Coleman Ruiz: Overcoming Physical & Emotional Challenges

Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Coleman Ru Coleman 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 ruy before 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 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 postmilitary 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 Heroes Journey it is The life of Coleman Ruiz Coleman ruiz's life is one that embodies focus 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 an 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

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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 uh whatever top Contour or deep details you want to get into yeah we're all yours 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 uh have older sister two younger brothers my dad was a welder my

mom was a dental assistant and we had a couple of boxers in the dogs and we had a very modest very modest upbringing I won't overd 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 and 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 very pleasant I learned later that you forget a lot of things in your childhood 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 and skateboarding and stuff you know we skateboarded the neighborhood BMX was a big thing when we were kids it was very much a rat

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 fist fight 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 um 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 um 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 can I just uh pause you for a second so on the the violence part um have a little bit of experience with this but uh violence can come from trying to protect others yeah uh instigating uh it can come from the wild just trying to you know see what it feels like experimentation and any number of other things all the way to Pure sociopathy Which we know you you are not um and weren't do you

recall feeling something inside that inspired this was it for attention did it feel good afterwards um yeah 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 Bon 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 J rener 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 rener takes maybe a 3se 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 rener Affleck excuse me or rener in that I was I I feel like I was mostly the rener put it this way if if you have Some good idea this afternoon like let's go try this I'm good I'm ready and I think it's just exciting you know I I I hate rules I hate being told what to do it's one of the things that was so frustrating about the

military I 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 uh a little bit of neurobiology or else I wouldn't be great uh Andrew huberman uh there's a really interesting phenomenon that one observes in both animals and humans which is that somewhere around adolescence MH when the hormone surge begins but even before that there's a phenomenon called dispersal um it's very different than fighting per se or sexual activity per se it's a it's a literal dispersal from one's home environment or an animals a nest in which animals

and humans and We're animals after all start forging new environments in in a very as you point out chaotic way it's not organized it's a little nuts and it um and biologists and neurobiologists in particular have observed changes in neural circuitry that 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 um some kids are more uh

prone to this than others certainly has a hormonal component boys and girls tend to do this differently but they both Do It um and psychologists and neurobiologists see this as a fundamental shift in our underlying circuitry so um 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 uh just running races one mile and 5K races when I was really small kid for you to run mhm to run with them they were into the road racing Thing back in the day when it was brand new you know the ' 80s um I'm 48 so I was born in 75 so I was seven 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 P PT competition at like the Boy Scouts thing in otan park is physical yeah physical training physical training so I won like the Whatever when I was young in 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 um but I didn't like him And always my dad wrestled in high school and college and um we were we were you know always rough and tumble in that regard and I haven't have a couple of buddies in the teams you know who obviously we're College wrestlers there's a lot of wrestlers in the teams and people would always joke about how we're so handsy and

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 cuz I boxed in high school between wrestling Seasons um 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 levies and you know fireman's carries and 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 uh an excellent book and for anyone male or female age who's interested in the human Spirit uh I recommend a Fighter's heart because it's about the different fight sports but it's really about um 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 um structured um as you were doing this uh what was happening with school um did it help uh 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 right 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 uh a good friend of ours who was also in the Ste

teams uh said one said to me he said you know wrestlers are different and I think he meant different in quotes yeah I think that's true um I 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 and 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 was four 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 NorthShore um 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 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 eth grade Andrew Willie was at my high school like I have no idea how Willie got and 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 PBS 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 heavy weights 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 this I have 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 at that point were you discovering relationships girls um were you partying were you a drinker use drugs no drugs I mean it's New Orleans right it's like one of the Things it was tough I'm glad I got out of the city frankly because it was Party Time Out 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 um but you kept it inside the lane lines sounds like no drunk driving no arrest we did 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 scor is not so much but um I started winning really fast and you know my last

two years in high school I was 89 and0 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 I my all my boys are way better athletes than I ever could think about being son yeah yeah and Um but in eth grade I made varsity and it was like was eighth grade yeah and I lost like 75% of the matches you know but you just grinded out and it's how I got into the Naval Academy which is a whole another

story but so let's talk about that so you finished finished high school mhm uh you head to the Naval Academy why the Naval Academy there's actually a crazy story behind this which maybe we Circle back to but um the Summer gosh I had forgotten that this started in 7th grade too the summer between my seventh and eighth grade year my grandfather was too young to joined the Navy and he wanted to go to the Naval Academy um during World War II and he lied to the recruiter and got into the merchant marines his I'm pretty

sure first cousin my uncle and my cousins are like first cousins once REM removed my Uncle Jim THL was at a family reunion in Mississippi which we were at and he didn't mention to 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 you sending these booklets and you don't like Authority no so I I've not been in the military

but I've done some work With yall and um there's a there's a lot of uh hierarchy and Authority yeah that's true it it the truth and was 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 uh that obviously you were a part of the family that got divorced was it chaotic was it uh controlled you and I are the exact same age we're both 48 born in 75 um back then it was a lot less common for um people being they called them broken homes back then yeah you know um Nowadays I don't think they call that everyone just cites the statistic that you know more

than half of marriages end in in divorce as if it perhaps to normalize it um but that's more than half um do you recall feeling um 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 that no it was a shock to me it wasn't shock to my older Sister um I just remember com this was the thought at the time I 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 going to have to do what they're going to 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 the best mindset but as you're heading off to college that's reasonably healthy mindset as opposed to getting am meshed in the what happened in and this and that can I ask you at at that stage you're 17 18 years

old at that point um were you journaling at that point no no no journaling no introspective work zero no school psychologist no no thinking about or talking about your feelings it's Wrestling Naval Academy social things School SATs like like very standard we're almost like talking like a superficial list of like what happens at the end of high school in 1992 Andrew it's a the 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 the 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 we'll get to uh how that played out in the long run but nonetheless um you got into the Naval Academy well didn't first okay so I applied I 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 it admittedly Andrew it was it was like there's got to be a way around this like 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 recruit for a 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 in my understanding a 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 um 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 to which you may bur bust out laughing when I tell you what the other one is because no internet I got a mailer in a pamplet 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 US Naval Academy well for those that follow wrestling I'm I get into either right uh 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 uh had plans to cut the Wrestling team despite having a NCAA champion at Stanford but you know the power of people Gathering and and petitioning works and um wrestling and a few other sports that were being cut from the curriculum um 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 there 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 Lehi and I I went to the prep school so Newport Rhode Island yeah in Newport for a year and there it's a nice place yeah it's great yeah and so you wrestle for I mean you do school you know you're you're in West Point has a prep school and Colorado Springs has a prep school and so we joke that my wife was first person in our class accepted and I was last which is highly possible actually I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our

