

• 43:49Speaker 06

  That's right, yep.

• 43:50Shawn Ryan?

  How, how long did it take for you to ship out?

• 43:53Speaker 06

  The uh...

• 43:54Shawn Ryan?

  To training?

• 43:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, that 18-month timeline to finally get the 18 x-ray contract. So 2003 is when I left. And then that pipeline, you know, that year and a half pipeline of basic training to infantry school, to airborne school, to this big, huge attritor called SOP-C, and then to selection, and then post-selection to small unit tactics, another attritor called SOP-C-2, then to small unit tactics, then to phase two, three, four, five, six, to SER school, to the dawning of the Green Beret.

• 44:37Speaker 06

  Then the day I graduated, I walked and another weird, rare anomaly. I had been, they had been tracking. I'd performed really well through training and I also was a top 10 fighter on the planet when I enlisted.

• 44:58Shawn Ryan?

  You were already top 10 on the planet?

• 45:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, shit. I just won like the largest middleweight tournament on the planet, the Extreme Cage Fighting Championship. Dennis King, Maham Miller, Ryan Narte, me, it was like eight of the best fighters on the time. I was the lowest ranked guy in that whole entire tournament I won. That was just a few months before I enlisted. And so they had...

• 45:24Speaker 06

  Been following me and when I graduated, I went to the, directly to the CRIF, which is something that should never happen. What's supposed to happen is you go to an ODA, you spend two, three years at an ODA, you get a bunch of experience, you go to some schools, then you go to this selection course and a must requirement to go to the CIF and CRIF, which is Safartek. And then from there, you're, you go to a selection to go to this unit.

• 45:56Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 45:56Speaker 06

  That's what should always happen. That's not what happened with me. So I was this young child that knew nothing about the military, that knew nothing about war, knew nothing about the army, that was then going to a special missions unit.

• 46:09Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 46:10Speaker 06

  Bad plan.

• 46:11Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's, let's rewind, let's rewind. See, let's, let's, let's skip basic training, let's skip everything up to selection. That's, how was that, was that a challenge for you?

• 46:23Speaker 06

  No.

• 46:23Shawn Ryan?

  It wasn't?

• 46:24Speaker 06

  No.

• 46:25Shawn Ryan?

  Breeze, you just breezed right through it?

• 46:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. That, I mean, that post nine 11, you would have had to walk in to the barracks in the middle of the night, like a ninja with a lead pipe and smashed dudes' knees in to have them quit. We, in our selection class, there was not a single quit. There's not one volunteer withdraw. So now if there's four, 500 people that go to selection, three, 400 of them quit. And then of the remaining one to 200, you know, maybe 20 or 30 end up getting selected. Four to eight out of 100.

• 47:10Speaker 06

  And then, post nine 11, not one quitter. Not one dude was like ringing a bell, not one dude is, is saying that he wants out. Like you'd literally have to kill them to have them, dude's, dude's feet were falling off and they were taking super glue and gluing the bottom of their feet back on to, to pass team week.

• 47:36Shawn Ryan?

  Where were the majority of these guys from? Where they're coming from?

• 47:40Speaker 06

  That class, there were a ton of collegiate athletes. And they're from all over the world, ton from Florida, ton from Texas and ton from California. Like of the 90, like there's 600, 600 something dudes that went through the SOPC and ultimately the 88 that were selected in our class to go forward. Once you pass Special Forces Assessment and Selection, which is a 23, 28 day hard trigger, then you get selected to go to the Q course. The Q course is a year to a year and a half long pipeline of training you how to be a Green Beret.

• 48:24Speaker 06

  And then when you finish that pipeline, then you get to dawn your Green Beret and go to a team. And then you get to your team, they tell you that you know nothing, you start all over again. But that, um, you know, from that gigantic population of people that first were at SOPC to the 88 guys that ultimately got selected, the 88 came from, like they, they were high level athletes from all over the, the nation, but most of them, Florida, Texas and California.

• 48:57Shawn Ryan?

  88 people got selected that round?

• 49:01Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 49:03Shawn Ryan?

  That's a lot.

• 49:03Speaker 06

  It's a ton.

• 49:04Shawn Ryan?

  That's a lot.

• 49:05Speaker 06

  Highest percentage that they've ever had.

• 49:08Shawn Ryan?

  Is it real, is it still to this day? Man.

• 49:12Speaker 06

  So it wasn't that it was easy for me, it was easy for us. There's nothing that, it was the environment. And we'd also been together from, like this group of 18 X-rays had been together from basic training to infantry school to airborne school, um, that through SOPC. And we had learned, none of us had ever been in the military before. So we didn't know how to do army. We just knew how to cheat and we cheated at everything. And we, we figured out communication systems and how to, you know, tap codes and symbols. And we had watches for when the, the cadre were going to be coming in to check you. So like the whole entire barracks asleep, you're not allowed to be sleeping. But everybody's sleeping, but two people on either end at the, the two edges of the windows where the, or the doors, where the doors are cracked out a little bit and they're looking out. And they had like set up things that we could hear the guys walking.

• 49:56Speaker 06

  So the moment that we heard that sound, the whole entire barracks would get up and guys would start like fixing their rucksacks, like we're breaking every single rule. You weren't allowed to run on the roads, we ran every road. So with the

• 50:08Shawn Ryan?

  Eighty is biggest class to ever graduate selection or to get selected.

• 50:12Speaker 06

  Highest percentage of graduates.

• 50:15Shawn Ryan?

  Highest percentage. With that amount of motivated men to go and protect the country, what, what do you think? I mean, the criteria had to be, had to be upped. They had to level it up, right? The, from, from what it usually is with that, with that.

• 50:32Speaker 06

  No, the, the standard never changes. The, the, the, the must pass gates.

• 50:38Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:39Speaker 06

  Uh, which, which are very close held, um, not secrets, but like the things that you have to do to be selected. Uh, those don't change. Like you, you have to run this far for this fast. You have to run this sprint for this fast. You have to be able to carry this much weight for this long. You, here's the grading criteria during team week. Here's like, so like of these, these variety of must pass events. When you get through those gates and you're like checking as you go, that doesn't change. So like the, like you might have five people that graduate, 10 people that graduate, or a hundred people that graduate, but everybody has to pass that, those gates.

• 51:18Shawn Ryan?

  But if you pass, I guess what I'm asking is if you pass, does that necessarily guarantee you a slot that you're going to be selected?

• 51:24Speaker 06

  No.

• 51:25Shawn Ryan?

  So that's what kind of what I'm asking is usually there's.

• 51:28Speaker 06

  But this is, this is peak war.

• 51:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So there was, what year is this?

• 51:32Speaker 06

  Two thousand four.

• 51:34Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. So there's definitely, so they're expanding at this point.

• 51:37Speaker 06

  They're expanding and diet guys are dying.

• 51:39Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 51:40Speaker 06

  And, um, and they're dying a lot.

• 51:44Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. So they were, they were needed.

• 51:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:47Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I was getting at. I was wondering if they, if they had, if they had the slots to fill eighty eight.

• 51:54Speaker 06

  They knew they're going to.

• 51:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 51:56Speaker 06

  That's, that's dark, but, um, this is war. And, you know, in two thousand four, when you're looking at Fallujah and Ramadi and Solder City, um, this is a.

• 52:08Speaker 06

  The first 10 years of GWAT from, you know, 2002 to 2012, like it was very dissimilar to the second 10 years of GWAT. Those first 10 years, that was war. Like those were battles, block by block, door by door, lots of killing and on both sides. And Green Berets were carrying a big burden of that because they were the first ones in Afghanistan. They were the first ones that were in the big gunfights. They were also the ones that were, you know, by with and through, advise, assisting and accompanying these militant fighters because that's the special forces way

• 52:45Speaker 06

  was to work with your aligned fighting force. So those guys were getting hemmed up and they needed help. Problem was 18 x-rays. We died way more than everyone else. Can you describe what an x-ray is? Normally to go to the Green Berets, you are in whatever, you're in the 82nd, you're in the 101st, you're in Ranger Regiment, and you are an E4, an E5, and you put in your packet to go to selection. That has always been the way. They've only done the 18 x-ray program

• 53:27Speaker 06

  one other time, which was during Vietnam, where you take a guy qualified off the street. So he has a high ASVAB score, he has a high GT score, he has a high PT score, and you put him into a special forces selection pipeline. And so they're SF babies. They've never spent a day in the Army, but they have on paper all of the qualifications that they could potentially later be a Green Beret. All of the guys coming from the regular Army, from Combat Arms, they have to have that same GT score, they have to have that same ASVAB score, they have to have the same PT score. But the most important thing is they have experience. And that had always been the requirement. You'd

• 54:08Speaker 06

  have to spend three, four, five years in the Army, then you could go to selection. The 18 x-ray program bypassed that. So, you know, a college athlete, and that's why there are so many collegiate athletes in that class, because you had to be smart, you had to have a high GT score and a high ASVAB score, and you had to have a very high PT score. You then got this contract that promised you, if you passed basic training, infantry school, airborne school, and SOP-C, which is the bigottritter, then you could go directly to selection. And, but we died, I think, at twice the rate of regular Army Green Berets.

• 54:47Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 54:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:49Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, man.

• 54:50Speaker 06

  Young and dumb.

• 54:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 54:52Speaker 06

  Not invincible.

• 54:54Shawn Ryan?

  You know, with going through the SF Baby Program, you get to, you get through selection, you get to the Q course, correct? What, how are you? How are you received there? Is a guy off the street who was pipelined right in?

• 55:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, they hated us.

• 55:13Shawn Ryan?

  Did they?

• 55:13Speaker 06

  Yeah. They...

• 55:20Shawn Ryan?

  How do you know they hated you?

• 55:22Speaker 06

  Well, they tell, they told us they hated us. That was pretty direct. I hate you, you don't deserve to be here. And to their, to their credit, they're doing a tour as instructors. Like the, the NCO development, you'd go to a team for three to five years, and then you would go to SWIC, to the Special Warfare Training Group, and you would become an instructor, teaching at one of the different phases, one of the different schools, Halo School, Sniper School, Scuba School. And you do, you know, your, your two, three-year tour as an instructor, and then you go back as a senior NCO, back to the ODA. So now you have ODA time, you have instructor time,

• 56:06Speaker 06

  so you've really mastered a craft, and it made a lot of sense during peacetime. But these guys that are coming off these teams, you don't have a choice of when the timeline is for you to go to... SWIC to teach. Maybe they just got back. Maybe they're gonna miss a deployment because they got orders to go and teach. And now they're furious because they're missing the war. Now they're furious because their brothers are over there fighting and dying. And they're sitting here looking at a 22 year old kid that just came out of college that thinks he knows everything and wants to go and be a warrior. And that guy's been on an ODA for five, six years and has during peacetime and has done everything perfect. So he can

• 56:49Speaker 06

  go and be a warfighter. And now he's sitting there talking to a snot-nosed brat. You know, like, I get it, man.

• 56:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that was my generation too. I was, I was right there with you. And yeah, that had to be, I didn't really agree with it, you know, we're all here to protect the country, right? But I do understand it. And, you know, the period between Vietnam and nine 11, there were very few.

• 57:18Speaker 06

  Panama, Grenada, you know, Desert Storm one, which we didn't even have a part in.

• 57:23Shawn Ryan?

  There wasn't, there wasn't much, there wasn't much to spur around. And so, so I get it. But what did you think of the Q course? Was that a challenge for you?

• 57:34Speaker 06

  No.

• 57:35Shawn Ryan?

  No shit?

• 57:36Speaker 06

  I loved it. I loved every second of it. I loved SERE School. We were chomping at the bit to get done. I took accelerated language school. I tested out early. I just wanted to, how fast can I get that green beret on, get to a team, get on a plane? That was the only thing all of us wanted to do. All of us were fighting and positioning. We're going down to the companies and asking, hey, do you guys have like your deployment orders? Do you know which day you guys are leaving? Because all of us, the day that we graduate, all of us would be requesting to go directly to that company because they're the next one that are going to be bouncing. And so like, all of us are like positioning and fighting for a chance to get into the fight.

• 58:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So did you have any hangups? Did you fail anything?

• 58:24Speaker 06

  No.

• 58:25Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing?

• 58:25Speaker 06

  No.

• 58:26Shawn Ryan?

  Just clean?

• 58:27Speaker 06

  First, first through everything.

• 58:33Speaker 06

  Funny SIR story.

• 58:37Speaker 06

  One of the guys that had been medically recycled was-

• 58:41Shawn Ryan?

  Could you, could you please describe what SIR school is? What the purpose of it is?

• 58:45Speaker 06

  Every special operation and aviation unit sends their guys to this SIR school. And there's different phases and levels of it. But the one that special operations goes to, it's a survival, evasion, resistance and escape. And during this, we also included peacetime government detention, which is if you're captured by a non-state or state actor and, and you're being held, how do you navigate the, which is different than like if you're POW being held by a combatant. So during the school, they teach you survival, like how do I forge for food? How do I purify water? How do I set traps?

• 59:27Speaker 06

  And then on the evasion side, if somebody's chasing you, whether it's in a rural area or an urban area, how do you escape? The resistance portion is during interrogations and torture. How do you stay?

• 59:42Speaker 06

  And the, the technique is inside of your circle. So they, they tell you, these are the things that you're supposed to know. And these are the things that you're supposed to say. And these are the things that you're supposed to do. And how do you stay inside of that during, you know, really uncomfortable physical treatment? Which I think now they call torture, but you know, you're training people. I hate that people throw stones at training that is hard. Like, how do you prepare people for war without it being like war? And the last portion is escape. When, uh, so that's SIR school and, uh, you know, it's a couple of months. The guy that had been recycled, which was one of my friends and teammates that had gone through all these phases to, he was working with the cadre and was learning like all the different escape and evasion routes.

• 1:00:27Speaker 06

  So there were lanes that were designated, designated to each of the teams. He told us which lane we were going to be on. And I went and I stole MRE boxes and I went out and I plotted a 10 digit grid coordinates. And I buried boxes of MREs during my evasion lane. Totally cheating, like this is not allowed and I'm not recommending anybody do this, but this is what we did because we knew, like we see the guys that were, that were coming out of SERE school, you know, they'd lose 30, 40, 50 pounds during SERE school, their cheeks are sunken in, their eyes are sunken in, like, and they're about to go to a team. It's one of the very last things that you do and their bodies are broken. We want to go to war. So not only did I want to graduate, but I wanted to graduate physically capable

• 1:01:09Speaker 06

  of going to a team to immediately hop on a plane to go overseas. So the motivation was kind of pure, but the route was very unethical. So we borrow, we'd borrow these MREs. There's 11 guys that are all 18 x-rays that I'm all friends with and we have one Air Force crew guy that's on our team. And we finished the survival portion, we get into the evasion and the, you're very motivated to not get caught during evasion because the sooner you get caught, the sooner you go into the concentration camp. So if you survive a week, that is an extra week that you are not in the concentration camp. If you're caught on day one, you spend six days and however many hours that you were captured

• 1:01:52Speaker 06

  early in the concentration camp, getting beaten, getting waterboarded, getting put in torture positions and, you know, paying isometric positions, getting starved. So, but if you stay out, how long can you survive during that week with the limited food that you're going to have while you're running? And they're, you know, they're hunting you with thermals and dogs and all the things and they're trying to, you know, manipulate in this lane that you're training. So we buried MREs. We go to these 10-digit grid coordinates, we dig them up and I hand out these MREs and the other guys are like, sick, this is so awesome, you know, way to go. Me and my friend Brian are the ones that went out and buried them. And this Air Force guy's like, where did you get these?

• 1:02:37Speaker 06

  Buried him. How'd they get, like, how'd you know that this was where we're gonna be? I'm like, I was told by, you know, somebody that's working as support right now that this is, was gonna be our lane, so we went and buried our food here. And they're like, that's cheating. I was like, is it? Like, I don't, I don't think it is. And to his credit, he stuck to what he thought was right, and he wouldn't eat any of them. And, uh, and we helped, even though we were fed, we helped him forge for food, we're getting deer corn, you know, we were like finding turtles and snakes, that's why they call us snake eaters. Uh, this, the training area, it's like very swampy and marshy, so there's not, there's not a lot of great food. We're eating pine nuts, you know, we're making pine needle tea for vitamin

• 1:03:20Speaker 06

  C. Like, we're doing everything we can to help this dude, even though there's plenty of calories over there that he wants to not do. Hold on, let me finish my Snackers bar real quick. Yep. And, uh, but again, to his credit, he does that whole week, and there's, I mean, there's food for us all the time. And they bring us, uh, a roadkill. It was like a dead raccoon or a dead deer. And most people, after not eating for five days, they would just skin this thing, gut this thing, throw it, stew it, and they'd be so pumped to have a little bit of protein. And we're like, that's kinda icky. So, you know, the catcher, we're like, what's, what's going on here, man? Like, what are you guys doing? Well, during indock, which is the most dangerous portion, like when you're initially

• 1:04:02Speaker 06

  captured, it's, it's where most casualties occur. Uh, and if you look like Shugart and Gordon during Black Hawk Down, the thing that they were trying to save the crew from was that initial capture, that, that wave of emotion that happens, that happens on a battlefield, that's when people get killed and don't get moved into captivity. So like, the longer and more peaceful that that transition can be, the, the higher the chance of survival. So they make that, that, that indock, when they're taking you in, to be very intense during SER school. There's lots of beatings happen, there's, you know, people are getting knocked out, and teeth, and blood, and all the things. And when we finally, at the end of that week, we go to make our link up to get evacuated, which we're...

• 1:04:49Speaker 06

  Betrayed and we get captured by the adversary force. It's at the end of the week, they force you to go to this link up. And we all get black bagged, all 12 of us. And you know, they're pulling your hood off, they're smacking you like, what's your name? Where are you from? What unit are you? What are you doing here? And they're going down the line. The moment they pull up that air force's, that guy's hood. He get, I, all of us, we hear him start screaming, they had food buried. They had food buried. They had food this whole entire time, this whole week they've been eating. And the crazy intense in-doc phase where like this whole camp is just beats and screams and slaps. You could hear a pin drop. Everything stops.

• 1:05:33Speaker 06

  And the guy goes, what'd you say? He says, my team had food buried on their lane. And immediately they separate all 12 of us. They pull us from everybody and for a week during resistance. Their interrogations were trying to find legitimate, real information. Which was where was the food? Who had the food? How did you get the food? And they had one guy telling all of the information that he knew. And they had 11 guys that stayed in their circle. Damn. At the end of this, 11 dudes graduated and one guy failed for an integrity violation. He got recycled.

• 1:06:18Speaker 06

  All 11 of us stayed in our circle and didn't break for 11, for the whole entire time. And at the very final moment, I'm not going to give away the, the, the final day of CER school. It's like a big emotional event. ID cards come out from the instructors' necks. And you see like that military DOD CAC card. And they're no longer, they're not sitting there like.

• 1:06:44Speaker 06

  Evil, torturing pricks, they're now Sergeant so and so, and you have graduated. And they, the whole entire cadre comes and gets the 11 of us and they're like, hey, we need to talk to you guys. The ID cards are hanging around their neck and we're like, yeah. Okay, seriously, what happened? You need to tell us what occurred during evasion week and now during resistance week where you guys, one, all had the same story the whole entire time. And like, it was fascinating because it proved the things that they were teaching actually worked in real interrogations. And they had real interrogators coming in

• 1:07:25Speaker 06

  to interrogate this class, the 11 of us, to get out real information. And all of us knew that if we messed up, all of us are going to be recycled, at best. Worst, kicked out of the Q course. And all 11 of us, like, we look at each other and we look back at them, we're like, Donnie the Green Beret is going to be in five weeks. When I put on my Green Beret, you can be there. And the moment I get my Green Beret, I will talk to you about what this looked like.

• 1:07:52Shawn Ryan?

  Good call.

• 1:07:52Speaker 06

  And all of them were there, Sean, every single one of them. It proved that, like, their TTPs, their POIs, their points of instruction, their tactical training points were legitimate and truly worked in interrogation. And they, this was...

• 1:08:06Shawn Ryan?

  So it turned into a case study?

• 1:08:07Speaker 06

  A perfect case study. Yep.

• 1:08:11Shawn Ryan?

  Nice. Well, you know, don't rat your team out. It's a good lesson.

• 1:08:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's pretty straightforward.

• 1:08:17Shawn Ryan?

  You know, that might be the biggest integrity violation of all. But, wow, no shit.

• 1:08:25Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:08:26Shawn Ryan?

  Well, what did they say when you told them?

• 1:08:27Speaker 06

  They, uh, they changed rules where any student that was in a support role for the cadre was never, they like siloed information that was relevant to the training so that the students, that the trainees that were going through the course never had access to the cadre information. So like, you know, they'd hang outside of the cadre rooms. So they changed a bunch of rules to limit silo information. But, uh, they were thrilled that this, that this stuff worked.

• 1:09:03Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing. That's amazing. So, so you get done with SERA School, where are you going next?

• 1:09:10Speaker 06

  So I went to Charlie Company for Third Battalion Seventh Special Forces Group. It was the, at the time it was the CIF, the Commander's Inextremist Force. And every-

• 1:09:23Shawn Ryan?

  How did you wind up? Can you explain what the CIF is first? Cause not a lot of people know about that.

• 1:09:28Speaker 06

  No. Uh, the CIF, every special forces group takes an area, a region of the globe. Uh, so Seventh Group handles South America. Third and Fifth Group balanced between Africa and the Middle East. Um, First and Tenth Group between Europe and the Asian Pacific. So regionally, we always have four deployed companies that are in that region. So you have a special forces company that's in South America. You have a special forces company that's in Africa. You have a special forces company that's in the Philippines or on, in Japan or in Europe.

• 1:10:08Speaker 06

  And so that's, that is a crazy concentration of talent and firepower. That's four deployed all of the time. Um, they were tasked with hostage rescue and counterterrorism. So you would go to special schools and the special selection to be selected to go to the CRIF. Um, at the time, the commander in extremist force, so you had the combatant commander, which was, you know, the four star guy that was in charge of that region of the planet. He had his own special operations company that was his. So that was if

• 1:10:53Speaker 06

  the cartels ran into Bogota, Colombia and took over the embassy. You had a company of special forces guys that were standing by. This is why like, uh, Benghazi was so infuriating to so many Green Berets is because when that was happening, there was a company of special forces guys that were sitting on a plane. Like just imagine, you know, there was what 12 GRS dudes that were saving.

• 1:11:23Speaker 06

  Two different compounds, the Department of State compound and the agency compound. What would have happened if you dropped 60 Green Berets into this fight? You're like, the whole thing's over. You take one ODA, the whole thing's over. But uh, there's a lot of survivor guilt in that. But that was the SIF. They were a hostage rescue.

• 1:11:45Shawn Ryan?

  Where were those guys sitting?

• 1:11:47Speaker 06

  They were a two hour flight.

• 1:11:52Shawn Ryan?

  I think Glover was one of those guys.

• 1:11:53Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 1:11:54Shawn Ryan?

  You know?

• 1:11:55Speaker 06

  Take Mike Glover and a company of Mike Glovers and drop them into that firefight? Dude.

• 1:12:03Shawn Ryan?

  Completely different outcome.

• 1:12:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. Infuriating. Yeah, phone gets, ultimately, somebody picks up a phone and says, no, those guys can't go.

• 1:12:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:15Speaker 06

  Hope that person burns in hell.

• 1:12:17Shawn Ryan?

  I'm sure they will.

• 1:12:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, me too. Yeah, so that's the SIF.

• 1:12:24Shawn Ryan?

  So how, hold on, hold on, let's backtrack. Cause the SIF, so the SIF is basically, it's a hostage rescue team.

• 1:12:31Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:12:34Shawn Ryan?

  Very advanced tactics. Very, I mean, just to get in the door over there. How did you get in the door of the SIF?

• 1:12:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43Shawn Ryan?

  As a new guy?

• 1:12:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I should have been there.

• 1:12:45Shawn Ryan?

  And SF baby new guy, nonetheless.

