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This is Undaunted Life of Man's Podcast. I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it.
0:56
All right, guys, we've got a special guest on the podcast today. His name is Sean Glass.
1:00
So he is a retired United States Navy SEAL Officer. He was also a combat leader.
1:04
And now he is a leadership instructor with Echelon Front. So that's the leadership company
1:08
started by Jocko Willink and Lafe Babin. Sean spent 13 years in the SEAL teams and he did three
1:13
combat deployments, one to Afghanistan, one to Iraq, and one to Eastern Africa. So when he returned
1:18
from Iraq, he actually served as the officer in charge of training for all the West Coast SEAL
1:23
teams. And this is where he was part of the team. And he specifically spearheaded the development
1:28
of the leadership training out of that of that time period. And also he personally instructed
1:33
and mentored the next generation of SEAL leaders. And so this guy has spent the majority of his
1:37
career dealing with leadership and being just immersed in what's going on, not only in combat,
1:42
but also in the boardroom. But also he is the co founder of Primal Beef. So if you've heard
1:47
me talk about these beef ads here recently, if you've been salivating, if you've been ordering,
1:52
he is one of the four co founders of Primal Beef and he basically heads up their operations.
1:57
And guys, if you're listening to this on time, Black Friday is here just in a few days.
2:00
Primal Beef is doing a sale for Black Friday. And so the link will be in the show notes,
2:04
but it's just primal beef.com. It's primal beef.com. That link will be in the show notes.
2:09
So I don't think you'll be able to use my promo code Kyle to get an extra percentage off during
2:13
Black Friday. But you know, just in general, the thing with their company is I've been so confused
2:18
about where to get good beef. And I've had so many people tell me just these horrible stories
2:22
about buying an entire cow or a half a cow and not being the best beef. And you know,
2:26
being very inconsistent, not really knowing what we're getting from the grocery store.
2:30
But we spent basically the last maybe 20 minutes in this interview and it's a long one today. But
2:34
a great one. We spent maybe the last 20 minutes talking about how their beef product is just very,
2:39
very different. And there's kind of a three step process that makes it different than what you're
2:43
going to buy at maybe a normal butcher or even just from a regular old grocery store or something
2:49
like that. So we get into all that information. But we do talk about his upbringing and some of
2:53
the things that led him to want to look at the military, but then specifically the SEAL teams.
2:58
We didn't spend a lot of time talking about buds because obviously you're cold, wet and sandy and
3:01
uncomfortable and not very many people make it through. I think we all know that at this point,
3:05
but really got into the mental minutiae. What does it take to actually get through once your
3:10
body is finished? So we talk about that. We talk about his deployments. We talk about some of the
3:14
biggest misconceptions about what's happening when SEALs are deployed and kind of what they're
3:18
able to do. I did ask him as well about what about the military? It seems like they're not really
3:23
focused on readiness and and lethality right now seems like they're focused on DEI and also the
3:28
random crap. And so we do talk about that. We talk about his transition out why he didn't do a full
3:32
20 years and I really liked his reasoning for getting out of 13 year mark as opposed to doing
3:37
another seven to get to his 20. And then we we get into what he does in the private sector,
3:42
what echelon front does and really just the overall requirement, not just benefit, but the
3:47
requirement of people to focus on their leadership skills and abilities to constantly be sharpening
3:52
that blade on their leadership. And guys, we talked about a whole lot more stuff. We talked
3:56
about some whiskey and some guards and soccer. We talked about everything. It was a very, very
4:00
fun conversation. I wish it could have gone longer, but it was a lot of fun. I'm really excited to
4:04
bring it to you guys. So without further ado, let's get into it. Shawn Glass, welcome to
4:09
Dawn to life of man's podcast. Well, I appreciate it. Kyle. Thanks for having me, man.
4:13
Now, where are you right now? Because I think this is the first time in the history of this
4:16
show that the background, I see like the back of an arrow, I see plywood, like where are you,
4:21
where are we at right now? Yeah. So my home is off stage right over there. And then this is our
4:29
family pole barn. So this is where we don't have a TV in our house at all. So we have a TV in our
4:35
in our pole barn. So it's very deliberate for my family. If anybody wants to watch a show like
4:40
you have to leave the house, we have to come up here together and watch it. But hang out space
4:45
over here. So the pole barn is just family rec space, basically. So the gym is in there,
4:50
ping pong tables in there, my bar with all my whiskey and cigars and pipes and stuff is in there.
4:56
And then this is part of the pole barn. And it's my office. So over here, what you can't see is all
5:02
my guitars, books, computer for work, stuff like that. And then, you know, previous lifestyle stuff
5:09
right here. And then my my saves off to the right. So this is my office. Okay, so you got my ADD going
5:15
almost immediately, because you mentioned cigars, which at least included in that is going to be
5:19
some undaunted life cigars. So shout out to our own cigars. You got one left. Okay, we're going to
5:25
need to remedy that. But then you say you got your whiskey there. So I am a bit of a whiskey
5:29
aficionado and have become and developed into a whiskey snob. Before the pandemic, I would actually
5:35
go and do like whiskey tasting classes. I would teach people like as like a charity event or
5:40
something like that, you know, the history of whiskey. And then we would do different whiskeys
5:43
from around the world. I would teach them how to nose it in the Glen Karen and what they should
5:47
expect on the palate and finishing blah, blah. And so I basically ruined my palate. I can't drink
5:50
crap anymore. So so what do we got on the bar? What are our what are our go to, Sean? Well,
5:55
I'll give you a peek of what's on our talking through what's on the bar. But you'll notice this
6:00
bottle not on the bar. This bottle is stashed away in my office where you you can't just come
6:05
and grab it. But this is one that stays. Ah, William the Rue Weller, ladies and gentlemen,
6:12
one of the B tax. That's amazing. What year is it? This is 2017, maybe is when my uncle gave it to me.
6:21
Wow. Very nice. So then my bar is arranged by types of whiskey. So you've got the scotch
6:29
on the left hand side of the bar. I like different kinds of scotch. Basically my favorite though is
6:35
PD stuff. So the Freud, Lagavulin, all that good stuff. And then bourbon on the right hand side. And
6:42
most of what I have is bourbon. Some gyms that people might not have heard of before, but maybe
6:47
they have John or the Duke, a great bourbon. It's got John Wayne on the label. So it seems like
6:54
maybe it's a little bit gimmicky. It's not it's ridiculously good. And then I think there's three
7:00
different blends. The one that I have is the silver blend, which I think is their premier one.
7:05
It's unreal. And then another hidden one that people have probably heard of is Noah's Mill.
7:11
But I think they I think they changed their recipe a little while back. Or maybe they got
7:16
bought out or something because it's not quite so good. But it's not quite the the same. And then
7:21
I have a little bit of pappy left as well. So my uncle by my wife's uncle. So now my uncle.
7:29
Awesome guy. He was exact for NBC, did some other stuff. And along the journey of his
7:34
life became a Somalia. So he's got an incredible palette linked up with all these crazy people doing
7:40
that side of the house. And eventually got into whiskey. And when I got back from a deployment
7:45
presented me with a bottle of of pappy, I think it was the 23 year old bottle of pappy that he
7:51
had got through some connection. So he got me the pappy and he got me the William LaRue. So
7:57
he's a good uncle. All right, man, that is he does he need more nephews? So it's like, you know,
8:02
I'm running out of now. I'm running out of uncles here. But I will. What's that?
8:07
You've been in, man. I'll just tell me one of my kids. I'm like three of my five kids are redheads.
8:11
You'd fit right in, man. Okay. And if they don't have beards, I'll shave the beard off for some
8:16
pappy. I will tell you my favorite bourbon I've ever had is the Pappy Van Winkle 20 year old. I
8:20
feel like that's kind of the sweet spot for the pappy. It's got a lot of, you know, red fruit and
8:25
a, you know, I mean, the finish on it just is forever. But I will say as well, our pallets are
8:29
very similar. So I do the same thing, like, because I don't have whiskey that often, maybe just a
8:33
handful of times in a month and maybe one or two at a time kind of a deal. But when I bring all my
8:37
friends over, I'll put my entire collection out on the counter. And I start with all the light
8:41
stuff on the left, you know, the Canadians, the Irish, some of the, some of the blends. And then I
8:45
get into Burbins and then it's like barrel proof Burbins. And then some of the lighter scotches all
8:49
the way up to the stuff that I like the most. Because if I'm drinking, I'm typically having a cigar.
8:54
And so I want something very, very pitty, very smoky. So I'll have Octamor or Lagavulin 16,
8:59
or, you know, you mentioned the Freewegar Bo more or any of these types. But I got to tell you a
9:04
quick story. And then we'll get off of this because all the, like people that want to hear about,
9:07
you know, all the other cool stuff you've done, they're going to be so we like, you know, they're
9:10
like, what, what is up with you nerds? But when my first son was born, James, a group of my buddies
9:16
got together. And like, when James was three or four days old, they came over to the house and they had
9:20
this Pelican case that they rolled onto my back porch. And I'm like, are they about to like dissect
9:25
me or something like what what's about to happen? I understand that. And they said, hey, man, you
9:28
know, we just were so happy for you that you have your first son and blah, blah, blah. And so they
9:32
got me my Holy Grail bottle. And it was a bottle of Lagavulin 25 year old. And so only 8,000 bottles
9:41
were made. I had a like an ounce of it like a couple years prior to that. And from that day
9:46
forward, it was my favorite scotch I had ever had because it was a Lagavulin that was aged in a
9:52
sherry cask only for 25 years. And so they got together with one of a private whiskey collector
9:59
buddy of mine. And they all threw into to give me this bottle. And I popped it immediately. I'm
10:02
like, we're having this. And they're like, are you out of your mind? I'm like, no, but like,
10:06
y'all got this for me. Let's honor it. And then I'll close the story with this. We drink about half
10:11
the bottle. And the thing is, is when you get a bottle, like below half, whatever's left in there
10:16
starts to oxidize. If you leave it in there too long, it can really affect the flavor profile.
10:21
So what I did was, as I redecanted that half left, which was like 375 mils or whatever,
10:28
I put that in a small 375 mill bottle. And I put a synthetic cork on it. And I completely
10:35
like wrapped up the top of it. And then I made a label of, you know, like made my own label on
10:40
there. But that is going to be James's birthday present on his 25th birthday. And so it's two
10:46
James from dad. And so it's good, you know, hopefully, you know, if I'm still there, still around,
10:50
it's like, I'm going to be able to explain to him, Hey, 25 years ago, some guys thought
10:54
enough of your dad to throw down to get this amazing bottle. And then now you get to have the
10:59
rest of it, and you can do whatever you want with it. Just don't pour it in, you know, Dr. Pepper
11:02
or something like that. So the world of whiskey, we should probably transition to something else.
11:07
We should probably talk about something else. But I do want to talk about your early life,
11:10
because you've done some really, really interesting things in adulthood. And you've kind of weaved
11:15
in and out of a lot of great things that we're going to talk about today. But what was it like
11:18
growing up Sean Glass? Yeah, I grew up in a small town in Texas called Corsicana. Actually didn't
11:27
grow up in Corsicana, but it's the town where we did all of our school sports, church, stuff like
11:33
that. So we kind of lived about 20 miles outside of Corsicana on about 60 acres. Parents had
11:40
different animals, had some horses that we were running for a while, sheep, goats, stuff like that.
11:45
Basically everything except for cattle probably at one point. So, you know, woke up, did some stuff
11:51
around the around the house for the farm, got ready, went to school, and that was it. And so,
11:57
what kind of sports did you play growing up? Kind of what what were you into at the time? Like was
12:02
because you know, with small towns, it's kind of hard because you don't always have all the sports
12:05
available. It is it is something I'm extremely jealous of my my kids is where we are now. They
12:10
have some some legit sports. So we had I went to a very small up until 10th grade, I went to a very
12:17
small Christian school that some parents from our community basically started called Corsicana
12:23
Christian Academy. And it was small. So you know, your sports are limited. I think soccer was the
12:29
biggest team sport we had. And it wasn't like you had a middle school and a junior varsity and a
12:34
varsity was just you had one team. And everybody was kind of on that team. So a soccer growing up
12:40
played soccer for the rec leagues, some travel team stuff, basketball for a little bit. But that
12:46
was really it. And then when I transferred over to the the high school in 10th grade,
12:50
I was so committed to soccer at that point that even though they had football and baseball and
12:56
track, I just kind of stuck on the path of soccer. Okay, so what position did you play? I was a
13:03
defense. I was usually right back. Yeah, not the most. My saving grace was I was very fast. So
13:11
not a lot of ball skills, but I was I was, you know, you're probably not getting past me and I can
13:16
probably chase you down. So I was never gonna go to college. I was never gonna play professionally
13:20
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13:52
So I won't go into all the details, but I grew up playing mainly baseball with a little bit
13:59
of wrestling, but I played all sports just kind of like, you know, sandlot style. But when I went to
14:04
college, I ended up somehow becoming the starting goalkeeper for the men's soccer team at my university,
14:10
University of Central Oklahoma. And the thing is, is like, I'm 510. And so when you see goalies,
14:16
they're typically like six, three, six, four, this enormous wingspan. And so it didn't really make
14:21
sense to people. But I was very aggressive. And my ball skills were awful. And so I tried to avoid
14:28
any time where I had to use my feet at all. And so as soon as I got the ball, it was like burning a
14:33
hole in my hands. And so I would just throw it, you know, because I was an outfielder. And so I
14:36
had a good arm. And so I would never put the ball down like I could punt. I couldn't goal kick any
14:40
of that type of stuff. But it was just kind of, it was just kind of weird how that all worked out.
