No One is Ready for This Coming War - Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf - #1089

Summary

Modern Wisdom #1089: "No One is Ready for This Coming War"

Guest: Andy Stumpf (Navy SEAL)

Host: Chris Williamson
Date: April 25, 2026

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Episode Theme:

An unflinching discussion of the changing face of modern warfare, the psychological burdens of combat, and the personal lessons learned from life as a Navy SEAL. Chris and Andy explore how technology, politics, and cultural perceptions have shaped the military experience—and how resilience, suffering, and leadership translate (and sometimes fail) outside the battlefield.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. Warfare in the Age of Drones and AI

(00:51-04:58)

• Technological Change: Andy is surprised by the rise of off-the-shelf drone warfare, noting, "I never once was concerned about somebody essentially ordering a drone on the Internet... The hardest of passes, being involved in that." (01:02)
• AI in Decision-Making: Introduces the "human in/on/out of the loop" phases. The third—when humans are out—is most terrifying:
  “If we take humans off the loop, I don’t know how you combat that … you’re already at a tactical disadvantage. And then we end up working for robots for our daily water ration. I don’t want Terminator to become a documentary.” (04:19)
• Limits of Automation: Direct combat and on-the-ground decisions can’t be fully automated: “As long as there are people still crossing thresholds of doors, I don’t know how much impact AI is going to have.” (05:07)

2. Urban Myths & Military Tech

(07:17-14:51)

• ’Ghost Mama’ Tech Skepticism: Andy is deeply skeptical of rumored heartbeat-detection technology from aircraft: “I saw Bigfoot on the Internet one time too. That doesn’t mean it’s real.” (07:30)
• Aviator Survival Skills: He contrasts aviators’ skills with ground operators and recounts the brutal consequences of ejection, referencing Keegan Gill’s near-lethal experience:
  “He basically said he almost got liquefied on departure from the aircraft.” (11:57)

3. Physical Hardship & Survival Training

(14:51-19:03; 91:09-98:14)

• Navy SEAL SERE School: The value is psychological, not just tactical: “There’s an alphabet system they would teach each other through tapping… a lot of it is what to expect if you’re captured.” (15:41)
• Emotional Coping Through Hardship & Humor: Andy displays dark humor about surviving simulated capture:
  “Just stay hard, you know what I mean? Just the whole way through.” (17:01)
• Drown-Proofing and Underwater Tests (see “Memorable Moments” for more): Stress management and following procedure under duress are the real skills.

4. Is Technology Making Soldiers More Fragile?

(19:03-24:45)

• Killing Remotely/Flippancy: Andy worries about moral detachment:
  “I don’t think you should outsource killing and killing through a screen... It should scramble your eggs for maybe the rest of your life.” (19:31)

5. Psychological Impact of Violence & Desensitization

(23:16-24:45)

• Exposure Online: The internet bypasses traditional “barriers” to witnessing or inflicting violence. Andy shares the pain of his own children encountering graphic content online:
  “All three of my kids [who] are almost terminally online at this point saw that… and that is not something most people ever actually see in their real life.” (23:27)

6. Cultural Myths About Special Operations

(26:00-36:24)

• Regular People, Extreme Situations: “The special operations community is not comprised of people that put a cape on and go to work. They are very normal people that are tasked with doing some exceptional things at times.” (26:07)
• Leadership & Failure: Both reaches and limits are present in elite groups:
  “The best leaders I was ever around was in that community—and in the same breath, the worst leaders.” (35:13)

7. Resilience, Failure, and Knowing When to Quit

(37:34-41:50)

• Failure as Tuition: Andy reframes failure:
  “I now consider them tuition payments. Some of my tuition payments have been relatively inexpensive and some have taken me to the brink of bankruptcy.” (37:34)
• When Resilience is Destructive: Staying too long due to pride or fear of quitting can ruin lives—emotionally as well as physically.

8. Veteran Reintegration and Family Costs

(43:02-48:09)

• Identity Loss After Service: “You put everything for that pursuit of who you are and what you’re doing on a pedestal and everything else around you in life is falling apart.” (41:50)
• Divorce & Family Fragmentation: 80–85% divorce rate in SOF, much linked to the strain and habits formed during service.

9. Ethics and Atrocities in War

(52:35-57:40)

• The Bin Laden Raid & War Crimes: Andy discusses the controversy around shooting a dead enemy post-mortem:
  “We need to be better than that. If we want to be a beacon to the world, we need to be better than that.” (56:17)
• Rules of Engagement: Emphasizes that lawful boundaries matter—both for the soul of the soldier and the legitimacy of the mission.

10. Public Perception of the Military

(57:40-62:39)

• Social Respect for Veterans: Contrasts U.S. and U.K. attitudes, noting the temporary swing in reverence for veterans post-9/11 and the risks of both over- and under-glorification.

11. Politics, War, & Mercenaries

(62:39-76:38)

• Unclear Objectives: Andy expresses frustration at recurring military interventions without “definable end-states”—and skepticism about political motivations.
• Private Military Contractors: “I don’t think you should be able to rent the American flag… If the military isn’t serving the role and isn’t capable of doing it, then let’s solve that problem.” (73:30)

12. Why People Quit—The Science of Endurance

(77:01-86:45)

• Chunking Time & Overwhelm:
  “The muscle that fails at buds is not below the neck, it’s between the ears. … The main reason why people give up on their lifelong goals … [is that] they focus on that distance, they become overwhelmed.” (81:27)
• Effective Coping: Break down daunting tasks into micro-tasks and focus on process, not outcome.

13. Combat Decision-making: Traits That Matter

(86:45-91:09)

• Movement Over Indecision:
  “If you stay [behind cover]… it’s actually where they’re going to find your dead body. … I’d rather have people take a step in the wrong direction but get some momentum going.” (86:55)
• Emotional Control Under Pressure: Stress tests (like underwater knot-tying) train emotional detachment, not just physical endurance.

14. Hardship as a Crucible

(101:41-104:24)

• Deliberate Suffering:
  “The grind is actually what life is all about … Your ability to determine how well you can suffer along the way and try to enjoy the journey.” (101:45)
• Community in Suffering: Joy is found in enduring difficulty with others: “Watching somebody else suffer with you and finding joy in that—yeah.” (104:15)

15. Life Lessons: What’s Worth Dying For?

(104:24-106:12)

• Prioritization:
  “Be cautious and make sure you know what you’re willing to die for. Because not everything’s worth it.” (104:33)
• Slow Down & Reflect: Not every decision requires speed; reconsider goals regularly lest they lead to hollow victories.

16. Psychological Strength: The Double-Edged Sword

(111:25-117:44)

• Chris reads his essay "The Curse of Psychological Strength," reflecting on how the same resilience that breeds glory in hardship can cause harm in relationships and private life.
  “What you are praised for in public, you often pay for in private relationships don’t reward endurance. They require attunement.” (114:22)
• Andy recognizes his own experience:
  “I can hear a startling amount of myself in that. It’s tough. What people see from the outside isn’t always what’s going on on the inside.” (116:41)

17. Helping Others & Meaning After Service

(120:02-123:59)

• Andy shares why he now writes and teaches:
  “At this point in my life, all I really actually want to do is make the world a little bit better than it was when I came into it. … Money’s cool … but there’s no actual happiness from the nice thing.” (120:02)
• The greatest rewards: Not bestseller lists, but “a dozen people have reached out and said they chose not to kill themselves because something they heard on the podcast.” (123:09)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the threat of AI in combat:
  “I don’t want Terminator to become a documentary, which we might be on that trajectory.” (04:19, Andy Stumpf)

• On leadership and failure:
  “I've made more mistakes in my life than I've had failures.” (36:11, Andy Stumpf)

• On resilience as a vice:
  “I'd rather see people fall a little bit short of their goals and know when to walk away than destroy themselves because they don't ever want to quit.” (39:47, Andy Stumpf)

• On post-military purpose:
  “It kind of helps to know that if shit goes sideways, like the chariot will be lit on fire… we're going to come do something.” (74:51, Andy Stumpf)

• On helping others:
  “If I end up doing nothing with [my experiences] and it only impacts my life… I will regret not doing something with that.” (120:02, Andy Stumpf)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:51 — Rise of consumer drone warfare
• 03:46 — The phases of AI in warfare
• 07:17 — Debunking urban military myths (Ghost Mama, heartbeat detection tech)
• 14:51 — SERE school, survival & capture training
• 19:03 — Technology’s effect on violence and killing
• 26:00 — Myths about special operators
• 37:34 — Failure as “tuition payment”; resilience and quit-shaming
• 43:02 — Veteran struggles, family impact, post-service life
• 52:35 — Inside look at the Bin Laden raid and ethical dilemmas in combat
• 62:39 — Shifting public attitudes toward veterans
• 73:20 — The ethical issues of mercenary organizations
• 77:01 — Why SEAL candidates quit: the role of mental focus and breaking down time
• 86:55 — Decision-making under fire vs. paralysis
• 101:41 — The case for seeking, not avoiding, hardship
• 104:33 — “Know what you’re willing to die for”; the importance of discernment
• 111:25 — Chris’s essay: “The Curse of Psychological Strength”
• 120:02 — Andy’s purpose after service and his hope for helping others

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Tone and Language

Frank, humorous, and unvarnished. Both speakers blend serious reflection with dark military humor, practical wisdom, and moments of candor about their own vulnerabilities and failures. Andy, in particular, avoids grandiosity, stressing the ordinariness of those in elite military units.

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Conclusion

This episode is a deep dive into the realities of modern warfare and the unseen psychological costs of elite service. Andy Stumpf’s stories and advice reach far beyond the military, offering rich lessons about endurance, meaning, identity, and the difficult art of knowing what—if anything—is worth suffering for.

Final lesson:

“Be cautious and make sure you know what you’re willing to die for. Because not everything’s worth it.” (104:33, Andy Stumpf)

Transcript

[Chris Williamson]

I'm gonna play a little trick for the first time ever in this studio to make you feel a little bit more at home. So you're a man who operated largely in the dark when you were doing raids, when you would have been operating. I imagine some stuff would have been by day, but other stuff would have been by night.

[Andy Stumpf]

Unless there was an extremely compelling reason to do so exclusively at night. Oh, nice. Here we go. Transitioning evening.

[Chris Williamson]

And now we're in a blood moon.

[Andy Stumpf]

I usually didn't go out at full moon.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay. Because there's too much visibility illumination.

[Andy Stumpf]

So, you know, even though you can see at night with night vision goggles, we constantly were looking at the illumination, the external illumination, because at some point, people can almost see you as well as you can see them with the technological advantage. So we would avoid the high illumination nights. And obviously aviators and things that fly that could be backlit against those, they try to avoid it as well.

[Chris Williamson]

What are you surprised by with what's happening with warfare over the last few years? Like, I can't work out whether technology is making things more humane or more dangerous.

[Andy Stumpf]

I think an equal measure of both. I've had a lot of conversations about this with guys during the time period that I served. I'd never for a single second thought about the danger of drone warfare. And I don't mean drones to us was predators or Reapers or overhead surveillance platforms that had great, you know, sensor pause and could pipe stuff down and you can have the ability to look at what they can see. It was great for situational awareness. I never once was concerned about somebody essentially ordering a drone on the Internet. Not that that's how it's being built in or made in Ukraine, specifically in Iran has some smaller ones as well. But having that be a kinetic option on the battlefield. Didn't think about it a single time. And I am glad that I am not a part of that because, I mean, I have an Internet connection just like anybody else, and I don't go searching for those videos, but sometimes they find you and people running away from basically a DGI drone that detonates hard pass. The hardest of passes, being involved in that.

[Chris Williamson]

I read that field medics are not getting the same sort of trauma training that they used to, because the kind of injuries that soldiers are getting on the battlefield are totally different now.

[Andy Stumpf]

Well, towards the tail end of Afghanistan and Iraq, it was very IED heavy. So it would be explosive wounds, which are really gnarly. Not that any kind of wound is particularly great, but it just. It Just tears things to pieces. And most of the stuff I'm seeing with the drone warfare is kind of the same. It's explosive base. So maybe, I don't know, I'm not sure.

[Chris Williamson]

It might be more aggressive, it might, might be able to be more powerful, I don't know. But yeah. Well, what have you been surprised by? Would you have been able to predict the direction that warfare was going to go in?

[Andy Stumpf]

No, because at the same time, like let's take Ukraine as an example, at the same time that they're at the cutting edge of what's going on with electronics, there are videos of guys running through trenches fighting at distances between you. And I like just putting AKs around a corner, which by the way, kind of a fan of clearing a corner that way like hello, is anybody here? Not advisable, honestly. I mean maybe, maybe like a high risk strategy. It is controversial. I'm not here to tell anybody how to party. So you do you. But I mean, so we're talking back to World War I and World War II, but at the same time the leading edge of electronics in the same battle space. What? So it's this blend of innovation and evolution and then humans getting it on like eye to eye.

[Chris Williamson]

Do you think we're overhyping AI in warfare? Because each technological development is basically touted as the end of one era and the beginning of something different.

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't know. The way it's been described to me is that there's phases that AI is coming in right now there's a human in the loop, meaning a human in making the final decision may be assisted by AI. Then there's human on the loop, meaning kind of just over watching the AI and then the phase that I think terrifies everybody is human out of the loop. And I think that's where a lot of the stuff when it came to mixed. Claude, is it anthropic? I think that I want to believe that they stood their ground. And again, I only have information based off what I could consume on the Internet, which, you know, take all that with a grain of salt, but it seems like they stood their ground morally from a intelligence perspective or the ability for mass surveillance and then getting to that point where humans being off the loop, because if we take humans off the loop, I don't know how you combat that as an adversary without doing exactly the same thing. Because if it can think and make decisions faster than any human, that's any of those earlier phases, then you're already at a tactical disadvantage. And then we end up working for robots for our daily water ration. And I don't think that's great. I don't want Terminator to become a documentary, which we might be on that trajectory.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I, coming from a SEAL background, how do you feel about AI basically being involved in life and death decisions for operators?

