Miguel Zeran (Marine Recon, Human Performance and Longevity) - Episode 978

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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing, and this week is my absolute honor to welcome on the show, recon marine and human performance coach Miguel Zuran. Now, in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from Miguel's journey into the military, training the tactical athlete, his perspective coaching firefighters, sleep deprivation, the impact of shift work on performance and longevity, working with the building the elite family and so much more.

Now, before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating. Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find. And this is a free library of almost 1000 episodes now.

So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them. So with that being said, I introduce to you Miguel Zuran. Enjoy. Well, Miguel, I want to start by saying firstly, this is a long, long time coming. You and I have been talking for years now and for very valid reasons, there wasn't the opportunity to do this podcast.

But here we are now and I'm sure there's a lot of people that know you that are looking forward to hearing your voice. So I want to welcome you on to the Behind the Shield podcast today. Thanks, James. It's an honor and a pleasure and a privilege. And I don't know that there's that many people who know who I am. So I think there are more than you realize. All right. Well, then let's start at the very beginning. Where on planet Earth are we finding you right now?

I am in the great Pacific Northwest and Issaquah, Washington. Beautiful. Well, I know that's not where you were born. So let's talk about the origin story then. Tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings? Yeah, so I was born in Dover, New Jersey. I don't know what my father did. And, you know, it's not a great happy story, but it's the only one I got.

Parents divorced at an early age. I think my dad did some computer stuff. I remember the mention of Hearts Mountain, but I really couldn't tell you what he did. My mom did kind of media labor tasks. She did a lot of secretarial work or cashier stuff. Yeah, no siblings, only child. She probably explains a lot. But yeah, man, early childhood, you know, not not great.

One thing that's become very, very apparent is, I mean, firstly, there's the what's called the ACEs score, adverse childhood experiences score. And a lot of us in uniform happen to have quite a high score. And we look back and, you know, you've got whether it's one parent left, both parents left, there was addiction. There was other sorts of trauma. And I think that's a good thing in some respects, because it sends us into a life of service.

And a lot of us don't want other people to feel some of that vulnerability that we felt. More often than not, though, the people that find themselves go in the right direction, not the wrong. Because if you look at prisoners, they also have a high ACEs score. So there's a lot of parallels there. And you hear people say, I'm either going to go in the military or I'll end up dead. You know, you hear that a lot.

So when you look back now, during your kind of school age, were there male mentors that showed up for you that maybe don't for some people aren't so lucky? Brother, not a one. Not a one. I cannot look back and find a male figure or father figure other than, you know, for a while, Lawrence Taylor was my hero. And then I found out he was fueled by cocaine, which was kind of a huge letdown. But, yeah, dude, no, no, no real figures, man.

I mean, I've said for good, bad or indifferent, there's really two influences on the man I am today. And one of those is the United States Marine Corps and the other one is my wife. Beautiful. Well, obviously, you've not only joined the Marines, you ended up in an elite organization within the Marines. When you were in the high school and younger ages, what were the sports and exercise that you were doing back then? Yeah, so football, wrestling, soccer and bouncing.

Bouncing. Yeah, I was a bouncer at a nightclub, started working at the age of 15. And then let me tell you, that was ruinous to my high school career because. One, it's interesting to be in some of the same social circles as your high school teachers. But two, it makes getting up early in the morning to get to class a real pain in the ass. So my I was a super junior means you get to do the 11th grade twice.

I had to be average, but I had like 50 something absences and they're like, we have to deny you credit. So I did I did 11th grade dash two. Firstly, bouncing at 15 is interesting. We'll get to that. But also the fact that you coupled that into the question when I asked about sports and exercise. So expand, expand on that whole thing. Yeah, I started playing football at an early age.

You know, whether it was some of the pent up aggression or just the ability to get out and do something that I thought was fun. I really enjoyed it, was never very good at it, but had a blast doing it over the years. Wrestling, I did not enjoy wrestling my first two or three seasons. I think in middle school, I just got tossed around because I was a I was a chubbier kid. You know, think about the kid from Goonies doing the truffle shuffle.

And most of the kids that I wrestled were bigger than me. So it was just like, go out there, you know, I'm like chest level. They're looking down to me. Whistle goes off. And then, you know, just cartwheeling around the ring until they decide to pin me, which was not fun. But I got better and had a OK high school career. Football, wrestling, soccer was more of a just something to pass the time. But the bouncing was pretty, pretty physical for a 15 year old.

We had some summer things. I can't remember what it's called, but like teen night or something, which was another interesting dynamic because all of the kids that I went to school with would show up at the club and then was one of the authority figures. And man, there was always a fight. Like every night there were a couple of fights. So it kind of turned into, you know, how do we stay prepared for this? And that kind of followed through the entirety of my high school career.

Even a year outside of high school, I was still bouncing. And then kind of boxing in and out of those. I had a couple of years on junior P.A.L. and then police athletic league in South Carolina. And then another year kind of as I ended my high school career and figured out what I was going to do with my life. The yourself and the people that you work with, you know, when you think of bounces, like what I think of bounces, a lot of them were the giant bodybuilders when I was growing up.

And, you know, so I don't know what their martial arts background was, but they were big enough to just basically pick you up and toss you. When you look back at the group that you were around and train with, what were the physical attributes that allowed you to be successful in bouncing, but also the mental side, the identifying before it happens or some of the some of the lesser known elements of bouncing that we maybe don't think about?

Yeah. So I would say like the start difference is the best work, best nightclub I worked at and the worst nightclub I worked at. And it's a matter of trust and support. Right. The best nightclub that I worked out was a higher end establishment with a dress code, age restrictions on certain nights, you know, and then wristbands for college night, which is an entirely different subject, probably type of podcast genre, to be honest.

But the folks that I worked with, they're not a lot of martial arts backgrounds. And, man, as a matter of fact, the one night that I actually got saw a guy show form, whatever kung fu style that he did, like it was kind of a standoff scenario. It was like three or four bouncers on one side and then three or four angry club patrons on the other side. And this cat, he was a he was a oh, man, what's the word when you stalk it? I can't remember, but it'll come to me later on. I'll just yell it out.

Anyway, he ran beers for the bar guys, for the bartenders. But he came from around the bar and he did his little kung fu thing and the guy across and just knocked him out. And like, OK, that. Yep. Here we go. But like I said, man, it was a trust and support. Right. So all the folks in this great club, we're on radios, we'd communicate, you know, we'd call out where we were, what we saw and guys would say, hey, I'm inbound. I'll be there in a few or I'm handling something.

And it was never a go approach a scenario by yourself because it quite honestly and very frequently turned into a. I need more than one person to help this. And, you know, sometimes people went out quietly and sometimes they wanted to take as many people out with them. So. Rare were the actual fistfights, you know, this this guy, this kung fu dude, they got punched in the mouth and laid out like this was a rare occasion, but.

This club was, you know, hey, two, three, four bouncers show up like, come on, you don't want to start a scene, we'll carry you out. And sometimes we threw people out. The worst club I worked out was like, haha, you go handle that by yourself and we'll stand here and watch and see how you do type of thing. And that was a more of a, you know, fight for your life scenario type of thing where not a lot of support, not a lot of trust.

There was no dudes there that I would call for backup to begin with. I didn't stay at that club very long. It's an interesting perspective, because obviously then you go into the Marines and then recon.

When you look at the world of law enforcement and I, this is my complete, you know, white belt perspective to me, the fact that we have one person in a cruiser that responds to God knows what seems like setting up a lot of our officers for failure right off the bat now, yes, other people might come up. But to me, if you've got two people to a car and those people are also held at a high physical standard and then what will be even more amazing, some sort of grappling background as well.

More often than not, that seems to act as a deterrent. So those kind of officers go hands on a lot less. What is your perspective having a background in bouncing and then obviously in the military side on the pros and cons that you've seen different departments as far as policing? I think this is a tough question because a lot of it comes down to escalation of force, right? And, you know, there's not enough people behind badges as it is right now. So how do we mitigate some of that?

And I think it comes down to how the public views law enforcement and then how the legal system views law enforcement, because I think those are wildly separate views. And then the type of support a law enforcement officer would have. So as dangerous as that job is, you send someone out there with, you know, differing levels of physical fitness and, you know, some agencies and institutions are all about it. Some are not, sadly.

So you've got folks that show up in different states of physical fitness. And a lot of us know that how trained or untrained you are will affect how well you respond to stress just from a physiological standpoint, not from a psychological standpoint. So a detrained individual with no hands on background, never wrestled, never did martial arts, kind of a couch potato, just decided they want to serve their community, which is honorable in and of itself.

But without this training, like you said, we're kind of setting them up for failure. Now there's a hostile engagement. And what do I have to fall back on? Well, no one taught me how to throw hands. I've never been in a physical altercation and I'm terrified. So maybe I've got a taser, but I certainly have a side arm. You know, is this a shoot scenario or a no-shoot scenario? And, you know, that in itself is stressful enough. Never mind the body cam.

Never mind the instant TikTok cancellation of your life and your career because people are filming you. Never mind the litigation that follows because you made a right decision or the wrong decision or the right decision at the wrong time. Like all of these things kind of factor into this last minute, like panic scenario. Well, I fear for my life, so maybe I'll pull out my side arm. Or I don't pull out my side arm and then I get beat up and they take my car and my gun and they have a joyride.

Absolutely. That's an interesting perspective because of your background. Speaking of the Marines, when you were in high school age, were you dreaming of entering the military or was there something else on your mind? There wasn't a whole lot on my mind, to be honest. For a long, long time, I wanted to play in the NFL because I had played football as a child. But then I kind of stopped growing and everyone else continued to grow. So that kind of dashed my dreams.

And then, you know, fell in with some less than savory characters, became a less than savory character myself for a few years. The type of teenager you would label as a complete piece of shit. Did a lot of things, you know, we can't really call it like teenage stupidity, but just outright, willful, ignorant type stuff. Didn't really have direction in life.

