Josh Thurman
Appearances
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Good morning, everybody. Welcome back. Today, we're talking largely about internet safety. I've read that we have access to 98% of the known knowledge of mankind through our devices, laptop, tablet, phone, whatever it may be. How do we access that safely, though, with our children? How do we create a system an app, a portal that allows them to access it safely with barriers and boundaries.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
A Nomex flight suit in the middle of the summer doing CQC house runs. That's brutal. Don't sleep on it. It's a good time. But it hooked me. I get asked all the time why. And I didn't have an answer then. And I honestly don't have a great answer now. I don't know exactly what it was. But once it got it hooks into me, it was as if my true north calibrated in that direction.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And I think, you know, my dad... Didn't have the best experience in Vietnam. And he came from military family, Navy on my dad's side, Army on my mom's side. Both sides, I feel like we're hoping that generationally the military service would end with them based on their own experience. So when I started heading in that direction, I can only imagine my dad like, I should have kept my mouth shut.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I mean, you know, the deal, the community that we served with, and I try to tell people this all the time, they're exceptionally average people. I really do. I mean, there are, there were a couple of people in my class and I'm sure there were in yours that like, you look like you're chiseled out of marble, like physical, absolute specimens.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
But if you were to line up an average buds class, most people would go. Okay. Some height, some shorties in the Smurf crew, if we're still allowed to call it the Smurf crew.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Somebody asked me the other day, what do they call the tallest boat crew? And I can't remember. Was there a name for them? Boat crew one. Obviously. Yeah. But I don't think they had- There was no nickname. Yeah. Why are you going to make fun of tall people, right? Yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
They're building a massive facility on the western edge of Missoula. So the Montana Knife Company is Kind of makes sense where that came from. The state of Montana is also in the logo, but it's a global brand. These are some of the highest quality knives I've ever gotten my hands on. Beyond the fact that Josh is bringing jobs back into Montana, these are American made.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. Save it for the Smurfs. But yeah, I know that he would have hoped that it ended with me, but I just- I couldn't think about anything else. And then you get into the community, and that was one of the most common sentiments of the guys that I had served with. But they're very average people in almost every way. Maybe we're tooled a little bit differently.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
But for whatever reason, that idea, it unlocks... this something. And then people just drive down that path. I heard it over and over again as an instructor. I heard it over and over again in the cage rooms, talking with guys and they're like, I don't know. It's just all I ever wanted to do. Like, why did it grab us like that, but not other people? I don't have an answer for it.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I would say that's probably soft wide. Yeah, I think that's right. I think the community – that is a skill that has served me well post-military. But then I try to reverse engineer that. Is that because people who can learn quickly are drawn to that job or is that a skill set that we learn along the way? I think both might be true to a degree.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
But, I mean, something I learned early in my career is if somebody, in this case the military, is going to spend a ton of money to have like world-class fill-in-the-blank – My theory is you do exactly what they tell you to do and no more.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Follow directions absent being interrupted or going down a rabbit hole, which I didn't have that option at the time because of the smartphones.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
You know, it's a, I couldn't go to YouTube and type in, how do you, whatever, become a better rock climber or fill in the blank. You would have somebody who'd come to the line who could just smoke everybody on the line with their pistol. And he would talk about exactly what he did. And it's like, why would I add to that?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
If this guy is literally the best in the world, why do I need to add something to that? You say, put your hand like this, every single, like you do that every time. Okay, cool. I'm going to do that every time too. Exactly what they say. Nothing more. But if you can do that, I mean, I don't know if there's a skill that would be out of your achievability range.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I literally have met the people that have made and sharpened these knives for me. This is a family business that is exploding globally. It hasn't changed who they are and what they stand for. Now, they release their knives on Tuesdays and Saturdays. They go very quickly. You can also sign up for their email list or a text. notification because sometimes they do surprise drops.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
If you can grasp onto that, there might be some, you know, some IQ issues depending on like, probably not going to design a rocket to go into space because I don't understand mechanical engineering, but I think I could probably, or most people could learn if you can grasp onto that headspace, I think you can learn at a rate that's a lot faster.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
The job rewards. Being able to perform. If you look back in buds. Oh, for sure. First phase, probably not so much. It's like be able to do some pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, and run your ass off. Yeah. And more flutter kicks. Muscle through. Totally. I mean, that's what first phase is about. Sure. Second phase, though, we're like, oh, we'll give you a whole week to prep for pool comp.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
But you know what you know really well? The procedures. That's actually what it was all about. So I taught second phase. It was all about the procedures. I had to brief the classes. And I don't know if it was in the curriculum, but I would sit them down after pool comp and just tell them, please don't go recreational diving. You guys are idiots. You don't know anything about diving.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
That test you just passed might have occurred underwater on open circuit gear, but it had nothing to do with diving. It was all about being able to follow procedure regardless of what's going on around you.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah, so you were... Yeah, because I proctored 264, so I had just gotten there. Yeah, you had just gotten there, yeah. Yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah, that's the phase where it was a little slower than watch one, do one, teach one. Yeah, a little bit slower than that, yeah. It took a few classes for the instructors because it's a one-on-one and you have to know the ins and outs of the test. Oh, for sure.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And you have to know the gray areas of what you can pass somebody with and what somebody should be failed for from a procedural perspective. And that's pretty heavy, too. At that point, if they fail, and they fail twice, they get remediated.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