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't know how it would be at the level that we operated at. I mean broadly, to speak broadly. And again, I am dated. So I don't know exactly how they are interfacing AI right now. The job was to, at some point a lot of other entities would find, fix, locate an individual, fix them in a location. And our job was to get to that location and then finish. And that doesn't mean kill. Sometimes it does. It largely depends on the actions that the individual would take. But. But solve the problem. Which means cross the threshold of a door somewhere. I don't know how AI does that for you. I think AI can do a lot of stuff, especially in the electronic spectrum. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I guess you could, you know, those Raytheon dogs or whatever they are, the robotic types, I mean, maybe it gets to that level and maybe that removes the operator from that or they're controlling him like the drone operators are now. But I don't think it's at that level yet. So I think it helps more in the planning and analysis process than anything. As long as there's people still crossing thresholds of doors, I don't know how much impact AI is going to have

[Chris Williamson]

could choosing to cross the threshold of that door or not, or the time to do it or not. And targeting and planning, the fact that that's done by AI now puts operators at the mercy of the decisions that maybe humans weren't involved in.

[Andy Stumpf]

It'll never make the decision as the go no go criteria. It will spit like intelligence. The intelligence community can present packages and you can, you know, in your mission planning process, you are looking at every phase of the operation. You're planning mostly on contingencies, but you're looking at all of those things. The go no go is not based on an intelligence package. It's based on essentially the ground force commander saying this meets the criteria. Now, there are exceptions to that. I would say, let's say if you are looking for somebody and there is a trigger, a cell phone pops up on a network and you've been looking for that thing, like that's like, hey, we might need to go like right now. But other than that, the decision is going to be based off when you think it is best suited for you and least suited for the person that you're going after.

[Chris Williamson]

Tell me you saw this Ghost Mama thing.

[Andy Stumpf]

Oh, you mean how we can find heartbeats from space?

[Chris Williamson]

Yes.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, I'm sure missing hikers would have appreciated if that got used for them as well, too, you know, like, I don't.

[Chris Williamson]

This is the wildest shit.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, but that's because you found it on the Internet. I saw Bigfoot on the Internet one time too. That doesn't mean it's real.

[Chris Williamson]

You don't think that this is what they did?

[Andy Stumpf]

No. Wow.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay.

[Andy Stumpf]

No. Does it sound awesome? Yes. Would it? Do I want that tech to exist now? Was it from space or was it supposedly from an aircraft?

[Chris Williamson]

Supposedly from an aircraft.

[Andy Stumpf]

I do not want to tip my hand again. I am very dated, but I don't want to tip my hand on any of the like. To me, it is essential to maintain the TTPS tactics, techniques and procedures. There are ways and means that I think aviators have to identify their location that would be picked up by aircraft. And probably the higher you are, the better you would have for line of sight and things like that. Do I think it's capable of doing it in a heartbeat? Maybe. But I don't think we're there yet. I really don't. There are other less complex ways to do that.

[Chris Williamson]

You mean instead of quantum electrodynamics fixed to the front of an Apache helicopter, detecting a heartbeat and getting rid of all of the gerbils and dogs and enemies that are out there, zeroing in on this one guy from 40 miles away to pick him up and extract him.

[Andy Stumpf]

So when the episode comes out, can you just dub me saying what you just said? But I'll. Because yes, that's exactly what.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't know why you think that this is unrealistic. This is just. Sounds fun.

[Andy Stumpf]

Here's the thing, though. I want stuff like that to be true. But can you?

[Chris Williamson]

The funnest story is the truest story. That's the way it works.

[Andy Stumpf]

Can you imagine how pissed people would be who had lost family members in the back in like backcountry and technology like this existed and we didn't use it for our own people because we were trying to.

[Chris Williamson]

It's like we wanted to wait for this one guy. What's he called? Like Dude44 Bravo or something? What was his codename?

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't know.

[Chris Williamson]

Dude45 Bravo.

[Andy Stumpf]

That was too good of a code name to be honest. Or a call sign. Most of them. You'll notice they're. They are from mistakes or things that the person who the call sign is associated with or not proud of. Which is exactly why they need to be what they are. Like if you make a galactic mistake in training and they can associate one word to that, that's what you're known for for the rest of your military.

[Chris Williamson]

What was yours?

[Andy Stumpf]

No, it's only aviator wise.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, okay, okay.

[Andy Stumpf]

I was just. Andy. Okay.

[Chris Williamson]

Super lame. What are some of the most stupid ones that you've heard?

[Andy Stumpf]

Oh, God. You hear people, you know, when they're trying to make them up because. And most of the time this is involving alcohol to being like, oh, yeah, yeah. My call sign was bone Crush. I'm like, you're 142 pounds soaking wet. Shut the stuff like that. You know what I mean? Like, you know, Reaper just like, take it easy, dude. Take it easy. You know?

[Chris Williamson]

So you. Did you think that this ghost murmur thing, at least the explanation of its. And the way that they managed to find this guy in the middle of the desert was something a little bit more.

[Andy Stumpf]

I think there are easier ways to do it.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay.

[Andy Stumpf]

And when. When pilots eject, they sound like they're ejecting with no tools. So part, you know, there's entire department. Like the aviators don't maintenance the aircraft. Right. So there's people making sure that the aircraft is good to go. There's people making sure that survival equipment is good to go. All of those things. So when you. First off, I've never punched out of an aircraft. I've talked to some people who have. It seems to be a spicy ride.

[Chris Williamson]

How so?

[Andy Stumpf]

Well, I had a guy on my show who ejected at about three knots under the speed of sound. About so. And I might be. I might be getting this exact detail incorrect, but he was doing a maneuver and was nose down in a Hornet looking at the Atlantic Ocean rushing up and punched out. And it basically. How did he describe it? Took all of the bones in his body that weren't broken and did the opposite of that. And the only reason he's actually alive is because the water was so cold. He was in the hospital for months. Keegan Gill is his name.

[Chris Williamson]

Why would the cold water help?

[Andy Stumpf]

Because it shunts your blood vessels. He was going to bleed out otherwise.

[Chris Williamson]

Hang on. So the force of ejecting a few

[Andy Stumpf]

knots under the speed of sound because

[Chris Williamson]

the air that was. That immediately slammed into. Okay, so it wasn't the force of the ejection, it was the.

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't think that feels good either.

[Chris Williamson]

I was going to say, because people. People can get concussed, I think, just by doing that.

[Andy Stumpf]

Oh, I think if you do two, you're done. I think they medically retire you. If you get two eject, it'll shorten your vertebrae. I mean, it's. I think you go from, dude, I

[Chris Williamson]

used to be five' eleven.

[Andy Stumpf]

Now I think it goes zero to double digigit. G's like that. And so, yeah, he was. And he was flying.

[Chris Williamson]

That was a real onew punch. Yeah, that was the. The jab was the ejection.

[Andy Stumpf]

He basically said he almost got liquefied on departure from the aircraft. I'm like, okay. Yeah. And then. And his aircraft. Aircraft just vaporized when it hit the ground.

[Chris Williamson]

Yep. Well, water.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, well, the water. There happened to be, I believe it was a Coast Guard vessel nearby that his. He was flying with his boss. They were doing, like, some early air combat maneuvers. And he literally. He's like, I initiated a maneuver outside of the envelope that I should have put the aircraft into a position where it was not going to recover. And can you imagine that visual? So he's probably like 600 miles an hour. And he said, a second and a half from impact. Can you imagine that visual coming up of you? Yeah. And then if you missed the little ejection handle, he didn't take the safety out. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, thank you. Hard pass.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow.

[Andy Stumpf]

But when they go out, not in that situation, you have. You have tools with you. And so the ejection seat itself has some stuff that comes with it, like

[Chris Williamson]

a little life raft. But for existing in a.

[Andy Stumpf]

For sure, you're gonna have a firearm, probably. You're gonna have a radio. You might have a beacon type system,

[Chris Williamson]

maybe some food, probably.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, it's not gonna be awesome. And people forget that aviators so that we go to the same school, the basics year school that aviators go to their specialists. That guy was a weapon systems officer. So he was in the back seat of an F15, I believe. So he wasn't flying. And I actually don't even know if they're pilots. My guess would be that they're not. So the guy up front is completely responsible for manipulating the controls. I don't even know if they have controls in the back, actually. I've never been around an F15 cockpit. So he's doing all the weapons stuff. Their world is very high off the ground. And so I've done a backseat ride in an F18. And it was. I'm like, this is ridiculously uncomfortable. Like, my Head was bouncing off the canopy, Was sick for about two days. Felt nauseous because of the G's we were pulling. But then earlier in my career, I went to Sears school and I was paired up with an F18 pilot. And you want to talk about a duck out of water? Like, how do you read this topographical map? Like, how do you, you know, now to me I'm like, oh, yeah, but just we'll celestially navigate or this is east and we're just gonna do that. And they're like, where's my airplane? Right? It's, it's the complete inverse. Like, if you were to throw your average special operations dude in an F15, they'd be like, oh my God. So just imagine the reverse of that. When these people punch out and now they're on the ground, I'm supposed to

[Chris Williamson]

be in three dimensions. I'm now in two dimensions.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, and it's, it's real. You know, you could maybe see in your sensors people looking for you, trying to shoot at you at 25,000ft. And now you're at 250ft and those same people are down there and they're looking for you. I don't know if anybody got that close to him, but I, I, I would like to believe that tech exists. I think that's a far stretch. Probable. I don't. Well, possible, not probable.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. It's crazy to think that these guys that have been, will they have training to be able to evade limited.

[Andy Stumpf]

So like I said, we, we go to the same school. It's about a week of in classroom stuff. And a lot of it, at least when I went through, was based off of Vietnam. A lot of studying the Hanoi Hilton and the POWs there and the, you know, the tap codes that they, they created an Alphabet system that they would teach each other through doing it. Um, and it was a five by five. And a lot of it is what to expect if you're captured, how you're going to be questioned. You need to, you know, stay. You're supposed to do the best that you can to stay inside of the boundaries of releasing particular information. But the reality is with enough pain, people are, they're going to break, you know, and then you go out to. The one I went to is in Warner Springs, which is in east of San Diego by not very far.

[Chris Williamson]

The one you went to the C school.

[Andy Stumpf]

Survival, escape, resistance, innovation. You go out to the. And it was, this was aviators and largely people who might find themselves on the ground. So special operations personnel, anybody that might find themselves on the ground in like a theater of war. I don't think you would need to send, like traditional Navy people who are going to be on a vessel to Sears school. Very unlikely. But that would be. That'd be a rough day if they ended up getting rolled up. I don't know. You're like, wow, they swam out here and took you out of here really far from home. Totally.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

God, that would suck. And then you would really wish you had gone to that school. But, you know, you gotta play the odds on that one. So it was a couple days of group navigation and then they. They start off a simulation where now you're on escape and evasion and you're paired up and you were trying to evade an enemy force that is looking for you. Probably very similar in concept to Iran. And then everybody eventually gets caught because you spend about two and a half days in slappy camp where they slap you around and they introduce you to being. I don't know if they would say interrogated, but it's essentially what it is. And you're in this little, you know, it's this. It looks like dog kennels that human beings are in, you know, and they're way too small to be in there, so you can't find a comfortable position. There's music playing all the time.

[Chris Williamson]

It must be very hard for you to get comfortable with the erection that you had.

[Andy Stumpf]

Just stay hard, you know what I mean? Just the whole way through. That's.

[Chris Williamson]

That's actually a great way to warn the terrorists off you. Yeah, like, we can't go in. Don't go in kennel number five. Like, he's just, he's permanently erect.

[Andy Stumpf]

That's the, that's. That's the problem. Some people, they let it go. The key is go hard, stay always. Gotta be honest, I mean, if I put myself on the other side of that coin, I'd be like, just leave that dude alone. Clearly there's some psychopathy there. I won't know why.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm terrified of him. You'll be right.

[Andy Stumpf]

But it's a couple days and then those people go back to. If you're an aviator, your job is to aviate. And so they're going to go back and master that craft. And I don't think any.

[Chris Williamson]

Keep on top of the handguns. The.

[Andy Stumpf]

Probably not. I don't know what, like, level of minimum training that they're required to do. It's probably currency at best. Competence in. Are not the same thing, but again, they have to Be competent and current and flying a multi million dollar aircraft in a place where prioritize your training appropriately. Totally. Yeah. So I can only imagine that that guy, he had a hell of a day and a half or two days, however long he was on the ground.

[Chris Williamson]

Someone said, can't wait for Mark Wahlberg to play this guy in a movie.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, yeah, that's possible.

[Chris Williamson]

That's basically what you're doing. You're like, I don't want to be, I don't want to be picked up after 12 hours. If I get picked up after 36, then there's a movie Mark Wahlberg gets to blaming.

[Andy Stumpf]

Especially if it's like 48.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, now we're talking.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't turn your beacon on, you know, like looking really, really keep him guessing.

[Chris Williamson]

Wouldn't it be cool if you had like a little chart? And on the chart it's the different actor levels and for the longer that you stick about and you go, it's 36 hours. But at 36 hours, I only get Marky Mark. But at 48, I get Brad Pitt.

[Andy Stumpf]

How did you get such insight into how the US military.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't. 72 is Chris Hemsworth. Oh, my God, I'm going to make it to 72. I want Hemi to play me.

[Andy Stumpf]

He's a handsome man. He is better in person.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Unbelievably handsome in person. Yeah. That actually was where I got the permanently erect idea from. Okay. That's terrifying. So technology in war. Yep. Is it making soldiers more fragile or more effective, do you think?

[Andy Stumpf]

I think two things can be true sometimes. I don't, I don't think you should outsource killing and killing through a screen. Even though I think that that's the way that the world is probably headed. I think that removes the burden associated with that. But at the same time, some of those tools can help you kill people a lot more effectively.

[Chris Williamson]

So you mean there shouldn't be a flippancy with pulling the trigger or the equivalent of on another human?

[Andy Stumpf]

No, I don't think so. I think it should scramble your eggs for or maybe the rest of your life. Not like destroy you, but it should change your optic on humanity in the world.

[Chris Williamson]

In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e commerce companies in the US they are the driving force behind Gymshark and Skims and Alo and Nutonic, which is why I partnered with them. Because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with shop pay, you can boost conversions up to 50%. Basically, you didn't get into business to learn how to code or build a website or deal with the inventory stuff. Bull on the back end. You just want to get down to creating and promoting an awesome product. And Shopify takes all of the mess off your hands and allows you to focus on the job you actually came here to do. Designing and selling the thing that you love. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use with Nutonic. With Shopify right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.commodernwisdom all lowercase, that's shopify.commodernwisdom wasn't there a stat around the number of soldiers who either didn't fire their weapon or fired their weapons in a direction that wasn't basically toward the enemy in World War II?

