Navy SEAL Diego Ugalde/The Trident Approach

Participant #1:

As I look back on the dusty and disruptive Warcloud that was my career as a Navy Seal, I am honored to have been one of the very few mortals serving alongside America's greatest superheroes in the teams. Though scarred and weathered, I stand now with a triumphant smile. A 20 year career forged in shortcomings failure, growth, and finally, success has become the root system of who I am and has left me with a visceral sense of deep humility and a profound feeling of gratefulness to those who mentored and sharpened me along the way. Thanks to them, I now know who I really am and my unique purpose on this Earth. It is my honor to share with you my personal lessons learned with the sole intention of helping you to create your own elite organizations based in cohesive and mutually supportive and inspiring environments. That is the biography of Diego Galle, Navy Seal, founder of the Trident Approach. I got that from the website, thetridandeproach.com link in the description, and he is our guest today on The Scuttlebutt Show. Hey, guys, just wanted to give you a heads up before this episode starts. It picks up right after me and Diego got on Zoom and started talking. But we were trying to figure out how to use Zoom together, and once we figured that out and we were both good to go, the conversation picks up right there. Enjoy this episode. We got to Okinawa in July, and I had to leave and go back to San Diego and finish work. And then I moved out to Okinawa in September. So I was here for about a week, and we did our in dock where we got our driver's licenses. We took the test. We got our driver's licenses. We bought a car from a guy who was PCSing out of okay canoe, which is kind of the way you do it. You just do hand me down cars. And we started driving, and I really didn't have a hard time with it. I even was okay with the blinker windshield Wiper thing. Everyone says the Okinawa wave is when you do your windshield wipers when you need to do your turn signal. And I was good with that, but I've done the windshield Wiper thing a couple of times since then. I still feel good with driving. I've never had an issue, but it's weird. This is my PSA about it. I looked the wrong way when I'm crossing the street. Like if I'm at a crosswalk, I'll look the wrong way for oncoming cars and start walking through the street and realize they're coming from the other direction. So when I'm driving, I'm okay. But when I'm walking, that's where I get jacked up. I hear you, man. I actually have a pretty funny story about that. And I can say funny because we were doing Master Mariner stuff and learning how to basically sail around really large yachts and how to do twin motor power, yachts and all that kind of stuff. When we're there for, like five days. And I was with one of my both guys and the guys, he's super cool guy, but he's a totally goofy guy. He's always the guy that you have to get them locked on, you know what I mean? And whether we're at work or at a bar or something like that, it's like, hey, bro, you in this? Okay, let's do this. Well, anyway, Goofball awesome guy, one of the greatest dudes, had such a great time with them during my time in Europe. But we were there for a couple of days, and we had been out on the water all day and military life. As soon as you're done with work and you just go out and see what the bar situation is like, got it. We were deep into it, man. I don't know. Who knows? I'll just say probably eight or nine beers at that time or something. And we're just having the best time. And we walk up to a sidewalk, and I look and I'm about to step, and he goes, Wham. And he hits me right on my chest, like, hard. And as soon as he hits me in my chest, hard, it was almost like he was fighting me, which we were both front or whatever. We didn't know what was going on, but he hit me so hard. I looked at him, I was like, what? And all of a sudden this car just goes, I mean, it had to be going. It had to be going 35 miles an hour easy. And I was about to just take that step without looking. And I looked at them. I've been to war a bunch of times

Participant #1:

almost. I had a plant crash and helicopters and all that kind of stuff. I'm like, dude, you just saved my life, man. He goes, hey, he was hammered too, or whatever. But it was funny. So many things were funny about that one. It was like, you wouldn't expect this guy to be the guy to say, you know what I mean? Because he was all over the place just to goofball. But he was there, man. He was an angel on Earth in that very moment, man. Because if I wouldn't have gotten killed, I promise you, dozens of broken bones, ruptured internal organs. It would have been bad going back to the States for if I was lucky kind of thing. Just the funniest thing. I wasn't looking the right way. So, yeah, it's funny. I do it. Even though I know I do it, I still do it. So what I do is when I get to a crosswalk, I just stop no matter what and look, like three times in both directions. Because if I don't consciously do it, I know I'm going to look the wrong way. And it's weird because driving no problem, easy from the first time, but walking, I almost will get myself killed just walking down the street. Let me know how this goes. If you're up for it, start brushing your right handed. Right? Yeah. Start brushing your teeth with your left hand and see what happens with the struggle or the cloudiness of which where your car is coming. Which way do I look? Okay. And it doesn't only have to be brushing teeth. Things that you do every day. It doesn't matter. You don't want to write with your left fingers. It's going to be all jacked up things that you do every day, right handed or whatever. Switch it around. And sometimes that really kind of Awakens the brain. It's almost like going to the gym for opposite thinking. And not only opposite thinking, but just learning as a whole. But I'd be interested to see what it's like if you were to do that. If you feel like, Dude, I've been brushing my teeth like this for five days, and all of a sudden it's not even a thing anymore. Or like, I would just be interested to hear, okay, if you're up for it. Jim Quick. What is his name? Jim Quick. He's like the world premiere guy on brain function. And he's an amazing dude. He's all over the Internet. He's got just the coolest story that I won't Butcher here. But as a kid, he was known as the kid with a broken brain because he had fallen at school and he hit his head on one of those radiators that are kind of attached to the wall. He had some sustained some brain damage from that, and from then he had difficulties learning. And for whatever reason, it was just kind of his path to figure out, what do I do now? And now he's like this PhD dude. He's the cool. I could listen to him all day long. He could be a part of this podcast, and you'd never know that he's like this huge guy. But that's one of the things that he talks about when you're starting to learn a language or you're starting to he does a lot with speed, reading all of these things. He goes and does, like keynotes for hundreds of people in the audience, and he'll go down, get everybody's name all the way to the back. And then by the end, he'll just be rattling like nothing. That's like one of his main things in terms of turning on the brain, saying, hey, man, it's time to wake up. Is the whole brushing your teeth with the opposite hand? Yes, I'd be interested. Okay, I'm going to try it, and I'm going to do an update. I'm going to do it for the rest of this week. And then I'm going to do an update video on how that goes. And maybe I'll record myself trying to do it because I know it will be really bad the first time. It's weird. Like you don't even know what to do with your feet. Yeah, it's weird, but that's why it's not like writing. You have to worry about how bad your handwriting is. You get it done. It's not a big deal. But definitely check that dude out. Jim Quick is in Kwik. Go ahead. You know what? That kind of reminds me of something. I was just looking at last night that my wife was showing me. Do you know anything about freediving? A little bit, yeah. Okay, so there's a guy, I don't recall his name, but he holds some free diving records once he freed off to 830 Ft.

Participant #1:

