Overcoming Physical & Emotional Challenges | Coleman Ruiz

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Coleman Ruiz Colman. Ruiz is a former Tier one Navy SEAL Special Operator. I think it's fair to assume that most of you have never heard of Coleman Ruiz before it and in fact it was part of his former life job description to be largely covert, such that only his family and friends really knew what he did for a living. He is, however, now living as a civilian. And the reason I invited Coleman on this podcast was essentially to tell us his life story, which of course includes his time in the SEAL teams, but includes so much more that I'm certain is of value to everyone. Today, Coleman shares with you his remarkable journey from from childhood through his teenage years into the military and some of the things that happened during his time in the military, which then informed his post military civilian life and what it is to be a father, a husband and somebody who has experienced tremendous loss at various stages of his life as well as tremendous triumph. Indeed. If ever there was a life that could be framed within the context of the so called hero's journey, it is the life of Coleman Ruiz. Coleman Ruiz's life is one that embodies focus and and pursuit, family and friends and love. All the things that we think of in terms of having a rich life, but also one that includes many unforeseen tragedies, many unforeseen challenges, both internal and external. Coleman also shares with a rare and extraordinary degree of vulnerability the extent to which challenges in life, both external and internal, have helped shape him as a human being. What follows is a discussion that everyone, male, female, young or old, and regardless of position in life, is sure to derive tremendous benefit from. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing therapy for over 30 years. Initially, I started therapy because, well, I was required to in order to stay in school. But eventually I just decided to keep doing it because I found it to be very beneficial. There are essentially three things that great therapy provides first of all, it provides a rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk about all issues with. Second of all, they can provide support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance. And third, expert therapy can provide useful insights that you wouldn't have otherwise had access to. In fact, I consider doing regular therapy as important as working out one's body in the gym or through cardiovascular exercise. And with BetterHelp, scheduling and doing, therapy becomes extremely convenient. They can match you to a therapist that can provide those three things excellent rapport, support, and insight, and they can do so on a schedule that matches yours. If you if you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.comhuberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.comhuberman Today's episode is also brought to us by Maui Nui Venison. 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I personally like all of those. In fact, I probably eat a Maui Nui venison burger pretty much every day, and occasionally I'll swap that for a Maui Nui steak. And if you're really on the go, they have Maui Nui venison jerky, which has 10 grams of protein per stick at just 55 calories. If you'd like to try Maui Nui venison, you can go to mauinuiveness.comhuberman to get 20% off your first order. Again, that's mauinuivenison.comhuberman Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity. Now, I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the critical need to get sleep, both enough sleep and enough quality sleep. When we do that, everything, our mental health, our physical health, performance in any sports or school, et cetera, all get better. And when we're not sleeping well or enough, all, all those things suffer. 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I've been sleeping on an eight sleep mattress cover for well over three years now and it has completely transformed my sleep for the better. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to eightsleep.comhuberman and save $150 off their pod 3 cover Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.comhuberman & now for my conversation with Coleman Ruiz. Coleman Ruiz.

Welcome. Thank you. Very excited to see.

You. It's great to have you here. I'm guessing most people are probably not familiar with Coleman Ruiz. So let's start at the beginning. Where were you born? What was the context of your home life? And maybe let's get up to maybe elementary school, middle school and whatever top contour or deep details you want to get into. Yeah, we're all.

Ears. Okay, I'll bring us up to seventh grade because I would say that was probably the first big inflection point in my life. I grew up in. I was born in New Orleans in a suburb called East New Orleans east we call it and have an older sister, two younger brothers. My dad was a welder, my mom was a dental assistant and we had a couple of boxers and the dogs and we had a very modest, very modest upbringing. I won't over dramatize it, but you Know, admittedly, you know, sometimes we got cheese from the lady across the street who didn't want her welfare cheese. And it was one of those, you know, I could tell my parents were fighting for every nickel. But it was great. I mean, my cousin grew up across the street from me. He's exactly my age. We had that. At least some of my memory. Andrew of it was. It was very pleasant. I learned later that you forget a lot of things in your childhood that were unpleasant. But my initial memories when I started thinking about this kind of thing and, you know, as you and I have discussed getting professional help and you start to learn a little bit more about your childhood, but I remember it being very pleasant. You know, we've. You've told me about your background in skateboarding and stuff. You know, we skateboarded the neighborhood. BMX was a big thing when we were kids. It was very much a race at the streets upbringing. There was a park behind the neighborhood. We would cut through the fence and go, you know, this kind of thing. I played football and baseball and very normal in that regard. Went to the neighborhood school, and then in sixth grade, I went to what was my high school. But it went. It went fifth through 12th, called Holy Cross High School in the Lower Ninth Ward, which that spot is now vacated because the school. I went back after Hurricane Katrina. The whole school had to be moved. And I went there in seventh grade, and it was a hellacious start. I mean, it was detention after detention, you know, fist fight after fistfight and damn.

Near. Were you the instigator of those.

Fights? Probably some. I definitely fell in with the wrong crowd initially in that sixth and seventh grade years. And I wouldn't say it was so extreme that, like, it was complete mayhem. But I was definitely on, you know, problem situation number whatever when my parents were called in and it was kind of the last straw type thing and I got cut from baseball. My grades were fine. I was always a pretty good student. It was just teenager shenanigans. And then I went out for.

Wrestling. Can I just pause you for a second? So, on the violence part, a little bit of experience with this. But violence can come from trying to protect others. Instigating it can come from the wildness, just trying to see what it feels like. Experimentation and any number of other things, all the way to pure sociopathy, which we know you are not and weren't. Do you recall feeling something inside that inspired this? Was it for attention? Did it feel good afterwards? Can you recall what it was.

About? I think it was the Wildness thing, Andrew, Honestly, it wasn't. I mean, I believe I don't have a malicious bone in my body. Like we all have that in us, obviously, my profession later in the military, you know, I was able to activate that. And I feel like I still can. And I was certainly able to in sports, which is why that seventh grade year was really pivotal. But even now it's funny. It's even funny you ask about the wildness because let me put it in movie terms. Like, one of my favorite movie scenes of all time is in the movie the Town, when Ben Affleck walks in the room. Jeremy Renner is the, you know, his. His partner, essentially. And he walks in the room and he says, we're going to hurt somebody. I can't tell you where and I can't tell you when. And he pauses and Jeremy Renner takes maybe a three second pause and he says, whose car are we taking? He doesn't even ask, you know, he's just. They're just wild and excited about doing something wild. I don't promote like going to hurt somebody. Of.

Course. Sure. Were you the Affleck or the Renner? Affleck. Excuse me. Or Renner in.

That? I was. I feel like I was mostly the renter. Put it this way, if you have some good idea this afternoon, like, let's go fucking try this. I'm good. I'm ready. And I think it's just exciting. I hate rules. I hate being told what to do. It's one of the things that was so frustrating about the military. The rules are in place for a reason. They're written in blood. I get all that. But we're so constrained sometimes. I think that was just all coming into fruition that seventh grade year. And I enjoyed going wild. Like it was just fun. And frankly, we weren't these fist fights. And this trouble wasn't like going to get some kid. Those other kids wanted the wildness too, you know, and so. But the school didn't want that. And then I went out for wrestling that year and I could put it all into the wrestling room and it was.

Awesome. Before we talk about wrestling and why it was so meaningful as a channel for you, a little bit of neurobiology, or else I wouldn't be great. Andrew Huberman. There's a really interesting phenomenon that one observes in both animals and humans, which is that somewhere around adolescence when the hormone surge begins, but even before that, there's a phenomenon called dispersal. It's very different than fighting per se, or sexual activity per se. It's a literal dispersal from one's home environment or an animal's, a nest in which animals and humans, and we're animals, after all, start foraging new environments in a very, as you point out, chaotic way. It's not organized. It's a little nuts. And biologists and neurobiologists in particular have observed changes in neural circuitry that drive this. So some of it's hormonal, but a lot of it is the brain taking all this input that one has been exposed to, sun, earth, food, others, social interactions, and starting to essentially throw the different paints, the different colors of paint together and just trying things. Some kids are more prone to this than others. Certainly has a hormonal component. Boys and girls tend to do this differently, but they both do it. And psychologists and neurobiologists see this as a fundamental shift in our underlying circuitry. So just a little bit of food for thought to put what you just described in context. With that said, tell us about.

Wrestling. I mean, Andrew, in many ways, like I said, that was the first inflection point. It was like immediate. I mean, immediate uptake. Within a week, I knew this was my thing. Maybe. Maybe the first.

Practice. What do you think it.

Was? So when I was younger, my aunt and uncle, when I was like seven years old, they started taking me to road races and I'm sure just running races, 1 mile and 5k races when I was really small kid. For you to run, to run with them. They were into the road racing thing back in the day when it was brand new, you know, the 80s. I'm 48, so I was born in 75. So I was 7, you know, 8 years old at the time. And I was into, like, obviously, can I win this race? I just. The pain of the effort was so comfortable. And then it's kind of silly, but, like, I won the PT competition at, like, the Boy Scouts thing in Audubon Park. Yeah, physical.

Training. Physical.

Training. And so I won, like the whatever when I was young and built Boy Scouts or something. And. And then it just snowballed. Then I was just like. The physical activity still today is. I mean, if someone said, what are you really in love with? It's. It's that. And so when I walked into the wrestling room, it was so extreme compared to anything else I had ever done. Football, baseball, whatever. I never really liked any of those sports. I played them all, but I didn't like them. And always my dad wrestled in high school and college, and we were, you know, always rough and tumble in that regard. And Ivan have a couple of buddies in the teams, you know, who obviously were college wrestlers. There's a lot of wrestlers in the teams. And people would always joke about how we're so handsy, you know, our hands are always on each other. And that was just a thing for us. Like, I loved the close contact. I love the fight of it. What I really love about combat sports because I boxed in high school between wrestling seasons, was the respect. Tell me more about that you just don't have. There are some, of course, like, you can see guys hyping it up and doing their thing in UFC these days, and that's totally fine. But for the most part, if you have fighters of any type, like in a setting when they don't have to do, you know, the stuff for TV and whatnot, they respect each other because, and they respect the effort and because you know what it takes and you know how hard it is to face another man in the middle of a mat with no equipment and nowhere to run and no timeouts and no one to tap in. That's extreme, you know, and it may not seem like high school wrestling is extreme, but as you just mentioned, something about, you know, development when you're 14 and you're facing another, like, that's the first time. Is someone trying to take your life? No, they're not, but it feels that way. And then you go and you put in all these hours of training and you don't eat during the week and you run stadiums or you run levees and, you know, fireman's carries and all of it while you're not eating and making weight and you're in the sauna. And it's just a very tough thing to do, combat sports. And I love the respect that it engenders between the people who do.

It. I think it was Sam Sheridan who wrote A Fighter's Heart, an excellent book. And for anyone, male or female, any age, who's interested in the human spirit, I recommend A Fighter's Heart because it's about the different fight sports, but it's really about the path of self discovery that occurs in various martial arts. And as you said, like, especially boxing is very gentlemanly. You touch gloves, you start, you know, then the, you know, the bell goes off, you go to your corner. Like it's, you know, sometimes people lose it, bite off people's ears and things like that. But. But for the most part, the sport is very structured. As you were doing this, what was happening with school? Did it help your academic studies? Did it keep them More or less the same. And how did your family and your peer group view what you were doing? Were you considered strange for liking wrestling so much? I mean, you're dieting. You're a young male dieting for purpose of sport and performance. You're sitting in saunas, you're running in wrapped in plastic bags, all this, like. I mean, a good friend of ours who was also in the Seal teams said once said to me, he said, you know, wrestlers are different. And I think he meant different in.

Quotes. Yeah, I think that's true. You know, school. My grades immediately went up, Andrew. It was like, oh, my gosh, the discipline of all of it. My grades were always better in wrestling season than out of wrestling season. Interesting. Like when I was cut loose, out of the structure, then it wasn't good. And, you know, between seventh and eighth grade and all that, I didn't have any crazy shenanigans going on. I wasn't going to get kicked out of school, whatever. I was doing normal stuff for the.

Age. But so the fight.

Stopped. Totally, totally. Because I could put it into. I could put it into the wrestling space, you know. And I think I grew up, obviously in New Orleans, and I think, you know, down there it's baseball, football, basketball. Wrestling is not. I mean, I was lucky to wrestle in college at all because it wasn't like Iowa was looking to recruit me. You know, they have plenty of people to recruit and they don't need any Louisiana wrestlers. Although Daniel Cormier grew up, like, north of the lake. He was four years younger. I was telling this to somebody. We don't know each other. I'd love to meet him. Super impressive athlete. We heard that. Hey, there's some kid up in the North Shore, I think is where he grew up, whooping everybody's ass. And his name's Daniel Cormier. And then, you know, obviously the rest is history. But the sport is not big in Louisiana. Which is all to say that we were kind of a unicorn. We had. It was very odd at my high school specifically, we had one coach, his son, either national runner up. His name was Willie Gatson. Willie's Willie passed away. I think his son ended up at Iowa State and within the last five or six years was either a national champ or a runner up. Willie. When I was in eighth grade, Andrew, Willie was at my high school. Like, I have no idea how Willie Gaston ended up in New Orleans, but we ended up with this cluster of wrestlers at that time with the right coaching and a few kids were going to junior College and coming back and wrestling in college and coming back, and there were three or four guys. I remember specifically in eighth grade because I started, at least in the junior high ranks. I started to take off my second year. These guys would abuse me in the wrestling room. They were seniors in high school. I was 112 pounds or 132 pounds my freshman year, and they would just. In my eighth grade year, and they would just abuse.

Me. Define.

Abuse. In all the legal, normal wrestling ways, like, there's. The wrestling gets broken up, obviously, by weights. You got the heavyweights on one end of the room, the lightweights on the other end of the room, and the young kids stay with the young kids for the most part. And a few of these guys would drag me down to the varsity end and I would wrestle with the middleweights, and they would beat the out of me. And eventually you get to the point where you're like, fuck this. I haven't. I had enough. You know? And that's when sort of things started to turn. But I think that wrestlers are different. And my peer group, one or two of my really good friends wrestled, but most of them played other sports. And so. But in. In every sense of the word, life got better for me because of that sport. It changed my.

Life. So you wrestled all through high.

School? Oh, yeah.

Yep. At that point, were you discovering relationships, girls? Were you partying? Were you a drinker? Used.

Drugs? No drugs. I mean, it's New Orleans, right? It's like one of the things that was tough. I'm glad I got out of the city, frankly, because it was party time outside the season. Yeah. Girls, girlfriends, normal stuff in that regard. Lots of drinking, lots of rat in the streets, you know, in those days in the.

90S. But you kept it inside the lane lines. It sounds like no drunk driving.

No arrest, A little bit of that, but not. Nothing crazy in that regard. I think I understood the consequences and I really cared about my career. I really wanted to wrestle in college. My grades were excellent. My SAT scores, not so much. But I started winning really fast. And, you know, my last two years in high school, I was 89. 0, and I almost won my sophomore year, so I was runner up in the state my sophomore year. I always joke with the. With the boys. My. All my boys are way better athletes than I ever could think about. Yeah, yeah, right. And when eighth grade, I made varsity, and it was like. Was it eighth grade? Yeah. And I lost like 75 of the matches, you know, but you just grind it out and it's How I got into the Naval Academy, which is.

A whole nother story, but so let's talk about that. So you finish high school, you head to the Naval Academy. Why the Naval.

Academy? There's actually a crazy story behind this, which maybe we'll circle back to. But the summer, Gosh, I had forgotten that this started in seventh grade, too. The summer between my seventh and eighth grade year. My grandfather was too young to join the Navy, and he wanted to go to the Naval Academy during World War II, and he lied to the recruiter and he got into the Merchant Marines, his, I'm pretty sure, first cousin. My uncle and my cousins are like first cousins once removed. My uncle Jim Farrell was at a family reunion in Mississippi, which we were at, and he didn't mention a Naval Academy. Family reunion ends, they all go home, and he starts sending me Naval Academy paraphernalia. I knew nothing about the military, and I just thought about it, you know, and he would send me stuff, you know, you didn't. We didn't have the.

Internet. Right. He's sending these booklets and you don't like authority. No, I've not been in the military, but I've done some work with y', all, and there's a lot of hierarchy and.

Authority. Yeah, that's true. The truth, Andrews, like, it was just. It just seemed exciting. I wasn't really thinking about the implications As 18 year olds, you know, it looked very exciting to me. And having gotten some professional help in the intervening years, what I really think was a big part of it was my parents got divorced my senior year in high school, and the family unit just blew up. Right. And so it also represented an escape. You know, get out and go get your life out of the New Orleans and just go. Just go do.

Something. Were you a part of that? Obviously you were part of the family that got divorced. Was it chaotic? Was it controlled? You and I are the exact same age. We're both 48, born in 75. Back then, it was a lot less common for people being. They called them broken homes back.

Then. Yeah, that's.

Right. Nowadays, I don't think they call that. Everyone just cites the statistic that more than half of marriages end in divorce, as if perhaps to normalize it, but that's more than half. Do you recall feeling distraught about that, or was it just kind of the natural consequence of something you had observed a long time, like, oh, that kind of makes.

Sense. No, it was a shock to me. It wasn't a shock to my older sister. I just remember this Was the thought at the time, this is like seared in my brain. This has nothing to do with me. That wasn't like some sophisticated view. It was mostly this. I'm not dealing with this. I have my own life. They're gonna have to do what they're gonna do, meaning my parents. I'm getting the hell out of.

Here. Not a bad mindset for a kid at that stage. If it had been four years younger, that might not be the best mindset. But as you're heading off to college, that's reasonably healthy mindset. As opposed to getting enmeshed in the what happened and this and that. Can I ask you, at that stage, you're 17, 18 years old at that point, were you journaling at that.

Point?

No. No. No journaling. No introspective.

Work.

Zero. No school psychologist. No thinking about or talking about your feelings. It's wrestling. Naval academy social things. School SATs, like, very standard. We're almost like talking like a superficial list of what happens at the end of high school in.

1996. And Andrew, it's a. The word superficial. And I carried this forward for years, which I'm sure we'll talk about here in a second. Those binary focus areas, like, I was literally just going after them at full steam. Stronger, faster, more intensity with zero introspection. No excavation of this, of the psychology of anything. Just full steam ahead. Like, let's.

Go. No meditation, no breath.

Work. Zero. Which was not adaptive in the long.

Run. And we'll get to how that played out in the long run. But nonetheless, you got into the Naval.

Academy. Didn't first. Okay, so I applied. I get. You know, my uncle's doing all this stuff. Anyway, I applied and I didn't. I still have the letter, the thanks, but no thanks. You know, you're not.

Qualified. How'd that hit you at the.

Time? It hit me kind of like everything I did when that age, when it didn't work out. Admittedly, Andrew, it was. It was like, there's got to be a way around this. Like, shit has to work out. But it. But it feels terrible, right? Like, it. You have a moment of what do we do? And my kids have heard the story a million times. My wife was a blue chip swimming recruitment for Navy. And so she was into the Naval Academy when she was at the beginning of her senior year of high school.

Right. What's a blue.

