Previously on The Sean Ryan Show.

I was kicking open some palace doors. Kick, kick, kick. And then the door flings open and immediately coming through the fatal funnel, the doorway, we took incoming fire, screaming right past me. I was a sawgunner at the time. I came up and I shot him in the face and just dropped him. I'd never killed someone that close.

My first mission, real mission, was in Haiti, and we didn't really see much at the time. It was the biggest deal that I had ever encountered. How did you kind of mentally prepare? When we come back, we'll start to talk about why you left the military and get into your transition into civilian life. All right, John, we're back from a lunch break, and we're getting ready to wrap up your military career. But one thing that I did want to ask you is you had mentioned that you had lost some buddies. I can't remember if it was on here or if it was on our break, but how do you deal with loss? How did you overcome that?

I don't think I've overcome loss any more than I've overcome fear. It's like fear. Sorry to pivot, but folks think of fear. It's kind of like you've been in the thick of it, so surely you mastered that. I'm like, no, no one can ever master fear. Just because you were a hero before doesn't mean you're not going to play the part of the coward tomorrow. Every day the rents do and you got to rise up and prevail. And so similarly, loss, I doubt I'll ever really get used to that. Of like, if I lost my wife, how am I supposed to limp through this life without her when we're so inextricably linked and knit together? How would I deal with that loss? I'm like, I don't know how I would it would not be pretty, though. I don't know how I would deal with that now. This far on my journey, how I deal with loss is I've got two buckets for it. One is if someone who shares my faith, I believe I will see them in greener pastures one day. And so to me, it's not a goodbye forever, it's so long. I'll see you soon.

I'll see you later. So one of my dearest friends, who was my first mentor in the Christian faith, I was in Ranger battalion with him. His name's kevin. And so I served with him. And then years later, him in the ministry would marry me and my wife together and he'd be one of my good buddies. So he survived all the war tours and whatnot, but then got in a motorcycle wreck, died. And so that I mean, I didn't handle super well, and that still hurts, of course. And I knew other dudes that died in Ranger Bat. Nobody I was really close to.

Okay.

Some guys that were like my platoon and some of my buddies who got shot. So that's hard. But when someone's in the same theological camp think of like, oh, well, as the Apostle Paul put it, well, for me to live as Christ and die is gain. Which means if your theology's really worked out, you're okay with dying. It's kind of like, oh, I'm going to die and then go be in everlasting joy with Jesus, that's not a bad gig. And when somebody, you know, belongs to Jesus goes and sees Jesus, it's not this huge tragedy on their part. It is on ours who are left behind and missing them. At least this is intellectually true, and I'm emotionally catching up to this reality that I recognize anyway. That theologically is a bit of a bedrock for me where I have the underpinnings to deal with loss now. When someone doesn't realize that this life does carry over into an eternity and they do not land in a good place to think of, like, yeah, I will never see that person ever again, and they have gone to torment. That's really hard. That's really hard. And so I don't know how to handle that except to tell people about Jesus.

I don't know how to handle that.

Do you mind if I chime in?

Please. Yeah.

I mean, this is a subject that we continuously touch on. We had spoken about how many people from the veteran community watch this show and have lost somebody. What I would like to kind of add to that is something that's helped me get through it, because I'm new to faith. So this isn't things that I was thinking about for a lot of the friends that I've lost, what's kind of helped me, because it's really easy to go down that road of self destruction and pity and feeling sorry for yourself. And it turns to anger, especially when it comes to guys that have died in combat. I think a lot of us considered an honor to die in combat. I don't think anybody I know that was killed in combat would have changed anything about really being there in the fight. Maybe certain tactics in different situations or maybe wrong place. But as far as being on the mission, everybody knows there's a good chance that it's going to be you. But we all still do it. And we do it because of the guy on the right and the left, to us and the team and the brotherhood.

Right. And you have to think, one, would that person have wanted to be doing anything else at that specific moment in time? Probably not. I don't know anybody that would have taken themselves off the mission. Number two, how do you think that person would want you to live the rest of your life?

Good call.

Do you think they want to see you in self destruction mode and feeling sorry for yourself and not living your life to the fullest because they're no longer here? I highly doubt that if they did think that way, they probably wouldn't have been close to you. That's just some stuff that I think about when I've experienced loss is you owe it to them to live your life to the fullest in their honor.

That's good.

Thank you.

Yeah, I could totally get behind that. If I'd kicked off, I would hope that me going out would strengthen your resolve to perform your mission better or you get out of the military, find a new mission and then go out and crush. Find a new community, find a new mission. Don't be looking back on me and what we did. Find a new mission, find a new community. Drive forward, improvise, adapt, overcome, brother. And let me be a little bit of fuel in your tank so that my legacy is to help you guys climb higher. What I don't want to know is they'll be like, oh, you got sad and you drown yourself in a fifth of Jack every single night before you ate a gun. I'm like, bro, you're making my sacrifice worse in the way that you are turning inward in that way. Honor me better than that. Go live because I don't get to.

Great way to put it. Great way to put it. One other thing that I wanted to ask you before we get into the end of your military career is you had spoken a little bit about how you've adapted your leadership as you advanced through Ranger battalion. And so how did your leadership abilities develop and what changed from kind of the typical maybe mold of a Ranger leader.

