Podcasts about SEAL Team Six

How can Navy SEAL training principles transform medical practice amid rising uncertainty? In this special guest-hosted episode of Succeed in Medicine, John Schneider interviews Rich Diviney, as he recounts developing The Attributes during his time leading selection for SEAL Team Six, distinguishing between teachable skills and innate qualities that underpin performance under stress. Listeners learn about the 41 attributes assessment available at theattributes.com, which reveals personal "dimmer switch" settings to enhance self-awareness without judgment. The discussion bridges military and medical worlds, exploring how ER physicians and SEALs share traits like compartmentalization, while roles like general practitioners demand higher empathy. Transitioning to Masters of Uncertainty, Rich delves into identity's role in performance, advocating "I am" statements tied to attributes for resilience during career shifts. He introduces the "Moving Horizons" tool to generate personal certainty by chunking challenges, drawing from SEAL Hell Week and Apollo missions to show how it dissipates fear through neuroplasticity. The episode culminates in dynamic subordination—a fluid leadership model where teams adapt like an amoeba, empowering all members in uncertain environments, with parallels to surgical teams. Essential listening for physicians navigating change, burnout, and team dynamics.Three Actionable Takeaways:Assess Your Attributes – Visit theattributes.com to take the free assessment and identify your unique strengths and blind spots. Use this self-awareness to match roles that align with your innate qualities, enhancing performance in high-stress medical settings.Practice Moving Horizons – In moments of uncertainty, ask: What do I know? What can I control? Choose a short, achievable horizon (e.g., next 10 breaths or task) to generate dopamine and focus, building resilience through daily practice like workouts.Foster Dynamic Subordination – Lead by behavior, not title: Create environments where the most competent person steps up, and others support. In teams, use first names and empower voices to optimize decision-making in fluid, high-stakes scenarios like surgery or emergencies.About the Show:Succeed In Medicine  covers patient interactions, burnout, career growth, personal finance, and more. If you're tired of dull medical lectures, tune in for real-world lessons we should have learned in med school!About the Guest Hosts:· John Schneider – An academic neurosurgeon and physician coach, guest hosts the Succeed in Medicine podcast, interviewing former Navy SEAL Rich Diviney. He trains residents, values self-discovery through assessments, and champions dynamic subordination in teams. Fascinated by human behavior, Schneider initially aimed to be an economist before pursuing medicine.Rich Diviney – A retired Navy SEAL Commander with over 20 years of service and 13 deployments, authored The Attributes and Masters of Uncertainty. As a performance consultant, he advises high-performing teams, using his SEAL Team Six experience to develop assessments and strategies for mastering uncertainty and enhancing self-awarenessConnect with Rich Diviney:Website:    https://theattributes.comEmail:    rich@theattributes.com  This medical podcast is your physician mentor to fill the gaps in your medical education. We cover physician soft skills, charting, interpersonal skills, doctor finance, doctor mental health, medical decisions, physician parenting, physician executive skills, navigating your doctor career, and medical professional development. This is critical CME for physicians, but without the credits (yet). A proud founding member of the Doctor Podcast Network!Visit www.physiciansguidetodoctoring.com to connect, dive deeper, and keep the conversation going. Let's grow! Disclaimer:This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical, financial, or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional for personalized guidance. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Each episode on Unstoppable Mindset I ask all of you and my guests to feel free to introduce me to others who would be good guests on our podcast. Our guest this time, Erin Edgar, is a guest introduced to me by a past podcast guest, Rob Wentz. Rob told me that Erin is inspirational and would be interesting and that she would have a lot to offer you, our audience. Rob was right on all counts. Erin Edgar was born blind. Her parents adopted an attitude that would raise their daughter with a positive attitude about herself. She was encouraged and when barriers were put in her way as a youth, her parents helped her fight to be able to participate and thrive. For a time, she attended the Indiana School for the Blind. Her family moved to Georgia where Erin attended high school. After high school, Erin wanted to go to college where she felt there would be a supportive program that would welcome her on campus. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapple Hill. After graduating she decided to continue at UNC where she wanted to study law. The same program that gave her so much assistance during her undergraduate days was not able to provide the same services to Erin the graduate student. Even so, Erin had learned how to live, survive and obtain what she needed to go through the law program. After she received her law degree Erin began to do what she always wanted to do: She wanted to use the law to help people. So, she worked in programs such as Legal Aid in North Carolina and she also spent time as a mediator. She will describe all that for us. Like a number of people, when the pandemic began, she decided to pivot and start her own law firm. She focuses on estate planning. We have a good discussion about topics such as the differences between a will and a living trust. Erin offers many relevant and poignant thoughts and words of advice we all can find helpful. Erin is unstoppable by any standard as you will see. About the Guest: Erin Edgar, Esq., is a caring, heart-centered attorney, inspirational speaker and vocal artist. She loves helping clients: -- Plan for the future of their lives and businesses, ensuring that they have the support they need and helping them find ways to provide for their loved ones upon death. --Ensure that the leave a legacy of love and reflect client values -- Find creative ways that allow them to impact the world with a lasting legacy. She is passionate about connecting with clients on a heart level. She loves witnessing her clients as she guides them to transform their intentions for their loved ones into a lasting legacy through the estate planning process. Erin speaks about ways to meld proven legal tools, strategies, and customization with the creative process to design legal solutions that give people peace of mind, clarity, and the assurance that their loved ones will be taken care of, and the world will be left a better place Ways to connect with Erin: Facebook: https://facebook.com/erin-edgar-legal LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/erinedgar About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Hi everyone, and welcome to another edition of unstoppable mindset. We're glad that you're here with us, wherever you may be. Hope the day is going well, and we have Erin Edgar on our episode today. Edgar is a very interesting person in a lot of ways. She's a caring, heart centered attorney. She is also an inspirational speaker and a vocal artist. I'm not sure whether vocal artistry comes into play when she's in the courtroom, but we won't worry about that too much. I assume that you don't sing to your judges when you're trying to deal with something. But anyway, I'll let her answer that. I'm just trying to cause trouble, but Erin again. We're really glad you're with us. We really appreciate you being here, and I know you do a lot with estate planning and other kinds of things that'll be fun to talk about. So welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Erin Edgar ** 02:14 Thank you, Michael. It's great to be here, and I haven't sung in a courtroom or a courthouse yet, but I wouldn't rule it out.   Michael Hingson ** 02:23 I have someone who I know who also has a guide dog and his diet. His guide dog, it's been a while since I've seen him, but his guide dog tended to be very vocal, especially at unexpected times, and he said that occasionally happened in the courtroom, which really busted up the place. Oh, dear.   Erin Edgar ** 02:45 I imagine that would draw some smiles, hopefully, smiles.   Michael Hingson ** 02:48 Well, they were, yeah, do you, do you appear in court much?   Erin Edgar ** 02:53 Um, no, the type of law that I practice, I'm usually, I don't think I've ever appeared in court after I've written people's wills, but I have done previous things where I was in court mediating disputes, which is a kind of a separate thing that I used to do, so I've been in court just not recently. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 03:17 Well, that's understandable. Well, let's start a little bit with the early Erin and growing up and all that sort of stuff. Tell us about that? Sure.   Erin Edgar ** 03:26 So I was born in cold, gray Indiana, and, yeah, chilly in the wintertime, and I started out I was blind from birth, so my parents thought it would be a good idea to send me to the school for the blind for a while. And back when I was born, um, teen years ago, they did not mainstream visually impaired and disabled students in that state, so you went where you could, and I was at the blind school for until I reached third grade, and then we moved to Georgia, and I've been in the south ever since I live in North Carolina now, and I started going to public schools in fourth grade, and continued on that route all the way up through high school.   Michael Hingson ** 04:21 Oh, okay. And so then, what did you do?   Erin Edgar ** 04:29 So after, after that, I, you know, I was one of those high school students. I really wanted to get out of dodge and leave my high school behind. I went visiting a couple of colleges in Georgia, and I said to my parents, I said, I really don't like this. It's like going to high school again. Literally, I was meeting people I had been in high school with, and I decided, and was very grateful that my parents. Were able to rig it some way so that I could go to an out of state school. And I went to UNC Chapel Hill here in North Carolina, Tar Heels all the way. And I was there for undergrad. And then I got into law school there as well, which I was very excited about, because I didn't have to go anywhere, and graduated from law school again a while ago in the early 2000s   Michael Hingson ** 05:31 Okay, and so then you went straight into law from that.   Erin Edgar ** 05:37 I didn't I did some other things before I actually went into law itself. I worked with some local advocacy organizations, and I also mediated, as I said earlier, I did mediations with the county court, helping mediate criminal disputes. And we're talking about like things with you get in a dispute with your neighbor and you yell at each other, those kind of People's Court type things. They were fun and interesting. And then I did go into law. After that, I started working with Legal Aid of North Carolina, which is a an organization that helps people in poverty who cannot afford a lawyer to go and have have their options communicated to them and some help given to them regarding their public benefits or certain other, you know, public things that we could help with we weren't able to help with any personal injury, or, you know, any of the fun stuff you see on TV. So and then, when the pandemic hit, I started my own law practice and completely changed gears and went into writing estate plans and wills for a living.   Michael Hingson ** 07:07 Do you think that your time doing mediation work and so on taught you a lot about humanity and human nature and people?   Erin Edgar ** 07:16 It did. I bet it did. It was invaluable, actually, in that area taught me a lot about, I don't know necessarily, about human nature. However, it did teach me a lot about how to talk to people who were on different pages. You know, they had, perhaps, values and principles that weren't quite the same, where they had a different way of looking at the same exact situation, and how to bring those those people together and allow them to connect on a deeper level, rather than the argument we're able to get them to agree to kind of move forward from that, so nobody has to be found guilty, right? And you know a judge doesn't have and you don't have to drag a criminal conviction around with you. I think the most rewarding cases that I had, by far were the education cases. Because I don't know if anyone knows this, but in most states, in the United States, if you don't send your kids to school, you are guilty of a crime. It's called truancy, and you can be arrested. Well, the county that I live in was very forward thinking, and the school system and the court said, that's kind of dumb. We don't want to arrest parents if their kids aren't going to school, there's something behind it. You know, there the school is not providing what the child needs. The child's acting out for some reason, and we need to get to the bottom of it. So what they did was they set up a process whereby we come in as neutral observers. We did not work for the court. We were part of a separate organization, and have a school social worker there or counselor, and also have a parent there, and they could talk through the issues. And in a lot of cases, if the children were old enough, they were teenagers, they were there, and they could talk about it from their perspective. And truly amazing things came out of those situations. We could just we would discover that the children had a behavioral issue or even a disability that had not been recognized, and were able to come up with plans to address that with you know, or the school was with our help,   Michael Hingson ** 09:42 going back a little bit, how did your parents deal with the fact that you were blind? I gather it was a fairly positive experience   Erin Edgar ** 09:50 for me. It was positive. I was so fortunate, and I'm still so grateful to this day for having parents who you. I were very forward thinking, and advocated for me to have and do whatever, not whatever I wanted, because I was far from spoiled, but, you know, whatever, yeah, yeah, you know. But whatever, however I wanted to be successful, they advocated for me. And so my mother actually told me, you know, when I was born, they went through all the parent things like, oh, gosh, what did we do wrong? You know, why is God punishing us? You know, all that. And they, very early on, found support groups for, you know, parents with children with either blindness or disabilities of some sort, and that was a great source of help to them. And as I grew up, they made every effort to ensure that I had people who could teach me, if they couldn't, you know, how to interact with other children. I think, for a while when I was very little, and I actually kind of remember this, they hired an occupational therapist to come and teach me how to play with kids, because not only was I blind, but I was an only child, so I didn't have brothers and sisters to interact with, and that whole play thing was kind of a mystery to me, and I remember it sort of vaguely, but that's just A demonstration that they wanted me to have the best life possible and to be fully integrated into the sighted world as much as possible. So when I was at the blind school, and I was in this residential environment, and there was an added bonus that my parents didn't really weren't happy in their jobs either, and they weren't happy with the education I was getting, that they decided, well, we're just going to pick up and move and that was, quite frankly, as I look back on it now, a huge risk for them. And they did it, you know, 50% for me and 50% for them, maybe even 6040, but as I look back on it now, it's another demonstration of how supportive they were, and all the way through my school age years, were very active in ensuring that I had everything that I needed and that I had the support that I needed.   Michael Hingson ** 12:19 That's cool. How did it go when you went to college at UNC?   Erin Edgar ** 12:25 Yeah, that's an interesting question, a very good question.   Michael Hingson ** 12:29 You didn't play basketball, I assume? Oh no, I figured you had other things to do.   Erin Edgar ** 12:33 Yeah, I had other stuff to do. I sang in the choir and sang with the medieval chorus group, and, you know, all this other, like, musical geek, geeky stuff. But, or, and when we were looking for colleges and universities, one of the criteria was they had to have a solid kind of, like disability, slash visually impaired center, or, you know, support staff that would help in, you know, allow people with disabilities to go through the university. So at UNC Chapel Hill, the they had as part of their student affairs department Disability Services, and it just so happened that they were very aware of accommodations that blind people needed. I wasn't the first blind student to go through undergrad there. That's not law school, that's undergrad. And so you know, how much was it? Time and a half on on tests if I was doing them on the computer, double time if I was doing them in Braille. A lot of the tests were in Braille because they had the technology to do it. And also the gentleman who ran the Disability Services Department, I think, knew Braille, if I'm not mistaken, and could transcribe if necessary. But I was at the stage at that point where I was typing most of my exams anyway, and didn't need much that was in Braille, because I had books either electronically or they had a network of folks in the community that would volunteer to read if there was not, you know, available textbooks from RFD, and what is it, RFP and D? Now was at the time, yeah, now Learning Ally, there wasn't a Bookshare at that time, so we couldn't use Bookshare, but if there weren't textbooks available, they would have people in the community who would read them for them, and they would get paid a little bit. Now, when I went to law school, it was a totally different ball game, because I was the first law student who was blind, that UNC Chapel Hill had had, and it was a different school within the school, so that student affairs department was not part of law school anymore, and we had quite a time the first semester getting my book. Works in a format that I could read them in. They did eventually, kind of broker a deal, if you will, with the publishers who were either Thompson Reuters or Westlaw at the time to get electronic versions. They were floppy disks. This is how old I am. Floppy disks. They were in this weird format. I think it was word perfect or something. Usually it was, and they   Michael Hingson ** 15:27 didn't really have a lot of them new or no, they didn't know now, newer publishing system,   Erin Edgar ** 15:32 yeah, there wasn't PDF even, I don't think, at the time. And the agreement was I could get those, and I actually had to buy the print textbooks as well. So I have this whole bookcase of law books that are virgin, unopened, almost. And they are, you know, some of them almost 25 years old, never been opened and of no use to anyone. But I have them, and they look nice sitting down there in that bookshelf antiques books. They're antiques. So the first year was a little rough, because for a while I didn't have books, and we were able to make arrangements so that I could kind of make up some classes on a later year and switch things around a little bit. And it ended up all working out really well once we got started.   Michael Hingson ** 16:16 Yeah, I remember when I was going through getting my bachelor's and master's in physics, I needed the books in braille because, well, it's the only way to be able to really deal with the subject. You can't do it nearly as well from recordings, although now there's a little bit better capability through recording, because we have the DayZ format and so on. But still, it's not the same as reading it in Braille and for mathematics and physics and so on. I think that the only way to really do it is in Braille. And we had challenges because professors didn't want to decide what books to use until the last minute, because then, oh, a new book might be coming out and we want to get the latest book, and that didn't work for me, right? Because I had a network that I, in part, I developed with the Department of Rehabilitation out here, helped our office for disabled students didn't really have the resources to know it. They were very supportive. They just didn't really deal with it. But the bottom line is that we had to develop, I had to develop the network of transcribers, but they needed three to six months to do the books, at least three months and and sometimes I would get them one or two volumes at a time, and they barely kept ahead of the class. But, you know, it worked, but professors resisted it. And my the person who ran the Office for Students with Disabilities, said, Look, you have to work on these things, but if you're not getting cooperation from professors, and you come and tell me, and I will use the power of this office to get you what you need, there's another thing you might consider doing, she said. And I said, What's that? And Jan said, Go meet the chancellor. Make friends, yeah, friends in high places. And so I did. And Dan, oh, there you go. Became pretty good friends over the years, which was pretty cool,   Erin Edgar ** 18:15 you know, it was weird because we didn't, I didn't have that problem with the professors. They were, you know, I had a couple of old codgers, but they weren't really worried about the books. They were fine with me having the books, but it was the publishers. The publishers were irritated that that I needed them, and, you know, in an alternative format. And I didn't really, I was not. I was one of those people that if someone said they were going to do something for me, I kind of let people do it. And at the time, I was really not an advocate, advocator for myself, at that time, a very good self advocate. And so I kind of let the school interface with that. I think it would have been really interesting, if I look back on it, for me to have taken a hand in that. And I wonder what would have happened well, and at this point, you know, it's neither here nor there, but that's really fascinating. Making Friends with the chancellor, sometimes you have to do stuff like that   Michael Hingson ** 19:15 well. And the idea was really to get to know Him. And what there was, well, obviously other motivations, like, if we needed to go to a higher court to get help, we could go to the chancellor. I never had to do that, but, but the reason for meeting him and getting to know him was really just to do it and to have fun doing it. So we did,   Erin Edgar ** 19:36 yeah, and I kind of had a comparable experience. I met the Dean of the Law School for that very reason. And he said, you know, if you've got trouble, come to me, my parents got involved a little bit. And we all, you know, met together and maybe even separately at some points just to make sure that I had everything that I needed at various times. Mm. Yeah, and I made friends with the some of the assistant deans at the law school, in particular because of the situation, and one of whom was the Dean of the Law School Student Affairs, who was helping me to get what I needed. And for a while, when I was in law school and beyond. He was like, We lent books to each other. It was very funny. We found out we had the same reading tastes beyond law books. It wasn't, you know, legal at all, but we were like, trading books and things. So a lot of really good relationships came out of that.   Michael Hingson ** 20:37 And I think that's extremely important to to do. And I think that's one of the things that that offices for students with disabilities that tend to want to do everything for you. I think that's one of the things that it's a problem with those offices, because if you don't learn to do them, and if you don't learn to do them in college, how are you going to be able to be able to really act independently and as an advocate after college, so you have to learn that stuff   Erin Edgar ** 21:05 Absolutely. That's a very good point.   Michael Hingson ** 21:09 So I, I think it was extremely important to do it, and we did, and had a lot of fun doing it. So it was, was good. What are some of the biggest misconceptions you think that people had about you as a blind child growing up?   Erin Edgar ** 21:25 Oh yeah, that's a great question. I think that one of the biggest misconceptions that people had about me, especially when I was younger, is that I would know I would be sort of relegated to staying at home with parents all of my life, or being a stay at home parent and not able to be kind of professionally employed and earning, you know, earning a living wage. Now, I have my own business, and that's where most of my money goes at the same at this point. So, you know, earning a living wage might be up in the air at the moment. Ha, ha. But the the one thing I think that the biggest misconception that people had, and this is even like teachers at the blind school, it was very rare for blind children of my age to grow up and be, you know, professionals in, I don't want to say high places, but like people able to support themselves without a government benefit backing them up. And it was kind of always assumed that we would be in that category, that we would be less able than our sighted peers to do that. And so that was a huge misconception, even you know, in the school that I was attending. I think that was the, really the main one and one misconception that I had then and still have today, is that if I'm blind, I can't speak for myself. This still happens today. For instance, if I'm if I want, if I'm going somewhere and I just happen to be with someone sighted, they will talk whoever I'm, wherever I'm at, they will talk to the sighted person, right? They won't talk to you. They won't talk to me. And so, for instance, simple example, if I'm somewhere with my husband, and we happen to be walking together and we go somewhere that I need to go, they will talk to him because he's guiding me, and they won't talk. And he's like, don't talk to me. I have no idea, you know, talk to her, and part of that is I'm half a step behind him. People naturally gravitate to the people that are leading. However, I noticed, even when I was a young adult, and I would go, you know, to the doctor, and I would be with my my parents, like, maybe I'm visiting them, and I need to go to the doctor, they would talk to them and not me, yeah, which is kind of sad. And I think it happens a lot, a lot more than people realize.   Michael Hingson ** 24:10 Yeah, it does. And one of my favorite stories is, is this, I got married in 1982 and my wife has always been, or had always been. She passed away in 2022 but she was always in a wheelchair. And we went to a restaurant one Saturday for breakfast. We were standing at the counter waiting to be seated, and the hostess was behind the counter, and nothing was happening. And finally, Karen said to me, she doesn't know who to talk to, you know? Because Karen, of course, is, is in a wheelchair, so actually, she's clearly shorter than this, this person behind the counter, and then there's me and and, of course, I'm not making eye contact, and so Karen just said she doesn't know who to talk to. I said, you know? All she's gotta do is ask us where we would like to sit or if we'd like to have breakfast, and we can make it work. Well, she she got the message, and she did, and the rest of the the day went fine, but that was really kind of funny, that we had two of us, and she just didn't know how to deal with either of us, which was kind of cute. Mm, hmm. Well, you know, it brings up another question. You use the term earlier, visually impaired. There's been a lot of effort over the years. A lot of the professionals, if you will, created this whole terminology of visually impaired, and they say, well, you're blind or you're visually impaired. And visually impaired means you're not totally blind, but, but you're still visually impaired. And finally, blind people, I think, are starting to realize what people who are deaf learned a long time ago, and that is that if you take take a deaf person and you refer to them as hearing impaired, there's no telling what they might do to you, because they recognize that impaired is not true and they shouldn't be equated with people who have all of their hearing. So it's deaf or hard of hearing, which is a whole lot less of an antagonistic sort of concept than hearing impaired. We're starting to get blind people, and not everyone's there yet, and we're starting to get agencies, and not every agency is there yet, to recognize that it's blind or low vision, as opposed to blind or here or visually impaired, visually impaired. What do you think about that? How does and how does that contribute to the attitudes that people had toward you?   Erin Edgar ** 26:38 Yeah, so when I was growing up, I was handicapped, yeah, there was that too, yeah, yeah, that I was never fond of that, and my mother softened it for me, saying, well, we all have our handicaps or shortcomings, you know, and but it was really, what was meant was you had Something that really held you back. I actually, I say, this is so odd. I always, I usually say I'm totally blind. Because when I say blind, the immediate question people have is, how blind are you? Yeah, which gets back to stuff, yeah, yeah. If you're blind, my opinion, if you're blind, you're you're blind, and if you have low vision, you have partial sight. And visually impaired used to be the term, you know, when I was younger, that people use, and that's still a lot. It's still used a lot, and I will use it occasionally, generally. I think that partially sighted, I have partial vision is, is what I've heard people use. That's what, how my husband refers to himself. Low Vision is also, you know, all those terms are much less pejorative than actually being impaired,   Michael Hingson ** 27:56 right? That's kind of really the issue, yeah. My, my favorite example of all of this is a past president of the National Federation of the Blind, Ken Jernigan, you've heard of him, I assume, Oh, sure. He created a document once called a definition of blindness, and his definition, he goes through and discusses various conditions, and he asks people if, if you meet these conditions, are you blind or not? But then what he eventually does is he comes up with a definition, and his definition, which I really like, is you are blind if your eyesight has decreased to the point where you have to use alternatives to full eyesight in order to function, which takes into account totally blind and partially blind people. Because the reality is that most of those people who are low vision will probably, or they may probably, lose the rest of their eyesight. And the agencies have worked so hard to tell them, just use your eyesight as best you can. And you know you may need to use a cane, but use your eyesight as best you can, and if you go blind, then we're going to have to teach you all over again, rather than starting by saying blindness is really okay. And the reality is that if you learn the techniques now, then you can use the best of all worlds.   Erin Edgar ** 29:26 I would agree with that. I would also say you should, you know, people should use what they have. Yeah, using everything you have is okay. And I think there's a lot of a lot of good to be said for learning the alternatives while you're still able to rely on something else.   Michael Hingson ** 29:49 Point taken exactly you know, because   Erin Edgar ** 29:53 as you age, you get more and more in the habit of doing things one way, and it's. Very hard to break out of that. And if you haven't learned an alternative, there's nothing you feel like. There's nothing to fall back on, right? And it's even harder because now you're in the situation of urgency where you feel like you're missing something and you're having to learn something new, whereas if you already knew it and knew different ways to rely on things you would be just like picking a memory back up, rather than having to learn something new. Well, I've never been in that position, so I can't say, but in the abstract, I think that's a good definition.   