14:44
Because it's a great, it's a great sport for people to get into. And again, the reason why Americans
14:49
are so bad at soccer on the international stage is because all our best athletes are doing something
14:53
else. And because we're so tough, because we don't want to get knocked down to the ground as if we've
14:57
been sniped by somebody in the 47th row. So we're not just gonna go, you know, flailing around on the
15:02
ground and go flopping. Okay. Yeah, I take the fact you pointed out after I said I wasn't good enough
15:07
to play in college that you literally didn't play it all growing up. And then we're on a college team.
15:12
But wait, but I did the caveat of like, I had no skills with the feet, which is what the whole
15:19
point of soccer is. But Sean, the reason I did that is to make myself feel better, because you did a
15:24
lot of really cool stuff that I didn't do. And so basically this is at one time when I can be like
15:29
Sean suck it, I was better at soccer than you. And I didn't even have to try. Okay, how about that?
15:33
But now let's transition into some stuff that you did that was way cooler than me. So all right,
15:38
so so you're growing up, you you've got this, you know, seemingly great upbringing, you're very
15:42
active and all that. But at some point, you had to have made the decision that you wanted to serve
15:48
your country. And then you specifically decided to try to become a navy seal. And so anytime somebody
15:55
served in the military, especially in any type of, you know, special forces or special operations,
16:02
a type of thing, special forces, greenberries, but any type of special operations thing like
16:07
recon or greenberries or seals or any of that, I'm like, okay, what, what led you to number one to
16:14
even want to serve in the military and the number two, why go the elite route? Not just why not just
16:18
try to be a grunt or just another guy, you know, do four years and then go move on and do something
16:23
else. Yeah, so I have to kind of rewind a little bit and unpack it just a little bit more about
16:29
childhood to kind of fully embellish that story. But you know, childhood was great for a lot of
16:35
different reasons. You know, I had space to roam around, had a lot of freedom, a lot of acreage.
16:41
When you're a kid, 60 acres seems like might as well be a million acres. So in that aspect,
16:47
really good. Some things about family life are great. Some things were not great. You know,
16:52
we parents got divorced when I was in, I think officially when I was in high school, but they
16:57
had been separated for a while. And out of respect for my dad, I'm not going to get into the reasons
17:02
why, but it was not the best situation for sure. But I was kind of, I was never like the most
17:09
disciplined kid growing up. I was never, if you watched me grow up, you probably wouldn't be like,
17:14
hey, Sean's going to go into the military, let alone Sean's going to try and do something,
17:19
something like that. So after my parents split up, even though in hindsight, when you're reflecting
17:26
on all these things with some maturity and a little bit more life experience, you kind of piece
17:31
all these things together. But obviously, I wasn't self analyzing myself as a 13 or 14 year old,
17:37
but looking back, just kind of floundering, [inaudible] off at a lot of different things that
17:43
were going on in life. Like most kids who have a self centered view, didn't really know how to
17:49
deal with all that stuff, manifested in different ways. That wasn't like a troublemaker or anything
17:54
like that, but just frustrated, angry. And one thing that was always pretty constant in my life was
18:00
I was always a big reader. Ever since I was a kid, like always reading a book, always had a book in
18:05
my hand, you know, probably read five, six different books a month. And we would spend a lot of time
18:10
at our public library because of that, you know, you'd go, you'd pick up a book, a couple books,
18:15
make it through the month, go back, pick up some more. And I was in the military section.
18:19
One day I was probably, I'll be 14. And I saw this book about seals in Vietnam and keep people
18:27
up to keep in mind, this is 1995, 1994, something like that, where there just wasn't a whole lot
18:35
of information out about seal. So I didn't even know what the heck a seal was. Had a photo due with
18:41
the green face in a jungle. I was like, this looks legit. Let me, you know, pick it up and give it a
18:46
give it a read. And I was fascinated and captivated. And again, not realizing all these things as a
18:54
kid, I just was like, Hey, this is what I this is what I want to do. Rewinding the clock and looking
18:59
at it from my perspective right now, I really think it was God's way of kind of laying a path
19:06
out from my life and just basically saying, Hey, here's something, it's a potential thing. You can
19:12
try it could be good for you. But you've got to be willing to walk that path, basically. So
19:17
it changed the whole course of my life when I read that book. So to me, I'm like, there's probably
19:22
some divine providence there and young, frustrated man getting shown a path for the potential to
19:29
move forward, do something with your life. And really, at the time, probably get me
19:34
not focused on all those things that I probably shouldn't have been focused on and focused on
19:39
something a little bit more positive. So when I read that book, it was like a switch is like,
19:45
Hey, this is what I want to do. I read everything I could get my hands on about it. I started
19:49
reading about working out and training and stuff. And yeah, I was an athlete for soccer book. I
19:55
never looked at weights. I never did anything on my own. I would just show up to practice and
19:58
whatever the heck we were doing that day for practice. Like that was my my workout. But
20:03
obviously, if you want to pursue something like that, you've got to make some some pretty
20:07
drastic sacrifices as far as PT and stuff like that. So the book was kind of what started not
20:14
kind of it was straight up what started me on the journey to wanting to become a seal. And then
20:19
the more I found out about and the more I found out about it, the more I was just convinced that
20:23
this is what I wanted to do. And I at least had to give it a try. And so I've heard very similar
20:29
stories to guys that are kind of in your generation, like I'm reminded of, you know,
20:34
Jack Carr and Eddie Penny and some of these people like maybe it was like they went to I think Eddie
20:39
Penny was like he was at a Cincinnati Bengals game. And I think there was like the honor guard was
20:44
there and there was just something about it that that really spoke to him. But it's typically that
20:48
story it's not typically the story of yeah, you know, I was 19 and then dropped out of college and
20:53
I was just kind of floundering. And then I figured hell weeks probably not going to be that bad.
20:57
Like it's typically something where they have some years at least of mental prep. So so give me an
21:02
idea. Let's talk a little bit more about that. So so you you start, you know, working out, you're
21:06
changing your workout, regiment, you're learning more as you go. But at some point, there had to
21:10
be a launch because there are people that do the same thing like, let's say let's take soccer. So
21:15
maybe they're a really good high school soccer player. And so they're thinking about what playing
21:18
at the next level would be like. And so they start preparing to do that. Maybe they're trying to get
21:22
on certain travel teams or they're trying to get exposure to certain coaches and soccer is a little
21:27
bit different. But you know, there's eventually that point where it's like, no, I'm going to do
21:30
this. I'm going to burn the ships and I'm going to at least give it a go. So so walk me through to
21:35
that moment where you're like, no, I'm going to sign on the dotted line and try to do this.
21:38
Yeah, I mean, obviously for the military, you can't sign on the dotted line until you're 18
21:43
unless it's World War II and you're the man and you're lying about how old you were and you're
21:47
actually 14. Probably can't get away with anymore. But for me, the process was, you know, I was like
21:54
14 at the time. So it wasn't even possible for me to enlist or start the journey for another
21:59
four years. So it was just workout, started running a lot, started swimming a lot, and then
22:06
decided around that time I was going back and forth on, hey, do I want to go the enlisted route?
22:11
Do I want to go the officer route? Because they're two very different routes. If you want to be an
22:16
officer in the military, you have to have your college degree. So, you know, that pushes the
22:21
timeline back even further because you can't get a college degree at 18 unless you're
22:26
doogie-houser, which I was definitely not doogie-houser in school. So I decided to go the officer route.
22:33
So but I was, if you could have given me a dotted line to sign on, I would have signed on it when
22:38
I was 15 years old. I'm very glad I didn't because I think I needed the college experience to really
22:45
get me prepared in shape for that journey because up until college, I thought I was in good shape.
22:51
And I thought I was in good shape because I was doing everything by myself. You know, there was
22:55
nobody else in my hometown that wanted to do anything similar to this. So, you know, I'd go to school,
23:00
I'd go to practice, and then our only gym was the YMCA. So I'd go run, I'd go to the YMCA, I'd lift,
23:07
and then two to three days a week, I would swim. And in my mind, I'm like, man, I'm the most in shape
23:12
dude on the planet in Corsa, Canada, Texas population, not that many, right? So I go to college, and I
23:21
start working out with some other guys that wanted to do the same thing. And the first run we went on
23:27
was this experience of I am nowhere near as in shape as I thought I was because these guys were
23:34
like actually in shape. These guys were just animals. They were turning in like a couple of
23:40
them, 16 minute, 20 second, three miles, like just freaks. So mentally, I think obviously pushing
23:48
yourself harder and harder and harder prepares you mentally. I think mentally, if I would have
23:52
went into 18, I probably would have been okay. But physically, that experience of college,
23:57
working out with with guys like that, iron sharpens iron, pushing yourself, making yourself better,
24:04
really set me up for success. So as soon as I graduated, my whole college experience was trying
24:10
to get a slot to go to Buds as an officer because you can walk into a recruiting station, and you
24:16
can sign on the paperwork right then and right there if you want to enlist. And like a week later,
24:20
you're going to be on a bus heading to boot camp. It's not the process for officers. There's a
24:25
selection process you have to go through. They only do the board once a year. You have to be in
24:31
the certain zone. So it's not like I could apply as a freshman in college. You have to be your senior
24:36
year. So wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. And then I applied. Thank goodness. I got picked up for a
24:42
spotted officer candidate school and graduated college. And it wasn't immediate. I was thinking
24:48
it was going to be immediate. It was still about a year after I graduated. But I graduated knowing
24:53
that at least I was going to get to go to Buds. I knew it was going to happen.
24:58
Okay, so the thing with Buds is by this point, everyone has seen the movies. They've read them
25:05
in Mars. They've gone through all that. I get it. It's hard, cold, wet and sandy, and you're just
25:11
miserable for a long time. Who's going to carry the boats? Like that's not necessarily what I want
25:16
to talk about. I think everyone by this point knows what you went through. But I want to dig a little
25:20
bit more into your psyche. So we're fast forwarding a little bit here. You've gotten in, you've gotten
25:24
your chance to go to Buds. Obviously you became a Navy SEAL. So you made it through that selection
25:29
process. I want to know about the mental part. Physical, we get it. They push you to physical
25:34
exhaustion almost immediately. And then they keep you there basically for months on end. But mentally,
25:39
I tell people to do this all the time, Sean, I'm like, if you're not redlining at least once a week
25:46
in your workouts, you need to figure out some new workouts. And what I mean by redline is where
25:50
you're like, I literally could not have gone another step. I literally could not have pumped
25:55
out another rep. And you're just like, you're in that panic mode, where you're like, my heart rate's
26:00
never going to come back down. And then you keep going. Like that's the part where you tell your
26:04
inner, you know what, hey, shut your mouth. Like I've got stuff to do. And you know, you just kind
26:09
of push through that. That's what I want to talk about. So take me through the mental aspect of
26:14
what you had to go through. Yeah. If you show up to buds, and by that, I mean, if you have
26:20
earned a spot to get to buds, you have everything physically that you need to get through. Some
26:26
people are going to have a harder time physically than others, because some people have more natural
26:31
attributes, some people prepared harder. But if you showed up to buds, if you earned a spot to
26:36
get there, that means that you were screened pretty heavily at this point. And it means that you have
26:41
the physical traits that you need to get through. And it's 100% the mental thing that separates
26:46
who makes it and who doesn't make it. And the biggest thing that gets people, and I was later
26:51
on in my career, I ran one of the phases of buds. I ran the third phase, the final phase of buds.
26:56
So I got to see it from the opposite perspective. It's people that lose sight on the day to day.
27:05
If you're just going evolution to evolution, you'll be fine. It's when people tend to look at,
27:11
oh, my goodness, it's day three. And I've got seven more months of this. And then even after I
27:16
graduate that, I've got seven more months of selection after buds before I make it. So it's
27:24
when people lose the focus of just make it through this next evolution. This next evolution.
