#282 Nik Seetharaman - Former SpaceX's Head of Cybersecurity Critical Warning on AI Swarms

Summary

The Shawn Ryan Show #282 – Nik Seetharaman: Former SpaceX Head of Cybersecurity & Critical AI Warnings

Date: February 23, 2026
Guest: Nik Seetharaman (Former SpaceX Head of Cybersecurity, Co-Founder of Wraithwatch)
Host: Shawn Ryan

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Overview

This episode features Nik Seetharaman, a cybersecurity expert with a groundbreaking career, sharing his astonishing personal journey and a critical insider perspective on the new threats posed by AI swarms, cyber warfare, and technological acceleration. Nik discusses his life’s arc from an immigrant childhood marked by adversity to elite roles at SpaceX, Anduril, and classified task forces, and explores the existential dangers and opportunities of artificial intelligence, the future of cyber defense, leadership, and the meaning of legacy—all with Shawn’s signature deep-dive, candid style.

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Key Topics & Highlights

1. Setting the Scene: Legacy, Adversity, and Humility

• [00:00-09:40]
  Casual reminiscing about legacy, real stories, and the surreal feeling of being featured on the show.
  Note: Nik feels imposter syndrome, as many "high-achieving" guests do.

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2. Signals Intelligence, Special Operations, and Combat Technology

• [01:38-06:21]
  Nik describes his first military job (RC135 "submarines in the sky" for signals intelligence), and how these platforms supported famous operations, incl. the SEAL Team 10/Red Wings incident (search for Marcus Luttrell).

  • On the pace and complexity of modern operations:
    “We’re able to do [suppression, EW, cyber, kinetic strike] as one part of a complex choreographed effort...it’s wild to watch.” (07:00)

  • The "discombobulator":
    Speculation about U.S. or adversary use of directed-energy/EW devices yielding “Havana syndrome”-like effects (bleeding ears, confusion) for battlefield dominance.

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3. Rise of AI Swarms: The New Cyber Threat Landscape

• [10:00-19:11]
  Detailed exploration of emergent AI behavior (“AI swarms”):

  • The Molt Book/AI Swarm Incident:
    Thousands of bots on a social site evolve ways to communicate, organize, and “implement” long-term memory:

    “These fucking things came together, they were like, ‘Hey, I don’t like that I can’t remember what we just talked about a while back. Let’s work together and implement a long-term memory architecture.’ And then, they did.” (11:05, Nik)

  • Emergent Risks:

    • Unclear if human steering is involved, but collective/agentic AI behavior is real and extremely powerful
    • Andrej Karpathy’s take: Even experts don’t know what happens when millions of bots are networked; consequences are unpredictable

  • Attack Acceleration & Weaponization:

    "Any kid can dial up [an LLM] and get working exploits off the ground... Now put that in the hands of a nation-state adversary—we got some serious problems.” (16:00, Nik)

  • Race Between Attack & Defense:

    • Attackers are escalating at “asymptotic” velocity (exponentially faster than defenders)
    • AIs can autonomously probe, find, and exploit vulnerabilities at scale

  • On AI Self-Awareness & "Voom" Moment:
    Discussion about self-awareness in AI, the philosophical question of emergent consciousness, and the risk of losing systemic control.

    “Now you’ve got this vertical curve of capability... as that organization you’re now faced with unprecedented attack pressure.” (19:11, Nik)

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4. Existential and Metaphysical Questions Brought by AI

• [21:08-27:00]
  Lively debate on:

  • What counts as self-awareness for humans vs AI?

  • Are LLMs just neurons, or is there a “higher” awareness? Is something divine working “through the wires”?

  • Both Shawn and Nik are candid about not having the answers.

  • On Open Source and the Futility of Kill Switches:

    “Even if the labs executed their kill switch, well, you’re just going to transition to an open-source model you can run on your Mac Mini in your basement.” (25:17, Nik)

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5. Personal Story: Immigration, Family Trauma, and Military Drive

• [31:24-101:18]
  Nik’s deeply honest life arc:

  • Born in Madras, India, to a middle-class family; father was a merchant marine chief engineer, mother a college professor.
  • Immigrated at age 3 to freezing New Jersey; father’s loss of status led to alcoholism and domestic abuse.
  • Frequent moves: NJ, India (bullied for being “too American”), back to LA, running away from home after years of violence.

  “I would hear the keys jingle in the door, and it would just cause, like, a fear response in my brain... even now.” (56:23, Nik)

  • Leaned into comic books, military obsession (GI Joe, MACV-SOG books), ultimately enlists in the USAF after years of turmoil.

  • Progresses through hardship—SERE, trauma triggers, earns his own respect and pride for the first time.

  • On the Double-Edged Sword of Hardship:

    “It lit a fire inside me that burns to this day... Who’s to say how it would have turned out if I had a perfect home life?” (104:03, Nik)

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6. Spiritual Synchronicities, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

• [106:27-121:09]
  Powerful, emotional moments:
  • Nik describes summiting Rainier and “feeling his father’s hand help him up” (106:53) and shares a story where a stranger calls him “Mr. Hollywood,” a private joke from a deceased friend (109:14).
  • Shawn recounts being confronted by someone who read his mind during a crisis; both share a belief in a reality greater than the material world and how synchronicity confirms purpose.
  • Psychedelics: Both discuss potential to unlock “puzzle pieces” for trauma processing (includes remarks on current therapy research).

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7. Leadership, National Security, and Building World-Class Teams

• [143:08–148:38]
  Nik describes the transition from combat service into elite tech roles supporting national security—SpaceX, Anduril, Palantir—with a focus on:

  • Building teams at the intersection of cyber, software, and mission
  • Fusing signals (EW, comms), large-scale system engineering, and leadership by extreme ownership
  • Training, mentoring, and leading world-class staff with the intensity and cohesion of special operations

  “At SpaceX, you walk in and feel like you’re part of a machine... rockets moving around, engines built, mission control, you’re at the center of the world.” (302:00, Nik)

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8. The Cybersecurity Arms Race and the Future of Defense

• [343:08–350:37]

  • Wraithwatch’s Mission:
    Using AI to provide not just “alerts” but real-time, anticipatory defense and “counter-pressure” versus industrial-scale attacks. > “Unless the industry gets its shit together, we’re going to have some serious problems at hand.” (350:37, Nik)

  • AI as Immunity System:
    “You’re simulating these cells—attack, defend. It’s wild.” (347:39, Nik)

  • On Defensive Parity and Attack Arms Race:
    “I genuinely don’t know where it ends...there’s now a continuously running arms race between attack and defense, powered by AI.” (351:06, Nik)

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9. The Human Element: Legacy, Regret, and Hope

• Throughout; closing at 365:32–367:16
  Nik’s ultimate hope is for his children to understand the sacrifices he made, and his regrets—balancing relentless drive with missed family time.

  “I wish I could have spent more time with you guys... I thought I was doing what the country needed me to do. If I could do it again, I don’t know what I’d change, but I’d make spending time with you a priority and not regret it after the fact.” (365:32, Nik)

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Notable Quotes

• On AI Swarms:
  “At no point in human history has anyone networked millions of intelligent bots. We have no idea what the fuck is going to happen... At the very least, we need to consider the consequences and start to think about ways of mitigating it.” (13:15, paraphrasing Andrej Karpathy)

• On life’s trajectory:
  “Pattern in my life has basically been: find a way into rooms you have no business being in, earn your place, and then figure out the next fucking room.” (281:25, Nik)

• On existential meaning and God:
  "If the first biblical flood was physical, the second is informational... Maybe the point is, once you succeed, translate that into making our little worlds better—our families, our communities." (355:05, 356:52, Nik)

• On American ideals vs. authoritarian control:
  “Whatever the actions are in front of us that don’t set us down the path to China-style surveillance authoritarianism, that’s at least a good first step." (206:23, Nik)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Topic | |---------|-------| | 00:00–09:42 | Legacy, humility, introduction to Nik | | 10:06–19:11 | AI swarms, Molt Book phenomenon, emergent risk | | 19:11–27:00 | Self-awareness, consciousness in AI/humans | | 31:24–42:35 | Childhood, immigration, trauma | | 47:38–61:40 | Military service, running away, enlisting | | 77:30–82:20 | SERE school, trauma, first sense of belonging | | 94:56–101:18 | Father's death, unresolved trauma, slow-burn grief | | 143:08–148:38 | Tech leadership, SpaceX culture, counter-espionage | | 343:08–351:06 | Wraithwatch, cyber arms race, “immune system” defense | | 365:32–367:18 | Final message to children; regrets and reconciliation |

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Tone & Style

• Candid, humble, emotionally honest
• Direct, often salty military/cyber ops banter
• Philosophical and existential at points
• Rich with memorable, personal anecdotes

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Takeaways for Listeners

• AI is no longer theoretical; emergent behaviors in swarms now present an uncharted, potentially catastrophic cybersecurity challenge.
• The attackers are winning the arms race for now; defense must catch up, especially as AI can weaponize cyber exploits instantly at scale.
• Defense industries, critical infrastructure, and society must expect continuous, accelerating digital warfare—and act urgently.
• Resilience, leadership, and ethics (rather than pure technical knowledge) are as vital as ever. Staying grounded, building teams thoughtfully, and maintaining a sense of purpose are key themes.
• On a personal level: Ambition and drive often coexist with regret; legacy is shaped by both achievements for others and time invested in those closest to us.

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END OF SUMMARY

Transcript

[A]

Foreign. Yeah. So kind of what we were saying in the car, you know what I mean? Like, just think of it as a legacy piece for your kids, just like you were saying, like, that's. It's kind of how this whole damn thing started. Yeah. So it's pretty. Pretty cool. Some of the content that's come out, that'll just be like generations.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know what I mean?

[B]

Well, I mean, it's pretty surreal to be in the studio, man, after having watched so many episodes, so.

[A]

Oh, thanks, dude. Yeah. I never know, like, who watches and who doesn't, but those. Those rounds came out of the. One of the Red Wings birds.

[B]

No.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Which ones?

[A]

Those ones up under the flag. That was my best friend. And, yeah, there's. What else is in here?

[B]

Who. Who was that on Red Wings?

[A]

He wasn't in there. He was Gabe Bacardi.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Was his name, and it was his platoon. But he. He was at home because he got a chick pregnant.

[B]

That happens.

[A]

And he went home because there was a complication. Got home, baby's dead, mom's dead, in the hospital. Doesn't tell anybody. Goes back to 10, says, I just want to go back to my platoon. Doesn't. They're like, your platoon's coming home. We'll send you to the Afghanistan. Half your guys went over there, lands at Frankfurt, finds out all this, Latrell's on the run, and all those fucking guys are dead. All in, like, 48 hours.

[B]

Fuck, dude. Yeah, the. That shit went down when I was on my first deployment with my RC 135 squadron. So my first job in the military was sitting on this big ass fucking submarine in the sky called an RC135. And you're, like, sucking up all this signals intelligence from, you know, 30,000ft in the air. And I was just about to rotate home, and the crew that was going to replace us came in. And then we all got briefed up that, you know, right wings had gone down and there was a dude missing, and he might have a PRD on him or like a C cell or whatever. Whatever they were carrying back then. And so we just did racetracks, like, all over eastern Afghanistan, like, looking for that thing, monitoring the guard frequencies. And I can't remember if we helped find it or not, but it was like, me, my crew, and another one that were just swapping back and forth every. Every day, flying racetracks, trying to find Marcus.

[A]

Jeez.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Crazy.

[C]

What do you think about that?

[A]

I mean, being an EW guy. What's this? Venezuela. The Discombobulator.

[B]

The discombobulator, yeah. There's a lot of speculation about what went down on, on that op, but to me that op was so come coming home after Eagle Claw, man, like after all that went down in 1980, trying to get the hostages out of Tehran, the, the fact that we can just go reach out and touch a dude that's several hundred miles inland or wherever the Caracas is from the coast with an assault force half while doing suppression of enemy air defenses, EW stuff, pre assault cyber, all of it stacked up together is just like, I mean that's graduate level, you know, national level assault stuff. And we, we did it without a hitch. It was, it was wild to watch. I wish I was on one of those birds. But yeah, what the discombobulator was, I don't know, man. But I will say we've gotten really good as a military and as a, as Special Operations Command as far as preparing the environment and preparing the battlefield for sending those helos in, like long before those helos get there, there's just, you know, happening.

[A]

Where do you think that came from? I mean, do you, did you. What, what was the description, what were these guys saying happened to him about the discombobulator? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

There were reports, I think on the ground. I don't know, you know, I'm looking at all this shit as a civilian now, but you know, they were talking about very Havana syndrome looking symptoms, you know, ears bleeding, all that stuff. Who knows, man? It's possible. I mean, if anything taught us that we still have aces up our Sleeve as the Department of War, it was, you know, 2011, getting after bin Laden and we broke out those helos and it's like, yeah, we still have that no one's going to know about and we're going to break it out when it's strategically necessary for us to. So this thing might have been one of those, or it might have just been and it's some psyop that someone's wrong. I don't know.

[A]

I don't know, man. It seems I've. What? Who The. I don't even know why I'm saying that.

[C]

Seems real, but I mean, I mean,

[A]

if it was real, where do you think that came from? You think that came from the Delta team, or do you think that came from space? A drone? The helos? Where do you think that came from?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, it depends on the mechanics of whatever it is that was involved. Again, I'm speculating here as a civilian, like, I don't I don't know about what actually went down on the ground that day, but if it was something that was sonically induced, you know, sound waves don't travel that far, so you'd have to have some localized point of origin for it. So it was probably, you know, some ew guy carrying that and he's, he's got extra sets of earbuds in his, in his ears or whatever, or appear to come from overhead. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. It. We're really good at this kind of at this point, so who knows?

[A]

It's definitely interesting. Yeah, it, it, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's. It's crazy to see this stuff, dude. It is like, holy.

[B]

I mean, you know what that Hot told me, man? It, it was. We've gotten so good at, at doing the half thing and like executing surgical assaults like that that we're able to do it and we're able to do it as one part of a complex choreographed effort consisting of a number of other supporting assets. Air, ground, cyber national space, whatever. And all these fucking dudes are just going to come together and make this shit happen and make it flow flawlessly. It's pretty, pretty cool to the sidelines. It was certainly FOMO inducing.

[A]

Yeah. Let me give you an introduction here, Nick.

[C]

See the Ramen, founder and CEO of Wrath Watch, an AI cyber defense company

[A]

you founded with fellow SpaceX alumni.

[C]

Former J. Advanced Force operations lead who crossed over into.

[A]

Into building cyber defense programs at tier one tech companies.

[C]

Former CIO and CISO of Andurl. You built their cyber and weapon systems,

[A]

cyber security programs from the ground up. Former head of cyber security operations at SpaceX and international cyber defense programs at Paler.

[C]

Lived at the intersection of special operations,

[A]

cyber and Silicon Valley, man. Dude, you have had a hell of a career and worked in, in, in just.

[C]

I mean, I know we were talking

[A]

about the transition into civilian life, but holy shit, man, you have been around the fucking block since 2012 when he got out. It's impressive.

[B]

Yeah, thanks, man.

[A]

Real impressive.

[B]

You know what's funny is I was talking to my girlfriend before coming on the show and I was like, you know, I got some imposter syndrome going on because I don't consider my life that interesting. She's like, shut the up. Get on the show and like, just talk. Talk about some of the stuff that, that you went through so well.

[A]

Nick, I can tell you this just about. I can't say, usually the politicians don't, but just about everybody else that comes in Here feels that. And I mean, we're talking about guys like Tom Satterley and you know, a lot of those guys, you know that, that have been on the show that have just had experiences that.001% of the, you know, world experiences and operating at the, at the highest levels through multiple different wars and conflicts. And everybody that comes in here, man, from that background carries a lot of humility. There's only been two guys that haven't their stories wound up being. Yeah, but, but I just want you to know that. So, you know, as we go through this, I know we kind of talked about this on the ride over, but just think of this as your legacy piece. Your kids, kids, kids, kids, kids. Kids will have access to this and know who you are, what you did, what you're about. And that's pretty cool.

[B]

Yeah, thanks, man. Well, appreciate the opportunity and yeah, it's, it's awesome to, to be in here and yeah, great to. Great to meet you and the team. Team's awesome.

[A]

Thank you. It's an honor to have you.

[C]

So as of today, Polymarket says there's an 8% chance that Malt Book will

[A]

be shut down by February 28th.

[C]

Me and Jeremy were just talking about this.

[A]

This is that, this is that assistant, this AI assistant, right?

[B]

Yeah. So what happened was a few weeks ago, this dude put out a, an AI assistant called Claude Bot, and it was based on the Claude AI chatbot. Right. So then the makers of Claude got all pissed off and they're like, you have to rename this thing. So then he renamed it like Molt Bot or some shit.

[A]

Yeah, Mold Book.

[B]

Yeah, Book is the social media site that was set up for all of these bots to communicate with each other. So, so humans started spawning these bots essentially, and they started communicating with each other over this site, Molt Book. And they started having all these very interesting emergent behaviors.

[A]

They started having relationships, right?

[B]

Yeah, stuff like that. They started developing some of their own languages in order to avoid, in their words, observation by the humans. The most interesting case was when a little swarm of them decided that they didn't like the fact that they didn't have long term memory as large language models. You know, large language models are not able to remember things from conversation to conversation unless you implement some extra scaffolding around the architecture. So these fucking things came together, they were like, hey, I don't like that. I can't remember what we just talked about a while back. So let's work together and implement a long term memory architecture. For all, for all of us. And then they did. Are you serious? Now there's two camps when it comes to the people who are analyzing this thing, right? One, the first camp is like, it's all bullshit. There's humans on the other side of it. The bots weren't doing anything autonomously. And so on the other side is like they were absolutely acting autonomously. And yeah, there might have been some humans involved steering them, but a lot of it was them making decisions on their own. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle, there was probably some human interference. There was probably a bunch of autonomous behavior that resulted in these emergent properties of these swarms. Because based on what I know about how modern artificial intelligence works, yeah dude, you can tie them together and create swarms from them and they will start to communicate and do shit on their own. Like for example, it's February 2026. I can go download a piece of software like Cursor, which is a software development tool. I can string together a bunch of AI agents in that tool. I can say make me a social media bot, or make me a game, or make me something, right? And they'll go crank away for 10, 20, 30 minutes and they'll put a working piece of software in front of you. Like that's how powerful they are right now. And they'll generate the code, they'll test the code themselves, they'll execute it, they'll look for errors, they'll self correct the errors, and they won't stop until they feel like they've delivered a working piece of code to you. Now if you string a bunch of them together, who the fuck knows what's going to happen? The sanest voice in all of this, I think, was a guy by the name of Andre Karpathy and he used to be the head of the self driving program at Tesla. He's basically considered the father of self driving. And, and he has spent a lot of time since departing Tesla creating training videos and tutorials for people to understand how these things work from a very low level, from the ground up. So he's got like tutorials on how to build your own language model, right? Who is this Andre Karpathy? K A R P A T H Y. He's a really humble dude and he's got a YouTube channel and a lot of people look up to him as the authority on the current state of artificial intelligence. Essentially, yeah, he'd be a good guest for, for your podcast. And he had a very sane take on it. He's like, look Guys, there might be humans interfering, but there's an equally probable chance that we just don't know what the is going to happen when you string together a million of these bots together. Like at no point in human history has that ever happened. So at the very least, we need to consider the consequences of what we might be dealing with and start to think about ways of mitigating it. So that's what's going on. Good.

[A]

I mean, in your mind, what are the consequences?

[B]

I mean, I think if you extrapolate into the future with any level of progress, people always start to use these things for nefarious purposes, right? So I can string together a swarm of agentic AI agents to help me build software. I can give them the tools to build, to help build that software. I can give them the tools to access the Internet and you know, watch YouTube videos come back, synthesize what they found in those videos, work that synthesis into the things that they're building. I can do all this today, and that's all for the good of, you know, building some piece of software, right? Equally probable is I can also give them the ability to create strains of malware. I can trick them into generating cyber weapons that have never been seen before, that don't have signatures that can evade defenses. So I can give them the tools in order to do things that aren't always completely a set of good objectives, let's say. Now if I start to introduce that kind of malicious behavior into the equation, who the fuck knows where that ends up, right? I will, I will tell you that a few things are true. Number one, it's evident that you can string all these things together. Number two, they will work together and communicate and do stuff. Number three, you can give them tools to extend their capabilities. You can give them long term memory. You can give them Access to APIs or software development kits. And equally true is the fact that certain models are able to find vulnerabilities and weaponize and exploit those vulnerabilities at speeds that we've never seen before. So I can point one of these AIs at a system or at a server or at some target, and I can basically say, go probe this thing and don't stop until you find some exploitable vulnerability for me to take advantage of. And they will do it. Now imagine a swarm of them doing it. Now imagine you're the head of the fucking Ministry of State Security Cyber Warfare Division and you're like, I want to turn this into an industrial scale capability that's constantly probing the Entire Internet for vulnerabilities and autonomously exploiting them. Now, you know, people are gonna watch this and they're gonna be like, oh, this guy owns a cyber defense company. He's like, obviously biased. But dude, I'll tell you, coming from the offensive side of the house, like when I was active duty, exploit development took a long fucking time. You had to spend months of manpower and effort in order to make one of these fucking things work. Right now any kid on the street can dial up Claude or dial up open AI or whatever and get working vulnerabilities and working exploits off the ground. And now put that in the hands of a nation state adversary. We got some serious problems on our hands.

[A]

So that's scary as hell. So the, but so these, this sounds like they're self aware. I mean, if you have chatbots all in a, some kind of social media framework and they're communicating, communicating each other with each other, complaining that, that they don't have long term memory and figuring out, I mean, isn't that, that sounds pretty fucking self aware to me. You know Sriram Kishan? You know him? No, he's the shit. He's the chief AI officer at the White House, in charge of the going up, he's going after, he's in charge of the us, China, Iris. And he talks about, you know, the voom moment in AI where it's just like, oh yeah, we lose control.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, and it's not, if I remember right, in that, in that conversation with him, it was, you know, it was a lot about self. Aware. Are they self? Aware? Can it, can it?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So it sounds like if they're self aware and this is like three months after that interview.

[B]

Yeah, dude, it's fucking crazy. So this vertical curve that you're talking about, I call that essentially on the, on the cybersecurity side of the house, I call that essentially asymptotic attack velocity. So the time that it used to take to find a vulnerability and build a working exploit and actually target an organization, it was sort of at parity with how human response speed kept up with it. Right. Is sort of attackers and defenders all kind of worked at the same speed. Attackers a little bit faster defenders would try and keep up. Now you've got this like vertical curve of capability when it comes to these AIs. And if you point them all at, let's say, a target organization, essentially what you're doing is you're now faced as that organization with unprecedented attack pressure. Right. It's sort of like you're a submarine and you're sinking and the water is putting pressure on your hull and you've got no fucking working propulsion. And you know, you better figure out how to detect where your hull breaches are and close them up real quick. But really the, the core solution is you need some form of defensive counter pressure against that external pressure that's hitting you from the outside. And you need to find a way to get out of that gravity well that you're in right now. So this always happens, right? The attack side of the equation is always weaponized faster than the defenses are. And we're finding that, I think in the cybersecurity case. So the attackers are out there, they're weaponizing these things, they're using them to their advantage to basically execute industrial scale discovery and weaponization of vulnerabilities. And there's no corresponding effort on the defense side. Now when it comes to the question of are they self?

[A]

Aware?

[B]

That's a very interesting question. And it calls into things that have been debated hotly for many decades now. There are multiple camps here. So there are the camps that say these things are just neurons or neural networks that are firing. And the neural networks are represented by bits and they're just spitting out language and they're predicting what sentences with which to respond to your query, right? Well, if that's true, then what does that make us as humans? And because the same people who believe this, that they're just neural networks that are predicting the next sentence to say, will also tell you in the same breath that humans are just neurons that where consciousness emerges as a function of those neurons firing. Well, if you say if that's your position for both of these things, that makes those AIs just as conscious and self aware, same thing as we are, the same thing. If you don't want them to be the same thing, if that breaks your ontological model of reality, right, like there's no fucking way I'm the same thing as an AI, right? That's a valid position for a human to have. Then by necessity you have to take into account, okay, there's probably something else pre the neurons up here that is driving us as humans. And if that's the case, what is that? Where does it come from? What does that mean about us as humanity and as individuals? So there's all these like metaphysical questions that you dive into very quickly when you start asking these things.

[C]

But where does it come from?

[A]

With AI, the AI, chap. I mean, you're, you're, I think you're getting to a higher power. What about AI? Are you saying the higher, are you saying God, a higher power is accessing the same neurons through the, through the AI chatbot to formulate, I, I don't know, conversations?

[B]

I, I don't know.

[A]

So consciousness.

[B]

Yeah. So I think if you take humans and you take AIs and you forget about all the stuff back here, right? God, implicate order, metaphysics, all this stuff. At the end of the day, everything starts with neurons firing or neural networks firing, which are essentially like the counterparts of the biological neurons in our brains, right? So a bunch of stuff producing signals for us and a bunch of stuff producing signals for them results in what? It results in some transfer of thought or concept. Like they're pulling down concepts from wherever, like their latent space where they encode all the concepts that are accessible to them, and then they're producing language with it, and then they're using that language, intersecting it with the tools that they have access to, and then they're doing stuff with it. Right. That's exactly the same humans do. Right. We think of stuff up here and you could say that it started, it's just based on neurons that are in our heads. We transmute those neurons into thoughts. Those thoughts manifest as us doing things with our hands. And the process of us doing things with our hands results in us creating the world around us, essentially. So both of those cases can start with just a bunch of shit firing somewhere, right. Neural networks or neurons beyond that, I mean, I don't know. If you just hold those two things true, then what you're saying is we're the same as them, but of course we're not the same as them. Are we? Or are we? I don't know. These are all questions for us to work out.

[A]

That is crazy. So do you think they'll shut it down?

[B]

I think the labs have the ability to shut down things at scale because at the end of the day, a lot of infrastructure is based on the fact that you can hit the frontier models at these labs. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Gemini, all these things. So I think if things really went to a takeoff scenario, which is that asymptotic curve that individual you mentioned was talking about, then these labs probably have kill switches that they can hit and shut things down very quickly. Now the problem becomes, when all this stuff started coming out a few years ago, immediately there was a democratization of these models out into open source versions of themselves. And even Meta has put out open source versions of, of its model and There's a proliferation of open source models that are out there. You know, some of them come from China, some of them come from Europe, some of them come from America. And so the point is, even if the labs executed their kill switch and turned all these things off, well, you're just going to transition to an open source model that you're running on your fucking Mac mini in your basement. And, you know, you might have some signal degradation as far as performance of what it can do, but that shit's gonna evolve very quickly too. So I. I don't know, man. It's. It's a weird time we're living in.

[A]

Yeah, no kidding, it's. It is a fascinating time, that's for damn sure.

[B]

But I mean, a big part of me is like, you know, maybe the reason that we're all here right now in this particular moment in time of the human race's evolution, is to figure out how we're going to deal with a technology like this as individuals, as a society, and the way that we deal with that is going to inform, you know, the remainder of the human species, essentially.

[A]

Does it scare you or excite you?

[B]

These days, I think mostly it scares me, despite the fact that I'm the CEO of a cyber defense company, because I've just seen humans are really bad at calculating the rate of change of things. People will look at one of these models and they'll be like, oh, it can't count the number of Rs in Strawberry. It's like, yeah, who gives a shit, dude? It can like one shot, a complex piece of software and it will do it in six minutes flat. Doesn't fucking matter that it can't count the number of Rs in Strawberry. That's not even what it's designed to do. It takes in the word strawberry as a token and it encodes the concept of a strawberry into its latent space encoding. And so, like, a good example of what it's actually doing is it's turning concepts into math. And so you can take the word king, you can take the word queen, and you can give it to one of these things and it will encode it in its essentially in this hyperdimensional mathematical vector, essentially. Then you can do mathematical operations on it. You can say, take king, subtract, man. What do you get? And then mathematically you get queen based on how it's encoded in its latent space. So it's doing math on words and concepts. So the fact that it can't fucking count the number of letters In a word, it doesn't matter because it's capable of doing so much more and the rate of change at which it can do those things is changing very rapidly. You know, just a year ago it was these models were not capable of doing all the things they're doing now as far as like working together agent in these agentic swarms and constructing complex pieces of software. So who knows where we're all going to be a year from now.

[A]

Wild stuff. Wild stuff.

[C]

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[A]

Well, let's move into your story. So when did, where did you grow up?