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portal to the naval Academy yeah if you graduate prep school you're you're straight into the Naval Academy like they fully expect you to be there the next year when junior year rolled Around M um and Senior 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 uh 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 um bus tables zero guidance

Andrew really like from my high school and I think 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 the 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 uh so you're in Newport yeah and describe what a day was like is it all wrestling you're taking general education classes like one does in the in the first two years of University yep so the way 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 um you go through like a Pretty hellacious first couple of weeks cuz you're away from the flag pole

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 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 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 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 uh 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 uh understanding the the history of our country and its position in the in the international landscape

are you thinking about that stuff are they feed 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 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 that within weeks like this is way bigger than I thought it was in terms of how serious this situation is you know um 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 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 post talk 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 uh obviously I didn't have that kind of um stature or talent in science I think I'm a good scientist but um good enough to you know get tenure at Stanford but then there there are levels within the game yeah 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 uh let's just say uh failures uh to uh integrate with normal life but there were also some guys that I grew up with who started companies and set world records and you know had their Pro Models and then if you zoom out from that and you go wait I'm in this Community it changes one's self viw 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 you know for people to realize that the town they grew up and 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 realized it was somewhat arbitrary because it was just day by day I didn't think I'm Coleman Ru as I made it here look I'm part of this e i 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 regards right mm very because to me it was let's go like today's another new day and it's 100% Allin full go I hope everybody's ready did 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 and some of it I do I I I genuinely know and believe 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 I mean I 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 um 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 young and anyway I did I suppose I'm going the other I 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 I thought I was Better than this clearly I suck I have to get to their level so um 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 um but I was operating out a 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 for sure MH yeah and my high school wrestling coach was um let's call it maybe from the old school mhm if you worked hard enough you could you could you could get there you know so this is the essence of growth

mindset long before Carol D coined the the phrase growth mindset yeah yet when I first read a book I'm like don't 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 right I think that's one of the more important 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 you know 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 um and we don't understand enough about it um to understand you know whether or not it's a global circuit you know and it's there's a lot of context but okay so you're 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 when yeah this is the opposite of chaos totally this is Structure yeah you told what to do every five

minutes more or less and this is um scary feelings fear is a scary feeling uh 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 and do the next day yeah how was your selfcare 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 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 um been in auna 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 in the like during the season because you're getting out of that room like you end up accidentally doing some of these things but there was no selfcare so you eventually go to the Naval Academy MH 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 at in those early years at the Naval Academy a guy named Doug zbec who's dead now who most people of my service time will know who he is um 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 of the Naval Academy I'm sleeping on Doug zek's floor of his of his room with his other two roommates and sometime around 3: or 4 a.m. I get woken up it's like a bomb goes off there's a bom 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 2 to 3 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 boft Hall It's maybe 4 in the morning 3:30 4 in the morning we race out of boft Hall the barracks we run across the

parking lot into Lun Hall in Lun 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 Lun Hall the doors of Jun Hall are locked with a chain on the outside and one of our Doug pulls on the Chain so that the do 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 cuz 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 Lun 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 HVAC 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 OV

exaggerate this we have to be another 20 feet into the ceiling so you're above the diving board what most people we're way above the diving board okay we're 5T Above the ceiling which is 20t above the 10 meter got it right and so um and now I've realize 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 pullup so you don't kick the SE in 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 SC in the dark oh yeah no one's supposed to be in there um 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 like you're going to go down to the 15 ft 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 Dougs no 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 uh he was killed in' 07 Marine mhm yeah we we'll talk about

Doug you've written about him yeah he's unbelievable I feel like I know him a little bit thanks to you we'll get around to that uh for sure I think people are getting a sense of where we're headed so that's the that 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 there isn't a lot of pause and reflect although your R your Rudder is not halfhazard it's not random no well yeah I can say right now you and I as similar as I you know we may be in certain respects like 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 a lot of organization that comes out of biology is through random Walks Like animal or human like finds a node and moves and and life is

like that Steve Jobs talked about not being able to connect the dots except retrospect and and I subscrib to that and his life Was a bit of a random walk but that we Guided by some Central beam of of uniqueness uh Robert Green was when he was on the podcast talks about that your beam is is um more narrow it seems narrow and the propeller behind that beam is uh high RPM yes that's very clear and what I'm not hearing here is like um yeah you know at one point I paused and wondered whether or

not I wanted to you know be here wrestling in the Naval Academy or or even like what I Might do when I get out am I going to work for an investment firm what am I going to do you're re Your Horizon it seems to be about 24 hours at that point yeah I hope not anymore but at that point at that at that point I'm no psychologist but but um but it just seems like you're uh it's not like you're playing checkers but you're you're optimizing for a fairly um short Horizon there's no question

that's right and the other part that was probably the Most important to me Andrew was the the person or the group mhm because this is going to sound very arrogant but when I got to I'm going to this prep school I'm going to 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 entirely focused on whatever our mission was and I didn't even 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 listen 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 it was it was a that was it it was that that narrow beam so you met your wife in 96 sophomore year at the Naval Academy yep uh and was She as driven is she

as driven I mean she's obviously a very talented swimmer presumably works hard as well um it's kind of interesting I didn't um realize until a few years ago that the both of you were you know 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 trath on team when she was 20 I think um really talented in every

regard um 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 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 PR RT 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 uh no no no and she was just nice and you know I 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 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 Cooks at these schools you know um 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 you went to Stanford I mean some of the you know the group of Naval Academy and 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 one gymnast and uh is a licensed clinical psychologist also maintains a a healthy relationship with 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 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 Ally or anyone else's um incredible work ethic that goes with what people perceive as an extra gear who knows if they have an extra gear or not uh I always just want to know what their parents did yeah and it out Allie's parents I hope I have this right uh but recollection of this is that um 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 and I find that really important to me and to highlight because I think people hearing this conversation and hear about people like alleys and other examples like that you think oh yeah you got to come from an academic family to end up at a at a top tier institution or or to win a Nobel Prize in fact there there are so many exceptions to that or you have to um be A natural athlete um or be born with some some genetic gift or or 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 um 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 make sure that you're continuing to go um in a direction that is adaptive And functional because imagine had you not found wrestling and you had gotten into some you know some group where the the the metrics of success were around you know dealing weed

or doing something which back then was highly illegal now is very varying levels of legality but you know where that where the points came back for effort in domains of life that could take you down into the gutter and and you see this so I'm I'm convinced that the work ethic is 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 is 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 waste 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 I was like you consider Leaving like leaving the ne leaving the I was just but it didn't have anything to do with the na Academy really it had everything to do with 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 yard dropped into his spot I went down to 177 fighting weight for me is like 193 but you know back then Andrew lifting

a lot I was 210 to 215 in the Off season and I cut to 177 sophomore year and I was just really miserable and um if it was easy to leave I probably would have and then I met Bridget in February and I was like 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 I can relate you know there's a uh I probably wouldn't be sitting here