So it goes like this. This is the short version, which is what I got watching him on YouTube. Last night, he freed off to 830 Ft. And he was ascending. And this is his words. He fell asleep 26 meters under the water. He didn't say passed out. He said fell asleep. So he is down there and his rescue team comes down and they saw him unconscious, and they thought that he was hurt or dead or something blacked out. So they brought him up. And I don't know how this works if you're just holding your breath, if it's the same as when you're diving. But he got decompression sickness because they brought him up from 26 meters too fast. So he got decompression sickness and he ended up he gave him air. Oh, maybe they're guessing. Yeah. Okay, so that happened. He ended up in a wheelchair because he basically had a stroke. He ended up in a wheelchair. He couldn't remember anything. He couldn't remember the names of the people he knew. He had full like, basically a full loss, catastrophic loss of ability. And doctors told him recovery is not possible. You should learn to cope with, like start coping with this. But he said he never accepted that. He started training himself. He got back up on his feet, and this was a while ago, but he didn't fully recover. He still struggles with some motor functions, but he gets back into water and free dives, and he says when he's in the water, he's fully functional. How interesting. It's like nothing ever happened to him. Once he gets in the water, you would guess, or at least I would guess it's got to have something to do with that pressure on the brain that normalizes them somehow. Yeah, but it's just like the brain is so crazy. The way that this works, it would be really interesting to get him on an EEG at surface and then put him in a decompression Chamber and take him to depth on an eg and see what his brain does. Yeah, I'm sure they've done it a thousand times. Who knows? But it would be interesting to see what the difference is, especially if he goes back to normalcy. I can't imagine falling asleep. I know it's such a violent thing because you've held your breath. I mean, you get that, but I'm just thinking, my way through this the first time. Obviously, I've heard this story. I mean, maybe he wasn't out of breath because I know you just got to almost go into you do go into a meditative state when you go down, there's very little energy that's being expended. Maybe he just had maybe had two more minutes left of air in them, but he was just so relaxed that he just went out. And the body's reflex is so averted to bringing in water that the people who die of drowning, I mean, they only find a couple of CC's, cubic center meters or water in their throat. It's the asphyxiation that causes it's not like their lungs are full of water. It would just be interesting to see how that whole thing happened, because I can't when we're drownproofing, there's this thing you go through when you're going through Seal training where they tie your hands behind your back and your feet together. They just want to see how comfortable you are in the water. It's actually very calm. It's calming. You're like 15ft of water and you just blow out all your air and then you sink and then your feet hit the ground and then you just push off gently. You come up, your mouth just comes above water and you just take it another breath and you just blow it out. And it's almost hypnotic. It really is relaxing. It's like one of the few times in Seal training where you're just at peace. It's calm, all of that. You do have to do some swimming stuff, which requires a lot more effort. But that piece alone is very calming and peaceful. So I wonder he couldn't have been out of breath. He just must have gone a little bit too deep. Meditatively speaking. Yeah. Well, I think these big time free divers guys, they hold their breath for like ten or 15 minutes. They did talk about his lung capacity was like 15 liters or something. And the average person is six because they work on these breathing techniques where they expand their lungs and they train over years to expand their lung capacity until they're able to do that. And this is without breathing pure oxygen or any of the other tricks that like, I think the world record breath hold is like 22 or 23 minutes. But the guy breathes. I just pulled it up. Jesus. 22 minutes, 22 seconds. Yeah. But the guy breathes pure oxygen beforehand. That's like an episode of Different Strokes, dude. Without the commercials, man. Oh, my God, dude. 22 minutes and 22 seconds. Yeah. If I take some deep breaths, I can do like a two minute breath hold, and I feel pretty good about that. But that is just nothing compared to ten or 15 minutes or 20 minutes. I don't know how they do it. It seems impossible.

Participant #1:

Yeah. Most all the time you can get guys, really, it's like this big challenge, maybe like three minutes or so. You know what I mean? These are guys are in shape, but they're not training for breath holding, but they're just in shape. And 22 minutes,

Participant #1:

not that long. Probably seven or eight minutes.

Participant #1:

Yeah, exactly. So one thing that I do, if anybody is out there listening to this and then they want to go try a breath hold is I'll sing a song in my head that I know really well, and I'm thinking about the song. I'm not really thinking about how much time is passing, but I noticed that if I get to the second verse or the second chorus, it's already been two minutes or whatever without even thinking about and you're not thinking about the fact that you're holding your breath, you have to do that. It is meditative because you have to let your mind go somewhere else, think about something other than the fact you're holding your breath. And then it'll help a lot. And it's good training too, because your song probably the beat starts to speed up a little bit. Yeah, exactly. Where you start jamming through the words to get the next chords, next chord. Now I'm wrapping it and it's like Freebird or something. Yeah, right, man. Jesus. So how are you? What's new with you since the last time we talked, which was like almost a year ago when we did that podcast. What's been going on with the business since then? Well, we were doing really good. We got these huge name clients, some I can't say on the air, but we've worked with Hertz and we've worked with other really well known, well established organizations. And we're making a lot of headway. And this is going to be a really great year for us. We were startups, so we're like literally getting out of startup debt and all those things and really starting to make a name for ourselves. I was getting phone calls from friends. It was like, hey, man, I was at a party in Colorado and some guy just brought you guys up and was just talking about you guys randomly and he didn't know that we were friends. And so that kind of stuff was going on and you're in a startup and that stuff is for sure exciting to hear that we're having huge impacts on people and not only how they look at how they see life, but also how they see other people now. So other people who they work with every day that initially got on their nerves because they did or didn't do something. Now it's like, oh, well, maybe this was at play and maybe I can help those types of things. And so that's been really such a great thing for us. And we are in this for the relationship. So we do, in fact, got off the phone today with some of our return clients and we've had returning clients and that kind of thing. So that's really awesome. But for sure the vast majority of what we do is up close and personal and interactive and all that stuff. So we've been shut down since really sort of the beginning. I think we had about three events cancel on us before the real kind of big thing hit. And then for sure, since we've been on lockdown, people are just shredding water right now. It just so happens that there are so many things that we do in this space anyway, that's really helpful. So the big word that everyone's throwing around these days is pivoting. And so we've pivoted from obviously having our events that are on the beach and groups and personal stuff to how do you lead in crisis? How do you communicate? How do you work together in teams? How do you support each other through these really just weird, unusual and scary times and those kinds of things? So we're working on podcasts with Get Up Nation and we're starting to develop our web based training, which we hope to use is like a prerequisite before you even come out to the beach because our program is like twelve days long and people just don't have either the time of the finances or what have you to go through those twelve days. So typically what they end up doing is either coming for a half a day or a full day. But the web based training stuff that we're developing, we can get them to go through that when they come out to the beach, that four hour block that they have. They're going to be so much farther along than the clients that we've had in the past who hadn't had that opportunity because we do have such a different way of looking at things and talking about leadership and communication and trust and cultural alignment and those types of things that it's a lot to take in. So as long as we're not spending money, we're doing well. So we're just preparing people now to reintegrate. That's the big thing because for sure it's not going to be this blanket, hey, on Monday, everything's going to be back to normal. It's going to be like this slow step by step thing, incremental for sure. But even then I think people have been damaged financially, mentally, and all this kind of stuff that they're just going to be focused on getting back to work. And that's not what you want to do. There's a lot of damage control that needs to happen. There's a lot of healing that needs to go on. There's a lot of understanding and all of these things that have to take place before you just go all engines forward, because believe me, there's a lot of damage that still can be done by just taking that approach. So we're taking a lot of time and helping people taking these step by step incremental approaches now while business isn't back to normal, so that when it does happen, they're in a steady and strong direction, for sure. So I want to unpack a couple of things you had mentioned there, because that was a lot of good stuff. And one of the things was let me try to do this linearly through, like, a timeline here. So your team that works with you. I think last time you were on maybe you had said you worked with, like seven or eight guys, and then you brought some people in. When you're doing classes, have you grown? How many people are working with you now? Yeah, for sure. We've got 30 vetted instructors now. They know our tenants, they know how we approach culture. They know how we approach trust and leadership, which is not common or not usual. So they understand that whole message. And you might remember from the last time, these aren't the vast majority of sales. These guys care deeply about people they don't know. They care deeply about their growth. There's high level of empathy, which isn't necessarily common in how we go about doing business. But I've been able to find a bunch of those guys that are really the right fit for the Trident approach. Like this last event we did with Hertz in front of the Hotel Dell, we had 150 people. So we have 15 instructors out there. And then we also work with YPOs, which is President, which is small units of highly elite CEOs that before the age of 45, have attained a certain amount of success in their professional career. It's a very exclusive club. They'll come in with, like 60 people. So I'll use two instructors. So you just never know how many of those guys are going to use. But, yeah, we do have really strong list of guys that we love and that we can depend on. I love that. Is it just the best feeling to employ people, to give people a job?

Participant #1:

It's a strange feeling because there's so much responsibility that goes with that. Everything from their job satisfaction, being happy to. It's just such a strange feeling being a CEO and being like, hey, this money that I'm giving to you is going to go to your family. I never really thought about all that stuff before, but it's a different feeling now. But for sure, we talk about culture all the time, and our number one value is long with the Brotherhood. So we're always trying to get back to the naval special warfare community. And so being able to give money to help either transitioning guys or there are guys who are for sure that are on with us. And once we click, they're always and forever going to be trying to approach instructors.