Chip? I. I mean, my understanding of blue chip is like, you are at the very top of the list. And the coaches put you straight into the admission Cycle saying, nobody else gets in until this person.

Does. So they wanted her. They didn't want.

You. I. Not only was she a blue chip, and I was. And I got the no, I guess. Well, the wrestling coach called me a couple of weeks after my no, which is now in May. I'm about to graduate from high school. I'm not accepted.

Anywhere. You only applied one.

Place? Actually two, which you may bust out laughing when I tell you what the other one is because no Internet. I got a mailer in a pamphlet from Stanford, the wrestling coach. I didn't know what Stanford was. I had no idea that the college was even prestigious. I didn't know they had a wrestling team. I filled out the application and wrote the letter thing and I sent it into Stanford and of course, never heard back from them. But I applied to two places, Stanford and the U.S. naval.

Academy. Well, for those that follow wrestling.

I didn't get into.

Either. Right. That's a great story. And I'll just briefly mention that a few years ago, there almost wasn't a wrestling team at Stanford. They had plans to cut the wrestling team despite having a NCAA champion at Stanford. But, you know, the power of people gathering and petitioning works, and wrestling and a few other sports that were being cut from the curriculum were.

Spared. It's amazing.

Yeah.

Rescued. So happy to see.

That. Yeah. So that. So it. Stanford does have a wrestling.

Team. So the coach. The coach back to, like, how I ended up getting in. I appreciated my. My college coach called and he said, I'm recruiting. I have one more spot at the prep school, which is in Newport, Rhode Island. I'm recruiting another kid from Pennsylvania. If he takes that spot, then I don't have anything left. And we were exploring going to prep school and stuff like that, oblique ways to get in. And he called me sometime in May, like right around graduation, and said, can you be in Newport in July? That kid went to. I think he went to Lehigh. And I. I went to the prep school. So Newport, Rhode Island. Yeah, in Newport for a.

Year. It's a nice.

Place. That's.

Great.

Yeah. And so you wrestle for. I mean, you do school. You know, you're. You're in the. West Point has a prep school and Colorado Springs has a prep school. And so we joked that my wife was first person in our class accepted and I was last, which is highly possible.

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Academy? You graduate prep school, you're straight into the Naval Academy. Like they fully expect you to be there the next.

Year. When junior year rolled around and senior year rolled around of high school, didn't anyone pull you aside and say, hey, you might want to, like, apply to a few other places. You might want to consider what you do if this doesn't work out. What did they assume you were going to do? They just head into the city of New Orleans and bus.

Tables? Zero guidance. Andrew, really, like from my high school, and I think the ecosystem I was in, like, people just didn't really know how to do that. You know how to apply to schools. I mean, my parents obviously helped when I applied to the Naval Academy, but when I, when I look at the system that kids go through now to go, you know, Their process to find the best college experience. I never had one conversation with a guidance counselor about what to do. I just didn't. I mean, I just got very lucky. A few people, my, my high school wrestling coach intervened, I think, at some point and called the Naval Academy to speak to the coach to say, you should give this kid a chance. But he didn't. They didn't know who he was. You know, I'm so lucky and so fortunate that I ended up where I ended up. It's, it's why I took it so seriously. Like the focus with which I applied my time in high school. I took that to 10x degree when I got to Newport because I knew this was my.

Chance. There's something magical to that. I can relate to that. So you're in Newport and describe what a day was like. Is it all wrestling? You're taking general education classes like one does in the first two years of.

University. Yep. So the way the prep school is set up for the Naval Academy is they're basically teaching you the first semester of the Naval Academy. So you take calculus, physics, chemistry, I think you take an English class, etc. And you go through like a pretty hellacious first couple of weeks because you're away from the flagpole where no one can hear you scream. You know, you're up in Newport, you're not in Annapolis where everyone's watching, and you do a couple hellacious weeks for an 18 year old who's never been in the military.

Before. So you're in the military technically.

If you go to this, you're actually enlisted in the.

Navy. Okay. So they own you to some.

Extent. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they do. And then you.

Do. You're wearing uniforms, you're jogging in the morning, you're doing salutes and.

Marching.

Yep. You're bugling, they're doing taps in the.

Evening. Yep, all of.

It. Got.

It. Yep. And you live. There's 300 people at the prep school. It's distributed basically amongst folks coming from the fleet. So guys who did four or five years in the military somewhere and they're coming into the Naval Academy from the fleet and then athletes and then sort of a mixture of other folks who need a little extra school. Right. And so. And then you do a full school year, you're competing. It's basically a red shirt year. That's not a red shirt year. I competed up and down the east coast against, you know, all the other prep schools and you finish that year in May and then, you know, you're done with the Prep. The prep year is fine. It's a little bit of a, a shock when you're 18, but it's.

Fine. Always been curious about these military schools and the people that go to them and what happens to people there. Did you have any sense of patriotism prior to arriving at this prep school and did that? Sense of patriotism, you know, I'm talking like love of country, understanding that, the history of our country and its position in the international landscape. Are you thinking about that stuff? Are they feeding you that or is it really like wrestling, get through the march, shower up, go to the next thing? Is it, is it very like plug and.

Chug? No, no, the, the feeding of. And I really appreciated this. The feeding of those concepts starts when you get there. But I was deer in the headlights and you're like, I didn't think about my life in this way at all when I was headed there. I mean, what, what you get very early because the school very quickly starts to bring really high level accomplished people, colonels, admirals, whatever, generals to expose you to this people. I do remember sitting there within weeks, like, this is way bigger than I thought it was in terms of how serious this situation is, you know, and how serious this ecosystem of people take this. Because I didn't have. My dad wasn't an admiral, he was a welder in New Orleans. You know, I didn't understand the bigness of.

It. One of the reasons I asked this is that various times throughout my life I've had this experience of like seeing people close to me doing incredible work. You know, like when I was a postdoc at Stanford, I had Nobel prize, was given that one week to the guy next door to me. Yeah, so you see him in the morning and like you're hearing it on the radio. And obviously I didn't have that kind of stature or talent in science. I think I'm a good scientist, but good enough to, you know, get tenure at Stanford. But then there are levels within the game. But there is something very special to the experience of having people close to you physically and in the same ecosystem as you described it, achieving amazing things. I also saw this in skateboarding. I mean, there were a lot of, let's just say, failures to integrate with normal life. But there are also some guys that I grew up with who started companies and set world records and had their pro models. And then if you zoom out from that and you go, wait, I'm in this community. It changes oneself view about what's possible. So I think that's what you're describing. And I think it's such an important thing for people to experience at some point, even if the goal isn't to be at kind of world scale for people to realize that the town they grew up in, the family they grew up in, that context can.

Expand.

Yes. And so do you recall being at this prep school and kind of third personing yourself and thinking like, well, I'm Coleman Ruiz, I'm from New Orleans. I went from this to this to this, the way you've been describing it. And I'm here. And they're like, I'm around some incredibly impressive people and I'm here. Like, once you make that recognition that you're there, a whole bunch of things can open.

Up. No, I actually came at it from the opposite way. And this has been a hard thing for me my whole life. And I have to watch out for this perspective is I felt like every day I had to wake up and earn my place there. I was never good enough for myself ever. So next day up is a restart to prove myself again on whatever standard I'm picking that day. Right. Looking back on it, I realize it was somewhat arbitrary because it was just day by day, I didn't think, I'm Coleman Ruiz, I made it here. Look, I'm part of the secret. I was afraid. Like Mike Tyson talks about being afraid every time. I was afraid every day. And I fought for like a position in this place every day. Now that was adaptive in some regard.

Right?

Very. Because to me it was, let's go. Like, today's another new day and it's 100% all in full go. I hope everybody's.

Ready. Do you ever recall falling asleep at night and thinking like, well, like, I had a good day, I had a good day. Or, or I'm scared, you know, they're going to discover I can't keep up or I can't keep up all the time. So a lot of fear, I.

Mean. Yeah, yeah, a lot of fear all the time. And some of it I do, I genuinely know and believe now, Andrew, that it was well intentioned. Like I wanted to do a good job for the group, whatever group I was in, my platoon, my squad, in the case of the prep school, you know, that first experience, I mean, I was talking about this with, with my wife the other day just because stories come up, you know, we had a 25th reunion at the Naval Academy and this kind of thing. And I was a really good runner for my group in high school. Like the people I was around, I ran Cross country when I was younger and anyway, I did. I suppose I'm going the other direction. I sort of did have some level of confidence in my ability Then I got there and like all these college cross country runners are like, my son is now just crushing me. And I think sadly, because it was just sort of in me that fed my fear. Like shit. I thought I was better than this. Clearly I suck. I have to get to their level. So I did have a very well intentioned excitement around. Just do a good job with the people you're around. There's something fun to that and wild, you know, as we spoke about. But I was operating out of fear for.

Decades. But there was a I need to get to their level statement in there. It wasn't I can't keep up, I better find a different.

Path. No, no, no, no. I knew I could, I knew I could get to their level with enough work, you.

Know. Was that something that your, your father or your mother or both had instilled in you.

That. Oh, for sure, yeah. And my high school wrestling coach was, let's call it maybe from the old school. If you worked hard enough, you could, you could, you could get.

There. So this is the essence of growth mindset. Long before Carol Dweck coined the phrase growth mindset. Yeah, we're not there.

Yet. When I first read a book like when people teach us this when we were.

Kids. Yeah, you know, well, some of us got it, some of us didn't. And it can be very context dependent. I think that's one of the more important and often overlooked aspects of Carol's work and Ali Crumb's work is that we can develop growth mindset in one domain of life, but then another domain of life. We get kicked in the teeth once and we're like, I can't do that. There's a carve out where I can't function. Some people do that, some people don't. And we don't understand enough about it to understand whether or not it's a global circuit and there's a lot of context. But okay, so you're hanging in there. At least you're surrounded by some very impressive people. There's a lot of structure. So we're a long way from the pre wrestling days. Oh, yeah, yeah. This is the opposite of chaos totally. This is.

Structure. You're told what to do every five minutes, more or.

Less. And this is scary feelings. Fear is a scary feeling, but you're channeling it. And you said the unit of the day became important. It's like what can I do.

Today?

Yes. You're not thinking about the week, you're not thinking about the season, you're not thinking about becoming some war hero down the line. You're just 24 hours do the next day. Yeah. How was your self care at that point? Or is that built into the.

System? It's not built into the system. And it was zero. I mean it really was Andrew. Like it was the old school. We were not doing anything sophisticated back then. I mean there was no. We stretched. And in the grand scheme of things. This is going to sound weird because there still is a lot of, you know, primal nature to combat sports. But in the grand scheme of things we were probably on the upper end of sophisticated. Like wrestlers jump rope, they stretch, they do aerobics. You know, been in a sauna since 1993. You know, it's like not purposeful not for to cut weight in a garbage bag. But there is some level of, some level of balancing out your training. You know, wrestlers like to swim and like during the season because you're getting out of that hot room, like you end up accidentally doing some of these things. But there was no self.

Care. So you eventually go to the Naval Academy 94, the actual naval Academy. And that's where you met your.

Wife? Yep, in 96, my sophomore.

Year. So when you get there, what, what's different than the prep.

School? First of all, it's big in the macro. Not just geographically big or footprint. Square footage wise, it's big. The concept is big. You know, like the superintendent of the school is a three star admiral. You hear about his career, you know, you're 19 years old, you meet. So there's two incredibly important people in my life in those early years at the Naval Academy. A guy named Doug Zembeck, who's dead now, who. Most people of my service time will know who he is. When I was on my recruiting trip to the Naval Academy and I was in high school, this is complete accident. Doug was a sophomore, we call him youngsters at the Naval Academy, he was a sophomore and we're the same weight class. So coach matched us up because it was my recruiting visit and my first. This is back to being wild. Literally my first night on the grounds in the Naval Academy, I'm sleeping on Doug Zembeck's floor of his room with his other two roommates. And sometime around 3 or 4am I get woken up. It's like a bomb goes off. There's a bomb didn't go off. But there's 12 other gorillas in the room, all wrestlers, maybe one or two other guys. And Doug is hustling. I don't know any of these people, Andrew. Like I just met Doug the previous evening. We just flew into town. He wakes me up, he's hustling me to get my shoes on again. I'm just this high school kid. And then within two to three minutes, all 15 of these gorillas bolt out of the room. And Doug grabs me. And I'm just following them, right? So we race out of Bancroft hall. It's maybe 4 in the morning, 3:34 in the morning. We race out of Bancroft hall, the barracks. We run across the parking lot into Lejeune Hall. In Lejeune hall is the swimming facility and the wrestling room. That's it. That's the only thing that's in there, Right. The doors. We run up to Lejeune Hall. The doors of Lejeune hall are locked with a chain on the outside. And one of our Doug pulls on the chain so that the door is open enough at the top that the 142 pounder can climb up and like get inside that little gap in the doors and run over and open one of the doors that isn't.

Chained. This is what you'll later do.

Professionally. I still have. Exactly. And what I frankly did as a kid, like back in the day. And so I'm terrified because I don't know what's coming, you know, and.

So you don't bother to ask, what are we.

Doing? There's no time. There's just no time. Like these guys are to me. They're full blown war heroes. They're not. They're college kids. But I'm 17, they're 21. All these wrestlers. I'm hoping I'm going to come here and be their teammate, you know. We run into Lejeune hall, go to the second story. We climb up the utility ladder where public works goes to get in the ceiling above the white foamy ceiling tile things. So we're now on the catwalk where the H Vac guys would be working. And I'm starting to get a sense of what's coming. We go a couple feet down the catwalk, everyone stops. Someone reaches over the catwalk and pulls one chalky ceiling tile out. So now you can look over the edge of the catwalk and see right through the ceiling into the diving well. Remember, the diving well has a 10 meter platform. And then we're another. I don't want to over exaggerate this. We have to be another 20ft into the.

Ceiling. So you're above the diving.

Board. We're way above the diving.

Board.

Okay. We're five feet above the ceiling, which is 20ft above the 10 meter. Got it right. And so. And now I've realized what's happening. And two or three wrestlers, they sort. You climb over the catwalk, get, you know, backwards, get your hands all the way down, and then very lower yourself in a reverse pull up so you don't kick the ceiling tile. And three or four guys go. And you can hear them hit the water after what is a terrifyingly long time. When you're, you know, my age.

And this is in the.

Dark. Oh, yeah. No one's supposed to be in there. And then one of the guys looks over. When you're a recruit, you're called a drag. They're like, drag. You're up. And I'm lowering myself, Andrew. And I kick the adjacent ceiling tile, and it hits the dive tank, and it turns into pancake batter and goes to the bottom of the.

Pool. Oh.

My. And one of my teammates is like, you. One of my future teammates. You know, he's going nuts. I drop. I live. And this is back to Doug. I come up. Doug clearly goes behind me, but I don't hear him. And one or two guys are going nuts. You high school piece of shit. Like, you're gonna go down to the 15ft and pick it all up. And Doug comes up and he just blasts everybody. He's our responsibility. This is not his fault. We brought him here. Like, just totally backs me up. And then the rest of the visit happens. I end up there. Doug's now senior. I'm a freshman, and he's just the legend. He was all American. And to this day, Andrew, you need to hear this loud and clear. Like, for all the people you and I both know and the people I've been around, no other human in my life have I met with his physical and mental toughness. Not even close. The guy was born in the wrong century is the way I describe him. And he was like my mentor, and he was my guy, you know? And he was killed in.

07. Marie. Yeah, we'll talk about Doug. You've written about.

Him. He's.

Unbelievable. So I feel like I know him a little bit, thanks to you. We'll get around to that for sure. I think people are getting a sense of where we're.

Headed. So that's the. To answer your question about, like, that, the bigness of the Naval Academy, that's how it started for Me, like, everything was just on steroids. You know, all these kind of.

People. I get the impression, at least up until now, that you're kind of just. You just go with what's right.

In front of you.

100%. Like, there isn't a lot of pause and reflect. Although your rudder is not haphazard. It's not.

Random.

No. Well, yeah, I can say right now you and I are as similar as I. You know, we may be in certain respects like that we're very different in this way. Like, there isn't a. There isn't like a foraging. You know, in biology, we call them random walks. You know, a lot of. A lot of organization that comes out of biology is through random walks, like animal or human, like, finds a node and moves, and life is like this. Steve Jobs talked about not being able to connect the dots, except in retrospect, and I subscribe to that. And his life was a bit of a random walk, but that we're guided by some central beam of. Of uniqueness. Robert Greene was, when he was on the podcast talks about that your beam is. Is more narrow, it seems, and the propeller behind that beam is high rpm. That's very clear. And what I'm not hearing here is like, yeah, at one point I paused and wondered whether or not I wanted to be here wrestling in the Naval Academy or even what I might do when I get out. Am I going to work for an investment firm? What am I going to do? Your horizon seems to be about 24 hours at that.

Point. Yeah, I hope not anymore. But at that point, at that.

Point, I mean, I'm no psychologist, but it just seems like you're. It's not like you're playing checkers, but you're optimizing for a fairly short.

Horizon. There's no question. That's right. And the other part that was probably the most important to me, Andrew, was the person who. Or the group, because this is going to sound very arrogant, but when I got to, I'm going to this prep school, I'm going to the Naval Academy, I think on day one, I'm going to literally meet the cream of the crop in the country. And that was not the case. And it was not the case at the Naval Academy. And frankly, it wasn't the case in the teams either. Like, I'm not saying I'm better than anybody, but I thought every single person when I got to the Naval Academy was going to be entirely focused on whatever our mission was. And I didn't know what my mission was. There Right. I just knew I was going to be told what Wright looks like. And Doug, not only did I meet him in high school and have the. The luck of having him as a teammate and a mentor, for me, he is what Wright looked like. So a focused beam and a propeller running at high RPM with the right, you know, quote unquote, swim buddy, so to speak, was literally all I cared about. That was it. Everything else was white.

Noise. Were there other interests at the time? I mean, presumably you listened to music every once in a while, but.

I mean, I would whatever, but didn't.

Fall in love with it. Didn't feel the need to pursue anything else, Learn an instrument, do anything else. It was.

A. That was.

It. It was that narrow beam. So you met your wife in.

96, sophomore year at the Naval Academy.

Yeah. And was she as driven? Is she as driven? I mean, she's obviously a very talented swimmer, presumably works hard as well. It's kind of interesting. I didn't realize until a few years ago that the both of you are.

Military. Yeah, she definitely just different. Different driven, Way smarter, way more, you know, it's obviously not one to one for men and women, but way more successful by gradient standards. She's in the Navy hall of Fame. She was Patriot League swimming champ. She was on junior national triathlon team when she was 20. I think really talented in every regard. Ninth in our class, I think. First female graduate. Number one female graduate our.

Class. Tell me more about that. How's it. How's that.

Work? You have a. I don't even know exactly how the grading. First of all, her grades are her. The academic success is just remarkable. And then you get a military grade and you get a physical grade. Not for your athletics, I don't think, but it's like your PRT scores, which is your physical readiness test. All this military stuff you do, you get this other cluster of a grade that goes along with your academic grades. And she was number nine in the class and the first female graduate based on that cluster of grading. And I mean, she's an amazing.

Person. Was her success in academics and swimming, was that part of what drew you to.