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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 Corp 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 Core I'm a freshman at the Naval Academy he's my wrestling partner Doug

could literally tell me to jump off of a building his 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 quanico 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 get 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 911 obviously and um and I 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 um you spend two weeks at the buds compound and they run you through a mini program and so find buds for the some some folks listening to this won't know won't know the acronym the acronym is basic underwater demolition seal school that's our school in Coronado screen 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 listed 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 station 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 months after graduation there's been a lot put out into the world around buds you know people have seen the log carrying and boat carrying and the screaming and the set set

screaming of the the uh instructors and the and the running and the you know clasped arms in the in the Water and hell week no sleep and on and on it's obviously tough it it calls 85% of the people that go out there thinking that they are the the absolute last person who would ever quit ring the bell so to speak um you obviously got through uh a while back you mentioned to me three things that you think predict whether or not somebody's going to get through Buds and um before you tell us what these

are I just will just uh tell people that yes Of course you made it through buds successfully and went into the teams um very successful career in the teams but you've also been a buds instructor so you've been on the on the um 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 we 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 pull that we could pull from pull-ups to runtimes 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 isn't 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 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 it 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 uh five nights no sleep you get an hour a couple minutes on on one day but you're basically in constant movement for about a week 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 going off blast it's got hard work boring components people the 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 uh let's break those three things down because um playing a varc sport has certain elements um having divorced parents has certain Elements and getting sus spended in school has certain elements let's start with divorced parents first because 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 um and you presumably have to go through Junior varc to get there so there's some oomph and required um in any event um but the divorce parents pieces is was surprising to me still is what you have divorced parents so do I divorces occur for any number of different reasons what in the world do you think is the uh the consequence of or the of 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 Want but I'm not leaving yeah that hits deep um I didn't do buds I didn't even know what the Seal team was

were but I certainly know the the feeling of um looking outside of the household for uh 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 um 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 talk Talking of course about um trying to understand the the human Spirit uh 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 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 that they don't feel like that family unit is really a 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 um so you're saying that one strong predictor of getting through is a feeling of people want essentially Making it their like almost like biological identity to get through it was certainly the case for me I mean when I got and 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 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 and that 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 in 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 it scruffed me and uh let's talk about the suspended in school yep um he's uh first of all that implies getting caught yes not just misbehaving but getting caught um 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 911 and then um 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 um obviously the military has rules and we need rules and you follow the laws of onc conflict and you follow the rules of engagement there's no question about that ever um but the that happens to you out in the field for real does not follow Any pattern and so if you are a complete you know nonsuspended 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 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 you 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 And then you find out later when you 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 those they they never said that that was a story from training and so my point is like what what you I 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 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 engage the laws of armed conflict everything else is a tossup the tactics aren't that's not a tossup but you know what I mean like the environment is it completely chaotic it's a new sport it's a brand new sport that no one coached you on and And it's highrisk 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 yeah so you obviously get through buds you probably weren't surprised given your mindset probably weren't surprised no no I wasn't surprised at this point I'm maybe building a little Self-confidence and just operate out of fear but happy presumably oh yeah yep and 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 um poll 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 who won the Navy cross in Vietnam um the book The the bridge of donga is about him he knew my this is back to I was my Uncle Jim who introduc he and my Uncle Jim were buddies and I met him he's since passed Away I met Colonel Ripley when I was a ple at the Naval Academy um I work with one of his sons now friend teammate Mentor is a great guy um 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 B the book to Bridget dong High you 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 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 just wasn't that big of a thing this this came for me after 911 obviously but yes the patriotism and the importance of the jobs there but what When I remember checking in Seal Team 3 what what emerged very quickly for me because we had Vietnam vets in the training cell at se team 3 and just some amazing people what I realized away was okay playtime is completely over and that was very useful like early lesson not that anyone was 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 was just no 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 the fun it's amazing yeah the job's amazing you do a number of different deployments MH and at some point you get Called to try out for the tier one uh tier one division

within the within the SEAL Teams um maybe just explain a little bit of what tier one means um 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 um and that uh yeah tell us what tier one is yeah well I'll just refer to a special Mission Unit it's probably the easiest um 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 the these different units within 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 had been platoon Commander during the invasion of Iraq we came to Monterey I went to school and went back to be a budge 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 9month

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 um which I thought this is actually a description of why the units 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 um at this point Have you ever sat down with a psychologist and done a therapy session that was no therapy but I sat

down with psychologist because they put us through the battery the neop 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 L yeah but now it might be two beers a week now it's zero zero right um 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 MH and the physical

tests ramp up and uh coincidentally I worked for him later still friends with him now on my interview board was uh bris Linsky who won the Congressional Medal of Honor BR Was on my interview board and he's 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 really rolling the dice because I was on the west coast you move your whole family sell your house you mean have to sell your house but we did and you move and you're going

to do a 9month 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 freef fall military freef fall 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 12,999 FT CU

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 jump 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 um and if you look out

of the Airplane you would be able to see the orange te 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 freef fall as a group when you go to the command your jumps are from 25,000 ft you do 30 minutes of Pre-breathing on oxygen helmet night vision zero lights and a attack board that has your navigation system on it 100 pounds of gear

your weapon your oxygen all your and 45 dudes piled up in a c17 and you drop miles away from the Drop Zone because you're over ground speed at 25,000 ft is hauling ass you know because of the wind and if you take your hands out of your gloves at 25,000 feet it's curtains like you're not going To be able to use your fingers cuz 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 and INF infrared lights so you can see

through night vision um 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 Freef 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 ah it man those guys aren't that much different like we're we're super highend 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 S uh I think I Had 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 there's echelons in you know this this command is ech on this this command is echel on

this and the military Congress sets end strength numbers it's says the Navy you get at The one time CU I 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 one but I think it has a you know has a reason so you got through M 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 counterterror Work

um so all the work in the military and SEAL Teams is high-risk High consequence but now it's Special Operations as as the name um implies um where things have to be worked out on a on a case-by Case basis it's highly unusual it was unusual before but now it's highly unusual circumstances um what was it like to be there did you like that family I loved it it was the best place to work MH um and this is 200 this is 06 through 2011 For me okay so it's post 911 uh through 2011 yep okay

so I'm sure a lot happened and most of which we can't and won't discuss um and that's not what's important here yeah um but clearly you met and worked with some amazing individuals um I happen to know because we've uh spoken before and we have some common friends in in the in the that Arena that um you had both the privilege of doing this work in this really important Wartime but also um the unfortunate experience of of being close to and working with uh quite a lot of people that uh were killed yep um how

