00:00:00 I was in an Insider attack in Afghanistan the Afghan Special Forces team lived in the compound with me we would get attacked every day I got hit with a bunch of rocket propelled grenades every day there would be someone that died in my room cuz it was the medical facility there were lots of patients people that I worked on that passed away your military training was teaching you don't show the weakness don't show the emotion stuff it deep down 23 military people a day are committing suicide these psych pills are

00:00:26 largely suicide pills they cause people to commit suicide there so dangerous a Raider that I know was basically put on a medication that you're only supposed to be on for several months they put him on for 3 years he ended up discharging his weapon in the middle of the city you take some of those meds long enough you could change who a person is completely you were a marine Raider you served 12 years in the special forces and you've been in you know some of the craziest situations that you know a

00:00:56 human could imagine uh you've talked in depth though about how uh emotional intelligence has really helped you through that and and when you uh went through certain trainings uh help you break through some of those walls that you'd created by going through those experience experiences uh how has emotional intelligence helped you uh the last few years wow so it's it's been a total transformational Game Changer uh of a thing and if you could think to when you were a kid and you had Growing Pains how

00:01:34 painful it was as your body was growing that's the same thing I felt going through those courses and you feel it's it's it's challenging because it's you're you're breaking through a lot of things but um one of the things that I've realized recently um through some of my um just interactions with um people that are in this work and personal development and healing and helping others and serving others is that when I went into the Marines and when as and this this isn't just the Marines or the military it's it's it can be any job

00:02:17 where you have to condition yourself to deal with high level stress like combat or like you know being a policeman or being a fireman or being whatever that is that you have to put your emotions behind in the back so that you can be the leader you can be a forward facing and navigate those experiences and so I think a lot of us are familiar with you know the the Marine drill instructors that yell at you yeah and that's that's what happens when you get to boot camp and they condition you maybe at first

00:02:51 you're not used to someone yelling and you know a little spit in your face and all this stuff and but over time over days over weeks over months then you're standing there and you can have five or 10 drill instructors all around you screaming and you're in a zen-like space right and so what's that conditioning you to do is to deal with highlevel stressors and obstacles and combat and friction of war or you know situations where things go wrong and worst case scenarios happen and contingencies happen and these

00:03:30 things and so why is that important because there's a lot of people that go into those types of jobs that have that experience that then lose their vulnerability and are conditioned to be in that state but then what happens like to someone like myself when all of a sudden you get blown up or this happens and then you're going to be in for maybe 16 or 20 years and they're saying you're out in 6 months where you're out you thought you were staying in you're out you can't pass your medical exam you got

00:04:02 blown up so we're we're removing you from the military and then so okay so now I'm getting out my vulnerability is pretty much gone I don't know how to use my emotions or communicate I've basically been conditioned to suffer in silence that's literally what they used to teach us you have a problem don't I don't want to hear about it suffer in silence deal with it yourself always and so that it it works until it didn't work yeah it gets you here but it doesn't get you where you need to go in the long run especially

00:04:36 going in the real the real world non-w zones yeah and so I'm I'm I am every day in more belief that relationships is the most important thing on the planet yeah and that's our relationship with ourself and that's our relationship with the world and that's our relationship with others and for me it's even hard to have it was hard to even have a relationship with myself when I didn't have access to my emotions and I didn't have access to regulate my emotions so what I experienc getting out is going from being on this

00:05:16 being in this medical hold to retirement to being on 15 medications to then now I'm on all these medications that basically turn me into a zombie yeah a robot right so I'm a high performing person I have been my whole life even when I was a kid it some of it was troublemaking but I've always been out and about doing doing things in life and I found myself after I got retired taking these meds and I I'll be honest I didn't take all 15 meds as I was supposed to but maybe I was on seven or eight of them and my I remember

00:05:52 distinctly my wife catching me on the couch at like 8 or 9ine in the morning multiple times after I had woken up taking my meds and then let them set in and then I was sitting there on the couch in the morning like early in my retirement and I'm like nodding off and kind of half cocked half asleep mhm and my wife's like what's going on with you right what's wrong with you yeah and what I thought back to is in all of like the highlevel military briefs like before a big mission or in a in a in a school in like Special

00:06:30 Operations and like one of the things where they're dropping a lot of students and you have to pay attention and there would be someone you know we'd been a maybe we've been awake for a few days and obviously there's someone nodding off in class which is natural but you don't do that right right and so they would always make the example of someone's falling asleep and nodding off like Bas some sometimes they slap them you know and so it's like wake up and as a leader you always want to police those

00:06:59 that type of behavior yeah and now I found that that was me now I see and so I'm like that was a huge wakeup call whoa I'm now the this guy that falls asleep not not in not in anything just in life yeah right and so that was my that was my wakeup called to get off all my meds nice so I got off all my meds and um I think the hardest ones for me uh full transparency was Aderall and um uh ambient uh you sleep and awake right right and because I was in business school because I got straight out I got

00:07:37 out of the Marines in July and in August I started USC business school M so it was like a a culture shock yeah and while I was in there they um I had been diagnosed with ADD or all these different things that they diagnosed me with so they were going to give me Aderall so I took it and I felt like once I started taking it it would you know activate me and I'd be able to do all my work and so I got into the Trap of thinking I needed to take that to do my work and then I needed to take my ambient to put myself to sleep so I

00:08:11 basically broke my natural ability to rise and fall and it was just diminishing everything over time so uh that was the last two that I broke away from but when I stopped taking the anti-depressants and then especially when I was cold turkey off everything what I started to notice is you know at the time I was working with a lot of professional athletes we had started deep in Fitness which is comes from uh me and my partner Don's uh experience as water survival instructors in the Marine Corps and we got to run a huge pool on

00:08:47 Camp Pendleton out in California for a whole year before we went into Special Operations training so before we went in we had we got this crazy experience of training thousands and thousands of Marines in the water which also trained us how to navigate a lot of things too we just didn't realize it CU we so young um so you know fast forward like that underwater training and all that stuff that we had had the access to had became such a critical like training tool for us and a part of our regimen that when we got out

00:09:20 um I lost access I had access to all the pools on Camp penon I had keys and I was a water survival instructor and I ran a lot of different trainings so I could liter go to any pool and reserve it and bring a safety vehicle and run any event that I could dream up mhm and when I got out now I'm out and I try to go to a public pool and they're like yeah you need insurance you can't do anything you can't just jump do underwater training in here you can't bring weights into the pool so we basically went to the drawing

00:09:51 board and looked and said look this doesn't exist out in the real world that the the training that we did do on Bas for Special Operations in the water that preps everyone to go to dive school that preps everyone to be so resilient and be able to manage stress this is only nobody has access to that yeah so how can we test out two public pools in Southern California see if we can get insurance see if we can fill them with participants and run a program here that we could test and learn from yeah and so we had advisors

00:10:25 we had like some some good stuff that's starting out with and we we set up two pools uh north and south of Camp Pendleton and we filled them up immediately oh nice so we had like 20 to 30 participants within a week or two it was like wow yeah so uh I want to get into the uh it's underwater torpedo league right yeah that's the that's your business deep in Fitness is the core okay utl is like a CRA is like think of it like the CrossFit games that's kind of crazy okay utl is uh like Yeah The Core that's I

00:11:00 and what does that stand for underwater torpedo League underwater torpedo league but deep in Fitness is the classes uh that that you do on a regular basis yeah yeah so I want I want to dig in a thatp but I want to say for you know for a minute uh or for a number of minutes you know uh go through your your career go through the EQ and how you've kind of broke through a lot of those things at what point did you get the EQ training in that Journey so it was divine timing how it worked out because I was I was on my second year of

00:11:38 business school and I was red flagging really bad so I was I was hitting rock bottom in my transition and the the best way I could explain it is through everything that happened in the in the Marines and in uh Marine Raiders that I experienced it was I was conditioned to almost be like like a robot so uh it there was there were times in Afghanistan where sometimes every day there would be someone that died in my room that I slept in because it was the medical facility so there were lots of patience and casual and things that

00:12:17 people that I worked on that I saw expire that you know passed away that I would literally just be like a robot and you know try to get him to live as much as possible but then once it once it's over then you you deal with it and you move on to the next thing you move on to the next thing and you move on to the next thing and kind of like what your military training was teaching you is to block it don't show the weakness don't show the emotion stuff it deep down which is probably why you know we were

00:12:45 talking earlier 23 military people a day are committing suicide you said now it's even more I have heard I thought I heard now it is around 27 but uh the the last one that I understand was 23 military people a day you know Comm suicide and that's probably the reason as you were saying in boot camp you know they're teaching you to stuff the pain stuff the pressure because you actually have to have that if you go to war you got to block out the noise and the bombs and the bullets and the stress but you know

00:13:14 sustaining that that's not meant for long-term sustainability that's meant for shortterm you're a warrior and when you get out of that Warrior uh mentality and back in in a real world where you're not being shot at and bombed all the time uh it's hard to know how to adapt to how to live a normal life right exactly you like a I don't know what the exact quote is but if if a sword is too sharp can't last like the warrior cannot last with his his sword always being as sharp as it can be you have to have a down you

00:13:51 have to be able to recover you have to have that you can't just you can't just always be on yeah and to your point you know if you're in a high threat environment you have to be completely understanding of your operational environment and you have to be on when it's time to be on you have to be completely on and monit managing and monitoring all the threats which means you're making a a lot of calculations maybe maybe many calculations every minute of of everything that's going on and you're processing doing all this

00:14:24 stuff but now you come back home and you're in a restaurant or you're in a peace environment or you're in these things and you have to rete yourself how to operate in this right how to not be completely on you know and and a lot of You Know Myself included and a lot of my friends we come back yeah we've got to you know when if we sit at a restaurant we need to be facing where we can see everyone you know in the corner where we're not boxed in where everyone's behind us and all these things but at a

00:14:54 certain point we have to be able to let that down let that guard down let that let that relax a little bit um but I think the bigger thing is being able to open up like you're saying we're we're taught to compartmentalize everything yep so then how how how do you open up how what's that first step look like is that healing is it therapy is it what what's that safe space that's going to start to unlock that yeah and then in the in the military we always say you need 360° security everywhere you're at

00:15:29 that's a threat environment you need 360 all around you when you get out you know you need 360° and that's everyone for me that's you know that's my family that's my friends that's my mentors that's my advisors that's my training Partners that's my dom cruises that I can call that's in that's always in a personal development work that I can talk about the most challenging things I'm going through with my sister or my family or whatever it is and he's going to be there to say hey this is a gift for you