• 1:12:50Speaker 06

  John McPhee, former Delta Force operator, amazing war fighter, storied career at the unit. He was my boss, he was my first team sergeant. And he had been kind of paying attention to some guys going through the Q course. Cause he knew we're about to go to war. And he, this was also the SIF's first deployment to combat. They had missed all the other rotations because the combatant commander hadn't released them to go into non-theater conflict. So he'd kept them kind of unfairly saying like, no, no, I need my SIF.

• 1:13:34Speaker 06

  You, you guys are under my control, like you had this.

• 1:13:39Speaker 06

  Competition about who could control which units were going to be in what battle space. And he didn't want to release his elite fighting force to go, you know, from South America and go fight. So they missed the first few rotations. Gotcha. And they were just like, they were ravenous to get into the fight. And you can train tactics into young men preparing for war. But putting the will to fight and that dog in somebody, some people have that. And it's really hard to artificially train that

• 1:14:22Speaker 06

  into somebody. I think the Marines do a really great job of of planting that that dog in somebody. The Special Forces Regiment, it's a group of intellectuals, like, yes, they're warfighters, but they also are kind of ambassadors and they they work a lot with different governments and the embassy and it's a joint interagency, multi departments. It's kind of a complex world that Special Forces works in. And John knew that we're going to go to war. And he wanted, he wanted a guy that had the dog on him. I think of

• 1:15:08Speaker 06

  hundreds of teammates that have it. And they were the guys that you wanted to be the first guy through the door. You know, Brian Hall, the Jeremy Haskell, the Ben Rios, like those guys kicking a door, anything on the other side of that door is going to be melt with with Speed, Surprise and Violence of Action, Hell and Fury. And that's a hard thing to like to put into somebody. So John had

• 1:15:31Speaker 06

  Knew my fighting background, knew my hunting background, knew my shooting background, and then had followed me through the Q course. And I was also moonlighting as a, as a bouncer in bars in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where I was going to school, and I was also fighting, um, moonlighting, fighting, like, while I was going through the Q course, I was still training and fighting as a professional fighter.

• 1:15:53Shawn Ryan?

  No shit?

• 1:15:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Shawn Ryan?

  Why were you doing that? I'm sorry, we're gonna go down this rabbit hole.

• 1:15:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm dumb.

• 1:15:58Shawn Ryan?

  Why would you put yourself?

• 1:15:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Shawn Ryan?

  I'm just curious.

• 1:16:01Speaker 06

  The dog.

• 1:16:02Shawn Ryan?

  Why would you put yourself into a situation that could potentially take you out of your ultimate goal, which is fighting for the country? Because it would have been relatively easy for that to happen.

• 1:16:12Speaker 06

  The, the... Young men think that they are invincible. And, um, and the balance of me wanting to keep my, my sword sharp and keep that like ability to fight, you know, fighting, gunfighting, knife fighting, brick fighting, fist fighting, it's all fighting. You know, like you, you, you take some person that's good fighting at fighting and you, you, you give him a battle axe, or you give him a club, like that dude is still like really dangerous. Well, it's because he's a fighter first. So like the heart of that warrior is a, is a very powerful thing, regardless of what tool he has.

• 1:16:56Speaker 06

  And like, I, I am, you know, in this room, no more or less dangerous because I have a gun or I don't have a gun, like I, you know, kill him without anything. And I wanted, one, that illusion...

• 1:17:11Shawn Ryan?

  Please don't kill my camera guy.

• 1:17:13Speaker 06

  I won't, no, I like him. That illusion that you're invincible as a young man, uh, but you feel invincible. Like I remember feeling invincible, like you can't, you can't hurt me, you can't kill me, you can't stop me from graduating, you can't stop me from making it to war, you can't stop me from going to this unit, and you definitely can't stop me in a fight. You know, like, to me, fighting was just plain. Um, you know, I was, I was making money on the side, and I was keeping my sword sharp, and I was keeping, you know, the, the ability to do violence at an acute point. So I wanted to keep doing it, and I did it all the way through my whole entire career.

• 1:17:53Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense. I figured that's what you were gonna say, you know?

• 1:17:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57Shawn Ryan?

  Would you do that again if you were, if you had the wisdom you had now?

• 1:18:01Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:18:02Shawn Ryan?

  So John McPhee.

• 1:18:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:05Shawn Ryan?

  He hand-selected you to come into the SIF.

• 1:18:08Speaker 06

  Yep, and Sergeant Major Oquendo, who is the company sergeant major, when he brought me in,

• 1:18:16Speaker 06

  he pushed back real hard.

• 1:18:19Speaker 06

  And he was right. But man, John was a force. He's one of those guys in Garrison, he is not a fun human to work for. He is not a fun guy to be a subordinate to. He's definitely not one that you like, you want as your personal mentor about how to be a good human. But you put John McPhee in a case in glass that says, "Break in case of war violence", and you break that, he is one of the greatest warfighters to like, walk during GWAT. And the...

• 1:18:59Speaker 06

  We were a hammer in that first deployment.

• 1:19:01Shawn Ryan?

  I'll bet. I don't want to get into that yet. But, what year, what year is this?

• 1:19:06Speaker 06

  2005.

• 1:19:07Shawn Ryan?

  This, oh shit, so this is like, the height.

• 1:19:10Speaker 06

  This is peak.

• 1:19:11Shawn Ryan?

  This is the height. So he, so John-

• 1:19:13Speaker 06

  This is Americans hanging from bridges, burnt alive. This is, like, this is peak war.

• 1:19:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, this is, this is the height. So you get into the SIF, what, how were you received?

• 1:19:25Speaker 06

  Not well.

• 1:19:28Speaker 06

  The, uh...

• 1:19:33Speaker 06

  You have to go to the school. This, uh, this multi-month hostage rescue school that is a Hyatt Critter. And, um, so I go to this school, graduate, come back to the team, you know, I thought I'd be accepted. And we're weeks, PDSS is, the pre-deployment site survey team is already launched, they're, they've already set up where we're gonna be landing at, where we're gonna be working out of, they're starting to set up target packages, you know, they're getting, working in our TS briefs about what it's gonna look like when we get into the operational environment. This is before we even wheels up, you know, and then-

• 1:20:15Speaker 06

  I knew nothing, Sean. I like, I had no idea how to order ammo. I had no idea how to do a forecast. I had no idea how to pack a pallet. I had all the things that, like, while the Q course taught you the skills to be a Green Beret, they didn't teach you how to be a good teammate of doing the things of your job. You know, like,

• 1:20:37Speaker 06

  how to do an inventory of our night vision, how to, I know how to zero a gun because I'm an 18 Bravo, but like, as I'm packing out the guns for this deployment, how many guns am I supposed to take? All of our guns? Like, every single dude has 10 different guns. You know, am I taking 120 guns? Like, I had no idea what to do and, and I had no idea how to ask. I had, I was too

• 1:21:07Speaker 06

  conceited or egotistical to,

• 1:21:13Speaker 06

  to ask in the right way, which is like, hey, can you teach me? I don't know how to do this. Or find a peer in the company that could explain how to do it. Cause my senior, God bless his heart, Ben, was, uh, he had to do everything because he had an idiot for a junior, me, that had no idea how to do anything. So, and he didn't have the time, as he's prepping to go to war, to teach me how to do things. Cause he had to do them, he had to palletize everything, cause I didn't know how to do it. He had to do, and he didn't have the time pre, in peak war, pre-deployment, to teach the subordinate. So it just,

• 1:21:50Speaker 06

  and made it hard.

• 1:21:52Shawn Ryan?

  Were you the only new guy?

• 1:21:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:21:54Shawn Ryan?

  That wound up on the stuff?

• 1:21:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. There's, there's one other guy, Dave, that was, that was same age. And, uh, but a little bit, you know, maybe six months more experienced than me. He and I were the, kind of the only two guys there. And the last two, they never did it again.

• 1:22:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that's a, I mean, that's a steep learning curve. Well, I'm, wow.

• 1:22:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:22:19Shawn Ryan?

  When did, how, when did you figure out, you know, what the significance of being on a SIF team was?

• 1:22:28Speaker 06

  I was pulling outside security in Iraq when

• 1:22:34Speaker 06

  a squadron, Delta Force leadership, Di Tomaso, comes and takes a knee next to me. He goes, "What are you doing?"

• 1:22:42Speaker 06

  And I'm wearing DCUs, like, cool fancy desert camo that we had altered, you know, so like, we took our pockets and moved them up to our sleeves. We put like spandex shirts underneath our body armor.

• 1:22:55Speaker 06

  Completely unauthorized, but functional. And I look over this to you, he's wearing multi cam. And none of us had multi cam. And I was like, "Who the fuck are you?" He's like,

• 1:23:07Speaker 06

  "I'm Di Tomaso." And I was like, "I don't know who the fuck that is." He's like, "You didn't answer my question." I'm like, "I'm pulling security." He's like, "Where's your intersecting sector of fire?" I turn on my laser. And like, two seconds later, the guy on the right corner of the building turns on his lasers. And our lasers goes like that. He's like, "All right, great. Have a great night." And just gets up and walks away. And I was like, "Who the fuck was this guy?" You know? And we're at a bomb maker's house for one of Zarqawi's lead henchmen. Like this, the VBI IDs that were kind of plaguing Baghdad at the time. Like, this was one of those houses. And this dude just like shows up on target and like walks up and starts talking to me. And it wasn't until afterwards when I was like, "Who is this dude?" And they tell me who this is. And I start understanding who the units are that are part of this task force.

• 1:23:51Speaker 06

  And then it like clicks. I was like, "Holy shit, this is the A Team." This is like the most elite fighting force on the planet. All 100% focus focused on one kill capture thing of one person. The sharpest tool in the entire arsenal of the American military was being wielded towards one person. And it was that, it was that night that I was like, "Holy crap. Like, this is frightening." Damn, man. That's when it started to make sense. Very cool. Wow. I still couldn't grasp it because I'm dumb, but that, that was the first time where I was like, "Whoa." Yeah, yeah. Lucky to be here. Yeah. Didn't deserve to be there.

• 1:24:36Speaker 06

  How long were you at the SIF before you got kicked out the door on deployment?

• 1:24:46Speaker 06

  Three months. That's it? That's it. Three months? Yep. I got, I missed one month of our pre-mission train up because I was still in Sephardic.

• 1:24:56Speaker 06

  So I missed a portion of, so pre before a special operation unit goes, they look at their metal tasks, their mission essential task list. These are all the skills that they're supposed to be able to have to go and do this mission. So they go and they rehearse and execute and they're graded on all of their core tasks before they go overseas. And that's called your PMT, your pre-mission train up. And I missed a month of that because I was in school. So then I get there, I finished the last two months. We have two weeks off before we ultimately have to show back up. They give us, they give us like a eight days permissive leave where we got to hang out with our families before we went overseas.

• 1:25:37Shawn Ryan?

  Are you married at this time?

• 1:25:39Speaker 06

  Uh-uh.

• 1:25:40Shawn Ryan?

  Were you together?

• 1:25:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Shawn Ryan?

  How's she taking all this?

• 1:25:50Speaker 06

  She's such an amazing woman.

• 1:25:54Speaker 06

  And everybody that comes to her now, where it's like, how are you dealing with Tim in Afghanistan right now, or in Israel, or Ukraine? And she knew what she signed up for. You know, she was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in 2004, five and six. And she saw her friends coming back without limbs. She saw her friends coming back without eyes. She had friends that deployed and never came back. You know, she was there on the green ramp receiving her friends. She's such a good, good human. When I say friends, like, these weren't boyfriends. They were just her friends that she was there to support. She was so young. And

• 1:26:39Speaker 06

  so she knew what, she actually probably knew better than I did, what the cost of war was. She got there before I did.

• 1:26:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. So you guys, okay, so how did you guys meet?

• 1:26:54Speaker 06

  Super creepy. She, she was working a government contract and she was keeping inventory of these secret devices. And every single one of them has a serial number. And she was working for a government contracting company that kept the inventory of all those things and then reported it back to the army. And she shows up and I saw her and I was like,

• 1:27:23Speaker 06

  That's a Russian spy. There's no, there's no way that that supermodel of a human exists in this world, which is like, you know, butt sweat and ECT charges and petting no nail lines. And, you know, like, there's guns everywhere in Greece and we're covered in, in carbon from shooting all day. And there's just no possible way. So I, I figure out who she is. Um, I kind of like make friends with some of her friends. I go up and try to talk to her. As I'm standing in front of her like this, she just like starts turning without acknowledging that I'm talking to her. So I, I kept like adjusting to try to stay in front of her as she kept turning. I was like, are you, do you not see me right here?

• 1:28:07Speaker 06

  I'm like, what's wrong with you? And then she just turns and walks away, doesn't say anything to me. And I see her stab a dude that grabs her leg with her stiletto. She balances on one foot and she's walking up this ramp. She stabs this guy that, that's trying to get her attention and I was like, that's, that's, uh, that's the woman for me. So I, I, um, I spend, I have to manipulate a date out of her. I tell all of her friends that we're going to be like meeting up at this time. And I tell her a different time. She shows up early, although a little bit late, it's fine. But I had enough of a window that the, nobody else had arrived yet. And as soon as she got there, this is like the flip phone razor time.

• 1:28:52Speaker 06

  So I'd preset text messages with all recipients. So I hit send and it goes out to all of them that dinner's canceled. And I take her out to dinner and I go out to dinner with her every single day. I go on a date with her every single night, all the way up until I leave. And that was, uh, my first trip with her. And then when I was gone, I had some ASOT guys, some advanced special operations spy guys that literally followed her around Fort Bragg to make sure that she was a good girl. And she was.

• 1:29:28Shawn Ryan?

  She was?

• 1:29:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:29Shawn Ryan?

  And you guys have been married for 17 years now?

• 1:29:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:33Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:29:34Speaker 06

  Wild.

• 1:29:35Shawn Ryan?

  What, in your opinion, is the secret to a successful marriage?

• 1:29:43Speaker 06

  You have to fight.

• 1:29:50Speaker 06

  Complacency kills. We know that in combat and complacency kills a marriage. Where you take things for granted about the person that you're with, you know, this person that you chose to spend the rest of your life with. But now you, you know, you let yourself go. You get a little bit the dad bod, you know, you, um, you stop buying flowers, you stop lighting candles, you stop buying lingerie, you stop fighting for that person that you fought for, that you dated, that you courted, that you tried to sweep off their feet. And, um, you know, now 10 years down the road, you're, you're fat and, you know,

• 1:30:31Speaker 06

  you're not sleeping, you're drinking a little bit, you care more about football game than you do her. You know, like shame on you. You don't deserve her. So like you set down the sword and when you set down that sword, that sword's hard to pick up sometimes, you know, you don't have the calluses anymore. You don't have the strength anymore. You don't have the condition anymore. And it's the same, same way with a marriage where it's like constant vigilance and intentionality into your marriage. And, um, the heart of a man is, is a, is a hard thing, you know? We, we can fall in love easy. We can, um, you know, we have these aspirations and these dreams. You know, I, I have to choose between going overseas and doing something that I know I was put on this planet to do or to be present.

• 1:31:14Speaker 06

  And I know I can't be present and look at that person, look at her or my kids in, in the face and the eyes without the things that I know that I, that God put me on this planet to do. And trying to reconcile those two things, the only way that can happen is with intentionality and, um, and discipline.

• 1:31:34Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I think that's great advice, man. Thank you.

• 1:31:36Speaker 06

  I don't know. I'm still figuring out though.

• 1:31:38Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, well, you're doing a hell of a good job. There's not too many people running around out there that could say they've been married for 17 years and throw all the combat deployments and the time apart.

• 1:31:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's all her.

• 1:31:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. But, um, last question, then we'll take a break.

• 1:31:56Shawn Ryan?

  So you're at the CIF and you find out you're going to Iraq.

• 1:32:04Shawn Ryan?

  Did that hone in your mindset at all? I mean, that you're getting exactly what you asked for. You're going to war.

• 1:32:13Speaker 06

  It did, but I didn't appreciate it.

• 1:32:15Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:32:16Speaker 06

  And I didn't understand what that meant. You know, like, I still had John Wayne movies in my head. You know, I still had Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis. Like, this is what I thought war was gonna look like. You know, it's like this barrel-chested freedom fighter as I'm like, covered in the enemy's blood, as I'm standing there with an American flag behind me, you know, like, this is, I don't know. The mind of a young man that knew nothing. What I thought war was gonna be like and what war was like was very different. And those were, the delta between those two things are indescribable.

• 1:32:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. All right, well, on that note, let's take a break. When we come back, we'll pick up in Baghdad.

• 1:32:58Speaker 06

  All right.

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  Mr. President? My company informed me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:33:05Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:33:11Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is.

• 1:33:12Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:33:18Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:33:23Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:33:26Speaker 04

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:33:27Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  Mr. President? My company informed me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:33:40Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:33:46Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is.

• 1:33:48Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 1:33:51Speaker 02

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:33:54Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:34:01Speaker 04

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:34:02Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 1:34:12Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Tim, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to go into your first deployment with the SIF team under Shrek McPhee.

• 1:34:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:34:22Shawn Ryan?

  In Baghdad?

• 1:34:23Speaker 06

  That's right. Yep, we first went to Al Assad. And we're there with the SEALs. And we're logistically constrained with the amount of air that we had. Number of targets in this time period were plentiful. And everybody fighting, doing a mobile, a vehicle assault was very difficult from that spot. So we relocated a few weeks later from Al Assad into Baghdad. And we're in the international, the green zone, kind of on the row of the Joint Special Operation Command houses.

• 1:35:06Speaker 06

  And once we tied in with them, it went from, you know, two, three targets a week to like 10 targets a night.

• 1:35:14Shawn Ryan?

  So let's, what year is this?

• 1:35:16Speaker 06

  This is 2005, 2006.

• 1:35:19Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, I was there then. So we're there at the same time, so.

• 1:35:23Speaker 06

  Everybody's there.

• 1:35:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so what I want to get at is Baghdad at that time was like the Wild West. You're hearing car bombs all the time. You're hearing gunshots all throughout the day. It becomes very real, the smell, everything. You know, it's there.

• 1:35:44Speaker 06

  You'd hear at night, when it's quiet, you could hear five or six different units in gunfights. And like, is that us? No, that's not us. Who is that? Do they need, are they good? And like, we're sharing QRFs, and QRFs is running to you guys to provide support. And then another QRF is coming to us. It's madness, the whole entire city. You know, Zarqawi's peak power right now. All of his lieutenants are in hammer mode. Al Qaeda is for the sole purpose of destroying and killing as many Americans that are on their soil as they can and to destabilize the new Iraqi government that we were trying to put into place. So like this, it was a very volatile, peak war. This is, this is war.

• 1:36:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Did it start to set in at all, hearing that, seeing it?

• 1:36:34Speaker 06

  It was.

• 1:36:37Speaker 06

  We never got this deployment in comparison to my next deployment to Afghanistan could not have been more dissimilar. This, I'm part of an elite unit that's part of an elite joint special operations task force that is part of an elite coordinated strategic mission. That is a very different thing than you being in Afghanistan as a special forces sniper advisor to NATO allies. Like, could not be further apart. We were the hammer every night. You know, if somebody from this task force is showing up at a door, if you shot from that

• 1:37:21Speaker 06

  house, everybody dies. You know, if you're on target, you're gonna get bit, you're gonna get this battlefield interrogation that's pretty intense, the tactical questioning as we're finding follow-on targets, as we're continuing to build out this target set. Americans are hanging from bridges after they've been burnt alive and dragged through the street. That's this era of war. This is, you know, Blackwater dudes being tortured, football players being kidnapped and tortured, you know, having anybody that was working for the American government, Zarkawi's having his henchmen, like they'd drill their hands to the wall, they'd cut off their eyelids, and then they'd rape their family in front of them before they killed them. And you'd walk in, you'd find this raped and murdered

• 1:38:03Speaker 06

  family with this dude's hands drilled to the wall. Like, this is fucking peak war.

• 1:38:07Shawn Ryan?

  Did you see that?

• 1:38:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:38:09Shawn Ryan?

  You walked in on that?

• 1:38:10Speaker 06

  We found every kind of imaginable horror that terrorists do to civilians, we found.

• 1:38:24Shawn Ryan?

  Let's rewind. Let's, I wanna go right into that. First time you saw that, what is the op? Just everything from the...

• 1:38:37Shawn Ryan?

  From the insertion to walking in that room.

• 1:38:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:38:42Speaker 06

  It's funny, full circle, I was in Israel just this recent October and we're in some of the kibbutzes adjacent to Gaza and seeing the same things that I saw back 18, 17 years earlier in Iraq. The inhumane, barbaric things that these radical extremists do are just inhuman. And I think that's the point is they want to show that anybody that does anything to support not Sharia law, not these radical ideas, isn't human, right? They're infidels, so they can do anything they want to them.

• 1:39:20Speaker 06

  On...

• 1:39:24Speaker 06

  This is, God, what month is this? This is early 2006. We are going to what we thought was a VBID target and Al Olivera was like the point guy. And we do a call out initially. So you set up like an L-shaped ambush on the outside of the house. And this is, this was early tactics of, for 2006, 2005, 2006, not a lot of, only special operations units were still, combat arms were still doing hard knocks and there's no

• 1:40:04Speaker 06

  immediate dynamic entries. We're doing as deliberate as we possibly can after some houses get blown up and there's booby traps and bombs. So we're trying to do call outs. And we're doing a call out of a target. And when we finally go to assault and clear the building, as we come in through the front door and you find a couple of kids that had been raped and murdered, your brain doesn't process it. You know, you can't...

• 1:40:37Speaker 06

  Not that you're planning what you're gonna see, but the last thing you plan on seeing is, you know, dead kids in a corner.

• 1:40:48Speaker 06

  And I have a really good memory and I journaled the whole entire time that I was deployed and all my deployments. And I'll go back and I'll read some of these journals. And there's things I literally don't remember, but it's written down. You know, like I came back and I sat there with a pencil in one of my green notebooks and I wrote for hours, everything that I experienced. My GRG is in there, like the target package is in there, everything's in there. And I'm like, no way this happened. I don't remember this. And I'll go and I'll like, I'll ask teammates that that were there at that same time. And they're like,

• 1:41:31Speaker 06

  dude, I barely remember that. The way the brain works, like the fog of war and then Compartmentalization. Yep. The trauma. Like I deny myself that like I saw some of the things that I saw, but we saw them and it's Do you remember it now? Yeah. Do you remember seeing them now? Some of them. Some of them, no. Some of them, yeah. But a lot of them, no. You remember the first time? No.

• 1:42:00Speaker 06

  And then confusing Afghanistan to Ukraine to, you know, Israel.

• 1:42:10Speaker 06

  The rooms look the same. The trauma looks the same. The date is different. Yeah.

• 1:42:17Speaker 06

  But the journal is accurate. Yeah, I'm sure it is. Why did you start journaling?

• 1:42:27Speaker 06

  Was, we had a, one of the very first kill capture missions. We do a dynamic entry of a house. And as we're approaching the front door, the front door is open, opened. And a man is standing, a military aged man is standing there. There is an AK on the other side of, so there's a T intersection of a hallway. That is from the main entry of the room. I'm stacked on the right hand side behind Al. And he and I are on the right hand side, the stack, the other side of the stack is on the left. And we're kind of like have cross coverage inside of this door. So like, once the number man goes, number one man goes, you, you kind of just follow taking opposing directions.

• 1:43:12Speaker 06

  And from the right hand side of the door, we could see the gun and we could see the guy. From the left hand side of the door, you could only see the guy, but you couldn't see the gun. So Al and the translator, they're yelling to this guy to get on the ground, get on the ground, get on the ground. And the guy goes to grab the gun and the right stack shoots him. And military aged man on target as he's trying to grab a weapon. And he literally falls on top of the gun. You know, he has a stack of, of green tip rounds. He was wearing one of those bead prayer necklaces. It was really weird because it looked like a rosary, but it's not because they're Muslim prayer beads.