So what I had experienced is leadership through kind of fear, strength, competency, all those were ingredients in the cocktail mix. That was leadership. Do this? Because I'm experienced. Do this because I'm strong. Do this because I'm scary. Yell, yell, yell. Do your thing. And that's typically how you raise up private. That's not as much how you talk to peers and whatnot. When you're spec four mafia, whether you're buck sergeants or squad leaders, whatever. When you're mission planning and stuff, it's brothers outside of the big command structure, you're probably on a first name basis depending on your unit and like out second bat. In our years, that was kind of where kicked out. We would default more to first names and we were putting our heads together and figuring out how we're going to take down something. And I never advanced real far up to be huge in mission planning, but at a smaller level, taking down buildings and breach points and things like that, I was in. And so we had more of that camaraderie. But what I wanted to do as I was a team leader and then squad leader, which I would punch out as a squad leader, is I wanted a different variable.

I wanted my guys to want to follow my leadership, not because they had to, but because they wanted to. And I found of like what would it look like if my guys knew I was really looking out for them and I really loved them and I'm still hard on them and I'm not cutting them out Valentine cards and send them flowers or anything. I'm like, I'm still a gritty, fire breathing Ranger, but what would it look like if my boys knew I'd eat a bullet for it? What would it look like? And what I found is I started modeling know the verses of like greater love hath no man than he would lay down his life for his friends. And I looked at Jesus who was a leader, but he led through sacrificial service. And what happened is he inspired a whole group of people, strangers from all kinds of different backgrounds. That's a leadership mess when you look at who the disciples were. And he inspired them all to die for him. Like, wow, something to that. Maybe I should lean into that leadership model since we are in the let's sacrifice and die for each other kind of business.

And so I leaned into that. What I found is when I really took care of the boys and they knew that and in my very gruff way would love them, they'd love me back. And it kind of came to it. I knew I'd arrived when we went to a bar one night. I didn't go to the bar very often just because it didn't have anything for me. I'd have a beer and then I'm done. That's about it. And I wasn't chasing girls. I was looking for a wife. And I didn't think I was going to find one at the bar. But I would go every once in a while just to kind of a spree decor, let me hang out with the Joe's, you know, every once in a while I'll just go out and that'll be a cool thing. And it's just one night where I can verify no one's going to drive drunk and no one's going to get in a bar fight and go to jail. And so that was good too, because Rangers get crazy. And so I was there, but somebody I didn't know, some dude comes up and he's talking to me and that's cool.

And we're chatting back and forth, completely benign. He's a military guy, so am I. And we're chatting back and forth and some of my dudes from my squad kind of like inch in and they're like eyeballing this dude and they just kind of inch in front of me and out to come between me and him. Now I think that they were pretty inebriated but whereas I was just having a good conversation, they had inserted themselves in a position of defend me from people that they don't know. And I'm like, bro, guys, it's cool. It's good. We're just chatting. There wasn't anything intense. But they didn't want anyone near me. They didn't want anyone near me. And so I thought that was pretty cool.

So, you know, you're a good leader.

At that point back, you that's when I saw my guys have my back in a real cool way of like they were the impulse there anyway, young dudes. And so I just remember that. And I remember that because it was right as I'd been trying to do those dividends, I'd been trying to make those investments and I wasn't just like screaming at dudes and now I had hard standards and if you didn't meet the standard, well, there's some type of remediation, there's some type of pain or something. But it wasn't done angrily, as if I hate you, you dirtbag, now I'm going to hurt you. It was they understood. No. When I cause you pain, I am making you better because I want you to be better so that we can be better. And they felt the impulse, the rationale behind it was different. So even when I caused them pain, it was done in a loving way.

You adopted that style of leadership at what age?

22? 23?

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Well, I didn't say I was good at it.

That's impressive, especially in any soft unit that is the road less traveled.

Well, what I noticed is different soldiers adapted or responded very differently to different kinds of leadership. I had one dude and he was just so jacked up, I ended up firing him. He shouldn't have been at Ranger Battalion in the first place. I did everything I could to turn him into a Ranger and he just wasn't capable of it. Shouldn't have been there. He got fired. I still remember the kid's Social Security number. That's how much paperwork I had to do on this guy.

Wow.

I still remember his social. I know my social. I know my wife's and I know this guy's social. That's all I know. Three Social Security number. I don't know my kids, but I know this guy. I did that much paperwork on this guy and eventually fired him. I couldn't make him into a Ranger. I tried, but that was my leadership failure, I suppose. Other guys I had one guy who's a former SWAT cop, he's a little bit older, squared away. And the guy was just so hard on himself, even when he was a private under me, even if I just kind of like if I was to wade in, this guy, this guy already beats himself up so much, he doesn't need me to throw a right cross to him. He doesn't need any punishment because what he does to himself internally is far worse than any. He's self correcting. Leave him alone. Because if you kick him when he's already punishing himself, eventually that's going to be a bitterness toward you. And so I just let him self critique it's. Just one he's doing his thing. I'm like, you know what I'd say? I know what you'd say, Sergeant.