00:16:05 MH right this you know why because of this having those people ready in your life it you may not see it as you're transitioning out of whatever it is that you're doing but you need that perimeter around you to keep like especially for me I'll be I'll be just use myself as an example like I have teammates that have similar personality uh or characteristics as me that have ended up homeless on the street yeah and so for me I know that if I don't do the work yeah and I don't do my maintenance and I

00:16:40 don't keep stay open and keep doing the integration and keep doing the personal work and leaning into the things that are difficult yeah that there is like I'm I'm I'm I know that there's if I don't do that stuff there is always an opportunity or there is a a chance or risk that I can move backwards where I was when I got out so at what point did you do the training the the EQ training so I did uh two years out uh of the Marines Rock Bottom um Everybody uh like I had a Navy SEAL that was in my NBA

00:17:19 team at USC and he was telling me I think you're losing your mind man like I'm going to connect you he connected me with uh Marcus cap who runs the Vets organization um which I'm sure you're familiar with and then I got connected with uh someone from that organization miles my good buddy miles now that started sending me all these healing ceremonies and it was like hey there's one in La next weekend there's going to be these actors there there's going to be these Navy Seals and this it was like

00:17:51 and then no I'm not going to that and then the next one and then the next one and then I was telling him like dude I don't think you understand man like I have dark problem s and issues I don't care about going to one more networking thing the rest of my life yeah period I don't want to meet another Navy SEAL I don't want to meet another actor I want I don't I need to go if I'm going to go do this I need to go do it in a cave by myself uhuh and I've been hearing because I we're talking about the 5 Meo

00:18:19 DMT the toad Journey that's what I was getting set up for and I'd been hearing Mike Tyson's experience and Mike Tyson I always followed my whole life since I was a kid he was a heavyweight champ went to prison all these things happened to him now he had this transformational experience and he's showing up completely different than I've seen him my whole life what changed he did this healing that's the same thing that I was getting offered so I I was receptive to like wow this this has to do something

00:18:51 if it worked for Mike Tyson so long story short like you know I got to I was doing a lot of dangerous stuff throughout that time period and like driving drinking um going to my appointments in La for my traumatic brain injury and just walking around the bad neighborhoods at night and looking for trouble starting trouble doing all this stuff and um at the time I had my wife my two kids at home I had a young baby daughter and so and I was losing my mind and um so I'm thankfully enough uh I had an

00:19:25 opportunity to go do a private 5 Meo so session and uh it was it was going to be in LA and and I had like 3 weeks to prep for it and my wife was like no not three weeks like we we can't go through another weekend the way you are MH like you need something this weekend and so I called the Healer back and I hadn't met him in person yet but he was like yeah if you can get up to Northern California to this place you have to be there Friday at noon and this was Wednesday and so the next morning I drove up you

00:20:02 know 12 hours and uh when I drove up there I had my I was like a bad out of like I was out of my mind I was completely out of my mind and I had no idea about setting intentions or any of the healing work um but when I got up there I was at the very end of my rope and I remember the shaman came out from the property and he met me when I parked my car and he was like brother he's from Australia um and he looks like an Australian Jesus and he's like 110 lbs wearing robes and all this stuff and I'm

00:20:38 looking at him and he has long hair and I'm like I have no idea where where I'm at or what this is because this is so different from anything I've ever experienced but everything everything felt like I was in the right place at the right time and I I even had a crazy experience right before I turned off to get to that estate where I wanted to drive away and I was I was just like fight ORF flight at the last second where kind of like your ego is holding on to everything and like all of the the parasitic part of your your

00:21:11 personality and all this stuff is fighting for you not to let that go and it's like telling you to to go back and I felt like I I I don't want to do this and I got to the last turn and there was a family and they had a little girl in the back that was on the right side that was close to me with the window down they gave me a thumbs up and I I don't know what it was about that but it was like yeah a sign yeah I'm right where I need to be I'm moving forward I'm going right and I got to the to the gate and I

00:21:46 put in the code that they gave me opened boom and he's like brother are you going to stay here tonight when he first saw me and I said I don't know I don't know anything that I'm doing like I'm doing the ceremony I whatever happens after that I don't know in my life mhm and so um he was like okay okay so we went out and uh we did a couple rounds of the toad out there and uh the first one was like the handshake and it and after that first one I felt I learned what surrender is it's not quitting different way

00:22:22 different way different than quitting you're not a quitter it's okay let it go you're letting it go it was all these wow oh like surrender I've never understood this concept now I'm doing it now I'm actually surrendering things and what came in immediately was griev grievances are not real it's all in your head it's all every grievance you have with any person imagine that you're at the very end of your life right now and we're kicking you off a cliff does it matter no it doesn't does any of the Grievances

00:22:57 that I had with my sister my only at the time matter no does any grievances with any family member or any individual on the planet matter no no they did none of a matter and I had so many grievances at that point because at that point I had fight I was fighting with every neighbor I had every person I could I had a fight going on with everybody that I could so all those grievances started to go away and then all of a sudden I got communication from my ancestors all these different things about like like re building all of the

00:23:30 fractured relationships within the family all these things happen in that first handshake and I'm just like whoa this I've never experienced anything like this and then so okay you ready for the second one okay yeah let's do it well we're going to put you in the middle for the second one this is the this is the individual Journey okay let's do it you ready okay so countd down from 10 but this is an overdose you don't know that you think it's going to be the same as the first one but now you're going to go through a death

00:24:01 situation in that in that thing so I had a full uh crazy thing where weeks leading up to that I was driving to La for one of my appointments and I was on the 405 and I was just out of my mind like I was at that point and I was frustrated at every little thing any loud noise or light or anything that happened it would trigger my traumatic brain injury and my u all this stuff which some of it was probably a story but it's like I would let it it would throw off my whole day so now I'm stuck in and there's blocked traffic for an

00:24:40 hour and all of a sudden there's a huge wreck and we get up and there's a huge fatality where there was a huge uh 18wheeler that crossed over and went over the median and there was fatalities both ways on the 405 going north and south there's a bunch of dead B there's a bunch of people that just died in this wreck and all I could all I was I was so mad about waiting for a couple minutes and all this traffic and I get up there and that whole scene it basically took over my mind for the weeks leading up to

00:25:11 me going to that thing because I started to think what if that was me what if this is the way that my story ended and I'm in this state is what is what am I doing with my life and all these are the questions that I was in leading up and I was I kept telling people I saw this wreck the other day da da da and that wreck became me in the experience and so it was this whole thing where it played right into it and it's like the the best way I could explain it was like uh the most Vivid commercial like imagine

00:25:46 Nike's the most production money that Nike ever put towards the commercial but it's made for you for your life and your Consciousness produced it and that was what happened and it was like boom you died and it and show took me all the way through it my funeral me feeling all the loss that everybody had and then what the most powerful thing was is and this is five years ago so everything that I've done in the last five years is completely crazy compared to what I was doing at that point um and so the

00:26:20 message that I got like at the at the at the back end of that huge experience because it was very traumatic probably the most traumatic thing I've ever experienced but then it became the most beautiful thing that I had ever experienced because it started a rebirth on the back end of it and so like for a couple hours after that second journey I was wandering around this rose garden and all this stuff and I thought I was in the spirit realm oh wow I didn't believe that my car was still outside I thought

00:26:48 I was done like I thought I was everything had passed and this is the next phase yeah as I'm passing over wow and and I had I had uh felt all the loss for my wife my kids like all these people yeah and then the the the coolest part was is that on the on the final one the third it normally like when you when I when I've done the 5 Meo DMT you sit up and the shaman gives it to you and then you hold it in and then you lean back pretty much it starts yeah and it always kind of puts you back then you're closed eyes or you're under mask

00:27:30 or whatever and you're in your internal experience yeah this the third one it it brought me up and it stood me up and it started giving me all these downloads of every email that I sent and basically the seed that that planted the calls that I had made the things that I had done the trainings that I had done for people the the breakthroughs that I had led people to all these different things it showed me like this is what it amounted to right like this is without you being here anymore yeah look at what

00:28:05 all the things that you did turned into right and this is without you being part of the equation anymore and that was the most powerful thing for me to feel that because I didn't know the impact that I was having on people and I wasn't ever seeing that I was always just focused on this depression and the Darkness I was not seeing any of that so that was a huge wakeup call and then I remember getting to my car because it was me and a and a um a younger lady that went through the healing together she had her

00:28:36 own all of her own traumas in life um and eating disorders and all this stuff and just abuse and I remember both of us just looking at each other and just at our cars before we left and like giving the most powerful hug and like like don't sweat the small anymore you know and like all this stuff and uh but I remember getting my car and the message that I got was like you are going to use this to help millions of people it was like at the time I'm a swim coach you know so it didn't really compute how the mechanism how was going

00:29:15 to happen but like that was when the seed was planted the intention was locked in on like this is your thing and the the healers that were there they saw what happened because you know as soon as I hit the second one I went through a a crazy thing where you know dramatic and I was holding on them and cuz I thought I was di I died and um and um they told me you know the experience that you had is like one in thousands MH and so what you're going to come out of this with you're going to we're g to

00:29:53 we're going to hold you to understanding like doing your research but understanding the vocabulary of what you just experienced we want you to listen to the Mike Tyson podcast which I already had it's like and and so uh this is when synchronicity was introduced into my life and clues like Blues Clues synchronicity I never knew what that was but these guys are telling me you need to listen to Mike Tyson you're you're basically going to be teaching people about what you experience and you're going to be using the vocabulary you're

00:30:29 going to be putting this out into the world because right now it's a very taboo thing mhm and so you know it wasn't three weeks later that I was at this uh event in LA with uh eban Brittain who was running the hot boxing podcast with Mike Tyson at the time and he said dude he connected with me at the session and said dude I want to get you to the studio m and so the next week I got invited to go watch Mike Tyson and Guru have an open conversation about fear and love and all these things at Tyson

00:31:05 Ranch this is three weeks after the toad session y so it was like now things in my in this life are starting to unlock really fast from the what I just experienced and um and it's been that way almost ever since and so uh what I've learned is that you know sometimes it'll be funny but um someone one of my advisers will say hey have you connected with soand So lately mhm you know random Navy SEAL or this or this and it's like no I haven't why what's up you really connect with them about this thing okay

00:31:41 cool but then later later that day someone else says hey you should really connect with so and so MH it's like wow that was two people on two different things telling me to connect with this person I take a mental note now yeah before I would just no I don't want to connect so how how did that tie into the EQ training the EQ came right after that okay so I wouldn't have been open ever to go to the EQ training if I didn't get cracked open with this yeah absolutely so now I'm open right and before the