and they can pass or take the test again the next day, Thursday, Friday, at least when I was there, they feel that Friday though, one again, twice they're in front of a board and it was, it's heavy to sit there and watch somebody who, you know, has a performance role already on their fourth attempt at pool comp. You feel like they're like they're performing well, they're a good dude.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Their knives oftentimes when they do those drops Tuesdays and Saturdays will sell out within minutes. I highly recommend actually purchasing something like a sticker on their website so they have your payment information saved. I have literally had at least a half a dozen knives taken out of my shopping cart because I didn't do exactly that.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah, you're like, okay, this kid has a performance role. You're not going to get two. Yeah. And you're watching him fail pool comp for the fourth time. Yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I went through a semen apprentice stump. I got to the island and a third phase instructor pulled me aside within weeks of graduating and said, hey, are you part of this class? I was like, fuck yeah. Good job. Yeah. Yeah, there's 0% chance as an O that you're going to be able to do that. 0% chance. For sure.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Actually, let me ask this. Yeah. Having gone through your career, if you could go back in time, would you still go the O route? Oh, man. These are hard questions.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I mean, they have, they have like, I heard they shut that down actually, the pre-training pipeline. And I've also heard that it is either going to be started back up or it was started back up. So for people listening, you would go to for the path for most people pre this pre-training program or my path was I enlisted bootcamp at like the fourth week.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
They literally put in a VHS tape that was a grainy, like dudes coming out of the water. Like, fuck yeah. Like who wants to take the test to do this, which was a run, swim, pushups, pull-ups, sit-ups. If you pass that, you picked an A school that would allow you to go to Bud's. You went to the A school, then you went to Bud's.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Then after I was in, it was, you could sign up with a contract guaranteeing your spot in Bud's. You would go bootcamp. Yeah. I think you would get assigned an A school, but at some point you would detach and then go through, like, this 12-week pre-training program, and then you would go to Bud's. Actually, you know what?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I don't even know if you went to an A school because Bud's became an A school.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I was putting in my credit card information and they sold out before I could execute the transaction. It's very frustrating. Even though I know Josh, there's nothing that I can do about it. Head over to MontanaKnifeCompany.com. Check out what they have. I have their website in front of me. They have awesome apparel. Their knives, again, are second to none.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
The amount of money they spent trying to figure out, I mean, surveys on people's hobbies. They were doing personality tests on people at a time.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I am not aware of it bumping or lowering the attrition rate by maybe one single percentage point. That program will just spit people out. It's a fucking wood chipper.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And the results of said compromise of standards. Exactly. The results of the tests are really out there for people to look at if they want to. I don't think you should deviate from the standard. Yeah, for sure. It was one of the things when I went back as an instructor, it was really cool. They did not ever expect us to deviate from the standard.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I will say the skipper would show up sometimes on a Friday of pool week if there was a large number of students that had failed twice on Thursday. He would attend on the pool deck. I don't know what he thought that was going to do. I think it made the students way more nervous than the instructors. Because quite frankly, the skipper didn't know what the fuck he was looking at anyway.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
He had gone through pool comp decades before. But yeah, yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Some point in their checkout portal, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Do me a favor. Put down either Cleared Hot or Andy Stumpf or both. That's the best that you can do to support me. This brand has done nothing but be supportive of the podcast. So that is the best way that you can give back to not only me and the brand. Back to the show.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. You know, every time when I was growing up, people would tell me that I wasn't going to make it.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
That helps so much. I tell you what, that's also a different kind of person too, where that negative read. I mean, I have, you have kids, right? Oh, for sure. I have two boys and a girl. Yeah. With my boys, I can fuck with them. If I fuck with my daughter like that, it's like throwing water on a fire. Yeah. My boys, it's logs of motivation. And that's the same way it is for me. Yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Somebody's like, Hey, you can't do that. I'm like, really? Let me get some fucking research on. Cause I'm about to blow your hair back. Yeah. And with my daughter and I've made that mistake once early on and I kind of saw her like shrinking. I was like, Oh fuck. Okay. We got to change tact here. Yeah. It's a special kind of person that sees that as motivation.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Resoundingly over the course of my 17 years in 99.9% negative feedback.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Anytime I got positive feedback, I remember sitting there like, are you fucking with me?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Like, am I in trouble? Like, you're actually being really nice. What did I do wrong?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Have you attempted to give that type of feedback in the civilian world?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I was going to say, I have a full Rolodex of examples of what I've tried. It results always the same.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It's funny to watch. It's one of the things I do a good amount of public speaking. I have for shit well over a decade at this point. I actually caution people against... the SEAL leadership model, leadership culture.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Because if you don't have the same type of people who went through the same type of course, that had the same type of buy-in, you are going to be just throwing people out into space like an atom coming apart. The electrons are just flying off.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And I think one skill is- I don't tell people it's bad. I just define the very narrow bandwidth that it can work in. Right. And I ask them the question, like, if your organization is tooled like this, this might be good for you. But if your organization is anything other than this, you better be really sparing. I've watched so many guys. Again, I'm not joking.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
The number of times I have fucked up and used the feedback model that- we were just a part of and seen it fail. I watched guys get out of the military and I think it's why actually a lot of team guys will be like individual entrepreneurs or start their own business with just themselves because it's so ingrained. And if you can't get it back and check, it is just not accepted in the civilian world.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It's interesting to see, and I think this is coming to an end a little bit, but For years, people viewed the special operations community, specifically the SEAL community, as if it was a nucleus of only the best leadership in the world. And you would watch people get hired for or approached for a role that, quite frankly, was outside of their capability.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Never been to Montana. Heading back to Nashville after this where everybody in the United States is currently moving. That's right. So you were born and raised near the area where you live?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
They might have been enthusiastic about it, but their enthusiasm outstripped their capability. And I've had this conversation so many times with people because, and I'm sure this is the case for you in your career. You probably worked with good leaders and bad, right? For sure. But did you ever have mission failure?