Michael Hingson ** 30:34 Well, there are a lot of examples, like, take a person who has some eyesight, and they're not encouraged to use a cane. And I know someone who was in this situation. I think I've told the story on this podcast, but he lived in New Jersey and was travel. And traveled every day from New Jersey into Philadelphia to work, and he was on a reasonably cloudy day, was walking along. He had been given a cane by the New Jersey Commission for the Blind, but he they didn't really stress the value of using it. And so he was walking along the train to go in, and he came to the place where he could turn in and go into the car. And he did, and promptly fell between two cars because he wasn't at the right place. And then the train actually started to move, but they got it stopped, and so he was okay, but as as he tells the story, he certainly used his cane from then on. Because if he had been using the cane, even though he couldn't see it well because it was dark, or not dark, cloudy, he would have been able to see that he was not at the place where the car entrance was, but rather he was at the junction between two cars. And there's so many examples of that. There's so many reasons why it's important to learn the skills. Should a partially blind or a low vision person learn to read Braille? Well, depends on circumstances, of course, I think, to a degree, but the value of learning Braille is that you have an alternative to full print, especially if there's a likelihood that you're going to lose the rest of your eyesight. If you psychologically do it now, that's also going to psychologically help you prepare better for not having any eyesight later.   Erin Edgar ** 32:20 And of course, that leads to to blind children these days learn how to read, yeah, which is another issue.   Michael Hingson ** 32:28 Which is another issue because educators are not teaching Braille nearly as much as they should, and the literacy rate is so low. And the fact of the matter is even with George Kircher, who invented the whole DAISY format and and all the things that you can do with the published books and so on. The reality is there is still something to be said for learning braille. You don't have sighted children just watching television all the time, although sometimes my parents think they do, but, but the point is that they learn to read, and there's a value of really learning to read. I've been in an audience where a blind speaker was delivering a speech, and he didn't know or use Braille. He had a device that was, I think what he actually used was a, was, it was a Victor Reader Stream, which is   Erin Edgar ** 33:24 one of those, right?   Michael Hingson ** 33:25 I think it was that it may have been something else, but the bottom line is, he had his speech written out, and he would play it through earphones, and then he would verbalize his speech. Oh, no, that's just mess me up. Oh, it would. It was very disjointed and and I think that for me, personally, I read Braille pretty well, but I don't like to read speeches at all. I want to engage the audience, and so it's really important to truly speak with the audience and not read or do any of those other kinds of things.   Erin Edgar ** 33:57 I would agree. Now I do have a Braille display that I, I use, and, you know, I do use it for speeches. However, I don't put the whole speech on   Michael Hingson ** 34:10 there that I me too. I have one, and I use it for, I know, I have notes. Mm, hmm,   Erin Edgar ** 34:16 notes, yeah. And so I feel like Braille, especially for math. You know, when you said math and physics, like, Yeah, I can't imagine doing math without Braille. That just doesn't, you know, I can't imagine it, and especially in, you know, geometry and trigonometry with those diagrams. I don't know how you would do it without a Braille textbook, but yeah, there. There's certainly something to be said for for the the wonderful navigation abilities with, you know, e published audio DAISY books. However, it's not a substitute for knowing how to   Michael Hingson ** 34:55 read. Well, how are you going to learn to spell? How are you going to really learn sit? Structure, how are you going to learn any of those basic skills that sighted kids get if you don't use Braille? Absolutely, I think that that's one of the arenas where the educational system, to a large degree, does such a great disservice to blind kids because it won't teach them Braille.   Erin Edgar ** 35:16 Agreed, agreed. Well, thank you for this wonderful spin down Braille, Braille reading lane here. That was fun.   Michael Hingson ** 35:27 Well, so getting back to you a little bit, you must have thought or realized that probably when you went into law, you were going to face some challenges. But what was the defining moment that made you decide you're going to go into law, and what kind of challenges have you faced? If you face challenges, my making an assumption, but you know what?   Erin Edgar ** 35:45 Oh, sure. So the defining moment when I decided I wanted to go into law. It was a very interesting time for me. I was teenager. Don't know exactly how old I was, but I think I was in high school, and I had gone through a long period where I wanted to, like, be a music major and go into piano and voice and be a performer in those arenas, and get a, you know, high level degree whatnot. And then I began having this began becoming very interested in watching the Star Trek television series. Primarily I was out at the time the next generation, and I was always fascinated by the way that these people would find these civilizations on these planets, and they would be at odds in the beginning, and they would be at each other's throats, and then by the end of the day, they were all kind of   Michael Hingson ** 36:43 liking each other. And John Luke Picard didn't play a flute,   Erin Edgar ** 36:47 yes, and he also turned into a Borg, which was traumatic for me. I had to rate local summer to figure out what would happen. I was in I was in trauma. Anyway, my my father and I bonded over that show. It was, it was a wonderful sort of father daughter thing. We did it every weekend. And I was always fascinated by, like, the whole, the whole aspect of different ideologies coming together. And it always seemed to me that that's what human humanity should be about. As I, you know, got older, I thought, how could I be involved in helping people come together? Oh, let's go into law. Because, you know, our government's really good at that. That was the high school student in me. And I thought at the time, I wanted to go into the Foreign Service and work in the international field and help, you know, on a net, on a you know, foreign policy level. I quickly got into law school and realized two things simultaneously in my second year, international law was very boring, and there were plenty of problems in my local community that I could help solve, like, why work on the international stage when people in my local community are suffering in some degree with something and so I completely changed my focus to wanting to work in an area where I could bring people together and work for, you know, work on an individualized level. And as I went into the legal field, that was, it was part of the reason I went into the mediation, because that was one of the things that we did, was helping people come together. I realized, though, as I became a lawyer and actually started working in the field, most of the legal system is not based on that. It's based on who has the best argument. I wanted no part of that. Yeah, I want no part of that at all. I want to bring people together. Still, the Star Trek mentality is working here, and so when I when I started my own law firm, my immediate question to myself was, how can I now that I'm out doing my own thing, actually bring people together? And the answer that I got was help families come together, especially people thinking about their end of life decisions and gathering their support team around them. Who they want to help them? If they are ever in a situation where they become ill and they can't manage their affairs, or if you know upon their death, who do they want to help them and support them. And how can I use the law to allow that to happen? And so that's how I am working, to use the law for healing and bringing people together, rather than rather than winning an argument.   Michael Hingson ** 39:59 Yeah. Yeah, well, and I think there's a lot of merit to that. I I value the law a great deal, and I I am not an attorney or anything like that, but I have worked in the world of legislation, and I've worked in the world of dealing with helping to get legislation passed and and interacting with lawyers. And my wife and I worked with an attorney to set up our our trust, and then couple of years ago, I redid it after she passed away. And so I think that there was a lot of a lot of work that attorneys do that is extremely important. Yeah, there are, there are attorneys that were always dealing with the best arguments, and probably for me, the most vivid example of that, because it was so captivating when it happened, was the whole OJ trial back in the 1990s we were at a county fair, and we had left going home and turned on the radio, only To hear that the police were following OJ, and they finally arrested him. And then when the trial occurred, we while I was working at a company, and had a radio, and people would would come around, and we just had the radio on, and followed the whole trial. And it was interesting to see all the manipulation and all the movement, and you're right. It came down to who had the best argument, right or wrong?   Erin Edgar ** 41:25 The bloody glove. If it doesn't fit, you must acquit. Yeah, yep, I remember that. I remember where I was when they arrested him, too. I was at my grandparents house, and we were watching it on TV. My grandfather was captivated by the whole thing. But yes, there's certainly, you know, some manipulation. There's also, there are also lawyers who do a lot of good and a lot of wonderful things. And in reality, you know, most cases don't go to trial. They're settled in some way. And so, you know, there isn't always, you know, who has the best argument. It's not always about that, right? And at the same time, that is, you know, what the system is based on, to some extent. And really, when our country was founded, our founding fathers were a bunch of, like, acted in a lot of ways, like a bunch of children. If you read books on, you know, the Constitution, it was, it was all about, you know, I want this in here, and I want that in here. And, you know, a lot of argument around that, which, of course, is to be expected. And many of them did not expect our country's government to last beyond their lifetimes. Uh, James Madison was the exception, but all the others were like, Ed's going to fail. And yet, I am very, very proud to be a lawyer in this country, because while it's not perfect, our founding documents actually have a lot of flexibility and how and can be interpreted to fit modern times, which is, I think the beauty of them and exactly what the Founders intended for.   Michael Hingson ** 43:15 Yeah, and I do think that some people are taking advantage of that and causing some challenges, but that's also part of our country and part of our government. I like something Jimmy Carter once said, which was, we must adjust to changing times while holding to unwavering principles. And I think absolutely that's the part that I think sometimes is occasionally being lost, that we forget those principles, or we want to manipulate the principles and make them something that they're not. But he was absolutely right. That is what we need to do, and we can adjust to changing times without sacrificing principles. Absolutely.   Erin Edgar ** 43:55 I firmly believe that, and I would like to kind of turn it back to what we were talking about before, because you actually asked me, What are some challenges that I have faced, and if it's okay with you, I would like to get back to that. Oh, sure. Okay. Well, so I have faced some challenges for you know, to a large extent, though I was very well accommodated. I mean, the one challenge with the books that was challenging when I took the bar exam, oh, horror of horrors. It was a multiple, multiple shot deal, but it finally got done. However, it was not, you know, my failing to pass the first time or times was not the fault of the actual board of law examiners. They were very accommodating. I had to advocate for myself a little bit, and I also had to jump through some hoops. For example, I had to bring my own person to bubble in my responses on the multiple choice part, it. And bring my own person in to kind of monitor me while I did the essay portion. But they allowed me to have a computer, they allowed me to have, you know, the screen reader. They allowed me to have time and a half to do the the exam. And so we're accommodating in that way. And so no real challenges there. You know, some hoops to jump through. But it got all worked out.   Michael Hingson ** 45:23 And even so, some of that came about because blind people actually had to go all the way to the Supreme Court. Yes, the bar to the Bar Association to recognize that those things needed to be that way,   Erin Edgar ** 45:37 absolutely. And so, you know, I was lucky to come into this at a time where that had already been kind of like pre done for me. I didn't have to deal with that as a challenge. And so the only other challenges I had, some of them, were mine, like, you know, who's going to want to hire this blind person? Had a little bit of, you know, kind of challenge there, with that mindset issue for a while there, and I did have some challenges when I was looking for employment after I'd worked for legal aid for a while, and I wanted to move on and do something else. And I knew I didn't want to work for a big, big firm, and I would, I was talking to some small law firms about hiring me, small to mid size firms. And I would get the question of, well, you're blind, so what kind of accommodations do you need? And we would talk about, you know, computer, special software to make a talk, you know, those kinds of things. And it always ended up that, you know, someone else was hired. And I can, you know, I don't have proof that the blindness and the hesitancy around hiring a disabled person or a blind person was in back of that decision. And at the same time, I had the sense that there was some hesitation there as well, so that, you know, was a bit of a challenge, and starting my own law firm was its own challenge, because I had to experiment with several different software systems to Find one that was accessible enough for me to use. And the system I'm thinking about in particular, I wouldn't use any other system, and yet, I'm using practically the most expensive estate planning drafting system out there, because it happens to be the most accessible. It's also the most expensive. Always that. There's always that. And what's it called? I'm curious. It's called wealth Council, okay, wealth. And then the word councils, Council, SEL, and it's wonderful. And the folks there are very responsive. If I say something's not accessible, I mean, they have fixed things for me in the past. Isn't that great? And complain, isn't that wonderful? It is wonderful. And that's, that's awesome. I had a CRM experience with a couple of different like legal CRM software. I used one for a while, and it was okay. But then, you know, everyone else said this other one was better and it was actually less accessible. So I went back to the previous one, you know. So I have to do a lot of my own testing, which is kind of a challenge in and of itself. I don't have people testing software for me. I have to experiment and test and in some cases, pay for something for a while before I realize it's not, you know, not worth it. But now I have those challenges pretty much ironed out. And I have a paralegal who helps me do some things that, like she proof reads my documents, for instance, because otherwise there may be formatting things that I'm not, that I miss. And so I have the ability to have cited assistance with things that I can't necessarily do myself, which is, you know, absolutely fine,   Michael Hingson ** 49:04 yeah. Now, do you use Lexus? Is it accessible?   Erin Edgar ** 49:08 I don't need Lexus, yeah, yeah. I mean, I have, I'm a member of the Bar Association, of my, my state bar association, which is not, not voluntary. It's mandatory. But I'm a member primarily because they have a search, a legal search engine that they work with that we get for free. I mean, with our members, there you go. So there you go. So I don't need Lexus or West Law or any of those other search engines for what I do. And if I was, like, really into litigation and going to court all time and really doing deep research, I would need that. But I don't. I can use the one that they have, that we can use so and it's, it's a entirely web based system. It's fairly accessible   Michael Hingson ** 49:58 well, and. That makes it easier to as long as you've got people's ears absolutely make it accessible, which makes a lot of sense.   Erin Edgar ** 50:08 Yeah, it certainly does well.   Michael Hingson ** 50:10 So do you regard yourself as a resilient person? Has blindness impacted that or helped make that kind of more the case for you? Do you think I do resilience is such an overused term, but it's fair. I know   Erin Edgar ** 50:24 I mean resilience is is to my mind, a resilient person is able to face uh, challenges with a relatively positive outlook in and view a challenge as something to be to be worked through rather than overcome, and so yes, I do believe that blindness, in and of itself, has allowed me to find ways to adapt to situations and pivot in cases where, you know, I need to find an alternative to using a mouse. For instance, how would I do that? And so in other areas of life, I am, you know, because I'm blind, I'm able to more easily pivot into finding alternative solutions. I do believe that that that it has made me more resilient.   Michael Hingson ** 51:25 Do you think that being blind has caused you, and this is an individual thing, because I think that there are those who don't. But do you think that it's caused you to learn to listen better?   Erin Edgar ** 51:39 That's a good question, because I actually, I have a lot of sighted friends, and one of the things that people just assume is that, wow, you must be a really good listener. Well, my husband would tell you that's not always the case. Yeah. My wife said the same thing, yeah. You know, like everyone else, sometimes I hear what I want to hear in a conversation and at the same time, one of the things that I do tell people is that, because I'm blind, I do rely on other senses more, primarily hearing, I would say, and that hearing provides a lot of cues for me about my environment, and I've learned to be more skillful at it. So I, I would say that, yes, I am a good listener in terms of my environment, very sensitive to that in in my environment, in terms of active listening to conversations and being able to listen to what's behind what people say, which is another aspect of listening. I think that that is a skill that I've developed over time with conscious effort. I don't think I'm any better of a quote, unquote listener than anybody else. If I hadn't developed that primarily in in my mediation, when I was doing that, that was a huge thing for us, was to be able to listen, not actually to what people were saying, but what was behind what people were saying, right? And so I really consciously developed that skill during those years and took it with me into my legal practice, which is why I am very, very why I very much stress that I'm not only an attorney, but I'm also a counselor at law. That doesn't mean I'm a therapist, but it does mean I listen to what people say so that and what's behind what people say, so that with the ear towards providing them the legal solution that meets their needs as they describe them in their words.   Michael Hingson ** 53:47 Well, I think for me, I learned to listen, but it but it is an exercise, and it is something that you need to practice, and maybe I learned to do it a little bit better, because I was blind. For example, I learned to ride a bike, and you have to learn to listen to what's going on around you so you don't crash into cars. Oh, but I'd fall on my face. You can do it. But what I what I really did was, when I was I was working at a company, and was told that the job was going to be phased out because I wasn't a revenue producer, and the company was an engineering startup and had to bring in more revenue producers. And I was given the choice of going away or going into sales, which I had never done. And as I love to tell people, I lowered my standards and went from science to sales. But the reality is that that I think I've always and I think we all always sell in one way or another, but I also knew what the unemployment rate among employable blind people was and is, yeah, and so I went into sales with with no qualms. But there I really learned to listen. And and it was really a matter of of learning to commit, not just listen, but really learning to communicate with the people you work with. And I think that that I won't say blindness made me better, but what it did for me was it made me use the technologies like the telephone, perhaps more than some other people. And I did learn to listen better because I worked at it, not because I was blind, although they're related   Erin Edgar ** 55:30 exactly. Yeah, and I would say, I would 100% agree I worked at it. I mean, even when I was a child, I worked at listening to to become better at, kind of like analyzing my environment based on sounds that were in it. Yeah, I wouldn't have known. I mean, it's not a natural gift, as some people assume, yeah, it's something you practice and you have to work at. You get to work at.   Michael Hingson ** 55:55 Well, as I point out, there are people like SEAL Team Six, the Navy Seals and the Army Rangers and so on, who also practice using all of their senses, and they learn, in general, to become better at listening and other and other kinds of skills, because they have to to survive, but, but that's what we all do, is if we do it, right, we're learning it. It's not something that's just naturally there, right? I agree, which I think is important. So you're working in a lot of estate planning and so on. And I mentioned earlier that we it was back in 1995 we originally got one, and then it's now been updated, but we have a trust. What's the difference between having, like a trust and a will?   Erin Edgar ** 56:40 Well, that's interesting that you should ask. So A will is the minimum that pretty much, I would say everyone needs, even though 67% of people don't have one in the US. And it is pretty much what everyone needs. And it basically says, you know, I'm a, I'm a person of sound mind, and I know who is important to me and what I have that's important to me. And I wanted to go to these people who are important to me, and by the way, I want this other person to manage things after my death. They're also important to me and a trust, basically, there are multiple different kinds of trusts, huge numbers of different kinds. And the trust that you probably are referring to takes the will to kind of another level and provides more direction about about how to handle property and how how it's to be dealt with, not only after death, but also during your lifetime. And trusts are relatively most of them, like I said, there are different kinds, but they can be relatively flexible, and you can give more direction about how to handle that property than you can in a will, like, for instance, if you made an estate plan and your kids were young, well, I don't want my children to have access to this property until they're responsible adults. So maybe saying, in a trust until they're age 25 you can do that, whereas in a will, you it's more difficult to do that.   Michael Hingson ** 58:18 And a will, as I understand it, is a lot more easily contested than than a trust.   Erin Edgar ** 58:24 You know, it does depend, but yes, it is easily contested. That's not to say that if you have a trust, you don't need a will, which is a misconception that some, yeah, we have a will in our trust, right? And so, you know, you need the will for the court. Not everyone needs a trust. I would also venture to say that if you don't have a will on your death, the law has ideas about how your property should be distributed. So if you don't have a will, you know your property is not automatically going to go to the government as unclaimed, but if you don't have powers of attorney for your health care and your finance to help you out while you're alive, you run the risk of the A judge appointing someone you would not want to make your health care and financial decisions. And so I'm going to go off on a tangent here. But I do feel very strongly about this, even blind people who and disabled people who are, what did you call it earlier, the the employable blind community, but maybe they're not employed. They don't have a lot of   Michael Hingson ** 59:34 unemployed, unemployed, the unemployable blind people, employable   Erin Edgar ** 59:38 blind people, yes, you know, maybe they're not employed, they're on a government benefit. They don't have a lot of assets. Maybe they don't necessarily need that will. They don't have to have it. And at the same time, if they don't have those, those documents that allow people to manage their affairs during their lifetime. Um, who's going to do it? Yeah, who's going to do that? Yeah, you're giving up control of your body, right, potentially, to someone you would not want, just because you're thinking to yourself, well, I don't need a will, and nothing's going to happen to me. You're giving control of your body, perhaps, to someone you don't want. You're not taking charge of your life and and you are allowing doctors and hospitals and banks to perpetuate the belief that you are not an independent person, right? I'm very passionate about it. Excuse me, I'll get off my soapbox now. That's okay. Those are and and to a large extent, those power of attorney forms are free. You can download them from your state's website. Um, they're minimalistic. They're definitely, I don't use them because I don't like them for my state. But you can get you can use them, and you can have someone help you fill them out. You could sign them, and then look, you've made a decision about who's going to help you when you're not able to help yourself,   Michael Hingson ** 1:01:07 which is extremely important to do. And as I mentioned, we went all the way and have a trust, and we funded the trust, and everything is in the trust. But I think that is a better way to keep everything protected, and it does provide so much more direction for whoever becomes involved, when, when you decide to go elsewhere, then, as they put it, this mortal coil. Yes, I assume that the coil is mortal. I don't know.   Erin Edgar ** 1:01:37 Yeah, who knows? Um, and you know trusts are good for they're not just for the Uber wealthy, which is another misconception. Trust do some really good things. They keep your situation, they keep everything more or less private, like, you know, I said you need a will for the court. Well, the court has the will, and it most of the time. If you have a trust, it just says, I want it to go, I want my stuff to go into the Michael hingson Trust. I'm making that up, by the way, and I, you know, my trust just deals with the distribution, yeah, and so stuff doesn't get held up in court. The court doesn't have to know about all the assets that you own. It's not all public record. And that's a huge, you know, some people care. They don't want everyone to know their business. And when I tell people, you know, I can go on E courts today and pull up the estate of anyone that I want in North Carolina and find out what they owned if they didn't have a will, or if they just had a will. And people like, really, you can do that? Oh, absolutely, yeah. I don't need any fancy credentials. It's all a matter of public record. And if you have a trust that does not get put into the court record unless it's litigated, which you know, it does happen, but not often,   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:56 but I but again, I think that, you know, yeah, and I'm not one of those Uber wealthy people. But I have a house. We we used to have a wheelchair accessible van for Karen. I still have a car so that when I need to be driven somewhere, rather than using somebody else's vehicle, we use this and those are probably the two biggest assets, although I have a bank account with with some in it, not a lot, not nearly as much as Jack Benny, anyway. But anyway, the bottom line is, yeah, but the bottom line is that I think that the trust keeps everything a lot cleaner. And it makes perfect sense. Yep, it does. And I didn't even have to go to my general law firm that I usually use. Do we cheat them? Good, and how so it worked out really well. Hey, I watched the Marx Brothers. What can I say?   Erin Edgar ** 1:03:45 You watch the Marx Brothers? Of course.   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:49 Well, I want to thank you for being here. This has been a lot of fun, and I'm glad that we did it and that we also got to talk about the whole issue of wills and trusts and so on, which is, I think, important. So any last things that you'd like to say to people, and also, do you work with clients across the country or just in North Carolina?   Erin Edgar ** 1:04:06 So I work with clients in North Carolina, I will say that. And one last thing that I would like to say to people is that it's really important to build your support team. Whether you're blind, you know, have another disability, you need people to help you out on a day to day basis, or you decide that you want people to help you out. If you're unable to manage your affairs at some point in your life, it's very important to build that support team around you, and there is nothing wrong. You can be self reliant and still have people on your team yes to to be there for you, and that is very important. And there's absolutely no shame, and you're not relinquishing your independence by doing that. That. So today, I encourage everyone to start thinking about who's on your team. Do you want them on your team? Do you want different people on your team? And create a support team? However that looks like, whatever that looks like for you, that has people on it that you know, love and trust,   Michael Hingson ** 1:05:18 everybody should have a support team. I think there is no question, at least in my mind, about that. So good point. Well, if people want to maybe reach out to you, how do they do that?   Erin Edgar ** 1:05:29 Sure, so I am on the interwebs at Erin Edgar legal.com that's my website where you can learn more about my law firm and all the things that I do,   Michael Hingson ** 1:05:42 and Erin is E r i n, just Yes, say that Edgar, and   Erin Edgar ** 1:05:45 Edgar is like Edgar. Allan Poe, hopefully less scary, and you can find the contact information for me on the website. By Facebook, you can find me on Facebook occasionally as Erin Baker, Edgar, three separate words, that is my personal profile, or you can and Michael will have in the show notes the company page for my welcome as   Michael Hingson ** 1:06:11 well. Yeah. Well, thank you for being here, and I want to thank all of you for listening. This has been a fun episode. It's been great to have Erin on, love to hear your thoughts out there who have been listening to this today. Please let us know what you think. You're welcome to email me at Michael H i@accessibe.com M, I, C, H, A, E, L, H i at accessibe, A, C, C, E, S, S, i, b, e.com, or go to our podcast page, www, dot Michael hingson.com/podcast, I wherever you're listening, please give us a five star rating. We really appreciate getting good ratings from people and reading and getting to know what you think. If you know anyone who you think might be a good guest, you know some people you think ought to come on unstoppable mindset. Erin, of course, you as well. We would appreciate it if you'd give us an introduction, because we're always looking for more people to have come on and help us show everyone that we're all more unstoppable than we think we are, and that's really what it's all about, and what we want to do on the podcast. So hope that you'll all do that, and in the meanwhile, with all that, Erin, I want to thank you once more for being here and being with us today. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much,   Erin Edgar ** 1:07:27 Michael. I very much enjoyed it.   Michael Hingson ** 1:07:34 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite

