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No guest this week. Just me and the questions you sent in. A guy 23 years into a marriage gets served divorce papers and wants to know how you start over at 43. I walk through the process itself — mediation over a courtroom, staying amicable, treating your ex like the person you fell in love with. Then the harder part. You've never been alone. You don't know who you are yet. Lean into that instead...

JP Dinnell spent nearly a decade in the SEAL Teams. Three combat deployments. In 2006 he went to Ramadi with Task Unit Bruiser as point man, machine gunner, and lead sniper for Delta Platoon. Chris Kyle was in Charlie Platoon. He came home with a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars with Valor, and an Army Commendation with Valor. Task Unit Bruiser became the most decorated special operations unit of the...

Most of this one comes down to one thing. Choices have consequences, and you own them. It starts with an email. A listener says the veteran community runs on lies and has an integrity problem, then sends it from an address that bounces. Transmit only. I read the whole thing and my response. A host who platforms a guest isn't endorsing them, and the size of an audience tells you nothing about the t...

My guest has a PhD from the University of Toronto. She taught at the university level, then at two prep schools for years. In 2017 she walked away from education after the system covered up the abuse of one of her students. She turned whistleblower, went public, and started digging into the brain science of what had happened. That work became two books, The Bullied Brain and The Gaslit Brain, and...

Four questions this week. Two about relationships. Two that aren't. -A friend wants another shot with an ex after a long marriage. I've watched four couples try this. Two made it. Two didn't. The merry-go-round of unresolved issues, and why you do the work up front or you do it later when everything is breaking. -Dating someone from your BJJ gym. What to weigh before you start it, and what Leah ha...

Fourteen years in uniform. Four with the Parachute Regiment, a decade in the SAS. Patrol medic and qualified mountain guide. Afghanistan, Iraq, and covert deployments. Jay Morton left in 2018 and went straight up the world's biggest mountains — two Everest summits, one of them solo. Everest comes up, and it isn't pretty. He stood on the summit alone in 2017. Now it's a queue of paying clients shor...

Nic McKinley went from Air Force pararescue to the CIA, then founded DeliverFund to fight trafficking with intelligence tools. Ryan Dalton was a trafficking attorney and federal agent at the State Department before launching Closed Horizon, a platform that crowdsources rewards to surface hard answers. Different roads, same fight. Skip the spy-novel version of Epstein. The simpler read: a guy who m...

Michael's in the studio and we're working through the week. We start with two Pasadena officers horsing around with loaded guns. One of them ends up shooting the other through the windshield of the cruiser. We talk about the accountability that comes with carrying a badge. One oh-shit can unwind a career of attaboys. From there we get into the aircraft gifted by Qatar and whether it belongs in ser...

Matthew spent six years in the Navy as a Search and Rescue swimmer. Then fifteen years as a cop — Virginia Beach, then undercover narcotics in New Hampshire during the opioid epidemic. He worked under a different name for years. He wrote a book, The Journey to Midnight, about the night he planned to kill himself. Now he talks to cops and veterans about it. This one covers why suicide is so high in...

Five questions this week. No real through-line, which is usually how these go. -A reader four years sober wants to rebuild the friendships he burned while drinking. -A father of two wants the kind of relationship with his kids he never had with his own dad. -A high school junior writes in about his 13-year-old sister and an eating disorder serious enough to put her in front of doctors. -A guy thre...

He was called the most dangerous man in Vermont. The governor said it on television. The truth is more boring and more alarming. Daniel Banyai is a former protection contractor and a Seventh-day Adventist who built a firearms training school called Slate Ridge in West Pawlet. He did it by the book. Federal firearms license. Explosives permits. Zoning. A school classification the town had handed ou...

Usually Full Auto Friday is just me and the questions. Not this one. JP Dinnell is in the seat — former SEAL, came up through Ramadi, now chief training officer at Echelon Front — and Michael is running the stories. We start where it counts. Whether anything in BUD/S ever matched the field. It didn't. BUD/S is hard. It's also a controlled environment with a safety net. The real cost came later, wi...

Rachel Cuda grew up the daughter of a Navy SEAL, raised on Coronado around the teams. She speaks Russian, Ukrainian, and German. She studied at the University of Tennessee, earned a master's from Georgetown, and wrote software at a startup before moving into defense contracting. At the Pentagon she led the data modeling and analytics line for the military's COVID task force. She married a SEAL off...

