Andy Stumpf is a retired Navy SEAL, public speaker, podcast host (Cleared Hot) and certified badass. In this episode, Andy joins the show to discuss the steps necessary to make the U.S. military great again. Follow Andy on X @AndyStumpf77 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Get ready to hear the truth about America on a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino. Folks, I have a special show for you today on this Friday before Christmas. You know in my hierarchy of people I adore and respect, our military men and women are at the top. Honestly, it's not even a close second. It's not even worth a second or third place because in my heart, I...
They just mean so much to me. I lost my uncle before I was born. He was shot in the back in Vietnam. He was given the Bronze Star with a V device. And his story about how he was shot saving his friends has just destroyed my family. I mean, he was scheduled to come home and never made it.
On the day he was scheduled to come back, two soldiers showed up instead to notify my grandmother that he had died. And the greatest regret of my life is not going in the military. It really is. So I've got an amazing guest for you today, Andy Stumpf. If you haven't heard of him, he has a show. It's called Cleared Hot. He's a member of SEAL Team 6, an American patriot and a hero.
We're going to get into everything military, lethality, training. What's the problems with the military? We can talk Pete Hegseth and everything else. You're going to love this show. So stay tuned. Hey, the ultimate sleep refresh for the new year. Try Beam's Dream Powder. Get up to 45% off for a limited time at shopbeam.com slash Bongino. Use code Bongino at checkout.
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These statements and products have not been evaluated by the FDA. Not to diagnose, treat, cure, prevent any disease or condition. These statements and information are not a substitute to or alternative to seeking care from your healthcare providers. All right, let's get right into the show. I want to welcome and... I forgot the bell there. Without the bell, I can't even get started.
So we're looking for an amazing guest to discuss the military. Producer Michael said, you got to check this guy out. Andy Stump, member of SEAL Team 6, the host of Cleared Hot. Andy, welcome to the show. What an honor to have you on board. And most importantly, thank you for your service to this country. You're a patriot. We appreciate it.
Yeah, I don't know if I can live up to that intro. I'll do my best. I aim to set the bar low and then just stumble over the top of it.
Brother, you are a humble man, but you already have. I did some homework on you. I was beyond impressed. Michael has got a really good judge of talent here. So first, you served in the military. I didn't. We were kind of chatting pre-show here. And I don't do a ton of interviews on the podcast. You're the first one in a while. I do some on the radio show. But what I don't know, I don't know.
I think that's kind of one of the elements of being not just smart, but intelligent, knowing the perimeter of your own knowledge. I wasn't in the military. One of the problems, though, I could imagine being in the military, especially an elite unit like SEAL Team 6, is you need absolute unit cohesion.
You can't have people going off half-cocked, independent, doing their own thing, or the entire thing, whether it's breaching a door, everything breaks apart, everybody has a role. So when you get this wokeness component, forget the politics of it for a second, just look at it from a pure tactical perspective.
We're emphasizing division, skin color, race, things that have nothing to do with Andy Stump, SEAL Team 6's ability to breach a door and take out a bad guy. This is really dangerous. It has the potential to break up our military.
Yeah, you know, you hit on something that I don't know if maybe the listener would pick up on, and that is the cohesion. And one of the things about the military, specifically the units that I served in, even the conventional SEAL teams, you make it through BUDS, which is a six-month training pipeline. Everybody who wears a trident goes through that pipeline. It's a known origin.
You get to a conventional SEAL team. You've been through multiple crucibles, selection courses. You've been tested and refined and trained, and your level of buy-in
for the overall mission and the community and the command and then you can take it to another level an additional six months of screening at a jsoc command and the cohesion is without question you definitely have people who have different levels of belief but it's all reverse engineered towards crossing the threshold of the door overseas everybody is bought in on the mission everybody is focused on their role regardless of their personal beliefs because it is a melting pot of society
And we're not this carbon copy repeat of each other. But we put all of that aside so that you can be as lethal as humanly possible. I mean, at the JSOC level, you are at the sharpest edge of the pointiest spear. And the only thing that you need to be thinking about, especially if you want to survive the sometimes and often very dangerous things that the country asks of those units,
is to be completely bought in on that mission. So anything subtracting from that lethality is a detriment to the people that are serving overseas, specifically in that role.
Andy, one of the things, too, that differentiates special operators, and you just emphasized it, is this is not your first rodeo. And, I mean, that's underplaying the situation. You've already been through boot camp, which for all the branches isn't easy. I don't care what you're in. You can be a cook in the Navy at the White House mess. You've still been through boot camp. It's a pain in the ass.
It's not easy. It's not like, you know, your high school gym class. You get a guy, say, in Delta, another special operations team, who's been a Ranger. He's been through boot camp. He's been through Ranger school. You know, you get guys who've had specific MOS schools before they're in SEAL Team 6. They may have been through, I don't know, some EOD training or something like that.
These are all really complicated schools. You've got Green Berets who've been through two or three schools beforehand. I mean, this is the kind of thing where... You've now broken down all these barriers and you've got, as you called it, the tip of the spear. Guys operating as one, almost operating as a symbiote. They can read each other. They can see each other.