• 1:43:52Speaker 06

  And I remember looking at those beads and be like, is this dude Catholic? What is this guy doing here? Obviously, you know, like, but these are the things that go through your mind in real time and a million thoughts per millisecond. And, you know, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta. The guy falls over on top of this weapon and we flow through the house. You know, whether it's going to be a flashbang or it's going to be a dynamic breach, an explosive breach of the door, the moment that goes off, just like a bullet, those bullets going, that overpressure from the barrels and those bullets impacting create a, in the Oodle Loop, the, it resets everybody on the inside. So you always follow your rounds in. So pow, pow, pow, we shoot and we flow into the target.

• 1:44:35Speaker 06

  After we secure the building and we're trying to find where the follow-on target is, like move off to the next one, and I don't know who made the calls. So a 15-6 investigation is where the army goes into fact-finding about information of possible criminal activity for UCMJ action. And I've had a few 15-sixes of these military investigations. And this was the first one where it should have been military-age man on target,

• 1:45:16Speaker 06

  corroborated statements from teammates that he was trying to grab a gun, was shot on target, died on top of a gun, case closed. No investigation, totally fine. And this is peak war. When you say Wild, Wild West, like you're shooting dudes squirting off targets when they're trying to move. Like if you do a deliberate assault on a house, so like a call-out, and you see guys start squirting out the back of the houses, we are set up to engage those guys that are leaving the target. But then we have a guy on a target that dies on a gun, and this initiated an investigation. And it was at this moment where I was like, we're hunting the highest-level dude in all

• 1:45:56Speaker 06

  of Iraq, and the scrutiny of this task force post-Blackwater, you know, as now the press is looking for excuses and opportunities to hang, figuratively and literally and metaphorically, special operations and contractors, that in response to that scrutiny, we were, I don't know, like putting ourselves unnecessarily at risk.

• 1:46:30Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:31Speaker 06

  So I started journaling from that night forward. Every single target, this is why I was able to write that book with such clarity with Nick, was because I had 15 years of journals from me in a variety of conflict zones. So starting that night after that investigation, Al was actually pulled off of the assault team because of that shooting.

• 1:46:57Shawn Ryan?

  Who initiated the investigation, do you know?

• 1:46:59Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:47:02Speaker 06

  You know, and this is, I mean, I do, but uh, um.

• 1:47:06Shawn Ryan?

  Was it a US service member?

• 1:47:07Speaker 06

  Yep. I uh, I'm never gonna disparage, there's a guy that was at war. I am an E5 at the time that just wants to get in gunfights. I did, I was not in his shoes, I was not in his position, I was not in his position of authority or responsibility. That is his name on documents, those are his men that work for him. So like, if I were in his position, I'm gonna say I'm of course gonna do something totally different, but I'm, where I'm at now, I'm never gonna throw a stone. I didn't know what he knew at the time. Do I think it was wrong? Of course.

• 1:47:39Speaker 06

  Dude, I would do anything to have Al in every single, to be the number one guy in every single room that I ever went into, cuz he was fast, he was dynamic, and, and he was uh, violent.

• 1:47:50Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, this happened a lot, a lot, and it just got worse and worse and worse, and I don't, I really don't wanna steer the interview this way, but I think it's important that people hear this type of stuff, you know, and, and um, how early in the deployment? I mean, that's your first deployment. Welcome to war.

• 1:48:10Speaker 06

  That was my first weapon from select to fire and press the trigger.

• 1:48:14Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 1:48:15Speaker 06

  First time, right there, initiated a 15-6 investigation.

• 1:48:19Shawn Ryan?

  So you pulled the trigger?

• 1:48:20Speaker 06

  That whole right side of the stack did. Like, and everybody stepped over.

• 1:48:27Speaker 06

  There's three people that shot that dude, and there was a stack of rounds like this, right here. It's crazy, right at the intersection of that necklace. They have 15 bullets, all touching each other, like.

• 1:48:42Shawn Ryan?

  How did that investigation

• 1:48:45Shawn Ryan?

  affect your, your mental state?

• 1:48:48Speaker 06

  Negatively. It uh, it made me second guess everything that I was doing. It made me, you know, in that, in that observe-oriented side, act what should be the gunfighter loop of how fast I can recognize that there's a problem, direct my attention towards that problem, decide what the appropriate action is to take on that, and then, and then act on that. You know, that, that's milliseconds, and that's live or die. And then confusing all of that is, well, what should be the action might cause me to be investigated for a not righteous shooting, that's gonna get, get me kicked out of country, or, like, even worse, you know, be arrested and sent to jail.

• 1:49:31Speaker 06

  Or kicked off the team, you know, that was the worst fear for me was to do something that would get me kicked off the team. And you should not have fear of fighting when you're in the middle of war. And there was all of the, just like the same moment that we started losing momentum in the Vietnam War, when cameras started coming in there and, and you're supposed to be fighting and winning. Our job is to go and kill the enemy. We're supposed to be the most lethal fighting force on the planet, and I should not have to think about what some politician is going to be leveraging and positioning in some argument on the floor to try to demonize what the men and women that are wearing the flag on the shoulder forward are doing in combat. Like you sent us there, so let us do our job.

• 1:50:15Speaker 06

  And right now, we've been seeing it for the past 10 years where every single opportunity is just a talking point for some politician. Well, you go all the way back to 2005 and 2006, it was, it was very similar. You know, you had journalists looking for opportunities, you had politicians looking for opportunities, it was just, it was infuriating.

• 1:50:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. What did, so that was the first time you pressed the shirder?

• 1:50:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:50:41Shawn Ryan?

  What did that feel like for you?

• 1:50:46Speaker 06

  Minimal recoil. You know, the green tip, it's a high-energy, fast bullet that is very light in grains, you know? And stepping over a body that is shot. Afterwards, John, again, we get back to the hooch and it slaps on backs and popping a bottle of whiskey. You know, like, I didn't know what to think. I didn't know what to feel. You know, he'd already been in a thousand gunfights. I have no idea how many deployments he'd been in, but it was normalized in, this is,

• 1:51:30Speaker 06

  this is the way, like that you are a warrior, you are on a warrior team, and you just had your first welcome. And for a man, for a young man searching for purpose and for searching for a place, not knowing if he deserved or belonged to be, like deserved and belonged on that ODA, there was maybe... For the first time, a feeling of I deserve to be here. I wanted to be there, but I didn't know if I deserved to be there.

• 1:52:07Shawn Ryan?

  Did you feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment?

• 1:52:14Speaker 06

  Yes, I did the thing that I was trained to do.

• 1:52:22Speaker 06

  That night, in my journal, I wrote, because there were two young boys in that house.

• 1:52:31Shawn Ryan?

  Alive or dead?

• 1:52:32Speaker 06

  Alive. And I posed this question to myself that I couldn't answer at the time. Because I just remember the wife screaming and the boys screaming for their dead dad. And I just, did I just create a new revolution in this wheel? Was I spoke that just continued to, I just killed one bad guy, but just made two more? Like, these are going to be forever men, future men that hate everything about me and us. And yes, I took out one, but it created two more. Have I just perpetuated this endless saga that is good versus evil? And I just created two more versions of evil.

• 1:53:16Speaker 06

  You know, I cut off the snake, the head of the snake, and two more sprouted up in its place because of my actions.

• 1:53:23Shawn Ryan?

  Well, there's another way to look at that, too. I mean, look at the example they had to follow.

• 1:53:28Speaker 06

  For sure.

• 1:53:29Shawn Ryan?

  You know?

• 1:53:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:53:29Shawn Ryan?

  So that's, that's interesting that you were already thinking that.

• 1:53:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:53:38Shawn Ryan?

  Did it bother you at all?

• 1:53:39Speaker 06

  A little bit. You know, the, man, it would be so nice if war was against thirty-year-old men with beards that are doing evil.

• 1:53:53Speaker 06

  You know, if you took the kids off the battlefield, if you took the women off the battlefield, if you took the confusing smells of the kitchen, mixed with the smell of all the dust that's kicked up from the overpressure of a door charge, you know, where you're like, I remember the smell of that dust, that fine moon-like dust that gets kicked up from our charges or from our flashbangs. And then you walk through the kitchen, you're smelling curries and spices and herbs that are hanging on the wall. But then you also smell the lead smell of the blood from that's pooling on the floor. Like, all of that is not what the brain's built to do. All the while, there's

• 1:54:32Speaker 06

  a 28-year-old girl with two sons, all three of them are screaming for their dead dad. And this is as good as it's gonna get, you know? It just gets worse after that.

• 1:54:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:45Speaker 06

  Like, that's on the best-case scenario, bad dude with a gun on target, you know, with legitimate intel.

• 1:54:59Shawn Ryan?

  You took out a top terrorist on your first deployment.

• 1:55:04Speaker 06

  Well, the-

• 1:55:04Shawn Ryan?

  You guys.

• 1:55:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:55:06Shawn Ryan?

  Took it.

• 1:55:06Speaker 06

  That'd be really cool.

• 1:55:08Shawn Ryan?

  Let me, uh, let me correct myself there. But let's, let's, let's get into that. I mean, that is a, that's a huge piece of American history.

• 1:55:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:55:17Shawn Ryan?

  That not a lot of people have insight into. So can you walk us through the Zarqawi operation?

• 1:55:23Speaker 06

  Yeah. So there were-

• 1:55:25Shawn Ryan?

  Actually, let's start here. Let's, who was Zarqawi?

• 1:55:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, one of the embodiment of evil, like the personification of inhumane radical Islam. Zarqawi was the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. You had Bin Laden, if you like, you think kind of two separate but connected elements. You had Bin Laden that was still on the run, but unknown since Torbo, right? He's, he's kind of disappeared, but he is the figurehead of this larger radical terrorist wing. But the man that is the ground force commander that is in charge of everything that's happening in Iraq is Zarqawi. Zarqawi and his lieutenants, uh, you know, he was infamous for posing with dead American soldiers.

• 1:56:16Speaker 06

  Battlefield recovery of their weapons. And if you saw him, he's sitting there with a 249 or a 240 or an M4 that he took off dead soldiers, dragging them through the streets. Heaven forbid, uh, somebody gets captured. The, he was infamous and notorious for torturing. So he would torture any American informant. So anybody that was giving information to the Americans, he would torture them. Uh, you know, Chris Kyle, American Sniper, his, his book is following some of the enforcers from the Zarqawi network. And, um, there were a few different special operations task forces that were tasked with eliminating

• 1:56:59Speaker 06

  support and, uh, strategic ground that he controlled while, all the while, we're on this kill capture mission to find him specifically. And, um, that, the, the climax, the, the crescendo of that led to a single night where we had taken down targets leading up to it, week after week after week.

• 1:57:27Shawn Ryan?

  When did you find out you were going after him?

• 1:57:29Speaker 06

  Um, this would be March of, till a month before we finally found him and killed him.

• 1:57:40Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. I mean, that's gotta be, that's gotta be motivating as hell.

• 1:57:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:57:47Shawn Ryan?

  To be out there after that guy.

• 1:57:49Speaker 06

  Let's revisit that. I am an E6 now.

• 1:57:54Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:57:54Speaker 06

  Um, and brand new to the team. So the, the task force 100% knew who they're going after and my team's leadership knew who they're going after. But the 18, the junior 18 Bravo, uh, that gets a GRG and is told where I'm going to go and where I'm going to attack and where my position's going to be and where I am in the stack and where my load plan is on the helicopter, where my position is on the, on the vehicle that night. My, my level of understanding of what was happening in the battle space was, you know, like, uh, pre, prepubescent at best.

• 1:58:30Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 1:58:33Speaker 06

  Everybody maybe besides me knew what was happening. Cause uh, you know, it's, it's difficult when you're stupid. And that's where I was.

• 1:58:44Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man. At least you're honest.

• 1:58:46Speaker 06

  Yup.

• 1:58:47Shawn Ryan?

  But um, well, yeah, let's walk through the, just walk through everything.

• 1:58:54Speaker 06

  Dude, so much. You know, this is a.

• 1:58:56Shawn Ryan?

  This is good.

• 1:58:59Shawn Ryan?

  Nobody's done this yet.

• 1:59:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. We didn't lose. We didn't lose anything. That task force.

• 1:59:08Speaker 06

  Had the unit. Ranger Regiment. The Criff, the SIF. Had our QRF. Were Abrams and Bradleys loaded with infantrymen. You know, like if we start getting scuffed up. Abram. Tanks and Bradley tanks came and just leveled blocks. You know, this is um, when I say we didn't lose.

• 1:59:33Speaker 06

  We're hitting a target that has. Maybe, you know, a bomb maker, an assistant and a couple of security guys. So four guys on target, we're hitting them with a company. You know, you're, you're hitting them with six, like an entire troop of an assault force. And uh.

• 1:59:51Speaker 06

  How, how. Victors and winners approach. A gunfight is every single thing is in your favor. You know, you're in the dominant position, you have the dominant technology, you have the dominant men, you have every dominant. Speed, surprise, violence of action that you can execute on target is being. Done in real time. That's what this entire deployment was. You know, the uh, Purple Hearts that were given out to the guys in the task force. Were from, you know, shrapnel. Like, nobody got shot, nobody got killed. This was.

• 2:00:27Speaker 06

  This was murder time. This is, we're gonna find this guy and we're gonna kill him. So the target board or the murder board. You have the guy at the top and then you have strings connecting to every single one of his lieutenants. And then from his lieutenants, every single one of their enablers. And then from their enablers, every single one of their advisors. And you create this big, huge target list. And then you attach physical locations to where these people could be or will be in real time. And you've seen hundreds of these boards. You have the people and then you have the targets.

• 2:01:11Speaker 06

  Those targets aren't always exactly like, even though this is, you know, number three guy's house. He's not, he's only gonna be at this house at this specific time. So you have to figure out the pattern of life and where that person is gonna be for you to not just take down that target, but also take out that person. Because what we're trying to do is limit the options available for where this, where Zarkawi can squirt to. And

• 2:01:40Speaker 06

  the targeters, the army and joint military intel team.

• 2:01:51Speaker 06

  They're amazing. They're just so good. They're, they're, they are the best that have ever been in the existence of this species. Watching what JSOC can do is, and I'm watching, you know, like by no stretch of the imagination, do I deserve to be there. I am at best a gun that is barely competent in how to use it. You know, I'm just doing what I'm told. And getting to see the effectiveness of all of America's might, power, technology, and military prowess directed at an acute, single thing is just the most impressive

• 2:02:36Speaker 06

  display, maybe in history. Like, I got it, we went to the moon. We found one dude that owned an entire country and we took out every single bit of ground and person that that man knew until we ultimately dropped two bombs on top of him. And he dies looking up at an American operator.

• 2:02:55Speaker 06

  That's freaking epic.

• 2:02:56Shawn Ryan?

  It is.

• 2:02:58Speaker 06

  So we hit target, target, target, target weeks leading up to this final night. And this is my understanding of it is that we had hit enough targets and taken enough literal ground, enough of his safe houses where there are few enough for him to run to in one night. You know, in some nights we'd have five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 follow-on targets as we're doing a battlefield interrogation and during tactical questioning, the guy says, "Yeah, this is the other place that we go to." And limiting, as you look at like the physical places on the board, there's lines through them. Now there's like 10 or 15 left. We can do 10 or 15 in a night. And they get prioritized.

• 2:03:41Speaker 06

  And of course, the highest priority targets, the ones that have the highest likelihood of finding, you know, numero uno dude, get, you know, one through four. The unit takes this one. These guys take this one down to us. And then he goes back through the list. And that night, we just hit them. House after house after house after house. And

• 2:04:07Shawn Ryan?

  For those listening right now that are wondering what the unit is, that is Delta.

• 2:04:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. And they're, you know, they're the leaders of the task force. They are the best, most capable fighting force on the planet. And they're hitting all the houses, you know, the first time in seventh group history. And to my, to my knowledge, the first time in

• 2:04:33Speaker 06

  Special Forces history was during this deployment where the CRIF and the, and Delta Force were on targets for the first time on, for gunfighting. Kind of cool.

• 2:04:47Shawn Ryan?

  Very cool.

• 2:04:48Speaker 06

  I was outside security. Just, just to reiterate. That was not an house. Really wanted to be, but I'll be wherever John told me to be at this moment of my career. And

• 2:05:05Speaker 06

  when

• 2:05:08Speaker 06

  it was wild.

• 2:05:11Speaker 06

  Leading up to these final nights where 160th SOAR, the Army Special Operations Aviation Group, they're flying guys to targets. We have Panders, like armored personnel carriers that are really, really fast, zipping all over the town. The Iraqi Counterterrorism Force is co-located with another element of the SIF, and they're going and hitting all of these different targets, and they're the ones that are like really driving a ton of information. You know, you hit a target, sometimes the guys from that target try to squirt, and that's the end of it. Sometimes they call for QRF because they don't realize

• 2:05:53Speaker 06

  who they're in a gunfight with. And the QRF that shows up is the Iraqi police that are supplied and trained by American military, and they're pulling out guns that were given to them by the United States government. And you're picking up a Glock off-target and being like, "We gave you this. You're dead, but I want to lecture you that you do not deserve to have this." You know, like, trying to figure out who the enemy was at this time is, because we're training some of the Iraqi military, we're training some of the Iraqi police, but then some of them are being controlled by Zarqawi. You know, he has some pretty long levers, and he's able to manipulate via force and fear and power for them to

• 2:06:35Speaker 06

  do what he wants. And we get, some nights, we're in a gunfight, and 160th got shot up so bad, they couldn't even come and pick us up. So our exfil, we're like at our exfil spot after a full night of gunfighting, and we don't have a ride out to get back to Baghdad, into the city proper, into the international, into the green zone. And we're like, "Well, where's the closest friendly force?" We find this little tiny Marine FOB, and we try to get them up on comms. You know, talk about one of the scariest moments of my life is walking up to a Marine base as a bunch of dudes blacked out in body armor and guns with

• 2:07:18Speaker 06

  dudes in drag bags and a couple of dudes that are zip-tied, as we're walking up, and like, "Don't shoot us." You know, like, link up a friendly forces in a battle space, and like, lasers start popping at us, you know, and we're like, we're doing the whirlybird up in the sky with our lasers, like, "No, no, no, don't murder us, please." We walk into this firebase, these guys have nothing. They have, you know, they're using M16s with ACOGs. They're getting mortared every single day. They're eating T-Rats. Their gym are buckets filled with sand and milk jugs filled with cement. That's what they're doing for like shoulder press and bench press. And they're training every single day. They're going outside the wire every single day.

• 2:08:01Speaker 06

  And I'm coming from a base where I have all the protein powder. We have like stacks of energy drinks. Like we have this big, huge, nice gym with like a jujitsu mat. We have our own shooting range. You know, I get to go and I walk into this. And remember, I've never spent a day in the military. I've only been in special operations and my whole entire time on a team, I've only been at the CIF. So I walk into this, I'm like,

• 2:08:25Speaker 06

  what? Like you guys live here? And they're on a 12-month deployment. Yeah, yeah. And they're getting hit every single day.

• 2:08:35Speaker 06

  It's wild. It is. And that led up to, you know, two weeks later, us being able to in one night hit every target. Driving Zarqawi to his final last safe house, where they drop two guided bombs, two munitions on top of him. Did you guys know he was on the run while you were hitting these targets? Yep, well, during the interrogation of people on target, you're starting to get this picture of the spider web. And things were being corroborated from multiple targets, where people were saying the same things, like, yeah, this guy's going here, this guy's going there. Everybody's like this address, this house, this location.

• 2:09:18Speaker 06

  They're all like driving back to these limited, you know, like on the location kill board, there's only a few left. And we've now seen that they're all going back to those same places.

• 2:09:30Speaker 06

  And it wasn't, you know, I wasn't on target when he died. But when we get back, you know, we're unloading, we're pulling belts, we're, you know, open bolt machine guns from 240s and 249s, start stripping gear, start repacking speed bags, you know, starting to change batteries. And everything goes black. Like all comms get shut down, all jammers get turned on, so sat phones aren't working. Like nothing's working. And

• 2:09:59Speaker 06

  And all cell phones, all internet, all landlines, everything gets cut for the whole entire compound. And that's when I was like, did this just happen? You know, only a couple of, that only happens for a couple of reasons. One, somebody messed up really bad and they have to shut out, shut down all comms out. Two is something really good happened and you have to shut down all comms out. I was really hoping it was the latter and it ultimately ended up being the latter.

• 2:10:33Shawn Ryan?

  When'd you get the news?

• 2:10:35Speaker 06

  When, uh, almost the same time I heard that George Bush is gonna fly in to shake everybody's hand.

• 2:10:40Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 2:10:43Speaker 06

  Dude.

• 2:10:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't think, like, I mean, I know it's been leaked and there's photos that have been leaked, but you know, that was regiment, Delta Force and Seventh Group SIF, all standing there shaking hands as George Bush walked down and like, he didn't do that for publicity. Nobody knew. He just hopped on a plane and flew over there to shake the hands of the men that killed the guy that had been doing so many unspeakable acts to so many innocent people.

• 2:11:17Shawn Ryan?

  Did it register at that point?

• 2:11:19Speaker 06

  Nah.

• 2:11:19Shawn Ryan?

  Still didn't register.

• 2:11:20Speaker 06

  Still doesn't.

• 2:11:21Shawn Ryan?

  It still doesn't. Damn, Tim.

• 2:11:25Speaker 06

  I mean, there's a moment in history and like, how do you know that you're there? I didn't deserve to be there. I was still an immature teammate, not supporting in any way. So like, there's, there's a lot of like emotions of shame and regret. Like, I would have wished so desperately to be the 2010 operator back in 2006. Just four years, man. Just give me four years, couple of combat deployments, a couple more schools, a little bit more understanding of how to actually contribute. Instead, you know, like, um, I'm just looking at a door in front of me and if the guy, number one guy goes right, I'm

• 2:12:08Speaker 06

  gonna go left. Like, that's where I was. And that sucks.

• 2:12:13Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you were hand-selected by a very seasoned operator for, I'm sure, a very good reason.

• 2:12:19Speaker 06

  Yeah. I bet if you asked John if he could go back and make that same, same decision, he'd make a different decision.

• 2:12:25Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that doesn't matter.

• 2:12:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:12:29Speaker 06

  Pretty epic.

• 2:12:31Shawn Ryan?

  It sounds like it. That is, uh, did you know the guy that found him?

• 2:12:36Speaker 06

  Yeah. And one of, uh, Matt Smith, who's the director of training for Sheepdog Response,

• 2:12:44Speaker 06

  retired special forces sergeant major. He's worked for a bunch of incredible units, special missions units. Uh, you know, he was longtime friends and, and so getting to like, hear the stories and firsthand and, you know, being there, getting to tie what happened at that target with where we were at the exact same time, you know, is, uh,

• 2:13:09Speaker 06

  you know, going back to my journals too, and like relooking at that night, which target we're at and which people we were questioning when that happened and we roll back in to the compound when they finally dropped those bombs. And, uh, you know, we'd just been in another fight with a different QRF. It's like the elevation and adrenaline, you know, is freaking out. And then like, wait, what just happened?

• 2:13:35Speaker 06

  It's over? Like, we got him?

• 2:13:37Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. Do you want to talk about what happened when they found him? Or should we keep that offline? Totally up to you.

• 2:13:45Speaker 06

  I want everybody to know that this dude, that Zerqawi, radical, murderous, raping, torturing fanatic, burnt people alive, you know, dragged them through the streets, tortured. I don't know. If you're trying, how many do you think, Sean, do you, under his lieutenants, did he, how many people did he torture and murder? Specifically Iraqis?

• 2:14:19Speaker 06

  That, tens of thousands?

• 2:14:20Shawn Ryan?

  I can't answer that. You know, I don't know.

• 2:14:22Speaker 06

  Thousands, tens of thousands?

• 2:14:23Shawn Ryan?

  It's gotta be. It's, I mean, I remember rolling up to locations where they would put people's heads on cinder blocks and on huge blocks and then just launch cinder blocks straight down and pop, pop people's heads like a grape. I've seen pregnant woman, you know.

• 2:14:49Shawn Ryan?

  Get hung on hooks just to bleed out with the fetus inside. And he was part of all that.

• 2:14:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, he's orchestrating all that.

• 2:15:00Shawn Ryan?

