#177 Captain Brad Geary - The Sinister Games the Military Plays in Hiding the Truth

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Terms and conditions apply. captain brad geary welcome back thanks sean again appreciate you having us again yeah my pleasure my pleasure it's good to see you and jason nice to see you again good to see you again so just a little recap you guys were on about what six to eight months ago

sounds about right see you and Jason nice to see you again good to see you again so just a little recap you guys were on about what six eight months ago it sounds we determined and so in a nutshell just real quick snapshot basically big debacle it buds Kyle Mullins buds candidate died in training died of what we believe to be performance-enhancing drugs, a lot of evidence, and basically the U.S. Navy kept reinvestigating this until the performance-enhancing drugs disappeared, and then they basically pinned it on you, the commanding officer of Naval Special Warfare Training Center, whatever they're calling it today.
Yeah, me and Eric Ramey, that's right. And so I wanted to bring you back on.
We got a lot of exposure. You came on, Jason, you came on, and your other internee.
Yep, Davis Youngs from the Stanford Warriors Foundation. Yep, we're still with him as well.
Got a lot of exposure. I know my personal friend and attorney, Tim Parlatori, jumped on board.
We got a ton of congressmen, senators, a lot of attention. And the case was ultimately dismissed.
But I know they're still coming at you for some stuff. And I just kind of wanted to do an update with you.
You interviewed with Secretary Head Seth and Director Gabbard. And I want to talk to you about what that is and if you do have a place in the new administration.
And so, yeah, it's good to have you back. Good to be back.
Thanks for having us. It means a lot to us.
My pleasure. To start, we have to do the disclaimer that obviously all, everything I say here today is my own opinion.
Brad Geary's not representative of the Navy or Naval Special Warfare or the Department of Defense in general. These are all my opinions and my understandings of the facts as I understand them in our entire case and everything that's happened since our last show, for sure.
And to that point, a big win with them dropping the case. As you released on social media, the signed document dated 13 December 24, where Amy and I basically signed it, both signed it saying, Sean, the lies finally crumbled under the weight of truth.
Thank you for being a pivotal voice for truth. Blessed are the peacemakers, Brad and Amy Geary.
Oh, man. Thank you.
It's huge. Man, your show was a pivot point.
This is awesome. Yeah.
Changed the whole thing. Everything.
I love, I love this. So be hanging here in the studio, along with all the other stuff from guests.
I appreciate it, man. This is an honor.
Thank you. Our honor, too, and we thank you.
Thank you for being a continual voice for truth for me and so many others. All right, so let's get into it.
Yeah. So you came on, what, I guess it was about, what, six months ago? I think.
A little longer? Somewhere around there? Yeah. And got a lot of attention.
Yeah. Real fast.
What happened? So like I alluded to, what we hoped and what we expected. Before I get into that real quick, I do want to highlight something I think we've seen here.
It's interesting because it all plays back toward leadership, which we talked a lot about in the last episode. Years ago, when I first took command of SDV Team 1, one of my task unit commanders sent us an article called Power Causes Brain Damage.
The Atlantic published it, I want to say 2014 to 17 time frame, I think. Really, really interesting.
And it's not a new idea, right? I think it was Lord Acton said, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely. But now in the modern day, we've been able to study that psychologically and actually do magnetic brain mapping and see what happens in the brains of those who have authority for long periods of time.
And it turns out it's not great. So this article lays that out, and it talks about how it creates hubris, a bit of cognitive dissonance, and what I think a lot of lower folk would look up the chain of command and say, that guy drinks his own Kool-Aid.
And so it's very dangerous. Now, the hard part about this study is it identified that knowing it's a psychological problem, and by the way, this isn't unique to a few people.
This is everything. This is everybody.
This happens to anyone who's in a position of power for a long period of time. Even knowing that it's a problem, it's a psychological condition.
I think they dubbed it the power paradox, or someone did, or the Huber syndrome, or maybe those are two separate but similar things. But either way, even knowing it's an issue isn't enough to counteract it.
You actually have to take deliberate steps to counter this as a leader in order to stay humble, grounded, and kind of in sync with the force and who's entrusted to your care, the organization you're leading, whatever entity that is. I bring that up because it was important for me in my development as a leader, certainly as a commanding officer, and then getting to do the second one at Bud's.

Did they talk about this in Navy leadership?

How did you find out about this?

So, great question.

They don't talk about it enough.

When I went to CEO's school,

they talk about the Bathsheba syndrome,

which is where you study David as this king from the Old Testament

who, you know, the classic story is he sees Bathsheba bathing on the neighboring roof, takes her, impregnates her, and then he has her husband killed. And so they talk about how being in a position of authority and power for a long time, the rules don't seem to apply to people and how that can be a dangerous slope.
So it's good that they talk a little bit about it, but they don't take it far enough because they don't really say anything other than be careful that it doesn't turn into you. Well, okay, not helpful.
And what this article does is breaks it down even further into how to stop that from happening. There's ways.
The point is you have to have a mechanism in place to stay humble, stay grounded. Some examples from the article, Franklin Roosevelt had an advisor that he made call him by his first name all the time.
So he wasn't allowed to call him Mr. President or anything else.
And the reason is the minute we established a hierarchical order, you and I both know, no one ever tells the boss the truth. We sugarcoat it.
We write it in our sit reps. We massage it so that it doesn't sound as bad as it was back at the beginning.
And so he knew that if I have an advisor, they're never going to tell me the full truth, whether they mean to or not. And over time, that creates a gap in my understanding of what's actually going on with the organization I'm leading and how I'm being perceived as a leader.
So the point is we all need people in our lives who are willing to look us eye to eye as an equal, as a peer, not in a hierarchical status, and basically call us on our BS.

That's one example.

The article gives a bunch of other ways on how to do this, how to stay grounded.

Another one, I can't remember the name, but she was some bigwig in some organization.

And she comes home to tell her mom she just got excited about getting selected to this huge board.

And she's all proud of herself. And her mom's like, hey, before you get to that, go to the grocery store and get me some milk.
And so her mom did it deliberately. And then she said something like, leave that damn crown in the garage.
So when you come home, you're not a big one anymore. You're not super important.
You're not puffed up on your ego. You are my daughter or my son or you are Franklin in that case.
But it's very interesting, and it takes deliberate approach. We do not talk about that in the military.
Not only do we not talk about it, this is super interesting, they teach these leadership concepts before your first commanding officer tour. And prior to that, there's a lot of leadership development stuff.
Here's what's super, I think, backwards is once you're done with your commanding officer tour, there's no

more real big leadership

development that you do,

especially prior to major command. There's like a

one-week course that's just

very surfacy.

Well, ironically, from this article, that is

precisely when we should be doubling down

on our leadership development and making sure

we have checks and balances as these people are

continuing in positions of authority climbing that chain of command. So, so right when we should do more, what we know from science, we're actually doing less.
So we're, we're mixing this up and we're, we're putting it backwards. And I think there's some problems I've seen certainly with, with, with, um, within Naval Special Warfare with some of my peers, as I've watched this take place in real time.
What was the...

I mean... special warfare with some of my peers as I've watched this take place in real time.
What was the...

I mean, when you came on last time, we had talked about your interactions with different

admirals, people that you had considered friends, that you had considered...

I mean, you had respect for these guys.

Yeah.

And then as the Kyle Mullins case kind of know, kind of unraveled longer or it just kept unraveling and you started fighting back. It was like, I can't remember exactly what the term was.
Was it like trust the process or something like that? I mean, did you ever hear from any of those admirals again? It's funny. After you came on the show? Oh, yeah, absolutely.
So there were three, potentially four, three that were willing to write me letters of recommendation for any kind of board of inquiry that I had. So a total change of heart.
Well, so, but a lot of them went the other way, too. But here's the funny thing, Sean.
Even though, and so one of them, two of them said this, but I'll tell you the story about one. After we won, called me up, old friend of mine, mentor of mine, phenomenal SEAL officer.
Brad, I'm so proud of you. Like, you just, you crushed this.
You did all the right things. You handled it the right way.
You didn't let it turn into an angry, bitter man. I'm just so proud of how you handled this whole thing.
Congratulations on the win. This is huge.
And then he paused and he says, but I've got to say it. I've just got to say it.
The process worked. You got to be fucking kidding.
No. The process worked? And I love this dude.
I know. I know.
And I love this dude. So I said, hey, no, sir, no.

Like, we won because I subverted the process.

We won because the process showed itself to be untrustworthy.

And so I raised this issue and then finally went around and obliterated the process.

And he was quiet for a second.

He goes, you're right.

And here's the thing that's interesting about that to me.

And this is one of the things we learned in this three-year process, is even the

great admirals out there, which there's some great ones,

and the great generals out there,

have become so institutionalized

that they're in many ways

incapable of even criticizing the

process when they see it acting unjustly.

They just can't do it. It seems like these guys

are imprisoned by their own

power. Does that

make sense? Yes. Like they imprison

themselves in their own power

because they're so scared of losing it. I think so.
Nothing's more important to them than holding power. We were talking about this at breakfast, right? Mm-hmm.
We were having a conversation about Gen Z just jetting out the door in special operations. It's like, man, you guys are going to have to make some changes.
If you want to stay on that soapbox, great. But there's not going to be anybody to look up on that soapbox because they're all jetting.
You're going to be a leader of nobody. Yeah, for sure.
So is that what happens? They get imprisoned by their own hunger of power? I think it's, well, I don't want to speak too generally, right? I think there are some absolute altruists out there who want to keep leading because they love the organization, they love the nation. What I've noticed, though, is it's an interesting pattern.
When something goes wrong, and I have a theory on it, when something goes wrong, commanding officers are kind of hung out to dry, right? Well, you were in command, we have to have total responsibility and accountability. So you see CEOs getting fired all the time for lack of trust and confidence.
Yet if you pull the thread on like root cause analysis on a lot of these ones, what you'll find is they probably or might be working under some other Commodore or some other Admiral who is somewhat of a toxic leader or not a good leader, and that trickled down to that CO. But you never, ever see, or very rarely do you see a Commodore or an Admiral fired.
And I think it's because at the command level, you represent that command. Everything above that, you now represent the institution.
And if you're going to fire someone who represents the institution, that is a criticism against the institution. And they view that as their chief goal, preserving the institution.
And I think that's where we see gradually what happened is a bit of a misplacement of loyalties, where I think what we saw our case, was, well, the institution decided we're going to go with this narrative. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not.
Now we have to defend the institution's decision, and we're going to follow this through all the way to the end, even when it made no more rational sense. Even when we exposed, to quote Congress, I think the quote was, grossly unethical practices, and I'm quoting them now, it's words to that effect, and a lack of investigative integrity from a congressional letterhead because, well, we can't criticize the institution because the public trusts the institution.
What I think happens subliminally with a lot of these guys is not they're so power hungry, it's. It's that over time, their loyalty flips, and instead of remembering that they made an oath to the Constitution, they somehow start placing the institution above that.
And that shapes decision-making. Yeah, and I can be a little more specific on that point.
I think your concept of being imprisoned in their own power, it's also imprisoned by their own ego. because in the military, the nexus, the origin of prosecutorial authority is vested in the commander, right? And so when a commander decides to do something in that realm, they become incredibly over-emotional to that decision on average.
I'm summarizing 15 years, 16 years of seeing it. they become rooted in this, if you're defying the system, if you're defying my choice to prosecute you, you're defying me.
And they take on this kind of insubordinate feel and communication pattern, even with me, through their agents and SJAs. Often they cut me off from even being able to go and talk to them.
No, you need to handle that through my SJA. It becomes a very personal attack to them.
And some cannot separate us rebutting the facts, pushing back on the prosecution, suing for innocence, and not take that as a personal attack on their decision making. Which is an attack on the institution, which they will defend.
Right. Yeah.
Jeez. So one guy, one guy, well, another guy.
He took a letter of recommendation and said, I told you. Well, three of them offered you the letter, but even one of the other guys, and this is one of the things I, I don't want to get too far ahead, we'll talk about this, but this is one of the things I talked to Secretary Hicks about when I interviewed with him is one of the other guys.
Same thing. We're going to write a letter for you.
You're a great dude. This is unfair.
This is unjust. I can't believe this.
We should treat our teammates better. I can't believe we've let this happen to you.
Pause, Brad. But what you really want to do is see this process through and go to the board of inquiry because that's how you get vindicated in the end is by following this process.
To which I replied, sir, I appreciate the letter. No, no.
When I have a thousand data points showing the process is untrustworthy, the answer isn't hope for the best and keep trusting it. I believe we have, back to our oath to the Constitution of the United States, as officers specifically, we have a moral obligation when we see something like this happening to stand up and say no.
To stand up for the truth and confront the injustice, confront the process or the system that is acting in unethical ways, and in some cases illegal ways, and obliterate it. Expose it at all costs.
And that's really what we've done here, what we did with the episode with you. And I tried, expose it at all costs.