Her? No, no, no. She was just nice and, you know, I didn't really care about the achievement. It doesn't. It certainly sounds like I care about achievement because of the narrow focus, but it wasn't really that, you know, she was just really normal in a group of a lot of abnormal people, frankly. Like, there's some kooks at these schools, you know, and I'm probably In that category, I don't know, but everybody's just really different there. You have this athlete group. You have, I mean, you know, Andrew, I mean, you've, you went to Stanford. I mean, some of the, you know, the group of Naval Academy in West Point, like these schools who produce like the road scholar level person, like that cluster of group, like at Navy, I remember they're super impressive. I mean, and then there's the rest of us, like doing our best, getting pretty good grades and stuff. But there's very different groups inside, you know, the.

School. Yeah, yeah. I looked at some of my colleagues, like a former guest on this podcast, Ali Crumb. You know, she's incredible scientist, was a Division 1 gymnast and is a licensed clinical psychologist. Also maintains a. A healthy relationship with children in the home. Like, I just go, who are these people? You know, it's, I mean, you know, every once in a while we talk about the person with the quote, unquote, extra gear. You know, like some people just seem to have that extra gear. And I don't want to take anything away from Ali or anyone else's incredible work ethic that goes with what people perceive as an extra gear. Who knows if they have an extra gear or not. I always just want to know what their parents.

Did.

Yeah. And it turns out Allie's parents. I hope I have this right, but recollection of this is that her mother ran a theater group and her father was a martial arts.

Teacher.

Okay. So, you know, there's nothing that speaks to academics per se. And I find that really important to me and to highlight because I think people hearing this conversation and hear about people like Ali's and other examples like that, you think, oh yeah, you gotta come from an academic family to end up at a top tier institution or to win a Nobel Prize. In fact, there are so many exceptions to that. Or you have to be a natural athlete or be born with some genetic gift or some extra gear, as it were, in order to succeed. But I think so much of success is the thing that you seem to operationalize really quickly, which is to really focus on that 24 hour horizon. And where one has seen failure to just keep going. I mean, a big part of it is just to keep going, but also to make sure that you're continuing.

To.

Go in a direction that is adaptive and functional. Because imagine had you not found wrestling and you had gotten into some group where the metrics of success were around dealing weed or doing something which back then was highly illegal. Now is varying levels of legality. But where the points came back for effort in domains of life that could take you down into the gutter and you see this. So I'm convinced that the work ethic is the fundamental piece. But there has to be that rudder and your rudder has to be pointed in the right direction. So along those lines you meet.

Bridget.

Yeah. And was it.

Instantaneous? No, we kind of had a friendship first. I felt like at least we've discussed this. I mean I instantaneously enjoyed her company. So I met Bridget in February of sophomore year. I was on the campus of Naval Academy. It's called the yard. I was on the yard all winter because the wrestling season is in the shittiest time ever. Right. It crosses over the holidays. You have to make weight during Thanksgiving, you have to make weight during Christmas. We were on campus on the yard and it was easily waist deep snow and we were doing two a day practices. Everybody else is home on vacation. That winter I considered leaving and thank goodness for no cell phones and stuff because I didn't know how to.

Leave. It was like you consider leaving, like leaving the Naval.

Academy. I was just. But it didn't have anything to do with the Naval Academy really. It had everything to do at that moment. I was miserable. Like I was making. I wrestled 190 my freshman year and Doug graduated. He was the 177 pounder. So sophomore year I dropped into his spot. I went down to 177. Fighting weight for me is like 193. But you know, back then, Andrew, I'm lifting a lot. I was 210 to 215 in the off season and I cut to 177 sophomore year and I was just generally miserable. And if it was easy to leave I probably would have. And then I met Bridget in February and I was like fuck it, I'll stay. She's better than this place.

Anyway. Having followed my high school girlfriend off to college and not gone to college when I got there, I just lived in the parking lot outside her dorm room. I can relate. You know there's a. I probably wouldn't be sitting here today were it not for Elainey. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors. Plunge Plunge makes what I believe is the best self cooling cold water plunge. Over the last decade and especially in the last five years, there's been an increasing amount of excitement about cold water plunging for sake of mental health, physical health and performance. And that's in large part because one of the most robust effects of cold water exposure are big increases in adrenaline, also called epinephrine and dopamine. So while some people do cold water plunging in pursuit of increasing metabolism or reducing inflammation, it's really those big increases in adrenaline and dopamine that lead to those long lasting increases in in alertness and feelings of well being. Not just in the seconds or minutes after the cold plunge, but indeed for several hours afterwards. I've been using a plunge for several years now, typically first thing in the morning or after cardiovascular training. I do agree that doing cold water plunging after a workout designed to generate hypertrophy or strength gains is not a good idea. But doing cold plunging at the other times of day can be tremendously beneficial. I use the version of plunge called the all in ice bath. And plunge now also makes saunas that get up to 230 degrees Fahrenheit. I love how the plunge ice bath and sauna can both be controlled from an app on my phone so that if I'm headed home I can turn on the sauna and it'll be hot when I arrive. So if you would like to try a plunge ice bath or sauna, you can go to plunge.comhuberman to get $150 off either product. Again, that's plunge.comhuberman so at what point did you decide you wanted to aim for the SEAL.

Teams? Is a great question. I mean, things, you know, as compared to at a gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps at prep school who I thought these are back to the first people you meet in this environment, Gunny Flynn. And he was great. Like he was super hard on us. But I obviously kind of love that. And I thought I was going to go into the Marine Corps and Doug wanted to go into the Marine Corps. I'm a freshman at the Naval Academy. He's my wrestling partner. Doug could literally tell me to jump off of a building. As long as he came with me, I'd do it, no problem and enjoy it all the way down. Doug was going into the Marine Corps. I thought I was going to go into the Marine Corps. And I did a summer training in Quantico between freshman and sophomore year. And it was okay. It was good, but I didn't love it. And I met a couple other guys who were going to compete for spots in the SEAL teams who were years ahead of me. But to answer your question, junior year, you can sign up and say, I want to start competing for a billet. We had 16 spots in my class. I think there's 32 spots these days. You know, the force has grown since 9 11, obviously. And I want to say maybe 150 or so people, they put you through this weekend overnight. Two day hell, two day things at Navy, some people quit. I don't know how many go to what we used to call mini buds. In the summer between junior and senior year, you go out to Coronado and BUDS instructors, they still have it. It's called something different. You spend two weeks at the BUDS compound, they run you through a mini.

Program. And so some folks listening to this don't know the.

Acronym. The acronym is Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL School. That's our school in.

Coronado. It's a screening process for who gets in, who.

Doesn'T. Yeah. And when you're at, when you're at the Naval Academy, it's obviously different than guys coming into the enlisted ranks. You have this pool of people, 150ish guys say they want to go sometime junior year. They run you through this weekend pretty hard. At Navy because we have SEALs stationed at the Naval Academy. And then I'm just going to guess that goes from 150 to 80. Maybe 80 guys go to the summer program in Coronado when you're still, you know, a midshipman at the Naval Academy. I've never, maybe people have quit mini buds, I don't know. But I don't know if I really saw anybody quit the two weeks we're out in Coronado. And then you get, you know, graded on your performance and stuff. And then you come back for senior year and you go through a series of interviews with a bunch of seals who come out and do interviews and you don't really know what you're doing. And then they select down, I don't want to again, overdo it, but.

It'S.

Probably seven, I don't know, maybe 50 or 60 qualified guys. They select you down to 16. And so to answer your question about when I got interested was when I knew I didn't want to go in the Marine Corps. I never ever had the Top Gun fever thing. I wasn't interested in flying. I just wasn't interested in anything else but something super physical. And that seemed like the best, the next best thing. And because I grew up in New Orleans and spent a lot of time in the water, that wasn't intimidating. That screens a lot of people out, obviously. Yeah. And got selected in the group of 16 and was at BUDS after graduation, you know, a couple of months after.

Graduation. There's been a lot put out into the world around buds. You know, people have seen the log Carrying and the boat carrying and the screaming in the set screaming of the. The instructors and the running and the clasped arms in the water and hell week, no sleep and on and on. It's obviously tough. It calls 85% of the people that go out there thinking that they are the absolute last person who would ever quit, ring the bell, so to speak. You obviously got through a while back. You mentioned to me three things that you think predict whether or not somebody's going to get through buds. And before you tell us what these are, I just will just tell people that, yes, of course you made it through BUDS successfully and went into the teams. Very successful career in the teams, but you've also been a BUDS instructor, so you've been on the other side of the equation too. What are those three.

Things? Yeah, this was, as you know, this was very anecdotal, but it lined up when I was back there in 05 as an instructor. Andrew, I feel like we're not scientists, right? But I feel like we tried every correlating data poll that we could pull from, pull ups to run times to, you name it, to regions of the country that people grow up near water. At least back then, nothing correlated. And so I was a First Phase OIC officer in charge. And so our team in First Phase, we can talk about what that is in detail if you want to, but first phase is in charge of Hell Week. You know, Hell Week's in the first two months of training and a couple of the guys said all this bullshit about this can get you through, that can get you through. I bet that every single person we talk to out here on the grinder has one of these three things. They were a varsity athlete in high school or college, their parents are divorced or they got suspended from school, I guarantee it. And we would walk around the Grinder and ask. And I mean, you know, this isn't going to pass an independent review board, but it's got to be 90 to.

95%. So that's incredible because, you know, so much has been made of BUDS and Hell Week. And just to just fill in a few of the blanks, for those that aren't familiar, Hell Week is what? It's five nights, no sleep. You get an hour or a couple minutes on one day, but you're basically in constant movement for about a.

Week. You.

Are. And that's when most people voluntarily.

Ring the bell and most of them do it before Wednesday.

Okay. And I know it's got chaotic components, guns going off, blasts, it's got hard work Boring components, people that the people trying to make it through have no sense of how long a run is going to last or what's going to happen. And you hear all this stuff like, okay, you just don't quit or you just go meal to meal. But what you just described is really interesting. Let's break those three things down. Because playing a varsity sport has certain elements, having divorced parents has certain elements, and getting suspended in school has certain elements. Let's start with divorced parents first. As varsity sport, I think we can probably just quickly say, okay, there's structure. You have to listen to somebody. You have to be able to push yourself. You have to have some level of physical competence, coachable mental competence, work with others. So there's something there. Right. And you presumably have to go through junior varsity to get there. So there's some oomph required in any event. But the divorced parents piece is what's surprising to me still is you have divorced parents, so do I. Divorces occur for any number of different reasons. What in the world do you think is the, the consequence of or a divorced household that would predict so? Well, at least in this back of the envelope measurement that you made. But as an instructor, that people would get through this excruciatingly difficult period of.

Time? For me, it was one thing specifically, I felt like I was alone if I didn't have the team. So I don't know what it would be for other people. But I was like, if I don't have this team, then what team do I have? So I'm not leaving. You could crank up the cold and misery as high as you fucking want, but I'm not.

Leaving. Yeah, that hits deep. I didn't do buds. I didn't even know what the SEAL teams were. But I certainly know the feeling of looking outside of the household for a sense of family and belonging and the feeling that like I'd much rather like from almost from a place of joy, like I'd much rather die for these people. Hopefully not with these people, but much rather die trying to save others and to do well in that than to quit. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a powerful thing that you just shine light on. I don't think of the hundreds of interviews with team guys, ex team guys, buds, instructors, etc, that are out there. I don't think anyone's ever highlighted.

That. I don't think I was aware of it then, Andrew, but I just, you know, again, it's in, it's in.

Retrospect. Well, the retrospect is in large part what we're here for, to go a little deeper on that, I think that a lot of people have challenging homes. The parents aren't necessarily divorced. And we're talking. Talking a course about trying to understand the human spirit. Certainly not accomplishments per se, but the human spirit. So I think that a lot of people, especially nowadays, they look to their home life, and if, you know, God willing, they had a great home life, that is the base. It's like the touchstone for them that they can return to. But for a lot of people, even people who go home for the holidays or who touch in with their parents, whether or not they're divorced or not, they don't feel like that family unit is really a solid thing. Maybe they're in a place. I see this a lot of where, like, they're the parent. They had to grow up taking care of the parents. I see that a lot on both the male side and the female side. I see that. So you're saying that one strong predictor of getting through is a feeling of people want, essentially making it their almost like, biological identity to get.

Through. It was certainly the case for me. I mean, when I got. Again, I don't really like to overdo these things because it tends to feed the mythos a little. But when I got to buds, Andrew, like, I. When I got to the Naval Academy, I had a very strong sense of, this is my chance. And, you know, you develop over the years and you spend time thinking about this and having mentors. When I got there, that was very much my first time of, you better bring the nastiest shit on the planet, because I'm not leaving here. Like, it's just not. I'm not. I'm just not going, you know, and there's a Navy bit to it, too. Like, I didn't want to do anything else in the Navy. So back to fear. I was afraid I would get stuck doing a job I didn't like. But there's some people are not wrong, you know, about buds. There's some very difficult days where you do start to wonder, like, is this really worth it? And I never once thought about quitting. It never crossed my mind, because I just had these other things that I really had to do for myself and my life or else I felt like I was going to have nothing. And so, again, I don't think operating out of fear is particularly adaptive. But sometimes it, you know, the bit in your teeth is.

Useful. Yeah. Certainly in my own life, I could say, you know, getting real scared about being 19 and essentially realizing I'm not good at anything, I'm not good at anything. And I was terrible at a lot of things. And some of those things were taking me down a dangerous path. That, that was the fear. I'm grateful for the fear piece. It, it would, it scruffed me. And let's talk about the suspended in.

School.

Yep. First of all, that implies getting.

Caught.

Yes. Not just misbehaving, but getting caught. Yeah. What do you think that's about? So we're really talking about a sense of rebellion against authority or the system that one finds themselves in, which.

Is super important for our line of work. Like, for me, again, I can only speak for myself. For me, it was the wild you factor. Like, you have to. There's just a nasty reality of the work we had to do. You know, I was in from 98 until 2011 in the SEAL teams, in the SEAL teams from 98 until 2011, everybody knows what was happening between 9, 11 and then. It's not that it didn't stop happening. I know, you know, from my own experience from 03 through 2010 was extremely intense. And obviously the military has rules and we need rules. And you follow the laws of armed conflict and you follow the rules of engagement. There's no question about that. Ever. But the shit that happens to you out in the field, for real, does not follow any pattern. And so if you are a complete, you know, non suspended from school rule follower, I'm not saying you won't be successful. I'm sure plenty of people are. But in our line of work, if you ask people, most of them had a weird streak as they were coming up. Like they have a little bit of a side eye when somebody tells them this is how stuff is. Like, maybe it's like that, but you don't know that. And where it really became clear for me, Andrew, was look at every stage in your development, you're still looking for what right looks like. And when I was a. I'm now a Naval Academy graduate, not that that means anything special, but I'm smart enough. I'm now in my 20s, I'm at Buds, and I have this recollection later, like people are always telling stories about the teams. And when you're a new student at buds, you're. You kind of believe everything the instructors tell you because it's pretty impressive shit. And then you find out later when I checked into Seal Team 3 and you actually start to understand the arc of the job. It's like all these guys were telling Training stories. Those weren't real combat stories. They never said that. That was a story from training. And so my point is, like, what, what you hope guys are getting it now. But what we didn't get a lot of was the real story in a sense. Meaning I will say definitively, my first combat deployment was 03, when we invaded Iraq. I was a platoon commander, we invaded Iraq. And I remember within a week of being in that situation thinking not one single instructor had the experience to mentor and coach me on this. Not one. And so you have to go back to that wild suspended fuck you factor mindset. Like all your silly rules about how the military works. None of that shit's happening out here. Like all this other stuff is happening that doesn't have anything to do with your training manuals except for the things you don't violate, which is to your best of your ability. Stuff happens. But the rules of engagement and laws of armed conflict, everything else is a toss up. The tactics aren't. That's not a toss up. But you know what I mean, like the environment is completely.

Chaotic. It's a new sport, It's a.

Brand new sport that no one coached you.

On. And it's high risk, high consequence for you and your teammates, but also for the other.

Side. I mean, every 15 seconds is a new consequential decision.

Yeah. Because you obviously don't want to kill civilians on the other side.

Either. Of course.

Not. So you obviously get through buds. You probably weren't surprised given your mindset. Probably weren't.

Surprised. No, I wasn't surprised. At this point I'm maybe building a little self confidence and we'll just.

Operate out of fear, but happy.

Presumably. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. And let's. I feel obligated to ask. Well, I'm just curious to ask that you, you know, you've been in a system of military for a long time. Is there a, a bigger pull of patriotism there or that's just. It's there. But I mean, are you thinking about country or are you thinking about team? You think about the.

Day. Yeah, I mean, at this point, you know, I'm fully indoctrinated in a sense. You know, the Naval Academy really does give you a sense of again, bigness. And you meet people from World War II and Vietnam and you know, an amazing guy, which, you know, we can cover later. I don't, I wasn't around when he was coming up. But Colonel John Ripley is a guy, won the Navy Cross in Vietnam. The book the. The Bridge of Dong Ha is about him, he knew my. This is back to. I was. My Uncle Jim, who introduced. He and my Uncle Jim were buddies and I met him. He's since passed away. I met Colonel Ripley when I was a plebe at the Naval Academy. I work with one of his sons now. Friend, teammate, mentor is a great guy. Colonel Ripley, he's a legend. Like, this guy's a Navy Cross winner. Should have won the Congressional Medal of Honor, by all accounts. If you read the book the Bridget Dong Ha, you are going to have no ability to understand why he's not dead. And these are the kind of people you meet. So back to the patriotism, you know, thing. By the time I was in the teams, I knew where I was sort of in this ecosystem. Admittedly, though, what I didn't really have, Andrew, because it. I mean, I love the country, of course, but it wasn't. Again, I didn't grow up with a dad who was like, you know, this was always in our house, or it just wasn't that big of a thing. This came for me after 9, 11, obviously. But yes, the patriotism and the importance of the jobs there. But when I remember checking into SEAL Team 3, what emerged very quickly for me, because we had Vietnam vets in the training cell at Seal Team 3 and just some amazing people, what I realized right away was, okay, playtime is completely over. And that was very useful. Like, early lesson, not that anyone was fucking around in buds, like, you know, it's serious. But you meet a guy like Master Chief Martin, who's got 100 combat missions from Vietnam, he's about to retire. He was like the third person I met when I checked into the team. And you suddenly are like a kid again, where there's just no fucking.

Around. So you're in the teams, presumably liking the work, loved it, Loving the team component. It's hard, it's unpredictable, and that's part of the.

Fun. It's amazing. Yeah, the job's.

Amazing. You do a number of different deployments, and at some point you get called to try out for the Tier 1 division within the SEAL teams. Maybe just explain a little bit of what Tier one means. And, you know, we don't want to speak in code here, but we, you know, just inform people that there are levels within the teams and that. Yeah, tell us what tier one.

Is. Yeah, well, I'll just refer to a Special Mission Unit. It's probably the easiest. We have a bunch of teams on the east and West Coast. As a lot of people know nowadays, this was not public knowledge Years.

Ago. Yeah. So. So you've got these different units within the SEAL.