  The headings, all of the shit that you saw over there. It was, he had a hand in.

• 2:15:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. So his last, his last breaths as he was dying from shrapnel and overpressure was an American commando with his foot on his chest. You know, that's, um.

• 2:15:25Speaker 06

  I'm not sure Americans have the appetite or the tolerance for what it means to win a war. You know, in 1941, a day that'll live in infamy, and we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. It finished with us dropping two nuclear bombs on a people that wouldn't submit. You know, behind every blade of grass, when you come onto the, the motherland of Japan, you'll find somebody fighting to protect Japan. Like, fine, Hiroshima. You're like, do, are you done? No, fine, here's Nagasaki. You know, are you done?

• 2:15:59Speaker 06

  Then we won that war, right? In Europe, in the, in, as we pushed into Berlin, it was absolute destruction and carnage of everything. If you look at photographs from early 1945, late 1944, it is destruction in epic, in epic proportions.

• 2:16:19Speaker 06

  There, there's no moral equivalency when you're trying to win a war. There's winning and there's losing. That's it. And we're, we're looking for like some moral justification about how we're going to be fighting these wars these days. And there's winning and there's losing. And so I realize that now people may not have the appetite of what it looks like to have an American standing with his boot on the chest of one of the evilest men to walk the face of the planet in my lifetime. But that is a beautiful, glorious thing. And I hope they can understand why that's important.

• 2:16:53Shawn Ryan?

  I think most people listening here are gonna understand why that's important. But, thank you for sharing that.

• 2:17:02Speaker 06

  America.

• 2:17:03Shawn Ryan?

  That's right.

• 2:17:04Speaker 06

  Greatest country in history.

• 2:17:05Shawn Ryan?

  That's right. So what do you do? So you take out Zarqawi. You guys, take out Zarqawi.

• 2:17:16Shawn Ryan?

  How much longer do you have on this deployment?

• 2:17:19Speaker 06

  I mean, that was the point of the deployment. So, we come back, keeping the momentum and hitting, making sure that none of his lieutenants are promoted. So, keeping that initiative, where we continue to hit targets rapidly, over the next few nights.

• 2:17:39Speaker 06

  We maybe had a 48-hour stand-down as the president came. Which is another one of the reasons why all the comms were shut down. And once you're told that, you know, President Bush is coming in.

• 2:17:52Speaker 06

  Everybody goes from the task force and is there, and you know, they shake hands and a few pictures are taken and he bounces. And then it was like, let's go, back to work. Every single bit of information that was taken off of every single one of those targets on that night is then reprioritized into a new target list as we, you know, taking this guy off, but moving, elevating these two guys that we haven't yet found. And, uh, and trying to keep that momentum to secure and stabilize that battle space.

• 2:18:25Speaker 06

  And then you go home.

• 2:18:27Shawn Ryan?

  How many top terrorists do you think were neutralized, that deployment?

• 2:18:35Speaker 06

  Fifty?

• 2:18:35Shawn Ryan?

  Fifty?

• 2:18:37Speaker 06

  Top. You know, like, I mean, there's a lot.

• 2:18:40Shawn Ryan?

  That's a whole deck of cards.

• 2:18:41Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 2:18:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, in that deck of cards, I think there's three or four just in that specific 2004, 5, 6, 7 deck of cards. I think there's like, five or six dudes that were in that deck.

• 2:18:55Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 2:18:56Speaker 06

  In that one deployment. But then, you know, the lieutenants for every single one of them respectively, like those guys went to the dirt as well.

• 2:19:05Shawn Ryan?

  So there was a, there was a 48 hour window of.

• 2:19:09Speaker 06

  I worked out like nine times.

• 2:19:10Shawn Ryan?

  You gotta meet the president. I'm sorry, but we gotta slow down the ops because you gotta meet the president. And then it's right back at it, right back to work.

• 2:19:18Speaker 06

  As it should be.

• 2:19:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yep. No time for celebration. Let's go get the rest of them.

• 2:19:23Speaker 06

  I, I think um, there, in that tactical pause and that battlefield patience, which is so important and often um, misunderstood. They were also processing all of the information taken off of all of those targets that night. And then they had to re-prioritize all new targets going forward. That, I mean, that's hard, like even now, if I were, if I were tasked with that, how do you reorganize your whole entire target list um, with all information that's taken off of 25 targets in one night? And then you move out, you know, number two, number one, two, five and seven, like.

• 2:20:08Shawn Ryan?

  And then all of the new ones.

• 2:20:09Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:20:10Shawn Ryan?

  That we didn't even know about.

• 2:20:11Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:20:14Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's a, that's a hell of a first deployment too.

• 2:20:19Speaker 06

  Holy shit. Dude.

• 2:20:24Speaker 06

  I still get like heart racing thinking back. That's, that's deployment number one, my first combat deployment.

• 2:20:31Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 2:20:34Shawn Ryan?

  Amazing.

• 2:20:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. And things changed, Afghanistan.

• 2:20:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so let's go home.

• 2:20:40Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 2:20:40Shawn Ryan?

  Let's, so you get home, you get married on this trip home?

• 2:20:45Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:20:45Shawn Ryan?

  So you come back, you find out, you talk to the spies, she's good.

• 2:20:49Speaker 06

  Yeah. And uh, I know I'm going to be going to Ranger School to Special Forces Sniper School and um, and I'm already starting to position, I'm trying to find out which unit is the next unit going back to Afghanistan. And I start trying to uh, manipulate, position myself to get on that hitch. So I'd like knock out two schools and then go on the next rotation.

• 2:21:17Shawn Ryan?

  So you're not on the SIF?

• 2:21:19Speaker 06

  No, I'm still on the SIF.

• 2:21:20Shawn Ryan?

  Then what are you looking at other units for?

• 2:21:22Speaker 06

  So the uh,

• 2:21:25Speaker 06

  You, once you spend a couple of deployments or a couple of years on the assault force, you can move to the recon halo sniper team. So I go to Ranger School. My team sergeant, John, says, hey, if you're going to go to Ranger School, you can't come back to this team unless you're an honor graduate. And so you have no choice but to go to Ranger School because you're immature. You don't understand leadership. You don't understand the Army. So go to Ranger School. And if you're not an honor graduate, you can't come back to this team. So I go, I'm an honor graduate. I come back to this team, but then like I still have the chip on my shoulder because I'm a prick. And I still haven't learned humility evidently. So I'm like, fuck this team then. I'm going to, you know, I'll go to the hell of sniper team.

• 2:22:10Speaker 06

  So then I, Alex Ortiz is the team sergeant for 796. And he offers me a spot to come to 796. So I go to sniper school after Ranger School. And I'm looking for when is the next combat deployment for anyone in the greater special forces regiment. Cause now I wanted to deploy as a sniper. And so I'm still in the CIF, but I'm looking for jobs for USOC, JSOC, for coalition soft forces that need a sniper. Cause I wanted to be an experienced sniper, not just a paper sniper.

• 2:22:55Speaker 06

  And that was, and especially as a special forces sniper, in addition to being able to shoot far, you know, far, far away, you come with the, the understanding of a battle space and how to, you know, call in nine lines and how to be the connective tissue between other special operations units and combat units in the theater with like as a softly like a special operations liaison.

• 2:23:24Speaker 06

  So a sniper is really useful in those roles because he can speak the languages of lots of different, different types of units. So I was trying to find a way to get to war as a sniper. And the SIF, having just, having just returned, they weren't on the playbook to go back for like two more years. Okay. And I did not want to wait two more years. Gotcha, gotcha. How did you, how did you propose to the, to your wife? Yeah, so, uh, I had, first, we were gonna be going to a baseball game in Southern California, and I was gonna do that cringey seventh inning thing. I had that set.

• 2:24:09Speaker 06

  And it, for a variety of reasons, a nephew that was sick, we ended up not going to the game, so I canceled that. Then I was gonna do it at Disneyland during the fireworks. And, uh, but fog and weather came in and they canceled the fireworks that night. So then I was going to do it at the beach house in California in Cambria, and we're driving on the coast road over, and as soon as you crest the hill and you see the ocean, I saw this gigantic layer of marine clouds. So I knew that once we got, it was gonna be a full moon that night, that once we got

• 2:24:54Speaker 06

  to the beach, you wouldn't be able to see anything besides the black murkiness that is fog. And I have a bad relationship with fog, so I was like, I don't really wanna propose to my wife on a dark beach in the middle of the fog. So as we're on top of this hill, looking, this mountain, looking out on the Pacific, and the, the Pacific Ocean's like, it's my, my, my home, it's my, I love that water.

• 2:25:21Speaker 06

  I right there on the side of the road, I got down on Anine was uh like, "You're made for me. I don't deserve you. Uh, and I, I, and I, I know that you fight for me." I'm not gonna tell you how I know, but uh, and she, she said, "Yeah."

• 2:25:39Speaker 06

  So, that was it. And I drove to my grandma's house in Cambria and told her, she was the first to hear that uh, I was getting married.

• 2:25:47Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 2:25:49Speaker 06

  That's cool.

• 2:25:50Shawn Ryan?

  Very cool. Very cool.

• 2:25:52Speaker 06

  Now, marriage is tough.

• 2:25:54Shawn Ryan?

  So you get married, you get engaged, and you get married on the same trip home?

• 2:25:59Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:25:59Shawn Ryan?

  And find uh, your new unit?

• 2:26:03Speaker 06

  Well, I stay in the CIF. Um, I find my new deployment.

• 2:26:06Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:26:07Speaker 06

  Um, so I was still at C-37. I was still in the 7th Group CIF and um,

• 2:26:15Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so hold on, let me, so there's multiple teams and within the CIF? In each group?

• 2:26:21Speaker 06

  There are two troops and each troop is comprised of an assault force of two ODAs and a uh, a recce team.

• 2:26:29Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:26:31Speaker 06

  And that recce team is broken into like the Halo Sniper and then like the tech human, human side of the recce team.

• 2:26:36Shawn Ryan?

  Got it.

• 2:26:37Speaker 06

  So each of those troops could kind of work independently, but as a squadron, they can like work as a four-team assault team with two recce teams. You know, that's how we're organized.

• 2:26:49Shawn Ryan?

  Got it.

• 2:26:51Speaker 06

  And this deployment,

• 2:26:56Speaker 06

  a new battalion was going into Afghanistan and the soft coalition, so the, the, all of our NATO allies with all of their special operations teams that are four-deployed, the British, the Canadian, um, Czech, the French, uh, all of those teams are under the battlespace commander of the American military. So the American kind of combatant commander of Afghanistan has all of these different countries that are all allies, that are all working under this kind of coordinated um, combatant wing.

• 2:27:39Speaker 06

  As a special forces sniper, I, myself and my sniper partner, volunteered to be USASOC snipers for the Coalition SOF. So anytime that any one of our allied tier one

• 2:27:55Speaker 06

  units were going to be going to a target, one of us would, well, the plan for both of us was to go, but as soon as we landed in Afghanistan, my sniper partner gets the Dear John letter that his bank account had been dumped, that his wife had a dude on the side and she was just waiting for him to fly overseas. She's like selling his gun, selling his motorcycle, dumping his bank account. So he was going to be combat ineffective. So they flew him home, which left me there by myself. So now I'm a USASOC special forces sniper assigned to the Coalition and I'm like, I got nobody. So this whole entire deployment, I am just hopping

• 2:28:37Speaker 06

  from TST to TST, time-sensitive target, or trip, or mission, which with each of these different Coalition units.

• 2:28:47Shawn Ryan?

  Before we get into the actual deployment, you did another thing on your off time. You started your first company, correct?

• 2:28:57Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 2:28:57Shawn Ryan?

  Ranger Up. How did that come about?

• 2:29:01Speaker 06

  I, uh, there's this fighting tournament

• 2:29:06Speaker 06

  called the Army Combatants Tournament. And all military branches could send their best fighters to this four-day-long, just violent tournament. You'd weigh in, the first phase was fighting in grappling. The second phase was fighting in pancrase, limited striking rules. And the third phase was you fighting in real MMA fights for who is going to be the Army Combatants Champion.

• 2:29:38Speaker 06

  Ranger Up was like this apparel line that would

• 2:29:46Speaker 06

  make fun of all of the things about the military that you couldn't make fun of being in the military. And it was awesome. And Nick Palmigiano and Tom Menta and Dave were like, hey, we want to sponsor you. So I went and fought in those Army Combatants tournaments as a former professional fighter. So I'm the only guy in history to win them three times. And you'd fight anywhere from 10 to 20 times over the weekend.

• 2:30:19Speaker 06

  You know, obviously submission fights, Pancrase fights, and then finally MMA fights.

• 2:30:23Shawn Ryan?

  What's a Pancrase fight?

• 2:30:24Speaker 06

  It's a, so your bare knuckle, but it's close fist to the body, kicks to the head, but you can't close fist punch somebody to the face. So it's grappling and kickboxing heavy.

• 2:30:34Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 2:30:36Speaker 06

  And then it kind of like limits face damage so that you are able to fight, which would be your third phase and final phase, which is the championships fights in MMA rules.

• 2:30:51Speaker 06

  When I won that, Nick and Tom and Dave were like, hey, man,

• 2:30:57Speaker 06

  we also heard that you're like fighting on the side. So they started sponsoring me. And I said, well, why don't, instead of you sponsoring and paying me, like, I would like some equity. And I would like to help build Ranger Up. So that was my first like business entrepreneurial step was getting equity of Ranger Up and then starting to help build that brand.

• 2:31:20Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you guys had some great branding for the time. I remember, I remember this one video specifically. And it was, I've never met Nick, but I think it was Nick and he was. He had this old special forces medic on there. Dude, that was hilarious.

• 2:31:44Speaker 06

  We were like so far ahead. Now, now there's tons of great military apparel lines.

• 2:31:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:51Speaker 06

  You know, you had like 762, you have 9 line, you have grunt style. And they're all great companies owned by great guys. We were the first, you know, we were the first ones to do it. You know, Matt Best and Jared that went on to own Black Rifle Coffee, they had Article 15, you know, with Rocco. So like, but we were the first. And, um, you know, we're the first ones in PXs. We were the first ones like saying things that you couldn't say and putting them on shirts and having soldiers like wear those things around. It was freaking awesome.

• 2:32:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. That stuff really, I mean, that got legs fast.

• 2:32:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, it took off.

• 2:32:24Shawn Ryan?

  It seemed like it.

• 2:32:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, it blew up. It was crazy to go from, you know, Nick and Tom and Dave like printing shirts in a garage to them, you know, selling five million in shirts.

• 2:32:35Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:32:37Speaker 06

  You know?

• 2:32:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:38Speaker 06

  An infantry officer, an SF officer, a Ranger Battalion kid and a Green Beret.

• 2:32:44Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, damn. That is, uh, very cool.

• 2:32:49Speaker 06

  It's fun.

• 2:32:50Shawn Ryan?

  Did you guys get a lot of shit for that?

• 2:32:51Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 2:32:52Shawn Ryan?

  Did you?

• 2:32:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, we got like, oh, you're, you're those guys, you know, like, and some, some people didn't get the jokes. And, and, uh, and military humor is not humor that is appreciated sometimes out of the military. So non-service members would see some things and they'd be like, dude, that's not funny at all. You're like, no, it's, it's, it's absolutely hilarious. You're like, I'm sorry that you don't get it and I'm sorry that you're offended or whatever triggered word is now. But, uh, this is funny. You just don't get it and that's a you problem.

• 2:33:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. How long did that run, uh, go on for?

• 2:33:27Speaker 06

  Wait, 10 years.

• 2:33:28Shawn Ryan?

  10 years?

• 2:33:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that, that carried me into, you know, I fought for IFL and Strike Force, UFC. I was, I was wearing Ranger up on fight shorts and, um, and that, the success of that company and how to do it and how to market really led into me opening new business ventures and how to organize business. There were a lot of mistakes that we made at Ranger up, but. Like with all mistakes, ideally you learn from them. And I was just surrounded by really smart people that, once we made a mistake and they learned from them, they would then tell me what to do. So I didn't make them again, because I would make them again, because I'm dumb. But they would be like, ah, maybe if you learn from this, we'd do this differently.

• 2:34:14Speaker 06

  And it just kept kind of getting better.

• 2:34:20Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting. Yeah, that, I mean, it essentially created an entire subculture out of the military that, that brands have

• 2:34:31Shawn Ryan?

  taken ideas from, learned from, developed new ideas. I mean, that was, that was kind of the start, you know, and it's very cool.

• 2:34:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're definitely proud of it.

• 2:34:44Speaker 06

  You know, we didn't, we didn't exit like the way that you'd want, you know, as you position yourself to sell a company at the right time. We did it in all the wrong ways, which is another hard lesson to learn where, you know, you've been part of a brand for 10 years. And then you kind of watch that brand die on the vine. You know, Ranger Up still exists, you know, I still own a percentage of it. You know, but the, that company, which I don't control anymore, and neither does Nick, is like a shell of what it once was. You know, that, that stings.

• 2:35:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:16Speaker 06

  We're like, man, why don't we sell at this moment? Or why didn't we position to exit at this moment? And we just didn't know any better.

• 2:35:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, plus was a, wasn't your primary focus. You know, so, all right, let's move into Afghanistan. So you're a sniper for use of SOC.

• 2:35:40Speaker 06

  Yeah. So going from

• 2:35:46Speaker 06

  being on a JSOC task force, hunting the number one dude on the planet, to being a single sniper in support of coalition units that do not get tier level targets, you get whatever's there in their battle space.

• 2:36:06Speaker 06

  Um, there's no QRF. There's no support. There's not even another person on target that speaks English and sometimes in some instances, like, like I knew they, some of the guys on the, on target spoke English. They just wouldn't talk to me in English. You know, like I don't speak French. I don't speak German. You know, like I'd fight to go with the Canadians or the British, but um, they weren't trying to get in the fights like the Czechs were, like the Czechs wanted to get into fights. So like me traveling and deploying and going with the Czechs off, for example, into Firebase Anaconda, like they wanted to get into gunfights.

• 2:36:41Shawn Ryan?

  No shit. I never even, I never worked with the Czechs.

• 2:36:44Speaker 06

  Dude, they're bad.

• 2:36:45Shawn Ryan?

  Are they?

• 2:36:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, a bunch of Viking blooded dudes.

• 2:36:49Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, I never got the opportunity. I've seen the, I've seen the Polacks, seen the Polish. And uh, those boys were hungry.

• 2:36:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:36:58Shawn Ryan?

  But I never, yeah, never saw the Czechs.

• 2:37:01Speaker 06

  Kind of same vibe between the two of them. You know, they're like, the, like the Guru and, and Czechs off both have that like something to prove, Eastern Bloc anxiety of post USSR, where like they got, they have a chip on their shoulder. They want to know how to fight. They want to bring lessons learned from combat back to their homes. But you have to be in Eastern Europe when you have Russia knocking on your door often. Um, and then making incursions into Crimea and to Ukraine and, and um, for you to understand the, the permanent anxiety that these special operations guys have because it's on them, right? Like you can say NATO all you want,

• 2:37:46Speaker 06

  but if Russia came to the Polish border, which they were trying to push through, you know, like when they got all the way to Kiev and they're looking at moving all the way up into Poland,

• 2:38:00Speaker 06

  Poland was positioned to find a line in the sand and stand there and die on it. Like you'd have to step over the bodies of every single Polish special operations guy. If you're a Russian soldier trying to invade Poland. And they have had that for 20 years.

• 2:38:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:18Speaker 06

  So then they get to go to war, but they haven't been in war, like real war. And now they want to.

• 2:38:26Speaker 06

  Prove their tactics, their procedures, they wanna make sure that their equipment is right, they're using the right ammo, all the things that you learn from war, they're trying to perfect there. The Czech and the Poles, or maybe the, the most hungry.

• 2:38:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Did you, so, what's it like going out with those guys?

• 2:38:49Speaker 06

  They, uh, don't shoot at them. They, uh, they also don't have the same scrutiny, you know, this is 2008. Now, now we're peak Afghanistan war. I went from like peak Iraq war to, you know, 2007, 8, 9 is peak Afghanistan war. And, um, if you're on, you know, if we're moving, we're, we're on a, a GAF, a ground assault force, we're in vehicles, moving towards a target, and that target starts shooting at the ground assault force, they're just gonna level the target. You know, like, this is the war that we're at now.

• 2:39:34Speaker 06

  It's not like, hey, let's continue to roll up and hit them in a dynamic entry, it's like, cool, let's stop, and we're just gonna drop bombs and mortars on top of these guys, and then we're gonna cruise down as maneuver elements and pick up the bodies. You know, this is, uh, um, we got blown up, this valiant, uh, is gone, with the Czechs, and, uh, it was a IED-initiated ambush, and they had positioned a few hundred foreign fighters and Taliban in this valley with this intent of taking out the entire Czech Special Operations, the Special Forces ODA that was escorting them to Firebase Anaconda,

• 2:40:16Speaker 06

  and all of the resupply that was gonna keep them at this firebase throughout the winter. So there's this gigantic caravan of Jenga trucks, and then the Czech Special Operations Forces and the American escorts to there, and I was the liaison to the Czech Special Forces.

• 2:40:35Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:40:36Speaker 06

  Uh, this is just an example of like, the different types of missions that I went on as that USASOC sniper liaison.

• 2:40:47Speaker 06

  From the time that initiated, that IED initiated ambush kicks off, PKM machines, guns start going off, RPGs are skipping off hoods and slamming into vehicles. Like that was the beginning of a three day gunfight. And if you're doing your battlefield damage assessment, you're looking at a few hundred dead foreign fighters.

• 2:41:12Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:41:15Speaker 06

  You know, the vehicle in front of me gets disintegrated, everybody inside of it dies. You know, like purple hearts were handed out to like, not handed out, that's not the right word. Everybody gets purple hearts from this mission. You know, shrapnel in the back of the necks, we're in villages as we're moving from there all the way to Firebase Anaconda, every time that we moved to the next village, we're having to fight door to door, building to building to get through this village. And you couldn't go around this village because around the outsides of these villages, they had put IEDs.

• 2:41:45Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:41:46Speaker 06

  So it was just like.

• 2:41:47Shawn Ryan?

  And you're with the Czechs?

• 2:41:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:41:49Shawn Ryan?

  How are you communicating with them? How are you integrating with their tactics?

• 2:41:56Speaker 06

  I would mostly talk to the Americans about where we were and where we're going. And I would just observe what the Czechs were doing or how they were maneuvering. And then I would communicate to the team sergeant of the special forces ODA about, hey, we're going to be heading, you know, like we're going north west, our azimuth is this right now, we're going to be moving to this position. And the company commander spoke broken English, but English enough where he would relay to his unit that would be maneuvering to a new position. And then he'd give me like the bluff, he'd give me the wave tops, you know, like this is the bottom line up front, we're moving to this hill and we're going to be providing suppressive fire as the ODA is going to be moving to the south. So I'd call the ODA, be like, hey, we're moving up to this hill, this is going to be

• 2:42:39Speaker 06

  the grid coordinates and I'll give you intel from this position as we go.

• 2:42:48Speaker 06

  That would be rapidly changing and I would always be struggling to find, figure it out like what the heck is going on right now.

• 2:42:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. And so, I mean, I gotta be honest, this sounds like a pretty good mission set to me. I mean, so you're, you're basically a strap hanger for anybody that's doing shit.

• 2:43:05Speaker 06

  That's right. I got to.

• 2:43:06Shawn Ryan?

  Was it hard to integrate in with these units and get them to say, yeah, we want them on the op?

• 2:43:14Speaker 06

  No, you're, I mean, um, you know, you, the, you pass a sniff test, you go into the pre-mission briefing and you ask a few of the right questions. And, you know, how am I going to be an asset? Where would you like me? How would you like me to communicate? What kind of information do you want me to relay to the Americans? Like here are some capabilities that I have in calling for fire. This is the equipment that I'm bringing with me. Is this appropriate? Where I would be useful if I have the stuff. Is there other stuff that you would like me to have that I do have that I can bring if you'd like? You know, the, those type of things really build immediate rapport when you're having kind of an outsider come into your unit.

