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Your Fear Is Making Every Decision For You | Andy Stumpf · Harder Than Life

• 0:00
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• 0:17
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• 0:42
  Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.
• 0:54
  Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. The statistics on the number of those men who have killed themselves post-military service is shocking. Just recently, in the Green Beret community, they have now lost more people to suicide than combat operations. They view it as a community of people that have a cape and cowl.
• 1:17
  and a shield and they're impervious to fear or struggle or hardship and all of that is complete you're not going through anything that anybody hasn't gone through before and if you ask for help you will get it but you have to keep going to me the best way that you could say thank you to a veteran is to live the most fulfilled version of your life humanly possible
• 1:41
  Be worthy of the sacrifice that others make for you. Discipline cannot be outsourced. What does scale is hard work over time when no one is watching, making microscopic steps towards the goal that you want to achieve. When you get there, people who know nothing about you are going to look at you and say, must be nice. And then the answer should be, it's way nicer than you think it is.
• 2:04
  You are not alone. We're in June. It's MUN's Mental Health Month. Reach out. We care. You're not alone. I've been there. My guest today was shot at close range with an AK-47, and he was back on SEAL team in six months. His name is Andy Stump. 17 years in Navy SEAL. Five bronze stars, a purple heart, and one of the most respected voices in the country on what it really takes to do hard things.
• 2:33
  So lock in, grab something to write with, and let us get into it. Andy, welcome to Harder Than Life. It is an honor to have you on. First of all, let me just say thank you for your service. Thank you for paying it all forward, and thank you for being you.
• 2:53
  You know, on the service one, a lot of guys get uncomfortable when people say that. And I think the easiest is just you're welcome. I wish I could say it was all done for other people, but it was very self-serving at times. It was something I wanted to do since I was at a very young age. And about 98% of it was awesome. 2% sucked. But I mean, you know, that's kind of the difference between the cost and the price.
• 3:16
  This is called harder than life. So we're going to get into it. You enlisted very young at 17 when most of us don't even know what the hell we're doing and to chase one dream. What did you believe being a seal would feel like and how were you wrong? You know, I get asked all the time, how did I know at that age? So at 11, I had formed the idea that that's what I wanted to do.
• 3:41
  And it was based off a conversation I had had with my dad, who was not a SEAL, but served with SEALs in Vietnam. He was on the first squadron of patrol boats in the Brownwater Navy. So they were an insertion and extraction platform.
• 3:54
  And I don't know what it was. I certainly didn't have the vocabulary at the age of 11 to describe what it was and why it became a magnetizing force. I'm 48 now. I would hope a better vocabulary than I did at 11. Arguments could be made either direction on that one. It might have had something to do with the challenge, the exclusivity, the novelty of what it sounded like. Those are shades of colors that might be close to it. I still can't describe...
• 4:22
  the exact why. And when I was growing up, knowing what you want to do at that age is very anomalous. I have three children of my own, two boys and a girl. None of them expressed this, hey, this is going to be my path and this is the direction I'm going to take it. When I got into the SEAL teams,
• 4:38
  Almost everybody in the community had that same magnetizing pole from that same young age with an inability to describe why. So it was the most anomalous narrative outside of the teams, but the most common one inside of it.
• 4:54
  And to answer your question about what did I think it was going to be, I didn't really even know. I mean, we're talking an era very pre-internet. I had the Rogue Warrior book series and, of course, the documentary Navy Seals starring Charlie Sheen, which I was hoping would be every day at work. And absolutely none of that movie is correct except for the opening scene where he wakes up hung over in the ocean. That's pretty accurate. Yeah.
• 5:17
  as far as what that movie gets right or wrong. And I had about five years to experience the community in peacetime, and it was still amazing. It was everything I thought it was going to be from...
• 5:26
  the people, to the training, to getting to see the world. And then 9-11 happened. And then it became so much more than I ever even thought it could be. It not only exceeded expectations, but exceeded, I would say, imagination as to what it was going to be like, what they were going to ask you to do. And there's not all positive with that. There's a heavy burden to being asked to do some of those things, to be going into those
• 5:51
  physicians and situations and it destroys some people and for others it makes them into a better version of themselves so long-winded answer to your question i wish i could give you exact specifics but honestly on that one it's better to answer broadly because it was so broad
• 6:06
  I think God is just aligning us. I remember at 17, I started college and I didn't know what I didn't know. And I was just stupid, literally. We're about the same age. I'm 50. So yeah, it was before the internet. Thank God. My children growing up with those devices, they don't remember a life pre-internet. I can't fathom the struggles that I would have had as a young man.
• 6:29
  So being the same age, we remember the time in high school you talk shit, you get punched in the mouth. It was much simpler. Now they're just text messaging you and telling you all kinds of bad things and they exit you out of this thing. But I digress, let's talk about something very serious. You were shot at close range by an AK-47. Walk us through the first three seconds after that round hit you. So it hit me high up on the hip. I was over there deploying, we were doing a cross training deployment with
• 6:57
  CAG or what is known as Delta Force. They were the army component of JSOC. I was attached to the Navy component of JSOC at the time. We were very busy. It wasn't an abnormal night by any stretch. To the best of my recollection, we were targeting a kidnapping cell that had not yet conducted a kidnapping, but it had somehow hit the intelligence radar that they were going to. So nothing happened.
• 7:21
  Crazy dangerous about the target, no intelligence that it was different about the previous 15 targets in the seven days before that. And I was approaching the first person over a wall. And there's a kind of a structured way that you can move up to an entry point to set an explosive breach, which is what we were going to do. You don't want to leave the person up there unsecured or unprotected. So I was going to be one of the security personnel. I was going to have to walk past essentially a very large window.
• 7:47
  And I didn't want to turn my back to it before I took a look in there. There's nighttime night vision goggles, so it was blacked out, but that doesn't mean that it's no risk. And as soon as I turned my head, what I was told from the people that were behind me is that I just raised an AK up and started firing.