They just got to tap you on the shoulder. And one guy knows to go left and right, breaching that door. He goes the wrong way, he's dead. People are freaking dead. It's not like you go the wrong way. Oh, sorry, do over. It's not Wayne's World, you know, where they're playing a hockey game and they go, oh, come on, start over. That's not the way this shit works. People die.
And that's my problem with this wokeness crap. Obviously the politics of it, I hate, but the division component, like so much effort's gone into teaching you guys cohesion. It's just such a shame to see it all attacked with this silly nonsense stuff.
You know, wokeness is an ideology that survives in an academic environment. In my own personal experience overseas, Combat and warfare, it doesn't care about your personal beliefs. It doesn't care about the color of your skin. It doesn't care about your gender, your age, any of those things.
A bullet, I've never watched a bullet, not that you can really watch a bullet, but I've never seen a bullet or heard of a bullet carving around somebody because they were the DEI hire for that particular organization. It's a structure that falls apart in real life. And
fortunately in my experience even though i have heard in communication with people that are still in that there is this creep uh towards you could call it dei you could call it woke i would call it um and attention suck outside of lethality.
That does exist even in a special operations world, but it's such a small community that they can do a better job of kind of pushing it away and focusing on that lethality. And it's one of the things though, that I hope will change with the oncoming administration.
And I'm very interested to see how Pete Hegseth approaches this, because at least listening to what he has said, he wants to be rid of all of those things. And from somebody who operated in that environment, and my opinion only counts for myself, I think that's what the military needs. It's what are we required to do on the battlefield? And everything is targeted towards exactly that.
We reverse engineer from that. And in my own personal experience, wokeness and DEI doesn't appear in that calculus.
Yeah. Andy hosts the Cleared Hot podcast. Be sure to check it out. You'll love it. Andy, on the nomination of Pete Hegseth for the critical position of defense secretary, one of the top two or three most important positions in the world. Forget about our government. I mean, we are the most powerful military in the known universe. That's not even in dispute.
One of the things I found so objectionable about the attacks on Pete, again, I was not in the military. I spent a career in law enforcement, you know, NYPD and on the federal side. It's a hard job. It's nothing like the military. It's not even in the ballpark. But I just remember going over to Afghanistan and doing the site advance for Obama at Bagram.
And, you know, watching these guys living in these hoochies, which is like sand on every... And the guys were like, you can't get this sand out of anything. And it's like... You know, these guys, they're going out and doing their runs and they got sand in their lungs. They're spitting out like brown mucus all the time. I was out of there after two weeks, Andy.
These guys are living there on 10-month year deployments. And, you know, they come back and they're attacking Pete, you know, suggesting sometimes he has an alcohol problem. No one I know has ever seen that. It's a fabricated issue completely. But Pete Hegsett's a guy who enjoys spending some time with people who understand what it's like to be in combat. I don't understand that.
Andy, I have no idea what it's like to breach a door in Afghanistan with some mutt behind you pointing an AK-47. I have no freaking idea. I got to imagine when you come back, you know, maybe headed to a bar responsibly with a few of your boys talking about that experience is really the only thing you have. I mean, what are you going to do? Talk to some shrink about what the hell do they know?
They haven't been there. And for them to attack him about this, that really pisses me off because guys like you who need that outlet now are probably going to be like, oh my gosh, is someone going to put me on Twitter at a bar? Like, am I going to be able to get a job later? That's kind of bullshit.
I mean, let's just be honest. The world was better before social media. Oh, God. You know, and stuff like... You could be yourself. I mean, we're all human beings and we all make mistakes, but now mistakes can be captured on social media and the internet lives forever. You know, the military...
and again i can only speak for the seal community it's heavily steeped in a drinking culture but having said that it's also steeped in the responsible use of alcohol at least from a doctrine level and actually now in the modern military one of the fastest ways you can be ejected administratively is what's called an alcohol related incident so it's an accepted portion of the culture but they expect you to be a professional both in your off time
and the time where you're clocked in overseas you know i don't know what it says about me um probably that i'm an but i love the fact that pete's potential nomination has people up in arms i love that the people who are like he's not a four-star general yeah that's the point
maybe you know maybe you don't need to be a four-star general to hold that position maybe four-star generals and admirals although there are some great ones out there maybe at that level you have become a politician inside of the military system and what we actually need is somebody who didn't get to that rarefied air and status or stratus and hasn't you know who can come in and give it a fresh look i mean if an old four-star general or admiral can it up why can't we give a younger guy a chance and you know give him some time behind the wheel and see how it goes yeah
Andy, you definitely can't curse on this podcast, right, guys? We have a policy. I'm kidding, obviously. That's bullshit. Yeah, fuck that. Andy, this show definitely took a different turn a few years ago. We're way too pissed off and stuff. I have to calm down, especially interviewing like door kickers like you, because I'll get crazy. I get into it. Lethality. The military.