And do I need to say it? He's like, you do not, Sergeant, and it's never going to happen. He's like, never happen again, Sergeant. I'm like, I believe you, and that'd be it. Whereas if it was this other kid, I'm going to light him up. I'm going to hurt you physically. I'm going to make you do so much PT that I'm going to permanently ingrain like a hot firebrand into your inner psyche so that you would never dream of doing that. You won't even have a dream about doing that again. And so what worked for one didn't work for the other. And so I realized, man, people tick different ways. And those are two dudes. I can see their faces right now. They responded so differently. Still others of like that, they ran on a little bit more. The fuel they ran on was more of like anger. And they spooled themselves up. And they were intense, and they needed me to get a little intense, too, to kind of get them into something. And so other folks have like this guy do real well. He just needs to know what in the world's going on.

He doesn't do well being left in the dark. And if you just give him a little bit general idea of the plan. So when you disseminate information, I need to make sure his key core questions are answered enough so that he can be good and drive on. Otherwise his brain just eats himself. His morale plummets. He needs certain amount of information. That's just how his brain works. And so whereas the other guys, they don't need as much information disseminated his morale would be it'd be better to not feed him for two days than do that. And so I was making a study of who responds to what and how should I adapt based on the individual needs, not the I will yell at everyone until I get my way. And though that seems pretty raindrific, that was not a good way to do business. It wasn't good leadership policy.

You were able to identify all these different styles of leadership and what resonates with your guys at age 22 years old.

It wasn't as refined as I can now see it looking back. It was kind of trial and error. I just knew I wanted to lead differently than some of the ways I was led. Now. I would also be quick to say of like, though I had some bad leadership, what I feel like is this was not a healthy form of leadership. I also had some really good leadership in Ranger Battalion. I love my platoon and the boys. I served with the guys and we had really stellar I was in at a time where our platoon leader was a former Delta guy who had been and so his desire is, I'm going to make this platoon in the image of the place I came from. And he set out to do that. We had on the ball staff sergeant, sergeant first class, platoon sergeant on the ball. And so these guys were known far and wide around Ranger Battalion. And so we were in like our platoon was set apart as something really special because of these leaderships. And I got to enjoy that immensely. All the benefits of that. That was the leadership scripture I grew up on.

My team leader was pretty toxic, but I knew enough of all right. I saw some things I wanted to emulate and some other stuff I wanted to reject. So it jump started a leadership study for me.

Interesting. That's impressive. It's not a lot of 22 year olds thinking like that, I don't think, in any unit. So it's a compliment.

Thanks.

You're welcome. But let's move into, before we wrap it up, the military career. Is there anything throughout your five deployments that you think we should document in this episode?

No, I've said all kinds of stuff I've never said before. Some of the kind of big war story pieces. Those are the ones that stood out in my mind. And so I've retold all this. It's amazing how foggy my mind gets. Like, I don't think about all this stuff. I don't talk about even a 10th of all this stuff and of like, going into what I just said of like, man, I don't know if I've talked about that more than one or two. Just there's some of the detail there of, like, I've never gone into. So no, we've covered a lot.

Good. I'm glad you're doing it.

Yeah.

So what you did five deployments you did Afghanistan, Iraq, and then three more Afghanistan deployments.

Right.

When did you decide you're ready to move on?

So I'm not a military man. I was just a man that was in the military. And I found especially with some scrapes of know quite a few that was insufferable. Also the op tempo, a lot of dudes kicked out. They were just done. And so by the time I was got out, I was actually promoted to weapons squad leader. That's the highest non commissioned officer position in the platoon under platoon sergeant in my short time of like, man. But it wasn't because I'd earned it. It's because the other dudes who were more squirted, they got out. So it's kind of like, here I am, weapons squad leader. I should have been weapons squad leader. And I wasn't very long before I kicked out. But I also got infuriated by bureaucracy and that sucks. And we were very insulated from it. Like, Rangers, we have our fences and MPs are not even allowed in unless it's following military police, unless it's kind of following hot pursuit kind of thing. But we're very private and us being second Ranger battalion meant we were across the country from regiment headquarters. We're in Washington and all the other Rangers in Georgia under all the commander Simpsons.

So we got to get away with all kinds of stuff. Back in a day when it was far more free. And then you're kicked out on these small patrols and kicked out things where we wouldn't shave for weeks. And so we're feeling like, all right, we're getting all SF grizzly anyway. We got away with all kinds of stuff that I think Rangers today wouldn't get close to. But even still, a lot of the bureaucracy was just maddening. I remember one time where there happened to been a sergeant major who had a Ranger who was man in a 50 gun on an active security perimeter of like he's doing a real world thing and he made him get down out of the turret to blouse his boots.

Bro this kind of stuff really makes my blood boil.

So it wasn't looking back, I'm like, man, I'm so spoiled that I wanted no restrictions. All this silly stuff of rangers suck at drilling ceremony, of marching around and saluting and stuff and shine your boots. And I'm like, what in the world does any of that have to do with combat effectiveness?

Exactly.

And a big fat goose egg zero. Now I can immediately turn around and make a case for why it could should be done at the most basic rudimentary. Let's get everyone knowing how to march. It's like, yeah, but once we have done that, it's better to be let's establish discipline, not in how shiny we can make our boots as targets for the enemy, but instead, let's do it in our work ethic, our knowledge base, our nutrition, our choices, our tactics. Let's be really disciplined there. So some of that stuff just drove me crazy. I was burned out on war and had a lot of life. I wanted to live. I put in. I did not reenlist. They threw everything at me to reenlist, and I said no to all that. I wanted to go in the military. I wanted to find a wife and get married. And I think the Lord wanted me to do some time in the military, but he had a plan to build out this whole warrior poet thing that I preach and hope to faithfully embody, and that means being extremely well rounded in many other areas. And if I had stayed in some 20 years like some of my buddies did, that would have been entirely way too monolithic warrior poets.

