Transcript of #350 Mike Hayes - The Navy SEAL in Obama’s Situation Room During the Captain Phillips Rescue

Mike Hayes, welcome to the show.

Sean Ryan, pleasure to be here, my friend.

It's awesome to have you. So we kind of— I guess we didn't really cross paths. I saw— I can't remember, uh, I think it was in a New York magazine, and, um, one that I had been in. And I saw— yeah, that's what it was. I saw a post on Instagram about a former SEAL officer who was paying off Gold Star wives' mortgages. And I think I commented under it, and then about 5 minutes later, I guess we have a mutual friend, uh, Chris Fetis, texted me and said, oh, Mike Hayes is an awesome— he's a badass, he's awesome. And I was like, who is, who is Mike Hayes? He's like, that's the guy's— he's, he's— you just commented under his thing. I said, oh, is this the guy that, uh, paying off the Gold Star families' houses and mortgages? And he said, yeah. So, uh, I called him up and we had a chat, and, um, and, uh, he said we should reach out. And so amazing that you're doing that. I mean, incredible, incredible.

Yeah, Sean, first of all, thank you for all your incredible inspiration and impact you've had, uh, on me and on so many in this great nation. And, uh, the first thing I'd say is clearly Chris Fettis doesn't know me then. So, but no, we've got so many mutual friends. I'm so close with so many of the people that have sat in this chair over the years. And, and thank you for all.

No, thank you for saying that. And yeah, we definitely missed each other by a hair several different times in the teams. And yeah, it was pretty cool at dinner last night to hear all the places where we almost connected. And, and it's, it's just, it's an honor to have you here.

So honor's mine. Really genuinely looking forward to this. This is going to be fun.

Right on. And man, amazing careers, plural, and life arc. And we just have so much to cover from business to the teams, leadership, your life. And so I'm going to start you off with an introduction here. Mike Hayes, you're a retired Navy SEAL commander and former commanding officer of SEAL Team 2 with a 20-year career spanning South America, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. You've served at the White House under Presidents Bush and Obama, working on START Treaty negotiations with Russia and the response to the Captain Phillips hijacking. You've commanded a 2,000-person special operations task force in Afghanistan and previously served as deputy commander for special operations Anbar Province, Iraq. After the military, you've worked for Bridgewater, became COO of VMware, and are now the managing director at Insight Partners with over $90 billion in regulatory assets under management. You're also the author of Never Enough and Mission Driven and funded the 1162 Foundation to pay off mortgages for Gold Star families. And, as I found out last night and we talked on the phone, the Medal of Honor

Museum.

Museum. And which, that place looks beautiful. I can't wait to see it someday. And, uh, and so much more. So once again, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Sean. Really, it's, um, ready to jump in whichever direction you want to go.

Let's do it. Well, I got a gift for you first.

I might know what it is.

What is it?

Gummy bears?

Well, I do got some.

Amazing. Thank you.

Got some gummy bears, and I got something else. So, you know, what do you give a guy like yourself who has access to pretty much everybody and everything? So I think I got something.

Wow.

For you.

This is exciting already. I feel like a kid on Christmas morning.

So you can't get one of these. Unless you come here.

I'm thrilled to be here. So I'm out of here now, man. Let's go hit the range.

Right on. So yeah, let me know what you think. Pick it up. So that is a Sig Sauer P385. That's not even— that— the only one of those that is outside the factory is right here. Nobody knows about it yet. It's not been released. It's not for sale. I don't know when it's going up for sale, but that's the newest, that's the newest design.

Wow. Yeah, and as a New Hampshire resident, this is, um, super meaningful. I'm looking forward to getting over to SIG with you. I know you pop up there from time to time, but, uh, love to, love to visit over there. Thank you so much. This is amazing.

My pleasure, my pleasure. And you know, uh, just one thing, like We were talking about giving back, paying it forward, a lot of that kind of stuff at dinner last night. And one thing I love about this company, other than the firearms that they manufacture, is they just always back me. Like we were talking about the roadblocks thing earlier and the letter that Schlepp's mother sent me. And I don't know if you watched that episode or not, but he screen recorded the fact that they have reenacted every active shooter event in the US, and you can go in there and kill the avatars of the kids that were killed in Sandy Hook. You have Dolby, and they actually put their names above the victims, and they were using SIG firearms. So I called my buddy Jason And he got legal involved to yank all that shit out of the game. And then another thing that they did that I think is really cool is there's a, there's a sheriff's department, uh, that's adjacent to this county, uh, here.

I've heard you talk about their donation.

In Tennessee. And they have like no funding, massive meth problem. Their firearms are shit. They're all— it's just hodgepodge stuff. It's like 20, 25 years old. And I have a friend who, uh, runs a SWAT team over there, and he was telling me about this and just enraged me. So I called my buddy Jason at SIG up and told him about this. And I was like, look, I don't know if you guys have anything laying around that's old stock, but I'll buy it and I'll give it to him. Just give it to me at your cost. And he was like, yeah, no problem. Give me a couple days. And so he called me back and he's like, well, we're not going to do old stock crap, but he goes, we're going to do these brand new AR rifles. We're gonna put suppressors on them, we're gonna put optics on them, we're gonna kit them out, uh, lights, everything, and outfit the whole SWAT team with them. And I was like, dude, that's fucking awesome. Like, that's just cool, you know what I mean? Like, just one phone call, done.

And, uh, those are the people you just want to be around, right? That's amazing.

It's good business. It's good, it's good, good. It's a, it's a good wholesome business that gives a shit about people. And so I love him.

Yeah. Well, if I can ever be helpful there, say the word and hopefully maybe he'll be listening. So, but it sounds like I always say, you know, we have Americans and Americans. He sounds like an American.

Yeah. Yeah. So anyways,

well, I've got something for you. Oh, yeah. Can I? It's not nearly as nice, but as you mentioned, I wrote, wrote 2 books and I never wanted to be an author. We can talk about this later on, but I donate all the profits from, from my books to the charity I started that has now paid off 12 Gold Star widow mortgages. I get overpaid to speak in public from time to time in the corporate world and just donate every penny. I've never profited from these books, and they've both been bestsellers. This debuted as number 4 in the world. This is a personal note I'm not going to read on air, but I'd love to read this one to you if I could. Sean, thank you, brother, for helping so many great Americans find purpose and meaning. Isaiah 6:8, whom shall I send? Here I am, Lord, send me. God bless you always, Mike.

Thank you, thank you, appreciate that.

Thank you, brother.

Thank you. All right, you ready to get into it?

Let's rock.

So as a SEAL with SEAL Team 4, you told me a story last night about being held at gunpoint Maybe hostage down in Peru. I would like to start right there.

Wow.

What was that about?

Yeah, let's, let's jump in. So BUD/S Class 192, graduated in, in '94. First SEAL team was SEAL Team 4. You know, took a, I don't know, a year, year and a half, whatever it was to get on my first deployment. I was downrange and bouncing around the different countries in South America, landed in a 3, 4-week exchange training event with the Peruvian SEALs. Great guys, you know, and in those days, the Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso, was the terrorist organization. And the Peruvian SEALs had captured a guy named Guzmán, who was the leader of the Shining Path. And so, the Peruvian SEALs were being somewhat targeted, and we were training those Peruvian— that unit on how to be better. We were traveling in like a squad size. It was 7 or 8 guys. The second half of the trip was down to Iquitos, Peru, which is on an offshoot of the Amazon River down, down deep in the jungle. But myself and a friend named Ken, the LPO of my platoon, stayed back because we need in Lima to outbrief with the embassy just for a couple, a couple hours. And we were like, we'll just go join you guys in Iquitos.

We'll see you there in a couple of days. So we were just— dude, we were just eating in a— I remember it was a Tony Roma's you know, restaurant and driving a really nice big SUV. And we weren't armed. We were just minding our own business. I was driving and got immediately pinned in by, by cop cars like, like— and you remember third phase of BUD/S, you learn what's the elements of a successful ambush. It's surprise, superior firepower, and violence of action. Mm-hmm. Man, they had all 3. And so outjumped what guys dressed as cops. And I was like, oh, these guys have us confused for somebody else. put my hands up so they wouldn't think I was reaching for anything. I had nothing to reach for. But, um, first guy opens the, the, uh, the door to the vehicle, and, and this was— I still can see this in my— in slow motion, but finger on the trigger, weapon off safe, you know, like a Belgian FN FAL kind of 7.62 rifle. He muzzle strokes me behind my ear and then in my head, and, um, and I was like, whoa, this is not the police.

And, and the only thing we could do at that point was like just comply and act like this happens all the time. And hey, we know you guys get the vehicle and we get to live. They put Ken in the way back of the, of the SUV, me in the, in the middle row, and started driving us around the city and interrogating us. I'm fluent in Spanish. And, and I just was thinking to myself, the only thing we could do is to act like I would want a victim of mine to act if I were them. And so kind of falling back immediately on, on the training that we had and thinking, okay, don't look at them, don't compromise them, and don't make it necessary for them to kill us. Uh, they'd say, hey, what are you doing here? And I'm like, uh, somos economistas, you know, we're, we're economists, we're desk workers, we're working at the embassy, you know, like we have nothing to do with the Peruvian SEALs. Basically every answer was like the answer that would like make them not need to kill us. Drove us around the city for like an hour.

And it was— I mean, they were threatening us with torture, execution, you know, like all kinds, just the worst things you could— you could— you'd want to hear about what the end of your life would be. And, and I just remember thinking, yeah, I'm prepared to die. But I was just thinking about— I was engaged at the time, thinking about my fiancée, thinking about my immediate family and and legit in a near-death situation. There came a point, Sean, where the vehicle slowed down to maybe 20 or 25 miles an hour. I had an easy opportunity to jump out of the vehicle and save my life. And I super vividly remember thinking, I could never live with myself if I jumped out of this vehicle and they killed my friend Ken. So, you know, we'll come back to that in a minute. But they continued to drive us around and they got came to a point where we were deep in a dark neighborhood and they brought us out at gunpoint. And I was like, okay, our bodies are either going to be in the side of the ditch. And this is all pre— obviously pre-cell phone, you know, nobody was going to know where we were.

And, you know, one of the lessons that I learned was, you know, be missed. And I was already thinking like, we're, we're not going to be missed. No, the rest of the guys will know we didn't show up, but they're not going to know where we are. You know, they won't know that we're missing for 48 hours. And so, you know, we basically— I said, hey, Ken, let's just keep walking. You know, we just put as much— my mindset was the longer the shot for them, the more chance there is of it, of it, you know, just injuring me instead of killing me instantly. And so we just walked forward really fast and I was like, it's either going to be now or never. And we got lucky. We jumped behind a tree and, and those guys jumped back in the car and they drove off and they stole the vehicle. And

why do you think they let you go?

I think they determined that we weren't a threat or, or, you know, I, you know, my fiancée gave me this nice Saint Christopher medal that said, you know, safe in my heart always. And, you know, I've always grown up, you know, guardian angels or, you know, prayer or whatnot. I mean, I think, you know, maybe the, maybe the big man upstairs still had more for me to do, you know, and it just wasn't my time. I don't really have a good answer to that question other than the fact that, you know, those guys just determined we weren't actually training the Peruvian SEALs and they didn't need to kill us. But what happened, we learned later the day— the next day that this happened to another woman on the streets, driving on the same streets, and she freaked out and they just killed her and they shoved her body out of the— out of the car onto the street and, um, and they took the car. So I don't know. It was a, it was a real, a real— like, I don't think I really knew what's— what happened, like, really thought about what happened until later.

Just like any team guy, you know, you finish some hard thing and you don't think about what could have happened in the moment.

Mm-hmm.

You know, you just never do. That's not how we're wired. And I really feel in many ways fortunate to know at a very young age that at the— potentially at the expense of my own life, I wouldn't leave my swim buddy. And, and, and I'm— I just wouldn't. That's just not who I am. And a lot of people can say that, but I got to learn that about myself at a young age.

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You have plans to continue to take down these block carriers?

Absolutely. No, absolutely. They are a clear and present threat to public safety.

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How many near-death experiences do you think you've had?

Just depends how you count. I mean, I don't really— I, you know, on— in my 2007 Iraq deployment, you know, there were something like 35 Marines killed in the first 30 days that we were there. And I wasn't— to be clear, like, you've had a lot of operators who've sat here and gone on way more Harrier missions, done way more than me. I was an officer that, yeah, I did 7 deployments of 6 months or more and was always at SEAL Teams. But man, I'm an— I haven't done anything compared to so many of these guys who have sat in this chair. But, but I've also done some things, you know? Mm-hmm. And, and so, like, in Iraq, I made it a point to go out on the ops maybe every 3rd or 4th day. The guys didn't need me on any op. They didn't need me at all. But if I'm going to be, you know, the— at the time, the executive officer of a SEAL team and, and be the deputy commander of all the special forces in Anbar Province, Iraq, like, man, like, I can't sit behind my desk the whole time.

That's not— how do you lead people like that, you know? And, and so, um, that— like, how do you count those types of situations in Afghanistan? When I was a commander there, these vehicle-borne IEDs were driving through gates and just blowing themselves up. And there's so much explosives that you just don't even know you got vaporized. And so, I mean, I've got videos that I took just for the fun of it, sitting in the front seat of Humvees in Afghanistan, where it's like, man, it looks like nuclear bombs went off on the road. I know a lot of people who listen to your— to this platform will have the same experience of riding over roads that could just instantly vaporize you. And done that so many times, you just think to yourself, will I even know that I died? But, I mean, I could—

Reason I'm asking is I'm just curious, is there a commonality about the— for you, I know for me there are, but it has changed over the years and what goes through your head at the moment that you think— like, you knew, and it sounds like in your mind, when you were taken hostage and they muzzle stroked your head, that you're pretty certain this is— this is how it ends?

I thought that was how— I thought I was. Yes.

So what was it the same the next time it happened?

You know, let me come back and answer that for a split second, because I think I had maybe 2 or 3 weeks after that. I was like, man, if that didn't get me, I'm freaking invincible. Like, there's nothing that's going to get me. And it's funny, there was another new guy in a sister platoon that was in a helicopter crash on our deployment. And, and I remember talking to him and saying like, hey, like he thought he was going to be at his end. And he had the same experience of like, man, if that didn't get me nothing will. And I think, you know, I don't want to say you feel invincible, but you just feel like, like you just compartmentalize. And so I think all of us in the line of business, not just SEALs, anybody in the military, you just get really damn good at compartmentalizing. And And so I think that, you know, in this particular instance with the hijacking, yeah, dude, I, I thought I was gone. However, I also will like never, never give up without a fight. A lot of people said, gosh, it's too bad you weren't armed.

Honestly, if we were armed, I wouldn't be here. Like, there's no question in my mind that if we were armed, they'd be like, why were you guys armed? Actually, probably the only reason we're here is because we weren't armed. And it's funny, there's a policy from the embassy that we disagreed so strongly with at the time that was you don't ride around on the streets armed. And we, we disagreed with that policy, and honestly, it probably saved my life.

Wow, interesting. You know, um, we were kind of talking about the Christian Craighead interview last night, you know, and it sounds like you'd listened to it. And in his interview, one of the victims, you know, that he saved came on. Mm-hmm. And to hear— I, I've never heard— I talked about this with him, but I'd never heard that kind of a perspective where it's, you know, the bomb goes off, you hear the shooting start, you shut down. And she— her name's Mailey— and she shut down. And, you know, just that was it. She couldn't think. You know, she called, she called like a number, you know, from Google, like a crisis hotline or some shit like that. But I mean, I mean, wasn't really able to clearly think. And, and, you know, I, I just— it was interesting to hear that perspective because I'm so used to perspectives like, you're— I'm not going to give up without a fight. We're, we're going to figure out a way to take as many of these people out with us or to get out of this entire thing and to win. And I've been in multiple situations where I, I thought I was never going to come out the other end alive, but There's still like a planning process that goes, that goes through your head and in all the contingency plans and all the what-ifs and everything.

And I think that— I don't know, it's just— I guess what I'm saying is just it, it, it— when I heard her talking, I was like, holy shit, this is, this is actually a rarity. Like, I've never talked to— and I— and she is the majority.

Yeah.

Of humanity.

Yeah. The rarity is actually guys like us who don't shut down. And so, like, what happened to me in those moments when I had, you know, my head down and gun at my head and Ken behind me couldn't understand any Spanish, I wanted to make sure he complied. And so what I did was I explained to the— there were 1, 2, 3 guys in my— 3, I'll say, you know, dirt— more than dirty cops, but in my vehicle that had us captive. And I explained that I needed to translate for Ken so that he could comply. And as I translated, I took a gamble. I figured they wouldn't speak English, and I, I'd say, hey Ken, they want you to turn around and, and spin the other way, and 434-3000, embassy switchboard, you know. And, and I— that's a real number. Like, it's still like— it was in my head from— it'll be in my head forever. Like, because when you're going out, you're like, what are your contingency plans? And so I did these little like plain English data bursts, and we set rally points around the, around the, the city so if we got separated, we'd know where to look for each other.

Again, pre-cell phone, pre-easy comms, you know. And so like those little things that you can do are the way that guys like— like I say, it's not because we're special, it's just because we got trained really well and we got to be around guys that were incredibly capable and we learned from them, you know. So

do you think that comes from training or do you think people are born with that mindset?

I, you know, the nature versus nurture question is a good one. I think it's a little of both. I think of it like this. I I think we all have some kind of like cone of possible like outcomes we can become in the world, and then training puts us on the steepest part of that like possibility. You know, it's like I think you have to have some God-given ability in order to have multiple thoughts at the same time, to to be able to weigh risk and options, and and to and to stay calm. You know, calm breeds calm, excitement breeds excitement. You know, and and those things like. But then a lot of it is also the training that you go through. It's funny because in Iraq, I remember jumping out of a building that was rigged to explode, and I was next to a friend, Josh. There were maybe 14 of us or so roughly in this house, and over the comms came, Avalanche, Avalanche, Avalanche. And that was our call sign at the time for HBID, houseborne improvised explosive device, because the tactics and techniques and procedures of the enemy at the time were blowing up entire houses, like bait a force into the house and blow it up.

And so, when we heard that call, we were like, oh my God, that's a call you don't mess around with. And so, I was kind of halfway up the first and the second, halfway up the stairwell, window right next to us, this guy Josh Cox and I, I don't know if he'll listen, but we dove out the same window. We landed on the ground and you don't feel an ounce of pain when you're going through that. And, we landed and our feet were crossed and our mouths were open like the whistle drills that you do in Hell Week. And we're just like, we were waiting for the explosion and we're like, our Hell Week training kind of kicked in and you're just like, we just started laughing. We're just like, like once the house didn't blow up, we were like, dude, we're like kids in BUD/S right now, you know? But I think that training really always stays deep in you,

you know? And then I just, I want to ask you this. I mean, being able to devise a plan and operate under that kind of pressure, I mean, How do you think that has carried into your business career? I mean, I think about it and I didn't— I guess what I'm— I'm just now kind of starting to realize that that mindset is not very common. And so just for me and my business, whatever crisis comes, like, I see a lot of people and they just shut down. Mm-hmm. They're like, they cancel the day, they cancel the week. They think it's over. And I can't go to sleep until I come up with 10 different plans. All right. Like, whatever the crisis is, somebody walks out, we're getting sued, like advertisers are leaving. I know whatever it is, you know what I mean? And some of these crises, I mean, I'm sure you dealt with probably way worse than I have in business, but it's like it can be debilitating. And I think it all comes from like Being in those type of situations where it's like, well, I'm not— we're gonna find a way out of it.

We're gonna find multiple avenues that could be ways out of this, and we're just gonna start going through them one by one until we figure out which one works.

I, I think that's, um, it's because guys like you, you're a doer, you know. You're, you're there. I think the world has doers and beers, you know. Beers just like the title and like the response, like, like the responsibility. But not the actual work. And the reason you've built such success is because you're a doer, you know. And so the doer can't go to sleep without thinking of the contingencies, making the list, coming up with a plan, you know. And, and I think that, uh, that's, that's just inherent in, in successful people. You can't sit still and rest until you kind of have things back in order. So I, I think a really good analogy is thinking back on our shared training in SEAL training. Yeah. You know, it's like, what did the instructors do? They stretched us past our limits and made us comfortable. They stretched us past our limits again and made us comfortable. And the limits that we live with, that we're capable of, keep stretching. And this is true of probably any military training. I'm just using SEAL training as an example. But, you know, you keep stretching your limits. And people, when you— like, when I speak in public, people are like, oh yeah, I get it, your limits get stretched more and more.

And I'm like, yeah, true, but that's not the big deal. The big deal is that you get used to working outside your comfort zone in a way that you have— you can't pattern match the situation. you're in with anything else. Hmm. But you— your, your value system is one where you become quickly calm because you know you're going to have a better solution if you're calm. You know, you're going to think about all the multiple possibilities of, of, of what's in front of you. You're going to have clarity around what is success. You know, I think like one of the biggest challenges for people is they don't— they can't define success. So when you're in a crisis, people kind of flock to activity. And I always say, never confuse outcomes with activity. You know, people feel good when they take activity and make an action. But sometimes, like, are you taking the right activity or action? There was a grad school professor of mine who said, you know, stuck with me, obviously, Mike, beware of fast trains to the wrong station. You know, it's like, do you slow down and say, okay, I'm really going to create clarity around what success looks like in this moment?

And then the activities, do they— are they the highest and best use in order to achieve that outcome? And I think that that is in business like the exact same as combat. Hmm.

Well put. Well put. Well, what got you interested in the SEAL Teams to begin with?

Wow. First of all, my grandfather was Naval Academy Class of '40 and a career naval officer. And I grew up with a hero in my family, you know, and he was at Pearl Harbor the day it happened. He was the, the, the first heli— the commanding officer of the first helicopter squadron in the Navy. Like, my grandfather was just the man, you know? And, you know, he was, he was on the USS Maryland. Actually, we've got time. These are pretty long interviews. But the quick version is on Sunday morning when they got bombed, he, like a good, you know, Irish Catholic drinking family, like he was, you know, 24 years old or whatever, 23, and woke up in some, you know, Quonset hut with 7 of his buddies. And, and wave 1 had hit. And then he commandeered a Jeep in order to try and try to rally his friends to get back to their battle stations. And only one of them would jump in the Jeep with him. Everybody else stayed in the Quonset hut off base. And because there was some big, you know, dance and drinking thing the night before. And, and he told me that the scariest thing of Pearl Harbor that day for him was driving past the Marine gate guard at like 40 miles an hour without stopping.

He was like, please don't shoot me, you know. And so, uh, he made it back to his ship for the second wave. And during the second wave, he was getting back, he was in charge of a, of one of the turrets on the Maryland. And, uh, and he was there for the third wave. And, um, and after that was over, he said, you know, I'm in the wrong line of business. I need to get up there and become a pilot. He put in for flight school, and then, you know, they cranked him through flight school. And I don't know, it was like 3 months or something like that. He went to the Aleutians 3 months later. Now it's like 1945-ish or something, '44. And his commanding officer got shot down. And so at a very young age, he became the commanding officer of a 35-plane bomber squadron flying bombs out of the Aleutians and dropping them on the Japanese in the days of like the bomber can carry like 2 500-pound bombs, you know. And, and so anyways, growing up with my grandfather, My grandfather was a real amazing influence. He never once said, Mike, go join the Navy.

Not once. My father was a career naval officer, and he was a supply officer whose first duty station was on a submarine, and he got qualified as a regular engineering officer of the watch, officer of the deck. And so, he was a— they don't do this anymore, but he was a supply officer with normal dolphins. And so, he kind of had a mixed career over time of different different roles. And so I just grew up knowing what service meant. I'm the oldest of 4, 4 kids. And I just, I was just aware that there was an ROTC scholarship that was out there and it would pay for college. And I thought, you know, you know, anybody in the military, you're like some middle-class family in Newport, Rhode Island, like, save, save the money if I can get the scholarship so my siblings can go to college. And I started in ROTC from day one at Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. And we, you know, and this is 1989. I'm class of '93 undergrad. And so in 1989, as you well know, we invaded Panama and we lost 4 SEALs on the runway in Paitilla. So as a freshman, they— there was a ceremony in the church on campus to, uh, to recognize John Connors, who was a Lieutenant JG SEAL killed on the runway.

And he was a, a part of the Holy Cross ROTC unit. He went to Worcester Polytech as his college, but he did ROTC at Holy Cross because that's where the unit was. And, uh, man, I was like some 170-pound, 6-foot-4, like, couldn't do, you know, freshman who could maybe do half of a push-up and no pull-ups, you know. And I, I just saw the SEAL community come together and honor one of its own and honor the family. And I was just like really moved. And so I just thought, that's really an amazing community. But never did I think I could even ever become a SEAL. There was a Reader's Digest article that came out. It was called The Measure of a Man. It's about John Connors. It's worth, worth a quick read. It's a quick read. But so from freshman year on, that's how I got exposed to the SEALs. And remember, again, This is pre-internet. There's like one book out. It's Rogue Warrior from Marcinko, you know, and like there's nothing else out there as opposed to, you know, all these other guys who write— random guys that write books. But, you know, as I aged through, through college, the summer between junior and senior year in ROTC, you have to do these like summer cruises to 3 weeks of, you know, play Navy for a real Navy person for 3 weeks.

And So, between junior and senior year, I did 3 weeks on an aircraft carrier with an A-6 squadron. I got to fly off the carrier a couple times. I picked up the ship in Naples, Italy and left from Mallorca or something, some crazy super fun collegey trip and 2 catapult shots off the carrier. And, I was like, man, Top Gun had recently been out, so it was free drinks everywhere. And, I was like, man, this is the life. I'm going to be a pilot. But then I also that summer did Mini BUD/S, which was a 3-week kind of exposure to BUD/S. And then I had to decide that that was an optional, optional summer cruise. And, and I became perversely attracted to the challenge of the man versus man problem. Mm-hmm. As opposed to the man versus machine problem of being a pilot. And so I just was like, man, I really want to lean in and be the best human I can be. And I think that path is SEAL training. And, I just worked my ass off just to be the kid that could at least— I think I did 12 pull-ups at my max or something like that.

I could swim and run real fast and do all that stuff, but man, I am not God's gift to the pull-up bar. And so, I put in and I think it was 12 or 14 officers that were picked from ROTC that year and then classed up with Class 192 with a bunch of guys and then one of 19 graduates out of the Class of 120 just like Same as all of us. Just put your head down and get through.

Wow. One of 19 graduates?

Yeah. Our class got 19 original from the class of 192.

Holy shit.

Wow. Of course, we had the hardest class, Sean.

So then you show up to— you get through training and you go to SEAL Team 4.

Yep.

Go to Peru.

Yep.

And then the next one is a EUCOM, right?

Next thing I do is, is leave. I go to DLI for 9 months for German, and I get stationed at Naval Special Warfare Unit 2 for a staff tour, actually, between my AOIC and OIC tour. I kind of made that choice because at the time, as an officer, you only got to deploy twice. You got to be an AOIC once and an OIC once, and that was it. Of course, pre-9/11, you know, there was like— you got 2 operational roles. So my thought process was, I want to be the best possible platoon commander I can be. So 2 years more of experience kind of seeing things where the platoons deploy and come over to Stuttgart, Germany, and, and see how they get employed. I'm just going to grow and learn and I'll be a better platoon commander. And so I, I, I did that. And that was around the time of, you know, Bosnia, Kosovo. And, and while the SEAL platoons came over and went in, you know, Dam Neck was doing those, the PIFWC snatches, the persons indicted for war crimes. And, you know, the, the regular teams were sometimes supporting operations like that.

And so I was exposed to, to that theater and it just made me a better platoon commander. So that was, you know, 2 years of, of hard work, but also some really fun travel with my, my at the time new wife, you know, got married in '96. And so we've been— we're coming up on 30 years this year. And, and, you know, it was great because you hit Prague, you hit France, you hit, you know, it was a really, really fun 2-year tour and then went to SEAL Team 8 in, in '99 after that.

What I mean, so what did your parents think when you joined the SEAL Teams or when you wanted to go?

Supportive. Like immediately supportive. Immediately supportive. And I don't think because there's not a lot— there was not a lot of available media about what it really is. I think it probably kept my mom from worrying a little bit. I would imagine that moms and dads these days probably worry a little bit more about their kids joining the SEAL Teams than the generation than when I came in. But no, they were, they were immediately supportive of, of, of service.

What did your parents do?

My dad, 20 years in the, in the Navy. He retired in Newport. My mom got her master's as a psychologist, as a counselor. So she has her master's in social work and she's been a counselor for many, many years now. So.

Were you guys tight?

Very. We're a very tight family.

How about your siblings too?