Teams. Yeah. So you, you have to raise your hand. You know, I was 10 years in, Andrew. I was at. I had been platoon commander during the invasion of Iraq. We came to Monterey. I went to school and went back to be a budget instructor. It was 10 years. I felt like it was time to, you know, take my shot. It's a little risky because it's hard to make it through, you know, green team and stuff. At the, at the Special Mission unit, it's a nine month advanced training program. You're 10 years into your career. You're not 22.

Anymore. And not everyone gets called the green team. Not everyone can go. You can't say, I want to go, I want to try.

Out. You can say you want to try out and you do a pre.

Screener.

Okay. So the command training staff, I'll call it the command for purposes of this conversation because I'm familiar with that term. For us, the command training staff comes out, they put you through all this stuff. Some of it's psychological, some of it's physiological. I don't think we did a blood test, but they checked, the trainers checked everything on me, which I thought. This is actually a description of why the unit's Tier one. I was even in the pre screening. It was the first time. The way I joke about it is like I really felt like I was doing what was in the brochure. Like it was real varsity.

Stuff. You know, I'm presaging a later conversation that we'll get to, but at this point, had you ever sat down with a psychologist and done a therapy.

Session that was no therapy, but I sat down with psychologists because they put us through the battery, the Neopir, the Raven, stuff like.

That. They're asking you, how do you sleep at night? How do you feel? What do you dream.

About? How much do you drink? And you say two beers a week.

And. And you're.

Lying. Everyone's.

Lying. Yeah, but now it might be two beers a.

Week. Now it's.

Zero.

Zero.

Yeah.

Right. But yeah, so it was good screening process. Like, I was like, oh, these guys are not messing around. This is exactly what I wanted to do. And the physical tests ramp up. And coincidentally, I worked for him later, still friends with him now. On my interview board was Brisk Slabinski, who won the Congressional Medal of Honor. Brit was on my interview board. And he's a great guy. And so, yeah, then you just wait and if you get picked up, you go out, you know, to the east coast. And you're really rolling the dice because I was on the west coast. You move your whole family, sell your house. You may not have to sell your house, but we did. And you move and you're gonna do a nine month advanced training program at the command just to get into a tactical unit, you know, which we call squadrons. And the best way tactically for me to describe the difference and look, my time at team three was amazing. I'm not diminishing it. But let me just use freefall, military freefall for anybody who's, you know, even done civilian free.

Fall. So it's jumping out of.

Place.

Jumping.

Yeah. So if you go, if we go to the drop zone and we go jumping right, FAA regulations have you jump at 12,999ft because as soon as you go above 13,000, you have to use supplemental oxygen, which is not a huge deal, but it's a pain in the ass for the airplane to have it. And so 99% of your all your jumps. Well, at any standard drop zone, your civilian jumps are going to be below 13 grand. For all of our jumping at Seal Team 3 is below 13 grand. It just makes the training more efficient. And you'll jump during the daytime, maybe a little night jumping. You probably have some lights for safety. And if you look out of the airplane, you would be able to see the orange T on the drop zone. Right? That's your standard jump profile. Maybe you'll jump with some weight. You'll certainly jump with your weapon, probably your helmet, but not all your jumps because you're bringing guys from zero to be able to do tactical military free fall as a group. When you go to the command, your jumps are from 25,000ft. You do 30 minutes of pre breathing on oxygen, helmet, night vision, zero lights, an attack board that has your navigation system on it, £100 of gear, your weapon, your oxygen, all your shit. And 45 dudes piled up in a C17. And you drop miles away from the drop zone because you're over ground speed at 25,000ft is hauling ass, you know, because of the wind. And if you take your hands out of your gloves at 25,000ft, it's curtains. Like you're not going to be able to use your fingers because it's so cold. And you jump from way away, obviously. And all your jump is completely blacked out. Everybody turns IR lights on their helmets, infrared, infrared light so you can see through night vision. And you got to fly that canopy multiple, multiple miles and land everybody on A drop zone. You know, that's. If you take every tactical thing we do and expand the same way you would expand free fall. That's the difference at the command, which is, look, I was. I want to own this when I was at Team three, because, you think about this, I had many, many moments where I was thinking it, man, those guys aren't that much different. Like, we're. We're super high end, right? And we are. And then when I got there, I was like, this is. This is another.

Level. What. What percentage of people that go to green team get through and get sort.

Of. I think I had 65 in my class. You don't drop that many. Maybe 10 guys didn't make it or something. Maybe.

15Ish. So then you were. Why do they call it Tier.

One? No idea. It must have some official reason, like, because if you go into, like, real documentation, Andrew, like, there's, there's echelons in, you know, this, this command is Echelon. This, this command is Echelon. This. In the military Congress sets end strength numbers. It says the Navy, you get at the one time because it took some class. The Navy had like 355,000 people. And that's the Navy's end strength. And they have to distribute those numbers across everybody in the Navy. So I don't know why it's called Tier 1, but I think it has a, you know, has a.

Reason. So you got through, you were accepted, and then you're doing very different sorts of things than you were doing.

Previously.

Very. So my understanding is this is largely counterterrorist work. So all the work in the military and SEAL teams is high risk, high consequence. But now it's special operations, as the name implies, where things have to be worked out on a case by case basis. It's highly unusual. It was unusual before, but now it's highly unusual circumstances. What was it like to be there? Did you like that.

Family? I loved it. It was the best place to.

Work. And this is.

2000. This is 06 through 2011 for.

Me. Okay, so post 911 through.

2011.

Yep. Okay. So I'm sure a lot happened and most of which we can't and won't discuss, and that's not what's important here. But clearly you met and worked with some amazing individuals. I happen to know, because we've spoken before and we have some common friends in that arena, that you had both the privilege of doing this work in this really important wartime, but also the unfortunate experience of being close to and working with Quite a lot of people that were.

Killed.

Yep. How.

Many? So, I mean, I don't know why I did this or why anyone does it. It's way over 40, but I try not to over affiliate myself with a larger group than I actually knew. But the people that I personally knew, Andrew, it's exactly.

40 and we could spend probably weeks detailing how impressive each and every one of those people was in their individual cases. This is perhaps an opportunity to put a call out. There's a wonderful book, I think an important book that isn't so well known in the array of quote unquote military and SEAL books, which is the book about Adam Brown. A fearless book. I heard they're going to make it into a movie, but. But what I, what I like about the book is, actually has very little to do with the SEAL.

Teams.

Totally. That's the best thing is that Adam had a serious, serious problem with addiction that he masked at times and it came back to pull him under various times while he was in the teams. And I know you worked with Adam and you're close. Yeah. So that's a great book for anyone that wants a different sort of book. It's really about addiction and family and his discovery of the path out of all.

That. His tenacity is.

Incredible. Awesome, awesome book. Human. About an awesome, awesome human. So you do those years and then you know what happens when 40 people close to you die, I have to imagine involves that. You get pretty good, unfortunately, at taking what each and every one of those is a tragedy and just continuing. So let's just talk about that for a bit, if you're willing. So guys are getting shot and blown up and you're close with them, to say the least. And what was your role in the, in the aftermath? Like, like how, what do you do? You, you go to a funeral, you, you, you toast a few beers and then you go back to.

Work. I mean, it's, that's kind of, you know, in the most simplistic terms, Andrew, that is exactly what happens. There's obviously, you know, a lot more that goes on, but if you script the diary, so to speak, it wasn't, you know, a funeral every three months. But on average, if I average it out, because I've done this in, you know, excavating the last few years, we were at a funeral memorial effectively every 90 days. And in that time period, but it wasn't obviously, you know, that simple. Like for me and our family. Doug was my first super close teammate killed and it wasn't in the Teams, right. I'm now at the command. I was back from Afghanistan from Kandahar. This is way before the Marines built up 100 kilometers west of Kandahar. We were operating six of us with like 180 Afghans. Kind of the Wild west back then. And Doug was killed that summer of 07. And I got a phone call from a friend. I was standing in my kitchen in Virginia beach, and it was like. Like the whole scaffolding of the world was just gone. Because at that age, and here I am, like, I'm some kid. I was in my 30s. But I'm thinking, you know, things get more and more serious as you go. Like at that time. But when Doug was killed and I was at Paul Berenice funeral and, you know, we came up to Annapolis, he was living in Annapolis. Cause he was working. It's now been publicly released, which is nice for Pam because she can talk about it more. He was working at the agency. And when after his funeral and just the days around that, and then I go back to work and what I mentioned earlier about Doug and what I knew about him, just as an operator, he had been a company commander in Fallujah. He was on the front page of the LA Times. Like, Tony Perry is a reporter in San Diego. He was in Fallujah following Doug. The guy was. And Doug is not a public people. People just attracted to him to tell his story. I have so many stories that I heard later from his bosses. His regimental commander, you know, told stories about his unit in Fallujah, his sergeant major and his amazing guy. I've talked to him about, like, what went on in Fallujah. Doug's just a legend. I mean, he was awesome. And the dominant thought after his funeral was, if things. It's not that you don't think they're serious. And I mean, just about life, Andrew. It wasn't just about combat action and hard deployments. It was about if Doug can be killed, all fucking bets are off. They're all off. Like, if I didn't respect the rules before and didn't think society was particularly ordered in a way that I respected, you know, shit that I think is made up. I knew when Doug was killed that it's all fucking made up. Like, he was supposed to be the immortal one. And if he's not, none of us are. Like, everything has to be reevaluated, you know. How old was? I was.

32. And you've got kids at this.

Point? Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Ollie wasn't born.

Yet. My youngest, because you now have three.

Boys. Yep, three boys. 21, 18 and 14. And the older two were born. My, my middle son was two at the.

Time. Did it occur to you at the point when Doug was killed or maybe some other point that you know, at some point you could.

Die? Oh, I mean, that's what I mean, Andrew. Like I, you know, personal work and therapy afterwards, it was then that I started looking over my shoulder just in general, like everything was suddenly like, has to be watched with a vigilant.

Eye. Something that close friends, close male friends of mine have told me these are friends that are married with kids. And I've heard this from people that were in the military and as well as those that weren't, was that it was very important to them to marry somebody who were they to die, they knew their kids would be well taken care.

Of. Oh, that one's not even. There's no question about.

That. Yeah, so that, that was a, like a primary criteria and I think in your line of work, I mean that that must be especially important because the probability of dying is, well, let's face it, is much higher. As my sister, who doesn't like sharks once told me, she said, you know, the best way to not get eaten by a shark is never go in the ocean. You know, there is a way to limiting probabilities. She'll swim in the ocean a little bit. But, but the point being that when you're in the military and your, your shoot, move and communique is a big part of the, the job description and the, the enemy is also taught to shoot, move and communicate that there's a, there's a decent probability that you could die. So did you ever think, okay, well if I die, my kids are okay because Bridget's solid? Or were you still just operating on this 24 hour schedule that you had adopted way back in the seventh.

Grade? No, I think, well, maybe I'd have to ask her that question. I think I was backed away from the 24 hour ledge a little bit. I knew that the boys obviously would be taken care of with my wife. Like that was never and never crossed my mind probably until you just asked the question that was almost just like table stakes. Back to this adaptive but maladaptive behavior. When Doug was killed, I just realized I had to work even harder to try to stay alive. Because if you met the guy, there is, I'm gonna say it, probably multiple. There is not a fucking human on the planet that was as tough and as focused and as hyper dialed in to how to do the job a hundred percent effectively as he was. And it happened to him, you know, And I just never. It's almost embarrassing, Andrew, to say I never thought about it like that until Doug was.

Killed. And yet. And I'm not challenging that at all, of course, I mean, life circumstances. The other team gets a vote.

Too.

Totally. Right. I mean, somebody can be seemingly indestructible, oh so capable and talented and get T boned at an intersection and die. Right. Like that. We've known people like that, all of us. You hear these things. That's why they're called.

Tragedies. Yeah. We just like to put it in context. We have to remember is part of the beauty of taking a young person and taking all the ingredients that a person comes into special operations. Pick your service. I'm not. I'm agnostic. I mean, some of my best buddies are Army, Marine Corps. Like, I'm agnostic to the service head is when you end up at a certain point like, and you look back, you realize for 10 or 15 years I've been indoctrinated in a very adaptive way to believe that I'm immortal. Because if you didn't, you certainly wouldn't jump out of aircraft at 25,000ft with no lights. And you for hell for sure wouldn't go into some of these fucking towns we go into and end up in these firefights. Like you have some weird. I'll speak for myself. I was entirely convinced that I couldn't be killed. And just because I was in some way, Andrew, convinced that our training was so good that that shit wouldn't happen to.

Us. Let's take a step back for a second and acknowledge the truth all around that set of statements, which is that I think most people can think of the government and the training programs as honing the body. But it's probably not lost on you at this point in your life that you were. You're a weapon. Your mind became a weapon. Right. Your body became a weapon. You were a weapon of the military from the inside out. And in the statement you just made encapsulates that. And that weapon honed itself for a long time. But then that's what the military is. It creates weapons of. Out of humans. And I'm not demonizing the military whatsoever. I want to be very clear. I realize that statement could be construed differently, but. But that mindset encapsulates that.

So. So with the other guys, I want to make sure I finish your question. So it started with Doug. And then, you know, I Don't know what direction you want to go here specifically. But then it just kept going. Andrew. Right? Like, at that time, Doug was 07. And then we went to Iraq in the winter of 07 08, which was complete mayhem. And the troop was. I mean, my. My troop in the winter of 0708 were like fucking superheroes. And a guy named Tommy Valentine was the troop chief. And we got home, and he was killed in a parachute accident. After all that shit we went through Badger, a guy named Mark Carter was killed in that deployment. We got home, and Tommy was killed in a parachute accident. And me and a guy named Dutch, we went up to Minnesota to notify Tommy's parents and his sister and his brother. And we're not. The Navy calls them caicos, like Casualty Assistance Officers. These are jobs in the military where you're trained to do this stuff. You know, one of the things that's amazing about us is if a guy gets killed, we send a team guy there. But think about the team guy. Like, it's great for the family that you send the team guy, but we don't know shit about sitting with a family who's about to be notified that their son, in this case, of Tommy, was killed. Britt went to Christina's house. Slab. Brit Slabinski, he went to Christina's house. And me and Dutch went up to Minnesota. And I'm shaking right now. Like, I was shaking the whole drive. We had to get to International Falls all the way up north. The Valentines are incredible people. And, I mean, notifying a family was just. It was brutal. And so this is 08. And then it just keeps coming. It's Nate and it's Mike and it's Lance, and it's extortion in 2011. And in the middle of that, Adam gets killed. Right. Like, tons of people know about extortion because it was a one helicopter.

Obviously. Four. Well, maybe we just. Just briefly want to mention that was August 2011, as I.

Recall. Yes. Yeah. August of 11. Yeah. So. But in 2010, Adam is killed, and I got a phone call, and. And I wasn't best friend. I mean, Adam had some very close friends at the command that I don't want to make some. Anybody give the impression that, like, me and Adam were boys. We were. We knew each other well. Right. We went through Green Team together. He was in a different squadron, though. So you sort of get separated a little. And I got a phone call in the middle of the night from one of my buddies who's still in. Who is Another legend. And I answered the phone, and it's midnight. I knew something was wrong. And we were kind of in this pattern then, Andrew. Like, actually, a few of the commands were like, our partner command and a bunch of other guys we work with in other units. It was a hard time. Like, guys were fighting hard overseas, and that just comes with the consequences. We know, you know, And I get the phone call the middle of the night. I'm like. And so this guy tells me, you know, get your uniform. You need to come in. Something happened. I'm like, I know what happened. Like, tell me who it is. And they, you know, didn't want to say it over the phone, which I get. And I. I had, like, one of those moments where I told him, no, I can't do that again. Like, you have to get somebody who knows what the fuck they're doing. And he just didn't let me off the hook. You know, get your shit and come. Come into the command, because you got to do all this prep stuff. And I walked into the conference room. I mean, I remember it clear as day. And I walked into the conference room, and I could see it on everybody's face again. This is 2010 now. They were more terrified than I was. And these are, you know, civilian guys, guys who retired, who are now civilians. They work at the command and amazing people. And they looked like. I don't know if you've seen Peter Jackson's remake. They Shall Not Grow Old. Oh, you have to watch it. They Shall Not Grow Old is Peter Jackson took real World War I.

Footage. Oh, I did see.

That.

Yeah.

Yeah. He put the color and the lip reading and it. And there's a scene. I don't know if it's a battle of Bulger, exactly. There's a scene where this young unit, army unit, is about to go up over the top and, you know, run across open field. And the camera pans over, and there's a young kid with his rifle in front of him, the bayonet affixed to it, his helmet on. His lips are sort of flat and pursed, and he. Everybody in that conference room looked like him. When I saw that movie later, I'm like, every single person looked like him. And they told me it was Adam, and we were going to go notify Kelly, his.

Wife. And he had little ones at that.

Point. Savannah, Nathan. Yeah, they were small. And we knocked on. She had a sort of a stained glass, like, window, and I could see her at the top of the. The stairs. That was the worst, man. It was the Worst. So we sat with Kelly and a bunch of other guys were there. Of course, it wasn't just me. And we did our best. And I learned later and, you know, reading Paul's work, Dr. Conti and other people and like, that was it. Dude, I was like a. I don't know if it's a locust or whatever that sheds their skin. I literally, like, left a shell of myself on Kelly's front porch and walked out of my skin. It was. That was tough. That was tough. And so that was kind of the tempo to answer your question. Like, it wasn't exactly every 90 days, but almost every 90 days from 06 to 2011. For me, I got out in the fall of 2011. It was memorial at the theater, memorial at the people's house, you know, and our neighbor across the street in Virginia beach, she lost her husband in 07, so one house over. So she was best friends with us, you know. And so you are trying to live two lives. You have this military life with all these consequences where every bone in your body is telling you to go full Spartan. Like, no, not that the Spartans didn't have families because they did whatever, nothing else. Like, just cut off every other thing in your life completely. You have to go do this, and you have to do it full on because clearly all bets are off. Like, we're barely making it through. We're losing our best guys, and how the fuck do I survive if at this pace? And so, because we're all in the same community in Virginia beach, you're around it all the time when you're home, you know, and you should be, because you're supporting your teammates, families, and that's important. But it was just. It's almost like a dream, you know, When I think about it now, how do. How did we live like that? How does anyone live like that? And I know, you know, my experience as the military people go through, you know, all sorts of tough situations in different walks of life, but I have so much compassion for anybody who's trying to live in an environment like that where, you know, you are going on the next deployment. And, you know, I mean, look, Andrew, we left Bakuba in 08 before Tommy was killed. Three fucking weeks later, guys are getting blown up in the same area, like, and they. They got all the debrief from us. They knew exactly where to go. But it was just such a kinetic environment. We just. It was almost like you couldn't stop it, you know, it was just like the balls rolling. And when I think about people Overseas and, you know, different situations that countries find themselves in right now, I can feel it for. For them, you know, what they're. What it takes. It's a. It's an intense.

Environment. Yeah, certainly that comes through. I think years ago you said to me, and this will be an important way of setting aside which side people are on, you know, whether or not you side with one group in the Middle east or the other, or you feel for everybody, that one of the things that you said that really rung in my ears for a long time is that the warriors on both sides, in their own minds, each and all of them, are just doing what they think is right for them and their.