Episode Notes S6E32- Join us as we dive into the mind of New York Times best selling author Ralph Pezzullo & Ex CIA opretive Robert Tosh Plumlee They'll be in the house talking all things Deep Cover Shallow Graves. Their newest Novel This is an incredible read through a no-man's land of political intrigue and covert military operations sanctioned by the White House. Ralph Pezzullo is a New York Times bestselling author, and award-winning playwright and screenwriter. He is also the host of the popular podcast “Heroes Behind Headlines,” which is ranked in the top 1% off all podcasts worldwide. Born in New York City, he grew up in Mexico, Vietnam, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala,Uruguay and Nicaragua as the son of a US diplomat. After re ceiving a Master's Degree in International Affairs from George Washington University, he worked as a legislative assistant and public affairs officer for Congressman Les Aspin and later as a correspondent for Associated Press covering assignments in Latin America. Robert Tosh Plumlee: Robert Tosh Plumlee was born in 1937. He joined the United States Army in April 1954 and was assigned to the Texas 49th Armored Division. Later he was transferred to Dallas where he joined the 4th Army Reserve Military Intelligence Unit. After leaving the army Plumlee worked as an aircraft mechanic before obtaining his pilot's license in 1956. Soon afterwards he began work as a pilot for clandestine CIA flights. This included working for William Harvey, Tracy Barnes and Rip Robertson. Plumlee also transported arms to Cuba before Castro took power. Plumlee was also associated with Operation 40. In 1962 Plumlee was assigned to Task Force W which operated at the time from the JM/WAVE station in Miami. Plumlee claimed that in November, 1963, he was a co-pilot on a top secret flight supported by the CIA. Plumlee's flight left Florida on 21st November and stopped in New Orleans and Houston before reaching Dallas in the early morning hours of 22nd November. On board was Johnny Roselli. Plumlee testified that their assignment was to stop the planned assassination of John F. Kennedy. HELPFUL LINKS: VETERANS: https://www.va.gov/.../mental-health/suicide-prevention/ ADDICTION: https://lp.recoverycentersofamerica.com/.../continuum-of.../ Due you know someone that has lost their lives due to addiction? Or even someone that has made a full recovery? Reach out to Johnny Whitaker so they can help to celebrate the lives lost/ lives recovered at overdoseawareness0831@gmail.com Follow our guest http://ralphpezzulloauthor.com/ https://www.amazon.com/Ralph-Pezzullo/e/B001IO9TNG https://www.instagram.com/ralphpezzullo/?hl=en Toking with the Dead: https://www.stilltoking.com/ ————————————— Follow Still Toking With and their friends! https://smartpa.ge/5zv1 ————————————— Produced by Leo Pond and The Dorkening Podcast Network MORE ABOUT THE GUEST: His books have been published in over twenty languages and include bestsellers Jawbreaker (with former CIA operative Gary Berntsen), Inside SEAL Team Six (with Don Mann), Most Evil, Zero Footprint, Left of Boom and Ghost. Other books include The Navy SEAL Survival Handbook, The Walk-In, At the Fall of Somoza, The Chopin Manuscript (winner of the 2008 Audio Book of the Year), Plunging Into Haiti (winner of the 2006 Douglas Dillon Prize for American Diplomacy), Eve Missing, Full Battle Rattle, Blood of My Blood, the SEAL Team Six thrillers Hunt the Wolf, Hunt the Scorpion, Hunt the Falcon, Hunt the Jackal, Hunt the Fox, Hunt the Dragon, Hunt the Viper, Hunt the Leopard and Saigon (which was recently published in Vietnamese) and The Great Chinese Art Heist (to be released by Pegasus Crime in July). His plays, all of which have been produced in New York City, include Dear Friends, On That Day, Eating the Shadow, The Education of One Miss February, From Behind the Moon, Ghosts in the Dining Room, Bad Moon Rising, Gauguin's Parrot, Asylum, Hide Mother in My Heart, Spain, and Okeechobee Split. Tail of the Tiger was awarded Best New Play by the National Arts Club, and The American Wife was recently produced by the Park Theatre in London Find out more at https://still-toking-with.pinecast.co Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/still-toking-with/3c3b5eb8-b12f-4138-b92c-420b5c36332e