Yeah, we're a tight family. It's, it's We moved around a lot, and so, you know, it's you know just the military families. When you land in a new area, you kind of get really good at at number one being tight with your family, but number two also, you know, welcoming others when they move and hopefully being welcomed when you move because these highly transitory areas that we moved to were just like you you had to become friends quickly or you didn't have. friends. So it was a very, a very high EQ kind of like upbringing.

So you move over to SEAL Team 8.

Yeah.

What are you doing there?

First job was to be a platoon commander, and, and, you know, that was preparing for a deployment to Kosovo and did the standard kind of workup thing and deployed to Kosovo. Again, this is all obviously pre-9/11. And at the time, you know, we had a great, great deployment. Toward the end of that workup, I was already starting to think, okay, what will I do after this platoon? Because the officer career path kind of turns into like all staff guys and whatnot afterward. And I was like, do I want to stay in? Do I want to get out? What do I want to do? And, you know, I screened for Dam Neck because that was the coolest Like, that's where— that's where if you want to do anything, that's where it's at. And, and I still remember, uh, I screened positive out of a, a decent number of guys that screened. And there was a guy, uh, I just remember Commander Sullivan. I don't even know his first name, and I don't even really know the guy, but he called me and said, hey, Mike, congrats, you're one of, you know, 3 or 4 officers we're going to bring over for Green Team.

And I said, great, I have a little bit of an issue. My deployment, like, takes me 4 weeks after Green Team starts. I'm gonna try to get home in time, you know, ask my commanding officer of SEAL Team 8 if I can come home just a few weeks early from deployment so I can make Green Team. And he said, great, let me know. It's non-negotiable, you know. And, and George Coleman, who, who I think the world of, was the commander of SEAL Team 8, and he wouldn't let me come home early. And, and so I— my, my damn neck path was immediately closed, and it was super frustrating.

You think the world of the guy that wouldn't let you go home early to go Well, I

thought, I thought the world— oh, I'm sorry, I should have used the past tense. I was extremely frustrated that, that he wouldn't let me come home. But, you know, I kind of— I try not to dwell on such things. When you want something really bad, there's often a reason, you know? And so I try to just stay mature and grounded with the whole, like, there's a plan and I just can't see it right now. But, you know, there's, there's a, you know, so I was just like, okay, what are my options and what am I going to do? I came home and And, and this— and he said, listen, Mike, here's the deal. We're going to reorganize here in the teams, and for officers, we're going to start doing something called, um, task force commanders. They were later called troop commanders, but you're— you can be in charge of 2 SEAL platoons. And so do you want to do another deployment? You can do the whole workup and a deployment being in charge of 2 platoons. And I was like, okay, that sounds— that's the next best thing. And, um, and so I got— I stayed at SEAL Team 8 for 5 years and did Did 2 cycles there.

Well, hold on. So before we go home, what were you guys doing in Kosovo?

We were doing 3-day SR options, special reconnaissance options. And so our operations, we had 3 units there. It was 2 SEAL units and then the Ranger Recon Detachment. And what we would do is you, you did a 3-day— first of all, the mission was enforcing the Dayton Peace Accords and capturing information about whether the the agreed conditions were being met on the ground. And so, you know, we were, we were in a sector, obviously, remember we had, you know, you basically had Albanians and, and, and effectively Serbians that were all, you know, mixing it up in Kosovo. And the Dayton Peace Accords kind of put people back on their sides and say, hey, hey, everybody, like, get back in your corners and stop messing with each other and let's create some peace. But there were a lot of like little skirmishy kind of things that were going on. And in fact, so, so these— we, we would, you know, go out in the, the middle of the winter and in these, you know, negative, whatever, crazy cold conditions and just basically lay around and take pictures and for like 3 days straight. A lot of times you saw nothing.

It's a very inglorious mission. But then sometimes when you saw things, it was really, really strategic information. You know, we Had one operation where— well, before I get to that, let me just explain the flow. You had a 3-day mission where you're the, you're the team in the field that's doing the thing, you know, and then you had a QRF. So there's another— and then there was like an off cycle. So you just rotated between 3 days. You were on for 3 days, you were QRF for 3 days, you were off for 3 days. And that cycle just kept going nonstop. And, and so among— and, and, you know, my SEAL platoon was both, you know, the, the infield SR unit and then the QRF. So, and then we— and then the— and then the Rangers, and we all supported each other as if we were just one big unit. And, and it went great. We had one particular operation where we, we were right on the border and we observed— the quick version is we observed the Russians transferring arms. illegally, and we got pictures of it. And this is early, early, early in the day of like night photography and near, near instant like satellite image transfer.

And we were sending images back of, of what— of this illegal arms transfer from the Russians to the, the Serb— effectively Serbians and the Kosovar Serbians, basically. And that's, that wasn't supposed to be happening. We were kitted out for a special reconnaissance mission, not a direct action mission. You know just as well as anybody, when you're— you have a 110-pound pack, you're not going to go fight. And this, this— we called, we called it in. And this major, Army major who was in charge of kind of all of the special operations in Kosovo was, was back and said, hey, continue mission, you know, and And, uh, we were like, yeah, no problem. Of course we're gonna continue mission. We're not, you know, we're gonna keep taking pictures. And then all of a sudden, uh, what happened is he said, I'm gonna send in another, a Special Forces unit to come in and, and action the target. And we're like, we're, we're like doing SR like extremely close to that target. You can't mix those. You know, it's, it's gonna, it's gonna— like, we need it. We need a better plan. And You know, these guys came in, banged up the target, broke windows, you know, did searches.

They didn't find anybody. The Russians were already long gone. But the, the, the Serbians in the morning when they woke up, they realized they'd been hit. And the reason we were still in the field was because I had to make a really hard decision. That major said, continue mission. And I remember typing back on the, on the computer, actually. And I said, hey, we have in the SEALs a saying, if you think you've been compromised, assume you have. And if you have, exfil. And he said, roger, copy, continue mission. And I was like, you know, this is like a Trident Board question. Like when you have a mission that you know you shouldn't do, you've got higher authority saying do it, what do you do? And what I did was I just kind of consulted the 5 guys I was in the field with. We had 2 guys at one operating outpost, 2 guys at another, and then myself and a comms guy a little bit. Like we were not— myself and the comms guy were not eyes on target. And, and, uh, we had internal comms and I said, hey guys, like, the— they're telling us to continue mission.

What do we want to do? We'll— I'll get us out of here and over and not follow orders if that's what we think. And we talked about it and we were like, hey, listen, it's the— the risk isn't crazy high. Uh, let's just continue the mission. And Sean, not like an hour later, we had— we counted 19 armed dudes like hunting us, actively hunting us. And I was I never forget, like, weapon off safe, you know, finger on the trigger, a guy walking closer to me than you are now and being like, please don't make me have to shoot this guy, because if I shoot this dude, it's going to be game on with 18 other dudes that are hunting us. And, and it was really, really sketchy. And, and it turns out we got lucky. Like, 3— they couldn't really find us. They started kind of ineffective fire spraying down the, the, the tree line that we were in. And, and I also remember one of the guys in the OP, Chad Wilkinson, who, you know, who was in your platoon. Like, I remember him calling me on comms and saying, hey, sir, I've got a guy with night vision methodically working his way down the tree line.

Do you want me to take him out? And my answer was, Chad, you are in a better position to make that call than I am. I am behind you. You know, whatever. Like, like it— like, you know, your call. Like, and, and Chad also didn't shoot the guy. And honestly, like, the reason— the fact that none of us ever had to pull the trigger on that op is why we're still here. And it's funny, Jimmy Graham— I think you said, you know, Jimmy Graham, but he was our comms guy. And it's funny, like, a year earlier we had— we were supposed to be doing some maritime training and it was lightning. And, you know, we didn't— it was, it was like weather conditions didn't allow us to train. Jimmy threw— instead of going home or playing Xbox or whatever the the Xbox of the day was. Jimmy said, listen, no, we're not. We need to do comms training. And, and so he put us all through some additional extra comms training, you know, blindfold, take your radios apart, tune in a freak blindfolded, all that kind of stuff. And because never miss an opportunity to train.

Jimmy on his own as the comms guy wants to do some advanced training and he's like reminding himself of like antenna, you know, the HF antennas. They need to be cut a certain distance, a certain length in order to propagate a certain frequency the right way. And the function— the length is a function of the frequency and Jimmy's like studying all these crazy antennas. Well, like on this op, Jimmy somehow rigs an antenna, gets a hold of a helicopter, a Kiowa Warrior, an OH-58 helicopter comes in. It comes in and starts reading out like where all the enemy forces are. Chad Wilkinson's the point man, just massively quickly plotting. He's so freaking good. And this other guy, Adam Newbold, and they were just like, doo doo doo doo doo, like machines. Like, I could never have done what they did, you know? And they just led us right out. And And we got out safely. And, and so those were the kinds of operations that we were on in Kosovo, which was important. But in the grand scheme of things, like, okay, we got pictures of the Russians giving arms to the people we probably knew they were giving arms to anyways.

Was, was that risk really worth it? I don't know.

Did anything come of it?

We heard. We heard. And I actually know this to be true, that it made the presidential daily briefing. like that, that, that intelligence the next morning, including some of the pictures that we took and sent back. And so that was cool. Like as a 26 or 27, whatever, 28-year-old SEAL and 5 other knuckleheads on a meeting or on a mission in Kosovo, you're, you're doing things that, that, that does help provide intelligence back to policymakers. But that was pretty much it.

Mike, let's take a quick break.

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The Terminal List Season 2 Watch now only on Prime. All right, Mike, we're back from the break. And so we're wrapping up Kosovo. You got denied to go back home early to go screen for DEVGRU.

Where do we go from here?

Well, actually, another thing I, I would, I would say is I also didn't get to go home for my daughter's birth on that deployment. And, and she was born in February of 2001. And, you know, it was like we were doing these very scheduled ops like I described. I could have easily gone home on those 3, like in that 3, 4-day window, gone back home, at least been there for the birth and back and not missed a thing. And, and that was always really frustrating to me.

They wouldn't let you go back for your daughter's birth?

No. Nope. Was

there any reason?

I think the teams used to be a lot less people-friendly, and maybe it's gone in cycles or whatnot, but that really shaped me because I was like, I will never let anybody around me miss their child's birth. And so, it was tough, but what can you do? You can only control what you can control. And so—

Holy shit.

Yeah, that was a bummer.

How did you handle that? What did you do? Were you on the phone? I got on the phone.

It was a guy named Chaz Herron, rest his soul, who was the commander at Unit 2 and just didn't want to pull people off the leadership, pull leadership off the line. And I tried explaining, like, he knew the rotations and stuff and he's like, listen, I hear your request, but the answer is no. And I just— it was very disappointing. So I just, like I said, I just vowed that nobody would be in this situation. Anything that I could control for anybody else, they wouldn't have happened to them what happened to me.

How did your wife handle that?

Like a good military spouse. And just like, you know, it's, it's, it's service for the whole family, right? You know, and, you know, we eventually rotated back to Germany. I got to meet my daughter when she was maybe 2 months, month and a half, 2 months old, you know, something like that. My wife flew her over when I got to get back to Germany for a little bit. So, but she handled it well.

This was at the beginning of the deployment.

It was, it was, it was more, more middle. Yeah. And so because for the last, you know, we— it was toward— it was a little bit after, right around the middle. So

when did you hear your daughter for the first time?

Yeah, that's a good question because there was no FaceTime or anything like that then. You know, I honestly don't remember the answer. I should know the answer to that, but I just don't.

When's the first time you talked to your wife after the birth?

Pretty quickly after, on the phone. Yeah. Like it was, you know, how did it go? It's like you're half a world away and you're like, hey, how'd it go?

You know, it's like, yeah, is that what you asked? How did it go?

You know, I don't remember exactly what I asked. I probably was You know, I just always appreciated that, you know, my wife was incredibly supportive of, of me. And, and I'll never forget that, you know, and, and it's hard. Service is hard, as you know. And, and the thing is, what leadership is, is making service as easy for others as possible. We don't need to make service harder for people. You know, and of course there's risk about pulling people kind of off the line or whatever, but like, there's also common sense and there was no common sense. So, so that, that, you know, kind of led me to the— What

was it like seeing your daughter for the first time?

You know, it's just overwhelming. Overwhelming. My wife coming through the civilian airport in Stuttgart with this little, you know, carrier. You know, it's like I hadn't seen my wife for so long. And it's the classic, you know, you go right to the kid. And, and it was just really special. Yeah, we just got a hotel. You know, we— I had a room in the barracks on the Panzerkaserne in Büblingen, Germany, right next to Stuttgart where Unit 2 was. But we just got a hotel room and I stayed— we all stayed in one hotel room. And this is back in the days of, you know, having no money whatsoever and just figuring out ways to make it work. And, and And so that was— I mean, I just loved being woken up at 3 in the morning to cries. It was, it was a real gift.

And so where do we go from here?

Well, I guess into the 2-platoon world. Like, I, as mentioned, I didn't get to go to Dam Neck. I was frustrated. Do I get out? What do I do? And then when, when the CO George Coleman said, hey, you can now be in charge of 2 platoons.

Is this the same guy that denied you coming home early?

No, it's a different guy. It's like the Unit 2 CO is who denied me from coming home. It's the SEAL Team 8 CO who denied me to come home early to go to Green Team. And, you know, these could have been common sense decisions, but they weren't. And okay, what do we do? Like, we try like hell to get the right decision, and then once you know it's not happening and you can't control it, you just salute smartly and drive on, you know? And, and that's what I did. And so I just entered another workup, you know, year and a half or whatever it was, year, year and a half, until we went over and deployed again. And this time, we were overseas in— this would've been a little bit after 9/11-ish.

Where were you when 9/11 happened?

I was at the pull-up bars at SEAL Team 8, not doing pull-ups. So, I was doing my half a pull-up, Sean. No, we were at PT on the grinder at SEAL Team 8, and we found out and we all kind of ran inside and just got glued to the TV. And, you know, we were saying, do we grab Stinger missiles and protect the bases around? You know, there was a lot of like quick, like, what's the base defense kind of plan? These are in the days there was no homeland defense kind of mindset because it just wasn't a thing. And so we were just like, I remember I went to some like bogus, like 1-week Stinger course at one point in my career. And so I was like then a Stinger expert and they're like, hey, you know, can you go lead a Stinger unit and sit outside of Naval Base Norfolk and make sure our ships don't hit get hit. It didn't— we didn't end up actually doing that, but it was discussed and things like that were kicked around. But as you know, it, it wasn't like some immediate, like, break glass and we all fly away kind of response.

You know, we just continued on our workup as we saw, you know, as we saw other forces go overseas.

So you were already a task unit commander at this time?

I was a task unit commander at SEAL Team 8. Can

you explain what that is?

Yeah, in charge of 2 SEAL platoons. And so it's— it was a first kind of reorientation in the SEALs Well, I'm sure we've— it probably had happened sometime in the decades prior, but in my career, it was the first time where an officer would be in charge of 2 SEAL platoons. And so, the thought process was kind of deploy with a little more seniority overseas, whether it's to a Naval Special Warfare unit or onto a ship. You have a more seasoned and savvy kind of group that can represent itself and make sure the SEAL troop gets employed. I said troop. It was task unit at the time. The SEAL task unit gets employed like it should. So it was just a— And

this happened post-9/11?

It was pre and post. So like, I kind of like we were doing our stateside workup. 9/11 happens. We continue the workup for a bit. And then I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember exactly what month or we deployed and when exactly that was, but we went to when it was time to go for our 6-month deployment, we deployed to Germany and it was 2 SEAL platoons sitting in Germany and the invasion of Iraq was just getting ready to kick off. And I guess so this would have been like late '02 or early '03. I'm embarrassed that I don't remember the exact— Early '03. It was early '03. Yeah. Okay. So we were sitting around in Germany And, and all of the planning in late '02 and early '03 saying, okay, we're going to be the force that comes in through Turkey into northern Iraq. That was the plan. And we were all geared up. We were like, okay, we're gonna— that's— we're gonna get the call for the big, the big mish. And, uh, what happened was Turkey said, hey, nope, no, no U.S. forces are coming through, um, through Turkey into northern Iraq.

So we ended up sitting in Stuttgart with a full SEAL platoon, like trained for war, ready for war, eager to contribute to the nation in the ways that we've been trained, and found out that we weren't getting the call. And so we were super demoralized. And in fact, I know from your wall up there, you have had Tim Beamer in one of your platoons. Tim and I— Tim was, was with me, and a couple of, couple of us were like, what can we do? What can we do? And I being the officer geek that I was, I was looking at the message, the deployment order of a very limited number of forces that were still going to go to Diyarbakır, Turkey and set up a base there and then be ready to kind of do small missions from there into Northern Iraq. And, I was reading this message, 3, 4-page, just mostly mumbo-jumbo. And, at the bottom of the very last page, it said, written by Major So-and-so, and here's the phone number in the Pentagon for the major. So I was like, okay, let me, uh, let me just call the guy. And I call him and I said, you know, hey sir, this is, you know, Lieutenant Mike Hayes from, from, uh, Shtuka.

You, you, you have a mistake in your message. You were, um, you, you missed listing the task force of SEALs that's attached to Unit 2 on your deployment order. Could you please fix that and reissue the message? It was like the ultimate end run, right? And who the— and I mean, who the hell am I, some little lieutenant sitting in Stuttgart, Germany, with 1,000 people between, like, the chain of command? But I completely didn't care. And the guy was, like, actually appreciative. I remember him. It was actually almost too easy. He was like, yeah, sure. I'm really sorry that I missed you guys. Let me fix that and type that line in and reissue the message. And about maybe 4 hours later, the commander of Unit 2 came, you know, storming over to me. And he was like, Hayes, like, you're going. Like, how did this happen? Like, you guys are going— you guys are going to war, and, and you're gonna go. And I just— I was just like, I don't know how it happened, you know. And, uh, hey, that's great, sir, you know, let's start packing. So now everybody in the, in the, in the task force is like, holy shit, Hayes is a freaking genius, you know.

Like, how the hell did this happen? I'm like, guys, you can't tell anybody this. Like, like, and they're like, we got your back, let's get out of here, let's go to Turkey. And then like 4 more hours later, uh, this guy Commander Weirs, Jerry Weirs, comes down and just rips, rips me a new one. And he's like, now I know how it happened. You called the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff staff to just get yourself inserted. And he just like, he was like, that's not how you work. Just like the, the ass chewing from hell, you know. But I was like, okay, whatever, what are you gonna do, take away my birthday? You know, I'm gonna try to get our SEALs employed into the way we were supposed to be employed. And, it ultimately didn't work. But, for a while there, it was some ups and downs and we ultimately did nothing. And again, I was just like, okay, here I am, a SEAL again overseas not really being employed. Full-on war is kicking off and I'm not anywhere near it. What's my life going to be when I get home?

Yeah, that happened to me.

It did?

Yeah. I decided I was good now, On my first platoon.

Yeah,

because we were sitting on our ass in Germany doing nothing.

Germany's a fun place. You

know how many people— I wonder how many people have gotten out because

of that exact scenario.

It's because

it was a fucking joke.

Well, when you hire people who want to do the work they're trained to do.

But why? Like, do you have any insight into that? Why? Why are we fucking sitting in Germany doing nothing, listening to the rest of the team over there blowing shit up, or other units blowing shit up, killing bad guys, doing the job. And I'm sitting on my ass in Germany going to the Irish pub.

Yeah,

getting drunk every night.

I mean,

while I do nothing because they need me there.

Well, get drunk. The Irish pub needed you there. You know, it's like,

that's how I was. Just like, this is a fucking joke.

That's how we all felt.

You're like 22 years old. I was like, this shit isn't for me.

Yeah. And I mean, I'm at the time, I don't know, 29 or something, 30, I don't know. And, and responsible for every— I was responsible for 35 people or whatever it was that were all in the same boat. And so the— there's the individual response that you just described. But then I also had the, like, the weight of, like, make— trying to make it right for everybody else. And it's like, like, gosh, what are we doing here? We got— we've got capable people not being used.

But what were we doing there? Like, that's what I'm asking you as an officer. Do you have any insight on why are we—

like, it just seems like a gross misuse of a very capable asset that could have been doing shit.

I mean, I agree. It's just— it's like supply and demand, right? They— there's somebody who assesses demand of what's needed on the battlefield. And then there's supply, which is like all the units that could go help meet that demand. And there's somebody who's kind of matching resources and helping supply meet demand. And, and, and I think the question really is, are you assessing those the right way? And, and that's the— that's what leads to frustration, you know? So I was, I was just saying to myself, hey, I'm, I'm going to get out. I got to figure out something else to go do. And I was— this is again early days of kind of the internet here, but, well, of like of infrastructure around Navy, the Navy's internet. And I was poking around and I saw this program called the Paul Mill Fellowship, Politico Military Fellowship. And it was 2 years of fully funded graduate school. And the Navy picks one officer per year for this 2 years of grad school. And I'm sitting doing nothing in Germany and I'm like, well, I got time on my hands. I can write my application for this and just turn it in.

And I mean, I can, rather than going to the Irish pub for the 7th night in a row or whatever, I'll just sit in my room and, and apply for this program. And, um, and I did. And I was— I found out on deployment, like, I don't know, I, I was, I was the first SEAL ever picked for this 2-year program. And so I was ecstatic, you know, because it had always been a big Navy guy. It always been a pilot or some, you know, somebody who really mattered to the Navy. And and you know, SEALs were just coming into their heyday. And I think part of the reason I got picked is because it was, you know, it was the right time for a SEAL to be picked. And so it's not like I'm anyone special. I just had a good application and and was in the right right time, right place, right time. And and uh. You can go to whatever school you apply to and get in. And so then I was like, oh man, pressure's on. I've got the Navy's like award, but now I've got to go get into somewhere respectable for school.

I applied at Harvard Kennedy School for the master's in public policy, and I was like, I'm going all in, you know. And I just applied and I got lucky and got in there. And then I spent '03 to '05 in Cambridge, Mass., you know, doing a master's in public policy. And I Even to this day, I joke around saying like, those are my best 2 years in the teams, you know. But, uh, it was, uh, but it was hard because, you know, that's— you just have all your friends that are deploying. And of course, when you're in grad school, '03 to '05, you're constantly talking to all your peers and, you know, you're seeing people come and go and doing all cool things and going overseas. Because look, eventually that supply and demand thing that I talked about, it caught up. It just took a while. Uh-huh. And all of us had way more work than we could handle pretty shortly thereafter. And so seeing everybody kind of ramping up, you know, I— it was, it was, um, I could kind of see that the wars weren't going anywhere. And so I, uh, you know, I, I was— I graduated in June of 2005, and of course, you know, Red Wings on June 28th.

I had orders to SEAL Team 10, which was the, the unit that that lost the helicopter on Red Wings. And, the task unit commander of that force was a guy named Eric Christiansen. And, I led, I did his Trident Board, I don't know, 5 or so years earlier at SEAL Team 8. I'm the one who certified Eric as a SEAL, as a SEAL officer because we used to do that on the East Coast. Now, it's all done on the West Coast as part of the SQT pipeline or I did STT, just always got to change acronyms and names over the years. But, but, uh, I knew all the guys that were in the helicopter that got shot down. I was at SEAL Team 8 with most of them.

Do you want to talk about that event real quick for the people that aren't familiar with it?

Oh yeah, sure, absolutely. Sorry, um, of course I'm, I'm presuming context that a lot of people probably don't have. The— on June 28th, 2005, we lost, uh, 11 SEALs and, um, and I think it was 8, 8 Night Stalkers. Um, uh, and so we So at the time, it was the largest loss of life in the special operations community. There were, you know, 3 guys on the— on the— well, 4 guys on the ground. 3 were killed in action. The lone survivor, Marcus Luttrell, obviously he made it out as the lone survivor. And one of the helicopters that was responding to go help in response to Lieutenant Mike Murphy's SATCOM call for which Michael was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. But the, the helicopter— the 2 helicopters responded and one got shot down, and, and all, all lives, all souls on board were perished. And so it was extremely difficult. I was sitting in Cambridge, Mass., uh, move quickly getting to Virginia Beach to try to figure out what I could do. I, I talked to Commander Kent Parrow, who was the commander of SEAL Team 10 at the time, and I called Kent and I said, Hey, sir, I'm checking into SEAL Team 10, you know, any minute now.

What do you need me to do? How can I help? And at the time, SEAL Team 10 had 4 SEAL platoons. 2 were in combat and 2 were not. One of the 2 in combat, there was one platoon in Baghdad and one platoon in Afghanistan. And each of the platoons, they did a 3-month rotation. So you got basically, if you were in one of those SEAL platoons, you got 3 months of combat in either Iraq or Afghanistan. at the time. And so Kent said, hey Mike, can you take over for Eric and just reconstitute the force and take over for the guys that are all in Germany? And, uh, dude, it was super hard.

What was that like showing up there after that? Oh man, was it— was it—

you know, to some degree I felt like I was— I was like born for a moment like that, you know? Um, First of all, you got a lot of friends that are gone. And but second of all, all your friends who are gone, all they want is, is the survivors to, you know, continue to thrive, you know, and continue to be, be well. And there was a lot of not wellness. There was a lot of, you know, everybody kind of had their own things, whether it was nightmares and not being able to literally not being able to sleep. Because these guys all helped with the recovery. These guys all went to the crash site. Rangers secured the crash site, but SEALs— that's the SEALs who lived through that also went to that crash site. They put their own friends, the, the pieces and the parts of their friends that they could find, in body bags. And, uh, and, and those images must have— I didn't see them personally live like these guys did. And, uh, and I could just imagine what they were going through. And so What I did was called back to the States, and I said, "Hey, I need a chaplain and a psychologist out here like ASAP.

I'm out of my depth here. Like I'm helping a lot, and I'm talking to all these guys, and you know they're all you know day drinking nonstop. It's it's like or literally can't sleep, or you know just excessive behaviors. You know, and and so I got there was maybe I shouldn't use their names. I don't know if they'd want me to, but there was a really amazing psychologist." I'll just call him JB. And, and then, and then a chaplain who I know would be fine with it, Corey Cathcart, who is just the man. Like, the, the 2 of those guys came out. I got all the, the SEALs together and I said, hey fellas, here's the deal. We're all trying to, trying to heal and honor our lost brothers. None of you are going to want to sit with the chaplain or the psychologist because you think that, you know, you're too cool for that or you don't need that. I'm going to tell you it's not an option because I don't want there to be any sort of chitter chatter on who spoke to the psych, who didn't, who opted in, who opted out.

Everybody's in. And I don't care if you walk in and you say hello and your name and your rank and your serial number and shake hands and be nice and pleasant and appreciate the person coming in and decide that you need to walk back out. But everybody will sit with both the chaplain and the psychologist and just talk. And this is the beginning. Like, Sean, I think this was the first time that we ever had any sort of real psychologist or real chaplain involved so closely in a SEAL situ— a real SEAL or a real special operations situation. I'm sure in the longer arc of special operations, many, many, many times, but— But at that point, it hadn't happened for a while, and it was kind of breaking some new cultural ground. And in fact, if you watch In Waves and War, you know, Matty Roberts, who was one of the guys there, you know, he talked about how he was kind of forced to talk to the chaplain and the psych. That was me that made him do it. And, and I love Matt. I love the guy. I loved all those guys. I love all those guys.

But not but and. The chaplain and the psych were very careful to not tell me individuals and situations, but give me the overall picture of how people were doing. And we just kind of, the 3 of us, constantly conferred of like, what can we be doing to help these guys heal?

And, you know, the overall consensus,

just more talking. It was keep people talking, you know, keep people, just let them—

I mean, would they tell you how the guys are doing?

Yeah, of course. Yeah, like not by name of like, hey, this person is clearly like, you know, using drugs, but the general consensus of like, like, yeah, absolutely, 100%.

What was it? Broken? Broken for more?

Broken is the best word for it. Broken. But like, you know, you've got that— you— but everybody's got the seal in them, meaning like there's a mission to do. We still need to be kind of like mission ready sitting here in Stuttgart in case something else happens. happened, you know, because the whole— because you were still on deployment. That was the deployed force to European Command, and the goal was to stay mission ready. And so it's, it's, um, that was really, really, really tough. And, and I'll tell you, we needed to extend the chaplain and the psychologist like 3 extra weeks. And they were going to come out, and I think their original trip was scheduled for like 3 or 4 days. They stayed for a month. Wow. And, and to this day, I think a lot of us are still really tight with both those guys.

Do you have any insight into the planning that went into that operation?

I wasn't part of it. I was sitting in Cambridge, Mass., for grad school. I've heard a lot of it anecdotally, you know, but it's all secondhand.

Okay.