00:32:10 before that tow journey I was completely closed off I see and one thing I've learned in the in the EQ training is that I'm a resistance expert because I've been through all this resistance training mhm in case you get captured you have to know how to resist yeah and all this stuff and you go through intense training for weeks of my life has been spent prepping to resist everything in case I get captured yeah and dealing with people beating the out of me during those uh trainings sure and so you really do become a resistance

00:32:45 expert fast you know yeah and so uh but um how how I got it was Dom Dom Cruz so thankfully I had started working with dom uh after his shoulder surgery he came and started training at the pool and um Dom's just one of those guys that if he sees that you have some like uh a gap and you're open to like you're looking to personal build yourself and do this work and he's going to see it and he's going to point you in the right direction yeah is my experience and so I was helping him with a lot of stuff and

00:33:24 training and this stuff at the pool to help him get back and all this stuff so he reciprocated and said hey I know you're working on some things and you know he had me tell tell him what my goals were he said this is something I would recommend to you based off where you're at yeah right that's awesome how how did uh you know there's I guess a few different parts Discovery breakthrough and then leadership they're all kind of tied in um what was your biggest you know Discovery kind of going through I mean discover is like

00:33:55 discovering your walls that you create and how those affect you and you know your relationships in your life what was what was the discovery on that one for you man so I realized that uh there was there were some moments where they gave me positive feedback and I was in like a circle of maybe five to 10 people and they did we we went around the circle and everybody gave me positive feedback and that that's where I realized because people started just saying these really nice things to me and all of a sudden I I felt so

00:34:31 uncomfortable that I was crying and I wanted to run out of the room and I wanted to quit and it was like and and so when when we went on the next break I went out and I remember like the mountains in Vegas are right there I remember walking out by myself and just looking at the mountain and thinking what is what is the deal with me yeah you don't feel worthy I can't take like I can't take anything positive I can take negative I can take constructive feedback back in combat like if I pulled up to this building and there were

00:35:01 gunshots going off and there was people that needed medical things yeah that would go into action cool yeah let's roll what's next yeah but if you You' told me to roll up and everybody's going to give me positive feedback and I want to run out of the room what am I scared about about positive feedback why what's what's holding me back from doing that and the biggest motivation for me is like if I can't do this then what example am i setting for my kids right so I have to figure this out yeah and uh

00:35:32 and so it was the lesson for me was um I wasn't able to receive I wasn't able to receive I was giving I was give give give and Coach coach was it like a worthiness conversation uh why do you feel like you you couldn't receive positive feedback I think that it was never part of my childhood and I I grew up a big part like um when my parents divorced in eighth grade um I lived on my own at the beginning of high school and then I went to boarding school and so I didn't have I had like a drill instructor at

00:36:08 boarding school you know I didn't have my parents during high school or any of that stuff that that gave me so that was missing in my life and then uh when I went into the Marines that was my comfort zone because you don't have any of that right there's none of that you don't have to ever worry about that and and so that was my that was my weakness that I had avoided and now I needed to be able to na to step into that uncomfortable Zone to learn what was happening and how to deal with it yeah so it was such a new it was new New

00:36:43 Concept positive feedback I should be able to accept as a normal human being yeah for for me it was uh I was carrying around all this blame I I learned the difference between blame uh which I put on myself and personal responsibility so there's a difference between blaming yourself and being personally responsible I didn't understand that distinction up until you know Discovery and once I figured that out it was like the biggest weight off my shoulders because I could stop carrying this blame that I was putting

00:37:12 on myself for everything that's happened in my life that uh might have been uh bad at the time and you know by letting that go and understanding well I can be personally responsible uh to how I react to it in the future yes certain things happen I might have made mistak mistakes people might have done me wrong uh whatever it is but I don't have to carry the blame of maybe that relationship not working out or this or that or whatever it was and that was the big you know discovery of you know a a giant weight

00:37:42 that I was carrying a big wall uh where I didn't want to let people in because I didn't want to carry this blame if some X Y or Z you know didn't work out and then you go to breakthrough you know breakthrough is Breaking Down the Walls what did you uh what did you break through uh on that second weekend a lot I feel like so the there's for me you know I was in an Insider attack in Afghanistan that's why I got medically separated but I was my I lived in a enemy Village and I work I had a army or

00:38:19 Afghan Special Forces team that lived in the compound with me and we fought every day all of us in that out of that compound you know because we would get attacked every day from the village and one day uh I woke up and um one of the Afghan Special Forces guys had set up everything in the tower to attack us and so normally they're focused out and they're holding security but uh I was the only one awake at the time because I got called out to talk to someone a local that I worked with at the gate so

00:38:53 7:30 in the morning and then I come back in and I'm kind of still out of it and I sit down and I got hit with a rocket propelled grenade then I got hit with a bunch of following rocket propelled grenades so I was unconscious and is that where your traumatic brain injury comes from that's a that's one of them yeah that's a that's one of the major ones for sure um but uh it's kind of a big um part of my life because it created such a trust issue for me because The Insider attack on top of all the other

00:39:23 trust issues I already had so I think breaking through a lot of my trust issues and realizing that if I never take any more risk or trust anyone you're not going to get hurt yeah but I'm also not able to have any relationship exactly as the air qut you're not going to get hurt but ultimately you're just tearing yourselfself up on the inside which is part of the reason why you're having 23 or 27 military people a day die because we're all doing the best with what we've been taught we're trying to make sense

00:39:54 of Life the very best that we can but if you haven't been taught of the ways to look at things or other ways to uh process things um you know you don't know any better and it's going to eat you up inside and so yeah I could see how you know was Insider attack well the first thing that comes to mind is oh I'm not going to let anybody in because when I let somebody in they stab me in the back and blow me up exactly right yep that's the subcon that's the story yeah that's a story so there's uh at at

00:40:26 breakthrough there's like you know in the scene in fight the scenes in Fight Club where Edward Norton goes to those sessions and he's hugging Bob oh yeah he's crying big big boob Bob that was me at breakthrough and hugging random strangers that were in my class you know that were now human beings to me yeah and now I'm so you're seeing them as human beings and yeah where open up and not the these people that can hurt you right yeah yes not looking at everyone as a threat being able to open and and

00:40:59 do this stuff and so I think the other part is the Judgment that I that you just naturally come with and like protecting yourself and all this stuff y that you have judgment for every person that you see based off of all of your interactions with everyone you've ever had in your whole life all your experiences yeah yes and so uh there were there were these gifts that I had where I was partnered with this individual um on a one-on-one exercise and when I first looked at him maybe I judged him and said oh well you can't

00:41:33 even tie your shoes you look kind of creepy cuz you're 40 years old and you're not tying your shoes properly and you look like you know whatever blah blah blah like you drive a creeper van right right that's my initial judgment initial judgment yep but then I talk to them and they would confide and tell me things about you know what their life was like growing up and how they now I started to see with the right questions that I asked what happened how they showed up like this what is the things

00:42:04 that are driving them to show up like that absolutely which is like under the they show this graphic of an iceberg you only see the top that's above the water right but what about everything down low that's driving everyone to show up and do everything that they're doing that's right we don't take the time to and so uh yeah the EQ it's and it it reminded me of cuz when I got out and I had such bad brain uh issues with the traumatic brain injury I was getting put into eoin therapy and I never been around horses

00:42:37 before but I noticed that was my first uh EQ work or assignment because I realized like I can't just walk in here to the this Clydesdale stall because he can stomp me out in like two seconds so what I need to do is mar is assess his energy and then I need to marry up my energy with his and then that's how he's going to let me brush him right I can't just come in and say hey I only have 5 minutes I'm going to brush you out he's going to stomp me out of the room so I have to appro so but I always think back like what if we

00:43:11 treated humans like that right what if like well so you know what you're saying right now you know because there's certain people like oh uh Choice Center is a cult and I laugh because you know what you're saying is you opened up to where you you realize the judgments that we put on people without really even knowing it just from all the things that we've been taught we look at people might judge them in a certain way uh you found out how to connect with human beings again and love and that outer

00:43:43 appearance is so weird to society that all of a sudden there's got to be something you know uh something wrong and you know it's sad when Love Like Loving uh other individuals and connecting with people and forgiving yourself and forgiving others and uh fixing relationships with your families you know becomes weird but I think that's kind of how Society has conditioned us absolutely and also like just like with anything maybe it's the 8020 rule yeah but there's always a high vibration and there's people that are

00:44:22 like at the top of there's the 20% that are creating the 80% of the results yeah there's going to be that yeah and so maybe that's us you know maybe that's like you know like people that we hang out with within the thing or whatever that are all you know doing everything that they can to break through and be open and learn and all this stuff but it's also everybody's going to some people that are there people will look for an excuse too and that's where I think that comes from because it's like

00:44:52 what what's going to give me permission to not do this work by judging it and putting a name on it it now that gives me an out yeah I saw I saw Dom taking a little heat I was I was kind of laughing uh I was actually texting him the other day messing with him like Hey I guess I guess we're the cult leaders in but um you know I haven't been by the way I haven't been to a class in a couple years oh wow so um I was thinking about that oh I guess if it was a cult they would be you know it's clearly they're

00:45:19 forcing me to go I mean like no I'm I'm still friends with everybody and uh you know but the work was the most impactful thing that I've ever done done yeah I mean you know and I've been in a bunch of Mastermind groups had a lot of success in business and so value is something I see in these these types of programs and I'll see people like it's $3,000 I'm like $3,000 per1 like I would I would pay like I would pay 100 Grand I mean actually if I knew I were going to get the results that I got from it I

00:45:49 would you know pay we open the hospital because of know uh Choice Center and Leadership it was part of one of my three goals in in leadership we 90% of it done in 100 days I've been working on it for four years before that wow and so I mean it's like you know it's hard it's hard to put a price tag on that but you know I look at uh I look at the the naysayers which is fine I mean people can say whatever but I mean if you look at like discovering breakthrough I would say 97% of people uh that you know that get

00:46:21 through breakthrough are like one of the big best experiences of the life maybe 3% are are bad going through leadership you get a lot of people dropping out because it's hard and um there's a lot of things that'll push your buttons in there and so a lot of people drop out and it's not the it's not the easiest thing it's designed to that's the design um so uh but the impact of it and here's my other thought of it I wondered it's not that people that aren't as successful can't get a lot out of it

00:46:47 because but it's it seems like those that have operated at a high level before really do the best or if they've competed in sports or they were really good you know I if if they've gone all in on something before and had they they know that have that that in them this helps unlock that really to the next level because you're getting so many tools yeah so if you're you're paying attention like you're going to be like wow this is a tool I could have used right I haven't had yet well what about like win-win I mean people you know