• 8:00
  And it was either the first round out or the second, but it impacted me really high up on the hip. And so because my body had shifted to the right to look into that window, probably saved my life, I would say. It would have been like shattered femur. And for the audience that may not know this, and this was something that was reinforced to us often, you can fit the entire blood volume of the human body inside of the quad and hamstring space. So you can bleed out internally inside of that space. And if the round is high enough up, you know, tourniquets are a great thing.
• 8:30
  But you have to have real estate above the point of impact or injury to actually get a tourniquet to work. And where I was shot, it was above an area where a tourniquet could have been applied. The round hit me. And it's actually the only time in my life where I have had the sensation of
• 8:46
  time distortion where things slowed down a little bit, but hit me on my left-hand side. So I pushed off as it kind of spun me towards the person that was shooting the second round that the person shot. I have a belt that I was wearing that night and it traveled and burned about six inches down my belt and the copper jacket of the round is still fused into my belt. So had it not turned me towards him, that one would have been even higher up on my body, probably directly into my pelvis, which would have been fatal for sure.
• 9:16
  So I pushed off and it seemed like I was falling in slow motion while watching the muzzle flash of the rifle go off, probably semi, but just pulling the trigger as fast as he could.
• 9:28
  And I remember my hand coming down to put direct pressure on where I thought I had been shot and landed flat on my back and slid underneath a vehicle, not intentionally, but face up underneath a vehicle that happened to be essentially in the driveway, which, of course, my equipment in a bungee. I was carrying a shotgun on my right hand side so I could shotgun breach doors.
• 9:50
  wrapped around a piece of metal undercarriage under the car, which essentially pinned me under the vehicle. I'm trying to get out from underneath it, and it's like this little bungee pulling me back and forth. Not awesome. 10 out of 10. Don't recommend for anybody.
• 10:02
  And in those moments, the very first thought I had was, I'm probably going to be dead in about five minutes because I thought it had shattered my femur and probably interacted with the femoral arteries in an area. And then a buddy of mine pulled me out from underneath the vehicle around a corner, got a pair of trauma shears out and kind of cut everything open. It wasn't hemorrhaging a lot of blood out. It was kind of just oozing a lot of blood out. So I started walking myself back from, hey, maybe I'm not going to die in five minutes, but this definitely sucks.
• 10:32
  They gave me my rifle and I just sat there on the outside of a courtyard. I think eight Americans got injured that night on that target. I was one of the least substantially injured. So they were flying helicopters in to fly guys off to the hospital. Myself and another guy who had gotten shot in the hand took a Bradley fighting vehicle, a ride in the back, but to the hospital that they had in the green zone. So it was pretty dynamic and really no indication that it was going to go that way that night. It was not any different than any other target or objective, whatever term you would want to use.
• 11:03
  We're 300 episodes into Part of the Life and I'm shaking. It's never happened. Your bravery is off the charts and I want to do my best to pay it forward. Remember, there's a fine line between bravery and stupidity. You know what I mean? You have an amazing knack of making a very heavy situation like
• 11:20
  I didn't do anything brave, man. I was doing my job. Like I said, I didn't know that that person was there. My thought process in that moment was, I'm going to make sure that my back is clear so I can provide security for my buddy. That was the last thing I was thinking about. It wasn't.
• 11:34
  Heroic. It wasn't, I know this person is there and I'm going to dive forward into the breach and charge this machine gun or we're going to take the beach. It wasn't Batman. So I'm not sure I've done a brave thing in my entire life. I did the best I could to do my job well, but I served around people who I saw do exceptionally brave things. And via that comparison of what I've seen through my own eyes, I don't think I've ever done a brave thing in my entire life.
• 11:58
  The most successful people in this world is so humble and your humility is off the charts. Most people would have taken medical retirement right there, but you didn't, you were back on the job in six months. Why? I was actually probably three quarters of the way through my twenties at that point.
• 12:14
  And again, this goes back to what we opened with. I wanted to do this job since I was really, really young. And at the JSOC command, it was everything that was awesome at a conventional SEAL team multiplied by orders of magnitude. I mean, we had a support staff that was probably 10 to 15 support personnel per one individual that was at a squadron and nearly unlimited budget, nearly unlimited training resources,
• 12:42
  always working with the best equipment, always working with the best training assets. We always had the real thing as opposed to simulated helicopters or vehicles or whatever it may be. You could have your guns in the cage. You could have ammo in the cage. You could go shoot 24-7, 365. It was legitimately big boy rules that you had to earn. You had to earn your way into that and prove that you were capable of that.
• 13:04
  And it was everything that I thought it could be and everything I wanted it to be. And so we were operating in the real world at an extremely high op tempo, I think making a difference, at least geographically and locally where we were operating. And that's all I'd ever wanted to do. And I had also never thought about what I wanted to do post-military.
• 13:21
  So at that moment, my only thought was, I am not done yet, and I'm going to get back to doing this because I hadn't really thought about what I wanted to do afterwards. All you want to do is get back in that race and get back to what you used to be doing. And that's probably a mix of both physiological and psychological. So I just never considered anything else is what I had wanted to be doing my entire life up to that point.
• 13:46
  That's such a good answer, brother. What's the difference between fear and danger? And why do most people confuse the two? I don't know the actual textbook definition of danger, but I would probably describe it as legitimate, demonstrable risk to life, limb, or eyesight. Fear is an emotion. I think danger is more of...
• 14:07
  something that is tangible. Like if you close your eyes and try to walk across a busy street, go in both directions, you know that there is an immense danger in doing that because the risk of, again, life, limber eyesight. Fear is way more individual.
• 14:23
  I mean, I know people who are terrified of snakes and spiders, and I know people who could care less about snakes and spiders. There's probably a risk to both, but you can't compare your fear or what you're afraid of to other people. It's a physiological response to what you perceive to be a risk. The issue that can come from that is that people allow fear to drive their decision-making process in.
• 14:49
  as opposed to having a healthy relationship with fear and recognizing, okay, why am I afraid of this? Probably because I perceive there's some level of risk. Well, can I analyze, assess, and mitigate that risk that I see and then take a look at the residual risk left over? I can either tolerate that or not.