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And that's the thing. So people look at the community and they say, well, you guys just keep succeeding and succeeding and succeeding. You must have the best leaders in the world. What they'll never know is that a platoon or a troop or whatever it is, sometimes they're succeeding in spite of the leader, not because of the leader.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
But that's invisible to anybody else. Like we all put it on our dress whites. Everybody would say that's a great picture. But let's say you're at a team on the West Coast. You'd be like, that guy fucking sucks. But he wears the same uniform and they look the same and they have the same title.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And if we go out in the field, two people might be doing the job of that guy and you're going to have mission success. And if that guy is the leader, they're going to say that spectacularly the best leader in the world. Like, no, it actually the SEAL community actually masks really poor leadership. Because the guys always pull through. They always pull through.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Well, it's, I mean, then that guy gets out of the military to say the poor leader goes into a sector and just proper fucks it for everybody else. I've watched doors close behind because they have such a bad taste in their mouth. And they say, probably rightfully so, not again. We're going to turn the faucet off there.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
So it's, yeah, it's interesting looking back at it now. Some of the best leaders that I ever worked with and also the worst. Yeah. And nobody would ever know the difference.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
But how do you explain to the outside world that both good and bad exists.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
So that's the kind of the officer and a gentleman course? It is. Equivalent?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. Cause I'm in eight weeks in bootcamp, another eight weeks at a school. Of course, this transition time, you got to wait for your school to start. Yeah. That's not a bad way to go, but now looking back, yeah. What would you have done knowing your career?
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
But you probably had the Country Music Hall of Fame, though, right?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. You could have easily, you could have made, you know, get to E6, maybe looking at the chief rep. Like, I don't think so. Lateral over, slap some butter bars on, you're good to go.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It is a different career trajectory. I watched officers come and go. 24 months is literally what it seems like. Yeah. You know, for an enlisted guy at a team, you're probably going to do five years minimum. And then over on the East Coast, damn, those guys have been there over a decade. And the O's can kind of bounce in and out, but they're not staying consistently.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
My first pre-911 platoon, the LPO, which is leading petty officer, right underneath, the head chef would be the OIC officer in charge, AOIC, the chief, and then the LPO. So the LPO finishes his tour and probably is going to pick up chief. This dude was on his 10th deployment as an E6. He had gotten in some probably along the way. So a little bit of up and down the ladder of enlisted ranks.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. I didn't need to look anything up because I would just go ask him.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. I mean, just a fucking Rolodex of information. Like, oh, yeah, I've done this training exercise 15 times. This is what you guys can expect.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. 10th. Yeah. Still to this day. I'm like 10th, 10th deployment. Okay.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
No, it does not. Yeah. I used to enjoy seeing students in that cycle and then I would try to just really help them and assist them deeper. Yes. It's shocking to me the number of people, it's, oh, somebody, you know, they made me quit. I'm like, I want you to sit with that for a second and let's really determine how who made the decision to quit.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Because I've never seen an instructor grab a student's hand and put it on the bell.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Probably because we're not allowed to. But, you know. For sure. Nobody makes you quit. No. You make the choice. Somebody can drive you to a place where you make that decision. But that's a tough conversation to have with people. Yeah. Because they'll get into those spirals. And it's amazing to see there's this minigun of excuses just. Yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Because if you have kids, you know, you do the absolute best that you can. You're not always there. And sometimes unfettered access, unsupervised access to the internet can lead to really, really dark places. My guest today is Josh Thurman. He is the co-founder and chief operating officer of a company called Angel AI.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And it all terminates in ringing the bell three times and somebody else's fault. It's like, that's unfortunately not how it works.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Sometimes you got to let the students work it out. Yeah. Like on a hell week shift, maybe just let them go do a little bit of a paddle and they do an oar fight first, you know, and somebody comes in a little battered and bruised and heads towards the bell. There's things you can do as an instructor and there's things you can hand back over to the class.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I mean, we, we would do that in our boat crew, like sitting into the side as an instructor and watching the class, uh, Because as an instructor, you'd see, especially in Hell Week, because Hell Week is about five days long. It's a 24-hour evolution. And so all of the phases have to augment, because there's just not enough first phase staff. So I didn't know any of the fucking students, right?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It's hundreds of kids, largely. So there's no way for me to identify who is really a top performer versus who the class doesn't like. But if you were to sit back and watch, you could find these little nucleus of boat crews doing
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
the job that needed to be done for the instructor staff and the curriculum, the number of students that I watched quit because they were under a boat and they are running and everybody in their boat crews like, fuck you, Bob, like you need to quit your, and I've watched boat crews push people, push people out from under the boat.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And then the dude's just like, they start like really enthusiastically chasing the boat and then they slow down and then they walk. And then the truck pulls up with the bell.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I know some of these names, but I'm going to be honest, I am not a huge fan of professional sports. I'm aware they exist. Yeah. I would struggle. If somebody put a million dollars on the table right now, I would struggle to name five names of professional football players.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It's not the tour you guys think it is. It's not postcards. It's... Like you said, the middle of the fucking night.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
So yeah, it was wild to see the, uh, the students, uh, self-selecting. And a lot of the times, another really interesting facet of being an instructor is you spend a lot of time with people who quit. Because as a student, I mean, my class, we had 181st day, 18 originals graduated. I have no idea where they went. Because you're running to breakfast, and you're talking to Bob.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Well, as an instructor, you get to sit there, and you get to talk with them. And they're in a pretty emotionally compromised state. And I was always very kind, because I was more curious about why. Yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
You don't need to. They already feel bad enough. But they're in a place where they were really open and honest about why they made the decision that they did. And it was fascinating case study and why people give up on, because most students would tell you, this is, this is my lifelong goal. This is what I want more than anything in life.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