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, SLA Marshall did a study on this and it's why they went shooting at circular accuracy targets to silhouette type targets. Now there's some issues with SLA Marshall and his data collection though. So as they've looked at this in hindsight, he claims to have interviewed a substantial number of people and somebody finally just got out a calendar and a piece of paper and said how many did you say that you did and how long were you over there for? The math doesn't math on that. So there's come to find out there's some BS involved in that section of military history as well. But that is a lot of where Grossman got his on killing information as well too. And walking through that, they claim that there was a statistically very small amount of people that would actually aim their weapon at another human being and pull the trigger. And they associated that with probably with two prongs. One, just the morality of humanity, but two, only practicing shooting at things that didn't look real. Not that it's like a green type silhouette. It doesn't look that real, but it looks more human than a circular bullseye. So they swapped that out and then I believe SLA Marshall and Grossman, their theory was that the percentages went up. I don't know how you actually measure that. You know, I talked with some guys who serve in Vietnam. They're like, God damn man, I was shooting at everything I could get. One thing that stopped me is I ran out of bolus. I'm like, whoa, dude, you're at a 12. Can I get you back at an 8. Also, are you okay? Have you talked to anybody about this in your life? Are you just like waiting for me 60 years later to ask you this question? As my dad, by the way.

[Chris Williamson]

Jesus Christ. Well, look, I mean the technology might enable people to get around that. If that isn't it issue and should we allow that?

[Andy Stumpf]

Man, I. Killing is so romanticized in so many ways and it is something that I. God. It should be a measure of last resort. And I don't know if you should remove the complexity and difficulty associated with that.

[Chris Williamson]

With certainly the flippancy that people can find around that. It shouldn't be that.

[Andy Stumpf]

Well, look at it. You can if you're on any social media platform. I mean, did you see Charlie Kirk's death?

[Chris Williamson]

How would you say? Unconsentingly?

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. So all three of my kids did too. That was the hardest conversations I had to have with all three of my

[Chris Williamson]

kids, especially knowing what that dad did.

[Andy Stumpf]

I am the most resoundingly uninteresting human being to them. I think they have maybe asked me about my old job five times. I don't, I don't know what they know or don't know. I don't talk with them about it. I have nothing military related at the house. It's just, I'm just. I just try to be their dad. But all three of them in formative years of their life scrolling on social media because their generation is of course almost terminally online at this point, saw that. I saw it as well too. And on any of these social platforms, if you go deep enough down a rabbit hole, there's no way that these filters can be as effectively as we want them to be. You're going to see people who are dying online. And that is not something that most people ever actually see in their real life. And I don't know if that reduces your. You know what I mean? Like, it's like this, this barrier that I'm very thankful that almost nobody is willing to cross. Like people might talk a big game about that, but almost nobody is willing to cross that barrier. And I'm very thankful for that because it's not something that should be talked about flippantly. I don't think we should remove barriers to making that easier.

[Chris Williamson]

That was really. I mean, that's seared into my brain. Think about how many videos on the Internet you've seen. Like tens of thousands of videos that I've seen on the Internet, rookie. Numbers, baby, numbers, dude, up your game. We're talking a week that's just porno. And that one, it's not the main angle that everybody saw. It was the second one that was much more graphic. And I didn't mean to see that one either. That's not my idea of a good way to spend an afternoon to see that. And yeah, I didn't mean to. But then you're contending with what does freedom of speech mean and freedom of exposure. Is that the same thing as freedom of speech? Freedom to be exposed to these things? And how much should we. There's certainly things that we don't want to be insulating people from. But then there's stuff that almost universally, like a guy being killed in a really, really graphic way. That's one of the ones that. Who needs to see that as a part of their human development?

[Andy Stumpf]

I completely agree. And the fact that that stuff exists and will for the foreseeable future, I don't know. I don't know what that does to the psyche of people who see that when they're in those developing ages.

[Chris Williamson]

What's something about special operations that you think civilians glorify that's completely wrong or

[Andy Stumpf]

misconstrued the people legitimately? So I. I truly served with people that I consider to be just tremendous in every regard. And not like a person that was tremendous in every sense. But I could look at somebody and say, oh, my God, I wish I could do what you're able to do, to fill in the blank. I could find inspiration in those people and look at them and say, okay, I know what's possible. And if you can get to that level, I can at least try to get to that level. Because I want that to be the standard. You can apply that across the board. But they're all exceptionally normal people. The special operations community is not comprised of people that put a cape on and go to work. They are very normal people that are tasked with doing some exceptional things at times. But they suffer from the same ailments of life that everybody else does. And you can easily create this unrealistic expectation that they can do anything, that they can tolerate anything, that they are impossible to knock down. And that isn't the case, man. They're normal, exceptionally average people. I wish I could take people and introduce them to the first day of Bud's training, where you'll have a couple hundred people lined up and like, just look at the physiology of these people. They'll be like, there is going to be like a D1 college athlete, which, guess what? That fucker's not going to be able to swim. So see you later. Right. And there's going to be a marathon runner, and that guy's going to have a really hard time swimming. So that stuff kind of sorts itself out. The rest of it, you would look at their physiology and anatomy and just be like, really like, you look like the dude who was checking me out at the grocery store. And it's like, yeah, that dude's a savage, but still also a normal person. And I think that's forgotten often. And you can actually lie to yourself when you're in that community, because if people expect that from you, you start expecting it from yourself. And then you're headed into a really deep, dark place.

[Chris Williamson]

You get a line. We are not as unique as we think. We just struggle in different ways.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm guessing that's what you're talking about here.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. I mean, there you have more in common with a guy who's bagging your groceries and a special operations soldier than you could possibly think. And nobody wants to believe that. I'm not saying.

[Chris Williamson]

Why do they not want to believe it?

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't know. Because then I think it makes it easy for people to say, well, I can never do that because that person's different. And I'm not saying, take the grocery bagger to Iran, you know, maybe take the guy.

[Chris Williamson]

See if you can fucking survive. Actually, we really want to make a movie about you with Mark Wahlberg.

[Andy Stumpf]

You can put whatever you want to in this brown paper bag, but it's all you have to survive.

[Chris Williamson]

Thanks. 72 hours.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, only if you want, Chris. Yeah. Yeah. Now it's easier to. If you can say, well, they're different, then you give yourself an excuse. So I can't do that. I mean, and I went back as an instructor for 18 months, and I watched these kids, and I'm sure the instructors watched my class and said the same thing, like, God, I work with retards. That's clearly what they were saying about my class. But it. It was not a group of people that are on baseball card decks. It was people from all over the US from the Midwest to coastal cities, who would probably have politics align a little bit more blue and some align a little bit more red. And people who joined the military to get out of their socioeconomic position because they had no upward mobility and legitimate people who had probably generational wealth. And they're all there, and they're all so ridiculously that the differences are. It's just. It's round off error. The similarities are. Yeah, they're just Average people.

[Chris Williamson]

What did you learn as an instructor looking at selection that you didn't learn being part of selection?

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. Let me just tell you, it was a different experience.

[Chris Williamson]

Right, okay. Yeah. Because you were warm.

[Andy Stumpf]

Did you.

[Chris Williamson]

Did you play into the fact that when you went through it, you saw some bastard with a big anorak on holding a hot cup of cocoa? You're like, ah, now it's my turn.

[Andy Stumpf]

Well, with all generational trauma, the goal with it should be to pass it downhill. So at least that's what the military uses. No, there are definitely people who play like, roles and caricatures. I was. I went back about 10 years after I had been in, and I was rehabbing from getting hurt, so. And also we were well into the global war on terror. So when I went through in 1997, the concept of the real world application of the job was exactly that. It was a concept. I volunteered during peacetime, and there was a generation of seals that had served to Vietnam all the way up into that point, that had never seen any.

[Chris Williamson]

No.

[Andy Stumpf]

But I mean, that doesn't change, though, how hard they trained and how much they focused on the job. It's either good luck or bad luck, depending on the optic that you're looking at. And people will tell you it's both, like, oh, it's good luck. I didn't get that. Or I feel like I have horrible luck because I didn't get those experiences. So it was a different world for me going through training a lot of this stuff as a student. It's really weird. You see, my class started with 180 people, and we graduated 18 of the originals. So every day you're peeling people off, mostly in the first phase of training. That's where the vast, vast majority of people are going to disappear. But you don't get to talk to them because your training day continues. And they're just. They're gone and they are shifted over to another division and they're housed in a different area and this. And that's not demeaning by any stretch. They just. They lift and shift them from the class that is going through training, and you're back to the needs of the Navy. You can come back. And that's something that people don't often know you can. You have to go back out to the fleet for a couple years. You're gonna have to rescreen to come back in. But some of the most legendary SEAL operators are guys who didn't make it through buds their first time.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow.

[Andy Stumpf]

And I don't know why people don't understand that, like, oh, you failed one time, I have to go, you know, my life is over. And I'm like, I don't, you know, I don't. If I had to list my successes and failures, let me just tell you, the failure list is multiples, magnitudes of order greater than my success list. But when I went through as a student, nothing made sense because you would have an instructor, one day he would, you would do something that they would ask and they'd be like, good job. And the next day you do something that they would ask and they would just hand you your ass. You're like, what is going on here? So it was very chaotic and it didn't make sense. Like, why are we so focused on some of these things? It was always attention to detail. Attention to detail, attention to detail and follow procedure regardless of how you feel and what is going on around you. As an 18 year old kid, some of those things are very difficult concepts, right? And I also, again, the lens of, I mean, this is just training, right? Like, nobody's been to war in a really long time. Like, you guys take it easy a little bit. I'm there, my God. Then I go back in 2006. So we're five years into the GWAD at this point and I looked at the curriculum and I saw what we were doing and there was constant aha. Moments of like, oh, this is why we do that. Attention to detail has nothing to do with the knife that I'm inspecting to see if it can cut hair before you go for an ocean swim, or the CO2 cartridges that you twist into a life jacket that was produced in 1918 that I don't even know would save your life if you fired the cartridge off. But you're sitting there as an instructor and you're looking at each one of the, you know, the, the screws and all, all of the little crevices. Is there any rust in there? Is there any sand in there? It's not going to matter. When it comes to functioning, you're focusing on attention to detail above everything else because that's what's keeping you alive when it comes to following a tactic when the entire world around you is falling apart. So that type of stuff, time management, emotional control, decision making, all of those things going back as an instruction. Okay, now I get it. And the way I viewed it was this. I'm looking to be an instructor for two years, maybe on the far end, 18 months. And I do want to continue my career and if I do so I'm going to go back to a SEAL team and guess who I'm going to end up serving with. All of these people. So it is probably even to my own benefit and perhaps survival if I try to pour as much knowledge, information into these people as opposed to treating them like the redheaded stepchild that you'd like to forget, which is technical description of how my class was treated. Not that I harbor any resentment and bad feelings.

[Chris Williamson]

You think you had a particularly bad one?

[Andy Stumpf]

They hated our class. Well, hated the leadership of our class. We did. So Hell week is the fifth week of training, and it opens with like M60s firing blanks and smoke grenades. It's supposed to be like this intro into combat.

[Chris Williamson]

Sounds like fucking Coachella's opening party or something.

[Andy Stumpf]

I've never been to Coachella, but I like where your head's at. And probably less alcohol at this party than Coachella and Molly. But for our class, they just walked out to the beach because they put you out in these huge general purpose tents and they just walked out to the beach and with a bullhorn, they're like, hit the surf. Which just means run out of the tent and just go get into the water. That's all we got. They hated our class. They beat the shit.

[Chris Williamson]

Why do you think they hate you so much?

[Andy Stumpf]

There's leadership.

[Chris Williamson]

You have a leader during hell week,

[Andy Stumpf]

you have a leader at all times, right? So they did not like me.

[Chris Williamson]

William the leader. No, no. I was going to say I totally understand them. If so.

[Andy Stumpf]

No, no. I failed in my leadership roles much later on after I had enough knowledge and experience and just not the technical capacity to do my job. It's not everybody's. And there's another thing that a misconception that people have. Well, you know, if you come from special operations, you're just naturally this leader. You're going to be awesome. You can lead in any situation. And it's not true. The best leaders that I ever was around was in that community. And in the same breath, the worst leaders that I was ever around was also in that community. But nobody can tell that from the outside, because we still will be successful.

[Chris Williamson]

Get the job done, right?

[Andy Stumpf]

And then so people look at that community, then they say, well, okay, if you guys always get the job done, then your leaders must all be awesome. Why don't you go ahead and canvas the group and you'll find out right quick which leaders are liked and appreciated and are actually doing the jobs and which ones are lucky that they might not have a dick rubbed on the inside of their coffee cup.

[Chris Williamson]

So you had a strong headwind.

[Andy Stumpf]

Does that mean a dick on my coffee cup?

[Chris Williamson]

Yes.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. I did the best I could. I've never claimed to be a good leader, man. I have made. I'm not joking. I've made more mistakes in my life than I've had failures.

[Chris Williamson]

This episode is brought to you by gymshark. I have tried pretty much every brand of gym wear over the years. Most of it looks good on the website, but very little of it survives real world training, which is why I'm such a massive fan of gymshark. Their hybrid shorts, especially in onyx, gray and navy, are basically my uniform in the gym at this point. They move properly, they don't bunch, they're super lightweight. You can wash and dry them in an afternoon. The Geo seamless T shirt is what I train in almost every single session. Breathes properly, holds its shape after you wash it. Everything that Gymshark makes is lightweight and sweat wicking and easy to wash and dries fast. And if you're still on the fence, they offer a 30 day free return. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't like it, just send it back. Plus, they ship internationally and right now you can get 10% off everything sitewide by going to the link in the description below or heading to Jim Sh ModernWisdom and using the code ModernWisdom10 at checkout. That's Jim ShModernWisdom and ModernWisdom10 at checkout. You have this line about failure being tuition payments. Yeah, I've reframed how I view failures. I now consider them tuition payments. Some of my tuition payments have been relatively inexpensive and some have taken me to the brink of bankruptcy.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, it's just an easier way to get comfortable with consistently failing. Just lying to yourself and reframing that, hey, maybe this is a good thing.

[Chris Williamson]

Cost of doing business is a great way to look at this stuff though, dude. Yeah, it really is.