Yeah. I mean, what I'll say is maybe this isn't popular, but Okay. Remember the Bosnia operation that I just talked about around the special reconnaissance? The adage that I learned from SEALs elder— older than me growing up was that if you've been compromised, assume you have. And if you have, exfil. Mm-hmm. What happened at Red Wings is those guys were compromised. They did not exfil. I'm not throwing stones. I didn't exfil either. Like, just to be clear, like, I'm— I am not judging. Those guys made an operational call. Not my place to, to, to judge them. Um, but it's just a fact they didn't, they didn't exfil. And if they, if they would have, it would not have been the same situation. And

there's a lot of, uh, I mean, there's a lot of chatter about what they were doing out there to begin with too, because if I remember correctly, DEVGRU actually turned the operation down because it was, it was, it was too hairy, correct?

I don't know the specific facts around that. I know they were operating in the area at the same time. I know the guy who was the troop commander from Red Squadron who was out there, and yeah, they, they didn't think it was a smart thing to put that big bird out in that kind of a situation. Um, I, I know there was, was disagreement with, with that decision. Um, but again, you know, like any of these things, like hindsight's always 20/20, you know, it's really easy to say that now. And, um, You know, it's not unlike, you know, for the— again, I want to be careful that nobody hears this, thinks that I'm in any way judging. You know, Jonas Kelsall was on the deployment with me in Iraq. He was the bravest, most badass young SEAL. Like, he and Lou Langliss decided to infill in one helicopter, which turned into Extortion 17. There's no question like that, that they made a tactical decision that to me seems like like the right decision. I mean, I'm, I'm not one of them, but I'm not some layperson with no knowledge either. I'm somewhere in the middle.

And being pretty informed like I am, like, it makes a lot of sense of what decision they made, but they lost everybody because they were all on one helicopter, you know? And, and again, it's really— I will never be somebody to look back and— well, we want to look back and learn and say what could or should we have done differently. Right. But I won't look back and judge. Mm-hmm. So that was— so with Red Wings, in fact, like, I don't want to jump ahead, but like in Afghanistan, there was a special— we had a really amazing mission that was a combination of actually SEALs and Green Berets, which was— we didn't do super often, but there were 4 guys doing this special reconnaissance mission overlooking this site where there were like 40 Taliban, and they were just waiting for everybody to get kind of like like, I'll just say, kind of like lined up just right to kind of drop a couple 500-pound JDAM, you know, kind of big, big bombs on these guys and take them out. But they also rate— they also had a couple of Taliban working up this hill and, and potentially looking for them.

And man, I canceled that operation like 6 hours into it or something like that. And it would have been really great to kill 40 Taliban, but it would have been like, I don't care about 40 Taliban as much as I care about the Green Berets and the SEALs that are on the ground. And I had learned that as a young SEAL in Kosovo. And so when I— like, years and years later, when I'm a commander of SEAL Team 2, that's just risk we didn't need to take. And man, those guys got back and they were so freaking frustrated with me for canceling the mission, and they thought I was weak or, or, um, you know, risk-averse. You know, they're working for the risk-averse commander that doesn't want to get after it. Nothing was further from the truth. But I sat down— I, I actually flew out to them. I got on a helicopter and flew to them after the mission, and I sat down with those guys and I said, guys, let me walk you through what happened to me in Kosovo and tell you what I could have just saved you. And even if it's 1 time out of 100, I'll take that all day long because you can go back out tomorrow and go find those 40 Taliban.

I care too much about your lives and your families and this mission because you need— if you're not here to do the mission, then there is no mission. You know, and I think there was like sharing, just like anything, when you have a strong disagreement about something, you got to slow down and say, well, what's the other side of this?

How do you— I mean, as a As a leader, how do you determine when the risk outweighs the reward and vice versa? Yeah, it's a really— determine that.

That's a— there's no, there's no formulaic answer. It's, it's a— because you're, you're always taking risk. I mean, we were doing ops every single night, you know. And so, but, but at some point, you know, you just have these risk parameters of— it's, you know, our job as, as special operators is to never fight fair. Right? Always ethically, always legally, always the way, the way, the, um, but, but never fair. And how do you stack the odds in our favor as much as you humanly can? And so when that becomes proportionate, like, why do you want to go— why do you want to go into a situation where you don't have the advantage, you know? And, and, um, and plus the other thing that I think human brains get wrong is that they underestimate how quickly something can turn bad. It's, it's real. Like, I, you know, it's only 2 guys coming up the hill. Yeah, but these freaking Taliban that were— that have been running up and down these mountains all their lives, and they're not wearing £40 of kit, they're wearing— they have a gun and 2 magazines. They can get up those— the, the 4,000 feet that you're sitting at, they can climb that.

And before we can have a helicopter out to you And you could have 50 guys overrunning you because all they have to do is get on one of their, their ICOM, their intercoms, and, and call all their cousins and friends. And now you've got Taliban overrunning you and you're at the top of a mountain with not that much munitions. Um, and, and it's, it's also a function, Sean, of like, what are the supporting assets that you have? Do you have the AC-130 or jets? Do you have helicopters? Where, where, what's— how far off is your medevac? Like, this is where, by the time you get to be a SEAL team commander, You have such a great sense for all of these risk factors individually, and then you aggregate that and you synthesize it into one yes, no, cancel kind of question.

Well, how had your mindset changed, if it had? How would your mindset change from when you were sitting in Germany and almost got your guys into Turkey to do some cross-border shit into Iraq to now you're in Afghanistan and calling off a mission?

Had it changed, or was it different circumstances?

It was just different inputs, you know, like, because the, the get, get from Germany into the, into the war was more of like, are we in proximity of the, of the, of the fight? And it's not like we would have been out there by ourselves. There were, there were other units that were around and whatnot. This particular reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan was one isolated mission by one small unit on one given night. night.

Gotcha.

There were 25 outstations that, that fell under SOTIF Southeast. It was actually like 22 or something like that that were either SEALs or Green Berets. And I, you know, we, um, we, we had about a third of those out doing some sort of a mission at any given time. And so like, who cares about one? Like, like that, that one mission isn't gonna make or break our overall performance over— like, I was in command for 10 months in, in Afghanistan in 2012. The time frame we're talking about. And, uh, and no single mission is worth— like, is worth losing one of these guys. But no, the pace that we were working at and the effects that we were having across the entire battlefield, we were, we were, we were doing what we were there to do.

Yeah. Uh, I mean, then I'm curious, why did you feel the need to— if it was just one mission and it was that busy, why did you feel the need to give them such a a detailed explanation on why they didn't do that exact—

That's a great question, Sean. I think it's because it's growth. It's, it's principles. It's a principle-based approach to like, like helping. Like I always say, we don't teach SEALs what to think, we teach them how to think. And there's a big difference. If I come in and just say like after an op, hey jackass, you turned left, you should have turned right, you're not going to learn anything. But let's say, hey, Sean, when you came in out of that mud hut, help me understand, why did you turn left? And you'll be like, well, Mike, because, you know, I had, you know, 3 enemy up high on a second floor in mud huts that were like over there. I had, you know, 68% of loom. I had, you know, I knew I had, you know, another force trying to flank us and da-da-da. And when you unpack that logic of what you were thinking, then you can say, oh, I understand what you're talking— understand what you were thinking, but here's a different way to look at it. Mm-hmm. You put your weight on this, but I would have put my weight on that. And like, it's interesting because like in my private sector career, right out of the SEALs, I went to Bridgewater.

And it's really like thinking about from the hedge fund world, you separate your data from your logic, from your opinion or your answer. And so we might be looking at different data, you know, and I don't mean ones and zeros. I mean, if you're coming off of a mission, just how are you looking at the situation on the ground? Mm-hmm. And or what's your logic, the why you turned left or right? And then where does that lead you in that way? In those debriefs, you can say, actually, you know, Sean, I think you were missing some, some, some information. You didn't see X, Y, Z. You didn't have the same— we didn't have the same data. We're not on the same— the reason we're not agreeing Let's not talk about do we agree or not. Let's back up and say, are we looking at the same thing? And then what's the logic? And then you can say, well, gosh, when you take the logic and apply it to the data, it might bring you to A and me to B. Why is that? Those are the debrief conversations that are really robust because you think about, you really learn.

And to me, it was worth— I was always, by the way, like in these debriefs, doesn't mean I'm right. Like, I'll go out there and say, here's what I was thinking. I might have been missing things. I might be wrong, you know? Mm-hmm. But, but that's— if I'm wrong, I'll go, hey, I learned, you know what? Like, I could have— yeah. So, you know what, guys? Sorry I missed that. I canceled the op. Sorry. It was in— it was in your best— in my opinion at the time, in your best interest. You're right. With what you just told me, I would have made a different decision. And I'm sorry. That's how I operated. Now, in that particular situation, that wasn't the case. But that's the way to approach leadership to me.

Let's backtrack a little bit.

Yeah.

What was your relationship with Brian O'Leary?

Um, and when I checked into SEAL Team 4, I pulled up and, um, and the team was just coming home from PT, you know, whatever, 9 in the morning. I'm, I'm the new guy, and you can imagine in '94 it's like game on, you know, and, uh, Brian Willette was one of the loudest guys you could possibly imagine and just like not new guy friendly. And that's the polite way to say it. And he had the thickest Massachusetts accent you could ever imagine. And so I'm just, you know, just roll with it. I'm the new guy. No big deal. I just come in from BUD/S. You can't hurt me. Bring the pain, whatever, you know. But, but then I see him in the hall and I'm like, like, I'm like, hey, you're some asshole, aren't you? And, uh, and, uh, this is like later that day. And he's like, yeah. And I— hey, I'm Mike Hayes, you know. I'm Brian Willette. And I'm like, okay, well, like, you're pretty much an asshole earlier today, but I think you're probably not as much of an asshole as you came across as out there, you know. And just introduced myself, you know.

Hey, tell me about yourself. Let me, let me, you know, somebody to learn from, whatever. So Brian and I had a good, healthy respect for each other. And, and there were a lot of, a lot of guys like that at SEAL Team 4. It was a special time there in the early '90s, early-ish '90s. But then, I mean, I'll jump forward like to when I was in grad school. And again, we're at 2003 to 2005 in Cambridge, Mass. I've grown up— I'm 55 years old. I've been a Sox and a Pats fan for 56 years. You know, and, and, and so being there in 2000— in 2004, the Red Sox were always trying to reverse the curse. They hadn't won a World Series forever. But Brian was killed in action in a Humvee. He was blown up in an IED along with 3 others. And it really shook me. You know, I'm sitting in Cambridge and a guy who I respected the hell out of was just instantly vaporized. And, and I was like, what can I do? You know, what can I do? Brian's got 7, I think it was, siblings that were all from the greater Boston area.

Both of his parents were from, from the area. And there was a reporter who is famous in kind of the Boston Globe, Shaughnessy, and his email address was always at the bottom of every article he wrote. And I emailed him and said, hey, here's who I am. Here's what's just happened. You know the Red Sox really well. I don't know anybody at the Red Sox. I want to get a game dedicated to my friend Brian. And just a cold email to the guy. And he said, hey, Mike, so sorry for your loss and the country's loss. And here's— I've connected you with, you know, so-and-so from the Red Sox organization. Got on the phone with her and I said, hey, here's what I'd like to do. This family is like Boston proud. And can we set up a game where we get a whole bunch of SEALs and the family, like, in the, in the stands. And this was the, you know, toward the tail. It was toward— I don't remember exactly what month, but roughly call it like, like September-ish, you know, toward the end of the baseball season. Red Sox were in contention for a wild card to make the playoffs.

And, and so the rest of the year was sold out. There were no seats left and we were trying to get 50 seats, you know, or something like that. And she's like, man, this is going to be impossible. And I was like, nothing's impossible. Can we talk to the players? They all get allocated, you know, tickets. And maybe I'm giving you the too long version here, but I said, can you get the players to donate the family tickets for a game? And so that at least like we can just take over the family section. There's always a way to solve some something. And, and So she did it and we got whatever, 50 or so tickets and we got the whole Ouellette family at, at Red Sox, you know, at Fenway Park and got his mom and dad and family on the, on the mound for, for the beginning of the game. Put his— put a picture of Brian up on the big screen. I wrote a nice paragraph about him that the, that the announcer read. And dude, the standing ovation that his family got was one of the most powerful things I've ever seen in my entire life.

It was almost 4 minutes long, just nonstop. No one sat down. And his family was out on the mound. I was just kind of over the— the fence on the field taking pictures and just bawling. You know, it's like the kind of cry where the tears are coming nonstop, but your throat's not crying, you know? And, and it was just overwhelmingly amazing to see his family recognized and to see 35,000 people in the stands recognizing what was happening with war and with loss for the nation. Because it was one of— it was one of Boston's own. And today in Waltham, there's a square named after Brian, which I— whenever I'm in the area, I drive through and I stop my car and I pause and I say a little prayer. That's Brian.

All right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We all have 1,000 Brians. I got— I got a lot of Brians. Unfortunately, yeah. But it was really meaningful to be able to at least set something up where, you know, his— I haven't spoken to any of his family members in years, but, but one thing I'm certain of is they'll never forget that. They'll never forget. And I don't mean the me part of it. I mean the 35,000 people part of it.

That's incredible. I've only seen one thing like that, to be honest with you, and it was, uh— did you know Scotty Wirtz by chance?

I know the name, I don't know him.

Scotty Wirtz is, um, he was the— he was contracting for DIA when, uh, Joe Kent's wife was killed in, uh, that When that suicide bomber hit him in Afghanistan. And he was from St. Louis, and I went to his, his service. And man, every overpass that you drove under on the highway from the church to the cemetery was packed, was packed with people.

Doesn't it make you proud to be an American in those moments?

It does. I'd never— I mean, I've been to funerals. I'd never seen anything like that. Like the whole town came together. It was—

yeah,

St. Louis is a rough town.

Yeah,

but, uh, that was incredible.

Well, this is why anytime I'm driving, I make it an absolute inviolable thing to do is when I see a road or something named after somebody, I Google that person. And more often than not, it's 90% of the roads that are named after someone, it's some sort of a service person, sometimes World War II, sometimes whatever. But every time I say, who was that? And I just try to remember. And I, of course, you never know the person, but you just— I just pause and say thank you.

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Hey, Sean, I forgot almost some of the best punchline from the Brian Willette story. The, the game that the Sox were at, they won. They won the wild card that year, and they did reverse the curse. They won the World Series in 2004. And the reason they won, according to Mrs. Willette, is 3 things. Number one, the game was dedicated to Brian. And in that game, there were 2 other really cool things that happened. There was a barkeep at Fenway Park who had been working there, like, for generations. And that night, for whatever reason, he was cleaning under his bar and felt something stuck there. And it was a penny from the year that Babe Ruth was traded away from the Red Sox. And he chipped that penny off. And so that reversed the curse. The other thing that happened that game is there was a foul ball that got hit down the third baseline. Hit a kid, I want to say in the head. I'm probably exaggerating, but like, and maybe hit him in the arm or who knows. But, but that kid lived in the house in either Lynn or Revere, north of Boston, where Babe Ruth lived also.

Wow.

And so Mrs. Willette is like, Brian reversed the curse and they won the World Series because of Brian.

Man, that's cool. That is cool. Wow.

So let's move on to— I think you did an augment with Red Squadron.

I did.

How was that?

Super educational. So yeah, so I finished, like, like Red Wings was done, we came home, and now we're in a workup to get ready to deploy to Iraq. I had never been to Iraq. This is now 2006. The war had been going on for quite some time. I'd never even stepped foot there yet. So I had the opportunity to go out with— to, well, to western Iraq with, with Red Squadron. And I knew a bunch of the guys there and, you know, guys that I'd grown up with or whatever and, and just got to learn, you know, what's the operational environment like? What are people dealing with? What kinds of— what kinds of, you know, how can you learn to prepare to bring your task force, my task force, back to Fallujah a year later. And I got the privilege of certainly sat in the JOC, the TOC, whatever, the operating center, whatever we were calling it those days, a lot. But also got the opportunity to go out on a couple of ops with those guys. And it was really— that was like my first In fact, my first op in Iraq was— it was amazing.

You know, these guys are so dialed in. They're just machines and just so frickin impressive. And I'm just kind of like, you know, I'm the strap hanger that's, you know, lucky to be on the op and glad to have that opportunity. And the— one of the troop commanders is a guy named Frank Frankie, who I grew up with at SEAL Team 4. Like, we were good, good, good friends. He's an amazing human. Wyman Howard was the commander of Red Squadron at the time. Knew Wyman really well. And this particular— my first op that I got to go out on, you know, after finally sitting in the jock for a month or something like that, you know, you just don't want to mess up. Like, I'm just like, how do I stay out of everybody's way, kind of observe, and, you know, maybe pick up rear security or something like that, you know? And I was in the command and control element with Frank, Frank Frankie. And the plan was to have— basically, there were 3 buildings that were going to get hit simultaneously. And Frank's busy kind of command and control stuff. And we were at a building, like a— I say building, it's just like a freaking mud hut.

But there was like a little piece of electric wire with a string light on it. And Frank's like, hey, Mike, take care of the light, would you? Like, do me a favor, take care of that light. And I'm letting— like, I don't want to bother him. I'm like, okay, yeah, of course. And then I'm like, wait a minute, like, we haven't gone hard yet. Like, I can't— I don't want to make a noise. I don't want to— like, is he asking me to do that now before we go? You know? And I'm like overthinking this now, right? Yeah. And I'm like, okay, I could take my Spyderco and cut the electric wire, but then I could see myself frying myself and like laying on the ground and being like some, you know, casualty on my first cool guy op with Damneck. And, uh, and, and then, uh, I'm like, okay, I got it. I was the kid in 3rd grade who everybody paid to throw the softball at the dunk tank and dunk the, the teachers, you know. Like, I have a pretty good arm and I'm, I'm pretty good throwing grenades and stuff. And, and I'm like, okay, I'll just throw a rock and hit the, and hit the light and, and, and, um, the light bulb.

So right when the guys were like, it's, it's like seconds away from going, going live, I have a rock. And Sean, I go to throw a rock at this light and my arm gets caught on my sling and my hand goes and the rock like falls one feet and one foot in front of me. And I was like, dude, did anybody see that? I just look like the, the, the, the like biggest loser on the entire planet. And I was just like, here's my first Dam Neck op. And I'm like, you know, just complete loser. And so, uh, that, that was a— but I, I, I say that, but like, man, lots of really good, good, uh, learning. And then in preparation to kind of come back for what was a very serious deployment in 2007.

What did you notice the differences were

between Dam Neck and us? Oh dude, just like speed and agility and precision. Like just, you know, you could say, oh, maybe better kit or this or that or funded better. But no, it boils down to like the, the exactly what I just said. But I would also say being able to execute without communication, you know, less like, you know, you think you're good at doing things without communicating. You know, I speak to some pro teams now. I spoke to the Pittsburgh Steelers a few, few weeks ago and or like I'm really close with Dan Hurley, the coach of the UConn basketball team. And when When I talk to sports teams now, it's like, like really the thing that makes you elite is being able to know what your teammate is going to do without communicating. So if you're in the secondary, you know, in football or you're, you're on the basketball court, like, do you know your teammate so well that you know what he's going to do without having to communicate? And how do you get there? And it kind of ties back to that, like the teaching people how to think, what not what to think.

Once we go through these debriefs enough times, I'm going to understand how your brain works and I'm going to know what way you're going to cut. You're going to make a read a certain way or whatever. And it's no different. Like, those guys were so frickin dialed in. It was really impressive.

How long did you spend with them?

I was there 3 months, maybe. I want to say— I can't remember precisely, but 3 months. I might have got to go out with them, I don't know, 7, 8, 10 times. Not 10, probably, but, but more than 5.

And so you brought some of that home to your—

As much as I could, you know. But, but a lot of it was We're not going to be them immediately from a finely tuned— the speed, the agility, the communication. But how do you take from that and transfer as much as you can back over to your organization? But I think that was all great. But I think what really helped was seeing the operational environment because we're operating in the same— it's the same enemy, basically. Yeah. And so what's the enemy doing? And it just gave me a really good sight picture until I like, how do we need to be preparing as a team? You know, we had our deployment in 2007 from SEAL Team 10. You know, part of the team went to Baghdad and then part of the team stayed in western Iraq, Fallujah, Anbar, all through Anbar Province. And yeah, there was a lot of— and we went out. I mean, it was every single night. Every night. And I probably on that deployment, I mean, I should look, the guys never needed me on a single op. Like they just didn't. But I went out with them every 3rd or 4th night and I used to—

This is at 10?

This is at SEAL Team 10. So 2007 deployment to Iraq.

So how many deployments have you done up to this point?

I would say that was my 6th, I think.

How's your wife doing?

Great. I mean, look, I mean, she's solid.

How old's your daughter now?

So 2007, she's 6.

How did you meet your wife?

In Virginia Beach, shortly after I checked in. You know, I had a really good friend that we went through. We started out in the same class. He got rolled to the next class, Jobe Price, and we decided we would be roommates at SEAL Team when we both— we had orders at SEAL Team 4. And so, he was arriving 2 or 3 months after me. And so, I kind of crashed at another friend's house here and there and kind of like, you know, you don't have much. It sounds silly, but like that, I don't know, at the time, $1,600 lease, like I could carry the $800, but I couldn't afford the whole $1,600 until he came out and could pay half the lease, you know? Yeah. And so, I just kind of lunged it, slept on friends' couches and stuff like that for a while. And, And, um, and then eventually signed a lease with, with Jobe. And, uh, and so my wife had moved to Virginia Beach at the same time, and, and we met down there.

How'd you propose to her?

Actually, in Puerto Rico on a, on a, on a vacation before deployment. So that SEAL Team 4 deployment was, uh, in 1996, and I proposed right before going on deployment. Came home and got married like 3 days after going home. So like the the I I had the either the masterstroke or the worst like logic on wedding prep, you know? Like I was not in the country for any of it. So no, she she was a champ. Like just like the the service that like a lot of people think you need to wear a uniform when they say service, and I just think like no, you. like everybody serves like that. And that's one of the things that drives me now is like, how do you just get off the sideline and serve? We are— we're all here to serve each other, you know? And certainly I'll tell you, like, my wife and daughter served, you know, it's like whether, you know, they worked double and triple time while I wasn't there to cut the grass and do all the things that every single service person, every— everybody in the whole military family understands so well.

You know, it's a sacrifice for the whole family.

I mean, how are you handling doing 6-month deployments, 3-month deployments, coming home? I mean, I've got little kids right now. I can see how much they can change in a month.

I don't think I knew better. I don't think I knew better. Like, it's just the life that I knew, you know? And it wasn't— it was always hard. Like, the hardest days of your life are like going to the team and saying goodbye to the family, you know? And, and I remember super vividly for that, that deployment to Iraq, thinking like, man, I hope I come home from this, you know. And, and we could talk about things on that deployment. There was a lot to talk about. But, but coming home from that deployment, you know, there's always the question of, do the wives meet you at the airport or do they meet at the team, you know? And we decided that deployment they'd meet at the team. And we took a bus home from the airfield and we flew into Not Oceana, into the, the Naval Base Norfolk and jumped on some buses. And I remember I was trying to hide this, and I don't know that anybody ever saw it, but like, um, being on a bus going from— on roads that weren't going to blow up, I just broke down on and, and just lost it on like, I'm back in America.

I don't need to worry about this road blowing up anymore. I did it. I made it home. You know, it was a really— it was a really powerful moment to appreciate something as simple as a road that doesn't blow up and what America is. Mm-hmm. And just, you know, I'm a sucker for those like military videos where like the kid throws out the first pitch and the dad just came home from deployment. He peels off the catcher's mask and it's him. You know, or any of the— like, all of those, like, family reuniting things. Like, we felt that so vividly so many times that those— it just brings me right back to those places where, you know, you get that come back together as a family thing. And it's— dude, it'll— it's just powerful. It's something that so many people who will listen to this understand. Yeah. You know, our family's no different. It's a family unit that comes together and sacrifices so much. And I just wish that the America that doesn't know what it means to serve could actually appreciate and understand the depth of— the depth and the intensity of what it takes, not just from the service members, but from the— I'll say wives, but spouses.

It's mostly wives and the kids. It's a real toll.

How old was your daughter when you stopped deploying?

Uh, 12, 13. 13.

13 years old.

Yeah, because my last deployment was the commanding officer of SEAL Team 2. I came home, I got out, and I moved to Westport, Connecticut.

So, I mean, did she ever talk to you about that?

Yeah, I think she's like—

What does she say?

I think she understands that that was her component of service. It in many ways has made her who she is. She understands what sacrifice is. You know, I will jump around a little bit here. I don't know if this, this really fits in right now, but I'll just, just, just do it. The— when I was at SEAL— in command of SEAL Team 2 in Afghanistan in 2012, I got ready to leave and my— that first roommate, Jobe Price, was like, hey, Mike, you know, I'll be there for the family. And he was— while I was deployed in command of SOTIF Southeast, and he was constantly checking in on my family. And, and I super appreciated that, like, because it's like you can't be there and you got like a brother of yours to be there for you, for your family. And like, hey guys, what do you need and how can I help? And or just to tell a joke or to make light of things. And, and, and so then I came— Job and his team deployed over to Afghanistan. You know, the, the outstations kind of do their first turnover, and the last thing to turn over is the, is the headquarters.

I'm skipping a lot of stuff from that deployment right now just to focus on this particular story. That was a really hard, really hard deployment. And, uh, we, we didn't, we didn't lose anybody. I had guys get, you know, shot, wounded. You know, I amputated a teammate's leg that deployment. Like, just a lot of craziness on that command deployment. But, uh, But, uh, we didn't lose anybody. And, um, it's probably worth a little bit of a conversation later on on that too. But, but for this, I just took it very seriously to tell Job everything that we did to not lose someone. And Job was like, man, it feels so much pressure to, to not lose somebody also. And, uh, in the first, I don't know, 4 weeks or so of his deployment, he lost 3 or 4 guys. 4 guys in like 3 different situ— uh, incidents. And, you know, when Job's family deployed, my daughter made what she called a deployment box for Job's daughter, who was like 1 year younger than her, maybe 2 years younger than her, something like that. And my wife and I did not ask our daughter to create some deployment box.

And what it was was a cardboard thing that— where she wrote a 3 by 5 note card for what would be every day of deployment, 10 months. So, 300 note cards with different thoughts on it. Things like when— and the concept was while your dad is gone, reach into the deployment box and take out a 3x5 card for every day he's gone. And like on that, on like the card said things like, when you miss your dad, go into his drawer and take out a t-shirt, put it on, and pretend it's a hug from him. Like those kinds of things. Like, and, and so, you know, so, so his daughter had, had the deployment box and about— well, it was December 20th or 21st, a month. He'd been in command overseas in Afghanistan for about a month-ish, maybe a month and a half. And I was picking up the phone at SEAL Team back home at SEAL Team 2 to call him. We have these, You know, there's like red lines and yellow lines, like secret and top secret. I had a yellow line on my desk and it rings— it rang right into his bedroom or into the operations center.

I knew both phone numbers by heart and I'm like, he's either in his bedroom or in his operations center. And, and I tried to just call him and check in on him. And you needed— there was some new policy where you needed a 4-digit PIN in order to be able to make a call from that. It's Friday afternoon and the team's like, I'm literally like the only guy. I'm not going to call the comms guy. to come fix my pin and give me a new pin. And, and I was like, I'll just call Job on Monday when I get back in. And the next day, you know, in the bed that I had slept in for the last 10 months, Job took his own life.

And— Sorry, man.

No, I mean, it's like I said, we all have our We have a lot of friends. We all have a lot of things like this. But, you know, that was my first roommate in the teams. And, and we went over to his house, and I will never get his daughter's screams out of my head of like, he promised he would come home. And I looked up in her bedroom and there was the deployment box that my daughter had put on, on her counter. And I just thought the rest of those cards don't matter, you know. And my daughter was there at the house consoling her. And at, you know, and I just remember thinking things like— it was myself and one other SEAL who was her godfather and who's an incredible guy. I don't know if he'd want to be named, so I won't right now. But, but we were the only 2 in the house. Like, like we were— it was, it was just us. And meaning like, it was me, my wife, my daughter, and this other SEAL. And, and then Job's wife and daughter. And it was super hard, Sean. And we had to quickly figure out things like, when do you tell a child that her dad committed suicide?

Is it in the moment at that, or is it 5 or 10 years later? You know, and like, how do you do the— how do you do the right thing for her? And, and I just— and even to this day, man, I just think like I'm the only person who could have heard anything in his voice when I— if I could have just got through to him that day. I know, I know that I would have detected it. And so I get, you know, I, I live knowing that there's more I could have done, you know. But I also don't— I try not to— I don't beat myself up over it. I know he wouldn't want me to. He's just, you know, but, uh, but it's just a fact I could have done more, and it is what it is, you know. And, uh, and, uh— And so all we can do is try to learn from that and become better people and say, what did I— what do you learn? What— how do you— and this is in one of the— in Never Enough, I wrote, be intrusive in other people's lives. You know, nowadays, like, since things like that, I flat out ask friends, like, have you ever considered harm to self?

