Beyond The Beret

Every week, Spencer Lewis gets messages from guys asking the same set of questions. How do I prepare for SFAS? How do I train for selection while active duty? What physical standard should I hit before I show up? Should I take an 18X contract? What if I'm still in basic training and don't know where to start? In this episode of Beyond The Beret, former Green Beret Spencer Lewis and his wif...

The part of the body the military never trains you to protect — and the part former Green Beret Spencer Lewis ignored the longest. Spencer and his wife MJ on why almost everything you feel every day traces back to one system nobody warned him about.

Somewhere in the last 10 years, leadership stopped being about action and became a content genre. Podcasts about leadership from people who've never led a team. Instagram life coaches with a million followers who have never coached anyone through anything. YouTube gurus quoting Jocko while sitting in a rented office. In this episode of Beyond The Beret, former Green Beret Spencer Lewis and his...

Most of what's online about TRT, peptides, and men's hormones is either AI-generated influencer slop trying to sell you a stack, or it's academic research papers that don't translate to real life. In this episode of Beyond The Beret, Spencer Lewis and his wife MJ have an honest, first-person conversation about what they've each learned over the last several years of getting blo...

Most veteran-to-entrepreneur stories skip the actual origin. The couch. The surgeries. The $25,000 you just sent to a manufacturer with no guarantee any of it works. The hours sewing patches onto hats one at a time in your living room because the orders are coming in and you don't have a manufacturer yet. In this episode of Beyond The Beret, former Green Beret Spencer Lewis and his wife MJ go...

This episode of Beyond The Beret started with a listener email asking exactly that: how do you find your identity and purpose after leaving the military? Former Green Beret Spencer Lewis and his wife MJ break it down without sugar coating it. Spencer goes back to the first time he lost himself — when high school sports ended and he turned to drugs and partying — and traces it all the way through h...

Ranger School is the most asked-about school in the U.S. Army, and most of the content out there is either polished recruiter talk or guys who went straight through and skipped the hard parts of the story. In this episode of Beyond The Beret, former Green Beret Spencer Lewis sits down with his wife MJ for a full, unfiltered breakdown of what Ranger School is actually like — from a guy who got pre-...

Why do some people get average results while others dominate everything they touch? Everyone wants to call it discipline, motivation, consistency, or talent. Former Green Beret Spencer Lewis says all of those are downstream of one thing: obsession. In this solo episode of Beyond The Beret, Spencer breaks down the trait he's seen behind every elite athlete, special operator, and successful entr...

In this episode of Beyond The Beret, Spencer and MJ dig into a topic suggested by Melissa after her visit: the real difference between motivation and discipline, and why most people get this wrong. Spencer's take is that motivation isn't bad, it's just an emotional state you can fall into when you're around the right people, the right examples, or in the right environment. The prob...

In this episode of Beyond The Beret, Spencer sits down with longtime Alpha Country athlete and friend Melissa, who flew in from Chicago for the Memorial Day Murph. What started as a DM about a pair of shorts five years ago turned into one of the closest friendships in the brand's orbit — and this conversation goes everywhere. Melissa shares her full story: growing up on the South side of Chica...

In this episode of Beyond The Beret, Spencer and MJ break down the full story of Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) — the gateway course every aspiring Green Beret has to survive. Spencer walks through it all: why he chose the SF route over Ranger Regiment after a training exercise with an ODA changed everything, how he prepped his body and mind in the 60 days before reporting, and wha...

A former Green Beret and his wife sit down to talk about the part of military life nobody puts on a recruiting poster: getting out. In this episode of Beyond The Beret, Spencer Lewis and his wife MJ go deep on Spencer's transition from Special Forces to civilian life — the Med Board process, three major surgeries (ankle, SI joint fusion, hip), losing 45 pounds bedridden, the identity crisis of "wh...

In this episode of Beyond The Beret, Spencer takes MJ and the listener inside his 2020 deployment to Afghanistan with 7th Special Forces Group. It's the longest, heaviest conversation they've had on the show so far, and it explains a lot of what came later in 2021 for anyone who watched the country fall and wondered how it happened. Spencer starts with the train-up: how a Bravo on an ODA carries t...

Welcome to Beyond The Beret. In this first episode, Spencer and MJ sit down in the garage studio to lay the foundation for the whole show. The idea: the brand and the videos cover the present, but a lot of people who follow Alpha Country don't know where any of it actually came from. This podcast is for the deeper stories that don't fit into a reel. Spencer starts at the very beginning. Bo...