You know, drinking some drugs and was just kind of floating my way through bouncing and high school and figuring out which one was more important. But there was never really a burning desire to join the military or really do anything. I wanted to get a boxing career going. But that, I mean, I didn't have the talent, I'll be honest with you. The guy I was working with, my trainer, he was like, hey, he kept telling me like I need six more months, I need six more months before we can go pro.

And it's like, maybe, maybe I don't have it. And he's just trying to string me along to make me feel better about myself. But the choice to join the military actually did not arise until my daughter was born. So that kind of came about as like I'm bouncing, making peanuts. You know, my trainers, hey, I need six more months before you can go pro. Wasn't really thinking that that was going to be a very lucrative profession to begin with. And I was like, man, I need a steady paycheck.

Well, where can I go work and do something cool? It's like, all right, I will join the military because that's a steady paycheck. Army? No. Navy? No. I hate boats. Air Force? Nope. Scared of heights. Marines? They sound tough. Let's do that. And that was it, man. I called the recruiter, say, hey, I want to be a Marine.

And the guy like put down the phone, you know, back before there were cell phones, you can hear him put it down to the desk, hop around and like, yes, it's the easiest one I've ever got. A couple of months later, man, I was, you know, bald head in Parris Island getting yelled at. Now, you mentioned your daughter. So that was that with a previous marriage or was that with a girlfriend?

On again, off again, girlfriend, kind of a tumultuous relationship, likely brought about by the the bouncing lifestyle that I lived. But, yeah, man, I got behind in child support and I was like, oh, people go to jail for this. So that was the steady paycheck desire to avoid jail, which, you know, the military is its own type of jail. Well, you mentioned about not having a mentor up to this point, you know, and obviously not having a father that was present.

Talk to me about just your your on ramp experience boot camp and the basic Marine training. Yeah, culture shock. I don't unless you're in a military family, I don't I mean, maybe now, you know, 24 years distant, there's a lot more access and documentaries, but, you know, the recruiter is going to tell you whatever the recruiter wants to tell you. And, you know, not trying to bag on recruiters across the military, but generally they're scum.

They're just trying to get you into the military. They really don't care about you. And I know they're they're decent humans, right? They're service minded humans. They wear a uniform. Congratulations. But but to a recruiter, man, they just they lie to get you in the door. And then you are that institution's problem. So, you know, my recruiter was like, hey, you know, just just do what you're told immediately. And that's that's it. Right. Because that was that was the running joke they had.

Just do what you're told. Shut up to boot camp. Got yelled at a lot. And it was just like I think we had 81 or 82 other guys in my platoon at boot camp. And we all just kind of looked at each other like what what is happening right now. And, you know, that was a that was an interesting experience, man. I know boot camps like these days, I'm pretty sure you can't yell or curse or do all the horrible things the same way. You know, each generation says, oh, it was so much harder in my time.

But yeah, dude, I don't. I never really look back. I think my drill instructors, you know, like everyone says, your drill instructors had had an influence on them because they're the they're the first gate, right. They get you from nasty, stinky, slimy civilian to, you know, Marine soldier, airman, sailor. Guardian is I don't even know if they go to boot camp, maybe just hand out the uniforms and the wristwatches. Sorry, Space Force, I'm still coming to terms with your existence.

But, you know, there's definitely some molding and there's not really a lot of time for mentorship. Right. Like these these men are not father figures unless you had a really, really bad upbringing. But they are definitely authority figures, you know, and depending on how they act towards you and how they act with you, there's a chance for them to gain a lot of respect and trust in your eyes. You know, and even the ones that were like super hard asses that just treated you like shit.

In the end, you look back and you're like, you know, whether it's Stockholm syndrome and you're trying to justify it or it is actually justifiable in the way they acted like, hey, there was a means there was an end to the means like they were definitely trying to mold me into A, B or C so that, you know, this type of person would be in their beloved Marine Corps. What about timing? Were you just before or just after 9-11 when you enlisted? Oh, that was July 2000. So I was over a year distant.

This was the peacetime Marine Corps that I enlisted into. So that's always really interesting. What was the whole kind of vibe pre 9-11? Talk to me about 9-11 through your eyes and let's go to how it shifted after that. Yeah, pre 9-11 difficult for me to talk about intelligently because I spent that whole year in schools. Right. So boot camp, Marine combat training and then all my schooling for my primary MOS.

So I came into the Marine Corps open contract, which is another recruiter trick to get you to needs Marine Corps because I wanted to be infantry. And they're like, oh, it's easy. Just get the boot camp and tell them you want to be infantry and they'll change your MOS. Ha ha. I call bullshit because that is not true. I've heard that by so many people. They told me just to say I want to be a SEAL when I get there. Yeah. No, wrong. Ha ha. Fooled you.

Got the boot camp, told them I wanted to be infantry and they laughed and they're like, oh, your your general technical scores. These are like the military's version of how smart you are. They're like, nope, your scores were such and such that you're going to be behind the desk for the rest of your career. Admin, supply and operations clerk or something. And I was like, oh, that's great. Let me see that rifle. I'm going to suck started the way that kid from Full Metal Jacket did.

So got to Marine combat training and they're like, hey, who hates their MOS? And like every hand went up. They're like, OK, who wants to jump out of planes? And every hand went down. And I did like this time slows, you know, you max pain bullet time and you get all this time in a very small space. I was like, I am terrified of heights. Yes, but I'm also terrified of computers. Which one's easier to get away from?

All right, well, if you want to jump out of planes, you're only in height for a little while. Otherwise, computers all the time. So I put my hand back up and two other ass clowns that I was with in boot camp were in the same class. And they were like, oh, no, no, if he's going, I'm going. So I ran the Army PRT. I did so many push ups. I thought my arms were going to fall off. And the guy's like, congratulations, you win. So I got sent to rigor school or air delivery specialist.

Was in. Not Fort Benning, Fort Lee was in Fort Lee for a while doing the rigor school thing, came out of that and got orders to First Force Reconnaissance Company as a parachute rigger. And they had a pretty high operational tempo when I got there, normally around five flatoons, sending guys out on Marine Expeditionary Units, which were six month deployments at the time. And we're still trying to figure out what really all of that meant when I got there.

So I got there in May, spent a couple of months and then I was on the rifle range. Me and this other rigger, we're in the pits. So there's two portions of the rifle range. There's the portion where they're on the outline shooting. And then there's the people behind the targets, underneath the targets behind this berm, pulling them down, marking your shot groups and putting them back up. We call that the pits in the Marine Corps.

So we were down there and day after my birthday, by the way, on the range, which was no fun to begin with. But some guy who's got like a radio back there is like, hey, something just happened in New York, like a plane crashed into a tower or something. And we're like, oh, man, that sucks. And then we just went back to pulling pits and then shooting on the range.

And we got back to the Parallel Off that night and it was chaos, dude, like the whole company, like every car was in every parking space, dudes were everywhere. And I walked in and my boss was like, hey, man, pack your shit, we're going to war. I'm like, what? Well, like what is happening right now? And the planes crashing in the towers on the TV and guys are packing up.

And we're talking about sending stuff to guys who are already on a Mew, who are in the Middle East right now, are going to be in the Middle East. And it was like, OK, so what is actually happening? Like, are we invading somewhere right now? And it's like, yeah, we've got guys going to Afghanistan right now. I'm like, OK, so we're going to Afghanistan.

And that was kind of the thing that we all thought for a while, like, hey, we're going to Afghanistan and then fast forward like a year and a half, I'm on deployment and we're going into Iraq. And I'm like, we've had guys in Afghanistan since like two days after 9-11. Like, what are we actually doing over here? So it was weird, man, to be honest. Thinking back, it was like we're going to war against Iraq.

I'm not sure Iraq had anything to do with 9-11, but you do what you're told and you follow orders. So there we were. I remember thinking that because I was in Japan when 9-11 happened and obviously following from there on in. And I remember thinking the same thing. Going into Iraq, I mean, it was the only thing anyone can say other than it was deliberately on the coattails of 9-11. But you go, it's like invading Canada for Mexico attacking us. Like, it's a completely different country.

And you hear now, I've had a lot of people from Afghanistan on the show and they were like, yeah, we were just building up some support. And then everyone got pulled, I think, for the second kind of wave in Iraq. So I think it's really interesting hearing because who am I? I'm an English-American firefighter that did nothing in the military. But from a layman's point of view, the initial reason why we went didn't make sense, other than, yes, he's a horrible human.

And there's lots of them around the world that hopefully we'll be able to bring down. But the fact that that was pinned to the 9-11 kind of retribution seemed just extremely irresponsible. And then as you go forward for two decades and you start hearing that maybe the WMDs weren't there and then you see the Afghan withdrawal, it really, we need to kind of reflect on all of that and say, what were we told? Where were we sent? What was the mission complete? How do we withdraw?

Do we make things worse? And again, I'm a civilian. I'm just asking these questions. But I can only imagine through a Marine, an Airman, a soldier's eyes, especially as you progress through your career, there's got to be that retroactive look and be like, I get the rah, rah, rah. Don't ask questions. Just go in because it's the same as a young firefighter. They tell me to go into the building. When I'm a pro-B, I don't have the capacity to think anything other.

15 years in, now you start to go, wait a second, this building is a commercial vacant building. We might get killed for absolutely nothing if we go in. So as you progress through, what was your perspective of that, those early years versus the 20 that we ultimately spent in the Middle East? Or you did, not we. Yeah, you know, man, it's easy to armchair quarterback. And a lot of the reason it's easy to do that is because there's always more information after the fact. Right?

There's the three-meter view that you have on the ground. There's the 100-meter view that someone in the building can have looking out. And then there's the 30,000-foot view that we don't always have boots on the ground. And the geopolitical situations are always fluid and hard for the individual units to have the overall commander's end state. Normally, you get that command structure up.

So if you're at the company, the battalion and the MEF, Marine Expeditionary Force, so you'll get their desired end state. But what's like CENTCOM or EURCOM or AFRICOM? This is the big continental commander. What is their overall desired end state? And it's difficult for someone who's at the rank of E5 and below to be able to connect all those dots. Say, hey, man, I just do what I told. So now being able to look back and say, well, we could or we should or we would have, but we didn't, I get it.