If you canvass the class, like, Hey, by a show of hands, how many people are going to be here on graduation day? Every fucking hand goes up. Sure. Every single one. And where'd y'all go? You know, where'd y'all go? But to see the students kind of being even an additional pressure vice on top of the curriculum itself is, weeding out what is invisible.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Because as the instructor staff, we see too many students to have the inner dynamics of what's going on. And then I would talk with some of the students about, if I saw a boat crew do that, spit a guy out, I would often try to get some time with members of that boat crew to understand why. They were shockingly unwilling to give me information most times. Yeah.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yes. Well, they thought I was going to use it against them, which for clarity, 100% was probably going to. Yeah. And I also wasn't a student too, so I totally got it. Yeah. But it was fascinating- A lot of the times, it wasn't even necessarily performance-driven. They just hated the person. It was personality-based.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And the personality conflicts were occurring in times where the instructors weren't around, like the weekends, when somebody was a shitbag away from the instructors. Because people think that Bud's is 182 days and it's 24-7. It's completely not. Hell Week is five days of pretty consistent kicking the dick. But you get your weekends off, other than on the island in San Clemente.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
But even then, you can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel. So if I could get the boat cruise to open up a little bit, it was fascinating to hear why that person was the one that they ejected out. And it almost never had anything to do with physical performance.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It was a violation of trust more than anything, which was wild to see it physically expressed that way.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Another misconception people don't realize. Yeah. I think it's a one and done.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
What you just described is so eerily similar to what happened in my class too. So he was not a hell week rollback, but he made it to... Tuesday midday-ish. Yeah. I don't think I'm giving away any inside baseball. If you can make it to Wednesday, Thursday, they might roll you forward.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It is not uncommon to have a medical injury and be rolled forward into Hell Week, meaning you'll get your brown shirt designating you've been through Hell Week. But for a class of people that hasn't gone into Hell Week at all and we don't know what to expect... this dude was the burning bush, right? Everything. This is what's gonna happen. This is how you should mentally approach it.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
This is what you should prepare for. We, my class, and I don't know if this happened because it was just scheduled to happen or that they absolutely hated us. Cause they fucking hated my class.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
We did not get a breakout for hell week. They put us out in the tents on the beach. And, uh, you know, we did the, we were watching pizza or watching a movie, ate pizza, whatever on the Sunday. And we go out there and, you know, you're ready for the M 60 fire and the smoke grenades.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And you just hear, hit the surf. And I was in like the northernmost tent. And they were down more by the southern one. So we watched. We were like peering through the tent.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
So we opened Hell Week with a good... probably two hour surf torture evolution. It's a surf immersion is what they call it.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. And this particular individual, I'm going to say, and this is again, through decades of looking back, I'm going to say within the first two hours he ejected. Wow. And the number of people that followed him because of the, I'm making a guess here a little bit, but because of how they viewed him and what they thought he was capable of.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
If this dude's throwing the talent now, what chance do I have? Yeah. Be careful. Be careful. The stories you tell yourself. Yeah. I think it actually, it nerded the instructors out a little bit. I mean, there was a symphony of fucking bells going on. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Like, you know, we were playing jingle bells out there. Wow. And, uh, It was wild.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I support it. I'm here for it. Here's the thing. I'd rather have it. You think you're in a bad place after Hell Week? Fucking stand by. Yeah. Because it gets a whole lot worse for you. You know what I mean? Yeah. I didn't believe the instructors when they said you're going to be colder after buds or more tired. I'm sitting there looking at them. I said nothing. I just was like, yeah, right.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And then it was way colder after training and way more tired.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Well, in the summer, when you get the temperature swing, and if you're busting your ass during the day, and then all of a sudden the temperature goes off a cliff, and sometimes you pack warmies, sometimes you don't because you think you're going to be back in a day. Right. And you're not because the weather rolls in. And then you're real cold. Yeah. Yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Probably wasn't as cold, to be honest, as the immersion in the ocean, you know, in San Diego. But it felt like it for sure. Yeah. Deserts, man, they'll crush you. They can have 100 degree temperature swings.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. I mean, honestly, like probably Kodiak was probably the coldest afterwards doing the bullshit like. let's do an OTB in our dry suits because it's 1999 and like, fuck it. This is what everybody did before us. So I was beaten as a child. So I have to beat you since you're my child.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
You could hunt elk in Tennessee. Really? I don't know if you have a mathematical chance of getting a tag.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Looking back through SQT and BUDS, what do you think the most important... Actually, let's just go on BUDS. What do you think is the most important lesson you took from that as a person? Or is there one to be gained from there? Or is it just a wood chipper?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I didn't know that until a few months ago and somebody told me. So I'm just sharing my shock with you.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
That's some good info. Good intel. Man. So when you left, I mean, obviously you went the Navy pipeline. Why'd you go officer versus enlisted? Who guided you down this path?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Well, you get a clean slate after putts. It's kind of, it's a little bit, it's truncated.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
So another interesting misconception I think is that people feel like everybody, it's like this homogenous organization where everybody has exactly the same beliefs.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Holy shit. I served with people. I mean, I legitimately serve with people who were silver spoon kids and straight up shooting dinner with a BB gun and like the deep woods of Arkansas. And everything in between. And I would say the military and the SEAL community probably trends right of center politically.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
But I certainly served with people who were on the left or support staff or all the structure that makes it possible. People think that leadership, like SEAL community, oh, you have the perfect team and you plan the perfect mission and it always goes well. And I just look, I'm like, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Right.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It's a buy-in to the mission. For sure. The greater mission, yeah.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Devoutly religious, complete and other savage walking planet earth, everything in between.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. Yeah. It'd be awesome if it did. I would have some choice feedback words.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Where'd your career take you after Bud's? Uh, so then what'd you put in your dream sheet?