Families.

Totally. You cannot erase that fact. Whether or not the government of this country or the government of that country or group was correct or incorrect, whether or not you're even talking about a terrorist cell versus a military, a formal military group or special operations group, that in the minds of the warriors, they're doing what they truly believe is right for them and their families and sometimes country as well. And when I heard that, it was sort of a. You know, it's sort of an obvious statement on the one hand, but it's a very important one, I think, to the psychology that, you know, everyone's fighting tooth and nail because they believe that they are right, or they're just fighting tooth and nail for whatever reason. And that was an important thing for me to hear. And I think about that a lot when I see any news stories about international conflict or terrorist, military conflict, terrorist, civilian stuff, even people. There's something about the human brain. People get this into their mind, like, this is my job, and they're doing it. Doesn't justify.

It.

Right. But going back to this thing of being a weapon. Humans can be trained as weapons, and it's often not the weapons themselves that are making the decisions about where to go and what to do. Sometimes it is at this time. Coleman, what's going on with the three boys, with Bridget? I mean, your boys have turned out really.

Well. They're.

Amazing. They're amazing. And there's no coincidence there. And obviously it was a team effort with you and Bridget, but there are a lot of things about the way the scenario you're describing here that speaks to how can a home function? But obviously it functioned well. And, you know, it's remarkable, but it can't be due to chance. So were you able to compartmentalize, like the moment you hit your front door, your dad at home, your husband, your. And was that a pause In a conversation with yourself at the front door, that's just something that becomes.

Reflexive. I mean, I. I think it was just reflexive. It wasn't really a pause at the front door. And admittedly, the story I would like to tell is that I was super Zen about it and I had this process and I would come home and I would take this off and put on regular dad things. And I think I was just. By the same level of effort that we put into what we were doing, Bridget and every other wife, mom, at least the ones that I knew, they put that level effort in as well. It made our home life just very comfortable. So it was easy. Like I didn't have to go through some process, right? It was. This is how I remember it. It was easy for me. I don't know if it was easy for Bridget. She would have to answer that question. It was easy for me. And so I felt like for the most part, like I wasn't like platoon commander dad, you know, some movie, you know, the Great Santini type dad. I think Pat Conroy wrote the Great Santini. His dad was crazy, apparently. Or it's like that's what he writes about. It wasn't like that. It was more of this home is such a relief. And Bridget is so dialed that I don't have to, unfortunately, hard for Bridget, I don't have to do anything. You know, the time that I'm here, I can be here and then, you know, go away again. And so it's as we know, what trauma does to the mind. Like there are many, many stretches of that time period that I just don't remember. And what I do remember is mostly obviously the fun times, the front yard, the whatever, playing with the boys, doing roughhousing and going on vacation and stuff. But the. When I was in the grind, when we were in the training cycle of our cycle or deployment or whatever, I don't really remember sections of.

It, so. A lot. Far too many. I guess even one would be far too many. Doorbells ringing on doorbells. You decide to get out. Was that a conscious decision based on time? Conscious decision based on, like, I would like to have the rest of my life. You're.

Done. I like to call it a regret, you know, but it's just kind of emblematic of where I was. It was the right decision. I do not regret getting out at the 13 year mark. Not for a second. It. I needed it. We needed it as a family. It was a snap. It was a snap decision. It was like a. What do we say 24.

Hour. 24 hour.

Horizon. I was standing on the ledge of the 24 hour.

Horizon. Right. And you said, what year was that.

Again? That was the fall of 2011. 2011.

Yeah. Okay, so that's about four or.

Five years, right, after.

Extortion. Four or five years before you and I met, yeah. Yeah. So extortion, we can just. We don't have to touch into it too deeply because people can look it up. But this was a. A massive loss of special operations, included a lot of seals. It was basically helicopter shot out of the sky with a. With a wrap. With a grenade.

Right? Yeah.

Rpg. Rpg. People can look it up if they want to. And there's a lot of material out there about it. It's just. Can only be described as a tragedy. So. And I'm not trying to make light of it, I just think that we could do. There's a lot to explore there for in a different discussion. Okay, so you're out now. The probability that you're going to die is much lower, provided it's not.

What my nervous system.

Said. Right, but you're out, and what do you do, Meaning, what do you do with all that energy, the energy of the way you've been operating up until now, these intense battle rhythms, vampire schedules, as you call them, but also what do you do with all the energy of what happens, happened? You know, I think this is where I think our conversation really hopefully has been related to other people as we've been going, but that, you know, sometimes I stop and I'm like, I know I'm supposed to process all this stuff, you know, that's happened, but it's like, what do you do when so much has happened or when something's happened that you know you have to move on from? You know, you need to compartmentalize, but that lives in our nervous system. System. So are you thinking about that? No. You're Coleman Ruiz. At that point, you're just. You're just going.

Forward. Just crazy. I mean, I just didn't know, you know, it's 2011. Doesn't sound like that long ago. But still, in 2011, this was not a topic for conversation, you know, And I took maybe one week to process out. I turned in my gear, I turned in my badge, and my next visit to the command, years later, I had to be escorted on by people I worked with in the same squadron. Like, so within a matter of one week, I'm a stranger. Like, I can't get on the base. There's reasons for that. I Get that. But I'm just using it as a. I mean, to make the.

Point. There was nothing dishonorable about how you.

Went. No, no, no.

No. It's just that there's security.

Reasons. You can't just drive on the base anymore, you know, and this is, like, emblematic of. Of course, I didn't talk to anybody about it, not even Bridget. But at the time, in those first. Call it couple of years or even couple of months, I don't know. The question you just asked me is a question I was actually like, what do I do? Like, not with work. Like, what do I do period with life? Like, how do I manage my time? And I'm not some bumbling idiot. It's not like I was walking around the neighborhood, like, trying to figure out where my house was. I. I had just been in that environment for so long, to your point, that I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do with my thoughts, my feelings, my. You know, I could go to the Buddhist five aggregates. My thoughts, feelings, perceptions, physical form, and like, all these things I've learned about and thought about later that have helped so much. I didn't know what to do with any of it. Like, I didn't know what to do with nights was. I didn't know what to do with. I thought the term PTSD was the. Was the biggest joke on the planet until I read all the symptoms and I'm like, wait, wait a.

Minute. Sounds like it sounds.

Familiar. And so it's that Andrew. Like. And so I remember, like, even the little things that kind of make the point of the big things. I didn't know how to get a dentist, like, just go to the dentist in the military. You know, I thought when I was walking around the food line that somebody was going to call me and say, come back to the base because, like, the bubble went up. You just. I had zero context and didn't have the courage. Or not even just the courage, but know who to ask, right? It wasn't the mentoring. One of the most important books in my life in the last 12 years has been Joseph Campbell's the Hero with the Thousand Faces for the back end of the Hero's.

Journey. And I haven't read it. I know I should. I know I.

Should. You should actually listen to.

It. You should listen to.

It. It's better to. I've probably only listened to five audiobooks in my life. I prefer to read in paper because I can take notes in the margin. That book is better listened To.

Hero with a Thousand.

Faces. The Hero with a Thousand.

Faces. Could you just highlight a couple of the things that you took from the back end of that that somehow shifted your mind toward, like. Like, cued you? I'm thinking Coleman RUI's circa 2011 is like, like, what do I do now? And then something cues you. There's like a beacon someplace. It's like, I always think of this, like a texture of something. And you're like, oh, I want to. You know, you want to feel it more to get a sense of what it is that. Is that about.

Right? It was in that case for sure. So Joseph Campbell wrote that book in 1949, and the Heroes a Thousand Faces is effectively the 17 stage hero journey, which, by the way, George Lucas says, and has said many times publicly, he built the arc of Star wars around the 17 stage Hero's Journey. He credits Joseph Campbell's book for helping him. And if you ever read it or you go through the 17 stages, or you see it or watch a short video, anybody, you'll see how damn near everybody's life, which is why it's called the monomyth. He describes it as the monomyth or the cosmogonic cycle. There's a little weirder term for it. But what he lays out in the book is, I don't know, maybe supposedly 2000 years of culture across multiple cultures. Book is incredibly complicated in that sense, Andrew. When I. So I listened to it audio first and then went back to it and listened to it in paper, I could not believe how a human could put this narrative together, honestly. And so. But the summary, I struggle with the first 10 stages a little bit, but I'll try to come back to them. If you look at the image when you lay out the 17 stages, the way it's in a circle is the ordinary world and the extraordinary world is on the bottom of the page, there's a horizontal line. The diameter of that circle goes horizontally across. And the extraordinary world's on the bottom, the ordinary world's on the top. Okay. And so let me talk about the back end of the journey first, because what I was mostly concerned about with when a friend pointed me to that book was my return to the ordinary world. And he told me, coleman, you got to read this book. And so the back end of the hero's journey in the return section is 3, 7 stages of the 17. It's the ultimate boon, which is you learned something big in life. It depended on everybody learns something where you. You sort of realize that Something big happened to me. That's the ultimate boon. And you have this incredible desire to do something with it. It's either knowledge or it's experience or whatever. And the ultimate boon you have and you feel like this life thing. And then the next stage is typically refusal of the return. You really don't want to come back to the ordinary world because you feel that there is some level of consequence that maybe you can't handle or somebody won't understand, you know, or maybe it's too.

Mundane. You'll be. Maybe you'll feel.

Adrift. Totally. Yeah. And this is in the description of the stages, what you just described as part of that description. The next stage you're coming up back into the ordinary world in this return is magic flight. And the way it's described in, you know, myths or in real life is you have to escape that extraordinary world and take one more dangerous flight or sneak away or something is catapulting you to take that ultimate boon and fight against that refusal. You're taking magic.

Flight.

Amazing. And then there is. Assistance. I think it's like assistance from a. Like a special power or something which could be your own or somebody else. Right? And then. And then suddenly you're into the last three, which is crossing the return. Crossing the return threshold into the ordinary world, Master of two worlds, where you finally realize through help and. Or process, where you can hold these two opposing life experiences in place. And then the very last stage 17 is freedom to live. And when you can. I'm going to give you my little pet theory in a second. When you can work your way through those stages, you can have the freedom to live. What I realized potentially happened to me just my internal feelings about, you know, my coming in out of the military and back is if you skip or you don't figure out how to deal with the refusal to return and you just pick. I'm going to call it the next big thing. You catapult yourself into a new cycle and you never finish. And one of two things has happened. You're either two people trapped in the ordinary world, or you're one person trapped in two worlds. I don't know which it is. It's either two worlds in one person, or it's two people trying to live in one world. But shit gets crazy, right? Because you just haven't done the cycle. And it sounds very miscalculent, but if you read it here with a thousand faces, you're like, this journey is not new. Like, this is thousands of years of very typical Human cycle. Now, if we go back to the top of the circle, let me try to screen through the first 10, which will be very obvious for Star wars fans. Just think about what Luke does. And I'm not like a super Star wars person. I've seen the movies. But it's a call to adventure. Most of us have a call to adventure of some sort in our life. Refuse to call help from a mentor. Crossing the first threshold, the belly of the whale, which is described as. When you first truly separate. This was me leaving for college. When you first truly separate from the ordinary world. Road of trials, meeting the goddess, temptations, atonement with the father, apostasis, which is kind of like dying a death while you're still alive. And then you're into those return stages. And when I first read that book, Andrew, I was like, I'm trapped in the Return. I'm trapped somewhere in the return, just emotionally. And one of the places that I was absolutely trapped in the return was I didn't have the mentor to help me cross the threshold. I knew I had to move on in my life. I knew I had learned something extremely valuable. I knew that there was a way through because people across thousands of years of humanity have done it. I don't think I'm special. And I never had the mentor. I got mentors later, you know, a couple years out. And it reminds me that in the. So I got out in the fall of 2011, in the summer, one of my very good friends who lives in Connecticut, he works in New York, he brought me to a lunch at some fancy club in New York with a guy named Buddy Buca. Paul Buddy Buca, who won the Congressional Medal of Honor. He was a West Point grad. He won the CMH in Vietnam. I've been around a lot of, you know, famous military people. Lunch was very normal. But Buddy was amazing. It was a normal lunch. We didn't talk about much like impact. We didn't talk about combat action or whatever. There was a green velvet set of stairs. We were leaving the club, the upstairs. We were coming down the green set of stairs. If I remember, Buddy's a little bit shorter than I am. He reached out his left. I was on his left. He reached out his left arm. I was a stair one stare below him. He stopped me. I turned to my right to look at him. He looked at me. He said, son, you have it. You know that you have it pts and you're gonna have to deal with it. And we left. I got in the cab and I left And I remember thinking, you might have it, but I don't because that's the old days. Like we're. We were prepared for this. I was still convinced that I'm good. Like, nothing happened to me. Nothing in the military happened to me. That's just normal stuff. And all of our training, it's a story I told myself. All of our training prepared me for that. Like this. The rest of my life is just going to. Nothing bad is going to happen because I'm good, whatever that meant. And when I started to learn more and read more and talk to people who are helping me, I remembered Buddy telling me that. And back to those return stages. Andrew, it's just incredibly important for me to understand that my journey is not special. We are part of a long history of evolution that people who go through very challenging and I mean the 17 stages in Joseph could not be more accurate to like to my life, particularly the.

Return. And of course, if one looked from the outside, they would agree with your mindset then and say, you're alive. You certainly have done very hard things, extraordinary things. You're married, you got three kids, they're thriving. Ptsd, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and things like it. Because I don't think any single acronym or diagnosis can capture anything. I think Paul Conti made that very clear to us in the mental health series. These are names by necessity, but.

It'S a framework that certainly taught me.

Something. Absolutely. And certainly those who haven't been in the military maybe had a seed event of something challenging or whatever it is. Many people struggle with these kinds of things that live inside them in their nervous system. They pack it down. Maybe they don't. But that was inside you at that point. I think you and I first got acquainted in somewhere around 2016, when you and some other folks from Tier 1 community and related communities started coming to lab. And my lab and I never really talked publicly about my lab has been involved with various things in Canada and the U.S. not trying to create any mystique there, but it's not a point of interest what we did. And. But I recall at that time just thinking like, this guy's just an amazing team guy. But in any event, you know, we got to know each other a bit. And my sense then was like, it's like a. It's kind of indestructible. Right. You know, and now I realize nobody's indestructible. We're flesh and bone. But. But if we may, let's fast forward a bit to a couple years later. If you're willing to talk about it, maybe talk about some of the evolution that happened. So you started working a job. You're getting back into civilian life. And I recall a conversation about this time of year, probably about three. Three years ago. Yeah. And you had done what a lot of vets from Tier one operations have done and are now doing, which I actually have mostly favorable outlook on, which is there. Now, these are, I want to be very clear, legal and sanctioned explorations of the psychedelic space. Right. And I remember you called me and you described the experience that you had had and some of the connection with warrior culture that. That had helped emerge for you. So could you explain what happened.

There? You know, probably the entry, Andrew, is as important, you know, meaning it's not all about books. But this is actually another thing I've really learned. You know, I was very intellectual and achievement central. And as you can see how easy the emotion comes out now, I kind of very frighteningly understand people who, like, feel stuff a lot.

More. It's a whole other.

Landscape.

Miserable. Well, wait. Yeah, it is. And yet it's. I. I agree it's a very uncomfortable space, you know, but we'll get. We'll get.

There. It's a journey for me, let me put it that way. So, you know, there's a bunch of other. I'm a voracious reader. I really enjoy it. And, you know, my entree and little window into the world of getting that kind of help came from a lot of different areas. I found in our area, a craniosacral therapist who. It still seems like, because I mentioned it to people and it sounds fringe to them, it's a very light touch, not even chiropractic like. And it's closer to myofascial type of.

Massage. Some. Some.

Tapping. Yep.

Yeah. Very light tapping on the top of the.

Head. The part I actually love the most is the back of the neck. Sort of manipulation is you're lying down, relaxed. Yeah. You're closed. Super easy in terms of that. Couple years of that. Just because of athletics. I love massage, and that's kind of my.

Entree. And so through the body. Somatics.

Yeah. Which frankly, in many ways is my favorite. Back to the physical orientation to the world is. Is what I. Is what's useful to me. But also I. I mean, I read Sam Harris's first book, End of faith, in 2006, and so I've followed him for 15 years, religiously, read all of his books, Lying Moral Landscape and his. I don't know him personally. So public stuff notwithstanding, that's not important to me. But waking up. And I took an online course with Robert Wright who wrote why Buddhism is True, but that's really not what he's known for, you know, Princeton professor. He's so funny. He's very humorous. And I started to work my way into. I don't have some like, I don't want people thinking I have some like whiz bang, like spiritual practice. That's whatever, you know. But it became very interesting to me, Andrew. This, this I. I needed to find. I started to realize I needed to find a way to back away from the 24 hour ledge. Like that super hyper focus. I needed to get a little bit of perspective. One of my favorite short videos is Richard Feynman's Pale Blue Dot. I needed to just back away, you know. That reminds me, thank you so much for talking about time, space bridging. I think the other day I'll.

Cue people to that clip in the caption. It's a way of taking oneself out of one's immediate sphere of vision and literally looking further out into one's environment and then back again as a perceptual exercise of understanding that as our visual field expands, our perception of time also expands. But the binning, the chunking of.

Time. Yeah, that and mine. Your conversation years ago about horizon and activating the parasympathetic system instead of sympathetic. I just very slowly started to realize I needed to back away from the small picture and the reading and the cranial sacrum massage. And I was still not really getting consistent. Real help. But I thought I could do it through educating myself intellectually and I thought it was time to. And it was. It has short term consequences, but long term it's been amazing to, you know, deal with the plant medicines in a. In a controlled and curated environment. And that experience was super safe and quite amazing actually. The weekend or the three or four days was super intense. But I didn't leave there thinking again. I kind of thought, I'm good. That was.

Great. Yeah. A couple things. One, we've covered psychedelics on this podcast before. I say this not for liability reasons, but just really to emphasize for people's safety, to protect them. Plant medicines are illegal most places still. This is changing. MDMA is, has been filed with the FDA as a potential treatment. It's not yet legal. These things have great power of, of to heal in the right circumstances and they also have great potential to harm in the wrong hands or circumstances. People with, you know, potential for psychosis, et Cetera. But with that said, I remember I was on, I was driving, I was on a phone call with you around this time of year, about three years ago, maybe it was four, but I think it was three years ago. And I said, what was your experience with ibogaine DMT like? And you said, you know, it was among the most profound experiences of my entire life. And I recall you saying that you felt that it had connected you through time to all the warrior cultures that had preceded you. Not just US Military, but all warrior cultures. And you sounded great. You sounded like better than great. You weren't high, but you just sounded like man, something had synced up. And I thought, this is great. And I hadn't explored plant medicines, at least not in a long time, because I had done the recreationally as a youth, which I do not recommend. It took me down a bad path. But. And more recently I've explored them in controlled conditions. But I thought, awesome, this worked. You got this new job, you did some very controlled and again, physician assisted Abigail DMT experiences and you're telling me how great everything was. And then about, I think it was about three, three, four months later, I got a very different call. And if you're willing, I remember that call, maybe you can tell me about.