Robert O'Neill compares SEAL Team Six and Delta Force—how Delta guards secrecy, why SEALs aren't truly “silent professionals,” and the tactical lessons both units shared. He explains evolving from speed and chaos in CQB to silent, night vision precision that saved lives.

Patrick Bet-David sits down with former Navy SEAL Robert O'Neill, the man who shot Osama Bin Laden, to tell all about the historic SEAL Team Six mission, the aftermath, and what really happened the night Bin Laden was killed.------Ⓜ️ CONNECT WITH ROBERT J. O'NEILL ON MINNECT: https://bit.ly/4nvGs4W

Robert O'Neill recounts the raid that killed Osama bin Laden: training, on-the-fly tactics, the moment of contact, and the aftermath. He credits the CIA targeter behind the lead, details Fort Campbell debriefs, and addresses Extortion 17 and conspiracy claims.

Robert O'Neill addresses conspiracies around Osama bin Laden's death, Pakistan's role, and the rapid Zero Dark Thirty movie release. He breaks down intel myths, kidney failure rumors, and what really happened after the SEAL raid in Abbottabad.

Robert O'Neill reveals why bin Laden photos remain classified, his view on releasing them, and what images were actually taken. He explains the risks of propaganda, Monday-morning quarterbacking, and how SEALs prioritized survival and mission success over evidence.

Lee and Eleanor discuss the secret and disastrously botched 2019 mission by SEAL Team Six into North Korea, personally approved by Donald Trump. Also, UN's potential to act on the Israel-Palestine conflict through the “Uniting for Peace” mechanism, which could circumvent the U.S. Security Council veto to impose measures protecting Palestinians and holding Israel accountable. Plus, Vienna's state-led social housing model as a global leader in providing affordable, high-quality housing.

Lee and Eleanor discuss the secret and disastrously botched 2019 mission by SEAL Team Six into North Korea, personally approved by Donald Trump. Also, UN's potential to act on the Israel-Palestine conflict through the “Uniting for Peace” mechanism, which could circumvent the U.S. Security Council veto to impose measures protecting Palestinians and holding Israel accountable. Plus, Vienna's state-led social housing model as a global leader in providing affordable, high-quality housing.

Master Sergeant Kevin Holland's story is one of rare courage and resilience. Early Career – Enlisted in 1988, became a Navy SEAL, served with SEAL Team 8 during Desert Storm, and later earned selection into SEAL Team 6 (DEVGRU) as a sniper and assaulter.Civilian Life – After leaving the Navy in 1995, he worked in his family's business and as a wildlife officer.Return to Service – Following 9/11, he re-entered the military, completed Delta's Operator Training Course, and joined 1st SFOD-D (Delta Force)—becoming the only publicly known man to serve in both DEVGRU and Delta.Combat Experience – Over 20 deployments and 2,000 missions. Survived an IED attack and later a near-fatal gunshot wound, continuing to fight and lead despite severe injuries.Honors – Awarded 7 Bronze Stars (2 with valor), 2 Purple Hearts, and 30+ commendations.Legacy – Retired in 2013, his journey embodies dedication, adaptability, and courage—an inspiration for all who hear it. What an incredible story. Jaggy and I thank you for tuning in and SHARING!

“Embrace the unknown, for it is in the unfamiliar that we find the most profound inspiration.” — Oscar MaxToday's a special one — Episode 250 of the Win the Day podcast! To celebrate, I've brought back one of our most iconic guests: Navy SEAL Commander Rich Diviney.Rich first joined us in Episode 124, and clips from that conversation have 10M+ views. Since then, he's become a close friend and remains the most respected voice I know on leadership, mental resilience, and elite performance.Through his 20-year Navy SEAL career, Rich completed 13 deployments and held numerous leadership roles within the most elite SEAL teams, including DEVGRU (also known as SEAL Team Six). His new book Masters of Uncertainty: The Navy SEAL Way to Turn Stress into Success has just been released.In this episode:• The secrets to elite performance in every domain.• Why you should embrace the traits that make you great.• The best lessons from Rich's career as a Navy SEAL.• How to become a master of uncertainty.

Lori Longfritz shares the extraordinary story of her brother John Chapman, a US Air Force Combat Controller who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor 16 years after being left for dead on an Afghan mountaintop where he continued fighting alone for over an hour.• John Chapman was a compassionate, brave individual from childhood who stood up to bullies and showed kindness to everyone• The battle on Takur Ghar Mountain was part of a larger operation where Chapman was embedded with a SEAL Team Six unit• After being wounded and mistakenly reported as dead, Chapman regained consciousness and continued fighting alone• Multiple attempts by the family to have Chapman's Air Force Cross upgraded were blocked for years• Video evidence from a CIA drone and AC-130 gunship ultimately proved Chapman's continued fight after being left behind• Chapman was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor in 2018, making him the first enlisted Air Force recipient since Vietnam• Lori describes institutional resistance and attempts to suppress the truth about what happened on the mountain• The First There Foundation now supports combat controllers and other military/first responders with mental health resourcesVisit FirstThere.org to learn more about the foundation's work supporting military personnel, law enforcement and first responders. Both books about John Chapman's story are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.Support the showDON'T WAIT FOR THE NEXT EMERGENCY, PLUS, SAVE 15%: https://www.twc.health/elsa#ifounditonamazon https://a.co/ekT4dNOTRY AUDIBLE PLUS: https://amzn.to/3vb6Rw3Elsa's Books: https://www.amazon.com/~/e/B01E1VFRFQDesign Like A Pro: https://canva.7eqqol.net/xg6Nv...

Jessica Kirson joins the pod this week and nothing is off-limits—comedy bombs, sex clubs, Mardi Gras madness, and plane etiquette wars. Mark and Sam get into it with Jessica about hecklers, shady green rooms, wild Berlin stories, and what it really takes to kill at a comedy fest. Plus, they spiral into nepo baby gossip, SEAL Team Six conspiracies, and why teenagers might be the scariest people alive. Sponsored by:

Mission Accomplished: Rob O'Neill on SEAL Team Six, Leadership, and Life After the Battlefield.  In this week's episode, Marcus and Melanie Luttrell meet with one of the most highly decorated combat veterans of our time—Robert J. O'Neill. With an incredible 400+ combat missions under his belt, Rob's experiences span across Liberia, The Balkans, The Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. As a Navy SEAL, Rob served in SEAL Team Two, SEAL Team Four, and spent eight years with the legendary SEAL Team Six. Rob's heroic career is underscored by 53 decorations, including two Silver Stars for gallantry, four Bronze Stars with Valor for heroism, and a host of other prestigious commendations. His resume of skills includes elite qualifications like Military Free-Fall Jumpmaster, Naval Special Warfare Scout/Sniper, and Master Naval Parachutist, among many others. In this episode, we dive deep into Rob's role in some of the most significant military operations in recent history: Operation Red Wings, which saw the rescue of the Lone Survivor, Marcus Luttrell The lead jumper in the daring rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates Operation Neptune's Spear, the mission that brought down Osama bin Laden Beyond the battlefield, Rob is the co-founder of the Special Operators Transition Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to helping special operations veterans transition to successful careers in corporate America. He is also the author of the best-selling memoir, THE OPERATOR: Firing the Shots that Killed Osama bin Laden and My Years as a SEAL Team Warrior. Throughout his post-military career, Rob has become a prominent public speaker, security consultant, and media contributor, sharing expert insights on military strategy and terrorism. Whether speaking to survivors of 9/11 or delivering keynote speeches to business leaders, Rob translates his elite training into actionable lessons on leadership, resilience, and success. Join us as we explore Rob O'Neill's incredible journey from the frontlines to the boardroom and hear his thoughts on leadership, transition, and how to thrive under pressure. Tune in to hear the untold stories and actionable advice from one of America's most decorated heroes! In This Episode You Will Hear: • I don't think I could beat Marcus at arm wrestling if I can't pick up a bowling ball. (1:58) • You do realize there's a thing called old man strength? (5:53) • [Rob O'Neil] I have a podcast as well, called “The Operator.” We're called The Operator because if you're doing anything, you're an operator. (6:18) • Having a big man to kick your ass and teach you wind a bobbin; you realize there is skill here. (9:59) • When people quit BUDS, it's not because “this is hard”. [It's because] I'm tired of the broken foot.; I'm tired of the shin splints; I'm tired of my dislocated shoulder; I'm tired. (21:20) • In BUDS, one of the biggest problems is eating too much. Like I want 5 cheeseburgers, but we have a 4-mile run afterwards. (26:35) • [Rob] and for everyone that doesn't know, can you explain what a SDV is? (39:20) [Marcus] Imagine a mini submarine and shrink it down. The difference is that a submarine is dry inside, and the SDV is completely full of water. (39:23) • Listen to Marcus discuss the details of being in an SDV for 8 hours. Talk about ultimate torture - If you have a deep freeze in your garage, fill that sucker full of water, crawl in there and sit down for 8 hours. (40:32) • The first time I got in there, I was terrified. (45:29) • [Marcus] There's stuff that happens to us out there. Sometimes safety gets in the way of it. (58:49) • [After falling down the mountain during Operation Red Wings] I could hear that stream running. I've got to get me water, but I kept thinking I can't drink out of it, because my buddies are in it. (81:07) • If you want to make God laugh, tell Him what your plan is. (92:04) • [Marcus] Bro, when you saw that son of a bitch's face [Osama Bin Laden], what was the first thing you saw? [Rob O'Neal] I saw his nose. He was skinny, wearing white – tall. (95:22 ) • My nickname was “Nisro” (Navy SEAL Rob O'Neal). When they asked “Who got him?” They go “Nisro,” and they said “Fuck! We're never gonna hear the end of it.” (97:30) Support Robert:   - IG: mchooyah - Host of The Operator Podcast Support TNQ   - IG: team_neverquit , marcusluttrell , melanieluttrell , huntero13   -  https://www.patreon.com/teamneverquit Sponsors:   - dripdrop.com/TNQ    -  cargurus.com/TNQ    - armslist.com/TNQ   - partnersinbuilding.com - Navyfederal.org        -    - You can find Cremo's new line of antiperspirants and deodorants at Target or Target.com    - WARFARE IN THEATERS APRIL 11th Watch Trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JER0Fkyy3tw First Look Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3DWuqiAUKg&t=3s    -   - PXGapparel.com/TNQ   - bruntworkwear.com/TNQ    - Selectquote.com/TNQ    - Groundnews.com/TNQ    - You can find Cremo's new line of antiperspirants and deodorants at Target or Target.com    - shipsticks.com/TNQ    - Robinhood.com/gold    - strawberry.me/TNQ    - stopboxusa.com {TNQ}    - ghostbed.com/TNQ [TNQ]   -  kalshi.com/TNQ   -  joinbilt.com/TNQ    - Tonal.com [TNQ]   - greenlight.com/TNQ   - PDSDebt.com/TNQ   - drinkAG1.com/TNQ   - Shadyrays.com [TNQ]   - qualialife.com/TNQ [TNQ]   - Hims.com/TNQ   - Shopify.com/TNQ   - Aura.com/TNQ   - Policygenius.com   - TAKELEAN.com [TNQ]   - usejoymode.com [TNQ]