But there's a lot of things we didn't know at the time. And I think, to be honest, we were just working with the information that we had at hand. And what we learned over the years, it's like when you're a kid, man, there's some things that you just hold to be fundamentally true. And as you get older, you realize that's not really true. Or like Obi-Wan Kenobi says, it's only true from a certain point of view.

So it's like, OK, I think if we look at should we have gone into Iraq, yeah, there were people who needed help there. And independent, if you say, well, they could have did it themselves. They didn't know how. And if America was trying to be the big brother that we're trying to be, or the world's 911 force, like, OK, there were definitely some good results that came out of that. Now there are a lot of lives lost unnecessarily on both sides, 100%. But that's the nature of combat.

And as the victors, we decide to rewrite history, sham on us. But there's a lot of lessons, good, bad, and indifferent, that came out of those 20 years of conflict in two different places. And I think we owe it to the next generation to not let those fall to the wayside and just to be cognizant of the mistakes that we made. We did what we felt was the right thing to do at that given moment. A good plan now is better than a great plan tomorrow type of scenario. Absolutely.

I've heard that they did the best of what they had stated a lot of times when people are talking about their upbringing and their parents, especially if it was ultimately somewhat detrimental. But at that time, both parents were 18. They were barely out of high school. They were whatever it was. It's a way of moving forward because you're accepting what happened for the way it was.

But I think just like COVID, if you then at the end of it just sweep everything under the carpet and refuse to talk about it, then history is doomed to repeat itself. So all our men and women went over there and served all these allied nations that came together. We owe it to them, whether they came home in one piece, whether they didn't come home at all or somewhere in between, we owe it to them to take those lessons just like you said and formulate something even better.

God forbid it happens again. Yeah, agreed. I'm just going to do a tangent for a second because you talked about 911 for the world. When you actually dig into the US, we are a very, very altruistic country. We give a huge amount when it comes to the financial donations. Obviously, our service members have been out doing all kinds of things and continue to do around the world.

One of the things though I think that seems to work against that at the moment is we have so many issues in our own country. Even the ability to recruit at the moment when 70% of the nation is obese or overweight is certainly working against us.

To me, it seems like maybe the lens needs to be back on our own country for a bit and our addiction crisis and our school safety and some of these things that are horrendous at the moment so that we then can be an even more effective power and a poster child for democracy as well. What is your perspective of us always going overseas and arguably having a lot of crises here in the US that need to be taken care of? Yeah, a couple of things you don't talk about in public, religion and politics.

I don't think that's politics. I think that's the welfare of our nation. I agree but I feel like there's some political undermining or undertow to that just because I think there is this global perception of who and what America is. Perception is reality. If we continue to project this global presence of strength and solidarity, independent of what mainstream media is showing about us internally, then everyone else will say, okay, they're doing fine.

Maybe we still trust them, we still support them, we're not going to knock them off the pedestal as the number one strength on the planet. I feel like there's some political aspects to the answer to that question. My point of view, Miguel Zarran talking. Again, you know what snafu and foobar mean? Yeah, okay. They're not just cool words that we say. It's a situation normal, all fucked up, which means we've gotten from something that used to be normal to now we're in some trouble.

Then foobar, fucked up beyond all repair. I think as a country, man, we're kind of hovering dangerously in between those two just because it's come down to independent of physicality. The army's trying to solve the physical portion of it. They've got a boot camp for boot camp, which I heard is doing okay. You know what? I laughed. I giggled my motherfucking ass off.

When I first heard there was a boot camp for boot camp, but then if you take a step back and say, yeah, more than three quarters of the United States right now does not qualify for military service, what is it? Age 18 to 44. Does not even qualify. Let's just say for mathematical sake, that's 25% of the population that does qualify. Out of that 25% in that age category, how many of those men and women are service minded?

Now we've got an even smaller population and then even those who qualifies for military service and then who doesn't qualify for military service. They're still service minded. They may or may not be the folks in uniform that show up to your house when you call 911. So internally, when we look at what we've been doing as a community, promoting obesity and fat is beautiful and don't exercise, take these drugs to stop being fat and diets are the enemy.

Man, if there was a more self-destructive culture on the planet in history, I'd love to know about it because I feel like America is doing its best to just tear itself apart. I had a thought the other day, my wife is half Filipina and the Philippines has some really, really poor, poor areas and you see sometimes your videos of these kids that literally live on a giant rubbish tip on a mound. Imagine being incredibly poor.

Imagine fighting for every meal and hearing that Americans kill themselves by eating too much. Again, I'm not saying this judgmentally. This is just simply a fact at the moment and then we have medicine to try and offset that. But they've got so much food that they die by food.

That must be, I'm sure there's not a lot of people talking about it, but if you think about the spectrum between the starving children and our eight year olds that are already obese with early onset freaking diabetes, it's insane because arguably both are preventable, but ours is uber preventable. We just create an environment where shitty food isn't on every corner and exercise becomes normal again. It's in PE programs. We pedestrianize more areas.

This is what's so devastating to me is it's an easy fix, but the problem is there are so many corporations that make money from sickness in this country and they are lining the pockets of the people that call themselves leaders. To me, we can turn the ship around and the pandemic was such a great captive audience where we should have done it. No better time than, hey, this disease is killing people who are fat and sick. Let's stop making people fat and sick.

But instead, like I mentioned before, it was swept under the rug. Just like you said, big is beautiful, ozempic. Let's just not talk about it. Yeah, man. Quick story about Philippines. In 2009, I got a chance to work with the Filipino force recall Marines. And buddy, when I tell you like harder than woodpecker lips, these guys were scary hard. So after every range evolution in the United States Marine Corps, we unleashed the range chickens.

That's just us bending down and picking up brass, right, which we've learned over the years is really bad for you to have all that stuff in your blood and in your camis and in your hat because or your cover in your cover because that's where it goes. Because you can only hold so many brass casings in your hand at once. But we pick them up because we don't leave that stuff lying around. The film ours, Filipino Marines, they pick them up and they has a jacket or reshell. I don't know.

But they take those brass casings and they make new bullets. And like a max loadout for them is like two magazines per per man, right, where, you know, I've I've gone as heavy as 13 mags or as light as seven mags and one of the gun. And these guys, you know, maybe one of them has night vision. Maybe one of them has like a magazine pouch or like some cereal boxes that he taped together to hold his magazines. But these gentlemen will go into the woods and go hunt Islamic extremists in the south.

They will engage in the jungle. And when they're done with their 30 or 60 rounds, they'll draw swords and daggers and go in hand to hand combat. These guys are tougher than woodpecker lips. And they make do with so little that it makes the United States Marine Corps, who is by far the poorest service component in the D.O.D. inventory, makes them look wasteful. Right. So big head nod to the force recon Filipino Marines. But if we're talking about America, man, holy shit.

A couple of years ago, I had to do an assignment on beef and how beef gets processed. And it just led me down some layers of what like the food industry is actually doing on a daily basis. And I'm sure the numbers have changed since then, this is probably 20, a decade ago. I'm getting old.

So probably 2013, 2014. But at some point when I was doing this research, I learned that the United States, right, as a country produces over 4000 calories in processed food per individual in the United States. And that's just processed food, man. Like that's a lot of calories, like, you know, athletes, tactical athletes, you know, industrial athletes, these folks are using a lot of calories in a day, but your average person does not need 4000 calories in processed food.

And man, like big sugar, the folks in Florida with all the sugar cane, there's a lot of support there. A lot of that money gets funneled back into politics and politicians and then who has what district in control. It's like, man, you know, the further ahead we get in nutritional science, and the more we learn that, you know, different types of diets work for different types of people, like there's no one diet to rule them all, right?

What we can agree on is that most of the things that come in packages that have a very high shelf life should be avoided at all costs. And who is most of that stuff aimed at? Children. And who is by far the most annoying population on the planet? Come on, parents. I know you don't want to admit it, but I'll be the first one to admit it here. Children, they will annoy you to get what they want. And they will continue to do it until they get what they want.

And then once they get it, they'll continue to do it to keep getting it. So I feel like it's a goddamn travesty, man. When you look around and you see fat kids at school. And I get it, dude, like I was the token fat kid when I was growing up, right? And you know, everyone can make all the jokes they want. But I think there's a lot of things now where we can't really put the blame on the children, right? I mean, they don't have the liquid assets to go out and buy their own food.

Yeah, maybe they can make their own decision and just go ragdoll and lay on the couch when you try to pick them up and get them away from the screen or the TV or whatever. But if you're providing the food for the family and your children are fat, man, shame on you. Yeah, it's a hard truth. And I think this is the other, you know, there's two sides. When I talk about first responder, you know, wellness in general, I'm always very, very careful and deliberate to talk about the environment as well.

And as we'll get to the way that the fire service has worked at the moment, especially now with the recruitment crisis, this sleep deprivation, these crazy shifts are creating immense illness in our first responders and they're contributing to obesity and high blood pressure and low testosterone and all the things. And it's the same with our schools. You know, when Cisco comes and brings that big old shiny trailer of food, you know, every option that they've got when they go in there is shit.

I mean, it really is. And I made my son's lunchbox from, you know, not preschool preschool. Actually, they made real food. It was amazing. But elementary school through to he just entered his senior year. Now he still takes a lunchbox with him. And it's not that I'm doing anything special other than creating an environment where that's been normal since he was a child.

But as I'm also very, you know, deliberate to point out, I'm an Englishman that grew up on a farm that we had vegetables in the garden and an orchard and animals, you know, so I was extremely lucky to be introduced to food in a very different way. So if we don't create an environment that normalizes exercise, that normalizes whole foods, then, you know, children and their parents are doomed.

And you've got this multi-generational thing where, you know, mom and dad were raised on McDonald's and, you know, fried chicken or, you know, Twinkies or whatever the things were, you know, and they're they're, you know, comfort foods. It's you know, chicken soup for the soul. But it's not it's bullshit.