Participant #1:

I don't feel like I'm jamming on a motorcycle on a freeway at 120 miles an hour, just being like, yeah, I don't feel like that at all. I just feel like it's something that needs to be respected and taken carefully. It's a big deal. But at the end of the day when all is said and done, I just feel so happy and so grateful that we can't even do that, that we even have a program that team guys want to be a part of and all that stuff. So a motion, a ton of emotions are wrapped up into that question for sure. I've been thinking about that lately in a few instances of people that have been on the show before who now their businesses have not been operating for one to two months, and they've got people who are their employees, and it's not just them affected when businesses are shut down, when people aren't spending money but their employees, and then the trickle down, the employees and the families and how people are going to make way. So that's been on my mind a lot. Like with all the businesses we've had on the show, how they're handling the situation. It sounds like for you the weight of the seriousness of it combined with the gratefulness and excitedness and humility is all kind of married up in exactly the right place because I think Jason tuition was on the show and he said a good leader is in love with the problems, not their own solutions. Does that make sense? Like everyday it's how can you show up and make things better? Not how can you bask in the glory of you being the man? Yeah, well, I think there's something for sure to be said about the solutions that are awesome when you can get people from one place to another. And I would say that's true. That analogy is true for people who are in the right space. You know what I mean? I'm in love with the dynamics of human beings that it's not so easy when somebody shows up to work while they're a jerk or they're not. I love really kind of trying to figure that stuff out and that kind of stuff. But that's for sure true when somebody's just hit a wall and they're not performing the way they want or the way they are capable of or whatever. But if you can help them kind of get over the wall and then just launch, that stuff is really gigantic. But it is the struggle. It's where you're struggling the most, where all the growth comes from and the realizations and all that stuff that makes those things so impactful and so meaningful. If all our events were very easy and the interactions with people were just like one plus one equals two and that's it for sure. It wouldn't be that fulfilling at all. Yeah. So I see what he's saying on a bunch of different levels there for sure. Do you have any stories you can share from your classes of maybe a challenging moment that you've had about kind of getting that message across? Yeah, they happen all the time. I would say about every other event we have at least one person who's never gotten in the water before. And they don't tell us as open and as genuine as we are, and we could possibly be. People just don't want to tell us stuff. Now. It's just we understand that, but it's always every other class, somebody comes up to us and says, you know, but probably my favorite story of that is we were in Oman, and we were training an organization that we can't mention, but we had 150 of their global leaders all converging into Oman on the beaches out there. And so whenever we do put people in the water, most of the time we're wearing life jackets from beginning the event to the end, whether they're in the water or not. But for sure, every time they get in the water, they have life jackets. So we're going through all these different events. There's, like, races, there's swimming around the booty, there's boat stuff involved and tying knots underwater and that kind of thing. But at the end, I saw this woman in tears, and I'm walking over there. I'm like. I'm like, hey, what's going on? Because our events are, like, super fun. What's happening? Why are you serious? And she goes, I have a swimming pool in my backyard, and my kids go swimming all the time, and they always ask me to go into the pool, and I won't. I'm just afraid of going into water. Now, I've been in the beach with you guys. It's not a problem. As soon as I get home, I'm getting in the pool, and she looks at me and she goes like this. And she goes, I'm going to be a better mom. Oh, man. Wow. You know what I mean? Come on, man. That's awesome. That's so good. Yeah, dude. So we have, like, personal things, just these limitations that we help people see, maybe from a different angle or different perspective, so they realize that they're not as terrifying or as big as they once thought they were. Or we have professional things, too. So we have our five tenants, and I'm not going to mention them because people forget anyway. But one of them is trust. And so rather than just talk about it, so people learn through experience and stories. We don't want to give them our stories, although we do tell our stories, but that's not what matters the most. What matters the most is actually giving something to someone where they have their own story to tell. And so what we do is we put our tenants in some sort of physical depiction so they're actually able to work their way through trust. For example, one of the things we do is we have this minefield, and it's just like we have these simulated mines and trip wires and things going on in the sand. And one person is blindfold and the other person isn't. And the person who's blindfold is her job to navigate through listening to the other person and avoiding all the mines and the trip wires while there was this guy from a pretty large Corporation, he had 30,000 employees or so. He's lying on his stomach. He's trying to go under the low crawl for the tripwire. And Mary's got his lifejacket on. So he's got to be really close to the ground, and there's landmines all around him, and he's yelling at this guy who doesn't have a blindfold on. It's his job to help him get through this. And so if you can imagine just all these mines everywhere. And his knee was up kind of closer to his right knee was up closer to his hip, and his left leg was just straight. He's just kind of shimming himself around, and he starts yelling at the guy. He's like, Where's my knee at? Where's my knee? Where's my knee? And the guy's like, you're okay? You're okay? And by the way, this is the CEO who's yelling and screaming. This other guy is like, oh, I don't know. And it really started to explode. And this is what I love about our programs is because we put people by the way, everything we do is either is under stress of time, physical discomfort, or peer pressure. And so he only had a small amount of time to get through this course. And he's the CEO. So his ego is just hitting him just big time. Like, you are the CEO. You've got to crush this thing. You can't look like you don't know what you're doing. And all this stuff, all these negative stressors are, like, inputting in his brain. And so the way he chose to react like, that is perfect because we all react differently in different ways under stress. That's what I love about what we're doing with our program is because however you respond to stress is perfect. We just want you to see what it is. And if you want to change it or if we can help you change it, if you want to, we can give you ways to figure that stuff out. He's yelling at this guy. This guy's freaking out. He's got the CEO. And if his CEO touches the landmine, he knows, who knows in this day and age where this guy was even worried about his job being online? Like, seriously, there's a lot of the owners screaming going. I was like, hey, hold on a second. Time out. I was like, hey, man, do you got a blindfold on? He's like, yes. I'm like, Is he? And he's like, no, did you hire him? He's like, yeah, I hired him myself. I'm like, do you trust him? And he's like, yeah, I don't talk to everybody like this. I talked to people how they need to be at their best. So I told him to shut the up, and he shut up. And he was like, oh. And I was like, you hired him? You trust this guy? He's this amazing dude. I know him. I've already been dealing with him part of the day today. Just trust him. And he goes through the thing and he gets done and he lifts off his blindfold and he looked at me and he goes, I don't trust anybody. And he almost broke down in tears. Well, I was like, that's okay, man, I get it. You got 30,000 people. I was just talking about, like the 30 guys I had the bills and the things. You got 30,000. You got this mountain. I get it. I totally get it. But imagine how much more effective your organization of 30,000 would be if you launch them off because you trust them and you trust them for a reason. Trust is proven over time in difficult times and all these types of things. But imagine if you trusted your people, what they could do for your organization. Like, you guys are coming to us for a reason. And man, he couldn't take his arm off my shoulder for the rest of the day. And that's what I love so much because you just know you're having these, you're playing a part in these people's lives where they're growing and they're happier and all these things. And there's a trickle down effect, especially when you're talking about that. There are plans that we talked about really quickly, how he could what do I do now that I know this? What do I do? So having an impact, they just go on and on about why I love what we do, because we do really have these emotional impacts on the people that we work with, which then means that we get that stuff too. So it's all good. Yeah. Trust. I've spent some time in my life thinking about who I trust and what trust really means. Like when you say to someone, I trust you, or when they say to you that they trust you, I think it's heavy for us, for veterans. Because if you're talking about trust in the military, you're talking about saying when you say you trust somebody, it's in a situation where there's a lot on the line, like where I trust you. And I understand that this is a serious situation and something bad could happen to me or someone else, but I trust you and I'm going to trust that you're doing what you're supposed to do, and in return, I'm going to do what I'm supposed to do. And hopefully this will all work out. But then there's a level of things might not work out, but I still trust that you did the best that you could or that you did everything in your power. And if things don't work out to then not have anger or lose trust or place blame because you believe that your team did everything,