• 2:43:56Speaker 06

  They, they also recognized the value of having that American special operations liaison. You know, they, if you want air support and you are French special operations and you're trying to call for American call for fire.

• 2:44:15Shawn Ryan?

  That's hard.

• 2:44:16Speaker 06

  Right? But then you have a me there where I can just pick up my phone and be like, my decorative phone and be like, hey, this is where we're at. This is what we need. This is where I need it. Send it and it's done. So like they, they recognize the, the value in that. So with the right questions and the right kind of immediate rapport building, and I would also bounce, each one of the different nationalities had their own bases. When you got to like Bagram or Kandahar. They were all segregated into like the Italians were here, you know, the French were here, the British were here. Do you remember like a

• 2:44:52Shawn Ryan?

  I remember.

• 2:44:53Speaker 06

  So I was, I would, I would go and spent, I'd go have dinners with them. I would, uh, you know, like if there's a soccer game happening, I would go and hang out with them and I was able to go outside of the wire and acquire things that helped build rapport with foreign units. Um, so, you know, I'd bring them a bottle of wine or I'd, you know, like things that are hard to come by in Afghanistan. I'd bring and show up with, you know, some salted meats and, uh, for a soccer game. And, and then, you know, you're, I was E6 with, you know, combat patch, recently came from Afghanistan. I got a Ranger tab. Like they know that I'm the special forces sniper. So there, there, it wasn't as hard to build

• 2:45:37Speaker 06

  that initial rapport. You know, I'm thinking back to my dad about like how to break down barriers. Um, I came bearing gifts. Um, I kept my mouth shut, asked questions when appropriate and, uh, looked for opportunities to contribute.

• 2:45:53Shawn Ryan?

  How many different units did you operate with?

• 2:45:55Speaker 06

  About a dozen.

• 2:45:56Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:45:57Speaker 06

  Over the course of, uh, eight months.

• 2:46:00Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. Did you, so now you're, you're a, you're a special forces sniper. If you had a whole new set of capabilities and skills, did you engage anybody as a sniper?

• 2:46:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, a lot.

• 2:46:14Shawn Ryan?

  Did you kill anybody as a sniper?

• 2:46:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, a lot.

• 2:46:17Shawn Ryan?

  Can we talk about the first one?

• 2:46:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a bad one. It was sad. Like all war is. Um, I wish it was like, dude, I saw this dude square in the back of the target, you know, he had like his head, holding the head of a, of a baby on his shoulder, you know, and, um, he's carrying an AK and I see that he's wearing a VBID vest and he's running towards an American unit and I shot him. Yeah, it was a child carrying a 1875 lever action British rifle. And he was moving in resupply points between this Taliban machine gun position. I saw him move a couple of times. I didn't know how old he was. He's about 500, 600 meters. There's like hours of limited visibility.

• 2:47:04Speaker 06

  So like, I see a guy with a gun moving from like the far side of a hill to a machine gun position. He does it a couple of times. So the next time that I see him moving, I shot him. Very rarely do you get to go and see the people you shoot as a sniper. And this was in our direction of travel. So as the caravan starts to move in that direction and I come and I see this 11, 12 year old kid with a rifle. Actually, have you ever come to my office in Texas, in Austin? I have this gun hanging on my wall.

• 2:47:47Speaker 06

  Right underneath it is the CENTCOM permission from the JAG for me to bring. It's not a war trophy. They said it's not even functional. And I also have US Special Operations Command JAG authorizing me. And I have both of them, like the stamped approved. What were those like little squeeze things that put a permanent mark on the paper? You know, with the JAG signature, yeah, with their little pressure seal. Both of those things sitting right underneath there. And it reminds me of two things. One is every time I hear a politician say like, why do you need a gun? Like, what is the importance of the Second Amendment? We have F-16s and F-18s and M1 Abrams. And I think back to a little boy, a peasant, a nomad that had been kicking.

• 2:48:34Speaker 06

  The American Special Operations ass in this valley for three days. And he's running around with an 1875 musket, one man with a rifle protecting his own land. How powerful he is and the power of the Second Amendment. And how this insurmountable force of one, one good guy with a gun, how powerful that is. So that's one reason. And the second is to remind me the cost of war. It's never the way that you want it to be. It's never the way that it is in the movies. It is horrible. It is young. It is pain and, uh, you know, I would. I don't want my son to ever have to shoot an 11 year old kid carrying a gun that doesn't even work.

• 2:49:17Speaker 06

  That's war. Everything else is for the movies. Does that still haunt you? Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. It's war. Yeah. Someday we'll have peace. We'll all live together. But until then, this is what war looks like. You can have these ideals and dreams of grandeur, but it's eviscerated bodies and burnt smell of hair and flesh and children that are raped and tortured and die from overpressure wounds and bad guys all the same, not but two days later.

• 2:50:01Speaker 06

  From me shooting that kid, I throw a grenade through a window with a PKM machine gun. Mike Goble. Hero. One of the greatest Green Brays to walk the face of the planet. Roy Benavides level Green Bray. I walk up to a door and I don't know how he knew this. I don't know if, uh, he was precog, like maybe he came from the future and came back in time. And I walk up to this door, divine intervention has happened multiple times in my life. I walk up to this door. We see bad guys move into this building. And, uh, as soon as I go to reach for the handle of the door, Mike and I, we always had like some friction. We had been in a couple of fights over some dumb stuff, using a machine gun position. He had a pistol out.

• 2:50:46Speaker 06

  I was like, why aren't you on your machine gun? He's like, well, I want a pistol kill. Like you're, you're a stupid idiot and we'd fist fight. So like.

• 2:50:56Speaker 06

  Fast forward to this. Typical Neanderthal conversation. A hundred percent.

• 2:51:01Speaker 06

  I put my hand on this door and he hits me so hard and shoves me and I stumble back and fall over as this door gets shredded with machine gun fire. And I don't know if he like heard a bolt drop or if he heard a selector switch. There's no way because I was at this door, right? Like I didn't hear anything. All I know is like, I just start falling back and I'm like trying to get my feet because I'm gonna come at him and knock his teeth through his face because he just shoved me because I thought he wanted to be the number one guy through the door. And as soon as he shoves me, it pushes him back and this door just gets shredded with machine gun fire. And uh, saves my life. No, no question had I been there like a half a second later and Mike Goldblatt not been there, I'd be dead.

• 2:51:45Speaker 06

  And uh, I see as this door like kind of starts swinging that there's a machine gun sticking out of this window and I take a grenade, I throw this frag grenade through this window. Again, it's not like the movies, right? There's not like this flame, like there's not this like da da da. It's just this thud. And uh, what you want to hear is silence. You know, all I hear is women and children start screaming.

• 2:52:14Speaker 06

  This guy barricaded himself and surrounded himself with a bunch of women and children in this room. And uh, you know, this is two days after coming off this kid.

• 2:52:24Speaker 06

  You got a lot of Spartan stuff in here. Do you remember the plungers behind the line of the 300? So you'd have the guys in the front, the phalanx, right? The short swords and the spears and they would move that line forward and then step over the bodies of the people that were fighting that would die against the shields. The next row behind them were long spears. So they were guys that were stabbing through the shoulders and over the shoulders of the forces that were coming. So the, the wall would come, they'd attack, they'd close the wall, spears would come. And as you'd step over these bodies, the third row would be a plunger and he would have this metal spike and he'd just stab these guys as the Spartans would move forward. Every night as we moved forward, I would sit there all night long with a thermal imager

• 2:53:09Speaker 06

  and I would splash rounds into every heated body on the battlefield. Holy shit, dude. And I did it every night for eight hours.

• 2:53:21Speaker 06

  Couple hundred rounds a night. Shit. The only one that could shoot out. So the, with these RG33s with the Crows amazing targeting system. What we didn't have was a lot of ammo. So the Crows has thermal. They'd be able to spot a target. I would lay and they'd give me an azimuth and a distance and a direction, right? And with the distance and direction, I'd kind of PID the body. And then I would dump a couple of rounds in it. And then they'd move it five degrees. And then give me a new distance and direction. I would adjust and I'd splash a couple of rounds. Repeat every night. And that, uh.

• 2:54:07Speaker 06

  Exhausting. Yeah, it's heavy. And then you drive out and you just see these bodies that have, you know, your holes in them. To, uh, to go into the next village that a dude is fighting from a room that he's surrounded with women and children. This is war. Fuck war.

• 2:54:30Speaker 06

  Man. How did that deployment end?

• 2:54:36Speaker 06

  With no elation or grandeur, with no celebration, with no, um, time. You know? A, uh, a redeployment date for me to go to another school. That was a, I had that rifle, which I'd kept in my, my little tiny crappy plywood sleeping area. Um, and I remember like getting in fight after fight after, with an Air Force JAG guy with like, uh, the redeployment security clerk, he's like, you can't come up like, I can, I literally can, like this is paperwork with a stamp that outranks you saying that I can.

• 2:55:21Speaker 06

  Like you can't, I'm like, this gun's coming with me. Um, it's like that fight to bring that gun back home was crazy. But ultimately, you know, the, that deployment date ended and I'm by myself. Like I didn't fly home with a team. I didn't like high five, like let's go back. My wife met me at the green ramp when I landed. There was nobody there. Damn.

• 2:55:47Shawn Ryan?

  How was it coming home to your wife?

• 2:55:50Speaker 06

  Broken.

• 2:55:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was a, I was a broken dude.

• 2:55:55Shawn Ryan?

  How was she?

• 2:55:58Speaker 06

  I didn't know her. It was eight months since I saw her. And in eight months, you know, I

• 2:56:06Speaker 06

  did the worst things that a person can do to another person. And she didn't, right? She's at home. She's working every day. She's taking care of our shepherd. You know, she's running marathons and, you know, she's finishing her MBA. And so she's developing as a human and I'm

• 2:56:25Speaker 06

  developing in a totally different way. You know, not better or worse, just different. So

• 2:56:32Speaker 06

  I was at a Best Buy.

• 2:56:36Speaker 06

  This guy in this BMW starts cruising by. And he's smoking cloves. There was an Indian restaurant that was like just a couple buildings away, but clearly it was like downwind from it because I could smell like the curry from the Indian restaurant and I could smell his clove. And he was listening to some Arabic music. And then he's like in a bad guy's car. Cause like, that's what all of them drew. And I, I mean, I was thinking about just like smoking this dude in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I've been home like three days and I was like, man, I gotta, I wanna, I wanna go back to my house for a few days. They had just had the UFC fight for the troops the same weekend that I got home.

• 2:57:21Speaker 06

  And I got home the day after it happened. So like Brock Lesnar is in town, Randy Couture is in town. Like, these are all dudes that I knew. And, um, and my

• 2:57:33Speaker 06

  and I love the brotherhood of combat arms, specifically special operations. Alex Ortiz. And, uh,

• 2:57:44Speaker 06

  no, this sucks because I can't remember a couple of their names because they're dead now. Some of my teammates.

• 2:57:52Speaker 06

  That sucks.

• 2:57:56Speaker 06

  They knew and had heard what that deployment was like for me. And

• 2:58:04Speaker 06

  you know, when I'd call back to give them updates to my team sergeant, I'd call Alex, I'd be like, hey, boss, just want to give an update. I'm back. I just got back from this hitch that I was with the British or the Canadians or whatever.

• 2:58:17Speaker 06

  He's like, hey, man, I heard like I'm getting updates every single day on the red side. So first of all, I just want you to know that I'm super proud of you. I want you to not feel any pressure to do anything like, you know,

• 2:58:32Speaker 06

  be the best that you can be, but you're not proving anything to anybody. Like, we're proud to have you. And like that really, that was the first time that I was like, I felt like I belonged there.

• 2:58:44Speaker 06

  Was because of Alex. And even like my team leader was supportive. We're not highly developed on the emotional IQ scale.

• 2:58:58Speaker 06

  So having, you know, a superior give you that affirmation was rare. And so when I came home, they were, they were there

• 2:59:09Speaker 06

  physically, you know, my wife was there like emotionally, like I don't know what you need right now, but I'm like here. And then the team was like, you know, take whatever time you need, but we're not going to let you get out of the saddle. So like, we're going to be sending you to another school immediately. So like, take a week, figure things out and let's get you back on the horse.

• 2:59:32Speaker 06

  You had kids too? Yep. Yeah, two, two daughters from pre military. They were

• 2:59:43Speaker 06

  they were born.

• 2:59:46Speaker 06

  Ten months after nine eleven. So I tried to recruit on nine eleven and in this kind of period of debauchery of me living as a broken man without purpose. Trying to, because I was trying to get in the military. Like, it took me eighteen months trying to figure out what branch I'm going to. They had delayed enlistment things or trying to put me in like this I R R thing. And I had no idea how any of it worked. So I, I knew where I wanted to go, but I had like no purpose or direction. And, uh, you know, a young man without purpose is a very dangerous thing. So, uh, yeah, I was, got a few girls pregnant, thought I got AIDS.

• 3:00:28Speaker 06

  You know, went for a swim in the Pacific Ocean, butt ass naked, out into the fog, with no plan about how to get back, just, uh, trying to figure things out. Were you hoping to die out there? Not consciously. You know, there was no, I was trying to get baptized. You know, I was trying to like wash away. I mean, at that moment, I literally thought I had AIDS. I had a, I had a girl that I had partied with after a cage fight and she was a ring girl. She comes and she is trying to find all of her partners because she tested positive for HIV. And, um, so

• 3:01:08Speaker 06

  one kudos to her is she's trying to track everybody down and be like, hey, you know. So she walks into the gym. I have a few girls pregnant at this moment of my life. My grandpa's dying of emphysema and I can't do the thing that I want to do, which is go into the military. And, uh, you know, post nine eleven, it's just chaos. Like this, this is, you're in basic training, which just blows my mind. And going to Bud's like the same year that I'm walking into the ocean, butt ass naked and swimming into the fog. I just want to, I would have done anything to be where you were.

• 3:01:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:01:45Shawn Ryan?

  That is some heavy shit, man.

• 3:01:49Speaker 06

  But you find purpose.

• 3:01:50Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's talk about divine intervention. So you're a Christian.

• 3:01:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:01:53Shawn Ryan?

  You're a man of faith.

• 3:01:54Speaker 06

  Very much so.

• 3:01:55Shawn Ryan?

  Talked to, we just talked about something that happened. And now we're getting into this, which we had discussed either last night or this morning.

• 3:02:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, even getting plucked out of this water. Like, I get naked. I swim a mile or two miles out into the fog. Have you ever tried to recover somebody from the fog? It's, it's nearly impossible.

• 3:02:15Shawn Ryan?

  Just trying to recover somebody in the ocean at night.

• 3:02:19Speaker 06

  We just lost two SEALs at night that went into the drink as they're trying to board. Like, we knew where they fell in. Like, we're talking about an entire body of water where nobody saw me walk into this water. Supposedly, some, some old woman, uh, had a witness of me getting into the water. It's impossible. This is like pre-cell phone. Like, there's, there's a pager on, on the sand next to my wallet.

• 3:02:44Speaker 06

  There's no vantage point that any house with a phone can see me. So that doesn't make any sense. But ultimately, a Coast Guard boat, and I hate that I got rescued by the Coast Guard.

• 3:02:59Speaker 06

  Ultimately, a Coast Guard boat with this dude with his feet hanging off the front of this boat cruises up and is like, hey, what are you doing? Tell him I'm swimming and he makes fun of me. I give him a brief update of like, what's happening in my life? And he's like, man, I was gonna offer you a ride back in, but maybe you just wanna stay in the water. And I was like, nah, it's cold. And he leans forward, he like, looks at my deck and he goes, I see it's cold. Like, but like, lit a fire, you know? I was like, alright. He's like, well, I'll give you an option. You can clamber, you can climb up onto the boat, but from this point forward, you're gonna treat your life with a little bit more respect than you do at this moment, or did at this moment.

• 3:03:43Speaker 06

  I, I said, alright. And he threw that ladder down. Ah, man, it was so hard to climb up. I've been in that water maybe an hour, hour and a half. To climb up that rope net with my hands that weren't even working right. In the Pacific Ocean, in Maro Bay, I'm gonna guess it's 52.

• 3:04:00Speaker 06

  Fifty-three degrees. I've been out there hour, hour and a half. You know, long enough to be in bad shape. And he put one of those wool navy blankets on me and it felt like a million needles were burning, steel needles were like burning in my back. It was like the best feeling I've ever felt. I was alive.

• 3:04:22Speaker 06

  There's no way that Mike Goebbels heard that bolt drop and saved my life. There's no way that some woman saw me walk into the ocean and was able to give a specific distance and direction as to where I was in the water. It's impossible. And there's no way that in the fog, in the darkness, a boat would be able to come up and find somebody in the water. There's no way.

• 3:04:45Speaker 06

  Go forward to my wife and I have been married about 10 years and coming back from twentieth something trip.

• 3:04:55Speaker 06

  Burnt emotionally, you know, raw, all the wires are exposed.

• 3:05:03Speaker 06

  And I'm just gonna call it quits, you know, or I'm done. And

• 3:05:12Speaker 06

  we're together and I don't know, we hadn't been to church. I hadn't been to church in 10 years. I, I couldn't reconcile like what was happening in war and the things that were seen with that there's the, there's an existence of a loving God. And

• 3:05:33Speaker 06

  so

• 3:05:35Speaker 06

  we walk into this church and the pastor is giving a sermon on the importance of marriage and why it is one of the most important things that you can do in your whole entire life. And I was like, well, that's kind of awkward because we're kind of already in this let's be done moment. And she's not really looking at me. I'm not looking at her. And he's like, you know, and, and starting today, we have this new small group called Marriage Matters and there is room for everybody that wants to go. If there's a thousand people in here that want to start Marriage Matters, we will find a thousand slots and

• 3:06:16Speaker 06

  And come as you are. We don't care what you have going on in your life. Just come. And like she won't look at me, I won't look at her, you know, and I was like, oh, this is awkward. And she's like, yeah, like, what do you want to do? And the girl next to my wife that I've never met before, her name is Jen Ferguson. Jen Ferguson, she leans forward and she goes, well, I'll tell you guys what you want to do. So I'm the small group leader for this marriage matters thing. And I was like, do you want Jen? I need you to not talk for a little while. I don't know you and I just want you to pump the brakes a spinch. And like, you're awesome energy. He's like, you're an 11. I need you to get like a two and I knew you had a two over there. So, you know, on that day, my wife and I walk into a marriage matters class and saves our marriage.

• 3:07:03Speaker 06

  It's going to get even more weird and you're, at this exact same time, one of my older daughters, Sabrina. There's a, there's a well, there's a hole. It's called the Deep Blue Well in Texas. It's called Jacob's Well. It's about an 80 foot, straight down dive. But an entire river comes up from this spring. So you're swimming, swimming against this current and it's about 20 by 20 wide hole that goes deep into the water. You're not allowed to scuba dive in it because a bunch of people have been lost and they died down there. It's a very difficult free dive. And in the same time that I am trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do in this marriage.

• 3:07:46Speaker 06

  Sabrina and I go there and she's a great swimmer and she's hanging out on the top. I do a free dive down to the bottom, grab a rock, fight my way back up, set the rock there, go back through my, my free dive, pre-dive breath protocols, take the rock, slip off and go all the way down to the bottom. I'm sitting down there, maybe about two minutes and I'm just like, it's cold. This is like Texas spring aquifer water. And just in the darkness and it's very eerie. A lot of people can't even like swim over it because it's literally just this straight down blue hole.

• 3:08:28Speaker 06

  And I see this glimmer of this ring or of this metal. And I swim over there and I fan it and I find a size 14 Irish band titanium wedding ring.

• 3:08:44Speaker 06

  And I grab it and I swim back up to the top and I'm like,

• 3:08:50Speaker 06

  Sabrina, look what I just found. She's like, where'd you find that? I was like, at the bottom. Are you kidding me? Clearly, like, somebody had jumped off and it had fallen off their finger. And I have giant apans. It's my ring size. You can't resize titanium. And it's an Irish band, Kennedy, I'm obviously Irish. And I'd taken my ring off, my original ring, and I hadn't been wearing it. And then sitting here at the bottom of

• 3:09:19Speaker 06

  this deep blue hole is my new wedding band at this exact same time of my life.

• 3:09:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, wow.

• 3:09:31Speaker 06

  I'm not saying confirmation bias that I can project that these things I wanted to happen, but they did happen. And they're so statistically impossible that I can't sit back objectively and be like, these were coincidences. You know, there's no way I didn't die in that valley. There's no way I didn't die at that door. There's no way I didn't die in the water. There's no way that that ring wasn't put there for me.

• 3:10:02Shawn Ryan?

  Still have it?

• 3:10:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:10:05Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 3:10:07Speaker 06

  Wear it every day at home.

• 3:10:10Speaker 06

  I don't shoot, train, or travel with rings. It causes extra problems.

• 3:10:22Shawn Ryan?

  Does your faith continue to develop? Do you practice it?

• 3:10:26Speaker 06

  I definitely practice it. You know, I read the Bible. I do devotionals. I am a...

• 3:10:36Speaker 06

  I know God exists. I know a loving God exists. I know that there's divine purpose. I know that every single person was made for a purpose and finding that purpose. And I've found my purpose and I know why I'm here.

• 3:10:52Shawn Ryan?

  What is your purpose?

• 3:10:55Speaker 06

  It's literally the mission statement of our company. And everything that I do is tied back to preserving and protecting human life and enabling and empowering people to provide for their families and be able to expand freedom. Like, that is why I'm here.

• 3:11:11Shawn Ryan?

  It's a damn good purpose.

• 3:11:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:11:13Shawn Ryan?

  I think on that note, let's take a quick break.

• 3:11:18Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company, the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 3:11:29Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 3:11:35Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 3:11:39Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 3:11:42Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 3:11:43Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 without parent.

• 3:11:49Shawn Ryan?

  How many guys out there are worried about brain health? You know, all we hear about is fitness. Everybody's getting ready for bikini season because spring's right around the corner. I'm personally more concerned about my brain. You look around, you see all these brain diseases that are getting out of control. I'm going to take everything I can to improve the health of my brain. And I'm going to tell you about my five favorite supplements from Laird Superfoods that help with brain health. All right, the first thing I do every morning is I have Laird Superfood Creamer. It's got adaptogens and functional mushrooms, which are great for brain health. I put this in my tea. Tastes amazing.

• 3:12:32Shawn Ryan?

  Who likes vegetables? Cool. Me neither. That's why I take Laird's Daily Greens. Just pour it in a cup, shoot it real quick, you got your daily vegetable intake. Plus, guess what? Yep, that's right. Functional mushroom extract, there's six different kinds in here. Once again, great for brain health. After greens, we got daily reds. This one doesn't actually have any functional mushrooms in it, but I can't stand beets. I think they taste like shit. And so I take one scoop of this, put it in my water, and I don't have to eat beets anymore. Alright, we're winding down the day now. This is the next supplement I take every single night. Laird's Sleep and Recovery helps me sleep, helps me recover from my daily workout. And guess what? Yep, you're right.

• 3:13:15Shawn Ryan?

  It has mushroom extract. Guess what? It's good for your brain. And I saved the best for last. Most of you know this. My favorite supplement at Laird's is Performance Mushrooms. Has a ton of mushroom extract. Super, super good for your brain. Take it every single day, sometimes multiple times a day. These are my five favorite supplements from Laird's Superfoods. You can go over to lairdsuperfood.com, use the promo code SRS, save 20%. Ladies and gents, I would not have partnered with this company if I didn't believe in them. They take the cleanest ingredients. They try to source everything in America. Unless they find a better ingredient that's more quality somewhere else.

• 3:14:00Shawn Ryan?

  I think we can all appreciate that. Once again, lairdsuperfood.com, use the promo code SRS, that'll save you 20%.

• 3:14:10Shawn Ryan?

