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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing, and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show, former US Navy SWIC and co founder of building the elite, Craig Weller.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from Craig's early life, his journey into the military, some deployment stories, training the tactical athlete, the evolution of strength and conditioning, physical resilience,
the importance of sleep, nutrition, and so much more. Now before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment.
Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of almost a thousand episodes now. So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you, Craig Weller. Enjoy.
Well, Craig, I want to start by saying two things. Firstly, thank you to Miguel, our mutual friend for connecting us. And secondly, I wanted to welcome you to the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me.
So where on planet Earth we finding you this afternoon?
I'm in Colorado in Evergreen, which is about 30 minutes west of Denver. So if you're ever in Colorado and you get stuck in traffic going skiing, I'm up on your left.
I went to Colorado a few years ago with my family skiing and the rental people would be like, oh, we've got a storm coming in, you're going to need to pay for a four by four and it's going to be $100 more a day. And I'm like, no, we'll be fine.
And then you had your coldest winter in like 100 years when we were there. And I've never been so terrified in my life driving a two wheel drive car probably past Evergreen to the slopes.
Yeah, there's always a few cars trying that. There's actually a whole Twitter account that just takes pictures of them to make fun of them.
Yeah, I was probably on there. So there we go.
All right. Well, I would love to start the very beginning of your timeline. So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings?
Okay. So I was born in Montana. I initially for the first three, four years of my life lived on a cattle ranch outside of Butte, Montana.
So my wife will make fun of me. She'll say, I had asked you if you were raised in a barn, but you kind of were because we were sort of feral kids.
Like we ran around on the ranch with my parents. Like my dad would take me to check calves in the middle of the night because I was probably up crying.
And he'd stuff me inside of his jacket or if it was too cold, he would put me in an incubator with the calves in a literal barn. So I was partially raised in a barn.
But we moved from the ranch to South Dakota when I was maybe fourish, something like that.
Bounced around quite a lot for a short period of time, maybe two years. And then after that, I grew up in the same small town called Phillips, South Dakota, which is just in the middle.
And there's like 900 people or so in the town and stayed there all through high school.
And yeah, that's where I grew up. That's where I was when I didn't have a swimming pool because it's such a small town, that kind of thing.
Well, you mentioned about cattle. It's funny because I grew up on a farm too. My dad was a horse vet, veterinary surgeon.
So I grew up lambing and all that stuff. And I'd go to school tired and get chastised for watching TV late, which I wasn't.
I was up at three in the morning, like you said, lambing or whatever it was. So I can totally relate to that.
Was that the career that your father did the whole time or were your parents doing something else after that?
They both grew up in that world. Once we moved to South Dakota, my dad stayed kind of in the ag industry, but he moved to basically became a lender, like a banker basically for farmers.
And my mom became a paramedic. Her degree was in like vet medicine, which she turned into people medicine.
I guess and became a paramedic. So I grew up with my dad was, despite having a full-time job doing his ag lending stuff, he was a volunteer firefighter and a volunteer EMT.
And my mom was a full-time paramedic. So the whole time growing up, we always had that chaos of like middle of the night ambulance calls or fire calls and that kind of thing.
And it was just like our normal world kind of. Beautiful. Now, what about athletics? I read obviously the beginning of the book, you talk about the lack of swimming training that you had growing up in South Dakota.
What were you playing? Because obviously it still prepared you in some way, shape or form to be so successful in the Navy.
I did, because it's such a small town, there's no like competition to be on any athletic team. So I did all the conventional sports. I wrestled when I was really little, I was terrible at it.
T-ball, played football all through high school. I ran track, I pole vaulted. What else did I do? I played basketball briefly. I didn't really like any organized sports though.
I always chafed at the structure. I didn't like, I didn't find fun in something where there's a guy with a whistle yelling at me and telling me to follow the rules.
So I was much more into like snowboarding. It was a good drive, like three hour drive to the Black Hills. But we'd go snowboarding every weekend during the winter.
Played roller hockey. There was no real hockey rink, so we played roller hockey. Took up skydiving when I was 16.
I'm not sure if that's how it's supposed to work, but I waited until I was 16 because that was the legal minimum age and never did a tandem jump.
I just did solo static lines and then after enough of those successfully, they let me do a solo free fall and started jumping free falls when I was 16 or 17.
And kind of that and snowboarding were probably my two favorite things. But I spent a lot of time in the weight room.
I was a really small, skinny, unathletic kid growing up. And that was right around the time that amazon.com was a thing.
I could get piles of books and I used all my summer like lawn mowing money or whatever it was and bought a ton of books on strength training and kind of human performance-y things.
And learned through a lot of trial and error how to train and went from being a scrawny, skinny kid to being pretty athletic and strong.
But I was in the weight room probably two hours a day, five days a week starting probably when I was in seventh grade.
Wow. When you talk about the organized sports is interesting. I had a guy from Finland on Pasi Sahlberg who's an educator. He lives in Australia, but he tours the world talking about the Finnish system, which is obviously very well respected and very successful.
And one of the criticisms of some of the other countries sporting programs is exactly what you said.
You have to follow the rules and especially in America, there has to be a lot of money in it too. You have to have this exact uniform. You have to go to these trainings and we're going to travel and all this stuff, which is a big barrier to entry for a lot of kids to just simply play.
But in Finland, of course, there are organized sports where you follow the rules, but their whole philosophy was just to encourage children to play.
And if you've got two football goals, soccer goals, and now you say that you can bounce it off the walls or you can hit it with your hand once, they'd be like, OK, make your own rules.
And I think there's so much power to letting a group of children come together and create their own rules rather than adults screaming at them because they're not doing what they told.
Yeah, yeah, I think there's a fair amount of research on that, actually, and the less specialized a kid is early, the better their long term potential is athletically.
Like if you make someone if you drill them into being the best performing athlete at a structured sport that they can when they're 13 years old, they're probably going to be burnt out, injured and just mentally uninvested in it by the time they're out of high school.
While we're on this subject, I ask a lot of people this and obviously you're deep, deep in the strength, conditioning and performance world now.
When I came from England, lucky to show because people listen to this podcast a lot heard this over and over again, but I kept bumping into Uncle Rico's.
And I mean that affectionately, but these 25, 30 year old dudes that were now deconditioned saying I could have, should have, would have been the next insert major sports team here.
And I realized that we squeeze performance out of our children in this country, but a lot of times it's at the detriment of their wellness.
What is your perspective on that?
I yes, I think that's quite true.
There's actually there's a good book called What Made Maddie Run, which is about a girl who was in that model that like performance athlete model.
She was a, I think she was from New Jersey, a star track athlete went to, I think it was UPenn, like a really good school on a track scholarship.
And her whole identity was wrapped up in being a track athlete and how well she performed.
And all of the combined pressures of that, especially when you mix in social media and all of that, became too much.
And she eventually committed suicide and the book follows how that happened and the role of ultra competitive sports as like the sole focus of her life, alongside also having to be a good student and popular and on social media and doing all this other stuff.
And I think to a large extent, it's easy for our culture to do that and just take all the joy out of sports or physical activity or games or whatever you'd want to call it.
Like if you're a kid, you don't really need to be doing something that comes with a rule book.
You can just be running around playing and we kind of take that away from a lot of people.
Yeah. Who wrote the book?
Was that a parent in the end?
No, I think it was an ESPN reporter.
I'm going to have to maybe get them on the show because that sounds like a very powerful story to tell.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, I mean, this is the thing that I noticed in the UK, not even probably as much now, sadly, because we're seeing the obesity epidemic really kind of grip that country as well.
But definitely there's a lot more people that graduate school because we just don't perform at a high, high level in the UK unless you are an amazing footballer or cricketer or somewhere where you get kind of sent off to an elite organization.
But then you see people play local leagues and pub leagues and adults keep playing.
And I think probably even more so in Scandinavia and some other places.
But what we see here is you get these uber athletes and like you said, they're either burnt out mentally or it's knees, it's shoulders, it's necks.
It's backs. And now, you know, they've gone from, you know, 10 percent body fat and this incredible athleticism to now they're working in a printing shop and they're 350 pounds.
And that's not, again, me being mean. It's the opposite.
I'm it's unfair to these children that they're set up for failure once they graduate.
Yeah. Yeah. And we do it by making it this artificial thing that's usually kind of joyless.
Like I my wife and I spent a lot of time in Costa Rica in this like little surf town on the Pacific coast.
And if you hang out there, like you see the the differences in the culture and you see the differences in how kids behave.
Like, you know, if you're sitting in a restaurant and a family comes in with like a gaggle of five year olds, you're like, oh, man, like you're probably going to be like disrupted and annoyed for a good deal of the meal.
But but there it just doesn't really work that way.
Like the kids are generally well adjusted.
They're like calmer and more regulated. And they're good at entertaining themselves, like not universally.
But but it's a much more significant factor.
And I remember sitting on a this like restaurant that sits on the beach where you like watch the sunset and stuff.
And there were these kids that would leave the table with their parents and go and run around all over the beach and like vault over logs and fight imaginary pirates or whatever they were doing.
And they were like seven, eight, nine years old.
And it was completely unstructured, just open play.
And they were having a blast and they were like physically exhausting themselves.
And there's such a big difference in when physical activity is structured that way, where it's the whole point is just to have fun or experience joy or pursue this fun outcome with your friends versus telling someone that they need to follow these rules and hit these physiological metrics and do these performance things where like the activity is kind of self-limited.
And that I mean, there's other research on how that affects people's eating behavior and things like that.
Like if you have someone walk a mile and tell them they just did a mile of exercise, they'll actually eat more junk food afterward.
But if you have someone walk a mile and tell them they just saw pretty things, so they were in a forest, they saw pretty trees or they were looking at sites, it doesn't negatively affect their eating habits because we have a thing of associating exercise with kind of punishment.
And there's a disparity where the term for it is parallel counter driving, which is where liking and wanting become separate.