One of the things I really kind of object to with the wussification of America and this toxic masculinity bullshit out there is that there's no realpolitik in it. This isn't the real world. It's a utopia that doesn't exist. Our military and guys like you exist to go kill bad guys. That is not cute. It's not a movie. It's not pretty. Nobody dies in a movie like, ah!
That's not the way this shit goes down. It's ugly. It's gross. There's guts. There's blood. And I just want to get your take on this. So I have two friends who were... in combat zones. They were both very, very quiet about it. But one guy opened up to me one time and he was a tow missile operator in Gulf War I Marine. And he said, you know, the Iraqis tanks were too slow for us.
So they would sometimes jump in like pickup trucks to try to get away. So he mentioned the story about hitting a pickup truck with a tow missile, which you know didn't end well. And he said, you know, all I could think about afterwards, you know, for these people to think like, oh yeah, you go off and kill and you don't come back with scars. Like that's bullshit.
He said, all I could think about from that point on was, you know, that guy had kids and his kids are never going to know what happened to him. He's just going to burn in the desert. And it was weird because this was obviously over a decade later and he's sitting there with me in the training center and I could see he was like, He was a tough son of a bitch, Andy, too.
This guy, he wasn't a recon Marine, but he was attached to a recon unit at one point. He was a badass guy. And just to watch him kind of, you know, in front of me open up, you know, this is what our military is, man. We've got to take care of these guys.
And this wussification of America, we're not doing our military any favors by playing this shit down with a lot of like, you know, cutesy DEI videos and bullshit like that. These guys are going to bring home a lot of scars mentally, too.
Yeah, you know, the way I describe it is, is that if you touch war, it's going to touch you back. And a lot of the time the narrative is around more of like a broken toy. Like if you go to war and you come back, the damage is so great that you have to be broken. And I haven't actually found that to be the case. The things that the military is asked to do, specifically my old job, they are.
I mean, if you were to just write it down on a piece of paper and have somebody read it out loud, the requirements that your job may entail, it's horrific.
but you spend a career training um you know and again working with people being bought in on the mission statement being bought in on the cause being bought in for the country and understanding of what your actions are doing and tying into the totality of the united states and what it stands for but it shouldn't be romanticized the way you described it is correct if i look back at my old job
Almost everything that we did was to lead up to the point of, it's called 3FEA, find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze. It's kind of the targeting process. But it is all based around finding an individual or organization, fixing them in place, and then getting an element to cross the threshold of a door somewhere in another country. to do something about an identified threat.
And it shouldn't be romanticized. We should be able to have open and honest conversations about what we are asking certain segments of our population to do. And we shouldn't expect them to come back as the same person.
But in my own personal experience, even though those things are horrific and they will weigh on you for the rest of your life, they can actually turn you into a better version of yourself. Like for me personally, I think I have a greater appreciation for what we have. I think I can love at a deeper level.
I have a deeper appreciation for my friends because I've seen those things just be taken away in an instant. And I actually wish that more people didn't share the experiences that I have, but they could at least share in some of what those experiences have given me from at least the view that I have of this country and the world.
Yeah, it's interesting you say that because I mentioned I had more than two friends that have served, but the two that I was the closest with, the second guy had a similar perspective as you. He sent me an email. I was his instructor. He was a Marine as well and served overseas and never said a word in the training academy, one of the quietest guys I've ever seen.
He was a real leader, you could tell, but really a man of genuinely few words. He sent me an email years later. And his name's Jason. He's fine with me saying his first name. And I read the email on my Fox show, Andy, and people had sent me feedback for days saying they were crying when I read the email.
And he said kind of what you said, that he loves his daughter so much more because when you see things like what he called the pink mist, when a guy just blows up in front of you, steps on a device or an IED hits him or whatever, and he just blows up, he's like that pink mist, like never gets out of your head.
And like you said, there's no question there's damage there, but people are all damaged and some use it for negative things. And he made the point that his relationship with his daughter was so much stronger precisely because he understood the horror that thankfully most people don't have to see, but you guys do.
Yeah, there's a difference between post-traumatic stress and post-traumatic growth. And sometimes it breaks people, and sometimes it unlocks a level that I, again, believe that allows you to become a better version of yourself. That takes time, though, and it takes a willingness to reach out for help when you need it.
But I can tell you right now, from what I've heard, again, to tie it back into DEI or the wokeness ideology, not a single portion of that is going to help the warfighter at that level that is being asked to make those decisions. That stuff, it's not helping them be a soldier. It's not helping them be more lethal.
And it's certainly not helping them deal with any of the long-term consequences that can come from the occupation.
A perfect segue because I want to get into training and what you guys do and how important that is next and getting over that fog of war. Quick break. We'll be right back with Andy Stump. The podcast is called Cleared Hot. Member of SEAL Team 6. Check out the podcast. Good man. Patriot hero. Hey, let me tell you, I've had my Helix mattress for several years now. It's actually my second one.