And that's really what we've done here, what we did with the episode with you.

And I tried to do it shy of that.

I wrote letters to admirals. I sent evidence directly to the CNO where we talked about, hey, here's the irrefutable

evidence showing admirals in your command lied, violated the oath of office and produced deliberately

manipulative

investigations calm

silent.

Jeez.

That's our duty as

officers I think.

Mm-hmm.

Throw it on the

table.

How many times did

they reinvestigate it

to change everything?

Was it three times?

It was more than that

at this point.

But trust the process?

Yeah.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

Brad why couldn't

you have just trusted

the process and Yeah, right. Right.
Right. Brad, why couldn't you have just trusted the process and gone to MAST again? Okay, well, I went to MAST.
You know, a lot of folks would say, the critics out there, which I've heard and I've seen, well, Brad's just been dodging accountability through this whole thing, right? Well, okay, let's rehash the last six-hour episode in about five sentences. No, I was taken to NJP to MAST by Amor Howard.
We accepted MAST. We submitted a rebuttal to what he understood the facts to be, at which point he dismissed MAST and wrote me a non-punitive letter of censure.
Case closed. I was held accountable.
That should have been the end of it. Then the Navy decided, no, we don't like that narrative.
We didn't like that investigation that said drugs were a contributing factor. So that's when from the top, the direction came to change the investigation, then start a new investigation based upon those changes with the presupposition that drugs had nothing to do with this.
And then the lie, the press release, and now created through this lie an entirely new need to hold people accountable based upon lies. So then they charge us with MAST again with all and all those lies.
Well, no. And I even accepted MAST earlier because I still had hope.
And we've laughed about this, how naive I was in like, no, Jason, I kept trying to talk him into it. No, trust me.
Like, this is NSW. We won't do the wrong thing.
We're gonna do the right thing here. But over time, back to trust, trusting the process, trusting the system.
Well, man, I can only trust it for so long, so naively when all I see are data points, which look like a trend line of abuse, of manipulation and of lies. And so at some point in that process, and we talked about that the last episode, I won't rehash all of it, but no, I've got to deny MAST.
And in my denial of MAST, we requested court-martial. Because that was our concern, was we were seeing a manipulation of evidence at a level that wouldn't stand in a court of law.
And so we requested that. That was denied us as well.
Who went the other way? What do you mean? These guys were somewhat on your side. Somewhat.
Oh, the admirals, yeah. Oh, quite a few went the other way.
You said they went two ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, old friends and mentors of mine have said openly in forums of other people, yeah, Brad's dodging accountability. I don't like how Brad decided to go public.
He never should have gone public. We talked about that.
I'll bet they didn't like that. No, no.
Even guys that weren't involved in this case, who had nothing to lose by me going public. And the sad part about that for me is like, hey, man, I got it.
Again, I crossed a threshold, the silent professional. I get it.
But when you look at the splinter in my eye by doing that,

by making that deliberate choice

versus literally falsified testimony,

fabricated documents, which are illegal acts in some cases,

at best violated joint ethics regulations in plain sight.

At worst, you actually broke the law a little bit here and there.

And the takeaway from all this is I shouldn't have gone public? No. No.
They got a plank in their eye. Don't criticize my splinter.
Yeah. What was the backlash? So it got worse after our show.
It got worse. It got worse.
One of the things we mentioned in the show was any charge against me at the time had nothing to do with Kyle Mullins' name. And that was very specific and deliberate.
And they were doing that strategically because when I would bring up, yeah, but this is a false investigation. You know it.
You've told me. I mean, my admiral said to my face, I know that this was a deliberately manipulative investigation.
But what they would say is, but the charges against you aren't related to Kyle, so none of that matters. It's inadmissible in a sense.
I was like, well, yeah, but you used that to get here, so it doesn't really work. And I know that you say that to me and Eric Ramey and Beef Drexler, but in the other side of the equation, you're telling the family that you're going to hold us accountable.
So you're saying both things. So one of the things they did after our show, right around the same time, I can't remember exactly how it sequenced, but they actually changed the charges against us and ramped them up, alleging cause of death against my leadership and Eric Ramey, saying our failures to, I don't know, oversight medical and conduct safe operations resulted directly in Kyle Mullen's death.
Eric Ramey was the doctor. The doctor, yes, thank you.
So they actually made these sound almost like homicide charges. Like negligent homicide.
Negligent homicide charges, but all administratively in what they say is a non-punitive environment.

And I was like, well, that stung.

That stung.

And what's interesting about that, too, is technically,

after non-judicial punishment doesn't happen,

and you convene these administrative board of inquiries,

which are supposed to be non-punitive,

they're supposed to just cut and paste the same charges from before

and adjudicate those in an administrative fashion.

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Yeah, well. Let me backtrack.
I mean no disrespect or disdain by saying that. And we forgot my opening disclaimer.
I can't believe we did it. Everything I say here today, obviously, just like last time, is my own personal opinion.

And based upon the facts as I perceive them and understand them, nothing I say represents the United States Navy or Naval Special Warfare. And in no way do I mean any disrespect to any senior officers or disdain to any public officials in anything we say here today.
I mean, I think it's important to note

that we don't actually know

if it was NavPERS who changed the

charges because it went up to Chief of Naval Personnel, Admiral Cheeseman. He actually was the one to convene the board, to notice the board.
His signature on there, just like the withdrawal letter, he was the one to start this process against us. A couple things to note there.
One, I talked to a ton of lawyers, including myself. I've never seen the chief of naval— Would you say the process against you, you're talking about upping the charges almost as if they're responsible for the job? Yeah, new charges, board of inquiry, official notice of a BOI with the new charges.
But one, I've never seen the CMP be the person who convened a board. I mean, pulling it up to his level is distinct in and of itself.
I had our military council that was assigned kind of reach out and see if anybody else had seen that. No one.
So what's interesting is Admiral Cheeseman was on the email list where they talked about changing the press release, and they issued the lie to the American people. So you put those two things together.
He pulls it up to his level. He's got an interest in it, right? He's got an interest in seeing this go bad for Captain Geary, and he's the one to promulgate and start this process.
But the beauty was this was a massive strategic error. Yeah.
Because by actually linking us to cause of death findings, even allegedly, now it opened up the gates for us to actually attack all of the false investigations that had led us to that point. And so now we're able to say, hey, we demand access to investigations that had been previously done and changed to different pieces of evidence that had been so far denied us.

We got full access to his phone and had a digital forensic analysis, ripped that. Turns out there was a lot more in there that we even knew from the beginning.
What was in there? Oh, just text threads with other candidates who were actively conspiring to hide their symptoms from our cadre, mask them with other drugs, and Google searches and discussion threads about, we can mask this drug use by adding this drug into it based off this data. I mean, an active, collaborative little pool of bodies who were doing this pretty deliberately.
Wow. With intent.
And they had that as part of the original NCIS investigation. That's where it came from.
That's the worst part. They had this the whole time.
Yeah, and they tried to resist discovery of this to us. We got a hold of some judge advocates who were prosecuting that at least understood their obligations.
But for the first time in two years, we're getting this material that they've had the entire time. So I still don't...
Do we ever find out why? Why were they targeting you? We never really came to that conclusion. Why were they hiding this shit? Because, I mean, they could have just...
Why didn't they just say, this guy was on PEDS. That was the original band.
It's big. Maybe not a big, but there's a little operation going on here within this BUDS class.
A bunch of candidates are on performance-enhancing drugs. This guy dies.
All the symptoms are here. This is what we found in the boxer, the cooler in his car.
Yeah. Here's the text messages.
Case solved. That's what happened.
It'd be super nice. Why did they waste all this extra energy and hide shit and all this other stuff to pin it to you? Well, that's what we're trying to find out.
I've started a FOIA campaign to try to get the back-end communications and the records that would give us some indication of their intent. Why did this happen in the first place? And I can tell you, I filed multiple FOIA requests and Privacy Act requests at all levels.
Office of Legislative Affairs, SECNAV, NSW. I have yet to have one record produced.
And in fact, the most I've gotten is a total denial memo from the current

chief of staff for NSW, a guy named Captain Kurtz, who also is the guy who we have reports is

scouring regulations to try to find something to stick to Brad. So that's where we're at at this

fight. The next fight is the why.
And to get some freaking transparency on this issue and find out

what was going on. But right now, I mean, what should be thousands of records, I've got zero.
What's FOIA stand for? Freedom of Information Act. Well, I'll give you a great example.
So why aren't they giving up the records? So I'll give you a great example on this one. One of the FOIAs we know came from a press release at some point.
someone from, I think, maybe it was the Times, I can't remember, but they had requested access to that initial line of duty investigation which had been serialized, completed, done. We talked about it last time.
Admiral Kitchener had independently verified it and then it got buried and changed once the Vice Geno at the time had said change it. So someone got worried about this and they were trying to get access to it.
I know from an insider who was sitting in a room with a bunch of jags and public affairs officers and they were trying to brainstorm ways to say no to the FOIA request. And at one point, someone's idea was, well, let's say that that was never completed investigation.
Therefore, by FOIA rules, we don't have to release it. At which point, another person in the meeting said, hey, you guys can't actually do that.
That's illegal. Like, if you have a legitimate reason to say no, fine, by the law, but you can't say that.
The response from one of the jags in the room was, yeah, but can you imagine how bad it would be if this got out? That's a problem. And that's not a FOIA exemption.
That's a problem.

Here we are.

It got out.

Yeah.

It comes back to, again, we don't know full intent yet,

but I do know that was the intent, like you said,

early on when Admiral Howard was still in command of Warcom.

That was his intent, was we're putting this behind us.

We know what happened.

It's clear.

We're going to do our best to preserve this guy's legacy and not talk about all the bad stuff. But we're done.
We're moving on. We also know that somewhere around there is where the SECNAV at the time had said, no, this sounds like victim blaming.
I don't like that. That's when it started changing.
Back to some of the stuff Davis Yance was saying in our last episode here. That's evidence of a problem within a culture that's very similar to whatever you want to call it, DEI, wokeness, whatever.
When you call someone a victim, you're automatically placing them in an oppressor and an oppressive relationship. So now where's the oppressor? If Kyle is the victim, where's the oppressor? We have to have an oppressor.
So that begins the hunt. And as you talked about in the last episode, as we all know in the military, if you give the military a mission, we'll get to the end state.
Hopefully we won't compromise ethics to get there. And in this case, that's what happened.
The end state is find an oppressor. Thus began the hunt.
Jeez. It gets worse.
As we're now getting ready for this board of inquiry we heard through the grapevine validated that there was a separate Bureau of Navy Medicine independent investigation into the medical part of all this and we found out that they determined that there was no medical malpractice that our medical professionals met the standard of care expected of them. No licenses were at risk.
So what are they going to do, just reinvestigate it over and over until they get it like they did the last time? We don't know. That was probably their hope.
But we asked for access to that Bumet investigation to fight the charges because one of them was that I failed to provide proper medical oversight. But if my medical professionals met the standard of care,

how do you draw that line?

They denied us access to the B-Med investigation.

It's privileged information.

You guys can't have it.

So you inflated a charge against us.