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And then... I was not aware you could change your dream sheet.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
This is Bud's officer privilege. Yeah, exactly. Because E2 Andy, they're like, we actually shredded your paper right after we gave it to you because that's a fucking joke. You're going where the Navy needs you.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Today's episode is brought to you by Element. It's spelled L-M-N-T like it is on the can. Don't be afraid to just say Element. What is it? It is electrolytes. I'm going to read right off of one of these little satchels that they have. You can hear this. 1,000 milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, 60 milligrams of magnesium. There's a couple of ways that you can get this.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
You have these little satchets right here that I travel with. I keep them everywhere. I'm getting ready to go to Costa Rica for my wife's jujitsu seminar. I have an entire Ziploc full of these. I rely upon them. And now they have the sparkling water. 16 ounces, exactly the same thing. 1,260, a variety of flavors. I might be giving you some inside tea as well, but they just got a packet of
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
lemonade salt at my house. I made it. It tastes exactly like lemonade, but it provides exactly the thousand two hundred and sixty. I don't think it's for sale yet, but it's coming down the pipe. So prepare yourself for that. Do not sleep on your hydration and electrolytes. I did for a long time and it sucks.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I distinctly remember when Rob Wolf, one of the co-founders, introduced me to this product, how I felt before using this product and how I felt after. For me, it It was jujitsu, two hours, an hour of class, an hour of open mat and feeling like an absolute drain battery afterwards or slamming one of these packets in a water.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And I'm not going to say you could feel the energy coursing through your veins, but you could almost feel the energy coursing through your veins. It made a huge difference on my productivity and recovery for the remainder of the day.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
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Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
They have sample packs so you can try everything. They make spicy salts so you can put them in margaritas, if you will. They make chocolate salts that you can put in coffee. They have you covered from an electrolyte perspective. Head on over to drinkelement.com slash clearedhot. That is drink, D-R-I-N-K-L-M-N-T.com slash clearedhot.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And you're going to get a free Element sample pack with any purchase. Again, at drinkelement.com slash clearedhot. Don't sleep on the sparkling. This stuff is actually really, really good, convenient. Throw it in your bag. 16 ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Go check it out. Feel the energy coursing through your veins. Back to the show.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Professional development. Professional development piece, yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
When did you start thinking about getting out? Wow. So you retired or got out, you did 12 years. So is that probably 04 knocking on 05? Yeah.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
You can ask whatever you want. There's just people, first amendment, like, yeah, the freedom of speech does not free you from the consequences of your speech.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I am not even going to begin to describe what they do because he does an amazing job and we actually walk through it in real time showing it. Before this though, before Josh got into the entrepreneurial world, he was a Navy SEAL. He served for 12 plus years, deployed overseas 11 times in the support of the Global War on Terror. I let him describe his career.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
The idea of being an entrepreneur and the reality of being an entrepreneur. I'm going to get out and I'm going to build stuff. Very easy to say. It's brutal. Where did you start? What was the first thing that you built? You're like, okay, cool. Next chapter of life.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I remember, so we got out in- Entrepreneur sounds great in the movies. Remember of entrepreneurs that I know, full gray hair at the age of like 35? I know.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
You just got another right line item to draw from. Maybe pull it from this program over here.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I mean, it's very analogous to what you're saying about, it doesn't really matter if you were the team captain or any of that before buds, leave that shit at the door.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Like you're trying to still shiny and people probably pay attention to you, but you better be able to perform.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I would only build things that I like and then it would be immediately bankrupt. I actually have a hard rule at the coffee shop, especially for t-shirt designs. Yeah. If it was me, we would sell only black t-shirts with only white ink on it. And so I constantly tell them when they ask me about a shirt idea, I'm like, listen, don't ask me, ask other people.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I like super simple stuff. And apparently people like more complicated stuff. Right. And that's your choice in business. Do you want to sell what you like or do you want to sell what other people like? Yeah. I would recommend the latter. That's exactly right. Which is a tough pill to swallow. God damn it. I'm an idiot again. Yeah. Yeah. It's rough. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Angel Q, how did we stumble upon this idea? Other than the internet is a fucking landmine field, worse than we ever walked through.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Strong. Use your teeth to pull the little three-inch antenna?