27:28
Right, let me ask you this real quick before I lose the thought, because I've heard this before,
27:35
and I didn't know if this was true or not. But since you were in that last phase,
27:38
I've heard that one of the first evenings of hell week or something like that, like,
27:42
you know, sometimes they would put people on the beach and make you look out on the horizon as the
27:46
sun is going down. And then it's basically like a lot of guys would quit at that moment because
27:52
they couldn't fathom what the week would entail as opposed to, you know, because they were trying
27:57
to eat the whole elephant at once, right, to use a leadership business guru example. As opposed to
28:02
just, I have to take this by right now, I've got to take this by right now. Is that true? Do you
28:06
have a bunch of people that get all the way to hell week and they just get to that moment to where
28:10
they're not even doing something physical in that moment? It's just the mental side of like,
28:14
crap, I don't think I have what it takes to make it the next few days.
28:16
Yeah, the most people, the highest attrition rate is hell week. And the thing that gets most
28:22
people in hell week is the breaks. When you get to sit down for a lunch, when you get to sit down
28:28
for breakfast, you go rejoin your class after that breakfast, and there's significantly less people
28:35
than there was before. You have time to reflect. You have time to same thing with the sun going
28:40
down and waving at it. It's a mental game of, hey, you've got six more days of this, five more days
28:45
of this, whatever the case may be. So it's a lot of times not in the motion. Don't get me wrong,
28:50
the motion gets a lot of people. It's in the quiet times when you have time to actually process,
28:55
hey, this is the first breakfast. And I've got to do six more of these breakfasts without sleeping
29:00
before this evolution is over with. And it definitely gets a whole lot of people. And people that are
29:07
in isolation don't do very well throughout buds. You know, I don't think anyone's making it through
29:13
buds that doesn't lean on their boat crew and lean on their team baits very heavily. And just
29:18
the nature of the beast is if you're not a good performer, if you're dragging your boat crew down,
29:24
or you're just selfish, and no one likes you, you're getting isolated. And I don't think anyone's
29:29
making it through that program isolated. So keeping the focus on the here and now,
29:35
and then just relying on your teammates, just understanding that you're all going through it
29:40
together, which is the awesome part about being a part of a boat crew is you've got six to seven
29:45
other individuals right there that are going through the exact same thing that have the exact
29:49
same drive and focus and goal. And you can lean on each other and you can get strength from each
29:56
other. And there's going to be moments when you're more tired than the other guys, and there's going
29:59
to be moments where they're more gas than you are. And that's the beauty of being surrounded by
30:04
such high caliber individuals. Okay, let's talk a little bit more about that. There is a
30:09
let's call them a very famous former seal, a retired seal, who has a as far as I can tell,
30:18
not a great reputation inside the seal teams. He's a very me focused guy, a very solo guy,
30:24
a very I'm going to do it and I'm better than you type of thing. And so talk to me a little bit more
30:30
about that solo versus team focus, because you don't get through buzz as a team, like you're not
30:36
evaluated as a team, you're, you know, technically you're evaluated as an individual, they don't say,
30:40
all right, you know, boat team two, you guys made it through, you know, you finish El Week,
30:44
you go through it as an individual, but you're absolutely right. If you don't have those people
30:48
around you, that can take some of the burden off of you or that you can take some of the burden off
30:53
of them, it's going to be very, very difficult, not impossible, but very difficult to make it through.
30:58
But let's just say one of these seals that is super solo focus on themselves, very, very selfish,
31:06
makes it through buds. Do the officers that are that are that are taking care of of this and
31:12
the instructors and the other guys, is that a reputation that follows a guy once they've been
31:17
put onto a seal team and they're going to be either West Coast or East Coast, or is that something
31:21
towards like, hey, he had to do what he had to do to get through buds. But now let's see if he can
31:25
be a teammate, does that make sense? For sure, it 1000% follows you. And what I would say to the,
31:32
hey, you're selected on an individual basis is yeah, you make it through buds on an individual
31:38
basis, but the instructors are viewing everything through the lens of the team the entire time.
31:43
So yeah, you've got to perform, you've got to meet all the standards. Most evolutions and buds are
31:48
not team evolutions. Most evolutions and buds are single physical evolutions, runs, swims you have
31:55
a swim buddy. So runs, O course, PTs, all those things are are solo. So you have to make it through
32:02
as an individual, but the entire time the cadre is looking at it through the lens of the team and
32:07
how this person is interacting with the team. Now, historically, there was a lot of people that
32:13
made it through that weren't probably going to ever be the best teammates, because all we were
32:17
focusing on as instructors was, can they make it through the program? Are they physically and
32:23
mentally capable of making it through the program? Around 2011, there was a shift. You had a very
32:31
well respected commanding officer come in and take over the buds pipeline. And he wanted to kind of
32:37
change how we selected people up. You still had to meet all the physical requirements. Nothing
32:42
physically changed, but he wanted to correct for what he called a selection error. And the selection
32:48
error was high performers, horrible teammates. We don't want those people. We want high performers,
32:55
good teammates, or we want good performers, great teammates. We don't want high performers that are
33:00
bad teammates, and we can't allow poor performers that are good teammates either. So we started
33:06
selecting people based off the physicality, but then we started putting in all these other measures
33:10
as well to try to get a better snapshot for what the individual is and how he functions
33:15
on a team. So basically imagine a graph, a chart where it's split up into quadrants. You have four
33:21
quadrants, and you would have good teammate, good performer, bad teammate, bad performer. And we would
33:29
lean more towards the guy that was struggling performance wise, but was just the best teammate,
33:35
like hard goal doing for his people. We would rather have that guy than we would the high performer.
33:41
That was it just out for themselves. So when that paradigm shift changed, we started to see a little
33:48
bit of a correction. It looked no system is perfect. You're still going to get people through that
33:52
aren't necessarily the people that you would want to have through, but it helped out a lot. Now,
34:00
yes, your reputation starts in buds, and it goes with you throughout the rest of your career.
34:06
And those instructors that and then we always heard this like, Hey, those instructors that are
34:10
that are with you right now, you're going to be in platoons with them. And you're like, Oh, okay,
34:15
sure, whatever, sure, I am. No, I was to my first phase instructors were my platoon chief and my
34:20
lead petty officer when I checked into my first platoon. When I was a troop commander,
34:26
I had a whole bunch of my buds instructors were working for me. So your reputation definitely starts
34:32
right there in buds. And it's hard to shake. It's hard to shake. It's not a possible, but it's hard
34:38
to shake. That's really interesting how you bring that up. I wasn't aware of that shift that y'all
34:43
made. It reminded me of there was this guy that wrote this book where he did this research on team
34:48
captains. So take the elite of elite teams all across the globe and all kinds of different sports.
34:53
And they had a lot of common a lot of things in common, a lot of similarities. And one of the
34:58
similarities is that coming up in their sport. So let's say it's soccer, and you're talking to,
35:03
you know, Zenidine Zadon, whatever he was the captain of, you know, the the French team or whatever.
35:08
A lot of these guys he he was a terrible example because he was always the best guy on the team,
35:13
but a lot of these team captains, they were not the best player on their junior high school team.
35:18
They were not the best player on their high school team. They were not the best player on their
35:23
maybe their college team or something like that. Something clicked along the way that made them
35:29
elite at whatever they did. But it wasn't their soccer skills that were elite in comparison to
35:34
their leadership skills and their teammate skills, because that's how these people end up becoming
35:39
captains. And you see that across sports, you'll see guys that have the sea on their jersey. They're
35:44
not always the best player on the team. Sometimes they are, but that's kind of something it seems
35:48
like y'all, you know, we're, you know, a correcting for, which was we need to find these people that
35:53
are just super duper teammates. And then the other stuff will come along. And that's part of the job
35:57
of the cadre is to make sure that person, if they do have a physical deficiency, not an injury,
36:02
but a deficiency that we get them up to snuff, especially if they are a good team player. So
36:08
that that's really interesting that you bring that up. And so if you if you look at what really
36:14
makes a successful organization, whether it's the military, whether it's civilian, whether it's a
36:19
sports team, it's you're selecting people. So there has to be a baseline for who gets to join the team.
36:26
You have really good training specific to that job set. And then you have a really good strong
36:33
culture that keeps people in line with what the goal of that mission is. And that's why typically
36:39
military does well, special operations forces do really well is they're selected. We spend a lot
36:44
of time training, but you're just a part of a culture that doesn't really tolerate the selfish
36:51
ness very well people that are selfish. It happens. You know, I've met plenty of selfish people in
36:56
the military, but in general, it's a self correcting problem once you get inside of your your first
37:01
platoon. Okay, very good. So let's talk about your first platoon because as people kind of colloquially
37:06
know, now you get into a platoon, you have a certain team that you're assigned to either East Coast,
37:10
West Coast. And then I'm assuming you got into a platoon when the GWOT was already off and going,
37:16
right? Yep. So 2008, I checked into a SEAL team seven and just had the best first platoon that you
37:24
could possibly have my platoon chief who I said previously was one of my budge instructors was
37:30
the guy that I looked up to the most going through that program. And it's still in my mind. He's the
37:35
epitome of what a what a seal should be. And on top of all of that, he was a great family man.
37:41
He had five kids. Four were his one was a niece that he had adopted because his sister-in-law had
37:49
some issues. So he had a great reputation. Like he can't get a better reputation, super hard worker.
37:54
And he was also a great family man. So to see someone as a new guy getting to look up to someone
38:01
like that, we're like, this guy's the total package. This guy's a stud. He knows everything about this
38:05
community. He cares. He pushes himself. He pushes all of us. And on top of all the dedication he has
38:11
here, he's also just a great family man for a young man who was engaged at the time to my wife now.
38:19
It was a blessing to see, okay, it's possible. Like you can have a balance. You can still be a good
38:26
father and you can still be a good seal. Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about that then because
38:32
also a thing that's commonly known to anyone paying attention is that in the spec ops community
38:37
divorce rates are through the roof. They're way higher than normal divorce rates. And so it's
38:42
interesting to hear you talk about how you were engaged. You had a long career as a seal. You got
38:47
out and you're doing your stuff and you're still married. Like I was honestly shocked to hear you
38:51
say that just because you don't normally hear that. Was that basically because of that guy that
38:57
you met where you kind of modeled after him or was it just like you and your wife are awesome
39:01
together and you're right or die and you were going to make it regardless?
39:04
I think it's a little bit of both. There's definitely a learning curve with marriage,
39:10
new marriage. And there's definitely a very steep learning curve with new marriage and then
39:14
you know, a military training cycle. But for both of us getting to to watch this guy and his wife
39:21
and how they loved each other and treated each other and raised their family and still
39:26
prioritized his job, it definitely set us up for for success. Now, I think my wife and I are a
39:34
great pair and you know, hey, step one, choose wisely fellas like, amen, honest. A lot of people
39:42
probably don't have the right conversations before they get married. And you know, my wife and I,
39:46
we dated for four months and then I asked her to marry me because I knew she was she was the one.
39:50
But in that four months, we had so many important conversations that gave me and her like total
39:58
peace of mind that this was this was you know, Providence that it was basically meant to be. So
40:03
choose wisely. And then the teams are super important, but you know, my family was important,
40:09
even more important. I've only ever had two goals as a man. And that was to be a seal and to be a
40:16
good husband and a good father. So if being a seal ever came in conflict with that, then the
40:22
nod was going to get to go to the family. But you know, we communicated really well,
40:26
my wife is a rock star. She's not someone that if if we're frustrated, she's letting me know,
40:32
which I appreciate. There's no silent treatment. There's no pin up frustrations or aggression or
40:38
anything like that. Like we're just figuring it out right then and right there in a productive
40:43
manner. Like we've literally never had a fight. And that's not a miracle. It's because we talk,
40:49
we talk about everything. So part of it's choosing wisely. Part of it is keeping the focus on where
40:55
it needs to be, which is a healthy relationship. And then part of it is modeling your your marriage
41:00
and your life together around people who have succeeded. Because there's plenty of negativity
41:05
around marriage and seal teams, plenty of negativity. Yeah, it certainly seems like it would be the
41:10
case. Now, something you've mentioned several times in this interview so far, Sean is the word
41:15
providence and God's hand working in getting you to that library, where you read that book,
41:22
where you were put on a path, or, you know, meeting your wife or, you know, making it through butts,
41:26
all these types of things. So there are a lot of people that can't really square the circle of how
41:33
a follower of Christ can take a job where one of the aspects of your job is to kill people.
41:40
And, you know, we can get into just war theory, and we can get into innocent versus not innocent
41:45
and all that type of stuff. But it reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with Bill Rapier,
41:50
very similar, you know, Navy Seal ended up going to the development group,
41:55
Seal Team Six. And, you know, he's a guy that has ended the lives of a lot of bad people.
42:00
And hearing him explain how he got through that was very interesting. But I'm just curious for
42:04
you, because we haven't even talked about your deployments yet, because as far as I understand,
42:07
you went to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Eastern Africa. And in each one of these deployments,
42:12
you're not there to give people rides. You're not there to, you know, just shake hands with
42:16
with the village folk. You're there potentially to take human life. So just just walk me through
42:21
all that because a lot of people just don't understand how Christian could do any of that.