• 15:06
  But that's an objective way to look at fear as opposed to being driven emotionally and either being paralyzed or controlled by those fears. So they're very different. I think one is very tangible. And then I think one is very individualized. I love that tidbit that you just worked in there. Analyze, assess, mitigate. Most of us miss that. Oh, it's fear. It must be real. They say false evidence appearing real. And you must know.
• 15:32
  You continue despite fear if you want to live a good life. Well, take an objective look at it. I'm not going to say I'm more comfortable with risk than anybody else. This to me is totally normal behavior. It's like, why would you not jump out of an airplane in a wingsuit? I've been skydiving now for 27 years. I have over 8,000 jumps. I have every military air qualification that is offered, or at least that was offered when I was in.
• 15:57
  And in that comes experience and the ability to look at what it is that you're doing. Am I trained, equipped, current, competent to do these things, which can reduce risk? So I'm willing to accept risk, but I'm never willing to gamble, especially with my life. And there's a very large difference between those two. The person that looks at the risks, analyzes, assesses, mitigates, and then looks at the residual versus the person that doesn't do any of that and says, okay.
• 16:22
  Fuck it. I'm going to go for it. One is an intentional assessment and acknowledgement that risks exist and you're making a cognizant choice off of that. The other one is to fly by the seat of your pants. So risk can be acceptable depending on the person, the training, the team that you're with. Gambling, use with caution. I mean, we've all been to Vegas enough or seen people that have lived in that life enough. If you extend the timeline out long enough.
• 16:46
  You're going to throw seven on the dice. That's such good advice. I didn't say this, but I read your book in about three days. Down proof. So good. A friend recommended it, could not put it down, made pages and pages of notes, made our questions about it. And you talk over and over about discipline and discipline is not motivation. What is it really? Discipline is a commitment to your future self. I think it's the strongest form of self-love that there is.
• 17:14
  It's giving up things you want in the moment so that the future of you has a better life. Dude, you're my brother. I freaking love everything about what you're saying. This is literally the heart of the life mantra. Do hard things over and over and you'll live a good life. Did you want to follow up on that? I think a lot of times people confuse discipline and motivation. It's a multi-billion dollar industry and what's wild is...
• 17:36
  There's conferences and seminars and all these things. And I wrote about this a little bit in the book. I've interfaced enough in this world where I know some of the people that host these. And the number of repeat customers that are there is a little bit shocking. And I'm not against that. Like, spend your money how you want to, spend your time how you want to. But you usually leave these things with the tools necessary to be successful.
• 17:58
  That should be the goal, at least. If I was hosting one of these, it's like, listen, here is the playbook. You now need to go implement this. If you want to come back for some additional motivation or to be surrounded by people who feel the same way that you do, that's great. But also be judicious with the spending of your money. We're still surrounded by people who fail constantly. So what I would say to people, maybe motivation and discipline aren't enough. I mean, they're very important, but...
• 18:21
  there might be a little bit more to it than just that. So be cautious where you put all of your hope and aspirations and money for people going down headlong on that path.
• 18:31
  You just made me think about it differently. I'm fairly disciplined, but motivated. I get up every day and I go to the gym at 5 a.m. I don't want to. There's no motivation on it. I don't want to do it. But I'm disciplined enough to go because I want to live to 120. And I know if I go to the gym and I keep my promises I make to myself, there's a good chance that I'm probably going to be healthy. I'm not motivated. I'm disciplined.
• 18:55
  We could all be more disciplined. Don't get me wrong. Everybody out there who makes their living talking about discipline, they could be more disciplined as well. Perfection is impossible. You're able to do that because you've seen the benefit over time from the discipline that you've already had in your life.
• 19:11
  A lot of people don't have that. So they need motivation to help them get more discipline. Discipline is like a snowball rolling downhill. It takes time to get moving, but it does increase in its mass and it can be more effective as it gets going. What does it take to change a habit? It's either 21 days or 29 days, something like that. But anybody who's ever started a new diet or a workout routine, this is intuitive. The first day sucks, maybe. You might be a little bit more motivated, but day one's pretty rough.
• 19:40
  And then day two is not that much better. And day three is not that much better. But if you can get to three weeks into it, it starts to get easier. The bridge for a lot of people, though, to even get started on that path is going to be their motivation. The beauty of motivation is that you can outsource it. And I think that's one of the benefits of the digital world that we live in.
• 20:01
  The internet, I describe it as the best worst thing that we have ever created as humans. It allows us to have this conversation, but it gives the rest of the world access to you as well if you're not careful. And you can get caught up focusing on negativity. Or if you create content, you'll have this insane negativity bias that we all fight. 99 positive comments, one negative, and all of your energy goes immediately to the negative and you ignore all the positive affirmation that you're getting. I'm as susceptible to that as anybody else is.
• 20:30
  But on a day where you're not motivated, you can find it elsewhere. You could find a song, a video, and you're like,
• 20:38
  God damn it, going to the gym. I didn't want to. So that's cool. That's great. Discipline cannot be outsourced. And that's why it's difficult. The only person you are going to find discipline with is the person you see in the mirror. But they can work together. When you don't have a lot of discipline or you haven't seen the benefits of discipline like you have, you're going to need more motivation. And hopefully, they can help each other. Because the more motivated you are, it's easier to do disciplined stuff. If you have no motivation on some days, which we all don't,
• 21:07
  but you have that snowball going downhill for a substantial distance, you understand whether I wanna do this or not. I'm going to because I'm already seeing the benefit. So you need both. What motivates you brother?
• 21:19
  I want to be a positive impact. It has taken me a long time to figure out what I want to do with my life. And a lot of people answer that question, what do I want to do? They'll answer it with an occupational title. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that because I was very in line with that until probably within the last year of my life.
• 21:38
  I am motivated personally by being able to see positive impacts in other people, especially if I have any way to impact that and influence that. I have made a tremendous amount of mistakes in my life. I fall short probably every single day of the person that I want to be, but I can't think of a better, more purposeful way to.