[Andy Stumpf]

Legitimately. I didn't view it like that for many, many years in my life. Because you want to sit there and blame every external circumstance. And maybe you do fail because of an external circumstance, but by reframing it as a lesson that I learned then that I can apply moving forward. The tuition payment that you really don't understand the cost of, I mean, I'll take a. To put it in business terms, I'll take a $5,000 mistake that would save me 500,000 later on, you know, and that's that's really all it is. It's. Failures are rough. I mean, it doesn't make it any easier by reframing it to that. But I also am sitting here today, the person that I am because of the failures and hopefully what I've learned from those as well.

[Chris Williamson]

What are some of the most expensive lessons that you've paid for?

[Andy Stumpf]

Oh, man. So earlier in life, my entire life was based around this concept of being somebody who was incapable of quitting, because that's the community that I came from. And because of that, I put my children and myself through probably 10 extra years in a relationship that I'm still working my way out of and the impact of. Because I would look at myself in the mirror and say, today's the day, huh, pussy? You gonna quit? I literally talked myself into staying in something that demonstrably and objectively, almost everybody from the outside, after I made the decision to leave, was like, hey, man, good job on that one. Wish you would have done that about a decade ago. Because of how I viewed myself in that situation, that shift, and I write about it, I'd actually, at this point in my life, rather see people fall a little bit short of their goals and know when to walk away than destroy themselves because they don't ever want to quit, and they end up having nothing in their life.

[Chris Williamson]

There's a fine line between resilience and suppression with this. And a lot of the time, I think we confuse suppression for strength. And I'm kind of fascinated about the line between. Giving up too soon, leaving it on the table, sandbagging a workout, and stopping because you're about to get injured.

[Andy Stumpf]

That is a tough one, because how do you measure that? There's no external tool that somebody can look at you and say, hey, you should keep going. Because they don't actually, you know, like, they don't know how your body is,

[Chris Williamson]

what your limit is.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. And especially, you know, using exercise as an example, like, the tension that you're under, like, you. You're actually getting physical feedback. Like, no, no, I'm not gonna put that down. So I don't blow my. You know, my spine out.

[Chris Williamson]

But the emotional one's even more difficult because for sure. What does it mean to say that you went past your emotional limit?

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

What does an injury relationally or karmically or psychologically mean compared with, yeah, dude, I put 380 on the bar and tried to do 20 back squats, and I blew my MCL. Yeah, that was a bad idea. But what does that mean? Because it's you erode psychological well being in small chunks, typically over a very long period of time. So you can always go one more day. You can always go until you get to the stage where you've accumulated sufficient damage.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, I wish I would have been able to recognize that point earlier in my life. It would have saved a lot of hardship for myself and I think for my children as well too. But if I'm like anybody else, I'm almost always my own worst enemy. My mastery of negative self talk. I, I have no education beyond a high school diploma that I barely got. I think they gave it to me just so I would get out of there. But a PhD in negative self talk,

[Chris Williamson]

how does that encourage you to stay in situations that you should leave earlier?

[Andy Stumpf]

The reason I stayed is because the entire currency of my life up until that point was being known as somebody who wouldn't quit. And that's very common inside of that special operations world. Again, you know, what are these misconceptions that people may have? And that's why to me it's so important to at least try to pull back the curtain a little bit and just explain that these are absolutely average people. Like, yeah, and God, so many guys will say this. I hate the term always and never. But most guys would tell you, like, listen, the job will always suffer last, the boys will always suffer last, but the family will absolutely suffer before your job performance does. I mean, you put everything for that pursuit of who you are and what you're doing on a pedestal and everything else around you in life is falling apart and you still have to deal with that at some point. And it's just that unwillingness to let people down and that unwillingness to admit, like, hey man, like I'm falling apart at the seams here. Like I might be performing at work, but absolutely every other metric in my life is, is trending in the wrong direction. The guys won't say anything and it's, it's dangerous. I think it has a lot to do with what happens when, you know, guys get out and the struggles that they have when they get out as well too.

[Chris Williamson]

I found out that of professional athletes who get divorced, 50% of the divorces happen in the first year after they retire.

[Andy Stumpf]

It's a different universe when you stop going to work and you actually have to physically be there. The world I came from 270 days a year on the road, easy. I mean, you're living independent, but hopefully parallel lives. And then you switch to 365 home. Hey, honey, do we know each other? Do you still like me?

[Chris Williamson]

And you've lost your purpose. I think that's a big one. Like you are trying to deal with the deceleration of your own identity.

[Andy Stumpf]

Hopefully you guys put the brakes on a little early, you know, lift their head up a little bit, realize that however long you want to stay in the military, the end is coming. So you can kind of keep an eye on the horizon, on the future. The longer people wait for that, I think the tougher the transition can be. But yeah, it's, it's a shock, man. You gotta be careful that it's not who you are, that it's just what you do.

[Chris Williamson]

Given that it's so all encompassing, that's got to be difficult then.

[Andy Stumpf]

Extremely. And I think that's why, I mean, the stats don't lie statistically. Veterans special operations as well, Suicide rate is statistically anomalous in comparison to the rest of society.

[Chris Williamson]

You've got this line, until you view yourself as the author of your life, you'll be the victim of it.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, what's that mean? It means until you stop blaming everything else around you for the course and trajectory of your life, you're just going to be a flag in the wind going with the direction that the wind is blowing. And for clarity, you have almost no control over what happens in your life, but you have complete and total control and how you respond to it, and that is being the author of your life. So life sucks sometimes. Cool. Are you going to suck with that? Or are you going to take control of who you are and work your way through that and maybe even be better at the end of that? Right. And that's the difference between somebody who will sit there and externally, instead of doing anything about what's going on, they'll sit there and complain about what's going on and point fingers at everything. The author of your life. Not that it's any easier, you accept what's going on and you focus on what it is that you can control, which is largely going to be your actions, your thought process, your internal monologue and what you do with it.

[Chris Williamson]

I suppose an interesting, an interesting challenge that you have here is you are the author of your life. And that means that you need to take responsibility for how you have contributed to the problems that you're facing. But that also includes how your traits, even the ones that in a different world or a different environment with strengths, you are having to pay the price for now too. That's also you are your own responsibility, your traits Are your own responsibility.

[Andy Stumpf]

If you take a no quit attitude to everything in life, you are headed towards failure. You have to control those tools as well too. And again, that from coming from the community where that was the currency and equity is your ability to never quit. Let's apply that to alcoholism. Like, I have a drinking problem. I should. Nope, Never quit. Okay. Maybe I should just pick up heroin then too and see how far I can push that one. Like, you know what I mean? Like, there's easy examples of where that can get completely out of control. And it's just. God, it's so. God, it's so dangerous. And that's why I say I would rather have people fall a little bit short of their goals and understand that not everything is worth destroying who you are or killing yourself for. There's just so few things in life that I think actually rise to that level.

[Chris Williamson]

What's the classic avatar mold of a special operator's relationship, like with their wife?

[Andy Stumpf]

Man, that really varies. I don't know if there could. Some guys like to marry strippers, you

[Chris Williamson]

know, So, I mean, this is. We're not even talking about the sale community anymore.

[Andy Stumpf]

So, I mean, that's a weird avatar. And I'm not here to tell anybody how to party. But I mean, that relationship dynamic often involves Chinese food getting thrown at you for some reason. I don't know why, but I've seen it. I've seen it. It's weird. So it really depends. The divorce rate in special operations, I would say hovers at 80 to 85%.

[Chris Williamson]

Fuck.

[Andy Stumpf]

That's an estimate. Like, I have no, that. That it's anecdotal based on my experience. But the other side of that is. So let's say it is 85, 15% of those people are making it. And I have seen it where it's been. High school sweethearts, legitimately high school sweethearts. And they. They have the ability to grow together even though they're apart and they can reconnect. I mean, a lot of it has to do with too the. What was modeled for you when you were young. Right. Because a lot of people will replicate the avatar of what was shown to them when they were growing. That's what they think a relationship looks like. That's one of my regrets for staying 10 years longer than I. Than I think I should have is. And I got to the point where I was asking myself, like, would I want my own children to follow my footsteps in this relationally? Yes. And if the answer like, and you

[Chris Williamson]

are imprinting them yes.

[Andy Stumpf]

And like, what am I modeling here? You know, I am the most influential person in my children's life, especially at that point in time in their life. What am I modeling? And it's like, that is a tough conversation here to have. Like, oh my God. I'm actually, even though I view myself as somebody who can never have quit and this is the only currency that matters, I am actually modeling something I would never want my children.

[Chris Williamson]

Would you want that for your kids?

[Andy Stumpf]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Before we continue, I wish someone had told me five years ago to stop overthinking nutrition and just find something that works. I've simplified mine down to one scoop a day and it's made hitting my nutritional bases an awful lot easier. AG1 includes 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food ingredients. And that is why I've been drinking it every morning for over five years now. And they've taken it a step further with AG1 Next Gen, the same one scoop ritual, but now backed by four clinical trials. In those trials, AG1 was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, boost healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, and improve key nutrient levels to in just three months. They've been refining the formula since 2010, 52 iterations and counting. And I love the next gen because it's more bioavailable. It's clinical validation, which is unbelievably rare in the supplement world. The older I get, the more I realize that the small stuff compounds and this is one of the smallest things I do that makes a massive difference. If you're still on the fence, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee in the US so you can buy it and try it for three months and if you do not like it, they'll just give you your money back. Right now you can get a free AG1 welcome kit that includes a bottle of D3K2 AG1 flavor sampler and that 90 day money back guarantee. By going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com modernwisdom that's drinkag1.com modernwiry I mean, I spent a good bit of time with Jocko over Christmas and he's an autonomous robot dude. He was just extolling the virtues of his and his wife's relationship. Yeah, he's like, yeah, we.

[Andy Stumpf]

I think that's an example of one that did work.

[Chris Williamson]

I think we've had about one and a half arguments in 35 years or however long they fucked up.

[Andy Stumpf]

Oh, that just means they lie to each other

[Chris Williamson]

or she's too scared to do it.

[Andy Stumpf]

Taco is a teddy bear. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

He's cute. He's been. He was nice. I saw him fucking roll on the floor with Mark Zuckerberg. That was a scene that I never thought I would observe.

[Andy Stumpf]

That's not why. Is it Mark?

[Chris Williamson]

No, no, that, that.

[Andy Stumpf]

No, that's not good.

[Chris Williamson]

It's about half. Half the weight and size and about a tenth of the experience of Jocko. But it was fun. It was fun to watch, especially while they were on their feet. It was really fun.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

It was like watching UFC 1 happen.

[Andy Stumpf]

Is Zuck. Is he. We. Is he a tiny man?

[Chris Williamson]

He's not small. He's definitely packed on some muscle and size and he's been training a good bit.

[Andy Stumpf]

How tall do you think he is?

[Chris Williamson]

5, 9.

[Andy Stumpf]

Average height for 1. But

[Chris Williamson]

look, I mean, it was good to see Jocko lie on top of another man. That was. That was a great way to spend it.

[Andy Stumpf]

That's the best part about jiu jitsu.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Getting to lie on other men or

[Andy Stumpf]

have them lie on top of you. You know, we're not all tops.

[Chris Williamson]

Sometimes we're both. Sometimes we're both. Dude. What happened with this Rob o' Neil conversation? Because me and you were texting about it and I saw an absolute tsunami of bullshit occur, man.

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't know how to accurately answer that because I don't know. It's the first time he and I ever had sat down and talked. When we opened the conversation, he reminded me that I had taken him for his first tandem when he went to the tandem. Remember that because on that day I was there as an instructor. You probably take six or eight people for a jump and that's how you.

[Chris Williamson]

That's strapped to you.

[Andy Stumpf]

Correct.

[Chris Williamson]

You're a bottom.

[Andy Stumpf]

They would be the bottom. Ah, they're front riding.

[Chris Williamson]

Power position.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, yeah. How do. Actually, it is power bottom. Yes. PBA power bottom actual. Yeah. I didn't remember that because I'd always said I'd never met the guy. And he was like, dude, you took me for a first hand. I'm like, sorry, man, I didn't remember that. I've taken 1500 people for the first hit up. So it definitely wasn't intentional. I have never seen a military operation that has more tentacles going out with divergence in relayed experiences or stories, whatever you would want to call it, than that particular one. And I don't know what to make of it. I know a lot of people that were there. I was not. And not all of their stories align with the most common narratives as well too.

[Chris Williamson]

This is the Osama bin Laden, right?

[Andy Stumpf]

Correct. Yeah. The operation was called Neptune Sphere. So dude, I don't know. He didn't deviate from his story. You know, he added some things in there that definitely surprised me about what they included in the debrief and what they left out of the debrief.

[Chris Williamson]

What were those things

[Andy Stumpf]

from? Again, I was not there, so I'm relaying this. There was the first floor, the second floor, and then Bin Laden and his wives and I believe a few children were on the third floor. The stories or the relayed experiences seem to start deviating at the, the, the stairs that go up from the second floor to the third and very, very few people were actually on those stairs. I don't know how wide the, the stairways actually were, but stairways can actually be really dangerous from a tactical. You don't want to get, get a bunch of people in there. It would take one guy to pull a pin on a grenade and roll it down a set of stairs and you're having a real shit day. So you want to have enough people. But also the minimum amount. And the way he described it is that they were getting a little bit thin on bodies, but the first person saw movement, took a shot, they went into the room. Rob encountered bin Laden, shot bin Laden. And then essentially before they went to the debrief and then after that, I mean, Rob said that as he was getting ready to take pictures, a guy walked up and shot him in the face multiple times right in front of him. That essentially before they went down to do the debrief that, that the people who were on the third floor got together and decided what they were going to include in that and what they weren't going to include in that. And again, the conversation was a while ago, so I don't know the exact specifics of it, but it was the initial shots and then the follow up shots from that as well from Rob and the man who was in front of him.

[Chris Williamson]

Why is shooting a enemy combatant that's dead in the face, it's a war crime, Mutilation of an enemy combat.