And we want something, say we want to be physically fit, but we dislike the process that's inherent to doing that because we've come up with a way of making it terrible.
And you see that with a lot of athletes.
Like we were working with this really good jujitsu grappler here in Denver.
And I mean, he's very successful, hated grappling, hated it.
Like he was miserable five hours a day while he was training because he'd been doing it since he was six.
And it was something where he wanted the outcome, he wanted to be on the podium, he wanted all the awards, but he hated the process itself.
And if it wasn't at that point in his job, he wouldn't be doing it.
And we can see that in just the way we treat physical activity in general in the stress response or the emotional associations that we have with an activity.
When we treat exercise as punishment or as this thing you have to do because you ate junk food or so you can eat junk food or just so you can arbitrarily look better,
it's perceived as a stressor and it's perceived as a very finite thing that we have a limited capacity for.
Like if you think of the difference between walking, like hiking up a beautiful mountain, enjoying a conversation with your friends, looking at the scenery,
you might do that for hours and you'll do it in a way where you're trying to be as efficient as possible so you can keep doing it.
Where if you go in the gym and do step ups, like multiple hours of step ups in the gym would be miserable.
You'd never do it in the first place.
And you're also doing it in a way where you're kind of inherently increasing the stress response that you get from it because you think that the harder it is, the better it is.
So you're making it deliberately worse while you're doing it.
And you're telling yourself that there's only so much of it that you can tolerate.
And you'd see that difference in any open, enjoyable sport compared to the make believe version of it that you might do in a gym.
And I think it's one of the biggest physical issues in our culture is we spend too much time in gyms and not enough time outside having fun.
Absolutely.
Now you made me think of Spartan races and Tough Mudders that I've done.
I had a Joe DeSantis on here a couple of times and that's it.
That's the draw is you're in a community, you're outside, you're getting dirty, you're climbing, you're jumping, you're falling, you're submerging under ice water.
You're playing.
And even elements, not all the elements of CrossFit, that's what drew a lot of people in, myself included.
You're doing handstands, you're climbing ropes, you're doing pegboards.
I mean, these are fun things.
So I think the further you are away from play, I would argue that probably the more challenging you find your workout.
So if you can find a way of getting outside more, I mean, I know you talk about barefoot in a bit.
I work out barefoot as well, like try and be as connected as possible to how you would have been 200 years ago.
Yeah.
And it changes the stress response that we have in association with that movement.
So our stress response can be divided between either a threat or a challenge response, where one, you're trying to survive it and one, you know that you have what it takes to deal with it.
And you're going to kind of enjoy the process.
And when we use exercise as sort of a punishing limited thing, we're more likely to create a threat response associated with it rather than a challenge response where we understand what it is and we know that we have what it takes to cope with it.
And we're going to just kind of explore what's within that activity.
And those responses are different autonomically and hormonally.
A threat response is more driven by adrenaline and has a higher cortisol load and a longer residue afterward.
Like you'll have higher baseline cortisol after a threat response, after you've done something that was threatening, where a challenging response has shifted more towards norepinephrine, which is more of a neurotransmitter.
And you have lower baseline cortisol and less of a stress response, less of an autonomic fight or flight response after the activity.
So depending on the way we perceive an activity, whether we're just going to go get ourselves beaten up in order to punish ourselves for something in a threatening exercise situation,
or if we're doing something that's enjoyable and open ended and inherently fun, changes our physiology.
It changes what's happening in our bloodstream. It changes our stress response. It changes our insulin sensitivity. It changes how our brains work.
It alters everything. It's not just fun or not. It alters everything about our autonomic system.
Absolutely. Well, speaking of stress response, going back to growing up with first responder parents,
what are some of the calls you remember them talking about or that you witnessed yourself as you were going through those years?
Oh, man. My mom has definitely seen the worst ones. I'm not sure how in-depth I can go because it's probably a HIPAA violation.
But she works on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which is probably the worst socioeconomic pocket of America.
So she's seen a lot of... The life expectancy for males there is, I think, under 40. It's really bad. And she's seen some brutal things.
There was one I remember when we were kids where she was just a shell of a person for weeks where a little girl,
I don't know how old exactly, six or seven, it was springtime and there was a flood. It was raining heavily and there was a flood.
And the girl fell into a storm drain. And that storm drain had like tangled up rebar inside of it.
And she was drowned in the storm drain. And then they had to like cut her apart to extract her to get her out after she died in the storm drain.
And my mom was one of the medics on scene for that. And right at that time, we were close to that age.
And yeah, she didn't talk for like a month. And that was at least an accident.
But she's seen things where people did things to each other, leaving paraplegics in cars to freeze to death, that sort of thing.
Where she was, again, like the first person on the scene where the person was still alive, but barely.
And she's gone through more trauma than like I had probably, if you total it up, four plus years of time in combat deployments.
She's seen way more trauma than I ever did. And I think that's the case with a lot of medics across the US.
I mean, you don't have to work in like the most socioeconomically devastated parts of the country to see terrible things,
because your job is to go find the terrible things and do what you can. And she's definitely had more than her fair share of that.
I know there were like upsides to it as well, like back to the cattle ranching thing, even where I grew up in the middle of South Dakota.
In the springtime, it's branding season right around May, about the time you're getting out of school.
And it's really physically rough work, like wrestling calves and branding them. So they hire high school kids to do the worst of it, because they can take the beating of it.
And we went out to a branding after school around the Saturday. And I met the guy, the rancher who owned the place, and he caught my last name, asked me my last name again.
And he's like, is your mom Doty? And he shook my hand and he said, your mom saved my wife's life.
And his wife had been in a car accident, and my mom was on the scene and did whatever she did and got her out. And it was a cool moment.
We don't really hear about that stuff a lot. My parents would try not to tell us too much about what they were up to.
But seeing the long term effect of that, this had happened maybe the year before.
And that guy still remembers that my mom helped save his wife's life. That was pretty cool.
And my dad's side of it, he was on some of those same calls. He was often on the same crew as my mom.
And he was also on the fire side of it. And I didn't hear as many of the stories of fires like they weren't.
A lot of them would be like grassland fires and things like that, that weren't as life threatening as something like a car crash.
It's so sad because I've had a lot of people on here that have talked about working on reservations.
And of course, it's not all doom and gloom. There's certain areas where there's the thriving.
However, that seems to be such an under discussed element.
And if you kind of unpack what we call now is tribalism, imagine if your entire existence, your entire identity had been unraveled by a country of invaders.
My forefathers, Europeans that have come now and driven you out of your land.
And then there's almost this kind of fallacy that, oh, they're fine now. They're making all this money from casinos.
And that's absolute bullshit. From what I hear, there's addiction and poverty and violence. And it's understandable.
I mean, if you take a people and you literally strip them of everything and in many cases try and make them like white people for lack of a better description, of course, it's going to be devastating.
And so I think this is a conversation that needs to be discussed more.
Yeah. And there are a handful of people who are advocating for that.
I mean, obviously, like the Lakota and Pine Ridge, like the Lakota people themselves.
And like if you look at just the paperwork, like the treaties, like the Lakota people are legally entitled to the Black Hills.
Like that was part of their land that was accorded or afforded to them in one of the final treaties in the late 1800s.
But then they found gold there. And everyone was like, nope, it's ours now, like all the whatever you call it, the white people, the Americans, and just took the Black Hills over, which was like a sacred spot to the Lakota.
And there's actually this fund where I don't know who the federal government or the state government allocated a bunch of money to try to pay the Lakota people for taking the Black Hills from them.
And it's been sitting in this bank account gathering interest for, I don't know, the better part of a century.
And they refuse to touch it because they don't want to sell the Black Hills.
They want it back. And it's this just, yeah, intractable problem.
And they're stuck in a poverty trap that is, I don't know, insolvable.
I don't know. We've all like, anyone who lives around there has had long conversations about what could be done about it.
Like alcoholism is a huge problem. But like most of the reservations are already dry.
They're not, you can't sell alcohol on them, even though alcohol is so prevalent.
But all that does is makes a single really profitable liquor store on the border of the reservation.
I think White Clay, Nebraska is one that has one where it does like millions in sales because it's bordering a reservation where it's a dry area.
And yeah, the educational system is bad. Addiction is bad. Gang violence is bad.
And there's tons of corruption.
You know, it's not unlike our efforts to change things in somewhere like Afghanistan or something like that, where it seems like everything we do makes it worse.
And no one really knows how to make it better.
Yeah, I mean, it's something we've got to figure out, though. I mean, it's a massive injustice.
It really is. And we're all enjoying the fruits of some of that injustice.
So I think we owe it to everyone who was kind of on the wrong end of the rebirth of this nation to kind of roll it back and go, all right, now we are so damn affluent.
And this is something I've spoken to people recently. We're not in Afghanistan or Iraq anymore.
So in theory, there should be a lot of money because there was plenty of money for ammunition and missiles when we were at war for 20 years.
So how can we affect the addiction crisis, the opioid crisis, the obesity epidemic, all these things that are hurt in Americans and also the land that was stolen during slavery, the land that was stolen from Native Americans.
That is something that we should be reinvesting in and getting these people out of these holes. We owe it to them.
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, people have tried at least halfheartedly.
But it's in another way similar to Afghanistan in that if you just throw money at it, that money is probably not going to go to the right place.
It's I think the only way I mean, I'm not going to be right about this.
Like, I'm not going to solve this right now, but it has to be like a grassroots kind of individual people on the ground kind of solution.
If it's like a federal thing where they throw here's 100 million dollars at a problem, it's not going to work.
It'll be just like Afghanistan or any other place where we waste a lot of money and probably end up hurting people in the process.
Yeah, well, I think that's just it.
I mean, we turn to government buildings expecting them to fix things when it's not.
They're at the point of the triangle and it really should be upside down.
We are the tip, it's all of us, so if we all band together, we can absolutely make massive dents in these issues.