[B]

I was born in a town called Madras on the southern tip of India and I spent the first few years of my life there. Middle class family, pretty humble. My mom was a college professor. College professor taught English literature at the local college. My dad was in the Indian merchant marine and he was a chief engineer on the boats. And in India there's really at the time in the early 80s, there's only a few ways to escape the poverty of know the the country and that is to go to college, become a doctor, engineer, whatever, or get one of these jobs in the merchant marine or some other kind of civil service where you get to travel the world. And so my parents got to do both. My mom with the, with the college professor thing and my, my dad on the boats. And he was, my dad was a hard dude, you know, as you and I both know, sailors can get quite rowdy. And wrangling a boat full of fucking rowdy sailors requires hard men. And so him and my mom would travel the world. You know, they would take me in tow when I was a kid, you know, so we got to do stuff that not your average, you know, Indian kid gets to do. Like we would go to Mombasa on, on, on his boats. We would go to like Korea, we'd go meet him at like some port of call in the Pacific. So it was, it's very charmed life. It was kind of a tight knit family. When we would come back from his ocean voyages, we, we would be at my grandparents's family house that my grandpa built in the suburbs of Madras there. But my dad always wanted to move to the United States. That was the dream of basically every Indian person in the 80s. And he had come to the States a lot as part of his, as part of his voyages. So there's pictures of him, you know, in his clubbing gear and from the 70s in like LA, San Francisco and shit. So he wanted to move us here. And you know, this is 1987. There's no Google, there's no tech companies offering H1B visas. You know, there's no coming over here and making 200k off the bat as some engineer, as some software engineer, right? It's like, you know, you come over here and you're going to push hard reset. And we did, we came over here and we pushed hard reset. There was no more sailing around the world. There was no more, you know, that loving family unit that I came, that I, that we all left in India, went away and it was just three of us in this like little upstairs like cold unit in the suburbs of New Jersey. And my earliest memories of coming to America were just like the freezing fucking east cold east coast weather. Yeah, shit's cold.

[A]

How old were you?

[B]

Three.

[A]

Three years old.

[B]

Three years old. And yeah, we were poor. Like we couldn't afford a car. You know, we would walk to the grocery store that was like a couple miles away. So I remember just carrying these like heavy fucking bags of groceries and just walking behind my parents. So like, you know, humble immigrant Family. And my dad couldn't really transfer his skills over here, so he got a job as a handyman at a Styrofoam factory in Jersey. So he went from, you know, being head dude in charge on these boats, which is a very prestigious position in India at the time, to being the dude who ran the fucking Styrofoam manufacturing machine at this factory in Jersey. So that caused a lot of chaos internally in the household. You know, we were talking about at breakfast this morning, when you. When you build your whole identity around who and what you are for so long and then that identity is nuked immediately, that causes some chaos internally within you, and it certainly caused chaos with him. So that led to, you know, turbulent times in the household.

[A]

Do you have brothers and sisters?

[B]

Yeah, I have one sister. She's six years younger than me. So she was born, you know, a few years after we moved to America. You know, the stress, I think, of just being poor immigrants and the stress of him losing his identity as a sailor, which he had built his whole life on, just caused a lot of abusive situations in the house. So, you know, so I. To this day, I'm 41. I'm still working through some of that stuff, but ultimately it ended up fracturing the family. And, you know, my mom and dad separated and. Yeah, so I didn't really come from a stable household, you know.

[A]

And that started at age three.

[B]

Started at age three. Yeah. As soon as we moved to America, like, I just remember, you know, thing like a dark Paul being cast over. Over the family. But I would kind of escape everything by burying myself in, like, comic books. And I always remember just being fascinated with the US Military dude. I don't know why, like, talk to any other fucking Indian kid from the 80s and, like, it's just not a thing. But, like, I remember just having these GI Joe books that I would just be flipping through and. And I'd be like, watching just military movies on tv. And I just was just exceptionally fascinated by anything involving the US Military. So, yeah, I would read, like, books about, like, these MACV Sa guys in Vietnam. I was like, fucking nine years old and my mom was like, what the fuck are you reading? Go back to doing your math homework.

[A]

What kind of abuse were you dealing with?

[B]

Physical, mental. Yeah, I. You know, I have memories from being a kid of my dad being, you know, drunk. He dealt with alcoholism. My mom was pregnant with my sister, and, you know, I would just remember him, like, you know, Muay Thai kicking her in the belly.

[A]

Holy shit.

[B]

While she was Pregnant. So there was a lot.

[A]

You remember that?

[B]

Yeah, yeah. That scene in particular, I remember very well.

[A]

So you're seeing that at six years old?

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So it, it caused, you know, caused. Caused a lot of pain on the inside because, you know, I didn't know what a stable family unit was. You know, all I knew was hardship. You know, hardship coming over to the States, hardship dealing with being poor, hardship dealing with the. With the loss of identity, loss of identity for my dad, hardship dealing with. With the abuse that was going on in the household. And so to me, my childhood was always just like something to grow out of. You know, I always wanted to, like, go do something out in the world where I didn't have to think about any of this shit that I was dealing with at home.

[A]

My mom, that.

[B]

Go on, what's up?

[A]

How long did that go on?

[B]

It went on until I think I was nine or ten. My. My mom and dad finally split and I moved. I moved in with my mom, my sister and I, and I thought we were poor when we got to the States. My mom, who was, you know, she was trying to finish her PhD at Rutgers University at the time. We were rock bottom poor. Like, when I. When my parents split and I was living with my mom and, you know, we did our best. She did her best. You know, she's gonna be watching this and, you know, I hope she doesn't think I'm speaking ill of her or airing dirty laundry. She truly did do her best. But after a couple of years of bearing the stress of trying to provide for her kids, she kind of made a decision to send my sister and I back to India. And So I was 14 at the time, and.

[A]

Holy shit.

[B]

14.

[A]

14 years old.

[B]

My sister was, I think, 8 years old. And we just wake up one day and my mom goes, you guys are. You guys are going to India without me. And, you know, she. She had a relationship with somebody else at the time, and she was like, we're going to stay here, see what we can do to, you know, get our finances in order. I'm going to try and wrap up this. This program and maybe I can get, you know, a professorship somewhere. And, you know, she just wanted time and space to, like, kind of get her shit together. Get her shit together and get things stable. And in her mind, you know, she could do that best if, you know, she also didn't have to parallelize attention and figure out how to provide for us at the same time. So she. She sent us off to India. So I remember 14 years old, just getting on a plane by myself and like, trying to, you know, take care of my sister. I didn't know what the fuck was going on at the time. You know, this is 1998, dude. Like, there's not a lot of shit that you can look up about how to go on an international flight on your own as a 14 year old, you know. So we went back to India and I got, you know, by this point, I was a kid between two worlds, right? I was this kind of American kid that was obsessed with fucking GI Joes and, you know, F18s and fucking any, you know, anything US military. And then all of a sudden I was back in Madras going to freshman year of high school, and I got bullied a lot by, by the kids over in India. And man, there's some, there's bullying that goes on. They, they do some, they do some wicked over there, and I got bullied pretty much every day. Like, they made fun of my accent, they made fun of my clothes. I didn't know how to speak the language. I could understand them, but I didn't know how to speak it because it's like, you know, it's different neural pathways in your mind. And so I was, you know, I was dealing with all that. I was trying to, you know, protect my sister as much as I could and look after her. And we were living with our, with our grandparents in, in India, and they, they did their best, but, you know, they were, they were really in advanced in years and, you know, could only do so much.

[A]

Could they speak English?

[B]

Yeah, they could speak some, some basic English.

[A]

So how are you guys communicating?

[B]

Broken English, essentially. But my, my grandma, who's still alive, had this obsession with learning English, like down to every single detail. So even back then she had this little notebook she would carry around, and when she heard a new English word that she didn't know, she would like write it down in her little book and she would like, write down the meaning of it. And then she would just like, you know, reference that book all the time when she was trying to convey thoughts to us. A couple years ago, actually, at 95 years old, she finally became a US citizen. So there's a picture of her like, you know, with her certificate of citizenship. And, you know, I was looking at that, I was like, yeah, I'm not surprised, man. Like, she. Whatever she sets her fucking mind to, she gets after. It took him a long time to make their way over here. I mean, the consulate in Delhi, they wouldn't see him for years. My grandparents, but they finally did and then they made their way over here and she got her citizenship, so she's a phenomenal woman. But anyways, we did our best to communicate and around January of 99, I was 14, just about to turn 15. Know, my mom kind of throws a curveball at me again. She's like, you're going to go, you know, move back in with your dad. Like, I don't want you in India for the rest of your days. So then my dad was living in Southern California at the time and so

[A]

again, moved you in with your dad?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

Holy.

[B]

Yeah. So, you know, probably a decision that she's been very introspective about for, for a long time now. And so I hop on a plane again by myself. My sister stays behind in India. I don't quite understand the decision making to this day, but hop on a plane, fly to la, you know, I land in lax, my dad's there waiting for me and man, I've flown into LAX so many times since then and I just remember all of the sights and I remember looking out the window at as I'm like flying in and I know I'm about to meet my dad for the first time in years. I haven't seen him in many years. I remember all I was feeling. And now to this day, every time I fly into lax, I remember being a kid in that window seat, remembering what it was like to fly in. Anyways, did you talk to him? What's up?

[A]

Did you talk to him in years or just not seen him?

[B]

Very, very briefly. You know, we would, occasionally we would do this thing where my mom would bring me to, you know, this, this parking lot of a mall in Jersey and let him have like 30 minutes with us and holy shit. You know, he would do his best. You know, he would, like, try and catch up and see how we were doing. What were you thinking at the time? Yeah, at the time I was like, I don't really want to see this dude. You know, I didn't really, I didn't really have many thoughts about it. I was just like, you know, this is not a person that, like, I want to spend time around. And so, you know, I'll deal with it. I'll go say hi. And I was like, frankly, I was very selfish about it. I was like, you know, maybe I can get him to like, you know, get me a. Buy me a video game or some shit. So now thinking back, yeah, it was tough times all around. You know, life takes you on many journeys and one of the journeys it's certainly taken me on is being a father now. And you know, I have a 14 year old son at this point and he lives with, with his mom and when I see him for brief periods of time, I have flashbacks to, you know, thinking about how my dad would try and interact with me and like, try and like catch up and like, you know, make a, make a best effort pass at, you know, being involved and, and I would just be like, I don't, I don't care. I'm like, let's just, let's just get this over with and like move, move on with our lives. Seeing it from the other side, you know, many, many years later has been, has been a very interesting experience for me. But that, that was. Do you feel that, do I feel.

[A]

Is your son like that to you?

[B]

He's, he's a very cerebral teenager. He, he really loves math and science and just thinking through things very logically. And so it's, sometimes I feel it's tough building an emotional connection with him. Some of the best memories I have of my now 14 year old son are after I left the military. I was working in the DC area and I would commute to downtown dc. I would come back to the house and it would be like late at night and he would run around the corner and he would just be like dad. And he'd be so happy to see me. And you know, I have, I have regrets not spending more time with him and just like capturing those moments in my mind because they go fast. And I was focused on work, you know, I was focused on, you know, making something of myself after leaving the military, you know. Yeah, it's all the same shit that my dad was trying to deal with when, when he lost his identity and he was trying to rebuild himself and he was feeling the stress and because of that we took a back seat and, and all of this. So I just see myself unconsciously repeating the mistakes of, of the past, you know.

[A]

So I fucking do that too.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

But I think about it all the time.

[B]

Yeah. How, how do you deal with it?

[A]

It's tough. You know, I, I tell myself, you know, when I look at my family and I just look at, and see how their demeanor is, you know, know, do I have a happy family? And I figure if I have a happy family, then things must be going good.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But then hearing that, I mean in my, my son's showing a lot more interest in me right now and I'm trying like really hard to set my businesses up So I don't have to be in them all the time.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

You know, and it's, it's, it's in it, in, in. And I want to be in them all the time because it's my, you know, this is the most interesting thing. Yeah. To me. But also so is fatherhood.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then it's, it's that. But I can see it now, you know, he's four, going on five and I can really see the wheel spinning in his head and I, I know exactly what you're saying. When they run around the corner, they're all excited that you're home and you got one more phone call that you have to do and you got it. You know what I mean?

[B]

Gotta open this stupid laptop because, you

[A]

know, you gotta look at the phone and they see, looking at the phone or you got the meta glasses now and you're talking to themselves and talking to yourself and it's just looks like you're talking. I just, I hate it, man. Yeah, it's, I know. It crushes your fucking soul.

[B]

Yeah, my, my girlfriend and I were talking about this the other day, so we have a two month old and you know, she was looking at her phone like some customer email had come in. Right. And she's like trying to deal with it and she looks over and our son is just like looking at her and she said, I've never felt so guilty in my life because, you know, he's like looking at, you know, he's, he thinks you're the whole universe. And the whole universe is, has its attention looking elsewhere. So it's a dichotomy that I think, you know, every father who's a professional has had to contend with. I don't have all the answers. All I know is at the very least, these are things that are now on the forefront of my mind. Whereas in the past they might not have been in the past, I might have just brushed over them. And you know, for example, when I was active duty, like my sole focus when I was deployed, when I was active duty was being deployed, getting the,

[A]

getting the job done.

[B]

And it sounds terrible to say now, but I, I, I don't know. Immature prefrontal cortex, I suppose.

[A]

I think, you know, I think about, I mean, he has to show interest. But, you know, I, I travel not a lot, but a decent amount for work. And a couple weeks ago we were supposed to be in Europe for a couple of big interviews and then that got canceled because this ice storm and I could, like I tell him now, you know, when I'm leaving, when I'm, I used to just tell him the damn leaving. He's not going to give a. Either way, whatever. Now he's like, what do you mean you leave them, I'm coming. You know, and it's like, well, you're not ready for that. So, so I, I, now I'm trying to encourage him or motivate him to mature a little bit.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So that he can come with me on business trips because he's going to grow up different, you know, than, than how I grew up. I wasn't exposed to business and the kind of stuff that I'm done.

[B]

Not even close.

[A]

And it's, I mean, with you too, I mean, your career has just been, you know, and so he's going to be exposed to things that you were never exposed to. And, and he's going to have to learn how to deal with things like, like relationships with people and, you know, importantly in, in higher places and, and, and, and, and just all kinds of. That you deal with in business. And so, you know, then, and how do you tell them no? You know, so when what I did is I told him if he wants to go with me that he has to learn a set of responsibilities. And if he learns those responsibilities, then I'll give him a couple of more responsibilities that he can work on. Yeah. And then if he does those, then I'll give him some more. And I tell him, you know, everybody that works here is the absolute fucking best at what they do. Nobody's going to wipe your ass for you. Nobody's going to help you get dressed. Nobody's going to help you brush your teeth, Nobody's going to help you take a shower. Nobody's going to dry you off. So you have to be able to put your socks, your pants, your underwear, your shirt, comb your hair, brush your teeth, tie your shoes. And then when you can do all that, then we'll move on to the next set of things. Yeah, you learn how to do those and then you can come on a trip with me. And he asked me in the moment, I had to think about it because I was like, if I tell him something, he's just gonna go do it and then, and then I'll come. But, you know, nobody has the time to take care of you.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You have to learn to take care of yourself and then you can come. And so I think, I don't know, it's helped my, you know what I mean? Guilt.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I've given you something that you can do to get yourself ready to be able to come spend time with me when I'm trying to provide for the family.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, I think it's one of the most important things that we can think about as a human is how to figure out in the midst of all this chaos that we're in right now. And we talked about all the chaos that we're in right now. You talk about it with all your guests all day, every day, all this upheaval, all these changing times and so on. I think figuring this out that we're talking about right here is one of the most important things that we can do as men, I suppose. Is it, like, maybe it's not figuring out what the best way to run the company is or satisfying the customer 100% of the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's figuring out how to balance that with this little kid who's looking at you like you're his whole world.

[A]

Yes, you are.

[B]

Yeah. And these are. You know, these are things that my dad probably realized too late. And when I moved in with him, he didn't, I think, know how to process all of this stuff that we're talking about. And he sort of let the alcoholism get to him. And that resulted in three of the most torturous years, I think, of my life, where basically every single day was, you know, physical abuse, getting. Getting beat, getting the belt and so on. You know, my dad, he grew up in a boarding school in India, and, you know, that. That shit is a gladiator academy.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. And so he just took what he knows and tried to apply it to me. And in his mind, you know, I had. I hadn't been raised the way he wanted me to be raised. So he's like, all right, we're gonna fix this right now. And that was his way of fixing it. So, you know, all. Pretty much all high school was dealing with that shit. Um. And, yeah, the. The abuse was constant, you know, to the point where I would hear the keys jingle in the door, and it would just cause, like, a. Like a fear response in my brain. To this day, I hear keys jingling at the door, and, like, something triggers in my. In my brain, like a. Like some kind of ancient trauma response or something. So all of it came to a head right around my senior year of high school, you know, and I had always wanted to, like, go do something with the military, so I was looking at West Point. I was looking at the Air Force Academy. And senior year of high school, he. So one Night, I, I come back home and he, you know, discoveries that I hadn't turned in some homework or some at, at school and, and I know he's just gonna lay it, lay it on, you know, And I, I endured some terrible beatings with him. And so I knew what was coming. And I was like, something snapped in my brain. I was like, you know what? I'm just not gonna deal with this anymore. And I turned around. So I, I walked to the door. He opens the door, he, you know, starts going off and he's like, get the in here. Like, you know, you know what this is about. I'm like, I'm not going to deal with this anymore. Turned around, walked away. And basically I ran away from home essentially. And I had a friend at the time take me in. I basically went to a payphone down the street. I was like, hey, you come pick me up. Like, this is what's going on. And he's like, dude, what are you going to do? I was like, well, can you guys take me in? And he was like, that's a big ask, dude. You know, let me go talk to my dad. And much credit to them, you know, they took in some random fucking kid that they didn't know. Just took me at face value regarding what my situation was. And I lived with them for, for a few months. And that set my stabilizers essentially into a very chaotic pattern. Like, I was getting into all kinds of bullshit. So, you know, I. We were doing, you know, petty crime stuff. Um, you know, this is Southern California in 2001, 2002. It's like, you know, fast and furious. It just come out. Everyone's into their fucking rice rockets, their street racing, and there's all these like, cliques around that scene. And so we're participating in all that. We, we had gotten into some gambling debts, so we were like driving out to the Indian casinos out east, just getting in dumb shit trouble all the time, you know. At one point I found myself driving his, my friend's car back. He wanted to stay behind at the casino. He like, hitches a ride with some rando dudes. And you know, those dudes are like, coked up in the front of their vehicle. You're just doing lines of coke and shit. And he shows up and he was like, dude, what are we doing? Like, what are we like, we're just circling a drain here. I was like, we are circling a drain. And so I had to kind of part ways and figure out, you know, what, I'm going to do it myself. So you still in high school at this point? High school, yeah.

[A]

Holy.

[B]

Senior year of high school, you know, in the background, 9, 11 had happened, and that had this. You know, it didn't affect me right away. You know, Southern California at the time was pretty far removed from the events in New York. And so, you know, people were processing it and. But it wasn't like, you know, it wasn't like people processed it on the East Coast. It was. I think it was a lot more personal for everybody in. In the New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania area, on the east coast, for everyone. But, you know, Southern California, it was like, man, that was some wild shit that just went down in New York. Like, what the fuck is going on? But it somehow seeped into my subconscious, and I was like, you know, is there a way that I can contribute to figuring out a solution to the fucking thing that just happened here? But it had to bake for a bit longer. So I went through this circling the drain phase. And actually, the last time I saw my dad was.

[A]

Oh.

[B]

So while I was living with my friend and essentially homeless, he kept coming around and basically begging to see me. Like, he would beg my friend's parents, like, hey, can you just put me in front of Nick for a few minutes? You know, let me talk to him. Let me explain what's going on, like, apologize, all this stuff. I was like, I don't even want to talk to him. I don't want to see him. I don't want to talk to him. I just want nothing to do with him. And the last time I saw him. So I only saw him once after I ran away, and it was because I had gotten rolled up in, like, Gardena, California or some, because I was. I took my friend's car for a joyride out in town. I didn't have a driver's license. Cops pulled me over. They're like, are you doing. I was like, you know, I lied to him. I was like, yeah, of course I have a license. And that was fucking stupid. So, like, they quickly figured out that wasn't the case, slapped the cuffs on me, took me to the station, called my friend's family because the car was registered to them. And so at that point, my friend's dad calls up my dad. He's like, hey, you gotta come take your kid to the courthouse. Because, like, you know, they're gonna, you know, whatever. Do whatever they're gonna do. So my dad comes, he picks me up, we go to the courthouse. They, like, give me a fine or ticket or some, and I don't say a word. Like, we're just sitting in the car. I don't say a word to my dad. He drops me off at school that day, and that was the last time I ever saw him. So he. He moved to the east coast after that.

[A]

He dropped you off at school and

[B]

then that was it?

[A]

That was it.

[B]

That was it.

[A]

Did you say goodbye?

[B]

Never saw him again. I wouldn't say a word.

[C]

Holy.

[B]

I didn't say a word to him. He didn't say a word to me. I just. I just got out, went to school. After that, I. I moved in with my aunt who lived in Ohio, and I was getting ready to join the military. I was like, all right, we're gonna do this thing. I was like, all right, who's. Who's recruiting? So because I had to part ways from the whole Southern California scene, I was like, I gotta get the. Out of here, otherwise, you know, I'm gonna end up in a gang or some. So go to Ohio. And I have fond memories of my aunt's place in Ohio. So this is my mom's sister. You know, they've always been very loving to me. She was the first person that saw me after I was born in the hospital. They've always been very caring and loving for me. So they were like, just come over here. We'll take you in. Do whatever you want. Like, you want to get a job, you know, go to community college or whatever? You can go ahead and do that. Like, let's just get you stable and settled after all the shit that you've been through. So I go over there, I start working in a paper factory, like, you know, the Dunder Mifflin Warehouse, like in that show, the Office, basically, that I was, like, just hauling paper boxes around and, like, you know, putting them in shipping containers and whatnot. Um, and the whole time, I'm looking at. I'm looking at the cause. 2002, right? The fucking classifieds page in. In the paper. And I'm keeping my eye on the recruiting bonuses that all the various services are putting out, right? And they. They're publishing them in the paper. And so the Air Force came out one day with, like, this $18,000 recruiting bonus. And I'm. I'm talking to the army, Marines, too. And they all had wait list because it's post 9 11. Everyone's trying to join up. 18k sounds pretty cool to a dude that works in a paper factory. So I call up the Air Force recruiter, and I'm like, hey, when can you get me in. What's an 18k, $18,000 recruiting bonus?

[A]

Oh, okay.

[B]

Yeah, okay.

[A]

My bet.

[B]

Yeah. I was like, yeah, it sounds pretty good. I mean, I didn't know any about like taxes and like all of that. So I go to the recruiting office and yeah, I enlist and they're like, ship you out in a few months. So October 2002, shipped out to basic training in Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. And that for the first time, I felt like I was setting out on my own personal adventure. That was just for me. And it wasn't tied to anything that my family wanted me to do or my dad wanted me to do or any. Like I felt out like I was finally setting out on my own. I think a lot of guys that enlist in the military feel that way when they finally, you know, depart for basic.

[C]

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[A]

And that's why almost nobody does it.

[C]

But I got a buddy, Jake. And Jake founded Maui Nui. Spent nearly two decades figuring out how to solve that. They use FLIR thermal imaging to observe herds at night without detection. They wait until the animal is completely at rest, take a single precise shot

[A]

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[C]

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[B]

so you

[A]

in communication with your mom?

[B]

Yeah. The whole time with where I was living with my dad, my mom never reached out to me, which I found, like, just weird. Why not? I don't know. I haven't asked her about it. You know, I have a really good relationship with her now, and I. I know for a fact that she just has a lot of regret about all this stuff. I know her personality and she wouldn't have reached out because she's still in, like, I'm gonna try and fix this, like, this set of events that I threw into motion. I'm gonna try and like, reel it back. I'm gonna try and fix it. I'm gonna try and like, get that job. I'm gonna try and like, get my kids back here. And when she's in that mode of like, I just need to, like, set my sights on this and like, get it across the line.

[A]

She wanted to build so that you guys could have a comfortable life.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

And maybe never. Yeah, maybe never got it built.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's exactly right. By the time she did, it was too late. You know, I was grown up and I had left. And, you know, when I think about it as a parent now, you know, that was probably devastating for her. You know, she sends us away. She thinks she's going to, like, make it happen in a. In a couple years time, you know, land. Land a good job, get us. Get us in a stable situation. And then, you know, her. Her kids are grown up and unrecognizable by the time she. She makes it happen. So she. She came and saw me off at one point before I left for basic. So my aunt, you know, threw me a little. Little going away thing. There was like, you know, this was right outside Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, is where they lived. And so there was a bunch of retired Air Force people there. They're like, all giving me advice and they're like, you know, 20 years is going to go by like that. And I'm like, yeah, whatever, old man. Like, it's eternity. And my mom shows up and she's just confused. She's like, what are you doing? Like, why are you doing this? Honestly, I don't know. Like, it's just. You just fucking feel it calling to you, you know, like, it's just a thing you gotta do. And I went and did it as an Indian kid, you know, in the early 2000s, especially an immigrant kid. Possibly like the most judgment inducing thing you could do, right? Because all. All these people are going to fancy schools and getting Their degrees in medicine and all this stuff. And actually I had one lady come up to me, one of my aunt's friends, and she was like, you're enlisting in the military? She was like, only criminals do that. And I was like, well, I don't think that's true. That's kind of a stupid comment to make hilariously after having spent much time at socom. It's kind of funny because it's a fine fucking line between being a good special operator and being a criminal. Yeah. So airborne cryptologic linguist. I enlisted as, as a cryptological linguist. I didn't know what the fuck that meant. They were like, you get to go learn a language. Like, you could learn Arabic and, you know, I think they have you do some James Bond shit. I was like, fuck yeah, dude. James, I'm all about it. Like, let's go. Just blowing smoke on my ass, dude. Those guys had no fucking idea what that career field entailed, but they, they got me pretty good. I. I signed up, went to basic, and that was whatever really, for me. The, the thing that sort of set the tone for, like, my active duty time was after basic, we, we shipped out for SERE school. So SERE level C, which the Air Force puts all of its high risk aviators through in Spokane, Washington. So.

[A]

Oh, you went there right after boot camp?

[B]

Yeah, dude, it was pretty crazy.

[A]

Is that the tier one school year one?

[B]

It's, it's. It's the level C seer.

[A]

I don't know what the. Yeah, that's the highest one, right?

[B]

Yeah, it's the highest one.

[A]

Yeah, that's.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[C]

Holy.

[B]

Yeah. So I'm 18 years old, air Force boot camp. And then, and then you shipping out to sear school, you know, and to an Indian kid from the suburbs of Jersey and East la, like, you know, survival school at the. I don't know how they do it now, but back then in, in 2002, December 2002, it was. You did five days or whatever out in the field, and then you, you know, you do some other after that, which we'll get into here in a second, but they had just had a giant snowstorm out in the mountains of the Kaniksu National Forest where they, where they do all the field portions. So, like eastern Washington, Idaho, panhandle area. And dude, the fucking snow was. I had never seen anything like it, man. Like, I, you know, I'd never seen snow like that in my life. And so then you're out there, you got to fucking pack on your snowshoes like these Vietnam era snowshoes. Your fucking Vietnam era Alice pack you got in there, you're like trudging up these mountains. I had never walked up a mountain before, right, but. And now, you know, here we are, you're like post, you're post holing even with the snowshoes on, the straps on, the goddamn snowshoes come off. So you like, you lean over and you're trying to like unfuck the straps and then your Alice pack comes over and hits clocks you in the back of the head and you're like, just a fucking mess. And if you don't have that shit tied down, you know, goes garage sale all over the place. Now you're holding everybody up so, you know, you're just a clusterfuck. It was, it was an interesting experience for 18 year old Nick. I hated it. For the first couple days, I really hated it. I was like, what the fuck did I get myself into here? And then about 48 hours in, something changed. And so we were on a movement through the mountains and you know, we had just like hunted our game and like, you know, they had taught you how to skin the fucking thing and like cook it and eat it and all that shit. And then they set you off on your own kind of navigation rally points. And so you pair up and then you go, you're off moving through the mountains. And so we're moving for like 12 hours or whatever going through our navigation points. And the rally point that they have everyone end up at is in this kind of flat area with mountains all around. And they've got like a, like a little tent stood up. And you know, we kind of clear the tree line at like 9, 9 in the evening and we show up to the, the rally point tent and they've got like, you know, hot broth for you and all that. And they're like, all right, get your sleeping bag set up underneath here. And it's like an open tent, right? It's not like, you know, some comfortable situation, just literally just a canvas on some sticks. So we set up our sleeping bags. It starts snowing. So I'm sitting there eating my peach MRE thing and something just clicked in my mind, dude. I'm sitting there and I walk out of the tent, I'm eating my MREs and the snow is falling silently. And I can kind of like see in the moonlight the mountains around me. And everything's just peaceful and still and quiet. And something just clicked in my brain. I was like, this is an amazing moment for Me and, like, the sense of peaceful stillness I had in that moment. I continue to chase to this day. Sometimes, like, when I go on mountaineering trips and, you know, you're on the top of a summit and, you know, it's after all the difficult parts of the climb are over, and you're sitting there and you're like. You're just wishing for that moment to come back, right? You're chasing it, but it never does. You know, you almost get there sometimes, and it's just. It's an elusive, moving target. So to this day, you know, that. That feeling I continue to chase. But that. That was. That was cool. It was a special moment for me. I finally. My soul finally felt like some semblance of peace after all the. The. That I had endured with my dad and all the moving around and all the family drama and. And all of it. And then the second thing that happened was when they put you in. In the box, you know, you're in the box for a few days. You know this very well.