[Andy Stumpf]

Correct? Yeah. Not, not advisable. And if you are going to do that and I mean, it's just that stuff happens. I mean, bottom line, you also sometimes, I mean there's a difference between. The way he described it is there was an immense amount of time between essentially the target being called secure, which is where you can kind of unwrap a little bit from a tactical perspective. Right you call, come over the radio and then you start a process of basically gathering as much information as you can. That's where you get the cameras out and you start looking for stuff and bagging things. You know, when you're clearing, you don't want to, you don't want to leave uncertainty as if you engage somebody, you don't want to leave uncertainty as to whether or not they're going to resurrect themselves and come. So it's. And so you, what you end up doing is you inflict wounds that are incompatible with life. So if you can put the inside of their head on the outside of their head, that's usually a good indication that that problem is solved. There's a difference in doing that as you are clearing instructor in a structure and actively engaged. And then after, you know what I mean, after that happening, it happens. It's a, it's a fucking ugly occupation. And it will show you the best of who you are and the worst of who you ever thought you could be. And some people get lost in that. And you put people on the front lines who have been sharpening their teeth for decades fighting the same people in the same places. It happens.

[Chris Williamson]

But does that feel like righteous retribution? In the moment, perhaps.

[Andy Stumpf]

Probably in the moment, but.

[Chris Williamson]

And almost immediately regret?

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't know if there's always regret. Sometimes I don't think there ever is. To me, my personal opinion, and I only speak for myself, we need to be better than that. If we want to be a beacon to the world, we need to be better than that.

[Chris Williamson]

And that's tough because it means that you need to play by rules that other people are maybe not going to.

[Andy Stumpf]

You need to respect certain boundaries. You need to play, I mean, Warfee, the Geneva Convention, get it? Totally understand rules of engagement, totally understand law of war, rule of war. Totally understand there is a lot of flexibility inside of all of those things. You can do everything that you need to do and be accomplish the mission you need to. And dominate people on the battlefield inside of those things. Just imagine, I mean, a lot of times all you have to do is flip the coin. How would the American people react if, let's say pilot in Iran, right. We'll go to modern day got captured, got killed. And then they put on the Internet a guy walking up with an AK and unloading a magazine into his face. That's not going to go over well. If we do that to other people, oftentimes that'll move the barrier for what they're willing to do. To us as well. And I think that our country and our flag needs to stand for more than that.

[Chris Williamson]

What is already a level of. Of contention over the US entering conflicts at the moment. And I don't know what you think this does to how attractive military service looks at the moment, but at least for me, you know, in the uk, for instance, you've spent a good bit of time in the uk. There is no. We would like to invite first responders and active military personnel to board the plane early.

[Andy Stumpf]

How come?

[Chris Williamson]

Because no one gives a fuck about our military. I've never. I've flown hundreds of flights around the uk. They may have changed it now, but I have never once heard.

[Andy Stumpf]

Do they have a special group that they invite on early? I'm fascinated now.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't know. Maybe your friend that ejected himself out into liquefied. Perhaps he would get to go on fast.

[Andy Stumpf]

Vegan gill. Look him up, man. Holy.

[Chris Williamson]

Can he walk now? Yeah. Okay.

[Andy Stumpf]

He's like running half marathons.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay.

[Andy Stumpf]

I mean, I'm not saying his gait's good, but, like,

[Chris Williamson]

loping down a little, so.

[Andy Stumpf]

Worse.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Just. So do you. UK doesn't revere the. The veteran community in the uk. I have no idea what that. Yeah, to me, it's the sort of shit that I just learned about in American movies. And then since coming here, I. For instance, I once was wearing a black rifle coffee T shirt, and I think it had the American flag. Yep. And it's a sort of a military green kind of color.

[Andy Stumpf]

Green.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. It's really nice T shirt. I wore it until it was fucking threadbare and I got on a plane and a gentleman who was sat in one of the earliest rows said, thank you for your service to me as I went past.

[Andy Stumpf]

What did you say?

[Chris Williamson]

I was like. As I'm like being fucking conveyor belted along the movies.

[Andy Stumpf]

You say, you're welcome. I did it for you.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, yeah. It's good. There's enough about stolen valor already for the British to come in. Not only is stolen valor, it's stolen patriotism. Holy fuck.

[Andy Stumpf]

It's stolen passing valor. You were being pushed along.

[Chris Williamson]

That's correct. I'm like, desperately trying. I needed to get my British out of the way first so that I could apologize for him getting it wrong. I'm so sorry that you seem to be mist me to say my word. But even within that, like, it's just so there's a. A reflex response in this country.

[Andy Stumpf]

Not always, though. So. My dad served in Vietnam. They didn't get that most of my dad's generation that served in military, they'd be the last person to tell you that they actually did. His experiences were completely different than the mo. Yeah, yeah. Than the modern era veteran. How do you think he would change in the UK though? Like, let's transport 9 11. Do you guys have twin tower? Are you guys allowed to build that high? Are you capable of it?

[Chris Williamson]

I think we're capable of it. I mean, look, Chris, I thought five

[Andy Stumpf]

stories was the maximum.

[Chris Williamson]

Christopher Wren was. Dude, we had seven. Seven. We had the seven seven bombings.

[Andy Stumpf]

So. But let's say it was something. Okay, well, for whatever the analogy would be, if 911 had occurred in the UK and the UK had responded in the way that the US had in Afghanistan, or like obviously take into fact differences in size and all that, that. Do you think it would have changed the mentality though of the. The citizens in the UK and how they viewed it?

[Chris Williamson]

Perhaps. I mean, look, are you saying to me that the turning point around how the military was interpreted and the level of warmth towards people who were veterans was 2001?

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't know if that was the. I don't know. I can't claim causality, but correlation certainly exists.

[Chris Williamson]

That seems to be prior to then not quite so revered after then. Pretty revered, but. Okay, so maybe it's just recency bias. For me talking that what I know from my memory of how people respond to American veterans is that it's thank you for your service, special dispensation, a variety of different days and parades and all sorts of other stuff with rainbow flags. And then you get to now where I don't know if the same thing's quite so true. I feel like there's a lack, there's

[Andy Stumpf]

a dearth of pendulums always swing.

[Chris Williamson]

And so maybe it's going back to what is more typical. Perhaps that was the aberration. Perhaps that was the anomaly. The last 30 years or so. 20 years. Perhaps that was what was strange.

[Andy Stumpf]

I would say 20 years is the anomaly. And honestly, I think the. Again, to go back to misconceptions.

[Chris Williamson]

Sorry, please. World War II.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Guys came home. That was a big part of the baby boom, was off the back of dudes that were just revered by every single person who hadn't been to war and all of the other people that had as well.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. I think revering a community above all others can also become incredibly dangerous as well. It becomes a manipulatable system. It becomes a system that you can gain and then poor examples or expressions of that Start that pendulum going back in the other direction. I think it's a naturally correcting thing, but yeah, I think it has more to do with the previous 20 years than anything else. That'd be my guess.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I did just. You know, if you are. If there's the potential for boots on the ground being needed in the Middle east, which every day it just. However low the likelihood was, or if is that likelihood increases each day, I

[Andy Stumpf]

have absolutely no idea what is going on. It is pretty wild.

[Chris Williamson]

How so?

[Andy Stumpf]

I thought that we were in the like, end the wars phase of politics and, you know, don't start any new ones. Even though technically we're not at war. Right. Of course, there's that lovely little caveat of how the authorized use of military force has been completely bent by every president that has been in office since it was. Was created. I don't know how well the checks and balances are currently working. I don't know, the conscription thing, like registering for the draft. I mean, there's a difference between registering people for the draft and then like executing a draft. I would actually really like to see two years of mandatory service for young men and women. It would give people such a different context on the world around them as opposed to just experiencing world through Instagram. At that age, you go out and just. Just. If you could leave where you were at and go to an area that was perhaps more impoverished or just get a different view of it and serve something bigger than yourself for two years, I think it would help a lot. But I mean, I don't know. I get really wary when there's no definable end state. And that's on my own experience in the global war on terror. I mean, we accomplished our military objectives in Afghanistan. And this has people way more steeped in military knowledge and understanding than myself. In about 90 days, we saved for 20 years. Our exit probably could have been better. We left a few things behind. Did you see the video of like the day after we left, they were flying a Blackhawk with a man hanging from his neck underneath the rope. Underneath it, literally. The day after.

[Chris Williamson]

No.

[Andy Stumpf]

Oh, yeah. Gnarly. We left a lot of stuff. Bombing Iraq. You know, what's our definable end state? What?

[Chris Williamson]

How long. Sorry? How long ago was the official withdrawal?

[Andy Stumpf]

Five years, I think. So, yeah. We have to look that one up.

[Chris Williamson]

My point is, however long ago that was, I don't know. It's like you and a toxic ex. You're just not able to stop going back. She's not good for Me, she wasn't good for me for a long time.

[Andy Stumpf]

I've had a few cocktails though.

[Chris Williamson]

God damn it dude. I had to send the u up WhatsApp.

[Andy Stumpf]

You know what's wild too is where

[Chris Williamson]

was it August 30, 2021? So not even five years.

[Andy Stumpf]

And here's what's wild. We're talking. The talking point now is that Iran has been our enemy for 47 years, which I'm not going to argue like death to America is a thing for a certain segment of the population and ideological belief there. Got it. It why are we choosing now? Over the 47 years, where was the people? I mean we had a robust. For people who don't know where Iran is, it sits in between Iraq and Afghanistan. We had Oreo that fucker. They were the delicious creamy center. This analogy is getting wild fast of the US military but what we did is bailed when we had an immense amount of infrastructure there. And now we're going to go back and I just give me some, give me some metrics by which we're measuring our. Like what are we using as our metric here? We destroyed their entire anti air system but we just lost two F15s and two A10s. We just nuked four of our own AH6s and the C130s that they flew in there on like I thought we had air superiority. Can't get. We can't let them get a nuclear weapon. Well then what do we strike for? Last year because the President United States got up there and said we completely annihilated their ability to enrich uranium. But now we're saying we can't let them get a bomb. Like were you not telling me the truth then? Are you not telling me the truth now or are you never telling me the truth? That's probably the better question for politicians. I just, it's such, it is such a horrific thing to ask of people to go do those things that I wish the people that made the decisions to some degree, I wish they had more skin in the game. I wish they had to go with them, you know, which that's never going to be the case but.

[Chris Williamson]

But we'll get back to talking in just one second. But first tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, maybe you even supplement, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside of their body. Which is why I partnered with function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests spanning hormones, heart, health, metabolic markers, inflammation, thyroid nutrients, liver and kidney function. It even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer. To put that in perspective, your typical annual physical might test about 20 markers, and function runs over 160. And this isn't just numbers dumped into your inbox. Every result is reviewed by clinicians, abnormal markers get flagged, and you get clear explanations and a personalized protocol with actionable next steps so you can actually do something about what you learned. Best of all, you test twice a year, and everything lives in a simple dashboard. You can just track trends over time, make sure that you're moving in the right direction. Normally, this level of testing would cost thousands through private clinics with function, it is $365 a year. That's $1 a day to know what's actually happening inside of your body. And right now, you can get $25 off bringing it down to 340. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save that additional $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's functionhealth.com modernwisdom wisdom and modern Wisdom a checkout. What's that line about wars being chosen by old men so that young men go out and die? There's some, yeah, some pithy aphorism around that. But I mean, I think what's been fascinating to me is watching the commentariat and the supporters and the critiques, criticizers of both sides, like, contort themselves into knots trying to work out what their position is on this. People who didn't like Trump still don't like Trump and have more reason not to. Lots of people who did like Trump also now don't like Trump. I don't know of anybody who has been converted over to the support. And I think this is shown in the polls like he has he's had over the last two years. Check this out. Jared. I'm pretty sure over the last two years, what's happened to Trump's approval numbers? I think he's had the fastest decline in approval numbers maybe in American history.

[Andy Stumpf]

Historically, when you tell people to go fuck themselves on Easter, that may happen or what did he end the Easter post with? Praise to Allah.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, yeah, yeah. What the fuck was going on with that? I was with this.

[Andy Stumpf]

You're asking me what's going on with that?

[Chris Williamson]

Trump's approval has followed a pretty clear Pattern A modest bump, then a steady decline, now persistently low and polarized. 46% approval and 43% disapproval in January 2025, which is higher than 2017. Keep going down. Recent polling shows 55 to 60%. So net negative approval of 14 to 20 points. Maybe that's not as low as I might have thought, but I mean, still not great. But that's a big drop. And what was the fucking. I was in Australia for this. I kind of saw it thirdhand. Why did you say DLR thing?

[Andy Stumpf]

I love that you're asking me for an explanation to that.

[Chris Williamson]

You psychoanalyze Donald Trump for me for a second.

[Andy Stumpf]

Oh, yeah. Good. There you go.

[Chris Williamson]

Psychoanalyze. I have a theory about why Donald. Hey, look.

[Andy Stumpf]

Oh, is it glasses tied?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Put these, put these on. And now that you've got. Okay, so why did Donald Trump say

[Andy Stumpf]

praise to Allah, because we elected a TV star to be the President of the United States.

[Chris Williamson]

God, I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to condition myself to use this. Yeah, well, I don't know what the fuck is. What you can say the current US Administration's plan is.

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't know if they have one. And I think that might be the scariest thing I. People get so wrapped around the color of their team's jersey, and I just. I want whatever administration is in office to do the best they possibly can so that we all can benefit from that. And I don't know where. Where it leads us when people forget that the goal should be like, hey, like thriving of this country, but they'll choose alignment of their colored jersey over, like, to the exclusion. I don't understand that. I don't know why it got that way. I don't also don't know how to get out of it either.

[Chris Williamson]

They'd rather their side win, but the country lose.

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't know if they would verbalize that, but their actions seem to be in line with that. And I don't. That's not great.

[Chris Williamson]

It really does seem at the moment, dude, it really does seem just like, I know. Own goal after own goal. And then even inside of the Republican Party, like the whole thing that J.D. vance ran on was America First. Like the whole. The whole.

[Andy Stumpf]

His whole philosophy was that the next Republican candidate for president is going to have a very interesting character trying to fucking unwind this. Well, they're going to have to run at a time while he's still president and answer for a lot of the

[Chris Williamson]

policy means throwing him under the bus.

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't think they'll be able to because I think he would cut his own nose off despite his face when it came there, I think.

[Chris Williamson]

And not support them.

[Andy Stumpf]

I think so.

[Chris Williamson]

So you've got to walk this tightrope of.

[Andy Stumpf]

And how do you do that?

[Chris Williamson]

Well, this was the issue that Kamala had right where she was being asked

[Andy Stumpf]

putting it down to a single issue or just being.

[Chris Williamson]

She was being asked to under the bus Biden while still being his vp.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And that was something that she struggled with.