Participant #1:

absolutely everything that they could, were honest, told the truth, didn't embellish anything. And still there's a chance that something bad might happen. But you still then don't lose trust in your team. You still maintain that trust because you really do believe in those people. It's a lot. It's a really heavy thing to trust somebody like that. It is. And I think one of the most important things about trust that we have to understand is a couple of things. One is we have to really look about internally. Almost everything we do, like number one, start going this way first. Before you start, if you want to be a great leader, start here first. If you want to be on a great team, start here first. If you want to trust people, if you want to, those types of things, start here first. And here's the thing, because this conversation, we can go down into some serious rabbit holes. But things to keep in mind is going way back in, looking about what people think of as being normal, not trust anything. What people think about is being normal because all of us, when we're walking down the street or we're anywhere, we were talking about snowboarding before, you just assume that everybody around you is normal, you don't think about it. But the thing is, when you list down all the things that you think are normal or not, my list is going to be different from yours and yours is going to be different from theirs and all this kind of stuff. So everybody has all these different understandings of what normal is and what normal isn't. Okay, hang with me because we're going way back. We haven't even gotten the trust yet. So just that, just think about the fact that I've never met anybody, to my knowledge, who's actually their idea of what normal is. Right. So even we aren't measuring up or living up to what we believe is like this normal standard. We've all got our little things here and there that are off the radar a little bit, but we don't acknowledge those things. We just blanket everybody with. I'm assuming you're normal until you prove me wrong. Right. So what that means is when we are doing things that we ourselves don't necessarily think are normal or whatever, not always. Sometimes we can be violating our values or we can be violating what we think are our principles or things like that. So in a way, we're breaking trust with ourselves all the time. If we're not really getting into this, if you're getting really into it, then it's no problem because then you can see all of these things. But a lot of people don't get into this kind of way of thinking. So what happens is we're breaking trust with ourselves almost every day. Now when you start to get in relationships with other people who are violating their own standards of normal and all these types of things, but then we judge them when they break something of what you consider to be normal and they may not necessarily here's the thing that's so valuable or so important to understand about trust is people are going to break and violate things with you. It's just going to happen. What matters is, is our heart in the right place? Is our mind in the right place? Can you basically depend on these people? And when the weather's really bad, that's really where trust comes from. It doesn't come when the Sun's out and everything's perfect. Cool. I can trust you, man. That's so awesome. No, it comes when, like, everything, things are going bad and this person specifically makes a decision that's harder, but they're making that because they believe it's the right thing to do and they're there to protect you in a way. That's how you start to actually develop trust with people. Even those people can violate you because we violate ourselves sometimes. Have you ever done something that you thought about eight or nine years later? Like, Damn, I can't believe I did that. Yes, if someone else did that to you, you're like, I'm never trusting that dude again, but because it's somebody else, you don't have to have time to have forgiveness. But if it's for yourself, you either start drinking or you forgive yourself and you love yourself or whatever. So the only things really that matter are is this person's heart genuinely in the right place? Is your mind in the right place? Can I depend on them? And are all those things going to stay fairly well intact when the weather gets rough, then yes, that's somebody I can trust. And so now when I have close friends who violate my trust or whatever, I see, hey, nine times out of ten out of ten, this guy is going to come through for me. So he hasn't ruined the relationships. I'm not never talking to him again or whatever, because I've done that stuff myself. So there's a whole lot of empathy that needs to go on when you really start to talk about I'm talking about real trust. Some trust is lazy, especially in leadership. Hey, I trusted you to do like, no how much. I'm telling you, I can go down rabbit holes forever on each one of these things, but we can get real lazy with trust. I'm going to trust you until you prove me wrong kind of thing. And that's not really how it should go.

Participant #1:

Just bring it and then just not with any cynicism or I told you so kind of stuff. Just see how everyone is and how they react, because people are doing their best, man. And there are some really trustworthy people who are really trying to do the right thing and make really terrible mistakes when things are going on wrong. Even that doesn't mean that they're not worth not having your trust. They might have just made a terrible mistake that they themselves regret eight or nine years from that point. Does that make sense? Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah. Trust is a big thing, man. It is a big thing. And I think another thing that continues to come up, the more and more I talk with clients about this is if you don't trust yourself and you don't allow yourself to be vulnerable, you're never going to get that level of trust that I think that we all have or most of us have is an idea or an ideal situation for trust. Like all trust is this thing. If you're not vulnerable, you're never going to get there. Everyone's going to always be right here. Even you yourself are going to be it's encapsulating, it's minimizing it's like ego is what it is. Ego just keeping you like this. But if you let yourself go, expose yourself to danger, expose yourself to harm, just understanding that things aren't going to be okay the next day. That's when people can really prove to themselves and you that they are there in that moment, all of this stuff. Yeah, I can tell. Well, you're one of those guys who is the right guy for the job. And I can tell because one thing you said earlier was, and this is a serious skill to have is when you said you talk to people the way they need to be talked to. Because if you're the hammer and you treat everything like a nail, but you end up on a Thumbtack, well, you're going to break the Thumbtack and the Thumbtack is going to be destroyed and useless. It's not going to work on a screw. It's only going to work on a nail. So you have to have a whole toolbox of ways to talk to people. It's a really tactful skill. Some people just don't have it at all. Some people can work on it and get it, and some people have it naturally. Do you think that's something that you had naturally or is that something that you learned? You and I went through the Honor Foundation together, and one of the core concepts that we both learned was strengths, right. So, like these innate strengths that were born with that we are in a perfect world going to spend some time in developing these particular areas because we have talents in those areas.

Participant #1:

I can never be a rocket scientist. I can never be an astronaut. I can never be a handy guy, like building a deck or something like that. It just never works out. But I always understood people. I was always good.

Participant #1:

I always understood people. I always had a lot of empathy for people, but never when it came to me when I was growing up, when I was a little kid, I always thought everybody was angry at me or disappointed me and stuff. And I would be talking like, hey, what are you going to like? Well, what's your problem? I never got it when it was coming this way, but I could see how it was going on out there, sort of thing over the years, I've gotten better at what it actually looks like when it's coming back this way. But for sure,

Participant #1:

it's something that I'm grateful to be good at, because what I like most about what we do is when we are interacting with people who are sustaining trauma of some kind of job stress or personal stress or whatever, just being able to help them kind of take next steps to get better or be happier. Really, to me, that's just so huge. I can only assume that's what it feels like for a guy to build somebody's house or an astronaut to finally be selected to go on these missions or whatever, just a great deal of ego driven work. The ego is not always bad, but it makes me feel grateful that this is my little pocket in contributing to the world. I feel like it's so cool. But yeah, we had a Hospice come through where we had something like 70 people coming through in the median age was like 45 to 52 years old, female, that kind of thing. There was about three women on that group that I could have said, hey, but all the rest of them, I would have lost them completely. It would have been like, what?

Participant #1:

Yeah, you're right. You've got to be good at that kind of thing because you can really hurt people. You can either hurt them. Or if, for example, he needed to hear that and I was like, hey, man, let's just time out. Like, if you were to do that another way, I might as well have been both of the clown up there, he would have just not listened and whatever. So, yeah, for sure, it's pretty dynamic and it's interesting. I love it. You stay in pretty close touch with the people who go through your class. Right. Or like, the leaders of the groups that go through your class? Yes. Do you get a lot of feedback after the fact? What's the longest time since somebody went through your class that you got like a letter or something that said, hey, I just want to let you know this is how this affected me. Is there anything like that I don't know about, like, the longest time? But today I was just talking to the Georgia Bulldogs, which is a hockey team that we work with, that we had this mutual huge impact on each other. Just I never went to College. And so as a kid growing up and even in my time in the military, especially because in the military, if you go to College, you can be enough certain those types of things. So I always had this psychological thing that people went to College were always older than me. Right. So we had these guys come in, we play hockey for their school, and they showed up and they look like they were a freshman in high school to me. I was like, where are these kids coming from? It was the weirdest thing. I mean, some of them said Zits on her face. You know what? I kind of like the awkward walk and all this. And I'm like, these are kids like, Whoa, dude, like, I'm an old man, dude.