But like you said, if we allow corrupt organizations to say that they're going to fix these things, then lo and behold, they're not, as we've seen for a millennia now.
Yeah.
All right, well, then you mentioned Afghanistan, so let's kind of walk through your military journey.
When you were in the school age, were you dreaming of the Navy or was there something else?
Pretty early on, yeah, I had decided that the academic route wasn't for me.
Like small towns out of Dakota, right, like isolated, very few resources educationally.
My younger brother and I in particular were both really unusually precocious.
Like we have perfect or near perfect scores on standardized tests.
My brother is like he's got his little Mensa card and all that stuff.
Just he actually only has it so that he has a piece of paper to officially prove that he's smarter than I am.
I don't think he even pays his membership dues for it, but that started pretty early.
And like our school, different teachers would periodically try to do something with us to help us.
You know, like they try to give us alternative curriculum, they created like a gifted and talented program for us.
But they just didn't really have the resources.
So my brother kind of plowed through and stayed on a more conventional track where I became more and more disillusioned with like the structured system.
And kind of I stayed in school, but almost dropped out in a way.
And then I just brought my own books.
Like I would just wear headphones in class, read my own books and whatever I wanted to study.
Like I try to teach myself a new language.
Right. I had a stack of books on like law and criminal defense and stuff.
I would just read whatever random things interested me.
And then I could pass whatever test I had.
Like I still had good grades by just skimming the material really quickly.
Like I didn't do advanced math.
Like I didn't do trigonometry or calculus or anything.
But I worked with a math teacher for an hour after school one day and scored in like the 95th percentile or so and trigon calculus on the ACT on the way out.
But I had my test scores sent to like a random school and I ran.
And you fill out like three different schools you wanted to go to.
I just picked random names with the weirdest locations I could find and sent my test scores to like a school and I ran.
And one in Utah that turned out to be for special needs kids.
And so I was I was bored intellectually and got nothing out of the standard academic environment that as I saw it and didn't want to do any more of that than I had to.
And at the same time, I'd been like learning how to become strong physically, like learning to understand that process and kind of transform myself, at least looking at physical metrics.
You know, like I had a 400 some pound deadlift by the time I was in my senior year of high school.
I was a fast runner, strong.
But with what I was reading, I read a lot of kind of philosophy oriented stuff as well.
I also understood that the concept of strength meant a lot more than picking up a heavy barbell or having a bench press.
And I wanted to test that sense of strength in a very real, committed sense, not just physically, but kind of mentally and emotionally or even philosophically,
which meant that I wanted to do something where I'd hit bottom, like where I kind of devastate myself or put myself through the worst thing I could find in order to kind of learn who I was and and develop whoever that was.
And I was also reading was my thing.
So I was reading a ton of books about special operations stuff of some sort.
And the Navy ones were the easiest to find.
I was drawn to the Navy, I think, because I knew it would be especially hard.
Something about the water appealed to me.
I didn't want to do something where I might have a natural talent for it.
So if it was a course where I was just running and rocking things that I kind of grown up doing, that didn't that didn't feel like as much of a it felt a little dishonest.
So I wanted to do something that would absolutely suck, which ended up being the Navy.
And I figured I'd learn how to swim along the way.
But I didn't realize how hard that was going to be.
Like, I turned out to be like innately just terrible at it.
I had no instincts for it whatsoever.
But but yeah, I didn't list it in the Navy by the start of my senior year.
I think I was still 16 or 17.
My parents had to sign a thing for me because I wasn't old enough to sign the papers on my own.
But by the start of my senior year, I was enlisted, which was just prior to 9 11.
So talk to me about that.
And you you didn't swim at all.
And it's not like you just go into regular Navy.
How did you find yourself in the SWIC selection?
So I also had terrible eyesight, possibly from reading so much as a kid.
That's a good that's a good beginning of a story how things went a little sideways.
Yeah. Well, it meant that I wasn't contracted because I was medically disqualified for a contract.
But I had a slippery recruiter who told me that as soon as I passed the screen test in boot camp, where I'd volunteer for a program,
pass the screen test and then they would shortlist me for eye surgery because you have to have close to 20, 20 eyesight to go through the Navy programs.
Turns out that wasn't true at all.
So I got I joined the Navy, sign up, not contracted for a special program.
I was signed up as like an electronics technician because I had high ASVAB scores.
So they gave me a nerd job and like first week or so boot camp, you do this presentation where they show you four videos.
It's like SEAL, SWIC, EOD and Diver.
And then you volunteer or the guys who are contracted just watch the video and then they go do the screen test.
And it took me a while. I failed the screen test the first time.
I was actually signed up for the BUDS program because that's that's the one that I read about in the books.
That's what I wanted. That's what I wanted to do is when I was familiar with.
I had no idea what a SWIC was, but I took the screen test, failed it very quickly because I couldn't swim at all.
I probably got two laps in and they tapped me on the top of the head, pulled me out and sent me to go get a swimming lesson.
And that's how I learned to swim was by failing the test fast enough that I still had time to go to the swimming lesson.
And I did that a handful of times while I was still in boot camp and finally passed the screen test on my last try by seven seconds.
Like I just squeaked under the line on the swim.
But it was at that point that I was in the it's called the dive motivators office, the guy who processes you into the special programs.
And he's like, you're not qualified. You have you're blind.
My eyesight was like twenty four hundred, twenty six hundred, which I believe is actually legally blind.
I had I wore contacts or boot camp classes.
But the SWIC program at the time, which I had never heard of, had eyesight waivers and they would let people go to selection with without the eyesight standards.
So that was how I like salvaged a career in NSW.
And I remember the the dive motivator, like explaining what the SWIC program was by like he was on a chair with wheels, like a little desk chair,
and he was pushing it around back and forth in his office, like rocketing from one wall to another, pretending to work machine guns and making boat noises.
He's like, that's what's wicked.
So I I I switched my contract to to the SWIC one and went to selection and at first had to wear these.
Like, first of all, they told like I really thought I was going to get eye surgery quickly.
I was still 17 or 18 at the time. Turns out you can't get eye surgery until you're 21.
Like you can't even get on the waiting list to do it in the Navy.
So I was stuck with terrible eyesight.
So my first bit of selection was with these they give you these glasses that are meant to be worn under a gas mask.
So they don't have like the normal stems like the plastic things behind your ears.
They're like a rubber band that holds the eye pieces to your face.
They are the dumbest looking things you could imagine.
Like they're just humiliating to wear.
And I think the instructors were embarrassed to even be associated with me and the handful of other guys that were there on eyesight waivers.
So they just quietly let us stop wearing them and wear contact lenses.
So I got really good at keeping contacts glued to my eyes, even like in the pool, getting surf torture, doing whatever.
I learned to keep contacts stuck in my eyes all the time.
And I had a little system of like I had a set of glasses stuck in a pocket as a backup.
I had backup contacts in my bag.
I think only one time they ever came out and I had my friend standing next to me and he would tell me the name of the instructor who was using the glasses.
And he was yelling at me because I couldn't recognize them and he would give me their names so I could like address them my name with it.
So I wouldn't get in trouble.
But it wasn't until my first I was back from my first deployment when I finally got eye surgery and I was like the best moment of my life,
throwing my glasses in the garbage can on the way out of the door with twenty twenty eyesight.
And I've never looked back.
I'm really happy to be able to see.
Now, educate me. Is SWCC the same as Riverines or will Riverines a separate unit?
There's a there's a Riverines SWCC unit.
So probably.
There's there's a coastal team on the East Coast and the West Coast.
And then there's a Riverine team in the middle and Mississippi.
OK, because I had Mike Taylor and Alex Rudehouse on who are the founders of BeaverFit USA.
And they were both Riverines and they were talking about working on the Euphrates.
So I think that particular team had been stood down in Vietnam and then stood up again for Iraq.
Yeah, that would probably be the Riverine team from Mississippi.
Yeah. So talk to me about SWCC then, you know, just give me an overview of the role and then we'll go into kind of where you found yourself deployed.
So SWCC are the boat guys.
So if you see a Navy commercial and there's like this cool looking jet boat with guns on it, that's a SWCC boat.
And most of what they do involves staying on the water, obviously.
And then depending on the role, they'll also do land based stuff, pretty much anything that involves mobility, driving something.
And they'll do some of the like ASO or sneaky squirrel type work as well.
They do they don't dive. SWCC don't dive.
They stay on top of the water unless they're swimming in it, you know, like normal swimming.
But they do all the other stuff like free fall, skydiving, that sort of thing.
And their missions vary from like in Iraq on the Euphrates, there was some direct action work where maybe they'd go and shoot something.
A lot of it involves it's called either VBSS, visit, board, search and seizure, which is where you like sneak up on another boat in the middle of the night and board it and search for something or search for someone or MEO, which is kind of the same thing.
It means maritime interdiction, which is where you drive around in a boat and look for people.
So our deployments, a lot of our a lot of our work was called FID or foreign internal defense, where you go somewhere else and you teach a host nation force how to do your job, usually pretty badly.
And then you would all we would also like you do that like in collaboration with the host nation force to do the VBSS thing, usually in countries where we're not officially at war.
So you're you're working with your partner who is technically responsible, you know, like carrying the flag of what's happening.
So like in the Philippines, I did two deployments to the Philippines where there's a lot of like Islamic terrorism kind of stuff, the Yabbi Sayyaf group and one that is hilariously named the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
It's literally the MILF. There's a there's a handful of them.
Obviously, I have and the MILF were, I think, the two main ones that come to mind.
But we just had like a target list, like a top 50 most wanted people.
And we we would work because it's the Philippines, like seven thousand islands.
We would work on the water to find those people in conjunction with the Filipino.
It's called the NAVSOG, the Naval Special Operations Group, like the Filipino version of Maritime Special Ops guys.
And then there would be special forces guys like Green Berets on the land.