• 22:00
  to try to spend the rest of the time that we have left, regardless of how much it may be, on just trying to be a positive impact on the world around me. There's enough negativity out there. It motivates me seeing other people do better, honestly.
• 22:15
  We are separated at birth, and that's why I wanted you on it. I love that answer, and you are doing it. He's going out and paying all this forward and constantly breathing into all of us, so I want to thank you. Was there a single moment in your buds that you replay in your head today?
• 22:32
  Not as a student, just because it was so long ago and your body has a very good ability to erase painful moments. Otherwise, I don't think childbirth would be a multiple evolution thing. I mean, the act of childbirth is pretty amazing for anybody who's never been around it. It doesn't look like a shiatsu massage. And the fact that women are willing to do that more than once blows my mind. If this was up to men, the world would have ended years ago from a civilization perspective. But I think it speaks to the point
• 23:00
  Your brain does a really good job of rounding some of those sharper edges. You're like, was it that bad? I'm not really sure. Maybe let's just do it again and see. So I have vague memories of buds, more funny stuff than anything. But don't get me wrong. It was hard and it was an important crucible in my life. But it was so long ago that I struggled to have pristine memories from that time period.
• 23:22
  These next several questions now are about the book because it was a page turner. You were the first junior enlisted SEAL commission through the limited duty officer program. What did that teach you about earning a seat versus being handed one?
• 23:37
  Oh, that just showed me the military advancement system was broken. As soon as I got the notification that they selected me, I was like, oh, you guys aren't paying attention to anything. If you're going to make me an officer, you guys are idiots. I'll try to break this down very briefly for people unfamiliar with the military system. So on the Navy side, at least the enlisted side on the ranks, E1 through E9, and then officer 01 through 09, the big jump between what I'll call mid-level management and senior leadership on the enlisted side is between E6 and E7.
• 24:07
  As you go through the ranks, the earlier ones, E1, E2, if you've been in the military for two years and you still have a heartbeat, they will advance you from E1 to E2, E2 to E3.
• 24:16
  E3 to E4 and E4 to E5, you're going to have to take a test, which is just rote knowledge. But from E5 to E6 is the same thing. It's a knowledge test. But from E6 to E7, you have to hold a leadership position called an LPO or a leading petty officer, which is going to be that junior leader that has all the people in those ranks that I just mentioned underneath you. And you're the interface to essentially the senior leadership, which is going to be your chief petty officer and then the officers that you are working with.
• 24:46
  So it makes sense that they want you to hold that role before you make the leap into E7 and become a chief petty officer, which is, it's got a crucible in and of itself. You get a different uniform. It can change a lot of conditions to what you get paid, to where you live, to where you dine, all of those things. There's a lot of traditions in the military and a lot of them are rank based. So once you achieve those ranks, things change for you a little bit. So I was on my LPO tour holding that leadership position the night I got shot.
• 25:15
  And because I came home before the deployment ended, they did not count it as being complete. I didn't know this when I put my package in for E7. Every year, they do one board every year for E7. All the E6s, you submit your package. It's an interesting paperwork drill. You make sure you got all your stuff together. You send it off.
• 25:32
  Well, the first year I didn't get picked up and I was like, huh, son of a bitch. Okay. Second year, I didn't get picked up as well. I'm sitting there like, what's going on here? Like my record doesn't suck in comparison to my peers. I should be okay. And I ended up running into one of the guys I used to work with and he actually was at the board and they're not supposed to talk about what happens there. But he said, he goes, dude, I saw your record.
• 25:56
  And they swiped it off the table without even taking a look at it. And I said, why? Because they didn't count your LPO tour as complete. So they're not even going to look at your record until you finish that LPO tour. Well, I was at a shore duty command and you have to hold that job for two years at a shore duty command before they consider it to be complete. And I had just gotten there. So another person had just started their LPO tour. So I would have had to wait until they did their two years.
• 26:25
  then I would have taken the job, had to wait two years. So now we're at four to submit my package again. So spinning tires in soft sand, essentially.
• 26:35
  I wanted to stay in the military. I wanted to continue climbing the ladder. And I found this not antiquated, but we'll just call it anomalous program called a limited duty officer program, which does not require a college degree, which I didn't have. I barely graduated high school. So it was the only way and going from E6 to 01.
• 26:58
  It's a pretty large jump. So I put in a package for it, which was almost identical to the chief's package, which was nice because I already had that stuff done. They had you write some essays and stuff like that, submitted the package and got picked up on the first look. So it was never this long term strategy. It was just me problem solving along the way, figuring out how I could continue the natural ascension through the rank program of the military.
• 27:21
  And found this program where you were able to go from enlisted to officer without a college degree. Otherwise, I don't know what I would have done, quite frankly, because I don't think there are any other programs out there like that that are available. You started it off saying that the military is goofy and you just nailed it and like you figured out a loophole. That's smart. That might be the best, the best story that wasn't in the book all the way.
• 27:44
  Yeah, I think there have been three SEAL officers commissioned that don't have college degrees, and I am one of them. And all of them came through that program. There was so little participation in that program.
• 27:56
  that they actually don't even use it anymore in the SEAL community. So few people applied for it, probably because they didn't know that it existed, that they just don't even offer it anymore. So it truly was like this anomalous program that nobody really knew about. And I found it and I was like, what's the worst thing they're gonna say? No, I'm like, I already got 90% of the package done. Let's fire this thing off. That's wild.
• 28:17
  When I was reading the book and I was reading about your skydiving and you jumped out at 36,500 feet. First of all, my heart was like, what was your very last thought before you jumped out? I hope I don't fuck this up.
• 28:32
  No, you didn't. You didn't think negatively. No way. You were going over. That's not a negative thought. That's a realistic thought. It's like, huh, we're pretty high up here. How about I don't mess this up? And then actually my first thought when I got out of the plane was I'm substantially underdressed because underneath that wingsuit I had on shorts and a t-shirt. And I think it was about negative 50 on exit. But we did that in Northern California in the summer and the ground temperature was nearly 100.