And I wonder now, I mean, you know, if you had stayed as that heavy little kid and your path took you, for example, not in the military, but just or maybe even the military, but in the computer programming, what would your physicality look like now? What would your blood work look like now? Would you still even be here now? Had you gone down that road of of continuing obesity? Oh, man, probably not. So my mother had diabetes and she was obese. I was a chubby kid because she didn't really cook.

So we ate out a lot. And I don't mean like we ate out like I had a lot of McDonald's. I was a poster child from McDonald's. I think one of my recurring memories as a child was having a five piece chicken McNugget and watching down or sitting down to watch He-Man, you know, when He-Man was on TV, daytime TV. Yes, long, long time ago, folks.

But yeah, man, just thinking back to like some of the things that we ate, whether it was microwave dinners or like bread and something that none of it was healthy. I think I lost some of that weight moving into my teenage years just because continuing the theme of poverty, I just didn't have enough money to eat. So I wouldn't really eat breakfast, lunch. Maybe if I had like 50 or 75 cents, I'd get a bag of candy from the high school spirit shop or whatever was called. I don't remember.

But I wouldn't really eat until dinner. So I lost a bunch of weight, but definitely not in a healthy manner. And man, Marine Corps, you know, they have PT requirements, which is great. And they normally will let you go train early in the morning or at lunch or sometimes both if you've got a very forgiving unit. But okay, so the Marine Corps Crime Syndicate, what is it? Marine Corps Community Services is the actual acronym, right?

But MCCS controls so the exchange, which is like the big grocery store, and then the PX, which is like the smaller kind of 7-Eleven type store that you'll find at every different individual camp in the Marine Corps. So I've been on a couple of Army bases, but I don't remember a whole bunch of Army stuff. But the way Marine Corps bases work, like let's say Camp Hamilton, I spent most of my career there, right? So Camp Hamilton is this big, like almost county-sized landmass in Southern California.

And inside of Camp Hamilton, you will have individual areas. So like 52 area, 51 area, 13 area, like those are all like small little cities inside of this big county that is in Camp Hamilton. And generally speaking, for every area, for every city, you will have a PX. And the options for food available in the PX are very snacky and high in sugar and not really focused on health whatsoever. And then the PX, kind of the same thing, man, like a general grocery store.

And it might have been like 9 or 10 years in when I started looking around and noticing that Marines were getting a little tight in the uniform, pushing the maximum tensile strength of the fabric. Like if you sneeze, you could kill someone with a button shooting off type of squishy. And let's not get it twisted, man. Like my call sign was Big Z for a while because I was a little chubby. I could still operate.

But my first six years in the Marine Corps, I was definitely more squishy faced than hard ass. And there's no one to tell you no. You know what I mean? And the Marine Corps was given not a tax break, but they were given breaks on your height and weight standards if you could PT above a certain level. Right? I think if you get a 275 or 285 on your PFD out of 300. So 285 points and 275 points out of 300, like you could be fat. It's fine.

Obviously, there's some muscle and conditioning underneath the Jell-O. So whatever. We'll let you have some extra body fat percentages. And it's an archaic method that they use anyway. But there's no one to tell you no. Right? You could go to the chow hall and get dessert. And that's it. Just dessert. And you can have a whole lot of dessert. Or you could go to the PX and buy as many, you know, insert your favorite snack item here and just eat that all day.

And there's no one to tell you no. And the only teeth that the Marine Corps has is the BNCP, Body Mass Control Program. I don't know. I kind of flushed all this stuff out of my head because I don't need it anymore. But you know, the run for lunch bunch, the fat kids of the Marine Corps are like, we're going to put you on this program because you don't meet height and weight standards and you're fat. Right? So there's some teeth there. And then that will lead to separation from service.

So they put a category in your realistment package that says you can't realist. But I didn't find that to be too prevalent. I just kind of found that people would hover around that squishy enough but still thin enough to do my job and then just kind of eat whatever. And the thing that leads over to like almost all tactical professions is the high op tempo, the sleep, the coping mechanisms, and the poor dietary choices.

And that's a recipe for metabolic deficiencies and people who look healthy on the outside but internally are a fucking disaster. And you know what, man? I can honestly say it kind of changed when I went from parachute rigger. Because there were some thick skinned riggers out there, man, let me tell you, some portly individuals. But they could pack parachutes. So it's like, all right, whatever, pack that parachute, Chubby, self included.

But I think the change came when I went from being a parachute rigger to a recon Marine. And looking around at the guys in my team, like there's no one else. I was one of the two Chubby kids in the entire platoon with my first group of guys. And there was just an expectation of physicality that everyone had. And if you could meet that, they didn't really care. Yeah, you had an extra 5, 10, 20 pounds, like great, you're carrying that obviously.

But if you can keep up with everyone else, that's really all that matters. So I think that was kind of a turning point alongside with my wife, who was desperately trying to get me to eat vegetables. Oh, man, I would not touch tomatoes unless it was ketchup form. She's like, that is so unhealthy. I'm like, well, it's still tomato. She's like, man, no. So big, big hat off to her. But also the community, man, just insofar as like, I don't think being fat is a great idea.

And it's much harder to keep up with everyone. But it was way easier to swim. So much easier to swim when I was heavier. I think like a stone always have. It's funny, the heavy guys in lifeguarding when I did that years ago, you look at them on the shore and be like, I don't know if I want to tow that guy. But it was completely backwards. The heavier guys would float like a fishing float. And I was like a little skeleton that would just go vertical while they were trying to tow me.

So yeah, there's no question. The leaner you are, the harder it is. Oh, yeah, man. I was, I wouldn't say the demise, but the woe of many a Martling, so marine awaiting reconnaissance training when I was working at Mart. We had them do rescues in the pool. And there's me and this other dude. And we were just so ridiculously negatively buoyant that on a deep breath hold, we'd just be at the bottom, 12 feet water, staring up at a student who's supposed to have rescued us.

And we'd just be like pantomiming, trying to do sign language underwater, holding our breath like, I don't know, is anyone going to come and get me? And looking at my watch, like, how long do I stay down here? I'm trying to give this guy an honest shot at completing the drill, but I've been down here and I'm starting to feel like I need to breathe. I guess I'm just going to come up and he's a failure. And my boss was like, I don't understand how you're so negatively buoyant.

Like you need to prove this. So I was like, all right, man, check it out. Took my shirt off and he's like, yo, what's going on with all this chest hair? I'm like, oh, it's part of the negative buoyancy. Take a deep breath and sank to the right, to the bottom. He was like, Hmm, yeah, okay. That sucks. I don't want to be in your line anymore. Yeah, I was the same. Even when I went diving, you know, they, they usually give you the belt depending on where you dive in.

I literally don't need a belt like one way. I mean, it's ridiculous. I'm exactly the same. If I, especially if I exhale boom, I'm down like a lead, you know, lead weight. It's ridiculous. But, um, well, you mentioned recon just while we're on the kind of fitness standards official or unofficial before we transition into deployments. One thing that I find interesting, I think a good example is law enforcement and squat selection.

You know, a lot of times law enforcement has a very low bar, not, not all the time. Um, and then just like fire, you know, we have, we have a pretty decent bar, but then once you get in, you're never going to see that bar again, which is absolute insanity. But when you talk to the swap operators, you know, some of their testing may, may be appropriate. Maybe a little bit too far, you know, on one side, but they hold themselves to a higher standard.

You've got to, you've got to repeat that qualification. Talk to me about that different expectation and recon and then what is your perspective of, um, you know, just, just the elevation of all standards, because ultimately, as you said, even if you were working at a desk, God forbid, you know, a bunch of North Koreans start skydiving into the U S you're going to have to pick up a rifle and function as a Marine. Wasn't that the new red dawn? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. It was terrible.

I watched about Yeah, I watched the old one. I don't, I don't know the remakes are normally garbage. Um, you know, man, I've put a lot of thought behind this, probably too much. And I doubt I'm the first person to say this, but I honestly think the level of physicality for any given unit has a lot to do with proximity to danger. Right? There is a ton, like a dirth D E A R T H big science fancy word for a whole shitload, right?

Like fuck ton of scientific literature that will tell us how much better you will be at your job physically and cognitively. If you have a high level of fitness, hard stop, right? aerobic capacity, strength, strength, speed, strength, endurance, like all the characteristics and traits of a high level athlete, you will be better at your job.

So when we look at the folks that have a closer proximity to danger, and we can start at the top with special forces, and then if you want to start at the top of the top, like the tier one assets to two soft, like folks who are not soft, but kind of do a soft mission, all of the folks that have a higher proximity to danger, or a higher rhythm of proximity to danger, have higher levels of fitness.

And for a while, I just kind of thought it was, well, you know, we have to walk to work and then the work actually starts, right? Well, the infantry used to walk to work and their fitness standards is kind of like, keep up. But the further away you get from danger, like the wrench turners on aircraft and airframes, historically speaking, the Marine Corps, those are some of the fattest people on the planet, because all they do is just put helicopters and planes back together.

And it's such a critical skill that the Marine Corps is like, you know, we don't want airplanes falling out of the sky, so you keep turning those wrenches, buddy, and here's another Twinkie. So, I kind of feel like SWAT teams, smoke jumpers, smoke divers, like all of these specialized units out there in the tactical space, they've learned the lesson that it's easier to do your job when you're in shape.

It's easier to have the mental capacity to make a good decision in a timely fashion when you're in shape. Like if I told you to walk down the street right now, and when you get to the end of the street, I want you to make a decision about dinner. You have to get all the ingredients to make it tonight and you have to make it tonight. Great. Now, if I told you I want you to do 40 minutes of 100 meter sprints, two minutes rest, right? You just sprint for 40 meters and then rest two minutes.

Keep doing that until an hour's done. Now I want you to make that same decision about dinner. Depending on your fitness level, you might be tits up right now. The ambulance is carting you off to the hospital. You don't have any room to make that decision. But if you're in decent shape, you've probably got enough in between sucking for air, like oh my God, okay, I want steak. Oh, I got to go to the store.