And we'd have SEAL teams. We'd be working with the SEAL teams as well, who if there was a large assault or like a land based assault, the SEALs would run that.
And then anytime if you're doing a ship takedown and it's a big boat, like a big ship, that's when the SEALs would be involved because the the swicks, you have three to four guys on a boat.
A couple of them have to stay on the boat and drive it. So you don't have many people to cross deck or go to the next boat and do a takedown.
So if it's anything big that involves like a caving ladder, going indoors, doing CQB, that kind of thing, then then you're running with a SEAL assault team.
And they're the guys going up the ladder and doing the CQB stuff.
I can just see the MILF headquarters seeing the internet recently and going, have you ever thought about renaming our group?
Yeah.
How my wife is actually half Filipino herself.
How prolific is this terrorism that the Filipino people are being exposed to at the moment?
I suspect you would be able to answer that better than me, but it depends on where.
I think in say, Manila, the more metropolitan cities, it's much less of a thing.
But if you get into the really rural islands, like in the southern Philippines is where we mostly were.
The what do you call it?
Forget the name of the peninsula.
Around Holo Island and all the way south as far as Malaysia was where we worked, where I believe they're called the Tawsug.
Was one of the groups of people that we worked with, the guys that live permanently on water, which is really cool to see.
And it's also like a beautiful area, like crystal blue water and these really pretty islands.
But when you get into the really remote rural islands, there can be pretty significant pockets of it around Mindanao, mostly the southern islands.
Why is it existing there?
Man, I don't really know.
I couldn't tell you where it started.
I know it's not like, I mean, it's like Arabic Wahhabist fundamentalism, the same kind of stuff that like I think they actually pledged.
What is it called?
Bayah would be the Arabic word.
They've affiliated themselves with ISIS now generally.
So it's got roots in the Middle East and it somehow trafficked its way there.
I couldn't tell you exactly how, other than I think you find enough economically devastated, poorly educated people in a rural area that's geographically isolated and you can convince them of a lot of things.
And bringing in violence is also a good way to do that, where like the Filipino terrorists are often big on kidnapping and beheading is one of their methods.
So, you know, like either go along with this or at least let it slide or we're going to kill your family, like that kind of thing.
And, you know, on a small island with 150 people where someone suddenly shows up and that's the deal, I think it's fairly easy for that to start to set roots.
But the campaign against it, I think, has worked pretty well in keeping it from completely taking over.
And it's kind of like a game of whack-a-mole, more or less, where there's so many isolated islands that little pockets can still relocate from place to place to place.
And even a larger island, there's a lot of hiding spots, but it's never fully taken over the way, you know, say Taliban and significant parts of Afghanistan did or the way ISIS took over, you know, things like that.
It's been kept from blowing up pretty well.
I always ask a question to anyone who's actually been deployed in combat.
And the reason behind the question is simply we at home have such a polarized view of war through our TV stations, our very, very left and right leaning TV stations that we have the misfortune of being exposed to.
But it's either, you know, kill them all, like God saw them out, or it's the baby killer narrative.
And in the middle are the men, women, arguably children that we send overseas to, you know, fight for our country.
The first part of the question, regardless of the politics that sent you there, was there a point in your career where you realized that there were some horrific people that needed to be taken care of?
And obviously you've talked about the heading in the Philippines, so that would be one example.
But aside from that, in the Middle East?
Oh, yeah, I mean, the I think the question there is how.
Like, if you if you look at the Middle East, like our method of fighting terrorism tends to produce more terrorists.
Like, we're very good at tactics.
If we need to find someone and kill them anywhere in the world, like we've got the people for it.
The problem is that there will usually be enough collateral damage along the way or just cultural lack of consideration for, you know, like you've just killed all these these people's family members or someone's kid just watched their dad get murdered or whatever.
Like, we tend to just reshape and grow the problem over time, you know, like if just finding and killing people was enough.
Like, Iraq would be fine now, Afghanistan would be doing really well. And none of that none of that is true.
I mean, there's absolutely people and ideas, I think is probably the better way to put it, like ideas that need to go away, you know.
But it's I don't know that we have the best long term strategy for doing that anywhere that we do it.
I think actually the Philippines is one of the places where we've been a lot more effective than a lot of Iraq or Afghanistan.
We've had we are fighting and have fought similar similar things.
Say I spent time in Kenya along the Somali border where it's al-Shabaab mostly just another Islamic fundamentalist group.
And you deal with the same problems where, you know, you kill a handful of people here, you have a fight here.
But it may not fundamentally change what is producing that ideology and the people who follow it.
As far as the like, you know, like that dichotomy between the people are like, let's just kill everyone and the people are like, I don't know.
Everyone's a baby killer in the military, I think it's like the American political system.
It's very easy to give the outliers disproportionate attention.
So you'll have people in the military who probably shouldn't be there because they do just like killing people for fun and they'll do it even if it's not the right person or where they're doing it just out of cruelty.
But that is a very, very small minority of the population.
And most of the people there are driven by an innate sense of values.
And they're human beings just trying to do the right thing and struggling to figure out what the right thing is in a very ambiguous setting.
Like, that's one of the things I learned growing up and joining the military and going through it all.
Like Midwest, rural America, I was raised with the impression that people in the military were kind of innately good and trustworthy and honorable people.
And then like the very first step of that was a recruiter who lied to my face, who faked a phone call in front of me and pretended to verify that I was going to get eye surgery as soon as I passed a screen test in boot camp.
Like just he literally faked a phone call and made all these promises. And that's where I started to realize that people are people anywhere.
You know, like you're going to have people who are liars, people who are psychopathic, but they're a very small percentage of the overall population.
And someone has to fight these fights, you know, like there are horrible things happening and I think it's a moral failing and an act of cowardice to let terrible things happen throughout the world.
And at that point, you also have to draw boundaries and decide who's responsible for what and whether we should be fighting a war in another country versus helping our own people or whatever.
But if you look at the individual actors on the ground, the Salters, Sailors, Marines, whatever, most of them are just trying to do the right thing and trying to understand what the right thing is.
The number of people I've had on the show, especially from the kind of SF community, that have said a similar thing when it came to Afghanistan, and it's clear even to a civilian.
You know, if you go in to initially help and then you stay, you become an occupier and then you're obviously going to create more enemies then.
And so there's this kind of similar conversation of, you know, we should have been there for 18 months, taken out the key targets, shut down the training camps and then left again.
One thing, again, from someone who's never been in the military, just a firefighter paramedic.
But it seems so woefully apparent to me is the same way that there's a lot of companies that don't want Americans to be healthy because they're making so much money from pharmaceuticals and surgeries and implants, etc.
It's the same with war. We know how much money is made by weapons manufacturers, uniforms, MREs, whatever it is, when we are at war.
What is your perspective of the checks and balances of the industrial military complex pushing our young men and women into yet another conflict?
Hmm. I mean, there's absolutely going to be a profit incentive there and people who don't have skin in that game, who aren't sending their kids to war, you know, they're not burying their family members.
And they're going to be all for it.
And I saw just how bloated that machine can be working in Iraq.
Like, I was in the diplomatic side, like, basically a glorified bodyguard for the ambassador there, which involved a lot of motorcade work.
So like driving around in armored cars and a lot of our vehicles were like armored BMWs, which are expensive to begin with.
And then you fully armor one and they're like quarter million dollar cars.
While I was there, they found one in a Connex box that no one like people lost track of it.
Like there's a quarter million dollar car sitting in a box that no one knew was there.
Like they lost track of it on a piece of paper because it wasn't important enough.
It was like a rounding error or like driving around with the ambassador.
I was the like lead driver of the car with the ambassador in it.
So you'd be in the back seat with whoever he was driving with, listening to them chit chat like they had.
We drive past some building or something and they would just casually be like, how much money are they spending there?
What's the budget there? You're like, I don't know. It's cost plus.
Meaning the contracts were structured so that the prime or the contractor doing the work were paid whatever they build, whatever their declared expenses were, plus a guaranteed profit margin.
So there's this incentive to inflate the cost of anything that they were doing.
So like if you looked at what KBR billed to wash a bag of laundry, it would be like a hundred and fifty dollars.
Like the amount of money that flowed through that place and the ethical lines that would get blurred were definitely disconcerting.
Like the contract I was on, they have written standards for for staffing or manning.
So every team needs at least one medic, I think two medics, maybe a primary and a secondary.
And they medics are hard to find and they bill at a higher rate.
So the private company that's hired us, that's going to build a government for having us there gets to bill more money for having medics on the ground.
And I remember there was a guy, he was an Army Ranger and he had his civilian EMT license, which you're probably familiar with.
I had an EMT license. It's not that rigorous and it's not going to help you in combat.
Not really. But he got there and they told him, hey, we've got you on the books as a medic.
So, you know, just don't tell anyone. You've kind of got the qualifications on paper.
We can get it through the paperwork. But we've got you billed as a medic, which means you're going to make way more money.
So his daily rate went up by like two hundred dollars a day more or something like that.
And the guy quit. He was like, I'm not doing this because first, like it's just unethical.
Like you're lying to put me on the ground and say I'm something that I'm not.
Like a medic in that setting should be like a special forces, 18 Delta, a PJ, a SOCOM, something like that.
This guy has a civilian EMT license. And he's like, regardless of, you know, what like we've all discussed this, that I'm not a real medic.
Everyone on the team knows this, but I'm being paid for this. And if we go out and we get hit and I need like someone needs help.
Now I'm the guy who's been paid for this job for the last couple of months and I can't do anything but hopefully put a tourniquet on.
Like he's got his basic skills. He's like, I'm not putting myself in that position to be the guy who is paid as a medic, who can't be a medic when the time comes.
And he left the contract, like he walked away from, I don't know, twenty some thousand dollars a month to be there and went home.
The other side of the initial question, I think is equally as important as you don't normally hear the stories of kindness and compassion.