42:24
Yeah, it's definitely a deep philosophical question that I'm probably not going to offer
42:30
anybody any light bulb moments on, but these aren't good people. These are people that are doing
42:38
really bad things to other people to include their own countrymen. And part of, I think, being a man
42:46
and part of being a follower of Christ is also looking out for people who can't look out for themselves.
42:51
And going overseas, knowing that that was going to be a part of the job was never really in conflict
42:58
with my worldview, because I looked at it more along the lines of helping people who,
43:05
through most of the time, no fault of their own, were stuck in situations that let's just say we're
43:13
less than ideal. Like anybody that wants to have a conversation with me about members of ISIS,
43:20
and whether they deserve to be breathing the same air that we have to breathe, I'll sit down
43:25
with you all day long, and we can have that conversation. And I'll run you through every single thing
43:30
that we had to sit there and watch those people do to their fellow man. So for me personally,
43:36
it was more of just understanding that by doing something like that, you're protecting people,
43:45
not just people back here in our country, but the people that are there, that a lot of them are just
43:51
there because that's where they were born. And they don't have a choice, and they don't have a way
43:56
to get out of that. And those people are doing really, really horrible things. So there was not
44:00
one night where I didn't have a good night's sleep, at least I was playing nights where I
44:06
haven't slept well, but there's not not because of any concern of that. Hey guys, real quick.
44:11
I know that a lot of you in my audience lead very disciplined lives. You crush your workouts,
44:16
you're getting your after it on the mats, you're standing out at work, your family actually likes
44:20
you. You seem to have everything under control. But I've been a part of enough discussions with
44:24
men over the years to know without a doubt that many of you are dealing with unwanted compulsive
44:29
behaviors or addictions, whether it's pornography, drinking, smoking, using illegal substances, gambling,
44:36
lying, whatever, many of you have allowed yourselves to be mastered by something that is stronger than
44:41
your willpower. If you don't get that in check, guys, it can have astonishingly negative consequences
44:46
for your marriage, your relationship with your children, your business, your job, your church,
44:51
on and on and on. I think you get the point. That's why I want to introduce you to my friends
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at Relay. Relay is a recovery app that matches you with accountability partners that will help you get
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45:12
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45:24
Let my friends at relay help go to the link in the show notes to try relay today. That takes you
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to join relay dot app backslash undaunted. It's time to start taking this seriously. Again,
45:37
go to the link in the show notes, click that link in the show notes to get started.
45:41
I think it's also interesting that this came up recently when Hamas obviously did the terrorist
45:46
attack in Israel. I was talking to my son into a class about a week later, and I was going through
45:53
the list of atrocities because I was like, look, guys, within a couple of weeks, you're going to
45:57
start hearing people saying, why is Israel being so mean? Why can't they just do a ceasefire?
46:03
Why can't we all just play nice and make nice? The reality is, is because if you think that way,
46:08
you have a low view of evil in that you either think that most people are generally good,
46:13
and they have a good heart, but maybe they had a rough bringing or rough upbringing,
46:17
or maybe if they had more economic opportunities, they wouldn't choose to chop people's heads off.
46:22
And it's just like, no, these people are driven by a satanic demonic ideology that causes them
46:28
to hurt people and to keep human flourishing from taking place. And I said this and not everybody
46:35
really liked that I said this, and I've said it before on the show as well, that I said that we
46:40
should pray for the Hamas fighters that perpetrated these attacks in two ways. Number one, we should
46:46
pray that they should repent of their actions and turn to Christ and accept his free gift of grace
46:50
for salvation. And then we should pray that if they don't do that, that they get killed quickly,
46:55
because if you let people like that live, they will continue to hurt, damage, rape, and kill
47:03
image bearers of Christ. And so that's kind of how for me, like when I think of a Christian that
47:08
is in that line of work, it's like, we're here to equip men to push back darkness here at undaunted
47:13
life. That's the front lines of darkness. Does that make sense? Absolutely. And part of it is
47:21
probably a perspective in that they've never actually seen or been involved or been engaged with
47:26
anything like that. But part of it is also just a deep, fundamental, fundamental misunderstanding of
47:33
human nature and good and evil. And this belief that we have, and I say we is a Western society who
47:40
is has the blessing of growing up with a whole lot of freedoms. And it can shape our perspective
47:48
in thinking that everybody's like this. They're just not, there's different belief systems. There's
47:54
different pathologies. There's all kinds of different things that leads to it. But there's
48:00
definitely evil out there. And like you said, evil doesn't just stop. It just continues and continues
48:06
and continues. And you know, there's also examples of evil just collapsing on itself, like the
48:11
terrorist organizations that are out there, they don't like each other. So if you've got a situation
48:16
like an afro where you've got al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda and all these things, like they're
48:21
fighting each other too. They hate, they just hate everybody. So there's the odds that evil collapses
48:27
in on itself, but it's not historically what usually happens. It continues to grow and grow and grow
48:31
until it's runs up against the opposite force, which is a force for good. And you can just look,
48:37
the most recent one that was on a large scale was the Islamic State, you know, in 2013, they weren't
48:44
really even a thing. And then within a couple of years, they're controlling most of Syria, almost
48:49
all of Iraq, the largest city in Iraq, they completely controlled all of it doing all these
48:54
different atrocities, trying to continue to expand their war and their slaughter all over
48:58
that continent, all over Europe, bring it to America. And you can sit in your bubble and just
49:05
hope that at some point in time, they're going to change their minds, but they're not.
49:09
They're certainly not going to. And I think you're right, you don't allow them, because I've heard,
49:14
you know, different policy won't say, oh, you know, just let them fight it out amongst themselves.
49:17
It's like, are we really going to wait to see if ISIS is taken out by Boko Haram? Is that really
49:22
what we're going to do right now? Is that the best use of our of our forces in our time?
49:26
I do want to talk briefly about your deployments, because you did deploy multiple times to all
49:31
different areas in the Middle East and Africa. We don't have to get into individual missions and
49:36
different things like that, like unless you want to, and then I'm all ears, I'm just curious about
49:41
the biggest misconceptions that people have when when people deploy, because yes, there are some
49:46
people that deploy and they're on the base and they never go outside the wire. And I mean, they're
49:51
they're there and they're generally safe the whole time. And then there's guys like you that are
49:55
getting kinetic on a regular basis, but talk to us a little bit about the op tempo talk to us a
50:00
little bit about about that. But for a city like me, explain to us some of the misconceptions about
50:05
when a seal deploys. Yeah, probably the one of the largest misconceptions is that we're all just
50:13
Superman. And there's nothing that possibly phases us. And we don't have bad habits. And we don't have
50:18
to continually fight against complacency and laziness. And at times exhaustion and potentially even fear
50:26
and all those things. And it's just categorically not true. The military to include special operations
50:32
forces are comprised of human beings. And human beings come in different shapes and sizes and
50:38
different capabilities. But at the end of the day, we're all intrinsically flawed. So you go overseas
50:43
and there's going to be times where you're exhausted. There's going to be times where you don't feel
50:49
like taking things quite as seriously as you possibly probably should, because it's your 100th
50:55
combat operation that deployment and not your first combat operation. So you could potentially get
51:00
lulled into a sense of complacency. Maybe the operation right before that you watched a friend
51:06
or a partner force get cut in half by a roadside bomb. And then there's the fear of, hey, that
51:12
could have been you. What happens if you go out tomorrow? Maybe that same thing is going to happen.
51:16
And all of those thoughts are plaguing all of us too. And the thing that makes it to where we
51:24
can overcome those things, I think for me personally was two things. One is just discipline. Like you
51:29
don't get to that point and be able to fight those things off if you have not cultivated
51:34
a certain amount of discipline, because that's what it takes to fight complacency. That's what
51:38
it takes to put that fear back inside or the exhaustion back inside is just the discipline of
51:44
doing the right thing, even when you don't feel like doing the right thing. And then the other
51:48
thing is you've got your brothers right there beside you and they're a consistent source
51:52
of strength. You don't want to let them down. You're accountable to them. I'm accountable every
51:58
single time that we go on an operation to make sure that I am the best version of Sean that I can
52:03
possibly be before we roll out the door, because the people to my right, the people to my left
52:09
are depending on that. So a big mis-categoration would probably be that it's easy, that you're
52:14
just out there and you don't have to ever worry about those things. Do we love being on deployment?
52:19
Yes, we would rather be deployed than literally anywhere else. But those same things that happen
52:24
in everyday life, the exhaustion, the annoyance, the doubt, all those things, we have to struggle
52:31
against all those things as well. Okay, so one of the things you mentioned there, Sean, was fear.
52:35
In a very micro way, I've experienced like primal fear before I thought there was somebody that
52:43
had broken into our house in the middle of the night. So here I am, you know, clearing in the dark,
52:47
kind of a thing. Excuse me. And that's something that was just par for the course for you guys,
52:53
that that's just something that you had to do. You were constantly in danger when you were out on
52:58
missions, you did not know what was on the other side of the door, you couldn't always trust your
53:02
intel, you know, things were changing all around you. And you know, the consequences for mistakes
53:08
is potentially paid with your life, but specifically with fear. And you also mentioned doubt,
53:13
how do you deal with that? Because part of it's like, yeah, you got dudes around you,
53:16
and you kind of have a sense that they're afraid to, but you're the one that's going to control you,
53:22
like you can't control all circumstances, but you can control you. But how do you deal with the
53:25
fear down? Yeah, so I'll talk to us specifically, because it's a long process. And then maybe some
53:34
things that just for everyday life to kind of keep in mind to one is, look, we have an advantage,
53:40
we screen people for this stuff. There's a lot of evolutions in buds that, even though the students
53:46
don't know it, we're just seeing who can keep calm when we're literally putting him in the
53:51
scariest environment imaginable. So we're putting you underwater with a scuba tank on,
53:57
and then we're ripping your mask off, and we're tying your hose and knots, we're taking your fins,
54:03
we're doing all the, we're tumbling you around so you don't know where you are. And then you have
54:07
to follow a certain strict order of procedures to get your hose untangled, to get your air turned
54:14
back on, you're not breathing for a minute, minute 20 seconds at a time while you're doing that. So
54:18
we're putting people in a scenario that does two things. One, it screens people out who,
54:24
when they have the fight or flight response that they flight, they choose the opposite. So we're
54:31
screening for that, but it also teaches people that they can control that. It teaches people that
54:36
aren't necessarily going to run away, but who still experience that fear, that you can still
54:40
control that fear and get things done. So we do select people for that training. We train
54:47
harder than anyone on the planet. Like we're gone, basically, what I was wearing the training
54:51
command are, you know, an average seal platoon on a year where you're training, you're going to be
54:55
gone 240, 250 days out of the year, just training. That training is hard, that training is pushing
55:01
you past your, your breaking point. So training, relying on your guys that are right there is a
55:06
huge piece of it, but it all just comes down to a choice. It's that easy, and it's that difficult
55:12
at the same time. It's a choice. There's no such thing as a person who doesn't experience some
55:18
level of fear. But when you experience that fear, it comes down to the choice that you're going to
55:24
make. And a very small example I'll give is my first deployment, my vehicle early on in deployment,
55:31
we'd already hit a roadside bomb. So I'd experienced what was like being hit by an IED inside of a
55:36
vehicle, which was not the coolest thing. But then later on in that deployment, we're conducting
55:41
this operation and some partner force guys, some local Afghani that was about five feet away from
55:48
me and there was Americans on his right and his left, stepped on a pressure plate that was connected
55:53
to two 84 millimeter mortars. And it blew both his legs off, blew part of his arm off. And I'm
56:00
sitting right there, like I'm watching all these things were rendering aid, we're getting things
56:04
ready. And then my platoon chief, that guy that I respected a whole lot, made the call that he
56:09
needed to go check out another piece of terrain to see if it was safe, because we didn't want to
56:14
be there anymore. And was I not wanting to walk? Yeah, I was not wanting to walk literally anywhere,
56:21
because I had just watched someone step on an IED five feet away from me. But I had a choice to
56:25
make, which was, Hey, I can either go back my chief up and go with him, or I could sit here
56:31
and just stay right where I am. And I knew that I needed to overcome that fear. I needed to take
56:37
that next step. I needed to go with him, not just to protect him, but also to shake that fear off
56:43
and just get right back to it. So ultimately, it's a choice, you're going to experience fear
56:49
in your life. And it's as easy as making the choice. And it's also as difficult as making the choice,
56:56
because there's no magic pill you can swallow that's going to make you, you know, Superman.
57:02
Well, and I think as well, you mentioned discipline there, if you can go back to your discipline.
57:07
So think about it like not in a combat scenario, guys, listen to this. Let's say you're coming back
57:12
from a serious injury, maybe you've had surgery or something like that. But let's say before that
57:16
surgery, you had spent years, if not decades, in a very disciplined approach to your training.