• 28:57
  and the exit altitude was well below zero, I didn't do a really good job of dressing for that range. So yeah, I dressed for the 100 degrees on the ground. And fortunately, I mean, you're kind of cutting through the air as opposed to being really immersed in it. But yeah, I could have had a few more layers on, I think. How long till you got to the warmth? Was it minutes? I think
• 29:18
  I think I was in free fall for almost eight and a half minutes. I would say four or five minutes into that, you're starting to get back down to normal skydiving altitude. So it's a general temperature decrease as you go to altitude is two to 2.5 degrees per thousand feet. So you can kind of calculate that on the way down. You're getting into warmer, denser air as you get lower.
• 29:38
  I'm literally going through the book right now. It's just that good. So there was a part where you broke two world records in a suit you'd barely worn months earlier. How do you build competence that fast without dying? One step at a time and you find mentors and you listen to what they say.
• 29:58
  My old job, the military job, rewarded your ability to learn. We were responsible for knowing like 80 different core competencies, and you were always chasing currency. We would be off in the desert doing land warfare maneuver tactics. And then right after that, we'd have to go dive for two weeks. And then right after that, we would go do air operations and jump for two weeks. And then right after that, we'd get the Zodiacs. And there's no way...
• 30:24
  that you are at a high level of currency across all of those things. I would say at best, you're at 80% competency at any given time in your career. So with these really truncated
• 30:36
  teaching and learning windows, you have to get really good at your ability to uptake, process and then perform when it comes to information. And the reality is this, people ask me this all the time. I'm a black belt in jujitsu, and it took me five and a half years to get my black belt on an average timeline for most people, that it takes them 10. Now, having said that, that 10 year timeline is somebody who trains two times per week, which is a totally normal trajectory. I had the ability where I could train as much as I wanted to,
• 31:05
  So if you do the math on 10 years of training twice a week versus the number of times that I was training versus five and a half years, the math is the math. It still checks out. But you can train all you want to.
• 31:17
  But if you haven't committed to actually learning, the training is going to be far less valuable. And to me, the best way that you can honor a coach or a mentor is to actually do what it is that they tell you and nothing more. And that is how we were able to truncate that knowledge. We would have the world's best shooters come and work with us.
• 31:36
  And if they said, hey, this is the fastest way that I have found to get my pistol out of my holster and present it on target, I'm not going to go any farther than that. I'm going to honor the coach and mentor by doing exactly what they say and nothing else. And that's exactly what I applied to jujitsu as well. So when you want to learn how to fly a wingsuit, again, I already had about 3,000 jumps under my belt. So I understood skydiving. I understood the parachuting system. What I really needed to do was layer on a different skill set.
• 32:07
  into the skydiving, I was already doing a different discipline for sure. But I had, let's say 60% of the knowledge base because I had been in the community for long enough. I knew the world champions. I knew the people that were the best at it in the world. And I said, Hey, I need you to coach me. This is what I'm looking at trying to do. Will you help? And they say, yes. And I tell you what, if you want somebody to continue helping you or to be more enthusiastic about helping you.
• 32:31
  Go back to what I just said a minute ago. Do what they say to you. Don't be an ask hole where you ask somebody what to do and then you do the exact opposite of that and you waste their time. Nobody wants to work with that person. But as somebody who has taught people, if they're receptive,
• 32:47
  If they will engage with the information, if they will do what you're telling them to do, you will bend over backwards and do everything you can to try to enhance that person's performance because they're honoring the time that you put in with them by doing what you say. It's really not that hard. Find the best people in the world or the best people in the world that you have access to. Ask them to help and then listen to their guidance. Andy, that was such good advice. Your ability to learn. We all need to learn. I call myself a learn-it-all.
• 33:17
  because learn from other people's mistakes, that's wise. I don't know why we spend so much time arguing. Guy called me out of the blue and he's, would you help me become a speaker? And then proceeded to argue with every advice I gave him. I just said, hey, I took this call because I thought I had a minute, but it's so frustrating. We all wanna argue instead of just look in the mirror and just listen, so. I wanna bring this book up here.
• 33:45
  Because to me it was written as advice to your younger self. What is the one thing you got wrong most back then? Oh, I didn't invest in Bitcoin. You know what, your next thing should be a standup comedian.
• 34:02
  People ask me, what would you tell your younger self? I was like, well, I would go ahead and say, hey, listen up. This Bitcoin thing that doesn't make sense to you, go ahead and put a couple thousand dollars in there. But I was such a jackass back then. I wouldn't have listened to myself anyway, or I would have pulled it out when it hit like $3. I mean, that would have been the most meaningful thing I could have told myself. Yeah.
• 34:21
  I wasn't at an age then where I think I would have listened to an immense amount of information that I put in that book. And I'm not trying to change your life by any stretch. More than anything, the desire to write the book was an attempt to maybe, maybe one thing out of those 270 plus pages will help you either get through something or round the edges quickly.
• 34:44
  on something that's going on in your life. But the younger you are, you know, it's the classic Dunning-Kruger effect. The younger you are, the more you think you have everything figured out. And so I get it. I've lived through that. I understand. So it's okay if you read the book and you're like, whatever. I'm going to figure this all out on my own. Go ahead if you want to. But maybe, hopefully, when you encounter a challenge, which you're going to, something that you read in that book, you remember it and you go, you know what, I'm just going to try this.
• 35:10
  And hopefully an immense amount of impact, even though a lot of this stuff is just very small mental perception or focus changes. That was the goal in doing it. And legitimately, yeah, what did I get wrong when I was younger? I didn't invest in Bitcoin. That was the biggest thing.
• 35:25
  They say the youth is wasted on the youth. And I've been there. 100%. I would just say, just invest in yourself. I didn't start until it was really late. And you did right off the bat. So what does actually staying afloat mean when everything in your life is going under at once? And I'm telling you, I just came out of this very recently.