I've heard so many because I ask this every single time. When you look back again at these times in combat, what were moments that you remember,
whether it was from your own men and women or whether it was the indigenous population that you were serving with or protecting as far as kindness and compassion?
Hmm. The most common thing I saw would have been we did these programs called MedCaps or medical civil action programs, I think.
We did some of them in East Africa. We did mostly in the Philippines because these isolated islands, like people have very little access to medical care.
And people would walk like five, six miles to get there at sunrise with their kids often to have like to get some kind of health care for their kids.
And we'd spend days on end like sunrise to sunset, just taking care of people, doing everything from like minor surgeries.
I remember like very crash coursing my way through some of this stuff, like watching helping one of the medics pull a giant cyst out of the back of a guy's neck.
That was disgusting, kind of horrifying. But like it was the only medical care this guy had.
So we had a soccer medic who was a decent, had some decent surgical training doing like minor field surgeries.
And then there was one woman, like a thing that's burned into my brain, who met us at a pier.
We came in from whatever we were doing. And this woman, who lived in the village near where we were, brought her baby who had been bitten by a snake.
And I remember the color of the baby's entire body was like wrapped in purple and yellow, like super swollen, like the skin was tight, you know.
And there was a hospital the next island over, but no one would take her there for whatever reason.
I guess there was some kind of superstition around it. I'm not sure what the deal was, but she couldn't get a ride to the hospital with her baby.
And we very quickly threw her in the boat, got on the sat phone to figure out where we were going or who we needed to talk to, and got her over to higher care.
And the kid lived, but I don't know, I remember just like we were her last chance, basically.
I think she, I don't know how long she'd been sitting there, but we were the only way that her kid was going to live.
I remember that scene. There was a big argument between, we had a SEAL officer with us at the time and some other Filipino guy who had a boat, but was refusing to take her for whatever reason.
I think guns were drawn briefly and yeah, we ended up getting her there, but that was the one that sticks in my mind, that and all the med-cap stuff, you know, like taking care of people medically.
Beautiful. Well, that's why I like to ask this. I mean, there's so much of that, you know, that happens. I mean, rebuilding of schools and hospitals and digging the wells and, you know, taking care of indigenous animals.
And I've heard so many, but you just don't hear that. You know, you hear, like you said, the mistakes and then you just, you get the patriotic flag waving and, you know, the sad returns of coffins with, you know, American flags draped on them.
But there's no actual personal stories attached to them unless it's something, you know, like, you know, the operation red wings or something where they end up storytelling parts of it.
But, you know, the kindness and compassion, I think is also what we need to hear to humanize our men and women in uniform.
Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, people, most people are on board with that when they're working there. You'll have people who are just kind of disinterested in other people.
But most of the people working in places like this are fundamentally good people and pretty values driven. They're doing their best in a really chaotic place.
Absolutely. So what was it that made you decide to transition out of the military and how was that transition process for you?
Some people seem to transition pretty well. Others definitely struggle with that lack of tribe and purpose.
The lack of tribe and purpose thing is definitely a big factor. In my case, I sort of consciously recreated it. And that was what I was doing when I started my first gym.
I was trying to recreate the culture that had been around me in the NSW world.
There was this house we used to hang out at. A friend of mine lived there. I think he paid rent for a beanbag, possibly.
It was in Imperial Beach, as far southwest as you can get in California.
And there were three or four doors down from being the last house on the beach before you hit the border to Tijuana.
And no one knew exactly how many people lived there because guys were in and out on training and deployments constantly. But it was a mix of SEAL and SWIC guys that lived there.
And it was just kind of like a weekend hangout spot. And if you walked in the door, you would see rows of dive tanks and wetsuits.
And there was mountain bikes over there. I kept my surfboard there. And when I moved, I think I just left it there.
And you'd go there on a Friday or Saturday. People go surfing together, play football on the beach, do a barbecue or something.
And if you ever needed gear, I needed an extra wetsuit. My friend who lived there, actually, and I did a trip to New Zealand to go surfing.
And I needed an extra wetsuit. And someone at that house gave it to me. I don't even know whose it was. But I brought a wetsuit to New Zealand.
So if you needed, you know, like you wanted to go mountain biking, you wanted someone to go mountain biking with you, you just show up at the house or call someone and someone would turn up.
And it was a very like kind of supportive and physically active culture, just as a group of people.
And you find pockets of that in almost any special ops community where people work really well together, support one another, and are generally physically active and kind of take care of each other.
And I was aware of the importance of that or the value of it and wanted to recreate it.
So one of the people I started my first gym with was my friend Marshall, who's a Marine Scout sniper and kind of came from a similar world.
And one of our things with the early members of the gym would be opening up my house on Fridays.
We'd all do a workout together. That'd be really short, like some kind of a test thing that might take like a 500 meter row on a concept tube, your entire workout, which takes 90 seconds.
And then afterward, we were trying to integrate nutrition into it and cooking as well.
So we'd take over the house and everyone would take turns cooking.
We have three or four different things going and people would cook a meal and then just hang out, drink a bunch of wine, eat good food.
And like it was we kind of created that social world again of people who were like healthy and physically active and eating good food.
And on the weekends would go hiking or go skiing or mountain biking or do whatever together.
And so in that way, I was able to kind of continue the sort of culture or the social world that I had.
I didn't feel terribly isolated in the way a lot of people do.
Like if I hadn't done that, if I had, say, just gone to a desk job somewhere without other people like me and without finding or creating something that would attract other people like me, it probably would have been bad.
Like I would have been lost for sure.
But knowing that once I left, I wasn't going to have that, I kind of consciously created it.
And that culture is still there.
Like I live in Colorado now, that first gym was in Spearfish, South Dakota. But it still kind of has that where it's a very supportive place where people get together quite a lot, hang out together socially and go and do things outside of the gym together.
And it worked really well.
And as far as like training other people, I think that was the other part of the question, right?
Like training other people for the special ops community?
Yeah. I mean, yeah. How did you get?
Well, before we even get to that, what was the evolution of your strength and conditioning principles and philosophies from what you were doing in seventh grade through into the military and then out the other side?
Seventh grade, all that high school stuff, it started with my dad buying me a squat rack that came with a Joe Weider bodybuilding book.
Like, you know, all that it actually wasn't bad programming compared to what you might find on some random website.
Five years later, it was pretty basic compound lifts made up the majority of it.
The issue is more my technical execution of anything I was doing.
But it went through terrible ultra high volume bodybuilding kind of stuff with like really bad form.
I remember my friend and I trying to figure out what a deadlift was for some reason, working on the assumption that it should involve as much flexion and extension of your lower back as possible.
Like like the range of motion of your lower back was part of what you were going for.
And fortunately, we weren't like we were in seventh grade or something.
We weren't strong enough to hurt ourselves much.
But we would do super high volume stuff where like I remember not being able to lift my arm to grab a phone off the wall after a workout because we'd done so much arm stuff or shoulder stuff.
But then from there, I found other books like Pavel Sotselin was actually a pretty big early influence.
I didn't do a ton of kettlebell specific stuff.
Like I wasn't super into swings and snatches, but his stuff on like heavy deadlifts and presses was really influential.
Like the first time I pulled over a 400 pound deadlift somewhere in high school was following a Pavel program.
Went from that to actually some of his stuff influenced things I did in the in the early part of the Navy, too,
unlike reciprocal inhibition and learning how to like stretch and turn muscles off and on.
I actually had when I was in the Brown Shirt program, we didn't talk about this,
but when I got rolled from the SWCC program the first time and then became a bud student for four months in the rollback program,
at one point I had my own time slot in the schedule because I was teaching people like PNF stretching,
like this particular type of stretching to help release hip flexors and some of the muscles that you really lock up when you're swimming two miles a day with fins.
And some of that I learned from Pavel's books as well.
But from there it went to that would have been early 2000s, mid 2000s.
So the stuff I was reading followed, say like Eric Cressy, Mike Robertson, those guys looking at how to assess movement,
how to create individualized programs based on like movement issues and that sort of thing.
But I wasn't very influenced by like conventional strength and conditioning work because it wasn't available to me.
Like where we were on deployments, we didn't have like super cool collegiate gyms with squat racks and bars and stuff.
In a lot of cases, you might have like a Fred Flintstone weight set that someone had made out of like metal pipes and blocks of cement or whatever.
I remember one guy rigging up a pulley system on a tree using a bag of rocks.
But in a lot of cases, we have sandbags and we'd fill the sandbags with rocks instead of sand because the sand would dump in your face or you just use heavy rocks and carry those around.
And so I learned how to program and train people using very little equipment where the focus was on just fundamental movement quality.
Looking at how well someone squats, does a lunge, how well they can stack their torso, do a hip hinge, how stable they are under load doing a long carry.
We did a lot of long carries and drags, like one mile barbell carries in the Philippines at one place.
We had a barbell we carried around everywhere.
Or we do like things where you do like you throw a rock as far as you can on the beach and we do relays down the beach doing like plyometrics and rock throws.
And we do underwater rock running out to the boat and then carry the rock up the anchor line, get it on the deck of the boat and then jump back in the water with it and bring it back on the beach.
And like, you know, you have one guy carrying the rock on the bottom while one guy swims above him as a safety swimmer and you alternate.
We do workouts like that.
But I learned to get people really fit and keep them healthy by paying attention to movement quality and then loading it in any way that I could or had to.
Based on what was available, you know, whether I had a barbell or if I had sandbags and rocks and that kind of thing.
And we got gymnast rings actually came up quite a lot.
We used gymnast rings for a lot of things.
And we did really well with that.
Like, like we got really fit.
And I think a key thing was people also weren't injured.
Like no one had super tight lower backs all the time.
No one was having knee pain because like the intensity that people put into things was more internally derived by moving really well with the heaviest thing they could find and moving kind of explosively or doing a lot of volume or whatever.