57:22
So you hurt your knee, take that disciplined approach to rehabbing your knee. And then
57:27
whenever you're at a good place, get back to the squats, get back to the box jumps,
57:31
get back to the wall says get back to the whatever the thing is that you're going to need. But
57:36
if you don't have that discipline, if you don't have that basis, if you don't have that foundation,
57:40
you don't have anything to fall back on. And that's one of the reasons why I tell people
57:43
that they need to train, do physically hard things all the time, because you never know
57:48
when you're going to need to take, you know, a withdrawal out of that bank account, but you need
57:52
to be putting deposits in there deposits every day, moving your body doing stuff you don't want
57:56
to do waking up early to do it, because one day you're going to need to take a withdrawal. Now,
58:00
there's more that could be said about a lot of your deployments and the things that you did.
58:04
But when you came back from a deployment Iraq, and I think I have these details correctly,
58:09
you became the officer in charge of training for all the West Coast SEAL teams. And so basically,
58:16
you were put in charge of developing the leadership training programs for this group of people,
58:21
right? So this was obviously a good experience for stuff that you would end up doing thereafter.
58:27
But take me through that process, is that kind of where you were working with with
58:31
Jocko Willink on different things on these leadership programs? Why did the Navy decide like,
58:36
hey, we need to get these, you know, train killers to be better leaders? Like,
58:40
take me through that whole process. Why that even was a thing?
58:43
Yeah. Yeah. Let me rewind one second, because I want to make a comment on the discipline thing
58:48
that you just talked about. Yeah. Just as someone who I'm not saying the most disciplined person in
58:54
the world. But I've been able to cultivate a decent amount of discipline in my life. And
58:59
as a man, also as a Christian, you discipline is going to be probably the most important trait
59:07
that you can possibly have. At no point in time did Christ ever say that being a follower of him
59:14
was going to be easy. Matter of fact, this is the exact opposite as many times as he could
59:17
possibly say it was, basically opening yourself up to just a hard life in a lot of different
59:23
aspects. And it's so important. Discipline is so important that there's seven cardinal virtues
59:30
and discipline is one of them, but we call it fortitude. Fortitude and discipline are basically
59:35
the exact same thing. So Christians throughout the years have kind of settled on seven virtues
59:41
that really are really, really important to walking a life of faith. And discipline
59:45
called fortitude is one of them. And the good thing about discipline is like you hinted at,
59:53
there's no easy button, but the more that you do it, the more discipline that you apply to
59:58
different areas in your life, the easier it gets to be disciplined. The easier it gets to tell,
1:00:04
you know, your internal struggles to shut down, like your internal self, your self doubt, it becomes
1:00:09
easier to do what needs to be done, to do the hard things that need to be done, to push yourself,
1:00:16
to have the good habits. The opposite is also true. No matter how much discipline you have,
1:00:21
the second that you start letting that backslide, then it becomes easier to say yes to the things
1:00:25
that you shouldn't be saying yes to. So I would just say, understand the importance,
1:00:31
important role that discipline plays in a man's life, especially in a man of face life as a husband,
1:00:38
as a father, discipline is going to be one of the if the not predominant factors in whether
1:00:42
you're actually going to be successful in all those different arenas. And there's no easy button,
1:00:47
you just have to do it with the knowledge, the more that you do it, the easier it will become.
1:00:54
That being said, so fast forwarding to training. So I get back from a tour in 2016, where I was
1:01:02
a troop commander. So I took five platoons from seal team five to Iraq. And we did the big push
1:01:08
against the Islamic State. So did the Mosul clearance, cleared amount of Mosul. We come back.
1:01:14
I wanted to stay at team five. So I became the operations officer of team five. So you're
1:01:19
the third in command. You got the commanding officer of the executive officer and the operations
1:01:23
officer. But the operations officer works directly with the commanding officer. You're running the
1:01:28
team basically for the commanding officer. He says, this is what I want to have happen. This is what
1:01:32
I want to focus on operations officer does that. After that tour is when I got pulled up to run
1:01:39
the training commands, it was a 20, I think 17, when I got pulled up to go run that. And
1:01:45
my job there is multifaceted. My job one, the most important job I have is to provide
1:01:51
the best possible training safe, aggressive, hard training that you can to prepare
1:01:57
seals for war. So that's job number one. Job number two is if you are an officer that's running
1:02:05
an operation overseas, the military likes to use different terms for things. So you're a platoon
1:02:10
commander, but the second you go on a mission, you're the ground force commander. And what that
1:02:15
title means is you're the one that's responsible for everything that's happening during that
1:02:20
operation, everything that's happening on the battlefield. If you're the ground force commander,
1:02:24
you're in charge of those things. The seal teams put a whole lot of effort into training our
1:02:31
ground force commanders into making sure that we had the best ground force commanders that you
1:02:36
could possibly have. So my favorite part of my job at that role was I was got to mentor the up
1:02:43
and coming leaders, the up and coming platoon commanders that were coming through to talk about
1:02:47
how to be good ground force commanders to do the theory of it, the practice of it, the mentoring
1:02:52
of it, the grading of it. And then the last part of my job, which is necessary, but it's never the
1:02:58
most fun thing is when people aren't cutting it, making the recommendation that they need to be
1:03:03
removed. So if you had a leader that came through and after a process of trying to get them where
1:03:07
they needed to be, if they just weren't there, then, you know, we'd have to remove them, remove
1:03:11
them from training. So a lot of impetus was put on making sure that our leaders were prepared,
1:03:19
because leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield. Your guys, if you're in a
1:03:23
simple tune, they will literally knock down a brick wall and chew through a sandburm in order
1:03:29
to get the job done. And the determining factor usually and whether they are set up for success
1:03:35
and allowed to actually get the job done is who's in charge of them is the leader doing the right
1:03:40
things as he's setting the right conditions, is he giving them the freedom and the guidance
1:03:44
that they need to actually get things done. So once our community realized that we started to
1:03:51
invest very heavily in making sure that our leaders were very, very prepared for their tours.
1:03:58
That being said, I never had one tour where I felt overly prepared for it. I was always wish
1:04:02
that I had been more trained and better prepared. But in hindsight, I think we do a pretty good job
1:04:08
of getting people prepared for those roles. Okay, yeah, I feel like you're always going to be
1:04:13
stuck in that vortex when you're preparing to go to these kinetic areas and connect situations.
1:04:17
So this is kind of an extension of that discussion because obviously you got out of the Navy seals
1:04:23
and we'll talk more about that here in a minute. But from a civilian perspective, when we look at
1:04:28
the military right now, it's kind of hard to see a lot of preparedness. It's kind of hard to see
1:04:34
a lot of leadership. And part of that is because some of the signaling from the generals,
1:04:39
they seem to be concerned about things that don't have to do with breaking stuff and killing people,
1:04:44
which is kind of what you what you do in war. It seems like they're very worried about
1:04:47
diversity, equity, and inclusion. They're very worried about getting that the non-typical
1:04:53
soldier like to come through. And it just seems very odd from from where I sit because it's like,
1:04:59
wait a minute. I don't care how diverse our special operators are. I care about how good they
1:05:06
are at their jobs. I care about how lethal they are. I don't care what the upbringing was like,
1:05:11
or if this officer had two moms instead of a mom and a dad, I care about if he can lead men
1:05:17
well that they're going to be going into battle because I want all of them to come home and I want
1:05:21
them to take out the enemy. So let's go from you setting up this leadership program. After you left
1:05:28
that program, has it continued to get better? Has it gotten kind of weighed down in the bureaucratic
1:05:34
nonsense of what we potentially see in Washington? Am I drawing some conclusions there that aren't
1:05:39
true? Let's go ahead and set the record straight. Yeah, yeah, potentially. So look,
1:05:44
this is maybe not the same verbiage that we're using right now with the diversity and the
1:05:50
inclusiveness and all that thing. But when there's not a war going on, people in leadership positions
1:05:56
in the military have always historically shifted their perspective into other things. It's not new.
1:06:04
War two ended. There was a massive drawdown leaders. It's not all leaders, but some leaders
1:06:09
started focusing on things that they probably shouldn't have been focused on that weren't
1:06:13
involving being as lethal of a fighting force as we could possibly be. So that historical perspective
1:06:19
has always been there. The war really, war really tends to put things in focus, shall we say, for
1:06:25
leadership usually. As far as the training goes, as long as guys are running around on the beach
1:06:33
in buds with a boat on their head and with logs and as long as they're cold and wet and miserable,
1:06:38
the SEAL teams are going to be just fine because that's the proving ground. And when you get into
1:06:44
that community, all the guys on the ground want to do is they want to be the best SEAL they could
1:06:48
possibly be. And that means being prepared at all times to kill the enemy and break his stuff.
1:06:54
And our training is always going to be focused on that. So I don't think it's the training that I
1:07:01
used to run. I don't think it's gotten worse. If anything, I think it's gotten better because I
1:07:05
know the two and three individuals that took over the command since I've been there and they're
1:07:10
phenomenal stellar people. And I know they're just going to continue to whatever, hopefully,
1:07:15
good work I did while I was there. I know they're going to continue to just just build off of it.
1:07:20
So at some point, does those messages become annoying to people on the ground? Do we wish we
1:07:26
didn't have to listen to some of those? Yeah. But the standards have not changed. You're not
1:07:32
getting through buds any easier. So as long as the guys on the ground are there, they're going to
1:07:38
be focused on the right things. So you mentioned standards, I was about to move off, but you brought
1:07:43
something else up because we do hear about the standards being adjusted so that more women can
1:07:48
get through more. You know, anyway, it's typically on the female side. And so I can't remember the
1:07:54
details exactly. But I think there were a couple of females that made it through the Ranger school
1:07:58
or something like that. And then they were actually put out there with the Rangers. And then they
1:08:02
they both quit because they're like, this sucks. We can't do this. Like, you know, we were good
1:08:05
enough athletes to get through the hard part. And you know, we were mentally strong. But when it
1:08:09
came to actually doing the job, and I guess my biggest concern, Sean, is let's take 10 years
1:08:13
from now. I mean, because the world 10 years ago, 2013, this is unrecognizable, the world that we
1:08:18
live in culturally and politically. So let's go 10 years from now. And let's say they're forcing
1:08:24
a female quota for the SEAL teams. I'm worried about someone like you getting shot being unable
1:08:30
to move in a 125 pound female seal that looks good on a poster, can't pull you out of harm's way.
1:08:38
And then you both die. And so is there a concern? Is there a groundswill of concern within the teams
1:08:44
that it's not just going to be board generals eventually? But this is just going to be this top
1:08:49
down authoritarian focus to where it's like, Hey, seals, green brace, marine recon rangers.
1:08:55
We need y'all to have more females. We need y'all to have this number of this many types of people
1:09:00
when describing their immutable characteristics. Or do we always assume that no, we're just going
1:09:05
to look for the best. And we're going to let the political commercial speak for themselves.
1:09:08
Yeah, I can't speak for things that haven't happened yet. I would hope that would never be the case.
1:09:16
But let's pretend that it let's let's say that that is the case. First the when when they first
1:09:22
started looking at women in the service in combat MOS is in the server MOS is basically your rating.
1:09:28
So then they expanded it to special operations forces and they asked all the special operations
1:09:34
forces to basically give their their data. A lot of other special operations forces in the in the
1:09:40
US military push back and just said no. What the seal teams did is I think the smartest that you
1:09:46
possibly could have done, which was and I was at buds when this was happening. I was an instructor
1:09:51
at buds when this is happening was we codified our standard and we said, awesome. Yeah, this is
1:09:57
great. That's great. Women want to come be seals. Awesome. Here's our standard. Here it is. You make
1:10:04
it. You're a seal. You don't make it. You're not a seal. The Marines hate no hit on the Marines
1:10:11
that were that were there. Like this was a leadership decision. They had no no choice in this. The
1:10:17
guys on the ground, but the Marine Special Operations Forces just they basically did a bunch of tests
1:10:23
and then they pushed back and said, you know, the data doesn't show that this is doable. So
1:10:27
let's not do it. And then the military said, we don't care what your data shows it's happening.
1:10:32
So our take of just modifying our our standards was the best that we could possibly have because
1:10:38
once the standards are codified, they're the standards. And there have been some women that have
1:10:43
tried to come through the pipeline, but they've not even got to day one. There's a there's a
1:10:49
pre screening that happens and I don't think anyone's even got to day one yet. But hey, in the odd
1:10:54
chance that that someone does make it through what that would mean is that they made it through
1:11:01
the standard. So it would be hard to push back against someone that made it through that standard.
1:11:06
I don't know if that'll ever happen or not, but if it did, in theory, they would have had to go
1:11:13
through every single thing that everybody else went through. So in theory, the capability,
1:11:18
the physical capability and the mental capability would at least be there. So that was our strategy
1:11:23
on codifying the standard instead of just pushing back and saying, we don't want to,
1:11:28
which of course, in a bureaucracy, what are they in a military hierarchy when you're like, we don't
1:11:35
want to when we don't care what you want, like we're making you do it. But when you have the standard,
1:11:40
then that's the standard and that's the entry to the organization from then on out. Now, as far as
1:11:45
the attrition rate and things getting easier, if anything, they've gotten a little bit at least
1:11:52
harder because we had about three years where you were graduating no joke, 11 people, 15 people.