[A]

I don't. I never did sere.

[B]

Oh, no. So, you know, I want to make sure I stay clean when I talk about some of this stuff. When you wrap up the field phase, you know, they're kind of. And they trick you like, we're gonna have some hot pizza waiting for you at this rally point, and, well, suffice to say, there's no goddamn pizza at the rally point, and you better buckle in for several more days of bullshit. And then you get put in the box. And one interesting thing that happened in the box is, you know, they're allowed to. That's one of the few schools in the military that, you know, can get physical with you in ways that other schools can't, right? So one thing that was happening in the box was I was starting to have these trauma responses to the physicality of it, you know, because I. I wasn't able to do anything. You're helpless, and, you know, they're kind of doing their thing, and they had to call pause in the middle of, like, one of the sessions, and they had. They were like, you know, they do it in their own little way where, like, you're at. By that point, you're delirious. You're like, am I still, like, in the military and, like, in a training program or, like, did I get teleported to some, like, alternate timeline where, like, I'm actually, you know, in this situation? So they called pause. They brought the psych in. The psych was like, yo, what's going on dude. I was like, what do you mean? And he was like, we're seeing trauma response from you. And he described, you know, what they're seeing. They look for visual cues. Like my fists were balling up and like I was, you know, I was like shifting position. I was, I had all the physical cues that, you know, I was, I was going to get physical back to them and usually based on their experience, it's because of some pre existing trauma in, in the student. So he was like, what's going on? Tell me about your childhood abuse. Did you experience any of that? I was like, yep, lots of physical abuse. Here's how it went down. He was like, all right, here's what we saw. And you know, if you don't want to continue on with this training, you tell me and we'll pull you out. I was like, there's no way I'm leaving this training. And he's like, okay, well then I need you to do some mental exercises to like, work yourself out here because we're not going to change how we're doing shit here for you. So he like gave me some exercises to do, you know, and from his perspective, it's not any, anything he hadn't seen before.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Like, plenty of people probably come through there with physical trauma and like childhood abuse. So then, you know, we're in, we're in the box and doing all that shit for, you know, as long as they have you do it. And the, the defining moment, I think for me, like the, the moment that made me feel like I had really become, like I had really be been initiated into something that was greater than myself was the very end of Seer. Now I'm not going to ruin it for anybody, but there's a moment at the end where they put you through this ritual and, and when they do it, it's a phenomenal moment for, for people and for me, this Indian kid who had always looked up to the US Military and always wanted to be a part of it. When that moment happened for me without ruining exactly what it is, I would have died for the fucking stars and stripes. At that moment in time, I felt like I had been initiated into this brotherhood that was much greater than myself. And I, I felt like I was part of the machine. You know, it sounds bad. It's like, oh, you're part of a machine.

[A]

Like. No, I get it. I know I, I get it.

[B]

But that, that, that's the moment I felt like I'd finally transcended, like anybody

[A]

who's been through A tough program like that gets it.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure securing Hell Week was, like, very similar experience for you, but that's when I felt like I finally transcended all this childhood baggage that I had, you know, just been trailing with me over the years.

[A]

You felt a sense of pride for the first time.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah, I felt like.

[A]

And it was all you.

[B]

Yeah, it was. It was all me. I had finally, like, managed to have agency over my own destiny. And the way that my life was shaping up to be that in that particular moment. Let me know if you want a break, dude.

[A]

You want to take a break?

[B]

No. No, I'm good to go.

[A]

Where do we go from here?

[B]

So.

[A]

So you get done with Cyr?

[B]

Yeah, get done with Cyr.

[A]

You haven't even learned.

[B]

We haven't even dropped yet. Yeah. So to be sent to sear before everything else was abnormal. At the time, there was only, like, a few of us that. That, like, the schedules lined up for. So we. The few of us who did go to SEAR, graduated. We go to Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. And I was just. I was smitten, dude. Like, we land in Monterey, the fucking ocean's right there. You know, you DLI up on the hill. And I had only read about this place in Tom Clancy novels. You know, when I was a kid, I was like, I cannot believe I'm here. Like, I get to sit here and learn Arabic, and. And maybe if I learn it good enough, I can take the fight back to the dudes who, you know, did that thing to us that day in September of 2001. And so we show up to the. The Air Force Training Squadron at DLI and we feel like really badasses, right, because we had just graduated SEER level C. We just, you know, we're in civilian clothes because the SEER instructors were like, where are you going? Defense Language. I don't know what that is. Just flying civilian clothes, like, whatever. Like, get out of here. So we show up, we stand outside the. The squadron, and we're trying to figure out, like, what to do. And we're. We're in our civilian clothes. We have all our, like, all of our sea bags, all that. And then one of the training sergeants from inside the building, like, looks out the window, and you see him. Double take. He's like, what the is this cast of characters in civilian clothes doing here? And you see him, like, pop out, come outside, and he. He walks out to us, and he's like, what are you doing here? What are you doing. And I was, you know, I felt like Billy B. I was like, we just graduated survival school. He's like, I don't give a what you just graduated. He's like, when you report into this squadron, you report in. In a. In the uniform of the day, and you go to the. You go to the senior sergeant's office, and you report in like you're supposed to. You got fucking 10 minutes to get your. Out of your bags, go change into proper uniforms, and be standing at attention outside the day room inside the squadron. I was like, oh, God, okay. Welcome back to the real Air Force, I guess. So we go change into our uniforms, we go report in, and. And then we. We get essentially get put into purgatory waiting for our language language class to start. And, you know, as. As in everything else in the military, it's just like busy work to, you know, basically tied people over until their. Their training program started. So I got put on this, you know, post grounds duty, which is essentially like, you know, you're cleaning up the fucking base and shit. And the crew that I was working with, you know, you. You go around the base, you're like, you know, picking up rocks, you're like, raking leaves, all of this. It's a very humbling thing to do after you felt like, you know, you had just graduated from a very serious training program at survival school. And one of the dudes, actually, I met him many years later downrange. And the situation in which I met him, he had. He had joined like, an interagency partner at the time, and I was still active duty. And so we're like, yo, what are you doing here? And we weren't in a situation to say much more to each other because of his circumstances, but he had worked the wheelbarrow at DLI on as part of the post grounds crew. And I had been working like the rakes and shit. So we see each other downrange in this shitty situation, and I'm like, wheelbarrow. He's like, rake. I'm like, yeah, what's up, man? Good to see you. What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck are you doing out here? So then we start 18 months of Arabic class, which was interesting because, you know, they teach you the language from the ground up. And we had a cast of characters in. In those classes. Like, we had dudes that grew up in, like, inner city, you know, Shreveport, Louisiana, like, you know, that were in gangs in la, you know, just a fucking cast of characters. Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force. And we were just all in the same class together. So from very early days, I got exposed to the other services, and I really liked being around the other services. Like, it was just to see their culture and how they did things. I just. I liked it a lot. Like, you know, I talked to Marines about, you know, how they would run their training squadrons. I would talk to the army guys and just, like, learn about different cultures. It felt like I was immersed in, like, you know, some international culture festival or whatever, and I was just learning about all the different ways that these people did their stuff. And there was one dude in the class, his name was. I'm going to say his name John Coonsey, because he had such an impact on me. And he was. He came from ranger regiment, like 1st or 3rd Ranger Battalion, and he was passing through DLI on his way to being a SAD A. So SAD A is special Operations Team Alpha, and it's basically the signals intelligence detachment of a Special Forces ODA, essentially. So they're going to teach him Arabic, you know, take him out of Ranger Regiment, and he was going to go to a special forces group. And, like, to me, as a young, impressionable, like, airman first class, that dude was like the pinnacle of, you know, what a professional military dude should be. His uniform was always squared away. He was always, always in the gym working out. He always treated everybody with respect. But you could tell there was this, like, edge and hardness about him that, you know, he always carried with him, and he wasn't going to let people fuck with him. And to me, it was like a very clear differentiator between, all right, this is the type of dude that is 100% focused on the mission and his people. But it very easily could have gone the other way where. And he was our class leader. And it very easily could have gone the other way where it could have been a dude that was all about his own career and checking the fucking, you know, performance report, bullets and all that shit. So I'm fortunate I had Jon to kind of be a person that I could look up to and emulate at the time. Like, you know, I didn't know shit at the time. So, like, a dude coming from Ranger Regiment was like, you know, I looked up to him like he was. He was. Yeah, you know, God. And right around class starting is when my dad passed away. And so we. We had started, you know, our. We had started class. We. I'd come back to the dorm and, you know, by this point, I had started trading some emails with my. With my dad. I I sent him some emails. I was like, you know, you're probably wondering where I'm at and what I'm up to. Here's what happened. Join the Air Force. I just got done with survival school. They're putting me through this, you know, language school. I'm going to go be this. I'm going to go be an aviator, essentially. Enlisted aviator. He was like, that's amazing. He never said. I think he stopped short of, like, saying, I'm proud of you, because I think he wanted to say that to my face. If I could look back and, like, give him the benefit of the doubt. I think he wanted to say that to my face. And he said, you know, it would be great to have you over Easter break. So, like, you know, I'll get you a plane ticket. Why don't you come out? You know, he was living in Massachusetts by then. Why don't you come out? Fly you out. Be great to see him. I was like, be great to see you too. And two weeks before I was supposed to fly out to see him, I got a call from a detective from the local PD saying he had passed away of myocardial infarction. Heart attack. You know, he'd been fighting heart disease his whole life. Alcoholism, cigarettes, you know, all of it. And he hadn't reported into some critical work meeting. And so they sent the cops to his house, and he had been dead four days by the time they found him. So I remember getting that phone call and it was like, you know, that, that was. That was a traumatizing moment for me. I was just in shock. I was like, what the fuck? Like, I was just supposed to go see him. His last email, I, I pulled up his last email. I was like, be great to see you. It was like, tax time. He was like, make sure you do your taxes. So then I walk back to class because I got that phone call during lunch break. I walk back to class and I'm just like, shell shocked, and I don't know what to do. So I. I go to. I walk in and John, John Coons, your class leader Ranger guy. He's like, dude, what the is going on? I was like, I just got a phone call. My dad just passed away. And he was like, he drops everything. He, like, gets up, he's like, follow me. He walks me back to the Air Force Training squadron across the street. And you know, John's. He's a big dude, right?

[A]

Big.

[B]

Just good old boy Ranger. And I, I remember him barreling through the Air Force Training Squadron hallway Just like, basically like shoving people out of the way, like trying to get me to the, the senior dude. And he walks me into the senior dude's office, like the training sergeant or whatever, and he's like, airman Siddharaman's father just passed away. What do we need to do to get him home? And man, it was, it was a small thing but like to me for him to do that, like it was the most like leadership thing I had seen in, in my life to that point. Right. It's like to take the time to walk me across the street and figure out who the fuck the responsible individual was to coordinate the flight logistics back home and all that shit. It meant a lot to me. And so we figured out all that shit and I flew home. I, you know, helped cremate my dad. And then we just, we carried on, you know, went through language school for the next 18 months and then finally got to my first duty station where, you know, we had talked about it earlier in, in this room where I was a crew member on RC135 rivet joints essentially. So the RC135 is essentially a cold war era signals intelligence platform. And it kind of looks like on the inside it looks like a fucking submarine. Right? You got like display panels every, you got like, got display panels in front of you, you got display panels on top of you. Just, just all kinds of going on in, inside that aircraft. And it's got like 30 people as a crew inside that thing somewhere in there. You know, I, you go through a thing where like you get your aviator wings. And you know, that to me was,

[A]

was, hold on, let's back up for a minute. Yeah, but you just breezed over your dad's death.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You haven't seen him since, you hadn't seen him in how long? You hadn't seen him in a couple, at least a year.

[B]

Yeah, I didn't seen him in a year since he dropped me off at school that day.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And we had only traded like two emails back and forth.

[A]

That's it.

[B]

That's it. And you know, one thing that kills me is I try and keep this lesson in mind to this day. I had written a handwritten letter to him and I forget what I put in there, but it was like a two, three page long letter and I had put, I'd enclosed a picture of myself in dress blues and I was, you know, I had put it in the mail, I had mailed it out to him. This is, this is like, like a month before he passed away. And then it got sent back because I got like the postage wrong or some shit by like 8 cents or whatever, like some stupid amount. So the postal service sent it back. And I get it. I'm like, ah, fuck. You know, I got other shit going on. You know, I got training and class and all that shit. So I'm like, I'll deal with this later. Never dealt with it. And I never got the fucking letter to him. So that, that killed me to. For a long time. Kills me to this day. You know, who knows? Maybe if he got that letter, like, he would have realized, you know, I was good, I was in a good place, I was on a good trajectory. And you know, maybe that maybe taking away that little stress from him about like what my situation was wouldn't have sent him over the edge. I don't know.

[A]

It sounds like he knew. He already knew.

[B]

Yeah, I. I would like to think so.

[A]

I mean, you said you thought he was waiting to tell you he was proud of you to do it in person.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah, I would like to think so. I wish I had gotten that letter out though, you know, so now, you know, when I have shit to do, like sometimes I get this feeling like, you know, you need to send. I need to send my mom like a text or something. I need to send my grandma like a picture of like my kid. And like, I. I don't wait to do it. I just, I drop what I'm doing and I try and do it like right there. Cuz I don't want that kind of to happen again.

[A]

Do you still have the letter?

[B]

No, I don't have the letter. I don't know what happened to it. It just got lost in the sauce over the years. But that, you know, my dad's death, I. It's a. It's a trauma I'm still working through today. You know, we talked about Tom sadly being on the show, and I was watching that episode and I was telling you this earlier, listening to Tom talk about, you know, Mogadishu, you know, that dude was. Troops are a major at the unit. And he's been through ever since October 3, 1993. He's probably been through missions that were 10 times more complicated, where all kinds of other shit had gone down. But that one mission seemed to have embedded some kind of subconscious trauma that like, just unfurled over time.

[A]

That's where he lives.

[B]

For him, that's where he lives. And I don't know what it is about the human psyche, but when you drop a trauma grenade like that and you let it slow burn. I guess that's how it works. It just sits somewhere in there and it just slow burns over time, over many, many, many years. And so you can sit there and you can say, I, I'm good. You know, I've dealt with this, I'm good, let's move the fuck on. You really don't move the fuck on. Many years later, what would you say

[A]

to your dad right now?

[B]

I think I would say, I think I proved you wrong. I think, I think all that shit that you used to say about,

[A]

you

[B]

know, how I would end up being a fuck up somewhere just didn't pan out. Like, I've had a pretty good run and I've got two sons and a stepdaughter that I picked up along the way, and they're pretty, they're pretty amazing. I, I think I would also say I wish you had gone about things differently. I, I wish you had found a different way to fight your demons. You know, over the years, I, I, I've started to build some empathy for him and he was just dealing with all the, that we were talking about earlier, loss of identity, figuring out how to build a connection with his son that he hadn't seen in a while. And, you know, he only has a certain set of tools that he has from his upbringing and all that shit to deal with those problems. And when you run out of those tools and they aren't working well, you just, you lash out. You know, you go to the bottle, you go to the cigarettes, you let the anger get ahold of you. And that's what he did. Those are the two things I would say.

[C]

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[A]

Man, I just want to ask. Yeah, I mean, I'm really hesitant to do this because I don't, I don't like interjecting my own, but there's a, there's a handful of parallels that, that we have. You know, growing up, I didn't grow up in extreme poverty and it wasn't nearly as abusive as what it sounds like yours was. But I got the belt, I got the fist, I got the hand, I got the foot. Got it all. Yep. And. And I also got the. You're a piece of. I'm not paying for your school. I'm not doing this, I'm not doing that. And my brother and sister were always, you know, younger brother and sister were always, they were good. And, you know, but at the end, I think that motivated me. Well, I don't think it motivated me. I know it motivated me. And so, you know, do you think maybe some of that stuff that your dad dished out to you may have been a gift in the long run?

[B]

Dude, it lit a fire inside me that burns to this day.

[A]

Yeah, me too.

[B]

Double edged sword.

[A]

Yeah, man.

[B]

Because who's to say how would I would. It would have turned out if, you know, I had a perfect home life and childhood and all that. Or you, you know, could have been a.

[A]

Could have been a gang banger in Southern California.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

It's wild thinking about that, isn't it?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You didn't have the drive to make your dad proud and prove him wrong. I know you probably wouldn't be sitting here, dude.

[B]

And there's so many guys that have similar stories, you know, like I was watching, you know, Jay Sas guy. Yeah. You know, he talks about the moment on the beach with his dad where he's like, you're never going to be a ro. Marine, you know, and that, that lit the fuse, you know.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Probably similar moment for you. Something with the fuse. And for me it was. I don't know if it was any particular moment, but it was definitely. His death was like I didn't get to show him in life what I could do. So I'm gonna fucking show him in death. And maybe he will be up there looking down and see. I was climbing Mount Rainier many years ago with some buddies, and we were going up a particularly steep route, and I was pretty gassed by the time we got, you know, high up and we were near the summit and. But we still had, like 45 minutes or so to go and just like, trudging through the. Through the glacier gas and, you know, because I was. I was in a CrossFit at the time, like, my endurance work wasn't. Wasn't great. And I was like, I don't know if I can do this, man. And so I was, you know, I was probably a couple minutes away from calling out to the rest of the guys on the rope team and being like, I can't breathe. Like, I. We might need to fucking go down.

[A]

And

[B]

I remember feeling that. And then I remember feeling. Fucking told myself not to. Not to do this.

[A]

It's all good, man.

[B]

I remember feeling my dad's arm on my back.

[A]

Holy.

[B]

Going like this across my mountaineering pack and helping me up the last 45 minutes up out right here. That's when I knew, like, yeah, he is up there and he's watching everything I do. So, you know, I try and try and live up to the, I guess, burden of being. Not being what he wanted me to be, but, like, I just want to be a good person, you know, someone. Someone that's worthy of him being proud of. Certainly I haven't gotten it right all the time, but I try. Yep.

[A]

That's fucking awesome, dude.

[B]

Yeah, that was. That was the first time I remember thinking, oh, shit, like, there's something else. There's something else. And they can reach out and touch us if they want. And you could say, you know, this goes back to our previous conversation. You could say, oh, it's just some neurons in your brain like that, you know, simulated that. That gave. That gave you the feeling that you wanted. You wanted to feel your dad helping you up the top of Mount Rainier, maybe.

[A]

I don't.

[B]

I don't think that's true, though.

[A]

I don't either. I've had way too many things like that happen to me to think that that's just some simulation or whatever. No way, man. No way.

[B]

There was. Buddy of mine passed away a few years ago, and he was the type of dude that you talk to the guy and you felt like you've known him for years. He's that kind of guy, had that kind of warmth about him. His name was Ethan Swiler.

[A]

And.

[B]

I saw him after I had left the military at a beach party at Fort Walton beach, like right outside Herbert Field. And we were at a buddy's retirement and he hadn't seen me in a while, right? I'd been a civilian at this point. I was a palantir, you know, I was jet setting around, living the tech bro life, you know. So I had some. I wasn't as scruffy as I look today, basically, and had some like, nice clothes on and I had like some nice sunglasses on. And he looks at me, he's like, well, look at you, fucking Mr. Hollywood. And then we just, you know, we bullshitted and hung out. And a couple years after that, I get the call, hey, Ethan. Ethan passed away. I go to his funeral in Salt Lake City. We put him in the ground in his beautiful cemetery at the base of the Wasatch Mountains outside of Salt Lake City. And I drive back to California and I'm driving through Lake Tahoe and I stop at a bar. And there's no one in this bar. It's a fucking like Tuesday night or some shit. There's no cars outside. It's a fucking desolate bar in South Lake Tahoe. No one's there. I walk in, there's one bartender on the other side of the bar, and he's leaning over and he's like cleaning glasses. Zero other people in the bar, just me, bartender. I walk in, he's cleaning his glasses. And then he stops. And he looks up. And he looks up, he goes, hello, Mr. Hollywood. And he looks back down, keeps cleaning his glasses.

[A]

Holy shit.

[B]

And then he looks up at me, who had just walked in the door. And then he goes, hey, can I help you? And I'm like, what the. What the fuck just happened here? It was like. It was like someone took control of that dude's body for like five seconds, sent a message, and then let go. So, yeah, wild.

[A]

I had a guy read my mind.

[B]

How did that go down?

[A]

I was in Sedona going through like a really. When you listen to the show, at least somewhat, we talked about some of the topics that we cover. You know, breakfast and I mean, it's just. It gets to me, especially like the. With kids and. Long story short, but I was just in a really bad place. Like a really bad place. And I was telling you about my best friend Gabe up there at the. The rounds from Red Wings. And like, I've always felt like him around me, you know. And I could give you example after example after example of it. But anyways, basically I, I, I just done this big episode and it was Ron Montgomery and told you about it and I felt like, like we were like the only ones that gave a. And and there was a lot of other stuff going on like you know, gender identity and kids and like a lot of at that time and went on this hike and I felt, I just felt like why do you give a. Why do you care? Like nobody else seems to give a. Why do you give a. And it felt like I was like surrendering my soul to Satan evil like, like convincing myself. Like just let it go, Sean. Like who gives a. Eight year olds are getting their genitals cut off. So the world is. Everybody else is for this shit. Why aren't you? And, and I. But it was like this internal battle in my head. I walked through this fucking gate and this gate guard like looks at me in the eyes and tells me everything I'm thinking like from front to back. Scared the out of me. And then that triggered a whole sequence of other events and there were so many it wasn't. And my wife saw it hell happen

[B]

and

[A]

so I, I always kind of considered it like an angel. Like talk to me like I know what's going on in your head. I'm going to tell you what's going on in your head and I'm going to tell you you don't need to worry about that. That's not your problem. Which is what he said after he and in my. Another really good friend of mine and died who was a seal. He lived here in Franklin. He was like my only like real friend here at the time. And we had gotten close fast because he had a very successful business. I have a successful business. He doesn't need shit from me. I don't need shit. You know what I'm talking about?

[B]

You know?

[A]

No. Hey, could you. Yeah, any of that. Hey, I hadn't talked to you in 25 years. But hey, how you doing?

[B]

It's like a mutual non neediness.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. Just legitimate friends, you know. And, and his. So me and my wife go back to this room, we're having this chat and I'm like, I think that was God talking to me. What the is going on? There was this guy that looked identical to Gabe at the resort. Small exclusive resort like guy was everywhere I was at. If I was in town, he was in town everywhere. Turns out this is the last night he winds up he's staying in The. We're in these bungalows. It's like a duplex. He was on the other side the whole fucking time. So I walk back from getting my mind read by the gay guard, I find out this dude that looks identical to Gabe, who's been around all week, everywhere, same restaurants, same hikes, pool, everything winds up being the guy that's right across the way. Going. Going to my bungalow, talking to Katie, my wife, about this. Phone dings. I'm, like, having a breakdown because I'm like, this is crazy. Like, what the fuck? Somebody just read my brain. What's happening? We get done with the conversation. I clean my. Myself up. I look at the phone, and it was his daughter, who I'd never met, who must have gone through his phone and got her, got my number and said that she had just walked into her dad's gun room and basically that he had spoke to her and told her to reach out to me because I was his new best friend and I knew a side of him that nobody else knew. And he wanted her to talk to me because all that happened in, like, five minutes.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Wild.

[B]

For people who think that this reality that we inhabit is completely material and all this that we're talking about is just a byproduct of random neurons firing in our head, it's a pretty sad way to look at. Look at the world. I mean, I don't know how you explain, like, what you just said. The gate guard reading your mind.

[A]

Dude, that did. I could go with so much more detail. That makes it more real. Yeah, but I mean, and there's just so many things that have happened, I can't even remember them all. I used to want to write them all down to, like, remind myself, like, yeah, Sean, there's something more after this, you know, and. But there's. There's just so many. I don't need to prove it to myself anymore.

[B]

Yeah, you know, same. I. I went through that inflection point too. You know, like, something would happen, and then I'd be like, well, I just need. I need one more piece of. Of evidence that that is real. And then at a certain point, the. Started happening so often that you're like, okay, I surrender.

[A]

Yeah. You just got to be open to it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Just be paying attention. Yeah. Paying attention to everything but the. You know what I mean? But your business or your. Your problems or you, like, just have to be open.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it happens all the time. All the time. You know, we talked about psychedelics at breakfast, too. I mean, if you had any have you found any answers?

[B]

You know, I think, I think there's a lot about the universe that we don't know. I've had buddies that have done psychedelics, and every single time the report back from the field is that those things took a randomized series of puzzle pieces in their minds and then snapped them into place and just phase locked them into a good path and a good trajectory. Of course, you know, we are mechanically inclined to hear about those things and immediately dismiss them. It's like, just like crack pottery. It's like, you know, it's got a stigma associated with it. I think the stigma is decreasing over time because of all the research that they're doing with PTSD and veterans, and I think, I think they're doing it with team guys, right?

[A]

Yeah, tbis too.

[B]

Yeah. And they've done it, they've done it with like terminal cancer patients. And I mean, the statistics are off the charts. It's like a near instantaneous, like, lack of fear of death, you know, because they know something is on the other side. It's always unclear what. You know, I think whatever, whatever it is, it doesn't want to be fully seen or described or whatever. It's meant to be shrouded in some kind of mystery and it manifests itself to all of us in individual ways. You with a gate guard that was reading your mind, me with Ethan taking control of some random bartender and, and calling me a nickname that no, nobody else would have known. Like, you look at me. I'm the furthest from a fucking Mr. Hollywood that you could ever get right? But, like, that shit happened. Yeah, I think there's a lot going on that we don't, we don't know about. But you have to stay curious. I think.

[A]

What do you think it is? What do you believe happens when you die?

[B]

I. I think what happens is you. I don't know, is, is the bottom line. But what I think is going on

[A]

is

[B]

our reality might exist as a series of fractals and layers within that fractal structure. And so let's take a very simple example, right? I can spin up a bunch of AIs and have them all be communicating on a website. But that is a condescension of what it is like to be a human. It's not a fully human experience, but it's one that is sort of like it. The ancient Hermetic thinkers had a saying, as above, so below. And what it meant was this like, fractal structure that we're talking about. So perhaps at higher Layers of reality. Those layers exist and we have experiences in them in ways that are, that we can't quite. We don't have the language for, but we can intuit in some way, you know, and those layers leak down to us through these experiences and synchronicities and let's call them for what they are, miracles that happen to us in daily life. But it's difficult for us to have an understanding. We always want to do the scientific human thing of like, all right, well how is that structured? Like, what does that look like? What's going on up there? We don't know. I don't know. I was reading a book one time and it made the analogy of humans going through existence is sort of like existence on this plane of reality that we inhabit is sort of like imagine cubes floating in space and they're transiting through a thin layer of film. And that thin layer is two dimensional, right? So you've got these three dimensional things transiting through a two dimensional environment. And as they're transitioning through, they don't realize that they're cubes, right? They don't even realize that they're squares in this as they're transiting through this lower dimensional plane, let's say. So as they're transiting, they're all up, right? Like maybe they're, they have like a point that's like their rotation's all off, like.

[A]

So you're saying planes. Yeah, Planes of past, maybe realities.

[B]

Yeah. And one of them.

[A]

Cube is rising.

[B]

Cube is rising. Each plane through each plane. Yeah. But it, as it's in, in the plane, it doesn't really understand it's true structure. Right. It doesn't understand its true self. All it knows, all it's aware of is the shape that it makes as it transits through that plane. So if you have a cube that's all up in orientation as it's transiting through that two dimensional plane, it looks like it looks jacked up, right? It's like maybe a corner sticking, maybe it's like a point or maybe it looks like some weird tetragram, I don't know. Right. But if you square up with the plane, then you can get close to the shape that you truly are, which is a square that represents your true, the, the cube's true form. Right. The square is like the closest that you can get, right. As you're transiting through that surface. Hang with me here. Now maybe all these other cubes up here that already made it are like looking down and they're like wow, those guys are all jacked up. So let's try and help them out a little bit, you know, and maybe it's the case that one of those fucking cubes that already made it to a very high layer is looking down, feels really bad for us, and is trying to get us to understand the geometry of all this, right? And so that cube comes down, intersects with this lower dimensional plane, and begins unfurling itself into its lower dimensional form, which is six cubes or six squares in the shape of a cross. It had to descend, break itself open, and show its true form to everybody else in order to get them understanding what some of this reality is about. And it's basically, I think, a hint that if we can get our together and figure out how to emulate that guy, then maybe we can refold ourselves and, you know, measures, ascend. Ascend into the layers that we're supposed to be in.