many so I mean I don't know why I did this or why anyone does it 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 um and we could spend probably Weeks detailing how impressive uh each and every one of those people was in their individual cases this is perhaps a an opportunity to um put a call out there's a a wonderful book I think an important book that isn't so well known in

the in the array of quote unquote military and seal books um which is the book about Adam Brown Yeah The Fearless book I heard they're going to make it into a movie but but what I um what I like about the book is um actually has Very little to do with the SEAL Teams totally that's thing is that Adam um 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 um I know you worked with Adam and

you're close my green team yeah yeah so um that's a great book for anyone that wants a a different sort of book um it's really about addiction and family and his discovery of the path out of all that His tenacity is incredible awesome awesome book and human about an awesome awesome human um so you do those years um and then you know what happens when you know 40 people close to you die uh I have to imagine involves a you get pretty good unfortunately at taking what each and every one of those is a tragedy

and and just continuing yeah so um let's just talk about that for a bit if if you're Willing yep so um guys are getting shot and blown up and you're close with them to to say the least and what was your role in the in the aftermath like like how what do you do you you you go to a funeral you you you um 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 um there's obviously

you know a lot more that goes on But if you script the diary so to speak it's it wasn't you know a funeral every 3 months but on average if I averaged out because I've done this in you know Excavating the last few years we were at a funeral or Memorial effectively every 90 days and um in that time period but it wasn't obviously you know that simple like for 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 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 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 a Paul Bear in his funeral and you know we came up to Anapolis he was living in Anapolis cuz he was working it's 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 um 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 fujia he was on the front page of the LA Times like Tony Perry is a reporter in San Diego he was in fuia following Doug the guy was and Doug is not a like a public people people just Attracted to him to tell his story um I have so many stories that I heard later from his bosses his regimental Commander you know told stories about his unit in fuia his sergeant major and his amazing guy I've talked to him about like what

went on in fuia Doug is 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 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 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 that I think is made up I knew when Doug was K

that it's all 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 re-evaluated you know how old was I was 32 and and you've got kids at this point yeah yep um yeah olly wasn't born yet my youngest because you you now have three boys yeah three boys 21 18 and 14 and um the older two were born my my middle son was two at the time and 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 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 um close friends close male friends of mine have told me um these are friends that are married with kids um and I've heard this from people that were in the military and 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 um 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 the probability of of dying is well let's face it is is much higher as as my uh 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 uh shoot move and communicate is a big part of the the job description and the uh the enemy is also taught to shoot move and communicate that there's there's a decent probability that you could die so Um 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 um I think I was backed away from the 24-hour ledge a little bit MH I I knew that the boys obviously would be taken care of with my wife like that was never even had never crossed my mind probably Until you just asked the question that was almost just like table Stakes mhm um 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 going to say it probably multiple there is not a human on the planet that was as tough and as focused and as Hyper dialed in to how to do the job 100% effectively as he was and it happened to him you know and it I just never it it's almost embarrassing and to say I never thought about it like that until Doug was killed and and yet and I'm not challenging that at all of course uh I mean life circumstances

the other team gets a vote too totally right I mean I mean somebody can be um seemingly Indestructible oh so capable and talented and get T-boned at an intersection and die right like like that yeah we've known people like that all of us you know you hear these things that's why they're called tragedies yeah we just 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 and 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 25,000 feet with no lights and you for hell for sure wouldn't go into some of these 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 I I just because I was in some way Andrew convinced that our training was so good that that wouldn't happened to us let's take a step back for a second and acknowledge the the truth uh all around that set of statements which is that um I think most people can think of The government and the training programs as um honing the body but um it's probably not lost on you at this point in your life that the you were you're a weapon your mind became a

weapon right your your body became a weapon um uh you were a weapon of the military from the inside out and in the statement you just made encapsulates that y um and that weapon honed itself for a long time but then that's what the military is it creates weapons and 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 um but that mindset encapsulates that so um 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 0708 which was complete Mayhem and the troop was I mean my my troop in the winter of 0708 were like 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 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 him Kos 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 about sitting with a family who's About to be notified that their son in this case of Tommy was killed Brit went to Christina's house lab Brit slinsky 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 way up North The Valentines are incredible people and I I mean notifying a family was Just it was brutal and so this is this is the 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 helicopter obviously full 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 as to command that I 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 to him 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 is another Legend and um I answered the phone and it's midnight I knew something was wrong and we were kind of in this pattern then and you're 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 um 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 and I'm like I know what happened like tell me who it is and and they you know didn't want to say it over the phone which I get

and uh I I had like one of those moments where I told him no I I can't I can't do that Again like you have to get somebody who knows what the they're doing and he just didn't let me off the hook you know get your and come come into the command because you got to do all this prep stuff and um I walked into the conference room I mean I remember clear's day Andrew 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 arei 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 um 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 he put the color in the lip reading and it and there's a scene I don't know if it's a Battle of The Bulge or exactly there's a scene

where um this young unit army unit is about to go up over 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 a fixed 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 and Nathan yeah they were small and um 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 KY and other people and like that was it dude I was like a um 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 did 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 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 and 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 bakan in 08 before Tommy was killed three 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 [Music] um we 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 um 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 uh that comes Through uh I think years ago you said to me um and this will be an important way of of um setting aside uh which side people are on you know whether or not you side with one group in the Middle East or the other

you feel for everybody that uh 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 like you cannot erase that fact like like 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 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 yep humans can be trained as weapons and and it's often not the weapons themselves that are making the decisions about where to go and what to Do sometimes it is um at this time Coleman what's going on with the three boys with

Bridget I mean you're um I mean your boys have turned out really well um amazing they're amazing um and there's no coincidence there and obviously it was a team effort with you and Bridget but you know there are a lot of things about the way the scenario you're describing here that speaks to like how can a home function but obviously it functioned well and um you Know it's uh it's remarkable but it can't be due to chance so the were you able to compartmentalize like the moment you hit your front door your dad at home

your husband your um and was that a pause in a conversation with your yourself at the front door that's just something that becomes reflexive uh 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 about 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 it this is how I remember it was easy for me I don't know if it was easy for Bri she would have to answer that question it was easy for me and so I felt like for the most part like I was I wasn't like platoon Commander dad you

know some movie you know the great Santini type dad you know I think Pat Conroy GRE WR the great Santini um his dad was crazy apparently it's like that's what he writes about it wasn't like that it was more of this 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 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 and I and what I do remember is mostly obviously the fun times the front yard the whatever playing with the bo boys um doing rough housing 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 uh doorbells ringing on doorbells you decide

to get out MH uh 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 13e Mark not for a second it I needed it we needed it as a Family um it was a snap it was a snap decision it was like a what do we say 24-hour decision and 24-hour