[Andy Stumpf]

I mean something I thought about, you know, did the Republicans win the last election or did the Democrats it up so much? You know, like hey, we're not even let you choose which candidate you're going to vote for. All because of all the money we would have to give back and not be able to fundraise with. So yeah, we're going to strip away your choice and like this is the person you got get on team Blue. Like what, what.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. What do you think about the. The future of mercenary organizations of sort of guns for hire? Increasingly I'm seeing.

[Andy Stumpf]

Depends on who you ask. Some people are saying it's the way forward. Usually those people own those companies, but that's a tough one. I don't think you should be able to rent the American flag. I think it should be issued on your uniform and that's it. If you want to do things, if the military is not capable of doing the things that you're filling those gaps with, then do me a favor and restructure the military and develop those capabilities abilities instead of outsourcing it. Because there are some ways to cut corners outsourcing it and paint outside of the lines that the military isn't supposed to be able to do. And I think that's a dangerous thing. I think if the military isn't serving the role and isn't capable of doing it, then let's solve that problem.

[Chris Williamson]

Because you're using this buttress performance enhancer thing to.

[Andy Stumpf]

And I mean it compensate. Yeah, it's. And there's also risk in that too. I mean the Iranian pilot as an example, dude, we nuked some assets to go get that guy. Which by the way, people complain about the price of that, but to go back to like being issued in a flag on your uniform and being asked to do exceptional things, it kind of helps to know that if goes sideways, like the chariot will be lit on fire. It might not be pointed in the right direction. Like you might see it go off a cliff. But like we're going to Come do something.

[Chris Williamson]

Send another one, totally send more chariots until we get mean it.

[Andy Stumpf]

It's. That doesn't exist in the contracting world. I mean if you're out there and, and you're doing a contract and you know, a kinetic contract in an environment that is maybe less newsworthy but you're still. I mean there is no like red button like hey, send everybody. It's. So there's a lot of risk involved in that as well too.

[Chris Williamson]

That's interesting. I didn't know that.

[Andy Stumpf]

How could there be? I mean the, the, the, the Sear Combat Search and Rescue Response, that was all military based on. Right.

[Chris Williamson]

I thought that there would be something that was a part of that ecosystem inside of it, but I suppose it's much closer to a market. It's just a capitalist entity, correct?

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. I mean they're talking probably minimum manning at times. You know what I mean? How many bodies do we need to be able to do this? What can we charge? They're not going to have like the assets that we, no pun intended, metaphorically and literally burned to the ground. Those organizations don't have a stable of those things to be able to do that. So yeah, it's. I don't like the idea of outsourcing military type roles specifically when the underlying motivation behind it is to skirt rules that prohibit military behaviors and activities.

[Chris Williamson]

What are those sorts of rules?

[Andy Stumpf]

Rules of engagement medley in affairs that the US military is not supposed to

[Chris Williamson]

be meddling in because it would cross some kind of diplomatic or.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yep.

[Chris Williamson]

Legislative. Yep.

[Andy Stumpf]

Right. I don't think we should be doing that stuff. I think that gets real murky real fast. I'm not saying there's not a rule for private military contractors, PMCs, which are most of those organizations. I don't think outsourcing will is a good idea.

[Chris Williamson]

But it suddenly opens up the problem of who's got the biggest bank balance and who can continue who. Who is going to pay the most.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And if allegiance is basically to whoever's got the biggest paycheck, that's a problem.

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't know much about bitcoin, but

[Chris Williamson]

there's a lot of people out there with a lot of bitcoin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why don't we have our own private military contract? That'd be nice.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

People quit when they focus on how far they have to go.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Where'd you learn that?

[Andy Stumpf]

So interestingly enough, going back as an instructor, I was there for 18 months. I did not want to go back. It was global war on terror. That's a sure duty command. Non deployable meaning regardless of what's going on, your job is to be an instructor, which if you are in a profession of arms and arms are being used in your profession, you're probably going to want to be over there, not at a schoolhouse wiping noses and asses, right? We didn't actually do that. We let them do that for themselves because they're adults. But it ended up being the most rewarding 18 months of my entire career. I look back on it and I learned a lot about myself and it gave me an incredible understanding of the community. And I realized it was like the world's best laboratory on why people quit it. Like all of this. There have been so many millions of dollars and I don't have an exact. I'm going to say it's safe to say millions of dollars have been spent trying to figure out who makes it through seal trading psychological assessments. Looking at your sporting background, did you come from a nuclear family, a broken home, where'd you come from, socioeconomic status, all of these things. Pre training programs that existed for a couple years. The attrition rate just hums right along all of this stuff. It might have bumped at a percentage point. And for people who don't know, the attrition rate in the summer months is about 75%. So three out of four students aren't going to make it. Winter months a little bit colder. So more exposure to the elements, 80, maybe sometimes 90% attrition rate, which is.

[Chris Williamson]

You did winter, right?

[Andy Stumpf]

Winter, Hell week. Yes, for sure. My class was the last Hard Buds class that there ever was documented. It's written somewhere, probably in my handwriting. But the winter, the winter is just, it's just colder and the cold sucks more. As a student when you're going through, you don't get a chance to talk to the guy who is next to you, who quits because they're gone and your training day continues. And especially in like hell week, if that's a five day evolution starting on Sunday and ending on Friday, if they're gone, most of the quitting occurs between Sunday and about Tuesday morning. They're already moved out of the bare, like you'll probably never see them again. So as a student you're just like front sight focus. As an instructor, they're there for a couple of weeks, they have to process out, they get put over in a different birthing place. A lot of times they have medical issues that they're working their way through. And you are around young men who probably a week before you have a conversation with them would have told you that it is their singular goal and focus in life and that they're is nothing that you could have done to make them quit and that they were going to be there on graduation day and that this is the only goal that matters to them. And then eight to nine out of ten of them quit. And you can sit there and you can talk to them about why. And I try to be very kind in talking with them because most of the people who have regret is the largest emotion that just is kind of outpouring. It's. They want to go back. It sucks. I've met students decades later or people who have quit buzz. I'm like, hey, man, I'm not trying to be a dick, but I'm just curious because I have a theory, like, how do you feel about that decision? Regret. Every single time they wish they had been able to see it through because it leaves a really large question mark in their life going forward. So in spending time with the students, I would ask them, you know, well, why did you quit? And in that kind of fragile state, they were really honest with me and they kept saying the same things. There was a couple categories and one of them was huge, huge. The small one was like, life happened, my dad died and I gotta get the fuck outta here. Like, dude, I wish you the absolute best. You know what I mean? Like, that's not the data set that I'm looking for. Injury is another one. Can't control that because that wasn't necessarily a consensual choice. So, boom, they're gone. Everybody else who rang the bell, why'd you quit? And they would all say the same thing. I couldn't be as cold as I was for as long as I thought. Thought I was going to be cold. I would say, well, how. Who told you how long you were going to be cold for? Well, nobody. But I told myself I couldn't be cold for as long as I thought I was going to have to be. Or tired or hungry or the combination of all of those things or in physical pain or it was too hard. What they are all expressing is a moment where they became overwhelmed by the situation that they were in. And they started looking at time. Literally time. How they viewed time was the determining factor on the decision that they made. If they could only see where they were. Like, this is the startup bud's first day and this is graduation, on average, 180 days. And the only thing that they can see is the gap between my two fingers, dude, That's a lot. Especially on your first day when you get your shit absolutely kicked in. And let's say you had a 3M stack of little notes. On the first one, it said 180. And at the end of that day where you're barely able to walk back to the barracks, you rip that off and it says 179. How pumped are you? Not that pumped. So that's a person who became. They're creeping towards becoming overwhelmed. Hell week, the same thing starts on a Sunday, ends on a Friday. But if all you can see is this gap and how far you are from your goal, you're getting into a really susceptible position in a really malleable position from an instructor state. And that, that was literally like, that's the secret sauce. This is the most important thing that I learned in my entire career. If you can identify that that is the main reason why people give up on their lifelong goals. You should be able to reverse engineer that. So how do you do that? You think about everything other than that. So instead of trying to get from here to here and only looking at that distance, you slam these two together. So there is a microscopic step that you can take, and you only focus on that step and then the next one and the next one. And you don't have to keep track of your steps because as long as you keep making forward motion, this bridge will be gapped at some point in time. The muscle that fails at buds is not below the neck neck, it's between the ears. So they focus on that distance. They become overwhelmed when they make a decision that they'll regret for the rest of their life. So the key to that is to chunk your goals into the most digestible piece that you possibly can and then consistently put those one on top of another.

[Chris Williamson]

Is there a difference between stress and overwhelm?

[Andy Stumpf]

Can somebody force you to be overwhelmed? Is a better question. I don't think so. You can't, actually. And I would, I would sort of have some interesting conversation with this dude. Like, well, instructor so and so made me quit. I'm like, standby, please. I have additional questions. What do you mean? Well, they made me quit. I'm like. So they, they, they interlace fingers like the movie Ghost where they were doing pottery and they put your hand on the bell and rang the bell. They're like, no, no, no, no. I mean, that's not what I'm saying. But they were like in my face. And they weren't going away because it told me they weren't going to go away. And I couldn't take anymore. So I quit. Okay. And again, these are people in a fragile state. So I'm not like trying to have an argument with them, but I would try to, you know, maybe reinforce a little bit. Like, listen, that instructor facilitated an environment for you where you became your own worst enemy. And you made that choice. And here's how I know that this works. As soon as I understood that concept that the view of time was the most dangerous thing for the student, I gave up on all physical tools that I had, whether it was the ocean or the watch or food or physical exertion. And I would just talk to students like you and I are talking right now.

[Chris Williamson]

I did.

[Andy Stumpf]

What's going on, man? Looks like you're having a shitty day. This is only the first day of hell week and it would be like the third. But they're already hallucinating. And I had set my watch to the incorrect date and time.

[Chris Williamson]

You would have lost it.

[Andy Stumpf]

How? You look like you're really cold. How long do you think you can be this cold? I'm on shift for the next 12 hours. I'm gonna sit here with you for 12 hours. I'm gonna keep you in this water for longer than you thought was even possible. And you can see it in their eyes. The students are like, just whatever, dude, I know the game. Fuck off. And they're so what they're chunking in that moment is just surviving the interaction with me. And I can recognize it too. I'm like, lame. Next. Then you go to the other student and you can. You start seeing the self doubt and you just water the self doubt. It was the single most effective tool to get people to quit. Trading had nothing to do with anything in the physical world. So you can reverse engineer that.

[Chris Williamson]

So by reminding them how much further

[Andy Stumpf]

they had to go, that's all I focused on, is I tried to get them to focus on where they were, how much more work they had to do to get to their goal.

[Chris Williamson]

H. It's not just going to be the next minute.

[Andy Stumpf]

No. I try to get them to think of anything but that. The kid who was thinking about the next month, like, lane, get out of here. You're going to be fine. Good. And they're like, as you walk me, you're like, good job. You wouldn't say that, of course, but you think it. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. You out fox me. You saw the game that I was trying to play.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, totally. Yeah. That's. I mean it. It's for clarity for people who are hearing this, they're like, yes, I'm going to start doing this and everything in my life is going to be easy. No, it doesn't make anything easier. It makes it more digestible. Pain still hurts. Suffering still sucks. But little bites of suffering, focusing on that little bite and not letting yourself get overwhelmed to make an emotionally poor decision, that's gonna make a huge trajectory distance in your life.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. The being paralyzed by indecision thing is something that I've been pretty fascinated by. And I know it's something that you are too. That line, many a wrong move was made by just standing still.

[Andy Stumpf]

It's the worst thing you can do. I wrote about that too. You get ambushed. The actually, the worst thing that you can do is just stay in place, which is a really hard one, because sometimes you find awesome rocks to hide behind. You're like, hey, dude, get over here. This thing stops bullets. And your body will be screaming at you, stay behind this rock, because it currently is stopping. It's ballistically. It's cover. Right? Cover is something that stops bullets. Concealment is something that hide. You both work in hide and seek. Both do not work in a gunfight. Don't confuse the two. I've actually seen it happen. It's pretty gnarly. Mostly it was the enemy combatants thinking that bushes were cover. It was not. And also I can see you because you keep peeking your head up. So like, dude, you suck at hide and seek. If you stay there, though, because you're scared, because you don't want to die, die. Both of which legitimate emotions. And your enemy starts to come around the corner, it's gonna be where you die. Your indecision and inability to control the fear that you are experiencing and being shot at and somebody trying to kill you is scary. It's another one of those misconceptions people have that there's. There's this fearless nature of people in that community. That is not my experience. I actually don't want to work with somebody who is fearless because that either means you're not paying attention or you're a sociopath or a psychopath, neither of which are a good model for that. So if you just stay there because you're scared and your enemy starts to maneuver on you, it's gonna be where they find you. It's actually we're gonna be. They're gonna find your dead body. What you actually have to do is even knowing that you could potentially absorb risk you could get hurt, you have to move and you have to switch that on the people that Initiated the ambush on you. The fastest way to get out of an ambush is to either depending on the type, there's linear ones that look like lines or Ls. Oftentimes is to punch through it or to flank, but that requires movement. That's. And that's the same thing as that indecision. Right. If you're paralyzed by indecision, you're not going to do anything and the world is going to continue to shift around you and then you're even farther behind the eight ball. I'd rather have see people take, maybe even take a step in the wrong direction, but get some momentum going. Obviously correct for your mistake as quick as humanly possible. But dude, get the wheels running. Like, get the wheels spinning on the right.

[Chris Williamson]

What are the other traits that matter in life or death situations that people overestimate or underestimate?

[Andy Stumpf]

Emotional control, as ridiculous as that is to say, because it is an emotionally scary event, you have to be able to detach your emotions from your decision making process. You have to be able to function. And that is what. The test I administered in second phase was a diving test, and it was 20 minutes long. You're tying a bunch of knots in the student's gear and they have to get the knots out in an appropriate procedure. If you deviate from procedure, you fail, we'll pull you out of the water. You get four attempts at the test.