You know that there's evidence that vindicates us,

and you deny us access to that evidence while you're charging it and moving forward?

Even worse, the second charge is that we failed to maintain a safe command, blah, blah, blah, led to Kyle's death. Well, we knew that there was a safety investigation out there because I was debriefed on it.
Again, the numbers of investigations are ludicrous here, but for the public, the way to describe a safety investigation, it's actually usually one of the most reputable investigations because they come in and say, hey, everyone has anonymity, and there will be absolutely no punitive actions taken by anything the safety investigation finds. And the goal there is to have everyone tell the complete raw truth and expose where we might have been acting unsafely so we can fix that and not have to worry about getting punished because of it.
The air community does this really, really well. Navy pilots have a very good safety standard

when it comes to these safety investigations. So the safety investigation actually got wrapped up before I even left for my next job.
And we remember getting debriefed from the investigating officers who said, hey, listen, it's pretty clear what happened here. Nothing that happened was unsafe based off of BTC, TTPs, tactics, techniques, procedures.
And none of that was related to Kyle's death. This was a safe command case closed.
So we said, all right, well, now that you've elevated and said, I ran an unsafe command resulting in Kyle's death, we want access to that investigation. Denied.
And that's one reason why they wanted to avoid court-martial here, right? Yes. In court-martials, you would have a judge, right? Order production of exculpatory material in the possession of the government, right? We don't have that in an administrative board.
That's one of the parts they get to end run. And the only way to really compel them is to file an independent federal lawsuit for injunctive relief from a judge to get that.
So they know they can deny us all day, and the recourse is difficult. Jeez.
Yeah. It's how—the administrative process, and this is part of the problem with the system, is that they say it's non-punitive, but it really is punitive because through that administrative process, you can give me another than honorable discharge all administratively.
You can demote me in retirement, separately administratively, you could take my trident all administratively. Those are very punitive things.
And you and I both know having, and you, I think all served active duty. You give someone an other than honorable discharge, you're ruining the rest of their life potentially.
Good luck getting a job. And they can do that administratively.
No, no, that's not non-punitive. That's very punitive.
And being shy of a court of law or court martial, they can subvert due process laws because, well, this is non-punitive. So it's a play on words, and it allows them to basically hide information

that they know would vindicate you

because they want to meet their end-state objective.

I mean, even when this board was happening

and we started fighting it

and trying to get this access to information,

and I was going public with a few outlets,

one of the people from Navpur,

his name is a commander,

goes on the record with one of these publications

and said something about, we will find Captain Geary accountable. It's like, hang on a minute, dude.
A board of inquiry is supposed to be an objective fact-finding administrative board. And you're already talking in the open press about you will find me accountable? Sounds like a predetermined outcome.
Huh. Almost like it's consistent with the entire process we've seen that has been very manipulated.
Well, and to show you the general disdain they have for discovery in this process, back in 2018, actually 2016, there was a federal case out of the Eastern District of New York where the entire case was remanded to a new BOI because there wasn't sufficient discovery given, meaning sufficient evidence provided about unlawful command influence specifically. And the court ordered that the regulation actually had expanded discovery rights and that they needed to provide these tangential discovery pieces of evidence.
What was the Navy's response? They went and amended the regulation in 2019, 1920.6 D instead of C, to reduce the discovery rights based on that case. And that's the one we're operating under now.
So they continually try to tell me that's insufficiently directly related, right? To circle back to your question, also, it's important to note why would they want to do this, right? Why would they want to get this big? Well, they're not used to people fighting back. And so when they do it, they can determine their outcome.
They can hunt for anything they want administratively, hold anything they want administratively, and still punish you, and then tell someone out there, we held someone accountable. We did our job, and most people can't fight back.
They either don't have the legal representation to fight back. They don't have the fight in them.
It's looking at Goliath.

It's looking at Goliath, and they have infinite resources. And so I don't think they anticipated.
It's impossible to win. Well, we won.
It's impossible to win unless you get loud. Well, and you're just loud.
The system is totally, it is completely corrupt. It's impossible to win unless you happen to have a way to get the word out in front of millions of people and get the attention of lawmakers.
We had great lawyers from Jason from the beginning, Davis Yountz, Mark Jessup, Tim Parlatore, fantastic lawyers.

We had insiders feeding us the emails and the evidence, like black and white guys, case closed. And then we had you and a couple other people who had helped us drop breadcrumbs along the way leading up to this episode, or last episode.
And then congressmen started jumping on that, and that's really what gave us the avenues to win. I mean, from the beginning, we had Nick Lallota from New York, congressman, Morgan Littrell from Texas, and Corey Mills from Florida.
Those were the three congressmen that jumped on this from the beginning. And Senator Mark Wayne Mullen from Oklahoma.
Those four dudes talk about breathing life into our fight. But as much as they raised issues, the Navy still ignored it.
They still kind of kept it off to the side. So it wasn't until after our show where we started seeing that increase in attention.
Eli Crane was the first one that came on board after we talked. I talked to you this morning at breakfast about a contact of a contact, put us in touch with the Speaker of the House.
That was a huge one. We met with him for a half an hour.

What did he say?

How was that being?

He was shocked.

He was shocked.

And he's like, hey, I'm on your side.

I'm going to support you on this one.

It was fantastic.

And this guy that got us the meeting,

just an incredible American,

just called me one day.

I told you, hey, Brad, can you get to Tucson?

I got us a meeting with the Speaker of the House for half an hour if you can make it.

I'm like, what?

The Speaker of the House? Oh, yeah. Then the big one in there, Brad, can you get to Tucson? I got us meeting with the Speaker of the House for half an hour if you can make it.
I'm like, what? The Speaker of the House? Oh, yeah. Then the big one in there, too, we started getting some more senators.
Senator Tom Cotton jumped on board. He's a heavy hitter.
He started helping. Senator Tommy Tuberville, huge heavy hitter, started helping.
I hope I said it right. Tuberville or Tuberville? Tuberville.
Is it Tuberville? I think. I always mess it up.
I'm sorry, Senator. I always mess it up.

Coach is what everyone calls him.

His now security advisor, David Jansen,

I've become very good friends.

So all of that started growing.

And then the one that was really the big pivot point was Congressman Brian Mast from South Florida.

Ironically, President Trump's personal congressman.

So his chief of staff, Stephen Lighton, links us up from another team guy after our show. And he gives me the time of day, listens to everything.
He goes, okay, here's what we're going to do. He had started this new Justice for Warriors caucus.
And so he said, this is exactly what this thing exists for. And so he partnered me with the chief of staff, some of his other staff, James Langenderfer and Derek Miller.
They said, we're going to draft a letter that'll be from Congress to the secretary of defense. And then I want you to schedule a trip to come out to DC and we're going to shop this line and try to get as many co-signers as possible.
They said, the key is we can't come to DC without a plan. We're coming with an ask and all we're asking for is your signature.
And so that was really the tipping point after our show, which drove success, because that ended with that first letter that I think we had over 30 senators and congressmen co-sign it. Wow.
It was powerful, man. And they were bringing up all the things that we talked about.
And it was basically saying, hey, Secretary of Defense, we don't like what we're seeing. These quotes that I mentioned earlier, we're seeing gross ethical violations.
We're seeing lack of investigative process. We're seeing a lot of alarming things.
They sent us the Secretary in September, calm, silent from DOD for another little bit. The Navy kept doing all the things we just talked about.
And so then they sent a second letter on, I think, December 9th. And that's when they were really mad because they were like, hey, not only are you ignoring us, you're showing contempt for Congress, but you continue to deny them access to the evidence that we all know vindicates them.
What are we doing? And through insiders, we knew that the prosecuting attorney for that board of inquiry, who was doing his own questioning fact-finding in preparation was openly discussing with people. He's like, we have no case.
Who orchestrates all these congressmen and senators? Dude, there is no master orchestrator. Is it you guys, the attorneys? We just flat-footed it.
We walked everywhere. You're driving blind.
There's so much. It was really, really interesting.
I learned a lot about Congress, and I learned I never want to be a part of it. It's chaos.
It's chaos. But it was great because you saw that relationships matter.
And so there was one where I'm with Senator Mark Wayne Mullen in an elevator, and in comes Senator Barrasso. And Mullen's like, hey, I need you to take a look at this listen to brad he's got an important story you can trust me he's like i need you to be on this team he's like sounds good i'm in so like in an elevator you all of a sudden you get another signature um or like morgan latrell and eli crane and a couple of other guys uh one of the nights they said hey there's a vote on the house floor tonight here's what we're going to do we're going to going to bring you in with Brian Mass Chief of Staff, Stephen Lighton, and we're going to have the letter, and then we're going to be all shuttling dudes off the floor into the cloakroom where you're going to be standing there in your whites, and you're going to give them the five-minute elevator speech about everything that's happened and what we need and where we're going.
And we got, I think, like 25 signatures that night in about an hour period by people just coming in, listening to the pitch. Some of them were like, hey, I know that dude.
I trust him. He signed it.
I'm good. So it was really interesting watching how these guys interact, the relationships.
And it was incredible because it was, I mean, it was a frenzy. It was a frenzy.
What was interesting is who didn't talk to us, though, right? Right. That they made this partisan.
Right. I mean, nobody on the left would talk to us, I mean, at all.
It was really interesting. Here we are uncovering institutional corruption, lying to the American people, and not a single, to my recollection, not a single Democrat returned our call.
And even stopping. You did approach him.
You called, a cold call to reach out. I stopped by my own representative's offices and said, hey, I'm here from Colorado.

Not a single response.

Why do you think that is?

I think—I mean, my opinion, and I think what we're seeing is that they generally support institutional corruption as long as it fits their ends, right? And they didn't want to do anything to embarrass the administration in that time period and didn't want to do anything that could be at all tracked back to an administration that was going to an election. And so they just ignored us.
These should be bipartisan issues. Yeah, truth is bipartisan.
Everyone should care about this. It's a big deal.
What a shame. It's ironic now that obviously this administration is doing some very interesting things and I've heard some of the criticisms is, oh, you're politicizing roles that are supposed to be apolitical.
I have to laugh because it's like, no, the people that are being fired allowed those roles to become politicized. This is the correction measure.
This is the return to apolitization. And the military should be apolitical.
We 100% should be. But we've lost our way as a military, and I think we're seeing the correction come.
A great example, I mentioned Beefxler. He was one of the other three wrapped into this thing with us.
He and I were great, but we were having coffee, and he was telling me how one of his kids, I can't remember whether it was son or daughter, but one of his kids, he was just talking to the kid and said, hey, I'm curious what's going on with all the recruitment challenges and why people aren't joining the Navy and the Marine Corps and the duty in general. And his kid said, well, yeah, Dad, we all see it at high school level and it's just become very politicized.
And Beef said, well, the military is apolitical though. And his kid just looked at him, eyebrow raised, like, really? You're going to say that after what's happened to all of you guys? And he had to shrug his shoulders and be like, yeah, you're right.
I mean, the public saw this. Kids were seen in high school.
You can't fool kids. They saw the politicization of the military and now finally we're coming back to being, focusing on lethality, focusing on war fighting.
Like, it was so needed. So needed.
So what was it that kind of turned the tides in? Was it all the congressmen and senators? It was. The two letters.
So that second letter, December 9th, they sent it. And it was strongly worded.
It's out there. It's released.
I would encourage people to read it. What did it say? Oh, gosh.
I mean, like I've quoted, gross ethical violations. Like, this is absurd.
They said, we demand at this point, you drop all charges against Brad Geary and Eric Ramey, let them retire, and we want a new investigation into the corruption that we have seen here, the institutional corruption we've seen here. As far as I know, they've answered the first part.
They dropped the charges between me and Eric Ramey, but they've not started an investigation into the institutional corruption. But that was released on December 9th.
Very, very strongly worded. And then December 12th is when I got the phone call that they were dropping all charges finally.
Jason, what would the repercussions have been had they dug their feet in? Had they dug their feet in? And not dropped the charges with a letter like that, with all those signals. I mean, there's no direct repercussions.
I think that that was one of my more surprising pieces of knowledge gained in this thing is that the military has a large ability to ignore Congress if they want to. Of course, you've got Tuberville who's willing to freeze appointments, right? So maybe you would have seen some downstream freezing on some promotions.
But as far as direct consequences, unless called to a hearing under subpoena, there's almost no direct consequences for just continuing to do what they want to do. And why did they fold? Well, I actually have a slightly different view.
I think it was a combined arms attack here that got us there. But there were some key pieces of evidence released to us.
One, the text messages from his phone. Two, a great deal of photos that purport to be of Seaman Mullen's car.
And let me just say again, this is our rational perception of the evidence. But what they released to me was tons of photos of drugs, black market performance-enhancing drugs with used syringes, all kinds of stuff.
I mean, reams of stuff were finally produced to us. Why were those produced to you? Finally in discovery.
So by linking it to Brad's actions did cause grievous bodily injury or death, right?