Participant #1:

But that became really cool because then we had life development stuff. It wasn't just pushing logs. And of course, their physical training aspect of what we went through, what we go through in the approach was much harder than like, a Hospice went through or like the sales boutique guys who are selling watches and things like that. I mean, everybody's program is different. Theirs was very hard. But we went a lot into life lessons, so much so that we connected with a lot of the kids on LinkedIn. They all have my cell phone number, and I'll just wake up to a text because they're on East Coast time. Like, hey, Diego, I'm running into this. What do you think? So that stuff happens a lot. The day before yesterday, we had an organization, Worldwide Rental Services. They rent heavy equipment to global construction sites all over the world. And it was an amazing conversation because you were asking about feedback. And we always like, hey, let us know how we can improve, because we only see as much as we want to see things from every angle and all that. It's just not as good as if you tell us where we can improve. Nothing. Crickets all the time. You guys are amazing. It couldn't have been better and all this kind of stuff. Ray, thanks so much for that. But we know it's not true. We could have fixed something. What could we have fixed? But I spent like 2 hours on the phone with this guy, and he was just being and thankfully the reason why I was on the phone with him, because overall, for sure, he thought the event was absolutely amazing and all this stuff. So I got screaming and crying and fighting for the last two years or whatever, and just that two hour conversation was boiled down to like four points. I'm like, oh, awesome. Well, we fixed these three already, so we're good. And that thing that you're talking about never heard before. But what if we could do this? And now all of a sudden our program is better than it's ever been just because of that feedback. So we're always looking for feedback. We hardly ever get it. When I say feedback, I mean critical. Like, what can we fix? It's always just. It was the most amazing thing I've ever been through. And as much as you just want to like, okay, cool. Thanks a lot. That's not enough. We know that there's always room to improve. It just really helps when you get the insight of the client. Yeah, I always wonder why? Because I know from my experience in the military when we do these, the feedback sessions and the post, like, when I was working as an instructor, when we did the post class surveys, when people say everything was great, wouldn't change a thing or leave, like very few comments, I always wonder and let's say in that case, I also heard them throughout the class saying things they didn't like. And we tried to explain to them, hey, we could talk offline, but we need this documentation too. Like, we need you to put it on paper so we can affect some change and justify spending some money on it or making curriculum changes or something like that.

Participant #1:

In the military. I'm pretty sure on the other side for you, I'm not so sure if people don't want to hurt each other's feelings. I don't think that's the case in the military. I don't know if that's the deal with you or if they feel like there is so much positive that it's like you don't want to what is it like? Look at gift tourists in the mouth or something like that because you did get so much out of it. You don't want to see them ungrateful or what the cause of not getting a lot of feedback is. I'm surprised at how little feedback sometimes comes out of people, but I hope people don't hold back criticism because they don't want to hurt somebody's feelings because that would be the biggest waste. If there's something someone needs to hear, you should tell them, if they can't handle it, then that's their problem. But you should try to help improve a situation if you have some real constructive feedback.

Participant #1:

Yeah. So there's a whole different mentality when you're not in the military. There really is. There's a lot of tap dancing, a lot of ice skating on thin ice around people's feelings. You can just say, especially in the military, you can say what you think is the most innocuous thing ever. And that person could be in somebody's office the next day just being like, hey, all this stuff went, you know what I mean? So people are definitely afraid of stepping their bounds. It's something that we are working with organizations to understand on a deeper level and overcome that kind of stuff because it does, erode, trust. I'm talking about trust. It roads, a lot of things. It prevents organizations and people from being their best when you're not able to hear those things. But really, a lot of that stuff really does come down to trust and being open and all those things. We talk about it at length. Listen, if there is something wrong with our program and anything, whatever it is, and you don't tell us, like, you're literally hurting us because we may continue just doing that forever. And if we can know that there's a better way to do it or it's not good enough, then that helps us. So you're not going to hurt our feelings. But people are there. It's just not their thing, man. It really isn't so you have to as much time and effort in all the stuff that we've done creating these events and these stations to address these specific tenants and all that kind of stuff, and what is the intent and what do we want to get out of them and what are the lessons learned going to be and all that stuff. You have to create the same environment for people responding to your question about where do we go wrong or what could we have done better? You got to set it up absolutely perfect. So they've got parameters. You're giving them the red carpet just to walk down. You got to make it as easy as possible because people just are not used to when they're not in the military saying, well, this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened. And especially when you're young in the military, you don't have any solutions for anything. All you know is that everything went wrong. But as you go over, these three things went wrong. If it was me, here's what I would do to improve. That's where you get a little bit advanced. But it's just a thing, man. I've gotten used to so much since I retired in 2018 in May. And the transition from everything from military jargon to customs and courtesies and all that kind of stuff, I can't even remember being in the military anymore. It's so strange. It was almost like a whole other life now. But I've become so accustomed to really understanding

Participant #1:

what needs or what an athletic organization needs now. Sometimes people, we get the military questions all the time and almost have to look back and like, that's the Rolodex that I'm kind of going through. Like, okay, yeah, this is what it was like. It's really up transition, man. I live right next to the main thoroughfare where people go when they go in out of work every day, going to the base, and you see these guys on motorcycles with their camouflage uniforms on them. Like, man, that dude, I don't have to follow him. Life is pretty good to go, bro. I'll tell you what, man, it's good to be here. That's good to hear. I was actually going to ask you my next question was actually going to be. So it's been another year that you've been retired for me, I'm another year detached from active duty as well. So I'm going on four years of being out. Well, three years of being out. What do you do or do you do anything to keep in touch with that part of your life? Do you ever go to any meet ups with somebody that you used to work with? Do you still have a lot of friends that you served with you see on a regular basis? Do you feel like any of that's missing? Do you ever go to the VFW, American Legion stuff? Do you go to the VA? Do you have any military affiliations still that you kind of activate by design. The Trident approaches like that. All our guys are like the guys, the boys. When we went overseas, it was just like being on a trip overseas with the guys. We're on rental cars and we're driving to the hotel and all that stuff and poofing off like, man, this is awesome. This is like the good stuff of living in the town that I live in. There are so many prior guys here and current guys that are here that I can just walk to a restaurant and you're almost guaranteed to bump into somebody. I bump into guys I went through buds with, bump into guys who I was in a platoon with. I bumped into a guy I went to war with twice who lives right around the block from me, and I didn't even know

Participant #1:

I walk past your house every day. So, yeah, all of that stuff is there, but all of the rest of the stuff that it was really kind of time for me to roll from none of that's in my life anymore, and I'm really grateful for that. So I just took the best of what it was like to be. I mean, for sure, not operating anymore, not going to the cold, driving schools and jumping out of planes and shooting guns and stuff like that, like the way we used to anymore. But being with the boys for sure, that's still a huge component of what we're doing. And I'm also still really heavily involved with the Honor Foundation. I'm an ambassador for them. So every class that goes through, I go through more than half the classes with them