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That's H-E-L-I-X, helixsleep.com for 20% off, helixsleep.com for 20% off, and two free pillows for all mattress orders. Thank you, Helix. And they just picked up a Vita show too. So we really appreciate that. Thank you, Helix. Let's get back to Andy now. Andy, training. I mean, obviously speaking to a SEAL Team 6 member, you obviously know the importance of training.
But one of the things, at least, and again, I don't pretend to know half the things you know about tactics or anything like that. But when you're in the Secret Service, you have to function as this cohesive unit too. We have a shift that has a specific defined number of members. Every member has a role. If you're the number one, you do this and you do only this.
Because if you do that, the other guy's doing that and you're in his line of fire. Your field of vision is here. That's what you cover. You don't cover this, guys. You don't go out on an adventure because you wind up shooting a good guy. So we are the importance of training.
But one of the things I think that the public doesn't understand is you guys have to train so much because there's always a fog of war. Even the baddest-ass guys in the world, Green Berets, SEAL Team 6, Delta, if you're there, that first contact, there's always that it takes a few seconds to kind of get your, you know, to not kind of redline. I don't know the best way to say it.
But I think the difference between you guys with all the training and everyone else is everyone has the fog of war. Just the amount of time before you guys get back into action due to all that training is so much shorter than anyone else. But it never goes away, right? Like, there's always that first contact.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the benefits that especially the soft community, and then it can get even more refined as you dive in and you screen for the JSOC commands. The soft community, regardless of the military branch, is so much smaller than the greater military branch. So in the Army, let's say it was Rangers or Green Berets.
You have per person in those units, so much more money to train and they focus on hyper realistic training. I mean, it's so much more than going to range and shooting an E type silhouette with no reaction whatsoever. I mean, you can elevate it to force on force training. And we used to do this in a desert environment. And it was essentially high speed laser tag that
would shut down your weapon's ability to shoot a laser out if you were contacted and people could coordinate in real time and put people down for down man drills or introduce medical situations. And then in an urban or internal environment, we're shooting at each other with wax bullets that hurt and elicit a normal pain response.
And inside of that, we're using role players and simulated explosions
and daytime and nighttime and assets and what you're trying to do because it's a smaller unit and our budget writ large is so much larger than say what an aircraft carrier can do because we can get a budget probably not that big but the seal community could probably get an aircraft carrier's budget but we're only talking about 2 000 people versus a massive infrastructure with 5 000 people and all the things associated with that so it becomes this hyper realistic training
that i believe it does a very good job of preparing you to get overseas but at the back of your mind you always know that in a training environment yes of course there's a risk to life because you could fall out of a helicopter a helicopter could crash there could be an accident but you can't really replicate
the real two-way range where somebody is shooting lead or rockets back at you or a real IED that you might step on. And again, I can only speak for myself. The first time I was ever shot at for real, I didn't even realize it because we were sitting in a helicopter and I was covered in chem bio gear. We were hitting the number one target, chem bio target in Iraq at the kickoff.
The first objective, we flew like four hours in to hit what ended up becoming an agricultural school, dressed up as if we were gonna go into sarin gas. And we were getting shot at a minute before we landed, and I couldn't see a goddamn thing. I didn't even know about it until after we got back and we looked at the helicopter. There's like 28 holes in this thing. So it progressed beyond that.
I never lost that sense of fear. The fear is always there. But what helps is that hyper-realistic training. And what helps even more than that
is your bond with the people to your left and right you might be scared shitless but if you see somebody to your left or right that you deeply care about that you came through the same pipeline that you've worked with for years and they're doing something or they're in a vulnerable position you're going to take action to help them or to try to get them out of that vulnerable position or to support them but it's still it's an interesting mental geometry
You know that that thread is there and you work your way through it. But the key to that, I think for most people is that hyper, hyper realistic training. It really does help.
Yeah, did you guys, I assume you guys use Sims, but when we used to use the Sims, did you ever use them in the winter when they feel like actual bullets in the fucking winter? And then everybody shoots your hand because that's what they see, the gun. So they shoot you in the fucking hands and your fingers are like green and purple. Those sons of bitches hurt.
Now, granted, yes, it's not like getting hit with a 5.56 round at supersonic speed.
It's not far off. but that shit freaking hurts you're like damn it every time how the fuck you hit my hand every single time those things suck man so i don't want to give anybody ideas but hypothetically if you were to put your sim rounds in the freezer overnight it could always be like winter right yeah the hand hurts so bad i tell you what hurts worse is the back of the calf
It drops people like a sniper shot to the chest.
Really? Dude, the freaking fingers. You know, everybody sees the gun. So that's what they shoot at. And they magically, it's like the most amazing act of marksmanship ever. How did you hit my hand six times out of seven rounds? It's crazy. Your fingers the next day, you'd be like, you can't even do push-ups in the academy because your fingers don't even bend. It's horrible.
But when I was teaching over there, Andy, we had... Matt Eversman, he was the sergeant in the Black Hawk Down operation. And he was doing kind of an autopsy of what happened with a lot of our trainees to give you a kind of lessons learned. He'd come back every other year or so. And it was really a fascinating, fascinating lecture. And he was talking about the Delta guys. You know, he was a ranger.