I never would have been born. I never would have been able to make the jump into the civilian world having spent the entirety of my young adult adult career doing that. And a lot of guys have like, I go and hire instructors. We have a training company. We train folks. And I was initially looking for resumes of former soft guys. I wanted the soft munimoniker of, like, all right, what special operations unit were you in and what'd you do? And I thought that would be the most important, and it's just not. People want somebody who's got some experience, who knows what they're talking about, and you got a resume. But I thought resume was this important, and actually it was far less. I wanted you to have a real world resume that was congruent with what you were teaching, but really I wanted a master communicator, and I wanted somebody that fit our ethos and our culture more, and that was a better fit. Somebody with a coach's eye, somebody with who people liked listening to. And so that ended up being far, far more important as an instructor than, hey, bro, how many bodies did you stack and over what period of time?

That ended up not being a good thing. And when I had buddies who had been in for a full career, they just couldn't make the jump to teach civilians. They couldn't see past their context that they had had. To them, they're still multicam madness running through the desert and trying to teach civilians how to do it. No, that's not the context. They don't understand half of the military acronyms that you just rock there with your incredibly specific vernacular. They couldn't make the jump. So I was happy to get out, and I had a plan. I'm going to go to college, and I'm going to buy a Duplex, and I'm going to rent out the other side to offset my mortgage, and I'm going to shop for a wife. That was my plan.

How did that work out?

I did my plan.

Did you really?

I did.

You went to school, you got the Duplex, and you bought a.

Yeah, at the time, the Ukraine was running a two for one special, and so, you know, I just kept the one that I liked the most, and it was great deal, great deal. Free shipping. It's all terrible. You actually got to cut this because this is human trafficking kind of joke. Very inappropriate.

But you did. You bought a Duplex, you run it the other side out. You went to school. It all worked out.

That's what I did. Now, I'd been on the prowl for a wife, even in the military, and so I wasn't looking to shack up anymore. I was trying not to do that, and I'm trying to be pure, and I'm just thinking about wife. That's the hope. That's the goal. I was on the prowl for a wife, and I'd gotten the point where I hadn't actually dated anyone more than about two or three days, and I went a couple of years without even kissing a girl, which, for me, in my background, that was something. So anyway, I was looking for a bride, and when I got into my college town in Georgia, I went to church, and I'm looking to get involved in different ministries. And I'm like, that's where you find a good wife. That's where you find a good woman, is in these places. And so that's where I was shopping. But I would be pretty frustrated. I knew enough of what I didn't want, but what I didn't want excluded just about everybody. Even in this big college town, I couldn't find a girl that I wanted to marry. And I began to think over time that my standards were just too high.

I had my list, and maybe all this is just unreasonable expectations.

Were they?

No. I met my wife and found out my expectations weren't high enough.

Where did you meet your wife?

Church. But it's a little spotty because she was dating someone else who had become a buddy of mine.

Oh.

So I wasn't interested in her. I knew I'm like, that girl is a hottie. I recognize that. But she's also struck me as a diva. And have you seen the hot, crazy matrix? I'm like, oh, she is hot crazy. No, that's a ten out of ten right there, bro. Good luck. Good luck. Anyway, their relationship fell apart, and they had been broken up for quite a while, and what I couldn't see before then one day, I feel like it was just like turning on a light switch, and all of a sudden, we looked at each other with completely new eyes, like, holy cow, how did I miss you. And we started dating, and I fell hard, and I fell fast, and so that would begin our courtship. It was about five months after we really kicked things off. We were married five months? Yeah, we were engaged for two months.

Wow.

Yeah.

What's your wife's name?

Rebecca. Good for you.

And you're in your 17th year. Of marriage now.

Yeah.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

What is the secret to a successful marriage?

Some of you listeners are like, oh, come on, don't say this. I'm like it's not cliche. It's true. It's true. If you can pull off love in Jesus more than your spouse, you got a chance. Almost all marriages fail in divorce or you end up living together as glorified roommates. That fire goes out. So you got to do a few things. One is tap into the source where love actually comes from. That's Jesus.

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It also allows you to have a reference point. So both of you, as you grow closer to Jesus, according to a biblical model, you are getting closer to each other as you move toward that similar point. Otherwise, hey, you're not the same dude that you were ten years ago. Do you have any chance that you're going to be the same dude you are now in ten years. No, you're going to be different, and you don't know exactly what that's going to look like. And then you could say the exact same thing about your spouse. And though you all may be near and close on in this point of your journey, at this point in time, you're near. In ten years, your future self and her future self may be worlds apart. Irreconcilably, what is the guarantee you're actually going to grow together over time just because you share a house? Well, good luck. That's just not how it works. Too much data proves that. That is not to the is just not a true statement of like, oh, time and proximity means that we are ideologically growing closer. It's just not true. People change. This allows an anchor point, a reference point, and it provides a basis, a standard, which can be our foundation and our dispute resolution center.