Even the administrative prosecutor who admitted he didn't have a case despite rule 3.1 that

requires him not to take frivolous actions forward.

But despite that, he still understood that they have a discovery obligation that minimally

tracked to the NCIS investigation, right?

That they had yet to give us.

And this was the NCIS investigation that

was done like that day. And all of this evidence had been in their hands.
And we asked, I asked a basic question. I said, okay, so we've got a drug case now.
Where's the tox lab results for all the drugs that were in his car, right? And they came back and said, we didn't test him. Now, this is where I start to have significant concerns that when we get to our FOIA information, that we're going to find that the SECNAB office stopped the investigation.
Because there has not been a single NCIS investigation I've ever been associated with, either prosecuting or defending, where NCIS obtained and seized a drug or something purporting to be a drug, even half-used syringes, and did not test the substance.

So I think somebody hit the off switch, and I don't know why yet.

But that's the only thing that—

So what happens when you find out who it was and why they did it? I mean, we go public, right? What does that do? I mean, it's public humiliation. Is that a career ender? Do you have any recourse for that? They're still active duty and we find that happened 100%.
I mean, now you've got them on... That's unlawful command influence to like an nth degree.
Yeah. I mean, I think the point is is that we've always been dedicated to the objective truth record.
The objective truth record, thanks to you, has had to play out publicly. This is an extension of that.
Ultimately, now we are litigating not just to fully restore Brad, but to make the truth record unassailable

so that all of this crap that they've been saying for years

gets cut through and we deal with facts.

So that's my interest.

My interest now is to not only vindicate Captain Gary,

his cadre, and everyone else,

but to ensure that the American people

see that there are still processes

by which we are able to stick to and expose objective truth. Are there still processes through that? Well, I mean, that's part of what we think needs to change.
I mean, these whole things, this whole system has to be overhauled. It's interesting, you know, we referred to what we're seeing as criminal infrastructure.
I don't ever hear anything good happening. No, I mean, it's not.
And I think people... They bury who are there? I mean, look.
I've got this shit all over my wall. We've got the Blackwater guys.
They hid the drone evidence. We've got the Eddie Gallagher charges.
We've got your stuff. Just the other day, I did this interview with Josh Mass.
Did you guys hear about that? I haven't heard that one yet.

Adopted an Al-Qaeda baby.

Now they're trying to...

Oh, that's the Marine?

Yeah, that's...

I mean, it's just like, what are we doing here?

Right.

Is there anything?

I mean...

All the pardons come out right before the administration changed.

Yeah.

A ton of them.

The way we've been doing...

Just like blanket pardons. Yeah.
I mean of them. The way we've been doing this.
Just like blanket cardons.

Yeah.

I mean, is there any justice here anymore?

Seriously, I'm not fucking around.

Is there?

Yeah.

No, you can get it.

You have to work hard at it.

You can't stop.

And often you go 10x and you get 1x, right?

You get something.

Epstein's list.

P-ditty list.

Bad.

What the fuck is going on, man? Well, we're seeing, I mean, we were just talking about this in the car. I think what we're seeing with this election is somewhat of a, it's a beautiful thing because it's a peaceful revolution in a lot of ways.
It's the American public seeing all this happen for so long in so many different forums saying, like, enough. We want radical transparency and accountability.
And so you're seeing that. You're seeing President Trump execute that through Elon Musk with Doge.
You're seeing it through Secretary Higgs. That's what he's doing right now, radical transparency and accountability.
And I think the way we've done business in the past is irrelevant because of the way the things you've talked about on this show, the shift from legacy media to long-form podcasts, the shift from trusting a news source to give you the truth to let's actually find out from the source themselves and stop trusting people to filter, package it up into an executive narrative and give it to me as they see fit based upon their bias. And so it's a massive revolution.
And I think we're going to need to see the same things in the Navy and the Department of Defense in general is a shift to understanding that, hey man, the old days are gone. From you being able to send a three-line public affairs officer narrative, let that appease the public and the Navy all while you kind of say, don't look over here while we administratively punish these people on the namesake of good order and discipline and accountability.
No, sailors are tired of it. And they're going to need to evolve back to Gen Z to be relevant to what this generation expects as they enter the workforce and are the larger dominant part of it now.
We've got to change everything. We've got to change everything.
They're going to demand radical transparency just like the American public is demanding it now. And I don't mean operationally.
We shouldn't tell of our top secret stuff. But how we handle these types of things, we have to be more radically transparent.
And if you don't, if they don't, if they fail to evolve, you're going to have more guys like me sit in this chair calling them out. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, so the case got dismissed, but now they're coming after you again.

Yeah.

How are they coming after you this time?

Yeah, it's good.

So there's another administrative instruction out there that somebody signed at some point that probably was started for a very good reason.

Just like we talked about risk management last time, great intentions turned into a military process, oftentimes subvert the very intent behind the idea from the beginning. So they found this instruction that says, basically, if you submit for retirement within two years of substantiated allegations as part of investigation against you, they can send you to an independent board for a pay grade determination.
So in other words, they can demote me in retirement all administratively simply because we're within a two-year window from that NETC investigation being finalized. Now, the problem here is that you could interpret that instruction a couple different ways.
The way I think you should interpret it is that was not a credible investigation. Congress's words, grossly unethical, lacked investigative integrity.
So to say that that investigation represents credible allegations against me and Eric Ramey, well, that's false. That's the whole reason the whole thing got dropped.
But yet you're using that because I filed for retirement and they said, well, we're going to pursue this board anyway. We're just, Brad, we're following the instruction as we're supposed to, and we're trusting the process.
It basically means a biased investigation, a biased investigator's findings that are unsupported by the objective record can dictate whether or not you lose thousands in retirement. And I know that they're subjectively targeting me because one of my other peers was just part of a whole other investigation.
He just submitted retirement, got it approved. So they're arbitrarily picking me, which shows us that, okay, you're making a deliberate choice here.
You clearly did not like what we've done and how we've handled this and your intent on finding a way to get to me.

They just can't stop.

It's like, help me help you, man.

Like, please.

I mean, why don't they just want it to end?

You'd think.

Who's the lead on this?

Chief of Naval Personnel.

How long until Pete fires him?

Can't be soon enough in my book.

Can't be soon enough in my book. Chief of Naval Personnel, what's his name? Admiral Cheeseman.
Oh, this is the Cheeseman guy? Yeah, same guy who was in the email, same guy who signed and noticed the board. Yeah.
I mean, so they're basically trying to take your retirement. Well, they're trying to demote me in retirement, which is basically it's taken a large chunk of your retirement.
Yeah, I'm not sure actually, because you're supposed to get the higher three average when you retire, so whatever pay averaged out for the last three years. So even if you demote me in rank, I don't know if it affects the pay exactly.
So it could be a nothing burger, but it's still it's them. It's a black eye.
It's a black eye, and they're trying to do it at a spite, I think, when I know that they didn't have to, and they don't have to. You can choose to interpret that, and there's no reason to.
And there's nothing that stops them from saying, I've determined that investigation's not credible and you're not subject to this regulation. Go ahead and retire.
Well, and the funny thing, too, is they've dragged this thing out for so long. March 24th, next month, we hit the two years from that investigation.
So all we did was, hey, pull my retirement, cancel it. I'm going to resubmit it on March 25th.
That exceeds your statute of limitations, I get to retire as a captain. So there's a mechanism, we're working through it, but it just exposes their intent, the fact that they can't let go, and they just keep trying these things.
So Admiral Cheeseman. Mm-hmm.
Junior, to be specific. Junior.
Cheeseman Junior. Nice.

Yeah.

Anything else?

Are they coming at you for anything else?

No, I mean...

Have you heard from...

Has there been any response from Kyle Mullen's family?

So what we heard through the news is that the Navy told Regina Mullen

that new information had come to light, and that's all they would tell her on why they canceled our BOI. We don't know what that new information is.
We have suspicions based on our demand that they test the drugs, the vials of alleged drugs, that who knows what was in them, what kind of contaminants, who knows the purity, who knows what drugs were even in them or not in them. We suspect that might have been in the calculus there in getting our whole thing dropped, but we don't know for sure.
Other than that, we haven't heard too much. Yeah, it was around the same time period they withdrew that we were expecting the results back.
So there's some correlation there. No cut.
Yeah. No cut.
What are we missing? I mean, that's the majority of what they've done since then. Did anybody ever apologize to you? One guy did.
Yeah, because we talked about that at the end, right? I said, we want to leave that open, that forgiveness piece. One guy has apologized since our show, Master Chief, that I think very highly of.
And he said it well. It was a powerful text.
It actually brought me to tears because we had been very close friends, and I'm paraphrasing it now, but he said, basically, we should have stood by you. We should not have let lies perpetuate, and we should have rallied around our teammate.
Instead, we didn't. He said, I'm sorry for that, and will you forgive me? So he and I have totally reconciled.
Good. Yeah, there's some goodness in that.
And yeah, a lot of goodness in that. I wish more had.
But back to our first discussion about power causing brain damage, I don't think a lot of people understand. They legitimately think their actions are right because they're defending the institution.
And so they justify this in some sort of a moral relativism

and a misplacement of loyalty, right?

It's like you're being, back to the splinter in the log,

you're being willfully blind about what's really going on right now,

and you're misplacing your loyalty to the institution above the Constitution.

That's a very, very dangerous thing to do.

And those two in sequence like that is a very, very dangerous thing to do.

That's how you end up with institutional corruption. That's how you end up with a Navy that no longer adheres to honor, courage, and commitment.
We've got to see these changes. How do you think that this case affected Naval Special Warfare, the sentiment, the morale, the guys that are actually out there doing the job, not the Admiral Cheesemans.
I can tell you how it affected them. How did it affect retention? How did it affect the sentiment? How did it affect morale? Guys are forced to...
I would assume that maybe I should make assumptions, but if I was still in and I was a young operator, still gung-ho about being a SEAL and going and doing the job, it would cause a complete distrust in the entire institution. And I don't serve that kind of shit.
I would have left. There is a growing trust gap.
And I mean, I hear from the guys. The break is about am I peering up? Some of my peers are for me doing it this way.
They saw all the actions I took before this to try to defuse this. But some of them, yeah, like we've talked about, just no matter what my reasonings were, they're going to disapprove.
But the majority of the force that I've talked to, the operators, the shooters, there's a trust gap growing in how they've seen this thing handled. And what they would love to see right now, I think, I still have coffee with some of my old Buds candidates too.
So we're still talking and they're giving me the, this is what the platoons are saying. What they would love to see is the community rally and say, hey, we messed this up.
We should have stood by our teammate. We should have been under the boat with him.
We should have defended our own by lies from the outside, and we should have done that at all costs. We used to be the shining example of how to do this in Naval Special Warfare.
We used to do really, really good at taking care of our people. We didn't do it in this case.
And they would love to see the force come together and say, we messed it up. We're going to AAR this, and we're going to figure out how we did this, what we did wrong, and promise that we're never going to let this happen again.
We're going to take care of our people. Soft truth, number one.
Humans are more important than hard mirror. Show them.
Show them. Right now, we're never shown them.
And I don't want to over-inflate my case. It's not just about me.
But my case is a symptom of a larger problem that they are seeing crystal clear, back to Gen Z. They are incredibly intuitive, this generation.
It's very interesting. I got to see a lot of them coming up through Buds.
They're very intuitive, high EQ. They're very mindful.
And they're not going to tolerate this. They're not going to tolerate it.
They see the trend line. They see that, hey, this is not the organization I thought it was.
There's massive trust gaps. One guy said it really well to me.
He was in E6 recently. He's like, hey, sir, they criticize us at the platoons for being a pirate culture.