All right, like all right, how long is it going to take me to recover all these things so I can get the meal prep to cook dinner tonight with this task that I'm giving? So when you look around at the proximity to danger, like you don't have the time to press pause, you know, tactical timeout. Hey guys, please stop the shoe stings. I need to sit down and collect myself. I can't breathe. I can't see straight. I think I'm going to pass out. So I think that's where a lot of it comes from, right?

Like I've said this before, I'll say it again. I would love to have been the person that coined it, but lives are at stake. Full stop. If you are in a service industry uniform, if you're an EMT, paramedic, firefighter, wildlander, urban, police officer, anyone in the military, lives are at stake.

Some point, somewhere, somehow, either your life, the lives to the men and women to your left and right, the lives of the people on the other end of the muzzle from you, or the lives of the community that you protect and serve. Right, you are doing this to protect life in some capacity. If you want to have that space mentally to be able to make a good decision, man, you don't ever rise to the occasion. You just fall back to your highest level of training.

And if you haven't worked on the mental skills to get you through whatever that tough moment is, and you haven't worked on the physical skills, conditioning and strength and aerobic capacity to get you to and through that point, it's going to be a rough go of it. Absolutely. Yeah, I think this is it.

And when you look at law enforcement and fire, especially in fire, and we have special operations and I'll be the guys that their expertise is either the hazmat or is going to ropes and trench rescue and some of these other skill sets that we gain. But more often than not, there's actually a lower op tempo than the regular firefighter. So we are far more likely to be the first on scene. And I have a lot of those classes, but I never joined a team.

So you're first like to be on scene and then those guys show up and guys and girls and they get their gear together and it's a very slow and steady operation. And the same with law enforcement. Yeah, when it comes to serving a warrant, it might be SWAT. God forbid it's some school shooting, but the first people on scene, as we saw in a Valde are going to be your regular officer.

And so if we keep lowering, lowering, lowering the standards on people who aren't aircraft mechanics, they're firefighters and police officers, then it's just a matter of time before God forbid you end up on YouTube getting almost murdered by someone on the street as you try and do a foot pursuit or having a heart attack during a foot pursuit or as a firefighter tapping out three stories up and then the family of burns to death in the 10th floor.

So this is the thing I think, you know, it's not the fire and police don't have the wrench turners, you know, if you're in uniform, you actually on the street. To me, we have to hold ourselves to the same standards as SWAT guys, because at any moment you could be in the same level of physicality than a SWAT operator would. God forbid someone enters a school with a gun or, you know, whatever that situation is. So I agree with you, but I also disagree.

And here's why I want to bring it back to that fat kid analogy, right? Is it the kid's fault? It's not. So when we talk about the officers and the firefighters that are out of shape and overweight, is it their fault, like individualistically, 100% like put down the doughnut you fat fuck I get it. But who do they work for? Like who's the parent? And granted that dynamic has kind of changed, right?

Because now the child has the opportunity and the assets to purchase whatever they want to eat and no one's going to, you know, naysay or stop them. But as the parent, even if you didn't expect that individual to ever come into harm's way, as the parent, you should have their best interest at heart. You should be like, hey, this is not a roster number. This is not a person on an Excel spreadsheet. Like this is a human. This is a human. This is someone's child.

This might be someone's brother, sister, mother or father. Like this is a human. Every human needs and deserves to be well, hard fucking stop. So as the parent, you should be like, hey, I'm worried about you. I don't know a lot of science, but here's what the people on ABC and CNN tell me about being fat. Here's what your life expectancy looks like. We don't even have to get into sleep restriction, sleep deprivation, stress, suicide. We don't even have to get into that. Just you overweight.

Here's what your risk stratification looks like. I'm concerned because I know as a human, you probably have a family. You have people who care about you. You have people that you care about, and you want to be able to care about them for as long as possible and not be a burden on them because you're a service minded individual. You joined this noble profession to serve your community in some way, shape or form.

The last thing you want to do is burden someone else with your bullshit or your health complications. So as the parent, as the institution, as the agency, I should be looking at you and be like, I want you to be as healthy for as long as possible to help you, number one. Number two, I say this in secret because even though I'm an institution and I care about you, there are people who are concerned with money. So as the institution, now I'm whispering because I'm concerned with money.

I don't want you to go away because I spent a lot of money to get you where you are right now. I trained you. I equipped you. I pay you for overtime. I want you to stick around for a really long time. And if you die because you're fat and out of shape, then I have to replace you. And that's a burden financially on me. So I want you to stay in this noble profession for as long as possible because you're very costly to replace.

I know we're getting steps away from the humanity side of it, which I think is a travesty, but likely the reality. And now we get into staffing and recruiting. I don't have enough people to bring in to replace you. Used to be, there were, I don't know what you call them, tryouts, not auditions. You're not tap dancing or anything. But when they were accepting applications, hundreds of people would try out to be a firefighter. Now we are in the single digits.

We'll take whoever we can get type of place. And I say this as an outsider looking in, never been a firefighter. May or may not be a Wildland hotshot at some point, but that's later on in the conversation. But when we look at like, we can't keep people under helmets or behind badges. How do we protect the community we have now for Christ's sake? Like there's no one else to come. There's no one else backfilling these people.

How do we keep them around as long as possible and cover our own asses with a force that is healthy enough to do the job for a very long time? Maybe we should start talking about health, wellness, and fitness standards because we're not hitting it right now and our populations are just fat and out of shape and all these other bad things are happening and they keep going away and we're dwindling down in capacity to now where overtime, I thought overtime was an option.

I hear the word mandatory overtime and I'm like, I thought mandatory was a thing they kept in the military. Like you signed a contract, I'd do whatever I want with you. Liberty is a privilege, not a right. You get to work on the weekends. Ha ha. I didn't know mandatory was a thing for the first responder communities. So why are we doing mandatory? Well, because we don't have enough people to fill all the shifts. Oh, okay. So we're not concerned with how healthy people are.

We don't have enough people to do the job and we're just going to grind you down into nothing until ellipsis dot dot dot because I don't know what happens when there's no one left. We'll just lower, you know, whatever. We'll take senior citizens, 65 and older. You want to run hoes? Great. Come on down because there's no one left. Yeah, we appreciate it. No, no, no, it's good because the other the other side of that is and then I've talked about this a lot.

And as we record this today, the city of Gainesville, Florida, their fire rescue has just gone to a 24 72 work week, which we won't go down that too deep because I talk about the time, but they have seen the financial savings and I hope coupled into that is the wellness of their men and women. I'm sure it is. And they were like, okay, you know, we're going to get you down to a 42 hour work week and what has happened? Imagine this.

A bunch of people have testing for him now because they're like, oh, this agency actually gets it. Now they have I don't know if it's in every station, but I've seen the newest stations. They have gyms in there. You know, Gainesville was known for a lot of very fit people. You talked about the smoke diver program. A lot of the Gainesville firefighters have gone through that.

You know, there's there's a culture of training and fitness in that department, but you can't have that in an environment that breaks people down because those driven firefighters end up breaking. And I did, you know, when you're working 56 and eight hour weeks, if you get mandatory, you know, and then you get that kind of lack of support and you're trying to make a difference, you get told to sit down and shut up, you know, mentally and physically, it does, it breaks you.

What you want, like you said, is a desirable profession. And I always use the ocean lifeguards as an example. When do you see an obese ocean lifeguard? You don't because from the fucking front door, they said every year we are going to be expect you to be able to do X, Y and Z, you know, and then but then on the job training to, you know, before we put the towers up, we're going to do our half mile swim and some toe training and CPR. And so that's all inbuilt as well.

And it just blows my mind because absolutely this is why this this conversation has failed. People are pointing, it's blamestorming. Oh, well, the administration needs to give me everything. No, you need to have ownership and do your shit when you're on your days off as well.

Also, the the administration needs to give you a work week that allows you to go home with your family, allows you rest and recovery, allows you to do strength and conditioning and jujitsu and whatever else that you do on the side. And then, you know, facilities to do it while you're on the on the job as well in the station. So it's not one or the other. It's both.

And just like we said, with the nation's obesity epidemic, you change the environment to 100 years ago where food was just food and you had to walk to a lot of places or ride your bike. The obesity epidemic will be over in 20 years, you know, so it's the environment and the individual. But as you said about, you know, take that doughnut out your mouth. That's part of the conversation.

But you've also got to understand that if you create an environment that is going to make people fatter and sicker, you know, if you've got an understaffed police department where they're stuck, single man in a police car for 12 hours at a time and all they have in their first due is fast food. Yes, I get it. You can meal prep and all the other things, but you are set up for failure. You are going to gain weight. You are going to be hypertensive. You are going to be pre-diabetic.

Your testosterone is going to be 250 and you're only 28 years old. This is science. So underlining what you said, the onus is on the establishment, not for the ownership, to create an environment of healing. And then you can put that fucking bar high. And if your officers or your firefighters don't reach it, you know, within a reasonable amount of time and you've given an opportunity to show that they want it, that's when that's why probation is there. All right. You didn't meet the bar.

Thank you so much. You know, you're probably an amazing electrician, but you're not the right cut for us as a police officer or a firefighter. But with zero bar, with a recruitment crisis, you've got some phenomenal men and women that are going to be great police officers and firefighters. And you've got the turds and they're all being scooped up at the moment. Yeah, man, there's a lot to unpack in there. And I think like when it comes down to it, the shift schedule is kind of inhibitive. Right.

You can talk about health, wellness and fitness all you want. But man, I'll tell you, like from a coach's perspective, the training that you do is important. Right. You know, whether it's an hour or two hours, the type, frequency, intensity, time type, all that's important. But the other 22 to 23 hours of your day are equally as important. Like you can't outrun your fork. So I can't do anything for you there.

But if you are high stress, low sleep, alcohol intake, highly caffeinated nicotine, like there's no training program on the planet. I don't care who wrote it. There's no training program out there that can compete with all of this shit that your job is subjecting you to. Like there's science right now, dude, like I can pull up a handful of studies that show you if you are sleep restricted, not deprived. So sleep deprivation is nothing. No sleep whatsoever. Wide awake.