• 35:44
  Super broad wave top level, it means survival first. It means at times in your life, you are going to have to get rid of the thought of even thriving. That's the biggest wave top, is you have to be able to survive before you can thrive. The technical mechanics of how you do that, first and foremost, I think you have to be very careful with the stories that you tell yourself or the stories that I tell myself in those moments.
• 36:12
  the most impressive people that I have ever seen walk on earth. And the statistics on the number of those men who have killed themselves post-military service is shocking. So the military special operations communities, they are way more similar than they are different. And just recently in the Green Beret community,
• 36:36
  They crossed a Rubicon that I can't even fathom is true, but it is. They have now lost more people to suicide than combat operations. And I don't know where the SEAL community is in that metric, but I can tell you it is trending towards crossing that same Rubicon at some point in time. And from the outside,
• 37:01
  People view that occupation, we'll just call it special operations, not even just the SEAL community. They view it as a community of people that have a cape and cowl and a shield and bullets bounce off of them. And they are capable of accomplishing the impossible and that nothing could bother them. And they're impervious to fear or struggle or hardship. And all of that is complete bullshit.
• 37:30
  They are, in my own experience, exceptionally average people who are asked often to do exceptionally unaverage or extraordinary things. But at the end of the day, when they go home, they are not impervious to the struggles of life that everybody faces. And in seeing some of the things that were left behind by my friends who have made the decision to end their life, it is some of the most heartbreaking moments.
• 38:00
  Information. It's they thought they were alone in what they were dealing with. They thought that nobody would understand if they had reached out for help. They thought that they would be judged.
• 38:13
  If they reached out for help, they felt like because of the job they came from and the only thing that mattered was performance and the standard they felt or got to a place because of the lies they told themselves that they as a person were unable to hold those standards personally now outside of that community.
• 38:32
  and had no value remaining in humanity, which it's like you want to talk about just soul crushing. My number one mentor in the SEAL community, I wrote about in the book, his name is Dave Hall. He is who taught me what being a SEAL is. He was physically capable of holding the highest standards that I've ever seen. And he would hold people to a very high standard, but he met and exceeded them and found himself somehow at a place in his life
• 38:59
  where he was really struggling deeply with the ability to do that. And I will add to this, he was struggling with an alcohol abuse issue. And he had been for a long time and he would kick me right in the balls if I didn't acknowledge that and tell the truth because that's who he was. He wants integrity and the truth matters. But those things can really compound. Pair with that, isolation. A lot of the times when people get out of the military, they go back to where they came from so they lose the community of support of the people that they were with.
• 39:27
  They go from a place where they think they have an immense purpose to one where now they're questioning what is their role in life going forward. They don't have the team dynamic, the team support anymore. But.
• 39:39
  The lies that we tell ourself this, I'm alone, nobody would understand. Everybody else seems to have this figured out. Look at Instagram. Everybody's life is amazing. Why don't I have those things? Why don't I have that happiness? Why don't I have that success? If you start talking to yourself like that,
• 39:58
  you end up in a really, really dangerous place. And the biggest thing I could hope people would take from the book is the realization that they aren't alone. You're not going through anything that anybody hasn't gone through before. You're not struggling with something that hasn't been struggled through before. And if you ask for help,
• 40:15
  you will get it because you're surrounded by people who care for you. And human beings are capable of doing some amazing things, but I am not aware of anybody who can legitimately read somebody else's mind. So you're going to have to have a participation in this as well too. And it may be more than one request for help, but you have to keep going. Brother, that's why that in and of itself is why I reached out to you. That's what I took away from the book is we're in June. It's month mental health month.
• 40:46
  And what I was going to say to that was don't make things worse by drinking, drugging. You probably have a term for it, but mitigate the damage by doing nothing and reach out to Andy's, the Kelly's. We care. You're not alone. I've been there, man.
• 41:05
  You've been there. It's the worst. I know it's the, it's the worst. And most of the time, if not always, I'm not a fan of absolutes. So I try to avoid terms like always never, but almost always, if you find yourself in that position, and I'm not saying that horrible things don't happen to people in life. Life is a horrendous uphill battle. Welcome to the fucking club. All right. We're all in it together. We're in the trenches. We're in the trenches.
• 41:27
  But most of the time, if not always, when you get yourself into that headspace, it's because you talked yourself into it. And not overnight. It's these little breadcrumbs of stories. For me, I am amazingly capable of negative self-talk. And I've worked with counselors and therapists over years
• 41:45
  to develop tools to recognize when I am going down that pathway to interrupt it so it doesn't get as insidious as it can be for me. And I know I'm not alone in that. But man, if you don't have those tools and you're just step by step by step deeper into the pool and the water's coming up to right below your mouth,
• 42:03
  It's tough, man. What do you do to interrupt that pattern? Because, bro, I'm the meanest son of a gun to myself. If I said the things out loud that I say to myself to you, you'd end this interview right now. What I do is I stop myself and go, is it true? And I literally talk to myself. I don't listen to myself. I start talking to myself and I change my environment. What does Andy Stump do?
• 42:23
  To me, the key is recognition because it can be insidious. It can be just a little bit of a thought process. You telling yourself it didn't work out that way because you don't deserve it anyway. God, what a horrible thing to say to yourself. I'm in the same boat. Not literally, but metaphorically. Most days I'll get up and brush my teeth and look in the mirror and be like, what's up, you piece of shit? What are you going to mess up today? It's not that bad, but I'm capable of that. Don't get me wrong.
• 42:46
  Right. So first it's recognition that that was the biggest thing. Recognition for myself, how dangerous that can be.
• 42:55
  Once you can recognize it, you have to be able to work on tools to interrupt it. And so for me, if I have a thought like that or if I catch myself verbalizing something like that, it's as simple as saying, hey, does this serve me well? Is this healthy? And so I start trying to answer objective questions to get myself out of this emotional mind state, which is really what it is. So I try to come back to objectivity.