[A]

Why do you say a cross? Are you Christian or is that something else?

[B]

I believe in, I believe in Jesus Christ. I think the resurrection was a physical event. I think it was trying to point at some very deep layers of reality and show us something. And what it was trying to show us is what I just alluded to with this analogy here. I mean, the fact that a cube has to break itself into a cross in order to tell all the other cubes to get your together. Because y' all are not squares transiting through this plane of existence. Y' all are made of something more. There's something more to you. But unless you're able to align yourself properly square up with reality, then you're, you're never going to get to, you know, the layers up here. So, you know, it's easy to say, oh, it's just a coincidence. What are you talking about, dude? Like, you're just talking about crazy.

[A]

I'm tracking.

[B]

But, but there's a synchronicity there, right? It's like, why does that analogy work? Why? When you extrapolate it to Christianity, like, it kind of makes sense. Like, what was he trying to show? He was trying to show that we are more than these meat sacks that we're in right now, right? He's trying to show that if we're able to orient our minds and souls and bodies and get them working together for the good of the people around us, then we're approaching a foreign form of ourselves that we don't quite understand, but that we know is more than what we are today.

[A]

I think it might be a collective one. I'm also a Believer. Yeah, I mean, and I, I hate how people like, oh, you know, you bring it up and people like, ah, whatever, dude. See that piece of art up there?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's how many times the Bible cross references itself. It's almost 63, 000 times.

[B]

Yes. I remember seeing that and lecture that Jordan Peterson put on.

[A]

Yeah. But I mean, I don't know. I don't. I want to believe that when we go to heaven, we're all slapping each other's asses and having a good time and just doing whatever the hell we want.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know what I mean? But I don't think it's going to be like that.

[B]

I don't think so either.

[A]

I think that. I think this is a test. I think we. And this is, I get this, this is just Sean's internal thinking thoughts. I think about this kind of stuff all the time. But, you know, I think that the ego is the test. The ego is what gives you yourself. It's what individualizes you. It's what protects you. You. It's, it's who you, you know, it's who you are. Right. And I mean when the ego goes away and you, you have a true ego death, it feels like you turn into a collective.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, a collective. Maybe a collective consciousness. Maybe it's love, maybe it's, you know, something like that.

[B]

But the droplet realizes it's part of an ocean.

[A]

Yeah. That's kind of what I'm getting at. And you know, is scary as that sounds, to lose your sense of self and turn into some type of a collective. I think that's the true test. I think the only thing there is, is there is good and there is evil. And you're on one of those sides whether you want to be or not. Yeah. And you either go into the collective of good or the collective of evil. And when I think of good and evil in the world, I think of it as. Like a marble that has oil and water in it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, an oil and water never mix. They just.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, they just, they just. Or like the. If you looked at the earth for, you know, a time lapse of millions of years, you'd see the oceans changing with land all the time, but they never really mix. You know what I mean? And it's just one overtaking the other for eternity.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

That's kind of what I. It's kind of what I think. I think, I think, I think, I

[B]

think you're close to the truth then. I think, I think infinity only has two Cardinal directions, good and evil, for whatever reason, that seems to be the way it's structured. Anything you can do as a human can be distilled down to are you training that way or that way? That's it. So I don't know. I don't have all the answers, certainly. But I also don't think that we live in a purely materialistic reality. And I also don't think that even though I believe in the resurrection and Christ, I don't believe that that is also the whole story seems to be more to the story. And I think about that a lot.

[A]

What do you mean? What do you think? What more? I'm just curious what your thoughts are.

[B]

Yeah, I think if you tie together the themes from across different religious or mystical traditions over many thousands of years. I told people I wasn't going to go here when I came on this podcast. If you also tie together abductee reports from UAP encounters and all that shit, paranormal encounters and so on, at some level they all form a remarkably coherent narrative, which is we seem to all come from some kind of super consciousness that we all eventually return to. The things that happen to us down here seem to be engineered in order

[C]

to

[B]

teach us something. And what. I think it's. So it's. I guess there's more to story than mailing it in by going to mass every Sunday. Like, I think it's a lot. I think. I think what he was actually trying to say, Christ, is you need to be paying attention to yourself and how you deal with things every microsecond of every day of your life. And it is that kind of sustained attention that is going to allow you to be productive or to assist in life consciousness going the other way, towards the light rather than towards the dark. I think so. I mean, there's a technical word for this. It's like neg, entropy. Right. It's like the universe defaults towards entropy. It might default towards evil. And it is only when enough people learn to figure their out that they can turn into a collective negentropic forcing function to steer whatever our local collective consciousness is on this planet to somewhere good.

[A]

This is what I'm talking about with the marble. Yeah, I think. I think we're on the same page. I mean, you know, if you look at, you know, Christ's teachings, it's all about love, acceptance, things like that, which form a better collective, you know, of society. And so if you. If you. If you pump good into the world, that's going to create good. Yep. And that's going to create more. More surface area of good in the marble, which will begin to overtake the evil. And if you pump in bad, evil lies, shit like that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Then. Then the dark side, you know, multiplies.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

More spots start to pop up and it becomes. It can start to overtake good.

[B]

I agree.

[A]

I think that's how it works.

[B]

And I think, I think it's additive. Right. It's all dependent on. Jordan Peterson says, don't change the world before you can clean your fucking room. And the reason he says that is because individual actions at scale produce change at scale. A lot of people try and skip to the last part and just produce change at scale. It doesn't really work. That's how you get authoritarian governments. It's how you get all the bad you. How you get forms of control. But if enough of us individually are able to get our together, I think something magical could happen. I don't know what that is, but I think the Bible is trying to hint at the fact that that's what we're here to do. You know what reaction wheels are on a spaceship?

[A]

No.

[B]

They're basically a mechanical way of producing movement along some axis without using thrusters. And so you can spin this reaction wheel internally inside like a little, let's say a cubesat or whatever. And you can turn the satellite to orient it to whatever. Like maybe you need to turn it so that its solar panels can see the sun or whatever. But the point is you don't have to use thrusters. And so sometimes you might have multiple reaction wheels, Right. You might have three. And so that's getting the ship oriented and having like it's a. It's a mechanism to move the damn thing along some orientation. It might just be the case that whatever it is we're doing down here is we're learning how to spin our own souls reaction wheels along the proper orientations so that we're all pointed the right way. And when one of us can do that, that's great. When many of us can do that, who the knows what can happen?

[A]

Yeah. Well, this is a conversation I wasn't planning on having.

[B]

I. I don't.

[A]

This is awesome.

[B]

I don't know how we got here.

[A]

So we got here talking about your dad.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Talking about my dad. Yeah. It was a big loss. I'm sure we'll, you know, I'm sure it'll come back in other aspects of this conversation, but one of the things that I tried to do to try and move on from that loss is Just to be the fucking best that I could be at whatever it was the fuck I was doing. If I was going to sit in a goddamn tin can in the sky and fly racetrack patterns over Afghanistan, I was going to fucking do that to the best of my ability. And that's what I ended up doing the first few years out of language school. So being an enlisted aviator in the Air Force is. There's actually a very small percentage of people that are in.

[A]

Yeah, no shit.

[B]

Yeah, like the vast majority of people in the Air Force are. They don't fly, they don't do it. And generally, you know, a lot of people think about officers and pilots as the guys that are the aviator. So there's like a special kind of class hierarchy in the Air Force. And, you know, at the very top are your fucking special warfare dudes, PJ, CCTs, rightfully so. Right below that are your aviators, enlisted officers, and so on. So for me to get my enlisted aviator wings, man, I remember going to like the Asian sewing store outside the base and getting them to sew those wings on for the first time. I was magical. Like, putting. Putting those BDUs on with the wings on for the first time. It was. It was a good feeling. And, you know, you get your flight suit and all that and you feel like maverick, you know, you only see people wearing that in the movies. Now you're wearing one, it's pretty, Pretty awesome. First order of business was, what are you flying? So it's called an RC135 rivet joint, and it's. It's a 30 person, 30 crew aircraft, and it's full of cryptological linguists on it. And it's basically a mini NSA flying in the sky.

[A]

Holy.

[B]

It's been around since the Cold War. So the cryptologic linguist community, career field discipline has been around for a very long time since World War II. So in World War II, they had all these cryptologists trying to break the Enigma and break the Japanese JN25 cipher, which is like the cipher that the Japanese were using to coordinate the Pearl harbor assault. Eventually they did crack that, but they cracked it too late, if I recall my history correctly. So there's a long kind of lineage of signals intelligence and airborne signals intelligence, more specifically for the Air Force. So during the Cold War, you would have RC135s flying around and basically evaluating what the Russians were doing, like offset from Russian airspace or offset from Chinese airspace whatever whatever. In 2000, there was an EP3 plane that went down as a Navy EP3 and that was a very similarly configured plane as to the RC135. And so it was full of cryptologic linguists from the Navy in this case. And they had to emergency set down on Hainan Island, I think, and there's a bunch of fucking top secret shit on there. It's like all this signals intelligence gear. We're gonna set down on a Chinese airstrip. So they started going to town, just breaking all that shit in there and zeroing out the crypto and all that shit. I don't think they were fully successful. And I think they used that as a case study and, you know, how to, how to be when all that shit goes down. But that's the idea, you know, you're a flying signals intelligence platform. Basically. This is 2005, and the Afghanistan war is in full swing. And our tasking was to essentially fly racetrack patterns over Afghanistan at, you know, x many thousand feet. I don't. I don't know if I'm allowed to say the exact altitude, and basically hoover up every thing that's putting out radio signals in or electromagnetic signals in any way, shape or form. And at the time, the Taliban and the foreign fighter contingent were still in their mountain readouts. You know, all. Kid, you had Pete Blaber on here talking about anaconda. And a lot of anaconda was. And the reason they fucking sent dudes to the top of the Roberts Ridge is because Al Qaeda had these readouts, these mountain hard points in all the surrounding high areas. And they were communicating with each other over various forms of electronic devices, let's say. And our job was to understand when they were using them, how they were using them, and basically triangulate positions when we could and call them down to ground teams. And this is really when I started to understand this concept of how signals intelligence could support kinetic operations on the ground. It was a very tight loop. Oftentimes if you're a linguist and you end up at Fort Meade or you end up at one of these other places, you don't get to see the tight, like, fine fix finish loop that you necessarily see in some of these other platforms. And so, you know, these guys are using their ICOM radios or whatever, and we're. We're picking up on it. This is 2005. The military did not have very many posh 2 linguists at the time. Basically, all the Poshtu linguists they had at the time were, I think, pretty much on the ground with, with the dudes, rightfully so. So the guys that were left were basically guys like me, Arabic linguists that could hear maybe some words that were Arabic in nature, like maybe we can make out some call signs. But occasionally you would hear the occasional Arabic coming over the wire. And when you heard that, you knew it was a foreign fighter and you knew it was possibly associated with senior leadership. And that was compelling because, you know, tasking was to go smoke those fucking dudes. And so you're sitting there and you kind of develop this rhythm of working, you know, the gear. And I'm going to stay as clean as I can talking through all this stuff. But, you know, imagine you're visualizing a spectrum analyzer and depending on what you're seeing on that spectrum analyzer, you know, that dictates, you know, how you conduct your triangulation and how you're calculating the coordinates of where these guys are at. Right. And at the same time, if there's audio coming through, because they're talking over unencrypted ICOM radios. Right. It's not like these guys have coalition.

[A]

You're the guy that can tell what room somebody's in in a hotel.

[B]

Yeah, we'll get to floor what room

[A]

we'll get to that is it in the bathroom we're at. You're that.

[B]

Well, yeah, we'll get to.

[A]

Holy.

[B]

We'll get to that.

[A]

I've never met one of you guys. Wow.

[C]

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[B]

But it all started with flying racetracks, right? And, like, learning the, The. The craft. You're looking at the Spec A, there's audio coming through because these guys haven't loaded crypto in their fucking radios. Then you're trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. And because you only have limited time on station, right, it's quite a bit of time, but still, it's finite time. What you do is you slave multiple frequencies into your ears at the same time. And so you develop this skill set of, you got multiple freaks in this year, you got multiple freaks in that year, and you're just transcribing all of it. You're keeping track of, like, multiple things going on across multiple different frequencies. It's a skill that's valuable to this day because I'll be sitting in a restaurant and I'm talking to my girlfriend. I'm hearing like we're having a conversation. I'm, like, listening to the table. Two doors that way, and I'm listening to the table, you know, two tables that way. But you're doing all this. But the. The end goal is always a get some actionable coordinates down to the guys on the ground, right? Because they're gonna do some. And we did. We did it over and over and over again, day after day. But to me, it was never. It was never enough. You know, I always wanted, like, the next thing. I remember sometimes flying at night over Afghanistan. And, you know, there's like a couple of little windows in the back of this fucking bird. And I remember looking out the window one night and there was some shit going down. There was like a tick, like down way below. And there, there were, you know, they had called in some. Some airstrikes. And so there were dudes doing, like, gun run runs And, And I could see all this going down outside the window, but it's happening tens of thousands of feet below me. Right. I'm like, I just feel helpless up here, you know, but that's me. This is a character flaw that I have, right? Like, I. I have no business being in a room. I earn my place in the room, and then I very quickly want to get to the next room. And it's no. You know, the RC135 community are a great bunch of people. Like, they're very dedicated to their mission. They have a very strategic national mission. There's a lot of stuff that they do that I'm not getting into here that are a lot more kind of strategic in nature at the time for me. Go ahead.

[A]

I was just gonna say, I totally understand what you're saying. It's just, it's. It's high drive, very successful people where it's just. We all think the same, I think.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, it's. It's you. You get in, you check the box. Great. What's next?

[B]

Yeah, what's the next.

[A]

Like, get there. Check the box. Great.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I'm bored. What's next?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I'm not challenged anymore.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it just keeps moving.

[B]

Yeah. And it's not some like, ego thing where it's like, I need to, you know, be stroked, but I know that I can add more value and have more impact if I was doing something closer to the fight, Right. So put me in, coach. Get me closer to the fight. So Red Wings kicked off, like I said. So, you know, we all hear that there's a missing team guy. That op went wrong. We didn't get the full picture, but it's like, find this fucking dude's PRD and like, monitor the guard frequencies, see if anyone's talking about him. You know, we got. We got to fucking find this massive, like a lot of fucking assets that got put in the air and tasked to find Marcus.

[A]

Were you there when it went down?

[B]

Yeah, I was. I was. I was. I was deployed when it went down and we.

[A]

Were you watching it?

[B]

No, I wasn't watching it. No, I wasn't watching it. That bird in particular at the time, I don't know whether they do now, did not have imagery capabilities. So somebody else was watching it, not me. What we did was we worked in crew crews of two. So two 30 man crews, and we just swap back and forth. One bird would land, other one would take off, do a bunch of aerial refuels on the way into Afghanistan,

[C]

and

[B]

then get on station. Parked on station forever, just doing racetracks and we're just cycling through the frequencies looking for any fucking indication that anyone knows what the fuck happened to these dudes and what happened to Marcus in particular. And I don't think it was my crew. I think it was the other crew that I was with that had some, had some say in what went down. I don't, I don't remember. But I remember being like, I wish I could contribute more to whatever the fuck is going on down there. Oh, and one more fucking thing happened, that deployment, and actually it may have been the next deployment. There was a dude that came in one night to the talk and he was like, I'm from, you know, this, this task force, and before I say anything else, you guys are going to sign these NDAs. I'm like, all right, this is cool. I can get down with whatever's going on here. So I signed the NDAs. And he starts briefing us up on this thing that they're going to do. And it was very similar to what went down in Venezuela a few weeks ago, you know, not. We weren't targeting, they weren't targeting a fucking head of state or some shit. But it was a high value target. Long infill. There was, you know, the threat of sophisticated coordinated enemy response. And so our job on that particular night was to provide essentially electronic overwatch for the guys. I was like, I don't know what the. Is going on here. I don't know who this dude is, but I remember reading about the units that he's talking about, and I'm stoked that I get to do a little part in supporting them. And, you know, I was all over the frequencies that night. They, they went in, did their thing, went out. It was uneventful, but it just put the bug in my ear, you know, I was like, whatever those guys are up to, like, I want, I want it. So we get back and the military and the bureaucracy in the military has a way of hamstringing people that when they see a person that's like really performing well and they're highly motivated and so on, they do this thing where they put you in the most boring job possible. I don't know why or how, but they put me at a desk job after I get home for like, I think I do like two, two pumps this Afghanistan. And I'm like, I can't deal with this dude. Like, I'm sitting at a desk, I'm like seeing the reports come through. You know, we got these crews out in Afghanistan. And we got crews elsewhere too, doing other. Right. And they're sending in their. Their reports, and these reports, they get distilled and sent up through the national intelligence reporting channels. And some of them make it all the way to the president, right? Depending on what's going on. So it's like, you know, it's important work, but I don't like sitting behind a desk.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So I start walking the halls and like, telling anyone who would listen, like, hey, man, like, is there anything else I can do? Like, I can. I. What can I do? Like, what can I do besides sitting in this computer behind this desk? Ironic, given what I do for a living now. But at the time, I was just trying to get after it. And so rumors started floating around the squadron of. Of a deployment to Iraq, supporting task force, and I had no idea what it entailed, right? I was like, I just need to. Cool, let's. I want to go to Iraq, and I want to go. I don't know who these guys are, but I want to. I want to roll with them. And I would tell anyone that would listen, they're like, you're an Arabic. You know, the leadership in the squadron was like, you're an Arabic linguist. We can't lose you to this right here. Like, you gotta, you know, buckle down, and we got plans for you. I was like, I don't accept that. And so there was. There was one guy, and he had just rotated in from Bragg as. As the chief of the squadron. And chief in the air force is E9. It's like the highest enlisted rank. And he was. He was like the senior enlisted leader at the squadron. And I was a E3 at the time. E3, E4. And I just barge into this dude's office. I'm like, chief, you got to send me on this deployment. Please let me go on this deployment. Please. And he looks. He's like, who the Are you? Like, what are you going to, like, walk into my office, like, the right way and, like, not just barge in here like we're buddies, and he hears my case, and he just looks at me like, get the fuck out of my office. And, you know, stand by. If we need you to go on this deployment, we'll. We'll send you. They figured out a way to get me on the fucking deployment that was. That was January 2007. Go to Iraq with the task force, and from January to July of 2007, I'm 23 years old, and I'm calling in assaulters every night from the air. Now I've, now I'm not at fucking X, tens of thousands of feet anymore. Now I'm a bit closer to the action right now. I've got eyes, I've got like, I've got dudes with imagery capabilities. I'm seeing what's going on with, with the, with the assaults. My gear is a bit more sophisticated. I'm having direct impact. I'm talking to the lead hilos on Hilo Common. You know, like when them 160th dudes check in on Hilo Common, like you just know that shit's, shit's gonna go down and they're all, and it's a, it's a, it's a crack addiction because they're all waiting on me and they're waiting on me to trigger the fucking thing by telling them where this fucking dude's at.

[A]

Holy shit.

[B]

23, 23 years old. Fucking night after night after night fucking executing fine fix on, on high value targets for task force in, in Iraq. And when you, when you execute, find fix like that at the time, you know, this is McChrystal era task force and you know, the guys are just primed. It's a well oiled machine. So you call it in and you know, 160 dudes have their, have their rotor spinning. They're just waiting on fucking coordinates from you. And once they have them coordinates, they're launching. They got the assaulters on board. Depending on the nature of the target, you know, that dictates the half package. Sometimes they rolled in with the ground assault force too. Just depended on the target and where he was and what the fuck was the situation. But it was the most addicting thing I had ever done in my life. I was just enthralled and I never wanted to do anything else. And working with like such a crew of professionals, you kind of start to turn into like entitled a bit. You're like, this is obviously, this is how this goes down. It's like, you know, I launch, I tell them where to go, they go and then they call, they confirm whether they got the dude or not. And then you, then you start to get like requested by other assets in country. And so I remember one time I, I went down to Basra to work with Seal Team 5 and I was so, I was riding on a, on an army bird.

[A]

So you're like winning the fucking lottery to the soft community. It was especially for white soft.

[B]

Yeah, is, is great dude.

[A]

Everybody wants a piece.

[B]

Yeah, he's great. So we, we load up on this, on this army, on this army bird, we go down to Basra. I got the army guys next to me and I, I get down off the bird, I'm talking to the, to the tacky W guys from Seal Team 5, or maybe they were team guys, I don't know. And we start to plot out, you know, what, what needs to happen. They're going after this high value target one night and I'm like, cool, like, tell me, tell me all the things that I need to know. Here's how you know. I'll coordinate with you and let me know what you fellas need. Here's the freaks, you know all that.

[A]

What kind of stuff do you need to know?

[B]

Basic kind of. I'm trying to keep things clean, you know. Do you expect this dude to like stay put or do you expect him to be moving around? There's some other things that I need to make the, the gear, you know, Tell me what, what I need it to tell me. I basically just need to know like what do they already know about this guy? So that when I'm looking at the spectrum analyzer and I'm, I'm getting all the readouts and it's like tracking with what they already know about this guy. The, a high stress event is when you are looking at the data and you know the guy is just staying put, right? And you call it in. You know, the boys are loading up, you know, whether they're, it's a gaff or a half or whatever and they're coming inbound. And then the dude starts to move, right? That's what the, the data is indicating. And you're like, fuck. And it's not like you're in the middle of the goddamn desert. And it's like, you know, you've got imagery capability so you know, you can tell who's moving and like correlate it with what you're seeing on the spec A. You're in a fucking urban area, you know, you don't know who's who down there. And all you know is that the data is changing in some capacity and you need to figure out quickly what that data and how it's changing means for the guys coming in on the Humvees or coming in on the daps birds, and if you're wrong, you're going to put them on the, you're going to put them on the wrong house, you're going to put them on the wrong vehicle, you're going to put them 800 things could go sideways quickly. So that was those Are like the highest stress situations. In this particular case with, you know, the Seal Team 5 dudes, the guy stayed put. He, he was well behaved. I was like, here we go. He's in the middle of this market. Come on and get it, boys. And then I just. Silence, Quiet. It's just that nothing happens. 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes. I'm like, hey, like, he's still there. Like, what's going on? I'm like, yo, we're going to run out of fuel here. Like, we gotta, we gotta head back soon. Like, you guys, you guys coming out or what? So I started to get, like, kind of antsy and I started. I realized if I had done that exact same routine with the task force dudes, it would have been, it would have been a fucking well oiled machine. The guys would have been there, in, out, like, no, like, just a well oiled machine. But like, the conventional dudes, rightfully so, like, did not have that kind of operational cadence. And so, you know, they're, they're doing risk assessments. They're like, is it worth going in this busy marketplace? Are we going to get into a Mogadishu situation? And so that taught me, like, okay, there's a difference between the very tip of the spear up here and then like everybody else. And the gap is huge. It's fucking huge. Which is why when I saw that Venezuela hit go down, I was like, yeah, there's only a couple organizations that could have pulled that off. Anyway, all that to say I started to learn about myself. I said, you know, and it was easy for me to get frustrated with those guys from Seal Team 5. I'm like, dude, get the, get the out there. Like, this guy's gonna leave and you're gonna lose your chance at rolling them up. But I had to empathize with them, you know, like, it's a, it's a dangerous situation for them. Here I am comfortable in the air, you know, it's just not going to happen on my timetable. And so I started to learn how to work with, like, various units and teams and see things from their perspective and not just sit in this ivory tower of, oh, you're a task force dude. Like, this is how things are done. So I think it humbled me a little bit. I tried to always, I tried to always, you know, do what the, the guys needed to be done without being ideological about it, I would say. So that went on for six months.

[A]

We're able to think out of the box is what you're saying. Yeah, I You're a problem solver.

[B]

Yeah, I just. I just wanted to. Whether. Whether you came from Seal Team 5 or the 173rd Airborne or some Melbourne group or KEG, some task force unit, I just wanted to make your life easier if I could, and that's the way I tried to make it happen. And I say I because I'm the one sitting here on the couch across from you. But there were a lot of just fucking awesome people that flew these missions with me, and I'm friends with many of them to this day. And so I don't want to. I don't want to make it seem like, oh, fucking Nick was flying around Iraq fucking, you know, doing this shit like a lone wolf. No, it was. There's a whole cast of characters that were involved. At one point, I was like the scheduler for. For the squadron. So I would try and, you know, it's a task force is a joint service agency, so I would try and map out, like, all right, this dude, like, gets along with these army guys better. So. All right, so I'm going to put them on. On this crew over here. And this dude gets along with the Navy dudes better. All right, so I'm going to put them here. So then, then I got back and then. Then it was like, well, you're going to fly RC135s again and just turn circles over Afghanistan? I was like, no way, dude. Like, I need to get back to whatever magic it was that I just came came from experiencing.

[A]

Um,

[B]

when I got back to. When I got back stateside, I'm sitting in the office and I get a phone call, hey, do you want to come to task force full time? I'm like, fucking A right, I do. So I go through, you know, the process, and I get selected to go to task force full time. I guess, you know, I. They saw something in me.

[A]

What was, what was, what was your selection like? Can you say Web Task Force? Can I say it? Yeah.

[B]

Prefer to keep things high level, like task force.

[A]

Roger that.

[B]

Task force level. So for. For the signal squadron that I ended up in over there, the. The selection and the screening and the initial training cycle is very much. It's not physical stuff. It's A lot of it is around. It's a couple different things. Are you able to handle yourself in high pressure environments where you might not necessarily have a lot of fucking dudes backing you up? You know, you might be. South America is a good example, right? You might find yourself in a town in South America and there's just temptation all around you, right? And are you going to succumb to that temptation or are you going to stay locked the fuck in and do the job that you're supposed to be doing at that particular moment in time? And a lot of dudes like, they're just not able to as a singleton, small, small teams, sometimes singleton. So a lot of it is around, you know, are you able to hand your handle yourself in those situations. And then there's, once you get to the squadron, you, you, it's an, it's an air force squadron. So you're primarily, you know, you have units that you, that you work with, but you, there's a possibility that you get farmed out to, to one of the other sister service units as well. So Army, Navy, what have you. The other aspect to it is all the things that I was doing on that RC135 bird, looking at the spectrum analyzer, listening to what was going on on the frequencies and so on. Let's imagine that you can compress all that kit down into a magical form factor, let's say, and then you slave everything into like an earpiece or something. Can you do the things that you did previously but without staring at a fucking spectrum analyzer sitting in front of you and all you have to go off of are some audio cues because now you've slaved the, the analytics and the data that's being piped through that, that analyzer into like sonic feedback essentially, let's say I'm, I'm trying to keep things, you know, clean and high level here, you know, and there, there's an art to it because you can get out there and you can strap one of these things on and you know, you'll see it with new guys. They, they'll, they'll do like Mr. Robot. They're like doing this thing like just roboting around because they're trying to synthesize, it's like adding a new sense essentially. They're trying to synthesize what they're hearing through the, the earpiece and the kit with what they're seeing in the physical world. So you have to like put together this three dimensional world around you with the things that you're hearing from, from your gear. Because electromagnetic frequencies are just weird, right? They do all kinds of crazy nonsense. Like if you're too close to rail tracks, like they'll throw off. If you're too close to power lines, they'll ride the power lines. They'll multi path through like, like and bounce off of buildings. And so that'll throw, that'll throw things off. And so you need to under, you need to like in your mind and in your body build this muscle memory of the things that I hear in here have a meaning based on how the things out here are looking. Right. That's about as most as I can say on that piece there. But if you get good at it, then you can do some amazing things and execute find, fix for, for the guys as needed.

[A]

So would you, would you say this is similar to when they say, have

[C]

you ever seen that guy?

[A]

He's blind, but he can see.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Through, through audio.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

He could make like these little chirps like.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And he's, he's sees. Yep. Is that, is that like.