Horizon I was standing on the ledge of the 24-hour Horizon right um 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 four or five years before you and I met 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 um it was basically helicopter shot out of the sky with a uh with a rap with a

grenade right yeah RPG RPG um people can look it up if they want to and um there's a lot of material out there about it um it's just can only be described as a tragedy so um and I'm not trying to make light of it I just think you that we could do there's a lot to explore there for in a different Discussion um 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 you're out mhm 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 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

is 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 so are you thinking About that no you're Coleman Ruiz at that point you're just uh you're just going forward it's 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 I there's reasons for that I get that but I'm just using it as a I mean there was nothing dishonorable about how you went it's just that there's security reason once you're out like 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 um at the time in those first call it couple of years or even couple of months I don't know the question you just ask me is the question I was at 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

um 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 kind 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 night sweats 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 um sounds sounds like sounds familiar and so it's that and was 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 I you know I 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

Cur or the not even 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 a 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 to Listen to it it's better to I've probably only listened to five audio books in my life I prefer to read in paper because I can take notes

in the margin that book is better listen to hero with a thousand faces a hero with a thousand faces could you just highlight a couple of the things that you took from the back end of that um that somehow shifted your mind toward like like cued you I'm thinking Coleman ruy uh 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 like a texture of something like I want 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 um so Joseph Campbell wrote that book in 1949 and the her with a thousand faces is effectively the 17 stage Heroes 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 Heroes 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 um but what he lays out in the book is I don't know maybe supposedly 2,000 years of culture across multiple cultures book Is incredibly complicated in that sense Andrew when I so I listen to it audio first and I 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 it I'll try to come back to them if you 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 and there's a horizontal line the diameter of that Circle goes horizontally across and the extraordinary world on the bottom the ordinary worlds on the top okay and so let me talk about the back end of the journey first CU 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 you Coleman you got to read this book and so the back end of the hero's journey in The return section is three seven stages of the 17 it's the ultimate Boon which is you learned something big in life it depending on everybody learns something where you you sort of realize 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 uh refusal of the return you really don't want to come back to the Ordinary World cuz 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 uh a drift totally yeah that 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 and this Return

is Magic Flight and the way it's described in you know um myths or in real life is you have to escape that extraordinary world and a and take one more dangerous flight or or sneak away or something is catapulting you to take that ultimate Boon and fight against that refusal you're you're taking Magic Flight amazing and then there is um is it it's it's assistance I think yeah it's like assistance from a um 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 crossing the return threshold into the Ordinary World master of Two Worlds where you finally realize through help Andor 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 happen 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 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 the in Two Worlds I don't know which it is like it's either Two Worlds in one person or it's two people trying to live in one world but gets crazy right because

you just haven't done the cycle and it sounds very misul but if you read a 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 scream 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 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 uh 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 emot Al 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 I got mentor later you know a couple years out um 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 um with a guy named Buddy bua Paul buddy bua who won the Congressional Medal of Honor he's a West Point grad he won the C in Vietnam I've been around a lot of you know famous military people lunch was very normal but buddy was amazing it 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 stair below him he stopped me I turned to my right to look at him he looked at me he said Son you have have it you know that you have it pts and you're going to have to deal

with it and we left I got in a 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 it 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 go through very chall and I mean the 17 stages in Jose 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 MH you certainly done very hard things Extraordinary things you're married you got three kids they're thriving PTSD postraumatic stress disorder order uh and things like it CU I don't think any single acronym or diagnosis can capture anything I think Paul kti 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 and and certainly those who haven't been in the military maybe had a seed Event of something challenging or whatever it is you know um many people

uh struggle with with these kinds of things that live inside them um in the nervous system they pack it down maybe they don't but um that was inside you at that point M I think you and I first got acquainted in somewhere around 2016 when you and some other folks from tier one 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 US um not trying to create any Mystique there but it's it's not not a

point of Interest what we did and and um but I recall at that time just thinking like this guy's just an amazing team guy but in any event um you know we got to know each other a bit and my since then was like it's like a that's kind of indestructible right you know and now I realize nobody's Indestructible we're flesh and Bone but um but if we may let let's let's fast forward a bit um to uh a couple years later um if you're willing to talk about it um maybe talk about some of

the uh the evolution that happened so you started working a job MH um you're getting back into civilian life yep and um I recall a conversation about this time of year probably about three year three years ago yeah and you had done what um a lot Of uh vets from um tier one operations have done and are now doing which I actually have um mostly uh favorable outlook on which is um there now these are uh I want to be very clear legal and sanctioned explorations of the Psychedelic space right and I remember you called

me and you described uh the experience that you had uh had um and some of the connection with Warrior culture that that had helped emerge for you so you 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 intellect 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 it's miserable well wait yeah it is yet it's I I agree I it's a very Uncomfortable space uh you know but we'll get we'll get there it's it's a journey for me let me put it that way so you know there's a bunch of other I'm a vicious reader and 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 um I found in our area a cranos cyal 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 myof fasal type of massage some some tapping very like Ta 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 clothed super easy in terms of that um couple years of that just because of Athletics I love massage and that's kind of my entree and um so Through the body sematics 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 um 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 um lying moral landscape and his I I don't know him personally so public stuff notwithstanding that's not important to Me but waking up and I took um I took an online course with Robert Wright who who wrote why Buddhism is true but that's really not what he's

known for you know Princeton Professor um he's so funny he's very humorous and I started to work my way into I don't I don't have some like I don't want people think have some like whizbang like spiritual practice that's whatever you know I but it 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

Fan'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 yeah we make we 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 looking 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 um the binning the chunking of time yeah that and my and your

conversation years ago about um Horizon and activating the parasympathetic system instead of sympathetic I I just very slowly started to realize I needed to back away from The small picture and the reading and the cranial sacr and massage and I was still not really getting consistent real help but I thought I could do it through educating myself intellectually and um I thought it was time to and it was it has short-term consequences but longterm it's been amazing [Music] to you know deal with the plant Medicines in a in a controlled and Cur ated 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 uh couple things um one we've covered psychedelics on this podcast before um I say this not for liability Reasons but just to really to emphasize uh for people safety uh to protect them um plant medicines are illegal most places still um this is changing MDMA is uh has been filed with the FDA as a potential treatment it's not yet legal

um these things have great power of of he to heal in the right circumstances and they also have great uh potential to harm in the wrong hands or circumstances um people with uh you know potential for psychosis Etc but Um with that said um 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 um iigame DMT like um 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 like like something had had had synced up yeah and I thought this is great you know and I hadn't explored plant medicines at least not in a long time because I had done them recreationally as

a youth which I do not recommend it took me down a bad path um but and more recently I've explored them in controlled conditions But I thought awesome this work you got this new job you're you're uh you did some um very controlled and again physician assisted abigan DMT uh experiences and you're telling me how great everything was Y and then about I think it was about 3 4 months later I got a very different call yeah and and um if you're willing you know I remember that call um maybe you can tell me about