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Okay. You got it earlier in life than I did. Yeah. Yeah. I remember my first phone was in my mid-20s. And I had, I think I bought the 60 minute per month plan, but they, but they rolled over.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. No, those, some of those bills were pretty stiff and reinforcing.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Free weekends though. Most of my calls were done on the weekends. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was the weekday. Oh yeah.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, my own kids, they don't remember a life without the internet.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It's wild. Yeah. They interface with it in a different way. They also, they are way more capable on the internet than I am. For sure. They can figure out ways to teach themselves things on the internet. Yeah. At a way I was never able to, my middle son started two businesses off of YouTube and Oh, wow. Like, you know, how do you form an LLC? What's a business model? That's impressive. Yeah.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
He's going to be just fine. He's at Bozeman doing a mechanical engineering degree. I don't have any worries about him. And one of his business was just knocking on doors. It was a window cleaning business. And so he doesn't mind talking to people. That's great. When they tell him no to his face, he literally doesn't skip a beat. Do you know if any of your neighbors would like my service?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
He's fine. He's going to be fine for the rest of his life. Right. I'm like, just go live life, dude. You're going to be absolutely fine. He's so smart. And then so utterly stupid in some ways too, I guess, as we all are, we can't, uh, we can't all be a multi-tool because, uh, yeah, he's way smarter than me, but he'll do some dumb shit, but he's also 19. Yeah.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
But their, their utilization of the internet is wild. And then watching them in COVID trying to go to school on zoom. Yeah. I mean, I graduated high school in 96. If COVID had happened then, that would just be the end of school. There's no Zoom. There's no Skype. That's right. That would be just see in two years. I don't know what the hell they would have done. No. Yeah. But.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
The number of kids I know who have gotten into some deep, deep water over their head, most of the time accidentally, sometimes making a decision in their prefrontal cortex developmental mindset of like, hey, this is a good idea to send this picture. There's some of that. A lot of it's accidental, though. And there's predators out there that are reverse engineering the internet.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And I didn't come up with this by any stretch, but people talk about giving their kid a cell phone because it gives their kid access to the world. It actually gives the world access to your kid.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
So I've seen it too. One of the differences, especially on the negative side, when we were growing up, you know, going to school, everybody has somebody who they don't get along with, but you could manage that distance.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
You can't manage the distance on social media. I mean, You can, but I think it's fair to say that a lot of these apps are designed to be addictive. They reward the interaction. Your social circle is on there. That's how they are communicating. That's how they're sharing their experiences. But that's also where the people are. The number of people, you know, cyberbullying is definitely real.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I've seen that firsthand. And you're like, where's this person? They're in a different country. Like, what the fuck are you – who cares? That wasn't even a possibility when we were growing up. Like some dude in Bangladesh is not going to bully me in 1996 over the internet.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I was going to ask you, do you think this is the new childhood?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Dude, I'm a late adopter. I never fucked with any of this stuff until I got out of the military.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
We just hit... There's examples that that's accidental. There's 100% concrete examples of people who have been driven to intentionally killing themselves.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Based off that inescapability or just being bombarded by what they think is a tsunami they can't survive.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I feel like we know enough about electronic targeting that the Yahoo boys probably could be menstruated down to a 10-digit grid. And I think a JDAM would be spectacular.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I mean, you know what they'll say too. We have three plus billion people who, Even with the most complicated AI tools, we cannot manage and monitor everything that's passed on this platform. That's what they'll say.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
They host the platform, but they're not responsible for it. For the content.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It's fascinating calculus. Yeah, it really is. I want, I mean, I don't understand those numbers. Yeah. Like when people talk about a billion dollars, I'm like, Oh, cool. Yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. You know, I guess everybody has their price. I don't know. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. Granted, I don't have the intellectual capacity to create one of these platforms. But if you're aware of the damage and you're aware of the vulnerabilities, I don't know.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I mean, is there just a monetary amount that you become so free as a person because you can just do whatever you want to do that you care less? I think...
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Plus he was so young too. I mean, at what age? You know, how could you extrapolate or even forecast into the future with a young 20-something mind? Yeah, exactly. To a place where three-plus billion people? Yeah, exactly. You know, when he launched it, he probably thought, you know, 3,000 would be amazing.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I don't even know how many more zeros would need to go on that to make it three-plus billion. But, yeah, man. I mean, but again, three-plus billion people? Is the chisel slowly chinking away at it? Is that enough?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It already kind of is. I get into the car this morning, and already up on the map display, it was close to where I was headed, but not exactly. Yeah, it knows. And I don't remember putting that in there. No. Don't get me wrong, I'm an idiot on technology, but it'll either look at my calendar and pull up the app. Right. I didn't click yes on that button. Yeah. Let me decide. Yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
My oldest son is doing great now. He had a period where he was legitimately, uh, He was gaming hard. Yeah. And I am underselling that. And he was bouncing back and forth between my ex and I. And we were getting ready to go on a trip. And I was trying to throttle his internet connection through our modem and app. And the dude... like research around it. Yes.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Why the SEALs? I mean, of all the branches, I mean, there's all something to pick from.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
He researched being able to hide his IP address from his device and just played his ass off. So it's, it's constantly move counter move. And that's, that's the struggle because You can have every safety protocol on your kid's device. If they're in a social circle where they have a friend whose parents are not paying attention, it's a portal to hell. It is. And you've got to manage that. For sure.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
So I want to see some of these features. I'm going to take a piss, and let's fire this up because I want you to be able to demonstrate, and then Michael can get you all set up, and we'll keep going.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah, I need to take a piss. Okay, a kid-first super... browser fire away, talk us through this bad boy. So, uh, for the audio only we're on angelq.ai and maybe just walk Michael through the website first and then we can actually dig right into it if you want to. So you can have them, you can be his hands, you can be as like, he's like a marionette doll.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Does this, you put this on your phone, you activate it. Yeah. Does it prevent them from downloading other things? Like, does it have backend control of the device?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Oh, you had a different upbringing than I did. Yeah. I didn't care about any of that shit. Yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It's fascinating to me to see the people, where they come from, why, what they do while they're in, and then what they do afterwards. It's a fascinating story arc to me. It's inspirational. I always leave these conversations thinking, God, I know that I can do more and I need to. So before we get into episode 384 with Josh Thurman, let me pay the bills.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
There's a, I don't think we really have the ecosystem for tigers to live up here comfortably. Yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Let's do it. Let's see what you got. Michael, we're putting this on your phone later. I get to be the parental. Yeah. I get to be the parental.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
The 234 documentary. Yes. Let me just tell you. Yeah. What's shown on the 234 documentary and the reality of training, as you know, is. They're kind of different. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Remember, film crews work for a union, and they have a certain amount of hours that they can be there.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Very Harry Potter. A Harry Potter wrestler. Yeah, we're really crossing genres here. That's right. I like it.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
This is not a good idea. Andy Stumpf is a former Navy SEAL for his impressive career in military service as well as his post-military experience.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
During his time as a SEAL, Andy was involved in numerous deployments and operations around the world, exemplifying skill, bravery, and dedication. None of that's true, but...