But but there's this thing that you see a lot of people do where the intensity has to be like externally imposed,
meaning if the workout isn't really complicated and confusing and doesn't make them feel out of breath kind of naturally or if they don't have what they think is a heavy barbell,
then the workout is just not going to be hard because they can't make it hard by just moving faster, moving more.
That kind of approach tends to result more in like bad movement patterns and injuries.
Like we see this a lot with people now where they think that they're not going to be strong if they're not lifting heavy barbells.
But to them, a heavy barbell weighs 200 pounds.
You know, like the actual limits of strength with a barbell are many times more than that.
So anyway, like there was a mix of, you know, say like Eric Cressy and Mike Robertson stuff that looked at like movement quality and how to assess that.
But then on the what to do about it side of things, the conventional stuff that you might read in a strength and conditioning program,
I never used very much of it because first, like we didn't have the equipment that a lot of guys used.
And for the population I was working with, I realized that a lot of those frameworks were kind of arbitrary.
Like the amount of volume that someone should have, the intensity they should use, things like that.
What people thought of as over training, none of it really applied to our population.
Like we were doing putting our body weight on a barbell and carrying it for a mile.
Guys would go on 15 mile runs on the weekend just for funsies.
Like the workouts we did would seem insane in like a high school or a college weight room.
Dragging tires for a mile for time was a popular one.
So the stuff we did just didn't fit into a normal training framework.
And yeah, when I started that first gym, the barefoot fitness gyms, I kind of brought that idea there,
where we had a more realistic perspective on what a human body is really capable of.
And we didn't use a lot of elaborate equipment or even really elaborate exercises.
We just did simple things really well at a high level of intensity.
And people got really fit doing that.
When we talk about movement patterns, I think when CrossFit started up, we were being told,
oh, you know, you've got to coach, don't let the knees over the toes and all the things, all the cues.
And then as we matured as coaches through the years, you're like, oh, OK.
So yeah, there is a cueing element, but really it's about muscle imbalance and immobility.
If you fix those, the person will move the way that you would cue them.
What were some of the common denominators that you saw as far as poor movement patterns
in some of these tactical athletes that you were working with?
The most fundamental thing I always saw was just how well someone could squat.
And that carried over into just about anything else, because you're even seeing upper body function there,
because you're seeing the relationship between their pelvis, their spine, and their rib cage,
which is going to affect rib cage dynamics or rib cage position and shoulder function,
breathing patterns and everything else.
And we had a ton of contrast on that because I was also training people in these other countries,
like in Central America or the Philippines or East Africa,
countries where people were much more likely to spend their lives regularly doing a deep squat.
So when we had someone doing, say, a goblet squat, like you give them a rock or a dumbbell or whatever you've got,
you tell them to squat as far as they can.
The guys from these other countries would pick that up really well,
and they'd be able to move heavy weights under quite a bit of load.
And you can add a lot of stress to that.
And they do really well with it, where you get an American who was also like a 19, 20-year-old
who was very fit and had a good training background.
But they hadn't, they'd never bothered like squatting deep,
especially squatting deep with their heels on the ground without like heel elevation,
which means that they have limited ankle dorsiflexion, probably limited hip mobility.
They would struggle a good deal more with that.
And you wouldn't be able to load them and give them a full range of motion or apply stress
because they'd hurt themselves.
So one of the fundamental things that we always started with was just getting people to squat well,
meaning no heel elevation, which would take a lot of time sometimes,
keeping their heels rooted on the ground, keeping their feet more or less tracking forward,
like maybe 10 degrees of external rotation at most, knees tracking out over their toes,
and as much of an upright spinal posture as they can get,
depending on their individual anthropometry, like how their joint ratio,
so you know how long their femurs are relative to their torso.
And everyone has that ability.
Like some people, just because of the way they're built,
aren't going to be like super deep upright squatters, like really good at deep front squatting or something like that.
But everyone can do a fundamental like bodyweight squat with their heels on the ground
if they spend enough time working on it.
And once you do that, it kind of unlocks a lot of other things.
So it's sort of like a canary kind of thing.
It tells you a lot about everything else that's going on, depending on how well someone does that one thing.
And we look at other basic things, like how well you can do a push-up or how well you do a pull-up.
A push-up is going to show you their sagittal plane stability or positioning,
and you're going to see how they carry their spine, what they do with their pelvis,
how well they can stabilize, what their shoulder blades are doing.
You can see the relative distribution of tension in their upper body.
You see all these things, and you kind of see the inverse of that when you have them do a pull-up.
You know, you see the balance of tension between their chest versus their upper back.
You see what they do with their spine again, if they're controlling their pelvis or not,
like kind of what their any unconscious motor patterns are doing.
And those are all like very basic things.
But if you go into a 24-hour fitness or some normal gym, no one's doing them right.
Or like, you know, one percent of people are doing a push-up or a pull-up or a squat
in a way that hits these pretty basic check marks.
And as a result, a lot of people who are in the gym training day to day
are just gradually working themselves up to an injury that's going to set them back substantially.
And then they're going to have to start over if they have the motivation to do so.
And they're going to start from scratch whenever that injury is kind of resolved well enough for them to do it again.
But they're not going to change their fundamental motor patterns.
So they're going to train long enough to hurt themselves again.
And they'll repeat that process forever until something changes, if it does.
They say sitting is a new smoking.
And obviously, that can be argued depending on how you look at it.
But obviously, inactivity really is the new smoking.
When you're comparing, especially Southeast Asia cultures and their ability to squat compared to us,
the glaring difference is what we're seeing in now, the chair.
So what are you seeing as far as inactivity and chair use and now device use
as far as that contributing to the inability to move in the correct way?
It's a big factor, yeah.
And you see it very young now with kids having that cervical posture,
like that upper body posture where their neck is turned into a human question mark
because they are so used to staring at a phone.
And they've been doing it through this really important developmental period.
And it can be kind of terrifying to see because their head position or their cervical posture is so altered.
And yeah, the sitting too long thing has been like plaguing Americans forever,
I think, plaguing Westerners in general.
And it's another one of those things that we just kind of have to build into the way we write programs
and the way we train people.
Like we can't assume that someone is going to have excellent movement quality as soon as like we can't just say,
go do a squat, go do a lunge and expect that it's going to happen in like an ideal or optimal way
because they probably have like tension in places they don't want it and not enough stability in places they want it.
And we have to account for that and how we write programming.
One of the things I learned over the years, like I mentioned, I helped a lot of like Bud's guys doing hip flexor stretches and stuff
because of all the fitting we did.
And the fitting there like does directly contribute to that.
But it's kind of a common misconception that we need to crank on our hip flexors a lot because they're tight, because we sit a lot.
Generally, if you move, like reposition someone's spine and pelvis and rib cage,
like get them into a better stacked torso position so that you can like change the structure that is contributing to that hip flexor tension,
you can make better long term changes in that tension than just basically treating a symptom by worrying about activating glutes or stretching hip flexors.
That's one of the things I've learned over the last 10 years, roughly, on how to look a little bit deeper past like the symptom
and look more for what the underlying structural position is or what the underlying structure is that's causing something like chronically tight hip flexors or whatever.
So what was it that you were seeing was missing when it came to training some of these elite tactical athletes?
And then talk to me about why you created building the elite.
Long term planning, I think, would be one of the key things.
There are a lot of things that can go wrong, but having kind of a deliberate approach where you understand the distinctions between development and display or practice and performance,
exploit and explore is another way of saying that.
That if you're some of it gets into like growth mindset research or performance versus learning orientations as well.
But if you're doing a workout where your goal is to perform well in that workout solely for the interest of that workout itself,
like you're trying to display a capacity that you have, so you're trying to squat as much weight as you've ever squatted or you're trying to run the fastest time you've ever run or something like that.
You're largely calling on a foundation that you've developed somewhere else before that,
which if you're just exploiting a pre-existing foundation over and over and early in a process,
then you're probably not also developing that foundation in the long run.
And that is one of, I think, the biggest mistakes that people make in thinking that their training should also be testing,
that all of their workouts should be some kind of a test that they have to perform through.
Instead, the approach that we work people toward is kind of the long term view or sometimes investing in loss.
Like if you have to say you have an issue with your movement quality,
like you can't really squat that well or that often without hurting yourself or every time you run, you get knee pain or shin splints.
You could just keep alternating the volume you apply and running less when you're in pain and then once the pain is gone, running again until you get shin splints and trying to run as fast as you can.
Or you can kind of take a step back and evaluate what it is that's leading to those shin splints,
which is going to be something in your gait pattern generally, your movement quality, cadence, vertical oscillation, these kinds of things,
and rebuild the pattern that you have, which initially is going to make you perform worse.
So when you go, say, like we commonly see where people have an excessively slow cadence when they run, they're over striding,
they're taking really long strides and their foot's landing quite a bit out in front of them.
So there's a lot of breaking force or impact or deceleration force in their shins every time they run,
which also means like they're having to rapidly decelerate and then pick it back up and regain the speed, which is really energetically inefficient.
To fix that, because that's a really familiar natural automatic motor pattern when you're doing it,
to fix it means you have to become much more conscious of what you're doing and you're going to be in a novel motor pattern that feels awkward and uncomfortable and slow and clumsy.
And it's going to make you run slower for a while, like possibly several months. And a lot of people will step away from that.
They won't want to do that because making this change has made them slower.
And if they're concerned about their performance in the workout and just what the workout does in terms of displaying an immediate capacity,
then that feels like a failure because now it made them worse at what they're trying to do.
But if they have that longer term view and they're kind of investing in loss, like they're taking a short term drop in performance in order to reach an eventual higher peak in performance,
then eventually they're going to work through that. They're going to improve their cadence or their running technique, their vertical oscillation,
whatever they were doing that was slowing them down or giving them shin splints, causing them pain.
And they're going to move past wherever their previous performance was, and then they're going to be faster than they've ever been.