[Chris Williamson]

So even if you do the knots but you do them in the wrong

[Andy Stumpf]

way, you have, if the, at a broad level, the mouthpiece that you were breathing out of, if it is in your mouth and I leave it in your mouth as I tie a knot, you have to start from the mouthpiece and work your way back. If I rip it out and tie a knot, you have to start all the way from your manifold and trace it up, up. And some people will just reach up and put the mouthpiece in their mouth. Like, dude, you just. It's like fail right there.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

But they can't breathe. And I know that because I can see the inhale and exhale. And if you want to be a dick instructor, you wait till all the bubbles come out and go, my mouthpiece. Right. If you don't want to be a dick instructor and you want to teach the students, you just tap them on the mouthpiece because it's a one to one ratio. This is a one to one test. Tap them on the mouthpiece, let them get a big breath, and then I take the mouthpiece and I tie knots. And there's a variety of different ways that you can do it. And I'm sitting there as an instructor, just floating in a wetsuit with a mask and snorkel on, and you start seeing it. They start like. Like, it's insane. And it's like, cool. I've been there. I know, it sucks. Are you going to follow procedure? And at the end of that week, if they pass that test, you sit them down. You're like, for the love of God, please do not go recreational scuba diving, because you guys don't know a thing about it. This test had absolutely nothing to do with diving and everything to do with stress management, judgment, and following procedure, regardless of what's going on in the world around you.

[Chris Williamson]

What's drown proof?

[Andy Stumpf]

Drown proof is an evolution that does not make you drown proof at all. Plenty of seals, unfortunately, have drowned. You get introduced to that in first phase. The final evolution, which is the picture on the front cover, is where you have your hands tied behind your back and your feet tied together. And I believe this is 30 years in the rearview mirror. You bob up and down for an hour. Hour. You then have to transit the pool all the way to the end and then back after an hour, after which, if this is one of the most relaxing. Hold on, hold on. What I'm about to say is not a recommendation for people to do in their own personal pool. What I'm saying is, as a student, you can only hear them yelling at you as your head is above water. So if you're comfortable. If you're comfortable in the water, I get.

[Chris Williamson]

If I stay down here, I can't hear Andy shouting at me.

[Andy Stumpf]

It's. Yeah, well, I had a bullhorn. So it's like talking in a normal voice with an extremely high decibel level. Yep. Which talking to somebody from six inches from their face with a bullhorn, Let me just tell you, it's pretty fun. What are you thinking about right now? They're like, oh, my God, again, generational trauma. It has to be passed downhill. Cause instructors did that to me. It is for an hour. I played water polo in high school, so for me, I was comfortable in the water. And although on the picture, on the book, their hands are tied, their feet are tied. But this is also a one to one ratio. Half the class is watching the students in the water. And there are instructors in the water for safety.

[Chris Williamson]

So you try not to kill people.

[Andy Stumpf]

We do our absolute best. Even though I will say it is essential. People die and training from time to time. And we can touch on that if you want to After I describe this. But the first time they do this, their feet aren't tied together and they're just holding their fingers behind their back. It's a crawl, walk, run, approach. Then we'll use like some Velcro, right? Or maybe just do the legs and then the hands. If you bob up and down it' it's honestly you bounce off the bottom, take a deep breath and you slowly exhale to become negatively buoyant and you bounce. It's really not that bad. The swimming isn't that bad either. Then you get back and they throw a mask into the water and you have to go down, bite it with your teeth, come up and then bob with it for a bunch of times and then the test actually ends.

[Chris Williamson]

Because that limits the ability for you to breathe. Or it's just a fucking awkward thing to do.

[Andy Stumpf]

I feel like it's the latter. I have no explanation as to why. And I think there's honestly a somersault in there somewhere too.

[Chris Williamson]

This is scientifically, this isn't justified at all.

[Andy Stumpf]

No, it's not at all. Again, this is just a rolling rock of generational trauma. It's going downhill. And so that is drown proofing. The concept being though like before thriving, let's learn how to survive. It's about control and comfort to the best of your ability in an environment that you can't control and you probably shouldn't be comfortable in if you have your feet tied together and your hands tied behind your back. Some people like, oh man, it's just so like if you guys are taking hostage on a boat, you can just go do like a dolphin off the side and port proo out. I'm like ah, no, that's not what that's for at all. So like it's so crazy. And again I didn't, I didn't understand a lot of this as a student. This was just the evolution of the day. Like okay, cool, let's go through it, let's get it done. One of the evolutions of 50 meter underwater swim, like why, why do we do this? Because it freaks people out. And that's exactly why we. Is it? Do you really need to be able to do a 50 meter underwater swimming swim? I don't think so. I hope not. That would suck. I don't want to do one. But you do it in training because it scares the out of the students. And it's again, it's a one to one and the instructors are doing the best they can to make you nervous beforehand.

[Chris Williamson]

How are they doing that we have

[Andy Stumpf]

many tricks and tools. What year is it? 2026. Okay. Statute of limitations, it's probably expired on this. So we would often grab the foreign students first that were augmented training. They were paid to be there by their host country and we couldn't really get rid of them anyway. And so like the diving test, when you're so the 50 meter underwater swim is a great example, but the diving test, or even the tread is even better. We have scuba tanks on your back, you have your fins on, a weight belt on, and you have to tread water with. To the wrist or about where the watch would be, with your hands out for five minutes. Five or six students are going at a time. Everybody else is on the pool deck, but their back is to the pool, so you can only hear it. So if you were to grab a subpar performer and they were to lose their shit, and everybody else had to hear that, wondering what in the absolute throw was happening, knowing that they have to go next, thinking that they were prepared, sounding like. And then somebody sounds like they're just like talking to a dinosaur and then is being pulled unconscious out of the water and being slapped back to life by a dude with seven years of medical school. That's one way. The noises, you, you could just see people just like, ah, God. And you're like, God, I love my joke job. It just, it warms your soul like a candle that starts a forest fire, you know?

[Chris Williamson]

Uhhuh. And what about the underwater swim? Same thing. Just people struggle with that. They make weird noises when they come out.

[Andy Stumpf]

Well, only when they pass out. Of all the evolutions in training, that is the only one I'm aware of that if you pass out. So you jump into the water, front

[Chris Williamson]

somersault, swim front somersault.

[Andy Stumpf]

I don't know. I don't know. Well, it's just, it's weak, weird. It interrupts because anybody could like run and jump and dive and carry the momentum, right? And it, it like screws with your ability to hold your breath, like just enough, right? Like, we know you can do this, but can you do it the way we ask you to do it for no reason other than we're asking you to do? So you jump in, front somersault. The smart students dive down to the bottom of the pool because it compresses your lung a little bit more, it makes it easier to hold your breath than maybe six inches above the surface or below the surface. You get the other side, you touch the other side, you have to do another fucking front flip and I think that's just so you can't push off. Actually, now that I think about it, you start coming back. This is also a one to one instructor ratio, so anytime it's one to one, it's considered more high risk. This is the only evolution that I am aware of that as you are. If you can stay down there and do like this last herculean breaststroke, in your forward momentum, your head touches the wall. As you are unconscious, we will pull you out and you go to the pass line. But the noises that students make when they come out of the water, I don't know how to describe it. And it's like a drunk elephant trumpeting or a blue whale surfacing is you're

[Chris Williamson]

trying to get water out of them.

[Andy Stumpf]

No, because they're just unconscious. They're only unconscious for a few seconds, but they're just like. And meanwhile, all the other students are just like, oh my God, it's wild. And yeah, because people are like, oh, man. They make you hold your breath in training until you pass out.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Andy Stumpf]

Like no help. Actually, in every ev. Ev evolution in the water, if you pass out, you're going to fail for not following procedure because there's a hand signal you can put out if you need us to come down and get you.

[Chris Williamson]

But does that not mean you fail too?

[Andy Stumpf]

It means you fail. So. But that if you get to that point, it means you either didn't follow procedure or you didn't control your. You know what I mean? Like something went awry and that's why you don't get just one and done. You get four attempts at the test. Most people pass it on their third attempt. The dieting test that I administer.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, okay.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. You get two attempts on one day and two attempts on the next day.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Andy Stumpf]

With a really probably great night's sleep.

[Chris Williamson]

That's fucking rough that you have to know that you've got to go back and do it again.

[Andy Stumpf]

As somebody who passed on their third try, you don't sleep very much. It sucks. And then that night I slept way better. But to go back to chunking, the reason I failed the first two times, the first time, I remember 30 years ago, I remember there's a knot where your head can get turned to the side and it's just an excess exhalation knot, meaning you can still inhale and get air, but your head is crimped to the side and you can't blow. It's a regulator, much like Jacques Cousteau would die with. It's two rubber hoses. That come to a bit essentially. So your head is yanked to the left and all you have to do is breathe out of your nose. But down there you're like freaking out because this happens within 30 seconds of starting. And a little bit of water is coming into your mouthpiece too because your head is to the back. And I remember the first time that happened to me, I started thinking about the exact thing I was telling myself, I can't do this for 20 minutes. All I started thinking about was the gap in between the two. Same thing on the second test. By the time I got in on the third one, the only thing I was thinking about was the problem that was introduced at that time, which again was the head yanked to the left. I'm like whatever, no problem, just went back to crawling. Meaning as the student, you accept the malfunction. It's not a critical malfunction, you're ready to continue with the test. And why didn't I just do this the first time? That's the only thing I changed was I was like, one problem at a time, we're going to work it. And that's the only thing that exists in my life is that one problem at a time.

[Chris Williamson]

Why is it important to have a proper attrition rate for people to actually die?

[Andy Stumpf]

Because the job is very dangerous and I don't want people to die. But if nobody ever died in training, you are not training hard enough. The training has to be a reverse engineer in downstream real world requirements of the job that you are expected to do. And it is a dangerous job. You cannot prepare for that by avoiding danger and training.

[Chris Williamson]

Because if no one ever died, there wouldn't be anything on the line. Ultimately there wouldn't be a sufficient risk for the guys to know that you

[Andy Stumpf]

wouldn't be pushing it hard enough.

[Chris Williamson]

There's a reason to fear it.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yep, you wouldn't be pushing hard enough.

[Chris Williamson]

What's the most common way that people die? Drowning.

[Andy Stumpf]

That is not uncommon. Well, the last one I think in the pool was somebody who vomited and then aspirated it while they were underwater. The last student to die in training was post Hell week. And I don't remember the exact medical term, but it was fluid into the lungs and he made it to the hospital, but still expired. It's, it's it. You, you are destroyed at the end of hell week. It's the only week afterwards where they let you walk in tennis shoes. I mean you're like, you're wearing life jacket like you are. Sand is abrasive for People who didn't know this, imagine just basically wearing sandpaper for a week because you're wet and sandy the entire time. It does things to the body. Uh, and, yeah, you're just absolutely destroyed. And most people are nursing an injury anyway throughout training, but, yeah, that one gets you.

[Chris Williamson]

What role do you think hardship plays in people's lives?

[Andy Stumpf]

I'm at a place now, as I'm getting closer to 50 than 40, that I actually think the pursuit of an easy life is a mistake. I think that the grind is actually what life is all about. It's not a matter of whether you're going to have a hard life or an easy life. It's an ability, your ability to determine how well that you can suffer along the way and trying to enjoy the journey.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, so as somebody that has either endured or doled out quite a bit of suffering, how do people deal with suffering more effectively?

[Andy Stumpf]

First, by acknowledging that sometimes the answer is you are going to suffer instead of looking for a way to avoid it altogether. You know, you don't have to nerf all the corners on tables. Maybe you shouldn't. Maybe it's okay to bang your knee every once in a while in the middle of the night. So I think it actually starts with accepting that if you really want to accomplish something in your life, there's no hack to hard work. I think you should hack as many, like, for efficiencies, like hack your Gmail inbox, like, totally go to town hack your business systems. There's no. There is no substitute for hard work. Do you have anything in your life that was truly given to you that you didn't work for at all that you accept? Yeah, right. And then I look at the things that I work the hardest for and the goals that I set, where I'm like. Like, am I out of my mind? Like, can I actually do this? That's the stuff that I value the most. And then I'm trying to. Trying to. Emphasis on this. Learn how to enjoy that journey more because it's hard. And enjoying hard things is. It's difficult.

[Chris Williamson]

What gets in the way of enjoying it?

[Andy Stumpf]

Usually just myself. You know, my biggest enemy throughout my entire life has been myself. You know, waking up knowing your day is going to be difficult or more difficult, or choosing to have it be more difficult to do the hard work up front so maybe you can enjoy an easier day later in the week. It's not, you know, it's challenging. I think that's where people struggle. That's where I struggle.

[Chris Williamson]

Strange to think that as you get older, you try to make things harder, not easier.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. My goal in life for sure, up until, let's say, exceptionally recently, was let's make things as easy as possible. Everybody's searching for that. Then you just edit. You know, you realize that all the stuff that you got eating easy just doesn't matter. It's the stuff that sucks. Especially if you could share that with your friends. That's the biggest thing I would say I probably miss about the community is that we would do the dumbest, most painful ever and laugh about it while we were doing it.

[Chris Williamson]

Because you're doing it with somebody else.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, totally. It would suck by yourself. I mean, you could do it, but watching somebody else suffer with you and finding joy in that. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

If you could take one lesson from the SEAL teams and force every young man to learn it, what would it be? Be

[Andy Stumpf]

one lesson, be cautious, and make sure you know what you're willing to die for. Because not everything's worth it.

[Chris Williamson]

Same all.

[Andy Stumpf]

Many times in my life, the things that I thought were the most important ended up being inconsequent because I didn't put enough thought or time and effort into understanding why I wanted to do them. And killing yourself from sacrificing everything in your life and trying to achieve that, you might get it at the end of the day and be the most hollow shell of a human being known to man.

[Chris Williamson]

And how do you do that assessment without having to go through it?

[Andy Stumpf]

I think you have to slow down a little bit. We seem to be in a world where speed is one of the most important metrics, and I think that's important at times. But do all decisions have to be made in a moment's notice? But for me, it's one of the things I really like. If your house is on fire, get the fuck out of your house. Right. If your house isn't on fire and you have time to make a decision, think about the decision, think about your available options and make the most educated one at the time. And then on that journey, keep asking yourself, is this. You know what I mean? Like, reinforcing it along the way as opposed to just one decision and then your full back dive straight ahead. I don't think you can get to that point, though, without making some mistakes on your own. Like people always ask me, what would you say to your younger self? The truly honest answer is, buy bitcoin, you dip.

[Chris Williamson]

Yes, buy bitcoin and do 531. That's it.

[Andy Stumpf]

Here's the problem, though. If I was 18 and my 48 year old self went back, I'd be like, shut up, dude. I got this figured out.