00:47:20 people play Life yeah they play Life win lose like I win you lose you win I it's like it's always that competition when I went through in 2014 I mean ever since then I've lived my life and and business that way where if I do a deal I want everybody to win I don't want to be I'm winning in this deal and somebody else is getting a bad deal it's like how do we make a good deal for everybody uh because you know what's the most important thing relationships you know and let's say I do a deal and you know it's a it screws

00:47:56 the other person person over in a way uh I might hurt that relationship forever and those relationships are worth a lot more than exactly deals if that makes sense absolutely that was something big I I came out well when when when you went through the exercise that focuses on that which we won't go into exactly what it is to not ruin the experience for somebody but uh what was your take away from from that I think I was noticing that and this was part of my judgment too but I was only wanting to click with high

00:48:36 performing people MH and it was like I'm a special operations guy y I work with UFC fighters NFL athletes Olympians blah blah blah I don't want to hang out with normies yeah I don't want to work with I don't want to you know do a exercise with a regular person right that was me back so much yeah absolutely and it was an excuse because I didn't have the tools to connect with every person right so I was using that story and that excuse It's like what can they do for me right when in reality a lot of times

00:49:11 well I mean they do so much for at any level you can have somebody who's homeless that could touch you in a certain way that's impactful yes anybody yeah I mean I had a guy uh at when I was pumping gas in San Clemente two days ago before I went to my office and and I hear someone screaming at me when I'm in my car and I look up and there's an older man that's he's not homeless he's clean cut he's got coffees he's giving out to people on the street and he's yelling at me telling me God fills my soul and all these different things and

00:49:44 I'm like yes I get out I'm like give hit me hit me you know and uh but before this training I wouldn't have been open to random person on the street connecting like that yeah um and now that's the magic of life yeah anybody that sits next to me on the plane whoever it is you never know what you're going to learn from someone or what what the takeaway is going to be or what you might be able to say to them yeah absolutely so and you were talking about the the iceberg and we only see the tip and everything that's underneath that

00:50:14 they go through you know we don't know what other people go through that cause them to be a certain way that caused them to tell certain stories that give them those limiting beliefs that keep them from being who they really can be and so that's one of the biggest takeaways too is is like really knowing that there's a lot of people who been through a lot of and who are we to judge them uh for whatever uh they might look like to us on the outside absolutely it's powerful it's powerful it's a better to me it's a better way to

00:50:47 live and um yeah the whole idea of being outward Focus constantly one of my favorite quotes from Choice centers win and doubt Focus out like if you're having a bad they go feed the Homeless go help somebody a hack yeah it's a hack it's a hack a hack of Happiness yeah you know Dom talks about it a lot like you know ultimately with a lot of the the therapies and stuff out there is they teach you to be a victim you know to your circumstance and if you keep bringing up this victim story and you tell yourself well I can't do this

00:51:18 because I'm a victim to these circumstances or I can't be that because this happened to me you you're basically a slave to that circumstance yes uh but you know standing responsible that makes people really depressed you know when you don't feel like you have any control over your life or any way out or any way better and you're blaming all these other circumstances on uh why you can't be whatever you want to be uh that makes a depressed and sad Society absolutely and uh but when you take responsibility

00:51:49 for it and say you know what I'm not going to be a slave to that circumstance that happened 20 years ago I'm not going to be a slave to this uh thing that uh and the story that I tell of why I can't be or do or or uh you know have whatever I really want once you realize that's all yeah uh and you can take personal responsibility it's it's lifechanging yeah um what was that like for you like when you had that you know personal responsibility is a big tenant of it when you had that Discovery that's

00:52:20 Al you know it's it's on it's on you so I had this talk with with dom because I was one of the one of the stories that I was in was an introvert story cuz are you an extrovert or an introvert me I'm an I'm an introvert I need to be by myself I need my time to recover I need to recharge my battery and I was so into that story that I was like I can't be in a room for with a hundred people for more than a couple hours I need to get back to my safe space the story your safe space the story it's all the story right so it was

00:52:56 like it having that that's why it's great to have those that those accountability Partners that's very necessary in this process to have that real feedback of Dom my homie but also my friend that's gonna say nah man that the introvert that's a story that you're that you're telling me right it doesn't have to be real yeah and the same thing goes with I was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder sad yep story yeah story yeah exactly and I you can I can hold on to that and I can hide behind it and use it as an excuse and I can build

00:53:33 it up or I can just tear it down to the ground and throw it off the mountain right I mean think about what you're saying what you're saying is so powerful because you know so you have been diagnosed medical diagnosis social anxiety disorder and you think about every time something's not going your way you could easily uh say well I have social anxiety disorder and this is why I can't do X Y and Z and oh this is the reason why I can't be successful or you could recognize it it's largely I mean it's a thing don't get me wrong but it's

00:54:13 it's not it doesn't Define you and if you strip that definition of that's who you are uh and not use that as an excuse how many times has social anxiety order actually held you back from being whoever you want to be a lot yeah and once you cut that story out I mean it doesn't mean it's not not there sometimes but it's not that fall back of I can't do it because of that right no no and humans are the most adaptable beings right and so what I've noticed is even like I used to not take flights all

00:54:48 the time because I don't want to be in the airport I don't want to do all this but with my work schedule this year I've been on flights sometimes multiple a week and so even I'm noticing that even last night my flights got all messed up coming out here I didn't get in till 2: a.m. I was unfaced I'm not F I was not phased by it where before with the introvert with the social anxiety with all this stuff it's just so much yeah yeah let it it's just it's it's all a trap and so it's so awesome to have that course to be able

00:55:21 to have that realization yeah and then once you realize it you can identify it and see it then you could start to work work with it and not let it control you absolutely yeah it's one of those things it takes a lot of practice too you know here people are listening it's not like you just go through a course and all of a sudden no I don't have to deal with this it's not that you just recognize it and there's an awareness uh you know to it you know so having that awareness then you can actually you know identify and say okay

00:55:49 I'm going to either choose to use this as a crutch or I'm going to choose something different and uh you know not let it not not be a slave to that social anxiety disorder absolutely partner with it partner with it yeah yeah exactly um did you ever do the was it uh Mastery with uh Jorge I uh I did Mastery I've done it twice I think but it was with uh blinking on his name Michael Michael yeah and I did I did the I did the journey within too nice that was that was a huge value yeah that was uh it's a six like a six Monon course

00:56:30 right you're going you go three times in six months I believe do calls once a week yeah that was uh that was a good one as well I mean you really uh it's working a lot with uh dosm you know the the yin and the Yang yeah and you do Shadow work which is which scares people if you if they don't know what it is and explain can if you were to explain what shadow work is what what was Shadow work for you so the best way to explain for me is I believe we all have that Mr Hyde and Dr Jackal so for me I'm Dr Jackal

00:57:08 right now this is my Dr Jackal era but the the Mr Hyde was the person that would come out like when I would drink in the Marine Corps and I would get it I would start these huge fires and I would create all this chaos and all this stuff while I was blacked out drunk and I would assault people I would do all this stuff because they pissed me off during the work day mhm but I but I let it go let it go yeah yeah yeah you can yell at me and do all this stuff because all these all the officers are around or

00:57:37 whatever it was yeah but then at night I would have some drinks and I would Mr Hyde would take over Dr jackal's gone now and now crazy would break loose and I never and I would black out so I could never remember what happened the next morning and I would get into huge trouble and I almost got kicked out of the Marine Corps within two years I would get into huge trouble sometimes every week all the time right and it was and it was frustrating to me a lot too because when I would get woken up in the

00:58:07 morning and there would be all these people around me some of them were my good friends at the time that would be like it's wrong with you man like get like that it was like get like what yeah I don't remember anything yeah and it was just that I had no control over that shadow and so and obviously when I would drink it would come out right so Shadow work to me is being able to identify and see what your shadow looks like and watch it and like and and and also uh have an outlet or an out or Outlets to

00:58:40 let it come out yeah and so don you know Dom and and other people have have been really good mentors and like being able to figure some of this stuff out uh and for example um I don't I'm not a a fighter or anything like that like I'm I've been out of the military for seven years but I train kickboxing one hour every week with Carl in San Diego who's Dom striking coach who's amazing yeah but he I get that hour and that is full Shadow work because within that hour he knows that I have things going on people you

00:59:22 know I have fires I'm putting out that week I have people that are probably crossing boundaries have all these different things that are happening that happen in life yeah that I get to now let my let my shadow off the leash and be as violent as I want on the pads be as devastating do as what the the most you know violence that I can create on the paths and it's such a release that when I get back into my car I don't take meds but it's like a bunch of anxiety medicine it's like I feel like a new

00:59:57 person much better well you know you think CU you know you're you're a literal Warrior you know Special Operations Marine Raiders um taught to go to war and you know is there any way to really completely turn it off probably not and to have that outlet to have that recognition within uh is it probably help a lot of other people in the military you know and some of them are not in a physical condition to where they can do it though sadly but I think that outlet is super important and and recognizing you know cuz a lot of times

01:00:35 people's Shadow they feel so guilty about their shadow that it just eats them up too you know I mean uh the shadow that could come out at War uh has to tear some people up with the fact that they were they were able to do some of those well I say horrible things but like in war you know you're at War you've got to kill certain people and which to me is a horrible thing doesn't make you a horrible person it's a horrible act as a human you know yeah and um of course you know different countries we fight that's fine but as a

01:01:09 human we feel you know it's it's it's not it's not good to kill other humans of course not and so that's hard I'm sure for I've never killed anybody thankfully but it's hard for uh people to get over that they had to drop into that shadow Shadow to release that uh uh death on somebody and so when people actually recognize what it is and can release it in the future after they've been to war or release in the future on pads or through extreme exercise or through whatever it is that's got to be a I say a more common sense release than

01:01:54 uh internalizing it and having 23 to seven military people a day committing suicide absolutely man I I I I I get to take veterans to striking with me sometimes cuz it's a special deal that I get to work with Coach Carl sure so I'll bring in sometimes two to three veterans with me during my hour and uh what I've seen is that it's it's a crazy it's like a primal Outlet unleashing MH and I've had several of them cry m or have like an emotional response after they got to have like a their like one five their

01:02:32 first five minute just round just full going off yep it's like putting my arm on their shoulder whatever and it's like what's up man and it's like you have no idea how much I needed this yeah it's like that's why I wanted you to come you know but it's like yes dude you can let this out yeah like whatever it is and some and sometimes jiujitsu and sparring rounds can get that same thing but you gotta you got to find an outlet whatever whatever it is because it goes back to what I was saying we compartmentalize everything we hold

01:03:03 everything in yeah we need to know how to do that The Green Mile where we get it all out you know and uh and so um can't stress it enough that's breaking that stigma as men yeah to say hey whoever you are whatever your background is whatever you got going on setting an example when you have something seriously bothering you or something going on that you get that you ask that you speak up you ask for help you go get help because I firmly believe as we heal ourselves we Heal the World yeah heal yourself heal your family it's