Participant #1:

now. It's crazy because I'm going through these. There'll be like these entire cohorts going through and I don't recognize any of them. Where are you guys from? It'd probably be different because I spent most of my time on the East Coast. It'd probably be different if I was going through on our foundation over there. But being in San Diego, man, I mean, this last cohort, there was one guy that I happened to remove his ingrown toenail in Ramadi a long time ago. He took out my toenail. What's up, dude? That's it. I don't know anybody else in the class at all, but it's still cool being around their stories, their aches and pains of transitioning and their fears and all these kind of stuff. Being able to be a part of their 50 cups of coffee and trying to figure things out has been really cool as well. Isn't that a weird feeling? When you meet somebody who worked where you worked and when you were there, you were like, this is my world. Like, I own this place and nobody could ever do it better. And what are they going to do when we're gone? Nobody could ever replace us because there's so few. Like when I was in SRT, there's so few of you there. And you become so tight, you forget that it could ever be any other way. Like it could never be another group of people is how it feels sometimes. It's always you on the road together. It's always you in the shop. It's you going on deployment, and then five years later, you see somebody from the same place and they don't care. They don't know you, and they have no reason to care, and they shouldn't care. And you're like, okay, life goes on. I got it. Yeah, it does, man. It really does. I had a dream like that. So I retired in 2018. About 2016, I had a dream that I was back in Germany and the job was super cool, but it was nowhere the coolest job I ever had in the military. But the people were the coolest people I had been around. Because when you're overseas, you don't have anyone else. You only have each other. And so the wives bond like nobody's business. The kids bond like nobody's business. The husband's bond like nobody's business. It is the one place that I've been where as co workers will just take a flight somewhere and then go to another country for a week or a four day weekend or something like that all the time. I've never been closer to any group while I had this dream that I went back and everyone I knew and I loved Europe and I loved Germany. If I didn't have family in the United States, I would never come back. I'm just telling you, there was something magnetizing about that place. Maybe I lived there in a former life or something, but, man, I deeply love places like Iceland and Austria and that kind of thing. So I had a dream that I went back and I was all fired up, and I get there and everyone was gone. It was just new faces and new people. And I was like, It's not going to be the same. You know what I mean? Just like kind of what you're talking about. And the truth is, it would have been the same. We would have developed those new relationships with those new people and all these things. But, yeah, man, it's such a cool thing about the military. You just show up, you just jump in the train and you just go and you develop those super cool relationships, and the next thing you know, you're pulling somebody out of a bar fight and then your best friends after that, you have crazy freaking memories and pulling guys out of handcuffs, police cars and all that stuff and all that stuff. Those memories are always there, and it's the time of your life. You're young and you don't know anything, but no one cares. Like, who cares? It's just a great time to be alive, really. Yeah, it's true. When I think about it, when I got out and went to go work as a contractor with all the same guys. And I didn't really notice any change in my life until I moved out to Japan. And I think for me, that period of my life ended at exactly the right time, which it's sad that it's in my past, but I'm really glad the way that it happened. It was all perfect. It was so good. I would never want to change anything about it because it was so perfect just the way it was. My old OIC one day I used to go to work at four in the morning because I love early mornings. I love that time early in the morning when nobody else is up. It's my favorite time of the day. And I used to go to work at four in the morning, and I would just start getting stuff done or, like, listen to the music and ready for the morning when people start showing up in PT and Oscar pretty early too. And he was getting ready to get out of the military and retire. And this is when I was getting out. So he said, do you think you'll ever work with another group of people like this? Do you think it will ever be as good anywhere else? And I said, Definitely. I don't think so. But that's fine because I wouldn't want it to. I wouldn't want it to be better than this. I want to remember this as the best time, and it still is up until this point. And I love it. It was perfect. So it's just weird to think about that, to watch generations pass. Yeah, absolutely. Have had that opportunity. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I feel bad for anyone who's never in the military. It happens all the time. I bump into people. And just because of things that we do, I talk to people all the time. Like, man, I would have joined if I could have done this and all that stuff. And there's all kinds of stuff going on. And so the more I hear about it, the more I'm grateful to be. Shoot, man, I wasn't colorblind. Awesome. Shoot. I was born with full functioning legs. Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. Just guys who had or cool. I made that decision. I could and I made the decision and I did it awesome because there are guys with pants. I don't know why I just didn't do it and whatever. I mean, obviously they're not higher, lower or anything, but I am just so grateful now that just like you said, it couldn't have worked out any better. It's just perfect the way it worked out. And I'm just grateful that had these opportunities. Yeah. And I feel like now would be a good time to bring up that we have another episode with you, and in it you tell your story of how you became a Seal. And it's been one of the most positive I've got more positive feedback on that. It's one of the best episodes that we ever did. And people love that story. So if you're listening and you want to hear that, just go back and listen to the other episode with Diego. And it's epic. It's like one of the best stories and moments from the show that I can remember ever. So good. You're awesome to listen to. I can just listen to you all day, talk about things that you care about. I need this interaction stuff. So you're awesome at what you do, bro. Thank you. Because these podcasts could definitely go a whole other way.

Participant #1:

Is there anything that you've learned in the last year from these classes that have enhanced you personally, any big takeaways moments that kind of affected your outlook or the way you do business day to day that you've learned from somebody who's gone through your program? I think probably the biggest thing that I've learned is perspective

Participant #1:

with the visual of, like, empathy. Right. So just trying to understand where people are coming from, why they make decisions, why they do this as opposed to doing this. And we've had people from all walks of life coming through. We've had people who watch cars to CEOs of multibillion dollar organizations that we probably say their names at least five or six times a week and everything in between, not education. And we had to start from someplace coming from the Trident approach of like, hey, we're bringing something to bear, something of value to bear. We thought we understood well enough to where we could bring this to the market and say we can help. But being operational for almost two years, it's just more there's so much depth in people and so much like, man, it never occurred to me that that's what you were thinking kind of stuff. And that happens all the time. The good news for us is that, hey, Diego, sorry I lost you for a second. Do you hear me? Yeah. It was about a minute ago. You were saying

Participant #1:

it just, like, disappeared from my mind. It was about a minute ago. Okay, well, the biggest thing that I got is perspective. That

Participant #1:

people from all to making minimum wage to people who make several hundred million dollars a year to roles and responsibilities and people that are in charge of and all that, all those types of things. When we brought the Trident approach to the market, saying, hey, we have something of value that we think can help, I was just blown away by that. There was still so much. There was still so much to learn from people. I shouldn't have been blown away, but I just was. It sounds clear. I can say to myself a million times that I don't know everything and be fully confident in the fact that you don't know everything, but it's really something different. Every time you meet somebody, there's a whole different way of thinking and a whole different way of approaching things. But the good news is that the approach that we've built and what we use to help people kind of get through is really kind of stood the test of time with all these wide spectrum people from all over the place and how they deal with people and how they deal with situations and that kind of thing. So definitely the biggest lesson learn is perspective. Yeah. It's one of those things where the more you do it, the more you learn, the better you get at it, which is true, obviously, about most things. But in this case, when you deal with people, it's never repetitive. You just figure out how to apply lessons learned to individual situations. But it's never the same way twice. I like that about being a teacher and instructor was the curriculum is the same, but the people change. So the challenge to you is always to figure out how to now get the message across to these new people to understand group dynamic and learn who you're dealing with and pick up on the little idiosyncrasies that people have. I'm very passionate about that. I love it. I love dealing with people. I love talking to people. I love talking to strangers. I love trying to have conversations and understand people. It's just always been really something that I enjoy. It's very intriguing to me. I get a lot out of it. I try to get a lot out of other people, too, and try to understand how they think about things. And it's just one thing that never gets old because every person is unique. Yeah, that was for sure true because I was an instructor in the military, too. But in some time,

Participant #1:

there's a type of person that's in the military, there's a spectrum. Right. They're on this side or that side everywhere in between. But we added a whole another branch to our experience with these people who aren't in the military at all. Americans can't even speak English. It's just like this whole it's almost like you're punching through the atmosphere and then now you're seeing space and how vast. I felt like when I was in the military, I was on Earth, and it was like, yes, so new Guy come from New Orleans, that kind of stuff. Got it. And Guy has been in the team for 35 years. He's from Boston, got it. That's Earth. And then with the right approach, we go out into the atmosphere, and this person could care less about politics or anything. They're just trying not to lose their job. And they've never really even heard of the concept of being blatantly honest with somebody and giving hard feedback. So there's all that stuff they're like, wow, man. Yeah, it's universal. It's super cool. It's super interesting. Yeah. I had to be careful sometimes where you were saying, like, Guy from New Orleans shows up. It's like, Guy from Alabama shows up. Got it. I know what I'm dealing with, but then I had to be careful because sometimes I would feel that way and then somebody would say something or do something. And I'm like, all right, hold on. I got to remember this is a whole unique person with unique experiences and perspectives themselves. And I don't know them. I don't know what they've been through. That's what you're alluding to, I think. But in the military, you get certain personality types and you kind of know what to expect. Like, for example, when I was teaching and were you a Buzz instructor? Did you do or any instructor in the team? You know what? We'll keep it on the you probably see this with the tried and approach because you set up these challenges, you probably already know exactly where people are going to fail and struggle. It's probably by design, and it probably starts each one of those iterations. When the struggle starts, it's probably predictable to you, but what's not predictable is how you're going to get them to solve it. Like how you're going to motivate them, how you're going to see them come together, who's going to take the lead, where good idea is going to appear from. That's the part that's surprising every time. Who overcomes, who really steps up. Sometimes it's not what you expect. And that's the part that really gets good. Yeah. And where they take it because it just keeps going on and on and on. You don't know how they're going to react. And once they react and once they receive kind of the input or the lesson learned or whatever, then where do they go from there? It's kind of endless. And you're totally right. And I appreciate you saying what you're saying. You don't really know. It doesn't matter if they're in the military or not. You don't know people. If you don't know them. There are people who don't know themselves. I mean, I would say most people on Earth have no idea who they really are. Not really. I'll just quickly wrap that up. It always seemed to me, though, in the military, it was, however infinite possibilities they were, it was still packaged somehow. I don't know how to explain it. Somehow you just kind of got it. But now these people are just and I do this meaning it's everything.