The guys invite New York Times Best Selling Author Kevin Maurer to join them in the studio. Maurer's acclaimed novels focus on military history, harrowing missions and the stories of humanity that surface on the battlefield. Whether bringing us to the forefront of Seal Team Six's capture of terrorist Osama Bin Laden in No Easy Day, or sharing the story of one WWII Bomber Pilot's 25 missions in Damn Lucky, Maurer chats with us about the business of authorship and the places it's led him. Hang with Don and Steve as they get into some pretty cool narrative, through the eyes of a dude who's been there to tell it all.Clean Eatz - www.cleaneatz.comBonseye Marketing - www.bonseyeonline.comFounderz Lounge - www.thefounderzlounge.comhttps://instagram.com/donvarady https://instagram.com/stevebon8https://instagram.com/thefounderzlounge https://instagram.com/founderzlounge Clean Eatz - http://www.cleaneatz.comBonseye Marketing - http://www.bonseyeonline.comFounderz Lounge - http://www.thefounderzlounge.com

Sean Combs, also known as Puff Daddy, Puffy, or P Diddy, is at the center of one of the most high-profile entertainment trials in recent years. Listeners, this week saw dramatic testimony in his Manhattan racketeering and sex-trafficking case, with the sixth former personal assistant, Brendan Paul, taking the stand to decode Combs's private slang and insider references for the jury. Prosecutors pressed Paul to explain terms like "Gucci bag active" and "SEAL Team Six," which referred to Combs's state of readiness, wild behavior, and insider dealings within his organization.Paul, who worked for Combs from 2022 until the mogul's arrest in 2024, detailed to the court how these phrases were used among staff and how they related to the narcotics-distribution, sex-trafficking, and forced-labor charges that could lead to a life sentence for Combs if he's convicted. According to Business Insider, the testimony revealed a world of coded communication and intensive work schedules that prosecutors argue were mechanisms to maintain silence and loyalty among Combs's employees.NBC News reported that on Friday, June 20, prosecutors prepared to rest their case, highlighting corroborating evidence such as Brendan Paul's own arrest for cocaine possession, which prosecutors say ties directly into the drug distribution allegations against Combs. With the prosecution close to finishing, the defense is poised to present its witnesses early next week, and both sides could rest as soon as Wednesday, with closing arguments to follow.The Los Angeles Times reports that federal prosecutors allege Combs ran Bad Boy Entertainment as a criminal enterprise, comparing it to a mob family and accusing it of orchestrating intimidation, violence, forced labor, and other crimes to cover up sexual abuse, trafficking, and prostitution. The indictment describes how Combs and his associates allegedly lured women under the guise of relationships, then used threats, drugs like ketamine and GHB, and a network of enablers to compel participation in so-called “freak-offs”—orgies attended and sometimes observed by Combs. The mogul has publicly and defiantly maintained his innocence since his arrest last September and remains the only one charged so far as the sweeping federal investigation continues.Listeners are reminded that these are allegations, and Combs's legal team continues to contest the narrative, insisting there was no criminal enterprise, only an entertainment company beset by disgruntled former employees and opportunists. The outcome of the trial, with the potential for a life sentence, could have lasting implications for the music and entertainment industry.

Perplexity.AI says: “Listen up, you slack-jawed civvies and podcast freeloaders—this week's Unrelenting is a full-throttle, no-bullshit barrage of tech lust, cholesterol bombs, and AI fever dreams that'll make your head spin faster than a SEAL Team Six room breach. Darren and Gene go hard on everything from reverse-psychology fundraising (don't donate, unless you're a coward) … Continue reading "158: Please Don't Donate"