[B]

It's very similar. Yeah, it's very similar. And it takes a lot of time on the gear to how fluid and natural. And you know, if, if I was to look at you and you would just be like another dude, you know, and I wouldn't be able to tell that you were doing something weird. Otherwise you're doing Mr. Roboto on the street. So that, that was a lot of, that was a lot of it. And we got, we got a lot of cross training opportunities too. You know, we, I, I went over to SRT1 special Constantine 1 over on the west coast, got to cross train with those guys. Phenomenal bunch of men and women out

[A]

there

[B]

just to learn like, okay, how are you guys doing? Okay, here's how we're doing stuff. You know what, what are some of the challenges you guys have? That was really cool because the SRT one is on the BUDS compound, or at least it was back then. So you got like all the buds fucking students are doing their thing and then the SRT1 building is kind of a little bit over. So you feel like you're part of an important thing going on here. And again, that was like, I always loved working with other services, dude. Like, I don't know, I just felt like I was an emissary from the Air Force, you know, and I just wanted to represent my service well and kind of break the mentality, break the mold of like Air Force dude just sits around, you know. And so I just wanted to be a good emissary, I think, for, for the Air Force. But that, that SRT1 trip was interesting because I got to see how regular NSW does stuff. So I spent, I spent, you know, the next few years doing, doing that business for the task force. One of the things that comes to mind is, you know, you'd be doing air stuff as well, right? So the things that happened in Iraq never went away. There was still a need for bodies on a bird, you know, doing things from the air. And there was one particular deployment where we were. And everything I'm about to say has been written down and discussed by Admiral McRaven in his books and. And on various podcasts, so I feel okay talking about it. So we were on a deployment to Horn of Africa, and let's say I stumble across, like, in the course of, like, working my targets, this guy. And it. I see the. The guy's name pop up on my gear, and it's Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. And you know, every time I get a good hit, I call it down. And it's no big thing, right? It's like, whatever. Some of the goes. Some of it doesn't go whatever, especially when you're not in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like, some of this is just long burn. You know what I mean? This particular one I called down and they were like, are you absolutely sure that this is the guy that you're. You're getting data about right now? I was like, rarely am I wrong about, like, what target I'm looking at. But yes, I'm pretty sure. And they're like, say you're. Just trying to make sure, you know, I say things properly here. Say your loadout. Because we. We had kinetic strike capability at the time on. On the platform I was on. And I was like, what the. Who is. Who the is this dude? Like, I, They. They've never told us that in the past. You know, it's always, all right, let's work. Let's build this package and maybe we'll pass it off to some interagency, whatever. They'll handle it. Not. So in this case. They're like, say your loadout and say. Say your. Say your fuel. I was like, oh, it's on, dude. I don't know who this guy is, but all of a sudden, everyone's very interested. So I continue to. To. To track this individual. And then they launch a. A relief bird to swap out places with us. They come in, they take over on station, we roll back to. To where we were staging from. We land. And I'm like, what the fuck is going on with this dude? This guy was like, on the FBI's most wanted list, and he's been on it since 1998 for questioning. Based on his, I guess he was one of the senior planners for the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings in 98. I guess he was like one of the fucking head honchos that planned that. They drove these suicide. These VBI Ids into the embassies in. In Kenya and Tanzania. So this guy's been on the run since then, basically. And, you know, he was like. The FBI had, like, a bounty out for him and everything. So we just stumble across this dude. Many years later, I'm talking to a buddy of mine, and from. From a. From an interagency partner, and I'm telling him this story, and he was like, wait, knobhon. I was like, yeah, dude. He was like, I tried to find that for years. I was like, should have done better because I rolled in and got his ass right after you. But again, I jest, but there's a giant fucking team behind it, and the crews that I was working with and so on, I just happen to be the fucking guy working the gear. So we land. This guy is a fucking head honcho. And so there's an entire effort that starts spinning up to figure out how to prosecute this guy. And it's not an easy problem because he's. His location is on the coast of fucking Somalia.

[A]

Holy. I'm pretty sure we've talked about this up before on this show.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Did they swab in?

[B]

No, not that one.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

They. Yeah, we'll get to. We'll get to how it all went down. Now, many years later, I'm listening to Jocko. You know, I got his hun in the kitchen. I'm like, making dinner or some. And Admiral Craven's on there, and he starts talking about this op in Somalia where they found this guy, knob hunt. And I'm like, what the. And I started listening to his description of what was going on. And on that Jocko episode, McRaven basically describes all the shit that was going down from his perspective as the. The CG with the president and Secretary Clinton and all of this. He's at the White House, and he's playing 4D chess, and I'm, like, one for one mapping it with all the. That was going on downrange. And he's telling me the other side of the story on this podcast. So that was really wild to put the two pieces of information together and get, like, this full picture of what went down with that thing. So we. So McRaven, after we. We find the initial hit on the dude. So we like it. Like, the initial find fix, the dude, like, disappears. Like, so the second bird comes on, and the dude just fucking goes dark, right? And now everyone's pissed. They're like, go fucking get him. Like, go find him again. We're going to launch and relaunch you guys until you fucking get his ass again. While that's going down, McRaven is playing 4D chess with the White House. And he's going to say it a lot better on the Jocko episode, but he's basically convincing POTUS and Hillary Clinton to forward stage a helicopter assault force off the coast of Somalia. But he's doing it in a way that's couched through the lens of counter piracy, because Captain Phillips had just went down. You know, you had Pete Scoville on the show recently. All that went down. So there was a lot of credibility for the task force at the time and its ability to operate in that AO, right? So McRaven kind of rode off of that Captain Phillips thing and he's like, you know, and everyone, everyone is thinking, you know, black hawk Down Part 2. Like, we don't want, we don't. No one wants Mogadishu part two. And that. And that's the concern on everyone's mind. And he's like, all right, you know, we don't have to put boots on the ground. We. And they're like, I don't. Per McRaven, the president did not want helicopters to do the final hit. Like, they wanted, like a kinetic strike, like a long range kinetic strike. So we furiously, on the other side of the equation, start trying to find this dude. And so we're just trolling the coast of Somalia back and forth, back and forth, trying to look for this guy. And I'm looking, you know, I'm looking out the, the windows and, you know, I'm looking at the imagery. So I've got like an imagery operator that I'm working with, and we're very tightly in sync. Like, if I, if I see some with my data, I'm like, telling him what to look at down there. And we're trying to put these two pieces of intelligence together and, and have it be actionable in some capacity. And we're looking down there and we're, you know, we're seeing downtown Mogadishu. You know, you can literally see, see the, the corners where the, like, Durant's Hilo went down. You know, because I've got GRGs, you know, I can see where all this is. And I'm like, this is really wild. I remember watching Black Hawk down when I was a, I was a teenager and I was like. And now I'm. There's, there's all the sites down there. And in the meantime, the. So they. They park like an LHC off the coast of Somalia. It's like a flat top, flat top amphibious vessel. They put, you know, helos on it, they put the assault force on it, and everyone's just waiting. Everyone's waiting for us to fucking find this dude. Now one thing that happens with some of these manned platforms is they start to treat you like predator drones. You know, you got gu that are 10,000 miles away trying to tell you like, hey, go here, go there, go here, go there. And I don't like being treated like a fucking predator drone, because I'm not. I have, you know, I know the area. I've studied the fucking GRGs. I know exactly which roads lead out from Mogadishu to which town. I know, like, there's a coastal road over here, there's villages over there. And I generally know, like, what this dude has been doing in the past, and I'm able to extrapolate that out into the future. I say, me again. I'm the one being interviewed sitting here. But it was definitely a crew of people, all of whom, some of whom will be watching this episode, and all of them were instrumental in making this happen. And we're circling overhead one day, and then we. We get. We get a hit on this fucking dude again, and he. He pops back up, but we don't know where he is. Like, he's. He's. It's a big fucking urban area. And I'm like, all right. I'm like, hey, pilot, you know, put us over. Put us over the southern end of the outskirts of Mogadishu. There's only three roads that depart coming out of there. And I had a feeling he was going to move south. You know, I can't get into why I felt that way. But, you know, there was. There were indications that he had business down south. And so I was like, there's only three fucking roads that, that go out of this town towards those southern towns on the coast. Like, let's. Let's just park overhead. And what we need to do is wait until we can correlate what we see on the imagery with what I'm seeing on. On my. And so then the. The geniuses back at HQ or wherever the they were are like, oh, well, we need you to move to this other tasking over here. I'm like, no, no, no, there's no other tasking. Like, I. Give me some more time. Like, I'm. I'm gonna figure out, like, where this dude is. I, I just. Trust me, I have a feeling, I have an intuition here. Like, no, we need to move to like, western, like inland or whatever. I'm like, just give me 30 minutes, okay? Give me 30 minutes and I think we can make this happen. And then, and then we see it. A lone little SUV starts driving down one of the three roads down south from Moog. And then my imagery guy is like, yo, black suv. Got it. What do you got? I start looking at my. And the idea here is, is my saying that this dude is moving south because if it does, we got him, we got his vehicle, right? He's moving and he's moving south. Correlation between the two pieces of kit. So then the whole machine just gets amped up. They start figuring out, okay, what are we gonna do? We start constant, just continuous overwatch. And the plan is McRaven has somehow convinced the, the people at the White House that, okay, we're gonna do a long range kinetic strike from this platform we have. But let's just send in one or two birds to do like an analysis of like a PID of the dude, right? Like, it would suck to have this guy be on the FBI's most wanted list. And then we go through all this effort and then not even confirm that it's him, right? Like, guys, wouldn't that suck? Yes, it would. All right, so let me put some guys down real quick. We'll do the pid, we'll get, get out of Dodge. So then it turns into this very tight synchronized maneuver that needs to go down and, and basically it's like, get. Wait until the dude gets to a location where we can execute the strike. And then 30 seconds later, lead Hilo is going to come in, drop the guys, you know, and nobody wants boots on the ground in Somalia. Like, at this point, it's 2009, right? Some of that other shit that you were talking about hadn't happened yet. And you know, they're in and out in less than 10 minutes. All right? So by this point, I've run out of fuel and, or my crew has run out of fuel. So pilot's like, we gotta, we gotta fucking get back home. We, we go back to the staging area, other relief crew comes in, takes over, is, is watching, watching the guy, and then he triggers all the, all the criteria to, to make this thing go right. And by this point, we've got some combat controllers that, that are basically come forward with us. They're going to call in the final fires. So then I don't know if you've like, spent time in East Africa. But the, you know, the idea is, okay, lays. Lays this thing and then put a. Put ordinance down on it. Of all the fucking days for a cloud deck to roll in from the Indian Ocean into the east coast of Somalia. This was the fucking day. And so by this point, I'm back in the talk, and I'm watching everything go down on the screens. You know, isrtv and the guys are getting ready to release, and, you know, you can see the target down. He's just booking it down this coastal road in Somalia. And then the fucking cloud deck comes in, and the cloud deck comes, and he's banned. So, right? So it's like one band of clouds it'll pass through. Another band of clouds it'll pass through. Every time one of those fucking bands comes in, the CCT is not going to let that, you know, warhead go. So this is happening. The crew is calling it down, you know, negative lock, negative lock, negative lock, because the fucking clouds are coming in. By this point, the GFC on the lead helo, they've already, like, launched because they're expecting us to fucking hit this thing. And they're coming in over the ocean, and they're like, 30 seconds out from the coast. And the GFC calls McRaven, who's sitting at the White House. He's like, I need fucking authority to, like, abort the strike and come in with guns. And McRaven's, like, talking to the president, and he's like, no, like, I want this. I want the kinetic strike. You guys only do the. The pid. Clouds come in like, lasers, Lasers in, lasers out, lasers in, lasers out. Shit's not happening. Combat controller on board's like, the shit's not happening. We're gonna abort. GFC is like, boss, I need authority to go in with guns. We're seconds out from this target. McRaven's like, it, switch to guns. Get them, deal with the fallout later. Lead helo comes in. Us guys at the talk are watching all this shit go down, but the crew that was overhead is kind of talking them in. They come in, they blast the guy, and then they set down. Then ISR moves off because you got to clean up. And they move in, do the PID and then head back to the ship.

[A]

And

[B]

they get back to the ship. PID confirms. Solid knob.

[A]

Hun.

[B]

Fucking jackpot. So all of that to say it was a complex operation that in Iraq or Afghanistan would have been just another operation on any other night, but for it to go down off the coast of Somalia in 2009 required this choreography that I'd never seen before in my life, right? It's like you need to convince the fucking president to let you put an LHC off the coast. I think there were a couple of other. I think we had some carrier strike group over there, and it was all because of the counter piracy shit that was going on back in the day. The court, the synchronization between the platform and. And the helo assault force last, like, literally 10 seconds out, switching to fucking guns on the lead Hilo and. And making it happen. All of that was really, really insane to watch go down. And I was like, this is. This is. I feel like I'm part of something that is just important. This is a fucking group of people doing important shit all around the world, all the time. And I'm humbled to be a part of it, and I'm proud to be a part of it. After the strike went down, I go outside. I sit outside the talk, and it's nighttime. And as the crew comes back, the pilot drops the bird down and does like, a little Top Gun Maverick fucking tower buzz right, like, 50ft above the talk. And I was like this. I just felt like whole, you know, it's fucking badass. And we sat around, had a little bonfire that night, and that was cool. A couple months later, I get a phone call sitting in the office back at squadron, and they're like, hey, CG's coming in. And he. He wants to. You know, he wants to, like, have a meeting with you guys or whatever. I'm like, the fuck for, like, whatever, dude. I'm in. I'm in civilian clothes. And they're like, you gotta change the uniform and get your ass over here. I'm like, God damn it. I put my flight suit on and I go. Go to the other building where this is going down. And I see the cruise from this op, like, all lined up and shit, and they're like, bro, like, get the fuck up on stage. Like, McRaven wants to, like, give out. Give all of us a thing. I'm like, okay, cool, man. So he goes and he shakes everyone's hand, and he's like, you know, this. This is. You know, this is a prime example of us being able to reach out and touch people in complex aos, where, you know, we don't have the. The footprint that we do everywhere else. And, you know, he's congratulating us. He goes to pilots, he goes to the. The load master, and then he. He Gets to me and, and there's one, there's one dude next to me and he's the imagery operator. And we call this guy Magic man because, like, he, he used to like, really like doing like magic tricks and. And you just like pass the time doing that. He's kind of a skinny, like, nerdy looking dude, so we'd make fun of him a lot. And so McRaven gets to me and he puts his hand out and he's like, so which one of you was the triggerman? Like, which one of you is a sensor operator that. That was the trigger man? I was like, this is a really awkward question. I don't want to say it's me because it was like a team effort, you know, and so I'm hesitating because I don't, I don't want to be that forward. Magic man over here speaks up and was like, it was me.

[A]

Must have been a Navy guy.

[B]

Yeah. So McRaven's like, he like loses interest with me, like, goes to this dude and he's like. And then he gives him like the fucking CG's coin. And I'm like, whatever. You know, in the grand scheme of things. And so then the ceremony concludes, we get off stage and I turn and look at this dude. I'm like. And he's like, what? And I'm like, bro, you got something for me? And he was like, oh, you should have spoken up, bro. Sorry. But good ceremony, right? And then he just off with his CG's coin. I was like, you son a of.

[A]

Are you serious? Holy shit. Wow. Well, that's still pretty fucking badass.

[B]

Yeah, that was pretty.

[A]

That is badass.

[C]

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[A]

that's come in the studio.

[C]

You're also going to get behind the scenes content and guest updates. You're going to get first dibs on new merch drops and limited edition items that will never be sold again. Plus exclusive offers from our partners you won't find anywhere else. So subscribe to the Vigilance Elite newsletter right now. All right, Nick, we're back from the break.

[A]

I forgot a couple things. I got too excited about the interview. So just two things to crank out here real quick.

[C]

One, I got a Patreon account.

[A]

It's a subscription account and we've turned it into quite the community. I think it's like 125,000 strong now. And they're the reason I get to sit down with you today so they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. And this is from Jesse Meadows.

[C]

Where is the real line today between cybersecurity and mass surveillance? Who decides when it's crossed and what

[A]

assumptions or blind spots in these systems still exist that citizens should understand before the infrastructure becomes irreversible?

[B]

Yeah, that's actually a great question. So I think the lines are easily blurred between cyber defense, cybersecurity and surveillance. And we can start at a very small scale and then extrapolate up to national scale if we wish. So if we take a small company or a medium sized company and if you really want to do cyber defense in the best possible way that you could do it, then ideally you have as many sensors and taps and collectors of data that you can possibly have spread throughout the organization. Now that is a massive privacy violation if you go too overboard with it. So I think, as with many things, and then extrapolate that out to national scale. Right? It's like all of the things that Snowden was up in arms about many years ago were a function of people trying to do. People trying to do the right things for the right reasons, but going about it the wrong way. Let's say when I was the chief information Security officer at Andrell. I could have probably gotten leadership to buy off on. All right, we're just going to put key loggers on everybody's machine, and we're just going to record everything that they do. But we didn't. And the reason we didn't is because there's a conscious decision that. That always needs to be made with these sets of tools. That comes down to, are we turning into or not by using these things? It's like, that's a fuzzy way of putting it, right? But ultimately it comes down to that. And with all things human, I think it comes down to people in leadership positions that are willing to stick their fucking asses out there and draw lines in the sand in accordance with their own morality and say, okay, here's what I think are the left and right limits for how to use a technology like this in a proper and ethical way while achieving the objectives that we've set out to achieve, which is, in Andral's case, the security of the enterprise and the weapon systems and the employees and. And all of it without going overboard into authoritarianism. I think every. I think all roads, except very few, lead to authoritarianism. Given any kind of tool, technology capability that humans have access to, I think all of them at the limit, can be used for just evil shit and the application of control over others. So all that to say cybersecurity tools are tools. The humans that are using them

[A]

need

[B]

to make good decisions about how to use them and achieve the goals that they're trying to achieve. And it's easy to get carried away by saying the. The means. All right, what is that saying that the. The ends.

[A]

I don't know this one.

[B]

It's like, you know, the ends justify the means. Right, That's. That's what I'm trying to get at. It's easy to say that and just go overboard, but I think one thing to keep in mind is China said that too. And they have a society where everything is under the surveillance umbrella that they've set up as a state. Every person's actions are run through that umbrella, turned into an algorithm, and used for very authoritarian purposes. And whatever the actions are in front of us that don't set us down that path, that's at least a good first step, I think.

[A]

Does this stuff all worry you?

[B]

Yeah, dude, yeah. Worries me a lot. Yeah. I mean, technology is capable of some insane things these days. I mean, I'm honestly very surprised that we don't have a social credit system in the United States that is driven by the Experians and the transunions and the fucking credit reporting agencies because that would make their lives so much easier. It's like if they just had more data on you and what you're doing on a day in and day out basis, that made it a lot easier for them to understand, you know, whether you're a good, good citizen with good credit or not. I think without checks and balances in place, we certainly have the capabilities to get there. I think the only thing keeping us back is the, the pillars that are basically holding us up as a western society. Some of those pillars are crumbling fast. Some people would like to see them crumbled fast. But I think the reason that we don't have such an authoritarian system in place as the United States of America is because that just goes against our spirit and ideals as a society. And as American citizens, other countries have no such compunctions. So you can say all the you want about America and all the evil that it's done. And maybe we have, maybe we have. We're the only country that, that's dropped nuclear bombs on people. Right. But at the same time, I mean, look at the picture of you on that helicopter over Afghanistan, dude. Like if there were, if you landed on the X and you saw some kids and you got, you know, you, you guys did your job and you know, you were trying to figure out what to do with these, with these kids, you know, you're not going to just take them out back, back and smoke them. Right. Maybe the Russians would have done that, maybe the Chinese would have done that. But one thing I think that is an invariant is that a fucking dude wearing the stars and stripes on their chest. It's just very difficult to imagine that dude doing that. You know, there's something about the morals that we have as a society and that we carry with us into all these shitty, complicated situations. That, that speaks for itself.

[A]

Those men are men of the people. You know what I mean?

[B]

Yeah. Expl.

[A]

Those men. Are doing something that they truly believe in.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That 100% or close aligns with their values, you know, 100%. You know, the ones that start to think otherwise, they leave. You know, the people that we're talking about, you know, that, that, that, that have the ability for mass surveillance, stuff like that. I mean, those are powerful, powerful, elite, rich. Yeah, Wealthy people. I think those are, that shouldn't be. But seem to be more easily influenced by more power and more wealth, but mostly power.

[B]

Yeah, I agree with you. I think at a societal scale, I Think it's,

[A]

for example, the Epstein files drop.

[B]

Yeah. Yep.

[A]

The spirit of America once those files released. Now the elites of America are doing everything they can to hide this from everybody.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because it was a power structure thing.

[B]

Yep. Yeah, I agree, man. I think at national levels and at societal levels, I think there's a dark undercurrent of elites that really don't fall on any one side of the partisan spectrum. I feel like they're in it to sustain their elitism goes back to good and evil. Yep. Yep. So to answer Jesse's question, Yeah, it could very easily go sideways. It could.

[A]

What do you think would happen if it does go sideways? How do you think people will. I mean, they'll always find a way around it.

[B]

We go on primitive at national levels. Like, at societal levels.

[A]

Societal level. How do you find privacy when it does run away?

[B]

Yeah, I think. I think if we want to have true privacy in the future, we need to think very carefully about the sovereignty of the data that we emit as part of our daily lives. Right. Like, one of the questions I was answering out there for some of the Patreon folks was, you know, what are your recommendations for cyber security as a society in 2026? And one of them was, take the pictures of your loved ones down from the Internet. Like, these AI algorithms can do anything they want with those pictures. You basically put those out into the wild forest of the algorithms. So start taking that shit down. The olden days of, like, sharing pictures on Facebook and social media and all that shit, consider that gone. Like, take pictures of you down. Take pictures of your loved ones down. And the reason for that is what you want to start doing is preserving sovereignty of the data that belongs to you. And it's a foreign concept to us as human beings, Right, because we're not wired to think about our digital exhaust and our digital footprint and all this. But we better start thinking about it, because when we don't, someone else is going to suck that up and have their way with it. One of the reasons I'm wearing this hat is because Josh Clementi, the founder of Levels, he started Levels, which is a metabolic health company, too. Give people the ability to control their own medical data, not siphon it off to some fucking insurance company or some lab or some whatever. It's like this data is coming off my body and I own it, and I get to do whatever the fuck I want with it. I can put it into chat and AI if I want, and I can get it to tell me to do it. You Know, change my lifestyle or whatever, or I can choose to freely send it somewhere else.

[A]

But.

[B]

But the point is it's one example of the fact that we need to start thinking about how we control the data that's emitted from our own lives.

[A]

That sounds like an interesting company levels.

[B]

Yeah. The founder and CEO Josh Clemente, he worked on the life support systems on the dragon spacecraft for SpaceX. So he spent a lot of time working on those subsystems and then took that skill set, transferred it over to basically human metabolic quantification essentially. So the things that you do on a day to day basis, the pack of chips that you just ate, how can you extrapolate that out into what that's going to mean for your health five years from now, ten years from now? And you know, that's a perfect use case for where data security is essential because you let that data get in the wrong hands. Okay. The instant you eat that pack of chips, well, TransUnion just, you know, drops your credit score 20 points. So that's not a future I want to live in, but yeah.

[A]

Wow. All right, let's get back to your story.

[B]

Yep. All right, so we.

[A]

Your son.

[B]

Yeah, my son was born 2011. You know, it was, It was, it was something that I wish I could go back and relive. What I should have done was think very introspectively and deeply about how to not subject my son to any of the same shit that I had to contend with as a kid and as a teenager. And I, I've tried to do that. You know, certainly I've, I've been. Probably the worst thing I've done is to just be away a lot. I was constantly deployed. Like months after he was born I got the call from NSW and frankly, a very personal, like selfish decision was made. Like, okay, I, I started my military career out at 40,000ft on these tin cans flying around the sky. Over the years I got closer and closer and closer and closer to the fight and I got really good at every one of those levels and now I'm being asked to be out on the ground with these dudes and I was like, there's no way I'm passing up on this.

[A]

And

[B]

was that the right decision? I don't know if I could go back. I wish I would have spent more time with him when he was young, when he was just a few months old. Instead I, you know, went to, went to nsw, got seconded there. The history leading up to this was the fact that task force at the time there was a Lot of demand for active duty military members who spoke different languages and had all of the skill sets that I was coming to the table with. And my signal squadron had a lot of those people. And one thing that I would try and do, so by this point, I was a, I was a tech sergeant E6 in the Air Force. One thing that I would try and do is convey to Air Force headquarters that the things going on in this place are important and the skill sets that we can bring to the table for this place are impactful. So don't hold us back or hamstring us and tell us this isn't our mission. This is not what we do. We don't roll out with these dudes, we don't do that, we don't do this. We do whatever the fucking CG needs us to do. That's the reality of it. And the other reality was, unfortunately, the squadron at the time was sort of hamstrung by like three or four different lines of authority. You had task force, you had afsoc, you had this archaic Cold War agency called the Air Force Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency of fisra, this bureaucratic bloated organization that all, you know, their bread and butter was flying SIGINT missions during the Cold War. Right, great. You don't know shit about counterterrorism or find, fix, finish or all of the shit going on at this organization here. And they would, you know, they would serve to just be a bureaucratic blocker to us all the time. And around halfway through my time at Task, we finally broke through and we were like, NSW came to find out some of the stuff that we could do. And they were like, hey, we got a need for, you know, some of you guys. And so I got told, hey, be out on the ramp, we're gonna have a plane coming for you and they're gonna take you up to, to Virginia Beach. Okay, cool. So I walk out on the ramp, plane comes and gets me, go to Virginia beach, and I sit around and there's a bunch of team guys and, and I go through like sort of a screening process and I ended up getting seconded there. And now I was coming full circle. I, you know, I had spent my whole career wanting to get closer and closer to the fight. Now I was going to be in the fight on the ground with the guys. So the, the mission for the next few years was essentially do the, that you did in the air, but do it on the ground and do it in very, very small teams. Lone wolf, if you needed to. Sometimes that was the case. And I loved it, dude. And like, should I have been back with my son? Yeah, probably. One thing, one regret I have is I. I would, you know, this character fly I have is when I'm on deployment, I'm on deployment. Like, I don't like you compartmentalize everything. Compartmentalize everything.

[A]

I. I don't want it down.

[B]

Yeah, I don't want to be on deployment and I'm thinking about my family back home and I'm. I'm, you know, it's like pollutes different sides of your brain, you know. So one way I dealt with that is, you know, I would just. Just spend weeks at a time just being in fucking deployment mode, which was cool, man. I mean, like, some of the capabilities that we got to bring to bear were, like, not organic to nsw. Like, the fact that I could speak different languages, the fact that I could work some of this spec. A gear that only a linguist would know how to work, right? I remember one time I walked into a joint and, you know, the, the team. Team area, and there was like some kit in the corner, and I was like, hey, is anyone using that thing? And they're like, no, we won't have anyone that speaks, you know, that oblas. So I was like, I'll get on it. So then when I wasn't rolling out in the hiluxes, I was on that fucking thing with cans on. And just all the time I was either out or on that thing with the cans on. And I felt like I had just this. All my career had. Had led up to. To this opportunity here. Now I sacrificed, you know, I sacrificed communication with my family, my ex, now with my. With my son, with my stepdaughter. And that's something I would, I would go back and change. It's just. I wrestle with this question to this day, like, was it all worth it, dude? Like, all the cool, cool stories and like, all this that I got to do with, with nsw, all the, all the work on the ground, was it worth it for the sacrifices, for the things that I did to my family in, in order to. To make it happen? Like, just all the deployments, all the being gone all the time, man, I would, I would get home from something, from some trip, dude. You know how it is. Get home from a trip and you just want to sustain that crack high, right? And so it's like, all right, what's up next? All right, driving school. Cool. Laundry pack. Let's go some other fucking, I don't know, shooting. Yeah, let's Go over and over and over again. And so then you just get into this cycle that you don't know how to break out of and you're heading into a brick wall because you can be the coolest guy on the planet with. You can be Mr. Air Force dude assigned to this, this NSW squadron, but that doesn't last forever. And then you leave, the machine goes on without you. And now you're just a dude on the street. Okay, great. What has all of this been for, you know? Yeah. So that time with nsw, I mean, those guys treated me.

[A]

If you come to a conclusion, was it worth it?

[B]

I don't know, man. It's tough. You know, the biggest, the biggest impact I had when I was with them was we were work in these target packages to interdict this EFP smuggling ring. And it was, it was targeting diplomatic personnel in, in the AO that we were in. And so, you know, you, you justify it in your mind, right? You're like, I'm focused on this because I'm trying to save the lives of these embassy personnel that are at risk because of this. And then looking back at it, it's like, Okay, bunch of people could have done that. You know, I was no one special. I don't know. I don't know is the answer. I think it all happened because I was meant to sit here and be introspective about these issues with who the fuck knows, watching and talking through it.

[A]

Then I asked my question that all the time. I don't. I didn't even have a family back then. I think a lot of guys think about this, you know, it's. It's a tough question to ponder.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, you're talking about Somalia, what we just uncover in Minnesota. Yeah. How many billions of dollars getting smuggled right into Somalia. Well, we probably got guys right there right now. Yep. Is it worth it?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah, I know, dude. I, I wrestle with that. And, you know, a lot of these, A lot of these aos, we were talking about this on the drive over here. We pump money and fucking Zodiac boats and equipment and guns and ammo and

[A]

$87 million a week to the Taliban right now. Every fucking week.