That. Yeah. So, I mean, the experience, it was incredibly powerful. Humor is such a powerful way to get through hard times is why I'm laughing. But it really was Andrew. I mean, to be fair to thousands of years of, you know, people having experience with these things, we often joked about, like, what poor sucker reached down and grabbed that root for the first time and chewed on it. The iboga tree boy, he found.

Out. Or.

She. Or she.

Yeah. To be.

Fair. To be fair. Probably, you know, some session that wasn't supposed to go that direction and someone chewed on the wrong route. But it was extremely powerful. I've heard that, you know, the five meo for some people is not much, it's like black. For me it was just liftoff. And I saw an entirely perfect geometric mosaic in light blue and white. And that was the warrior culture connection. Like that whole 20 minute ride was just something.

Else. As you know, I haven't done.

It. Noetic is the.

Word.

Noetic. Yeah. That people use. And very difficult. I don't have the language for it. And a couple months later, the bottom dropped.

Out. Yeah. And it be. And I want to talk about that now. I also want to emphasize I know a good number of people that have had the same experience you did with ibogaine dmt through the Veteran Solutions group. And I know Marcus and Amber Capone very well. Actually, a bill just got passed in Congress that Dan Crenshaw helped helped spearhead to bring funding to the use of psychedelics for PTSD treatment in military. And I should mention, because this was interesting to learn, that that bill was highly bipartisan. I'm not gonna name off the names because if I do, there's gonna be a lot of cringing, screaming and yelling. But it's like if ever there was a bill that was supported from both sides of the aisle with the, like, the most diametrically opposed names who came together around that funding, it's that bill. Yeah. And just striking. And so this is a very bipartisan thing. So I will say a number of people have been greatly benefited by the Veteran Solutions work. And we can't causally link what happened to you afterwards to that at all. There's a lot of contextual stuff, so we're not doing that. But we're an open book here. And I think that's a great group, by the way. Veteran Solutions is amazing. A few months later you said the bottom dropped out. So what happened? And when did you start to notice it? And then maybe we can talk about that phone.

Call. Yeah, I think, you know, looking back, Andrew, I think a couple things most people who call me about, you know, friends who say, hey, should I go do this? I initially tell them, well, 100% of the time I tell them no. Until. Until you get. I was having this conversation last week with a guy who I never met before. You need to stabilize your situation, whatever your situation is, through some very slow, deliberate, Dr. Conti level help. Because in the case of. I'm happy to see that some people are using just a wider spectrum of on ramp, not the nuclear option to start, I can tell you unequivocally, ibogaine and 5m Meodmt two days apart is the nuclear option. And it's not right for everybody. I'm not a scientist. There's no question. That cannot be right for everybody. That just doesn't make any sense. There's other ways to enter, I.

Believe. And when you say the Conti option, we'll just for those that didn't see the series with Dr. Paul Conti, we'll put a link to in the show. Note captions. But what Coleman's referring to is talk therapy with somebody highly skilled and perhaps also prescription medication, if that's necessary, maybe hormone therapy, if that's necessary. That's up to the physician, but. But clearly talk therapy with a skilled.

Clinician. I believe I needed. I don't know what other people need. I needed a mentor to help me contextualize what I was coming from and what I'm going to. And my experience, you know, with the plant medicines was it kicked the door wide open and took that beautiful ice sculpture, perhaps at a person's wedding, and shattered it on the floor. And I was again left alone. My fault, not anybody else's, left alone to figure out how to put that ice sculpture back together piece by piece. And my belief is I could have avoided that by having a much more deliberate process. So when suddenly the ice sculpture was on the ground and every bit of intellect that I built over, you know, however long four decades I was, I was flat on my back. And. And as. As I told you, Andrew, and I've been, you know, really verbal about with so many friends who only want to talk about it in quiet circles, which I totally understand and. And respect. And if you want to talk about in a quiet circle, like email, the Humor Life podcast, and you can give them my cell phone number, because I know how important it is to people when they're in that stage is. That was another thing that I never thought was possible for humans. It was severe depression. Severe. And I was so. Because I guess I just never thought about it again or never had a mentor. The shocking thing, Andrew, was how shocked I was. It was like if I had known something like this was real. Not that I would have listened to anybody if they said it, but the most shocking thing was that, again, this could happen to me. And when it did happen, I was completely unequipped to deal with it took. Forget how weak, forget every other thing in my Life. It took 10,000x the energy of anything I've ever done in my life before to just put my feet on the ground in the morning. I could not pt. I couldn't run. And you're like, I could not function. I did function somehow to some level, but it was so terrifying. I just have. For anyone listening who has been through, I just have such incredible respect for people who have dealt with it and have learned to get through something like.

That.

Depression. Oh, yeah. Or any pick to pick the title. Right? Whatever tough situation someone's in emotionally, I have such tremendous respect for them because I would have been years ago the guy who, like, just tighten up your boots and get to it. It's not possible. Like, you have to get help from people who care about you, and you have to, like, you have to step back Away from the problem set somehow and, and work through it, you know, step by step. The. One of the most helpful things. And I'm so feel so fortunate that it never really had like the chemical dependence thing. It was easy for me to stop.

Drinking. When did you decide to stop.

Drinking? It was around three years ago or so.

Ish. Prior to this lapse into.

Depression? No, no, right. During. Yeah, right.

There. You just figured alcohol is a bad thing right.

Now. Yeah. And I mean, look, you and I have been friends for a while now, Andrew. Some of the things you and I have discussed and I hear you talk about publicly, they were just good reminders. You know, one of the things I absolutely hate, but I do every day, which is wait 90 minutes to drink coffee. Oh, it's the worst. I cannot tell you how much of a difference that's made in my energy throughout the day. And the drinking was similar. You know, I, I like, look, I'm just going to drop it for a couple of weeks and then suddenly my sleep's better, my fitness is better, you know, so, you know, we all, even my friend, you know, you chat about stuff. Oh, what are you doing at this age and I'm approaching 50, that helps you stop drinking. Everything else, like all the other recommendations come second, at least for.

Me. Was that pretty easy for you to do? Because I know there's a big culture of drinking in the.

Teams. Yeah, I was just lucky. So. So my point there is, you know, the. Just the respect I have for people who, who work through stuff like that. And I was going to say the reason I referenced the drinking is because I started reading a lot about the 12 steps. AA. I've never been to a meeting, but The Simpson, the PTSD and the 12 steps, like, oh my God, this is me. Like I need to go through these steps in my own way. Not for, you know, not for drinking, but for whatever. This low grade, the way I've described it as, you know, the Buddhist obviously called Dukkha, it's unsatisfactoriness, this low grade irritation that I carry around every day. The one amazing thing that that couple of months did for me and the way I describe it visually is if someone cut me from neck to belly and filleted open my chest and took a propane torch and scorched me from the inside and then put me back together and said, start over, that's how it felt. That's literally how it felt. I mean, I could not believe Andrew. And you can Obviously, you know, Dr. Conti can articulate this better. I couldn't believe how emotional pain could be so physically painful. That whole experience, again, the shocking part was the shocking part. I just. I just didn't think it was real. And so then when it was, and I'm like, how many fucking things do I have to deal with? You know? And I realized everybody deals with a lot of stuff, and it was challenging. And then slowly, you know, it got better and better. And guys like, you know, friends, very close friends, a very, very small, tight group were, man, what people do when you finally tell them and you think, oh, this guy's gonna. He's never gonna talk to me again. They do the opposite. They rally immediately for you, you know, and then guys that aren't in your inner circle necessarily helping directly, and they're in the next circle. Because now this is very weird. It's back to, like, the feeling thing. I can. Not 100% of the time, but a lot of guys in my community, if I speak to them and they're in a bad spot, I can detect it within five seconds. Just the tonal and kind of like the tempo. And when you tell that ring of people, not your super inner circle, they dump it immediately. As soon as you open the door, they're like, hey, man, I had a couple of tough, like, months, you know, boom. They're right.

In. For the most part, they open.

Up. Yep. And that really scares me, Andrew, because I know, like, if we need. If we need to flip the switch this afternoon, like, we can flip the.

Switch.

Meaning. Meaning, like, I can go to old school 20, you know, 15 years ago. That's what you and I have discussed in the past is kind of come back to, you know, the fighter mentality is. The problem with that. The hardcore, intense, focused. That's easy. Like, it's so easy to do that tough stuff. That's easy. This is the hard part. And that's what, you know, was so challenging. It was to go to people who normally we do, you know, the. Yeah, yes. Do this, let's do that. Let's do something crazy. Okay, well, tell that same person who you've built, Persona, identity, you know, around them and with them, they're like, you're this guy. And then you have a tough spot. Now you have to go tell them the opposite. Like, I'm really not doing well. It's.

Terrifying. It is terrifying. And I. But I second with both arms your statement that when we actually open up to somebody trusted, hopefully a friend or somebody close to us, but, like, some people go to clergy or aa or any number of the different resources. And those resources really are out there at zero cost. They really are there if one has to look a little bit, sometimes a lot, unfortunately, but they're there. My experience has always been, and in observing others, that there's something about the human spirit that wants to help totally. And sometimes that help comes from somebody who's really been through it. But even if somebody hasn't been through it, there's something in our nervous system that sees real pain in somebody. And contrary to what we think, they don't judge and think that everything that the person who was hurting was before was a fraud. The contrary, they see it as an act of strength. But it feels like hell to reveal that. And I totally agree. I think all the tough stuff, all the. Anything physical is like a fraction of the emotional pain. And thank you for highlighting the physical aspect of emotional pain, especially if one isn't accustomed to it. If one isn't accustomed to it, if you're willing. How bad did it get? I mean, the call we had suggested it was bad. I sometimes refer to a line, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I've seen that line a few times in my life. I've been right up next to it a few times, and now if I ever see it, I know to do many things when it first comes into my visual sphere. The line, of course, being the point which one is considering taking their own life. Something that happens far too often. Even once is far too often. And we've sort of skirted around this topic after all the wartime stuff and the gunfights and people dying and the doorbells. Been a lot of friends of yours, and some of whom I know, but most of whom I don't, but two this year who continue to kill themselves, to put it bluntly. Where were you at with respect to that line? Because depression is one thing. There's mild depression, there's severe depression, there's recurring depression, there's manic and on and on and on. But ultimately that's the thing that hopefully everyone's seeking to avoid. And it's a. Yeah. How close were.

You? I would say there was probably. I really want to say one day. And the truth is it was one.

Day. It lasted one.

Day. Being that close to the.

Line. But it only takes a moment to.

Go. That's the scary thing, right? It's. And it probably lasted a couple of weeks, but there was only. Back to the buds thing. Like, I never thought about quitting. I thought about it one.

Day. What was the.

Thought? It was, I mean, sort of like the classic symptoms. Andrew. I was up all night sweating and shaking. And it's back to the shock of it. It was okay. I actually was able to, like, one of two things is happening. Either I am fundamentally bad. There's no way you can feel this bad and be good. So one of two things is happening. Like I'm just bad a bad person, which I know is not true, or something bad got inside of me that I have to get rid of and I don't know how to get rid of it. And so sweating, shaking, you know, up at three in the morning and legitimately thinking this is just the scariest thing. And for anybody in the situation, you think with every ounce of your being that people are better off without you. And then somehow, thankfully, through chemistry, neurobiology, past learnings, I stepped back away from that very quickly. But the feeling of putting me up to that line didn't go away. I just intellectually was able to. It was kind of where the maladaptive behaviors, you know, back to training, work in your favor, which is, I'm not quitting. Like, this can't be just me. Even though it did feel like just. I mean, you suddenly become the core of the entire existence of the universe. You think like you're it, you know, but in the negative side of it, not the adaptive side of it because the pain is just so extreme and. But I was able to back away from it and then over. I'm so grateful to so many of my friends. I can't imagine how many hours, if we collect up those hours, how much time I spent with them on the phone. And one of my, in the, like in those really hard weeks, maybe a little bit after that, injured one of my buddies. I was actually just talking to him yesterday because I had time in the car. The tough love side of it, when you're feeling that poorly, is a little tricky. Like, I wouldn't, I probably wouldn't deliver tough love unless I really thought the person could handle it. I think it's. You got to really deal with kid gloves at that. Those moments. But one of my buddies told me, if you do something to hurt yourself, you will have proven to every person who knows you that you are a fucking liar and a fraud. Everything you've been about your whole life is a fraud. And Andrew, I was. We were on the phone, I was like, whoa, my God, he just went 10 ring. I mean, dead center. And that was a pivot. Like, that really helped me a.

Lot. So that's what you needed. I mean, I don't know that that's what I would have needed. I recall when we spoke, because I. Obviously not professionally trained in any of that. I just remember thinking, how do I put this into language that Coleman's going to understand? And I just said, you know, I think your goggles are. I know one thing for sure, which is that your goggles are foggy. So you gotta. So you have to outsource your decisions.

Now. I think you might have also told me to outsource my identity. And that helped a lot because it was that idea of, you have foggy goggles. You're clearly, like, not on stable ground. Everything you believe about yourself, just let it be the spokes of a wheel that somebody else can hold for you for a period of time. I was like, well, I can do that. And then my other buddy. I didn't want to be a liar and a fraud. I was like, I can do.

That. Yeah. I'm grateful for the opportunity, but unfortunately, I had a few circumstances where people close to me were at that edge, and I'd be lying if I. And say, I've been at that edge. So I knew where I had some sense of where you were at. And under those conditions, I don't think there's a playbook. I mean, obviously, when people have a plan and they're thinking about implementing that plan, those people need to be put under protection from themselves. Fortunately, it didn't come to.

That. Yeah. And, you know, a few friends just did the basics. Andrew. Which was. I really wanted to talk to you at that time because I knew you would give me some advice. You know, I was so uncertain about just the. I'll just say the chemistry, but the chemistry and nerve. Like, something is not right. Yeah. And, you know, different friends offer different. And some friends just sat and listened to it all. And when I think back, it's like I would take a bullet for them because they just took it, you know, and let me offload it. It's. It's an amazing experience for. Let people help you. Which I was never willing to.

Do. No. And you were. We have to highlight something that might have been overlooked earlier because we went through it quickly, but that you were, you know, you were commander of a unit, so you're head of a family. I know. Bridget's also head of family. There's a. There's a trade. You go back and forth. Right. Exactly. But you're used to leading and protecting others, and I think it's awesome that you're able to have access that raising your hand, asking for help, you have to. It's such a sign of strength and skill and it feels like the exact opposite in the moment. The exact opposite. And then we go to these narratives like, oh, if I've ever done that in the past, people didn't help. We come up with a million excuses. But in the end it's. It's such a thing of strength to do that. So you did ratchet yourself out of that very, very dark hole slowly. And I want to place this in the context of this hero's journey. Would you see that you talk about the magic flight, that you're against, the refusal. You won't go back. So it was accepting, it seems that there was. That some pieces of you needed work, that there was this ptsd, this gentleman that you mentioned saw that and you refused to kind of deal with it and so shine a light on it and God, the universe, whatever your beliefs are, forced you to see it. And you went to the very bottom, but not out the.

Bottom.

Yep. What was the process of putting things back.

Together? I mean really. I mean a lot of it. Andrew was cutting out. I. So as a practical matter, I mean I'm going to go just go back to regular therapy because I don't that. I mean my therapist is amazing.

She. So you're not. You. At what point did you enter immediately talk.

Therapy? Immediately.

Then. So you got a quote unquote therapist.

Because. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean effectively, you know, Bridget and I and multiple. At some point it was, it was. Bridget was like this is this is it like full time help effective immediately. And I knew it was necessary, but if I'm really honest, like I would have avoided it. I would have somehow like tried to gut through the situation without like full time help and I mean once a week therapy.

Yeah. So the idea of sitting down with somebody and talking about past, present and maybe some ideas of future was worse to you than jumping out of a plane at 3,000ft or going into a.

Gunfight. Not even close. Not even.

Close. And hearing yourself say that, dude, you realize how ridiculous. Well, how untrue that must be at the physical level. But the nervous system doesn't know as to quote Dr. Paul Conti, the limbic system that experiences or it creates this sense of fear and dread doesn't know the clock or the calendar. It's like if you go the meaning, if you experience that, there's the idea that it's going to go on forever. I think that's the.

Fear. That's correct. Yep, that's exactly right. Thank you for saying that. The fear was, this will go on forever. But so, yes, it. That. I just did not want to, you know, back to Bessel van der Kolk when I read this word in his book, Body Keeps a Score. Alexithymia. If that's a real thing, where you can't put language to, you know, what's going on, I didn't want to put language to it. I couldn't. I just didn't feel like it. Like, I just felt like gutting through it. And then I got, you know, once a week, therapy, amazing people, and. I don't know, Andrew. The first three months was, you know, I mean, gutting through. I just couldn't. I couldn't seem to shed that emotional, like, burden of. Pick the category of stuff from the last. Let's just say 20 years. It was just. But it was all. I couldn't stop it from coming out. And obviously that's a good thing. And so that just continued and every day got. And when I say this is the tough part for at least me, and I know a lot of guys like me, the gains are minuscule, you know, but things improved slowly but.

Surely. Were there ever moments where you felt you were drifting.

Backward? Not really. And that's. That was nice. You know, you see that there's some stall, you know.

Plateaus. You don't have to share this, but because I'm a believer that talk therapy can be very effective, certainly that's experience. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for two in particular, amazing people who really helped me along the way, but in that way. But I do think there's a place at times for pharmacology to assist the process. Sure. I know nowadays people hear SSRIs and they demonize those. That wasn't. I'll come clean. And then maybe, if you feel like it, you can. I hit a bout of depression during my postdoc. Did a short run of Wellbutrin, bupropion, which is more of the dopaminergic. Noradrenergic agonism, mostly adrenaline. Noradrenergic. It really helped. It nuked my memory at the dosage they suggested, which meant I had to take a very low dose. And then eventually I came off. And I think that that's one thing I learned from Conti, which is that most of these medications were designed to help people get over a bump, as opposed to be taken continuously. Some people need to take them continuously. I have been Able to be away from that for a long time. But I think pharmacology can.

Help. Oh yeah, I think I'd have to go back and look four months maybe of pretty low dose of Wellbutrin thanks.

To. Yeah, yeah, that's about.

Right. Yeah, thanks to my buddy Jimmy. You know, I called him and asked him what he thought and he said, well, you use a gun sight on your weapon, don't you? And you use glasses if you can't see. No, I need reading glasses. You need glasses if you can't see, right? He's like, fucking take the Worbutrin, man. Chill. Like, just get it, get some space. Back to the space time bridging concept. Just get back away from the danger for a few months. That really.

Helped. And that's very different than the backing away from the danger with say, alcohol or drugs. And look, my stance on cannabis is some people can use it safely, Most people probably cannot, but some can. But there's something different about the drugs that have an addiction potential or the drugs that disrupt sleep. Like ultimately, if you look at people who commit suicide, and I've spent a lot of time with this literature, in almost every case in the preceding weeks, there's a disruption in sleep schedules, meaning disrupted from what they were doing prior to that when they were not feeling suicidal. So then you think about alcohol, disruption of sleep, even if you think you're sleeping and there's a story, like a common theme starts to emerge. So you stabilize sleep. You were getting some dopamine and noradrenergic assistance from the low dose Wellbutrin, and you're basically also just offloading. You're just letting it all out with a.