01:03:38 a ripple effect goes out to your whole tribe everybody that's connected to you and then it continues to go for every person that I see that goes to choice that I've sent creates a ripple effect throughout their their whole life throughout their whole bloodline throughout their whole everything um our buddy that was the best chef you know that we knew that then started his restaurant we call him Chef right we call him chef but it's like there's countless stories like that yeah right and uh and there it's possible for any

01:04:11 of us um one of the coolest things that uh my brother-in-law is is figuring out right now who's in there right now is like it's all in our minds we literally get to control the frame and perspective of every experience that we've been through so we could frame it in the victim yeah or we could frame it as the Victor that's right there's two ways to do that imagine how much better life is when you can frame things as the Victor instead of being the victim you know victim's powerless victim is this happened to me

01:04:49 and I am you know I'm hurt I'm this I'm that I'm not that victims are weak I don't mean that I'm not saying that there are times where there are victims absolutely not saying that but when you identify as a victim over and over and over again you're you show me someone who always identifies as a victim and I'll show you somebody who's miserable absolutely miserable people you know that's that's just that's the framing of it that's that's I'm a victim woe is me uh all these things are coming at me I'm

01:05:20 oppressed I'm marginalized you know I'm just a victim to society's whatever Absolut they miserable how can they be happy because they have no power when they give all their power away to victimhood they have no power to F some self pride you know they they don't have that it's I'm a victim they're they're they're PR they're proud they're victims it's just like the most powerless version of a human that you can get yeah and I it's it's crazy because it I I feel like everybody gets it from somewhere it s off on them from their

01:05:57 mom or from their friend or from this or from that and a huge learning that I've had since getting out is that because unfortunately uh not every veteran wants the best for me or wants the best for us right so it's like it can be and it has felt at a lot of times since I've gotten out like some of the veteran Community is like a bucket of crabs yeah right why don't you need to put a b a a lid on a bucket of crabs no because they'll pull everybody down yes they'll just keep pulling you down crabs

01:06:32 in a bucket that's right right so if you find yourself in an environment or in a crew or in that your friends are a bucket of crabs you need to get the F out that's right need to get out yeah and there's a a a transformational process that lobsters go through where they break away from all their lobster friends and they go underneath a rock or whatever it is because they're going to grow their new shell oh okay they can't just do that they continue to play with all their friends and keep doing the

01:07:03 things that they're all doing so obviously when they go to go under the Rock and they leave their friends it kind of creates an issue and they're kind of leaving their crew yeah but they have to at some point to transform that's right so one of the best uh experiences that I have in the Marines these days is I I run a program for suicide prevention and resilience and also water confidence uh for the Marine Corps and so I get to go do uh leadership discussions and then I get to take like hundreds of Marines to the

01:07:37 pool to build water confidence right before they go to deployment so it's a two-hour talk and then we take them and do something real so it's not just all all talk yeah it's talk and action but with those talks the biggest question that I get from the Marines after my talk is hey if I really want to make a change and I feel like my friends are holding me back how do you navigate that I'm like that's a great that's the questions that I'm this is why I'm here yeah this is what I went through what how you

01:08:06 navigate it is you need people in your corner that could be your family for me it was my grandparents that's I'm a fighter they're in my corner they're cornering me through life right that's important that that grounds you and aligns you with the your biggest priorities in life right it is are your friends in your corner corner or not so that's your first thing who's in your corner and then who do you need to communicate with what you're telling me now that you want to make a change in your life right if you can't tell your

01:08:38 friends they're not your friends that's right period they don't want you to move up which and and everybody's at where they're at in life I've been there we've all been there we've all been in Low Places we've all been in bad spots if you're not in a position where you can help yourself how can you help your friend MH so um and then we all like serving others is such a huge part of life and it's such a rewarding and amazing part of life and so for anyone that is in that work it it's like working with veterans I'm here to help

01:09:11 it's like I'm a lifeguard I'm it's the same as lifeguarding in lifeguarding especially Advanced lifeguarding you have to have combatives to save yourself from Bad situations because people will drown you drowning victims their last thing is to take the Lifeguard down with them you have to have combatives to get out of that situation and then process it and deal with it so same thing is for a drowning victim in Life or someone that's not doing well it's like hey I'm here to help what what resources can I

01:09:40 give you what things can I get can I throw you a rescue raft can I throw you this thing I'm going to throw this out can you hold on to it if you're not willing to do anything I'm not going to come all the way in and let you drown me I need to see that you're will that you're moving right you're making steps to help help yourself and that's I don't know if that fully lands but that's like you know with friends and and people cuz I mean I've lost uh we were talking before this but I've lost two teammates

01:10:08 and really good friends in the last six weeks and they both died within eight days yeah so yeah so yeah you lost two teammates that you were at battle with in the LA and and over the last six weeks you lost two of them within eight days of each other both to Suicide um how has that had you know an impact and what like as you're processing it and and making sense of it how have you how have you done that so uh both of them uh were really close in different ways and spent a lot of time with them some overseas some back here

01:10:54 training some getting going into real life all these things and uh so uh Dan Smith and then Georgio cillo uh were my two friends and um they uh after the after Dan passed away that week I was in serious trouble like just I was not I was trying to keep my cool but I was had like my it felt like my post-traumatic stress was like overflowing so I was being really short with my kids and I was having to apologize him I'm sorry um all this stuff and then I think by uh he passed away on Sunday I think by like Wednesday

01:11:40 my wife was like hey I'm just going to get you a hotel by the beach so you can go and decompress and so um I uh I went and uh slept on the beach I didn't sleep in the room I slept outside and I had like a powerful experience where I felt like I heard my friend talking to me and I felt connected to him um and uh and so I had my my way of processing that um and then um the second one uh was really hard Gio uh because I worked closely with him we worked in a capacity where it was just me and him working out of the embassy

01:12:24 and uh where we were running missions in certain countries together so um we had a lot of time together with just me him and a driver and stuff and I had nicknamed him the situation because he would always have these meltdowns and so I was like you know I it's it's like a Bittersweet thing because you know you you anytime someone passes away it seems like it's an our natural coping or our whatever the healing process is that all the memories of that you've had of them they come in and you start to it hits you so hard and

01:13:00 then you start to process them and so uh one of the things that um that's helped me navigate is I've done uh some dedications to both of them both on social media and then just like out in the in the world that uh that have gotten um that I've got to like basically tell them you know uh share their legacy MH uh and the meaning that they had to me uh in a on a big big stage and in big areas which will be coming out in the coming months but um those were things that um I felt called to do um and uh

01:13:46 so um I have a a integration therapist that is um that see sometimes like maybe two three times a year um or more regularly and uh I met I've started working with her after my toad ceremonies I got connected with her so it's a different wide open yeah yeah and so uh she has uh she's a medium so she's able to read things and give me readings and messages stuff that I don't know about myself so when I sat down I went to therapy after I had the two friends lost M and uh I hadn't been in 6 months and when I sat down she

01:14:31 didn't I didn't say anything to her and she the first thing she said to me was um your friends want you to know that there's worse things in this world than dying wow and that um they both still have all their chakras and they haven't lost any affinity for anything wow oh well that was uh what what what did you think when she said that I I cried yeah yeah it was like a huge emotional um moment yeah when you have friends like that die do you have any you carry any blame on yourself like I wish I

01:15:11 would have done X Y or Z are you able to let that go so uh yeah there's definitely blame that comes up um and uh specifically with this case uh my my buddy Dan um the last time I was in Austin uh he was texting me um you know where are you going to be um I'm running I was running a training so I was at multiple addresses and I was giving him the updates uh but he never showed up and then uh we run a charity organization we have mentors from all over the country that are from different Special Operations backgrounds and

01:15:52 civilians and all the stuff that work together on this type of mission M and he had supposed to be on the one of the planning calls and he was texting me hey I'm gonna be I'll see you on the call d d and then he didn't show up and so and then the two weeks later he's dead and so I thought man why didn't I just take that extra time when he didn't show up in Austin yeah and when he didn't show up on the call and just say dude what is going on bro you're not showing up you're supposed to be here you're

01:16:27 supposed to be there you're telling me everything's great with your job what's really going on yeah there was so much that I there were so many questions that I could have asked yeah um but in the same breath like I can't hold myself responsible that's right so um that's got to be the hardest I I could imagine you know knowing you have a good heart and you care about people you know um it's it's it would be easy to blame our I could have made the call Etc but the reality is you know you think about

01:16:57 all the people that we uh have in our lives either that we're really close to or that we consider friends but we're not that close to we're not talking to them every day every week every month even and um you know it's easy to say I wish I would have called but you know we're all doing the very best with you know what we've been taught and you're you know on the grind helping veterans uh do doing speeches um being outward focused and uh it's you know you can only do so much so the reason I ask I just don't you know I can imagine it

01:17:38 be easy to kind of look at that and be hard on yourself but um you know you're doing the best that you can you're doing more than 99.9% of people out there to make a difference in this type of thing that's awful and that we see you're giving it exposure you're you know talking about it openly you're uh going through things that have helped you uh all to help other people you know so um yeah it's easy for me to say don't carry that that blame but maybe just to remind you yeah you know hey it's not on you

01:18:14 dude at all and um you know think about all the people that you've save by being there for them you know and uh yeah it's hard when you're dealing with a lot of people in the military that are committing suicide 23 to 27 a day let's say um you know how do you call everybody back or catch every sign without being almost paranoid all the time then that oh I got to make sure that I you know then you're not taking care of yourself too it is yeah it's uh you got to protect your own energy it's that oxygen Mass thing they tell you in

01:18:48 the airplane that's right anything happens you got to get your oxygen mask on first yeah got to keep your oxygen mask on and life especially with family and friends all the different you know responsibilities and stuff it's important to to keep that on so um that's goes back to what I just said because I work with a lot of veterans and if I feel like they're trying to drown me and they're not they're not actually here to move forward or do work then at a certain point it's like okay that we're not we're not aligned on the

01:19:20 criteria here yeah um and then there's other criteria you know so but uh but everything is a Learning lesson and and one of the things that I've taken away from having so many friends pass away over the last couple years that were in the wars and then survived being in Iraq and Afghanistan and then once they got back home they did not survive transitioning and integrating back into society and so uh it's been a it's been a a a growth process with that too because at first I would blame them and

01:19:54 say how could you do this how could you quit how could you check out on us how could you leave your family how could you do all that stuff and it's really evolved into I have no judgment for any of my friends that took their life because I didn't know I don't I wasn't there experiencing their Iceberg and everything that they were experiencing in their emotions stuff and if you could have put yourself in my in my experience right before I went to do my toad thing yeah you might have checked out too