that call yeah so I mean this yeah the experience it it was incredibly powerful You know humor is such a powerful way to get through hard times just why laughing yeah but it it really was Andrew I mean to be fair to thousands of years of you know people have 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 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 um it was extremely powerful um I've heard that you know the 5 Meo for some people is not much it's like black for me it was just liftoff and um 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 um as you know I guess I haven't done it noetic is the word no yeah that people use very difficult I don't have the

language for it and a couple months later the bottom dropped out yeah and it and I want to talk about that now I I also want to emphasize I know a good number of people that have uh had the same experience you did with aiga and DMT through the veteran solutions group um uh and I know Marcus And Amber Capone very well actually a bill just got passed in Congress that uh Dan krenshaw helped um helped um spearhead to bring funding to use of psychedelics for PTSD treatment in in military um and I should mention

because this was interesting to learn that that bill was highly bipartisan if I'm not going to name off the names because if I do there's going to be a lot of cringing screaming and yelling but if 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 um just striking it's a and um so is a very bipartisan thing so I will say a number of people uh have been greatly benefited

by the veteran Solutions work um but and we can't causally link what happened to you afterwards to that at all there's a lot of contextual stuff um so we're not doing that but we're we're an open book Here um and I think that's a great group by the way veteran Solutions is amazing um 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 um 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 kti level help because in the case of I'm happy to see that some people they're using just a wider spectrum of on-ramp not the nuclear option to start I can tell you unequivocally

abigan and 5 Meo DMT 2 days apart is the nuclear Option and it's not right for everybody just 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 cont option well just for those that didn't see the series with Dr Paul K we'll put a link to in the show note captions but uh what Coleman's referring to is talk therapy with somebody highly skilled yes and perhaps also prescription uh medication If that's necessary maybe hormone

therapy if that's necessary that's up to the physician but but clearly talk therapy of with a skilled clinician I believe I need 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 plan medicines was it um 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 anybody else's left alone to figure out how to

put that ice sculpture back together piece by piece and you 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 like P 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 Um that was another thing that I never thought was possible for humans it was severe depression severe and 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's 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 I could 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 I

just have for any one 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 the 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 I never really had like the chemical dependence thing it was easy for me to stop drinking when did you decide to stop drinking that was it was around Three years ago or so is prior to 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 you and I have been

friends for a while now do some of the things you and I have discussed and I hear you talk about publicly they were just good reminders you know um 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 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 you I'm approaching 50 that helps you stop drinking everything else like all the other recommendations come second at Least for me um was that pretty easy for you to do because I know there's B big culture of drinking in the teams yeah I was just lucky so um 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 to drinking is because I started reading a lot about the 12 Steps AA I've never been to AA meeting but the the Simpson The PTSD in 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 is you know the Buddhist obviously call Dua it's unsatisfactoriness this lowgrade irritation that I carry around every day um 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 Andre and you can obviously you know Dr kti 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 I just didn't think it was real and so then when it was and I'm like how many things do I have to deal with you know and I realize everybody deals with a lot of stuff and um it was challenging and then slowly you know it got better and better and um guys like you know friends very close friends a very very small tight group were and what people do when you finally tell them and you think oh this guy's Gonna he's never going to 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 in they're in the neck Circle cuz now it's 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 5 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 Y 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 that's that's what you and I have discussed in the past has kind of come back to you know the fighter mentality is the 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 yeah let's do this let's Do that let's do something crazy and okay well tell that same person who you've built Persona identity you know around them and with them to 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 uh but I I second W with with both arms um your statement that when we actually open up to somebody Trusted uh hopefully a friend or somebody close to us but like some people go to clergy or AA or any any number of the different uh resources and those resources really are out there at zero cost they really are there if one one has to look a little bit sometimes a lot unfortunately but they're there um my experience has always been and and in observ others that um

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's hurting was before was a fraud the contrary they they see it as a as an act of strength mhm and but it feels like like hell to reveal that it feel if and I totally agree I think all

the tough stuff all The um anything physical is is like a fraction of the emotional pain and I thank you for highlighting the the physical aspect of of emotional pain especially if one isn't accustomed to it if one isn't accustomed to it [Music] um if you're willing you know how bad did it get I mean the call you we had suggested it was bad I I sometimes refer to a line and I 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 my uh my visual sphere um the line of course being that the point at which one is considering taking their own life y 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 in 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 uh 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 a thing that Uh hopefully everyone's seeking to avoid um and it's a yeah how close were you I would say that 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 budge thing like I never thought about quitting I thought about it one day um what was the thought I don't it Was I mean sort of like the classic sympoms andreww I I was up all night sweating and shaking and um it's back to the shock of it it was okay I actually was able to step 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 3: in the morning and legitimately thinking this is just the scariest thing and for anybody in the situation um you think with every ounce of your being that people are better off without you and then somehow thankfully Through

Chemistry neurobiology past Learnings um 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 is 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 you 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 um because the pain is just so extreme and um 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 um and one of my in the like in those really hard weeks maybe a little bit after that inre one of my buddies I Was actually was talking to him yesterday because I had time in the car um the tough love side of it

at 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 with kid gloves at that Mo those moments um 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 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 it that was a pivot like that really helped me a lot that's what you needed I mean I I don't I don't know that that's what I would have needed um I recall when we spoke uh because I Obviously not professionally trained in any of that I just remember thinking how do I put in this this into language that Coleman's going to understand and I just said you know I think uh your goggles are I know one thing for sure which is that

your goggles are foggy so you got to so you have to Outsource your decisions now I think you might have also told me to Outsource my identity mhm and and that helped a lot because um it was that idea of you at 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 and yeah I I mean I'm grateful for the opportunity but you know unfortunately had a few circumstances where people close to me Were at at that edge and and i' I'd be lying if I say I've been at that edge so I knew where I had some sense of where you were at um and under those conditions I don't think there's a Playbook I mean obviously when people are have a plan and they're thinking about implementing that plan that those people need to be put under protection

from themselves um Ely 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 neur like something is not right yeah uh and you know different friends offered different and some friends just sat and listened to it allh and when I think back it's like I would take a bullet for them cuz I

just took it you know 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're a 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 um but you're used to you're used to Leading And and protecting others

and um like I think it's awesome that you're um able to have access that that uh raising your hand asking for help you have to it's it's it's such a it it's such a a a sign of strength and skill and doesn't 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 that you know we come up with a million excuses but in the end it's it's it it's Such a PO a thing