In the Fall of 2021, Donald Trump was selling a hardcover book about his presidency called Our Journey Together. It would be self-published because it had to be. No publisher would touch it, no author would write it, and no critic would be caught dead praising it.January 6th was meant to be the end of the Trump story. He was to slink back to Mar-a-Lago, disgraced and a failure. They all said his book was a joke, a Putin-like rewrite of what really happened in his first term. Obviously, it had to be a lie - covering up the crimes, treason, and corruption.But something told me I should get that book anyway and hold onto it. It might matter someday. Maybe, I thought, the Trump story wasn't over quite yet.So I paid the hefty price for the signed copy and waited. When the package arrived, it came in a plain cardboard box. I breathed a sigh of relief because I thought if the UPS guy knew I was buying it, he might accidentally lose some of my packages next time, or who knows what else.I knew I wasn't a Trump supporter because I was still holding on to what I thought were my principles as a lifelong Liberal. I didn't vote for Trump in 2020, and as long as that was still true about me, I was protected from their wrath. I would find out years later just how bad it was to admit you supported Trump, let alone voted for him.Much of what we have experienced over the past ten years will be memory-holed. No one will remember how treacherous it was back then to buy Our Journey Together. Now, I keep it to remind me of what it felt like to be that afraid and how foolish I was to give them that much power over me.That's what Trump has done for the past ten years. He's refused to give the mighty empire power over his story. He's decided to tell it himself, even if he has to self-publish a book. He'll dress up in a tux with Melania and attend Les Miz at the Kennedy Center, even if some of them boo him. He'll celebrate his birthday on the same day as the 250th anniversary of the creation of the United States Army, even if they mobilize their infantile “No Kings” protest.Trump insists his version is the truth, and two narratives go to war every day. But the thing is, Trump's is the better story. It's like the end of the movie Life of Pi, where the lone survivor of a shipwreck has the choice of whether to tell the good story or the bad story. One will destroy you, and one will inspire you. It's used as a metaphor for religion, but it works here, too.Trump's is the better story because he's a better storyteller. For all of Trump's obvious gifts, that one has served him the best. He's mastered it for his entire life, starting all the way back in high school, where he would just stand in front of a crowd and tell stories.For the past ten years, many people have needed to believe in Trump's story, many of them discarded and forgotten by the empire. Over time, more and more people were drawn in as each side played its role. The Left hunted Trump down and cast themselves as the villains. How could they have ever thought that was a winning strategy?That is what I find most inspiring about Trump. That's why so many of his supporters remain loyal to him and fiercely defend him, even when — especially when — he makes mistakes.In 2020, I was in a very dark place. I was caught up in the so-called #resistance. I believed Putin had Kompromat on Trump. I believed it all. I read all of the books. I hung on to every word Rachel Maddow said.But things would change in those four years. It would become dystopian on the Left. I would feel the mob's wrath one too many times just for speaking out and pushing back about things I knew to be true. I also had no other social life except Twitter and Facebook during lockdowns, where the daily ritual of hate aimed at Trump, his staff, his family, and his supporters began to feel like poison.I didn't want to be a part of it. If, for no other reason, I'd been the target of hate for so long, and I empathized with them. Worse, I knew I was wrong to dehumanize a whole group of people, no matter what the excuse was. Dehumanizing them had already led to violence on the streets before, during, and after Trump's first term.I knew enough history to have asked myself the question more than once: What would you do? What would you do in Salem in 1692? What would you do in Germany in the 1930s? What would you do in the Jim Crow South? I'm not comparing them. I'm just saying the mechanism is the same, and the person I wanted to be, and believe I am, is someone who would not go along with it, especially since my life wasn't in danger.Thus began my journey over to Trump's side of things. I wanted to know whether our version of Trump was true. Was he a threat to Democracy? Was he a virulent racist and “white supremacist”? If I watched enough of his rallies, I might find the smoking gun. Maybe I would have enough proof to justify everything we did to try to destroy him. But that never happened.In 2020, he had survived COVID and was out doing five rallies a day, flying in on a helicopter, circling the crowd overhead, then greeting them with a handful of red hats, tossing them to the crowd. And I watched every single one of his rallies. And as time went on, something happened to me. I guess you could say I was like the Grinch.My heart grew because I saw people who had every reason to be miserable, full of hate, and resentful, as the media describes them, but who were none of those things. They were happy. They were joyful. Trump made them laugh. They danced. It was one big party—a glowing oasis of fun amid an endless, dark winter on the Left.I'll never forget hearing Trump at a rally in Miami in the pouring rain. I remember thinking, This is amazing. The press will never cover this. They could never. They could never write about people who loved Trump that much, to stay out there as the rain pounded down.But of course, that was the story. That was the real story. That was the truth. What I saw in Trump and MAGA is what Tucker Carlson saw in this often-played video summarizing the Trump movement just before the 2020 election.Trump speaks a language called Normal American. It's one we on the Left abandoned long ago. After years of curating our language to be pristine, inoffensive, soft, and kind, we became too fragile to speak Normal American.But Trump can talk to anyone, especially normal Americans. That's why he could fly to so many different states, land anywhere - a McDonald's, a pizza joint, or even East Palestine, Ohio, and fit right in.Normal American can sometimes be offensive. Some of us still speak it when we think no one is watching or listening. To the Left, that means we use all of the slurs that prove we are an ist or a phobe. But no, it just means the occasional dirty joke, or talking like we all used to, without fear and at ease.What I love so much about Trump is his persistent, unshakable optimism. He refused to accept the Left's rewrite of him. They could never destroy Trump because they weren't fighting the real guy; they still aren't. Their ridiculous “No Kings” protest on his birthday is a fantasy about someone they invented who doesn't exist in real life.They don't see the Trump we all see—the guy who faced them down for a decade and triumphed. Four years of attacks, framed as a Russian asset, impeached twice, indicted four times, convicted of a felony, called a racist, a rapist, a fascist, a dictator, a criminal, a felon, Hitler and now — a King. A guy who was almost assassinated twice, took a bullet, survived it, then got on stage just days later to give a 90-minute speech. You bet that's the better story.In all of that time, the Democrats never did the one thing they would have to do to defeat Trump: offer the people something better. The reason they don't is that they can't. They want America back the way it was before Trump. But it's never coming back because we, the people, voted for it never to come back.If they think they can somehow force those who speak Normal American to ever listen to them over Trump, they're fooling themselves. They can throw as many tantrums as they want, but that won't fix who they are. That's why they lost the election. It's never been about Trump. It's always been about them.If anything, Trump was the guy who spelunked into our Doomsday Bunker like SEAL Team Six to get us the hell out of there. You can throw all the lawn signs at us you want. We're not going back.What watching Trump for five years has taught me is just how weak so many of those I once saw as heroes really are. They've never looked so small as they do right now, never so petty as all of them cosplaying oppression just because they lost an election and can't face the humiliation. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Jeffrey Madoff is, as you will discover, quite a fascinating and engaging person. Jeff is quite the creative entrepreneur as this episode's title says. But he really is so much more.   He tells us that he came by his entrepreneurial spirit and mindset honestly. His parents were both entrepreneurs and passed their attitude onto him and his older sister. Even Jeffrey's children have their own businesses.   There is, however, so much more to Jeffrey Madoff. He has written a book and is working on another one. He also has created a play based on the life of Lloyd Price. Who is Lloyd Price? Listen and find out. Clue, the name of the play is “Personality”. Jeff's next book, “Casting Not Hiring”, with Dan Sullivan, is about the transformational power of theater and how you can build a company based on the principles of theater. It will be published by Hay House and available in November of this year.   My conversation with Jeff is a far ranging as you can imagine. We talk about everything from the meaning of Creativity to Imposture's Syndrome. I always tell my guests that Unstoppable Mindset is not a podcast to interview people, but instead I want to have real conversations. I really got my wish with Jeff Madoff. I hope you like listening to this episode as much as I liked being involved in it.       About the Guest:   Jeffrey Madoff's career straddles the creative and business side of the arts. He has been a successful entrepreneur in fashion design and film, and as an author, playwright, producer, and adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design. He created and taught a course for sixteen years called “Creative Careers Making A Living With Your Ideas”, which led to a bestselling book of the same name . Madoff has been a keynote speaker at Princeton, Wharton, NYU and Yale where he curated and moderated a series of panels entitled "Reframing The Arts As Entrepreneurship”. His play “Personality” was a critical and audience success in it's commercial runs at People's Light Theater in Pennsylvania and in Chicago and currently waiting for a theater on The West End in London.   Madoff's next book, “Casting Not Hiring”, with Dan Sullivan, is about the transformational power of theater and how you can build a company based on the principles of theater. It will be published by Hay House and available in November of this year. Ways to connect Jeffrey:   company website: www.madoffproductions.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/b-jeffrey-madoff-5baa8074/ www.acreativecareer.com Instagram: @acreativecareer   About the Host:   Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes:   Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us. Well, hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset. We're glad to have you on board with us, wherever you happen to be. Hope the day is going well for you. Our guest today is Jeffrey Madoff, who is an a very creative kind of person. He has done a number of things in the entrepreneurial world. He has dealt with a lot of things regarding the creative side of the arts. He's written plays. He taught a course for 16 years, and he'll tell us about that. He's been a speaker in a variety of places. And I'm not going to go into all of that, because I think it'll be more fun if Jeffrey does it. So welcome to unstoppable mindset. We are really glad you're here and looking forward to having an hour of fun. And you know, as I mentioned to you once before, the only rule on the podcast is we both have to have fun, or it's not worth doing, right? So here   Jeffrey Madoff ** 02:13 we are. Well, thanks for having me on. Michael, well, we're really glad   Michael Hingson ** 02:17 you're here. Why don't we start as I love to do tell us kind of about the early Jeffrey growing up, and you know how you got where you are, a little bit or whatever.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 02:28 Well, I was born in Akron, Ohio, which at that time was the rubber capital of the world. Ah, so that might explain some of my bounce and resilience. There   Michael Hingson ** 02:40 you go. I was in Sandusky, Ohio last weekend, nice and cold, or last week,   Jeffrey Madoff ** 02:44 yeah, I remember you were, you were going to be heading there. And, you know, Ohio, Akron, which is in northern Ohio, was a great place to grow up and then leave, you know, so my my childhood. I have many, many friends from my childhood, some who still live there. So it's actually I always enjoy going back, which doesn't happen all that often anymore, you know, because certain chapters in one's life close, like you know, when my when my parents died, there wasn't as much reason to go back, and because the friends that I had there preferred to come to New York rather than me go to Akron. But, you know, Akron was a great place to live, and I'm very fortunate. I think what makes a great place a great place is the people you meet, the experiences you have. Mm, hmm, and I met a lot of really good people, and I was very close with my parents, who were entrepreneurs. My mom and dad both were so I come by that aspect of my life very honestly, because they modeled the behavior. And I have an older sister, and she's also an entrepreneur, so I think that's part of the genetic code of our family is doing that. And actually, both of my kids have their own business, and my wife was entrepreneurial. So some of those things just carry forward, because it's kind of what, you know, what did your parents do? My parents were independent retailers, and so they started by working in other stores, and then gradually, both of them, who were also very independent people, you know, started, started their own store, and then when they got married, they opened one together, and it was Women's and Children's retail clothing. And so I learned, I learned a lot from my folks, mainly from the. Behavior that I saw growing up. I don't think you can really lecture kids and teach them anything, yeah, but you can be a very powerful teacher through example, both bad and good. Fortunately, my parents were good examples. I think   Michael Hingson ** 05:14 that kids really are a whole lot more perceptive than than people think sometimes, and you're absolutely right, lecturing them and telling them things, especially when you go off and do something different than you tell them to do, never works. They're going to see right through it.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 05:31 That's right. That's right. And you know, my kids are very bright, and there was never anything we couldn't talk about. And I had that same thing with my parents, you know, particularly my dad. But I had the same thing with both my parents. There was just this kind of understanding that community, open communication is the best communication and dealing with things as they came up was the best way to deal with things. And so it was, it was, it was really good, because my kids are the same way. You know, there was always discussions and questioning. And to this day, and I have twins, I have a boy and girl that are 31 years old and very I'm very proud of them and the people that they have become, and are still becoming,   Michael Hingson ** 06:31 well and still becoming is really the operative part of that. I think we all should constantly be learning, and we should, should never decide we've learned all there is to learn, because that won't happen. There's always something new,   Jeffrey Madoff ** 06:44 and that's really what's fun. I think that you know for creativity and life at large, that constant curiosity and learning is fuel that keeps things moving forward, and can kindle the flame that lights up into inspiration, whether you're writing a book or a song or whatever it is, whatever expression one may have, I think that's where it originates. Is curiosity. You're trying to answer a question or solve a problem or something. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 07:20 and sometimes you're not, and it's just a matter of doing. And it doesn't always have to be some agenda somewhere, but it's good to just be able to continue to grow. And all too often, we get so locked into agendas that we don't look at the rest of the world around us.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 07:41 I Well, I would say the the agenda in and of itself, staying curious, I guess an overarching part of my agenda, but it's not to try to get something from somebody else, right, other than knowledge, right? And so I guess I do have an agenda in that. That's what I find interesting.   Michael Hingson ** 08:02 I can accept that that makes sense.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 08:06 Well, maybe one of the few things I say that does so thank you.   Michael Hingson ** 08:10 I wasn't even thinking of that as an agenda, but just a way of life. But I hear what you're saying. It makes sense. Oh, there are   Jeffrey Madoff ** 08:17 people that I've certainly met you may have, and your listeners may have, also that there always is some kind of, I wouldn't call it agenda, a transactional aspect to what they're doing. And that transactional aspect one could call an agenda, which isn't about mutual interest, it's more what I can get and or what I can sell you, or what I can convince you of, or whatever. And I to me, it's the the process is what's so interesting, the process of questioning, the process of learning, the process of expressing, all of those things I think are very powerful, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 09:03 yeah, I hear what you're saying. So for you, you were an Akron did you go to college there? Or what did you do after high school? So   Jeffrey Madoff ** 09:11 after high school, I went to the University of Wisconsin, ah, Madison, which is a fantastic place. That's right, badgers, that's right. And, and what really cinched the deal was when I went to visit the school. I mean, it was so different when I was a kid, because, you know, nowadays, the kids that my kids grew up with, you know, the parents would visit 18 schools, and they would, you know, they would, they would file for admission to 15 schools. And I did one in my parents. I said to them, can I take the car? I want to go check out the University. I was actually looking at Northwestern and the University of Wisconsin. And. And I was in Evanston, where Northwestern is located. I didn't see any kids around, and, you know, I had my parents car, and I finally saw a group of kids, and I said, where is everybody? I said, Well, it's exam week. Everybody's in studying. Oh, I rolled up the window, and without getting out of the car, continued on to Madison. And when I got to Madison, I was meeting somebody behind the Student Union. And my favorite band at that time, which was the Paul Butterfield blues band, was giving a free concert. So I went behind the Student Union, and it's a beautiful, idyllic place, lakes and sailboats and just really gorgeous. And my favorite band is giving a free concert. So decision made, I'm going University of Wisconsin, and it was a great place.   Michael Hingson ** 10:51 I remember when I was looking at colleges. We got several letters. Got I wanted to major in physics. I was always science oriented. Got a letter from Dartmouth saying you ought to consider applying, and got some other letters. We looked at some catalogs, and I don't even remember how the subject came up, but we discovered this University California campus, University California at Irvine, and it was a new campus, and that attracted me, because although physically, it was very large, there were only a few buildings on it. The total population of undergraduates was 2700 students, not that way today, but it was back when I went there, and that attracted me. So we reached out to the chair of the physics department, whose name we got out of the catalog, and asked Dr Ford if we could come and meet with him and see if he thought it would be a good fit. And it was over the summer between my junior and senior year, and we went down, and we chatted with him for about an hour, and he he talked a little physics to me and asked a few questions, and I answered them, and he said, you know, you would do great here. You should apply. And I did, and I was accepted, and that was it, and I've never regretted that. And I actually went all the way through and got my master's degree staying at UC Irvine, because it was a great campus. There were some professors who weren't overly teaching oriented, because they were so you research oriented, but mostly the teachers were pretty good, and we had a lot of fun, and there were a lot of good other activities, like I worked with the campus radio station and so on. So I hear what you're saying, and it's the things that attract you to a campus. Those count. Oh,   Jeffrey Madoff ** 12:35 yeah. I mean, because what can you really do on a visit? You know, it's like kicking the tires of a car, right? You know? Does it feel right? Is there something that I mean, sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you do meet a faculty member or someone that you really connect with, and that causes you to really like the place, but you don't really know until you're kind of there, right? And Madison ended up being a wonderful choice. I loved it. I had a double major in philosophy and psychology. You know, my my reasoning being, what two things do I find really interesting that there is no path to making a good income from Oh, philosophy and psychology. That works   Michael Hingson ** 13:22 well you possibly can from psychology, but philosophy, not hardly   Jeffrey Madoff ** 13:26 No, no. But, you know, the thing that was so great about it, going back to the term we used earlier, curiosity in the fuel, what I loved about both, you know, philosophy and psychology used to be cross listed. They were this under the same heading. It was in 1932 when the Encyclopedia Britannica approached Sigmund Freud to write a separate entry for psychology, and that was the first time the two disciplines, philosophy and psychology, were split apart, and Freud wrote that entry, and forever since, it became its own discipline, but the questions that one asks, or the questions that are posed in Both philosophy and psychology, I still, to this day, find fascinating. And, you know, thinking about thinking and how you think about things, I always find very, very interesting.   Michael Hingson ** 14:33 Yeah, and the whole, the whole process, how do you get from here to there? How do you deal with anything that comes up, whether it's a challenge or just fulfilling the life choices that you make and so on. And philosophy and psychology, in a sense, I think, really are significantly different, but they're both very much thinking oriented.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 14:57 Oh, absolutely, it. And you know, philosophy means study of life, right? What psychology is, yeah, so I understand why they were bonded, and now, you know, understand why they also separated. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 15:15 I'll have to go look up what Freud said. I have never read that, but I will go find it. I'm curious. Yeah,   Jeffrey Madoff ** 15:23 it's it's so interesting. It's so interesting to me, because whether you believe in Freud or not, you if you are knowledgeable at all, the impact that he had on the world to this day is staggeringly significant. Yeah, because nobody was at posing those questions before, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 15:46 yeah. And there's, there's no doubt that that he has had a major contribution to a lot of things regarding life, and you're right, whether you buy into the view that he had of a lot of things isn't, isn't really the issue, but it still is that he had a lot of relevant and interesting things to say, and he helps people think that's right, that's right. Well, so what did you do? So you had a double major? Did you go on and do any advanced degree work? No,   Jeffrey Madoff ** 16:17 you know it was interesting because I had thought about it because I liked philosophy so much. And I approached this professor who was very noted, Ivan Saul, who was one of the world Hegelian scholars, and I approached him to be my advisor. And he said, Why do you want me to be your advisor? And I said, because you're one of the most published and respected authors on that subject. And if I'm going to have an advisor, I might as well go for the person that might help me the most and mean the most if I apply to graduate schools. So I did in that case certainly had an agenda. Yeah, and, and he said, you know, Jeff, I just got back from the world Hegelian conference in Munich, and I found it very depressing as and he just paused, and I said, why'd you find it depressing? And he said, Well, there's only one or two other people in the world that I can speak to about Hegel. And I said, Well, maybe you want to choose a different topic so you can make more friends. That depressing. That doesn't sound like it's a mix, you know, good fit for life, right? But so I didn't continue to graduate studies. I took graduate courses. I started graduate courses the second semester of my sophomore year. But I thought, I don't know. I don't want to, I don't want to gain this knowledge that the only thing I can do is pass it on to others. It's kind of like breathing stale air or leaving the windows shut. I wanted to be in a world where there was an idea exchange, which I thought would be a lot more interesting. Yeah. And so there was a brief period where I thought I would get a doctorate and do that, and I love teaching, but I never wanted to. That's not what I wanted to pursue for those reasons.   Michael Hingson ** 18:35 So what did you end up doing then, once you got   Jeffrey Madoff ** 18:37 out of college? Well, there was a must have done something I did. And there's a little boutique, and in Madison that I did the buying for. And it was this very hip little clothing store. And Madison, because it was a big campus, you know, in the major rock bands would tour, they would come into the store because we had unusual things that I would find in New York, you know, when I was doing the buying for it, and I get a phone call from a friend of mine, a kid that I grew up with, and he was a year older, he had graduated school a year before me, and he said, Can you think of a gig that would earn more than bank interest? You know, I've saved up this money. Can you think of anything? And I said, Well, I see what we design. I mean, I see what we sell, and I could always draw. So I felt like I could design. I said, I'll start a clothing company. And Michael, I had not a clue in terms of what I was committing myself to. I was very naive, but not stupid. You know, was ignorant, but not stupid. And different. The difference between being ignorant and being stupid is ignorant. You can. Learn stupids forever, yeah, and that started me on this learning lesson, an entrepreneurial learning lesson, and there was, you know, quite formative for me. And the company was doubling in size every four months, every three months, and it was getting pretty big pretty quick. And you know, I was flying by the seat of my pants. I didn't really know what I was doing, but what I discovered is I had, you know, saleable taste. And I mean, when I was working in this store, I got some of the sewers who did the alterations to make some of my drawings, and I cut apart a shirt that I liked the way it fit, so I could see what the pieces are, and kind of figure out how this all worked. So but when I would go to a store and I would see fabric on the bolt, meaning it hadn't been made into anything, I was so naive. I thought that was wholesale, you know, which it wasn't and but I learned quickly, because it was like you learn quickly, or you go off the edge of a cliff, you go out of business. So it taught me a lot of things. And you know the title of your podcast, the unstoppable, that's part of what you learn in business. If you're going to survive, you've gotta be resilient enough to get up, because you're going to get knocked down. You have to persevere, because there are people that are going to that you're competing with, and there are things that are things that are going to happen that are going to make you want to give up, but that perseverance, that resilience, I think probably creativity, is third. I think it's a close call between perseverance and resilience, because those are really important criteria for a personality profile to have if you're going to succeed in business as an entrepreneur.   Michael Hingson ** 22:05 You know, Einstein once said, or at least he's credited with saying, that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, right and and the reality is that good, resilient. People will look at things that didn't go right, and if they really look at them, they'll go, I didn't fail. Yeah, maybe I didn't go right. I may have made a mistake, or something wasn't quite right. What do I do to fix it so that the next time, we won't have the same problem? And I think that's so important. I wrote my book last year, live like a guide dog, true stories from a blind man and his dogs about being brave, overcoming adversity and moving forward in faith. And it's all about learning to control fear, but it's also all about learning from dogs. I've had eight guide dogs, and my wife had a service dog, and it's all about learning from dogs and seeing why they live in an environment where we are and they feed off of us, if you will. But at the same time, what they don't do is fear like we do. They're open to trust, and we tend not to be because we worry about so many things, rather than just looking at the world and just dealing with our part of it. So it is, it is interesting to to hear you talk about resilience. I think you're absolutely right that resilience is extremely important. Perseverance is important, and they do go together, but you you have to analyze what it is that makes you resilient, or what it is that you need to do to keep being resilient.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 23:48 Well, you're right. And one of the questions that you alluded to the course that I taught for 16 years at Parsons School of Design, which was my course, was called creative careers, making a living with your ideas. And I would ask the students, how many of you are afraid of failing? And probably more than three quarters of the class, their hands went up, and I said to them, you know, if that fear stops you, you'll never do anything interesting, because creativity, true creativity, by necessity, takes you up to and beyond the boundaries. And so it's not going to be always embraced. And you know, failure, I think everyone has to define it for themselves. But I think failure, to me, is and you hear that, you know, failure is a great way to learn. I mean, it's a way. To learn, but it's never not painful, you know, and it, but it is a way to learn if you're paying attention and if you are open to that notion, which I am and was, because, you know, that kind of risk is a necessary part of creativity, going where you hadn't gone before, to try to find solutions that you hadn't done before, and seeing what works. And of course, there's going to be things that don't, but it's only failure if you stop doing what is important to you. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 25:39 well, I think you're absolutely right. And one of the things that I used to do and still do, but it started when I was working as program director of our radio station at UC Irvine, was I wanted people to hear what they sounded like on the radio, because I always listened to what I said, and I know it helped me, but getting the other radio personalities to listen to themselves was was well, like herding cats, it just wasn't doable. And what we finally did is we set up, I and the engineer of the radio station, set up a recorder in a locked cabinet, and whenever the board went on in the main studio, the microphone went on, it recorded. So we didn't need to worry about the music. All we wanted was what the people said, and then we would give people the cassettes. And one of the things that I started saying then, and I said it until, like about a year ago, was, you know, you're your own worst critic, if you can learn to grow from it, or if you can learn to see what's a problem and go on, then that's great. What I learned over the last year and thought about is I'm really not my own worst critic. I'm my own best teacher, because I'm the only one who can really teach me anything, and it's better to shape it in a positive way. So I am my own best teacher. And so I think you're right. If you really want to talk about the concept of failure, failure is when you won't get back up. Failure is when you won't do anything to learn and grow from whatever happens to you, even the good stuff. Could I have done it better? Those are all very important things to do.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 27:19 No, I agree. So why did you think it was important for them to hear their voice?   Michael Hingson ** 27:25 Because I wanted them to hear what everyone else heard. I wanted them to hear what they sounded like to their listeners. And the reality is, when we got them to do that, it was, I say it was incredible, but it wasn't a surprise to me how much better they got. And some of those people ended up going into radio broadcasting, going into other kinds of things, but they really learned to hear what everyone else heard. And they they learned how to talk better. They learn what they really needed to improve upon, or they learn what wasn't sounding very good to everyone else, and they changed their habits.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 28:13 Interesting, interesting. So, so part of that also helps them establish a certain on air identity. I would imagine finding their own voice, so to speak, right,   Michael Hingson ** 28:30 or finding a better voice than they than they had, and certainly a better voice than they thought they had. Well, they thought they had a good voice, and they realized maybe it could be better. And the ones who learned, and most of them really did learn from it, came out the better for it.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 28:49 So let me ask you a personal question. You have been sightless since birth? Is that correct?   Michael Hingson ** 28:56 Yeah, I've been blind since birth. And   Jeffrey Madoff ** 28:59 so on a certain level, I was trying to think about this the other night, and how can I phrase this? On a certain level, you don't know what you look like,   Michael Hingson ** 29:15 and from the standpoint of how you look at it, yeah, yeah.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 29:19 And so, so two, that's two questions. One is so many of us for good and bad, our identity has to do with visual first, how do you assess that new person?   Michael Hingson ** 29:39 I don't look at it from a visual standpoint as such. I look at it from all the other senses that I have and use, but I also listen to the person and see how we interact and react to. Each other, and from that, I can draw pretty good conclusions about what an individual is like, so that I can decide if that's a a lovely person, male or female, because I'm using lovely in the sense of it's the kind of person I want to know or not, and so I don't obviously look at it from a visual standpoint. And although I know Helen Keller did it some, I'm not into feeling faces. When I was in college, I tried to convince girls that they should let me teach them Braille, but they had no interest in me showing them Braille, so we didn't do that. I actually a friend of mine and I once went to a girls dorm, and we put up a sign. Wanted young female assistant to aid in scientific Braille research, but that didn't go anywhere either. So we didn't do it. But so Braille pickup. Oh, Braille pickup. On the other hand, I had my guide dog who was in in my current guide dog is just the same chick magnet right from the get go, but, but the the reality is that visual is, I think there's a lot to be said for beauty is only skin deep in a lot of ways. And I think that it's important that we go far beyond just what one person looks like. People ask me all the time, well, if you could see again, would you? Or if you could see, would you? And my response is, I don't need to. I think there's value in it. It is a sense. I think it would be a great adventure, but I'm not going to spend my life worrying about that. Blindness isn't what defines me, and what defines me is how I behave, how I am, how I learn and grow, and what I do to be a part of society and and hopefully help society. I think that's more important.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 31:53 You know, I agree with you, and it's it's also having been blind since birth. It's not like you had a you had an aspect that you lost for some reason, right?   Michael Hingson ** 32:04 But I know some people who became blind later in life, who attended centers where they could learn about what it was like to be blind and learn to be a blind person and and really adapted to that philosophy and continue to do what they did even before they lost their their eyesight, and were just as successful as they ever were, because it wasn't so much about having eyesight, although that is a challenge when you lose it, but it was more important to learn that you could find alternatives to do the same things that you did before. So   Jeffrey Madoff ** 32:41 if you ever have read Marvel Comics, and you know Daredevil has a heightened sense of a vision, or you know that certain things turn into a different advantage, is there that kind of in real life, compensatory heightened awareness of other senses.   Michael Hingson ** 33:08 And the answer is not directly. The answer is, if you choose to heighten those senses and learn to use them, then they can be a help. It's like SEAL Team Six, or Rangers, or whatever, they learn how to observe. And for them, observing goes far beyond just using their eyesight to be able to spot things, although they they certainly use that, but they have heightened all of their other senses because they've trained them and they've taught themselves how to use those senses. It's not an automatic process by any definition at all. It's not automatic. You have to learn to do it. There are some blind people who have, have learned to do that, and there are a number that have not. People have said, well, you know, could any blind person get out of the World Trade Center, and like you did, and my response is, it depends on the individual, not necessarily, because there's so many factors that go into it. If you are so afraid when something like the World Trade Center events happen that you become blinded by fear, then you're going to have a much harder time getting out than if you let fear be a guide and use it to heighten the senses that you have during the time that you need that to occur. And that's one of the things that live like a guide dog is all about, is teaching people to learn to control fear, so that in reality, they find they're much more effective, because when something happens, they don't expect they adopt and adapt to having a mindset that says, I can get through this, and fear is going to help.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 34:53 That's fascinating. So one I could go on in this direction, I'll ask you, one, one other. Question is, how would you describe your dreams?   Michael Hingson ** 35:08 Probably the same way you would, except for me, dreaming is primarily in audio and other interactions and not using eyesight. But at the same time, I understand what eyesight is about, because I've thought about it a lot, and I appreciate that the process is not something that I have, but I understand it, and I can talk about light and eyesight all day. I can I when I was when it was discovered that I was blind for the first several years, I did have some light perception. I never as such, really even could see shadows, but I had some light perception. But if I were to be asked, How would you describe what it's like to see light? I'm not sure how I would do that. It's like asking you tell me what it's like to see put it into words so that it makes me feel what you feel when you see. And it's not the excitement of seeing, but it's the sensation. How do you describe that sensation? Or how do you describe the sensation of hearing their their senses? But I've yet to really encounter someone who can put those into words that will draw you in. And I say that from the standpoint of having done literally hundreds or 1000s of speeches telling my story about being in the World Trade Center, and what I tell people today is we have a whole generation of people who have never experienced or had no memory of the World Trade Center, and we have another generation that saw it mainly from TV and pictures. So they their, their view of it was extremely small. And my job, when I speak is to literally bring them in the building and describe what is occurring to me in such a way that they're with me as we're going down the stairs. And I've learned how to do that, but describing to someone what it's like to see or to hear, I haven't found words that can truly do that yet. Oh,   Jeffrey Madoff ** 37:15 fascinating. Thank you.   Michael Hingson ** 37:20 Well, tell me about creativity. I mean, you do a lot of of things, obviously, with with creativity. So what is creativity?   Jeffrey Madoff ** 37:29 I think that creativity is the compelling need to express, and that can manifest in many, many, many different ways. You have that, you know, just it was fascinating here you talk about you, describing what happened in Twin Towers, you know. And so, I think, you know, you had a compelling need to process what was a historic and extraordinary event through that unique perception that you have, and taking the person, as you said, along with you on that journey, you know, down the stairs and out of the Building. I think it was what 78 stories or something, right? And so I think that creativity, in terms of a trait, is that it's a personality trait that has a compelling need to express in some way. And I think that there is no such thing as the lightning bolt that hits and all of a sudden you come up with the idea for the great novel, The great painting, the great dance, the great piece of music. We are taking in influences all the time and percolating those influences, and they may come out, in my case, hopefully they've come out in the play that I wrote, personality and because if it doesn't relate to anybody else, and you're only talking to yourself, that's you know, not, not. The goal, right? The play is to have an audience. The goal of your book is to have readers. And by the way, did your book come out in Braille?   Michael Hingson ** 39:31 Um, yeah, it, it is available in Braille. It's a bit. Actually, all three of my books are available in with their on demand. They can be produced in braille, and they're also available in audio formats as well. Great.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 39:43 That's great. So, yeah, I think that person, I think that creativity is it is a fascinating topic, because I think that when you're a kid, oftentimes you're told more often not. To do certain things than to do certain things. And I think that you know, when you're creative and you put your ideas out there at a very young age, you can learn shame. You know, people don't like what you do, or make fun of what you do, or they may like it, and it may be great, but if there's, you know, you're opened up to that risk of other people's judgment. And I think that people start retreating from that at a very young age. Could because of parents, could because of teachers, could because of their peer group, but they learn maybe in terms of what they think is emotional survival, although would never be articulated that way, at putting their stuff out there, they can be judged, and they don't like being judged, and that's a very uncomfortable place to be. So I think creativity is both an expression and a process.   Michael Hingson ** 40:59 Well, I'll and I think, I think you're right, and I think that it is, it is unfortunate all too often, as you said, how children are told don't do this or just do that, but don't do this, and no, very few people take the next logical step, which is to really help the child understand why they said that it isn't just don't. It should be. Why not? One of my favorite stories is about a student in school once and was taking a philosophy class. You'll probably have heard this, but he and his classmates went in for the final exam, and the instructor wrote one word on the board, which was why? And then everybody started to write. And they were writing furiously this. This student sat there for a couple of minutes, wrote something on a paper, took it up, handed it in, and left. And when the grades came out, he was the only one who got an A. And the reason is, is because what he put on his paper was, why not, you know, and, and that's very, very valid question to ask. But the reality is, if we really would do more to help people understand, we would be so much better off. But rather than just telling somebody what to do, it's important to understand why?   Jeffrey Madoff ** 42:22 Yeah, I remember when I was in I used to draw all the time, and my parents would bring home craft paper from the store that was used to wrap packets. And so they would bring me home big sheets I could do whatever I wanted on it, you know, and I would draw. And in school I would draw. And when art period happened once or twice a week, and the teacher would come in with her cart and I was drawing, that was when this was in, like, the middle 50s, and Davy Crockett was really a big deal, and I was drawing quite an intricate picture of the battle at the Alamo. And the teacher came over to me and said she wanted us to do crayon resist, which is, you know, they the watercolors won't go over the the crayon part because of the wax and the crayon. And so you would get a different thing that never looked good, no matter who did it, right? And so the teacher said to me, what are you doing? And I said, Well, I'm drawing. It's and she said, Why are you drawing? I said, Well, it's art class, isn't it? She said, No, I told you what to do. And I said, Yeah, but I wanted to do this. And she said, Well, you do what I tell you, where you sit there with your hands folded, and I sat there with my hands folded. You know I wasn't going to be cowed by her. And I've thought back on that story so often, because so often you get shut down. And when you get shut down in a strong way, and you're a kid, you don't want to tread on that land again. Yeah, you're afraid,   Michael Hingson ** 44:20 yeah. Yeah. And maybe there was a good reason that she wanted you to do what she wanted, but she should have taken the time to explain that right, right now, of course, my question is, since you did that drawing with the Alamo and so on, I'm presuming that Davy Crockett looked like Fess Parker, right? Just checking,   Jeffrey Madoff ** 44:42 yeah, yep, yeah. And my parents even got me a coon   Michael Hingson ** 44:47 skin hat. There you go, Daniel Boone and David Crockett and   Jeffrey Madoff ** 44:51 Davy Crockett and so there were two out there. Mine was actually a full coon skin cap with the tail. And other kids had it where the top of it was vinyl, and it had the Disney logo and a picture of Fess Parker. And I said, Now I don't want something, you know, and you are correct, you are correct. It was based on fess Barker. I think   Michael Hingson ** 45:17 I have, I had a coons kid cap, and I think I still do somewhere. I'm not quite sure where it is, but it was a real coonskin cap with a cake with a tail.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 45:26 And does your tail snap off? Um, no, yeah, mine. Mine did the worst thing about the coonskin cap, which I thought was pretty cool initially, when it rained, it was, you know, like you had some wet animal on your Well, yes, yeah, as you did, she did, yeah, animal on your head, right? Wasn't the most aromatic of the hub. No,   Michael Hingson ** 45:54 no, it's but Huh, you got to live with it. That's right. So what is the key to having great creative collaborations? I love collaborating when I wrote my original book, Thunder dog, and then running with Roselle, and then finally, live like a guide dog. I love the idea of collaborating, and I think it made all three of the books better than if it had just been me, or if I had just let someone else do it, because we're bringing two personalities into it and making the process meld our ideas together to create a stronger process.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 46:34 I completely agree with you, and collaboration, for instance, in my play personality, the director Sheldon apps is a fantastic collaborator, and as a result, has helped me to be a better writer, because he would issue other challenges, like, you know, what if we looked at it this way instead of that way? What if you gave that power, that that character, the power in that scene, rather than the Lloyd character? And I loved those kinds of challenges. And the key to a good collaboration is pretty simple, but it doesn't happen often enough. Number one is listening. You aren't going to have a good collaboration if you don't listen. If you just want to interrupt and shut the other person down and get your opinion out there and not listen, that's not going to be good. That's not going to bode well. And it's being open. So people need to know that they're heard. You can do that a number of ways. You can sort of repeat part of what they said, just so I want to understand. So you were saying that the Alamo situation, did you have Davy Crockett up there swinging the rifle, you know? So the collaboration, listening, respect for opinions that aren't yours. And you know, don't try to just defeat everything out of hand, because it's not your idea. And trust developing a trust with your collaborators, so that you have a clearly defined mission from the get go, to make whatever it is better, not just the expression of one person's will over another. And I think if you share that mission, share that goal, that the other person has earned your trust and vice versa, that you listen and acknowledge, then I think you can have great collaboration. And I've had a number of great collaborators. I think I'm a good collaborator because I sort of instinctively knew those things, and then working with Sheldon over these last few years made it even more so. And so that's what I think makes a really great collaboration.   Michael Hingson ** 49:03 So tell me about the play personality. What's it about? Or what can you tell us about it without giving the whole thing away?   Jeffrey Madoff ** 49:10 So have you ever heard of Lloyd Price?   Michael Hingson ** 49:14 The name is familiar. So that's   Jeffrey Madoff ** 49:16 the answer that I usually get is, I'm not really sure. Yeah, it's kind of familiar. And I said, Well, you don't, probably don't know his name, but I'll bet you know his music. And I then apologize in advance for my singing, you know, cause you've got walk, personality, talk, personality, smile, oh yeah, yeah. I love that song, you know. Yeah. Do you know that song once I did that, yes, yeah. So Lloyd was black. He grew up in Kenner, Louisiana. It was he was in a place where blacks were expected to know their place. And. And if it was raining and a white man passed, you'd have to step into a mud puddle to let them pass, rather than just working by each other. And he was it was a tough situation. This is back in the late 1930s and what Lloyd knew is that he wanted to get out of Kenner, and music could be his ticket. And the first thing that the Lloyd character says in the play is there's a big dance opening number, and first thing that his character says is, my mama wasn't a whore. My dad didn't leave us. I didn't learn how to sing in church, and I never did drugs. I want to get that out of the way up front. And I wanted to just blow up all the tropes, because that's who Lloyd was, yeah, and he didn't drink, he didn't learn how to sing in church. And, you know, there's sort of this baked in narrative, you know, then then drug abuse, and you then have redeemed yourself. Well, he wasn't like that. He was entrepreneurial. He was the first. He was the it was really interesting at the time of his first record, 1952 when he recorded Lottie, Miss Claudia, which has been covered by Elvis and the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen and on and on. There's like 370 covers of it. If you wanted to buy a record by a black artist, you had to go to a black owned record store. His records couldn't get on a jukebox if it was owned by a white person. But what happened was that was the first song by a teenager that sold over a million copies. And nobody was prejudiced against green, which is money. And so Lloyd's career took off, and it The story tells about the the trajectory of his career, the obstacles he had to overcome, the triumphs that he experienced, and he was an amazing guy. I had been hired to direct, produce and direct a short documentary about Lloyd, which I did, and part of the research was interviewing him, and we became very good friends. And when I didn't know anything about him, but I knew I liked his music, and when I learned more about him, I said, Lloyd, you've got an amazing story. Your story needs to be told. And I wrote the first few scenes. He loved what I wrote. And he said, Jeff, I want you to do this. And I said, thank you. I want to do it, but there's one other thing you need to know. And he said, What's that? And I said, You're the vessel. You're the messenger, but your story is bigger than you are. And he said, Jeff, I've been waiting for years for somebody to say that to me, rather than just blowing more smoke up my ass. Yeah. And that started our our collaboration together and the story. And it was a great relationship. Lloyd died in May of 21 and we had become very close, and the fact that he trusted me to tell his story is of huge significance to me. And the fact that we have gotten such great response, we've had two commercial runs. We're moving the show to London, is is is really exciting. And the fact that Lloyd, as a result of his talent and creativity, shattered that wall that was called Race music in race records, once everybody understood on the other side that they could profit from it. So there's a lot of story in there that's got a lot of meat, and his great music   Michael Hingson ** 54:04 that's so cool and and so is it? Is it performing now anywhere, or is it? No, we're   Jeffrey Madoff ** 54:12 in between. We're looking actually, I have a meeting this this week. Today is February 11. I have a meeting on I think it's Friday 14th, with my management in London, because we're trying to get a theater there. We did there in October, and got great response, and now we're looking to find a theater there.   Michael Hingson ** 54:37 So what are the chance we're going to see it on Broadway?   Jeffrey Madoff ** 54:41 I hope a very good chance Broadway is a very at this point in Broadway's history. It's it's almost prohibitively expensive to produce on Broadway, the West End has the same cache and. Yeah, because, you know, you think of there's that obscure British writer who wrote plays called William Shakespeare. You may have heard of   Michael Hingson ** 55:07 him, yeah, heard of the guy somewhere, like, like, I've heard of Lloyd Price, yeah, that's   Jeffrey Madoff ** 55:15 it. And so I think that Broadway is certainly on the radar. The first step for us, the first the big step before Broadway is the West End in London. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 55:30 that's a great place to go. It is.   Jeffrey Madoff ** 55:32 I love it, and I speak the language, so it's good. Well, there you   Michael Hingson ** 55:35 are. That helps. Yes, well, you're a very creative kind of individual by any standard. Do you ever get involved with or have you ever faced the whole concept of imposter syndrome?   Jeffrey Madoff ** 55:48 Interesting, you mentioned that the answer is no, and I'll tell you why it's no. And you know, I do a fair amount of speaking engagements and that sort of thing, and that comes up particularly with women, by the way, imposter syndrome, and my point of view on it is, you know, we're not imposters. If you're not trying to con somebody and lying about what you do, you're a work in progress, and you're moving towards whatever it is that your goals are. So when my play became a produced commercial piece of theater and I was notarized as a playwright, why was that same person the day before that performance happened? And so I think that rather than looking at it as imposter, I look at it as a part of the process, and a part of the process is gaining that credibility, and you have to give yourself permission to keep moving forward. And I think it's very powerful that if you declare yourself and define yourself rather than letting people define you. So I think that that imposter syndrome comes from that fear, and to me, instead of fear, just realize you're involved in the process and so you are, whatever that process is. And again, it's different if somebody's trying to con you and lie to you, but in terms of the creativity, and whether you call yourself a painter or a musician or a playwright or whatever, if you're working towards doing that, that's what you do. And nobody starts off full blown as a hit, so to speak. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 57:44 well, I think you're absolutely right, and I think that it's all about not trying to con someone. And when you are doing what you do, and other people are involved, they also deserve credit, and people like you probably have no problem with making sure that others who deserve credit get the credit. Oh, absolutely, yeah, I'm the same way. I am absolutely of the opinion that it goes back to collaboration. When we're collaborating, I'm I'm very happy to talk about the fact that although I started the whole concept of live like a guide dog, carry Wyatt Kent and I worked on it together, and the two of us work on it together. It's both our books. So each of us can call it our book, but it is a collaborative effort, and I think that's so important to be able to do,   Jeffrey Madoff ** 58:30 oh, absolutely, absolutely, you know, the stuff that I was telling you about Sheldon, the director, you know, and that he has helped me to become a better writer, you know, and and when, as as obviously, you have experienced too, when you have a fruitful collaboration, it's fabulous, because you're both working together to create the best possible result, as opposed to self aggrandizement, right?   Michael Hingson ** 59:03 Yeah, it is. It is for the things that I do. It's not about me and I and I say it all the time when I'm talking to people who I'd like to have hire me to be a speaker. It's not about me, it's about their event. And I believe I can add value, and here's why I think I can add value, but it's not about me, it's about you and your event, right? And it's so important if, if you were to give some advice to somebody starting out, or who wants to be creative, or more creative and so on, what kind of advice would you give them?   Jeffrey Madoff ** 59:38 I would say it's more life advice, which is, don't be afraid of creative risk, because the only thing that you have that nobody else has is who you are. So how you express who you are in the most unique way of who you are? So that is going to be what defines your work. And so I think that it's really important to also realize that things are hard and always take more time than you think they should, and that's just part of the process. So it's not easy. There's all these things out there in social media now that are bull that how people talk about the growth of their business and all of this stuff, there's no recipe for success. There are best practices, but there's no recipes for it. So however you achieve that, and however you achieve making your work better and gaining the attention of others, just understand it's a lot of hard work. It's going to take longer than you thought, and it's can be incredibly satisfying when you hit certain milestones, and don't forget to celebrate those milestones, because that's what's going to give you the strength to keep going forward.   Michael Hingson ** 1:01:07 Absolutely, it is really about celebrating the milestones and celebrating every success you have along the way, because the successes will build to a bigger success. That's right, which is so cool. Well, this has been a lot of fun. We've been doing this for an hour. Can you believe it? That's been great. It has been and I really appreciate you being here, and I I want to thank all of you who are listening, but please tell your friends to get into this episode as well. And we really value your comments, so please feel free to write me. I would love to know what you thought about today. I'm easy to reach. It's Michael M, I C H, A, E, L, H i at accessibe, A, C, C, E, S, S i b, e.com, or you can always go to our podcast page, which is Michael hingson, M, I C H, A, E, L, H i N, G, s o n.com/podcast, where you can listen to or access all the of our podcasts, but they're also available, as most likely you've discovered, wherever you can find podcasts, so you can get them on Apple and all those places and wherever you're listening. We do hope you'll give us a five star review. We really value your reviews, and Jeff has really given us a lot of great insights today, and I hope that you all value that as well. So we really would appreciate a five star rating wherever you're listening to us, and that you'll come back and hear some more episodes with us. If you know of anyone who ought to be a guest, Jeff, you as well. Love You to refer people to me. I'm always looking for more people to have on because I do believe that everyone in the world is unstoppable if you learn how to accept that and move forward. And that gets back to our whole discussion earlier about failure or whatever, you can be unstoppable. That doesn't mean you're not going to have challenges along the way, but that's okay. So we hope that if you do know people who ought to be on the podcast, or if you want to be on the podcast and you've been listening, step up won't hurt you. But again, Jeff, I want to thank you for being here. This has been a lot of fun, and we really appreciate your time. Thank   Jeffrey Madoff ** 1:03:16 you, Michael, for having you on. It was fun. You   **Michael Hingson ** 1:03:23 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com . AccessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for Listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.