He said, yet we are a pirate culture because they drive us to be, because we don't trust them.

So they show themselves to be untrustworthy, senior officers out there.

Not all of them.

I don't want to overgeneralize, but a couple of them.

And so we isolate ourselves, which they interpret to be a pirate culture, yet they're the ones that have caused that.

I said, yeah, that's a tough one, man. Are guys leaving? Oh, yeah.
Massive retention problems right now. And again, it's not because of me, but they see the larger problems.
And massive retention problems across the force right now. I mean, I don't think we've seen this many 05s and 06s getting out in a long time.
They're scratching their heads. So what does that look like? What is that gap? So you've got a bunch of admirals, and you have massive retention problems, and you've got, what, like a bunch of E4s? Well, I mean, yeah.
Like, who's going to fill that gap? That's the problem, right? You have to replenish the force. And so— a lot of E-4s? Well, I mean...
Like, who's going to fill that gap?

That's the problem, right? You have to replenish the force.

And so...

A lot of these admirals and stuff,

they've never even been to combat,

so they don't even have any experience.

So who's going to fill in the gap here

and teach the younger generation

how to fight a war

when these guys have been

sitting behind a fucking desk

their entire career?

Well, thankfully,

a lot of our admirals

do have combat experience

Thank you. teach the younger generation how to fight a war when these guys have been sitting behind a fucking desk their entire career.
Well, thankfully, a lot of our emeralds do have combat experience. And even when they leave, guys in my generation are still coming up through the ranks.
I'm looking at the guys right now in command at the O5 level. I'm very encouraged by what I'm seeing in some of these combat leaders.
So we still have that, and that institutional knowledge will continue to get handed down. What I'm more concerned about is that the majority of our base force is the E-5s and E-6s, right? That's the largest pool of bodies that comes out of BUDS and does one or two platoons.
And if we're driving them out of the teams faster than we can replenish them, you know, that's a problem. Because now we're going to degrade what naval special warfare can even resource when it comes to what our nation asks us to do.
And the inevitable problem that comes from that usually is if you're having a hard time replenishing the force, well, then they increase the pressure to produce more. Well, if you're increasing the pressure to produce more, that usually means you're reducing the standard in order to get more.
And that's kind of what we talked about. This isn't bad.
I mean, we just labeled the cartels, terrorist organizations. I would think people, I would think guys would be excited to stay in this exciting time.
We're potentially on the cusp of World War III, you know, TBD, to see how that plays out. We've got China tapping at the door.
Yeah. You know, with Taiwan.
I mean, there's a lot of shit going on, and we have major retention problems not only in the U.S. military, but in naval special warfare, which are the war fighters.
Yeah, man. That's why we've said in this, that truth and transparency is a national security issue.
100%. All this is linked to that.
Yeah. 100%.
And, yeah, man.

Plus all the COVID stuff, a bunch of guys left.

We drove dudes out.

And who's left?

I mean, there's some really good dudes left, for sure.

But here we are, an all-volunteer force.

We took away the 20-year pension also, by the way.

So... What do you mean we took away the 20-year pension? So they no longer offer a 20-year pension for people that join the military.
What? Yeah, that went away a couple years ago. It's now a contributed retirement plan.
It's like a 401k, basically. Yeah, that can go with you.
You've got to be shitting. Oh, no, that went away.
That was like 10 years ago, dude. I didn't even know that.
Yeah. So that was a huge incentive for a lot of people to stay is, hey, I can keep serving, but I can guarantee myself some financial stability for later parts of life, knowing that I'm losing marketability on the outside, right? Every day we stay and then we get older.
Like, you're missing opportunities out there. But you don't do it for the money.
We do it for the service. But, yeah, that's still a big carrot that used to be there to dangle.
So now that's gone. I mean, what incentives are you providing people to stay in the military these days when you've taken away some of them back to what we talked about last time as leaders? All of our decisions have to be either incentivizing or disincentivizing a particular behavior.
What are we hoping to achieve here? I don't see us providing a lot of incentives to our young troops to want to serve when they see the administrative system and the NJP system abusing their own, doing things like they did with us. And I've lost count of the people that have hit me up on LinkedIn after our show.
Same thing happened to me. Same thing happened to me.
I mean, thousands of people. And you start connecting dots and talking to other people who know of other thousands in the Army and in the Marines and in the whatever.
This is a really, really alarming trend. And we are driving people out of the military because we punish so severely, sometimes unjustly.
Sometimes even when a guy does something right, the punishment is so disproportionate that it's driving them out too. I'll give you a great example.
One of my candidates, when I was at BTC, hurt himself, and then he goes home for Christmas break and his mom gives him some CBD pills. And she's like, hey, this will help your healing.
There's a lot of science on it. It doesn't have THC, don't worry about it.
And he's like, okay, so he does does it. Now he violated a Navy instruction.
You're not supposed to take CBD, whether it has THC or not. But he ended up, it did have THC.
So he popped positive on a test. So we did the investigation.
He confessed immediately. He was a really, really sharp young man, totally honest and forthcoming.
So we said, all right, let's find a way to help this guy fall forward. We took him to mass and I found him not guilty of knowingly ingesting a controlled substance because he didn't knowingly ingest THC.
But I did have to find him guilty for knowingly violating US policy. But it was a much lower offense than knowingly taking a controlled substance.
And I thought, this is a way to help him fall forward. Great.
I still had to drop him from the program, but wrote a huge letter on his behalf. This is a man of honor.
He has integrity. He confessed.
He's going to be a phenomenal leader in the Navy somewhere else. So we catapulted him off to success.
I get a call from him. Hey, sir, having some hangups.
They're asking for an admiral letter. So I ask Admiral Howard.
He writes the letter on his behalf. Okay, we'll get him to another community.
Another year later, he calls me. Hey, sir, I'm up for my security clearance review because I have a guilty mask in my record.
I need you to write another letter for me if you're willing and able to convince them to renew my security clearance, that I'm still trustworthy. Okay, another year goes by.
Hey, sir, I'm up for promotion. They're stalling my promotion because of our mask two and a half years ago now.
Can you write me another letter? Sure, write you another letter. And so what we saw is that administrative, bureaucratic machine just take over and continually punish this guy because, well, these are our processes and these are in our instructions.
And so we just kept beating him down years after he should have been able to fall forward and recover from was a bad mistake, but like should be survivable. And that's what we see.
That's a micro example. But I think that's what sailors, soldiers, and airmen are seeing at a macro level consistently with their friends.
Like, why would I keep serving when I make one small mistake that would cost me nothing as a civilian? Not even a blip on the radar. But look what happened to me.
And look what happened to my buddy over here for the next four years he's dealing with this. Zero defect mentality and then disproportionate punishment.
Yeah. I mean, that's what we're seeing across the board.
Jeez. It's demoralizing.
The human toll is huge. It's huge.
Yeah. Let's take a quick break.
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Where were we? I think we were talking about Gen Z. That's right.
I'm actually interested. How is Gen Z in Naval Special Warfare, other than just pissed off, rightly so, and leaving in droves? Yeah.
I like them. I like them a lot.
What is that generation like? So, you know, every generation. In combat and in the community.
Yeah, I don't know in combat yet, I guess, because these guys are just getting into the workforce right now, right? So I think the last ones that saw combat were probably millennials, but we're making that shift right now, and I think it's an important shift. It's interesting.
Simon Sinek wrote a book. He's written a few, but Leaders Eat Last is one of my favorites.
And he talks about these generational differences and how important it is as leaders to evolve, to be relevant to these next generations. So my observations with Gen Z, we talked about it a little bit.
Very high EQ, very impressive. They have a low tolerance for abuse of authority.
They're unimpressed. It's interesting.
Some people look at them as you're too disrespectful. You don't value the hierarchical structure that we put in place.
I don't see it as that, actually. I think it's that they've got a lot more courage to stand up to authority than any of us ever did.
Let me give you an example. We had this young guy in Bud's, and he had a mistake out in town.
And so he was going to come before me as the CEO board, that whole process we talked about last time, where I was going to determine whether he was going to stay or go in our system. And like we talked about, every candidate writes a letter.
It's their last appeal. I read it before we bring him in and then question them and make our decisions.
But the title of his letter was Fear No Man. We're like, that's interesting.
That sticks out. That's a little different.
So already I was like, what's this guy's deal? So my CMC, Dave Hanson's like, hey, yo, let me put some rounds across this guy's bow. Let's try to rattle him.
Let's find out what this is all about. Is this ego? Does this guy have an ego here? So dude comes in, sits down, and my CMC is just letting him have it.
I mean, like yelling, like if you've ever been on the receiving end of Dave Hansen, you know, giving it to you, not a great place to be. And I'm watching this guy's body language the whole time, just like you and I are sitting here right now.
Dude, if we had a pulse oximeter or whatever it I don't think his pulse would have jumped one beat. Dude just sat there and took it.
He was so secure in himself. And he was like, hey, I don't think I made a mistake.
Here's what I did. Here are the facts of my case.
I stand by it. I regret that we're in this room and we found ourselves here, but I stand by my decisions and what I did and my choices.
And we're sitting there and so we're like, this guy's impressive. And so I hit him up on the last question I asked him.
I said, hey, man, I have a question for you. You wrote Fear No Man.
Right now I've got all the authority in the world to let you continue on in your dream and become an Navy SEAL or end your career right now and move on to something else? Do you fear me? And without skipping a beat, this dude leans forward. He goes, no, sir, but I respect you.
That's Gen Z in a nutshell. I was so impressed.
Not only was I impressed, having gone through what now I've gone through, I can tell you, I thought of him probably every single day I was going through this struggle because I'm like, how do I get what that dude has? As a 22-year-old man to look an 06 in the eyes and have no fear, he did not fear me. He respected me.
How do I do that? Because I was very afraid when I started this journey and started pushing back against authority and saying, this is wrong. I think we're having a problem here, guys.
I was very afraid to do that. I was very afraid to confront people with higher rank than me.
So I'm looking to this Gen Z guy, 20-something years younger than me. I'm like, I'm inspired by this guy.
I got to learn from him. Wow.
They're impressive, man. Very interesting.
That takes big balls. And you don't just fake that.
That was genuine. Other things I saw with this generation, man.
So you would say that's a commonality throughout Gen Z? I saw a lot of that in Gen Z, yes. Yeah.
That's one story, but I saw things like that. So it's a good one to use to kind of, I think, use an example to say that this is pretty consistent with what I saw across this generation.
We always like to pick on the next generations, make fun of them, obviously, because they're different from ours. Some of the things I did notice that are negatives, they don't, to quote an Italian soft guy, they don't bruise well.
And what I mean is some of them were helicopter parented, I think, growing up. And so they can't handle, they don't handle failure well.
When they fail at something, sometimes they emotionally crumble. And we saw candidates do that.
We saw candidates do that. One guy, this guy was a total stud, class leader, class OIC.
I mean, he looked like he was chiseled out of the granite of Oklahoma. Like this guy was just quintessential what you think of as you want as a potential SEAL officer.
Great dude, showed a lot of great leadership attributes. Class loved him, very charismatic.
Everyone was running with this guy. And then on day one of first phase, he failed his first four-mile timed run, and he quit.
Failed it by like two seconds, and he quit. You almost want to rewind the clock sometimes and say, no, no, don't say that, but he said it, and you know how that is.
You don't unring that bell. And so our coach was like, why did you do that, dude? You were crushing this program.
Everyone loved you. And he said, well, how can I lead men if I can't hold the standard myself? Now, our point to him was, that's admirable.
However, you missed the entire point of our program. Nobody ever succeeds at everything.
How do you lead through adversity is a better question. How do you lead when you don't succeed? Because as we talked about, the enemy gets a vote.
Sometimes you can do all the right things on target and still be caught on your heels. How do you lead in those cases? So that was a negative that I saw in their generation, but that wasn't consistent with all of them, but a lot of them.
And they are, they have an incredible sense of teammanship. One more story, and then we'll move on, I think.
But this one time I was coming out of a couple months of amanship. One more story and then we'll move on I think.
But this one time I was coming out of a couple months out of a boot, I'd broken my foot. And so I was not in the best shape.
I haven't been in a boot for like three months. And my first day is OIC, total stud.
He's like, hey sir, we're doing the MRF as a class. We're gonna lead the MRF for one of these PTs.
It was, I think we were at the, one of the anniversaries of Red Wings or one of these things. And, and are you in? And in my mind, I'm thinking like, dude, I'm not in shape to do a MRF in front of candidates right now.
But how do you say no, you know, as the skipper? So yeah, of course I'll be there. So me and my CMC show up and we're doing this and um man i was sucking like bad bad and i'm so far behind everyone else they're like knocking out all their reps for those out there don't know what the murph is you can look it up but it's it's a mile run i think it's 100 pull-ups 200 push-ups and 300 squats is that right and another mile run i think that's right um so i'm still cranking out my reps and these guys are already done with their reps and 300 squats, is that right, and another mile run? I think that's right.
So I'm still cranking out my reps, and these guys are already done with their reps, and they've started their second run. And it's just me and my CMC on the grinder now still doing the reps.
Like, we're that far behind everybody because I'm that out of shape. And it was embarrassing.
I was humiliated as a CO. My CMC was a good teammate.
He was pretending that, like, he was hanging with me, like, oh, no, it's not you dragging me back. But it totally was.
He was just being a good swim buddy. So we start our run and now guys are actually coming back from the last run.
And I'm so beat down and defeated and depressed. As I'm running through the sand, I'm looking at my feet.
I'm depressed. I'm watching the sweat fall off my face.
And I'm thinking like, how do I salvage this moment as the CEO here when I wasn't hanging with these dudes and I've embarrassed myself? And I get to the turnaround point, hit it, turn around and start to run back. And I see something different.
I look up and I see my first phase OIC coming back to pick me up. And as he comes around the corner, a candidate's behind him, another candidate behind him, another candidate behind him.
No one told him to do this. They came back, filed in right behind me.
Didn't say a word. Just got in place, marched with me to pick me up as a straggler.
There was no condemnation in their eyes. There was no pity.
There was nothing other than we're here to be a teammate.