1:11:59
Wow. It's insane. Insane. So it definitely is not that easier. And it's also every seal's
1:12:06
favorite pastime to say, well, my generation, my buds class was the last hard, but I can tell you
1:12:12
somebody who ran buds, not true. It's still exceptionally hard. We might not get to do everything that
1:12:19
some of the old timers got done to them, but it's still exceptionally hard. And the last piece of
1:12:23
this is, this is just my opinion on things. I don't think it matters who says what, as long as the
1:12:32
the hairy chest and frogman E six is running buds as the instructor, buds will be just fine.
1:12:38
All right. Well, that's good to hear. But let's transition to you transitioning out of the Navy
1:12:44
Seals. So as far as I understand it, you did 13 years as a Navy seal, is that correct? Great.
1:12:49
So 13 years, you hear a lot of stories about guys doing their 20 and their 20 is, you know,
1:12:55
getting in 20 years and you hit all these different, you know, standards and for stuff for retirement
1:13:00
and benefits and money and all that kind of stuff. Well, you got out seven years prior to that. So
1:13:04
it wasn't exactly like you were just shy. But anytime a special operator gets out of whatever,
1:13:10
you know, unit or platoon or whatever they're in, that's a big decision because it's not just,
1:13:14
Hey, I want to do this with my life. It's like, Hey, these are my brothers. We fought and, you
1:13:19
know, bled together. You know, I've lost some of them. And you know, I can't just leave them hanging,
1:13:23
you know what I mean? So, so why get out at the 13 year mark? Yeah, so a lot of different things
1:13:29
were going on that kind of culminated in it, but it was 100% the hardest decision I've ever had to
1:13:34
make in my entire life. And I went back and forth on it for over a year. But one of the,
1:13:41
the main reason was was family. And what kind of shine a spotlight on this was I had a commanding
1:13:48
officer when I was at SEAL Team five, when I was a troop commander and went to Iraq, he was my
1:13:51
commanding officer and he was just awesome. Just a great guy, a great leader in every aspect. And
1:13:58
he sat me down one day. And, you know, when you're post troop commander, you're starting to now move
1:14:04
into the realm where you're going to be an executive officer, a second in command of a SEAL team. A
1:14:10
couple years after that, you're going to be a commanding officer of a SEAL team. So the community
1:14:14
is starting to look very heavily at your career and where you need to go and what you need to do.
1:14:19
So he sat me down, he's like, Hey, let's let's just go through the next, you know, let's pretend
1:14:24
like you're going to hit 20 years. Let's go through the next five tours that get you to 20 years. And
1:14:30
let's just do an experiment where every tour is exactly the tour that you want. So walk me through
1:14:36
where if you could do five tours, like where would your next five tours be? And I was like, man,
1:14:42
this is awesome. Hell yeah. Well, I want to do this, then I want to run the training command,
1:14:46
which I got to do, which was awesome. I want to run the training command. Then I want to go do this,
1:14:50
and then I want to be a commanding officer. And he's like, okay, great. That's awesome. So we got
1:14:54
that mapped out. It's okay. Now do me a favor and write the age of your kids, the age that they'll be
1:15:00
underneath every single one of those tours. And I was like, oh, it's kind of weird. So I started
1:15:06
writing my kids names under all those tours. And the longer I went down that pipeline, the more
1:15:13
my heart just started to sink. Because I'm looking at my kids who were then my oldest son was,
1:15:21
oh my goodness, five, maybe five or six when I was doing this. And now I'm looking at a roadmap,
1:15:28
where when I hit the 20 year mark, and I'm finally able to retire, my oldest son Ronan would be
1:15:35
18 years old when I finished that tour. So what that meant well, what that meant was I would hit
1:15:42
20, finally have all this time to dedicate to my family, and my son's out the door that same year.
1:15:49
He's going to be off in college or whatever if he even goes to college these days, who cares.
1:15:55
But if he's going to be out the house, sure, and he's going to be going and doing some other stuff.
1:16:00
So that was the moment where the wheels started turning of, okay, two goals, be a good seal,
1:16:08
be a good father, be a good husband, be a good have a good family. And I started to see the
1:16:14
world through the lens of it might not be possible to achieve both of those things. I'd at least be
1:16:20
sacrificing on the family side. So the other thing that I had going for me that worked against me
1:16:27
in the end, but helped me make the decision was, I had had a little bit of a unique career path,
1:16:32
and I had moved through things very quickly. So there's certain wickets, if you will, that you
1:16:38
have to hit as an officer, if you want to keep moving up through the community. And I was very
1:16:45
fortunate because I had very good advocates for me in the community where I hit all of those
1:16:50
wickets exceptionally fast. So I was a lieutenant commander in under seven years, I was spot promoted
1:16:58
because the job I was in was lieutenant commander role. So I was a troop commander,
1:17:02
probably three years earlier than I should have been a troop commander. I was the operations
1:17:08
officer probably three years earlier than I should have been an operations officer. And in the Navy,
1:17:13
your executive officer tour is a huge tour. And it's usually done at like your 13 to 14 year mark.
1:17:20
I did it. I was done with it in 11 years. So I was done with all of my big milestones
1:17:26
at the 11 year mark. And now I had nine years basically left on in my military life if I wanted
1:17:34
to hit 20. And I knew that during that time, it would be a bunch of moves, a bunch of surprise
1:17:40
deployments places. In the chance that I would the only tour that was left that I really wanted
1:17:45
to do was a commanding officer tour. So I was going to stick it to my family for nine more years,
1:17:51
just so that I could have two years worth of being a commanding officer. So when I looked at it like
1:17:58
that, man, I got to do everything I wanted to do and more. The SEAL teams for me, I mean,
1:18:03
it shaped the person that I am. And it was so much more than I ever envisioned it could possibly be.
1:18:08
I had three absolutely amazing kinetic deployments surrounded by amazing people. I got to do a tour
1:18:16
at the initial training command and get a peek behind the selection process. I got to be an
1:18:21
operations officer and help run a team. I got to run all the training for the West Coast SEAL teams,
1:18:26
like what more can you ask for out of a career. So when I started to layer all those things together,
1:18:32
Kyle, it made it easier to make the right call, which was put the family first because not that
1:18:40
I'd been sacrificing the family. I was a good family man, but I'm gone a whole lot of time. And I
1:18:47
didn't want the formative years for my kids, for their dad to have an idea of what their dad was,
1:18:53
but not actually know their dad. So decided to make the jump. And the last thing that made it easier
1:19:00
was again, I've always had benefited from being blessed with good advocates. And I known Jaco
1:19:07
before that. And when it came time for me to make the jump, he extended an offer for me to go and
1:19:13
work with him and his team at Echelon Front. So it was like, I have again, Providence, like God's
1:19:18
hand just guiding me through all of these different things. And then my offer amp was set like,
1:19:23
what better community could you possibly be around after getting out of the military than to go and
1:19:29
work with guys like Chaco and Lafe and JP and Jason and Steve and just all these amazing individuals?
1:19:36
Sean, when you lay it out like that, doesn't it sound cooler than hey, I used to play college
1:19:40
soccer? See, I put you down a little bit at the beginning. It took us about an hour to build you
1:19:45
back up. But here we are. So let's talk about that. You transition out of the military and it's no
1:19:51
secret and it's no surprise to people that a lot of men, especially people from the SpecOps
1:19:56
community, they have a hard time transitioning because they lose the brotherhood. They lose the
1:20:00
daily disciplines. They lose the predictability of their income or whatever the situation is.
1:20:06
But you seemingly made a pretty smooth transition. I think you worked with a startup there for a
1:20:11
little bit, but then you go work with Echelon Front and then we'll get more into business that
1:20:16
you're doing now. But what was that like? And do you almost feel guilty that some guys don't
1:20:21
transition the same or is it like, hey, I got to worry about me and take care of business? I
1:20:26
don't feel guilty, but I do feel I empathize with them. It's a hard, hard decision. That being said,
1:20:34
and this might come across as a little callus and I don't mean it like that. But what were you
1:20:39
cultivating when you were in the SEAL teams? I was cultivating a family. I was cultivating really good
1:20:47
friendships that I knew would endure in and out of the SEAL teams. And my identity when I was a
1:20:53
younger man in the teams was definitely a SEAL. Like if I had worked so hard to get there, and if
1:20:58
you had stripped me of that identity, it probably would have had devastating ramifications for my
1:21:04
life. But with a little maturity and a little grace, my identity was not fully wrapped up in
1:21:12
being a SEAL. It was a huge part of my life. But a bigger piece of it was a more important piece
1:21:17
of it was I was a father. I was a husband. I had other things that outside of that community. Now,
1:21:26
almost all of my life revolved around the SEAL teams because it's all encompassing. But I think
1:21:32
people that have a heart and I also benefited that I knew what I was going to get to go do on the
1:21:37
outside. I knew I was going to continue to be surrounded by good people. Now, that again was
1:21:43
cultivated. I don't think and I don't want people to take this the wrong way because it's going to
1:21:48
come across as a little egotistical, but I don't I genuinely don't mean it that way. I don't think
1:21:55
I would have had the opportunity to work on the team at echelon front. If I hadn't done some things
1:22:03
right throughout my career, if I hadn't worked really hard, if I hadn't applied myself, if I
1:22:08
hadn't strived to have the best reputation that I possibly could have, if I had been disciplined
1:22:13
enough to do all of those things and to say no to things that were going to be a distraction,
1:22:18
alcohol, drugs, whatever the case may be, I don't think I would have had that opportunity to transition
1:22:24
in that. So I think a lot of times what people that struggle with the transition, it comes around
1:22:30
to two things that I've seen, failure to cultivate anything else outside of that identity,
1:22:37
and then failure to identify a mission before they get out of the military. And that mission
1:22:43
for me was being a father. It could be being a police officer. It could be being a husband. It
1:22:50
could be being a friend. It could be being a plumber, but you have to have some other mission
1:22:55
identified before you make that switch. Or else, especially I think for men who really put a lot
1:23:02
of value into the work that they're doing and a lot of their dignity is wrapped up into the work
1:23:06
that they're performing. If they're doing it right, at least, I think that's why people struggle is
1:23:11
that they don't have a mission when they get out. And they've probably at some level failed to
1:23:17
cultivate some pretty important things. And that's why when I was talking with guys in my platoons
1:23:23
in my troop, and I got the opportunity to talk about more than just work, I would try to caution
1:23:29
people about what they were doing to their families, what they were cultivating on the outside,
1:23:35
because it doesn't matter who you are. At some point in time, the community is going to say,
1:23:39
"Thanks for your service, but you have to go somewhere else." And you're going to be left with
1:23:44
whatever you either built or destroyed during that 10, 13, 30 years. So I think those are two
1:23:53
reasons people struggle. I think you're right. And you brought up just the whole provider aspect.
1:23:58
I was just talking about this with my wife the other night. But first Timothy 5/8,
1:24:02
if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially his own household, he has denied the
1:24:06
faith and is worse than an unbeliever. I mean, just think about that. And then there's other
1:24:10
parts of scripture talking about how you should leave your children's children and inheritance.
1:24:14
And so that doesn't mean to every woman out there that, "Hey, you can't have a job and you can't run
1:24:20
a business or you can't do whatever." Like, "Hey, we just need you barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen."
1:24:23
That's certainly not what that means. But it does mean that we're going to have to answer
1:24:27
someday for how we let our households. Were we a spiritual thermometer or were we a spiritual
1:24:32
thermostat? And all that goes in, like the type of money you bring in, the life that you create
1:24:38
for your progeny is a big deal. And I do think that some people sell themselves short
1:24:43
when it comes to transitioning in any aspect, whether you're transitioning
1:24:47
from your graduate studies to the real world or whenever you go from the military back to the
1:24:52
civilian world, I think that that comes for all of us. So let's just do a little quick
1:24:57
echelon front commercial, because I think most people are familiar with what you guys do, but
1:25:02
leadership training and development of staff and things like that. But I mean, y'all continue
1:25:07
to balloon out from when it was just jocko and lathe. There's certainly more of you doing this
1:25:12
type of thing now. But what are the deliverables that echelon front brings to the marketplace?