And it's a really uncomfortable question. But I'll take 99 awkwards for the one person that's like, yeah, actually, Mike, I have. And in the last, whatever, 13 years since I've been out of the teams, man, I'm so still super close to not just SEALs but other military friends. And man, I ask that every time, and I've had dozens of situations where that answer is yes. And then it's like, man, how do we get in there and help the person in the, in the ways, in the best way we can?

Have you?

Have I ever considered harm to self? No, I haven't. I— my grandfather told me, Mike, don't die for your country, go on living for it. I'm here to do the greatest good that I can for others. I didn't want to write books, you know, Sean. I, I wrote books so that I could help others. And, uh, of course, like you heard, the profits literally— I mean, step— I have the nonprofit foundation that I started, the 1162 Foundation. 1/1/62 is the date Kennedy started the SEALs, and 1/1 kind of signifies renewal. You know, everybody, January 1st, like new year, new me. And so I don't talk about the names of the women whose mortgages I've paid off. It's their story to tell. I don't have a website with pictures. If you Google the 1162 Foundation, you will find one website on GiveButter that is a little— Like, if you wanted to donate, you could. There's there is nothing but just quiet help. When the women, if they decide to tell the story to others, that's their story to tell. In this particular situation, Steph Price has told other people that that that I paid that that my foundation paid off her mortgage, and and I'm proud of that.

You know, I'm I'm I'm in many ways, I think. You know, we were talking at dinner last night, like. We can't sit still. Like, we're people who can't sit still. And, and I, I have dozens of other stories that, you know, that are similar to what I just described, as do a lot of people who will hear this. You know, I'm no different than anybody who's lived through the Global War on Terror kind of years. And, um, and so I think that I know if I weren't here what I'd hope my friends would do for my family. And I just live a life trying to do the same for them.

You're doing a damn good job.

Trying. But it's rough when you lose that first teammate in the— your first roommate, your first, you know. And, uh, you know, we have a mutual name that we know so well, Chad Wilkinson, your, your platoon. I'm like, same thing, man. I was Chad's platoon commander. He was on that operation I described in Kosovo. Nobody in the team saw that coming. Like, if it happened to Chad, that's when it scared all of us. Because, like, if it can happen to Chad, it can literally happen to any of us at any time.

Yeah.

And that's why I think we have to talk about it. That's why I think we have to become comfortable asking other people, like, hey, have you thought about harm to self? I appreciate you asking me. You know, that's what teammates do for each other.

What do you do if they say yes?

Well, I don't let them go. I don't let them out of my arms to start, you know, and, and I, and I dig in a little harder. The first thing is like, well, like, do you— understanding, does someone actually have a plan? Because yes is one thing, and then is there a plan is another. And then I'm no expert in this field. I make sure that they talk to somebody who is, you know, but I quickly try to mobilize resources around that person. You know, not everybody wants to talk. You know, I think, like, like for me, I've never considered harm to self, but, but, but a lot of people say like, hey, have you ever done talk therapy? I haven't. Like, I don't want to sit around and talk to somebody about, you know, I just, I don't know. I don't think it'll help me. I don't think I have. I just don't— I don't know, maybe this is arrogant, but it's like, I don't need the help. I'm just gonna drive on and keep trying to do great things for other people, you know? And, and, you know, I watched the Alex West— I don't know Alex at all.

Holy cow, what an impressive dude. If anybody listening to this hasn't listened to the Alex West episode a couple episodes ago, go listen to that man. He's a great man. Mm-hmm. You know, pivoting into the to go help people. And then one of the things he talked about was, as he's now in the same world that my mom is in, as Alex helps others, he said something very interesting to me, which was, I can— I started out on this path. I'm paraphrasing here, obviously. Sorry, Alex, if you listen and I don't get this exactly right, but I started out on this path because I wanted to help my fellow teammates and my veterans and first responders and whatnot. But what I realized is my caseload, I can only have about 1/3 of that category. Because it just drains me too much. You know, I think that's really incredible self-awareness, and and and it makes it resonates with me. You know, it's like who who wants to be? You know, I'm a glass is half full, look forward, don't look backward guy. You know, like how do we just drive on and continue to make great things happen for people?

And I think like one of the questions early on. For the Patreon was, does service to others and helping others— I'm paraphrasing here— but help you avoid focusing on yourself? And I think the answer is yes. You know, like, why am I on a long-haul flight to Bangalore, India for work? And instead of streaming the 7th show in some series, why am I working on, you know, my book? Because that book is going to make money for a Gold Star widow who doesn't have a house paid off right now. Or that book is like— the words on the page will hopefully help somebody, you know. So how can we use our time for anything other than doing the best that we can for others? Sorry, that was a monologue.

All good. Well put. Let's go back to your Iraq deployment.

Yeah,

with 10. A lot of significant stuff happened on that deployment.

Yeah.

How did it start?

Well, gosh, it started with our advance party, a couple of guys from the team who went out early to augment SEAL Team 4, who was there before us. And, uh, And it was an operation where there was a heavy, intense exchange of gunfire. And I don't know, to my brothers at the team, I hope I'm not mixing operations right here, but that was the operation where Mike Day got shot like 27 times. We had a guy from our team get shot through the arm. There was a guy named Clark Schwedler who was killed in action. I didn't know Clark, but I've learned about him since. He seems amazing. So like right before we deployed, we knew it was serious. And, and so it started before we even got on our first planes overseas because, you know, there were very serious incidents happening. And then as soon as we got over there, there were 35 Marines killed in the first 30 days I was— that our task force was there in Fallujah. Some of them getting, you know, just at on watch at some outpost at 3 o'clock in the afternoon in broad daylight. You know, some— I don't know, some Marine giving another Marine a haircut at an outpost and takes a round through the head.

Or, you know, like, those are the things that were happening. And it was— and some were all kinds of different losses, but the Marines were taking heavies in '07. And I went down to the Marine who was in charge and I said, hey, sir, I've got one of the world's best snipers and I've got a really capable force. We want to help you to clean up this problem. So that your great Marines— we can take some pressure off of your great Marines. And dude, I don't want to use this guy's name, but like, he said, no, we'll solve our own problems. And I was just like— he was one rank higher. I was Lieutenant Commander. This guy was a Lieutenant Colonel, you know, Marine Lieutenant Colonel. And I was like, sir, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

Wow.

We're here to help you, and your ego isn't going to let SEALs go help the Marines. I want you to think about— it was just me and him, just he and I. And I said, I want you to think about what your answer just was and ask if that should be your real answer and if that's what serves your Marines best. I'll be back tomorrow. And I went back to his office the next day and I said, hey, sir, I just said, sir, let's de-escalate. You're in your battle space. You're the, you know, you're the, you're the HMFIC, you know, the, the dude in charge. And I'm here to help. I know I came on strong, but please read me coming on strong as my unit's desire to help your unit. Can we start again? And, and he was like, hey, Mike, thanks, man. He goes, also, like, I also was too quick to— and I let ego get in the way. And I was like, thank you. How can we help? Let's talk about it. Let's get our best guys together in a room and let's figure out what we can do together. And then And we just got after it, man.

Like, it was night after night after night. It was vampire hours. It was just sunsets. SEAL platoon's only question was, do you get in vehicles or do you get in helicopters? Do you go straight to the, to the, to the X? Do you offset infill and walk in? You know, it's just like, these were the— like, but it was just rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. And, uh, and it was It was heavy. And, you know, and the other thing that was happening was that, you know, we'd be up all night, the guys would come home. Now, I'm the deputy commander responsible for a lot of different outstations in Anbar Province, Iraq, but I'm co-located with a SEAL troop. I don't remember if we call them task forces or troops, but 2 SEAL platoons were co-located with me in Fallujah. And And everybody was going out every night. But that, that, that group, like every third night, like I said, I would head out with them and I'd joke around and be like, hey, fellas, I already wrote my award. I just got to go do the operation, you know? And, and it was just full of really good dudes.

You've had DJ Shipley on this, you know, sit in this chair. You've, you know, we've got a lot of guys who aren't here also from, from that, that troop. Kyle Milliken, uh, Mark Weiss, you know, um, I, I, I, I don't need to name everybody right now, but the, uh, there was one— as we were there, we would sleep from like, I don't know, 6 in the morning until maybe 11 in the morning, 10 in the morning, and just get right after the intelligence cycle and get ready to go out again. Meanwhile, Fallujah had this Fallujah Surgical, which was where all the level 1 trauma cases came, and, and, or the KIAs came, made it back to Fallujah Surgical. And the loudspeaker would constantly be like, anybody with A-positive blood come immediately to Fallujah Surgical.

Yeesh.

Like, it was every— probably 3 times a day there was a call for blood. And you know, when you're only sleeping literally 3, 4 hours a night and your, your blood type gets called And you lay there and you're like, dude, there's like 1,500 Marines on this base. Like, do I really have to get my ass up? You know? And like, that's a hard problem. Like, that's a hard problem, you know, because you, you get up and now you, you're compromising your sleep for your own performance the next day. You're a bad teammate and bad American, not missing an opportunity to go help someone else. You can only give blood so many times. There's only so many people that can give blood so often. And there was one night where I was like, my, my, um, blood type got called and I was like, it was just me. I just jumped in the truck. I was like, you know, and I said, you know, I'm just gonna go up there. And I'll never forget under like the red lens, the darkness, like the, the tenty kind of like, like, you know, body parts everywhere, being like, I got to give blood to whoever needs it.

I walk in thinking I'm like the only guy from probably the SEAL task force that's going up. And I, and I look in a chair, not unlike— I mean, not this quality, but this kind of like sit back. And there's Kyle Milliken already sitting there with a needle in his arm giving his blood, one of my teammates. And it was funny because like Kyle and I didn't even talk. We just kind of did that like nod, you know. And that dude was the man. And, uh, he was later killed in Somalia on a mission. And it was— that affected me a lot. It affected a lot of us, uh, just one of the greatest guys on the planet.

Man, it was that bad? They were calling out people to donate blood every night?

3 times a day.

Shit.

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was. And it's really hard to figure out, like, do you go or not? And, uh, you know, this— on that deployment cycle, you know, um, we had things mostly went very well the whole deployment. I wasn't on the operation the night that you think, you know, we both have a mutual friend, Jason Redmond, Matt Roberts. You know, there was an operation where Jason got shot a whole bunch of times, and he's just such an incredible American. And—

You want to talk about that?

We can. I mean, there's a lot out there about that. From my perspective, we can. Yeah. I mean, sure. I'm not opposed to it. You know, ultimately, every operation that happened was my decision of do we say, do we go or no go? Um, I didn't go on the op that night. I wasn't out there, but I was watching, you know, the whole thing unfold from the operations center. And, and, uh, amazing heroism. Amazing heroism, you know.

Is that the most heroic thing you've seen?

No.

What is the most heroic thing you've seen?

When I would— I think Yeah, I don't know. There are a lot, but I'd say it depends if I know the per— if the answer has to be I know the person or I don't know the person, you know. Okay. And so I'd, I'd, I'd answer it kind of 2 ways. I'd say on deployment, I had to— we had an operation in— when I— sorry, uh, in command of SEAL Team 2 in Afghanistan. It was, it was It was a lot of kinetic activity, a lot of engagements with the Taliban, a lot of governance too, a lot of tea drinking and speeches in villages and stuff like that. It wasn't all— it was different lines of operation. But on that deployment, we had somebody step on a pressure plate IED and lost most of his leg. The next guy— and these are guys I know super well. These are guys I'm responsible for. And, you know, just completely— I don't want to be too gruesome, but like the most charred, gruesome black face you can possibly imagine. And, and, and the, the question for the platoon commander on scene is always like, do you send your medic back with the, the wounded?

And it was about a, you know, 8 or 10 minute helo flight back to my location where I had 3 doctors and about a 15, 20 person medical staff under my command. And so we were that highest level of care before they moved back to Germany. So we got a lot of mass casualties from areas that weren't under my command come to my, my, my element. But this particular one, we had 2 SEALs who were, who were wounded in action. And I would say not a month earlier, you know, I had told the docs, like, listen, on a night when it's quiet, when there's nothing going on, I want to come down and scrub in for an operation with you guys and just appreciate you and understand life from your perspective. And this guy Tucker came running up to the TOC. He said, hey, sir, we were treating some Afghan soldiers, the friendly soldiers that were kind of on our team, if you will. And he said, we're going to need to— he's got a broken leg below the knee and just come on down. It's going to be a— We're going to put a what do you call it, like a metal tube in his leg to put his bones back together.

So I get down there, I scrub in, and they have a Sharpie drawn on his knee, and they hand me the scalpel. They're like, just cut his kneecap off. And I was like, okay, I said scrub in, but like, I don't want to mess this guy up. And they're like, no, no, no, we're going to supervise this. You're going to do it. So I cut the kneecap, the guy's kneecap off. They handed me this big-ass drill with a drill bit that goes all the way down the inside of the bone. I drilled the inside of his bone on his his leg. And then I hammered the— what do you call it? Like a metal tube, like metal tube that basically fixes the inside of the bone and then sewed him up. It was maybe a 3-hour operation. And I was the— like I'd say I was the lead doctor. Of course, not lead, but like I was the primary hands-on

surgeon.

Mm-hmm. And it was some of the best experience that I think I've ever had. You know, I had done the tactical first responder, you know, the shoot the goats and bring them back and try to make them live as long as you can and all that stuff with live tissue training. With— and, uh, and nothing replaced— nothing gets you ready for humans like working on humans. So I had such appreciation for how good our medic, our docs were. That The next, like, a couple nights later, the, the task force that the 2 SEAL platoons located with me in Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan, at our headquarters were like playing Xbox that night. They weren't going out on a mission. And 4 of the guys I pulled aside and I'm like, guys, what you doing tonight? And they're like, hey, we're, you know, I don't know, like our 40th game of our Madden football league or something. And I'm like, wrong, wrong. I want you guys to go into the medical unit and just hang out there tonight and you're just going to learn. And sure enough, some mass— you know, there were some Afghans that got blown up and things, and they were hands-on, not quite like what I just described, but like they saw all the doctors in action.

And all 4 of these guys the next day were like, sir, thank you for making us go in there. We never would have volunteered, wouldn't have thought of it. But like, man, that was a really educational experience. and thank you. So a month later, when this operation, these guys got blown up, 2 of them had already been in that unit helping. So even though they couldn't see and they were almost out of it, they knew where they were. And months after, you know, after they kind of— I saw them again months later, they were like, you know, they were so comforted knowing where they were because they'd already been in there. And, and I met— there were only maybe 3 or 4 SEALs in the headquarters the night that, that they got blown up, because every— we had to throw the kitchen sink at the— out, out, out in the field. It was like me, the command master chief, and like, I don't even know, maybe 1 or 2 other SEALs on the— on the— in the headquarters. And, you know, when you get mass casualty call, like, I'm— any of the SEALs are some of the more medically trained people on the, on the thing.

So I, I went and I met the bird. And there was no medic on the bird coming back. It was just tourniquets that had everything tied off. And one of the guys whose leg was missing to about here had like 4 tourniquets on and, dude, arterial bleeding. None of them were working. And so like, I just right away had to get my hand in the middle of his leg, stop the arterial bleeding. He's yelling at me. He's got a fentanyl lollipop in his mouth and And, and he's still like screaming, Mr. Hayes, have them put me out, have them put me out, you know? And I'm like, Bo, wait. And then I just remembered, like, I'm not a doctor, but like, understanding someone's response to pain is a very important medical set of like information that the doctors need. So I'm like, I'm not going to like give this guy more fentanyl or morphine or anything. Like, I'm going to— I basically carried him while stopping the bleeding. And my Master Chief drove us down to the, to the, to the gurneys down in the medical unit. And, and there were so many people down there that, like, I had to cut the rest of his leg off, you know.

And so—

Yeah.

So when you say, like, that's a dude who, you know, who I cared a lot for, you know, and, and, and, um, and, uh, I knew really, really well. Like, I knew his his wife at the time. You know, my wife knew her. And, and there you are cutting off a guy's leg, you know. You know, that sucks. You don't think about the moment. Like, in the moment, you're just like, you do what you have to do. Like, there's no it sucks in the moment. I mean, and I'll never forget looking at this other guy's—

How do you cut it off?

I just— the doctor, like, he would come— this guy Tucker came over and said, here's what we need off. You know, he kind of guided me. I wouldn't have known what to do. Like, he was just like he knew I because that operation I did a month ago or 3 weeks ago or whatever, he knew I could handle it. And he's got he's working other mass casualty stuff, you know. And so it was basically like he was going to be a at the knee amputee for the rest of his life. And so it like you just and they needed to get into. basically, you know, I guess— not I guess, like cauterize, cauterize what was left and stop the bleeding. So they needed to cut some back in order to cauterize the wound. And I just followed the— it was paint by numbers, you know. The guy was like, hey, do this, do this. And he'd come back and check on me every little bit. And I'm just like hacking away, you know.

Hacking away with what?

A scalpel. Like a proper medical— I mean, I'm in the unit.

Like, yeah.

I mean, yeah.

So that, like, to cut his leg and clean off.

Well, he was missing his— it was all like— I don't want to be too gruesome, but like, it was like he came in with it like here, but so jacked up that everything from knee to here needed to come off. Shit. So, um, but I was like, you know, I know— I knew he was going to be okay. He— that was his only wound. And I'm like, he's going to live. He's going to be an amputee. And it turned out he actually— he had his other leg at the time. They needed to take his other leg, actually his other leg from the knee down, when he went back to Germany because there was nerve damage that we didn't know about at the time. He's a double amputee now. And another SEAL who was on that operation, like, I think maybe the most gruesome thing I saw was looking into his eyes. I don't want to— for the sake of people listening, I won't even describe it, but it was the worst thing I've ever seen.

Um, looking into his eyes?

Because his face was blown up and he couldn't see. Uh, I'll just leave it at that. I mean, right now he's got partial vision in one eye, and he himself is a doctor now. So he's— and, uh, what kind of sucks is that as I bring up all these guys, like, I haven't talked to either of these guys in like One of them, I traded voicemails with him maybe 3 months ago or so as he officially finished residency to become a doctor. And, you know, it's like you just can't— you just have this desire to kind of keep up with everybody and help everybody. But at this point, you just know so many people like this, it's impossible, you know. But that same deployment, we— I know, I know we were on Iraq and I'm on Afghanistan now. So we were on '07 Iraq with like, and I'm jumping thematically, it's all the same. But, uh, in— on that 2012 deployment to Afghanistan, there— the, the mass casualties came up to our spot, and, and the SOTIF South commander became a really good— we were just— there was no Green Beret SEAL bullshit. It was one team, you know?

How do we help each other? You know, it's like— and that's what I love. I have such respect for the Army Green Berets, man. There's just some really, really, really awesome dudes. Um, you know, when I was younger, it was like, like when you first graduate from BUD/S, it's like, I'm a SEAL, you're no one else, you're not. And the faster you lose that mentality is the beginning of your success. Until you lose that mentality, you aren't successful. And, um, and so we had— I remember one night where, like, this, this guy Rich who ran SOTF South would call me and he's like, Mike, I'm sending you, you know, 3 WIA because the helo The helicopter ride was closer to my medical unit than to his in Kandahar. And these guys were massively shot and blown up. And I remember one dude, like, I physically was peeling frag out of his intestines that was outside of his body, you know? And, and, and then what goes through my head sometimes is like, man, I don't even remember that guy's name. I knew their names for a while. But there's some human out there, like, who was an SF dude at that deployment who, you know, I had my hands on his intestines trying to help clean him up.

And I, I just don't even know who he is now. You know, it's really weird like that. Like, that combat stuff, it gets, it gets pretty real and pretty heavy pretty quick. Mm-hmm. I mean, another— can I, can I share another interesting, like, story from that deployment? Absolutely. The— so that, that SEAL Team 2 deployment, you know, we're on— while we're on, like, I think the people listening, you know, you read about combat or you read things and, you know, intellectually that it's hard on people. But the— I think sometimes some of these stories making it real, Like, I think it's probably net helpful. I mean, you don't have to. You can always tune out if you don't want to hear things. But I mean, there was one situation where there was a truck, an army vehicle was blown up, and the guys got their bell rung really bad. They came to our medical unit. I went down to see, to check in on them. The medical unit was literally like. 80 yards from our operations center. So it was a very easy, you know, like crunchy rock walk, you know, with no lights and everything.

And you just learn the pattern of how to get there. And, and, uh, and I went in there and I was like, okay, thank God these guys are okay. They were 2 from an ODA team that I had not had any knowledge of. They were part of the SOTA South Task Force And one of the guys' bell was rung pretty bad. And I pulled the docs aside and I was like, hey guys, like, what's— like, I don't want to send someone back to combat if they're so, like, excessively concussed and, like, in TBI land, you know, traumatic brain injury land. Like, let's make sure we do the right thing here. And on this one, they were like, you know, sir, this is like a 50/50 call. Like, this is like— the docs, even the amazing docs that we had, they were like, This is truly 50/50. You got it. They're like, boss, you got to make the call on this one. And I was like, who am I to make this decision? You know? And so I don't want to use this guy's name for a reason I'll get into in a second. Remember this so vividly, but I grabbed his rifle, his kit, and, you know, I'm a commander.

This guy's like an Army E-4, E-5 or something. He's, you know, yes sir, no sir, 3 bags full. That's not who I am and how I live and whatnot. But, you know, military hierarchy and whatnot. I grab his stuff and he's very uncomfortable with me carrying his helmet, his rifle, and his kit. And I'm like, no, listen, dude, like, let me do this for you. We're going to go back to my office. I had a little— in our plywood palace kind of office, it's like 4 in the morning. There weren't a lot of ops. There was not a lot. It was— I sat down with just him and I said, I got to give this guy a fake name so I can say his name. I'll just say I'll just, I'll just let me think. I'll call him. I'll call. Just call him Ed. Whatever. So I'm like, hey Ed, listen. Here's the deal. You got your bell rung really bad. I don't want to send you back if you're going to have any sort of long-term damage. I want to send you back to the unit. I also don't. I also want to respect that.

That might be all that you want. And I just want to talk to you. Like, how are you doing? Like, you, you can tell me. I will never let this conversation go anywhere. Do you want to go to Germany and get checked out? And he said, sir, that would kill me. Like, if I can't serve with my unit, I might as well be dead. And I said, wow, like the dedication this dude had to his teammates was simultaneously not surprising but also so impressive to me. And I leaned in and I asked him the same questions 100 ways to hear like the little nuance of like, is he just— is he bullshitting me? Like, is he just trying to give that reflexive answer that any soldier knows they're supposed to give? Or what is— does he really mean it? Because you got to draw that out. Yeah. And I was like, I'm going to ask you this question 100 times. You know, and I felt like I had a really confident picture of what this guy wanted to do, and, and he really wanted to go back to his unit. And I was like thinking to myself, okay, the docs are saying 50/50, like he can choose.

And so I said, all right, hey, I leaned in and I said— I actually put my hand on his shoulder, I still remember very, very distinctly. And I said, hey, Ed, I got a question for you, dude. What's a hero? And he's like, sir? And I said, you know what? You're my hero. Like, being able to serve with somebody like you who just wants to give back to your teammates and help serve your teammates, I go, you're a hero. I said, let me walk you to the bird and we'll get you out of here and back to your unit. Okay, so he goes, he goes, flies back to his unit. 3 weeks later, somewhere in Sota South, there's another mass casualty situation. 3 guys come to my medical unit. 2 of them need to be put out right away, major surgery. Another guy is like, he's only shot like through the ass, you know, and he's trying desperately to give intel to me. So that, like, because he's thinking, what can I still be doing for my friends? And hey, here's the situation. Like, he didn't know, like, the whole situation was under control, but he's just out of, like, pure desire and intent to do the most that he can.

He's trying to fill me in and I'm just letting him, letting him run. And, and he said, but, you know, we had on, on this op, we have 3 WIA, me and my 2 guys here, but we had 1 KIA. And I was like, oh shit. Okay, that sucks. And I said, well, like, how did this happen? He said, well, it was a, a green-on-blue situation, meaning an Afghan that— you know what that means. But for everybody, an Afghan that we were working with and training as a good Afghan turned his weapon onto the, the SF guys and just started from an elevated position, just started shooting at them nonstop. And so this green-on-blue situation, those are really, really hard to stop. And he said that there was a guy who, in their unit, who proactively— like, I don't know the exact details, but basically proactively made a move— movement to, to try to go shoot this guy and take him out. And that guy was killed in action. And I said, hey, I wouldn't know who your teammate is, I don't know your guys, but, uh, but let's honor him for a second. And, and what was his name?

Uh, And it was Ed.

Shit.

Who I had just sent back 3 weeks earlier. Wow. Those are the decisions you have to make, you know. And Ed would be here if I didn't— if I would have sent him to Germany.

Or maybe he wouldn't be.

Or maybe he wouldn't be, right? But you know, Sean, like, I didn't prepare much for this conversation. I was just like, let it fly and just think. But I, I did think about this particular story that I'm talking about right now, and something I'll share, which is like, I'm not one— I don't think I'll ever really want to read the comments on, on whether whether it's Instagram or TikTok or wherever on this kind of— but, but something I'd love help on from people listening is that, you know, I've never told his wife this story, and I've always wrestled with whether I should or I shouldn't. The argument for it is just be transparent and as forthcoming As possible. And I'm a very transparent person, usually by default. The risk is that I open up old wounds. I cause frustration from that spouse, prior spouse, to be frustrated that he decided to go back when he had a ticket out. And like, my only thing that drives me is what's the greatest good here? And I don't know the answer. And because I've never been able to like answer this for myself, I've always erred on the side of inaction rather than action.

Anyways, just another struggle. What do you think?

I think you should tell her.

Yeah.

I think she'll want to know. Do you know her?

I, I know her name. I've never talked to her. I've never contacted her. I know how to find her. I don't know where she is now. I have no idea, but I know I can find her. I get to where I get to. Like, when you say that, I'm like, yeah, you're right. I totally should. Like, let me, let me go do that later today. At the same time, like, what happens is like, I'll get conviction feeling like it's the right thing, but I'm like, man, like, could mess her up.

It's been a long time.

True.

Did he have kids?

No. No. But that dude was a hero.

It's a tough call.

It is, right? You can see both sides, right? I'm usually pretty decisive. I haven't— obviously haven't been on this one.

Do you think he would want her to know?

I don't know. I didn't know him well enough. You know, I only knew him from my conversation for an hour one random night at 4 in the morning in Afghanistan. That's literally the only time I've ever talked to the guy.

Would you want your wife to know?

That's an interesting question that I haven't thought of it that way. Would I want her to know? Would I want my wife to know that I could have come home and didn't? Probably, but I don't know. Probably.

Anyway, you thought he was a hero because of it.

Well, I thought he was—

Probably will too.

Yeah, I think you're right. I'll keep thinking on it.

Do you want to go back to Team 10?

Yeah, we were back in Iraq, and I know I jumped to Afghanistan. Yeah, I just was really— I just think back on that time and I just think how fortunate was I. There was— to serve with such men, you know, the— there was— here's a— is a— I mean, I think a funny story, but first of all, even among all that, we played some crazy good practical jokes. Like, I know we're not in the practical joke mode right now, but like, we were tight, you know. And, um, but the, uh, the number 2 most wanted guy in western Iraq, his name at the time— these things changed all the time, but based on who was captured, killed, or became worse— there was a guy who went by Abu Talha, T-A-L-H-A. And, you know, he was always on our like most wanted list and how can we get him and, and whatnot. And there was one op where at the last second I was like, you know what, there's not a lot of other stuff going on. I'm going to roll out with the guys. There was always— there was always— when you go helo, you can always— there's always room for one more guy.

So I walk in a little bit late, but we've been doing so much that, like, you know, we were just in such a mode of operating that it wasn't like, hey, I hadn't been in mission planning since, you know, 2:00 PM in the afternoon and it's 11:00 PM and getting ready to go out. It was maybe like— I'm gonna make this up— maybe like 8 PM, and we're just getting ready to do the brief, and it's like 7:55, and I'm like, hey, throw my name on chalk 3 on bird 2, or whatever, you know. So like, okay, cool. And the guy, you know, and I always, always like, I don't need to be the one man or the two man. Like, put me with the command and control element. Like, I don't need to be— put me wherever I'm most out of the way, wherever it's like least obtrusive. And, and in this particular night I was going— there were 2 or 3 buildings that were going to get hit simultaneously, and the command and control element was going to this like little, you know, outstation that looked like some— not like a little shack, if you will, like a— almost like a— where you'd store your lawnmower if you had a lawnmower in Iraq, you know.