Have you ever heard a story so wild, so intense, and yet so full of heart that it just stops you in your tracks? That's exactly what happened when we sat down with Don Mann—SEAL Team 6 veteran, world-class endurance athlete, mountaineer, bestselling author, and now TV host. But more than all the titles and achievements, Don is a man who has been through the fire—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—and came out stronger on the other side.In this episode, Don shares stories that'll have you on the edge of your seat. From almost dying on Everest, to SEAL missions that pushed him beyond human limits, to the tender moments of being a grandfather supporting his daughter through her child's leukemia diagnosis—this isn't just about adventure. It's about grit. It's about faith. It's about how pain can refine us, not define us.If you've ever felt stuck… If you're in a low season or wondering what your next move should be… this episode will light a fire in your soul. Don's “four rules for life” are simple and powerful—daily practices that anyone, anywhere can do. You'll walk away inspired to stop making excuses and start summiting the mountains in your own life.This isn't just a podcast—it's a call to action. And trust us, you don't want to miss it.Chapters:[00:00] Podcast Preview[00:40] Podcast Introduction[01:15] Topic and Guest Introduction[04:34] Setting Macro and Micro Goals[08:14] The Influence of Family and Hard Work[10:35] Learning to Welcome Pain[12:11] The Everest Climb That Almost Killed Him[21:35] The Role of Faith in Endurance [26:05] The Path to Becoming a Navy SEAL[31:50] Underwater Challenges and Survival[36:03] The Formation of SEAL Team 6[40:07] Personal Resilience and Family Challenges[42:20] Creating Impact Through TV Shows[45:55] 4 Simple Daily Rules for Success[49:50] Finding Purpose in Adversity[54:28] Don's Biggest Breakthrough: The Pain of Loss[57:07] How to Connect with Don MannResources mentioned:Don Mann's WebsiteGuest's bio and social handles:Don Mann is a former Navy SEAL and SEAL Team Six operator whose life reads like a real-world action thriller—only it's all true. A world-class endurance athlete once ranked 38th globally in triathlons, Don has competed in over 1,000 races, pushing the boundaries of what the human body and spirit can endure.He's also a New York Times bestselling author and the creator and host of the hit TV series Surviving Mann, where he challenges others to dig deep and go beyond what they thought was possible. But behind the elite training and high-stakes missions are personal battles that reveal Don's deeper strength: the loss of loved ones, supporting his family through serious illness, and walking alongside his granddaughter in her fight against leukemia.Through every mountain climbed, mission completed, or mile endured, Don remains grounded in his faith—often turning workouts into sacred moments of prayer. His life is a living testimony to how grit, grace, and unwavering purpose can transform pain into a breakthrough.Call to action:Make sure to visit yourbiggestbreakthrough.com for your FREE access to our e-book and audiobook, "Unstoppable: Divine Intervention in Overcoming Adversity," showcasing six powerful real-life stories. Get ready to be inspired by these mind-blowing breakthroughs!To learn more about Wendie and her Visibly Fit program, visit wendiepett.comTo find out more about