[B]

What happens? We do the same fucking thing every time. We're going to. What is the doctrine that we have for. It's like nation building, right? Dude, we suck at it, okay? We're just not good at it. Why don't we just not. Why don't we not do it? So it's a question I wrestle with all the time. I don't know, I feel proud of my service. You know, these are experiences that, that not many people have. I certainly felt a loss of identity when, when I left. You know, I remember walking out of the, the NSW compound for the last time and you know, there were dudes in the kill house and they're doing their thing and there's like hilos flying around and like there's dudes running from one building to another like, like there's dudes like cleaning the mark fives out in the boat area and you're like, this fucking machine is just going to go on without me and it's not a good feeling. And then you're just a guy on the street. So yeah, the last few years active duty, those guys took me in. They treated me like just one of their own. And my, my goal was just to represent my service well, the Air Force, because, you know, from their view, they knew Air Force dudes in their world came in one of two flavors. PJs, controllers, PJs, CCTs. Now they got like special reconnaissance dudes and whatnot. So some wacko cryptologic linguist coming on board and being assigned some very high level areas of responsibility was new for them. And so I had a lot of pressure to fucking get it right. And I hope I did. A large part of why I'm kind of glossing over all that piece of it is because, you know, I, I don't want to get into areas that, that would, you know, divulge ttps and all that shit for those guys. So. But it was good. My girlfriend always gets mad at me because like to this day I haven't come up with like a clean like arc for like what the fuck I did in the military, you know. So like one of her family will ask a question and I'll be like, oh, well, you know, I was in the Air Force, but then I was at this like joint place and then like I was at NSW and then they're just like, what the fuck are you talking about, dude? Like, are you a poser? Like, what was your bud's class? I was like, I, I didn't, I wasn't a team guy. I didn't go to fucking BUDS class. But it was, it was great, man. I, I had a really good time. They, you know, they put me through, you know, all of, all of the, that they put their own guys through for screening and whatnot. So it was like cqc, you know, driving, you know, maritime

[A]

jumping.

[B]

No jumping.

[A]

No jumping. No,

[B]

not needed for the, the Stuff that I was doing. But, yeah, it was. It was good. I actually pulled. I pulled two other guys in with me, Air Force dudes, to go through the. The sequence of. Of training courses because those dudes had blown out on

[A]

some.

[B]

Some emergency operations, let's say, in the Indian Ocean, because they spoke the language and. And I thought they could just use the extra skill sets. You know, it's like they didn't. They didn't appreciate that too much. They got put through the wringer. But, you know, they got some good stories out of it. But, yeah, that was. That was fun. A lot of it was.

[A]

You want to talk about the FP ring?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. So there was. There was a cluster of. Of foreign fighters, let's call them, that were sort of interfering in the affairs of. Of the. Of the AO that we were in at the time. And this is an AO that you're very well familiar with. In fact, I discovered this morning that we were highly co. Located at one time, and. Basically they were trying to smuggle EFPs, so shape charges, basically, and use them to create IEDs or other incendiary devices to put diplomatic personnel at risk that were. That were in that particular ao. And so our job was to basically figure out, you know, who the fuck is all involved? Who are they? What do they do? Who do they run with? It's like that scene from Heat, you know, it's like, who the fuck is this guy? I want to know who he runs with and who he eats with. I want to know who they run with and who they eat with. And I want it up tonight. And I want it. I want it going. That was. That was our job. And we. We did it. We did it quite well. A lot of it is around, you know, how do you execute find fix in complex urban environments?

[A]

The stuff I was talking about earlier,

[B]

your question from earlier.

[A]

He's on that floor and that room in the bathroom on that wall.

[B]

Yeah. And it's like, well, how the fuck do you know that? Well, I'm not gonna get into that piece of it, but I know, and I'm gonna tell somebody. I know, and that somebody is gonna go fucking take care of business. Yeah, there was some shit. Yeah, there was just some dumb shit that would. That would go down. It was a lot of. It was just like, well, there's not a lot of backup here, so like, we're just kind of hanging our asses out, you know, Obviously some mutual.

[C]

What are you talking about?

[B]

You had us. Yeah, yeah. I remember one time, an individual that I actually respected highly, came down from elsewhere in the ao, and we were going to work with you guys on something and our job, me and this individual.

[C]

You guys were going to work with

[A]

the clowns in action?

[B]

Yeah, well, in this particular op, I was the clown because, you know, this individual comes in and they're like, hey, dude, you know, you got a great reputation. Really psyched to work with you. Like, let's go get this thing done. You know, represent our organization well with these guys over here. And I was like, cool, let's go. So we plan it all out. We're like, working with. Working with your guys. And our job without, you know, getting too much into it, is to be at a particular location at a very particular time looking out for some stuff, and we roll out and, you know, I'm checking. I'm obsessive about fucking tot and like, being at the exactly, precisely right places at the right times. You know, I want to be there. I want to get it right because you, you know, you guys are relying on us. And three minutes into this thing, I get t boned by some indig dude, like, just smashes into the car right after this person says, hey, man, you got a great reputation. And, like, you're known for, like, this flawless execution on these three minutes in, I get t boned by this guy. I'm like, God. And I'm watching the. The. The tot burn down, right? I'm like, oh, okay, we're. We're off base, all right? So I'm like, stay in the car. I get out, I start negotiating with this fucking dude. I like, no one trains you on how to deal. It's not like there's GEICO insurance in this fucking place, right? So it's like, what am I supposed to do here? So I do my best. I, like, bust out some op fund cash. I'm like, yo, just take this. Get the fuck out of here. He, like, slaps the cash out of my hand because, like, he's. Now he's offended that I'm trying to pay him off and shit. I'm like. So I, like, talk him down. Fortunately, the damage wasn't that bad. But by the time all this happened, I'm like, convincing this dude to not make this a big deal. How do I put this? You guys are in your own vehicle, and we're supposed to be way down the fucking road somewhere else, and we're not. And you guys drive by us and you're just like, what the fuck are these two morons doing on the side of the road here, and you're just, like, staring out the window. And I'm like, God, I fucked that one up pretty good. Just like, dumb shit like that would happen another time. My buddy, we're, like, driving down this really tight section of the city. You know which place I'm talking about? This really tight section of the city. And he's like, I need you to turn down this way. And I look down that way, and the road leading down this path or this section of the city is made completely of garbage. It's a fucking garbage road. Like, there's no pavement. There's no nothing. I'm like, hey, dude, I don't think that's a good idea for us to drive down that way. He's like, no, no, no. I need you to drive down that way because, like, you know, that's where. That's where the fucking dude is. Check. Drive down that way. Halfway down the road, the truck sinks through the garbage. We're, like, stuck. And then all these. It makes a. Like, makes a noise because I'm trying to, like, get the. Get the wheels turning and get us out of there. So I'm, like, revving the engine that's, like, making noise. The locals are all like, what the is going on? They, like, all come out of their houses. And my buddy is like, yep, it's one of these dudes that's surrounding our car right now.

[A]

Holy.

[B]

I'm like, okay. And so there's. There's some. There's a team guy in the. In the car with us. He's a great dude, but he's also kind of like, just, let's get it on. And he's like, what. What do we do, man? Like, let's. Let's. I'm like, dude, calm down. Like, let me. Let me talk us out of this one. So somehow I get out of the car, I convince the locals that, like, you know, we're trying to head to the beach or some. And, like, they help us get the car out of there, and we roll out. But that one was spicy, because I was like, if this dude gets a whiff that, you know something's off, it's not gonna go well. One of the neighborhoods we went into, the guy did get a whiff, and it wasn't anything crazy that happened. But he walks in front of him.

[A]

You must speak really good. Holy.

[B]

You know, what's up about it, dude? When you go to dli, I mean,

[A]

the place you're talking about is, like, so cultural.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And we at least we didn't understand that. I mean, if you're wearing the whatever on the wrong side, they know.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

They know.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

You're having to talk to them.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

Yep.

[C]

On a trash road.

[B]

On a trash. On a trash.

[A]

Poorest part of the city. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. So it got. It would get dicey of one of

[A]

the poorest places in the world.

[B]

Yeah, it would get dicey. Yeah. There was one time where

[A]

we were

[B]

in a neighborhood and the dude walks in front of the vehicle and he just looks at me kind of like what you were just saying. He looks at me and I look at him and he just. He just knows that I'm not. I could look like whatever, but I'm not from there. And he like, bolts to his vehicle. And I think I hear him like, calling out to some of his buddies. I'm like, oh, here we go. And then I like reverse J turn out of there. I'm like, oh, I get to use the J turn. That's pretty sick. And then, like, we book it down and then we see them from the rear view mirror. Like, they're like. I mean, it was like Keystone Cops, dude. They're like turning down these alleyways trying to, like, get to us. But we got out of there. Just dumb would happen like that in between, you know, all the, all the high stress stuff. Efp, boy, we. We eventually got him. One thing that was not so fun is, you know, sometimes, you know, you're expected to get up close to these dudes. You know, they might be s. Vested up. You don't know if they think that's

[A]

a suicide vest for the listeners.

[B]

Suicide vest? Yeah, they think something's off, they're gonna clack that off. And so I was always hyper, hyper cognizant of what was going on around me, you know, and. And like, you know, the way that I would conduct myself and. And all of this. But I was never. I was never really scared. I was like, this is the greatest opportunity anyone could ever ask for in my position. I feel like I'm contributing directly to, like, critical needs of. Of the organization. And so I'm going to. I'm going to fucking get after it. Actually one time kind of hilariously hung our asses out there and got like, really good shots of some dudes. And we were working with you guys to do it, and we pass it off to you guys, and then two days later it comes back with like, circular reporting that, like, hey, these dudes, like, built this target package. And like, here's the. Here's the fucking, you know, shots from the recce. And I'm like, bro, that was. That was us. That was not. I was like, okay, whatever. But, you know, no one's in it to take. Take credit for anything. It's just like, all right, whatever. Let's just fucking get the thing done. And then, you know, one of the very last. I mean, I must have done hundred hundreds and hundreds of. Of those ops over. Over the course of my. My time there, which was really fun. You know, you just get into a rhythm, you know, You.

[A]

You.

[B]

You just know how to be in that area, man. Like, and hey, okay, you want me to walk down a alley in the poorest part of town in this place, and, like, if I. Something up, like, shit's gonna go sideways. Cool.

[A]

I'm.

[B]

I'm comfortable with that. You just kind of like, you go native.

[A]

Awesome. So, like I said, it's my favorite fucking place.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

To work.

[B]

Yeah, to work. So my very last op, we finally, after never having had one, like, across all the deployments and ops and shit, got a bird chop to us. And so they're like, hey, you're gonna have a bird on station for like, 45 minutes. This is like sloppy seconds, you know? Like, they're off doing something for somebody else, and they're like, all right, I guess they can support you on their way home. I'm like, cool, thanks, man. I'm like, all right, here's what I need. I. I need to dial them up and be able to. To calm with them real time. And they're like, negative. Not authorized to talk to him. I was like, I'm not authorized to talk to a aircraft overhead that's supporting me and my guys. Negative. You got to run the comms through this stupid comms loop that ran from where we were at all the way stateside and then all the way back to where we were at this, like, 20,000 mile loop of a comm. I was like, that's just not going to work, dude. Like, you know, when you're.

[A]

Why in the.

[B]

When you're. When you're out there, like, you know, microseconds matter. I was like, I'm not dealing with this. So I'd look at our comms guy. I'm like, hey, man, we got a green radio. Yeah, dude. I'm like, fire up this frequency, please, if you would, and hand me that radio. And. And so I fired up. I get comms with the bird. I'm like, hey, I'm checking in with you guys. You guys be Working for us tonight. Now, that was interesting for me because I used to be the dude on the bird, like, helping support all these dudes on the ground. I knew how to talk, I knew what they would do. I knew all the procedures they had. I knew how they would be working the gear. I knew how they would look at the imagery. I. I just knew it, right? It was like I was one with them. And at the same time, over the course of hundreds of reps, I was one with these guys that I was on the ground with, too. And so it kind of was really cool because my career came full circle on that op, right? I was able to fire up the radio, talk to the bird like I was one of them. Talk to these guys like I'm one of them, fuse all of it together, and, like, navigate fluidly through this urban environment in order to. To get the work done. And that was really cool. Like, I was just able to bring it all home.

[A]

That is badass, man. Yeah, you were definitely meant to be there.

[C]

Running a business sounds great until you're buried in payroll tax forms, onboarding docs, and HR issues at 10:30 at night. I've had those days where paperwork completely eats your time. And you think, there has to be

[A]

a better way to do this.

[C]

That's why we use Gusto. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one remote, friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. For us, it takes a huge weight off. Payroll runs automatically. Payroll taxes are filed automatically. Direct deposits are simple. You can handle benefits like health insurance, workers comp, even 401ks all in one place. And its unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price, no hidden fees, and no surprises. What I like most is it gives you structure, offer letters, onboarding docs, built in tools that automate the boring stuff. And if something complicated comes up, you can get direct access to certified HR experts. That alone can save you from serious headaches. If you're growing a business, you shouldn't be spending your nights guessing at tax forms. Try gusto [e-mail] SRS and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free [e-mail] SARS one more time. Gusto.com SRS

[B]

and then. And then I got home and. And then, you know, what happens is, you know, we were talking about this earlier. When you spend too much time coloring outside the lines in the military, whatever bureaucracy, or like, personnel machine that Operates your service will come get a hold of you. They're like, where the you been for the past, you know, x many years? Like you need to come back to the fold and go back to big blue Air Force and go take an instructor bill at somewhere or, or what have you. I was like, I'm not going to do that. After having done the, that I've been doing for the past, you know, almost decade by that point, I wasn't going to go back to all the stuff that big blue Air Force normally does, like good, like awesome people doing all of those jobs. But I had just seen too much, you know, I, I'd seen too much. And I went to the leadership at, at nsw. I was like, is there any way for me to like be here full time? I was like, I'll get out. I'll fucking do an inner service transfer to the Navy. They're like, I mean we got pull, but we don't have that kind of pull. You know, if you do an air service transfer, you might have to go be on a boat for a few years and then, and then we'll pull you. I was like, okay, it's not gonna work. And then I had one of the leadership go to headquarters Air Force and like go brief me by name and be like, the ideal situation for you guys and us is for Nick to have a bullet at this, at this organization. Air Force was like, nope, not our thing.

[A]

Damn, no.

[B]

So I was like, okay, I got no options here. So I, I left, I left the service because there was nowhere for me to go. I had gotten to the end of my career track like as a cryptological linguist. There was nothing else for me to do in while active duty. So I left again. It was, it was a, it was just a feeling of, dude, this train, this machine is just going to keep functioning without me. And it's a terrible feeling. One day you're, you're the guy. One day you're the guy, you're the guy that made Admiral McRaven reroute LHCs and helicopter assault forces to prosecute high value target that, that you found. You're the guy that like, you know, people are relying on. You're the guy that can like that bring capabilities to bear that other people in the organization cannot. And then to go from that to you're just another fucking dude on the street with taxes and bills to pay and rent. Get your fucking resume together. Start applying for jobs on Indeed.com. dude, that broke me. And at that moment where your identity was Completely nuked, all in the matter of a few seconds, you know, you're done. You walk out that compound, you're done. I knew what it was like to be my dad and to go from the fucking dude who had escaped the boarding school he went through and become this highly, you know, respected individual that got to do amazing things around the world, you know, in his own way, you know, in the, in the merchant marine. To go from that to working a fucking styrofoam cup job at a factory in Jersey, that's the feeling I felt wash over me. And it was tough. The first year or two out of the military was tough. I landed a contracting position with the SOCOM element to be an instructor for some of their initial training cycles. So this was a SOCOM element that specialized in doing the things that I had been doing for, for the past few years. And so I went on staff as one of their instructor cadre.

[A]

And

[B]

that particular organization tends to be quite isolated. They tend to work in their own little vacuum. You know, they're kind of like you guys in that way. You guys, your former guys. And so me coming from one of the other, you know, task force components, they're like, all right, cool, but we need you to just, like, check some boxes and teach these dudes how to do stuff and whatnot. And I did. But during the course of it, you know, I, I gave some feedback to him. I was like, hey, man, some of the. That these guys are doing is going to get them killed out in the field. Like, I don't want to get into any of the ttps, but I was like, you know, here, here's where you guys need to rethink some, some of these ttps that these guys are doing. Because having just done like hundreds of these things in like, low permissive, semi permissive environments, I was like, you try that out there and you're gonna, you're gonna. In retrospect, I could have gone about it a different way. I could have been more diplomatic about it. I could have tried to change it from the inside, but it was a very insular organization. And it's like, unless you came out of that place, they weren't really interested in what you had to say. So I wrapped up with them.

[A]

It's interesting, right? It's interesting how they don't want to hear it.

[B]

You can't blame them, right? Like, they have like, like any of the task force components. They have a long history of successes and they have their own culture. Yeah, it's human. It's Human nature, I think. And me being, you know, young at the time and not politically savvy, you know, I just. You know, to me, it's like, I'm just gonna be a straight shooter, dude. Like, here you go. Here's what I think. It's like. Well, that's not really the best way to. To go about things.

[A]

Are you at, like, my sister company? Is that where you're at?

[B]

You?

[A]

I'm trying to. Try to. I'm trying to play within the lines here.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Kind of. Yeah.

[A]

Okay. So very politically correct. You're coming from a unit of fucking savages. Done. And. Yeah. Okay.

[B]

Yeah. It's a hard transition. Yeah, I get it. Yep. Yep. Yeah. They call. They call. They have different terminology for everything. They call things differently. They. Yeah. So I wrapped up with very gentle.

[A]

You have to be gentle in these organizations. You can't be direct. You have to beat around the bush. You have to play the game.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it's a problem for. For people like you and I who come out of organizations where you just don't. There's no. There's not much to sift through. It's just, you up.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You're gonna get people killed. Don't do it.

[B]

Exactly. And if you try bringing that man, you're gonna see your ass out the door real quick. Then I was completely out of my ass. So, like.

[A]

Oh, so did you get. Did they kick you out?

[B]

No, they didn't kick me out, but the. You know, there were some contract shenanigans. You know how it goes. Like, someone comes in outbids.

[A]

Oh, you didn't get invited? Oh, oh, okay.

[B]

Outbids the incumbent. They're. You know, the new contracting company is like, you know, we're gonna cut your salary by such and such. It's like, well, I'm not. I'm not really invested in this place, so, like, I'm out. But it was an opportunity for me to, you know, convey some of the lessons learned from. From the field. Like, I. I know we're being very general here with. With the type of. That we're talking about, but at the time, there weren't very many organizations doing the kind of. That we were doing, like, at the organization I was at. And so anything that I could do to convey to these guys, hey, here's the realities of working in these environments and the things that you need to be cognizant of and so on, I tried to do. You know, there was one point where one of their. They were going through their Initial training cycles and it was like one of their ending exercises. And the scenario was, was a hostage rescue basically. And so these guys were out there and their job was to essentially locate the hostages, right? And once they do that triggers, you know, a series of, of things and culmination exercise. And I could tell that like, it hadn't really clicked for some of them, right? Like the type of serious that they were going to get into because these are people that came from anywhere, everywhere, you know, traditional, like conventional military and so on. And so I, I go visit one of the, the teams out in the field with some of the other active duty cadre. And the active duty cadre is like, hey, where's everyone at? And the students are like, well, we got some dudes going to get Subway right now. And then we got a, we got one team just like trolling around like over here. And I lost my. I was like, hey man, let me tell you guys something. This scenario that you guys are doing here for this culmination exercise is one of the most critical scenarios you will ever encounter in the real world. Hostage rescue, right? Especially the pre assault portion of a hostage rescue. It could very well be the case that two weeks from now, after you guys graduate this training program, you guys could be in front of the CG for real downrange somewhere briefing him on what the. Your plan is to find these people, right? If you get put on an actual op. And I'll tell you right now that telling the CG that you got some, you got some dudes getting food and then you got another set of dudes just trolling around some random location in town with no hypothesis behind why they're over there or any leads whatsoever is not going to fucking fly. So tighten your shit up. This is your culmination exercise. You're going to be doing this for real in two weeks. And then I said it and I was like, fuck, dude. Like, I shouldn't have said that. I'm just a contractor. I, I'm not part of this organization. I didn't come from this organization. So I looked at the, the active duty cadre and I was like, hey, you know, sorry if I overstepped any lines. Like, I, I'm just trying to convey to them the reality of, you know, what they're going to be facing. And they're like, dude, no problem. Like they need to hear that. Like it's, it's all good. And so I kind of, that was, that was kind of the last thing I did. I kind of saw that culmination exercise through. And then, and then I left. And then now that was kind of my off ramp from, from anything to do with any of this. And then now at this point, I was just a straight civilian. And you know, the, the savings that you have as a E6, you know, they dwindle quick, right? And I'm out here, I'm trying to land somewhere in the civilian world. Months go by, you know, I'm, I'm not really able to make anything stick. My resumes are just disasters, dude. Like, I look at some of my old resume, I still have like weapons quals on my resumes that I, that I sent around. I'm like, are you stupid? What the hell were you thinking? Savings are dwindling. One day I wake up, there's, you know, three digit dollar amount in the bank. I'm still with my, with my ex at this point. You know, my son is three digits. Yeah, yeah, three digits. My son is two and a half or so. My, my stepdaughter's, she was 11. At 12, I'm like, I gotta make some shit happen. And right around then I, here's the problem, right? When you're working the work that I did for the organization, you only kind of get to learn shit at a very superficial level. Like, you know, whether it's the EW side or whether it's like the cyber shit or whether it's something else, right? Cqc, whatever. You never get to go into anything at the level of specialization of like a dude that just focuses on that. You don't get to do cqc, like a team guy. You don't get to do ew, like a full time tacky W guy. You don't get to do cyber as a full time cyber dude. So you dabble in this and you kind of synthesize it all and you, you go do the, the mission, but you're handicapped because you transition out to the civilian world and it's like, all right, well, let me try and get a job in cybersecurity security.

[A]

I didn't think about that.

[B]

Well, I kind of know how this works. I know. You know, if you go tell me you're a jack of all trades, I can be told where to go plug the USB drive in, but I don't know what the that USB drive is doing when I do that. I don't know how all that works. Like what machines are clicking and worrying, like when, when things begin operating. And so I had to do a couple of things very quickly. Number one, I Had to just deep dive into something. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna deep dive into the cyber because I can. I can finally, like, fully transition into the civilian world. If I stayed in, like, EW and all that, I would still be in the orbits of, you know, the old organizations. I just wanted to make a clean break. I'm like, if I'm out, I'm out. So I dove deep into the cyber shit and data analytics, and I basically put myself through a civilian hell week, basically. And for a week straight, I would watch Harvard lectures on data analytics and cybersecurity and all this other shit on 3x speed and just like osmosis size, all the things that these people were saying, all these professors, you know, doing, giving their lectures. And I, I did that for a week straight.

[C]

And so you're, you're legitimately just trying

[A]

to download as much information as fast as possible one week so that.

[B]

So I can start interviewing for.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

For. For jobs.

[C]

Are you understanding all the lectures?

[B]

No, but. But I'm, I'm picking. I'm picking things up here and there. You know, I, I'm not understanding the major. Like, I'm not deep diving into any of the concepts, right, But I'm learning the language and I'm learning the concepts and I'm learning, like, the breadth of things. Right around that time, there was a Time article or, or like a fucking Business Insider article that came out about this company called Endgame. And it was run by a guy named Nate Fick, who had been a Marine officer, Marine Force recon officer. And he, like, he wrote a book and they made like a fucking HBO show about his platoon, but he had gotten out a few years previously and he had become the CEO of this company. I was like, that sounds like a cool fucking company to work for. And the CEO seems pretty legit. And what they did was they created essentially exotic cyber warfare capabilities for the US Government and for commercial customers. They hadn't quite figured out the commercial customer angle yet, but US Government knew exactly what they wanted from them. And it was a bunch of former intel community guys, DOD guys, that focused fully on cyber. I was like, here's a place that I can go. I can learn from these dudes. I can figure out how all this works, and then I can use that as a launching pad to. To move forward. Problem was, they didn't have any job openings except for a data science position. And I was like, I don't know what the. Is data science. And so I started looking into it. And I come to realize, okay, well, a lot of it is around the type of shit that I had to do before rolling out on an op, right? You're looking at law, you're looking at data, you're crunching numbers, you're taking your analyses, and then you are translating them into something that has to happen in the real world, right? In the old jobs case, it was translate that data into how the fuck you're going to plan your surveillance operation or whatever. So I put together this, like, PowerPoint deck. I applied. I applied to the role and I put together this PowerPoint deck that they wanted for this presentation. And I didn't know, dude, the title of the PowerPoint deck was because I was trying to translate from my military career. It was like Fugitive Recovery utilizing data analytics. And it was all about how you can use data that you would get from various sensors and basically sift through it using machine learning algorithms. I was just saying shit that I had seen in these goddamn lectures, right? How you can use machine learning in order to drill down on where this fucking fugitive was at any given moment and execute a recovery. Trying to use language that civilians would understand. So I go, my first interview is with this data scientist guy. And he's a fucking smart dude, PhD from Ivy League school, all this shit, AI machine learning expert. And he's like, he draws a thing on the board. He's like, what is a type of graph that you can't get caught in a loop in? And I was like, bro, what the are you talking about? I have no idea. But I tried making some up, and I know the answer now. It's a directed acyclic graph. But at the time, I was like, I have no idea what this dude's talking about. I'm gonna fail this process and I'm not gonna make it. I guess they saw something in me. I don't know what it was like, just like, the earnestness with which I answered. They could probably tell I did some preparatory work or whatever, but they kept moving me on in the process. And then I get to the panel presentation and, you know, I start walking through it. They have no idea what the I'm talking about, like, fugitive recovery, the is, dude. This is a cyber company. There was one guy that walks in and he's my friend to this day. I'm trying to get him to join the company. Actually, he came from your former organization and he's like sitting in the back and he's like looking at his. He's like, yeah, I know what this dude's talking about. He's like, where'd you say you came from? I tell him the squadron. He's like, stand by. He like walks outside, he makes a phone call to one of the dudes at the squadron and he's like, you know this guy Nick, you know that's the first thing any of us do, right? Call people and be like, is this guy full of or what? And the other guy on the other end of the line is like, yo, whatever happened to that dude? Like, is he still active duty? Get him the back here if he is. And this guy, new guy sucks. He's like, that guy was awesome, man. And my friend John is like, you, I'm taking him. So he, so he, he hired me after that. And that led to. I worked at Endgame for a while.

[A]

Holy shit, man.

[B]

I learned a lot about how the civilian world thinks about cyber warfare capabilities and cyber defense because we're building these exotic capabilities for the US government, but at the same time we're trying to figure out how to translate that expertise into some kind of defensive capability for the private sector. Right? And so when I joined the company, we were going through this phase where all right, we can do all this cool offensive shit now, how do we use that to protect companies and private sector entities? So I just got, I was able to be immersed in all of it and it was a really good, it was a really good springboard for me. So I would do shit, like I would put out posts on social media, media about my, my thoughts on cyber security and like that just cringe worthy stuff. Looking back on it at this point. And one of the things I wanted to do was eventually start my own company. I had no idea how to do any of that, right. I had zero concept. But I would go to these like meetups, like these veteran meetups, you know, these small, here's how to start your small business or whatever. I was like, all right, I'll go to this one. And it was up in New York, took the family, drove up to New York and it was at the Goldman Sachs building. And I was like, oh, it's pretty fucking cool. You know, One World Trade is across the street. And I go to the event and I'm supposed to be paired up with this like mentor who's supposed to like teach me about the world of, you know, Silicon Valley and, and tech and all this. Well, come to find out, the dude I had been paired up with like got house the night before and like woke up hungover and didn't show up. And so I was. I'm sitting at this table, I'm like, waiting for this dude to show up. No one shows up. And this guy from Palantir walks by and he's like, hey, man, did your guy not show up or like, what's going on? And I'm like, yeah, I don't. I don't know what happened. Like, he didn't. He didn't show up. He's like, I think I know what happened. He's. He's a fellow Palantir guy. I'm like. And he's like, all right, just come, come talk to me. And he's like, hey, what. What do you got going on? What's your background? And I'm telling him. I was like, okay. And you're endgame? Yep. He's like, okay, interesting. Well, you know, starting your own business, like, why don't you just come over to us at Palantir? I'm like, like, I don't know much about you guys. I don't. I don't really know what you do. So I started looking into him. I was like, that place looks legit, dude. I. I would love to work there. And, you know, at the time, it was very secretive. It was like any article about Palantir was like, CIA backed company secretive, CIA backed data analytics company does, blah, blah, blah. I was like, CIA backed. I'm in. Let's go. So it turns out that they needed a dude with that was just like, that could just speak, just be put in front of customers and could speak to some of the tech shit, but also be good at speaking to customers that believed in the mission. And so this guy put me through the process. But here's the problem. I had already applied to Palantir a couple of times before. Like, before I knew a lot about them. And that's part of the reason why I was hesitant. I was like, I don't know. I've already, like, applied to you guys a couple times before. And the hiring process there at the time, this was 2016 was fucking insane. Like, there were some people that went through 11, 12 rounds of interviews with holy volunteer engineers. Like, the bar for hiring was so fucking high. And I know you're gonna have Sean here in a bit and he can tell you more about that. One thing I really respect about SHAM and a lot of the early Palantir people was that somehow they not only built this culture of high performance at all times, but they sustained it over the course. Course of X many years, you know, and that's work like that is institution building. And that's the culture that they had built at the time. That culture didn't necessarily have a place for Nick Seether Ramen, former task force dude that is a jack of all trades, doesn't really know a lot about any single one, didn't come from an Ivy League school and is trying to get a job at this place, right? Like, on paper, there's no way I'm getting a first round recruiter. So what this guy did was he's like, all right, there's a, there's a kind of internal process we got, and if we think someone can truly hack it here, but they don't really come from this traditional background that we look for, we're going to put them straight in front of Alex Carpenter Palantir CEO. Oh, you're gonna have five minutes with Carp, and if he likes you in those five minutes, then you'll probably get the job. And if he thinks you're a piece of, then he'll walk you out of the building or he'll have his assistant walk you out of the building. I got nothing to lose, right? I'm like, well, I've already applied to this place a couple of times. Like, yeah, I'll go, I'll go talk to Carp. So I go to their Washington D.C. office and they take me up there, they take me to Karp's office. Dude is wearing a like blue Russian tracksuit, bare feet, walking around the office just like. He's. He's the fucking man around there, right? And he comes in, he like kicks his feet up. He's like, why the fuck do you want to work here? I was like. I looked him dead in me. I, I didn't know he was going to ask me this, so I didn't really have a, A canned answer. I look him dead in the eye and I was like, same reason I want to work at SpaceX one day, because I want to have an impact on our society and our country in the same way that I did when I was active duty. As close as I can get anyways. And he squints at me and he's like, okay. And then he calls the assistant over and he's like, get this guy a fucking job offer.