01:20:25 that's right because it was such a horrible dayto day that how long it's it's not sustainable sometimes maybe maybe maybe not maybe maybe not but instead of judging them or trying to find the right or wrong on their end none of that I don't do it like I challenged myself to never do that again uh because that was their decision and that was my friend so no matter what no matter as hard as it is for me I have to honor them in whatever they did yeah so it's really hard yeah I mean I I can see that and uh you

01:21:05 know I don't think as human beings we're meant to go to war I mean as far as kill multiple people and be put in that situation and the impact that has is uh we're seeing it now you know I think we're seeing it more in society now than probably ever before I don't know the numbers of people that came back from Vietnam and World War II and committed suicide but society's teaching us a lot of different things and uh you know with social media I feel like it's probably more prevalent you know these these

01:21:43 desires or this you know uh image of oh well this is a happy life because it seems like everybody on social media is happy and they're showing their best life and you know you're a soldier that is coming back from war and you know it's in in in many ways very superficial and that superficialness probably uh warps our mind into thinking it's real but it's not real these lives that we're seeing people live on social media and aren't real the division that the media creates right now between the left versus right I mean they create

01:22:21 real division but the issues that they're talking about about aren't real issues the average person doesn't care wouldn't care yet they make it front and center to to cause division so you have this kind of perfect storm in the world right now where people are coming back and they're coming into this we know it's that's the other part imagine going and fighting in war making this huge sacrifice doing things that nobody else uh could do and coming back and just seeing all the and knowing it's um you know convincing us that men can

01:22:59 get pregnant for example a small one but I think about how that would impact like we know that's why are they pushing this and I think it's causing people to snap and I think the people in the military are some of the ones they don't want to be okay because they know how strong they are and they know uh that they they understand war and combat and so there's a lot of things going on right now that are driving up these numbers yeah and um you know just know I'm here you know to support you and what you do for so many other people is

01:23:39 seen and appreciated well you do support us and uh I definitely want to I I I want to bring this up but when I got out I was medically retired I walked with a CR I walked like with a a crutch and didn't you know uh my back I never thought that I was going to recover and be able to walk run do all these things because my lower back the l5s one was completely blown out and that was my back was always spasmed so I didn't have anything going down the leg but my middle back and my whole back was always locked up

01:24:15 and spasming MH so if I sat if I went on a flight if I did anything I would be in really bad shape and um I was throwing my back out once a month and I couldn't walk for a few days and this has been going on for so long and in the in the Marines they sent me to get a spinal fusion and when I got there the surgeon was like guy you're so young man like you get this bottom disc fused the next one's going to go out the next one's going to go out and it's a domino effect so if I were you I would get out and I

01:24:46 would find a different type of modality to work on this yeah right and so what is that nobody knew all the disc experts didn't know anything about discs that was like a big game of what is your real job how who knows anything here about this nobody in the VA or or Naval Hospital could give me any positive advice besides putting me back into Physical Therapy giving me pain meds doing yeah none of that I've been doing that for 10 years so uh at one point I was supposed to fly to Miami this this one week this is like four or

01:25:22 five years ago and I threw my back out so I was now I'm not going on the trip and D was like oh you gotta you know you gotta go see uh roie in San Diego so I went to roie and I got fixed up but then afterwards he's like no you got to get stem cell and so that was when uh I think Dr Matt was out there and like staying at Dom's house sometimes so that was my first stem cell was like while my back was thrown out and like I was in bad shape I got this first stem cell in my lower back or uh into the ve

01:25:55 and then they put a bunch of inflammation shots in the lower back M and I remember getting up cuz I still had Nova I still had the numbing Med on yeah and he was saying hey turn to this side turn to this side tell me how it feels he's like this feels great man but I wasn't believing it because I've already played that game and all these other little surgeries and things I had like burning all my nerves off that didn't do anything horrible surgeries that were super painful that did nothing yeah and then what the way they got me

01:26:25 is they had me all Nova caned up and they said all right now do this now do this you feel that that's how it feels now but once they wore off once the numbing were off it was back to it was even worse than before yeah so he's having me do all this and I was like wow wow yeah and that it didn't go away and so the stem cells was the game changer that's awesome game changer and so I haven't been to the VA for any appointments and this is another thing if anybody gets VA disability you stop going to your appointments and you don't

01:26:59 take your meds they lower your disability so the point is is just I mean it's it sounds horrible but one get a lawyer so that they can get your money if that's what you care about but do not put yourself on all these meds just so you can get disability pay protect yourself protect your body protect your mind know what's going on as soon as I stop taking my meds and I stop filling my prescriptions my disability went from 180% to 170 to 160 all the way down to 90% over the last two years wow so they're going to continue lowering it

01:27:37 and they might continue lowering it down to and so lawyer but I'm not going to go and take a bunch of meds so that you can up my disability back to 100% right I have buddies that are not here because they took the meds that you put them on they lost their mind yeah what's Wild is you know the VA my my parents go to the VA you know both of my parents were in the Army and it's awful man the way they treat I mean we just got my mom uh uh private healthcare in Nashville um but the VA what they did to them both my mom

01:28:17 and my dad it's embarrassing y I mean my mom had rheumatory arthritis number one uh well not number one but one of the main side effects is heart disease I thought they were doing um you know testing her heart here so she came down about six weeks ago to Mexico uh and we did a echo cardiogram and it turns out she had heart disease she had thickening in the valves and the VA didn't even look at this in the last 10 years you know thank God we caught it yeah and so we sent her to a cardiologist here and they're

01:28:57 they're they're working on it but if she wouldn't have come to us we wouldn't have known and she would have had a damn heart attack that's that's the VA they weren't monitoring her uh specific ra numbers like they were supposed to and this is a rheumatologist at the damn VA and I'm like what in the world is is going I feel B talk about like a little guilt because I'm like why didn't I do the echocardiogram years ago for my mom I just was thinking it's Common Sense yeah so this I I had some questions

01:29:31 recently and that's why we ran the echo cardiogram I'm like you know what I want to just see here yeah some couple things aren't adding up yeah but the VA man I'm I'm really you know actually disgusted by how they've treated my parents and the idea that you have veterans that are uh sacrificing for our country who are risking their lives who are coming back who are committing suicide from 23 or 27 a day and we can't even take care of them with Health Care like what what the hell is going on in this world and why

01:30:07 aren't more people outraged you know so the the VA system it's it's got to be completely just torn apart and rebuilt in a logical way that actually takes care of people without by the way without giving them a million Medicaid absolutely the fact that you were on 15 to 17 I mean I understand certain pain or maybe a nerve block what whatever but bro you don't need medication for the most part I mean like there's times maybe when it makes sense but to have you on something regularly 15 I mean dude I don't take any medications you

01:30:45 know I mean are you taking uh I mean you so you're not taking anything now yeah so I mean you I might take Ibuprofen every now and then for a headache yeah or Tylenol like Tylenol better for a headache but like no regular day-to-day pills no and it's normal for people to be on 15 medications how old were you when you got out what was I 33 yeah 33 years old and the military had you on 15 medications how many psych med meds were were were like like yeah three three so three psych meds yeah I'm like

01:31:21 God and they kept putting me on more and I would tell them like hey this is creating all these weird side effects like that are not like good for my relationship with my wife and anything else like I'm can't function right and they'd be like well we need to calm down your Vagas nerve so I know this anti-depressant didn't work but we're going to try this other one out because we need to have you can't we need you on this and even when I came back uh it was funny because I went back to the VA after the toad ceremonies yeah and I was

01:31:51 like no like I I I had all my test tests done uh at operation men which is a nonprofit out of UCLA and so I had the best doctors like 30 a staff of 30 do all my uh neuro like neurological all my studies and they were horrible and then I went and and they were going to put me in a six- week inpatient program because I was so bad Y and then I came back and got everything shown after I did the toad and it was it was 180 degre shift I was great and so I I had some of the doctors were crying when they were

01:32:29 showing me the results and also because they knew me personally wait what what what was what were the tests they were doing so I was part of a program called operation mend at UCLA Medical and it was a special nonprofit that basically uh deals with traumatic brain injury or anything that is not getting met at the VA yeah and you're in Special Operations or whatever you can get into that and they can they can help you with it so it was a highlevel thing and at the time that is when I was rock bottom and so

01:32:59 they were interviewing me and they were doing all the running all these tests on me and I was completely out of my mind oh I see so I was like going off on some of the doctors I was going off on some of the therapists all this stuff and then I went and had the tow journey and I came back and got all retested and I'm nice to everyone and I'm cool and I'm patient and I'm not tripping about anything yeah and literally people the doctors were crying when they saw me cuz they're like we we're about to put you

01:33:25 into a six we impatient because you're so bad off for mental health now we're now we we're non reccommending you for even the the me the the inpatient you're free wow and but they sent me back to the uh psychiatrist to check in they know I'm not wanting to take any meds but they just wanted me to go check and so the psychiatrist from the VA he did not want me to get off anything yeah he kept convincing me to try to get me back on as many of those things as possible and I kept saying no and I kept saying

01:33:58 no yeah but why do you want why why are you so incentivized to get me on those damn medications again when I'm telling you was destroying my life my uh my uh sex organ doesn't work all these different things but you are so are incentivized to get me right back on that thing yeah what am I lost here well you know I don't know if they all have like bad intentions I I don't want to say that no but I would say that that you know they're taught to take a pill for everything I mean just think about in general not not your situation but

01:34:30 the average person if they get exercise have a good diet and meditate those three things will do more than the psych meds for probably 90% of the people out there exercise alone and have a cool relationship or two exactly and you're healthy yeah exactly that's right so like but they want you to take a pill you know and for the longest time they convinced people that it was a chemical imbalance in the brain and that got debunked last year there's a a study that actually shows the whole chemical imbalance in the brain for a depression

01:35:08 thing is complete it's not even it's not even real so when they're giving these people these psych these anti-depressants thinking that it was changing the chemical imbalance in the brain the chemical imbalance in the brain was it even what was cusing causing the depression and if you look at the side effects on these pills it's you know suicide you know uh intrusive thought it's like the the side effects can be very very bad yeah so and I'm not saying certain people don't need to be on certain things not saying that but I

01:35:41 am saying with 100% certainty that they overprescribe these drugs to people absolutely and there there are good people at the VA yeah just like anywhere and maybe it's the 8020 rule or whatever that looks like but yeah uh my experience has been uh very much feels like a disability money game where okay if I want to if I want to get 100% disability I go pretend like I'm taking all these medications but if I Stand My Ground and say I'm not taking these meds and I want everyone to know that I'm never going to fill these again yeah now