And so it was myself, a guy named Scott, a guy named Jay, and I think that was it. 3 of us. Maybe there was one And so as the, the 3 elements kind of got to their set point for their 3 different buildings, the 3 of us made our way to the place where we were going to, uh, plant the command and control element. The, the 3 elements kind of do their thing. They, they all go hard at the same time, make, make for— make noise and, and start the operation at the same time. And Myself and the 2 others start going, and I realize— I see in my— in my— we're all on 100% NODs, night vision. I see a little, like, an out— a bed. Everybody sleeps outside at that time of year. And there's a man, a woman, and a kid-ish, maybe a 10, 15-year-old. I couldn't tell from that far away. The guy's on the end, and I see him roll over and start reaching for a weapon. And I remember back in training, at least what I got taught was 21 feet is the magic number. You're 21 feet and closer, you close on the person with a weapon.

21 feet and further, you know, you— this is like, or you don't, you know, you go either shoot or you move the other way or whatever you decide to do. And, and, you know, of course, could have just put a round in the guy's head or whatever. But I'm like, man, like, like, like, we're all good shots, but I've got like his daughter in bed right there, or son, I don't know, and like wife right there. And I'm like next to him, and I'm like, there's no need to, to shoot this guy. I, I'm faster than he's going to be able to get there. And so I remember just saying JJJ just so somebody would know where I was going. I sprint forward and I make it to the dude to get my foot on it, like basically as he's pulling up his weapon. I basically get my— I don't remember exactly the physical human moves, but somehow I got like, I got the weapon back down to the ground, my foot on it, on his arm and the weapon so that it couldn't engage us. And I put my muzzle right on the dude.

And, um, and basically, you know, Jay comes up and we zip tie the guy and, and, and we bring him and we— once the— all the targets are secure and we're sorting through who did we find, who do we not find, uh, that dude was Abu Talib.

No shit.

And I talked so much shit. I'm like, fellas, when you need the officer to come and grab Abu Talib, like, you just let me know. I just wrote my award, you know. I need some shooter statements of how cool I am, you know. I never let the guys— the whole rest of the deployment, man, I was like, you know, it was all kinds of shit talking, and it was so fun. It was. But, you know, you know as well as I do, and anybody listening, listening, dude, blind luck. Blind luck. It's not skill at all. But, we had a lot of good times and impactful times. Well, at the time, we thought we made a difference. And, I've heard some of your prior episodes and I'm probably somewhat aligned of answering the, was it all worth it question is so complicated and multilayered. I don't know if we want to get it. I don't want to necessarily go there unless you really want to. But, but nonetheless, like, we had a mission and, and that group at that time was really good. And, and then, you know, as an officer, like, you don't get to do the next deployment at that level.

You got to go find some other job to go do. And that's where I decided to— I, I applied for the White House, a thing called the White House Fellowship, where you, at an atypically young age, you get a a really senior job somewhere in the executive branch. And that was kind of the next chapter.

Well, before we go there, let's take a break.

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All right, Mike, we're back from the break, and I think we're getting ready to get into the White House and the Bush administration. How did that happen?

I applied for a program called the White House Fellowship toward the tail end of my time at SEAL Team 10, because in the officer career path path, you basically can only deploy so much. You can rise up to kind of be the third in charge of a team, then you need a diversity tour. Then you can be the second in charge of a team, then you need a diversity tour. So my first diverse— diversity tour was, uh, was graduate school. And then for my next diversity tour, I was like, let me apply for this White House fellowship. I learned about that actually when I was, when I was at the Kennedy School in Cambridge, Mass. there was a guy who was a White House Fellow who came and spoke about how cool the program was. There were probably 150 Harvard students that sat there drooling about how cool this program is. And honestly, I sat there and I was like, I'll just do that in 3 years. I'm just going to do that. It's very competitive. 5,000 people apply. They pick 14 a year, plus or minus. And, it was weird. I don't mean to sound like the president of my own fan club or arrogant.

I'm not. But, it's like in life when you're like, I will go do that. And, And when the time is right. And after my Iraq deployment, it was the right time. And threw my name in the hat, you know, did— stayed, stayed up nights and weekends and putting together a very hard application package. It's— there were probably 10 essays or so, and some of them are the, the 200-word essays, which it's way harder to write a 200-word essay than to write a book about yourself. You know, every word counts. And I remember one of the questions was, why do you want to be a White House Fellow? I very distinctly remember my answer was that I don't just want to help people, I want to help people to help others. And that way you have that nonlinear positive impact on the world. So I just saw that as a really great program to continue to build the foundation. Even now in my life, I feel like I'm still building the foundation and the walls and the roof can come later, you know. And I just think if you lean into the really hard things and the that's where all the learning and growth comes from.

And I just saw the White House Fellowship as that. And I, you know, the, the program is based on— after— it's been around since the early '60s, but you basically spend a year at a very atypically senior role in government in the executive branch somewhere. The application or the selection process is There's 5,000 written applications or so. It's all alumni that read and get it down to about 100 applications. You have regional interviews for one day with all pretty esteemed panelists that do the interviewing, many of them White House Fellow alumni or some prominent people. It's like, call it like 100 people in 10 cities around the country that eventually each city kind of pushes 2 or 3 people forward for the the finals, the final interviews. If you make the round of the finals, you just move from 100 down to 32. And in those 3 days, they're going to pick the 14 from the 32. So any of the 32 could be White House Fellows. But what they're really doing is also kind of curating a class, different experiences, different kind of backgrounds. Probably my class had 3 military— 1, 2, 3, 4.

4 out of the 14 were military. 10 of them had nothing to do with the military.

Oh, shit. So, this isn't even just military.

Oh, this is like one of my—

The whole country.

Whole country. One of my classmates, Dan Fletcher, was mad professor, hair up to here, awesome dude. Actually, funny vegetarian story about Dan if we get into it. But, this guy Dan Fletcher was the youngest tenured professor at Berkeley. And, when I met him, I'm like, hey, what's your work? And, he's like, oh, I'm just trying to reverse the O2 to CO2 cycle. And, you know, like, you're like, okay, you know, it's like, like people that are just amazing, amazing experiences. And, um, and so the, the year is— once you're selected, the year is kind of founded on 3 things. One is like I get to spend the year with 13 really amazing people and learn from them. The other are like speakers where you You get to go into the Oval with the president, the vice president, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, and you get off-the-record conversations that are totally candid. And you just learn from being around these people in these really amazing roles. And then the third pillar is you get a real job for the year. Now, you get some agency over where you work. What happens is your name gets put in the ring.

Across a bunch of departments and agencies, and any department or agency will say, I want to talk— interview these 4 people. So I had interviews at Department of Commerce, Small Business Administration, Department of State, National Security Council. And the biggest question for the year that we all have to make is, do you go deeper in what you've already done, or do you diversify and learn something new? I had an offer to kind of— to be— to run the desk in the Department of Commerce that was responsible for all trade with China. And I was like, man, like, that would be really cool. I was super interested in that. Then, then the next day I went and I had an interview at the National Security Council with the, the, the Deputy National Security Advisor, this guy Jim Jeffreys at the time, and small little office in the basement of the West Wing. And he said, hey, Mike, you know, nice to meet you. Great. You're a fellow. Congratulations. And I'm sure you'll have a great place to land. I'm— I've got an open role that is an incredibly senior role. It's the Director for Defense Policy and Strategy.

It's a really important role. I'm interviewing 2 real people who've been in DC their whole lives, and I'm just interviewing you in the off chance that, you know, like just kind of almost my words, not his, like you're a throwaway interview kind of thing to interview. And so he said, for example, Mike, you know, this role will be responsible for the START Treaty. Well, excuse me. He said, this role will be responsible for all international treaties that the nation has with anywhere around the globe. among many, many other things. But, you know, the START Treaty, for example, runs out later this year. And so one of the things that'll need to get done is we need to rewrite the New START Treaty. And it's stuck in, in the interagency right now. What do you know about the START Treaty? And I looked at him and I said, well, sir, I know how to spell it. And I was like, dead serious. And he was like, so taken aback because in Washington, D.C., for the most part, in many places, there's just a bunch of like chest thumpers that are like, listen to how smart I am.

And I think it like, so like, it was so such a different answer. And I said, listen, like, let me explain. Like, I've been a Navy SEAL for a really long time. I'm the guy who knows how to run a process to get to the best answer. Like when you have a SEAL operation, just because I'm the commander, in fact, the chances of me having the best idea as the commander is almost zero. Yeah. I just run the process that gets all of the ideas for a mission together and get the best idea for the mission to rise to the top and select it and then execute it as well as possible. So when you say you're interviewing, you're not actually interviewing for a START Treaty expert. What you're actually interviewing for is somebody who knows how to run a process and lead to an outcome. And, and I— he called me like, or actually I didn't— he didn't call me like the, the office office for the White House Fellows called me the next day and they're like, they really want you to go to National Security Council and take that job. And I was like, geez, I have really 2 great, great options.

But, you know, the opportunity to work in the West Wing and run meetings in the Situation Room, you can't say no to that. And I was like, I'll just go deeper in national security and I'll learn a lot more and be a lot better for it. And so probably the most, I'll say, transformational year of my life from a growth perspective. You know, I had done a lot in the SEALs, but to see how the national policy process really works and to be part of it was incredible. With the START Treaty, for example, I ran, I ran my first meeting maybe on the 10th day or so at the White House.

What was the START Treaty?

Sorry, I should have. Thank you.

Do you know more about it other than how to spell it yet?

I know a little. I know, I know. I now know what it stands for. That's about it. You know, so it's the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. It's the treaty that governed basically the nuclear portfolio between the US and Russia. Wow. So it was the treaty for all things US-Russia. Operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads, how many, what type, what are the limits that each country can do? Because Ideally, you don't want an arms race with nuclear weapons. You know, it's— once each country has mutually assured destruction, why do you want to pour a bunch of resources into seeing who can have more weapons? Like, just as a nation, both nations are better off if you can come to a verifiable limit for both nations. Now, you could ask, is it actually verifiable? And we could have that conversation. Like, that's different. But at the time, I didn't know anything about it. And I remember very vividly in my 10th day or 14th day or something like that, I ran my first meeting in the, in the White House Situation Room. I mean, this is the room where there's a big room, medium room, and small room.

It's since been renovated. I haven't been in there recently, so it might be different. But at the time, this was the room. I'm at the head of the table, and then around the table is basically like number 3s from all of the organizations around DC, like State, Defense, the intelligence community, Department of Energy, et cetera, et cetera. And, I started my first meeting saying, it was all men, I said, hey, listen guys, here's the deal. I know that there's 150 or more years of DC experience sitting at this table, table and 15 minutes or less of experience at the head of this table. But here's the deal. I've been a Navy SEAL for 15 years, and what I'm really good at is keeping those 2 doors closed until we all figure this out together. And because these— this group of people were stuck, they were hitting issues that were binary that you couldn't really compromise on. Legal structure of the text, how should it be written? Or do you give telemetry data for the rockets that get tested? Do you share those with the other nation? Things that were a 0 or a 1. And so, we had to have those conversations and figure it out.

And, I said, listen, my other observation in my 15 minutes of DC is that this group at the table is smarter than your bosses on these topics. Your bosses have to be responsible for a bunch more, and their bosses are all the deputies, the number 2. DEPSEC State, DEPSEC Def, you know, Deputy. And I said, listen, do me a favor, guys. Raise your hand right now if your boss is smarter than you on this topic. Of course, no one raises their hand, right? Great. So we got the smartest people in Washington, D.C. at this table right now. If we as Americans can't figure this out, then it is our failure as citizens and as patriots. Now let's dig in and roll the sleeves up and figure it out. out. Dude, like 7 days later, 10 days later, we had everything hammered out. And then I got asked by the Deputy National Security Advisor to lead the delegation to Moscow to go negotiate that treaty across the table from the Russians. So here I am, a 35-year-old dude, something like that, and responsible to bring this delegation over. Now, look, everybody who is on that delegation knew way more than I did about this thing, But on paper, I was kind of like the senior dude from the White House.

There was one other White House guy that went on this too. But so in fairness, it was co-lead. But showed up in Moscow with the little things that you see in the movies with the microphones and push the red button and interpreters and all that. And it was just quite an experience to do that.

What's that pressure feel I mean, that's a big deal.

It is a big deal. And at the same time, I was— I think we were all realistic knowing that the Russians aren't going to sign a new nuclear treaty with the Americans like 3 months before Bush leaves office. So they would just stall and engage with the next and drag things out. So we were not like— we were realistic about what a good outcome could be. But still, I mean—

What was a good outcome?

Well, a good outcome would've been limiting nuclear weapons for both sides in verifiable ways. I don't want to get into numbers and things like that, but knowing what our arsenal is. And the thing is, it's in our national best interest to make sure that we don't set up rules that bind ourselves and then unbind the, I'll say, the opponent. How do you trust but verify? It's Reagan, trust but verify. So I would say it really wasn't that much pressure because this guy, Anatoly Antonov, his name's popped up from time to time. He was the ambassador in D.C. for a while, but for this event, he was the head Russian. He was fashionably late to our meeting. His whole team was sitting there. He walks out with a printed— I don't know what it 60— I'll make this up— 60 pages of the text that we wrote for the treaty. He comes in and without sitting down, he throws the paper down on the table. And he's like, you know what this smells like? Pause for effect. He's like, this smells like the Cold War all over again. And he just goes on a rant. And I'm just like, you know what this smells like?

What? like? It smells like a comedy movie. You know, like, like, it's like— so anyways, it was, it was going nowhere, but it was a great experience as a— in that role. Months later, you know, President Bush's administration goes home, Obama's administration comes in. I'm the only person at my level that stayed, at least that I know of. I'm 99% sure that's right. But the— because I was not a political appointee. I was a White House fellow. Everybody else at my level, like, was mostly— everybody at my level was a political appointee. Some people detailed from departments and agencies. So thinking back, I'm sure I was— there would have been a handful, you know, not— I'm probably hyperbole for effect there a little bit, but just mostly everybody went home. So in comes the Obama administration, and there's only a handful of us that know where the light switches in the bathrooms are. And they came in with a lot of energy, you know, 2 BlackBerrys in each hand and like boom, boom, boom, like, and it was off to the races. And it was really interesting and a real privilege to be a person who got to see and witness firsthand a transition of presidential power where on one day it's one administration, on the next day it's another.

And, you know, we could— and then, you know, I had a lot of— I mean, we could— got into a lot of really interesting things when, when the Obama administration came in. You know, it's— there was a, I'll say, natural, natural mistrust of the, of the military, maybe somewhat unnatural. I don't know. But the— Pardon me. I was asked to lead a sensitive review of all classified operations of the Department of Defense did. And as you know, from like top secret land, very things get compartmentalized. And by nature, you need— you don't have one person who knows everything. And so I had to go to the Pentagon and say, hi guys, I'm Mike. I need to get read into every single thing that we do.

I mean, what does that even mean? How is that even possible for one person?

It's

to dig into every single classified program that the DOD is involved

There's a way to do it systematically. And there's something called— and this is public, just to be— but it's the— Stephen Hadley was the national security adviser for President Bush, and he wrote memos like the al-Qaeda network execute order. And so that gave the authorities to the Department of Defense of what can you do and what can't you do. And so there were these what was affectionately called the Hadley memos that that allowed the parameters, the policy parameters of what are you allowed to do in the Department of Defense under Title 10 authority. And that's the area— the legal word might be wrong, but that's where the code is written of what the Department of Defense is chartered to do. And so Title 10 is what gives Department of Defense its authorities. And so what can happen under the DOD authorities? And as you know, you spent time at the agency. Title 50 authorities are where the agency's authorities are laid out. And sometimes there are ways to kind of connect those. But what President Obama's staff, like senior staff, was trying to do is just get their head around it. You know, just what's the lay of the land?

What's the what is? Not the what should be. What's the what is? And so I had to kind of help go through— I won't use a number because that is classified, but I had to go through, I'll say, more than a dozen of these exords. More than a dozen, less than 100. Kind of that's the range of like what, what authorities reside in the Department of Defense.

Okay.

So it just meant I had to get read in and get familiar, go to the staff officer who was in charge of this program, spend time with the staff officer in charge of that program and say, hey, tell me what you do and just learn. And it took quite some time to do that. But in the meantime, a couple of months later. So Obama came in. I don't remember the exact day, but January of '09, just say the 20th or whatever it is. The couple of months later, my BlackBerry is going off at like 3 in the morning. Of course, you know, this is, you know, we're not on the iPhone in iPhone world yet. And I didn't really wake up to it all the time. Like, my role was a policy role. It wasn't a crisis role. Yeah. So there was really nothing that should have woken me up at 3 in the morning and mattered. It wasn't the Fallujah, like, oh my gosh, I got to get up and spring into action in 2 seconds. It was— but this particular night, I read what was— I was like, what's happening? Because the BlackBerry kept buzzing and I saw that there was a guy who was hijacked on a ship off of Somalia, a ship that was hijacked by pirates.

And I thought to myself, geez, this is a really serious situation. I drew back to my experience being hijacked in Peru in 1996, and I'm like, I know what this feels like. But set that aside for a second and just think very logically. You've got pirates who want money. And then whatever it was, 40, 50 nautical miles away, I don't remember exactly how far, you have al-Shabaab, the terrorist group sitting in Somalia with money. If pirates can bring Americans to Somalia, there's a really interesting trade for both those parties. Uh-huh. And we have Americans in the hands of al-Shabaab. And I'm like, we cannot let that happen. happen. So at 3 in the morning, I called a friend of mine, Chris, who was sitting on alert at Red Squadron at Dam Neck. And I said, hey brother, as you know, there's a million, a million layers of chain of command between us, but you need to start looking at this situation and start preparing to do something. I don't have any details other than what— very limited details about operational details. And but like, you need to put all of your intelligence assets and everything that you can do to start figuring this problem set out.

And he's like, roger that, you know. So I go put my suit on, I go over to the, the basement of the Pentagon, the NMCC, the National Military Command Center. There was a Marine 3-star general who was the operations officer for the Pentagon, if you will. You know, he's the J3. And I said, I introduced myself. Hey, I'm wearing a suit. Hey, sir, I'm Commander Mike Hayes in the SEALs. I know I'm dressed in a suit, but I'm one of us. I'm not one of them, but I'm here on behalf of— I told him my role, which is like positionally senior to the Department of Defense. And, and I used every ounce of EQ and humility that I could to just say, listen, sir, here's a really serious situation. I'm sure you're tracking it. it. What are you thinking about doing here? And he very derogatorily said, like, Mike, we're not doing anything with this. Or Commander— not even first name kind of guy, just Commander Hayes, we're not doing anything with this. And I was like, wait a minute, sir. I explained to him like what I just said about pirate and al-Shabaab. And I'm like, I don't understand.

Like, you're really like, you're not— And I know where his head was. In his defense, he was like, listen, as soon as we have to go like help every knucklehead in that gets captured at sea, like the Department of Defense will be forever chasing a civilian problem. But that wasn't the right strategic way to look at this because this is a little bit different. And I got to the point where it's like, I'm not going to get anywhere with this guy. He's talking down to me and like he's the smartest guy in the room. And so I just got back on the little Metro that takes me back to the— on the Orange Line and walk out of, what is it, Farragut East or something stop or north or whatever it was and walk my block back into my office in the White House. And I only did this 2 times in the 2 years that I was there. But the— I waited probably 20 minutes just to seem like a bunch of time, like enough time had passed. And I called him back and I said, hey, sir, it's Commander Hayes again. I'm calling with White House guidance.

You know, the White House needs you to prepare courses of action military courses of action for this problem, and that's White House guidance. And so now he's thinking by definition that I can't, I can't make White House guidance. Of course I can. It's my judgment of whether I say that or whether I let the national security adviser say that or the president say that. But it's like 6:45 in the morning. No one— like, it's not like people rolled into work at, I don't know, 7, like early. They're hard workers in every White House. But I just didn't have like— first of all, I knew what people would say. I knew people would trust me to make the right call and whatnot. So then that spun up a bunch of people to start planning, and that's what kicked this into gear. And then it famously became the Captain Phillips situation, which turned into the movie and whatnot. But I ran that—

Wow.

From the White House Situation Room. Wow. Yeah, it was. So like—

White House guidance.

Yeah. Take this as White House guidance, sir.

Oh, man.

The, the cool thing was, I remember we had secure video. We used to call them Civits, SVTCs, secure VTCs. There's always a different name for it, but a 6 a.m. and a 6 p.m., or maybe it was 7 p.m., 7 a.m., 7 p.m., something like that. like twice daily calls with the whole interagency. So, you know, Department of Defense, State, Justice, everybody's plugged in. And man, I am just running the show from the White House Situation Room, just like it's like command and control central. And I remember very vividly the department— like I said to Department of Justice, I said, okay, listen guys, here's the deal. We're going to have one of two outcomes here. We're going to have live pirates or dead pirates. If we have live pirates, where are we prosecuting them? If we have dead pirates, how are we going to bury them so that we don't have a tactical victory but a strategic loss? And they're like, oh, we don't really have an answer to that. Okay, okay, good. I'm glad you don't have the answer, but we got to think ahead and see around corners and think about what will happen.

So I need you to have an answer on our next call in 12 hours and just have the answer so that we can just go into execution mode whenever the time is right. And President Obama walked in to hear that little blip. There were probably 4 of us from the White House that were involved in this, maybe 5. It was, yeah, President Obama. It was Denis McDonough, who later became the White House chief of staff. It was John Brennan, who later became the director of the CIA. It was myself. It would have been Brian Losey, another SEAL, but he was on the road for something. He was actually the guy responsible for all things piracy, but I stood in for him. He's an incredible leader. The— and then there was one other guy who, a staffer who didn't really have much to do with it. But, but when it was all said and done, everybody knows how that, that turned out, that operation landed. But the President Obama, actually, I think I grabbed a screenshot, Sean. President Obama wrote me this really nice note card that I wanted to share with you right here. I've got that in my safe at home.

Mike, great job on the Somali situation. You made a family very happy on Easter. Barack Obama. That's pretty badass.

That felt pretty cool. I was at Easter— I remember I was at Easter Mass at Holy Family. I think that's the name of the church at Georgetown. And I needed to— like, it was like out of— it was like out of the movies. It was like one of the coolest experiences I had in my life. But I was like, oh my gosh, so I got to get back to work right now. I didn't want to miss Easter Mass with my family, but I remember I had to leave Easter Mass and grab a taxi real quick and get back into, into the, the Situation Room. And, and, uh, for, for different reasons. And it was just— it was just a crazy time. But that particular operation really put SEALs on the map with that administration. So I got pulled personally into a whole bunch of things after that. And, hey, get Mike down here to the West Wing or the Sit Room or whatever. And what does Mike think on this? Or, you know, it just, it just gave a credibility. And it wasn't about me, Sean. It sounds like it's about me. It's like I felt great because I was representing not just the SEALs, but the military in the general.

SEALs, but the military, representing the military to this civilian administration and hopefully doing us right to show what can we do as a, as a Department of Defense when things are done right. Now, wow.

Does that general know? Or the— yeah, does that—

I could name him right now and it would be like— but he— I mean, I never— I, you know, I'm not— I'm not a person that needs to— I told you so.

I'm just curious.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it was, it was. It's not complicated. He was the J3. His last name was Paxton. You know, he was the J3 when I was there. I was— we know what year it is. It's not hard to look up. But look, that was my only interaction with the guy. I'm not judging him. I think he was difficult in this situation and made a wrong decision. And I'm sure he made plenty of right decisions and was a great American and served in so many other different ways. But on this one, it took me forcing his hand and that the right thing happened for the country. And that's what the system of checks and balances is. Yeah.

Man, that's amazing. Wow. Damn. So that led to— I mean, that probably played a— wound up playing a role in the Osama bin Laden raid and everything.

I mean, I certainly wouldn't— I think that— I think the right way to say it is it certainly built trust and confidence in what special operations could do. And so when it came time, like, I think Obama made a very bold bet to give the green light to that operation. And I don't care what somebody thinks about Obama, what side of the— I'm not making a political statement here at all. As an individual man, as an individual leader, that was a bold call. That's not in dispute. Mm-hmm. And I think that you can make bold calls. You make bold calls as a leader based on the confidence that you have in someone's— in an organization's ability to execute.

Wow. I mean, what was it like for you just coming off the battlefield straight into that? I mean, that's a staunch difference.

It was. What was it like?

Different person. I mean, totally different personalities.

I had to like chameleon into a whole different, like Battlefield was like—

Totally different culture.

Like, I took very seriously, like, I'm in the lunch line, let me talk to the person in front of me. There was a little, little like buffet in the basement, and I, and I, I didn't have time to, uh, normally to run out and get something to eat, and I would just meet the person next to me. I'm the, I'm the person in the elevator that if the two of us are in the elevator, I can't stay quiet. I'm gonna say, hello, how's your day? You know, I'm probably too extroverted, you know. And, but with every personality type has its pros and cons. But one of the pros of that is that you just are comfortable meeting other people and saying, what do you do? What do you learn? And you learn how the White House as an institution works because you say, hey, listen, let's grab a coffee sometime. I'd like to hear more about your role in your office and what you do. And then when you do these lunches or coffees or things like that, you quickly learn how— learn an organization and you learn how to navigate it.

When it comes to the classified review or AAR, is there anything that you can discuss about that?

Um, sure. I mean, obviously without crossing truly classified lines and getting myself in trouble, I think that— I think it's easy to be skeptical about, and rightfully so in some situations, about like either the institution or specific people. Skepticism is healthy. But, you know, in the national security world, when you go from one party to another, as you get read into the real intelligence in and around something, you realize that there's less party politics around problems than you would imagine, because the military problems are just the military problems, or the policy problems are just the policy problems, and they don't care if you're Democrat or Republican. And so it's harder to be partisan with the truly national security issues than you'd imagine. And so as the administration learned more about the Hadley memos and what was done And this is my take on it. Others in the administration might disagree. There wouldn't be very many people that knew about this, but a couple. I think that there was, you know, more confidence than less that, that the Department of Defense is a pretty damn professional organization.

So you go there commanding SEAL Team 2. Yeah. To Afghanistan, which same deployment we were discussing earlier, just a little out of order. But where did we leave off with Afghanistan?

Well, I jumped around a little bit. Let me go slightly chronologically here because there's an interesting story. First of all, when it was time to leave the White House,

okay,

I was ready. Like 2 years of like nonstop long hours, like the learning curve had flattened out. What I keep learning, of course, Force. But the community, the SEAL community called me and said, hey, Mike, can you extract yourself from your role? And, um, let me— sorry, I left one thing out. After the Captain Phillips thing, President Obama said to me, hey, man, like, that was amazing. Where'd you come from? And I said, don't worry, sir, I was here with the last administration. Just as— because I knew, just as a— what I thought was a joke. But, um, the— I said, but don't worry, sir, I'm actually a White House fellow. I'm not a political appointee. I'm I'm not partisan, you know, and I'm here to serve. And he said, dude, like, that was amazing. Can you just stay my whole administration? And it got to the point where, like, I was involved in a bunch of really fun, cool things. And then when it was time to extract myself, I didn't need to speak personally to the president, but I needed to talk to the right people in the administration and say, the SEAL community has an important role for me running SEAL Team 2.

I want to go do this. I want to make sure it's cool to go. Whether that presidential personnel kind of conversation was just stuck there or it got raised higher, I don't know. I don't need to know. And I got clearance to kind of leave, to leave the White House. So, and to go move into, into the role as commander of SEAL Team 2. The SEAL teams at that time were just beginning to be in charge of all of Special Operations Task Force Southeast. So as, as we well know, we're usually— as much as the public might think SEALs are cool, we never own our own battle space. We're always like under the thumb of like big Army, and which sometimes works well, but sometimes it works really, really horribly wrong because of unnecessary friction. But we were going to be in charge of this whole battle space, and it would be an opera— an opportunity to bring my whole SEAL team overseas. I wasn't the first I think I was the 2nd or 3rd or something like that. But the— just like I did with Iraq, going over to augment Red Squadron and try to learn, what I did right away was, well, was to go bring the leadership of SEAL Team 2 over to Afghanistan for 3-ish weeks or something like that and learn the battlefield and say, what's unique about Afghanistan right now?

Where are we? What's working? What's not working? And, you know, what's the mission? And, and so I went over there and right away, as soon as I landed, there was a helicopter that killed 3 SEALs, I believe it was. I'd have to look back at it. But there was a guy, Brendan Looney, who was killed in a helicopter crash. We could piece that back together with— but I didn't know these guys. They weren't from my team. But I was there for a memorial service. There was like a crypto tech. And of course, a lot of aircrew passed away. I don't remember all the details of this. You know, we've been around so much loss that a lot of these days that should be really crystal clear in my brain just start running together, unfortunately.

Real quick, I'm just curious, why did you feel like it was more important to go back and lead SEAL Team 2

than to be

at the White House? Than to be at the White House when you— when you obviously had the START Treaty, the pirate, you know, the Alabama He obviously had a tremendous amount of respect for you. He asked you to stay. How did you weigh that decision?