1:25:17
Yeah, the big deliverable and probably the first one to break down is a lot of times
1:25:21
I'm working with different clients and different organizations. Some people are like, yeah, this
1:25:26
is going to be great. And then there's some people who are like, this is military style stuff,
1:25:30
like we're not a military. It's absolutely not military leadership. Like, I think this is how
1:25:37
most of us in the military wish that we were all led during our time in the military. And at times,
1:25:42
we got glimpses of this, but it's not military style leadership. What it is, is its leadership
1:25:48
training. And a leadership challenge in the military is going to be the exact same
1:25:54
fundamentals of that challenge as it's going to be whether it's a civilian job or whether it's
1:26:01
in your personal life, because you're dealing with people, military deal with people, regular
1:26:06
jobs. Sorry, everybody sounds horrible when I say regular jobs. I mean, non military jobs,
1:26:11
non military jobs, you're dealing with people, your family, you're dealing with people and people
1:26:18
in a lot of ways are the same. And anytime you put a lot of us together, there's going to be
1:26:22
challenges that we need to overcome. But there's also a whole lot of opportunity to get things
1:26:27
done if we're leading effectively. And I think a lot of people put the focus in different areas
1:26:34
and not necessarily on leading. And the determining factor whether you're going to be successful or
1:26:39
not is absolutely how well that you're being led. You can have the best widget or gadget on the
1:26:46
planet. But if you don't have a good team that's being led well, that widget is never going to reach
1:26:52
its full potential. So we spend a whole lot of time talking to different companies and training
1:26:57
different companies and teaching people how to lead because leadership is a skill. It's not like
1:27:02
you're born a leader. There's nobody that emerged from their mother's womb, just ready to conquer
1:27:09
everything. Like it's a skill. It's like any other skill, you can get better at it. If you focus on
1:27:14
it, if you learn about it, if you're disciplined about it, you can get better at leading. And when
1:27:19
we work with these different companies, there's like a domino effect where everything just gets
1:27:25
better. The leader who we're working with, their life gets better because now all of a sudden they're
1:27:31
being more efficient. Their personal relationships are starting to bloom. They're keeping their plans
1:27:37
more simple and people understand what to do, which means there's less problems for people to solve.
1:27:42
And the people underneath them, their life is improving because now all of a sudden,
1:27:46
they're giving some freedom. They're giving some buy-in. They have a simple plan that they know what
1:27:50
they need to do to execute their relationship with their chain of command gets better. And if
1:27:55
your life at work is better, where else is your life going to be better? It's going to be better
1:27:59
at home too, because I'm not going to carry all that stress and frustration from work
1:28:04
back to my home. If my life at work is improving, then odds are I'm going to have a better life
1:28:11
outside of work as well. And all of that really starts from a foundation of being good at leading
1:28:17
people. Very good. Well, Sean, we're well over an hour in at this point. We've talked about whiskey,
1:28:24
cigars, sports, working out the military, leadership, business. We've talked about it all.
1:28:32
But I don't care about any of that stuff. I just had to do all of that to set up for what we're
1:28:36
going to talk about now, because one of my favorite subjects on the entire planet to discuss is the
1:28:43
consumption of delicious meat. So someone's going to clip that out later and use it against me. But
1:28:48
I don't care. I don't care. Because the reason why we're hunters, the reason why I'm literally
1:28:53
leaving from this interview to go hunt is because that's how we get protein, the best protein
1:28:58
possible. But the problem that people run into, Sean, especially with beef is where in the world
1:29:03
is this beef coming from? Like what has been put in this beef? Like what's going on with it? Why
1:29:08
does it taste so funny? I had a family member, right? Her or the, you know, the husband and wife,
1:29:14
they they got with another couple of them. I think they bought either a half cow or an entire cow.
1:29:18
And lo and behold, it was an old bull that got delivered to them. The stakes were atrocious. Even
1:29:25
the burger, even the ground was just gross. But somehow, Sean, you go from the soccer pitch
1:29:32
to the Navy Seals to the boardroom. And now you're running, perhaps the best beef operation in America
1:29:40
right now, the beef delivery operation, we should say, call Primal beef. So guys that have been
1:29:45
listening to this for any length of time, you guys have heard me talk about Primal beef before.
1:29:50
But this is your baby. This is your company. So that's not exactly a normal transition, Sean,
1:29:56
to go from the life that you've done into the cattle business. And you mentioned way back at
1:29:59
the beginning of this episode, y'all had animals growing up. But what are the only animals you
1:30:04
didn't have was cattle. And so how in the world did you end up doing this, Sean?
1:30:07
Yeah, again, the provenance. So when we got out of the military, we moved to a town in Virginia,
1:30:16
right in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley called Front Royal. And the reason we chose Front Royal
1:30:21
is my wife's family over the last probably nine years now has been kind of moving one at a time
1:30:28
to this town. So my wife's one of eight, and they grew up in the Northeast in New Hampshire.
1:30:33
And then her brother-in-law and sister moved here, and then her parents moved here. And then
1:30:40
another brother and his wife and their two kids moved here. And then some other siblings moved
1:30:46
to like the DC area, which is right outside about an hour away. So this became the hub of
1:30:52
all things family for us. So we've been coming to this town for seven or eight years visiting
1:30:58
a couple of times a year seeing family. And man, it was just amazing. It was like a little microcosm
1:31:04
of like Mayberry back in the day from the Andy Griffith Show. It was like still, still that.
1:31:11
People caring about each other, people looking out for each other, just good hardworking Americans
1:31:15
and we kind of fell in love with it. And we bought some land out here and moved out here.
1:31:20
And one of the guys that I had met through friendships through our church was a guy named Paul.
1:31:25
And he was a cattleman. And I bought a cow from him very similarly to what your friend did.
1:31:33
Only this was not that type of cow. This was the best steak I had ever had in my entire life
1:31:39
when we purchased this beef from him. And I still remember sitting at the table after cooking the
1:31:45
first steak. And I took about three bites and I looked at my wife who always sits to my left and
1:31:50
I said, this is the best steak I've ever had in my entire life, like hands down. I have five kids.
1:31:57
We eat a lot of beef. So that cow didn't last very long. So I called Paul back up. And we got
1:32:03
another cow and lo and behold, it was the exact same quality, the exact same flavor. It was just
1:32:10
a repeat performance. And that's what kind of got the gear turning is, hey, this is amazing,
1:32:17
high quality, all natural beef. And it's almost sinful that we're not offering it to other Americans
1:32:24
that we're kind of just keeping it to ourselves. So again, being very blessed with good friends
1:32:31
and good mentors, I called you up and just said, Hey, you know, what do you think about starting
1:32:36
up a beef company? And let me tell you why I'd like to do this. And he was all on board. He's like,
1:32:42
absolutely guy eats a lot of steak too. So I think he wanted to support. Also, it was selfish. He
1:32:47
wanted just cows on his house. That kind of started the journey of just wanting to bring this same
1:32:56
amazing beef that we had available to us, bring it to other hardworking American families who just
1:33:04
through cons or through proximity would never get to experience something like this. If you live in
1:33:11
New York City or Houston or Atlanta or San Diego, like you're just not surrounded by farmers who
1:33:18
are pouring their heart and souls into all these different animals. And one of the beautiful things
1:33:23
about primal beef is all of our cows come from one farm, all of our cows are raised the exact same
1:33:30
way. They're all American black Angus. They're all raised the exact same way. And what that means
1:33:35
is every time you order from primal beef, you're going to get the exact same flavor, the exact same
1:33:40
quality and the exact same consistency. So that was really the driving desire behind it was to just
1:33:48
feed Americans and feed Americans something that they can feel good about putting on their plate,
1:33:54
they can feel good about getting people together and breaking bread over.
1:33:58
Okay, so a couple of questions on that, because I'm already starving, right? Because I'm fasted
1:34:02
right now, I've already worked out, you know, it's almost lunchtime. So this is really starting to
1:34:06
bother me. So we might need to speed this up here towards the end. But I don't understand,
1:34:11
and maybe you can't reveal any of the secrets, because you know, maybe one of those other companies
1:34:15
is listening right now is the how, because I've gone, like, how does it taste so good? Because
1:34:22
from you guys, I've had the New York strip steak, the ribeye steak, I don't even know how to pronounce
1:34:27
a bevet steak bevetty bevet. Never even seen that cut. That was fantastic. And it was like the
1:34:33
perfect shape to cook consistently. I've had to try tip. And I've had the burger. And I even told
1:34:39
you I was like, Sean, don't send me to the burger. I'm not going to eat any of that. I've got all
1:34:43
that. And then you send it to me and then I had it. And I was like, Okay, okay. What is what is going
1:34:48
up going on with the beef? Because I've been to the fancy meat places, where you pay a very, very
1:34:55
large sum of money to get a very mediocre piece of beef. And sometimes you get a very good piece
1:35:00
of beef. But guys, if you just go to your local supermarket, it's kind of like Russian roulette. You
1:35:05
don't know anything about that beef. You don't know what pharma came from. You don't know what types
1:35:12
of hormones or vaccines or anything that has gone in there. You don't really know if it was
1:35:16
grass fed or grain fed or finished. You don't know any of those things. And so sometimes you'll just
1:35:22
get a piece of meat that just isn't as good as the last one you got. And you just kind of throw
1:35:26
your hands up and go, I guess I'll try again next time. So how is it so consistent? I don't know
1:35:32
anything about being a cowboy or cattle operation or any of that type of stuff. How can it be
1:35:36
consistent from cut to cut to cut box to box to box? Yeah, what it really comes down to is
1:35:43
they're eating the same thing. So all the cows are all the same basic genetics in that they're
1:35:49
all black Angus. So a lot of the stakes that you get when you go to a store, depending upon
1:35:55
what your store is, I'm not saying every butcher shop is like this. But if you're going to a grocery
1:35:59
store and you're paying, you know, five, seven, $10 for a steak, that's not Angus. That was probably
1:36:05
actually a dairy cow that was no longer producing milk. And like, they're not going to just continue
1:36:11
to let that cow live a nice life. So they're going to process that cow. That's not a beef
1:36:15
cow. That's a dairy cow. And they're going to get as much money return as they can on that. So one
1:36:22
Angus was developed, literally developed for rich beef flavor and marbling. So you've got the
1:36:29
genetics of the cow itself. And then you've got where we live in the Shenandoah Valley. And it's
1:36:34
one of the, if not the most lush places in the United States of America. And what do cows eat?
1:36:41
They're eating grass. And these pastures are just overflowing with all these native grasses and
1:36:48
clovers and everything that a cow needs to really nutritionally thrive. And they're, they have a
1:36:56
very nice easy life. They're not moving around a lot because everything is so lush that the cows
1:37:03
don't really have to work super hard for their food. And what I mean by that is ranches out west
1:37:08
are massive because out west is a little more arid. Things don't grow in as much of an abundance.
1:37:15
So if you need to feed a thousand head of cattle, you need 30, 40,000 acres to do that. Because you're
1:37:22
going to have to move those cattle almost every day to allow them to graze and get enough forage.
1:37:28
Here, that's not what happens. You can have a whole bunch of cattle in a much smaller
1:37:34
proximity because the pastures are just so lush. And a big reason for that is the Chesapeake water
1:37:41
shed comes way into the area of where we are into this valley. And then the Shenandoah River
1:37:47
runs right through it. You've got the Blue Ridge Mountains on the right and left side. And you've
1:37:51
just got this real unique little microcosm where things just thrive. Like, I have cows on my property,
1:37:59
my own personal cows on my property. I still have to go out there with my tractor and mow
1:38:03
my property at least twice a year because they just can't eat enough grass to keep everything
1:38:08
down through certain parts of the year. So that's the first thing is they're all eating these things
1:38:13
that they're all growing up on what they should be growing up on and they have it all in abundance.
1:38:17
The next piece is, what are you finishing the cattle on? And there's two methods to finishing
1:38:24
cattle. One is grass fed. So they're fed grass their entire life. And then the other method is
1:38:30
typically you're finishing them for some period of time. Some cattle all they eat is grain. For
1:38:36
some period of time on a grain or a blend of grains. And what a cow is eating, obviously,
1:38:42
is going to affect the finished product of the cow and what its meat tastes like. So same thing,
1:38:49
if you went and shot a buck in South Texas, even though it's genetically the same whitetail,
1:38:55
it's going to taste very different than if you go to Nebraska and shoot a buck that's been just
1:39:00
eating corn out of people's farms its entire life. So what the animal eats affects the way that it
1:39:07
tastes and affects the tenderness of the beef. And all of our cattle eat this really, really unique
1:39:14
blend. So they're raised on grass. And then for the last about 200 days, they're also supplemented.
1:39:21
So they're still eating grass, but they're supplemented feeding with a blend of distillers grain
1:39:28
and produce. So like fruit and vegetables that markets bring to the farm. So markets, you can only
1:39:35
keep fruit, vegetables, pineapple, produce on the shelf for so long before they bring new stuff in.
1:39:40
So the farmer takes all of those, blends it up with this distillers grain that he's growing on his
1:39:46
property. And then it basically becomes a mash. And that's what the cows are supplementing with.
1:39:51
And that's one of the reasons why the meat is so tender and has such a not just an amazing flavor,
1:39:57
but a very unique flavor because of that distillers grain and then the fruit,
1:40:02
all the sucrose from the fruit and the vegetables that they're getting to eat.