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I wish some of that was accurate, but... Hey, is Andy a good dude? Oh, it caught to my mind.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Angel certainly didn't ask you if I was going to do that. I was not consulted.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
First one was Lake McDonald, which is like the iconic GMP image.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
The rest of training that you might have skipped out on or rounded the edges on will get caught up on after the film crew leaves.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I would call it the normal buds that maybe the Navy said- let's just not do this on camera. And you know, as an instructor, somebody went back as an instructor, when somebody tells you to do that, VIP is coming by or whatever, they want you to modify training in your head as an instructor, all you're thinking is, You guys owe. Oh. You owe. For sure. This is more work for me.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Some moms will be getting those emails like, your son asked if your husband has a big dick.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Why did you want me to ask that question, Michael? I did not say that. And so they can consume, like you're saying, Netflix, which is a super common one, YouTube.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
We should ask if we watched Navy Seals with Charlie Sheen. Yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
So as you guys are growing, you're talking about for like the tween and older, I mean, obviously you're going to have to figure out a way to gap the social media ecosystem.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I mean, the cadre will be physically present, but yeah, we're not paying the debt. That's right. We will keep going until I get tired. That 234 documentary, yeah, that was a wild one. I was already in when that came out. I didn't watch it at the time. I think I watched it years later. Some of it's accurate.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It's a war between parents and kids. True. It puts the parent back in the driver's seat where the parent should be in the first place. Absolutely. It puts them in that place where they need to make the decision for the best interest of their kid. And that's going to be an uphill battle that is going to be fought all the time.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Because if a couple of the friends in the social circle don't have that and maybe you missed something. Yeah. Or a message or, you know, I get it. I can understand where they were coming from. But then also maybe you don't actually or accidentally hang yourself in the closet because you were exposed to something that was misunderstood, horrendous, predatory, fill in the blank. Yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It doesn't work. It doesn't work. Straight up doesn't work because they'll find a friend.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It's having, you know, my kids, my oldest now is 21 and then 19 and then 16. We're getting ready to go into birthday season. So they're all going to level up one It's the biggest lie we tell our kids is stranger danger. But parents have been doing that for years. It's more the stats are resoundingly back that it's more often than not going to be somebody that, you know.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
But I don't think that applies necessarily anymore to devices like this.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
So we had there needs to be stranger danger is, you know, you're going to end up on a milk carton. Right. People, my kids, if I were to say that to them, they might even actually be like, what's a milk carton? And why would it have pictures on it? Because the milk cartons are actually different now. But I remember growing up, and that was the thing. Avoid dangerous people. Avoid scary people.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Don't get into a fucking van down by the river for an ice cream cone. Stuff like that. Made sense, even though most of the time it's going to be an extended family member or somebody in the proximal social circle that you have. whether the mantra was accurate or not, it's stuck.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
You got to figure out a way where the mantra for one, hopefully it can be more accurate, but two, that it sticks as well.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It is what it is. As far as a recruiting tool, probably not bad.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I feel like the mental health struggle you're talking about, it's 100% real. And any parent out there that has kids, I'm gonna say in the early teens to late teens, just sit back and watch the consumption or the attachment For sure. With the inability to put it down. There's another part of it too, you know, growing up, you could get away from the person that could potentially be bullying you.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
But then you could just go to bed at night too. I guess they were, they could call you on your landline if they would happen to get your number or they could write you a shutdown real quick. Yeah. Or they could write you a really mean letter, you know, two ways delivered to that mailbox.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Point being you got some silence, you know, at the end of the day you could go and sleep. Um, Watching kids, they never turn the notification off. And they'll wake up in the middle of the night to every notification that goes on. People are in different time zones, all sorts of shit you didn't have to deal with when you were our age.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
The mental health thing, it impacts parents, but it impacts communities too. And I feel like schools, they're bearing the brunt of it too. Because a lot of that is expressing itself in the social interactions. There's no reason why a school couldn't. Again, I'm not writing policy here at this point, but those are other good portals where it could almost be mandated.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I mean, I don't know how they would manage people's individual devices, this, that, or the other, but a required portal, you know what I mean, to access whatever, the Wi-Fi at the school, whatever it is. Those institutions are dealing with the social media crisis. I would actually agree that it could be called that. But the mental health crisis is associated with that as well.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I feel like they could be incredible advocates levering it at least in that direction.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And that's a battle for parents. Oh, it totally is. And I get it. Depending on the socioeconomic status, I mean, you might be using a device as a babysitter at some point. Absolutely. You might be exhausted at the end of the day, but you have to fight that battle.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. That's all there was. Yeah. So I joined, what year did you join?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Okay. So I joined in 96 and was looking at it since I was about 11. So in the late 80s. Okay. That was about it. There was that and the, what I thought at the time was a nonfiction Rogue Warrior series. Come to find out a little bit more fiction than non.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Knowing what you know about tech, do you think that these massive platforms, and honestly, most of the main platforms, I mean, like Meta is an example. Sure. I mean, you know what I mean? They funnel up to fewer and fewer people. For sure. Do you think they possess the technological ability to fix it if they wanted to?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
How about pass that bill and also still put the $10 billion safety center in? Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, yeah. They'll both sound great to me. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny how that, uh, I mean, there's absolutely nothing new in that. And that's where I go back to, like, is there just some dollar figure where people are like, fuck it, I'm getting a yacht?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I, yeah, I would like to believe that I would not be, plus, I mean, I've made just stupid decisions with money in my life. It's now one of the last things that I look at in anything. Sure. I do. I work with a couple of brands and anybody who approaches me with money up front, I'm like, no, absolutely not.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Now, if there was a lot of zeros on top of that, I want to believe that I would still say no.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