Therapist. With a therapist. And the thing that strikes me as to your point about my resistance to therapy versus jumping out of airplanes or whatever, the most important people in my whole life since day one have been people that have helped me. Coaches, parents, friends, boom, Doug, work colleagues, the guys that I work for now, like other. You have all these people helping you and then you hit this thing that's so unusual. I'm like, I don't want anybody to help me and I don't want to tell anybody about it. It's like, what is that, Andrew? That was the. It's like, what is that? And it's not like I wasn't in these environments where I've been coached and mentored. I've had coaches and mentors on my ass my whole fucking life. Like instructors, you know, it's a non stop. And I, I Don't know, I like, I couldn't. I just couldn't do it until I did it and then. And you know, it's been a process since and I'm super grateful for it. And I don't know where we are in the journey, but in terms of like the hero's journey. But I hope I'm at freedom to live some version of it because with my re. This is dangerous because I only say this like with my really, really, really close friends. I know this is going to more people in my. I feel like a completely different person. And none of that stuff really ever goes away. It's all a process, right. And I'm never going to stop the process. But I don't even recognize myself in some ways anymore. And that's been a good thing because in those times when I was just on the 24 hour horizon, sometimes I just did not know what the fuck was going on other than exactly what I was doing, you know. And it's just an odd experience to be in a different place. And it's scary to know that without that experience and without people really kind of forcing me to get help and things forcing me, I might be doing the same stuff, which is a hard way to live, you know, or.

Worse. Or worse you might not be.

Here. Or worse, which has happened to many of our buddies, you know, And I want to go like retroactively hug them and collect them up in like a net and say, guys, just stop for a second, you know, like we. It doesn't, it doesn't have to go.

There. Yeah, I feel that, the yearning in that statement. I suffer from a terrible, very destructive, debilitating desire to travel back in time and fix things. It's like, I know I don't have my graduate advisor who unfortunately all three of my graduate advisors are dead, but she used to say, my time machine's broken. Anytime I'd raise something that coulda, woulda, shoulda, my time machine's broken. And we know that. But I felt that statement in every cell of my body. It's clear you would. But you're also in sharing this experience and this information. You're doing that now in what we call in biology, in the interrogate fashion. Somebody many people are going to hear this and cue to the recognition of what's happening to them. Hopefully before they get to that.

Line. Yeah, you have to. And you just gotta tell somebody, you know, it's like, it's crazy how simple that is, Andrew. I mean, months, I can't tell anybody. I can't tell.

Anybody. And maybe we drill into this a little bit deeper because I think that this really speaks to the global experience of. Of being human, where unlike a physical wound, where if you see bone exposed, you're like, this is pretty serious. We all have different thresholds for what we can tolerate in terms of pain and seeing ourselves wounded. We all don't have to decide what's the difference between hurting and injured. But when it comes to psychological stuff, we don't know. We also are dealing with a world now where some people feel psychologically injured by everything. So that's the extreme there. But what we're doing, I think what comes through and I think people need to perhaps highlight in their minds is when something's kind of nagging or scratching at you beneath the surf. That voice, what do you think that voice.

Is? I call it the low grade pain. Okay, for me, there was a low grade, just slight hot burning Starting in 07, probably before that. But it was. For me, it was a weird mix, Andrew, of like an uncertainty, a seeking, a. This just doesn't feel right. Like it has to be fixed. There has to be an intellectual and achievement way to sort of get around. This is where the Buddhist writing and thinking really helped me a lot. There has to be a way around this low grade unsatisfactoriness. Somehow. My sense for me, and I'm obviously not, you know, the Dr. Conti in the room just because of all the things I've learned and how it just had to be this constant. I'll use the word trauma, but for me was it was like something had to happen to our system. Obviously it does. Something happens to our system that is a little bit of a. There's a shock there. Boom. And then a buddy gets killed. And then you. It's not even always with that. Then you have extreme firefight or, you know, close call, and then it's just boom, boom, shock, shock, shock, shock. It's almost like getting TBI for the nervous system. It's just a constant high. To me, it always felt like that constant high end. Now if you keep going, perhaps if you never recognize any of it and you just keep jacking the dopamine and the adrenaline your whole life, maybe you can just never recognize it. But for me, when I shut the engine off and I decided it's not really how I wanted to live, and I was trying to work out of that low grade whatever I was residue that I was left with. It was like every time I came from home, from deployment, I would get Sick that night. Like I would have a fever that night. Headache and fever. And I tend to get sick at the end of the year. Last two years it was Christmas, this year it was Thanksgiving. And you know, Bridget and I always joke about it. It's because I slightly turned the engine down a little. And then the immune.

System. Yeah, that's the way it works. Everyone thinks stress depletes the immune system, and indeed it can. But if you think about it in evolutionary, adaptive ways, Go, go, Go, go, go allows you to stave off the infection or at least to not have the symptoms of combating infection. And then when you relax a little bit, go on vacation, boom, you get sick. Which is not to say constantly stress, but you need to.

Modulate.

Right? You gotta modulate. But when you're on deployments, you don't have the.

Option. No, you.

Don'T. You're in gunfights every.

Day. Yeah. So as soon as you turn it off, you get sick. Right. But in for me, in this particular instance, what do I think it is? I think it was all of those experiences at once. Turning the generator all the way off or the electric panel fully off, and then it just all came out.

Well. For people or anyone listening who is facing that feeling, that underlying feeling, or who is challenged with a breakup, loss of a loved one, fear about the future languishing because they don't know what the future holds, or the feeling that so much has happened, or some combination of those five things. Where do you think the healing process.

Starts? I hope again, back to the hero's journey. I hope for every single person that it's not a rock bottom moment. But it seems like if you follow a lot of enough people and you hear enough stories. You've talked with Dax, right? Dax Shepard, he talks about it non stop, like, unfortunately, I think aversion of bottom is where the process starts. All the people I know, the stories they tell me know what the.

Future holds or the feeling that, quote, unquote, so much has happened, or some combination of those five things. Where do you think the healing process.

Starts? I hope again, back to the hero's journey. I hope for every single person that it's not a rock bottom. The process started when they hit some version of bottom. What's the quote that I love is you don't change until the pain of staying the same is worse than the pain of change.

Yeah. Amen to that. I have experienced that more times than I would like to admit. And that brings me actually to this more macroscopic question. My understanding of the hero's journey from.

It. But it seems like if you follow a lot of enough people and you hear enough.

From. Obviously I haven't read or listened to the book is that we don't complete this cycle and then rest at the.

Stories. You talk with Dax.

Right? Dax.

Yeah. He talks about it nonstop. Like, unfortunately, I think aversion of bottom is where the process starts. All the people I know, the.

Stories they tell me ordinary world where we are living in bliss and peace forever. We actually have to go around that wheel over and over and over again. Hopefully not going to bottoms that put us our lives in danger. But it is not a.

Process. The process started when they hit some version of bottom. What's the quote that I love is you don't change until the pain of staying the same is worse than.

The pain of change in which we ever really get to cruise. So let's orient Coleman Ruiz in that. Amen to that. I have experienced that more times than I would like to admit. And that brings me actually to this more macroscopic question. My understanding of the hero's journey cycle. You seem to have returned to the ordinary world. For those listening and not watching. Whenever you describe the feeling of getting through, but also the that people assisted you, you smile as friendly a guy as you are. I think in the first three years I knew you, I didn't see you smile.

Once. That's probably.

True. I didn't see you smile once. I just thought like, man, these like tier one team guys, they're. They're serum. Obviously I haven't read or listened to the book. Is that we don't complete this cycle and then rest at the ordinary world where we are living in bliss and peace forever. We actually have to go around that wheel over and over and over again. Hopefully not going to bottoms that put us our lives in.

Dangerous. They're locked.

In. They're locked in. But you smile a lot now. So I think you're back in the ordinary world. What are the things you're watchful for? You're not drinking. You pay attention to your sleep. You always trained. You always did. You call it pt, but it is not a process in which we ever really get to cruise. So let's orient Coleman Ruiz in that cycle. You seem to have returned to the ordinary world. For those listening and not watching. Whenever you describe the but physical.

Training. Yeah.

Yeah. Cycle, run, swim.

Yeah. Lots of.

Kettlebells.

Yeah. Every morning I train probably five out of seven days. And the two days that I don't train, I'm In. I have a sauna at my house. I'm in sauna at least for an.

Hour. So funny how team guys talk about getting into cold or getting in the sauna. Like it's just a regular thing. Like, they don't. They never post it to social media. For them, it's just. It's part of the feeling of getting through, but also that people assisted you. You smile as friendly a guy as you are. I think in the first three years I knew you, I didn't see you smile.

Once. That's probably.

True. I didn't see you smile once. I just thought, like, man, these, like, tier one team guys, they're seared of the routine. But I say that because I think a lot of people think it's like this esoteric biohacking thing. Wrestlers and people in the military are accustomed to, like, sauna, cold. Sauna cold. Just like cardio, lifting weights. It's not this esoteric.

Thing. No, no. I mean, I think on average there's a sauna in Finland. They're locked.

In. They're locked in. But you smile a lot.

Now. Yeah. And for like every single person in the country. So we didn't invent some amazing.

Recovery. I think you're back in the ordinary.

World. Every process by doing.

Sauna. Right. What do you think. What do you think it is about physical movement that helps the mind? Obviously it's not. It's. I consider it necessary. What are the things you're watchful for? Like. Like you're not drinking, you pay attention to your sleep. You always trained. You always did. You call it pt, but not sufficient. Like, you need to do the talk therapy, the working through the writing, the reading, the introspection, the talking to other people. Maybe pharmacology, but it's. It does seem to be so important for resetting us. What do you think it is about physical.

Movement? I mean, since it might go back to John Ratey's little.

Anecdote. Physical.

Training. Yeah.

Yeah. I train, cycle, run, swim.

Yeah. Lots of.

Kettlebells.

Yeah. Every morning I train probably five out of some spark, you know, the sea squirt, I guess, swims around. Then as soon as it does whatever it needs to do, it just dies when it stops. Seven days. And the two days that I don't train, I'm in. I have a sauna at my house. I'm in sauna. At least for an.

Hour. It's so funny how team guys talk about getting into cold or getting in the sauna. Like it's just a regular Thing like there's movie. Yeah. When the. So the C square is this aquatic animal aplysia as it were that that when it lands on a, on a rock, it stops moving. It actually digests its own nervous system. That movement is the great Nobel prize winning scientist Sherrington that said that movement is the final common pathway that they don't have. They never post it to social media. For them it's just. It's part. Movement is the way that the nervous system tells the brim of the routine. But I say that because I think a lot of people think it's like this esoteric biohacking thing, wrestlers and people in the brain and rest of nervous system that it's still needed here on earth. Let's say you're accustomed to like sauna cold. Sauna cold. Just like cardio lifting weights. It's not this which I like. It reminds us of our own.

Utility.

Yeah. In a neural.

Way. I mean whatever that is. Andrew.

Right. That's a terrible.

Thing. No, no, I mean I think on average there's a sauna in Finland for like every single person in the country. So we didn't invent some amazing recover the chemistry and the neurobiology of it all. This goes back again going back to seventh grade. I was at the end of the rope on the detentions and the suspension. And I have this very clear memory that before my dad got home, like I ran laps. I don't know how many, but a lot around the block. And by the time reprocessed by doing.

Sauna. Right. What do you think, what do you think it is about physical movement that helps the mind? Obviously it's not, it's. I consider it.

Necessary. He got home, I was like, whatever my punishment is, I'm good. Like I'm not worried about it. That physical activity for me all the time. I don't want to overdo the runner's high thing, but whatever that is, that's what I think it is. Like when I'm in motion or my heart rate's up for the most part everything's fine and I'm clear headed and I cannot be again dropping but not.

Sufficient. Like you need to do the talk therapy, the working through the writing, the reading, the introspection, the talking to other people. Maybe pharmacology, but it's. It does seem to be so important for resetting us. What do you think it is about physical.

Movement? I mean since it might go back to John Ratey's little anecdote drinking. I can't be Lethargic and sit around like I have to, you know, take care of myself in that regard. I watch my sleep super close. If it gets past 10:30, I'm in like a full blown panic. I need to get to a pillow. The basics, like, I don't do anything crazy really. You eat what you want and spark, you know, the sea squirt, I guess, swims around and as soon as it does whatever it needs to do, it just dies when it stops.

Moving. Oh yeah. When the. So the sea square is this aquatic animal aplysia, as it were, that when it lands on a, on a rock and stops moving, it actually digests its own nervous system, that.

Movement. No, no, I would say on the neurotic scale of things, that's probably my most extreme is probably a little bit of cutting weight. Kind of like eating disorder issues, if I was guessing. Not that.

Extreme. You eat meat.

Vegetables. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm. I'm a really light eater. I like a bird and probably eight times a day, maybe.

More. Eight times a.

Day? Oh, easily, I'll have you know.

Thanks. Is the great Nobel prize winning scientist Sherrington that said that movement is the final common pathway that to.

You. I'll wait an hour and a half. Half to have coffee, which is.

Miserable. You're.

Welcome. But oh, it's.

Amazing. Movement is the way that the nervous system tells the brain and rest of nervous system that it's still needed here on.

Earth. Thank you. It's helped me so.

Much. Well, you know, I take some. Some which I like. It's. It's like a. It's like a. It reminds us of our own.

Utility.

Yeah. Some shit for it. Because some people say, do I have to? Well, if I train first thing, then I'll have my coffee first thing. It was really to stave off the afternoon crash. But a lot of people find that experiencing that natural wake up and look, it's 90 minutes. It's not like cutting out for two days or two weeks or. Michael Pollan, I think quit coffee. And I was like, why in the world would you do that? Yeah, why in the world? In a neural.

Way. I mean, whatever that is, Andrew. Right. The chemistry and the neurobiology of it all. This goes back again going back to seventh grade. I was at the end of the rope on the detentions and the suspension. And I have this very clear memory that before my.

Dad. I love coffee, love yerba, mate. Always have from. From. From first sip. Which by the way, I had my first gourd of.

Mate. I got home, like I ran laps. I don't know how many, but a lot around the.

Block. And by the time they caffeine mate when I was four, there's a picture of me and my grandfather's lap. That's Argentine side. Yeah. So but the, the point here is that these practices, these things, I think they involve a little bit of discipline but they really can't have an outsized effect. I.

Think. Oh my goodness. Yeah, it's incredible. I mean the eating thing and then maybe one more mental thing in this regard. He got home, I was like whatever my punishment is, I'm good. I'm not worried about it. That physical activity for me all the time. I don't want to overdo the runner's high thing. But whatever that is, that's what I think it is. Like when I'm in motion or my heart rate's up for them I'll probably have maybe an avocado in the morning and then two hours later, maybe one hour later, I'll have sliced cheese and an apple and.

Then. You're a light.

Grazer. Most part everything's fine and I'm clear headed and really light. I probably have the smallest plate at dinner in my house. I cannot be again.

Dropped. We've always been in great shape. Like visually you always. You're tall, you're lean, you're.

Strong.

Yeah. Yeah. I think we're realizing now that you can still train on. You have to be like gorging oneself with.

Calories. Yeah. Especially now. Right. Like we're Both your approaching 50. It's actually surprising drinking. I can't be lethargic and sit around like I have to, you know, take care of myself in that regard. I watch my sleep super close. If it gets past 10:30, I'm in. Michael. How much I've discovered we can do on how few calories and I'm not trying to like test it some crazy way full blown panic. I need to get to a pillow. The basics like I don't. But then just eat throughout the day and you know, macro life experience. Andrew. I just cut a bunch of extra bullshit out of my life. Big end little things. Like I don't. I try to just do, do anything crazy.

Really. You eat what you.

Want. My job and you know, do a good job at it and hang out with my people. No, no. I would say on the neurotic scale of things that's probably my most extreme. There's probably a little bit of cutting weight, kind of like eating disorder issues. If I was Guessing not that extra friends and. And family and.

Dreams. You eat meat, vegetables. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. But I'm. I'm a really light eater. All the extra shenanigans like I'll maybe do, you know, I was always doing some big race or some big mountaineering adventure or I was just piling stuff into my schedule. I might do one race in like in the spring. Everything else is casual. Work really hard at it. I like cycling. I eat like a bird and probably eight times a day, maybe.

More. Eight times a.

Day? Oh, easily. I'll have you know, thanks to you, I'll wait an hour and a half to have coffee, which is.

Miserable. You're.

Welcome. But. Oh, it's amazing. Thank you. It's helped me so.

Much. Well, you know, I take some so A.

Lot. It's one of my favorites and go hard. But I'm not trying to race cat too, or, you know, win some event or. That release of extra bullshit in my life has been as big as anything.

Else. And your boys presumably take some time and attention in your third. Yeah, the son's a runner for university level runner. Some shit for it because some people say, do I have to? Well, if I train first thing, then I'll have my coffee first thing. It was really to stave off the afternoon crash. But a lot of people find that experiencing that natural wake up and look, it's 90 minutes. It's not like cutting out for two days or two weeks or Michael Poll and I think quit coffee. And I was like, why in the world would you do that? Yeah, why in the world? A lot of our conversation gets to some kind of core features of being human and the psychology of challenge and thinking. One is where others are invincible. Discovering that none of us are invincible, but that we are renewable. You clearly illustrate that. I love coffee, love yerba mate, always have from first sip, which, by the way, I had my first gourd of mate, caffeine mate, when I was four. There's a picture of me and my grandfather's.

Up. That's.

Hilarious. Argentine side. Yeah. So. But. But the point here is that these practices, these things, I think they involve a little. There's clearly a message that everyone is gleaning from this many messages. But what, if any, revision or adaptation do you think we need of the concept of. Of being a man, growing oneself into a man? You know, I'm not a bit of discipline, but they really can have an outsized effect, I.

Think. Oh, my.

Goodness. Gender studies, sociologist, psychologist, neuroscientist. But setting all the sociology and the nomenclature aside, like if you had a short list of things, like, seems like you believe that it's important to be able to do hard.

Things. Yeah, the. It's incredible. I mean, the eating thing and then maybe, you know, one more mental thing in this regard. I'll probably have maybe an avocado in the morning and then two hours later, maybe one hour later, I'll have sliced cheese and an apple and.

Then. So you're a light grazer. But sometimes those hard things are not the hard things that you are. We think they are like sitting down and telling one story being more terrifying than going into gunfights.

Overseas. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's funny that the prelude a little bit is I'm not a gender studies scientist either, a sociologist. I stay away from most of these conversations, you know, really light. I probably have the smallest plate at dinner in my.

House. We've always been in great shape. Like visually, you always. You're tall, you're lean, you're.

Strong. Yeah.

Yeah. I think we're realizing now that you can still train on. You have to be like gorging oneself with.

Calories. Yeah. Especially now. Right. Like we're both approaching 50. It's actually.

Surprising. But they're barbed.