of strength to do that um so you did ratchet yourself out of that very very dark hole slowly and um I I I want to place this in the context of this uh hero's journey would you see that you talk about that the Magic Flight the you're against you're like the refusal you won't go back but so was accepting it seems that there was that some pieces of you needed work yeah that there was this PTSD this gentleman that you mentioned yep saw that and you Refused to kind of deal with it and so shine

a light on it and um God the universe whatever your beliefs are um forced you to see it Y 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 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 you at what point did you enter quot talk therapy immediately then so you got

a quote unquote therapist because oh yeah yeah I mean effectively you know Bridget n and multi 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 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 was worse

to you than jumping out of plane at 3,000 ft or going into a gunfight not even close not even close and hearing yourself say that D you Realize how how ridiculous well how how um untrue that must be at the physical level but but the the nervous system doesn't know as to quote uh Dr pa kti um the lyic system that it experiences or or creates this sense of fear and dread doesn't know the clock or the calendar if 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 it the fear was this will go on forever um but so yes it that I just did not want to you know back to Bessel Vander when I read this word in his book body keeps the score Lexia if that's a real thing where you can't put um language to you know what's going on um I didn't want to put language to it I couldn't I 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 to say 20 years it was just and 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 in 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 install you know plateaus um you don't have to share this but would because I'm a believer that talk therapy can be very effective certainly that's my experience it's I wouldn't be here if it weren't for for Two in particular amazing um people who really help me along the way but um in

that way but I do think there's a place at times for pharmacology to assist the process sure um I know nowadays people hear ssris and they demonize those that that wasn't uh I'll come clean so um and then maybe if you feel like it you can uh I hit a a bout of depression in my during my postdoc did a a short run of well buin BR buproprion which is more of the dopaminergic noradrenergic Y agonism Mostly adrenaline nergic um it really helped it nuked my memory at the dosage they suggested um 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 Ki 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 conv I I have been able to be away from that for a long time but 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 okay that sounds 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 site 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 it's like take the warb man chill Like just get it get some space back to the SpaceTime 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 or drugs and and look I 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 a 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 so then you

think about alcohol disruption of sleep even if you think you're sleep sleeping and like it's there's a story like a common theme starts to emerge um so you Stabilize sleep you were getting some um dopamine and neurogenic assistance from the low dose rutrine and you're basically also just you're just letting it all out yep with a therapist with a therapist and the thing that strikes me as to your point about my resistance to the therapy versus jumping out 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 War colleagues the guys that I work for now like other you 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 and it's not like I wasn't in these environments where I've been coached and mentored I I've had coaches and mentors on my ass my whole Life like instructors you know

it's a Non-Stop and I I don't know 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 cuz I only say this like with my really Really really close friends I know was going to more people in my CL 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 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 um yeah I feel that the yearning in that statement uh I I suffer from a terrible

um very destructive debilitating um desire to travel back into time and fix things it's like it's like I know I don't have my my graduate advisor who un Unfortunately all three of my graduate advisor are dead but she used to say um my time machine's broken yeah anytime I'd raise something if you know that the could have would have should have my time machine's broken and and we know that but I listen I felt that statement in every cell of my body it's clear you would but you're also in sharing this this experience and this

information you're you're you're doing that now in what we call biology in the Interrog grade fashion and you know somebody many people are going to hear this and and cue to the the recognition of what's happening to them hopefully before they get to that line yeah you have to and you just got to tell somebody you know it's like it's crazy how simple that is Andrew I mean months like I can't tell anybody I can't tell anybody well well and maybe we drill into this a little bit deeper because I think that This really speaks

to the the the global experience of of Being Human where unlike a physical wound where you know if you see bone exposed you're like this is pretty serious you know we all have different thresholds for what we can tolerate in terms of pain and 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 you know we also are dealing with a a world Now where some people feel psychologically injured by everything you know so that's the extreme there but

what we're I think I think um 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 Sur that voice what do you think that voice is I call it the lowgrade pain okay for me it it was there was a Lowgrade just slight hot burning starting in ' 07 probably before that but it was for me it was a weird mix and 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 Lowgrade unsatisfactory somehow my sense for me and I'm obviously not you know the Dr kti in the room just because of all the things I've learned how it it it it just had to be the this constant I'll use the word trauma but for me it 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 it to me it always felt like that constant highend 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 lowgrade whatever I was residue that I was left with it was like every time I came from home home from deployment I would get sick that night like I would have a fever that night headache and fever and um I tend to get sick at the end of the year last two years it was Christmas this year it was Thanksgiving and um you

Know bridg and I always joke about it it's because I slightly turn the engine down a little and then the you know the immune system yeah that's the way it works everyone thinks stress depletes the immune system and indeed it can yeah but if you think about it in evolutionary adaptive you know ways go go go go go allows you to saave 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 um you need to modulate right you got to modulate but when you're on deployments you don't have the option you're in gunfights every 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

um challenged with like a breakup a loss of a loved one fear about the future languishing because they don't 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 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 um you talk with Dax right Dax shepher yeah he talks

about it nonstop like unfortunately I think a version of bottom is where the process starts all the people I know the stories They tell me the process started when they hit some version of bottom what what's the quote that I love is um you don't change until the pain of staying the same is worse than the pain of change yeah Amen to that um 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 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 um uh 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 um it is not a a process in which we we ever really get to cruise so let's Orient Coleman ruy in That cycle um you seem to have returned to the Ordinary World um for those listening and not watching you've been

whenever you describe the uh the feeling of getting through but also the that people assisted you you smile MH 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 and these like dear one team guys they're they're Serious they're locked in they're locked in but um you smile a lot now yeah so I think you're back in the Ordinary World mhm um what are the things you're watchful for um like

like you're not drinking you pay attention to your sleep you always trained you always did it you call it PT but physical training yeah yeah I Train Cycle run MH swim lots of kettle bells yeah every morning uh 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 mhm it's so funny how uh Team guys talk about getting into cold or getting in the sauna like it's just a regular thing like they they

don't they never post it to social media for them it's just it's part of the routine yeah but I say that because I think a lot of people think it's like this esoteric biohacking thing wrestlers and and uh 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 for like every single person in the country so we didn't invent some amazing recovery process by doing SAA right what do you think um

what do you think it is about physical movement that helps the Mind obviously it's not it's I consider it necessary but not sufficient like you you need to do the talk therapy the working through The writing the reading the inpe 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 Rady's little anecdote and Spark you know the SE squirt I guess swims around then as soon as it does whatever

it needs to do it just dies when it stops moving oh yeah when the so the SE squirt is this uh aquatic animal uh apia as it Were that that when it um lands on a on a rock and stops moving it actually digests its own nervous system that movement uh is the great Nobel prize winning scientist sharington that said that movement is the final common pathway that movement is the way that the nervous system tells the brain and rest of nervous system that it's still needed here on Earth Earth H which I like it's

it's like a it's like a a it reminds us of our own utility yeah 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 got home like I ran laps I don't know how many but a lot around the block and by the time 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 clearheaded and I cannot be again dropping and drinking I can't be lethargic and sit around like I have to you know take care Of myself in that regard um 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 the basics like I don't do anything crazy really um you eat what you want no no I would say on the neurotic scale of things that's probably my most extreme there 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 but I'm I'm a really light eater I eat like a bird and probably eight times a day maybe more um eight times a day oh easily I'll have you know I'll thanks to

you I'll wait an hour and a half to have coffee which is miserable um you're welcome but oh it's amazing thank you it's helped me so much well you know I I take some some uh some 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 stay the afternoon crash but a lot of people find that experiencing that natural wakeup and look it's 90 minutes it's not it's not like cutting out for two days or two weeks or Michael