Participant #1:

I don't know how to measure people up. You just have to see it. You have to let it play out before you start. Okay, this is how I'm going to deal with this person or whatever. But yeah, for sure. I mean, people are so complicated. Yeah. The stuff that I would forget to consider a lot of times was like, okay, I've got this person who is this personality type. I kind of know how they operate. I've met people like this before, but what I don't know and what I haven't thought of is at home, they have a kid and their kid is sick or something really stressed about something coming up or a spouse who just got fired or something like that. I always have to remember that. I don't know those things because people, especially in the military, won't bring that stuff to work. They'll just show up to the job. And maybe that's the best thing that work for a lot of people is an outlet where they can kind of escape other stressors, especially in the military, where deployment for a lot of people might be the easiest time of their life. I've definitely met people like that. And I try to consider that when I'm talking to them because I've been talking to people and all of a sudden they like, break down and you're like, oh, what's the matter? You know, my Buddy's kid just passed away or something like that. And they were like family to us. And that's been really hard shit. I'm talking to people

Participant #1:

trying to remember now where we're going with that. Well, you had mentioned before that people deal with all that stuff in different ways and sometimes they talk about it and sometimes they don't

Participant #1:

remember I was saying before about people. There's a lot of people who don't really, really know. A lot of that comes from because people don't want to go down those roads at all. People say that kids are resilient, and I don't believe that at all. I think that kids are really great at just burying stuff. Like it never happened. But for whatever reason, I'm drinking a lot and I'm 45 years old or I'm eating a lot or whatever it is. We don't know how to solve things or handle things because we don't talk about it, especially as boys. We are raised. You don't cry. I don't want to hear it. What you just said was stupid. All those things all contribute to this constant message of just keep your mouth shit. We have a saying in the Seal team, suffering silence. You never want to be the guy at the gym. What's this dude's problem? Shut up. Suffering silence kind of thing. So we are trained to just keep our mouths shut. And fair enough. But I love this analogy. You get those stress balls and you squeeze them, squeeze them, squeeze them as hard as you can. But what ends up happening is it starts to poke out here and then maybe inside the crack here. I mean, that stuff has to go somewhere. And because we're so good at tricking ourselves, which is what it is, we're not good at suppressing stuff. We're not good at not addressing. We're really good at lying to ourselves. It just didn't bother me. Like I'm good and that's where, like, a lot of PTSD comes from and all of those things. So what we're really trying to do in a lot of ways, regardless of your personality type, whether you're introverted, extrovert, or whatever, is we're trying to explain a lot of the value of, yeah, if it sucks, tell somebody you know. And you love

Participant #1:

that's. What the people you love are there for. That's who I want to be for the people that I love. I want them to be able to say, Diego, I just had the worst week ever. Like this happened. My girlfriend broke up with me. My cars broke down or whatever. And all this kind of stuff goes, I want to help. This is kind of going off on a tangent a little bit, but it's important to remember that you yourself have to be grounded if you're going to be that receiving point. Because what a lot of people do and I end up talking to people about this stuff for hours on the phone is you yourself are kind of a mess. There's a lot of stuff going on they haven't hashed out yet, haven't figured out yet, haven't done this. And then your friends call you and then they, my friends should be able to do is they release all this stuff. And instead of just releasing that into the air and have it getting cycled through and then blown out, you then add that onto your list of things to do, add that onto your weight and your burden and all these kinds of things. So you already are struggling because you still haven't figured out how to manage the relationship you had with your sister growing up. But now you got to manage this friend of yours who may or may not be considering suicide and all these things. And so it can be really, really damaging if you don't have the strong, solid base. So I don't know where you were going with that, but it was an important point that you talked about. We just need to get to a place where we have at least somebody to say, hey, man, things are not cool, and then figuring out a way to get good at just laying all that stuff out with the intent of them, not burdening or shouldering any of the burden of just releasing it, just letting it go, or at least off gassing a little bit. So you're lighting up attention a little bit so you can function more. And the better you get it, the more healing goes on and all that stuff. And that's all really important. But that stuff that we just as a culture have really ignored big time for way too long. And hopefully now we're starting to see the importance of why it is important to really, you know, you got stuff going on, let people know. Yeah. I have one more thing on that that I want to say, and I say this to people when it comes up in conversation is a lot of times I've heard people talk about older generations, like World War II Korea, which I always like to try to bring up Korea because I feel like it's so often neglected that the Korean War happened, didn't even happen. Yeah. People think that the men and women who were in the military in World War Two and Korea, went to war, came home and then were fine and went back to work. And it's like it never happened. And they were all happy and they handled it no problem. So what's wrong with people who struggle with it? But that's not the case. I think if you say that, it's really for one, it's not very thoughtful or obviously you're not well educated on it, but also it's kind of disrespectful to people who voice what their problems are to say. Why aren't you just like these other people who had no problems? But I think what they're neglecting is all the people who came back from wars generations ago, who then drank every day, eventually got addicted to drugs, a lot of domestic violence, and they just called it PTSD, but they called it shell shocked. They're just shell shocked. People struggled big time, but they didn't have a place to go or a word for it. It's not like people had no problems. It was very similar. I think we should appreciate that and respect that they had to deal with that their own way. You see it a lot when you see World War II veterans on the History Channel or something like that doing interviews and you see them break down in tears, you're talking 70 years later. It's never left the front of their mind for decades. And we just are like, oh, you're bad ass dude. Like World War II, man, that must have been awesome. You guys crushed it over there and came back and then built businesses, which is true, but that we neglect the whole kind of psychological aspect of what they went through because we say suck it up, which there's a time and place for that also. But everyone should know that they should have at least one trusted confidant, at least that they can talk about these things with and without fear of judgment because it's tough stuff. Yeah. So just like you said, there's a couple of things to unpack there. The important thing to remember is what's generally in the majority of people's minds, especially in our culture, is all generated by media, and the media just didn't cover that stuff. To me, it's easy to understand why people don't get it, because it wasn't talked about at all. These guys were just badasses that they went through D days. They had to climb those cliffs while they're getting shot out with automatic machine gun fire, and they went over the freaking hedge Groves in France and all that stuff and pushing forward and all of this stuff was going on and they had flamethrowers and everything just going out a man, they did it. So it just wasn't a thing. But now that we're talking about it, it's starting to get more and more on people's radars to understand that it is a thing. I forget I always get the names mixed up, so I'm not going to mention it, but there was a pretty famous general who literally did not believe and he was there. He was experiencing it as well, but he just didn't even believe in shell shock is what they called it at the time. He thought that it was what he didn't understand is that people deal with all kinds of things differently.