And they're going to do it without pain. But that's a multi-week or multi-month process to get there.
And along the way, they're going to feel worse. They're going to look worse and perform worse.
And it's having that longer term perspective of putting together all of the pieces and investing where you need to invest that I think gets a lot of people where they assume that whatever they're doing,
they just need to do it harder for two or three months, and then they're ready for whatever selection course they're going to.
And that tends to lead to a lot of failures. I think the other aspect of it kind of on that theme is we call it the sword in the stone fallacy,
which is the idea that a soft selection is something that you do as a tryout.
So you just show up and it's not about your preparation. It's about an innate ability.
And like the kid who magically could pull a sword from the stone, people think they're going to show up, do the tryout, and they're going to be the one with the magical ability.
They'll have like a special sparkle in their eye or something that the instructors are going to see, or they're going to have some kind of X factor that just came from within.
And that is not true at all. These soft selection courses are job interviews.
And the people who show up to these interviews really well prepared, able to demonstrate that they've been getting ready for this job for a long time,
and they have all the capacities that are necessary to perform well in the interview, are the ones who are going to get hired.
And the ones who show up with minimal preparation because they think it's a tryout are usually the ones who pad the attrition stats in the first week.
So just as a side note to this, what is so disheartening being a firefighter in America is when I talk to people like your community,
you're constantly held on an extremely high bar and that's maintained.
And if you fall below that bar, obviously you'll find yourself outside of these teams.
Ocean lifeguarding, another great example, and some of these are volunteers.
But if you can't pass the test, you cease to be a lifeguard.
In police fire EMS in the States, we might have fitness standards when we go through the academy.
There might be a test we have to pass like a CPAT to get hired.
But there is no mandatory annual physical standard at all.
And even call the fire certification in Florida is called the minimum standards.
So it tells you from day one that's the shittest you should ever be in your entire life.
Yet there's no standards as we progress through.
What is your perspective? I'm sure you've come across that before.
Coming from an extremely physical role, an elite tactical athlete group,
learning that the police and fire, they're protecting your families aren't even held to a standard.
I think when we look at something like fitness standards across law enforcement, first responder type people,
our first impulse to immediately impose a standard could also create, it could be a solution that creates its own problems.
Like there are a handful of things to consider there, the first of which is probably Goodheart's law,
or the idea that a measure is useful until it becomes a target.
So, you know, even the military does this, a fitness standard like doing 60 sit ups in order to pass a screen test or something like that.
It has nothing, how many sit ups you can do has very little to do or nothing to do with how good at your job you're going to be a year later
when you're through your selection course and the qualification process.
No one's like out sit upping the enemy.
They just have these fitness standards in the hope that they loosely correlate with the general physical capacities that someone needs.
And also general physical fitness correlates with certain psychological characteristics.
So you're seeing somebody's conscientiousness, you're seeing that they're self disciplined enough to get themselves out of bed
and go do a hard workout and put themselves through things that require delayed gratification.
Well, no one's watching them or making them do it or cares if they're doing it.
But the moment you create a specific standard, like you tell someone they have to do so many push ups or sit ups, they start gaming it.
And now you have people like say you did this in a law enforcement community or firefighter community.
You'd have people who would train exclusively to squeak by this test.
They would only do whatever it was you assigned them to do, their sit ups or pull ups or dragging a dummy around or whatever.
And then they'd either want to just pass it well enough to keep their job or they'd want to game it so that they could max out the score
and maybe get a promotion from it, depending on how the incentives are structured.
But neither of those things would necessarily help to significantly improve the readiness,
like the general capabilities of the people in that unit or community.
And the other part of it is like as a real world solution, if you were to do this and impose rigorous physical standards across these communities,
you might lose half your people immediately unless you made the standards easy enough that they also didn't matter.
And there are probably plenty of people who would fail or wouldn't do very well at whatever rigorous physical standard you have
that are still valuable contributors to their community.
So yes, physical fitness should be a much more significant part of these cultures and it should be, I guess, reinforced in the way it is in a soft community.
But I think the thing to consider is that within a soft community, nobody is concerned about meeting a physical standard, a minimum physical standard.
Like no one in like a Green Beret platoon or whatever they call it, Green Beret is in an ODA,
is worried about being able to run a two mile in the time that's their standard.
Like they're all holding themselves to a high physical standard and usually in a very broad way that has very little to do with specifically passing any kind of a screen test or physical annual physical test.
They're doing it out of an intrinsic set of values.
So it's the product of an innate culture.
It's not the product of a manager writing a memo.
You know, it's not it's not that it's been externally imposed.
Like if you look at the workouts that we did in the Navy, no one was making us do like all this underwater rock running or rock running.
No one was making us do 15 mile runs on the weekend for funsies.
No one made us train five hours a day like some of us did.
We did it because it was who we were.
And like it was a reflection of the values that we innately had and kind of the culture that we had created for ourselves.
So the issue isn't the presence or absence of a physical fitness test and whether you make someone run a mile and a half in 12 minutes or not.
The issue is deeper and would take a lot longer to change than a fitness test.
It's rooted in their culture and in how people value physical fitness and how the organization supports it and where the incentives are.
Like we talked to a law enforcement unit for a state recently, a state in the U.S.
And one of their rules was they their people couldn't train on the clock and they couldn't they didn't provide them training facilities because of liability concerns.
So if someone in the police department was training on the clock at work and in a gym that the department provided and they hurt themselves,
then you have this whole mess of like workman's comp issues and all these like paperwork challenges.
So their policy was the cops couldn't work out on the clock and they did not provide them training facilities.
So these guys who are already working long hours with erratic shifts, possibly doing night shifts and whatever, had to figure out how to stay fit on top of their jobs in their own downtime,
which was very limited, while finding a gym that is probably far away from where they work and live in their own time on their own dime.
And the entire system was designed to disincentivize physical fitness.
So if you took that system and said, oh, by the way, you also have to run a mile and a half and eleven and a half minutes or whatever,
like you just have people quit or fail who wanted to stay there.
So it's not as simple as do we have standards or not?
It's more of a deeper look at the entire culture and the specifics of the system or the organization or the bureaucracy that these people are working in.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more with the kind of testing exercises in the fire service.
We have a thing called the CPAT, which is all firefighter movements.
You start with an encumbered climb, like, you know, like three minutes in the stairwell with 70 pounds on your shoulders.
And then you go to a series of movements where you got things, 40 pounds again to simulate the pack, you know, your dragon hose and carrying tools and force entry.
So it's things that you would have to do as a firefighter.
So no one can say those are unfair.
If you cannot do them, you have no business being on an engine or a truck. It's that simple.
But I'm very, very fair as well.
You know, looking at the work environment and where, you know, law enforcement, partly, but fire, especially people have no idea.
The average firefighter in the US outside of the Northeast works 56 hours a week.
So they do 24 hours, you know, awake or really shitty sleep, depending on the shift.
Then they have a 48 hour period and then they do it again over and over and over again.
More often than not, with the recruitment crisis, now they'll call you at 730 and be like, oh, you can't go home.
You got to do another 24 hours because we haven't staffed our department properly.
So now you've got people working 80 hours and not sleeping three or four days at this point per week.
So this is where we have failed the first responder profession, especially the fire service is that we have not given them the ability to recover.
So when you have the fired up firefighters that take their fitness seriously, that take this training seriously,
they do get hurt because there isn't the recovery for you to actually grow and be stronger from this training.
What is your perspective of, you know, rest and recovery and specifically sleep as far as, you know,
the ability for the tactical athletes to even perform at the level that we're asked to?
It's I mean, there's no there's no easy answer for people who are doing shift work like that.
They're just compromised, like they're just playing the game on the hard level.
We know that shift work and erratic sleep schedules like that, they create a negative risk factor for everything.
Chronic disease rates, depression, obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes, like all of it is worse when you're working shift work.
And there's no magic button for that.
The best you can do is try to like externally impose a healthy circadian rhythm,
which if you're doing something like that, like you're on a 24 hour shift and then they tell you you need to do another one,
you know, like when there's that much chaos in it, it's a lot like the night ops that we would do in the military,
where you might go out for what should be a single night run, doing something where you'd be back by sunrise and then it ends up stretching out for three days.
Like there's there's just nothing you can do other than accept that that's terrible.
And then once you can sleep, try to establish a fixed circadian rhythm with predictable sleep and wake times.
But in a lot of cases, they don't allow people to do that either.
They alter their their sleep and wake times.
Like I know I've worked with clients in the military where they do there's a term for it,
but they alternate every week or two whether they're working at night or whether they're working in the day.
And it just ruins their their sleep cycle like they have no autonomic or circadian rhythm left anymore after sometimes years of doing that.
So they they kind of have to bandaid it and just accept that it's not a good situation and do what you can to reestablish deep sleep.
And well, we can't bank sleep, we can catch up on it.
So hopefully they have the ability to when they come off of a shift or they come off of a particularly long work period,
like shut down in an environment that is really conducive to sleep and get a lot of it.
But as far as training consistently under those conditions,
the most successful guys do most successful people do find a way to train consistently,
but they also have to modify the way they're training and forget about the idea of some kind of like theoretical optimum training volume
and integrate into their planning that their recovery capacity is compromised.
So the results or the adaptations that they get from a given stimulus from a given workout are going to be rate limited or determined by their ability to adapt and recover from that workout,
which means that when their recovery capacity is limited, so is the magnitude of the stressor that they can apply and benefit from.
So the people who are most successful are finding ways to train consistently or regularly,
but they're also adjusting their training volume or intensity in response to the amount of sleep deprivation that they've had or the amount of stress that they've been under.
And if they've just had a shitty week, sorry, I hope I can swear here.
If they've just had a bad week, they might kind of work out in half.
They might change some kind of high intensity or power oriented thing into something that's more recovery oriented or lower intensity.
So they have to be a lot more flexible and adaptable.