And he was talking about the Delta guys and just how impressive they were and just how they had almost no emotion about combat at all. And, you know, SEAL Team 6 and Delta is always like, who's better? They're both badasses. Better word means nothing to me with that. Because I couldn't do either, so it makes no difference.
But one of the things he emphasized in that kind of autopsy in front of our students was the difference between our military and everyone else. outside of the bravery and the courage and the things we do, is just pure marksmanship. He said these Somalis would come out, empty an entire AK mag, and not hit one freaking person.
He said you'd see these Delta guys behind cover, you know, on a three-round burst or whatever, bang, bang, bang, bang, not wasting a single round, knocking off nine, ten guys at a time. Like these guys, the marksmanship component is, at least according to him, was one of the prime differentiators between us and everyone else.
Yeah, and that goes back to the training. I mean, the shooting standards, even in a conventional team, I mean, there's an E-type silhouette, but then there's an A-zone inside of the E-type silhouette, which is going to be much tighter where the vitals are generally going to be.
And up on the head, yeah, there's the space of the head that you can shoot at, but again, there's that A-zone in there as well. And, you know, as somebody who served on the Navy side of JSOC, I've heard it so many times, right, the comparison between Delta and seals. And, you know, I am not one to say anything other than I have the utmost respect for that organization.
I actually was able to train and deploy with them one time. And I still have very close friends that were associated with that command and they're amazing. And I, and I think what would shock people is,
is it's not really like the movies the speed that we move on target isn't incredibly fast it's calculated it's like 3d real-time chess there's not a lot of yelling you're not i mean if i had to choose between to go to your example of a somali shooting at me if i have to have somebody shooting at me i'm going to request that they're on full auto because you're not going to hit anything your most accurate round is going to be your first one unless we're like five feet away from each other but what you'll notice is professionals i had uh you know our weapons in the military i had
safe, single round and fully automatic. I never once flipped it to fully automatic because I have to carry the ammunition that I'm in the field with. And I'll let somebody dump an entire mag at me and take my time and get a, you know, a stable shooting position, hopefully behind cover and take one shot because that's what a professional does. And it, it is in it.
I wish people could see how surgical and precise it is. these tip of the spear special operations forces are. They would be so underwhelmed at the speed. They would be shocked at the lack of communication. It's almost all done off of body language because these people, all they do is practice this. They are absolute surgeons and specialists in the conduct of warfare.
So what I'm getting from you is a line I've heard often from friends of mine and former colleagues who were military special operations. Obviously, in my prior line of work, we sucked a lot of special operations people out just because of their massive body of experience. I used to hear this all the time. They say, fast isn't fast, brother. Smooth is fast.
Matter of fact, fast is almost slow because you're going to have to do it multiple times to get to the end game. That smooth is fast. I'm going to take my last break. Andy, on the other side of the break, I want to ask you about leadership. I've had quite a few special operators on, and the whole idea in society about leadership that's just collapsed.
I just don't think we have a lot of leaders out there anymore, and there's such a thirst for it. Maybe there's a political component to that. Maybe there's not. I don't know, but we're really thirsty for leaders. It's time to be awake, not woke. I got me some blackout coffee today because this is the coffee. Can I make up a new motto for blackout coffee? The coffee that kicks ass and takes names.
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Back to Andy Sump, the host of Cleared Hot, the podcast, member of SEAL Team 6. American Patriot. Andy, your thoughts on leadership. Now, the reason I always ask guys in the military about this is because unlike most professions, maybe outside of policing, maybe the only kind of similar, not the same, but similar one, when you guys screw up the leadership component,
People die, like literally die, not figuratively die. And they're people close to you. They're not people you don't know. They don't die at a distance. You got a guy next to you because you screwed up a breaching decision or whatever it may be, or you go down some fatal funnel. That's the end. So I've asked a ton of people this about leadership.
And I mean, the best thing I can say to people is, the biggest component I think, and your thoughts on this are, you have to know when the... you know, kind of be like a shoulder for, for a guy. I mean like getting all wussy and, you know, but sometimes dudes are really like broken down, but you also got to know when not to be a shoulder and be like, Hey man, shut the fuck up.
Like you're whining about bullshit. We got a mission to accomplish. And I think that's where poor leaders, they don't understand the fine line between the two. They're too much of a shoulder to cry on when they shouldn't be. Or once in a blue moon, you know, they don't know when to tell someone to shut the fuck up, you know?
Yeah, you know, given my military background, I was fortunate or unfortunate, depending, I guess, on how people view it, to be around amazing and explosive and powerful ordnance. But I truly think the most impactful and probably will be the best description of it. The most lethal tool that human beings actually have access to is leadership. And there's not a one size fits all model.
Leadership is very difficult. And to go with what you were saying about when you need to be more of a supporter versus you need to be a little bit more directive, that comes from, it's a combination of IQ and EQ. And you have to, each person is different. What I will say is this, in the military, leadership is actually easier because of what we talked about
when we first got on this, the selection and the refinement and the training. I mean, 80% of people who attempt to become a SEAL, they don't make it. And then another 40% of those people who attempt to go to a JSOC level aren't going to make it either. So the person on the far end of that has such an amazing level of buy-in that you can lead in almost any way that you want to.
