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Chapter 1: Why is leaving the military the hardest thing for veterans?
You've done a lot of hard things in your life. Couple. Why was getting out of the military the hardest thing that you've had to do?
No one ever prepared you for it. When you get in the teams, any military, especially special operations, it becomes your identity. It becomes the only thing you do and it becomes a justification for everything you don't do. Why don't you do this? Because it'll affect the end state. When you transition away from it, you never thought it was going to be hard.
You thought you were going to transition. You were going to find that same love and passion, the energy you had for being in the military. And then when you don't find it, it's a huge fall from grace.
But I mean, you hear these fairy tales of this billionaire is going to pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars to live on his ranch and to do nothing but tell war stories and shoot coyotes and whatever. Any place you want to go, they'll pick you up because of your background, because of your resume and all these different things. And when you get out, you quickly realize that's all a lie.
Yeah.
No one's going to pay you to do a compound assault. No one's going to pay you to skydive. No one's going to pay you to assault a cruise ship or whatever else you did. They don't exist. So I've spent my entire adult life developing a skillset nobody wants. What am I supposed to do now? I don't know how to do anything. You want me to go to Home Depot? Like, what am I supposed to do?
I've avoided getting my picture taken for 20 years. I've avoided conversations with normal people.
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Chapter 2: What challenges do veterans face when transitioning to civilian life?
I don't have a Rolodex because I've never opened myself up to anybody who wasn't inside of that 12-man team.
Right.
I don't have anybody. I don't know the CEO of Apple or Google. I don't know any of these people. There's nothing for me to do except contract.
That's it. Which just keeps you in the same system.
It's the exact same thing. You're with the same people, the same deployment schedules, same routine, and you just chip away until you're too old to do it anymore, and then you just fizzle out.
That must feel to a lot of special operators like they basically can't ever leave.
Exactly. Even the guys who do leave, the majority of them, they're either miserable or they transition to a job that's so similar to the military. It's like they're still in.
What like?
Contracting, agency work, Blackwater, triple canopy, stuff like that. You're basically doing a very similar job. Just you get paid a little bit more or the guys just come right back in. We've had guys get out and go to Goldman Sachs and try to reinvent themselves. They make it six months, three years. Nope. Right back in. No way. Oh yeah. They miss it that much.
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Chapter 3: How do special operators cope with the loss of military identity?
That's where you see... level two unlock when everybody truly believes that you have covered all your bases. I couldn't burn another rep. I couldn't spend another hour. We're as good as you could humanly be. We're good. We're unstoppable.
How many times have you been on deployment and seen somebody that shouldn't have been there based on expertise or disposition? You know, Andy came through and explained an awful lot about what his selection was like. And then he went back and was the guy with the bullhorn as opposed to facing it. Um, and you think, well, this is supposed to weed out people that aren't supposed to be there.
It's incredibly rigorous, but it can't be perfect. It simply can't be perfect because it's unable to replicate what you're actually there to do. So yeah. Have there been any times when you've got out there and thought that guy's not, you shouldn't be here with us.
There's definite times when you get people inside the team, you wish were not there. You just do. Like you get there and you're like, man. But it goes back to, you know, I had a mentor. He used to talk about being clonable. Would we be better off if I had five of you? If the answer is not yes, then you shouldn't be here at all. I don't even want one of you.
So why they might not be the best guy for the job, if you can compare them to all the other guys you've worked with, they're so much better that it doesn't really matter. The group and, you know, the strength of the overall collective is going to make up whatever deficiency he might have. If it's a cultural thing or a personality trait,
Those are harder to navigate, believe it or not, because everybody can perform. You're not going to find a guy that can't shoot, move, communicate, skydive, dive, do all the things. He might not be a 10 where this guy is, but he's a solid eight no matter what. His personality, I just don't like. And nobody else does either.
So I was learning about the way that bands form. I've been thinking a lot about music over the last couple of years. And many times you might have someone that's a savant guitarist or an unbelievable bassist, but they're a shithang.
on the tour bus and what you don't see i suppose um the job is not finished in the bounds of what you do professionally it's well how do you impact the morale of the team and what's the energy that you bring when you're on your way to a job and on your way back from a job
and how do the debriefs are you keeping in touch when you're not on tour whether you're a musician or a comedian or a special operator like are you whatsapping every so often are you kind of keeping that connection and what's the sort of vibe that you get or do you just low-key irritate everybody or is it just a mismatch of this one particular type of personality maybe if you were the different group your annoyances wouldn't annoy quite so much but
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Chapter 4: What challenges do veterans face when reintegrating into civilian life?
No one ever do it. Nobody.
Yeah. It seems to me, I mean, again, sat in the rosette of the stands talking about what the fuck goes on in the American military, a country that I've only just moved to, uh, The fact that things are heavily scrutinized, that war stories have got a kind of allure and romance and sort of sexiness to them, means that the dose response of information being put out is so unusually magnified.
And yeah, with the Osama bin Laden raid, you have every single second of potential information is going to be just It's game tape. It is like game tape in some World Cup final. And there's a critical mass that you can reach of information. And when you get even close to that, you basically have a kind of nuclear self-sustaining reaction where it just generates more and more and more.
And yeah, I watched Rob talk on Andy's show and I'm like, if nothing else, this is going to create an awful lot more nuclear reactions.
Really wish you wouldn't have said it. You think about all those guys that are still in, they're the ones that are going to have to deal with that. I had to deal with it. And Rob does Rob things, you know, guys got out and they wrote books.