See, this is the so many layers to this conversation, but what I'm trying to do and it's it started here in Florida, not just because of me,
I'm just one of many voices, but it's not very many voices, it's a very kind of disputed conversation, which is why we work in our firefighters 56 hours a week.
The people that we're asking to perform from a dead sleep to pulling some out of a building or pushing pediatric drugs.
And so when you hear about the whether it's learning the ability to process what you learn,
whether it's the ability to heal from the training that we've done, you know, the breaking down and building back up again.
It's all, as you said, you can't expect a firefighter to perform at a high level when they're not sleeping every third day.
It's impossible. So you got there will be a high level for them, but it won't be the highest of levels.
So this is yet another kind of layer to the argument is like if you gave our first responders more rest and recovery, which is the only answer.
We have to be awake for 24 hours. So give them another 24 hour period in between,
which should bring it to a 42 hour work week, the same as most civilians work anyway.
That to me is the conversation that it started to be started happening now.
But this is such an imperative conversation as to question why you still work in these people.
They are 100 years ago when they were literally sitting around smoking cigars. Absolutely.
But you stand into any middle of any kind of suburban or urban area. All you hear is sirens.
We run constantly. So, you know, to me, that rest and recovery, you said the environment for us to thrive.
You create that. Now you have the ability to really enforce those fitness standards that we've given you an environment to be great tactical athletes.
Now, now it's your turn to step up. And again, and just to your point, not you have to be there tomorrow.
Obviously, if you're going to bring that in, then it has to be a couple of years on ramp to allow the people that are deconditioned to get back to where they should be or retire.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's I mean, just from like a staffing or managing manpower perspective,
if you create conditions that improve the resiliency and performance of your people, they would probably I mean,
because a lot of this is going to come down to someone with a spreadsheet talking about money,
they would probably see significant improvements in retention and performance and reduced like sick leave, reduced injuries, things like that.
Like there, I think, is a strong financial argument for improving the quality of life of people who are first responders.
Like if they're constantly being run ragged to where they're cognitively drained, they're physically on the brink of an injury, they're more likely to get sick,
they're more likely to just burn out and leave the profession, the cost of hiring and training someone to replace them is extravagant.
If they could make it a more sustainable environment, it would probably also be better for the budget in the long run.
You know what's sad is that that took you three minutes to figure that out.
And yet we've got people that have been running fire departments or cities or counties for decades that still haven't figured that out.
I mean, it is. And the data is there.
Just the overtime alone of covering all these holes that our first responders are plugging days and days and days more away from their families.
That overtime alone would cover the manpower that you need.
And if not, as you said, you add in workman's comp claims, you add in, as I always talk about lawsuits when we make mistakes because we're so tired.
You know, you've got the medical retirements, got the line of duty deaths.
There's so much money downstream.
And just like you said, if you are proactive, you should be caring about the well-being of your people.
But let's just say for a moment, you're a sociopath and you just care about money.
Well, that's still also going to benefit you because you are plugging the immense amount of holes that are in your financial system.
So I want to transition to some closing questions, but obviously we need to talk about your book first.
So we've talked about your kind of journey through the military, some of your strength and conditioning principles and philosophies.
What was it that made you write the book and then talk to me about what people will find within the pages?
I think the book came about because the clients that we had, we've been training people for special ops selection courses since about 2010.
I mean, I was training people while I was in the military prior to that, but we had civilian prep clients at that point onward.
And they would ask us where they could learn the things we were talking about.
And it could be anything like on the mental skill, the psychological side, it could be how energy systems work, it could be any number of things.
And we never really knew what to tell them because there was no comprehensive resource for that.
Like we would just have to point to the bookshelf behind us and be like, 30 of those books and you're going to piece it together, hopefully.
And then we'll forget some of the other ones that you should probably have in that list too.
So we wanted a single standalone resource that put the whole picture together, starting at broad kind of theoretical concepts like systems thinking,
moving into specific tactical things like what an energy systems workout looks like and when you would want to use that particular type of workout and how to put together a long term plan.
We also wanted people to understand that there's no one size fits all magic template or magic workout that works for everyone.
Like something that is designed for an air quotes average person is in fact designed for no one and will not work for anyone as well as something that accounts for individual variables and context.
So we put the book together as a way of creating the thing that our clients needed and didn't have clients and it turns out a lot of other coaches.
So that's kind of the basis of the book.
And it took us six years, I believe, of research and writing the first time, about a year just to finish editing and layout and that stuff.
And then we did the second edition where we added some more content, which took another one to two years.
So if you have the second edition of the book, it's like 500 some pages, that's maybe eight to nine years of work in total condensed into those pages.
So it's a lot.
Yeah, I mean, it's just it's an excellent book.
And like you said, there's exactly what you just talked about before.
It brings all the pieces together.
It's not just a strength and conditioning Bible or sports psychology Bible or a mindset guide.
It's everything together.
So I thought it was phenomenal.
And yes, as you said, it's aimed at the selections of special forces, but it's absolutely applicable to police and fire and EMS as well.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
And people have been figuring that out, fortunately, because they cover the book.
It's all about special operations, but anyone who does hard things under stressful conditions could benefit from a lot of those concepts.
We actually have a pretty good following.
We've gotten some really nice letters from people who run surgery centers because some of the early concepts in the book around systems thinking and chaos and feedback loops and things like that apply well in a surgical setting, apparently.
Brilliant. Well, that was your book.
So the first of the closing questions, is there a book or are there books that you love to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated.
It would depend so much on the topic or like what you wanted from it.
Some of the most influential ones I read, like as I want to say, as a kid, but I was 19 or 20 or stoicism kind of stuff.
Or I got pretty heavily into Buddhist philosophy just as a general way of coping with uncertainty and stress in the Navy.
You know, the life is suffering, suffering is caused by attachment concept was pretty fundamental to how I process things when I was having a near drowning experience every day.
What about films and documentaries?
It's probably a little cliche, but like I graduated high school in 2002 and the movie Fight Club was a huge influence for me.
Like that's where some of the movie in the book, the wanting to go hit bottom philosophically thing came from.
Otherwise, I don't know.
I've gone through a few Ken Burns documentaries that if you have a lot of time to burn are really well done, but they're quite time consuming.
I'm not sure what else I don't watch a lot of TV.
Yeah, that's that was one of my watch.
Yeah, it was good.
I talked to a guy who was a Mac V a SOG guy like a CIA.
He was a SEAL who went to the CIA there.
I talked to him about it because he'd watched it as well.
He was kind of grumpy about it.
He thought it was biased, but that was the only other perspective I had on it.
Gotcha.
Well, I think that bias towards sympathy to the Vietnamese.
Is that what it was?
Probably.
I think that's where it is.
Yeah, I think it just it hasn't been told that way.
It's always the other way.
And so sometimes people are to whatever.
It's like, yeah, but you always hear you always hear America is the greatest country in the world.
Maybe we should be talking about obesity and addiction and all these things.
You know what I mean?
Otherwise, you just carry on down that same path.
So I thought it was refreshing personally.
Yeah, there's there's this joke I heard somewhere that not only will America come into your country and kill a bunch of your people,
but then 20 years later, they're going to come back and make a documentary about how killing your people made them sad.
I mean, it's a sad irony, but it's true, isn't it?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, speaking of amazing people, is there a person that you'd recommend to come on this podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated professionals of the world?
I think of a few.
Dr. Tommy Wood, I just had him on our podcast.
He's a he's an M.D. and a Ph.D. neuroscience guy who studies brain health and longevity.
Brilliant, brilliant guy.
I really enjoyed talking with him.
Laura Gordon, who is a lead coach at Deep End Fitness in San Diego, she walked away.
She had a law degree and walked away from being a lawyer in order to get a Ph.D.
in human performance fields and is has a therapy sort of some sort and works on nervous system regulation and works with a lot of first responders and special ops guys as well.
Charles Morgan or Andy Morgan, who's a former Yale professor and operational psych who works with a lot of the SOCOM community, probably one of if not the most intelligent people I've ever talked to.
He would be a great one as well to talk about like cognition under stress and those sorts of things.
Brilliant. Thank you.
Yeah, Tommy, as he was on the show, I actually did a thing with HMC up in Pensacola with him in November as well.
And I had prime and done on the show from Deep End Fitness quite a while ago now.
Yeah, I would definitely love to get those.
Allison Braggart, you have you had her on the show yet?
I've had her on to.
Yeah, she'd be another one.
Yeah, I want to get this Allison.
And then Rachel Marquardt is the Navy sleep expert.
So I was thinking of doing a conversation, try and get them both on simultaneously to kind of go back and forth.
Brilliant. All right. Well, then the very last question before we make sure everyone knows where to find the book and where to find you.
What do you do to decompress?
Snuggle time with my two year old or I go play with apple trees.
I have about a dozen apple trees that I've planted in my yard and I'll go like putter around in my yard and like water them or whatever, or I go mountain biking, do outdoor stuff like that.
Beautiful. So where can people find the book and then where are the places online or social media to find you specifically?
I don't have my own like individual social media like Instagram or anything like that.
We have a building the elite one, which I write roughly 50 percent of the content that goes on there.
The book is available at building the elite dot com.
You can also get it on Amazon if you want to give Jeff Bezos five dollars, but it's going to ship from the same warehouse at the same in the same amount of time if you buy it off her website.
And then, yeah, I mean, Instagram's our main social media. I have a LinkedIn, which is just like where I keep track of work related stuff.
But otherwise, like to get in touch with me directly, it just be email, which is Craig at building the elite dot com.
Beautiful. Well, I want to say thank you so much.
We've been all over the place. I mean, some of your philosophical perspectives on, you know, war and those kind of things were phenomenal, too.
And then we took a arguably a shallow dive into the strength and conditioning side. But it's been such a broad conversation.
I love that. So I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time and come on the behind the shield podcast today.
Yeah, this is great. Thank you for having me.