You can be very directive. And let's also not forget they're contractually obligated to be there. So if they don't like you as a leader, they can't really go anywhere because they got to serve out their commitment. Civilian leadership is so much more difficult because people are, you know, I own a coffee shop as an example.
The average age of the employee that we have is 17 to 19 years old and they're there for a variety of reasons and they're not going to make it a vocation and they're going to come and go. It might be seasonal or they might have a relationship. If I treat them like I did the people that I worked with in the military, I would have zero employees. So it takes more nuance. It takes more time.
It takes more EQ to understand what motivates people and what drives people. But leadership is the most powerful tool that human beings have access to. It trumps the power of anything that I have seen overseas in some way, somehow, especially in the civilian world.
We've lost this emphasis on being a leader and people, the mistake I think people make is when they hear, well, you know, leadership, they're looking to somebody else. Leadership is about how you view yourself. Don't look to somebody else to be your leader. I mean, fuck, look in the mirror and start leading yourself and your family at a local level.
Yeah. Andy, one of the things about leadership I found is amazing leaders. And you just said you see them. They have the Genesee quality. You know it, but you can't describe it. I mean, if we could, we wouldn't be doing this segment. I'm asking you what it is. You and I said two similar things, but in completely different words. But one of the things is you know it when you see it.
And I don't know, you may disagree on this one, but I found that I spent two years as an instructor in our academy, and I guess we flushed about 200, 250 agents through. And I noticed good leaders can't make a bad guy a good guy. They just can't. I mean, we've tried and we've tried, but they can make a good guy a great guy.
Like if you get a guy in there with a good, decent set of principles who maybe isn't familiar with any military or paramilitary organization, they find a good leader. You can make that guy a superb agent. But we had a couple of guys, they would, you know, they were just, you know, I don't know if you guys call them like what blue Falcons and shit birds.
That's what we, you know, we used to call them. Yeah. They were just shitheads and they were just like, we would have to hide them. Like they meet the minimum requirements, met the minimum requirements for training. But when they got out, you'd have to stick them in a unit where they just can't hurt anyone because you just can't make a bad guy, a good guy, but you can make a good guy, a great guy.
Every team, regardless, I mean, if you have 10 of the most highly refined selected operators, the best military operators on planet earth, there's still a bottom 10%. Right. And in that cohort, they're a turd. So the dude at the top of that is the most amazing operator ever. And they're looking down the line, like you fucking suck. Right.
Now to everybody else, that would be the top performer in any sector everywhere. So, and I totally agree with you. Great leaders, I mean, they can enhance everybody. So you can polish the turd a little bit, but guess what? It's still a turd in the bowl at the end of the day. But you can actually, and I wish people want, equality of outcome is not something I agree with.
Equality of opportunity, I definitely agree with. And the difference in those two things is people's ability to perform. And let's just be honest, we're not all created equal. Some people are smart and some people are idiots. And that's just the way the cookie crumbles. And nothing is going to make the idiot a smart person.
But a great leader can take that smart person and maybe turn them into a genius or unlock for that person their genius capability. Leadership is a great tool. But as human beings, we all have glass ceilings. And when you hit that, as much as it may suck, I'm sorry, that might be your station in life.
Andy, having gone through SEAL training, there is a local young man, my daughter's friends with his sister. He's a SEAL team member, not six. Obviously, leave his name out of it. He just got on a little bit ago. But I always ask him for advice about firearms and things like that. He's just a really wonderful young man, really talented, super smart, loyal.
So I asked him about buds and seal training. And he said, Dan, I, everybody there's in shape. Obviously no one goes to seal training, not in shape. He's like the physical stuff sucks, but it's totally bearable. If you're in good shape, like these guys are, he said, it's a mind fuck. He said, you know what the worst part about SEAL training was? I'm waiting for him to say the rocks, the push-ups.
He's like, the fucking sand. He's like, you have sand everywhere, all the time. Your skin isn't even red. It's non-existent. He's like, you have it in your balls, in your crack, in your toes, behind your ears. He's like, I couldn't take it anymore. He said, it'll drive you crazy. I couldn't believe that is what he remembered because that's one thing that drives guys bananas.
So to even get to BUDS on your first day, you volunteered multiple times and you've taken physical screening tests that if you pass them, you possess the physical ability to graduate. People don't quit because of the muscles above the neck. They quit because they get fatigued. Actually, I need to flip that. The muscles below the neck, right, the combat chassis, if you will,
It can tolerate so much, they quit because they get tired of the grind. And I describe buds as sandpaper. If I told anybody to get a piece of sandpaper and on your first day, you're gonna take it across your knuckles with a good amount of pressure. People can do that.
And they might do it the second day and the third day, but two months in when your knuckles are red and raw and there's pus seeping out of it, And I keep telling you to take the same piece of sandpaper across your knuckles. That's where you start separating the wheat from the chaff. And it's not that your body can't physically take it. You talk yourself out of it.