Paul and I think quit coffee I was like why in the world would you do that yeah why in the world um I love coffee love yber M always have um from from from first sip which by the way I had my first gourd of M caffein Monte when I was four there's a picture Of me and my grandfather's up hilarious Argentine side yeah so but the the point here is that um you know these practices these things I think they involve a little bit of discipline but they they they really can't have an outsized

effect I think oh my goodness yeah the it's incredible I mean the eating thing and then maybe you know one more mental thing in this regard um 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 apple and then so you're a light Grazer really light I probably have the smallest plate at dinner in my house um we've always been in great shape like visually you always you're tall you're lean you're strong yeah yeah I I think we're realizing now that you can

still train on uh you have to be like gorging oneself with calories yeah especially Now right like we're both approaching 50 it's actually surprising 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 Andre I just cut a bunch of extra out of my life big end little things like I don't I try to just do my job and you know do a good job at it and hang out with my

people friends and and family and uh 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 I 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 win some event or that release of extra in my life has been as big as anything else

And your boys presumably take some time and attention and you're they're great yeah uh um son's a runner for University level Runner um a lot of our conversation gets to some kind of core uh features of Being Human and the psychology of 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 uh there's a there's clearly a Message that everyone is gleaning from this many messages but um like what if any revision uh or um adaptation do you think we need

of of the concept of of being a a man growing oneself into a man you know I'm not a gender studies sociologist psychologist neuroscientist but setting all the the sociology and the 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 mhm but Sometimes those hard things are not the hard things that you are uh we think they are like sitting down and telling one story being more terrifying than than going into gunfights overseas yeah yeah I mean funny

that the Prelude a little bit is I'm not a gender study scientist either a sociologist I stay away from most of the conversations you know um their Barbed Wire yeah they just people seem to be so overactivated over Stuff it's very odd um but for me in my life experience Andrew it's range like to use David Epstein's book title right it's range um and I've noticed this so much because of parenting and watching my boys grow into men if I think about come back to range if I think about myself at 177 or 18 not

my parents not my coaches unless I really wanted it you could not 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 teammate ship 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 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 one of the most important parts

of my job is to release the grip and take the Reins off and just barely keep them inside the boundaries of a 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 that I see and I saw myself a lot for years was we grip sometimes as men like we are so afraid of losing control in an already uncontrollable world that we overgrip everything and I over gripped everything And suddenly when I'm not over gripping stuff things are going better and

um 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 swivel and if somebody touches them it's curtains and we need to keep that Because that is 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 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 that takes you all the way over here to what we might consider oh Coleman's he's soft now no no don't mistake my kindness or weakness there's a category for everything and I think

that makes you such a much more complete person um it's made me a more complete person it's it's difficult I feel like I'm brand new at being able to do other things in my toolbox like you and I like this part's easy I'm go jump to that in A nanc this part over here of normalizing you know life across across a whatever 8090 is it's really hard to sort of excavate 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 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 how painful it is to to undergo that surrender and and here I'm talking to myself too it's been it's a process I'm still deeply involved in you know somebody who's tried to you know go rung over rung 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 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 basic 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 uh resist surrender the more that um well I believe

in God so I'll just say God but God the Universe or whatever it is for people but for me more that God places me in circumstances that make the the uh 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 good friend of mine um I've been mentioned by name Tim Armstrong he just said like you got to hit every branch on the way down you know he was he 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 but like the universe just screams out um 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 uh evolutionary adaptations too and and the hero's journey nothing in the hero's journey says that the transitions Between these different states are linear no are of equal duration are of um

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 Ian like you hit every BR nobody skips and then 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 a family obviously is super important but 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 are some I'm not that experienced in it I just read about it a decent amount it's like hitting every Branch like 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 because even if you're not conscious of it it erods 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 Wrecking Ball and said fine you're not going to listen sent you all these messages you're not going to listen okay I think it's important that we at least briefly touch on where Things are at right now um because it would be remiss for us to give the impression that like you're sitting there meditating you're drinking your coffee 90 minutes late late after you wake up you're uh 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 um to

the extent that you can share um you're working all the time you're what what are you doing nowadays As a vocation I was in private equity for a while before I met you run a company for companies for really good friend of mine and Tom Ripley amazing guy 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 um and he and I are incredibly close like he was one of

the guys who is in That super tight Inner Circle um and then I came back to it um with you know with this team that I'm on and I serve as the chief operating officer at lid Sports Group the largest brick and mortar licensed Sports retailer um in North America we have 200,000 stores during the holiday we have 88,200 employees and amazing team the private Equity Firm that I work for is an amazing team and the company is an amazing company and am just incredible Group of folks um 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 um 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 is a workout Tom and I throw kettle bells around multiple times a week and um I do those other little things but 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 again this is back to the hero's journey I thought like the return to ordinary life was going to 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 gonna be easier and so when we talk about the lowgrade pain inury 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 rest Like the regular world just it's not 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 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 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 um you've been providing mentorship to millions of people uh in the form of sharing your experience of uh your own Heroes journey and uh 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 um but Also making it so clear that while while your your life experience is you know extraordinary SEAL Teams tier one teams all all and all you know all of it that you know everyone's life has these components of extraordinary and the opportunity for Extraordinary and the return and renewal through the Ordinary World um so much of what you shared is has meaning regardless of people are male female young old so thank you for being a mentor to

today and um for Having the The Bravery for stepping out into the the quote unquote Ordinary World which is oh so unordinary unordinary and um if you're willing I think it'd be great to have you back in a maybe a couple years and see where you're at meanwhile uh you and I will be T in touch often as as we as we frequently are so thanks Andrew appreciate it Coleman Ruiz thanks for everything you've done thank you uh thanks for everything you're doing and Um thanks for coming out today and and sharing with us uh

what real life's about it's always great to see you appreciate the time it was a joy thanks likewise thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Coleman Ruiz if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple You can leave us up to a five-star review please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support

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