So neither one of us are the ultimate authority. Scripture is, period, all ties broken right there. You mean like all controversial ties, not familial. And so, you know, love Jesus, then you got to date your never stop pursuing her. This is something big. I was just listening to Mark Driscoll on Instagram who hates us all, and he said, hey, date your wife or someone else will like, whoa, that's savage. But it's true, man. Hey, once you get married, that's not the finish line. That's the starting line. And whatever you did to get her to marry you in the first place, keep doing that and you will be able to walk hand in hand and happily ever after into marriage. My marriage, man, it's good. It's strong, it's fun, it's vibrant, it's romantic, it's passionate. It's working. And so somebody can castigate me all they want regarding some of the foundational things that I've just said regarding faith. But what you can't deny is it's working. Maybe I'm a moron, but it's working. So it must not be so dumb after all. How's your marriage?

Great point.

And so I'm like, if it works, then maybe, just maybe, you should remove the chip from your shoulder and lean in and think that there might be something that I'm onto here. Because most marriages are not working and mine is growing stronger over time, not weaker or becoming more in love, not more embittered. And that is extremely rare and it's taken a lot of effort because our first two years was not good.

Why is that?

Because I was an extremely strong personality and she was too. I say it is what happens when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force. And that was us. And so our marriage and our first couple of months was really great. And after we'd settled into happily ever after together, after a few months, we started locking horns and hard. Now, her being a woman raised in the 21st century, she is caught up in the ether of mad third wave feminism. Every woman today is caught up in the effects of at least third wave feminism, meaning feminism has so infiltrated and affected our culture that a lot of our marital relationships have been affected by feminism in ways that we can't even understand. And for her part, she always wore the pants in all the relationships she had been in, and she had had kind of control and power in that. And she was a bit of a man eater. She was beautiful, and she was smart, and she was strong, and she was opinionated, and she was a little unyielding, you know, and so anyway and I believed I was in charge, and I was supposed to be the leader of my home, and so that ended up being very tough.

Our next two years would not be rainbows and butterflies. This would be tough.

How did you work through that?

So most folks will think you have marital problems. There aren't a lot of marital problems. Communication, that's the marital problem. There's not much else. Everything else is just personal problems brought into a relationship. It's, oh, your selfishness bumped into her selfishness, and so you had a marital problem, but it was really just, no, you're evil, and you suck, and she's evil, and she sucks. And when you put that together, it's explosive and bad. I'm not saying people out there, you're evil, and you suck. I'm saying you and me and you. Everyone's evil except Jesus. And so we've got to somehow become less selfish people. We've got to become better people. And that took a couple of years to gain a level of selflessness that would actually make marriage be good. And that was a hard fought war, because I thought I was a pretty selfless guy before I got married. I'm doing ministry and had some money from military and so I would take out big groups of friends and I'd pick up the check and I was in my own gruff military way of like I thought I was infiltrating into the civilian populace and I'd become one of them.

And all of them look like I'm this wildly intense, G. I. Joe action figure come to life. Like hardcore and a little bit psychopathic. That's how I was perceived. And I would find this out much later that I wasn't this super spy houdini infiltrating that, like, no one knows where I just came from. No, everyone was keenly aware, intuitively, that I just stepped off the battlefield. So I was an intense force to be reckoned with relationally. Even though I was doing everything I felt like I could in my power to be selfless and loving and kind. Still, me trying my hardest was still way too harsh to nurture a new blushing bride. I thought I was being sweet and understanding and patient and selfless because I was trying hard, and compared to my former peers, I was, but I still wasn't good enough to actually flourish this woman I had been given, and I had to get better.

How was that journey to improvement initiated?

The Lord had to deal with me specifically. I had to just bump in of like, so I thought I was a selfless guy. And then you get married and all of a sudden I don't have me time anymore. It's us time when I'm working and I'm working on a degree, so I'm full time school and work, and now I've got a bride to think about. And when I have downtime, it's kind of like I'm just going to sit on the TV or sit on the couch, and I'm going to watch Conan the Barbarian, arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm going to bring it way back. Fun story. That was one of the very first movies we ever watched together. Nice. So anyway, I'm going to watch that. And she's like, well, I don't want to watch that. I'm like, all right, well, have a good one. I'm going to watch good in the TV over in that room. Fantastic. That's fine. Have fun with it. And then maybe you do compromise on a movie. Like, fine, we'll watch over the Hedge boo. Watch a little cartoon movie. And she's like, all right. It's not so bad. She's soft.

She's sweet. I like, cuddling up with her. I'm like, all right, well, what do you want to watch now, college kid? I'm like, let's watch back to back double header. Now. It takes me and my wife three nights to finish one movie.

I'm right there with you.

Sometimes longer, but we used to do double headers. We watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a day once. Like, what was I doing with my life? College unbelievable. She's like, I don't want to do that. Do you want to go for a walk? I'm like, no, I do not want to go for a walk. And then she'd get mad at me, and she'd be like, well, why won't you go for a walk? I'm like, oh, no, I will go for a walk. But you asked me if I wanted to go for a walk. I don't want to go for a walk. Saw it outside. Lots of nats. I don't want to do it. I've walked outside enough lately, babe. So we got into all these little interchanges, and I had to learn the ways that women communicate. And then we get in a fight about the idea of wanting to go on a walk and will you go on a walk? And I'm upset of like, well, if you want me to go on a walk, just say, will you go on a walk with me? Just say, I don't like your tone.

