Andy Stumpf Gets Honest About Navy Seal Training | Joe Rogan

Unless you're a sociopath, you know, and then, you know, there's issues with that as well. They're out there. They are out there, man. I know a few. They, I went to, I went through Buds with a sociopath. The honor man of my Buds class is still in jail for chopping people up and then disposing of their bodies with his wife. Really? Yeah. Who are they chopping up? I don't know the people, but they would bring people back from, I know it happened at least once. It might have happened multiple times, but they would go to bars, find a couple, continue the after party afterwards, elicit an argument. Some type of exchange. They killed, I believe it was a man and a woman, chopped him up. He used to work at a grocery store chain, so he knew that they, the very cyclical removing of the garbage cans there. They got, you know, sent to the landfill more often. So he disposed of the body, bodies in multiple grocery store garbage dumpsters. And then they eventually got caught because in the middle of the night, they broke into a Hooters to steal t-shirts and got caught by the cops. And I believe it was in her purse, they found a Spyderco knife with like hair and like basically tissue still on the knife. And I think the woman's ID. Yeah, it was high level criminal. They really thought this one through. And that's the only way they got caught? That's how they got caught. Imagine if they didn't break into Hooters. Yeah, of course. Well, first off, why the fuck are you breaking into Hooters for t-shirts? Cleaning your knife, you dirty bitch. But again, so this is, you know, sociopaths out there. And this is another thing that I try to tell people often. The best people that I ever was around in my entire life was in the SEAL community. And my mortal enemies and the worst people I've ever seen on the face of the earth was in the SEAL community as well. He was the honor man in my buds class, which if I look back, it's they he had he had passed more evolutions from a statistical perspective than anybody else in the class. They weren't actually viewing him through the lens of is this person honorable or does he, you know, they weren't grading him by his integrity. But it just goes to show you that no selection process is perfect. And if you can't separate an individual from an occupation or a uniform or a black belt, right? If you think that because you have a black belt that you're going to be an awesome person or because somebody is a SEAL, that you're going to be a great person, stand the fuck by. And it's not the norm. Right. I'm not I'm not I don't want him as the anomaly to paint the norm, but it's important for people to remember that those people are out there. And again, they can leverage from my background, they can leverage the fascination, the curiosity people wanting to give back. I mean, one of the most common questions that I get from people is, you know, how can I thank people for their service? And like, well, hey, just say thank you. And then my answer to them is B is, you know, provide them an opportunity if you feel it's necessary, but don't allow them don't do anything for them and don't give them any special treatment. Make them earn it. Because then you can get a true look at the individual as opposed to perhaps just the shiny object that you were focusing on before. Interesting. So treat them as an individual, thank them, but treat them as as an individual and judge them based on the merits of their behavior and their worth. 100 percent, not real world merits of their background. If you have a job, you know, you like, hey, I want to provide opportunities for veterans. No problem. Provide the opportunities for veterans, but treat them exactly like the person who is in the cubicle next to them if it's in that environment, obviously. And if you hold the person that was a non veteran to a certain standard, you better hold the veteran to the same standard. Don't let them get away with anything because it doesn't help them either. Right. You know, it it it helps everybody in the organization. If you set the standard and make sure everybody holds it, it's insidious to an organization to set a standard. And why is this guy getting special treatment? Like, dude, he was a seal. He gives a fuck. It's just a job title. And if that person is sociopathic or they are, you know, there's a bell curve, there's a top 10 percent and the and the top and the bottom 10 percent. If he's in that bottom 10 percent by holding him to that standard, you're going to get an objective viewpoint of that as opposed to just being blinded by whatever it may be. It's interesting, but only you can say that or someone in your position can say that. It's very difficult for someone who's a non veteran to say anything remotely close to that. Well, I hope they listen then because they don't need to say that. They just need to act. They need to just live that they need to structure their organization with that framework. So it's objective, not subjective. There's this like people look at being a seal. It's not a Harry Potter wand. I have probably a familiarity and comfort with weapons and tactics more than your average person. But if I'm being completely honest about my old job, I could teach a monkey to do most of the things that I do. I'm serious. I could teach a monkey to do the things that we did. It's not we're not out there doing nuclear physics. You're out there doing, you know, we find an individual. How are we going to get there? OK, let's figure out how we're going to get there. We train to those standards. We get on target. Everything is based on tactics and standard operating procedures or TTPs, tactics, techniques and procedures. And everybody is trained to those standards. So you know what to expect from somebody, whether they're from an East