From War Zones To Podcasts Veterans Powerful Life Lessons

Spend fucking time with them. Okay, great. That sounds like fun. Let's go do that. The other end of it is like if you feel like you tend towards depression, I certainly do. I've wanted to kill myself. I've considered it. I knew I needed to be of service to someone else because one, I lacked the perspective to know, hey, this all like, first off, this can be worse. And there's a lot of people dealing with worse. So before I get to my own pity party, let me go help someone out. Even if I've got nothing, I've got time, I've got attention. You know, I can stand somewhere and just have a conversation with someone. So getting yourself out and doing something charitable in service of others and, you know, spend time there instead of, you know, in the echo chamber, on the Internet, on TV, you Go help out. Save the Brave, in our case. Or whatever charity it is, whatever thing you're passionate about. And if you don't know, that's the best thing of all. because you get to try all of it. You get to say, I want to try some of that. I want to try some of that. I want to help people with ALS. That way, you're in a community. You get some perspective on what struggle looks like outside of your own head. Not that anybody's struggling harder than anybody else. Struggle is struggle. But you can see, like, there's a lot of people struggling. I'm not alone. And you are interacting with people that have compassion. And you might just find someone who's ready and prepared to help you and save you. I think you're right. I think your work is my work. You know, by doing work for somebody else, you're actually helping yourself. It just happens that way. I couldn't agree with you. Everything you said was definitely just spot on. It couldn't be perfect. It couldn't be better. That's exactly right. You know, one thing real quick. Talk about perspective. I have a new saying in my life, and that is I don't have a problem if I don't have a heart problem because my heart gave out on me last year, and I was going to die. And I was bedridden. I had to be in a bed. I could not get out of the bed. I mean, I could barely get to the bathroom. My wife was feeding me in bed. I had to go to Panama to get stem cell therapy. It saved my life. And it wouldn't have happened otherwise. I would have died. And so I have like a new threshold because I've got time away from the war. Now this has been a new thing in my life. So I have a new threshold of what a problem is. And in my life, I now know because I've been through something else that I don't have – everything is manageable so long as my heart is working. Yeah. I think that's the bottom line that maybe a lot of us could learn something from. If your heart's working, everything's manageable. Politically, we've seen shit that's way worse than what we've got. Financially, you know, we know that, like, here's one of my favorite things. Like, you're complaining about the 1%. Oh, yeah. Hey, dummy, pull the camera back and look at the world and decide where you fall. You know, like... You want to complain about the 1%? You are the 1% motherfucker. So true. All of those things are like no one's looking over iron sights deciding yes, no, when they're looking at me because that's certainly been a case. You know, the line of work that you do, and I know this is true just going in. I have had Intel reports come back and I use my name. I use Pete when I collect, right? Because I want to know. It's genuine for me and that's how I do it. All the time, they're like, we want to know who Pete is. We want to kill Pete. There's a bounty on Pete. Get Pete. And it's got to be the same with you. No one's doing that to where my life is in danger. No, nobody's doing that. And I was a very popular person in Sauter City. I was a very popular person. And so, you know, having, you know, having people know you by name that know you know what you're doing. Yeah, it's it's a it's that's another level of that game of combat. That's another level. And no, I don't. Well, maybe I do. You know, maybe there are people here like, hey, I'm sure. But but do they really have the balls to do it? Ninety nine percent of the time. No. And that was a different case. Some other player. So it's you know, it's good to be alive, man. That's all I got to say. It's just good to be alive. And everything's manageable. It just is. Well, let me give you the mic for a few minutes. You know how to do this. I don't want to cover how I got started in podcasting because that's a question everybody leads with. So I'm going to take that one away from you. But why don't you hit me with a couple of questions and then we'll wrap it up. When did you join the military and did you get what you were looking for? I joined the military in 1994. And yes, I was unable to find a job in my field that my college degree was in, TV, radio, and I wanted to be a sports guy. And I had the standard problem a college kid has. I had no experience, but no one would give me a shot to get experience. And I went to the bottom of the barrel market-wise. I'm like, what are the smallest markets? And I sent my stuff out, and I could not find a way in. And back then, you sort of just had to make your own way, and I wasn't figuring it out. And the path I was on was going to lead to, you know, just not where I wanted to go. Nothing wrong with staying home. Nothing wrong with playing softball, you know, in rec league and everything. But that wasn't the path that I wanted to be on. And so I needed to get some experience. I wanted to go do some crazy hard shit. And that's ultimately what I got to do. And it turned out that I, you know, the right job sort of picked me, you know, in a lot of ways. And, you know, there's a lot of things you could have done. I could have done. Our jobs overlap a lot. But, you know. You know, the right job found me and I was able to make a lot of it because I was out of the military more than I was in it. I was with the military more than I was in it, I should say. I was able to stay in the field and get better and better and better and better at being deployed and being on the ground as opposed to and you know how this goes, Boone, like, as you get good, they're like, hey, that's great. Why don't you run ops? Hey, why don't you be a first sergeant? You know, hey, why don't you go nowhere near the battlefield? You're like, but I know everything now. Yeah, you're looking at a guy who was an E5 for 17 years. There's a reason for that. Yeah. I actually want to go do this work. Yeah. You want me to do this work. Yeah. Okay. Let me ask you another question. We talked about the warfighter community being in the digital space. You're in the digital space as a warfighter. What do you see and where do you see your trajectory as and where do you see yourself in five years? The five-year question. Well, ultimately, I would like to be making more original content in terms of less long-form interviews and, I guess, a greater focus on original content in the podcast space. So ideally, when movies and documentaries come out, there's an accompanying podcast that joins it. But also just some completely original stuff. Take screenplays that should be made because they're all over this town. I live in Southern California. And there's no bandwidth in the movie world to make them. Well, I want to make those things. And then personally, I want to get past the point where I am a veteran first. And I'm pretty much past that. But I want to be seen as like, this guy's a podcaster. He makes great shit. And then someone's like, wasn't that guy, wasn't he a spy at one point? That's what I want. Like, I want to get further and further past like high school football and just continue to evolve into this podcast world. expert and producer that I am. I like that answer. I like that answer. Matter of fact, I think that's something that that's exactly, I'm getting ready to do another project. I'm sorry to talk about myself during your face, but I'm getting ready to do another project coming up soon. And I've already told the producers, listen, I don't want to be marketed as a warfighter. I want to be marketed as X who happened, who happens to be, you know, a combat veteran. I don't even want it to be in any of the literature because people already know they'll find it out. And I would rather it just be a thing that exists, but not a thing that everything is based on. Yeah. It's not a hinge. It's just part of my story. And I totally agree. And that's really what transition is. You do transition. Hopefully, I never have to go back and go fight. Hopefully, we aren't stupid enough to have a civil war. Because, look, I'll tell you this right now. Nobody wants you and me against them in a war. Like, that's just bad for you. That's bad. Nothing good comes out. That's bad for you because we've already collected 20 million people who are ready to roll. And it's just not hard for us to do. And here's the thing about the Civil War thing. I don't think it's going to happen because people are really attached to CVS and Walmart. Yeah. Yeah. I was out at the Bundy Ranch when that whole thing happened. And the primary reason I went out there is because they're making all these claims about veterans with PTSD with guns and it's going to go bad. And I was like, oh, I better get down there. Because they're going to use it. Again, that political leverage on certain topics. So I went to –