• 43:20
  Is it healthy? Is it true? Why are we wasting our time talking to ourself like this? Let's not do that. And again, I verbalize, I talk to myself all the time too. From the outside, if there was like a CCTV footage of me throughout the day, people were like, you need to lock that dude up because I'm having full conversations with myself. Most of the time I have my dog with me. So people are like, oh, he's just talking to his dog. I'm like, yep, totally. Nope. Just having full conversations with myself. But
• 43:45
  Recognition and then get into the logical versus emotional. Try to pull it out of the emotional and into the logical. Does this thought process serve me well? If you can say no to that, you're on the pathway at least to being able to implement some steps that can work.
• 44:05
  hopefully make a difference for you. But you have to be able to recognize it first. To me, the earlier recognition, and over years of working on this, I can catch it way earlier. Because sometimes it's not always a crazy, large, negative thought. It's you just crack the door. But then you push it open a little bit more to see what's in the room. And then maybe you take a step in. If you could stop that at cracking the door versus you're six feet in the room, you're gonna be better off.
• 44:29
  This is so good, I'm not gonna have to tell people to share this, thank you. I'll be vulnerable up until a couple months ago, I thought I was worthless. It was a subconscious thing going underneath. Worthless, unlovable, and I was bad. And that just kept running on repeat in the subconscious way down, and I kept sabotaging. So I want you to know, I'm saying this, so everybody knows, as soon as I say that, that I operate in shame and fear, there's 15 guys going, 50, 500, whatever guys going, hey, me too, Kelly. And I'm saying this,
• 44:57
  And I bet you, you do, you do the same thing. Like you just said, interrupt that and talk to yourself and be like, is this even true? Guys, we all are there and I'm going to just keep saying it and saying it and saying it. You reach out to me and I'll walk in the mud with you because there's a reason you're here and you deserve to be here and you're supposed to be here and I freaking want you here.
• 45:19
  So sorry for the soapbox. Let's break this down a little bit. When the mission ends and the uniform comes off, who are you, Andy? And how long did it take you to answer that? I always reminded myself that what I did wasn't who I was. So I was always just Andy. Don't get me wrong. I still, I think I have a military uniform somewhere in a closet under plastic, which eventually I'll throw away though at some point. I don't even know necessarily why I have it other than was in a moving box.
• 45:48
  It means a lot to me. That time in service that I spent was the formative years of my adult life as a young man. Very proud of my service. I'm proud of the people that I served with. I did the best that I could. But it was never who I was. When people ask me who you are, I'm just a husband and a father. To me, I care far more about my children and my wife than I do about any accomplishment that I may have. I mean, I own a coffee shop. Is that who I am? No. No.
• 46:11
  I host a podcast. Is that who I am? No, that's just one of the things that I do. And it's a tool that I use to try to have a positive impact on the world around me. So who I am has never changed. What I have done throughout the course of my life or my occupational titles have changed. But the person underneath that never has. That is so good. My identity, I just ripped it apart in the last six months and took me back to what I was, what God intended me to be.
• 46:35
  And I'm at 50 and I figured this out late, that late. And I was always, I had to do more. That's what heart in life is about. Do more, do more, do more. And you'll become somebody. You'll be worthy. You'll be lovable. You'll be good. And that wasn't it at all, man. It wasn't it at all. So thank you for saying that. I should have asked you this last time. It just popped in right after I blurted out that last question. What's the hardest conversation you've ever had with yourself?
• 46:57
  Hardest decision I have ever made was the decision to leave my first marriage. I came from a community where really the only currency that truly mattered at the end of the day, if you reduce it down, is your unwillingness to quit. And that is a very dangerous mindset if you apply that to things outside of a very narrow skill set inside of the military.
• 47:21
  So I was married for 19 years and 11 months. And I think my ex and I would agree that probably the last 10 years of that would have been a way better time for us to separate. Now, having said all of that, I would go through every day of that again because of my amazing children. I would still make the same decision that I made, but I would reenter into that and go through everything that was...
• 47:44
  Painful, and I'm not saying that that is her fault or my fault. I'm just saying that that relationship ended up becoming very painful for both parties. But I would do it again every day of it for my kids. I'm not saying that there was no value associated in that relationship. But looking at yourself and knowing that you needed to leave
• 48:02
  But telling yourself or asking yourself, so you're going to quit? You're going to be a quitter? How are you going to explain that to your friends? How are you going to explain that to the people who look at you and all they can say is, oh, that's Andy, the former Navy SEAL. He doesn't quit at anything. That was a tough one. That was the toughest decision I'd ever made because so much of the value, like the anchor of value in my life up until that point had been an unwillingness to give up. And the reality is there are some things you need to give up on.
• 48:32
  I'm so glad you went there because that was the other part that shook me to my core. There's so many things where I stayed the course because I was stubborn and stupid and that didn't serve anybody. Quitting sometimes is the noble right thing to do. And you just made it cool and made me think about it. So thank you for that.
• 48:55
  I have a sneaky suspicion. I know where you're going to go with this, and we probably should have asked this even earlier, which is you've raised millions for the SEAL community. What do most people get wrong about how to truly help veterans? I think more than anything, people don't know what to do or how. And I also don't think...
• 49:15
  that people should feel obligated to help veterans. It's a cool title. It's a meaningful title, but it's also not a free pass. In my opinion, veterans should be held to a higher standard for what they have gone through. And I don't mean combat exposure. I mean, just entering into the military. You're gonna have a better understanding, hopefully, of communication and structure and leadership and all of those things, things that broadly apply to military life, personal and professional life. I talk to organizations all the time.
• 49:43
  And I actually caution them. I'm like, listen, hiring veterans is an amazing thing, but promise me you're not going to do it just because they are a veteran. It's a title, but it's not a qualification. It doesn't mean that they're going to be good at something outside of the military just because they had a military career or did something that you considered to be flashy or meaningful while they were in. Hire them because they're.
• 50:08
  They are qualified to do the job that you want them to do. And then on top of that, if they're a veteran, that's just an added bonus. To me, the best way that you could say thank you to a veteran or to give back to a veteran is to live the most fulfilled version of your life humanly possible.