Sleep restricted is like supposed to get seven and a half to nine. I got six or I got four and a half or I got two episodes of two hours or three hours and then 15 minutes because the alarm went off again. If you are in that sleep restricted state, there are signs right now that will tell you like if you had a plate of donuts in front of you and a plate of broccoli, independent of how you feel about either one of those, your brain will gravitate towards the donuts.

So dietary choices are affected by your sleep status. And like you said, meal prep, sure, great. Like if there's something in the station, man, I was talking to some firefighters here a couple of weeks ago, like ice cream is one of their favorite things in between calls in the middle of the night, especially in the summer when it's hot.

I'm like, man, we need to talk about the ice cream in here because in addition to what this is doing and how these carbohydrates affect your body and trying to get to sleep, like this is not the right approach. But again, they're in that sleep restricted state. So it's harder for them to make the good decisions dietarily. So again, when we talk about like where the onus is, I think you said it 100% correctly, like the onus is on the institution and the agency to create the environment.

And that's not just for the leadership to say, hey, your health is important to us, but like, okay, how do we manage the schedules? How do we manage the shifts to get you to a point where you have the opportunity to attend to your health, wellness and fitness? There's an agency that I worked with recently. They don't allow their employees to do physical training while on the clock. Strictly prohibited. That's number one. Number two, there is no facility in the entirety of where this agency is.

There's no facility for their employees to conduct physical exercise. So no gyms, no treadmills, no nothing. So when you look at those employees and you're like, hey, you need to be in shape. It's almost like I feel like you're standing in the way and telling me no, independent of what you are telling me I need to be in shape. Like how do I support this? I can't do it while I'm on the job. Now I got to go out and pay for a gym membership on my own.

And maybe I should because I'm a decent human being, but how does this affect the shift work that I'm doing? How do all these things line up? Another agency that I was talking to because I listened to the podcast. I can't remember their names, but Matt sat right next to me when we were together last year in Florida talking about 2472. And I know that was kind of the big push we were looking at and all of the reasons why. So many reasons, too many reasons why that's a better idea.

And the push here was for a 48 144. And guys were like, six days, dude, like, prove me wrong. That's amazing. Six days off. I'm like, oh, okay, sure. Six days off. Let's walk this back. Like that first day, that 24 hour shift, like how is it normally, you know, people, there's a guy who drives three hours to get to work. He looks like I almost stayed away. They gave him a whole bunch of shit when I was there talking to him.

And he's like, okay, so your shift starts at seven o'clock in the morning. You're not getting any sleep the night before. So you're showing up to work in a sleep restricted state, right? You're already looking at poor dietary decisions, your cognitive functions going down, a little bit of a hormonal disruption, but nothing too bad. So you work that 24 hour shift and who knows what that shift is like. Maybe it's ghost town and nobody calls or maybe the alarm goes off.

You know, every 45 minutes you get no sleep at all. So now you are, you know, because you want two days on and six days off, you are pigeonholed into this schedule. And what does it look like for that second day? Right? The rig, the fire truck, that's a 30,000 pound missile. And we talked about this, like, hey, what's the difference between drunk driving and drowsy driving? And one of the smartasses was like, alcohol. Okay, great. You know, alcohol.

There's a difference between drunk driving and drowsy driving. It's not alcohol. It's the crash profile. So like these investigators can tell by tire treads, skid marks, vehicle trajectory, paint transfer, whether there was a decision or no decision. So drunk driving, there's normally a decision. Just too late. You know, your reaction time being drunk, slowed down to where, ah, turned too slow. I stepped on the brakes too slow and I crashed.

If you are having a micro sleep, there is no decision at all. You're out. Everything is off, turned off. And that thing is just headed in the last direction that you pointed it out at the speed that you had it moving. So you know, a 3,000 pound car, you do a lot of damage. You can kill a lot of people in a car. A 30,000 pound vehicle is like, man, that's carnage. That's like mass murder scenario, right? So who absorbs that risk? That's that agency that absorbs the risk, right?

How much sleep is your driver getting? I don't know. Same as everyone else. Cool. This poor man or woman had three hours of sleep in two days and they, you know, everyone fought hard for this two days on, six days off, which sounded magical. And how are we doing on day two? How's everybody feeling? How's our response time? What's our call volume? How much sleep did we get? Like what are we actually doing?

And the more we started talking about all the terrible things that go wrong with poor sleep and now you're six days off, isn't really six days off. Alison Breger, she'll be an astronaut inside of two years, beautiful, smart, intelligent young lady. She and I have been talking about sleep a lot and I lean very heavily on her work because she's done some pretty interesting things with soldiers. Every one night of sleep takes two nights to recover from.

And when that's like microphone drop level stuff. And when I said that, people were like, wait, what? So then a very intelligent person in the crowd was like, well, hey, what happens if you, you know, two nights of poor sleep, how long does it take to recover from that? I said, man, I don't know. I got to ask Alison. She's a smart one here. And she's like, man, it's not linear. It doesn't go, you know, one to two and then two to four.

Like there's a host of things that happen that change the way this goes. So now when we're talking about two nights of different sleep, like how many of those does it take for you to get back to good inside of those six days off? And it was a tough conversation, man, but I like to feel that maybe some folks are a little bit more interested in looking at what other smart departments were doing as opposed to just fighting something that seemed magical at the outset.

I had Alison on, it would be God, this is eight years old now, probably six years ago. And then again, a couple of years later, it's episode 117 and 513. I've had Rachel Marquardt on who's her kind of Navy partner.

And again, and I've had people from the Air Force, from the SEAL community, from the sporting community and everyone says the same thing, but what's really interesting slash scary and it totally underlines my agreement with you on the insanity of 48 hours is a lot of people that have started to kind of understand this will talk about Matthew Walker's book and they'll say, oh, you know, one night without sleep is the same as a blood alcohol of 0.1. And I say, well, yeah, that's interesting.

But anyone who knows what studies normally look like, it's a professor in a college and they put out to the students in that college, hey, we're doing a study, earn yourself a hundred dollars worth of beer money. So you have these 18, 19, 20 year old kids that usually sleep pretty well aside from party nights. And they do this study and they do 24 hours without sleep and then they go back to school.

They're not doing it every third day, sometimes two days in a row because of mandatory overtime or two days in a row because their department for some unknown fucking reason decided that 98, you know, sorry, 48, 96 or even more was the answer. But if you have a cognitive level of 0.1 with great sleep prior to that for this one off study, what is the cumulative effect of 24 and then what is the cumulative effect of 48? I would argue if you could actually calibrate that, it would be horrendous.

And I can say my own personal experience, I remember driving onto the front apron of a fire station, knowing the area that I worked out really well. I couldn't even remember if I was supposed to turn left or right to go to this call out the front fucking door. That's how exhausted I was. So there's a guarantee if you could calibrate it, it would be so much more than 0.1. It would be off the fucking charts.

Yeah, Alison pointed me to some research that they've done in Harvard and I didn't pull it up because I honestly didn't make the time for it. But man, like scary things happen after two days with little to no sleep. Right. And it's not just the fire service. It's not just police officers. We used to say this in the recon community, man, we plan all day for a night up. And then how'd you sleep the night before that? I don't know.

Like this was a last minute decision type thing, the crisis action team. So we plan all day for the night up and then we go do the night up and things go a little bit wonky. And that sucks. But you know, normally like day two on patrol is when all the weird shit starts happening. You know, it used to be six. I don't know what they're running with recon teams these days.

But when I was doing it was a six man team and one of the one of the rules we tried to adhere to is never go below 50% for security. So that means three people are up and awake at all time, you know, to keep the patrol safe. Well, it's not just these three guys like, you know, each one of them has 120 degrees of security. Like there's priorities of work. You have to write reports. Somebody's taking pictures. Somebody's monitoring the radio.

So really it's like one dude on security and you know, he's trying not to fall asleep pointing his gun in one direction and the other two jerks are busy working. And you know, it's never like, hey, eight hours on eight hours off, right? It comes down to when there's a lot of work to be done, we'll have the whole team up. And you know, the radio folks are getting calm. And then, you know, maybe our snipers and our scouts are getting pictures so they're away.

We've got two guys out detached from the patrol. Now we've got four people here, you know, maybe one of them is on the rest plan. And so I used to have this on a slide when I talked to folks, but you can look at like Army doctrine, Marine Corps doctrine, like for priorities of work, security and all these other things like way, way, way, way, way, way down at the bottom is rest. Like way down like the last, that's the last priority. Cleaning your weapon comes before rest.

Like I get it because if your weapons got dirt jammed in the muzzle, it's not gonna work. Equally so if you are like drooling on yourself tired, you're not going to work very well or work the weapon well. Then like, when I was an Oakey guys would wander off into the jungle after a couple nights of patrol because no one had slept. And I was like, hey, where'd he go? I was like, I can hear him stopping around. Like, okay, time out. Let's stop playing, you know, fairy tale military right now.

Turn all the lights on and go find this fucking guy because his life could be at risk. Like he could fall out of cliff or get bit by a snake. Like we can't just let him wander around naked in the jungle. And you know, you could laugh because I laughed all the time. But this is how we operate, man. And everyone thought it was just the price we paid for doing the job. And man, like resilience does not mean setting unrealistic goals and absorbing the damage at any cost.

And sadly, that's what a lot of the folks in uniform thought about it. This is just the price of doing the job. Like I'm old and I'm tired before my time because that's what I signed up to do. Like it's not not how it works, man. Like some of the most fit people in the service are the people at these higher echelon units. And they're operating well into their 40s because they are being very well taken care of.

You know, and everyone else in all of these services who are not is like, oh, man, I'm 36 and I creek when I walk. Like I look like I'm old. I sound like I'm old. I feel like I'm old. Like, yeah, you do because you haven't slept well. Like you are so far like chronic sleep restriction. Like your hormones are turning on and off in ways that they should not be turning on and off. Like disco lights instead of the lights in your house. And it just it comes down to like, man, I'm tired.