01:36:17 they're going to start deducting now I'm losing points in the game I see and now I don't get paid now I'm because so that's that's clearly what I've what's happened with me so I just like to put that information out because but also there's people that are getting good help from a VA good on you like awesome oh yeah yeah that's I mean we we want them to get help that's actually if they are getting something very useful great then I'm you know that's that makes me feel good right but the it's it's really

01:36:49 the damage that they cause by giving a lack of good health care by using a medicine model that give a pill for all the problems when you're you're not going after the root cause I mean you're just masking every time you take a pill for something like that you're masking whatever is causing it and you've got to get you're avoiding it yeah you're avoiding avoiding move it oh I don't have to feel I don't have to and then all of a sudden you know 23 to 27 military people a day are committing suicide I keep going back to those

01:37:21 numbers I probably said it 10 times in this podcast but it it it blows my mind man when are we going to like see what the problem is and do something about it as Society I understand you're doing a lot of things with it but I'm saying like when is everybody else going to know those statistics and have it mean something to them because I I guarantee you have 350 million Americans that really give a that 23 to 27 uh veterans a day are committing suicide we would fix the damn problem problem is people's heads are the in the same

01:37:54 and they don't care and they're like you know living their lives on social media or all these other distractions that life give us and you know they lose sense of what's really important you know yeah one of the one of the effects of that that I see with young marines getting out and this is like 22 23 years old they were in the the when the Afghan withdrawal happened my old unit was when it happen so some of these kids they were in an explosion they saw a lot of things that where they weren't able to

01:38:30 help these people you know as as Afghanistan was being closed out all these different things but man I'll see these 22 23 year old kids and take them to lunch and hear like hey you're getting out next week yeah what's your plan what are you going to do well my first thing is when I get up back home I got to go check in with the VA and I'm going to get my meds and I'm going to get all my stuff for my PTSD D and my and it's like it's t it's taught to you to them they're brainwash into thinking oh when I get home I need to get my meds

01:39:02 for my PTSD and take these pills that are eventually going to cause me to commit suicide that's what they're saying I mean or could yeah or could what I'm saying like that's I believe that the medications are probably the number two contributing factor I mean everything that happened is one but you know think about the path that you've taken compared to the path that others are taking and a lot of others have taken the path of doing what the doctors say and taking your 15 pills a day and taking more and more and more I

01:39:40 mean the pills the psych pills are largely suicide pills that's in the freaking data man they cause people to commit suicide many times so man that's there's so dangerous that some of sometimes they put like a cap on them where they'll say this cannot be taken for more than eight months or for more than a year and uh you know I I have uh a Raider that I know in out on the East Coast that was basically put on it for years put on a medication that you're only supposed to be on for several months they put them on for three years

01:40:17 and how they found out was he ended up discharging his weapon in the middle of the city and he ended up getting like having all this this whole scene broke out M it's like well this isn't like him this he never done anything like this before what what's going on what's changed well what medications has he taking oh wait he's taking that one how long's he been on that one oh three years yeah you're only supposed to be on that one for like a couple months yeah that's a hardcore psych met and it was

01:40:46 like okay yeah yeah you know you take some of those meds long enough you could change who a person is that's what I'm saying I'm not saying by the way yeah that they never do anybody good not saying that what I'm saying is they are over prescribing them like crazy uh if if someone needs to get numb for a minute to get them out of something okay that's fine use it strategically but if your strategy is to give people pills their entire life to live a normal life like you get the wrong stress stry

01:41:24 right you got to say okay we're going to use this as a for as small of a time as possible you know we're not going to try to drag this thing out over the years what do we got to do to get you better where you don't have to take these medications because what happen they use the medication as a crutch oh it's my medication you know my this my that instead of okay we got to work on what's inside me to fix this this problem and you know sure not everybody can be fixed you know some people are dealing with

01:41:59 some things that are just too much but that doesn't mean that the majority of people uh can't be fixed I believe most people actually can but we're not giving them the right tools they don't have the right tools to know how to they're saying take this pill take this pill take this numb out avoid be a victim circumstances I mean all that's that's what we teach when people get out of the military that's what we teach in society right now too that that's a great point so the approach versus avoid coping

01:42:29 mechanisms like we avoid like the society that perfect example is you know hey I I don't want to deal with this hey guys let's go out to the bar you know let's let's go out in in Marine Raiders we used to go do team nights and all the guys it's like you know that have families that haven't been home for months they're out partying at the bar with the whole team avoiding everything back home cuz they have a of they need to deal with back home they're avoiding all of it and just right where you avoid your problems even now like I

01:43:01 take meds I avoid my problems I hey I I don't want to have this hard conversation let's just go to the bar avoid avoid avoid avoid it's like you're not approaching anything you're not dealing with anything yeah so the approach looks way different where it's almost to a point where when I was in avoidance and I have like the the guy rad in San Diego is an awesome example cuz he's a guy that like he'll put a taser next to me while I'm doing a workout or something just to do a mental like a mental check with me to

01:43:35 see where I'm at mentally hey it like do 50 more push-ups like that it's like well I was done you want me to do 50 more he pulls a taser out like if you drop you're going to get tased and he's just doing it to test you but right what what it does is it develops approach based coping M because over time roie has all these tools that he uses like uh he has the Amazon uh Warrior eye drops that feel like OC spray and pepper spray when they put them in your eyes it burns like the worst burning sensation um but Amazon uh Warriors have

01:44:10 used it for night vision and all this stuff so there's real beneficial things of doing it wow but it is a you go through like hell to get through it mhm the burning sensation yeah so I've learned through my personal experience of having this guy roie of what approach versus avoid coping looks like yeah because every time I did the workout he pulled the taser he would do all this stuff and he'd say Hey you want these new eye drops they're like level 100 pain you know and he would always introduce you want this next and and so

01:44:41 at first I'll say no I don't want it yeah I already worked out dude like I didn't come to do all this extra right but then I would drive home and I would start thinking as soon as I was driving like pissed off about why does he want me to do this and da D he but he would win and what I started to learn is anytime that he asked me then I would think about it all weekend why didn't I just do those stupid eye drops it would have been done in five minutes why don't I just deal with that thing why don't I

01:45:10 just approach it instead of avoid it now I'm thinking about it all weekend it's bothering yeah and so I started to anytime that he would offer me something even if it was in the middle of victory in the middle of the gym or whatever yeah he wants me to do the eye drops yes please right now now give it go I'll lay right come on bring it and it's like which ones are these are these the the real strong ones yes thank you hook it up but it's like we make these boogey men out of all these things in life by

01:45:38 avoiding it yeah we make these mountains out of mole Hills they're nothing yeah it's a fake Boogeyman but when we approach it and we face it we're like what what's up now yeah it disappears absolutely it's like what's next that's right yeah no it's uh it's incredible and you know you've worked on a lot of this stuff and got you know gotten through more than you know most in the military I mean you've really put the effort in and and are giving back and making a positive difference in in a lot of people's lives so um I think the more

01:46:11 that we talk about these type of things you know the more you know gives exposure and you some people will listen to what uh I was saying about the medications and say uh oh he just he's telling people not to take their meds you know and they'll have a big problem and I would say you you know I'm so over the on on the left you know complaining and blah blah blah blah blah I'm not telling people not take certain medications I'm saying that we over medicate people and if we have the result of 23 to 27 people

01:46:50 in the military killing themselves every single day or retired military killing themselves every single day we've got to do something different and if we if we think that the pills don't have something to do with it we're living in a fantasy world we're teaching people how to avoid not deal with what's going on and this doesn't doesn't mean that medication doesn't work uh sometimes or doesn't help some people Etc or some people don't need to be but it is saying we know we're overprescribing I mean

01:47:22 ater all overprescribed you've got I don't know what percentage of society on on Aderall way overprescribed um you know they they were showing the difference between liberals and conservatives right now this is wild it was like uh 70 something percent was it 7 76% of single women are Democrats and 56% of them are on psych meds because they seem crazy to me whoa you know what I'm saying it's like some kind that makes sense it makes sense so you know and we're teaching you know people this victim mentality and take a pill

01:48:04 and avoid and I feel like imagine a warrior going off to war fighting for his country and coming back to that craziness and those same people that are uh pushing those pills you think that they're uh know how to fight no they're like oh avoid they're teaching you to move out of the way of the pain and don't you know you gotta freaking walk through it sometimes you got to face the fire yeah you got to realize people actually do want to help you they don't most people are good most people are loving when you break through those

01:48:38 walls and understand and so yeah that's why I would say you to somebody who has a problem with me saying that most of these meds are over prescribed I think they're killing people dude I think I think the meds are what's killing or are what causing most people to have these psychotic breaks yeah and there's this there's a saying that I love like the only way to the other side straight through yeah like you're not that's it the more we're trying to like avoid or run this way like we need to just run towards the gunfire the thing

01:49:10 that's scary or the thing that's creating the resistance just move straight what we resist pers yeah I mean that's what it is and the more we resist something the more it's going to persist until we actually face it and deal with it and then we feel so much better when it's actually dealt with absolutely um other thing I wanted to go because we got a we've been going for a while here and uh I want to talk about the deep in Fitness yeah uh how did you get started in the deep in Fitness and uh you know

01:49:38 how's that going now so uh I started as a water survival instructor running a pool on Camp Pendleton as a young Marine uh so I got to train uh and I got that job because I wanted to get really good in the water before going into special operations a lot of people I was getting Intel that a lot of people quit or got dropped in the water those psychological stress you need to prepare for it so became water survival instructor but then I guess the biggest gift was being able to train so many marines uh as a

01:50:11 water survival instructor that had low water confidence uh and so I had thousands of Marines over that year that I got to run through different trainings at the pool or uh guy them off the 30 foot high tower that we had so I had I had a lot of uh incidents where I had someone them that was deathly afraid of heights or deathly afraid of the water and it these were huge opportunities for me to to learn how to coach them and so I didn't realize it at the time but um I started and and what got me to use my

01:50:43 coaching or my mouth more was because on the 30 foot high tower when I had people that wouldn't jump off or they acted a little weird I would just trick them and I would throw them off huh and then in a second they would be in the water and they'd be like thank you and I'm like yeah it's nothing right right but they're they're making this big deal out of nothing and it would just be like that but I had a senior ranking officer that I threw off that I got in trouble oh and so then I had the thing of

01:51:11 like okay it does nothing it I'm helping him throwing them off now he wants to burn me for doing it so now I need a tool I need to be able to just instead of touching him pushing them off I need to be able to coach him off and so I started to like really focus on coaching and like getting to focus on something external The Horizon relax he take a full 30inch step so I was like becoming a coach and with the water with the fear of the heights all that stuff and then um you know uh there was a lot