• 50:26
  Because it is a job that could end up costing you your life. And you know that going into it. And we used to have very honest and black and white conversations about death. Talk about what we wanted to have happen if we were going to die. I mean, this is actually, I was going to say bizarre, but probably natural. You never think it's going to be you, of course. So you're sitting around having these conversations. But in the back of your mind, it's like, it'll never be me. It's probably going to definitely be Bob over there. Bob kind of sucks. So he'll definitely be the one that gets it.
• 50:54
  But like really deep conversations about what would you want for your family if you didn't come back? And I never heard anything, anything other than I would want them to live the most fulfilled and enriched life. Go out and live your life.
• 51:14
  to the maximum extent possible. It doesn't have to be prescriptive. Whatever makes you tick, whatever drives the engine that you have or you get inspiration or motivation, go do that as hard as you can because what we have, people have sacrifice for. And I think that is the most meaningful way that you can say thank you. Be worthy of the sacrifice that others make for you. Mission accepted. Thank you for that. As a civilian and never served in anything, it bothers me.
• 51:44
  Especially now that you just said that the homelessness and the mental health and the lack of what we do. We'll send money to other nations, but we won't help our veterans. Like it bothers me. And then now that you just do that stat about suicide, it doesn't sit well with me.
• 52:00
  I'll add a layer to that, though. And this is something that people don't want to talk about often, specifically with the homeless issue. And I have encountered this in people I know directly, but then also in people who interface with that community and not just veterans in general. There is a large segment of those people that don't want the help.
• 52:18
  that is being offered. And that could probably tie into the mental health aspect as well, too. But you have to have a willingness of the person to have and engage with those services. There are a legitimate cohort of people that want no part of that. And again, they probably don't want a part of that because of the mental health aspect. But you can't force somebody into that matrix and expect it to be successful.
• 52:40
  There are, on last count, over 40,000 service-based organizations that exist, nonprofits, 501c3s.
• 52:49
  that exists to help veterans and military members. There is not a lack of people out there looking for abilities to give and to help. There's not a lack of money. Oftentimes, it's a lack of people having an interest in seeking those things out. So you have to look at both sides of those equations, right? Like there's an equal sign in the middle, but you gotta look at the integers on both sides and they both have to participate.
• 53:12
  I would have bet that it's fear or being vulnerable or something mental about that because the next question will make sense from that. It's if preparation is what makes execution possible, where do most people quietly skip the work and pay for it later? And I was specifically thinking about are they skipping the work of doing the mental health so they can live their life? But
• 53:36
  I'm just going on a tangent. Where do most people quietly skip the work? Because I see it every day. Oh, it's not even quietly. I mean, let's just be honest.
• 53:44
  Doing hard things is hard and it doesn't always seem like it's what you want to do because it's not always what you want to do. But I don't know anybody who is successful who skips the hard work. So there's always going to be this anomalous person that finds overnight success. And I am like, awesome. I have nothing but support for people's success. However, comma, does that scale? No, it doesn't.
• 54:10
  So there is an Elon Musk out there, right, who has national defense level autism and an ability to have a valuation of his personal net worth that is apparently now in the trillions. Great. There are a lot of people who want to repeat Elon Musk's process to do that. It doesn't scale. And that's okay. Okay.
• 54:29
  What does scale is hard work over time when no one is watching, making microscopic steps towards the goal that you want to achieve. And then guess what? When you get there and achieve your goal, people who know nothing about you are going to look at you and say, must be nice. And then the answer should be, it's way nicer than you think it is.
• 54:50
  I wish I could microphone drop right there, but I got one last question. Then we're going to do a quick rapid fire. After everything you've survived, what still scares you? This goes back to the guys from that community. They're not superheroes. Fear is 100% present in combat operations. It actually needs to be because, again, we go back to the difference between danger and fear. Combat environments are legitimately demonstrably dangerous. Yeah.
• 55:13
  If you're not afraid of life, limb, and eyesight, I actually don't want to work with you because that means you're a sociopath. It means you do not have a normal human emotional range. I need you to realize that carrying a gun for a living and going and hunting other people that carry guns for a living is dangerous.
• 55:32
  If you're skipping that, it's like, hey, man, I you need to go be on the other team because I want people who have at least a little bit of fear of this because I don't want you to do stupid or irrational or irresponsible things. So I have the same fears. I mean, my biggest fears in life are revolver on my children or the people that I care about. And my single biggest fear.
• 55:52
  is that something will happen with somebody that I care about, and I will not be there and have the ability to help them. Those are the thoughts that will keep you up at night. And if anybody has children and you intuitively understand that,
• 56:05
  You are an outstanding individual. I've enjoyed every part of this, man, and you were the real deal. So thank you for taking time today. We're going to do a quick seven one word to one sentence answers, and we'll get out of here. And I just, man, I'm not going to tell people to share this. This is, we've covered everything, and thank you. So we'll start off with mountains or oceans? Mountains. I've spent enough time in the water. One word for bud. Bud.
• 56:33
  Interesting. Coffee black or loaded? Black. Skydiving or base jumping? Skydiving. The most overrated piece of advice you hear? You can accomplish anything in life. One book everyone should read besides downproof.
• 56:51
  I would say The Art of Spending Money. I just finished it recently, and it talks about a lot of internal versus external motivation type things, status versus utility. It's an interesting concept in why we work so hard and what we value so much. Guys, get out and read this book, Down Proof, in three words, in your three words. You are not alone.
• 57:14
  Buddy, you've tugged on my heart. I've made a new friend. I'm going to be weird and tell you I love you. I do. I love everything about you that you stand for. Get out, read this, guys. Part of Life Nation, support the man. Thank you for coming on. And I want to leave everybody with this that just says exactly what you said. You're not alone and you're here for a reason. And take care of yourself and each other. And until next week, be harder than life.
• 57:40
  Please rate and share this podcast. I'm active on all social platforms and love to hear from my Segal supporters. Each and every episode is sponsored by my company, National Technology Management, the easiest and best IT company to do business with. Delivering peace of mind with technology every day, even simplifying cybersecurity. Visit TrustNTM.com for more info. Until next week, be harder than life.