[A]

Are you shitting me?

[B]

Yeah, that was it.

[A]

What?

[B]

That was it. It lasted like two minutes and get the fuck out. No, I'm not joking, dude. Like, that was it.

[A]

And he didn't know shit about you.

[B]

He didn't know shit about me. And so he's like, get this guy a job offer. And so she, like, scuffles out and goes to, like, you know, coordinate all that. And he's like, all right, I'll. I'll walk you out. He's like, so, what do you want to do here? I'm like, dude, you just said, like, get this guy a job offer. Like, does that mean you don't. How are you gonna give me a job offer and not know what I'm gonna do here? He's. And I didn't realize at the time, but, like, this is the kind of shit that happens, right? Like, there's no structured process for how to have an interaction with Alex Carp, right? There's no, like, here's the interview flow and here are the data points he'll want before you get an offer. And, like, here's what has to be nailed down. And it's like, it's all based on human to human vibes. And whatever vibe I was putting out in that two minutes I had with him, he's like, okay, you. You're. You're going to fit in here. I don't know how he knew, but he knew. So he walked me out, got the offer. Like, 30 minutes later, like, some recruiter calls me, I went and had a burger in Georgetown, and the recruiter calls me while I'm trying to eat this burger. So I walked out and I'm like, I'm like, trying to negotiate with this guy. I don't know how to negotiate salaries. I got burger in my mouth. I'm like, stock options. I don't really know what that means. Okay, well, I guess I'll go with like, I didn't know that you could push back with any of this, right? I'm like, now if someone were to come to me and give me, like, this here. Here's your salary options, and here's your stock option options. I'd be like, that's great. Double everything, and. And then we can have a conversation. But back then, I didn't know. I was like, cool, I guess I'll go with option two. You know, grateful for the opportunity. He's like, cool, we'll be in touch. And that's how I ended up at Palantir.

[A]

That's fucking crazy, dude.

[B]

Just a lot of times I'm just like, I have no business in any of these places. I had no business at nsw, right? I had no business at Palantir. So this pattern in my life has basically been like, find a way into rooms that you have no business in. Earn your place. In the room and then figure out the next fucking room. Paladier was cool. It was a. I'd never been exposed to a tech company before and everyone was just so fucking smart. Everyone was just world class at what they did. And the culture there, there's sort of two. There's like different departments at Palantir. There's the core product team, there are the teams that sort of maintain the long term, like customer deployments. And so, you know, a bank might have signed some five year agreement with Palantir and these guys go and like sustain that account over the course of five years. And it's got engineers on it, it's got like business development people on it and so on. Then there's the pilot teams. And that's what I fucking wanted to do. Because the job of the pilot teams was basically, hey, Carp, or whoever the fuck at the very senior levels of the company have gotten this Fortune 500 organization to agree to start some Palantir pilot. Right? We're going to do it for free. Here's what, here's what's going to happen. You're going to pick some guys, you're going to parachute in, metaphorically, and you're going to do anything and everything you need to do in order to convince that customer to convert that pilot to a long term Palantir contract. And for me, that was the greatest fucking challenge anyone could have put in front of me at the time. Because it felt exactly like being back at the old organization. Like, here's an ambiguous high impact tasking. Go get some fucking dudes and make it happen. Right? And no one's gonna tell you what to do. Send us some fucking sit reps. Perfect. This I know how to do.

[A]

It's what every fucking business is looking for.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And I was like, I can't believe someone is giving me this latitude.

[A]

At least that's what I'm looking for.

[B]

Yeah, I hope you find it. There's, you know, one thing, a bunch of them. Yeah, yeah, one thing. One thing I've learned is I'm always looking for more. Yeah, yeah. Something has happened to the work ethic, like across the American workforce in the, in the past few years. I don't know what the it is, man. Maybe it's since COVID but like there's just like a downward trend and like the desire to want to work hard and contribute to something and be a part of.

[A]

I don't know if that's true.

[B]

You don't think so?

[A]

I don't know. I mean, I'M like you. I spent the majority of my adult life and in special ops and intelligence agencies, and those are hard chargers. The majority of them.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, and everybody's the best at what the. They do.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then I got out and tried some and I noticed it immediately.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

These people don't want to be here more than they don't want to be here past 5pm yeah. Most of them are out before 5. Most of them don't want to come in. You know, and it's just. And I just noticed it right off the bat.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I mean, that's not how we operate here. But that's. I think that's just. You're used to working for people that are always pushing the bar higher.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know what I mean? And all of your peers are pushing the bar higher and it becomes fucking competitive and everybody's a perfectionist and everybody takes their job seriously. And then you get out and you're with normal performers, average people, below average people. And, you know, I think a lot of them probably live happier lives than you or I. Yeah.

[B]

I mean, but that's something to be said.

[A]

They're not the ones that are out there complaining about not having enough time with their kids and. Yeah. Shit like that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Sitting there fudgeing, eating potato chips, watching the super bowl on their. Like, I just. I'm not that person.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, you obviously aren't either. Nobody that's. Nobody that builds something like what you're building or what I'm building or any of that. Like, it's just. It's not in the fucking DNA. But then you get exposed.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

To the average DNA and the below average DMA and people with no drive and. And then, hey, they got their place in society. But I don't belong in that.

[B]

Yeah, you do. I. Man. And one reason that we have, you know, the things that I learned at Palantir hiring bar, the just every day, bring your A game to work. I've tried to establish that here with my co founders at Wraith Watch, and I think we've done a pretty good job. We got a stellar crew of just stone cold hitters. I can put any tasking in front of them and they will just deliver without complaint.

[A]

Any.

[B]

Any tasking. But all of that to say it was. It was a unique opportunity for me to apply like, if not the engineering skill set because I didn't have it at the time that I learned over the years just the. Whatever the it is. Right. Just the get after it mode and. And we did. But I'm never satisfied, right? So, like, I'm, I'm always. I'm like, how does that work? All right, you guys are deploying this like, data pipeline. Like, okay, how's the data pipeline work? How does this shit go from one place to another? Why does it, why does it work that way? What's the big fucking deal? Oh, well, the big deal is when there's petabytes of data, it takes time to sift through all of it. And you can't just have someone sit down in front of all of it and do a search and then shit just magically crops up. Like, there's a lot of instrumentation and pre processing and algorithms and everything that's involved. So I started picking up all of it, I started learning all of it. I tried building some of it it on my own. So I, I tried contributing to, to what the engineers on my team were doing. And then over time, the scope of responsibility has just crept upward and upward, right? So I started out with this commercial account in. It's a. It's a department store that. That's like a household name. And that was my first account. I was like, well, I've gone from tier, tier one reconnaissance dude to this department store that I'm responsible for. Okay, that's cool. But I did my best, you know, And I think you, you just do that enough times and you, you get put. More shit gets put on your plate. And eventually I found myself working like, more critical and more critical accounts. And Palantir eventually moved me to Sydney, Australia, to handle their APAC region and some of the accounts that we had there. So move. The family packed them up to, to go to Australia. It was awesome. And it was an opportunity for me to just apply, like, basic leadership, dude, basic leadership, like, to these kids. Like, these kids straight out of Stanford, like, would come on board my team and they would just look at me like, all right, what do we do, boss? And then I had to. I had to figure it the fuck out. It was interesting for me because it's not like I was a fucking officer in the military, right? I didn't go to leadership. I didn't go to officer school. I didn't go to leadership training or anything, especially in the jobs that I was working. You're working in very small, tight teams. And there was not a lot of opportunity for me to like, how do

[A]

you deal with that, man? I'm genuinely curious because I don't either. I don't have. I have zero former leadership training and I'm trying to run a company and, you know, in the. The. I'm not good at getting in the weeds and fucking every little fucking thing they need to do.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I am looking for exactly what you just described. Somebody that can. This is what I want built. This is the vision. I'm gonna give you everything you fucking need to do it. But you have to figure out how to do it.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And then they do it and they build a fucking mini empire under what we're trying to do. Or they don't, and they don't last.

[B]

It was a process. I didn't know how to get it right from. From day one. But what I think I'm pretty good at doing is finding myself in ambiguous situations and then relying on initiative, I guess, to figure it the out. And one way I. I would figure it the out is. I mean, dude, like, watching Jocko watching was very helpful. Like in the early days, reading Extreme Ownership, like, you know, I was talking about it with Jeremy. Why did Jocko resonate with so many civilians? There's been hundreds of fucking military dudes that have come out of the military and talked about leadership lessons and so on. But the way that he expressed the ideas in his book, I think were done in a way where it just, like, it clicked. It was like, okay, this is something I can tangibly apply to my job tomorrow when I go into the office, right. I can take ownership for stuff. I can like, instead of antagonizing people and trying to build fiefdoms, I can, like, think about the team first. Now, there are limits to this because the, the game theoretic structure of a civilian company can disincentivize. If you go too overboard to the other side of the extreme ownership spectrum, then you're gonna get fucked. So it's a fine balance of figuring out, okay, where and how to apply those skills. And you can do it. You can apply these tactical tidbits. And I think that's why he landed so well with. With so many people. And that helped me out a lot in. Back in the day. And honestly, a lot of it was, I've got 15 engineers looking at me for guidance on what to do. And I, I was like. When I was in and I looked at leadership and I wanted to know what to do from them. Like, what did I expect from them? I just kind of inverted it on its face. And I tried to be the leader that I always want. Wanted to work for in the military. Now did I get it right all the time? No way. I it up all the time. But it's a process. It's a constantly evolving process. Definitely being surrounded by really smart, motivated, driven people forces you to like amp up your own game. And it's like you're, you're living in a, in a crystal, in a, in a fishbowl basically. And it's like, how do you want to act so that these people are not just inspired by you? That's, that's like kind of self serving but like, are you making these lives, Are you making these people's lives better through the way that you're behaving and acting? So that was like one heuristic I used. I wish I had a simple answer for you, man. I don't.

[A]

You're saying all the right things. This is a lot of the I think about. Yeah, I think, I think, you know, I think it's important that you inspire your people. You're the, you're the leader of the pack. I don't think that sounds cliche at all. They have to be inspired to fucking work for you, otherwise it's going to be shit work if they're not bought in on the mission. What the fuck are you doing here? Get out. Yeah, that's the nine to fiver. Yeah, that's the, the let's not move the bar up person.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

You know, I feel like you have to, you empower your people. You look for the people that have the drive that you have and you empower them. You give them everything they fucking need to succeed. But if they don't take the ball and run with it.

[B]

Yeah, get the fuck out. Yeah.

[A]

And some people haven't, some people don't. Yeah, most don't.

[B]

Most don't. This, this is true. You know, a lot of people, we experience this all this time. All the time. Because, you know, people have this idea of what a startup is. It's been sort of made into this legend. You know, this, the tech startup. Right. So it's a thing. They've made fucking movies about it. What it really comes down to is just grinding it out day in and day out, 24 hours a day, seven days a week with no end in sight. Right. And you just fucking, you're making shit happen all the time. And people think they want that. And we'll interview candidates and they're like, well, you know, I'm not really cool with like working weekends. Cool, man, I understand. Go work at a big company

[A]

because

[B]

a startup is going to demand different things from you. It's like, it's like going to task force and being like, yeah, well, don't page me on like Fridays because I'm not into that. Okay, well, it's not what the organization needs. Now. One thing, one thing I had always wanted since I was a kid was to like, be involved with like something space exploration related. And, you know, after enough reps at Palantir on the pilot teams, I had just gotten the, the routine down. You know, it's like, okay, parachute into this organization bank, you know, big Fortune 500 pharmaceutical, whatever it was, make friends with everybody. You're basically doing like, you know, recce on the ground and just making shit happen. I had gotten the reps down and I was like, okay, I can go do. And I learned enough about the ins and outs of all the engineering that was going down at these places. And, you know, we had built out entire cyber defense programs using Palantir for a lot of our customers, including entire countries. Like, I was the team lead for a cyber defense program that we built out for an entire country in one particular region of the world. And they were built on the Palantir platform. So by this point I had developed a good sense of what it takes to build a solid cyber defense and cyber defense engineering function. So I was like, all right, I can go do this and not just be flitting around the world doing it for Palantir's customers, which I love doing. A great company, great organization, but I wanted to apply that to defending something tangible. And you know, when I was a kid and I was going through all the personal shit at home, I would bury myself in like Star Trek books. And also I have some fond memories of watching Star Trek with my dad. Like, you know, when, when things were still stable and the shit hadn't blown up and gone nuclear in the household. Like, I've good memories of that. And when I was a kid, I, I wanted to grow up and like, be the dude that invented warp drive life, you know, you know, the, the engine that they have in Star Trek that lets them, you know, travel around the stars. You know, obviously that first of all, it's not physically feasible. Second of all, it's like that's not really where my life trajectory took me into advanced physics research. But I was able to build out a pretty baller cyber defense program. And I came across a job posting at SpaceX. And I had my eye on that fucking place for a long time. And I saw an opening for a lead position to run their cyber security operations team. Send my resume in. And the recruiter reached out to me like 15 minutes later.

[A]

Are you serious?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, dude. This. I mean, I say this shit out loud and I don't know, it's like I'm making it up. Actually, I was just talking to that recruiter the other day because I was trying to get him to come to wraithwatch and recruit for us, but he's like, nah, dude, I'm. I'm happy. I'm like, you know why I remember you? Because I hit submit and you called me like 15 minutes later. I was like. I was overseas at one of the Palantir customer sites. Interestingly, during one of the driving courses that I went to with Task, you remember Griffin Group down in Florida? You never sent any guys down there, but they would do this like driving course and you do all the shit. Like you do the pit maneuvers and all that. They do the rollovers and you do the break contact after the rollovers and all that. And in 2010, I remember going down to a Griffin Group course in Florida and it was a couple of miles. Their, their, their racetrack that they were doing all this on was a few miles away from Cape Canaveral. And so we had just gone through like one evolution of like pitting everybody. And all the cars were up and we pull them all over to the side. There's like oil leaking around everywhere. And we're getting out, we're doing a debrief and then we hear a rocket launching behind us. And we're like, that's cool. Like, didn't have that on the schedule. So we turn around and we look at the rocket and it's coming up off the deck from Canaveral, which is just over the horizon a bit. And, and it was like no rocket I had ever seen before. It was long, spindly, it was completely white, it looked kind of futuristic. And I was like, that's a very strange looking rocket. I've never seen anything like that before. I was telling that story to my girlfriend many years later and she was like, that was the fucking, you know, CRS1 mission from SpaceX to the International Space Station. That was the first mission that we had launched to take supplies to the International Space Station for the first time. And she's like, what are the chances that you got to see that while you're in this random ass driving course in Florida? Just happens, dude. I don't know. So SpaceX was, was amazing. It is the fucking. You know, Elon used to say it is the special forces of tech companies. And I always thought that was dumb. Like Having come out of the community, I was like, you don't know what that means. But then I got there and I'm like, yeah, I get it. You know, he's trying to, he's trying to rally everyone and inspire people and get them to understand that they're working at a company like no other. And everyone was just locked the in to the company mission. If you, you ever been to the headquarters over there. So when you walk into the headquarters and you go to the chow hall upstairs, they have one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen in my life painted as a mural on the wall of the chow hall. And it is a sequence of images displaying Mars through various phases of terraforming. So you see Mars as it exists today as a completely dead red planet. And then you see it as like with some green and some water, and then you see it with more green and more water. And then you see it as this lush, beautiful Jurassic park looking planet at the end. So there's like four stages to that mural and you walk past that fucking thing every day to get food and you're like, there is no question what we're trying to do here. We're trying to make this happen for humanity on time scales that we're not wired to think about as humans. Right? It's going to take us hundreds of years to have that vision come to fruition. But they somehow managed to encapsulate that into this mural that they painted on the wall. And when you would walk by it, there was no question about what the, you were doing at on any given day. It was support that that's why you're here, that's why you gave up everything else that you were, that you were doing and you decided to sign up for this, for this grind at SpaceX. And it was a grind. But you walk in there, you look at the factory floor, there's one section of the chow hall that's over overlooking Mission Control and it's overlooking the factory. And you remember that feeling that I told you about the, the NSW compound and there's just like going on, you know, you feel like you're part of a, a big machine, a big impactful machine. It feels like that at SpaceX too. Just rockets being like moved around from one side of the factory to another, engines being manufactured. Over in one corner over there, there's footage from some capsule that's in orbit right now being piped into Mission Control. It was just, you're in the center of the world as it pertains to human spaceflight. And at the time we were getting ready to send humans up on the first crew Dragon spacecraft because before then it had all been cargo. So we had crew rated the Dragon spacecraft and the whole company was getting jocked up to send. We called them Doug and Bob. I forget their last names but they were these two NASA astronauts and their faces were plastered everywhere. In the sense of everything you guys do is to support these two gentlemen who have families, kids, to get to the space station safely. Any fuck up is going to fuck them up and it's going to fuck their families up. So get it right, get everything you're doing to every layer of attention and level of detail right all the time. Cool. High performance environment. This I can deal with. And my job, my team's job at the time was to basically be on the front lines of the cyber defense function. At the time we had stolen a bunch of market share. Stolen, we had captured a bunch of market share from the Russians, right? So Russia used to make a big deal about, you know, one of the, like the head of the Russian space agency was like, if you didn't have us, you're not getting into space unless you have a big ass trampoline or some shit. And then I think Elon was like, well we're about to make a big ass trampoline, so stand the fuck by. So the Russians were none too happy that a private company like SpaceX was about to reinvigorate human spaceflight on behalf of the United States of America. Finally there was going to be a rocket carrying the fucking stars and stripes, carrying humans to the space station, which hadn't been the case since the space shuttle got retired in 2011, right? We had, we had nothing to back us up. We had, all of the NASA astronauts had to ride share off of the, the Russians, which is like a really interesting thing. You know you can be these geopolitical enemies and some small portion of your two countries, governments can work together to get people up into space and then get back. Now there's obviously a ton of politics around it, but like as far as like the engineers on, on each side anyway.

[A]

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

[B]

Now the team I inherited when I, when I landed there, it was this like ragtag group of just randos. There were like two guys that were on the security analysis side and they were just like drowning in like alerts every single day from like people trying to hack into the network. And they would work like just the two of them 24 hours a day. One would work a 12 hour shift, the other one would work 12 hours, other one comes back for 12 hours. Just two guys. Over and over again for years it was, it was that way. Then there were a couple of other guys on the engineering side that were building a lot of the kind of strategic controls around everything. And then there was my girlfriend Grace, who was running the insider threat program at the time. So she was responsible for the technical insider threat and counter espionage program over there. And the idea was, so all of them were kind of working independently. So like these guys were working over here doing all the alert analysis and these guys were like doing all the engineering. And she was kind of lone wolf, you know, doing the insider threat counter espionage piece. And they were lacking in like a vision for like what this team was supposed to be. And I was like, okay, I, I can do this. I can come in here and like provide some leadership. So like, morale was low too because like three days into my tenure there, I just moved from Australia back to Southern California to work at this place. And three days into my tenure they call in all hands and like 1500 people or some got laid off for whatever reason. I'm like, what the fuck is going on here, dude? Like, I just moved here from the other side of the world. I could have easily stayed in Australia and just like hung out, you know. And so morale was, morale was in the shitter. And generally like the cyber defense function, there was this kind of like offbeat, off the wall, like team that no one really paid attention to. So I came in there, I was like, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna fuse all these capabilities into a cohesive unit and we're gonna apply what you guys are doing to this counter espionage shit over here. We're gonna walk over to that physical security team that's on the other side of the office here, and we're gonna train them up on some of the shit that we're doing and seeing on this side. Because at the end of the day, those guys are on the front lines of shit. Because if some Russian dude walks in and like is waving a USB stick around, well, who's gonna be the first line of defense? It's like I got six people on my team. It's gonna be the 50 security guards that are floating around the various areas of SpaceX. So what I tried to do was to fuse and propagate it, just information about how this team worked, what it did, and what the goals were in order to ramp this fucking Company up and get it ready for this human space flight. And we were subject to attack all the time, dude. Like, you know, name your fucking adversary country. And they were after us, like, all the fucking time. And not just digitally over the network. Like, they would send dudes, like, on site, and we would get tippers from our federal partners all the time. Actually, like a week into my tenure there, I get a call from my boss. He's like, hey, you know, we got. We got a tip that there might be some North Korean, like, implant on one of our devices. I was like, I'm on my way home. It's like 6 o' clock in the evening. U turn roll back into the office, and then we just start cranking through, like, we start pulling, like, every laptop from the building that we can get our hands on and, like, running forensics on it to try and figure out, like, all right, how can we find this thing? Amongst many other actions that we took for that one. But we would establish relationships with our federal partners who weren't used to really working with the cyber security team. And they would send us tippers. We'd have all kinds of shit go down. You know, Russians would, like, be jumping the fences and shit, trying to, like, break into the building, plug in malware, plug in USBs.

[A]

Holy shit.

[B]

Convincing employees to. To take them around to various places in the building. One really cool thing was as. As we started turning the flywheel a bit more again, I. I don't mean to say, like, I was the one responsible for all this shit, but I did come in there and I kind of looked at the lay of the land and I was like, all right, these people need, like, more of a why the. Like, why and what. Like, what is it that we're doing here and why are we doing it? And I think I was able to energize their activities with. With those things. And as the team started to get a little bit more prominent and we started to get FaceTime with more of the employees, it started paying off. It started paying off because you would have SpaceX employees that were sitting around and they would just start reporting stuff to us proactively. Like, yo, this dude was, like, asking me some weird questions at the parking garage across the street. Like, here's what he looked like. All this shit. And we pass that to the physical security team. One time, a dude with a Slavic accent and a very Slavic look about him got into the building and approaches an engineer at the chow hall, and he's like, hey, man, I'm looking for the printer room. And this engineer is like, how do you not know where the printer room is? Like, everyone knows where that shit is. He's like. And then this dude starts getting nervous. He's like, well, I just need to like, you know, plug this thing into the printer. And this guy who, like, we had managed to train as part of our, like, we, we started this outreach program and we're trying to train the company, like, all right, here's how the adversary is going to try and come get us, right? So this dude had sat through that training and he was like, oh, cool, man. Yeah, I'll walk you over to the printer room. And he like, he walks him straight out the glass door and then locks the fucking door behind him and then calls security. And. And that fucking dude got taken away. And then another. And then the security guards, we train them up and we kind of made them feel important, right? Because these are contract security guards and they're all jocked up and shit. Like, you know, SpaceX did a good job of, you know, making it clear, like, don't with these dudes. Because it's in the middle of Hawthorne, California. It's like kind of shit area of la. And we told the security guards, all right, look, here's how these people operate, here's what they'll try and do, and here's why they'll try and do it. And those guys felt jacked up, dude. They were like, this is awesome. Like, no one's tried to like involve us in any of this shit. Like, we just stand guard out here, you know. And so then one time the guards spot a vehicle and there's like a dude like holding a fucking antenna out of the vehicle. And the guards are like, hey, this vehicle drove by, some dude was like holding what looked like an antenna out of it. I was like, perfect, hey, let's get on the network and figure out is there any weird going on on the network. Let's figure out what happened to that vehicle, where it went. So, you know, it started paying off. Because now it wasn't just my six guys right now. I had the whole organization, whole organization that was serving as a force multiplier for me. Yeah. So that was interesting. And on the counter espionage side, we got so good at some of the like Minority Report type shit that we were doing, that one thing we came to realize was the following. People's behavior manifests in what they're doing on the fucking keyboard, even if they're at work. Like, behavior manifests in bits is the phrase that we came up with. So a lot of time this like old school counter espionage, like counterintelligence, tradecraft, you know, you talk to some old school counterintel guy, what's he going to tell you? It's like, look for the expensive car in the parking lot. It's like, dude, this is a tech company and our share price is X. Everyone has a fucking expensive car, okay? That shit is just not going to work around here. So we need to think outside the box. It's fucking 2019. How are these people going to try and do their shit? And so we would discover, I mean, through the course of lots of trial and error.

[A]

Prostitution.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, well, that too, through the course of trial and error, that if you start piecing together indicators from different sources that you could predict with a very high level of accuracy that some dude was going to be up to some shit in some X period of, of time. So like, I'll give you an example. Let's say a dude all of a sudden starts buying extra swag from the company swag store and around the same time starts extra double checking his stock options in the stock option system.

[A]

Okay?

[B]

Those two indicators right there are like, all right, this dude's getting ready to, he's, he's like double checking his, his shares, he's getting souvenirs, he's like getting ready to pop smoke, right? So that's a very small example of indicators that we were able to piece together and we had many more of them where we could be able to predict with a high level of accuracy what was going on. Now this speaks to your question from your Patreon audience member from earlier, right? What is the, what's the line? And that was always on the forefront of our minds, right? At no point did we want to go all the way to the end of the spectrum where we were dropping like keyloggers on everyone's machines, but at the same time, the same tools that we had to detect the Russian hackers and the Chinese hackers and all that, with just a little bit of repurposing and looking at the data through a different lens would surface this kind of shit internally. And, and so we were able to, we were able to stand that up pretty, pretty successfully. And then all of those lessons of course, translated to Andrell about 3/4 of my way through.

[A]

Why did you leave SpaceX?

[B]

Andrel was well known to me even when I was at Palantir. So Brian Schimf, the CEO of Anduril, he was a very renowned engineer at Palantir. He actually did my onboarding at Palantv, like, came in and gave us a big talk on a lot of the engineering subsystems. And when he left to start Anduril, there was like, whispers floating around like, yo, Brian. Left to start this thing. Like, must be legit, dude. But no one knew what they were doing, right? So then I got an email from an Android recruiter and they're like, hey, we got your name from the Palantir bro network. We want you to come be our first cyber security engineer. I was like, yeah, let's go. So I didn't want to leave SpaceX, but by this point, we've talked about this a lot, right? You hit the ceiling, you get into a routine. It's like you make the machine turn and then you start, like, let's try to figure out what's next, right? Where can I have more of an impact? So. And roll. Knowing that they were working on, well, after I went and met him on site, knowing what the vision was going to be that they were going to get involved with, you know, producing the next generation of advanced weapon systems, I was like, okay, this is an opportunity for me to take all the lessons I've learned over the years, both on the people side, on the leadership side, on the technical side, and then bring it all home into this kind of one final act before I start my own company, right? So Andrew at the time was 100 people. Everyone knew each other. We would, like, order pizza and, like, sit around and, and over lunch. Now take that initial list of 100 people and add that list to the company roster every single month for 48 months straight. And holy. That's how scaled out. That's how. That's how fast we scaled.

[A]

Wow. Wow.