01:51:40 of aha moments where I had instructors that work for me and it's like hey we're going to go I'm gonna I want you to get comfortable at the bottom of the pool in case you need to go down and save someone or whatever and we had a 15 foot pool so I would take people their first day or second day working at the pool get them acclimated trying to get them to the bottom it couldn't get down to the 15 ft and but whenever but then I put the torpedo if if you've seen the torpedo P that we pass in the pool I brought the

01:52:11 torpedo in I said here I'm going to pass it to you I didn't say anything about going to 15 ft the next time I'm going to pass it to you and I just want you to pass it back so I'd pass it to him like a little under the water and then I just start pass it to them down at the bottom yeah they go down and get it yeah hang at the bottom now we're at 15 ft passing but when what happened they focused on something external which is the torpedo and we made it a game yeah and we sto it so all of their anxiety and their fear

01:52:38 about what they can and can't do in the water they're not thinking about any of it they're in flow with the present moment yeah because they're focused on this external thing and so I was like whoa so I can't I if I do it like this nobody can do it but if I do it like this everybody can do it yeah so it's a huge aha whoa so get them to focus on something external so then I started working with all these non-swimmers that could never swam before and I would trick them and get them to relax and get

01:53:06 them to pass this with me and then follow me and follow me and just focus on me and relax and then now we're on the other side of the pool you just swam across the pool you never swam in your life that's right did you feel like you swam you're just following me you relaxed so uh that was a huge thing so um getting blown up I went got to go to some uh as I was getting retired I got to go to some um uh transition courses so I got to go to one at Dartmouth business school ivy league a 3-week course for Special Operations veterans

01:53:40 and Olympians and I was really searching at that time because I just found out I was getting kic or retired so I need to find out what I'm going to do mhm and uh they had all these panels the last week of the course and it's all geared towards jobs and career opportunities and one of the last panels was entrepreneurs and they were saying stuff in there like I had all these businesses when I was a kid I always had all this money and it was like that was me that was me all the things they were saying they were like you know I can't

01:54:13 work in a box when I'm out of the box I can do anything and I was thinking like when I was in Afghanistan I had no oversight really barely anyone looking over me and I was running like crazy operations 100 Afghans cell phones ter interpreters all this stuff because I wasn't held in a box but if you put me in this box and you put micromanage me I'm not doing any of that stuff yeah I'm doing bare minimum MH and so I was like that's what's going to happen if I go work for a corporation or a company yeah

01:54:44 so that was the things that I was experiencing is like well I'm going to be an I need to be an entrepreneur because these are my guys this is what I resonate with so I need to create my own thing what am I going to create and then it was like well where does your passion and interest and experience over overlay right and it was water training creates Transformations I like this is how I can train someone in the shortest amount of time to have a breakthrough so water training is it deep in Fitness

01:55:11 underwater torpedo league so we created them both as a beta test at the same time but utl is the crazy sport that's been going viral pretty much since like the first or second year a lot created a lot of awareness and attention for us but deep in Fitness is the feeder program and the training um we we people call it CrossFit at the pool but it's you know uh it's the the training and deep in Fitness and everything is what we spend and what I spend uh about 99% of my time as a CEO on and then utl is

01:55:46 still we just had a a tournament um last weekend in Orange County but we run uh several tournaments a year in Southern California and also in Austin um but that is uh that's pretty much it for utl all of the tournaments always go viral the content goes viral for utl uh and that's been the case for a long time so just from the tournaments alone the content from that does like 20 to 100 million views a year and then deep in Fitness is now just because it's like a thumb stopper because the content's all

01:56:18 underwater yeah gets people to stop and look at what what it is um and sometimes it's not all good it's controversial and people are going how are you guys doing this how are you not dead down there where's the oxygen tanks it's like dude we're just like doing a you know so but it's it's funny the things that go viral because it's usually a lot of these silly comments that make it pop like that really yeah but um what's who's saying this who's who's saying those things um trainers or like experts it's uh um just

01:56:53 underlings across I don't know who it is man but you look at them you look at them and it's like sometimes I'll look and it's it's you know um three followers following 10,000 you know or whatever that weird unbalances yeah some like 30-year-old living in his mom's basement right yeah yeah know telling you how to run your armchair quarterbacking our workouts right right that's funny and then a lot of them you know are kind of like like I just I almost drowned just watching this and all the stuff and it's like you know a

01:57:27 big part people don't understand but we're trying to show you what's possible and yeah yeah this can't be done and there's a lot of other things that you can do that you're not doing right exactly no it's cool though I mean it's it's uh yeah it looks fun the uh underwater torpedo League how did you come up with those rules we played uh uh a game while I was a water survival instructor called underwater football and it was basically we tested out different uh objects of the game so we would have five on five in the deep end

01:58:05 of the pool we would have a 45 pound plate and you would have to move that across the pool I see and and obviously that's creates challenges because if it drops it can mess up the the the bottom of the pool the tile whatever so that's not good to play with nor was it that fun uh then we use a dive brick but it was still kind of fun and we use a dive brick and it's like you know uh full tackle underwater people trying to rip the brick and then you get the brick and you touch the other wall and you score

01:58:34 oh I see then we use a torpedo and that was the most dynamic the most fun because now it creates a 360 degree environment where attackers can come top down bottom up and from every angle yeah and then the the torpedo can move halfway across the pool in one throw M so can move anywhere really quick and it has a mind of its own so you got to throw it correctly um so yeah that underwater football was how uh I trained my guys to get ready for dive school and that was like a lot of the the water confidence

01:59:08 tool that we use to get people to get the highest level confidence I see is to play the game because then they forget about any of their anxiety or fears about water or anything and they just go and then they get a lot of gains and then after that way more confident so just like it was a real Force multiplier um that we did the the research of all the Underwater Sports from the history since the beginning of the Olympics and essentially we have underwater hockey and underwater rugby that have been around since 1940s 1950s

01:59:41 both started by water enthusiasts we started utl uh in 2018 so what we we after we did the research we said none of these have maximized the media opportunity and brought it to the surface through media yeah that's what we're going to do different and instead of running it through as a nonprofit that's like under the whole underwater Federation that everybody has to basically you know uh Kiss the Ring and do whatever this thing says yeah we're going to run it as a commercial business and just blow it up

02:00:14 with the media nice and it's going to go faster than these other ones and that's what we've seen that's awesome using the power of viral videos I mean 20 million views is a lot it it is and deep in Fitness is doing 25 million a month just on Instagram right now that's awesome so deep and fitness does better than utl which is our that's our core business so we're happy with that yeah um but uh the um it goes back to uh the principle of showing versus telling and so uh my uh parents-in-law I'm really close to and

02:00:48 they're uh experienced design Business Consultants High Business Consultants and one of the things they taught me when I was getting out of the military I got to go through some of their courses was uh the individual that was um contracted to do the Golden Gate Bridge they hired the they hired him back then to do the feasibility assessment for the Golden Gate Bridge and he did it he did the feasibility and it was like yes we should put a bridge here and for seven years or something like that they I mean

02:01:20 he had gotten hired to do it mhm and it was a the feasibility was a positive and then for seven years they were all he they were talking about yes it's good this is we want to build it we want to build the bridge we want to do all this stuff what happened that made it happen I don't know so the guy the architect contracted an artist this was marketing back then to create the Golden Gate Bridge as a 3D model MH and then they brought everybody in to show the 3D model and then to Market that out on the

02:01:53 news and the newspapers and all that stuff immediate approval that week from showing yeah what it is not talking about it you talk you're wasting all your time and energy you got to show that's right so even like at the pools because I had no sales experience until we started selling the pools to let us train that was our first closes but it was like dude um we you know I'm talk talking to the pool supervisor and she's like well what is it is like look this is my son playing it mhm and show a video hey here's us playing with so and

02:02:29 so last week whatever ah okay nice it's like okay now we just move Lighty years instead of me trying to talk to you something yeah so that's awesome yeah and so you started in in 2018 what are your what are your goals over the next uh you know six years wow sixy year goal that's I was saying 2030 yeah so right now now uh I mean we started our expansion in three years ago last month so September 2021 we started licensing deep in Fitness and testing and learning and we're up to 42 licensing Partners across the country

02:03:08 right now but we have about 300 leads in the pipeline for licensing that want to start programs somewhere in the world so right now we're in this huge process of uh reshaping our team we're bringing on a couple new strategic team members this month but basically we're going from uh 42 locations to 140 in the next year is our goal wow um and uh and so it's it's about a lot about systems and efficiency of processes and how we uh operationalize and and actualize that but uh yeah it's uh it's all a learning

02:03:52 Journey you know and being open and again with the EQ work I've I don't think I like every obstacle is an opportunity to grow you know and if you if you can realize it and it's like that yes moment where instead of I I think we're condition our whole life if something is hard to say this sucks yeah or this is like not good is this good or bad yeah who cares like there's way more ways to quantify things or to like evaluate things than good or bad right that holds us back in a big way and when people say hey how are you

02:04:38 doing and they want me to say I'm good when I'm not I'm not going to say that yeah right right right so um but uh yeah where um we have sometimes drama happens and and things are out of our control and obstacles happen and fires get set and you have to put them out and you have to deal with things yeah and you have to you have a day that was supposed to be vacation day that turns into all these things but it's like yes bring it yeah bring it on yeah that's that's how like and sometimes I don't feel like

02:05:14 that sometimes like no yeah but you got to shift yeah to get to yes okay this is a growth opportunity Bring It On yeah absolutely so yeah I mean it's uh yeah same I I couldn't imagine uh opening the hospital and building everything that we built without having uh that ability to shift into that you know to where I mean I'm definitely not perfect I still have my still have a temper uh and you know still you know will plow through a wall to get things done sometimes but uh you know those I don't know the the

02:05:51 original kind of uh goto urge to do it I'm able to see it and you know we would not be successful if it weren't for the training like straight up yeah we would not be here today if we didn't have the training CPI wouldn't be open chipsa wouldn't be open um we wouldn't have been a been able to get through these crazy crazy times without having you know the emotional intelligence and um it's been it's the most impactful thing well brother great talking to you man anything you want to say before you uh

02:06:22 you leave yeah so uh for anyone interested in deep in Fitness uh check out deep in Fitness on Instagram we have uh 40s something locations but a lot of new locations coming um if you're interested in looking at a location there's not one in your area let us know uh and then I I like to give out my email for stuff like this so if there's anything that resonated that you want to follow up or reach out to me my email is prime atl.com let's keep rocking and thanks for having me brother thanks for coming

02:06:54 all the way out from San Diego man talk next time all right awesome brother