Coast team or a West Coast team, you can meet in the middle and we all are taught to clear rooms the same way. And it's just it's it's not complicated. Actually, the way to make us less effective and efficient would be to make it complicated. The simpler that you can make it, the better you're going to be. Mm hmm. That makes sense. I mean, it makes but it's also the mind of a seal like the type of person that can get through buds. That's that's complicated. That's complicated in just being able to control your mind. You know, one of the things that you said in one of the one of the times you talked about it was someone who's able to keep their world small. We're in Utah. Yeah. I'm like, that's an interesting way of looking at it. Keep your world small like people that applies to what's happening right now, too. So what you're talking about, you know, buds is a physical test. You're actually I would say having gone back as an instructor, which I learned much more about the process, applying the curriculum as opposed to going through it, because as a student, you're just like, ah, I want this day to be over. As an instructor, you can kind of and you also don't really know what you're going to do the next day as a student. As an instructor, I can look at the entire curriculum in the story arc of where you start on day one and the product you're going to get at the end. It's a physical test, but we're using the body to test the mind. We're stressing the body. We're going to make you tired, hungry, hypothermic. We're going to get you so exhausted to the point that you're going to hallucinate. And then we're going to take a look at how you behave. Do you value we over me? You know, one of the first things they do in buds, you're explaining the concept of a swim buddy and you don't get to go anywhere farther than six. Feet away from another human being for that six month time period. That is the opposite of most people's mentality. And you can test it early on. You yell at him and you'll say, hey, you got 30 seconds to go run out to the ocean and get wet. And in the first few days, they just take off and they start running because they forgot about their swim buddy. They're me centric. And so you bring them back and you punish them, the individual that made that choice, and then also the swim buddy, you know, to reinforce that people there are consequences to other people from your behaviors. And after about two weeks, you really can't separate people from their swim buddy. So it's a lesson and it's at a beginning point where you can instill this philosophy of we is greater than me. And it's one of the most beautiful things I think from the seal community. If you talk to people where my experience has been is in talking to people in their most dire moments where things are getting the worst, they're often more concerned about the people to their left and right than they are about themself. My biggest fear, probably I know what it was in the seal community, but to this day is that I am not going to be there when somebody needs me. That was my biggest fear in the seal community that I wasn't going to live up to the standard of the people to the left and right held at me and that they were going to suffer for it. I was more concerned about letting them down than myself getting hurt or killed. And that starts with that ethos from seal training, but it's not a complicated course. We're stressing the body to stress the mind. And if you look at the people who make it through, so when I went back as an instructor as a student, when you're going through training, if somebody next to you quits, you never see them again. Like there's no, hey, dude, what the fuck are you doing? Like they're just gone and you continue on with your day because you just want to graduate the program as an instructor. You can talk to those people and you can ask really important questions. And my favorite question is why you said this was your lifelong goal. This is all you've ever wanted to do. You left a D one scholarship to come here because you saw no for yourself, no value in the higher education. And you wanted to come to the seal community and you quit. Why time and time and time again, the answer I would get from the students is they got overwhelmed. So they were doing the opposite of keeping their world small because there's two ways you can look at buds. It's 180 days long, I think plus or minus one or two. Or you could look at it as a sunrise and a sunset 180 times. So you could look at a pie and go, oh my God, I have to eat this whole thing. Or you can look at a slice and eat the slice and not worry about the rest of the slices and keep doing that and doing that until the training process is complete. Hell Week is another good example. It starts Sunday in the evening and ends Friday in the afternoon and you get about two hours of sleep on Wednesday. That's it. It's horrendous to go through and it's pretty entertaining as an instructor because you can totally fuck with the students because they're off their rocker by Tuesday afternoon. But almost all of the attrition occurs from Sunday night until I'd say Tuesday morning. And beyond that, you're probably going to make it through because you've invested so much. But the advice that I was given when I went through was don't look at Hell Week as a five day pipeline. Just make it to your next meal. They have to feed you every six hours. So if I can stack six hours on six hours and six hours and just focus on getting to the next meal, doesn't matter how much I'm in pain, doesn't matter how cold I am. If I can just get to the next meal, I'll get a reprieve, a mental reset and I can continue on. That's that in combination with some, you know, the mental toughness is how you approach and set your goals and then resilience. And my definition of resilience would be the