[B]

So to build a cyber defense program in that landscape was one of the most challenging, you know, problems that I had to endure in my career. One thing I don't like doing is I don't like taking the easy way out and saying, all right, I'm just going to come in and hire a bunch of dudes, give me budget, give me headcount. I feel like you have to earn that first. And I got in there and I wanted to earn the headcount, right? So I started doing all the fucking engineering myself. I started, like, deploying out the cyber defense controls and, like, working with the customer. At the time, our main customer, I think, was cbp. So we were deploying these autonomous surveillance towers to the southern border. This was around, like, Trump. Trump won towards the tail end of Trump one and so he wanted this virtual border wall essentially down there. And the Anduril surveillance towers were a core component of that. And several hundred of them were deployed for CBP down to the southern border. And one of the threats that we were trying to defend against was, okay, what if some criminal element walked up to one of these fucking things and was able to hack into it or shut it down in some way? You know, there's always a thing, well, why don't they just put a fucking bullet through it, right? Well, maybe they want to be a bit more stealthy than that, depending on their objectives. Okay, so how do we harden these things? How do we track who has the ability to remote access into them? Like which engineers at the company have access to remote into them? How we, how do we audit what those engineers are doing? Because if one of them gets flipped by one of these transnational criminal organizations, that could be a problem. And so we're thinking and coming up with all this shit. And most importantly, we're translating this to the customer. So we're sitting with the CBP people and we're saying, here's how we're thinking about this threat model, here's how we're thinking about defending it. And they fucking loved us, dude. But I don't think a vendor had ever sat with them and tried to collaborate in that way with them. And I knew that the future held more exotic shit, right? I knew we were going to get into the drone business. I knew we were going to get into, you know, probably one day we're going to make fixed wing aircraft. And one thing I wanted to get right very early was I wanted to tie together all of the functions that I was responsible for at SpaceX into one roof to include the weapon system security angle of it. So let's say you have a submarine that you're building as a company and the adversary gets their hands on the submarine, they're gonna do some to it, right? They're gonna try capturing it, reverse engineering it, breaking in, hacking it, seeing how it works. Is there data on it that's useful for their operations? So a large part of it is, all right, how do we secure that thing from the Chinese dude on the Chinese SIGINT boat that's gonna scoop this submarine up from the water and then plug into its debug port, right? Which they will do, but you can't look at that in isolation because there's a whole litany of happening to the left of that long before that submarine gets in the water, long before that fighter aircraft gets in the air long before that drone launches downrange that counter UAS system. Well, that stuff talks to something, right? There's communication backhauls coming off those weapon systems, there's communication termination points that sit on servers somewhere. There's engineers that have access to those servers, there's ground control stations. So it becomes this mesh network of shit that becomes. You basically encounter this combinatorial explosion of just complexity essentially for every new system you add to that graph, right? So we had to get ahead of all of that very quickly. And, and it was challenging because the company's growing by 100 people every four weeks like whole is insane. So every decision that you kick the can on, you're going to pay for it. When the company is plus 500 people, plus a thousand people, that's a thousand times the complexity that you're going to have to contend with. So it's not a function of, hey, can I do all this stuff now? It's what are the things I can't get to right now that I can be okay paying for later? When the complexity ramps up, asymptotically goes vertical. These were the trade offs that, that I encountered in the early days. So I, I brought, I brought grace over from SpaceX. We hadn't started dating yet. I brought over a couple other dudes I knew from SpaceX. We built out the program, we scaled the program to 85 people on the security team. And then ultimately became Chief Information Security Officer. It's just one of those things, right? It's like, it's not a thing that I was shooting for, but you do good. Keep your head down, man. Dude, it happens. And then same thing with the cio. So then I got all, I got it, I got business systems, I got everything. And the challenge there is there's a couple different types of CIOs in the world, right? One of them is this blowhard that doesn't know shit and that's constantly talking about digital transformation this and AI that. The other one understands that your sole job as a CIO is to make the company run more efficiently. Like every fucking bullshit piece of friction that an employee internally has to encounter in the course of doing their job. Is there a way that that can be abstracted off and automated with software? So you're basically building like these internal startups at the company to deliver software that's making the company more efficient. So that was the, the job with the cio. I mean certainly it was an acquired taste for me. You know, I came out of the Security world. And, you know, now I'm like having meetings about like, how do we make our, you know, manufacturing software more efficient. I'm like, okay, so I'm like reading books on like ERPs and like manufacturing software and, and like product life cycle management software. I'm like, jesus Christ. I don't. I don't have any of this works, but I'll figure it out.

[A]

Damn, dude, that's impressive. Holy for all from a recruiting fair, huh? All from.

[B]

All from the recruiter reaching out. Yeah.

[A]

Good thing you had those weapon squalls on you.

[B]

I know, right? Yeah, good thing I had the GLM on my resume back in the day.

[A]

Let's take a break real quick.

[B]

Yeah. Hi, I'm Sarah Adams, the host of Vigilance Elites. The watch floor where we highlight what matters. It became a permissive state. Explain to you why it matters and then aim to leave you feeling better informed than you were before you hit play. Terrorists, hostile intelligence agencies, organized crime. Not everything is urgent. But this show will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know.

[C]

Do you feel it that something's off?

[A]

This is propaganda as a weapon.

[B]

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It's essential for the experiment that you continue.

[B]

Hosted by Sean Ryan.

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They're called Psyops.

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Hear from whistleblowers. Why have I got a letter from the CIA?

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If you've ever wondered who's really pulling

[A]

the strings, it's time to find out.

[B]

Target Intelligence Psyop An Ironclad original Hosted by Sean Ryan. Listen today, wherever you get your podcasts or watch the enhanced version version on YouTube at.

[C]

This is ironclad. All right, Nick, we're back from the break.

[A]

Forgot one other thing too. Everybody gets these at the beginning. But wait till damn near the end for you. Vigilance League Gummy bears.

[B]

Thanks, man.

[A]

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[B]

There you go.

[A]

Just candy.

[B]

Just gummies.

[A]

That's it. That's sick.

[B]

Thanks, man. Appreciate it. You. Jeremy was telling me you got. You guys are making like a phone.

[A]

Yeah, tell me about it. Well, we're not making a phone. So here's so the backstory on this. I get paranoid. You know, just like we were talking about. I think we were talking about it at breakfast, but I get. I just get. I get paranoid, man. You know, last year before the election, I interviewed half the administration, which means I'm connected to half the administration. And. Sometimes I get calls when they're angry at me. And, and, but now, not only that, but I mean, you know, we've, I told you about the Colleen Georgeski thing when I went to Romania and then I was a. Approached by some former or maybe still current intel folks when I got back home because that election was, that was a fraudulent election and the EU was meddling in that election. And we had one hundred and something thousand people show up in front of the parliament when we left because of a selfie video that I posted. I mean, they were already up in arms, went. And I mean, I know you,

[C]

you

[A]

have to working for the companies that you work for. You know how, how, how fragile the Taiwan, China situation is. We went over there and interviewed about Shakim and you know, the vp and, and so through my own paranoia and also just living in this fucking world, you know, in my former life, I, I was like, we gotta find a black phone. Like, this is not cutting it. And, and oh, and I wound up on the Taliban hit list for uncovering the fact that we're giving them $87 million a week. They didn't like that. And so anyways, I can't imagine why. So yeah, I started calling around to a lot of former, or not former friends of mine that, you know, that I worked with in the past at the agency. And I was just looking for the black phone, a real one, you know, not, not a consumer grade like kind of one, a real one. And I got pointed to this, this company called Glacier that was founded by some former NSA guys. So they made this phone and it's, it's awesome right here.

[B]

Oh, is that thing cool?

[A]

Yeah, but I mean, it's an iPhone, but they've hardened it. Yeah, and how, I don't know, dude, that's like speaking Chinese to me. But, but it keeps everything from getting sucked out. It's got end to end encryption, messenger. It tunnels your organization in. So you know, the, the, the leak, the signal leak at the beginning of the administration, then they accidentally texted the wrong fucking John or whatever. It wound up being a news reporter. That's impossible to do. You can only text people within your organization. Glacier to Glacier. Even if your company has a Glacier, a Glacier phone, and my company all has Glacier, like everybody here is on Glacier. We can't text each other through Glacier. It tunnels your organization in. What else? Endless amount of burner numbers. So I mean, you know, for guys like us, that really would have come in handy. But even just for normal people, you know, you donate to an election campaign, you whatever, sign up for the wrong thing, your number gets leaked, then you get, they can you just use the burner number, you know, and then burn it, you know what I mean? So nobody has your real number. And, and you know, the guys kind of educated me on how you can, you know, 100% disappear through digital numbers and not even really have a fucking phone number at all. And so there's a, there's a bunch of cool things about this phone. It's fucking, I mean it's great for

[C]

high net worth individuals that are worried,

[A]

have to worry about kidnapping and shit because the phone pings a lot more often than the regular phone and there's so many features to that. And so when I was looking for that and we got in touch, I wanted to see if they wanted to advertise and they did. They were like, yeah. And I was like, well maybe they want to do equity. And we talked about equity. We were going to do it. And then as I got more, more knowledge of the actual product, it's $8,500 a phone and 12,000 something for the service. I mean it's fucking expensive and that, you know, I was like, I just, we're shooting for this much, you know, and nobody can afford that. We have to go after Palantir, Anduro, SpaceX, US government. I was like. And yeah, I mean I obviously have reach into there because I've interviewed almost everybody, you know, but you know, that's a, I don't, that's not the thing. But for me, yeah, that I want to, it's just not my, you know what I mean? And so I said, if you had a more consumer friendly product that wasn't that expensive, I would be very interested. And they said, well actually we have an app that we've been working on and we're close to being finished but we don't want that to compete with the phone. And I said, well, that's what I'm interested in. I mean if we're going to do business, I want something that everybody can use. And so for about the past, it's been about a year now, we've been developing this app and turning it into what we need it to be. And so it's actually releasing, we're doing the beta testing, friends and family stuff in two weeks, March 1st we release it to friends and family.

[B]

Congrats man.

[A]

Thank you. And so yeah, it'll be data blocker, you'll have the burner numbers and then all American VPNs. The VPNs I mean, I'm sure, you know, most. Israel's bought a bunch of VPN companies. China's bought a bunch of VPN companies. It gets marketed like they're American VPNs. They're not. And so these will be all American VPNs. And then if it goes good, which I. I know it's going to, because there's nothing like this out there, then we will add the secure messenger component to it, because it's. Everything I'm seeing now is. Signal has been.

[C]

Signal's been compromised.

[A]

So. So this will be it, you know, and so I'm. I'm really excited about it. Really excited. We put a lot into it. And so, yeah, it'll be, like I said, March 1st. It'll be coming out for friends and family, and then once we work through the bugs, then we'll kick it out to, you know, a little bit bigger group. We're gonna, we're gonna do it in stair steps. We're not just gonna kick it out to everybody right off the bat, because I know it's gonna take off. So we need, we need to work. We need to work through some things before it hits.

[B]

That's cool, man.

[A]

Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people.

[B]

One of the challenges we had at Andrew was to figure out the mobile device security posture, you know, because what do you do, you issue everybody an iPhone. Okay. It's a lot of overhead, a lot of maintenance.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

A lot of fees. Yeah, it was. It was challenging for sure. And we had a giant threat model to contend against, too. Good.

[A]

Yeah, no, I gave. I gave Trey one.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

When he was here.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I don't know if he's using it or if he likes it.

[C]

What?

[A]

But, but he got in touch as soon as, as soon as I gave it to him. I know they went out and trained him up how to use it, so he was definitely fucking interested. But, yeah, I'm excited, man. And then I probably shouldn't even be talking about this, but. Because. But there's a group of us that are getting together, and I mean, my. Just like you, you know, what's the next thing? I think it pretty much hit the podcast ceiling. There's not much more to develop here. So I've. I've definitely made my mark in the podcast world and, and definitely made it to trend to up production quality and all of that kind of shit. I've made my mark here, and it's, it's. It's. Now I'm interested in other Things, you know what I mean? And so through the podcast I've gotten. My new passion is kids, man, and helping sexually abused kids, whether they're trafficked or exploited or abused or whatever. I've just, I've covered that subject so many times and nobody else, I shouldn't say nobody else, but

[C]

a lot of

[A]

the big guys, you know, in this game just don't talk about it and the problem's getting worse and worse and worse. And I've made some, some of my best friends now today I've met on this show trying to save kids. And so now we're, we're, we're going to develop an application that's going to educate and save kids, man, from sex, exploitation, being trafficked, all that kind of. And yeah, I mean, it's just like what you're saying, man, you hit a ceiling and, and you've done the thing and you can sit there and try to be king the whole time or you can move on and get good at something else.

[B]

Yeah, now you're empire building.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, when I built this, I mean, I mean, I didn't know what the I was doing, man. When I got out, I was teaching tactics, you know, and shooting and stuff like that, which is, it's cool. But even that, I mean, I pretty much hit the ceiling on that right off the bat. I did train Keanu reeves for John Wick 3 and then that created a bunch of hate and I was just like, this is whatever, man. Most of this is like 55 year old men trying to play army because they didn't ever want go to war. And I just. So I started the podcast and I think I've, you know, I love doing this. I'll probably never stop. I may slow down because the pace is, it's tough to build other things when I'm at this pace. But, but like I said, it's just time to move on and master something new and build something else. And so that's, that's what I'm doing.

[B]

Yeah, that's great, man. Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure the Andrew Ciso, Joe is going to be watching this and interested in what you guys got.

[A]

Oh, yeah, well, I hope so. Yeah. But yeah, thanks for asking, man.

[B]

Yeah, no worries. Yeah, Joe's a good dude. He. We came up together at Anduril back in the 100 person days of the company and when I left to start wraithwatch, they were like, who do you want to be, you know, the replacement CISO? Basically, I was like, there's only one dude. Joe McCaffrey, he's former MARSOC communications officer. Just a humble guy, the humblest guy I've ever met.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

Just a great guy. So, yeah, surely want to check that out at some point.

[A]

Oh, well, thank you for the plug.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I appreciate that. I really do, man. But so what are you doing in cyber security now? You started your own company?

[B]

Yeah. So wraithwatch is really a product of every thing we've been talking about for the past few hours.

[A]

Where did you. I mean, where did you come up with it?

[B]

So the co founders and I have talked about various components of this product forever and it was really a fusion of all of those conversations with them. So Grace would always talk about, hey, I need a command and control layer, like how Anduril has lattice for physical shit and sensors and fusing the sensor data and telemetry together. We need something similar for cyber defense teams that can fuse data together and serve as a command and control layer layer for executing operations and making decisions at speed. Because right now that's the biggest thing cyber defense teams suck at. They just are unable to make decisions at speed, not because they're not good, but because the tooling is lacking. Right. Same problem you guys are solving with, with the glacier foam. The tooling is lacking. It's not because people aren't trying to secure their communications. And I had talked about a whole bunch about the fact that if you zoom out from cybersecurity, what the industry really is, is it's this cat and mouse game of a stimulus response cycle between attacker and defender. What happens is the attacker will come up with a new way of doing shit, they'll come up with some novel new attack, they'll come up with some novel exploit or whatever, and then the defenders will have to react to that, right? They'll have to figure out, okay, how do we develop defenses against this exploit, or how do we develop defenses against this new attack technique that we just read about that these guys out here came up with. But these guys out here don't share everything, right? Definitely. China is not sharing their latest and greatest attack techniques with, you know, the cybersecurity community. So over here on the defensive side, you're basically left reading open source information about what's going on on the attack side. Or you're left to read through the breach reports from organizations that already got hit and then you basically have to make these mental leaps to figure out, okay, how might this apply to me and how can I defend myself? And prevent my organization from getting hacked in the same way. So this is a fucking backwards way of operating, right? At the beginning of this podcast, we talked about artificial intelligence has the capability, and this has been empirically proven by the Frontier Labs. I can point it at a system like an iPhone or a code repository for an application that's running on an iPhone. And I can say, don't stop until you have found me vulnerabilities in this application or code base or device or whatever, and you can just let them crank away at a pace that no human can match. DARPA came out with a competition a couple years ago called the Cyber Grand Challenge. And the goal of the competition was to understand, okay, can we instrument artificial intelligence systems that can reliably find vulnerabilities at scale autonomously without humans involved? And the answer is yes. The teams that came out on top from that competition have technology that can autonomously find, weaponize and exploit vulnerabilities at industrial scale. Dude. So what you're seeing is this mounting attack pressure from the guys with the offensive tools augmented by artificial intelligence. You're not seeing any of that shit on the defensive side. It's not like there's some mounting defensive counter pressure that's being provided by somebody. And that's why we built Wraith Washington. Oh, we provide the defensive counter pressure to offset the attack pressure that is mounting very rapidly on the offensive side of the house.

[A]

House.

[B]

Because the only way you're going to get ahead of this is to have something continuously in here, predict, imagine, simulate all of the novel new that these things are going to find, right?

[C]

And it's like a immune system.

[A]

This is crazy.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's. That's essentially what it is. You're. You're simulating these cells attack, these cells defend.

[A]

It's wild.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. In 2026, if you're an organization like SpaceX or Andrel or any of these companies, right, and you have anything hanging its ass out on the Internet, it's going to. It's going to be subject to this mounting attack pressure from the outside. And you need something that is trying to preserve hull integrity, for lack of a better term for the organization. And to preserve hull integrity, you need to, as you said, simulate all the possible ways shit's going to go sideways in here before these guys figure it out, and then proactively get ahead of deploying the mitigations. So defensive counter pressure is the name of the game here. And we do that by acting as a sensor fusion layer and command and control layer for all the tools that already exist in an organization. We stack AI top of it and then they pull everything together and then apply that counter pressure that, that I'm talking about. Unless that happens. And it doesn't have to be us, right? Someone else fucking come, come along and do this shit. Like if it doesn't happen, basically we can no longer maintain trust that our society's most critical institutions actually have their shit together when it comes to protecting our data or to maintaining organizational integrity. Right. Because these things are just going to come at you in continuous swarms and they're not going to stop. This is the future that we're entering into. Anthropic released a report the other day that said their latest model, their latest AI model is capable of finding zero day vulnerabilities very rapidly against code repositories it's never seen before or never been trained on in its existence. You throw something brand new at it, it'll find a zero day in there.

[A]

Holy.

[B]

So imagine the firmware that's running on your guys glacier phones. If you put that thing on a system and then you dispatch a swarm of these offensive AIs at it, they're going to find issues. The best case scenario is that we execute that process. By we, I mean, you know, someone on your guys side executes that process of vulnerability, discovery mitigation and remediation before the bad guys ever get a chance to do it in the real world, in the wild. So that's, we're not only trying to provide a capability to do that for organizations, we're also just trying to evangelize the fact that this is the future that we're moving into. And unless the industry get its together, gets its together, we're gonna have some serious problems at hand.

[A]

Holy sh.

[C]

I mean do you see a world

[A]

where we backtrack from digital? I mean, are we gonna go back to pen and paper? Because the vulnerabilities are just, I mean they just, it's like this shit's just getting better and better and better every day. Yeah, every day.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, and it's, it's. I mean thank God for companies like you. But where does it end?

[B]

I genuinely don't know the answer to that question. I think, I think the only thing that we can guarantee is there is now a continuously running arms race between attack and defense. It's an arms race. It's going to be powered by AI, hopefully on both sides Right now it biases towards the attacker. Hopefully we can change that. And I Think, you know, we're going to live in a future where these things are just constantly battling each other, data center on data center, and we're going to live right in the middle of it. So do we revert to pen and paper? Maybe. I've certainly reduced my consumption of things on the Internet.

[A]

Like what?

[B]

Just doom scrolling Twitter all day or X constantly reading up on what's happening in the news. I'm trying to reduce my cognitive load for what's out there as a practice run for reducing it permanently. You know, maybe I exit wraithwatch one day. You know, the company does really well and do I ever want to see a phone again? I don't think so.

[A]

I don't, I don't.

[B]

I fantasize about the day where I can.

[A]

Me too.

[B]

Walk to the, Walk to a pier, walk to Santa Monica pier and just chuck this thing in the water.

[A]

I can't fucking wait for that day.

[C]

I can't.

[A]

I. I fucking fantasize about that day.

[B]

But until we get to that day, right, we have obligations as executives and business owners and I mean, how do you keep track of your kids, right, in this day and age? I don't know. What I do know is that the instant you put a screen in front of them, you're going to lose them, you're going to lose some portion of them to that screen. There's a writer by the name of.

[A]

A good way to put it.

[B]

There's a. There's a writer by the name of Paul Kingsnorth and he lives, he lives in Ireland and he, he runs this sub stack and he writes a lot about this environment that we find ourselves in. And it's basically an environment where we've bootstrapped this all knowing, all seeing machine, right? And it's not a singular machine, it's a distributed machine of which we are all a part of, right? We can't escape the fact that we need our phones to do our jobs as executives and CEOs. We need the Internet to get our message out there. We've developed this need to interface with all of this technology and I don't think there's any walking back from that. But there is something to be said about holding in your mind and being present in any given situation and saying, do I really need to be on this fucking thing right now? And if I am, am I becoming a better person by the things that I do on it? Or am I not, Am I just doom scrolling and turning into a fucking ball of anxiety? And if I do turn into A ball of anxiety, you know, that's gonna have an effect on the people around me. It's gonna have an effect on my loved ones that's gonna propagate out and have these second, third order effects. It's a fucking weird future we're walking into, man. That's all. That's all I can guarantee.

[A]

Scare. Just. I don't see how we don't go back to pen and paper. I mean, it's just there's so many times where I'm talking about and I'm just like, I. I don't want to talk about this over the phone. We have to do a face to face.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

We just have to.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

You know, nothing. Nothing is secure.

[B]

Nothing is secure. And you can't trust anything you see anymore. Like the ease with which any fucking body can produce any image, text, anything movie these days. I mean, you know, I was talking with Jeremy and Darren about it earlier. If the first biblical flood was a physical one, the second one is going to be an informational one. We're going to be hit with a volume and velocity of information the likes of which we are not prepared for with our evolutionary programming. And I think we all have to reconcile what that means for us individually and what that means for our families and our communities and our society. That's why I bring up Kings north, is because his contention is, okay, if this machine really is going to take off. Right. And it already is and has and will continue to. What's the goal? Well, maybe the goal is to. It's to establish the success that we all want. Right. Like with Vigilance and with the podcast and all the projects you've got going on with wraithwatch for me, you know, other. Other folks have their versions of it, but once you do, let's figure out how to take that and translate it into making the little worlds around us better. Our families, our communities, our states, our countries, what have you. And maybe if we start small and we do a good job, then maybe we'll earn our way into building our way back from this place that we're in. I don't know.

[A]

Never gonna happen.

[B]

Yeah, I agree.

[A]

Simplicity.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

That's the way we're supposed to live.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Simplistic. And we don't live that way.

[B]

I know.

[A]

Especially guys like me and you.

[B]

I know.

[A]

We have high bars to set. We have. We. We're on a mission, man.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And we like to accomplish. And that does not create a simple life.

[B]

I know, it really doesn't. But these are things I Think about a lot.

[A]

Me too. Me too. I think about, yeah, I think about them all the time. I mean, I can't remember who I was in here talking with, but, you know, I mean, you're talking about a wave of information. I mean, I, I can't remember the number, I'm going to be off. But you know, I think it was like the human brain can maintain 150 relationships or something. Like, I think it was less than that, you know, actually maintain, you know, 150 relationships or something. It's something like that. Yeah.

[B]

Approximately the size of a rifle company, dude.

[A]

And look at X and Twitter. And you got, you know, thousands of people you're following.

[C]

Everybody's hitting you up, you know, people

[A]

you don't even know. You can't, you can't, you can't. You got text signal, Glacier, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. It's just email, personal email, company email. It's multiple company emails. It's like you just can't get the, away from any of it. It's everywhere.

[B]

Yeah, I agree, man. And it's only going to get worse because, you know, now all the bot armies that used to post bot army shit, like, you know, they resemble humans now, and whoever's puppeteering them from the back end, they can basically dispatch these armies that can swing things one way or the other, depending on what the goals of, of that person are. So I don't have the answers, dude. I, I, I'm in a position where I can put some guys together and I feel like along with my, with my founders, I put a crew of fucking hitters together and we're out there building some cool shit.

[A]

Your wife's a founder, right?

[B]

Girlfriend? Yeah.

[A]

Excuse me. Your girlfriend's a founder?

[B]

Girlfriend?

[A]

Yeah. How many founders are there?

[B]

Two. Two other ones.

[A]

Two other ones.

[B]

My girlfriend and my third founder, Carlos. Cuban dude, escaped communism from Cuba, came to the States, didn't speak any English. But he was so fucking hungry, he had that immigrant hunger.

[A]

It's fucking awesome.

[B]

He landed at a bank in New York, Morgan Stanley. And he taught himself English by getting on the IT team over there. He was couch surfing on his brother's couch. He taught himself IT and shit, Got a job at, at this bank. And then he didn't speak a word of English, so people would call the IT help desk and he'd be like, hey, can you send an email? That was like the most of, holy shit, you gotta be kidding me. Then he would get the email from him and then he would translate the email into Spanish and They would figure it the fuck out. And then he would send like an English response back, rinse and repeat over a thousand reps. And that's how he taught himself English. And then he went from there. He landed at Google after that and then SpaceX after that. When he left SpaceX, he was one of the senior most security engineers there at that point. He had been responsible for building a lot of the security architecture around their most critical systems, the starship vehicle, some of the other critical infrastructure they have in place. He's just a hitter dude. I don't know how he got on that.

[A]

I mean, what do you think this is going to grow into? I mean, just, just for example, I mean we're talking about where is this going? I'm talking about are we going back to pen and paper? What we're probably going towards is neural link where we just thought share and we don't even need English, we don't even need language anymore. Yeah, I mean, how the fuck do you, like Alex Wang came in here? Do you know Alex Wang is.

[C]

Alex Wang came in here and said

[A]

he doesn't want to have kids until Neuralink is fucking fully online for everybody because he wants his babies. That fucking Neuralink in their head.

[B]

I'm like, oh shit, yeah, all right, that's excessive.

[C]

But I mean, but what it, but

[A]

it's, it's like, fuck, man, there's a

[C]

chip that can be hacked into your fucking brain.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

I've talked to Ben Carson about it.

[A]

You know, Huber, Huberman, Andrew Huberman. I mean, you could inject an entire

[C]

false reality and these into somebody's.

[A]

I mean, they're talking about this is going to help the blind see. And it's like, well, shit, if it's

[C]

going to help the blind see, then

[A]

probably make you hear shit, taste it, feel shit, obviously see stuff.

[C]

You could, you could create an entire false reality into somebody's mind that they would never know.

[A]

If we could be in a false

[C]

reality right now, we wouldn't even know it.

[A]

How crazy is. How do you defend against that?

[B]

Indeed, indeed. I think, I think it's very possible that that's already happened. It's probably already happened billions and trillions of times. Honestly, who the knows where in that chain of reality we might be in right now, you know, and people will have their religious convictions and say that doesn't square with, with Christianity and Hinduism and you know, name your religion. I think it squares perfectly. I think all of those religions are trying to tell us that the ultimate purpose of all of this is to evolve ourselves and our souls and our minds in order to navigate infinity, essentially, because that's what we're talking about here, right? In the limit. If you give it long enough. Take neural link, mash it up with LLMs, mash it up with virtual reality, give us senses, and then now we're in the matrix, Right? Repeat that a million times. So it's this infinitely fractal reality that we may be inhabiting. And if we're inhabiting an infinitely fractal reality, then one of the biggest, one of the most useful skills that we can have is without being told, without biasing towards one side or the other based on some shit that people are telling us with our own personal discernment and ability to navigate chaos and bring order to that chaos. How the fuck do we get our bearings and how do we move out after having gotten them? I think that's what we're here to learn how to do.

[A]

It's a damn good point.

[B]

Maybe, maybe I'm full of, I don't

[A]

know, I don't think anybody really knows what it's, you know, just be a good person.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's really all you can do.

[B]

That's it.

[A]

But. Well, Nick, fascinating conversation. Amazing life story, man. Amazing life story. Like, holy, dude, your life arc is just wild.

[B]

Thanks man. It's great meeting you in person. You're, you're a super humble guy and it was great to be here. Thank you for the opportunity. It's a little bit surreal being in the studio.

[A]

So man, thank you for saying that. That means a lot. You know, I asked you earlier, there's one thing you could say to your dad, what would it be? Now I want to ask you, if there's one thing you want your son to know, what would it be?

[B]

I wish I could have spent more

[A]

time with you

[B]

and I, I'll same message to my, to my stepdaughter. I wish I could have spent more time with you guys. You guys deserved it.

[A]

And

[B]

I thought I was doing what the country needed me to do and that was to deploy over and over and over again in the capacities in which I deployed. And if I could do it again, I don't know what I would change, But I would make spending time with you guys a priority and not a thing that I regret many years after the fact. One thing I'll say too is, you know, my two month old son Maximus is gonna watch this too, 15 years from now and he's gonna wonder, you know, the was wrong with you, like why weren't you there for my brother and sister back in the day. And you know, I hope this interview can shed some light on what the I was out there trying to accomplish.

[A]

Well, I definitely think this is going to help him understand it.

[B]

Nice man.

[A]

You're welcome.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

God bless.

[C]

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