But I think yachts might be cool. I don't know. Apparently they are. I couldn't do it. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. Yeah. But I don't know. Maybe that also limits my economic ability because I'm not willing to create something that I know is predatory and unleash it on people that can't protect themselves.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Man, I've been asked that question so many times and I still don't have a great answer. Yeah. So my dad who I finally extricated him out of California, he lives like a mile from where we live now was in, uh, you know, the Mark fives we used to work with. Yeah. Well, he was on the Mark ones. Oh, wow. So Brownwater Navy, um, uh, He enlisted. He did not get drafted. He volunteered.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And what do you see? God, I'm interested what their move would be. I mean, meta absorbs companies like Instagram as an example. I could see a world where as you guys get larger and you are that chisel on this and They just start hitting you up. You know what? Let's just buy you and integrate you into our system. What they really mean is buy you and shut you the fuck down.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Especially if they pitch it as, we'll just integrate this. We love what you guys are doing. Let us put our hands on the wheel.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Well, that's what I'm saying. I'm sitting here thinking about this. Like, what would I do if I was in his shoes and you were somebody who for somehow can sleep at night in his Hawaiian bunker that he's building and Which I gotta be honest, if I had that much money, I'd probably do the same thing too. I definitely need an underground hockey rink that needs to be like DEFCON 5 proof. Sure.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
A foot of concrete. Can you imagine having so much money that you actually could do whatever you want for the rest of your life? I actually can't fathom that.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I think it would be scary. And I think, I know a couple of people with, uh, some exceptional wealth. The one thing they seem to struggle with is truly knowing who is their friend.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
You know, can you imagine the filtering that, I mean, maybe Zuck, I don't know the guy at all.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Are you even capable? I mean, you would have to almost limit yourself to people you knew before you got to the place that you were at, which is super weird because you wouldn't be able to meet new people because you would never know if behind the scenes, they just have daggers out trying to just bleed you to death for whatever, you know, round off error for a guy worth, I don't know, 400 billion.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I think he could probably nurse a couple million out of them. I don't even know what that is. Is that a $20 bill to that guy? I mean, who fucking knows? Yeah.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
If I see you sailing around in a yacht. Yeah. Hey. Yeah. I was at Angel Cougar. I'm like, well, listen, you know, it was going good. Do you think you'll stay in the tech space? I mean, obviously this will develop, this will turn into something. It'll go ways. Do you, do you foresee, do you enjoy the entrepreneurial tech space?
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I think he probably just assumed he was going to get drafted. So he volunteered. I think he would probably say he thought it was going to give him a better choice as to what path he wanted as opposed to needs of the military. Went over in the Mark I's and obviously not a SEAL, but, you know, the deal, the maritime. They were working with him all the time. For sure.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
It's going to be like World War I trench warfare. We're talking an inch at a time.
Cleared Hot
Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
He came from a family of Masons in Santa Cruz, California, where I was born. I mean, my dad and I were born in the same hospital. Wow. And my great- I mean, my great-grandfather- It was either my great-grandfather or my grandfather built the high school that my dad went to. Oh, wow. Some pretty deep ties. It was hard for me to get in trouble there.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Here's how I see it going down. We have the good AI and the bad AI, but it's going to come together. They're going to scheme against us, and we're going to work for robots for a water ration.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I mean, there's an argument there, right? So nation-state actors who are just diving headlong into the AI development, regardless of the cost. But should we be more responsible as the US? Because we'll fall behind.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I mean, he went to high school and college with the chief of police. So we're going to be okay on a Friday night.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
I feel like that change will either happen or not in our lifetime. Yeah. We'll have a front row seat to whatever direction it goes.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Given the pace that these things are accelerating. It's crazy. It is insane. Yeah. And our dumb, dumb monkey brains are not designed to keep up with that evolution whatsoever. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. I could, for hours, give you countless examples of my father's usage of the internet to just show you what happens if you kind of detach from it for a little bit. It's almost impossible to reintegrate.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah, you're going to get a ride home in the front of the cop car, not the back.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
He just was like, in his life, it didn't really matter much. My mom did a lot of it. And now he... leaves fucking laptops out in the rain. That's true.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Today's episode is brought to you by Montana Knife Company. If you have been a fan of the podcast, you've probably heard the episodes I've done with their founder, Josh Smith. This brand, born, bred, raised, and is growing rapidly in Montana, about 100 miles south of where I am. Frenchtown, Montana is where they're currently operating.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Or the fire truck. Yeah. But he also- to this day, has not talked a lot about his military experience. I mean, I think it's very fair to say that the Vietnam era specifically has been treated substantially differently than the GWAT. For sure.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
Yeah. Dude, I got to get you on a flight here pretty soon. What do you want to close out with?
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And if it was in that era, I don't know how open I would be about my experiences either, given how it was framed, and probably rightfully so, the framing at least, not the treatment. Yeah. We were, I remember the actual car ride when he first brought it up.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
We were driving back from an area near Aptos, which is just kind of southeast of Santa Cruz along the Half Moon Bay, or not Half Moon Bay, the Monterey Bay. And it was the first time I'd ever heard that term. And he was talking about basically insertion extraction platforms. And I remember asking him, like, what is a SEAL? And he's like, well, in paraphrasing, this is like 40 years ago. Yeah.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
You know, they're the special operations, or he probably said special forces of the Navy because he has no shit about Green Berets. Sure. Right. No offense to the Green Berets. This is my dad like 40 years ago. Like, they're special forces.
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
And it just seemed really interesting. And I remember him saying that not many people make it through, which was interesting to me at that young age. Yeah. And that the training was very challenging and arduous. And then I found, I think I found the book first, The Men with Green Faces, which at 11, who doesn't want to paint their face green, right?
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Episode 384 - Josh Thurman
So then that led me to probably the movie Navy Seals with Charlie Sheen, which I watched at least a thousand times. thinking that it was going to be exactly what the community was going to be like. It was not. Even though I did get to wear a flight suit doing CQC in my early days, and it was horrendous. They are flame retardant, which also means sweat insulating. They are the worst.