That's a great question. While it was an attractive kind of cool policy role, I mean, I'm a SEAL at my core. The opportunity to command a SEAL team into combat that is at the time what I— at the time I would tell you that's what I was put here to do. Because I'm really good— I'm bad at more things than I'm good at, but I'm really good at weighing risk decisions and what should we be doing. I'm really good with vision, with strategy, and then saying what actions do we take or not take in order to achieve said vision and strategy. And I think about all of the lives that our nation's you know, parents or siblings entrust into the military, you have to have people that are really good at risk decisions in charge. And so everything that I had learned up in my life to that point, I think, put me in a very unique ability to make those risk decisions really well. And I felt like that would be more of a capstone type of deployment. Or command opportunity than any number of years, more years at the White House. I think that you're putting your finger on a really good tension, though, because I think if I'm being honest, I would have had more impact for the nation probably staying at the White House.

Maybe it was, but it's also a machine. You know, it's also like you could, you could argue like, hey, somebody else came in behind me and took my job and probably did better than I would have done. You know, I don't know. I remember who that was, but, but I was just ready. And the opportunity— it's kind of like if you're in the minor leagues your whole life and you get that call to the major leagues, or they're like, hey, do you want to, you know, come do something different? You're going to want to go to the major leagues. And so commanding a SEAL team, when you get to bring your whole team into, into combat, it was a no-brainer for me.

Okay.

So we did this advance party with the leadership, and right away I'm at a memorial service for a bunch of great Americans, you know. And I was like, holy shit, this is real again. And I circulated around to a couple different places and, you know, asked about different operations. I just asked all kinds of questions. And just the, the inquisitive, like, learning me was like, let me learn as much as I can. so that I can prepare our team to come over here, come back here in a year. And the thing that I remember the most about that trip was actually my return flight from Kandahar back to Germany. We were having trouble getting our own aircraft out, and all of a sudden there was a medevac bird. Like, it was like a KC-135. It was like a 135. platform. It might have been a KC-135, but it's normally— it was a refueler platform but reconfigured to be medevac. And it had like a bunch of gurneys on it, and, and there was room for us to kind of basically ride the ambulance back to— from Kandahar back to, to Germany. And so we jumped on the— when you're ready to get home, any trip you're on, you're ready to get home.

And we were like, let's just jump on the medevac, you know. And we got on and I remember maybe 10 patients or so being on there, and I was toward the aft end of the plane. I don't know, aft is a ship term. I don't know if it's a plane term, but the back end of the plane, there was a gurney with a soldier, you know, elevated maybe 4 or 5 feet and just laying flat, head like all kinds of ACE bandages around his head, completely out of it. And like, like medically induced coma, kind of like borderline coma. And there are, of course, nurses that are flying. They're each responsible for, I think, 2 of the patients or something like that. And I was— I had a seat basically right next to this guy who was in this medically induced coma. And I asked the nurse, I said, you know, you know what happened? And she said, yeah, he was in an IED. They— he right now, his his skull is, is just like cut open. His brain was exposed. He's going to pass away, but we're just flying him back to Germany so that he can pass away next to his family.

Shit. And I'm just thinking to myself, Jesus, man, like it was like some young soldier who— I mean, people were dying, like many people a day. So it's on the one hand, you get numb to it. But I just remember putting my hand on him and praying for him and talking to him. It's like the Unknown Soldier, man. Like, I don't know who that guy was, but that kid gave his life for the nation. And I was like, the least I can do is talk to him and pray for him for 7 straight hours or 6 hours, whatever that flight is from Kandahar to, to, uh, Landstuhl, to Frankfurt, Germany. I slept underneath the gurney for maybe a little bit, but I stayed right with him. And, and I had such an intense drive to say, this will not be any of my guys when I come back to— when I come back to command here in Afghanistan. I will do whatever it fucking takes to not have any of my guys look like this on the way home. You can't outwork me. And, and that's how I approached the next year of my life.

And we went to Afghanistan a year later. And I think, you know, and I'm really proud to say, like, we brought everybody home. It was really hard. It was nonstop. It was the hardest time of my life. That 10-month deployment, by far the hardest 10 months of my life. I don't think I slept more than 3 hours straight for 10 months. I was, you know, at that time of the war, I was the guy who decided when we dropped bombs from planes onto the ground. That was my decision. And, you know, today with the limited kinetic activities, that those decisions get made way higher. But when you're dropping all kinds of bombs all the time, you need to delegate decisions down. And in 2012, 2012, That was the O-5 commander's decision. And we dropped more than 1,000 times. And I'm proud to say we never harmed anybody we shouldn't harm, and we harmed a lot of people we should harm. And, you know, it's interesting because like when I speak in the business world, I talk about decision-making systems and how to think about things like this. A lot of the— like what I built from a decision-making system and how to do that was I carry into the business world.

But, you know, it was waking up at on a moment's notice, running down the 40-foot hall into the operations center, and very distinctly not having a job. I always joke around that L in SEAL stands for lazy. But like I say that because like I need to come in there and be able to think about what we're missing. When you have an operations center, everybody gets so focused on the positive space, you know, like, like the things that they have to do, and they're overwhelmed with all the things they have to do organizationally. You have to have somebody who sits back and thinks about what you're missing. What aren't we thinking of? And, and then you have to separate. Like, I'm ultimately the decider on that bomb, but I'm also an input. And the thing is, if my decision is always the same as my input, then by definition, I don't need anybody else in that room. That's a bad system. You know, and so what that means is out of 1,000 times, I need to be the input, but then listen to the other inputs. And then my decision sometimes is going to be different than my individual input.

And probably it was maybe 5 or 10 times we did something that I like. Like we did, we I reversed my decision based on other people's inputs, and I think that trait of surrounding yourself with people who aren't afraid to speak their mind, who tell you what you think, who really have the experience, who know how to ask the right questions, who know how to communicate, who are quick, agile, like that's the kind of thing that that that allow that keeps people safe in the field. So you know that that Afghanistan deployment was. incredibly, incredibly intense. You know, when I got there, Sean, I was doing a turnover with the previous team. I had all my deployment bags. I'm in the— the commander gets his own room, and I actually even have an internet line at the time, like an unclassified internet and classified in my room. I'm really lucky. And, uh, I was unpacking and And I found my grandfather's mask card from his, his, from when he passed away in 2009. So at the time, 3 years earlier. And I was just like, you know, my grandfather gave me so much wisdom along the way.

Again, the Pearl Harbor survivor and everything. And then, and it just felt really nice because I thought like, hey, my grandfather's with me. This is going to be— this will be about— this will be the hardest 10 months of my life. And I knew it coming into it. And, and it just felt great because I felt like he was watching me. And, and I'll jump ahead just to keep continuity of a story with my grandfather here. But middle of the deployment, I had a really hard day. If you said how many times have I felt real true stress in my life, I think it's one day. And this one day comes like, comes to mind. We had all kinds of crazy shit happening tactically, strategically on the battlefield, people being, you know, attacked, etc., etc. Sometimes we had 5 different or 6 different units in troops-in-contact situations. I also had just found out that my wife had a medical situation back home, and I wanted to go home. I really wanted to go home and be with her. But I also knew that I'm better at these risk decisions than anybody else in the organization.

And not to sound arrogant, I just had done it more. You know, and the organization isn't the same. Like, sure, it would have been fine. My number 2, my executive officer, Rocky Russell, the best guy on the planet, and he could have easily been me. But the 2 of us are better than one of us would be alone. And I didn't— I didn't— so I was just really conflicted and I just felt a lot of pressure. And I called a really good friend of mine who was a White House fellow classmate of mine who was a a badass doctor, this guy Brian Alexander. Shout out to Brian. I called him, just buried the weight of the world on him, and I was like, dude, I need help. And he'd never heard me like that. And I explained what I needed with my wife. And dude, like, this is when you find out who your friends are. I don't want to go into detail what it was, but my friend Brian made magic happen and just did everything that— like, if, if you call me at 3 in the morning and you have whatever your highest expectations are of your friends, of what help you need, like, brother, I got your back.

That's the way I am. Unfortunately, not everybody lives that way. I don't know. But, but when you live that way, when you do need that help, it's— you get it, you know? And you don't always get it from the same place you give it. it, but it's like that karma concept. And this guy Brian, like, really, really allowed me to focus on what was happening in Afghanistan. So I felt really, really, really pressured. And, you know, one of the things my grandfather taught me was a poem that he read. He had to— his dad made him memorize as a little boy. It's called If by Rudyard Kipling. I'd be tempted to read the whole poem here. It's not that long, but I really recommend people listening Google Rudyard Kipling's If. It's an amazing poem that kind of— it's what does it mean to be a man is the essence of the poem. Like, you know, can you hang out with— these are my words, not Rudyard Kipling's— but can you hang out with kings and can you hang out with plumbers? Can you be around people like— can you tolerate people lying about you and talking distaste or distrustful things about you?

And like in all of these hard situations, You know, if if this if this if this if if all these things you'll be a man, my son, is the way the poem ends. Nobody knew in my like the significance of that poem in my in my I didn't talk much about this kind of stuff with my my teammates, and I just felt Sean like the such extreme stress and pressure and everything, and I I log on to my computer and I have to show you. This, this is what was in my inbox. This is a this is an email. I'll maybe we. This is my buddy Rocky, my XO. He sent me the poem If. That's June 7th, 2012. He didn't even write anything. He just copy-pasted and sent me If without knowing its significance at all to me. That was an email from my grandfather in heaven.

Geez. Well, that's not a coincidence.

No. You know, I've heard you talk a lot about guardian angels. I believe so deeply in that, but I also believe that in many ways my grandfather is my guardian angel. Wow. Isn't that mind-blowing? Of all the things he could do, how would he ever know? Like, he just couldn't know. There's no way. And this just lands in my inbox at the time, the greatest time of stress in my life.

Did you ever ask him?

I said, right, yeah. I, I, I said, Rock, what made you pick that? He's like, I don't know, just great poem, you know? Like, dude, great. Like, I had— I, I was so overwhelmed I was so overwhelmed that I couldn't even, like, tell him the significance. So, I mean, powerful.

Yeah. Wow. You still talk to him?

All the time.

Did you tell him the significance of that poem to you?

Absolutely, yeah. So we had an Australian— like, we were right next to the— in Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan, where my headquarters was. We had the Australian SAS and Commando task force right next to us. Man, those guys are bad to the bone. Like, uh, and their commander became a friend of mine. He still is to this day. They had a Catholic priest assigned to their unit. He came over to our— in our compound, which is like a stone's throw away, every, I don't know, Saturday at 4 o'clock or whatever. And we had Catholic Mass every day on deployment. And it was the same 5 or 6 of us in the task force that would be at Mass. And it's kind of a weird feeling when you're like— Like, we got rocketed for the first 30 days of that deployment. government at that headquarters. Like, they were sometimes effective, sometimes many times ineffective. But, you know, you're just like in cammies and you got a gun on your side and your long gun sitting, you know, at the entrance to the makeshift room that's the chapel, if you will, the church. And then there you are, like, able to pray, able to have Mass, able to take communion, able like to And so Rocky also, I hope he doesn't mind me saying this, also Catholic and also at that, at that Mass every single week with me.

He's a great man, Rocky Russell. But like, it was a lot of like the first 30 days when we got rocketed, like, man, there were, there were vehicle IEDs that were like the big technique, procedure, tactic, whatever you want to call it. From the enemy was to get these big gas trucks because, you know, we were so dependent on, on these, on generators. There was contracted vehicles that would fill up the generators, but some of them had been hijacked or taken over by the enemy. They would drive in and then just blow themselves up and just blow— I mean, just vaporize buildings on compounds. I slept in that room that had like— my concrete was maybe 6 inches thick. And every night you go to bed, you're like, will I even know I died? Every single night. And in those first 30 days of getting rocketed, like, it— look, I wasn't like scared about the getting rocketed. I was, I was worried about it hitting somebody randomly on our camp because I'm responsible for everybody. But there was one night I was on Skype. Nobody uses Skype anymore, it's not a thing, but at the time that's how I was able to Skype home.

And we were so used to getting rocketed that I was, I was on video and audio with my wife and daughter, and the alarm started going off about incoming, incoming, incoming, you know. And it's like this— it was anyways, um, it was not a human, it was one of our systems that, that helped us know that. And the explosion was super close. I assessed from the sound it was maybe 5, 10 meters outside my wall.

Geez.

And, and I was like on video with the family and I was like, I was like, oh, I got to go very calmly. Like, oh, I got to go. And they're like, what was that? My wife or my daughter, I don't remember who asked it, one of them. And I said, oh, no big deal. We're just getting rocketed again, but I got to go check this out. Dumbest thing I've ever said in my whole life. I've said a lot of dumb things, you know. The worst, to have your wife and daughter sitting home and be like, oh, no big deal, honey, we're just getting rocketed again. Happens all the time. IQ zero, you know. Uh, so that didn't help the stress on the home front. I mean, they didn't show it, But anyways, but, but I think that we underestimate the pressure on the families. I've got another really good faith story, if you will, from that deployment, if I could.

Yeah.

So at the time, there was a— we had finally figured out the more innocent people you accidentally kill, the more the populace doesn't like you. Like, hello, not rocket science. But there was a policy that was implemented called Boots on the Ground BDA, Battle Damage Assessment. So after you drop a bomb, you were supposed to somehow get boots on the ground, peep humans to go verify that you didn't kill any civilians. And, and like, I was— that was a— sometimes like you have a force in the field that calls in bombs and they can just be like, you know, through some sort of optics be like, nope, boots on the ground, BDA negative, we're good. There was a night where we did a— what's— this is early in the days of this, or a Type 3 CAS, close air support. So what that means is there wasn't a human on the ground. There was an Army A-team that knew their battlespace cold, man. The, the, the, the— just stuttered 17 times. The A-team guys, the Green Beret guys, really are great with knowing their terrain and their battlespace. And 3 in the morning, whatever it was, these guys call up and they're like, we have 9 Taliban that are, uh, some of whom are planting IEDs on this road.

And these guys know this space really well and they know the patterns of life. And you have to be careful. Is it farmers? Is it a backhoe? Is it, you know, or, you know, they, you know, the classic things you need to worry about. Yeah. But man, I trust these guys. Like, these are great Green Berets. And but we get a— they're not They're looking at it through a drone. They call me up and say, sir, can we do Type 3 CAS? We can clear the battle space. We can clear the battle space visually through the optics of the drone. So I'm like, that's a pretty badass move. Let's do it. You know, but how sure are we that there's no civilians? And we talk through that. Like, I'm talking actually on the phone to the senior guy. from that outstation, maybe 20 kilometers away from me. That's it. Maybe, maybe less. And I get to the point where I'm comfortable. Missiles away, kill 8 Taliban, 9 Taliban, whatever it was. Now, higher headquarters in Afghanistan, who monitors all the SATCOM channels, calls down to my headquarters. One of his staff staff, like the colonel, his colonel staffer calls down and goes, okay, hey, great effects on the battlefield.

Get us your boots on the ground BDA as soon as you can. And I'm like, we are not going to send humans down this one channelized road. But I call the Green Beret team out there and I say, hey guys, listen, like, let's just talk about this boots on the ground BDA. Like, are you— and they were more against it than me. Like, they were like, this, no effing way. We'll die. Like, that's a— we just saw IEDs being planted there. We know the terrain, it's channelized, it's a perfect place for an ambush. Like, no freaking way, that's stupid. And I'm like, okay, that's what I thought, I just want to hear you say it. So, so the— I call back personally to the colonel and I'm like, hey sir, we're— this is going to be a unique situation. We are not doing boots on the ground BDA, makes no sense. And he's like, People kind of knew I came from the White House, and I was like, you know, I know strategy. And like they knew I worked Afghanistan. Like like like I had a lot of credibility with with you know not like everybody knew me.

I don't mean to sound more important than I was, but I had some credibility. And this colonel was like, "Hey, that's not that's out of policy." Like you know, well, let me. I'll talk to the general about it. But I knew what he was going to do. Probably the same thing I did when I was at the White House is go just pretend he talked to the general. And I just laid down the law and I'm like, hey, listen, I'm— no, we are not going back. We will not do it. Like, and he had the general call down and it was an order. This was an order to put our guy, these Army, this Green Beret team to go do the boots on the ground BDA. And I was like, sir, this is a terrible risk decision and it doesn't make sense. And we left it in the way that it was kind of like I wasn't yet subordinate to the point where I was telling him, F no, final, this is it. But I was like, but also he knew my position and it was basically like, let me just go get some more information and I'll call you back in a few minutes kind of thing.

And I'm like, really what I need to do is think, you know, don't say something I don't want to say because I know I'm in one of those moments where time doesn't actually matter. I can take the time to make sure I make an informed decision. Sean, I go back to my room and I do what my mom taught me when I was a kid, which is, you know, you flip through the Bible. This is my Trident worn-off kind of Bible that I had on deployment with me. And my mom always said, you know, when you want to get some guidance from the big man upstairs, just flip through and, you know, close your eyes and put your finger on a spot and just read what comes up. So I do that. This is what I get. Matthew 24:26. So if anyone tells you, there he is out in the desert, do not go out. Wherever there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather. From the Bible, Sean.

Wow.

Wow. So if anyone— if anyone tells you there he is out in the desert— I'm in the desert— do not go out. Like, plain as day, do not go out. So I'm like, wow. So, okay, so I— so I don't— I've got so many pages like this. This could be a show in and of itself. But so I called the general back and I'm like, hey, sir, final, you know, we're not, we're not going out. And he said, and he was pissed, and he said, okay, well, Mike, I have the Afghan commando general here, or I don't know, commando, the one of the Afghan local forces general here. I'm going to order, I'm going to have him order the Afghans to go do it. I think he was trying to give me elegantly, give me a way out. I don't, I don't command the Afghans. Like, that's a different chain of command. The Afghans get in their vehicle, they go down that road. 3 vehicles, 2 of them blown up, one to smithereens. 3 die. 3, 4. I, my, this is the, this is the thing. Like, I, my details on this are so fuzzy a little bit too.

I might be off by a person, but like 3 or 4 Afghans die, which is horrible. We lost good men, good humans. A bunch of the guys got like wounded in action, mangled up, and like, why? So unnecessary.

The leadership is too detached from the ground.

Yeah. And that's what I'm there to help. That's what I— that's why you need to rely on your people who are closer to the ground to make the decisions. So I'm deeply disturbed. I'm, first of all,

Pete Blaber came on to talk about this. Do you know Pete Blaber?

I, I know who he is. I, I— yeah, yeah, it was— so the next day I get on the helicopter, I fly out to that Green Beret team. I walk in, that team— the team is assembled. It's just me and them. I forget, 7 of them, 9 of them, something like I walk in, it is dead silent. And their leader, their, their captain says, sir, you made a decision that so few officers would ever, ever make. At least 3 of us are here today in this room because you had a backbone and you made the right call. And like, we can't thank you enough. And when you ask me what's the thing I'm proudest of in my life, it's making decisions that have enabled people to still be here. And I like, I can't even describe the emotions of hearing those words. In the, I don't even want. I didn't even want to be proud about it because it was a situation I wish none of us were in. But like, man, you talk about consequential decisions, like not caving into the orders the general gave me. And admittedly, I was like, this is a potential career decision.

This guy can say, not following orders, you go home. We don't want you here anymore. anymore. I would have been on the next plane home. But I was like, you know what? I know what right is. Right is right. And sometimes you just got to go against the grain and do what right is. And I'll never forget that moment. Damn. But can you believe that Bible reading? Do not go out

Clear as day. Clear as day. And that's happened quite a few times, huh?

Things like that. You know, you just get some wisdom that you wouldn't have otherwise had. You get another perspective. Look, sometimes my mom's wrong and it doesn't mean anything. And you're like, what the hell does this say? Like, I'm confused. I don't know what this says. It's not helping. But, you know, A lot of times it helps.

Wow, pretty cool in that exact moment.

That feeling, Sean, of lifting up on the C-17, the last bird out of there, not having lost any— anybody. Now granted, we had guys who, who certainly, as you've heard, you know, wounded in action and missing legs and stuff like that, but everybody came home. A lot of us came home with, you know, certainly invisible wounds from war, but everybody was alive. And It's funny because the last bird out, I remember it was really bad weather and the Tarin Kowt runway is really short for a C-17. It had to do this like crazy landing to get in, and we weren't sure it was going to get in. It was like really bad visibility and, and it landed. And then we're like, well, if it lands, it can definitely take off. You know, taking off is easier than landing. And, and, uh, and, uh, So we were just praying for this bird to get down. It had done like 8 passes and it landed. And myself, Rocky, who you just heard about, this guy Owen, my supply officer, who was one of the greatest humans on the planet, and just like the rest of the head shed, if you will, getting on that plane.

And then when you're finally out of small arms range, because the C-17s got hit with small arms all the time, time coming out of that runway. Like, once you were out of small arms altitude, like, I can't even describe the weight that came off of me.

I'll bet.

I just, I just, I just hugged Rocky for the longest uncomfortable man hug that you could possibly imagine, you know? And same thing with Owen and the guys that I was with. It was just We did it. We brought everyone home. Where do we go from here?

You're a hell of a leader, Mike.

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What happens when you get home?

Well, about maybe 2 months before the end of deployment, I forget exactly when, but the commanders all get a fit— every rank, as you remember, you get a fitness report or an evaluation on your performance once a year. I— my whole career was like one of X, you know. I was always like the, the early promote, or like the— meaning like whenever there were like competitive like situations, I don't think of it as— I never thought of it as a competition, me and other guys. It was me versus self of go be the best person you can be. But I always always was the one of X. Like, I could lay my fitness reports out here and like somebody who looked at it would be like, yeah, the guy's right. Except when, uh, or so not except, but when I, I got my, my fit rep as it— when I was in command of SEAL Team 2, 8 months or so into this deployment that you, you and everybody's heard a good bit, probably too much about now today. Tim Szymanski, Commodore Captain Tim Szymanski, who is a great human and a great friend. But he sent me my fitness report.

I have like the one of, I think it was 6 or 7 commanders. And I was like, okay, you know, great. You know, that kind of keeps you on the track for the next wickets, the next command promotion, etc. And I, because I just never saw myself getting out. I never, at that point, I was I was having fun, doing well, etc., etc. He called. So he sends me the fitness report. It's signed. It's one of 6 or— I'm top-ranked guy. And then he calls me the next day and he is, hey, Mike, I need to pull that fitness report back and make you number 2. And I'm like, huh? Like, you already signed this. Like, I'm like, what do you mean number 2? Like, can you explain? And he's like, well, we have one of the other commanders who will not do a deployment won't have a combat deployment in command like you do. And I'm gonna make you guys the same average so that your, your averages are the same, but you'll be— he'll be 1 and you'll be 2, and it won't matter to your career. I'm gonna make sure you screen for major command and promotion and etc., etc.

But I need to do this because if I don't do this, this other guy won't get promoted. And, and I was like, I was really taken aback

because he didn't do a combat deployment.

He didn't have the opportunity. Like, it wasn't his fault that he didn't. It was his timing in command.

So

I know my thoughts exactly, but, um, what, what Tim Szymanski was trying to do was get 2 of his guys promoted and moved, moved upward instead of just one. That was his intention, and it's a good intention, but it's not a good intention when— like, for me, it certainly didn't feel right or feel good. Like, here I am busting my ass, not sleeping. Like, you know, is

it a good intention?

Well, not toward me, but his. It's a net—

Is it a good intention to put somebody without combat experience in charge of whatever he was going to be in charge of?

Well, you could—

A good intention? Well, is that a good intention for the guys that are under him?

Well, I understand what—

A lack of respect? Is there a reason why combat experience—

Well,

I'd be important in a promotion at a SEAL command.

Trust me, I had all of those thoughts.

Because it sure as shit would matter to me as a— as an enlisted guy.

Let me, let me put But not saying I— let me argue the counterfactual just for argument's sake. This guy had combat experience earlier in his career in Iraq, and like, he's a combat-proven SEAL. He just didn't have the opportunity to deploy as a commander in combat. And so now I would argue like, hey, command in combat is different than everything else. And so Your point, I think, is right. And so what I told Tim was, I said, hey boss, like, totally your prerogative. You can do whatever you want. I'm just going to tell you that I'm getting out. Like, right there, I was like, I will not, like, stick around. And at this point, this isn't a statement to try to make you change your mind because I just made my mind up. And of course, there's an old saying, like, never make a career decision on deployment. I've given that advice so many times in my life, and I just— I failed to take take it myself. I'm really great at giving advice and not good at taking my own advice. But on that call, like, I was just like, I could see it so clearly because one of two things would happen.

I don't want him to change his mind. He's already made his mind up. Like, you've already— like, I don't want to force— I don't want to be back to the number one because I've just threatened the guy that I'm gonna get out. That's not the way that I want my— my— that's not— that's against my values, you know. And so I, um, I told him verbally, I said, I'm getting out. Of course I'm going to finish this deployment super strong and everything, but I'm done. He was so taken aback, like never in a million years did he think that was a possibility.

Why do you think he didn't think that was a possibility?

I just don't think he considered how seriously I took, you know, the situation or the issue. You know, it's— to him it was like, oh, no big deal, you're, you know, same average and this and that. Like, big deal to me. I'm not going to stick around if I'm— there's the— the world is a meritocracy. I got plenty of things that I can go do outside the SEALs if, you know, and, and, uh, I didn't know what at the time. I didn't have a— I didn't have a plan or anything, but I'd seen at the White House or through the White House Fellowship, I saw plenty of people that had really cool things that they were doing, and I was like, look, look, you know, in a grand scheme of things, like, I don't— I love the SEALs, I love the military, I loved everything, but like, everything happens for a reason. And I probably shouldn't say this, but you know, my— when I, I, uh, my wife was like, hey, the first million dollars you earn, we'll just call that your first Szymanski. I have the screenshot. From when my bank account finally, you know, when it hit that, it is on my home screen on my, on my desktop to this day.

Nice. Oh man.

And so that, like, I knew I was getting out. So I came home myself, another guy Scott Moore, and another guy Britt Slabinski, 2 other amazing humans, amazing SEALs. Slab, Medal of Honor recipient. Scott Moore, Rear Admiral. Like, we were all kind of getting out at the same time. They put the 3 of us in one office for like 3 months where we worked out and stretched and like figured out what we were doing with our lives. And, and, uh, I just kind of— I didn't even do a retirement ceremony.

Are you serious?

I was like, I'm out. I just quietly faded away. And I was pissed at the teams for a long time, but like, in the words of one of the detailers Uh, he said, Mike, you know, this is an institution made of individuals, and, and, uh, you know, it's not like— it's not like the Navy just kicked you out, you know. It's, it's, uh, it's not like you've decided to get out. You're getting out on your own terms. We want you in. You're still going to have a crazy good career continuing in the team. Everybody tried to convince me to stay in. Everybody tried to convince me to stay in, but I like just— maybe I'm stubborn or, or just, or just maybe, maybe the ego was too high and I was like, hey, I can't just— hey, as soon as I'm not number one, I'm out. Whatever. I don't— I just, I didn't really give it that much deep thought. I was just like, I'm out.

I just, um,

and

you think it was your ego, or you think that maybe the value system?

Well, I'm being generous to think of other possibilities. I think, I, I think it's— if something's truly a meritocracy, I would have, I would have not been in the situation that I was in. But I think, look, I mean, I am so glad that happened to me right now. I'm so glad. It's hard in life when you get these things that happen to see it a blessing, you know, and to go through these— like, I had a hard transition out of the military and, and thinking through, like, I didn't have a job. I don't— and I had 3 months later, I had a mortgage to pay and like, what am I going to go do? You know? But I was just like, I've heard, you know, Sean, you talk about— we talked about it personally last night. And then I've heard you on, on this platform talk about how hard you had it starting this platform. Like, nothing good comes from not taking risk and working really, really hard. You've built this with all kinds of probably pressures and stresses that no one can appreciate but you and your wife, you know. And, and, and I certainly had that in different ways.

And, you know, I was really lucky, though, When I was getting ready to deploy, I thought about our spouses who stay home. And I thought, you know, if there's only a way to get our spouses some babysitter coverage when we deploy, that'd be amazing. I thought if we gave the spouses $300 or so. Like they wouldn't spend it on babysitting. So I was like, I need to come up with a system that gives people use or lose babysitting hours and that's it. You can either use it or you just get nothing. And then every one of the spouses will use the 10 hours per month that I was thinking about getting. And there was a service in Virginia Beach where they had like you could, you could text and get a babysitter on short notice. It was like a, like a ring a babysitter kind of thing, you know? And I thought, what if we could get that? I did the math and I thought of, you know, how many spouses do we have? How many hours? How many months will we be gone? How much we need to raise? We need to raise $800,000 to get every spouse at SEAL Team 2 10 hours of the use-or-lose babysitting hours per month.