ability to get bent and come back stronger than you were before. And the way you do that is by bending yourself as often as possible, which you do all the time by running sprints or you know what I mean? You're doing that stuff. You're mentally tough because of that. And if you can apply that resilience to approaching setting and approaching your goals from digestible perspectives, you can accomplish an insane amount. So that's really what I mean, it's a physical test, but we're just testing the mind. Can the individual ignore the big and focus on the small? Can you do the step that you need to do and not get overwhelmed regardless if you're tired, exhausted, hungry, cold? I mean, that's really all it is. It's not a complex training program. There's the ocean. There's the beach. There's some telephone poles. There's some boats. And then later on, we introduce scuba gear and towards the tail end of it, you know, some demolition and pistol and rifle. How many days can you stay awake for where it becomes dangerous for your health? Yeah, I don't know. It's dangerous for their health in Hell Week. And what the students probably don't realize is there is a huge safety network for them. You don't see it as a student because you're so just task saturated. There are MDs walking around all over the place. There's people constantly, you know, we're checking the temperature of the water. We'll take core body temperatures on the students. We're keeping a very good eye and we're buffering them because by about Wednesday, they're brain dead. I don't know how long you could stay awake without suffering some severe physical consequences. So they literally get two hours of sleep in the whole week. You might get a little bit of break time. You know, there's a it's actually on the wall at the buds compound. It pays to be a winner. And the inverse of that is incredibly true. It does not pay to be a loser in the SEAL community. And for clarity, loser is anything other than first place in the community that I came from. The podium has one platform, not three. So if you win, you might get 15 minutes off or hammering the shit out of the rest of the class. So if you win a task, if you win a task, I can Hell Week. You'll you sit by the task such as a boat crew race is a perfect one. Jamie can pull up a picture. It's Bud's Hell Week Boat Crew Race. And there'll be students running with boats on their heads. And people get bald spots from it. And we'll do races like, hey, take that boat that's supposed to be in the ocean and you're going to run with it on your head as a crew of seven people, three people on each side and the leader in the back. And at the end of four miles, we'll be done with this. The winning boat crew will get a little break and the losing boat crews will get remediated. Four miles with a boat on your head. Yeah. You know why? Because it's fun to paddle it in the water and you can surf it. So fuck you. Yep, there you go. Yeah. That look at that neck on that front right guy. Yeah, he might have some disk issues later on in life. But they'll do short races. They'll do long ones. And how much is that boat weigh? That's a good question. It looks inflatable. It is. It's an IBS inflatable boat small, but still probably one hundred and fifty two hundred pounds. And then you got to imagine sometimes there's water sloshing around in there. Sometimes they'll get sand in there because we do let them paddle. They'll do races where they have to run, go out past the surf zone, flip the boat over for no reason other than it's difficult. And it forces them to get wet, right the boat, come back in, continue the race. But so if you win that, you might get, you know, 15 minutes while we're remediating the class. And we know what's going to happen in that 15 minutes. You see people sleeping, standing up. You see people face down on a high lick track in the sand sleeping. They're sitting there sleeping. And it's kind of just a reward. And you just leave them alone. See them sleep for 15 minutes. We'll give you a little bit. Yeah. And then wake up, bitch. Pretty much back to work. Get right back on that ocean. Wow. Five days of that. Yeah. And it's learned about people in that. You learn a lot and you see people pushed to the point where do you care about me over we? And we get rid of the people who cannot prioritize we over me. Mm. Damn. Arrogance comes out. You see it a lot in the leadership as well. You know, the students are largely the same. Like from a physiological perspective, there's ones that are faster runners and from a contractile potential, like more stamina or a cardio respiratory endurance. But most of them are the same. It's like probably like a 3 percent difference between the students. But these little pods of seven people, some of them can work together and they're just crushing it. And other ones you'll see there's oars in the boat. So when they run, they're stuffed on the top and you'll see they'll be out paddling. And then you'll just see a sword fight start with people just knocking each other's heads off with oars. Really? Oh, fuck. Yeah. Because look, I mean, imagine how exhausted you are. You are so exposed and raw, so suppressed as a human being, like from all the physical tools that we have, that the real person comes out. And sometimes boat crews will just eject a person. They will hate that person so much because they might be selfish or arrogant or they're not pulling their weight. And they will just harp on that person or beat the shit out of that person. Eventually, they'll end up quitting. Now, when they do get in a sword fight, what do you do? Do you kick them out if they get in sword fights or do you let them sort it out? I'm going to let them sort it out. Plus, they're out in the water and I'm not getting one out there. A lot of the times you're watching it through binos.