And as we're marching now,

all of a sudden, another one follows in, and another

whole class

starts to get a little bit better.

My gate opens up, my breathing fixes,

I'm starting to get, okay, that surge of

energy in my first phase, though, I see

whispers behind me, it's always nice

knowing someone's coming back for you.

And this was this class.

And they just did it. And then we come around the corner,

they do their class chant, I'm joining in the

Thank you. And this was this class.
And they just did it. And then we come around the corner, they do their class chant, I'm joining in the chant.
Dude, I got goosebumps. Man, these guys are incredible.
Super inspirational. Just one more.
I can't stop. One more.
We're at San Clemente Island, Dave and I. And we hear this weird noise.
We come around the corner, sun's going down and the whole class is standing around the American flag and they're doing colors and they're lowering

it and they're singing the national anthem as a class. So we stopped, salute, do the thing.
And

I look at the instructors. I said, Hey, do we mandate that? Is that something like we've forced

them to do? They're like, no, no, they just do it on their own. They started it a couple of classes

back as a tradition and they just kept passing it on. These patriots just love their country, and they bring so much to the table, not to mention the fact that they're incredibly innovative.
Man, it's cool to hear. Yeah, that's something I want to dive into a little bit.

Breakfast, we were talking about, they are innovators.

Yeah.

And they're fast innovators, and it sounds like the military in general is having a hell of a time.

It's impossible for them to keep up.

Right, right.

You were talking about that.

And so it sounds like the SEAL teams need their own science and technology shop. Well, I mean, you could just say Gen Z run, you know, because they are the science and tech.
These guys, I mean, they grew up on cell phones. They understand coding.
They understand man-machine pairing in ways that we can't understand from our generations. I didn't get my first smartphone until, what, like mid-30s or early 30s, maybe.
And so they are automatically looking at problems through a different lens than we'll ever get to. On top of that, you know, while we did some great things in the war on terror and we evolved as a warfighting entity, I think that a lot of that has built scar tissue and is irrelevant in the fight to come.
And so we're holding on to that as my generation a little bit like, no, no, we were successful because we did it this way. Well, that's irrelevant.
And Gen Z sees that it's irrelevant. And in a sense, we're almost slowing them down as a military.
Our acquisition process in general is too slow. We talked about this, it's a five-year cycle.
And that's if you have a requirement written to get something into the cycle and fund it in order to get it in the warfighters' hands. And what we're hearing from the front lines of Ukraine is that they're on a 30-day cycle of evolution right now where they come up with a new tactic, monster garage, 3D print, whatever, implement, and within 30 days, the enemy can counter it.
And so now you're having to evolve to a new tactic, a new technique, a new procedure, a new piece of equipment that helps you exploit now what they're doing differently. And so it's this constant 30-day loop.
But we're supposed to catch up with that with a five-year cycle right now to fund our troops with the next piece of gear? Have you seen them? Is there anything specific you've seen them invent or innovate that captured your interest? I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Let me think here.
I think you were talking about drones. Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of examples.
So I was going through my files, and then I'm wondering, what can I say, what can I not? But the drones is a great example. Just last weekend, we're at a hotel with some people, and we had an E6 and then a contractor who's helping them out.
And they literally brought a 3D printer and all this stuff, and they're 3D printing parts of a drone, soldering wires together, and making this mobile backpack with a drone

with some glasses that serve as an FPV,

first-person point of view, with an overlay.

So it's almost like what Lucky was talking about with you

a few episodes ago, but the Monster Garage version,

low-tech for sure, but so you could see through the glasses normally, but you'd have the overlay image of what the drone was doing. And they were like, just in their off time, came up with this.
Are you shitting me? No, I'm just serious. Yeah.
So what sparked that mini-invention? They just want the technology and the SEAL teams doesn't have it, so they're like, fuck it, we'll just make it? I think so. We could do this.
Harness that kind of energy. Cut it off the leash.
You know what I mean? Like, hey dudes, here's your left and rights. Let's give you funding, authorities, and equipment to just experiment and have fun with this stuff.
Boom, run.

Let's see what we come back with.

Compete by teams.

See what rises to the top.

Buy some off-the-shelf stuff.

Monster garage it.

We should just be giving these limitless authorities an autonomy direction.

Run this way.

You can't cross these thresholds legally, whatever.

But right now, I mean, they're doing it on their own

because they're hungry and they see that there's a need. But we're not evolving fast enough as a military to, I think, scratch their itch as Gen Z.
And that's a problem. Because like we've talked about, they're not going to sit around forever and wait for us to do what needs to be done.
They're going to leave because I can go make money somewhere else doing this. Or if this isn't going to, if you're not as innovative as I hoped you were when I got here, I'm going to walk away.
You only have so much shelf life before they're going to get impatient and walk away. What would it take to do that, to have an S&T shop set up with funding so they can innovate? I did a couple years in the acquisition world.
There's a few laws mandated by Congress. Now you do this thing, so that's part of it.
Those you can't bend. years in the acquisition world.
There's so many, there's a few laws mandated by Congress now you do this thing. So that's part of it.
Those you can't bend. But then there's tons of these policies that have happened over time which have created these procedures which are just behemoths to get through.
And so I think what we need to do is, and I know I've read Secretary Hegseth is talking about overhauling the acquisition process within DOD. So I think we're going to get there.
That's why I keep telling these young guys, like, hang on, dudes. I think all the right change is coming.
That whole system needs to be overhauled, just like we've talked about with other things here, with the legal, the administrative, to give those kinds of guys the autonomy to actually innovate and give us the solutions that we don't even know we need yet. And I think they're ready and they're hungry for that.
We just have to empower them and get out of their way. Use guys like me.
Well, I'm on the way out. But guys that are still in like me, let me use my authority and my top cover to support you.
Provide you a pot of money. You have a finite amount of money, but this is your money.
And here's your authorities to do whatever you want and figure out how this could work. I guarantee you they're going to come back with solution upon solution upon solution that have boggled our minds for 20, 30 years.
I know for a fact they will, because I saw that when I was the CEO of SDV Team One. I can't go into too many details, but we had a couple of undersea problems that had stumped our community for 30 years.
30 years. I walked in the room, young platoon, lieutenant and the chief running the show, young Gen Zers.
Yo dudes, here's the problem, whiteboard. Here's a case of beer.
See if you can solve this problem. Solved it.
No shit. Stuff that had stumped us for 20, 30 years.
They're like, oh, what if we do this? Oh, no one's ever thought of that. How come no one's ever thought of that? I don't know, because we're old? Because we're stuck in our ways? We're like, holy cow.
They literally changed the paradigm in our undersea ability. One platoon, by trying something, having an idea, and then trying it that nobody else had tried.
And then they're like, well, what about this other problem that we have? That stumped people for a long time as well. Can you solve that? Another case of beer.
Solve that. These guys were delivering incredible results in rapid success that in a normal cycle, you're talking about, well, we submit this problem, this need, a commander's statement of needs or concerns or something.
We have this need. Three to four years later, some program office somewhere delivers something that's like, okay, that would have been useful three years ago when we highlighted that it was a need.
Now it's almost irrelevant. These guys were doing that within months.
Wow. One capability they thought of, open source bot got waivers to dive it, and we implemented it.
We added some mods to it because we got waivers to that, and we implemented it on a real-world op in less than a year from concept to execution, proven and taken down range, and it was all them. Wow.
All young dudes in spite of the system, in spite of, you know, us who just hold that thing back sometimes. Wow.
How many, how many leaders within Naval Special, I mean, is this, is this, is this, are leaders like you and they're, they're trying to empower these guys or is there a lot of pushback? This is probably both. Probably both.
It's hard to say. I mean, it's hard to say.
Yeah. We got some really good ones out there that are like trying to jump, like run with these guys.
Like, let's go. You can do it.
But then I know that we have, we have dinosaurs who just can't let go of yesteryear's war. I mean, yeah.
And I'll hit the dudes up. Like, yo, how did your training block go? We spent four weeks doing mobility with MRAPs, big armored vehicles, right? What? You guys are still spending four weeks doing that in your workup? Why? Those were useful in Iraq, but we haven't been there for a while.
And I'm pretty sure we're not driving those in Beijing next week or anything. So why are we spending time doing that when we could be doing drone warfare as a common block of training? I don't know.
Okay. I mean, 2018 National Defense Strategy shifted us to great power competition.

2018.

And this guy's a new team guy, just finishing his first platoon,

was still doing an MRAP training block.

Like, okay, guys, we have to evolve faster than that.

That's a problem that it took that long.

Now, I did hear recently, fairly, they finally just cut it out.

But that's a problem, man.