  I want to give a big thank you out right now to all the Vigilance Elite patrons out there that are watching the show right now. Just want to say thank you, guys. You are our top supporters and you're what makes this show actually happen. If you're not on Vigilance Elite Patreon, I want to tell you a little bit about what's going on in there. So. We do a little bit of everything. There's plenty of behind the scenes content from the actual Sean Ryan Show. On top of that, basically what I do is I take a lot of the questions that I get from you guys, or the patrons, and then I turn them into videos. So we get, right now, there's a lot of concern about self-defense, home defense, crimes on

• 3:14:54Shawn Ryan?

  the rise, all throughout the country, actually all throughout the world. And so, we talk about everything from how to prep your home, how to clear your home, how to get familiar with a firearm, both rifle and pistol, for beginners and advanced. We talk about mindset, we talk about defensive driving. We have an end of the month live chat that I'm on, at the end of every month, where we can talk about whatever topics you guys have. It's actually done on Zoom. You might enjoy it. Check it out. And, if Zoom's not your thing, or you don't like live chats, like I said, there's a library of well over 100 videos on where to start

• 3:15:34Shawn Ryan?

  with prepping, all the firearm stuff, pretty much anything you can think of, it's on there. So anyways, go to www.patreon.com/vigilanceelite, or just go on the link in the description, it'll take you right there. And if you don't want to, and you just want to continue to watch the show, that's fine too. I appreciate it either way. Love you all. Let's get back to the show. Thank you.

• 3:16:06Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Tim, back from the break.

• 3:16:08Speaker 06

  Phew, I needed that break.

• 3:16:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it was getting pretty heavy there. And I appreciate you diving deep for that last segment there. But, so now, you're leaving the CIF, and UFC is about to pick you up.

• 3:16:23Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 3:16:23Shawn Ryan?

  How does that, how does that even happen?

• 3:16:27Speaker 06

  So I was fighting the whole time that, when I'd come back from deployments, or I'd get back from a school, I fought five days after graduating from Ranger School.

• 3:16:38Speaker 06

  Most people don't walk for months. Like, you don't have to take a PT test for a year after graduating from Ranger School. I graduated from Ranger School and I get a call from Leo Korolinski, who is one of the owners of the team, one of the teams in the International Fight League, the IFL on Fox. And he's, "Hey, I have a, I have a fight this weekend. I lost my light heavyweight. Can you come in? I heard that you're a fighter and you're on some shows that you're just in.

• 3:17:05Speaker 06

  Can you come this weekend?" I was like, "Well, it's, it's Monday, like weigh-ins are Friday, fight's Saturday." I was like, "All right." So five days later, I weigh in on Friday and I go and I fight Dante Rivera. Incredible black belt, professional fighter. And beat the brakes off of him. And Leo Korolinski is like, "Who are you? Like, what is going on here?" And I'm trying to explain to him, like, "Everybody on Fort Bragg or on Coronado, all of us trained. All of us fought. All of us, like, it is just part of the, in every course that you'd go to, whether it's Sephardic or Sephauic or Sistic, every single morning, you're fighting, you're grappling, you're,

• 3:17:48Speaker 06

  you know, on the CMMS range, you're, like, it's just fighting." And they wanted to keep that warrior spirit healthy. And I was like, "I hate to break this to you, but I literally know about a thousand guys that fight as well as I do, and they're at Fort Bragg currently. But, uh, but I'm here if you want me to fight." So I kept on fighting. And that went well. And it went unnoticed for a while. Until one night, live on Fox, a couple of Sergeant Majors were at a famous bar in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. And they see this kid with a shaved head walk out to the ring. And it says, "A Ranger from Fort Bragg, North Carolina." There are no Rangers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. And they're like, "Well, that's probably one of our guys, isn't it?" And they see me go and knock this guy out in a main event fight.

• 3:18:33Speaker 06

  And so they go, "Tim Kennedy." They get on the Global and they search a Staff Sergeant Tim Kennedy. It's signed to C37. And I get back, I'm on leave. I haven't broken any rules. So I took permissive leave to, to travel. Waited in on Friday. So I took leave on Thursday and Friday, traveled Friday, waited in. Fought on Saturday, flew home on Sunday and I get home Monday morning at six, I show up for PT and my team sergeant goes, "Hey, uh, we have to go down to group headquarters." I was like, "Like our group?" They're like, "No, no, no, Special Forces Command."

• 3:19:16Speaker 06

  I was like, "Okay, you got a good uniform?" I'm like, "Marginally," you know, so I go in there. The only thing that was good was my beret. I looked like a dumpster fire.

• 3:19:28Speaker 06

  We walk in and the command sergeant major of Special Forces Command, of US Special Operations Command and of group are sitting there and they're like, "So, hey, how was your weekend?" I was like, "It was fantastic." You know, "We saw that you're fighting." I was like, "Roger?" "Did I do something wrong?" And they're like, "Well, you can't do both." I was like, "I've been doing both. I've literally done both for the past eight years." You know, "You just saw it as a main event fight, um, but like I've been, I've been fighting for the past eight years. I've, I've, you know, a couple dozen fights in my duration of here at Special Forces." They, they said, "You have to choose. You have to pick between the two."

• 3:20:12Speaker 06

  And, um, "I don't want to." I was like, "No, like, make me." Like, "We will make you. This is the Army. This is how this works. You'll literally have a choice. So you can do one or the other."

• 3:20:25Speaker 06

  So- What was the rationale behind that? I don't know. Digital footprint, facial recognition. I don't know. It's, it's, I've always fought this like misconception about what I'm, I was 100% a company guy. They could have told me to do anything. I would have worn anything. I have always just wanted to support the regiment in the best way that I possibly could. Most people couldn't understand, they couldn't control me and that scared them, even though they didn't need to control me because I would have done anything that they asked. You're already loyal. Uh, to, to the death.

• 3:21:01Speaker 06

  But they couldn't understand that because they couldn't control me doesn't mean that they can't control me because I voluntarily would have done anything that they needed to do for the regiment. You want me to go on suicide prevention, recruiting, retention? I would have done any of that. Just let me fight. If you leave me alone and let me stay on my team and continue to deploy and go to specialty schools and develop as an NCO and also win every single of the most prestigious fighting tournaments within the military and bring that recognition and honor back to the regiment, which I was doing. That gigantic trophy on your wall, I brought that to you. All of those ribbons, those are mine. I got awards for those. Oh, you don't care. Okay, got it.

• 3:21:45Speaker 06

  The Green Berets have two National Guard Special Forces groups, 19th Group and 20th Group. So I was leaving active duty. The National Guard, they're part-time soldiers and full-time civilians. So you, as an M-Day soldier, you work some weekends a month, a couple of weeks a year, and then deploy when called upon. And so when I was trying to figure out, how do I do both? Because I'm going to do both. I get a call from the Texas National Guard, 19th Special Forces Group, and they're like, hey, come to us. You can fight. We'll use

• 3:22:24Speaker 06

  you as recruiting. And you get to go to an ODA. The day I got out, they just left me alone, pay me as an E7 salary. Nice. Pennies, right? I would have done anything the Army wanted. They didn't. So then I go to the National Guard, and the National Guard pays a contract to me as a marketing, recruiting, retention tool, and they're paying me hundreds of thousands of dollars to put "Go Army" on my butt. No way. I would have done it for free. You know, just let me fight, man. Good for you, man. So that was the beginning of then the marketing and media was a forced position

• 3:23:09Speaker 06

  from the Army saying you can't do both. Damn. I mean, it turned out. How do you feel about it? I don't know.

• 3:23:21Speaker 06

  Teammates got in fights when I wasn't there. You know, deployments that didn't go perfect. And the what ifs, right? Like, never go down that road, because that is, that is just one that leaves to despair. But like, had I been there, would this have gone different? Could I have been part of this operation? And it, you know, could I have been with Mike Goble when he died? And one of his many deployments later into Afghanistan. He saved my life. I wasn't there when he died. Like, would that be different? I don't know.

• 3:23:54Speaker 06

  Andrew McKenna, like, I don't know.

• 3:23:58Shawn Ryan?

  Got it. I understand that.

• 3:24:03Shawn Ryan?

  But UFC?

• 3:24:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I go for the title runs. So I commit to fighting. I'm a part-time soldier, full-time fighter. And while I'm doing that, I am contracting for a bunch of different for-profit government contractors. And, you know, because I still got to put food on the table. So I'm, I have a skill set and my, so my full-time job is like fighting and contracting. And then I'm like a part-time soldier.

• 3:24:32Shawn Ryan?

  Shit. I mean, food on the table, you're making hundreds of thousands for wearing army on your, on your fight shorts.

• 3:24:41Shawn Ryan?

  You're contracting.

• 3:24:42Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 3:24:42Shawn Ryan?

  You got to be making at least two, three hundred thousand a year off of that.

• 3:24:47Speaker 06

  Yep. Hundred bucks a day at the time.

• 3:24:50Shawn Ryan?

  And, and you're, you're in the National Guard.

• 3:24:54Speaker 06

  Yep. And then the fight purses.

• 3:24:56Shawn Ryan?

  What? Yeah. So what is, how does it work? How does it work in there?

• 3:25:01Speaker 06

  So, pre, we'll say the Reebok deal. So the UFC controls all apparel now. So you wear what they want you to wear and you get a, you get, depending on how many fights you have, you get a purse, an apparel salary purse. But back then, you could sell every inch of your shorts and your fight banner. So I could take on, you know, like Trigicon or a firearm, a knife, a, I would never do it, but like Condom Depot, or like you could have any sponsor that you want. And they would pay you to have their name on your banner and on your fight shorts.

• 3:25:40Speaker 06

  Then you would have your fight purse and then you had kind of like the commercial marketing. So, you know, as a professional athlete and with the military background, there are a bunch of different commercial entities that were like, hey, will you film this commercial for us? Like, this is the very beginning of social media, like Facebook and MySpace. And so like, social media influencing wasn't a thing, but television and radio and Sirius XM were. So you could like, go on there, you could record like a 30 second, "Ham Tim Kennedy, I'm a UFC fighter. You know, I'm also like a Green Beret, blah, blah, blah, insert like all the cringey things and you get paid for those things." So I'd take my fight purse, I would take my banner, fight shorts, marketing purse,

• 3:26:24Speaker 06

  and then I'd take like my commercial purse and break those down into these quarters where my wife and I would then like reinvest those monies into businesses.

• 3:26:32Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:26:32Speaker 06

  Because we're still just living off of one of our respective solid incomes.

• 3:26:37Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:26:38Speaker 06

  And, uh, and she was a W2 still as a government contractor and as we're trying to like buy a house and continue to like grow our position, it was hard to go to a bank as a professional fighter and overseas contractor.

• 3:26:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:52Speaker 06

  It's like, uh, "No, no, I promise they're gonna pay me. Like, I just gotta find some more poachers or some pirates."

• 3:26:56Shawn Ryan?

  "I'm gonna win."

• 3:26:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:26:58Shawn Ryan?

  "Leave me alone. Give me the loan." But, um, I mean, how are you, how are you managing? So you're fighting at the number one. I mean, what did that mean to you to be fighting in the UFC at the, I mean, you just came from the apex of military special operations. You went to the CIF, then you had an extremely eventful deployment in Afghanistan. Now, you're, you're, you're fighting at the apex of the US military. Now you're fighting at the apex in mixed martial arts.

• 3:27:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:27:32Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what's the sense of accomplishment?

• 3:27:35Speaker 06

  There, there's no... Like I haven't arrived. There's no feeling of like I've accomplished anything. I wanted, I wanted to be the world champion. That's what I wanted. I wanted that. Tim Kennedy is the world champion of the world. And, you know, fighting for the world title a couple of times, fought for the Strikeforce middleweight title against Chakravarti and Luke Rockhold. You know, when I go into my first fight in the UFC, I'm fighting Hodra Gracie, like the most accomplished, one of the greatest grapplers in the history of pugilistic sports. My first fight in the UFC. A stay or go. Winner stays, loser goes. You know, to go to fight main events against like Michael Bisping, and I was the last person to fight

• 3:28:18Speaker 06

  in a UFC fight for the troops. I fought Hafan Atal, I was supposed to fight Lito Machida, but fought at Fort Carson in an aircraft hangar as the main event.

• 3:28:31Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, that's cool.

• 3:28:32Speaker 06

  For the UFC, surrounded by service members.

• 3:28:36Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man, that's awesome.

• 3:28:37Speaker 06

  Dude, I mean, talking about full circle.

• 3:28:39Shawn Ryan?

  Whoa, that's gotta be, I mean, that's gotta be a, just an awesome experience and adrenaline just pumping and, I mean.

• 3:28:50Speaker 06

  Again, like, I hadn't felt like I arrived and I didn't feel like I deserved to be there. And I had so much guilt, like I had abandoned all these men and women in uniform. And now I'm in there as a prizefighter, making, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars and all these men and women are in their uniform in an aircraft hangar for their first opportunity to see a live UFC event. And, you know, it like, it kind of stung a little bit. And Joe Rogan walks in to talk to me after, and I could barely formulate words. You know, it was, I'm sorry, I love you, I wish I was with you. Like, that's what I was able to get out.

• 3:29:28Shawn Ryan?

  So you really felt a lot of guilt?

• 3:29:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:29:33Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, man.

• 3:29:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. Fighting.

• 3:29:37Shawn Ryan?

  How were you able to, I mean, how were you able to compete at that level? I mean, I don't know a lot about mixed martial arts and I don't know a lot about the UFC, but I do can appreciate the dedication that it must take to get to that level. And, you know, I hear about these guys' fight camps and how much time, blood, sweat and tears goes into training for especially a title fight. But you don't have that kind of time because you're still deploying, you're still in National Guard. And on top of that, you're doing, I guess I shouldn't assume anything, but probably combat deployments with US military contracting companies.

• 3:30:21Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 3:30:22Shawn Ryan?

  So you're going to war, coming home, what, doing a quick fight camp and then going right into the ring?

• 3:30:27Speaker 06

  You could stay in shape when you're overseas. I wrote this online, they're called Letters from a Foreign Land. And it was talking about like me doing snatches with 50 cows and running up hills with transmissions and filling them up ammo cans, like all of the unconventional training that I was doing while I was overseas to stay in shape. And then I would come back and I would immediately go into fight camp. So I'd fly to Albuquerque, New Mexico with Jackson Winklejohn, best fight team on the planet at the time. And we have John Jones, Rashad Evans, George St Pierre, Carlos Conde, Demisio Page, Holly Holm, like the list just goes on and on of all of these incredible world champions. And I'm Brian Stan and I'm one of those guys there.

• 3:31:12Speaker 06

  So I could immediately walk into this room and the best in the world are all consolidated into this one place. There's only like three or four super camps on the planet at the time and Jackson Winklejohn was one of them. And so I start doing my fight camps there. I'm at altitude and I'm training with the best in the world. So I come back in shape.

• 3:31:36Speaker 06

  Arguably, had I taken a different approach, it would, that little bio would not say two-time title challenger, you know, that stings quite a bit. Cause I never won the world title. I was a perennial contender that was, you know, on three different title runs, fought for the title twice, was positioned to fight for the third time and, and um, never won.

• 3:32:02Shawn Ryan?

  What could you have done differently?

• 3:32:06Speaker 06

  I was always torn. I don't think I could have done anything differently because like my heart was always in two different places. I wanted to be in Africa. I wanted to be in the Middle East. I mean desperately, like I couldn't not be there. And um, and then I wanted to be a world champion. You know, my, this is the worst thing about the ego. There's my ego that wanted those two things. And um, I probably didn't need either of them. You know, how about like being like the best teammate or the best employee or the best husband or the best father? I argue that those are far superior to these other

• 3:32:48Speaker 06

  two wants, but those were the things that were driving me was to be in war and to uh, be a world champion.

• 3:32:58Shawn Ryan?

  Are there any similarities between being on the battlefield in the thick of it and being in the ring in the thick of it?

• 3:33:06Speaker 06

  Physiologically, there's a ton of similarities, you know, like the exhaustion physically and putting all of the, all of who you are and everything that you have into this moment, you know, to not get knocked out or choked out. Similarly, like putting everything that you are and everything that you have into this moment to not die. So like physically, it's very similar. You know, and when a commentator is talking about like, man, these guys are going to battle. Look at this war. Man, it feels like it when you're in there. And uh, like I would, I'm never, would never castigate or disparage, you know, one of the commentators or one of the athletes that are out there that describe what they're going through as, you know, like as a war or battle. Cause that, I mean, it's, it's,

• 3:33:50Speaker 06

  you're out there completely raw and exposed. You know, you're wearing shorts, a cup, tape, gloves and a mouthpiece. And you're going to go try to knock out another dude in a cage. It's um, it's pretty.

• 3:34:06Speaker 06

  Pretty Gladiator.

• 3:34:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's, that's as close as it gets, right? But, um, I mean, what were, how would you prepare yourself mentally for?

• 3:34:19Speaker 06

  You know? I never had it.

• 3:34:20Shawn Ryan?

  What are the similarities between preparing yourself for going on an operation? And going into the ring?

• 3:34:29Speaker 06

  They're, they're really, really similar. You, um, you know, that, that preparation and that training and that skill development, you know, on the military side, those core metal tasks, making sure that you know how to shoot, move, communicate, medicate. You know, when you look at the, the fighter, making sure that I'm able to grapple both offensively and defensively, making sure I'm, I have good offense and defense as, as a striker, being able to dictate range and execute my game plan over their, their game plan. Those are the same things that I'm trying to do in combat. Um, and then a big advantage that I had was like the military discipline and this very

• 3:35:06Speaker 06

  clear approach to both business and being an athlete. You know, I took it like, I treated it like a business. I was 10 minutes early to every single training session. You know, I had all of my gear and I was at the right place, at the right time, with the right equipment, to the right training. You know, when, when, um, Greg Jackson walked in for our first private and I was sitting there, I was already wrapped up and, um, 10 minutes before our session was supposed to start and he's like, I, I was about to go and like, watch some tape for a little bit. I didn't even know that you're here. I was like, well, we start in 10 minutes, don't we? He's like, yeah, I mean, I, I wouldn't have expected to see here for like 30 more minutes. I'm like, all right, well, moving forward, I'll be here 10 minutes early.

• 3:35:50Speaker 06

  Let, let me know if you want me to arrive later and then set that time accordingly. And the same with Winkle John, you know, my striking coach. And, uh, it was hilarious because I'm in the, in the gym with John Jones, who's on the opposite of that spectrum, right? Like he's out partying late and, and burning it down and showing up like hungover. Talk about the most talented athlete on the planet, man. That guy is the best to have ever done it. And he could show up two hours late to practice, be there for five minutes and get more out of that practice than I would have been there, been, having been there the whole time.

• 3:36:24Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 3:36:25Speaker 06

  He's just such, so superior.

• 3:36:27Shawn Ryan?

  Is it surreal training with people like that?

• 3:36:30Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:36:30Shawn Ryan?

  For the first time?

• 3:36:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean like-

• 3:36:32Shawn Ryan?

  It's like, what the hell am I doing here?

• 3:36:34Speaker 06

  Rashad Evans was the champ at the time. And like walk in, like champ's there. You know, Brian Stan, who is like one of my favorite fighters. He's a marine officer. That, uh, we were in Iraq at the same time, kind of cool. But watching him just knock people out with his right hand and then being like to walk in and see him, George St Pierre, you know, like one of the greatest welterweight champions in the history of the sport and like, they're George.

• 3:37:03Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 3:37:03Speaker 06

  It's rad. Cowboy Saroni.

• 3:37:07Speaker 06

  You know, he's in the Hall of Fame now, but and he'll probably be inducted for a few things to include, you know, his fight with Roy McDonald, one of the best fights in UFC history. And like, that's one of my teammates. I'm training at his house. I'm going to his ranch, you know? And, uh, yeah, it's weird. It's surreal, like not even the right weird, like it's indescribably weird. Again, like, do I belong here? But I'm like thumping you up, like mauling you in the corner. I hit harder than you. You can't hit, I guess I deserve to be here. Like, when's my fight date?

• 3:37:36Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. Damn. How long would you, how long would it take you to prepare for any particular fight?

• 3:37:43Speaker 06

  Six weeks.

• 3:37:44Shawn Ryan?

  Six weeks?

• 3:37:45Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:37:46Shawn Ryan?

  Would you time your deployments to where you had six weeks straight with them?

• 3:37:51Speaker 06

  Yep. I'd try to set it where I'd come back from a hitch and I'd, you know, wife and I would pack up the car, drive to Albuquerque and do the fight camp, go to the fight, come back, pump, do another pump.

• 3:38:04Shawn Ryan?

  Had you experienced a lot of losses or failures up to this point? I mean, you blew through SF selection, you blew through the Q corps, you said there was no challenge there, blew through SERA school, pumped out two crazy deployments.

• 3:38:24Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds like you're crushing it as a kid, you know? And then now you're fighting at the, at the apex of, like I said, mixed martial arts. And, I mean-

• 3:38:36Speaker 06

  Is that the first time you've really experienced failure? Yeah, that's not like self-induced from choices. You know, standing there as a 21-year-old with a couple of girls pregnant and no like source of income, that's failure. It's a different kind of failure. But this one is like in your face. You're standing there, you're covered in your own blood, mostly naked. And the dude next to you gets his hand raised and he's called the champion. And you're just standing there. You have to go to your after-party because sponsors paid for you to go there. Your eyes swollen shut and your hands are swollen. You can barely hold a glass with them. And you've got to walk into this room of your fans that you just failed and let down.

• 3:39:21Speaker 06

  But I'm not going to not show up, you know, because like they're there to see me. They love me like win or lose. And yeah, it sucks. How do you learn from it? What did you take from it with the long term? After the fight, you had a fun account to follow is the UFC Fight Doc. He's the guy that stitches most fighters up. He's a cosmetic guy. And, you know, he'd put the little local painkillers on these. He'd inject some lidocaine. And he'd come up to sew my face closed. And okay, lay down on the table. He'd walk up with the painkillers like, nah, I don't want that. So you got this, I can see your skull, Tim. I need to, like this is from Robbie Lawler.

• 3:40:06Speaker 06

  This is from Jacque Raisuza. You know, like this was, I think, from Luke Rockhold. And I'm like, nah, just sew me closed. And he would sit there and he'd pull out and he's talked about it a bunch of times on his, on his pages. He'd sit there and he'd sew my face closed. And I wanted to feel every bit of that pain because every single one of those things was like a mistake that I had made. And I would carry that. I would like breathe in this failure and I would bring in this, I'd breathe in this pain and I would exhale purpose.

• 3:40:42Speaker 06

  And this embracing the suck, embracing failure as we kind of move into some of the darkest, most horrific moments of my life to include the Mexico border, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Israel, same thing. Man, I would like suck in all of this failure, my failure, the failure of the situation, the pain that I see, and then I would like exhale purpose. Dan Holloway kind of coined that phrase and it doesn't more aptly describe the what I would feel and weaponize all of that failure into purpose.

• 3:41:24Shawn Ryan?

  Makes a whole lot of sense.

• 3:41:27Speaker 06

  It makes sense. It's hard to do.

• 3:41:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:29Speaker 06

  Cause there's embarrassment and shame and ego and you know, like then the physical portion of it, like, okay, well, how do I then take this purpose and direct it into something meaningful and constructive? Like motivation is failing, discipline and intentionality is permanent. So I have to take that purpose and turn it into what I'm doing in the gym, what I'm doing in my technique, what I'm doing in my businesses, what I'm doing overseas, how I'm planning in these ARs when we fail or do something unsuccessfully. Like how do I turn that to good?

• 3:41:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Do you, did you ever, I'm trying to think out a word this.

• 3:42:08Shawn Ryan?

  Did your coaches or your team or your, your, your, your opponents, anybody, you know, the, the UFC commentators, did they see anything different in you coming from the background? I mean, this is a sport extremely grueling, as close to being a gladiator as you get

• 3:42:29Shawn Ryan?

  a couple of months earlier.

• 3:42:32Shawn Ryan?

  You're putting hundreds of rounds into bodies in the middle of the night.

• 3:42:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:42:36Shawn Ryan?

  Do they see?

• 3:42:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:42:38Shawn Ryan?

  A difference in the way you carry yourself, the way you fight, the way you train, your discipline, your motivation, your dedication, like, is there a difference between what you brought to the table?

• 3:42:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:42:52Shawn Ryan?

  With all that other life experience that nobody else in the UFC has compared to?