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Chapter 5: How do military experiences shape personal relationships?
If you weren't in that command, when those books dropped, you have no idea the hell we all went through. Why? Oh, anybody who had association with them. We had guys combing the ceilings for bugs. You know, they leave listening devices. I mean, it was, it was so, because nobody knew who was feeding them information.
So once they separated out and they started writing the book, they're like, okay, well, somebody's communicating with them. They knew too much active information that is happening now. And you could tell with some of the emails going back and forth, they were following guys home.
Oh, there was, there was, I didn't realize this, uh, Some of the people who had been in and then got out and were then allowed to talk about what had happened included information that they couldn't have known had it not have been passed on from people who were still inside. Wow.
Tonight you got everybody just pointing fingers and shit like, you're talking to him, you're talking to him, you're talking to him. Can we just go back to work, man? Let's just go back to work.
Chapter 6: What is the impact of hyper-vigilance on post-military life?
I wish nobody would have ever said a thing. Just kill him, put it up on news, he's dead. Don't say how, don't say it was a compound raid, don't do any of that.
Don't say how, don't say who.
But then on the same side... We got to be honest. Everybody who's in special operations right now, today serving, the only reason you're in there is because you read a book, you watched a movie or something from somebody in Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Black Hawk Down.
That's the only reason. Isn't that strange?
It is. You're telling them not to, but the only reason we're all in this building is because somebody like him wrote a book.
How many people have wanted to become Navy SEALs? How many people have become Navy SEALs?
Not many, but a lot of people have tried. Yeah. I mean, somebody asked me the other day about David Goggins. And they're like, what do you think about David Goggins? And I'm like, when I was in the teams, he was different because he was a poster child. He was an athlete for the Navy.
I'll say between David Goggins and Jocko, those two people have probably put more people in the services over the last 10 years than anybody else in the last 50. They just have. Millions and millions of people have read their books, seen all of that. They've become cops, firemen, Navy SEALs. They've joined the Coast Guard. Yeah, they all do. Like they did it right. They did a good job.
They put them up on a pedestal. They weren't talking about war stories. They weren't doing all this stuff. But you take that and then you take the actual operational side of it and you're like, well, you're okay with they do that. Yeah. But you can't do that. Why?
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Chapter 7: What challenges do veterans face when reintegrating into civilian life?
Until it happens to you, it's just so hard to wrap your head around. I just woke up every day. I just didn't want to play the game. I want to hit the big reset button on Nintendo and start over in a different life.
And that was both in service and out of service and during transition.
The medication helped for a little bit. So it was like, it was that quiet noise in the back of your head just kind of subsided. It was always there. I'd wake up in the morning like, nope, nope. Just override, go to the gym. Override and go to the gym. Go to the range. Do this. stay active like a shark, just keep swimming. Every time I stopped, things got bad. Don't stop. Just keep going. Yeah.
But once everything happened, we came off all those meds. I still had to be on quite a few of them. I wasn't, it wasn't a full med washout. We came off the hard, like painkillers. So I could feel all the pain. I was still on Cybalta, still on Adderall, still on a bunch of these things, blood pressure medications to stop nightmares, all this stuff. It's hard to quantify with how bad it was.
Just... Everything you loved before you didn't have anymore. Didn't have the group. There's no group chat. No one ever can tell you to put it on again. There's no purpose.
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Chapter 8: How did DJ's experiences with psychedelics impact his mental health?
And now I don't have a job. What am I supposed to do now? I never planned on getting out. I never planned on not doing anything less than 30 years. I was going to do it forever because there's nothing else for me to do. I don't like anything else. I don't have another hobby. I'm not a scratch golfer. I don't want to be an entrepreneur. I don't want to do a podcast. Don't want to write a book.
I don't want to do any of that. I just want to do this. And now I can't. What do I do now? I don't know. Circling the drain over and over. But I mean, now that you're out smoking a bunch of weed, doing a bunch of stupid shit, started cheating on my wife, started doing all the things that I shouldn't have done, all the things I didn't do in the past, I started doing during that transition.
And it just, it ruined everything. Everything I tried to avoid my whole time in, I did as soon as I got out. Right. Like everything, like everything that everybody does to get them divorced, they've usually been doing their whole career. I'm the opposite. I didn't do any of it until I got out and I was like, yeah, I have no purpose. Might as well just burn it to the ground.
I wanted to be divorced. because I didn't know how to reintegrate with my family. I loved her, loved the kids, didn't want to lose what I had, but I didn't know how to integrate because I didn't have any practice. And I never looked at it like obtaining a skillset. When you talk about being a good husband, being a good father, being a good friend, it's a skillset.
You need repetition in order to be good at that. Like how are you going to... How do you raise kids? You got to be there. You got to show up. Are you going to be a good husband? You have to be there. Like the pen pal thing doesn't work in reality. You have to live together. And I didn't have any experience doing it.
So when I transitioned, like what's a job I can get right now that is going to get me out of Virginia beach and away from this, not because I don't want to be there, but because I don't know how. And in my, in that version of myself in that moment, the easiest thing to do was to separate. Let me get a job that's got me back in Arizona, skydiving as much as I can, working these contracts.
Like, let me just stay busy. Yeah, it's safe. Let me get out of here. Worst thing could happen. Started a spiral. She got to the point where she was going to shit can me. Like she was over it all inside of a year, just like everybody else. And that's when I found out about Mexico. Ibogaine 5-MeO DMT and all the things. And that was really like her last call for prayer.
If you love me, you'll go to Mexico and do psychedelics.
Did she find it or you?
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