So there is a huge physical component to being at Bud's. But when I went back to an instructor there for 18 months and actually talked to the students about why they quit, Almost nobody expressed anything physical. They expressed that they got overwhelmed with the totality of their goal and how far they were from where they wanted to be to their current station in life.
There were 120 days from graduation, 130. And they said to themselves, there's no way I can keep doing this for that long. And they quit. It was more mental than physical almost every single time.
Andy, one other thing. I want to get to drones next and the drone threat, whether in combat, domestically, protection, all of that. However, one other thing he did mention, and I only laugh about this because I have a running kind of segment on my radio show. It's a joke. I got a cold plunge about a year ago, and it's like torture. I mean, sitting in this thing for four minutes at 45 degrees –
And I just think back to when I first started, he mentioned the sand thing, but he said, Dan, you have no idea what it's like to sit in like 50 degree water for like a half an hour at a clip. He's like, you don't even, he's like the pain. There's no going numb. Like it never feel, Oh look, I'm numb. That like, that's not a thing. Like you're just freaking freezing.
And he's like, that is one of the other big mind fucks in training is that you're freezing cold all the time. And in your brain, you know, you're not going to be warm. anytime soon. Like there's no like, oh good, we get to go over to the heaters and roast marshmallows. Like that's not happening.
Yeah. There's no heater. And it's almost as if the instructors know this because we all went through training. So there is an instructor, like my main tool to get people to quit is I would sit there and I would talk to them about how long I was going to keep them in that water. How long do you think you can tolerate this? Oh, you think this is going to be 30 minutes?
Maybe today we're doing two hours. You don't know. And maybe hypothetically, I would set up a picnic table with steaming hot, hot chocolate on there and say, Hey, if you want to end this right now and get one of these, come on up. All you need to do is say, I quit, you know?
you're right. It's like a, you know, it's like a run. They used to have these things like the, the Indian run. Like if you're running at someone else's pace, it's always harder. You know what I'm saying? Even if it's a pace you could totally handle because in your brain, you're like, is he going to speed up? Is he going to slow down? I totally get that. Let me ask you about drones. Uh,
Now, in the protection space I was in, I wrote a book a long time ago about this. And one of the chapters was about the drone threat. And the reason the drone threat right now is, I think, unique, and I hate that word, is for two reasons. Number one, it's low tech. I mean, we have a JSF and an F-22 that other countries don't have.
But if it can be taken down by a swarm of $100 Amazon drones, it's kind of freaking worthless. That's number one. It doesn't require a lot of money and almost no skill. I mean, a trained F-22 pilot takes forever. But second, Andy, it's obvious, you know, from a tactical perspective, humans can't fly.
So if they tell SEAL Team 6, hey, there's a guy in the ghillie suit, there's a way to mitigate that. You can hit that target, flank it. You can take out it with a countersniper. But you can actually walk over there if you needed to and inspect the target, not that you'd walk in front of a gun. You can't do that with a drone. So if you're on the White House lawn, there's a drone threat.
You can't just go, oh, hold on, let me go check it out. We can't fly. This freaks me out, this drone threat, not only for combat operations with guys like yourself overseas who've done it, but also for domestic, too. I mean, Times Square, you get a swarm of drones dropping grenades on New Year's Eve. You got hundreds of casualties.
Yeah, it's, you know, I... There's pros and cons to the internet. One of the wild things is you can see things that are going on all over the world. And sometimes in my feed, these drones from Ukraine show up. And what they are doing over there and the velocity that warfare is shifting is unbelievable. I mean, they're chasing people down and exploding them into pieces with drones.
I mean, these drone operators, I have no idea how far away they are. But that is not a threat that I had to face when I was in. And I'm really thankful that I didn't have to. So it is changing. I do believe that the U.S. military is aware of this and that they are changing as well. A lot of people are talking about what's going on in New Jersey, and let me be clear. I want it to be aliens.
God, I think it would be awesome if we weren't alone. Like, come on down, guys. Let's have a beer. If you wanted to nuke us, you could have done it already. So I want it to be aliens. But I don't think it is. And the best example of why I don't think it is, is I can point people towards Operation Neptune Spear, which I was not involved with. But that was the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
And a lot of people made a big deal about that. But to me, from somebody who was peripherally familiar with one of the programs involved with that. And almost nobody focused on it was the actual helicopters that were used to get there. And we left one of the helicopters in the courtyard because it crash landed. The technology being used with those helicopters, I never rode on those things.
I don't even think I actually saw them in person. But again, I was peripherally aware that that program existed. They had to create those things, test them only at nighttime. They had a reduced signature with both radar and sound. And my point in that is there are a lot of things that our government, specifically military,
that they are developing that they're not going to tell anybody about until they have to or until it meets the front page news criteria, which I was shocked. People can go on to Google. I'll talk about the program broadly because people can go on to Google and see pictures of that helicopter in the courtyard in Abbottabad. That, to me, was the biggest surprise that came out of that operation.