It should not take from 2018 to 2025 for us to fix that. Yeah, yeah.
We've got to evolve faster. What were you interviewing with Hexeth about? Yeah, that's a funny one.
We hadn't won our fight yet. We were still in the middle of it.
And the week before Thanksgiving week, I get a text from Cash. And he said, hey, check your email.
So I checked my email, and it says, hey, can you be in West Palm Beach within the next 36 hours for interviews? It said, you have, quote, been nominated for and are being considered for a senior position in this administration. I was like, well, that's interesting.
Yes, I can be there. So I flew out, caught a flight at the last minute, went down there, and I interviewed with now Secretary Hegseth and Director Gabbard, DNI, both of which you've had here on the show, actually.
So yeah, a couple of days of interviews with them and their staffs, and it went really well. We talked about a lot of the things that you and I have just talked about here today, and my observations that even these good admirals out there, even these good generals, these great leaders are institutionalized.
And so it's not lost on me that in the last Trump administration, he put a lot of three and four star retired generals and admirals in positions of politically appointed positions, and yet he meant institutional resistance, even though they were great leaders, great leaders in the military, but he meant institutional resistance because they're institutionalists. If you notice in this administration, there's not a lot of three- and four-star retirees that he's nominating.
I know everybody out there has to be just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us. And I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source.
It's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world. And so one thing we've done here at Sean Ryan Show is we are developing our newsletter.
And the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA targeter. Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call sign super bad.
She's made two different appearances here on the Sean Ryan Show. And some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mind-blowing.
And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief. So it's going to be all things terrorists, how terrorists are coming up through the southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to.
And here's the best part. The newsletter is actually free.
We're not going to spam you. It's about one newsletter a week, maybe two if we release two shows.
The only other thing that's going to be in there besides the intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that. But like I said, it's a free CIA intelligence brief.
Sign up. Link's in the description or in the comments.
We'll see you in the newsletter. It's a lot of lower ranking, 05 and below's, who did a little bit of time in the military, enough to gain a perspective of it, but not enough time to where they're institutionalized.
I said, I've noticed that too, and it's what I've noticed through my case. So I talked about all the change that's needed, and I told them, if you want change, I'm happy to be a change agent for you.
I've seen a lot of things that need to be fixed, need to be overhauled, and I'm happy to run fast in that direction. And I would be very honored and happy to continue to fulfill my oath to the Constitution wearing a suit instead of a uniform.
But I see the need to wear a suit instead of a uniform. I see the need now to have civilian oversight that's going to mandate change for the good.
And like we've talked about in our case, I see the need for congressional oversight because even the good-meaning ones are institutionalized and they won't always do the right thing. So that's what it was all about.
I don't yet know what they're going to do with me, if anything. I keep hearing my name circulated up there for some positions, but I know some of the positions I was being considered for have already been nominated for.
So we really don't know now if I'm still in the running for anything. But it makes it tricky because I'm still at the duty trying to retire as well.
And I understand that's a complexity. What are some of the things you would immediately go after and try to change?

I think in the civilian courts, it's very important, our legal framework of innocent until proven guilty.

I think that has been bastardized in the military over time, not any one person's fault, just over time, like we've talked about.

And you're very much treated guilty until proven innocent. And that's crushed a lot of people's souls.
Or you're even innocent but find yourself being abused by this system. There's a very, there's a human cost associated with this stuff.
Walk the Talk Foundation just put out a published document the other day. I don't know if they published it, but we've talked about it, that of active duty suicides out there, 29% of them are related to UCMJ or administrative investigations like the one we went through.
Wow. 29%.
I can't remember the actual numbers of what that represents, but it's thousands. And I see that and I felt it.
It's the double-edged sword that is the SEAL teams in a lot of ways. For so many years, your value is defined by does the team value you? Are you under the boat with them? Are you carrying your weight? And are you choosing to carry more on a daily basis? And that's great because that produces things that, that's why they make movies and books about this stuff, because it just produces these supernatural units that go do things as a team that you could never do individually.
It catalyzes teamwork. It's amazing what you can do with that.
The double-edged sword part of it is over time, and the longer you do that, your self-worth, my self-worth, got wrapped into that. And so when I get wrapped into now an investigation based upon, like we've talked about, all the lies, it doesn't matter, you're ostracized to some degree.
And you feel like you're no longer valued by the team anymore. And that can shatter your self-worth, which is, I think, what attributes these suicides.
We did a suicide stand-down about a year ago. And our prevention specialist said, statistically, the highest number of suicidal ideations in our force come from people under investigation.
Whether you're innocent or guilty,

doesn't matter. Just the simple part of being under investigation and those leaving the teams.

And I was like, oh yeah, I understand that. And then they start showing all the psychological

reasons why, all the things that these things produce. And like we've talked about, if we're

disproportionately punishing people, we're putting them under this kind of scrutiny for no reason. Man, 29% of suicides? My father-in-law quotes this old political satire cartoon, Pogo.
He says, we have met the enemy and he is us. We should really care about that.

I didn't go this in depth with Secretary Hegseth and Director Gabbard, but that whole system

needs to be overhauled because if we have a suicide epidemic, which we do, we already

have problems with this.

Why are we contributing to that by allowing a process to be involved that disproportionately

punishes people?

It's horrific. It's horrific.
And I've heard it from them. I've seen it.
I've seen it in their eyes. And we lived it.
We lived it. We talked about some of the things, the suffering we endured through our career.
We hit on this journey, this three-year journey, we hit three really dark moments. The first one was fear, fear-based.
And it was when they released this investigation to the press without having let me even see it and rebut it in any way. And I saw that frenzy as everyone was frothing at the mouth.
And it was just horrible to watch. And we were actually scheduled to go on leave the next day.
So I went to the airport with my family. And my mind's just in a million places.
And as we're checking in all of our luggage, I had that moment. You know, they take too long sometimes, and you're just trying to figure it out.

And so you're just sitting there with nothing to do.

And it was the first moment I had nothing to do.

And I closed my eyes, and it was almost like I'd been running in front of a wave,

and the wave just collapsed into the back of me.

And it's the closest I've ever come

to a full-blown panic attack.

And I'm pretty sure I was having a panic attack.

Heart starts racing.

It was all fear-based.

And I'm thinking in my mind, like,

I got a kid about to go to college. I got another one about to go to college.
This is all I've ever known. What am I going to do? Like, what am I going to do? This is all I've known.
My mom signed a waiver at 17 years old to join the Navy because I wasn't a legal adult yet. This has been my entire adult life that I've invested in this job and in this mission and this sense of service.
And it's being, I can see it's, it's the dream is being killed right in front of my eyes. What am I going to do? And I was so afraid.
I closed my eyes and just, I was like, oh, and I prayed. And I'm like, Lord, I'm so afraid right now.
Like, I don't even know. I don't even know what I'm going to do.
I need your help. I need you to help me now.
and in that moment it was really it was really cool

in my mind's eye, I saw myself. It was really interesting.
I saw myself on a desert road. And it felt very much like many of the places we've deployed to, with mountains on either side and just winding nice flat path.
And I looked over to the right, all in my mind's eye, and I see Jesus standing at a crossroads on a smaller path that's going up the mountainside, a very treacherous path, lots of rocks. I mean, unpleasant.
But he's looking back at me, he's holding out his hand, and he's got a smirk on his face. And I heard in my mind him say, it's okay.
I'm going to walk with you, and I'm going to show you each step, and I'll be with you the whole time. And so I reached out and took his face.
And I heard in my mind him say, it's okay. I'm going to walk with you.
I'm going to show you each step and I'll be with you the whole time. And so I reached out and took his hand and I'm back in the airport.
Now, again, this is all my mind's eye. I don't want to make it sound like, I don't want to make it sound like, you know, it's like a full up vision, but it happened.
And I've never felt, I talked about the lucid dream last time. It was very similar to that.
And I'm back and I was like, whoa.

And all of a sudden we're checking the luggage.

I go sit down in the airplane again.

I stopped and I started thinking through, I'm like, did that happen?

And I start crying because I couldn't even control my emotions.

And my wife looks over, freaks out.

Like, what do you, you know, what's wrong with you?

You're crying on the airplane.

And I couldn't even speak it because it was so overwhelming.

I had to text her.

And so he answered my prayer and he showed me, don't be afraid. I've got you.
So that was the first part, what this produced fear. The second part, failure.
And in many ways, I think that's what many men fear is failure or failure to provide or failure to succeed. I felt that through all the criticism for sure, but it manifested most as a dad in the middle of all this.
Obviously, we were stressed. Obviously, we had hard moments.
I was impatient at times. And I mentioned in the last one that my youngest son developed some sort of a brain injury where basically his blood brain barrier got compromised and so when he gets sick the antibodies from the sickness that his body is producing jump over into his I think the basal ganglia part of his brain and it's like fireworks going on in his brain and it produces irrational spirals.
It was horrific to see as a dad and And it was like 24 hours. He would, for instance, brush his mouth accidentally and then freak out because there was dirt on his hand.
There wasn't, but he had imagined dirt. And so he would now be so disgusted that dirt was in his mouth, he would start gagging and spitting.
And he would just spit all over himself in the floor because he couldn't tolerate the dirt in his mouth. He was taking like five baths a day.
It was really, really weird. And we realized it was neurological, but we were really, really trying to figure this out.
And so I was, as a typical dad and man, trying to ration my way through it. And so he's having a spiral one night.
And I said, hey, buddy, just talk to me about it. Let's just talk through this.
Like, we can talk through it. And he's crying.
He's in an absolute, he's irreconcilable. And he said, dad, it's a nine-year-old.
He was eight at the time. Dad, I don't want to tell you because you're just going to get mad at me.
And I said, dude, I love you. I'm not going to get mad at you.
Let's talk through it. So we start talking through it.
I wasn't able to solve it. And so at some point, I get frustrated, probably with myself, not with him.
And I yelled. And he starts crying.
And he said, dad, you broke your promise. Oh, man.
And dude, every dad goes through this just the feelings of failure like ah i stood up i could barely hold it together and i go to the garage and i collapsed on the garage floor and just wept and i couldn't press my face into the pavement far enough in submission to god and i was just like enough like Like all this other stuff we're dealing with and now this, like enough, please, like take this from me. I can't do this.
I cannot do this. I don't have the strength.
I don't have the knowledge. I don't have the wisdom as a dad.
I can't do this. Like, please, please enough.
And he answered that.

We started getting answers.

Got him on a path to healing.

But the best part, the best part, I walk in afterward after I collected myself.

He's already in bed.

Amy took care of that, gets him in bed.

And I walk in and I knelt down.

And I said, dude, dad's sorry.

Please forgive me. Because you were right.
I broke my promise without skipping a beat. It's okay, dad.
I love you. Like, no, it's not okay.
But I appreciate that. I mean, the beauty of a kid, right? I think this is why Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is meant for these, and we should have childlike faith.
This idea, this total idea that he's so quick to forgive, so quick to love when it's not okay, when I did fail. It was a huge lesson for me to learn through this process as well as just, I am not capable as a man to deal with these kinds of things.
The third and final one. As we were fighting all this, putting together documents with Jason, just, I mean, I'm talking, we put three separate documents together that were like master's level theses and just evidence upon evidence, irrefutable.
And I was so convinced that reason would prevail. And as I submitted these, the Navy and NSW would be like, ah, here's all the evidence in the world.
You did it. You know, dropping all charges, total vindication, facts matter.
Let's get back to work. I was really convinced that this was going to happen.
And the morning I submitted them all or the day I submitted them all, it was like, yeah, it's this huge weight off my shoulders.

So again, back to, I think, my self-worth and how I was defining that.

That Friday morning, I get an email from our admiral who had said,

hey, I've reviewed all the evidence.

I've still decided that you meet the criteria to proceed with this board of inquiry.

I still find reason to believe you were negligent and derelict in your duties.

And that one crushed my soul more than anything else because back to my self-worth, I had let this become defined by what man thinks of me, what the teams think of me. And here we have an admiral who speaks on behalf of our community.
Like it or not, he represents us all.

And he's telling me I'm not worthy.

And so when you've built 25 years of self-worth around that,

and that's taken from you,

it took me to some really, really dark places.

And I was driving by myself, actually,

up to one of the foundations, the C4 Foundation,

up in the mountains near Julian.

So I was on the road by myself,

just spiraling into some darkness.

It's a hard thing as a man

when your self-worth gets taken from you.

And I reached out to a few friends.

You were one of them. You answered.
And I reached out to a few friends. You were one of them.

You answered.

Pulled me back out a little bit.

They say that in those darkest moments,

you need about eight minutes of someone's time.

And it helps you get out of it.