And I thought, geez, how am I going to get $800 grand? That's an astronomical number to me at that time. I was a lifetime member of the Council on— I am a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. And, and I had a buddy who did a trip down to SEAL Team 2, and I called him. He was from Goldman Sachs. And I said, hey, Tim, I need to— I'm not allowed to raise money as an active duty naval officer, but you can for me. Like, I'll come up to New York and, and talk anywhere that you need me to talk. And we got to collectively raise $800 grand. We— I don't remember our final number, but we were close but not quite there. But we had all that money go to the Navy SEAL Foundation. And then the Navy SEAL Foundation, which of course nonprofit, so everybody's donations were tax deductible. They paid, they covered, you know, that became the payment mechanism to go pay for the babysitting use or lose hours. And so when we were, when we were on deployment, everybody, every spouse got that. And I had spoken for, I don't know, 3 or 4 straight days to different groups up in Goldman or other New York groups.

And you know where we are back at the tail end of the deployment. You know when I'm going through all this, I'm getting out kind of stuff with with only my like I didn't even tell Rocky my number two that I was just like this is just for me to know. I don't need anybody else to be distracted right now, and I don't want them to think I'm distracted because I'm not. And and I got this email randomly. From Goldman Sachs like 2 months before coming home saying, hey, Mike, a bunch of people heard you speak here a year and a half— a year, year and a half ago. We're doing a really big event. It's going to be a who's who speaker thing. It's the first annual Builders and Innovators Conference. We want you to be a keynote speaker. And I was like, hey, I'm flattered. Thank you. But I'll be just getting home from Afghanistan with my wife and daughter. I'm emailing you from Afghanistan. Afghanistan. And the guy coordinating it said, no, no, no, you don't understand. You can't say no to this. Bring your wife and daughter out. It's going to be President Clinton, Deepak Chopra, Larry Ellison from Oracle.

It's Ryan Seacrest. He's like, bring your daughter. She'll meet President Clinton and Ryan Seacrest. And, we'll make this such a cool homecoming thing for your family. It was out in California in Newport Beach. So, I said, Okay, so I did that. I prepared really hard of like, what should I talk about? And then just got up on stage without notes and just kind of wung it. And it went, it went really, really well. And the CEO and the president of Goldman, Lloyd Blankfein and Gary Cohn, came up to me afterwards and they said, hey, listen, that was so amazing. You are coming to Goldman as soon as you're out in another month or to. And they, they, they said a number that I'd be too embarrassed to state publicly here on multiples of my salary, you know, that was just mind-blowingly different. And I was like, okay, that's great. Like, good. And I said to them, I said, look, that's great. Thank you. I'll either in 2 years, I'll either be good or more likely I'll be from Goldman. You know, you guys, you know. And they didn't think it was funny, but I sure did.

So I said it again. But I made my rounds at like a couple of different meetings at Goldman Sachs. And then I had met Jamie Dimon when I was a White House fellow, and he had said to me, Mike, anytime you get out of the SEALs, let me know. I'd be glad to help you land a role. So I was like, as long as I'm talking to Goldman, I might as well talk to JPMorgan Chase. I emailed Jamie just like, hey, Mr. Dimon, here, here's where we met. Reminder, 3 years ago we met. Here's what you told me. me. And he emailed back like within 10 minutes and said— it was like a Thursday or Friday— he said, can you be in my office at 9 AM next Tuesday? I was like, yes. So this was my transition, Sean, out of the military. Yeah. So I fly up and I go meet Jamie Dimon, and he has a guy who to this day is one of my best friends, Matt Zames, the chief operating officer at JPMorgan, like walk me around all kinds of places at JPMorgan and be like, do you want to work in credit cards, in finance, in real estate, in technology?

And like, what do you— what interests you? Because JP Morgan has everything, you know? And I was like, man, how freaking lucky am I? Like, this is amazing. So, uh, I flew back down to Virginia Beach. I'm not still— I'm not even out of the SEALs yet. And I call a buddy of mine who was at Treasury when I was at the National Security Council. His name is Dave McCormick. He's now a senator from Pennsylvania. Dave was at a hedge fund called Bridgewater Associates in Westport, Connecticut. I called Dave and I'm like, hey, brother, I need some— I need some help. I need your advice here. I've got Goldman and offers from both Goldman and JPMorgan, literally from the top of the top 2 leaders of the 2 firms. I need your advice on how to navigate this and what I should go do. And he said, Mike, I'm only going to give you your advice live. Get your ass up to Westport and let's do it over dinner. I got nothing but like my stretch routine, you know, keeping me in Virginia Beach. And so I fly up and meet Dave. He springs Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund, and Greg Jensen, the real brains behind the operation, an amazing human being.

He springs them on me. And it's not even like an interview. It's just like, hey, here's why you're coming here. And so now my life's harder. Now instead of getting advice, they're trying to get me to come to Bridgewater. And they must know me really well because they said, listen, 2/3 of our senior hires fail out here and only 1/3 are successful. You're coming here. Come here. You'll love it. I was like, really? While that was like— I knew that would be a path of like the hardest path in front of you is always the path of greatest growth. All of these would have been hard paths for me, but I— and numerically, all the offers were basically identical. There wasn't like a numbers reason to go to one place or the other. And Westport, Connecticut has a beach, and I'm a SEAL. And so I was like, you know what? I can still run on the beach, and this will be really freaking hard. I went to Bridgewater, and that was my transition out of the SEALs.

Wow, man. What were you doing at Bridgewater?

I started out as like a chief of staff for Ray Dalio. In many ways, I was kind of a— it was a similar-ish role that I had at the White House because as like a chief of staff, like in the business world, I would describe a chief of staff as potentially a very strategic role. Your job is to put things in 3 buckets. What can you decide on behalf of the boss and never tell him or her? What can you decide and then tell him or her later, like, hey, I made this decision, but I need you to know? Or the third bucket is, what can you— what do you explicitly not decide but make sure it's teed up in a very efficient way so that you're like, hey boss, here's a hard decision to be made. Here's one argument for this. Here's the arguments against it. How do you want to think about this? And let the boss decide. Like, that's the— that is, in essence, that's the role of the chief of staff in any organization. And then simultaneously constantly move things from that last bucket down to the first bucket as you gain trust and confidence.

So these guys, honestly, they just made a bet on a general athlete. They didn't know what they were going to get from some random ex-SEAL who had a policy role at the White House. And they're just like, I think they were just like, look, this guy's going to bring something here. Let's just go figure it out. And I found myself kind of like, like any first role, you want to land somewhere where you can contribute and be helping the organization, but also learning. And so with like, I don't know, 15 different departments, you know, IT, front office, client service, etc., etc., how do you help those, those departments within the organization work better together and in harmony for the good of the whole organization? And so that I can do anywhere. But do I know about equities or debt, credit cycles, et cetera, et cetera, and the underlying business of what Bridgewater did? Absolutely zero. And so that's where I was able to start learning a good bit. And that was my— I stayed there for 4 years and I don't— I mean, you can keep talking about private sector stuff, but You know, that's, that's, that, that hard, hard kind of like assignment, if you will.

Assignment, I call it. But the first role out of the SEALs really set up my— set me up for great success because it just made me so much better in all of my future roles.

How long did it take you to make your first Szymanski?

One year. For real.

Congratulations.

Thank you. Yeah. Wow. It's just a different feeling, like, to go out and not worry, you know, to not worry. Like, when I got out of the SEALs, we probably had $50 grand in home equity debt. Maybe after we sold, if we would have sold the house, we might have had $100 grand after 20 years in the SEAL skills. Like, people underappreciate— like, civilians who don't understand the military underappreciate the compensation aspect of what you leave on the table by being in the military. Now, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of people in the military who don't have the hustle, who, like, frankly, the military is like a social welfare program because they don't work. You know, they're like— What I'm saying is There are all types in an organization.

Yeah.

You know, the top 5% of the military and the bottom 5% of the military are the same in the civilian world and the military world. I think everybody that you've had sit in this chair is in that top 5%. You're in that type of— like, you just grind, you hustle, you make things happen. And ultimately, I mean, it's not about ourselves. It's about being able to give back.

I think entrepreneurship is a— I think it's the best segue for people coming out of special operations, maybe even all the military.

You know, I, I agree with you when I can see you on this side of it. I don't know that I always agree Because, well, you try, you fail, you grow for sure. But like when I was getting out, I have a really close friend who runs Warby Parker. It's a company that makes eyeglasses. And Neil Blumenthal, amazing. I actually met him at that Goldman Sachs event. He was being— he was selected in a very elite group of entrepreneurs. He's built something from zero to very big. Neil introduced me to a co-founder of his and he said, Mike, here's my friend, Jeff's going to— he's starting a business right now. I met Jeff Rader, amazing guy. And Jeff said, hey, Mike, I'm just going to start a company. Do you want to be the second employee? Here's what we're doing. And I was like, Jeff, I appreciate it, but I can't go work for $100K and a lottery ticket. You know, it's the risk reward for my family doesn't make sense. That company is Harry's Razors. Like this many years later, I'd be a $100 millionaire or whatever, you know, like, but I don't regret bet not picking that entrepreneur path because while that was the— well, with Jeff, the odds would be higher, but there's no startup that is anything close to even as much as a 20% chance of winning.

And so, I just took the safer path of go to the big corporate thing and then do things on the side where you can get equity in a business, be on a board, do this, invest, you know, $20K or $30K of your own money on this thing, and maybe it grows, maybe it goes to zero. But like, I just personally, I agree with you from a growth standpoint, but I personally couldn't have taken the risk that, that like you took. I, I would have— wouldn't have been bold enough, as bold as you were.

I mean, I, I feel like there's a lot of similarities in that with what, what you did. I mean, I don't know. I don't know, but I feel like there are. I mean, were you not, especially in the next one where VMware, I mean, would you consider that similar to entrepreneurship or no?

Yes and more no than yes. And, here's why. I actually had another stop before there at Cognizant Technologies where I, for 4 years, a really good friend of mine founded that company, spun it out of Dunn& Bradstreet. Street, built it into a Fortune 200. I was privileged to learn next to Frank D'Souza for 4 years and, and to be part of the leadership team there. They had an activist investor, Elliott Management, take a $1.7 billion position in their stock and just start agitating. And so I helped with that situation, and then I eventually ran the global financial services portfolio, like a $2+ billion portfolio of technology services that were sold into financial services. And so basically consulting, call it fancy technology consulting. And, and then I moved to VMware. And the funny thing is with VMware, I had never been at a product company. I'd been at a, I'd been at a hedge fund for 4 years of finance. I'd been at a tech services company. And then a buddy of mine introduced me to a guy, Pat Gelsinger, who was the CEO of VMware at the time. He later became the CEO of Intel.

In the email, I could call it back up, but it's like basically like, Mike and Pat, you're both great Americans. You just need to know each other. And this was in COVID when we were doing those stupid COVID coffee chats or on Zoom or whatever. And, and because we were all stuck in our houses and Pat and I had a lovely conversation about anything but work. And at the end, he's like, Mike, you know, I wasn't thinking about this from a work standpoint, but we really need to transform this company. You know, we have 3 COOs that we use more as a title, as a as a title than it is an actual role. Just come here and lead the transformation and the operational infrastructure for VMware.

Isn't that intrapreneurship? Intrapreneurship.

Intra. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, maybe I misheard you earlier.

I said entrepreneurship, but I don't know. I just, I feel, I mean, intrapreneurship is basically entrepreneurship, but you don't hold the majority of the risk.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say that's true for sure. It's just a little safer because you're in these big 40,000-person organizations that are already established and they don't need to worry about where they're making their next dollar. You know, whereas like when you were, you know, in your garage, in your attic, your garage, you know, and those days you probably didn't totally know where your next dollar was coming from all the time.

There were no dollars coming.

You know, that's— and so your risk reward, your, your risk was way greater than than me going to VMware in that regard. But, you know, I had never been at a product company and I'm like— and Pat Gelsinger was, I mean, just, I don't know what he saw or whatever, but he was like, listen, you seem like the perfect guy to kind of help us transform. And I had never been at a product company before. And so, like, my— in many ways, like, people can look at my career and be like, man, that guy's got it all figured It's so easy and everything. Like, no, man, I'm a total fraud. Like, any job that I've ever done, I've never done it before. Like, I don't know, like, I've been just like, like the Washington, D.C. thing. You land there and you just figure it out. And, and you land as the chief operating officer of one of the world's largest technology firms. And, you know, I think probably a lot of people are like, what the heck is this guy doing here? You know, he's not grown up in our ecosystem. But what you bring is such a different perspective and set of experiences that, you know, I'm an inch deep and a mile wide.

A lot of people are, you know, the inverse of that. But I can connect dots unlike a lot of people can. Conversely, I don't, I don't know much depth on anything. I describe myself as like, I don't play an instrument, I conduct bands. You want to name— you name any instrument, I'm not the best instrument player. I'll go get— I know who the best instrument players are. I'll go get that person and put that person in the role and build the team around, like, of all the best instrument players and go do the thing. And that's how I helped transform VMware over a number of 4 years or so. And we, we basically got it sold for $69 billion to another— to Broadcom. And—

Shit.

Yeah, it was crazy. And, and, you know, it was like— I still save this note. Michael Dell chaired our board, and Michael sent me a really nice note afterwards saying, hey, Mike, you know, we never would have been able to transform VMware, or we never would have been able to sell VMware if it wasn't for the transformation that you led. And, um, just a really nice, nice note. And, and, uh, he's a great— he's another great American, great, great dude. And, um, and I, I just felt really proud of that successful chapter of, of getting the company sold. And I didn't want to join, you know, the, the new company that was buying VMware. And decided to exit stage left at that point. It was a natural break.

Are you heavily involved in AI now?

I am now, because what I did after leaving VMware and Broadcom was joined Insight Partners. It's an it's a an venture private equity investment firm that focuses on software, specifically on growth, on soft and on companies that are growing and that are B to B business to business, not so much B to C business to consumer. Like Glacier business to consumer, right? You know, we focus on software that is sold to other big enterprises. And, and, you know, how do you pick the winners in the universe out of the, you know, I don't even know, 8 bajillion different companies that are out there? How do you pick the ones to invest in? So there's a selection process, and then there's a growth process. How do you help them grow? And then how do you help get them sold, either by going public or by getting sold to another company? And that's what we do. And it's a— I'm like humbled that it's a 400-ish person organization, 450, of incredibly smart people that sometimes I ask myself, what am I even doing here? And I'm amazed every day and learn every day and get the privilege of working with the world's leading technology companies that are, you know, everything from emerging small things to some pretty big things that are consequential.

So it's really a very, very cool perk. And of course, the companies that were born before the AI era, we're all trying to help them kind of transform and call it AI-ify their business. And many of them that were born AI-native are growing in really cool ways too. So it's a super fun organization to be a part of.

Well, I got a question for you. At this time, polymarket.com has more than 100,000 betting on whether the US will enact a federal AI safety law this year. You've worked at the White House, run one of the world's largest software companies, and now invest in technology. Do we need something like an independent federal AI commission to oversee frontier AI, or would it slow us down against China?

It's a great question and a great topic of much debate and conversation right now. I think, you know, I'll weigh in on the Polymarket side of that with Mike Hayes's own individual kind of thoughts. But look how hard it is to get anything done in government. Would you even take the words AI out of there? Would you bet on government doing something or not doing something?

Not doing something.

Of course. So that even look at in the crypto space, look at the Clarity Act was just had a lot of energy put into how do we regulate crypto? Because I don't care how you slice it, the world economy is going to go digital. It's not if, it's when. And so, if you look at crypto infrastructure and making digital payments on blockchain, that's coming. Should we regulate that and create some clear rules so America can be the clear leader or not? Personally, I'm very much for it. And, it's funny because I personally don't— nobody ever wants overregulation that chokes some regulation, some amount of regulation is often very helpful because it creates rules for the game that people can follow. Like, I shouldn't call it a game, rules for the, the, the system, if you will, that will help create clarity around who regulates what and what can be done and what can't be done. Like, you know, Congress just had a lot of discussion on the Clarity Act over the last 6, 9 months, whatever it is, and ultimately just died. Didn't— it got shot, got it voted down. And, you know, I don't think it's the— it's certainly not the end of crypto.

It's not the end of the world for the nation. But it's really, really hard to get anything done in government. Mm-hmm. You know, I personally— it's an interesting question. I think I need to think a little bit more about it. But personally, I just think I think anytime you can make progress at whatever fastest, best pace you can, you should do that. Mm-hmm. And then just figure out the consequences along the way with quick fixes to those consequences. I think that's what's best for us. It's like in BUD/S when we're all running around with boats on our You know, and you've got to do a base tour. Can you— do you cut the corner or do you go the whole way around the corner? You know, young SEAL trainees know how to save every calorie and every step that you can, you know. And that's a— I think that's a good thing. That's one of the best things that we learn is how to expend the least amount of energy as we can in order to achieve a goal. Like, I think that secretly is actually what makes us— one of the things that makes us special.

And I think that, you know, when the instructors catch us, they inflict pain on us to make us do things the way they think is right. So it's, it's, you get a system of like, do the best you can and get, then get quick corrections. And I think that, uh, not to, to, to draw too tight of a parallel between, you know, Hell Week and BUD/S training with the AI legislation that is being asked about by that question. But I think there, there's something to going fast and then quickly fixing things if, if they, if or as they break.

Does AI scare you at all?

Not for me. I don't. It doesn't scare me at all.

Nothing?

No, I personally, no. I think it's encouraging. I think that granted, changes are happening a lot faster. But, imagine right now about the jobs that we don't have. In 1900, these are just estimates or whatever, but think about how much of the economy was farm-based. I think it's 40% or 50% of the jobs at 1900 were somehow related to agriculture or the immediate offshoots thereof. And, it was something like 10% of our GDP was agriculture. Now, it's 1% of GDP and it's like, I don't even know the number, but it's Like, I'm going to guess like 3% of jobs are agriculture-based. That's because we went from humans doing manual one-to-one things with plants to then inventing machines that made us a lot more effective. Then we moved to machines that drive multiple machines. And now we have farmers who sit in buildings like this with a bunch of screens and control everything. So now, what one farmer can do relative— now relative to 1900, would you rather have that or not? Now, along the way, you could argue that a whole lot of jobs got displaced and we have less farmers, less people making money from agriculture, et cetera, et cetera.

True statement, but what world do you want to live in? Uh-huh. The price of electricity has come down. The price of food has come down. The price— that is what keeps us growing. And so to put a governor, a restrainer on growth, I think is a bad thing.

You think we're moving to crypto?

Well, I don't think we'll ever get rid of fiat currency, but I do think that, I don't know what timeline, but an increasing amount of transactions will be digital payments. It could be stablecoins, which is loosely— it is crypto infrastructure. So, imagine right now Apple Cash looks like you and I, if you and I move Apple Cash or Venmo or Zelle or whatever you use, sure, that's electronic, but that's riding the rails of the banking system or Visa, MasterCard, Amex, some of the classic rails for payments. Crypto is instantaneous. It's inspectable. It's resilient. It's cheaper. And when you have those 4 traits versus the classic rails on which payments run, I think the world will always go to where more value is. It's just the question is what pace will it move at?

Do you transact in crypto?

I don't. I don't right now, but I'm a huge fan of a company called MoonPay that does crypto infrastructure. I'm on their board in full disclosure. I've got a MoonPay wallet where I've bought Bitcoin and watch it and learn. I'm fascinated to learn in this new area. I'm not an expert. If there's any mistake about what I've just said, man, I'm no expert. Expert. I know people who are really smart in this space, but I am smart enough to kind of just step all the way back and think about the macro forces that are driving us as an economy. And I'm convinced that more and more transactions will be crypto-based. And I want to learn. Whether it's AI or crypto or whatever, I just constantly want to learn and be part of solutions and be part of the future.

How many different companies are you on the board of?

Oh, I think I'm on the board of maybe 7-ish, plus or minus. Depends if you count public nonprofit. Yeah, about 7.

What would you rather be doing? Would you rather be in the teams or doing this? Or is it just totally night and day?

Yeah, it's night and day. I'm so happy doing what I'm doing right now. I think about A lot of people ask a question like that, or different strains or variations of that question. And personally, I think about the world through a GDP lens, gross domestic product. If you think, what is GDP? It's just labor times productivity, and that equals the total economic output of either the nation or the globe. globe, depending what level you're at. So if labor is relatively fixed, you could argue like it's fertility rates, how many people in immigration, you know, like how many people are entering the workforce and who can work. That number is relatively inelastic, meaning it doesn't change massively from time to time. The massive driver in GDP growth is productivity. So when we create more economy, more economic output from the engine, that's way cooler than being a SEAL to me because more economic output gives policymakers choices. You can buy more SEALs or security, you can buy more healthcare, you could buy more education, you could pay down debt. You get, you know, it just makes us stronger as a nation. So when I think about like, what effect did I have doing a 6-person mission in Bosnia versus now, Like, I can have a much greater effect, positive effect for the nation on doing what I'm doing now.

And so that's— and I think part of it's, you know, part of getting older too is like, look, I have no desire to be on a 110-degree roof in Afghanistan right now on day 3 of an op. You know, it's like, you know, I know I remember what that was like. You know, it's— yeah.

What do you think's harder? I'm sure you make some really tough decisions.

I think they're just so different. It's hard for me to say. Like, each of them have elements of hard, you know? It's, it's like pick your hard, you know? You've seen all those pick your hard kind of things and I don't know, Sean. That's a good question. I've never really thought about it in an either/or. I think you heard me spend time in DC, so I know how to not answer the question you just asked.

Fair enough.

I need to think more about that one. They're both hard in different ways.

I love business.

I do too. I do too. I love helping see someone succeed. I love— it's winning. It's winning. Is there this— there's a scoreboard.

There's no guardrails. There's no limitations. There's nobody to put limitations on me.

That

it, it, it, it is— you get, you get out of it what you put into it. And

I told my wife when I got out, I was like, you know, I used to think I knew like, um, what the boundaries or the limits in life were

There are none.

Until you get out and you start living that life, you don't even realize the, the, the blind— the, the blinders or the limits that were on you when you were in the military. You don't even know it.

You know, we were chatting last night. You've written, you know, 2 books. Your transition was obviously I mean, one of a kind. Your leadership was incredible. Your guys' respect. I mean, it's just up to this point, I mean, one hell of a story arc.

Lots of tough decisions in, in, in a successful, a very successful transition into civilian business, private sector. With that being said, I mean, what advice do you have for, for guys coming out, for guys who are going to get out, officers, enlisted, everybody?

Yeah, well, um, I love this question, and I have really— I, I have some good answers for you, but I'll give you the flippant answer first. You know, I never wanted to write Never Enough. I told you, like, I always felt like I— when I was in these near-death death experiences, I was like, I didn't give or do everything I could and share. When I finished Never Enough, I was like, oh, thank God I've got that monkey off my back. I don't feel that— like, I'm done. I got the question that you just raised many, many times when guys are getting out. They're like, hey, can Mike, you know, can I get 30 minutes of your time or an hour and can we talk about transition and this, that, the other thing? And And it's just I've had more requests of my time than I have time. Uh-huh. And let alone the, like, my neighbor's kid wants to be a SEAL and all this. You're just like— so that's why I wrote Mission Driven, the second book, because I, I kept hearing myself talking through not the answers to that question, but the process. Like, how do you find purpose and how do you think about transition?

And so literally, I read this on Audible for 7 hours, and it lets me— when I get that question from SEALs getting out, I'm like, listen, I'm glad to talk to you, and I will, but not until you've listened to this 7 hours. And it just— it— or parts thereof. So the flippant answer is buy Mission Driven, but the real answer is to work top down, not bottom up. Let me describe. A lot of guys, when you're— they're getting out, will say something like one of two things. Either, hey, I just want to get out and find a place where I've got real meaning and purpose and I can contribute with a great team on a great mission. And I'm like, dude, that is so non-transactable, I can't help you. That tells me nothing. Mm-hmm. Okay. The other hand, the other extreme end of the spectrum is, hey, I know a guy who's got a thing, who's got a business, who has a spot for me. Okay, let me shoot holes in that one. That's bottom-up thinking. And it's like, I've got a thing in front of me. I'm going to evaluate that one thing and say yes or no.

The point that I would make is first start in the— to work top-down, you want to work abstract first. And think about, and I've got this exercise in this book, but basically think about the attributes of what you want. And even if you don't quite know the answers yet, think about let's just make it simple: geography, size of firm, quality of life, and opportunity to move in the company laterally. I could name ten other attributes, but just to make it easy. In fact, let's even just use geography and compensation as examples. So what's more important to you? And as you go through this list that's in the book, I want you to score each of them 1 to 100 on how important they are to you. And then you put them in forced ranked order. And that way you can kind of see in the abstract what's most important to you. In thought exercise, let's say you say, man, I've got to move back to wherever America so that I can be near family? Well, geography sounds like a 100. Comp might be like a 95. Being off at 3:00 might be— quality of life might be— or travel, call it how much travel you want to do or things like that, that might be lower.

And when you land on that force-ranked list, it's going to give you information to make your decision. And a thought exercise on geography and compensation, your answers should tell you this. Let's just say theoretically you had a job making $1 million a year in the city you never— you least wanted to live in, or you had the city that you most wanted to live in and you make $100,000. Which would you choose? Your map that I just described of putting things in kind of abstract order should give you the answer to that. And so if you do that kind of map in the abstract, Now, what you can do is turn it into a little elevator pitch. Like, when— like, I have such a— like, I and many people like you and others have such a great network of people. If you can tell me and walk what you're looking for and walk me in on what you're looking for, I can then map my network in my head a lot easier and do the filtering to say, oh, you should talk to my friend Matt, you know, or Sally or Susie or Billy, you know, and because here's where they are and this fits what you're looking for.

Yeah. Looking for. So I think people don't do that abstract thinking first and create kind of the map of what they're looking for. If you can create that abstract elevator pitch on what you're looking for, now somebody like me or you or whomever can help you generate more options. So you're no longer the person who's talking to the guy who knows a thing, who's got one opportunity. Instead, you're generating a whole Funnel of opportunities, so like what goes in the front of the funnel is a function of your logic around like what you're trying to do, and then the people that you get to help generate and put things into that funnel, and then you funnel it down through conversations, and then you land on the thing. That to me is working top down and way, way, way healthier because you've done the thinking of of like like Bridgewater was super hard and the culture is really tough. I knew that. that going into there. So, 2 years into Bridgewater, I was like, hey, I kind of knew this. I knew this coming in. It would be like this. You're not surprised. So, your chance for happiness, for mid-range or longer-range happiness is greater the better you do the abstract thinking upfront and then get to the particulars.

Okay. Last night at dinner, we talked a lot about helping people.

Yeah.

And we got into— we've already gotten into, you know, the 1162 Foundation that you have, uh, where you're paying off Gold Star mortgages. We're talking about it right now, and I 100% understand what you're saying. Everybody wants 30 minutes of your time. Everybody

wants, for lack of a better term, their handheld into transition into business, into entrepreneurship, into whatever, how to run shit. And it is, it's more requests than there is time. You have a daughter, you have a wife, I have kids. You have to become very particular on who you do spend your time with and who you do decide to help.

Who you decide to mentor, guide? How do you, how do you make that determination?

Dude, that's such a great, great question. So first of all, the first screening of that, I don't have to because I can just point right here at these 2 books, you know, because that's 14 hours of me. But then the real answer to your question is, man, it's hard. And I have a rule that I don't help friends of friends. Like, if you, if you come to me and you're like, hey Mike, my next-door neighbor wants some business help or whatever, I'm gonna say this to you. I'm gonna say, Sean, if I'm doing this for you, I'm all in. You're my friend. You know, if this is a— if I'm doing this for you, I'm in. I don't have the capacity to help friends of friends. 99 times out of 100, you'd be like, oh yeah, you know what, I'm not using my, my chip on that. You know, and you— because it kind of like people People don't appreciate how much time people are, like, are getting asked to spend in that category of life. So that kind of serves as a really good way to kind of winnow out that first, like, the first, the furthest out kind of circle.