• 3:43:00Speaker 06

  Leo Korolinski first was like, what is wrong with you? As we're about to walk out to the fight, everybody's yelling, come on, let's go, let's go, let's do this. You know, like getting ready to go out and I'm sitting there.

• 3:43:13Speaker 06

  We having sushi after this fight? That sounds great, you know, I haven't.

• 3:43:20Speaker 06

  Some real wasabi, you know, not this fake paste stuff. And he's like, you're about to fight, can you focus on your fight? And I was like, yeah, I got it, man, just relax. And I went out there, picked this dude up, put him on his ear, knocked him out. And I come in the back after my fight with Robbie Lawler.

• 3:43:38Speaker 06

  Barn burner, like bathed in blood. And they come and stick a microphone in him and they're like, what, man, how was that? That was one of the craziest, most brutal fights we've ever seen. You know, Robbie comes on to like, to become one of the greatest, like, like George St Pierre, one of the greatest welterweight champions. Knocking everybody out, he has the Cinderella story of an exit. He's in the, he's going to the, he is in the Hall of Fame and he'll go in as one of the permanent halls of fame. And.

• 3:44:04Speaker 06

  Hey, how do you feel? I'm like, I feel good. You know, they're like, doctor's taking my pulse, I'm already back down to like a 55 heart rate. And like, what is, what is wrong with you? You're like, like, well, there's nothing wrong with me, just my experiences leading up to this have been vastly different. Like, this is not the pinnacle of my life. This is a fight and this is a sport. And I want to be world champion, but this is not the wildest thing that's happened to me in this, in this past couple of months.

• 3:44:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Do you think that scared your opponents?

• 3:44:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't know if it's a good thing either.

• 3:44:39Shawn Ryan?

  Why is that?

• 3:44:43Speaker 06

  You remember the first time walking into a shoot house? And like, it felt like you're looking through a straw?

• 3:44:48Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 3:44:49Speaker 06

  And then the 500th time that you went in there and you could see everything? You could see that they glued a flashlight over the hand of the guy that originally held a gun? Cause they're trying to have you shoot a no shoot target, which was a shoot target? You know, but you saw it and you also saw like that was crappy glue and it was a bad paint job? And you realize that the door that you guys breached last time, they didn't change that door out? Now you can just swing it open. You don't even need to put an ECT charger. You see it all.

• 3:45:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:19Speaker 06

  Compared to like number one, where like all you could see was like walk through the house like this. When I was walking out of the cage, I'd have to hide my wife in the audience. Cause I could see everything. I could describe where every judge was. I could tell you where my, what my corner was wearing. Like I was, I was seen too much. Where like I should have just seen what was in front of me. So I think there was like, there was some value to that. Like I never had the pre-fight butterflies. You know, like guys were throwing up before they're walking out. You know, like I'm playing on my phone and figuring out what I'm gonna have for dinner.

• 3:45:54Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's gotta be, there has to be a certain amount of fear for somebody to walk into the ring with another man who has taken life.

• 3:46:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:46:07Shawn Ryan?

  Legitimately killed for survival. And this is a fucking sport.

• 3:46:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:46:14Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I can't think of anything that would be more intimidating for an athlete.

• 3:46:20Speaker 06

  Well, kudos to the dudes, cause I got beat. You know, Luke Rockhold beat me. Jacques Ray squeaked out a decision. Yoel Romero, although he cheated, he beat me. You know, so there's a, there's a couple of losses on there that those badasses in light of standing across from a dude that's been to war a bunch of times and is like.

• 3:46:37Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, have you ever had that conversation with anybody?

• 3:46:40Speaker 06

  I'm, I'm friends with most of, like most of the athletes that I competed against with in my era. And, um, you know, we joke a lot about those, some of those things. Um, you know, like Luke Rockhold, to, you know, his credit, he's like, man, I had no idea what I was supposed to do with you. I just wanted to keep on the outside and pepper you cause I didn't want to let you near me. That's what he did. And that's how he beat me. You know, literally that was his game plan. And, um, so, you know.

• 3:47:11Shawn Ryan?

  It's just interesting. It's a, I mean, it's a

• 3:47:15Shawn Ryan?

  interesting psychology to tap into, you know, it's, it's a I've always thought about that ever since I've heard about you. So, yeah.

• 3:47:26Speaker 06

  It's fun.

• 3:47:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'll bet it was. I'll bet that was a hell of a ride. But so what was, um, what was it that, why'd you leave UFC?

• 3:47:36Speaker 06

  When, uh, my, you know, my heart got broken in the fight with Yoel Romero. I knock him out at the end of the second round. Michael Bisping is the champion. Michael Bisping's last loss was to me. I beat the brakes off of him for 25 minutes. And, um, so like, this is my third title run. You know, I beat Yoel Romero. This is a title eliminator fight. The winner of us is going to go on to fight for the title. And, um,

• 3:48:04Speaker 06

  he threw a variety of, of mischievous and cheating mechanisms is able to, after I, he gets saved by the bell at the end of the second round, um, blow some big punches into him up against the cage. John McCarthy pulls me off him and, um, you know, like, I'm like, did he get saved by the bell? Or is that the end of the fight? Like, did John touch me after that? Because if John touches me before the, the bell, then I won. If he touched me after the bell, then, and I'm, I'm blasting him and he's just like, he's out. He crumbles to the ground. And I was like, oh, okay, that was the round. So I go back to my corner and I'm sitting there.

• 3:48:46Speaker 06

  I'm pacing back and forth, just looking at Yoel Romero as he's, uh,

• 3:48:52Speaker 06

  just messed up. And, uh, his corner's in there. They're, they're fixing his face. The bell sounds ding. And I take a couple of steps forward and John McCarthy grabs me. He's like, no, Tim, go back to your corner. So the Athletic Commission rules are very matter of fact. You have 10 seconds to answer the bell. If you don't answer the bell, it's disqualification. And as you can imagine, I'm a man that would know the rules. So 10 seconds passes and that's the end of the fight. I'm screaming, I'm still, I take my mouthpiece out, I chuck across the floor, I point at Dana White. I was like, you're fucking gonna pay me for that fight. You know, I'm looking for my wife, put your red panties on, I'm coming, you know, and uh, figuring out the after-party. I also know I'm going straight to the title. I'm gonna be fighting Michael Bisping, I'm gonna destroy him.

• 3:49:36Speaker 06

  And this is all happening in a matter of seconds, right? 10 seconds happens, 15 seconds happens, 20 seconds to happen. You know, like I'm talking with my corner, like, alright, hey, um, let's get these gloves off. Let's start getting things going. And John McCarthy's like, hey, come back in, we're fighting. We were fighting. They call it stoolgate, is a pretty, um, there is a calamity of errors that John messed up big time. He got played by his corner. The corner spilled some ice, they put on too much Vaseline, they're pretending like they couldn't speak English. There's confusion about like when he had to get off the school stool. Ultimately, they were able to buy him an extra 40 something seconds. And uh, so he sat there for almost two minutes.

• 3:50:18Speaker 06

  While I'm leaving the cage mentally, he's with the sole focus of getting back into the fight. And uh, huge adrenaline dump, you know, that endocrine system's wild. And I get knocked out a few seconds later. That's the uh, that's the end. That's the, that was, I was like, man. I don't wanna do this all over again. How do you recover from that? The, that was um, I actually fought one more time against Kelvin Gesslum. And uh, I didn't, I shouldn't have. I was already done at the end of the Yowell fight.

• 3:51:00Speaker 06

  But all of that propelled me into everything that I've done post-fighting. Um, into starting these companies, into, you know, going overseas on rescue operations. You know, nonprofits, for-profits, like, like filling gaps. It-

• 3:51:23Speaker 06

  Gave me purpose.

• 3:51:24Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 3:51:25Speaker 06

  And also ended the most selfish portion of my life. The being a professional fighter, everything has to be about you. Your diet, your travel schedule, your sleep schedule, your training, like all of these things you're trying to line up for this periodization so that you're peaking at the right moment. So everything is, and it's terrible. It's like the most selfish thing that you could, it's, and I wanted so to be done with it because I wanted to do something to contribute in a meaningful way back to the things that I care about. I couldn't when I was fighting. I could like amplify because I had a big platform, you know, to

• 3:52:09Speaker 06

  to talk about things, but I couldn't specifically contribute.

• 3:52:15Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. So this propels you into what you just said, the darkest portion of your life, which, Tim, we got about an hour left before you're gonna get to the airport. So I'm gonna leave this up to you. We got a lot to cover. We could talk about the school. We could talk about sheepdog. We could talk about Ukraine, Israel, the border. Where do you want to go?

• 3:52:40Speaker 06

  Well, I think they're all, well, kind of, I think maybe cover wave tops of them because they're all very connected. When you take a step back, you know, like, you know, what I was doing in Ukraine was different than what I was doing in Israel, which was different than what I was doing in Afghanistan, what I was doing, and those were vastly different than what I was doing in the military, part of Operation Lone Star, the Mexican border, you know, fighting cartels and human traffickers and drug smugglers. Sheepdog response, where we're training under the soft model of like empowering people to force multiplication. It's the special operations, the Green Beret soft model. Like, we don't want to do all the fighting. I want to go and find a populace that supports our ideas, equip and train them to do the fighting with and for us.

• 3:53:24Speaker 06

  Sheepdog Response is fully embracing the soft approach where I'm trying to train as many Americans as I possibly can in really basic, good citizen skills of like being able to provide for your family, being able to preserve and protect human life. That's what we're, all the shoot, move, communicate, medicaid, like we're trying to give those skills to civilians. And after, you know, nearly 20 years from, or 25 years as a EMT, firefighter, a police officer, and then a special operations guy, and then a government contractor,

• 3:53:58Speaker 06

  when I saw globally the frail edges of the canvas and how weak we were strategically, I knew that big problems were gonna be on the horizon. So in August of 2021, which is when we founded Save Our Allies, I was on the phone, I was actually writing Scars and Stripes, I was sitting on the couch with Nick Pomashano, and my phone rings and it was Chad Robishow. And Chad says, hey, man, I have my translator's in Afghanistan, he's currently being hunted by the Taliban, they're gonna rape and murder his family, and they're

• 3:54:40Speaker 06

  gonna kill him. I've been on multiple deployments with this guy. Can you get in there? And my phone had been burning down since Afghanistan started crumbling for contract jobs, like personnel recovery, evacuations. And I didn't want to be that, I wanted that chapter of my life to end of this, like this profiteer. And I was like, yeah, I'll be on a plane tomorrow. And I look over at Nick, and Nick's on the phone, Nick's talking to Sarah Verardo. Sarah Verardo was, is this incredible woman whose husband was horrifically wounded in Afghanistan, and she's carried all that purpose and pain, or all that pain and all that suffering and

• 3:55:23Speaker 06

  directed it into purpose. So she started the Independence Fund, the First Responders Action Group, a whole bunch of different military nonprofits, and she has a ton of connectivity at the Pentagon. So as I start trying to figure out, how am I gonna get into Afghanistan, Nick turns to me, is like, you're not believe who I'm on the phone with right now. And she is saying that we got our way into Afghanistan. So like divine intervention yet again, like I'm on the phone like we're doing that Spider-Man thing where it's like, wait, you got, you got, you got, let's go. So I booked a flight that same day, we had to fly into UAE and figure out other routes to smuggle us into Afghanistan. And, um, and that was literally the four of us on the phone was the beginning of Save Our Allies. Damn.

• 3:56:07Speaker 06

  And it was identifying these gaps that the US military wasn't able to go outside the wire at H Kaya to go and recover people that had been isolated and were unable to make it on to H Kaya. So, um, Hamid Karzai Airport, which was the final Neo, the noncombatant evacuation operation, which was being run by Department of State, which is a bad idea, but they're doing the best with what they had. Um, everybody that was flooding to H Kaya was getting stuck at these choke points and the people that controlled the outer perimeter was the Taliban. So they,

• 3:56:48Speaker 06

  nobody could make it past the Taliban to even make it to the base to get onto a plane to be flown out. So all these people that fought with us for 20 years, you know, these were special forces commandos with a dozen deployments, you know, they have TS clearances and they, you know, they fly helicopters that we gave them. Um, they stay, they're either going to be working for the Taliban or they're going to be killed by the Taliban. It's going to be one or the other. Mm hmm. And then we have all of our legitimate allies to include Americans that were contractors, that were plumbers and electricians, you know, for KBR, Hal Burton, Raytheon, all those contractors were stuck in Afghanistan. So they had to be brought out and for them to be brought out,

• 3:57:29Speaker 06

  they had to be escorted in. Well, this was the first identified gap, which was the American military can move logistics wise, we could do anything. But how do you go and find three people, five people, seven people that are hiding in a warehouse out in the city and then be escort them past the Taliban and bring them onto the base past, um, past American lines and then put them on a plane. That's the gap. And that's, we had four guys on the ground and that's what we immediately went to work doing. How did you do it? Um, I have a, I have a picture of a target on the back of the target are three different con ops.

• 3:58:14Speaker 06

  So there's four of us. Dave was gonna be staying back as like comms for the three of us that went to do solo singleton missions. And on the back of a target is in permanent marker. Like concept of the operation number one, this guy's going to Eagle Gate. He's linking up with this, the agency to go find this group of people and they're gonna be bringing them through this guy. Number two, Tim is going to be going out this Abbey Gate. He's gonna be picking up so and so. Number three, we're gonna be going and we would do this every 60 minutes for the entire time that we had left. Till ultimately the bombing at Abbey Gate happened on the 26th and they like locked down the base.

• 3:58:59Shawn Ryan?

  Were you there for that?

• 3:59:00Speaker 06

  I was.

• 3:59:01Shawn Ryan?

  What a mess.

• 3:59:03Speaker 06

  It was so bad. You know, we, uh, we, we, we did really, those men and the team back in DC, they're so brilliant. They didn't sleep for, for weeks doing everything. Again, like I was, I was barely deserving to be there, being surrounded by so many capable operators that knew how to do so much, so fast, so effectively and so efficiently. I'm just like trying to like contribute in the best way that I can. Not every mission went well. You know, we had, we were bringing in some buses through Blackgate and there was a miscommunication and a commander at that gate wouldn't let those buses in.

• 3:59:45Speaker 06

  And everybody thought that it was me, like that Tim Kennedy was the one that had set all of these buses up. This was absolutely our, our operation, but guess who were the people that were making the calls to link up? This is at the highest level of, of government, where like the most elite commanders on the planet are saying who's getting on these things and trying to communicate that down to a ground captain or a ground like Colonel and that's coming from like a four star joint level is uh, where wires get crossed, right? And so these buses get kicked back out into the city and you know, all those people got

• 4:00:27Speaker 06

  tortured and killed by the Taliban. But you didn't have time to.

• 4:00:35Speaker 06

  Think about it because the moment that that gate gets closed, I had nine other, I had to run over to the UN gate to clamber over that wall through Konstantinowire to run out to do another link up with a commando that was bringing him and another aviator on and their entire families. You know, like had minutes to like take a breath. Yeah, yeah. Damn. How long were you guys there?

• 4:01:03Speaker 06

  I mean, Save Our Allies started working from the moment Taliban crossed the border and started taking Kandahar and Bagram, you know, as Kabul, like all the way until they're stuck at Kandahar. We were, we had teams in DC that were doing logistics and building lists and de-conflicting lists to get rid of duplicate names and also verifying, you know, if we brought in one wrong person, the whole thing's for not, you know, like the whole thing's a failure. I could have, you know, saved a thousand people, but we bring in one terrorist, done. Yeah.

• 4:01:45Speaker 06

  Right? So like, we had to be perfect. And so 10 days total on the ground, all the way up to where outside the wire operations were, can't like, I would have had to fight my way against 82nd Airborne and Marines to go outside of H Kaya. So that was the. And you guys evacuated how many people? Oh, man.

• 4:02:15Speaker 06

  If, if you went into the talk that night, they have, we moved privately 12% of everybody that left. Anywhere from 6,000 to 15,000 people were moved by private NGOs and private contractors, you know, Pineapple Express, the Glenn Beck and Mercury One.

• 4:02:42Speaker 06

  Obviously, Save Our Allies, Mighty Yokes, like the dozens of veteran organizations all mobilized and I'm never going to take credit for us moving one because there's not one person that moved off that airbase that was not coordinated, facilitated by 10 other groups, you know, so like total.

• 4:03:03Speaker 06

  Fifteen to twenty thousand.

• 4:03:05Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you know, as tragic as that story is and is,

• 4:03:13Shawn Ryan?

  what a fucking complete disgrace our government is.

• 4:03:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:03:18Shawn Ryan?

  Like a complete incompetent fucking nightmare.

• 4:03:27Shawn Ryan?

  The fact that a few veteran organizations were be able to, would have been able to come together and get six to fifteen, save six to fifteen thousand lives against,

• 4:03:41Shawn Ryan?

  you're more effective than the US government.

• 4:03:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:03:46Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think people fucking are hearing that. You're more effective than the US government.

• 4:03:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:03:55Shawn Ryan?

  That's how, I mean, that's insane to me, you know, and, man.

• 4:04:07Shawn Ryan?

  You guys did amazing work there, man.

• 4:04:10Speaker 06

  Hey, we, I can't even say their names, you know, but like Kevin, Sean, Sean, Dave, Nick, Sarah, like the, this group of people, again, divine, there's no way that you could, the connections that each of us brought and the experiences that each of us brought from all of the different things that we've been doing for the past 10 years, made for the perfect recipe for success. Like, had it not been us,

• 4:04:40Speaker 06

  it wouldn't have happened. You know, the, um, from, you know, Eric Prince and Glenn Beck and like the connections that they have, you know, Mark, the, these, these people were able to just move little tiny nidgets and knobs to make this a possibility. And, um,

• 4:05:03Speaker 06

  What hell, what a hellhole, though. You know, those babies stuck in Konstantinowire, you know, executed women on the side of the road by the Taliban, right in the face of the Marines in the 82nd.

• 4:05:18Shawn Ryan?

  And we funded it.

• 4:05:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, we did.

• 4:05:20Shawn Ryan?

  And we're continuing to fund them.

• 4:05:23Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 4:05:23Shawn Ryan?

  It's, um...

• 4:05:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, when Iran...

• 4:05:26Shawn Ryan?

  Are we a failed state?

• 4:05:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're close. We're knocking on the door to complete disaster.

• 4:05:37Speaker 06

  We still have the best and brightest on the planet. We're the most prosperous nation in the world with the most elite fighting force to ever walk the face of this planet. So, no.

• 4:05:50Speaker 06

  But, uh, man, we're close.

• 4:05:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we're definitely riding the line.

• 4:05:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Let's get into what you're doing in Ukraine.

• 4:06:03Speaker 06

  So, we recognized in Afghanistan that there is never going to be a single solution to a problem when you have a gigantic gorilla that is the American government and the bureaucratic approach to problem solving. They're always going to be constrained by rules, authorities, authorizations, funding, permission, like, the list of their constraints are seemingly endless, right? But if you're small, if you're like this small expeditionary ability, small digital footprint, small financial footprint, small risk, we provide incredible asset to the large behemoth, right?

• 4:06:48Speaker 06

  We're, cool, you have a problem? We too care about that problem, but we have a bunch of different opportunities or different approaches to solve this problem. You got all these constraints. We don't have any of these constraints. Whether I'm gonna go as a for-profit contracting company and not once ever has anyone ever profited in any way, shape or form off of anything that we've ever done in the humanitarian evacuation neo sense. Everything that we've ever done always stays within the organization to advance abilities and capabilities so that then when the next crisis happens and fuck, there have been so many in the past three years where I can pick up the phone and be like,

• 4:07:31Speaker 06

  "Hey, sir, just want to give you an update. Here's some current capabilities that we have in the region. I have a team that's on the ground or they're at the border or they've positioned themselves. They have this ground evacuation route. We've set up these rat lines. We have these evacuation and evasion lanes set. We have these boats. We have these planes, right? Like, all I do is come with assets. Tell me how you want me to skin this for you." Like, because I could do it as an NGO. I can come in as humanitarian aid and evacuate personal recovery. But ultimately, like, with our mission, with our purpose, everything else is for the sole reason of being able to accomplish that. Mission first always.

• 4:08:14Speaker 06

  No paid salaries. You know, I've never taken a cent. Neither has anyone else that is part of that organization. All 100% program funded. Damn. We were talking last night how much you hate NGOs and you're not wrong. When they get so big and they lose that. But when you look at a problem and you go like, "How do I get Americans out of Sudan? How do I get Americans out of Israel after the worst terrorist attack in their history and per capita in any history? You know, 10 times worse than Pearl Harbor, eight times worse than 9/11 per capita. But the difference was that everybody there was raped and murdered and tortured.

• 4:08:59Speaker 06

  Big significant difference. All the Americans, forty thousand of them that are in Israel, now have no flights to get out. They're also, some of them are old and they went to see where Jesus was baptized, but they can't make it back to the airport or they're in Jerusalem. They have to get back to Tel Aviv. Every, like Delta, United, American, all those flights are canceled, even though you've booked, you've tried to book three, four, five, six different times and now your, your card has been charged every time. Now you have no money to book another flight because your credit card's frozen and there's no airline that'll take you. So how do you get out? So then Department of State says, hey, we're setting up these corridors and these timelines for us to fly these people out. We're going to bring them back to, you know, like back to Europe into a safe area to get them out. But we can't go actually out and pick them up.

• 4:09:43Speaker 06

  Boom, new gap identified. Let's build rosters, let's start building manifests, let's start moving, building movement sheets and start escorting these people in. Insert the next conflict, you know?

• 4:09:58Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you guys are effective, you know? And yes, I do hate a lot of nonprofits.

• 4:10:04Speaker 06

  Me too.

• 4:10:04Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of nonprofits start off with a very good mission statement and they want to do good and then they explode and then greed kicks in. And the next thing you know, nobody gives a shit about what they were doing. And originally it's all about fucking money and taking out the competing nonprofit out rather than, and you know, in, in, in the way the conversation went is when we started talking about keeping it small, keeping it grassroots, having, you know, specific investors that don't need name recognition and aren't trying to build a massive business. They want to affect the world.

• 4:10:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:10:43Shawn Ryan?

  In a positive manner. And, um, and so that's, that's what I was getting at.

• 4:10:49Speaker 06

  Yeah. The, the other side of that coin that you're totally right about the NGOs, like how many times have you in your professional career, a missionary group, um, you know, a nonprofit, Doctors Without Borders, that gets hemmed up and they're stuck. Now they're captives and they're, and they're being used as hostages or leveraged for not just money, but also like positioning within the government. Like it happens time and time and time and time again. So like they, they.

• 4:11:14Speaker 06

  They are and have been historically big problems. We are organized in a way that we are small, we are maneuverable, and most of all, the talent, you know, if you look at the group that was in Israel, JP, Ryan, Nate, these people are coming from tier one, the most elite special operations backgrounds in the world, and then moved on to work for other groups that gave them even more skills. And like, these are the guys that are effectively doing the evacuations and the rescuing. Like, there's nobody more capable or competent on the planet. And they

• 4:11:57Speaker 06

  want to be there. Their heart is there to do the right thing. They've always wanted to be able to help in a meaningful way, but they've always had their hands tied. And sometimes by the government, sometimes by bureau chiefs, sometimes by, be like, case officers, sometimes the list goes on of all of the ways that they've been constrained. Now, they just get to do good. Yeah. And they have all the, well, not all the resources, because we're small, but we have enough resources to do the job at the highest level.

• 4:12:30Speaker 06

  Freaking rad. Yeah, it is, man. You know, Dave Benjamin Hall, he was the Fox News correspondent that got blown up in Ukraine. Oh, okay. I'm not familiar with him.

• 4:12:44Speaker 06

  Kind of peak evasion. Fox News correspondent is doing a segment and his car gets attacked. His cameraman dies. He gets horrifically wounded. Rad. Right now, Ben Hall is in Israel covering the conflict there. Full circle. Save Our Allies was mobilized by Fox to go and rescue him out of Ukraine. No shit. So we had to first find him in the middle of this invasion and the entire conflict. Like, where is this one dude that got blown up? He's in some hospital somewhere. And he's dying. And we had to evacuate him out of the country, get him into Poland, and

• 4:13:25Speaker 06

  then get permission from the Secretary of Defense to fly him into the military. Combatant recovery, like we brought him to Landstuhl to Ramstein and then he moved as if he was a combatant into the military hospital system. And had that not happened, he'd be dead.