And I'm like, I don't like that you're upset with my tone. Stop yelling. You're yelling. And so it's just how in the world do you communicate with this alternate species of like, holy cow. Women were this enigma machine. And there was this I remember we got in a knock down, drag out, fight over face wash, because a little bit later, after we hadn't been married too long, we started really needing to budget. And so we're budgeting, let's do good finance stuff. And she goes to the store, and I say, hey, babe, just get the necessities. And she comes back with this fancy face wash. And I'm like, Becca. I said necessities. And she's like, well, I needed this. I'm like, no. Needs it's. Basic food doesn't have to taste good. Water, shelter, fire needs. She said no. I needed this. And I'm like, we have soap, but this is this special kind of FRU FRU, whatever potpourri soap that she needs. And she's got twelve different kinds of soap that all have a certain purpose. And I'm a little skeptical that all these soaps are the same freaking thing with a different rebranded bottle and markup prices.

I think the base is just soap. And then everything else is this cosmic game that Johnson and Johnson plays with all of us. I have no idea. But anyway, we paid a lot for that. And so we got in a fight about it, and it was something that started stupid, but our pride bumps into each other and our misunderstanding. And so then I'm like, all right, I'll do the mature thing. I'll ask all of our friends to weigh in, and we'll vote to figure out which one of us is right, which I say that was the mature thing. That wasn't the mature thing. That made everything worse and made my friends feel really awkward, and it did nothing to settle me and my wife's dispute. But these are all little examples of Ranger John not realizing how harsh, brash, and stupid I was. And she didn't realize what a man eater she was. I was harsh and she was controlling. And so both of us had our own different junk that we had to get better on. And so it was just awful learning to communicate. And I would start out the effort completely out of patience and then have to find reservoirs of patience that I didn't have.

And so, man, just little by little, I was made to grow so that I could actually do this gargantuan task of loving this woman. Well, that's a hard thing to do, to actually truly love someone not as you think that you're loving them, but as they need and want to be loved, that's an entirely different measure. And it's much harder, and you have to pull it off, or your marriage has seeds of destruction sown in it that you don't know about and that will later blossom into divorce.

I'm glad we covered that. I am very glad we covered that. Let's move back a little bit. And then I want to hit feminism. I want to go there and cover that. But transitioning from military to civilian life a lot of people, you and I both know this. There's a suicide epidemic going on in the veteran community. Talk about it all the time. The drugs, the depression, the Pts, TBI. Now they're calling it Operator Syndrome. What kind of challenges did you face? Reintegrating in?

I was ready to reintegrate, and so I wanted a new mission. And I kind of treated, funny enough, I treated moving into the civilian world kind of as if I was going on a different type of mission and was still in the military. So perhaps I'm pitching myself my own little operations order. And what I'm going to do, I'm going to move in to this area of operation. I'm going to train these insurgents to be on home team. We'll call them friends. I don't know. I've just made it my next new mission to integrate into this otherworldly environment with people, and I wanted to find a new mission. I did not want to be one of these guys that was looking backwards on what I had done. And I definitely knew it was going to be a great barrier to making any new relationships, is if I had to have them compete against the folks that I just had or to lord it over as if to shame them for not being Rangers. I just understood before I even met any of them. They will be weaker in many ways. They will drive me nuts, but they're going to have attributes and stuff about them that's going to be better and cool.

And I went there with more of an open hand. Recognizing these civilians will be better in some ways than my Ranger buddies, and they will be worse than others. And that's okay. That's fine. But improvise, adapt, overcome, right? That's the special operations mantra. Well, then carry that into the civilian world. The civilian world is not going to change for you. You have to change to be able to integrate. And if you don't find a new mission and you don't find a new band of brothers, you're not going to make it. So whatever PTSD you have, it will be made worse over time because you do not have a new band of brothers, and you didn't find a new mission. You just looked back.

So live in the future, live in the present.

Live in the present and work toward a future that you are planning for. But you have to find a new mission, and you have to find a new band of brothers. And they're not going to look anything like your past band of brothers, but understand that they are better in some ways than your old band of brothers. Find out how they're uniquely better. It's going to be easy for you to spot how they're worse. They're going to be worse in a bunch of different ways. That's easy. I don't need to tell you to do that. You'll know how they're worse. Why isn't anyone on time. You're supposed to be 15 minutes early or you're late. You know what? Why isn't anyone taking any of this seriously?

Why do you think that's what we default to? Because it's an interesting point and a perspective that I've not thought of or heard of. Why do you think that? And this isn't I don't believe this is just soft veterans or veterans. I think this is just humanity. But when you say you'll automatically know how they're worse, why do you think we always default to that mode? We never look for how they're better. We always look at they're not as good. We are quick to look at the flaws.

Why do you think.

Why do I.

Think we do that?

Man, that's a tough question. I think that I do that, and I could be wrong. I haven't had time to think about this, but I think that that happens because we had spoken about this earlier. In special operations community, you are always striving for perfection.

That's good.

There is no room for everything's. A competition, fastest shooter, fastest runner, fastest swimmer, strongest guy, most kills, most operations, longest end, doesn't matter. Everything you do in special operations is to prove your worthiness and to strive for perfection and earn your keep. And I think that that probably has something to do with it. I mean, what do you do after every single house run? What do you do? Debrief it. Run it again. Debrief it. Run it again. Debrief it. Run it again. Where did we mess up? You don't get compliments during those debriefs. It's all critiques, constructive criticism. And so I think that that probably plays a major role in why I'm like that. But I think that all of humanity is like that. Maybe we're like that a little bit more over the top in that aspect. But what's your take?

Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think that's a good read. And to expand it, to say, hey, I think it's just a human nature thing as well. And special operations take some good and bad elements of human nature and write it really large, write it high. And so that means you'd be really good at certain virtues of courage, but really good at certain vices, too. But even like soccer mom, they want the best house in the neighborhood with the kids who are best at sports and make the best grades. And you got the newest shiniest, brightest stroller with the newest minivan, and everybody wants to be somebody. And you're keeping up with the Joneses, and you're climbing that corporate ladder at work, and you made the most money, and you got the corner office. And so maximizing performance and wealth and status and to be critical of other folks. And I think it's just pride, it's ego. I want to believe awesome things about me, and there's two ways for me to believe great things about me, because I want to believe I'm amazing. And that's one is I've got to accomplish and be the best.

And two, I need everyone below me. And it is easier than earning and excelling. It is easier to just criticize. And we have this insatiable me monster, this pride thing going on. It's part of why I only do an interview. So I'm like, Man, I've talked about myself so much, I feel very uncomfortable. That's why I just flipped of, like, you asked me a question. I'm like, well, what do you think? I'm tired of talking about me. I'm so sick of me. My wife's going to ask me something about me. I'm like, please, God, no. Don't talk about me anymore, baby. Talk about anything else under the sun. Sean wore me out for the month on me, but maybe that's in our human know of just to criticize and to pull people down so I feel better about me, and it's an ugly thing.

Let's move into some of your mission work. Sure. When did that happen?

So my wife and I were married. We worked through those couple of years, and they were really hard. After those two years of being married, we started it, started getting better, started getting fun. Year three, year four, going real well. I went into business, started a business, and that went very well. And I was making good money. I started it from scratch, and I'm working on a business degree simultaneously. It took me a long time because I didn't finish my degree right off. I kept working. I was working full time, started a company and married. And then we moved and I went to a different college.

Was it your current company?

No, this is an entirely different company.

Let's go into that, okay?

Sure.

What was that company?

So it worked on commercial kitchen fire extinguisher equipment. So in all the restaurants, there's this fire suppression system that automatically puts out fires. And so I helped start and then run a company that installed and serviced and maintained those things. They have to be maintained every six months. So it's a recession proof type business that allows for repeat, whatever. And so I did all the marketing, the sales and naming and the books and the service until finally I could get a few other people work in it and brought that up, made it successful. I had it in the black within just a couple of months and wrote my own salary for it. And so it was successful right up. And I worked that gig for a couple of years. Now, that was happening. My wife and I, we were in a big house. We were enjoying it. She had this hot little Audi convertible that I'd bought her, and those were some fun, happy years. We've been married about three ish, four years, and it was going really well. We were having some fun, and we had two firm hands on the American dream. We were doing it, and it was cool.

Now, the next thing would be a little disruptive. My wife and I are both very interested in ministry, though. We're both working jobs, so she's working at this time, too. We don't have any kids. We are dreaming about, hey, you know what'd be real cool is if we did some missions work one day and like, well, what are you thinking, like a week or so? I'm like, man, it'd be fun to do something longer, to really give ourselves to a greater service. Let's really shake it up. Let's really help some folks. Let's do something radical for the Lord. Let's do a grand gesture. Let's do a great and so that was really attractive. That was filled with sacrificial service, which was very attractive to us. We'll love the Lord, and it'll be a fun adventure. And if you don't do it when you're young, when are you going to do it? And so we're like, yeah, let's punch out. I would do something like that. And then one night at church, an opportunity came by and somebody said, hey, who would like to go do this missions work for a year? And we're kind of like, a year?

Would you do a year? I was like, I think I'd do a year. I'm like, all right, well, hey, just kind of signed up. We did more due diligence than that. We talked about we saw exactly what was going on and what that mission looked like and saw if it was a good fit. But very quickly we flexed on that and we decided, all right, we'll do that. And we rented out our house, we boxed up all our stuff, we put it in storage, and then we punched out for the mission field. And we didn't really do a lot of support raising. We just feel like, I got some money, I'll fund the mission. And so we had a little bit of help, but really we helped fund it. And so I had some savings, and I'm like, this will be fun. And so that's what we ended up doing. We ended up going to San Jose, Costa Rica. So don't think beaches, think inner city. And so dirty smoggy. Every once in a while we'd punch out and go see pretty beaches, but don't think beaches. We're inner city.

A lot of poverty there.

Yeah, a lot of poverty. A lot of people didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing. And so we'd be there. But we were also right there by the University of Costa Rica, usiere. And so there was that. We planted a church there. We were live in kind of student life directors for 30 different college students, college age students from all over the United States who would go there to learn Bible, engage in missions, and learn Spanish. And so we were kind of their student life directors. Now on mission, where we're doing all this, including planting a church that I was the pastor of I was teaching Bible classes because I found out of, like, I really like teaching. And I found out not only did I like it, I was pretty good at it. Now, I'd already done some teaching in the military. I had an affinity for combatives, like in Rip, I won the combatives contest for all of Rip. That was a lot of people that was good. And in Ranger Battalion, I was one of the early guys who was really good at Jiu jitsu and combatives at Ranger battalion. And so that was an old hat.