I would do— and then the way I would say it is this: on the other side, man, if you need anything from me, my answer is yes before you finish your sentence. I just do it, you know? But I know you well enough to know that you're only going to ask me something if it's super important to you. And that's why, because I know you, I know you're only going to ask things that really matter to you. So when real friends ask for anything, I don't think about it. I just do it. What's harder is that middle, right? The 2 bookends are easy to kind of say yes or to say no. The middle for me is a little bit of a function of what's the potential of the person And the potential for impact. You know, it's like I don't spend a whole lot of time mentoring third graders anymore because, like, if I'm going to spend time mentoring, my time is much better spent on people who are going to benefit more from whatever, however I can help them, whether they're, you know, I'll say older but further along in their career or higher likelihood to have impact themselves.

themselves. Going back to that White House Fellow essay, I don't just want to positively impact people. I want to positively impact people to positively impact others. Is this a person that I'm confident is going to positively impact others? Like, when we pick White House Fellows, we don't— like, it's a major resume ticket, major resume builder. There is not a— like, we do an amazing job of winnowing out, eliminating the people who are just trying to build a resume. And we can really see someone's heart in their head to say, are you doing this to truly have impact for others? It's like I always repeat that team, teammate, self thing, you know? And, and are you, are you really doing this to help? So in that middle ground, I try to assess some combination of impact, You know, my time, like, like we go through seasons. Sometimes I'm busier, sometimes I'm— I go from either crazy busy to just busy. You know, like, you know the saying, like, if you want something done, give it to a busy person. I'm always busy. But, but even anybody who's busy has different levels of busy. And when I'm less busy, I can fit a little bit more of that in.

But the thing that I would say, I learned this when I was a White House fellow. I forget who quoted it. It wasn't my— this is not my own original thinking. But it might have been Colin Powell when we sat with Colin Powell, who was also a White House fellow, actually. But, but yeah, it was Colin Powell. He said busy leaders always mentor. You always have to be helping others. Otherwise, what's it all for? You know?

Makes sense.

Yeah, it's always, um, it's interesting when you have 2 books sitting right there and you get somebody to ask, you know, ask for your mentorship and they haven't even taken the time to do that. To me, that's already a— you're not going to succeed. You're not willing to put the work in. What the fuck are you here asking me questions for?

Exactly.

You can't even help yourself,

dude. You just said it so clearly. It's exactly how I think about it.

And, uh, because I get a lot of it too, and a lot of it is asking things that I've— I have specific—

You've talked about it already.

Exactly. Not even just talked about it, but have talked about it multiple times.

Yeah. And you know, it's funny, but another thing that I wrote in Mission Driven that highly correlates to success is, do you naturally circle back to the people that helped you and say thank Thank you. Very few people do. I can tell almost everything about you based on whether or not you come, like whether you come back and just say thank you. If I like if if I'm trying to find a job and you introduce me to two people, you're like okay hey Sean here's what I'm looking for da da da da da. You're like oh man Mike you should talk to you know Billy and Susie or whatever. Okay great. After I'm done talking to Billy and Susie, what I am going to do. Because of who I am and what I've learned, is I'm going to come back to you and say, Sean, thank you so much. The conversation with Billy was amazing. He he connected me onward to two other people, and it was super helpful. Thank you. And same thing with Susie or whatever name I just used. And that's just a way to keep you understanding how much I appreciate your help.

That is so rare. But then. I'm aware of that. But the funny thing is, it actually— I'm sorry that I'm referring so much back to the book. It's just because it's so much of how I think is in there. But one of the chapters is called Helping Others Helps Us More. But let's just say Billy and Susie peter out and I get nowhere. I can also come back to you and say, hey, Sean, hey, man, I've kind of reached dead ends with these 2. Do you have anybody else you might recommend me speaking to. Now, if I haven't thanked you, I've gone like ask to ask to ask, like I'm an energy drain to you.

Yeah, yeah.

Never be the energy drain.

There's a lot of the people that need to hear that. A lot of people that need to hear that.

But did— I mean,

have you ever struggled with resentment?

I have. Yeah, I would say for sure, because I really put a lot of work into getting these books out there. And one of the important things is reviews on Amazon. It is so easy to click like 2 buttons, click a review, like I want, like, like get that algorithm out there. I'm not making one penny on these books. Like, and I've got so many friends that I'm sure have just given me lip service to say, yes, I'll do a— throw a review in for you. And And then don't actually do it. And it's the easiest thing to do in the world. And I hate to say it, but it's just like, man, I'd do that for you in a split second. And so I'd like to think that I don't resent people for that. That might be a little strong of a word, but I definitely take notice.

Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. I mean, we just launched a business. I don't know how many people I've met, nobody's mentioned it.

Well, but, but whatever, you know what I mean? I struggled with resentment for a very long time. Still do a little bit. But, um,

you know how

I hear it? It's an energy suck just even thinking about that kind of shit.

Yeah, but here's the, here's the thing, Sean, is that

it always comes back.

It's going to come back to you via another channel that you can't predict.

predict. Yeah.

In another time, you can't predict. You just have to stay true to living your life by your principles. And to put like resentment energy on resentment— I'm, I'm imperfect. I'm gonna, you know, giving advice that I probably can't take myself. But the, um, why bother with the negativity, the negative energy?

Yeah.

You know, like when my daughter went to school every day, I didn't say have a great day. My wife didn't say have a great day. We said make it a great day. Have is a passive verb. Is the world going to happen to you or are you going to happen to the world? Make is an active verb. Even to this day, we— M-I-A-G-D is often in our family group chat. Make it a great day. It's a big difference in mindset.

It is.

You had what, Holiday on here? The Stoic dude? I don't know him at all personally, but like, it's just that Stoic mentality. Is it Ryan Holiday? I'm sorry if I just said that wrong. Yeah, Ryan. Yeah, yeah. I haven't read his book or done a review for him. Sorry, Ryan. But I don't know, I don't know the guy though, so.

Well, let's talk about the, the, uh, is there anything left with the 1162 Foundation that you want to talk about? We talked about it quite a bit. I do want you to talk about how you came up with the name.

Yeah, so one of my college classmates, one of my greatest friends, Sean Regan, actually came up with a name. When you, when you create a nonprofit, you need a board. And I have myself plus 2 amazing friends. I'm not sure the third would want to be named publicly, so I won't. But Sean is the chair of our board, and we were just brainstorming like, what should the title be? And he just called me one day and was like, Mike, this is super easy. Kennedy started the SEALs on 1/1/62. 1/1 renewal Like new, new you, new year, new me kind of thing. Like you're helping, we're helping these widows to, you know, like let me say this very delicately, like make their life 0.000001% better, you know, but moving the needle in the right direction. And we're trying to help to give, like to let them stay in the homes where all of dad's love was, you know, you know, where, where dad had, you know, pushed the kid on the first bicycle and saw, you know, and saw the first, you know, successful bike ride, or where Dad overflowed the toilet Christmas morning and everybody made fun of him for the next 5 years, you know, like, like these kind of things.

You don't want these families moving, having to move out of these houses. And, um, and so, and being so close to the community of like, what's the needs? Look, there's a lot of great nonprofits out there. Like, for me personally, Like, again, I'm thankfully not a Gold Star family and I can't speak firsthand, but I, I would imagine that, you know, the, the 3-day or the week-long trips to kayak or wake surf or fly fish or whatever are super nice and very appreciated, but they're temporary. You know, when you can pay off a mortgage, it's a permanent thing that really helps. And so that's why I leaned into that as an avenue, is I just felt like from knowing a lot of these, these, these And I just felt like that was the greatest need. And I think I was one of the earlier, if not the first nonprofit to pay off mortgages. And now there are a lot who do it, and I'm super thankful that there are. I don't care about— a lot of nonprofits get like territorial and like we talked about this a little bit last night, but like, dude, I couldn't care.

My only care is, are these families, the women and the children, taken

care It's, you know, the goal of every nonprofit should be to put themselves out of business, but it never seems to go that way.

It— I, I couldn't agree more. And that's why you won't see like websites with my picture. You will not find my picture in anything with my name in 1162. I guess now after this you will, but, but, um, it's just about them. And when you— when I have had the privilege to fly down to Virginia Beach or wherever And to talk to one of these women about their husband and bring him back to life through laughter or re—you know—laughing, crying, everything in between, bringing stories back, and then reaching across the table in the far corner of the random coffee shop. shop and put your arm on her shoulder and say, hey, and, and, and Sarah, you know what? You don't have a mortgage anymore. To see that reaction or hear that reaction, dude, it's indescribable.

I bet it is.

Those are the 12— those are the 12 best days of my life. And number 13 is coming up here before the

Good for you.

Yeah.

Good for them.

It changes lives. And, it's not just financial because when I do it, I also talk about not being forgotten and how it's not like I'm personally paying these off. There are other great people around me that either bought the book or made a donation because they heard me speak somewhere or whatever. And, and, uh, and I just remind them that it's a nation that is paying off their mortgage. It's not my foundation. It's this nation saying thank you for your continued service. Because all of our friends who are gone, they paid the ultimate sacrifice. That's past tense. It's done. These families are paying the ultimate sacrifice every single day of their lives. That's the weight that I feel, you know. And, and Like, I mean, I don't want that to be misheard or misunderstood. Like, I feel the weight, and their weight is infinitely more than I feel it. You know, I feel it for them. And so I've been privileged to be in the spots that I'm in, and I just feel like— what's the saying? You know, to those who much has been given, much is expected. Man, I've been given so much.

I've been given so much. I, I'm privileged to be able to give back. It's an honor.

The Medal of Honor Museum.

Yeah,

man, that place looks beautiful. How did, uh, where is that?

Arlington, Texas, right next to AT&T Stadium.

How long has it been open?

March of last year.

What's in there? That place is— will put us, uh, We'll put a screenshot of it up right now.

Okay, cool. The— I think you probably don't need to see this. I showed you last night, but we can put that up. So maybe quickly, the origin story. Dave McCormick, who I just spoke about a couple of minutes ago, Called me in 2017 or so, '28, 2018, and said, hey, Mike, I've got a friend who needs some advice. He's trying to do this little thing in South Carolina. I've been, you know, loosely involved. Would you mind meeting him and giving him some advice? Dave is in the category of like, I say yes no matter what, you know? And, and so of course So I meet this guy in New York City after a breakfast that I had, and he talks to me about this, frankly, this little thing that he was going to do with Medal of Honor, Medal of Honor down in South Carolina on this ship that was like— and it was not a great vision. And I said, Hey, listen, like, I'm— I just came from this breakfast with— where I got invited by a guy named John Whitehead to join. John had passed away a couple of years earlier, and John asked me to join.

He was at Normandy. He was an ensign that drove the ships in at Normandy, the landing craft. And just, you know, just a great American. Later became CEO of Goldman Sachs. He was Deputy Secretary of State in the Reagan administration and then and then led the reconstruction of Manhattan after 9/11. And it was funny, John told me when he asked me to join this breakfast group, he said, Mike, you know, you'll add diversity. You know, I'm like 30 years younger and poorer than everybody else in the group. You know, like it's a bunch of rich old white guys, you know, and, and it's kind of the— it's like the Illuminati of like, you know, that generation and just remarkable humans. So I forget what I had spoken about at that breakfast table that morning, but I said, listen, you know, I just came from this breakfast with— that this guy John Whitehead asked me to come into. And this guy kind of teared up right away. And he was like, Mike, you don't understand. John Whitehead was like my mentor in life. And so he's been gone for 2 years. And the fact that you're kind of invoking his name and giving me advice, like, I'm having a moment, man.

And, he teared up and that made me tear up. And, I said, all right, well, listen, dude, like, I'm glad to help. I painted this really big vision for like what the nation needs because our Medal of Honor recipients are our greatest heroes. Man, I've been privileged to be in the Oval with multiple presidents around all kinds of, you know, the top sports people or, you know, singers, actors, actor-actresses or whatever. whatever. None of that matters to me. The, the one, the one group on this planet that I just am so in awe of and inspired by are our living Medal— are our Medal of Honor recipients. And specifically, of course, the living ones, because they're the ones we know. And I just think, like, our nation doesn't have a place, a repository for those stories. And those— to recognize those people. And what I was painting for this guy was a vision that said, like, listen, you aren't just collecting a bunch of, like, Medal of— Medals of Honor and a uniform that a guy wore on the day of his, you know, action where he received the award. What you're actually doing is collecting— creating a place that collects the values of these individuals.

And if you do this right, you are going to be able to extract those values that those people showed on their day and use those values to inspire America. So the tagline for this museum is actually something like, on a mission to inspire America. And while maybe 500,000 or 1 million people will pass through whatever museum gets built, if we built this nationally, What we're really doing is ultimately, eventually, once we're all wearing goggles and visiting things, or glasses that have the next-gen glasses where we're kind of accessing the internet and seeing things through glasses, it's not too far off. But, the kid in Topeka, Kansas or some other far corner of the country who would never be able to get on a plane and go visit a Medal of Honor War Museum. How do you reach that kid with those stories and those values so that when that 3rd grader sees bullying on the schoolyard and sees some little girl being, you know, having her lunch money taken or being insulted or something, or, or worse, how do you, how do you have the, the courage, the integrity, the commitment, the bravery like the recipients showed on their day?

How does that transfer onto the schoolyard in that moment. And so if we do this right, we'll have a way to not just tell the stories of the recipients, but to go inspire all of America. That's what this museum needs to be. And he was like, dude, can you join the board? And I was like, man, I'm busy. I can't do it. I'm just— I'm sorry. I just kind of riffed and was ideating with you and kind of telling you, closing my eyes and like seeing what the nation needs. And he said, no, no, no. Like, like John Whitehead, you just told me that John Whitehead thing. You got to be on the board. And I was like, listen, I'll join the board on one condition. I get to fire everybody on the existing board for the existing organization and start again. And he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, I can't do that. I'm like, okay, you know, hey, call me in the future if you need advice or whatever. You know, he called me the next day and was like, okay, I'm in. Kind of surprised me. And I was like, oh, really?

Okay. Like, like, okay. So I was like, all right, I'm, I'm on the— I'm now the first I'm the founding board member for this Medal of Honor Museum. It's my vision for this thing. And, and I called 5 friends, actually, and, and said, listen, I need you on the board. We're going to go create the most badass, kick-ass organization on the planet. We're going to do the best thing that you can possibly imagine for America. We don't have a museum for our Medal of Honor recipients. Anything worth doing is worth doing right. And let's go. These are all friends that are like, #LFG, baby. And like, let's roll. It's Matt Zames, who I spoke about, who is the chief operating officer of JPMorgan Chase. Alan Schwartz, who is chair of Guggenheim Partners. Frank D'Souza, my friend from Cognizant I just talked about. Jared Weinstein, amazing guy, co-founder of Thrive Capital, and was President Bush's body man. And, And then Britt Slavinsky, who I grew up with in the SEAL Teams, who is a recipient himself, plus me. That's the original 6 people who all reflexively were like, Mike, I'm in, I'm behind you. And I'm like, no, no, no, you're not behind me.

We're all next to each other, going to go do this thing and go build this. It took like— it was really hard raising money when you didn't have a location or it was just a concept. But million by million, we eked away and eventually we We picked a location. We got offered New York City, Washington, D.C., Denver, Colorado. Like I had— when we were doing our decision-making, I had like the governor of Colorado and like Peyton Manning called my— calling my phone and going, hey, we really want Denver and here's why. And, you know, I told Peyton that I was a Pats fan and, and, and we went down to Arlington to visit down there. And there's a guy, Ray Davis, who owns the Texas Rangers. And, and he and his chief operating officer, Neil Liebman, pulled me aside and they had a roll out the red carpet kind of thing. Roger Staubach and like all kinds of Dallas people, like to convince us why to bring the museum to Arlington, Texas. And Ray pulled me aside. Ray Davis pulled me aside, a guy who I don't even know that well. And I don't know if I've even actually spoken to him since this, this day.

I mean, we've— he's been critical in helping get the museum off the ground. But, but, but he was, he was President Bush's roommate in college. And, and Ray said, Ray and Neil said, hey, Mike, like low-key, quietly, like, what do we need to do to win? And I'm like, well, guys, we need 2 things. Number one, we need a soft start with $10 million, a commitment for $10 million. And in order to kick off our fundraising, we think we're going to need to raise about $250 million to achieve our vision. And they're like, wow, that's a big vision. We're like, yep, it'll be the biggest raise for a museum ever. And the second thing I need is I'm going to chair the NOM and Gov committee, but I've saved the role of the chairman of the board open so that we can find somebody who is both local and national to wherever we choose. And he's like, I have just the person for you. Let me just do a little homework. Let me make a phone call or so. I'm not ready to say name. Charlotte Jones chairs our board. She's amazing. Like, we would not be here without Charlotte.

She raised all kinds of crazy amounts of money, and she's just a wonderful human. Her dad owns the Cowboys, and she's the chief brand officer for the Cowboys. And so, we've just built an all-star cast besides the names of people I just mentioned. We've got CEOs of AT&T, American Airlines. We've got Rex Tillerson, who was the CEO of Exxon and Secretary of State when Trump won. We've Like, we've got all of the ex-presidents on our, our advisory board. It's a really remarkable group of people. Wow. Tashunda Duckett, who's the CEO of TIAA. I'm going to do injustice to a lot of other people on the board who are just amazing. We've got probably the best board in America. And the thing is, while those names all sound impressive, the thing I've personally interviewed every single one of these people to come on the board, and the thing that we've chosen every single time is great humans, humans who care, who want to do the right thing for the nation, who are individually and collectively on a mission themselves to inspire America. And so we raised ultimately $320 million because things cost more over the years between 2018 and we opened our doors in 2025 with a really cool, a really cool celebration and And, but I, while opening was amazing, that was just the end of the— I call that the, the end of the beginning.

We've got another phase of growth to kind of come and really work on, on getting out there. I shared with you I'm going to start a podcast for the Medal of Honor Museum. I'm not going to be putting you out of business. I'm not worried about that. But, but I'm going to— damn it, I'm going to try. No, but totally different thing, of course. But I'm thankful you're smiling and not like about to use one of these guns on me here, Sean. But, but no, we're, we're on a mission to inspire America. And the museum is amazing. It's, it's, you know, you go up these, these amazing glass stairs into this rotunda where you have a 360-degree movie that I don't think any American has made it through that 7-minute movie and not cried a lot. It's— it is so emotionally powerful. And then you move from that out into this, like, lots of displays of various recipients and a lot of the things that I'll just say, like paraphernalia that they had from the day associated. It might be the uniform they wore, but it might have been the logbook they kept. It might have been all kinds of different things.

It's letters home. It's just a— it's a really world-class museum. USA Today voted it the number one museum Damn. Right away. And then, we just found out a month or so ago we won something called the PRIX Award, P-R-I-X. None of us had heard of it, with due respect to the PRIX Committee, sorry. But, that is an award that chooses the top 7 architectural wonders of the world every year. And, we were the only thing in the Western Hemisphere that won this year. So it feels great, man. Like, it all started here, and success has a thousand fathers or mothers or parents or whatever. And the greatest joy I have is that it— like, dude, we've all— there's so many people that played such an incredible part of pulling this thing together to bring it to life. My swim buddy from SEAL training from Class 192 is Chris Cassidy, and Chris, we were swim pair one through all of BUD/S. And, you know, he was a SEAL for over 12-ish years and then became an astronaut. When he was getting ready to leave NASA, I called him and I'm like, brother, I've got the most amazing opportunity.

Would you become the CEO of this museum? And it, it, it took a couple of conversations. And, and, and as he saw what it was, he said yes. And he spent He stepped down a few months ago, but got us— he got us all the way through the fundraising and the build and then chose— he chose to go on and do something different. We've hired a new CEO in his— in his— in his— in Chris's absence, as Chris has stepped down. And between Charlotte, Chris, myself, the board, you know, it's— we're just all thrilled to be doing something that's contributing to the nation. And, the thing is there's so much more to do. We're trying to build the economic foundation of the museum, not just from visitors but from merchandise, from leadership institutes, from maybe we get some sponsors for a podcast and can bring in a little bit money to the museum that way. And, because the better the economic footing is for the museum, the more programs we can do. My brother's a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers who's been an amazing partner. They donated actually a little north of $5 million of services in kind and they did helped oversee the development of a curriculum that is now in every 8th grade classroom in Texas and trying to bring it nationally to a bunch of things so the 8th graders can learn about these recipients.

There's just a lot of vectors of where this thing can go, but everything is rooted in values.

Congratulations, man. I can't wait to see that place.

Well, we're going to do a showdown there, right?

Let's do it. Let's do it out. Wow. Faith. Yeah. So I've got here, your only regret in the SEAL Teams was not sharing your faith.

Yeah, I wrote that in Never Enough. You've done your homework.

Why is that?

You know, it's funny because in retrospect, when I was writing, I was kind of looking back at my career. And I'm somebody who grew up with a deep faith and, you know, very Catholic family. And a lot of, well, like my values and my inspiration or whatever come from the big man upstairs. Like you just said, I didn't really share that along the way. And, I don't think I totally know why, but I think a couple things. Number one, probably the lazy answer is it's partially true but maybe not the truly intellectually honest deep answer, but at least the superficial answer is I have my own beliefs but I don't want to project my beliefs on You, you know, and I think that's part of the answer. But I think if I'm honest with myself, I'd probably say something also like, I don't know, maybe I'm afraid of what people are going to think of me, or maybe I'm I don't want to be judged, or I don't want negative commentary, or. You know, it's it's really interesting listening to listening to Christian from SAS talk about faith in in that episode. It really was cool because he he has he took a thought that I've had from around leadership and everything non-faith to the faith.

Let me explain. I've always said to myself, like if I live my life a certain way, like the best kind of leadership is is helping. like junior SEALs say, I want to be like that guy when I grow up, you know. And living a— like, like leading or making decisions or, or, you know, being human in a way that others want to emulate is the greatest compliment anyone can pay you. And I've always tried to live that way, but I haven't— like Craig said, he does that with his faith. He was like— again, paraphrasing here, um, or sorry, I said Craig Christian.

Um, Christian Craig.

Christian Craighead. Yeah. He said, again, paraphrasing, but basically like, if I can show my faith, it's going to help the younger guys feel comfortable showing theirs.

Makes it okay.

Yeah, makes it okay. And so like, I feel like maybe by not sharing my faith, I'm part of the problem instead of part of the solution, you know? I mean, I've always been like, Here I am, Lord. I'm an instrument of your peace. You know, like, like, what can I do? Send me, you know. And, and, uh, and when— and, you know, like in the SEALs, what's our job is to stop bad people from doing bad things to good people. I've always prided myself on being the person who's going to stick up for the person that can't help themselves, help themselves. And like that, obviously, you know, you've been— obviously I've heard you talk a lot about like what you've been going through with, with your faith and and various, you know, negative challenges. I'll say that just obviously very lightly and obtusely, but I'm not sure I'm as brave as you are on that front. You know, I'd like to be. You talked to another guy. I don't know Eddie Penny at all. I know he was a SEAL. And I know that you've said that he has helped you find faith, right? The— or, or, um, sorry.

Yeah, he, uh, I mean, he is somewhat of a mentor of mine, but, um, it was his testimony. He came on here on the show. Have you listened to his?

Yeah.

Insane,

dude.

And, uh, and it, it led to— it led to a pattern.

Yeah, we

didn't talk about that at all, really, you know, maybe a couple times, maybe before him. But not much. And then it was like every single person after him kept bringing it up. Yeah, bringing it up. And it— I didn't even realize where the pattern came.

It's not an accident.

I traced it back to that specific episode that we released on Christmas.

Well, and I've seen him on Instagram. I started following him on Instagram and I'm like, man, this dude's bold. You're bold. You're bold, you know? And And I know, like, I just find it hard to be— I don't know how bold I want to be, you know. And in theory, like, when I think, think about, like, obviously, I think, like, you know, Catholic Christian values are— there are none finer, you know. And so why not not work to help bring more of that to the world? It shouldn't just be a nice-to-do. It should be an obligation. And so it's something I want to work on.

Where are you going to start?

I don't know. I'm open to any advice you have, but I think starting is just talking about it a little bit more.

Well, I think it just Yeah.

Oh, people listen to this show?

One or two. Yeah. I mean, especially with that Bible right there beside you.

Yeah.

You know, when you open it up—

Oh, I got all kinds of markings in there and stuff. Like, it's real. Like— You

got any more you want to share? Anything that sticks out?

Um, none that are as equally as impressive as the one that I left people with. And I think what I'd rather do is leave that as like the one, you know. I've got a lot that were just like, hey, that's just smart guidance kind of thing, but like nothing as clear as that, like do not go back out there in the field, you know. But I've had many readings that are like so spot-on to a situation that I'm in in my life at the moment, you know. And yeah, and so to some degree, look, like I said earlier, I didn't overprepare for this at all, but I did a little. If you leave it to the last minute, it only takes a minute to do. That's my college motto. The other is it's only a lot of reading if you do it. But, you know, with preparation, I did think like, hey, am I— obviously I brought that with me. So I was like, hey, I'll talk. Let's talk about this. Let's go there. And I think that for me, that's a big step.

Let's talk about purpose.

Let's do it. I think it's one of the biggest things people miss. We get so, so bogged down in life with activity that we don't zoom back and understand our purpose. And so that's why I like the path to a life of purpose. That's why the subtitle is there, is that like, what is it that gives your life purpose? What are you on the planet to do? Everybody has different like gifts and abilities and interests and skills. A lot of people out in the world will thank guys like you or me or others who've sat here and say, hey, thank you for your service. And I love that. I think it's nice. But I always flip that back on people and I say, well, Thank you for your service. You know, you don't need to wear a military uniform to serve. We call the military you like in the service, but the verb to serve can be done by anybody whether you wear a uniform or not. And I just think that's one of the things I'd love for America is to take more accountability of the problems or opportunities that this nation has, and you don't have to wear that uniform.

And pick the military path of service. Go get plastics out of the ocean. Go cut firebreaks in the, in the forest. Go Teach for America. Like, what is it that you are doing to make this nation better? And I just feel like so many, especially younger people, haven't done the hard work of thinking of like what gives them purpose. We need people who go figure out how to capture more plastic out of the ocean. You know, it's not something you or I grew up doing, but man, somebody's got to figure out that problem. That's purpose. And if you— and purpose can change too through time. It's, it's, but if you don't have a map, then where are you going? And even me in life, I find myself sometimes a little bit all over, like doing a little of this, a little, a little of that. But I think that You know, for me, I think my purpose is to use my experiences and I'll say wisdom. And I mean that in a way of like wisdom is just something that's gained from making mistakes through life. You know, it's— and so whatever wisdom I have, I'm just here to pass it on and help you help others from stepping on the same landmine or if I can help somebody else accelerate their way to a problem.

That's one of the reasons I love Insight Partners is that I've seen a lot of things in business, not as much as many, but certainly a lot and a lot more than some. But if I can help some young startup avoid a problem because I've seen it before, that's super fun to me. And so I think I know my purpose pretty well. It's like things like this. It's paying off mortgages. It's Medal of Honor Museum and inspiring America. It's inspiring at scale. And my answer, though, doesn't have to be your answer. And that's where— and I mean, Literally, I mean, anybody listening, like everybody's answer can be different. But if I, if I got 100 people in a room and I said, write your purpose down on a 3 by 5 card, I think, I think 98 to 99.5% of people are going to struggle with writing down that 3 by 5 card because we don't think about that. And you just go through life full of activity. Look, it's hard. You got to pay a mortgage. You're, you're a parent of multiple kids. You got— like, it ain't easy, but the time you can spend at something, you know, doesn't necessarily need to be outsized relative to your purpose.

Like, being a parent is a purpose, you know? Like, raising great humans to be the next generation of leaders and people who contribute is purpose. But just be able to know what it is. I think that we need more of that.

Where can people get the books?

Anywhere you buy your books. Amazon. And do your review, damn it. No, I should say, do your review. Thank you. But yeah, I'd say Barnes& Noble, Amazon. Download the Audible. I read, I read both of the books. It's, uh, I felt like it's, it's, it's, it's cool. Like, you, you have terabytes of, of talks that your children's children's children will be able to listen to and know about, you know, great-great-great-grandpa Sean. And, and you're leaving a legacy behind in all your work. For me, like, this is legacy, you know. It's like Reading 2 books is, is on how I think about the world is something that, that, that people can have. And I just think that it's very rewarding when you can help on multiple levels and create the win-win. Ideally, somebody benefits from the words on the page, but to also be helping a Gold Star family. Yeah.

up.

With 100% of the profits. It's just like, man, how are these not like— what else do I need to be doing better in order to keep these books front and center and flying off the shelves? Because the feedback when people do read it has been amazing. Mission Driven debuted at number 4 in the world when it came out a year ago. And And so I'm just on a— I'm on a mission to be mission-driven, I guess.

You're a good man, Mike.

Never enough, Sean.

Thank you. You want to end in a prayer?

Let's do it.

All right, you lead.

Okay. Dear God, thank you so much for all you've given us. Thank you for this wonderful time with my friend Sean. Thank you, Lord, for everybody who's listened and will listen to this platform, not just this episode but all. Please keep us strong, keep us healthy, keep us focused on helping others. Please help us to continue to find our purpose, but most importantly, let us Show gratitude and thankfulness for not just all of the great things that you've given us, but for the challenges that you place in front of us so that we have the opportunity to grow and learn and get better and therefore be able to be more and do more and give more in your name. Thank you, Lord. Amen.

Amen. Beautiful. Mike. It was an honor, man.

No, honor's all mine, brother. Thank you so much, man.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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