Participant #1:

It may not necessarily be like a slap in the face. Like, these guys are not the deal. So how come you guys are just a lack of awareness and understanding? And like I said, most of the information that we get is from media, and they were not covering that stuff at the time. It was more about. And I can tell you from my perspective, at the time when I was in Iraq, I was really resentful of the Media's portrayal of all the effects on us and how things were going, because I felt like every time I heard an American saying, Hurry home, that was empowering the enemy. I wished at the time that Americans were saying, we're with you as long as it takes. You know what I mean? For me, doing the job and all that kind of stuff, I wish that wasn't it was like, hurry home soon. Like, get back safe, keep your head down. You don't win wars by keeping your head down, believe me. Anyway, just a different perspective on that. And again, it just goes back to empathy. Why do people even think that in the first place that it didn't matter? Same thing with the Korean War and all that stuff, the forgotten war. How could that be? How could it be? Especially being a corner. So I wasn't always a Seal. I was a corner with the Marines. And if there's anybody who is hardcore on their history is the Marine Corps. So as a Corman, I learned about all of the things that, man, those guys went through in Korea, and it was just like if there was ever a war. Yeah, that's one too.

Participant #1:

It's crazy.

Participant #1:

I thought on deployments I was in Afghanistan during two winters, and anytime I thought it was cold, I just thought about World War Two and Korea, and I was like, I'm not cold, I'm fine. People would get frostbite, and it wasn't even a big deal. People were out there for weeks with a petticoat and one pair of pants and boots with holes in them, sleeping out on the ground and, like, makeshift tents. It's like I can't even imagine. And in World War II, they were deployed for years just on deployment for the whole war. Yeah, it's just crazy. You have a layered system and we had cortex and we had Warmies and all that stuff. I love if you've seen The Banner Brothers, the episode of When They're a Bath stone, if you haven't seen it or your listeners haven't seen it. Well, number one, I highly recommend just watching Band of War in Quarantine. Watch the whole thing from beginning to end. It's insane. But the beauty of it is it's reenactments of what these guys I'm not even going to say because it's either 101st or 82nd airborne. But it's these guys jumping into Normandy and basically going all the way through until the war is over. And like you said, you don't go on this year long or six month long deployments. You're just there. But the Bath Stone episode, they are in Belgium. Almost positive is Belgium, but it was Christmas time and there was snow on the ground and all this kind of stuff. And they were wet and they were cold and they didn't have cortex and they didn't have warmest and they didn't have the layered system. They had just like that really crappy, scratchy green army blanket stuff that was soft and water and they were freezing. And I was going to say, the great thing about the episode is it's reenactments. But before and after the episode starts, they have the guys that are in the episode who are still alive at the time, giving their takes on the situation. And one of the guys goes, It's funny because I'll be at home and guys well into his 70s or 80s at the time they recorded, it would be cold in the house, and the wife would turn over to him in bed and say, It's cold. And he's like, at least it's not bad, Stone. He's like, I'm dry, dudes. Are dry. You know, all of that stuff. And when I was watching the Band of brothers for the first time, I had already become a Seal and I had already been exposed to my cold. I was exposed like, negative 70 with the windshield factor and all this stuff that you get with Hell week and all that. And even as cold as I have been, I'm watching this episode of the Band of brothers being like, Jesus, these guys are cold, man. Like, real cold. And helps not coming. And that's every guy. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. That's hardcore stuff, dude. That's tough. Yeah. So we've been going for almost 2 hours because I could talk to you all day. Honestly, I feel like we just started, but we should wrap it up and then we should do this again soon. I'm down. Cool. I appreciate the opportunity, Max. And I'm so glad to hear that you're doing so well. Thanks. Sorry. Go ahead. No, I'm here for you whenever, man. Awesome. It's really good to catch up with you and talk to you and see your face because I appreciate knowing you. It's my honor and your company is the Trident approach. I hope people listening to this are taking notes because you always share some really great knowledge with us. You do have great perspective on things, and it's awesome to hear it. You're somebody who I can tell when you speak, you're speaking from experience, which is the most valuable place to come from. And the experiences you have now with the Trident approach are obviously enhancing what you have to offer and share. And I appreciate you sharing it. And the website for your company is the Tridenteproach.com. If anybody out there wants to go check that out. Do you have anything that you want to plug while you're here? No, that's about it. I will also plug Get Up Nation. We do weekly podcasts with those guys. We're talking about resilience, talking about leadership in times of crisis. We're just now starting to get a weekly podcast going on with those guys for sure. But just reach out to us on the website. There's like a contact us form. It's normally reserved for actually doing events, which we're not doing events right now. If you guys are having problems with people, even virtual leadership issues, or trying to figure out how to reintegrate your teams, just go to thetruddenaproach.com and click on Contact US. We're Quarantine, too. So we're happy to wrap about this stuff with you guys to help you guys through as best we can, and maybe our perspective can be helpful to you. Awesome. Do you have any tips for people in Quarantine? How are you and the family and have you guys been getting through it? We're rocking and rolling. We really are doing really well. If I'm going to say anything about tips, well, that's a whole other maybe even two hour conversation as quickly as I can.

Participant #1:

Relationships are number one. If you don't trust each other, this quantity and stuff can be really difficult. So number one, trust. If you don't have it, now is the time to prove it. You prove trust when things are going really bad. So if you're having issues with you maybe being somebody that you wanted to but haven't been able to, like, now's the time to do it. Buckle down and really prove to the people that you love that you're really there for them. For number one. And then number two, be hyper aware of just the smallest things because everyone is afraid right now. Nobody knows what's going on. We don't know when this is going to end. This may never end. They're saying, oh, my God, this stuff may live through the summer. So now this may be a whole new way of all this uncertainty, the fear and uncertainty. So just make sure that when your family or you are displaying the slightest peak of something that you're afraid, just talk about it. You got all day to talk. You got all day to watch Netflix. Hey, man, how are you feeling? Like, what's going on? Get that stuff out in the open. Let it release before it becomes that stress ball and it explodes and the family gets in this huge fight and you don't know where to go because you can't go anywhere. And all those things, like I said, we talk about that one for another 2 hours. Easy. There's just so much that's involved with Quarantining strategy and how to deal with it and all of those things. It's kind of like when you're deployed and about three, four months in, you love each other, but don't drink my rip it, you know what I'm saying? And there's nowhere to go, so we got to live with that now for two weeks while we don't talk to each other and figure it out, resolve it somehow. I can only imagine.

Participant #1:

I'm lucky. I've heard how tough it is for kids of all ages going through this. We don't have kids. Just my wife and I are here.

Participant #1:

Yeah. You know what's funny, Diego, is last time we did this, right at the end, I was like, we got anything else before we wrap up, you're like, Let me tell you how I became a Seal. And it was like, no kidding. It was like the best story. It was like 40 minutes, and I could care less because it was like the best story ever. But yeah, we should just jump on this again in a few days and talk about Quarantine and do the whole thing. I'm here, dude. I'm not going anywhere. Okay, cool. Sounds good. All right, man. All right. Thank you so much for the opportunity, man. Thank you. It was great to catch up with you and talk to you like I was saying. Yeah. And thanks for getting on here with me. I really appreciate your time and what you have to say a lot, so. Yeah. Good to go, man. All right, brother. I'll catch you later. Talk to you later. Bye. Hey, do my outros suck? I'm not sure I don't know how to sign out of these podcasts. It's something I'm working on. Hey, I just want to thank you guys for listening to that episode. It was really fun to do. I hope that you enjoyed it. Also, if you haven't already go ahead and subscribe to this podcast. You can listen to all the other episodes. There's tons more episodes already available and more coming every week. If you haven't gotten over to YouTube and subscribed over there, please go ahead and do that. It would mean a lot to me if you did. There's all these podcasts available on YouTube, as well as a bunch of other content that you wouldn't find here in the podcast. If you're looking for ways to support the show, you can head over to anchor.com subscribe there, and you can do monthly contributions if you choose to. If you'd like to see this program grow and support, then that would mean the world to me. I just want to say thank you for listening. Feel free to reach out to me anytime via our social media or email all at the email is The Scuttlebutt Show@gmail.com, and I look forward talking to you guys very soon. And let's go ahead and listen to another episode alright bye.