So let me have some caffeine. And then I normally berate people for like 45 minutes about all the terrible things caffeine does to you and for you. And then some of them threaten me with bodily harm and physical violence. But I mean, dude, we are fueled by caffeine. We are sedated by alcohol. We are inundated with crappy food and stimulation and toxic information everywhere we look like I. My heart sincerely goes out to all of the folks in uniform time now.

Right. Like as a Marine, like every good Marine shit, I complained every day I was in uniform. Sometimes I didn't know what I was complaining about. But, you know, we'd sit around and solve the Marine Corps problems and, you know, say all the things that were fucked up from the floor up with headquarters Marine Corps and how they were running the show. Right. Yet and still, I had more resources at my fingertips. Some of them I didn't even know about.

Most of them I didn't know how to use because, you know, it's too busy chest thumping. I don't need that shit. But more resources at my fingertips than anyone in the first responder community. Even now as a retiree, I have many more resources available to me than anyone behind a badge or under a fire helmet. And that's a travesty, dude. Like that is a no shit travesty. Independent of how I feel about the military and whether it's a welfare system or not, it is.

You sign up, you generally know when you're going to get deployed. In time of war, you generally know when you're going to get shot at. And you can plan routes to go get shot at or to try to not get shot at. But for most of the folks in a military uniform, the area under the curve of exposure to danger is much smaller than anyone who wears a badge or a firefighter helmet. And when you think about what we're doing, we are off in foreign lands protecting America's freedom? Question mark. Great.

The people at home, the first responders at home are protecting our communities. They're keeping our families safe. And they do it day after week, after month, after year, after decade. And they've got such a small sliver of support, like a blip on the fucking radar. It burns me up inside, man. Because like, you know, you look at statistics and the first rule of statistics is 70% of them are invented on the spot.

But the epidemiology of death for someone who is in first responder community, man, between firefighting and police officers, it's like five years post retirement is this weird magic number. And then you're dead. Like are you kidding me right now? Like five years after I retire, I'm going to die. Either self-induced, my body finally shuts down, or all the things that were wrong with me caught up with me, or I've lost my tribe and my will to live and my identity.

But five years doesn't seem like a great long time after 20, 30 years of selfless sacrifice and service to your community. Five years doesn't seem like enough to enjoy your family and your kids, maybe your kids' kids or go fishing or just sit on your porch and do nothing. And that's terrible. That's just unacceptable, man. Sorry, I don't know where that came from. No, no, trust me.

Just you again preaching to the choir, but it needs to be said, and this is what's so interesting when I interview everyone else. I can interview another firefighter and we'll just be like you in the Marines, be in your chairs. This is what leadership is doing wrong. I use that term very, very loosely.

But when it's someone coming from another high performing tactical athlete profession from the outside looking in, and that's why it's so interesting talking to DevGru guys, because they have all the resources. They go to the human performance organizations and test the latest supplements and equipment and strength and conditioning techniques and rehab techniques. And so they have organizations that are forging elite performance out of their own group.

And then obviously that filters down to the rest of the SEAL teams. But in the fire service, we don't have that. And this is the problem is that we're talking about disease management. That's not even addressing the how do we forge performance as a firefighter? How do we make that firefighter be able to take that gear, 100 pounds of gear, high rise strip, 20 floors up and have the strength and endurance to then go to work? Because just you guys walk vertically, we walk horizontally.

You guys walk somewhat horizontally, we walk vertically. Most of the places that we have to walk to are up unless you're in the wildland community. And even then they're navigating mountains. But we haven't done anything yet. We've just got to the place and then we have to deploy hose and do searches and drag victims out and pull ceiling and do all the things, which is very physical in gear that won't let us offload heat.

So just as kind of like the final chapter of this particular conversation, talk to me about the human performance side now.

What should an environment look like so we can give the police officers, the firefighters, the paramedics, I mean, even the dispatchers, I mean, that's a different kind of performance, the health, especially the tactical athletes, the ability to forge the most performance when we literally, as you said, go from a dead sleep sometimes to, as I have many times, standing on a fucking three story apartment building roof with a chainsaw on my hand and

fire blowing out literally 10 minutes after I woke up from a dead sleep. Yeah, man. I think any environment that caters to health, wellness, fitness, the things that fall under the umbrella of human performance, that environment has to be conducive to sleep. It has to be supportive of sleep. And I get it. You work in a profession where you have no idea what your sleep schedule is going to be like a certain amount of time every week or every month. Okay. So there's some strong science.

Again, Allison's talked about this a bunch. If you can maintain your circadian rhythm, you're onto something. So get up generally at the same time, go to bed generally at the same time, view light at the same time, exercise at the same time, eat your meals generally at the same time. These are hormonal and photic, so light-based things that will help keep your circadian rhythm as steady as it can be in this chaotic environment. How do you combat feeling tired? You do not caffeinate.

You take a nap strategically in the same way that you would caffeinate. I know I get up at six and I'm super tired at 10. Instead of having another cup of coffee, I'm going to have a nap. Like that fat comedian, John Panett, ravioli and a nap, only minus the ravioli. Take a nap. If the one didn't do it, try to. If the two didn't do it, you can squeeze in the third one and nap. A nap, not a coma. 20 to 30 minutes. This is where the science strongly suggests 20 to 30 minutes as a nap.

Because every firefighter I have talked to, to an individual, man, woman, rookie or senior, everyone I have talked to, I ask them to prove me wrong. I say, okay, you go home, whether it's a 48-hour shift or a 72-hour overtime mandatory, it doesn't matter, and you sit down and you either took a two or three hour nap or your body forced you into a two or three hour nap. Did you feel better after that nap? Not one of them has been able to tell me they felt better.

To an individual, they're like, I feel worse. I feel garbagey. That's not a nap, that's a sleep. It's not a great sleep. It's kind of like a coma and it's not enough to get you the restorative sleep that you need every night. Take that 20 to 30 minute nap. Any performance environment has to cater to sleep. I would say kind of tied for number two are stress and nutrition. We have to talk about proper nutrition. Protein is always a huge requirement for folks with a high physicality.

Most folks aren't getting enough of it. People start getting into caloric deficits and then they don't understand the hormonal complications of being in a caloric deficit for a long time. Really the thing that's burning most of the calories that your body needs is the muscle. When you're in a caloric deficit, your body's like, hey, I need to survive. How do I survive? Well, I got to cut down on my bills. The easiest way to do that is just get rid of muscle.

Yeah, maybe you're losing a couple pounds, but a lot of it's muscle. Muscle is a parking space for glucose. Muscle is metabolically active. It's one of the highest correlates to longevity right now. Muscle mass and strength. There's a finite point. I'm not saying that bodybuilders are living the longest or having the greatest lives. They got their own problems, but enough muscle mass to be active. This has implications for later on in life.

Dietary considerations are important, but stress, equally so. Stress is important because if you sleep well, well, if you sleep well, your stress is probably low. If we're giving you the opportunity to sleep well and your stress is high, there's some hormonal complications there as well. That can have negative effects on muscle mass and fat mass. That can have negative effects on mood and respiratory rate. Here's an interesting fact.

Like Catholics, respiratory rate and heart rate are tied together. No chance of divorce. One goes up, the other one goes up. It just happens. We could do an experiment here, but anyone could prove it at any time. If you have poor posture, there's a strong chance you're breathing poorly. If you're breathing poorly, there's a strong chance that your heart rate has gone up.

If you have a certain level of fitness and you've only got so many BPMs before you feel like you're starting to redline, we've just decreased the space you have to work because you're breathing poorly and now your heart rate's higher than it should be. Now instead of, let's say, your heart rate hovering at a nice, very highly trained 50 to 60 BPMs, you're around 70 to 80, maybe 90 BPMs. You feel like you're starting to redline on 150.

Well, I just took 30 away from you, 30 of those points on the same scale because you breathe like shit. Posture and breathing are tied together. So if your back hurts, if your neck hurts. Man, I used to make fun of this Looney Tunes cartoon. It's this goofy ass vulture who's bringing home a baby bumblebee, right? And his head is so far in front of his neck and it's just, it's comical, right?

It's like, there's no way that could ever, and now look around, look around at people, and they are so kyphotic, their shoulders are in front of their hips and their head is in front of their shoulders. Even young kids, which is heartbreaking. Dude, it is, I used to wonder, like, if you just sat around and read a book, like, you know, Edgar Allen Poe, like what was his posture like? I don't know.

I mean, that dude still had to go out and chop wood and do other stuff, but look at around at people now, man, if you know anything about kinesiology and like proper pain-free authentic bio-mechanical movement, and you look around at children right now, like, it's terrifying, man. They move poorly. And we've been doing this for years. So like this whole movement thing is tied to posture, which is tied to breathing, which is tied to movement.

If you move like shit and you have bad posture, you're going to breathe poorly. Well, if you breathe poorly, there's a strong chance you're going to have bad posture and move like shit. So if you hurt, you have things that hurt, like my lower back always hurts, my hip always hurts, my knee, my shoulder, my elbow, like, we need to talk about how you move. And before we get there, we need to talk about how you breathe. Because if you're not breathing properly, you're inducing bad posture.

It almost doesn't matter what movement corrective I give you. And again, this is just talking about stress, because stress will make you breathe poorly. And there we go back down, posture and movement. So tied for number two is stress and nutrition. And then the third thing, the third thing would be physical fitness. And man, there's so many people that could wax poetically about the type of physical fitness you need for A, B or C job.

In reality sake, man, to make this a shorter conversation, you need enough. And that's it. Like how strong do you need to be to be a firefighter? Strong enough. Like, I don't think there's a bench press or deadlift requirement, but you need to be able to pick your own ass up off the ground. And then you generally need to be able to pick up half a human or a full human, half a human if you've got some port. And by the way, you got to do this with your gear.

So whatever that adds up to for you, the individual firefighter, there's your strength requirement, your conditioning requirement. Like I think the OPAAT is pretty cool. But man, like is anyone actually doing that? I feel like operations take way longer than five minutes. I don't feel like you're doing all those things on every fire every time. I feel like if you could do those things continuously for an hour without needing to sit down or throw up, you're probably in a good spot.