And I'd teach that, and I'd teach them the medical. As a team leader, you're always teaching. It is squad leader, you're teaching as well. And I was pretty good at it, but I found that I got like, a spiritual gift of knowledge and teaching at conversion. I was a terrible student my whole life up until conversion. And then all of a sudden, I became a good student who loved reading. Just overnight, a love of reading clicked on in my brain. Wasn't there, and then it was there. And so I've read hundreds and hundreds of books now. And these years on the mission field, I would spend for four years I spent abroad on the Christian mission field, and I fell into deep, deep study. And this is theology, this is philosophy, Christian worldview, apologetics, all the ologies of mythiology, ecclesiology, Eschatology. Soteriology all the ologies and whatever of hermeneutics homoletics exegesis of like, I studied. I studied church history. I fell in love with it. And so I would spend wild amounts of time studying. Like, I would get lost in books where I would forget to eat. I would just get caught up, like, almost in a trance, and I would look up and I would have studied 8 hours straight.

Wow.

And then when I wasn't studying, I was teaching. This is where I learned to teach, is on the mission field. And later that teaching knowledge would pour over into teaching tactical stuff. Now, the subject matter of what I'm teaching changed dramatically, but the actual delivery and being able to connect with students and be light hearted and then come in strong of all the teaching, I was doing hours every day for years. And theology is my favorite subject to teach. And I did it for years and loved it.

When was the Warrior Pose Society formed?

So I did missions work for years. Then I would come back, I would get into the tactical training space. So I'm leaving ministry now, and I want to get back into the only real skill I have was Rangering hey, let's do gunfight stuff and night vision training. And so I was working a job for a different company as a tactical trainer, and I did that for a few years.

I'm curious why you didn't go back to the fire extinguisher business or the fire suppression business in kitchens. I think you'd built a pretty successful company.

I could have, but it was someone else was the owner of it.

Okay.

And I came in and created it and worked there. I should have been a partner, wasn't? And then I was just the general manager. And so when I went for the mission field, basically, here's the keys. And I had no stake and so it wasn't mine anyway. That was handed off. I could have come back to it. I think that was available to come back to, but I don't know. I had a different opportunity and I was going to go back into this back into the old military stuff. Now I had to start kind of gearing up training because on the mission field I had dwindled away to like I had a librarian body. I dwindled away into a skeleton. I was maybe 1520 pounds lighter than I am right now. I got skinny because I would just read and teach all day. So I started training up and then got into the tactical training and I did that for a number of years. They were after more like military and law enforcement contracts and after training SWAT and night vision and stuff and I wanted to leverage social media to access the civilian populace for everyday carry.

That's what I was after. And so there was quite a natural departure and Warrior Poet Society was born through it in that I was on a certain journey and I called it and I came to call it the Warrior Poet way. Warrior Poet Society, that was my own personal journey where I'm trying to reconcile these different parts of me where I believe that a man should be fierce and strong and courageous and long suffering and gritty and hard to kill and a good protector and all the virtues of a warrior, of a strong man. But I also recognized, and that's not enough you also need to adore your children and be emotionally available to them and you need to romantically pursue your spouse and you need to be compassionate and loving and self sacrificing and appreciate beauty and revel in awe in all these attributes that kind of like that's the good stuff. That's the fire in the blood. We don't fight just to keep fighting. It's not just fighting for freedom, but there's the enjoyment of freedom. It's like I like to say of like warrior Poet. You see these two different elements and you can even say, well, what is the more important of the two?

And I'd say, I think poet is more important. And this is why the founders of the United States penned our Bill of Rights. The first one, freedom of speech, freedom of press, of religion, assembly, all the good stuff packed there. You can say what you want, you can meet with who you want. Government can't stop you from doing it. We have the inalienable rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, that kind of stuff, protected and embodied in the first amendment. They listed it first because to them, it was preeminent, it was most important. This is the freedoms that you're supposed to do now. That's the most important. But the second amendment is the only way you keep it. That's it. And so you have the right to bear arms, meaning you got the most important stuff and you get to guard it from us, your government. So it's the second amendment because the first amendment isn't possible to keep without the second amendment. And so whereas the warrior and the fight exists as a means to an end, the beauty and love and relationships is an end in and of itself. Freedom of religion, religion, faith, family, speech, ideas, that's where all that stuff is.

It's the poet right. And so I want to be a good warrior and poet because I realize a man should be fully both. You should be a lion and you should be a lamb. If you're all lion, you may be able to protect your family, but you will not keep them that is out of reach. You will divorce, your family will fall into pieces, and it'll probably be your fault. Lion and a lamb. A lamb is not going to keep the respect of a wife for very long. She'll love you, but she desires somebody who can protect and provide and lead. A woman wants to be led in. Many know, despite what the feminists would say, I still believe women want to be swept off their well, let's take.

A break and not a break break, but I wanted to touch on feminism.

Sure.

Next on the Sean Ryan Show.

But your point remains. No one, no one trusts the government.

Being why would you trust your kids to be educated by the government?

If like, what happened to our kids? I'm like, well, you gave them to the government for their entire childhood, and social media helped. That hurts to say because I know it hurts people to hear, but the government raised them and that's what happened. Government and social media hijacked a generation.

What do you think the goal is behind that?

Control.

Control of everything.