• 4:13:44Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 4:13:44Speaker 06

  So like when people are throwing stones, like the Secretary of Defense put his name on the bottom line that we can move this dude out of here. So like, if you think that I'm out there doing like some John Wayne shit, like you could not be further from the truth. Like I'm doing in whatever way we can contribute the best that we can with the assets and and support that we have, we'll do that. But by no means is anyone out there being like, hey, look where my name is. Like, look what I did.

• 4:14:10Shawn Ryan?

  Well, thank you for setting the record straight.

• 4:14:13Speaker 06

  I'll fight some people sometimes.

• 4:14:15Shawn Ryan?

  You and me both, man.

• 4:14:17Speaker 06

  Throwing darts at my forehead, like

• 4:14:18Shawn Ryan?

  You and me both.

• 4:14:19Speaker 06

  Trying to take a selfie.

• 4:14:20Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, you know, everybody's tough on the internet, right?

• 4:14:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:14:25Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, the border.

• 4:14:30Speaker 06

  Am I taking you down there?

• 4:14:32Shawn Ryan?

  I would love to go down there.

• 4:14:34Speaker 06

  Let's go. It is insanity.

• 4:14:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that's what I keep hearing. It's hard to believe. It's very hard to believe.

• 4:14:43Speaker 06

  When you see numbers, when you see like 300,000 people a month, the Super Bowl

• 4:14:50Speaker 06

  had 60,000 people in it. Right? This last couple of days ago.

• 4:14:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:14:56Speaker 06

  60,000 people, then you multiply that to 300,000, come across in a month.

• 4:15:02Shawn Ryan?

  One month.

• 4:15:10Speaker 06

  Five times the Super Bowl, crossing our border, military aged men from every single one of our enemies, state actors, moving their people across our open border, Chinese, Russian terrorists.

• 4:15:28Shawn Ryan?

  See, this is

• 4:15:29Speaker 06

  Multi-time felon.

• 4:15:30Shawn Ryan?

  This is where I get into, this is what really, I mean, everything else that's gone on, all of it. The Afghan withdrawal, Ukraine, Russia, is like, Epstein, like, all of it, dude, all of it. This shit, when I just asked you, do you think we're in a failed state? I don't know how you can answer that question and say no. Because.

• 4:15:59Shawn Ryan?

  We have become so fucking incompetent in this country. I don't, I don't understand how we could not be defeated. It would have to be a nation that is more incompetent than we are. And that's fucking hard to find right now. That is really hard to find. We don't have a fucking border. We are the only free country left in the world. Supposedly free, right? And we have a wide open border that roughly, what? Last thing I read, 6 million plus people have crossed. We are broke. We are printing our money.

• 4:16:42Shawn Ryan?

  We have weaponized our dollar. We have destroyed the First Amendment by tech corporations. It's fake money. It's, I mean, in, in... How could we possibly not already be defeated? That's a real fucking question. Yeah. What would you do if you were Russia? What would you do if you were China? What would you do if you were one of these many terrorist organizations? Who, by the way, are all joining forces against a common enemy. You know who that common enemy is? For those listening?

• 4:17:25Shawn Ryan?

  We're the fucking common enemy. Good job. Good fucking job letting this shit happen. I wouldn't have to do anything. I would continue to stoke and stalk the flames and fires of dissent, of...

• 4:17:50Speaker 06

  Racism of every form and fashion of divisive issue that Americans have right now to confuse and divide us further. I would throw all of my money into TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat to make these kids sit there on those phones for as long as I could, which they are. I would show them that the nuclear family is not necessary, that freedom isn't really a thing that's given by God, that's something that's given to us by the family or by the government, which is another thing that they're paying for us to see on our phones often. I would finance and support political opponents that would want to fight American values

• 4:18:33Speaker 06

  and put in other forms of governance that are wholly against the American ideals and the founding fathers would have imagined. I would try to support the expansion of the federal government. These are all the things that I would do if I was the adversary. And that's what they're doing. They don't have to do anything. They just sit back and hang out and watch us just eat ourselves.

• 4:18:51Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I'm getting at. You know, we, I just, I don't know how we pull out of this. I don't know. I mean, we talked about, we talked about at the beginning before the cameras got turned on, you know? People think something, people thought something was going to happen at the Super Bowl. People think, you know, how, how come nothing's happened yet? You hear one side of the aisle mocking people that are concerned that our border's wide open and mocking them because nothing's happened yet. We've had, we've had three years where there has not been any terrorist attacks.

• 4:19:34Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let me tell you about war games and simulations. They inject, they put, they put these things through a simulation. It shows the probability and the percentage that they're going to have to come out on top. What's, you know, maybe today they have a 65%, this is hypothetical. Maybe, maybe today in the simulation, they, they, they feed it all the information and the simulation says, hey, you got a 65% chance you're going to come out on top against the US.

• 4:20:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:20:05Shawn Ryan?

  But right now. We are a failed state. We are completely incompetent. And so why would they take that time to attack us right now? Why wouldn't they up the percentage? Okay, well, let's, let's, let's put a little more people in this way. Put them up in this region. Let's get, let's, let's infiltrate the power grid over here. It's weak. There's no, you can't even arrest an immigrant right now. Even in this state, in Tennessee. Yeah, exactly. And so it's, all they're doing right, right now is strategy.

• 4:20:44Shawn Ryan?

  They're just infiltrating, doing whatever they need to do to get that percentage up. And then when somebody strong comes in and the shit starts to get cleaned up, that's when it's gonna happen.

• 4:20:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, so how do you fight that?

• 4:21:03Speaker 06

  I, I argue, you know, for the Titanic, which was headed towards that iceberg, had they known, and they just made a slight adjustment, just a couple of degrees, they would have avoided that whole entire iceberg, right? None of those people, is that, is that what we need to do? Just the slightest of adjustments? Does that pendulum need to swing back once again towards sovereignty and freedom? You know, the, um, the founding of Apogee, our school, was in that same vein. The founding of Save Our Allies, the founding of Sheepdog Response. Like, all of these things, all it takes is this entrepreneurial American spirit for we as a collective to be like, man, we acknowledge that this is not right and this is dangerous. And for us to combat, for us to have a strong America, again, is for the individual

• 4:21:48Speaker 06

  to be a strong, competent, capable individual, right? Not to be fat, not to be this gelatinous mass that can barely read, that just sits there and swipes on their phone and looks at porn all day long, doesn't know how to use a rifle, doesn't know how to purify water, doesn't know how to be an intentional disciplined parent to their, to their children, or a loyal.

• 4:22:09Speaker 06

  Entrepreneur that's going to be dedicated to his employees and his colleagues and his partners in the companies like this is when you look at the founding fathers, when you read that beautiful declaration declaration of independence and the bill of rights like these, these were written by Americans that stood on the core values of what it meant to be an American. They were not educated at some Ivy League university, but they wrote a document that will stand the test of time. And God, I need Americans to recognize how vulnerable we are. Everything that you just said right now can be fixed. We adjust just a couple of degrees and people take back their sovereignty. They start growing their own food. They start having their own chickens. They start getting strong in body

• 4:22:49Speaker 06

  and in mind. They're, they're an ungovernable force. The Americans, the essence of being an American is ungovernable. We are rebel, we are rebellious traders from our origin. Let's remember what that looked like. They told us to do something. We said no, and we put their tea in the harbor. Then they went to Boston and that shot that was heard around the world, kicked off us killing every single one of them and kicking them off of this continent. That is what Americans can do. You mess with our boats at Pearl Harbor, we drop two atomic bombs.

• 4:23:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. There's only so many Americans left.

• 4:23:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm hopeful.

• 4:23:28Shawn Ryan?

  Unfortunately, but you know, I think that kind of where I'm going with this, how do you fix it? I think you're, you're doing it.

• 4:23:38Speaker 06

  Trying.

• 4:23:39Shawn Ryan?

  The youth.

• 4:23:40Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 4:23:41Shawn Ryan?

  Let's get into the school that you started and how that's developed.

• 4:23:44Speaker 06

  Yeah. So Apogee, the first school was Apogee Cedar Park, and it was literally a brick and mortar Socratic school. And man, year one was hard. Did, I did everything wrong. I thought I knew how to run a business, having ran a bunch of businesses and running a school is pretty different. Then year two, kind of like learn from our mistakes, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. We, we adjusted. We also realized that we have to expand the...

• 4:24:15Speaker 06

  The influence. So we went from just being a brick and mortar to online mentorship. I partnered with Matt Boudreau and we started Apogee Strong. And we brought in thousands of people in the online mentorship program, like how to be leaders in your community, what sovereignty, financial sovereignty, physical sovereignty looks like. And then from that mentorship program, we said, hey, we want to expand this Apogee school idea. Who wants to open a school? And all of these owners stepped up and raised their hand, like, I want this in my community. So we have been training and mentoring all of these school owners about in 2024, we'll open another 50 schools.

• 4:24:56Speaker 06

  And then all of, again, back to doing the right thing with money and being small enough to make sure that you're aligning with your purpose and direction, motivation. Taking all of those funds and putting them back in to then help other schools launch and to build a larger campus to be able to mentor more people. So until we bring the Department of Education to its knees or completely abolish them, we haven't produced something from public school. Yes, there's outliers and there's anomalies where like extraordinary kids are going to always rise, but you take that same kid and put them anywhere, they're also going to be wildly successful.

• 4:25:39Speaker 06

  It's the mass, it's the 95%. And they have just been turned to useless masses. The consumers, laborers.

• 4:25:50Shawn Ryan?

  Tax meals.

• 4:25:51Speaker 06

  That's it. I don't need those.

• 4:25:53Shawn Ryan?

  We're a bunch of tax meals. But I'm really interested in this school. And so one question I have is this, when did you start that?

• 4:26:06Speaker 06

  Three years ago.

• 4:26:07Shawn Ryan?

  Three years ago. And how many schools are there now?

• 4:26:09Speaker 06

  Well, 50, launching in 24.

• 4:26:12Shawn Ryan?

  And how many are there right now?

• 4:26:14Speaker 06

  One.

• 4:26:16Shawn Ryan?

  One?

• 4:26:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:26:16Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 4:26:17Speaker 06

  So we went one year one, mentorship launched year two, and expansion happens year three. Year five will be at 300 schools.

• 4:26:26Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. So how do you, how do you feel?

• 4:26:31Shawn Ryan?

  How do you filter who's coming into the school without getting sued?

• 4:26:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:26:37Shawn Ryan?

  You know, because this shit seems to just bleed in everywhere.

• 4:26:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, um, we, we have, one, the people opening the schools, they are part of the mentorship program. So we've spent months and months and months to go into live events with them, training with them, talking to them, learning about their values, making sure that their vision aligns with the vision of the school. So we, we have, you know, Matt has hundreds of hours with these new school owners. Um, on the, and then on the mentorship side, when we are advising about how they're going to be accepting families, and we have this gigantic waiting list, we're, we're accepting out applications for 24 school year for Apogee Cedar Park. So you can go to apogeesederpark.org and put in an application right now.

• 4:27:24Speaker 06

  And when you put in an application, you're going to be entered into this big, huge funnel. And, and there's these gates that you have to go through. Here's a reading list of books. Here is you coming in to tour the academy where we get to do a face to face with you. Um, here is you, the, your hero, your kid, getting to go into one of the studios and spend time with the teachers and the other heroes.

• 4:27:46Speaker 06

  I love kids, um, and they're also innocent. They're not great liars. So when they're in there for a week, they're interviewing with the whole entire studio. That kid goes home, we get to ask all of the kids, and these, these Socratic minds, these critical thinking minds, they know, like, they're amazing, brilliant, truly brilliant, genius little kids. And when we go like, hey, man, what, what do you, what were your impressions? What did you think? And we, we have a bunch of, series of questions. We have Socratic conversations of like, uh, you know, would he be a value added to the studio? What does he bring that would be useful and that you would benefit from, that you would learn from him? What are some things that you think would be kind of a detriment?

• 4:28:28Speaker 06

  And listening to an eight-year-old in a very clear way articulate why that kid is good or bad for the studio. Man, like, wow.

• 4:28:38Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's good.

• 4:28:40Speaker 06

  It's a learner-driven environment. That means the leaders of that studio are the kids.

• 4:28:45Shawn Ryan?

  You're also giving these kids freedom of thought.

• 4:28:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:28:48Shawn Ryan?

  Without any repercussions.

• 4:28:52Speaker 06

  There's no-

• 4:28:52Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about this?

• 4:28:54Speaker 06

  All questions are open-ended. So they're guides, not teachers. In every single one of the studios, not classrooms, in the studios like Socrates, he wasn't telling somebody how to do something. He was asking questions, open-ended questions, for that person to think through their answers and critically devise the solution to the question that was being posed by the leader, by the guide. So I'm not going to say, hey, we're going to add mulch to the playground. This is how much mulch we're going to add. I'm going to go to the kids and I'm going to say, hey, what mulch do you want? How much volume of mulch will you need to make this three inches deep? Okay, if the thickness of the mulch, like, you know, sand compared to a gravel compared

• 4:29:36Speaker 06

  to a rock, is that going to change the amount of volume that we're going to have to order? Like, we've so, we have just done these kids so dirty because we, they're so capable. They're so much more capable and they're so, uh, there's a fascinating study done by NASA and MIT. They took a bunch of kids preschool. They started tracking them, saying which ones could problem-solve at a genius level. So take something, give them a problem, and you provide them with existing solutions. Which ones could use the non-existing solutions to solve the same problem? And the longer, long story short, the longer that these kids were in school, the less capable and less genius they ever were in problem-solving.

• 4:30:18Shawn Ryan?

  Are you kidding me?

• 4:30:18Speaker 06

  No, 100%. Google this right now. It is the most mind-blowing study. The final conclusion was, the longer these kids were in public school, the dumber they got. The less critical thinking and problem-solving were they capable of.

• 4:30:34Speaker 06

  And MIT and NASA were like, all right, man, let's just kill the study.

• 4:30:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, let's sweep this one under the rug.

• 4:30:41Speaker 06

  When you go back to the origin of public education with Rockefeller saying, man, I don't need anything. I don't need, I don't need a critical thinker. I don't need a collaborator. I don't need an innovator. I don't need somebody that, that, that can create. I just need somebody that can work. I just need a laborer. I just need somebody smart enough to show up to my factory and do the work to make me money. That is the origin of public education.

• 4:31:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:31:04Speaker 06

  And every day since then, it's just gotten worse. So you have two options right now. You open your own school or you homeschool your kids. That's it.

• 4:31:13Shawn Ryan?

  How do you, I'm really interested in this. I mean, I told you my idea last night. I don't, I don't want to take any time up explaining my idea, but how do you vet?

• 4:31:25Shawn Ryan?

  I'm sorry, I know that what, what do you, how do you, the teachers, what do you call them?

• 4:31:29Speaker 06

  Guides.

• 4:31:30Shawn Ryan?

  How do you vet the guides?

• 4:31:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, in, in a really similar way.

• 4:31:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, of course, like the background check and the social media scrape scrub, the, the drug test, all of those things. But most important, the people that are applying are when that first email comes across, hey, I'd really love to come work for your school. I am leaving, insert this place that I currently have been a guide or a teacher at for this amount of time, for these reasons. Now I'm going to ask five very basic open-ended questions. And these open-ended questions are like very similar to that kid showing up to the studio and saying, you know, as he's auditioning and interviewing against all of his peers. We, the last thing that we need is a teacher in there. You know, how are you going to be at a peer by peer level, be able to guide these kids through, here's a problem?

• 4:32:21Speaker 06

  And, and they're, they're open-ended narrative questions. And when we interview these guides, it's very evident which ones get it and which ones don't.

• 4:32:32Speaker 06

  Um, my first year, major mistake, I hired teachers. I went and I bought, I bought the highest, fanciest, um, you know, with the best resumes and like awards for this and this, but they weren't aligned with this vision and catastrophic failure.

• 4:32:51Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 4:32:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:32:53Shawn Ryan?

  What are some of the things that you saw?

• 4:32:57Speaker 06

  Um, when a critical thinker that can't sit at a desk, that needs to move to problem solve and is gonna think in a, in a, in an atypical way, that teacher who can only do something linear, but then something that's kind of chaos and anarchy in an approach to a solution, they literally can't process. So they've combat it and it's stifled and it's stuff and it's stomp and it's stop. Where instead, we're supposed to inspire and supposed to, to, to, to give, um, resources. And if they fail, it's fine. Like if the kid fails, you will learn from that failure.

• 4:33:39Speaker 06

  And I don't need to have every kid passing in a session. I just need that kid to grow. I just need that child to evolve and to, um, continue down this road of becoming a critical thinker. They can do anything. Like if you can program manage and you can critical think, you can do anything. So like, why don't, why aren't we, and we haven't been in education, doing anything besides teaching kids how to take a test? I'm not, I'm fairly certain I have never been, I've never been to war and I've never walked into a ring and I've never start, started a business that I was like given anything that was useful, that resembled a test that I ever took in school.

• 4:34:26Speaker 06

  Why don't we prepare them for what real life looks like?

• 4:34:31Shawn Ryan?

  You know, you were talking to me about some of the

• 4:34:36Shawn Ryan?

  some of the curriculum. And you were talking about some type of an exercise that you had these kids doing where they were building their own business.

• 4:34:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:34:43Shawn Ryan?

  What age group was that?

• 4:34:45Speaker 06

  First, second, third, fourth grade.

• 4:34:47Shawn Ryan?

  Can you go through that?

• 4:34:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:34:48Shawn Ryan?

  Exercise?

• 4:34:49Speaker 06

  Super simple. We had a business fair, a date set. So in two months from now, we're going to go to this business fair or we're going to go to a farmer's market. Everyone in the studio, you have to create a product. You have to create this product. You have to market this product and you have to bring this product to market. Then at the end, you're going to come back to the studio and you're going to give a brief about the performance of your product. So one, one little girl got, took a loan from her parents, bought mason jars, got kinetic sand, and then built themed environments in every single one of these kinetic sands. So like one of them was like green and brown kinetic sand. She put all these little dinosaurs in there and she sold them for $25 apiece.

• 4:35:34Speaker 06

  The cost of her product, like her out of pocket cost was like $3. You know, so she's making $22 for every single one of these sales. And she sold a whole bunch of them at the farmer's market. And she paid her parents back. Then she took her profit and gave her presentation. Here was what I spent. Here's how much my booth cost. Here's how much the, the cost of goods were. This is the loan that I took. This is the interest that I paid back and here's my profit. All right. And then we had another one that took, he went and collected all the sheds off his parents ranch. And he trimmed them and cut them with the skill saw, which is kind of cool. How many kids know how to use a skill saw? Put screws through them with like nice little fancy washers with this big, huge industrial screw

• 4:36:17Speaker 06

  and turned them into hardware. So it was like a bolt that went through it on the back. You could screw in the nut with another washer and you would have like this axis handles for your cabinetry.

• 4:36:31Speaker 06

  He took those and built them and sold them as sets, like six and eight and 12, depending on how many drawers you had for within your bedroom, and sold dozens of sets and made a ton of money. He had almost no overhead besides some bolts and some nuts and some washers. So he was almost pure profit besides the the the cost of him renting one table to put at the farmer's market. And so success, massive success. And then this other kid went and like took some sticks, some branches that he thought looked like guns and tried to sell them at the farmer's market and made no money because nobody bought them. I think his uncle bought one and, you know, out of charity.

• 4:37:15Speaker 06

  And he went back and he had to brief everybody in his class and he was embarrassed. And I remember being embarrassed. I remember failing. I remember not doing well in a spelling test. I remember all the times that I failed were the moments that I learned the most. And I will argue, even though the two success stories, sure, they made some money and they learned a ton about how to do business. Their their parents were super involved. But that kid that sat there with shame and embarrassment learned the best lesson of them all. And everybody's walking out of the studio. Parents are mad because, you know, Tommy didn't do great in his presentation where he lost time, lost a little bit of money.

• 4:37:59Speaker 06

  And but most of all, was embarrassed because all of his friends were successful. And instead, being able to, you know, juxtaposition, switch the perspective and be like, but look at what he learned, you know? And are you excited to see what he's going to do in this next one?

• 4:38:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:38:15Speaker 06

  But it's on you, parent. Like, there's no teacher that's going to sit here and hold their hand and do this work for them. And it's not your job, parent, to do all the work for them. It is your job to help them be able to learn how to do this. It's your responsibility. It's nobody else's responsibility. Government's not going to teach your kids ethics, grit, integrity and hard work. That is your job. So rise.

• 4:38:41Shawn Ryan?

  How many? How many kids are in the school roughly?

• 4:38:45Speaker 06

  Apogee, sort of 24, I think we'll probably be around 3,000.

• 4:38:51Shawn Ryan?

  3,000?

• 4:38:55Speaker 06

  Between mentorship, um, physical locations, brick and mortar schools.

• 4:39:00Shawn Ryan?

  That's incredible. So if I wanted to.

• 4:39:02Speaker 06

  So we're not, we're like just getting started.

• 4:39:05Shawn Ryan?

  I know, I know. That's what, that's what's so exciting about it. I, I mean.

• 4:39:10Speaker 06

  We're literally like the second, the first year was a real rough start. We're in our, we're in our, our second year right now. You know, we're three years into this, two years of actually doing it right.

• 4:39:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:39:20Speaker 06

  And, um, we're going.

• 4:39:21Shawn Ryan?

  It's, I mean, it's obviously spreading like wildfire.

• 4:39:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:39:25Shawn Ryan?

  So, you know, I want to know if I want to bring this to Franklin, Tennessee.

• 4:39:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:39:34Shawn Ryan?

  What do I do?

• 4:39:35Speaker 06

  You go to, go to apogastrong.com. We launched a, a documentary yesterday. Like an hour long documentary talking about public education, talking about our purpose, talking about our vision. How, you know, Matt and I are approaching not education, not schooling, about creating critical thinkers. And, um, so you're going to go to apogastrong.com. Uh, all the people that are going to be opening schools are going to come from within the mentorship program. Um, there, there'll be very rare exceptions because we have to know everybody. Like if we don't know them personally and we haven't spent time with them, you're not going to open a school. So like, we have to have the rapport and relationship and trust and faith that you're going to be doing the right thing.

• 4:40:17Speaker 06

  Um, to continue to spread this vision. So if you go to Apogee, you get out of the mentorship program. Um, and there's a lot, we demand your big reading list, you're like, you're journaling, you're working out every single day. Um, we're asking questions about intentionality as you as a parent and you as a, as a, as a husband or a wife in your family. Um, and it's a full family approach. Like this isn't, hey, you leader of the household. It is you as a complete family, nuclear family, as a family unit. How are you approaching raising the most powerful influential children that you possibly can?

• 4:40:55Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you are doing a lot of good stuff.

• 4:40:58Speaker 06

  Hope so. I'm trying. If not, I'm gonna go crazy.

• 4:41:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, man, I'm, um, we covered a lot of ground there.

• 4:41:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:41:06Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, I wish we had another six hours to dive into some of this stuff, but...

• 4:41:13Speaker 06

  As we're walking across Big Bend in southwest Texas towards the Mexican border, well, we can talk more.

• 4:41:19Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. Well, I'll meet you down there, but Tim, I just want to say, man, um,

• 4:41:27Shawn Ryan?

  I'm really happy that our paths have crossed and it's an honor to know you. It's an honor to be able to get your story out and, um, man, I'm just, uh, I'm blown away at all of the good that you're injecting into this world because we sure as hell need it, man. So, thank you.

• 4:41:45Speaker 06

  Thank you, man. Thanks for having a voice, dude. I'm proud to know you, so...

• 4:41:50Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 4:41:51Speaker 06

  Keep on killing it.

• 4:41:52Shawn Ryan?

  All right, brother.