And that speaks more to an aerobic base than this CrossFit like intensity of action. And all recovery is aerobic, man. Like whether it's in between sets, reps, or if you're stopping in between flights of stairs or you're bending over to try to throw up, like all recovery is aerobic. So a higher aerobic base is always a good thing. And how much? Man, enough. Again, so anyone who's like, hey, I got the reps, I got the sets. It's individualized for you, number one.

Number two, it's individualized for your job. And number three, like it's almost impossible to know what level of fitness you need if I don't know what level of fitness you're at. So if I don't assess you, I'm kind of taking a stab in the dark with your programming. And if I don't check in with your programming, I kind of don't know if it's even effective. And we haven't talked about the rest of your life, no programming is effective. So I could write you a 12-week hypertrophy program.

James, guaranteed, you're going to put on five pounds of muscle, make this V-Shred dude look like a clown, and everyone will be great, right? I don't ask about how much alcohol you drink, how your sleep is, what your family life is like. You didn't bother to tell me that you're a new parent, that your wife is also sick, your parents had to move in, and you don't have enough time to cook dinner.

You barely sleep, so you drink yourself to sleep, and then in the morning you're tired, so you caffeinate. But I gave you this amazing program, and 12 weeks later we come back, and you're like, yeah, actually, I hurt my shoulder and my elbow. I'll put on two pounds of fat. Science is stupid. Fuck you, I want my money back. It's like, okay, well, if we were to talk about all those other things, maybe we wouldn't have come to this resolution.

So when we talk about performance, like sleep, number one, diet and stress, number two, and then the physicality of it, number three. Because without those in front of it, man, it's like, it almost doesn't matter what I tell you. Yeah, get up and go for a run, great. Go walk the dog. That's amazing. Like, an active lifestyle is way better than an inactive lifestyle.

But if you're standing on the brakes trying to throw the car in reverse because of all of these other lifestyle factors, there's not a whole lot I can do about that. Absolutely. You mentioned the naps. I was the same thing. I could never nap usually, but if I had one of those horrendous nights where, again, literally zero sleep, I would sleep the next day and I'd feel terrible.

A tool, I think we've talked about this before, a tool that I've found amazing, absolutely amazing is Newcom, the app, because it's putting you into these different states. Again, I'm the opposite of confirmation bias. Usually when I'm trying something and I'm old school, sunlight, ocean, dirt, that's my truth. When someone's biohacking air quotes, I'm usually going into this and go, and this is going to probably be bullshit. But my God, does that work? It's so good.

That's what I've talked about a lot. You are a firefighter, a cop, a dispatcher, and you do live an hour, two, three hours away. Or even if you don't, take 20 minutes, do their rescue or their power nap, and it's incredible. You feel like you had a couple of hours of actual sleep and it's down regulating your nervous system.

So you did God knows what, the middle of the night, whether it was some horrible call or just four bullshit calls that made you want to choke people or the chief was an asshole five minutes before you walk out the door. Now you get to punctuate that shift. And so that when you walk through as husband, father, mother, whatever role you're going to play, you've been able to step back down again. So I can't speak highly enough. N-U-C-A-L-M for people listening. It's an app now. Truly amazing.

That's awesome, man. It sounds like an amazing resource. Yeah. All right, mate. Well, I want to hit one more area and then want to be mindful of your time and let you go. I had Craig Weller on a couple of weeks ago talking about building the elite and I know you're part of their team now. So talk to me about that role. Yeah. They hired me on as a full-time coach and man, I can't say enough good things about John and Craig.

So as I was transitioning out of a job last year that sent me on my merry way due to irreconcilable differences, I was looking through my inbox, man, and I don't know how or when, but I was getting these Navy SEAL performance emails kind of rolling my eyes like, oh, great, more SEAL stuff. I don't care. I'm a recombinant. I don't need this. But I checked out the website because I was kind of scrambling to get a job and I introduced myself as, hey, man, are you guys looking for a coach?

Here's who I am and here's what I know. And they interviewed me and they're like, well, here's the book. Read the book and then let us know what you think. Man, I was blown away with how well put together the book was. It covers a broad range of things. When you think about building someone who's an elite level anything, most people would have this preconceived notion that it's like all sets and reps.

And man, like a large portion of that book is about what a performance model would look like and how you individualize that and all the mental skills training that goes into being able to thrive in a chaotic environment. And actually, dude, I think it was on the way to Florida last year and I read like the first half of that book on the plane. Oh, really? And I texted. Yeah. And I texted. I was like, God damn, this is a really good book. Like I'm not often. It is amazing.

Yeah. So the more I read and the more I got to know what they were doing, the more I was like, you know, because I'm an asshole. I was like, how can I use this for my own nefarious deeds? You know, and they let me be a coach. And part of the thing that I enjoy about it, it is not just a, hey, follow this program, because all the things that I just said, but it is very much a, hey, how do we make you a better human? How can we help you on your journey? Whatever that is.

And it's not just for people looking to get into SEAL training. Like we have clients who are trying to select into soft or soft like units across the world. Like literally, we got folks, German SWAT teams, Austrian SWAT teams, Estonian Special Forces, Australian Special Forces, all manner of jobs in the United States of America. Even a couple of stay at home folks who are just regular civilians looking to get healthier and better.

And we teach them about the mental skills needed to get through chaotic situations. We teach them about self-regulation, self-compassion. Like it is an amazing opportunity to talk to people about how to be a better human. And the thing that I like about it, one of the things that I like about it is that a lot of the folks are starting their career. So they're at inception, right?

They're either civilian looking to get in on a special forces contract, or they're in their first couple of years in uniform trying to select into the specialized unit. And we've got an opportunity to help give them tools to succeed and be successful for the rest of their career now at the beginning. And I think that's something that we've missed as a community, like the tactical community. We've missed that over the last couple of decades, right?

Like these are normally the hard-won skills that the men and women who have stuck around for a long time have figured out. And even then, to be brutally honest, maybe a lot of them haven't figured it out. They're just doing a great job of masking all the signs and symptoms of someone who is struggling for help, right?

So now, instead of waiting, instead of being the reactive culture that we are, there's a chance to be proactive and to engage with the clients in a way that will help them stay ahead of most of the things that go wrong with people who work in high-op tempos. How do we keep you injury-free? How do we make sure you know how important sleep is? How do we help you manage stress?

Because even if you are a physical specimen, like straight-up mutant, if you can't handle stress, you won't make it through selection, hard stuff. Let's just say you squeak through selection, like stressed out, maximum, like barely made it, but you made it, congratulations. How are you going to handle the schooling, the op tempo, the deployments?

You may not last very long if you can't handle stress, if you can't manage stress, if you don't know how to segment or compartmentalize, or you don't have any positive, healthy self-talk. These are all the things that we can teach the clients at the very beginning. And it's great because it's an ability to meet them kind of where they are around the world and just offer a helping hand in a way that's bigger and broader than I thought I would ever be able to be a part of.

Beautiful. Yeah, the book I was blown away because obviously, you know, 50 years old and being in strength and conditioning most of my life, never as a full-time coach, you know, weekend warrior at best, but exercise physiology grad as well. You know, you're aware of what good information looks like, especially evolving information that isn't still repeating the same shit from decades ago. And I was so impressed, like you said, that holistic approach.

You're forging an elite tactical athlete, but it's the whole human approach. It's not like you said, oh, you just need to follow my program and you too can be in Bud's, you know, class 2001. Yeah, yeah, man. It's definitely pretty cool. And I am extremely thankful to those two fine gentlemen for giving me the opportunity to be a part of that. Well, we could talk for another two hours, but I want to be mindful of your time. So I know that you're not, you know, huge online, you know, deliberately.

So if people do want to reach out to you and learn more, where are the best places to find you? Man, nowhere. I don't have much of an online presence. So my struggling small business has a website, but I don't know if anyone's ever been there. I'm also too lazy to figure out how to do a check if people have visited the site anyway. I want to say LinkedIn, but I don't know if I'm using it right. Because every time someone reaches out, I'll reply like, hey, man, what's up? What can I do for you?

Or, hey, ma'am, how can I help you? And then nothing. So I don't I don't know if I'm using LinkedIn the right way. You probably are. That seems to be a generational thing like the unanswered text and email. And this isn't just young people. It just seems to be a socially acceptable thing now. And I don't understand where the fuck that that came from. But yeah, I'll have people that reach out. I'll reply and then and then nothing. I'm like, well, then why did you why did you message me?

You know, so yeah, I don't think it's you. I think it's it's society in general. Hmm. Could be. So yeah, I guess LinkedIn, Miguel's Iran or man, come and find me in building the elite. And doesn't matter where you are in your career, whether you're a slimy civilian, pre or post service or you're a firefighter, police officer. We've got something for you. And if you do want to focus on the programming, it's scalable to the individual.

It's program tracked by profession like we've got something for you. And if you can only train three days a week, we can hook it up. You want to train six days a week. We got you. But I think the ability to speak to a human on the other end. Like I don't know, man. For a while, I was uninterested in managing the inbox because it seems like people are needy and they just want to send needy texts and take your time.

But the more that I'm in there interacting with the clients, the more it's like there's some real growth here. Like I asked this person how they were doing. And instead of like some weird emoji, I got like a three paragraph explanation of the introspection needed to get through a difficult time and how some of the mental skills that they're learning have helped them in their life and their career. And dude, that shit's meaningful. As long as they didn't use chat GBT to write it.

Yeah, I don't even get me started on that, dude. One of my colleagues in my cohort is using chat GBT for some assignments. I'm like, man, I don't know if I agree with that or not. Absolutely. Well, mate, I want to thank you so much. Like I said, this has been a long time coming. I can foresee we're going to have another conversation not too far in the future because we just skimmed the surface of a few things and there's so much more we could dive into.

But I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today. Yeah, man. Like I said, it's an honor, pleasure and a privilege, James. We're stand up human and I sincerely appreciate what you're doing for the tactical community.