And so I've encouraged people,

hey, just in a text to somebody, say I need eight minutes of your time. And they'll know, okay, this is serious.
We need to talk. So you called me and another friend called me and helped pull me out.
And it was like, okay, okay. I don't know.
I can't explain that. I don't think it came from within me.
I think it was something external.

But it came in my most vulnerable place.

And I worked through that with God over the weekend.

And I was so ashamed of the dark places I had gone that it was hard for me to even tell Amy.

I was so ashamed.

And when I finally mustered the courage to, I'm crying. And she said, I know.
She said, I felt it. And I was worried.
And I was praying. She said, I'm glad you got through that moment.
I said, yeah, me too. Me too.
And when I heard God say in that moment, he's like, why did you give man this authority over you? It's yours to give and take. You don't have to care what this person thinks about you.
You don't have to care what this community thinks about you. You gave that to them.
You can take that right back. And what I heard him say in my mind was, give it to me.
I define your worth. I value you.
You are worthy because I made you worthy.

I love you.

I have chosen you.

I have claimed you.

I bought you with a price.

See yourself through my eyes.

And I realized, oh man, I had to get to that dark moment

to even see the chains that I had forged around me

to define my self-worth by what man thinks of me. I didn't even know they existed.
I had no idea they were there. And they were the strongest things I had to break over this whole three-year journey.
And so it was only until that moment when I could give that self-worth back to God that I was able to shadow those chains. And it was then that I was truly free

to actually start making the decisions

that landed us in your studio last time.

Because if I no longer care what man thinks of me,

well, man offers me the world.

And man uses the world as leverage

to influence my decisions and shape

what they want me and don't want me to do.

If I no longer care about what man thinks of me, well, now I'm free to make these decisions based upon what I believe in, truth, principles. You wrote the other day on social media, we talked about it earlier.
I'll mess it up, but paraphrase. I think you said something to the effect of, nobody ever regrets standing up for truth.
They only regret the moments they didn't. Yeah.
But you're not free to do it until you don't care what man thinks of you. Because they'll use the world as leverage.
So I say all that because I know that there's people out there that have been going through the same things we went through and they need to hear that it happened to all of us and it's okay and there's hope. And we need to fix these processes that put people through this, because it is unjust, and it is disproportionate to anything they might have done wrong, I do believe.
Yeah, all of this in supposedly a non-punitive system. Non-punitive system.
Right. And he's not, obviously, I've had tons of clients like this.
He's not the first to feel the way he's feeling. This is what the military will do to you.
You sign your life to that check, right? And then they tell you, we need to rip up that check, right? It takes months to get clients to where I'm not worried about their safety anymore. I think that's why you called, is you knew you've seen this before.
Yeah. And I've since had friends go through this stuff, and I call them.
I'm like, hey, man, how are you today? How are you right now? Not good, bro. I understand.
Keep your head up. Stay in the fight.
This too shall pass. I tell them all now.
I had a guy call me the other day.

He's like, I love how you guys dealt with this.

You know, I'm going through something similar.

How do I deal with it? I'm like, bro, get in the Bible.

I mean, get in there.

There's refuge.

I love John Piper.

He's one of our modern-day theologians.

He said, cry out to God, then ransack the Bible for his appointed promise. We are fragile.
He is not. And I found such strength in that submission to him and just like, yes, okay, Lord, take this from me.
I know you're doing something. I don't understand it, but I know you're doing something and you are good.
So I'm going to choose to trust you. I'm going to choose to carry on.
I'm going to choose to remain steadfast

and we're going to get up one more day and we're going to

keep fighting this fight.

One dude recently

probably gave me the best

compliment I've ever received.

And I'm so tempted to take it, but I can't.

But he is on social media. He's like, you have

more testicular fortitude than any other

man I've ever met.

I mean, it's like the best thing you could ever hear as a dude, right? It's awesome. It's so awesome.
And I so am tempted to be like, yeah, bro. And people have said similar things like, we just can't believe how strong you were through this.
And it's like, no, you're missing it. You're missing it, man.
I don't have testicular fortitude. If you compliment me, I've got to just point you right to Jesus.
I've got to do it because anything else is me claiming that I was strong through this. You may have seen moments of strength.
Those came between moments of absolute despair, absolute weakness, absolute just brokenness. And I just kept submitting to the Lord and trusting that he was taking us somewhere special, like we talked about, to a season that will be producing more fruit.
And he carried me through that. So if you saw strength, you saw his strength through me.
It was not my strength. Paul talks about this in the New Testament.
When we are weak, his strength is manifested through us. And that's glorifying to God.
So when we are weak, that's when we're actually strong. Because when we lean on him, his strength manifests.
It's a powerful message. I hope they hear it.
I hope they hear it. There's solidarity in it.
And I think it's important for him to hear. And I struggled with how much to tell on that part of the story.
But I think it's important for them to know that, yeah, man, there's other people who have gone through this. We can get through it together.
Call me. Reach out to me.
And or let's make changes. Let's fix this.
Let's stop this from happening to our teammates. Let's stop contributing to the suicide epidemic by 29%.
There's a better way to do business that takes better care of our teammates. Last thing, when do you guys expect to hear? When do you think this is going to be done? When are you going to be able to retire and move on with your career as a voice actor? I think, yeah.
Dude, it's so funny you said that. I never really thought much about my voice.

But seeing all the comments from the last episode about my dadgum Batman voice, apparently.

And now I got a head cold, so I don't know how this is going to turn out.

You never really thought about my voice.

Yeah, yeah.

Come on.

Well, my old CEO guy I loved, I mentioned him last one,

whenever I told stories, I would drop into an octave.

And I didn't even know I did it, but he used to call it the Marlboro Man voice. He's like, did you just smoke a pack of cigarettes before the story? Like, what happened? I'm like, I don't know.
Just, I don't know. It just happened over the years.
But so yeah, next career, who knows? Hopefully I'm retired by the summer. One June, one July timeframe is what we've been aiming for.
Assuming we can figure this out with the Navy and just let me leave, guys. Let me leave.
That's the hope. And then we'll see what's next.
Whether this administration decides to pick me up for a job, great. I've told them I'd be happy to serve as long as I'm a change agent and able to actually run in the directions that we need to run in and make the changes that'll protect our teammates.
And if not, it's fine. Give me a call.
I'll consult with you for free. I will tell you about all the things we saw and what needs to change and what needs to be fixed.
And I know they already have smart people doing these things also, which is good. They weren't hearing this just from me.
They heard it from a lot of sources. And so we're seeing that start to manifest now, which is very exciting.
So I'm comfortable and confident that all the right change is gonna to happen very, very soon here. And it's already starting.
So yeah, hopefully by this summer, this season's behind us officially. Man, I hope so.
Yeah, I hope so. Tell me about the no, bro.
Yeah, thank you. Appreciate that.
Part of that change, we were just brainstorming one day about like, man, one of the things that prohibits you from doing these things is we talked about the cost, the financial piece. People have been like, oh, well, he was an officer.
He was able to pay for this. No, dude, we're up to about $200,000 in legal fees in totality for three years.
We couldn't afford that. And one of the things the military prohibits you from doing is fundraising for yourself for these types of things.
So it's like they pitch you up as a David versus Goliath scenario, but then they deny you access to the stones to even fight. We've got to fix that problem too.
If someone's allowed to be provided civilian counsel, which they need because you need a mediator attorney, and in my case, a team of mediator attorneys, like we said, between you, Davis, Mark Jessup, and Tim Parlatori, who all still, we still collaborate. We had a whole thread called Team Truth.
If that's what you need, well, then we need to be able to allow that person to solicit funds for that. And so one of the reasons we started talking about this was we had to search through nonprofits to get there.
We talked about the Cash Foundation. We're still with Stan with Warriors.
Davis Yance was here last time represented by them. But he had thought of the idea of we should just start our own 501c3 because what we found is even family members and these people out there want to help people like us, but they also want it to be a tax-deductible thing where they can get benefits from that, and it makes it easier for them to throw money at that.
And so on a whim, he's like, well, I don't know. I just started a 501c3.
So if your parents want to help or friends of the family that ask want to help, they can just go through that, and it saves them some tax burdens. So we're in the process of starting that.
Amy's going to be a board member. Oh, man, that's cool.
Yeah, very cool. It's called the Civilian Military Defense Fund.
Yeah. The Civilian Military Defense Fund.
Yeah, and it's organized in Colorado right now. We're going through the fundraising registration at the state level, and then we'll submit for 501c3 status.
But its specific purpose, and the board's amazing. I've been honored by those who have chosen to serve on the board.
It's a mix of high-level civilian attorneys, high-level criminal defense attorneys, some military justice attorneys as well, a public defender out of Washington State. People see the problem, and they want to help.
And we want to do things. We want to be able to give all service members access to civilian counsel.
Because in this case, Captain Geary wasn't eligible for military counsel until Admiral Cheeseman served him the notice. That's two years after this process started.
All of that is out of pocket, right? And on top of it, judge advocates are restricted from filing in federal court. So around this administrative issue, needing to seek injunctive relief if they get really out of whack, they have no access to that.
It's civilian lawyers with that civil experience, especially, that can bring these kind of weapons to bear, and military have no access to that. And in fact, I want to inspire big law civilian lawyers who haven't even been judge advocates.
I want to inspire their level of litigation to be brought to the military because I think that's the only way within that system that we're going to elevate our treatment of personnel and elevate the due process is by bringing these inordinate experienced civilian litigators in to fight the fight. But we need to be able to pay them.
These guys are expensive for a reason, right? And we need to be able to pay them. Or we need to be able to get experts when the military justice system refuses you an expert.
We need to be able, and finally, I added a third prong as we talked about it. We've got to find a way to support people in this military justice process from going to the dark places.

The military is not taking care of their own for the minute an allegation is levied. You're on the outside and you're done, right? And we talk a big game about suicide prevention in the military.
We do a lot of that. But we need to find ways where people can call and talk to somebody for those eight minutes that understands the system, the problem, have been through it themselves.
And so, you know, through this, we're like, you know what? Let's do it. We're good at operational management.
This is the best leader I've ever known. We're going to create the Civilian Military Defense Fund, and we're going to push.
That's awesome, man. That's awesome.
When do you think that'll be ready to roll?

I expect the Colorado registration to be back in about eight days.

That will open donations.

It just won't be deductible until we get the 501c3 certification.

But, and I'm no tax professional,

my understanding is it will be retroactively deductible.

So we are going to start accepting donations.

Check with your tax providers ahead of the 501c3 process, because that does take a while. But my understanding is we have a 27-month window to get that done, and I will get it done.
Perfect. Well, thanks again for coming on.
And man, I just... I know you're going to get through this.

Yeah, yeah.

It's just...

It's enraging, you know, what the U.S. Navy's doing.

And Admiral Cheeseman.

Cheeseman Jr.

Yeah, it's just...

It makes no sense, but...

I know you guys will get through it, and hopefully one day we'll see some repercussions for this kind of bullshit. Yeah, and protections.
Protections. I hope you'd stick it out for the change to come.
Yeah. I was teaching this class, and I keep reinforcing these young dudes, like, stick this out.
The teams are a great place, and we need you to stick it out. We need you to make it better.
We need you to take the baton from my generation and start innovating and start pivoting fast to keep the pace with the changes of war. If I had any message for them, it would be, these are your teams.
Your generation has it. We did our duty.
Now it's your turn to do yours. So make us proud.
I trust they will from what I saw coming up through the ranks. Sounds like it.
They're going to make us proud. So that's my message to them.
These are your teams. Own it.
You own the culture. You own where we're going in the future.
To my peers and up, get out of their way. Empower them.
Give them autonomy. Let's give them authorities and let them innovate and run because we're falling behind if we don't.
Great message. And on another note, I hope you do get picked up by this administration.
Yeah, we'll see. Thanks.
I can't think of anybody better, frankly, to be in this administration to get some shit

done.

Yeah.

Happy to help if they want it.

It'd be fun.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

All right.

Yes.

Good job.

Thank you.

And you can do it.

Bye.

Jim Rome takes on sports. Why? Because you're not playing me.
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He's not over the NFL. The NFL is over him.
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