1:40:06
So that's the first two pieces that have the biggest impact to the meat is how they're raised,
1:40:13
where they're raised, what they're getting to graze, and then what they're finishing. And then
1:40:17
I'll take a pause and then we'll talk about the last piece, which is what happens when you process
1:40:21
the cows. Well, we'll get to that in just a second. I did just want to kind of reiterate
1:40:25
something you said about the uniqueness. Like, I remember like the first time that I had elk,
1:40:30
I had an elk steak and I was like, whoa, like, what, what is this? Because typically,
1:40:36
when you're preparing something like a barbecue or something like that, you're getting a lot of
1:40:40
that seasoning, you're trying to figure out the bark and the crust and all those different things.
1:40:43
But I cook my steaks the exact same way each time. I bring them up in a convection oven to
1:40:48
about 100 degrees. I have a cast iron skillet about as hot as I can go. I either put tallow,
1:40:53
which primal beef needs to start selling. I'll either put tallow or butter down. And then I'll do
1:40:58
like 45 seconds per side to get that sear. And the only seasoning I put on is cracked pepper,
1:41:04
coarse salt, and garlic powder every time. But the very first time I think the first mistake I had
1:41:09
was ribeye from you guys. And I bit into it, I was like, okay, something's different about this
1:41:15
ribeye. And I've had some fancy ribeyes and I've had some absolute dog crap ribeyes. Dog crap
1:41:20
may have actually been better than some of these ribeyes. And then I just kept eating through it.
1:41:24
I'm like, this, this doesn't make any sense. Maybe I got a good one. And then I did the New York strip.
1:41:29
And then I did the tri tip. And like I never done a tri tip before. So I had to learn all these
1:41:33
different methods. And every time along the way, I can absolutely cosign the uniqueness
1:41:38
of that. So I appreciate you getting into the details of step one and step two that really lead
1:41:42
to that. But I give you here, don't let me keep going on and gallivanting around about the
1:41:47
particular beef itself. Let's talk about the processing. Yeah, so processing is the last piece
1:41:53
where everything comes together and it can make a break. All the hard work that's been put into the
1:41:59
beef up until now. So we partnered with a kind of boutique processing plant facility down here
1:42:07
that's in Lynchburg, which is about two hours away from where we live. And it was a couple of
1:42:14
guys, young guys, hard chargers that bought this plant that had been around for about 100 years
1:42:20
and had fallen on some hard times and closed down, I think in the early 80s. And they they had a vision
1:42:26
for bringing this plant back for providing jobs to the local economy, to getting a little bit of
1:42:31
respect back and like the butchering game. And they bought this place and they completely renovated
1:42:36
themselves. And it's called seven hills abattoir. So we met with them. We told them, without telling
1:42:44
anyone who was involved, we told them kind of what we were looking to accomplish and had some
1:42:48
conversations with them. And in the conversations, we really started to like their vision. We really
1:42:53
started to appreciate them for who they were as entrepreneurs and his men trying to start this
1:42:58
thing up. And then it came out that without them knowing that Jocka was involved at all,
1:43:03
that they were both huge fans of extreme ownership. And like, that's how they ran the business. I was
1:43:08
like, done deal, like this is it. This is all the layers that we need to see. So what they do that's
1:43:14
very unique is they dry age the whole carcass. And when you're finishing beef, there's two different
1:43:22
ways of aging. If you're even going to age, some beef is not aged. The good thing about aging is
1:43:28
what you're doing is you're breaking down enzymes. The tenderness level is increasing. Lots of good
1:43:32
things are happening. There's two methods that are typical for dry aging or for aging. There's
1:43:38
dry aging and wet aging. What they do is they dry age. So they take the whole carcass and it
1:43:45
dries in a big freezer for somewhere between 14 and 20 days. And during that time, everything in
1:43:52
the carcasses is breaking down in unison. All the enzymes are doing what they need to do to tenderize
1:43:58
the beef and to really increase the rich beef flavor. And then they from there after the whole
1:44:04
carcass has been dry aged, then they process it. They hand cut everything into the finished cuts
1:44:08
like your bevet, your rib eye, all those other things. Their butchers do all of that. The reason
1:44:14
that's very unique is it takes a whole lot of space to dry age a whole carcass. So if you imagine
1:44:22
every day you're processing more cattle, you need vast amounts of space. If you're going to keep
1:44:28
a whole carcass aged for 14 days, because let's say some of these big plants, you know, they're
1:44:33
killing, they're processing a couple thousand beefs a day. You can imagine the warehouse space you
1:44:41
would need, the cold storage space you would need. Let's just say for 14 days at 500 a day,
1:44:47
that's 7,000 beefs that you would have hanging and you would need space basically like an Amazon
1:44:53
fulfillment warehouse, probably that beat. So they just won't have the space to do it. So what they
1:44:59
do is a process called wet aging and I'm not trying to knock it. I just don't think it's as good as
1:45:05
dry aging. And I think the proof is in the finished product. Wet aging means they kill the animal,
1:45:13
they cut into the animal, they put all the different cuts, so they process all the different cuts,
1:45:19
so you get your rib eyes broken down, all of that. And then they put those individual cuts in a
1:45:23
vacuum seal and they vacuum seal it and they put those on a shelf in a very organized fashion that
1:45:28
doesn't take up a lot of space. What it's wet aging in is it's wet aging in its own blood.
1:45:34
And the blood is what acts as the enzyme that breaks everything down. So seven hills, the best
1:45:40
beef you can get is dry aged. And seven hills was not trying to be the biggest processing plant
1:45:46
they could be. They were trying to be the absolute best processing plant they could be. They were
1:45:50
trying to deliver the best finished cuts that you could possibly deliver. And that's why we wanted
1:45:56
to partner with them is everything that we have done with primal beef. We've done with an end user
1:46:01
in mind. We wanted every single family's every single person's experience from the time they got
1:46:08
on the website, to when they saw that awesome black box on their door, to when they prepared
1:46:13
their first beef, we wanted every single touchpoint that they had with primal beef to be as good as
1:46:19
it could possibly be. So we chose to partner with seven hills because everyone that we talk to,
1:46:26
they're the best in the business. And I think that translates in the finished product.
1:46:30
I certainly think it does as well. I co-sign all three of those steps because somehow that all
1:46:35
coalesces and a delicious side of beef that you can feed yourself and your family.
1:46:40
Speaking of feeding families one more thing before we get you out of here,
1:46:43
I always like when companies have some sort of philanthropic thing that they do that actually
1:46:48
makes sense with what it is that they do. So some people have a certain business and their
1:46:52
philanthropic endeavor isn't like a direct line of correlation. I was like, oh, there's something
1:46:57
weird happening here. But you guys are feeding American families that pay for the right to have
1:47:03
that black box show up on their front door and then they get to enjoy it. But one of the aspects
1:47:07
of what you all do is with each box that is ordered, so that includes my audience. You guys
1:47:12
that have taken my promo code and plugged it in at the primal beef website and got that.
1:47:18
That actually sent a portion of that cow or whatever cows or whatever to an American family,
1:47:25
but specifically a family of a special operator that is now retired or something like that. And
1:47:31
that's through the C4 Foundation. So tell me a little bit about C4 Foundation, kind of how you
1:47:36
guys got involved in specifically what you deliver to these families. Yeah, so it was very important
1:47:42
to all of us that are involved, myself, Jocko, Paul, my brother, Declan, or the team that found
1:47:48
the primal beef. It was very important to us to be able to also be a blessing with the business and
1:47:54
because of my background and Jocko and our shared background, I wanted to do something that would
1:48:00
directly affect guys that had that put a lot on the line for the country and not only them but
1:48:05
their families who also sacrificed a tremendous amount for all of us. So the C4 Foundation is
1:48:13
named after Charlie Keating the fourth, which is why it's C4, Charlie the fourth. He was a teammate
1:48:19
of mine. He was killed overseas in Iraq. We actually, my troop, when I went to Iraq, it was his troop
1:48:26
that we were replacing in theater. So he was killed a few months before we showed up in a massive
1:48:32
firefight against the Islamic State where a handful of team guys, I think it was 18 team guys
1:48:38
during this. ISIS basically did a massive operation and they tried to push forward and gain some new
1:48:46
territory and these 18 team guys were were there and they held a line, you know, killed over 100
1:48:53
guys. And on that deployment, you know, Charlie was killed in one of those big firefights. So his
1:48:58
father who's a great man started a nonprofit in his name in his honor, the C4 Foundation. And what
1:49:06
they do is the reason that I really love Mr. Keating and what he's done is as a community, we have a
1:49:13
lot of different nonprofits that that offer aid to seals and to special operators. What I really
1:49:20
appreciate about Mr. Keating's is I don't think there's one out there that has more of a direct
1:49:25
impact on the lives of special operators in their family. So he started this 500 acre ranch in San
1:49:32
Diego and set it up to basically be an oasis for operators where they could come with their families
1:49:39
and get whatever resources they needed and help they needed and aid they needed. Even if all that
1:49:44
meant was they just needed a weekend away from life and the teams to decompress. But they've got
1:49:51
therapist and brain health and performance coaches and jujitsu coaches and they got everything you
1:49:58
could possibly need. And it's all aimed at just taking care of these guys. So I called him up.
1:50:04
Actually, I called my first platoon chief who I love very much is now working for the C4
1:50:10
Foundation. So I called him up and just ran this idea through through him and said, Hey,
1:50:15
here's what I want to do. We just started this business. I would like for every box that we sell,
1:50:20
we're going to set aside a cut of beef. And I would like to donate that through the C4 Foundation
1:50:26
directly into the hands of special operators, active duty special operators. And Mr Keating was
1:50:32
was all about it. So now what we have is anytime anyone purchases a box, we take a cut of beef,
1:50:40
and we set it aside. And at the end of a quarter, we compile all those cuts and we deliver it to
1:50:46
the C4 Foundation and some teams out here on the on the East Coast as well through the C4
1:50:52
Foundation and disseminate those beat that beef right into the hands of special operations members
1:50:58
and their families. And something that I want to point out is, Hey, give charity. So that so,
1:51:05
you know, obviously people who know what we're doing, but the model was give charity actually,
1:51:11
give charity, don't try to play games, don't try to hide it, don't charge the customer for the
1:51:15
cut of beef. Just not tell them that you're charging them for the cut of beef. So like,
1:51:18
there's no games or no showmanship with with this donation. You buy a box, we are setting a cut of
1:51:26
that beef aside that's costing Declan, Paul, Jocko and myself money, that's money coming out of our
1:51:33
pockets that we want to go towards those family members. And we just did, we've only really been
1:51:39
in business since the very beginning of August. And we just passed the three month mark, the first
1:51:44
quarter. So we compiled our first shipments and we just shipped donated over 600 pounds of beef,
1:51:52
directly to special operators. And all of that was made possible by everyone out there who's buying
1:51:58
boxes and supporting us. I absolutely love that. Again, if you can deliver a product to somebody
1:52:05
that they want that you sell, that is a great thing. But if you can leverage that product
1:52:11
to where it could lead to human flourishing somewhere else, that's the ticket. And that's
1:52:15
what we've tried to do with undaunted life. I'm glad to hear that with primal beef. But
1:52:18
Sean, we went quite a bit longer than I was expecting for us to go. But you said you didn't
1:52:23
have anything going on this morning. So I decided to take a whole bunch of diet tribes and go down
1:52:27
different rabbit trails. But that's all for me. Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
1:52:32
No man, just hate. I have truly enjoyed getting to know you. I truly appreciate everything you're
1:52:39
doing for our country. I truly appreciate everything you're doing for me and Jaco and Paul and Declan
1:52:44
with with primal beef and just blessed to have he's a friend Kyle and I appreciate you bringing me on
1:52:50
here. Absolutely my pleasure. Sean Glass. Thank you for coming on Daunted Life, a man's podcast.
1:52:55
There you go, guys. I hope you enjoyed my time with Sean Glass. I certainly did. But before we
1:53:00
let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost out in Daunted Life. Our mission is equipping
1:53:04
men to push back darkness with content that forges spiritual, mental and physical resilience. So I've
1:53:08
got three links for you today. I've got a link to the primal beef website. Also, I've got a link to
1:53:12
the echelon front website so you guys can check that out for more leadership training and then also
1:53:17
link to the C4 Foundation that we discussed later in the interview. Thank you guys so much for listening
1:53:21
to this episode. Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate and leave us a positive
1:53:25
five star review. If you want to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, just shoot me
1:53:29
an email to info@undonton.life. That's i-n-f-o @undonton.life. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook
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and check out our website for everything else including how to donate to keep more content like
1:53:40
this coming your way. Just go to www.undonton.life and also we want to thank the band Holy Name for
1:53:46
allowing us to use their music for our content. The music on this podcast is our song Perpetua,
1:53:50
which is off their self-titled debut album on Face Down Records. The links are in the description.
1:53:55
I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual,
1:54:01
mental and physical resilience. Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:54:31
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