[Chris Williamson]

All right, Granddad, sit down.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, totally. I pretty much, pretty sure I'd like to invest in new cars. I like to buy high and sell low. It's not a big deal. It's a new investment strategy. Yeah, I wouldn't have listened to myself. But I also probably would not remove the mistakes. I wouldn't remove some key mistakes in my life just to make sure that I learned the lesson from them. I would remove some for sure because they were unneedless, pain and suffering. And don't worry, they were repeats of mistakes that I was already making. But you have to have those mistakes.

[Chris Williamson]

The fascinating thing about the question, what would you tell your younger self? What advice would you give your younger self yourself? If you answer that, it is almost always the exact advice that you need to hear right now. In the same way that you've got the same feat that you did 30 years ago, you have the same patterns, the same fears, the same coping mechanisms, the same responses when things become stressful or overwhelming. And that means that you're going to be driven by those unconscious, unalchemized trends. Those are going to be the things. They're going to be the. That you dealt with when you were 18 and you got cut from the baseball team or the way that your first breakup felt and how you coped with it after that. For the most part, those are going to be the dynamics that are going to drive the rest of your life too. So when you think about. So for me, it would be fearless, like, just stop fucking fearing so much, dude.

[Andy Stumpf]

What do you fear the most?

[Chris Williamson]

Not doing it right. Not getting it right.

[Andy Stumpf]

What do you use as your yardstick for that, though?

[Chris Williamson]

Totally superfluous, ethereal, fucking fluffy, big cloud of like something going wrong, things will go wrong and you'll be in the wrong and something will be taken away from you. I don't know what, I don't know by who, but not doing it right, not getting it right, not being enough. I don't know who for or why.

[Andy Stumpf]

All that's going to happen though, of course. So isn't the juice then in just preparing yourself for that and working your

[Chris Williamson]

way through and then overcoming it? Yeah, of course. Which I, I've done throughout my entire life.

[Andy Stumpf]

But I'll be the judge of that, sir.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Yeah. Interestingly, we have a, we have a pool and a bunch of knots for you to get stuck into after this. You know, all of the things everybody that's listening, whatever the challenge is that you thought was going to destroy you by virtue of the fact that you're listening to this, it hasn't.

[Andy Stumpf]

Can I add one thing to that too? And this is one thing that I wish. I know people hear this, but they don't believe me. Whatever it is you think you're going through through, please do not convince yourself that you are the only one struggling with it. My God, if Covid taught us anything that it should be that isolation, or even perceived isolation is one of the most damaging things to the human brain. We are. Every person I've ever met in my life is more defined by their similarities than by their differences. And it is so unfortunate. Again, statistically, the world that I come from has a much higher suicide rate than many other Baki occupational fields. And for those that have chosen to leave things behind, oftentimes there are deep sentiments of being isolated and alone and feeling like they were dealing with something that nobody else would or was or that nobody else would understand. And it's not true. You're. You can't. Nobody knows what's going on behind your eyes, right? Like we. I guarantee you and I are probably spend our mental bandwidth with worrying about the vast majority of the same shit, but in my mind I'd be like cutting them nails. But like, who. Who could I possibly talk to about this? Because I'm the only one on earth dealing with this. And the reality is almost everybody is. So we lie to ourself. You isolate, you don't say anything and it ends up getting worse.

[Chris Williamson]

And it's interesting, you said, I don't think that I can do the thing that I need to do for as long as is going to be required of me. And that's not too dissimilar to one of the most common thoughts that people have before taking their own lives, which is that the world would be better

[Andy Stumpf]

off without me, or I can't take

[Chris Williamson]

this anymore, the people around me would be better off without me, and I can't continue. Yeah, and it's the combination of those two things. It's the isolation that's in there too. The wonderful line, the feeling of being alone is one of the most dangerous lies we tell ourselves.

[Andy Stumpf]

I have never asked for help and not received it. And I have been like in tears, overwhelmed with a number of people who saw that I needed help but didn't say anything because they were waiting for me to ask.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, this is a curse of being competent in the sort of people that listen to this show and read books like yours. They're the kinds of people who usually in their friend group are the ones that have got it figured out out. You know, they. They're the ones that are working on their diet, that are thinking about their sleep pattern, that are reading and doing meditation. They're everything maxing.

[Andy Stumpf]

Like Thor.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, he. He didn't. He just. Genetics maxed. And what that means is that if you're the friend that always seems like you've got your life sorted, people tend to not want to come to your aid because, well, like, you know, Andy's the guy. Guy that, that I go to. Like, who am I? Who am I? Who am I to help him? Like, he's. He's got it sorted. Like it's not. It's not on me.

[Andy Stumpf]

Like he's.

[Chris Williamson]

It's going to be embarrassing or it's going to be whatever. And it's a weird inversion of things that are. Of. There's lots of ways that competence is great, but this is one of the ways where competence can hold you back. And yeah, yeah, I think it's.

[Andy Stumpf]

It goes back to the misconceptions of. About special operations defined by their competence. A country calls upon that community to solve problems when they can't figure out another solution. And by the way, they're not looking for a negative result, they're looking for success.

[Chris Williamson]

I wrote this essay. This came to me when you were talking about the fact that you stayed in a marriage for longer than you should have done and that you'd used a skill that had got you a lot of accolade in your military career, but it had damaged you when it came to your relationship. The curse of psychological strength. Everyone has a limit, an end to the amount of discomfort that they can cope with. This is obvious. Physically, some people can lift more and run further than others. But how much emotional pain, upset or disappointment a person can endure is subtler and harder to detect. It's not apparent in the size of someone's arms, but the capacity of their nervous system. System. It's not a weight that you can see on squat rack. It's their ability to carry a heavy emotional load. This psychological strength can be a good thing. You're able to handle more than most. You don't bulk at pain, you keep pushing through regardless of how you feel. But too much strength can be a weakness. High performers are particularly vulnerable to this trap. Psychological strength is rewarded almost everywhere. In the gym, it's discipline. In business, it's grit. In public, it's composure. You become the person who can handle handle it. Who doesn't complain, who pushes through when others would quit. Your ability to ignore how you feel and keep moving forward earns admiration, builds your career and creates momentum. But what you are praised for in public, you often pay for in private relationships don't reward endurance. They require attunement. If your default strategy in life is to absorb discomfort and override warning signs, you will do exactly that when someone repeatedly. You'll rationalize it, reframe it, decide it's your job to make it work. And the stronger you are, the longer you can stay. What looks like strength from the outside becomes self abandonment on the inside. You've trained yourself to believe that struggle is noble and difficulty is meaningful. So when love feels destabilizing, it doesn't register as a warning. It feels like a challenge. And challenges are your thing. But a relationship isn't a marathon to be endured. It's a place to feel safe. Safe. The qualities that make you formidable in the arena can quietly make you miserable in your own living room. Let's say that you're dating and feel like a side character in your own relationship. You put them first and they put you sixth. The rupture is regular and the repair is absent. Lower resilience. Less stubborn people would have broken long ago and said I'm out. But not you. You're the jocko willink of psychological suffering. Forget carrying the boat. Boats, you'll carry the whole fleet forever. In these situations, you're faced with a much tougher problem. Not how much can you tolerate, but how much do you want to tolerate? Perhaps this is what you had to do as a child. If your needs weren't noticed, your sadness was ignored and your feelings didn't matter. Then you become accustomed to pushing through disconnection in order to make those relationships function. If child you learns I need to work hard to be loved, loved, then adult you believes, if I am not loved, I just need to work harder. You've achieved 10,000 hours of ignoring your own needs. You can't tell people how you feel without first worrying about how it'll make them feel. You unconsciously believe that suffering is the price of connection and that silent subjugation is noble. You basically think I should be able to tolerate the intolerable in order to make this work.

[Andy Stumpf]

What inspires you to write that?

[Chris Williamson]

Thinking about some of the ways that I'd denied myself. Prioritization. That I'd pushed through discomfort because I could. Because almost everything that was valuable in life had come on the other side of working hard and going through difficulty. So there's just this implicit belief that, well, if something's hard that must mean that there's something valuable on the other side of it. But there is such a thing as kind of pointless suffering.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

It made me think about the curse of psychological strength and made me think about what you were saying.

[Andy Stumpf]

Sounded very self reflective as you were writing it.

[Chris Williamson]

Massively. Massively.

[Andy Stumpf]

I could have easily. You have a better grasp on the English language than I do. Probably because you guys. You guys don't use it properly. But you guys might kind of.

[Chris Williamson]

I did it.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah. So. Yeah, no, that's.

[Chris Williamson]

Say more.

[Andy Stumpf]

It's good, man. That's. I can hear a startling amount of myself.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Andy Stumpf]

In that. It's tough. Yeah. What people see from the outside isn't always what's going on on the inside.

[Chris Williamson]

I like that line, you know what, what you appraised for in public you pay for in private. And it's one of the reasons why when you look at anybody that's a high performer or somebody that's in the seals or, you know, whatever, anybody that's got unusual results typically has unusual inputs and an unusual environment internally too. You know, normal people get normal results, weird people get weird results. And the most successful popular in the world. Your first response shouldn't necessarily be envy. A lot of the time it should be pity like what happened to you that caused you to do that to

[Andy Stumpf]

yourself or at what cost? Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

What did you have to go through in order to get there?

[Andy Stumpf]

Man, that message is so not put out there that be careful what you wish for. And you know, envy may not be the first thing that should cross your mind when you see somebody who has something you want.

[Chris Williamson]

It's the question that I've been most fascinated by on the show for probably about five years now. Unfortunately, it's an anti mean. It's. If you tell people that the view from the top of the mountain that they are still climbing maybe might not be worth the rest of the journey. It feels to them like you're sucking the oxygen out of the fuel tank. Because it is, it is. Fuck your feelings. Just work harder. You will get there and glory is waiting for you. The total addressable market for that is 99.999% of people. The people who get there or got close to the top and said, I think this is a false pe. I don't think that what's up there is going to be worth it. Or they got there and said, no, there's a very small number of people who got there and went, ah, it's two mountains. That's the problem. As opposed to this entire game is kind of rigged against me and I actually need to look deeper. I'm not going to fill an internal void with external accolades, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's an anti meme. It's an anti meme and it is always going to lose to a much more simplistic. No, no, no. It's just more. The answer is more. You should push for more.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, well, especially in a society that

[Chris Williamson]

celebrates more, it's radical to say that you're satisfied. The most radical thing that you can do in a meritocracy that's capitalist is say I'm good. It's to be in Montana as opposed to downtown New York City. It's to. I kind of like my life. It's kind of enough for me. And yeah, dude, it's, it's, it's fucking fascinating. And what's more fascinating to me is how many guys have come out of special operations and turned their hand. There's still always the fucking glint in your guys eyes. The little.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, that one.

[Chris Williamson]

What do you mean the Tell me more. I'm scared you're gonna pin me down after we finish up, which actually is my request. The turn to fuck. I really did a lot physically kind of in these three dimensions. And then this is you trying to turn that mirror around, I guess on yourself and then start to show it to other people too.

[Andy Stumpf]

The most common thing people say to me when they find out about my background, they'll say, say first off, dude, you must be crazy. So I, I skipped that part of it. But they'll say those experiences must have been like unbelievable. And the reality is they were and they are statistically out of reach for almost everybody. But if I end up doing nothing with that and only, it only impacts my life and I'm on my death bed, I will regret not doing something with that. And I think that there is a way to take those experiences and package them in a way that can help people. Because at this point in my life, all I really actually want to do is make the world a little bit better than it was when I came into it. Like that's literally. Money's cool. I like nice things as well too. But I'm also at a point in my life where like, okay, I get it. Like I might want the nice thing, but there's no actual happiness from the nice thing. State teaching somebody Something or giving them a tool that they can use to just attack a problem in their life. That's fucking awesome. And it is so much more rewarding than a thing that you write a check for. And that's what I'm trying to do with that, is to take experiences and tools and lessons that people think they don't have access to. And I will be honest with this too. You can learn or be exposed to those lessons in organized sports. It's not like the military. There's no unique creations inside of the military. Yeah, a lot of things are reinforced to a higher degree because the consequences of the environment can get pretty gnarly pretty quick. But if things work in that pressure cooker environment, you're telling me that they're not going to work in your personal and professional life. It'll help you just crush whatever it is that you're trying to do. And that's. I resisted writing something for many years. 1. Because I talk so much shit about other guys who were seals that wrote books. And now I'm well designed, deserved, and deserving of the other people who are talking shit on me. But I just. I want to try to take those. To create tools to give people a foundation and a framework to throw it at whatever it is is going on in their life so that they can maybe suffer better. I don't know if that's a great way to put it, but just to attack whatever it is that's going on in their life.

[Chris Williamson]

Suffer better is a wonderful tagline. Dude, if the world went completely sideways from a zomb, we had to put together a militia to save the human race. Andy Stumpf would be my top draft pick. Can you imagine how retarded the rest of the militia would be?

[Andy Stumpf]

Oh, exceptionally.

[Chris Williamson]

You're the first guy.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

The tip of the spear.

[Andy Stumpf]

Well, the base of the shaft, perhaps.

[Chris Williamson]

Ah, of course. Andy, you're a fucking legend, dude. I appreciate the hell out of you. Congratulations on this. Looks awesome. Worked real hard on it.

[Andy Stumpf]

Yeah, it's. I don't know if you get emails like this. I'm sure you do, because the Internet's a weird place, right? We hit upload and I don't know where anything goes. Your platform is massive and I could not be more proud for what you have built.

[Chris Williamson]

Thank you.

[Andy Stumpf]

But I bet you get emails from people that you'll never meet. And they say, you know what? Something I heard you say, or a guest say, change the course and trajectory. History of my life. And that is. I don't. I save those emails. I have a. I have a folder. About a dozen people have reached out and said they chose not to kill themselves because it's something they heard on the podcast. Books are measured by bestseller lists. Fuck all that. I want to hear about people who changed the course of their life because it's something they got from a place that they never thought that they would have access to to, but picked this up and realized, holy, we are way more simpler. And I can use this and I will use it. And you're still going to make mistakes and I hope you do because you need them. But it'll help you suffer better.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, dude, you're awesome. You're awesome. Congratulations.

[Andy Stumpf]

Thank you, man. Appreciate it.

[Chris Williamson]

All right, goodbye everybody. Dude, let's go. So good. Unreal. Unreal. If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading list, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found, fiction and non fiction, real life stories. And there's a description about why I like it and there's links to go and find, buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.