Two questions this week, plus a video I've been asked about more than anything in recent memory. I break down the paraglider that got hit by a plane and why this stuff almost always lands on pilot error. I answer a man rehabbing from a spinal tumor who can't run, swim, or ruck anymore and is staring down a third surgery. I tell him about my own injuries, the rabbit holes I went down, and what actu...

Dennis Benigno started in 2001 as a New Jersey corrections officer at nineteen. He moved to the U.S. Park Police in D.C., then to patrol in one of Jersey's largest municipalities. Over fourteen years he made more than 1,500 arrests and ran over 10,000 car stops. He had to self-train to survive the road. When he realized the academies weren't teaching cops what they needed, he started teaching it h...

Jonathan Dickinson is the co-founder and CEO of Ambio Life Sciences, one of the world's leading ibogaine clinics. He's spent more than fifteen years on this — apprenticing in Tijuana clinics, running the Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance, and writing the field's first clinical safety guidelines. He's a Mexico-licensed psychologist. He holds the only active export license for iboga root and led the...

Thomas Massie just got primaried out, and it cost the most money ever spent on a primary. $32.6 million in ad buys. A guy hand-picked by Trump comes out of nowhere and takes the seat. Massie voted with the administration 77% of the time. His sin was the Epstein files. So we get into it. We talk about getting that kind of money out of elections, and why the people who could fix it never will. We ta...

"Crike him." That's the call a tactical medic makes when a guy can't breathe and the clock is at zero. Mike Simpson is the doctor on the other end of that radio. He's a former 1st Ranger Battalion anti-tank section leader, a Special Forces engineer turned 18 Delta medic with 7th Group, and a board-certified ER physician who spent his last six years on active duty attached to JMAU providing trauma...

A soon-to-be 40-year-old wants to face his fear of skydiving and use it to teach his anxious five-year-old that fear is normal but it doesn't get to run your life. I break down the difference between gambling and accepting calculated risk, what to actually look for in a drop zone, and why pushing yourself smartly and incrementally beats trying to be a badass for an audience that isn't watching. A...

Alan Mack flew Chinooks for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment for seventeen years. Chief Warrant Officer 5. Senior MH-47 pilot. Flight lead. Instructor. He was the pilot in command of Razor 03 on Takur Ghar — the aircraft shot up trying to insert a SEAL element on top of the mountain that became Roberts Ridge. He has logged over 6,700 flight hours, took rounds through his cockpit on A...

Michael and I get into it on this one. Hantavirus headlines, the Doomsday Clock, wind turbines, the Epstein note, and a guy on YouTube paying his bills by getting stung by bugs. I open by confidently passing along bad medical advice from two articles I read. Michael fact-checks me in real time. We agree it's a good exercise in why you should slow down before you repeat anything. From there we get...

John Kiriakou spent 14 years at the CIA. He started as an analyst, went operational, and eventually ran counterterrorism work in Pakistan that led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah. He was the first U.S. government official to publicly confirm that the agency was waterboarding prisoners. For that, the Obama administration prosecuted him under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and sent him to...

Four questions this week. The kind that don't have clean answers. A guy whose father murdered his mother is asking how to get back to who he was before. He's not. A 28-year-old still living at home is watching his mom's cancer come back and trying to figure out how to spend the time he has left. A man in his sixties wants to know how to bring up suicide with three friends he's had for 40 years bef...

Today's "episode" is the audiobook first chapter of my book: Drownproof. Thank you to everyone who helped make the launch such a tremendous success. Hitting all of the "Best Seller" lists, to include the NYT, was quite frankly, incredibly humbling. You all made that happen, not me. For those of you who have read or listened to it already, well, clearly today's episode is not going to be exciting f...

Justin Klahn is hard to put in a box. Twenty years inside Nike Innovation. Years embedded with JSOC units building gear that had to actually work. Time consulting with three-letter agencies, DARPA, and the Harvard Learning Innovations Laboratory. A run working directly for Kanye West. He calls himself a problem solver, and the resume backs it up. His new book is Innovator's Handbook. We open on th...