Wire. Yeah. They just. People seem to be so over activated over stuff. It's very odd. But for me in my life experience, Andrew, it's range. I like to use David Epstein's book title. Right. It's range. And I've noticed this so much being how much I've discovered we can do on how few calories and I'm not trying to like test it some crazy way, but then just eat throughout the day and you know, macro life experience. Andrew, I just cut a bunch of extra bullshit out of my life. Big end. Little things like I don't. I try to just do because of parenting and watching my boys grow into men. If I think about come back to range. If I think about myself at 17 or 18, not my parents, not my coaches, unless I really wanted it, you could not fucking tell me what to do. You can't tell me what to do now. Like if I want it. I love the mentoring and the teammateship and the things that my job and you know, do a good job at it and hang out with my people, friends and, and family and all the extra shenanigans like I'll maybe do. You know, I was always doing get you where you want to go. But if it's something I don't want to do, I'm not doing it you know no matter what. And so if I think about that in terms of being a dad or manhood is let's take it back to my kids. Like I think I'm one of the most some big race or some big mountaineering adventure or I was just piling stuff into my schedule. Important parts of my job is to release the grip and take the rein. I might do one race in the spring. Everything else is off and just barely keep them inside the boundaries of a lot alive. You know because they're going to make all their own decisions anyway and they have to. Right. And so I think a big part casual work really hard at it. I like cycling a lot. It's one of my favorites. And go hard. But I'm not trying to race cat too or you know that I see and I saw myself a lot for years was we over grip some win some event or that release of extra bullshit in my life has been as big as anything.

Else. And your boys presumably take some.

Time and attention and times as men like we are so afraid of losing control in an already uncontrollable world that we over grip everything. And I over gripped everything. And suddenly when I'm not over gripping stuff things are going better and they're.

Great. Yeah. Your son's a runner for university level runner. A lot of our conversation gets to some kind of core features of being human and the.

Psychology. When it comes to range. It's okay for me. It's okay to have your tough guy moments, your fighter mentality moments. I would never want to lose that because no matter how much help I get when I'm out with my family or my wife or my boys, my head is on a fucking swivel and if somebody touches them it's curtains. And we need to keep that because that is.

Challenge. And thinking one is or others are invincible. Discovering that none of us are invincible but that we are renewable. You clearly illustrate that just a.

Part of life like you have to be. You cannot move through life with blinders on. Like there are people who are not good people. And it's okay to have.

Range. There's. There's clearly a message that everyone is gleaning from this many messages.

But what if any have that in your toolkit? What I don't think is okay to do is to let that slice.

Of the traditional vision or adaptation do you think we need of the concept of being a man whatever you want.

To call it aggressive manhood be your whole life that's just not functional. It's not good for relationships. It's not good for parenthood. So every other little tool you can put in that toolbox to take.

Growing oneself into a man, you know.

I'm not all the way over here to what we might consider. Oh, Coleman's gonna. He's soft now. No, no. Don't mistake my kindness for weakness. There's a category for everything. And I think that makes you.

Gender studies, sociologist, psychologist, neuroscientist. But setting all the sociology and.

The nomenclature aside, such a much more complete person. It's made me a more complete person. It's difficult. I feel like I'm brand.

New. If you had a short list of things.

Like. Seems like being able to do other things in my toolbox like you and I like this part's easy. I can go jump to that in a nanosecond. This part over here of normalizing, you know.

Life. You believe that it's important to be able to do hard things. But sometimes those hard things are not the hard things that you are. We think they are like sitting down and telling one.

Story. Being more life across. Across A. Whatever 80, 90 is. It's really hard to sort of.

Ex. Terrifying then than going into gunfights.

Overseas. Evade the normal. But that's what I think we need to do. You know, I mean, it's okay to be kind and calm and. Yeah, yeah. I mean, funny that the prelude a little bit is gentle and you know, that's. There's nothing wrong with.

That. And I'm guessing the word surrender probably held a far different meaning for you in the past, but a lot of what you're describing is surrendering to the realities of life, that we can't control everything and. And.

Just. I'm not a gender studies scientist either, a sociologist. I stay away from most of these conversations, you know, but they're barbed wire. Yeah, they.

Just. People seem to be so how painful it is to. To undergo that surrender. And here I'm talking to myself too. It's been. It's a process.

Over. Activated over stuff. It's very odd. Um, but for me in.

My. I'm still deeply involved in, you know, somebody who's tried to, you know, go rung over wrong as best I.

Can. Doesn't Andrew speak to our, like, evolutions? Like that is so difficult, at least for me and guys like me. I'm putting you in my group here. That is so hard to do. Like, that just tells me more about the life experience. Andrew. It's range like to use David Epstein's book Title right? It's evolution of our male system. Like that part's so easy and this part range. And I've noticed this so much because of parenting and watching my boys grow into men. If I think about I'm gonna come back to range. If I think about myself at 17 or 18 is not so easy. But man, it's a. It's a battle to remind myself, you know, slow down, listen. Just the basic shit. You don't have to go attack every problem like a fist fight. It's.

Tough. It is tough. And I think that the more that I resist surrender, the more.

That not my parents, not my coaches, unless I really wanted it, you could.

Not. Well, I believe in God, so I'll just say God, but God, the universe or whatever it is for people. But for me, the more that God places me in circumstances that make the. The. The act of surrendering.

Harder. Tell me what to do. You can't tell me what to do now. Like if I want it. I love the mentoring and the teammateship and the things that get you where you want to go. But if it's something I don't want to do, I'm not doing.

It. Like if I would just do it on my own, it wouldn't have to be so hard. I wouldn't have to a good friend of.

Mine, you know, no matter what. And so if I think about that in terms of being a dad.

Or been mentioned by name. Tim Armstrong, he just said like you gotta hit every branch on the way down. You know, he was telling me I had to. You know, he's like, you're a stubborn punk rocker. You have to. And he was talking about himself too. Like there's certain. There's certain phenotypes where we have.

To. But manhood is take it back to my kids. Like I think I'm one of the.

Most. But like the universe just screams out you don't have to. You can actually just like lower yourself down on a rope to the ground and walk away. But then there's that stubbornness. But I think that the stubbornness.

Important parts of my job is to release the grip and take the reins off and just barely keep them.

Inside. The boundaries of this has its evolutionary adaptations too. And the hero's journey Nothing in the hero's journey says that they transitions between these different states are linear a.

Lot alive, you know, because they're going to make all their own decisions anyway.

And they have to know are of equal duration, are of.

Right. And so I think a big.

Part certainty only that they exist. And that there's no way, as you point out before, to skip.

Steps. You can't skip. Yeah, I couldn't skip if somebody skips. Nobody, I mean, I mean it's like you hit.

Every. No, but nobody skips. And, and whether or not somebody tries to skip through psychedelics or through being the toughest or through the acquisition of money or just focusing on.

That. I see and I saw myself a lot for years was we over grip sometimes as men like we are so afraid of losing control in an already uncontrollable world that we over grip.

Everything and I over family, you know, family obviously super important, but that's not going to accomplish the other aspects of, of the, of the journey. It's a huge part of it, but it's not, it's not the only part. Again, necessary, not.

Sufficient. Yeah, it's like again it's the 12 steps or some I'm not that experienced in and I just read about it a decent amount. It's like hitting every brain or gripped everything. And suddenly when I'm not over gripping stuff, things are going better. And when it comes to range, it's okay for me. It's okay to have your tough guy moments, your fighter mentality moments. I would never want to lose that. Because no matter how much you got to follow the steps, man, or you can live with that low grade pain non stop, you know, it's. That's not a good way to.

Live. No, because it, because even if you're not conscious of it, it erodes you in ways that are very.

Destructive. I wasn't conscious of it at all, you know, until the universe, as we say, came in with a fucking wrecking ball and said fine. How much help I get when I'm out with my family or my wife or my boys. My head is on a fucking swivel and if somebody touches, you're not gonna listen. Sent you all these messages, you're not gonna listen.

Okay. I think it's important that we at least briefly touch on where things are at right.

Now. Zem. It's curtains. And we need to keep that.

Because that is because it would be remiss for us to give the impression.

That like just a part of life, like you have to be. You cannot move through life with blinders on. Like there are people who.

Are. You're sitting there meditating, you're drinking your coffee 90 minutes late, late after.

You wake up, not good people. And it's okay to have.

Range. And you're sitting there in bliss and thinking about all the great things that happened, how you made it through. Like, there's still a lot happening right now. So to the extent that you can share, you're working all the time. You're. What are you doing nowadays as a.

Vocation? I was in private equity for a while before I met you. Running a company for companies for. Really good friend of mine named Tom Ripley. Amazing guy. And have that in your toolkit. What I don't think is okay to do is to let that slice of the traditional, whatever you want to call it, aggressive manhood, be your whole life. Like, that's just not functional. You know, it's not good for relationships, it's not good for parenthood. So every other little tool you can put in that toolbox to take. And then I stepped away because I was exhausted and I didn't know how to say it. I didn't know how to tell anybody. Like I needed to escape again, take magic flight somehow, you know, And. And he and I are incredibly close. Like he was one of the guys who is in that super tight inner circle. And then I came back to it with, you know, with this team shoot all the way over here to what we might consider. Oh, Coleman's. He's soft now. No, no. Don't mistake my kindness for weakness. There's a category for everything. And I think that makes you such a much more complete person. It's made me a more complete person. It's difficult. I feel like I'm brand new at. I'm on and I serve as the chief operating officer at LID Sports Group, the largest brick and mortar licensed sports retailer in North America. We have 2,000 stores during the holiday. We have 8,200 employees and amazing Team. The private equity firm that I work for is an amazing team and the company is an amazing company and just incredible to do other things in my toolbox like you and I like this part's easy. I can go jump to that in a nanosecond. This part over here of normalizing, you know, credible group of folks. And so, yeah, I work a lot. I was out here doing store visits in San Francisco and la and that's. It's all good. And I think I do those little things all day long, all the time. But no, I am not sitting on a mountaintop. Like most days. There's no meditation at all, Andrew. It's meditation as a workout. Costs across a. Whatever 80, 90 is. It's really hard to sort of. Tom and I throw kettlebells around multiple times a week and I do Those other little things, but evade the normal shit. But that's what I think we need to do, you know, I mean, it's okay to be kind and calm. And the difference for me is I'm okay with it. And I say that because I was incredibly busy, you know, before when I first got out of the Navy. And I wasn't okay with it because I thought gentle and, you know, that's. There's nothing wrong with.

That. And I'm guessing the word surrender probably held a far different meaning for.

You. Thought again, this is back to the hero's journey. I thought like the return to ordinary life was gonna be sunshine and rainbows. Like, look, I have the ultimate boon. I had this big experience. Not that I wanted to be like front and center in the media, but here I am. World. It's calm out here, right? Like, we get to chill and have a good time and slip.

Past. Like, a lot of what you're describing is surrendering to the realities of life, that we can't control everything. And, and just how painful it is to. To undergo that surrender. And here I'm talking to myself too. It's been, It's a process, sleep.

And nothing is stressful in the real world.

Right? I'm still deeply involved in, you know, somebody who's tried to, you know, go rung over wrong as best I.

Can. Doesn't Andrew speak to our, like, evolutions? Like, that is so difficult, at least for me and guys like me. I'm putting you in my group here. Wrong. I just wasn't ready for that. Like, I really genuinely thought that it was just going to be easier. And so when we talk about the low grade pain, injury and like the, you know, what is that? To me, that was one of the biggest frictions. Like, holy shit, I did all this stuff, all these deployments, lost all these buddies, and there's no fucking that is so hard to do. Like, that just tells me more about the unrest. Like the regular world, it's supposed to be easier. At least that's the story that was in my mind going through all the stuff we just talked about. Now I'm okay with it. Like, I like it. I know how to manage my life. I know how to manage my time. For the most part, I have a different relationship with my team evolution of our male system. Like, that part's so easy and this part is not so easy. But man, it's a. It's a battle to remind myself, you know, slow down, listen. Just the basics. And my mentors and my bosses and my own work life, you don't have to go attack every problem like a fist fight. It's.

Tough. It is tough. And I think that the more that I resist surrender, the more that, well, I believe in God. So I'll just say God, but God, the universe or whatever it is for people. But for me, the more that God places me in circumstances that make the act of surrendering harder. Like if I would just do it on my own, it wouldn't have to be so hard. I wouldn't have to. A good friend of mine, I've been mentioning my name, Tim Armstrong, he just said, like, you gotta hit every branch on the way down. You know, he was telling me I had to. You know, he's like, you're a stubborn punk rocker. You have to. And he was talking about himself too. Like there's certain. There's certain phenotypes where we have to.

But. And I love it. Like, I feel like I'm back to. In a very different way where I was when I was in the squadron back in 07. I feel like I'm on hope this doesn't get clipped. But for me, I'm on another level. Like, I really feel good about where I'm headed. And I haven't felt like that since I went into college. You know, I felt like shit was just deteriorating and now it's. It's not. Which is. Which is.

Nice. Well, the beauty of what you just said and everything you've shared today is that I don't know if it occurs to you or not, but you've been providing mentorship to millions of people in the form of sharing your experience of your own hero's journey. And I want to thank you for making it so clear as to what your experience was and being unafraid or perhaps afraid and doing it and telling us anyway. Exactly. Very afraid. What that felt like even better in that sense, you know, and. And stepping into that fear. But also. But they're like the universe just.

Screams.

Out, you don't have to. You can actually just like lower yourself down on a rope to the ground and walk away. But. But then there's that stubbornness. But I think that the stubbornness is. Has its evolutionary adaptations too. And. And the hero's journey. Nothing in the hero's journey says that they transitions between these different states are linear, making it so clear that while your. Your life experiences are of equal duration, are of certainty only that they exist and that there's no way, as you point out before, to skip.

Steps. You can't Skip? Yeah, I couldn't skip. If somebody.

Skips.

Nobody. I mean. Yeah. I mean, it's like you hit.

Everybody. No, but nobody skips. And, and whether or not somebody tries to skip through psychedelics or through being the toughest or through the acquisition of money or just focusing on family, you know, family obviously super important, but that's not going to accomplish the other aspects of the journey. It's a huge part of it, but it's not, it's not the only part. Again, necessary, not.

Sufficient. Yeah, it's like again, it's the 12 steps or some. I'm not that experienced in it. I just read about it a decent amount. It's like hitting every branch. You got to follow the steps, man, or you can live with that low grade pain nonstop. That's not a good way to.

Live. No. Because even if you're not conscious of it, it erodes you in ways that are very.

Destructive. I wasn't conscious of it at.

All. Extraordinary Seal teams, tier one teams, all of it. That everyone's life has these components of extraordinary and the opportunity for extraordinary and the return and renewal through the ordinary world. So much of what you shared has meaning regardless. People are male, female, young, old.

You know, until the universe, as we say, came in with a fucking wrecking ball and said, fine, you're not going to listen. Sent you all these messages. You're not going to.

Listen. Okay, so thank you for being a mentor today and for having the bravery, for stepping out into the quote, unquote, ordinary world, which is oh, so unordinary. Unordinary. I think it's important that we at least briefly touch on where things are at right now because it would be remiss for us to give the impression that like, and if you're willing, I think it'd be great to have you back in maybe a couple years. You're sitting there meditating, you're drinking your coffee 90 minutes late after you wake up and see where you're at. Meanwhile, you and I will be in touch often as we frequently.

Are. So thanks, Andrew. Appreciate.

It. Coleman Ruiz, thanks for everything you've.

Done. Thank.

You. You're sitting there in bliss and thinking about all the great things that happened, how you made it through. There's still a lot happening right now. So to the extent that you can share, you're working all the time. Thanks for everything you're doing and thanks for coming out today and sharing with us what real life's.

About. It's always great to see you. Appreciate the time it was a joy.

Thanks. What are you doing nowadays as a.

Vocation? I was in private equity for a while before I met you running a company for.

Likewise. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Coleman Ruiz. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way.

To companies for really good friend of mine named Tom Ripley. Amazing.

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Apple. And then I stepped away because I was exhausted and I didn't know how to say it. I didn't know how to tell anybody like I needed.

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YouTube. I do read and he and I are incredibly close. Like he was one of the guys who is in that super tight inner.

Circle. All the comments, not so much during today's episode, but on many previous episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast.

We and then I came back to it with, you know, with this team Discuss.

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Momentous. I'm on and I serve as the Chief operating officer@lidsports.com Huberman if you're.

Not already following me on social media.

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Newsletter. Incredible group of folks. And so yeah, I work a lot I was out here doing store visits in San Francisco and la and that's it's all good. And I.

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Dopamine. I do those little things all day long, all the time. But no, I am not sitting on a.

Mountaintop. Improving your sleep neuroplasticity and learning. We have a foundational fitness protocol that details.

Cardiovascular. Like most days there's no meditation at all.

Andrew. It's meditation as a workout, vascular and resistance training workouts. And all of that is available to you completely zero cost. You Simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab, scroll down to newsletter and provide your email. We do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for Tom.

And I throw kettlebells around multiple times a week and I do those other little things. But the difference for me is I'm okay with it. And I say that.

Because. Joining me for today's discussion with Coleman Ruiz. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in.

Science. I was incredibly busy, you know, before when I first got out of the Navy and I wasn't okay with it because I thought. Again, this is back to the hero's journey. I thought like the return to ordinary life was gonna be sunshine and rainbows. Like, look, I have the ultimate boon. I had this big experience. Not that I wanted to be like front and center in the media, but here I am world. It's calm out here, right? Like we get to chill and have a good time and sleep and nothing is stressful in the real world, right? Wrong. I just wasn't ready for that. Like, I really genuinely thought that it was just going to be easier. And so when we talk about the low grade pain, injury and like the, you know, what is that? To me, that was one of the biggest frictions. Like, holy, I did all this stuff, all these deployments, lost all these buddies and there's no fucking rest like the regular world. It's supposed to be easier. At least that's the story that was in my mind going through all the stuff we just talked about. Now I'm okay with it. Like, I like it. I know how to manage my life. I know how to manage my time for the most part. I have a different relationship with my teammates and my mentors and my bosses and my own work life. And I love it. Like I feel like I'm back to, in a very different way, where I was when I was in the squadron back in 07. I feel like I'm on hope this doesn't get clipped, but for me, I'm on another level. Like, I really feel good about where I'm headed and I haven't felt like that since I went into college. You know, I felt like shit was just deteriorating and now it's not, which is.

Nice. Well, the beauty of what you just said and everything you've shared today is that I don't know if it occurs to you or not, but you've been providing mentorship to millions of people in the form of sharing your experience of your own hero's journey. And I want to thank you for making it so clear as to what your experience was and being unafraid or perhaps afraid and doing it and telling us anyway exactly what that felt like. Even better in that sense, you know, and stepping into that fear, but also making it so clear that while your. Your life experiences, you know, extraordinary seal teams, tier one teams and all of it, that everyone's life has these components of extraordinary and the opportunity for extraordinary and the return and renewal through the ordinary world. So much of what you shared has meaning regardless. People are male, female, young, old. So thank you for being a mentor today and for having the bravery, for stepping out into the quote, unquote, ordinary world, which is oh, so unordinary. Unordinary. And if you're willing, I think it'd be great to have you back in maybe a couple years and see where you're at. Meanwhile, you and I will be in touch often as we frequently are.