Talking to the guys that were there that night, they're like, yeah, man, it was just another Tuesday, a totally average target. That asset sitting there that I guarantee you was exploited by foreign adversaries within 24 hours was shocking to me. So I know that those programs exist. How that ties into the drone stuff and why they're in New Jersey, I'm not so sure.
And even though as much as I wanted to be the little green men, I'm reminded that there are areas out there in our government or in contractors working with our government where they're really pushing the front-leaning edge of what is possible. And the government's not going to tell us until either one of those things gets shot down or they're forced to.
Yeah, you know, I say a lot of my show, government is a really tough time keeping secrets, and they do. But I will say this. When I was on the job for about 10 years or so, I was briefed into a program, and I was pretty stunned myself. They put us on a helo and on a kind of an op around D.C., and pointed out some stuff. And I was like, wow, I didn't know that's what that was.
Like, it was really kind of shocking to me too. So you're right. I mean, we don't know everything and we don't know what that is. And you're also right about the green men. Like if they have the technology to get here and they wanted to kill us, they probably would have done it already. So yeah, sit down, have a Heineken, enjoy yourself. Andy, last question for you.
I want to make sure I get a plugin for your podcast at the end to clear it hot. You know, having gone through buds, which is, you know, inarguably one of the toughest things any human being on planet earth can do physically, the cold, the sand, the grind, the lack of sleep, the hunger, just all the horrors of being human in your hierarchy of needs in one training session.
You know, I just want to get across to the audience and kind of a motivational closing here that you're capable of so much more than you think. I mean, I have not done anything close to Bud's, but you know, you are, you, you, you think you have this ceiling. Like I can only do 10 reps. I promise you, you can do 12. You just haven't experienced that pain yet. And you'll get used to it eventually.
And you'll recondition your nervous system. Like your ceiling, I promise you. Isn't your ceiling. You can do better. And it's something like buds where a guy like you is the perfect guy to talk about that. Cause you've done what 99.99 repeating decimal of society just can't get through the, but your ceiling is higher than you think.
You know, I did not want to go to BUDS as an instructor. I was injured on a target actually with the Delta guys. We were doing a cross-training deployment. I got injured in Iraq and the command I was at basically said, we're moving at a velocity that we don't need somebody who can't walk right now. So I got sent to BUDS and I didn't want to be there because I was loving my old job.
And after being there for 18 months, it was the single most rewarding tour of my career because I got to make sense of the curriculum that I was put through. And you've mentioned some of the tools that I had access to as an instructor. I could water, sand, of course, in combination, obstacle course, running, physical conditioning, sleep deprivation. We couldn't really mess with their food.
That was actually one of the things we really had no control over. We could mess with when they got it, but not how much they got. And none of those tools are even remotely comparable in their effectiveness than the human mind. When I understood and when I sat down with these students and talked with them about why they quit, and it was this resounding narrative, I became overwhelmed.
I let my optic of time become so wide that I was only thinking big picture instead of staying in the small picture. I stopped using all of those other tools. I would let the instructors do that. And I weaponized people's mind against themselves. And all of those tools, those are all external. The most powerful one is the internal tool that you have. And you get to determine where your ceiling is.
Yes, physically painful things hurt. But does it hurt enough that you need to quit? Nobody can answer that for you. But people limit and self-govern themselves so far before they get to the point of what they're capable of. It's a fascinating case study.
Yeah, it is. I've told people that over and over again. Again, not even close to comparable, but they say, gosh, why did you, like, you left the Secret Service to go run for office? Like, that's crazy. I'm like, I like doing crazy things. I just like taking chances because, you know, I don't believe in luck. I believe in taking a thousand chances.
And if two of those chances work out and you only took two, you're zero for zero. If I took a thousand and two of them work out, it was just a law of probability, brother. Like eventually something was going to hit, you know? It's simple probability. Andy, what an amazing interview. We don't do this often, but I may have to now that you set the bar so high. We got a new studio opening up soon.
I hope you'll join us for a follow-up to this. This was really amazing. Your podcast is called Cleared Hot. Andy Stump, look him up. Bongino Army, do me a favor. Go out and support this man. Download his podcast. Give him a follow on these platforms. We need more patriots like this to hear from him. Andy, God bless you, brother. Thanks so much for your time. We appreciate it.
Yeah, man. Thanks for inviting me. And you guys know how to get a hold of me. I'll join you anytime. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.
Man, folks, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I'm serious. You know we don't do interviews on the podcast often. It's the first one since Tucker last year. It's been a year or so. But my gosh, I learned more from that than I think many of you did out there. I really, really learned. I didn't even get to half my questions. We're going to do a follow-up with him when the new studio opens up.
Really appreciate you tuning in, folks. I will see you back here Monday live. Spread this show around. You need to hear his message here. We'll be back here Monday at 11 a.m. Rumble.com slash Bongino. Please download the Rumble app. Give us a follow. Also give us a follow on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We really appreciate it. See you then. You just heard the Dan Bongino Show.