Hi Loyal Readers. Thank you for opening this week's issue of Article Club.In case you're new here: Every month over the last five-plus years, we've done a deep dive on an outstanding article. This means reading, annotating, and discussing the piece on Zoom. It also means inviting the author to share their views in a podcast interview. They almost always say yes. Click here and scroll down to check out all the authors we've had.Today's issue is dedicated to my interview with Brendan I. Koerner, author of this month's featured article, “The Spectacular Burnout of a Solar Panel Salesman.” Scroll down for:* a quick review of the article (and why I liked it so much)* a short bio of the author (and why I appreciated our conversation)* an invite to our discussion on June 1The Article (and why I liked it so much)“The Spectacular Burnout of a Solar Panel Salesman”Original Article • My Annotations • Gift Link • Wired (20 minutes)Eighteen-year-old Aaron Colvin lives in New York and attends college at Niagara University. But like many young men right now, Aaron is unsure that college is for him. He feels incomplete, lost somehow — and he's yearning for a way to make it big. Then one day, while at the gym, Aaron meets a bodybuilder, an enormous man who says he's made “crazy money” selling solar panels down in Florida. You should check it out, he says. After thinking about it, Aaron takes the plunge, leaving college to join a door-to-door solar panel sales crew named Seal Team Six. He spends his days “blitzing” neighborhoods with his colleagues — also young men wanting to strike it rich. In the evenings, Aaron records content for his fledgling YouTube channel and downs burritos with the bros, all the while seeking personal enlightenment (and paying for his lodging, and making very little money, and not receiving benefits).I've been telling people, this article is quintessential Article Club material. The writing is superb, the pace is quick, and most importantly, you'll have empathy for Aaron, because Mr. Koerner writes with compassion. In addition, the piece explores many of the topics we care about: masculinity, capitalism, higher education, technology, and the American dream. If you haven't read it yet, I hope you try it.The Author (and why I appreciated our conversation)Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired, where he writes in-depth stories about criminal justice, national security, biomedical research, and sundry other topics. Mr. Koerner is also the author of two books of narrative nonfiction: Now the Hell Will Start, the tale of an American G.I. who went native in the Indo-Burmese jungle, and The Skies Belong to Us, a history of the American hijacking epidemic of the late 1960s and early 1970s.I appreciated my conversation with Mr. Koerner for many reasons. We covered a wide range of topics, including how this article came about, how he found Aaron, and why he was interested in the topic. Mr. Koerner also spoke about how he reported and organized the piece, and most importantly, how he wanted the reader to feel about Aaron. He said, “ We have to come out of this admiring Aaron, because I admire Aaron. He made kind of a foolish choice, which he acknowledges, and he went through something kind of crazy, but I admire him. I admire his authenticity. I admire his earnestness. I admire his perspective and his intellect.”It was illuminating to hear Mr. Koerner share his thoughts on the challenges that young men face and the allure of get-rich-quick schemes, especially when they embrace notions of spirituality and self-help and cultiness. I liked the entire interview, but my favorite part was when Mr. Koerner talked about his teenage son, who is not much younger than Aaron. My hope is that you'll take a listen.Note: If you prefer listening on Apple Podcasts, you can subscribe to Article Club there. It's easy: Click here.An invitation to our discussion on June 1I warmly invite you to participate in our discussion on Sunday, June 1, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT. We'll meet on Zoom. You can sign up below.If it's your first time: We'll spend the first few minutes saying hi and doing short introductions. Then after I frame the piece and share our community agreements, we'll break out into small, facilitated discussion groups. The small groups usually include 5-8 people, so there's plenty of time to share your perspectives and listen to others. That's where we'll spend the bulk of our time. Toward the end, we'll return to the full group, sharing our reflections and appreciations of fellow participants.If you're unsure, I get it. If you don't know me, it might feel strange to sign up for an online discussion with total strangers. But I'm confident that you'll find yourself at home with other kind people who like to read deeply and explore ideas in community. It's not a surprise that we're able to create an intimate space, almost like we're in the same physical room together. I hope you'll try it!Thank you for reading and listening to this week's issue. Hope you liked it.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Rob Roy, a Navy veteran, former member of SEAL Team Six, and the founder and CEO of Trident Coaching and Consulting. Rob brings decades of experience in elite military operations and leadership development, and his personal journey—from a difficult upbringing in Milwaukee to the pinnacle of America's special operations community—is nothing short of extraordinary. In our conversation, Rob opens up about his time in the SEALs, the intense mental and physical challenges of BUD/S training, and what it was like to serve among the most elite warriors in the world. He shares hard-earned wisdom on resilience, leadership, and self-mastery, the transition from life inside SEAL Team Six to coaching high performers in the civilian world, and much more. I invite you to listen to the full conversation, where we explore grit, growth, and the mindset of excellence. And now I give you, Rob Roy.

Marcus Capone served as an elite SEAL Team Six operator, carrying out some of the most dangerous missions in modern warfare. But after years of intense combat, Marcus faced an even greater battle PTSD & TBI. After overcoming this with Ibogaine, Marcus has now set out to bring psychedelics medicine to the mainstream through VETS and TARA minds. In this episode, Marcus shares his raw, unfiltered journey from the frontlines to discovering how psychedelics helped save his life and the lives of many other veterans. Shawn Ryan Show Episode Mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq9oDM_u2yA&t=161s Guest: Marcus Capone • Former SEAL Team Six Operator • Advocate for Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy • Founder of VETS, Inc. & TARA Minds⸻Related Episodes: • Inside the Elite Team Hunting Cartels in America → https://youtu.be/yne6IoVAFV8 • Former CIA Spy Exposes the Secrets of Espionage and AI Control → https://youtu.be/eDj3891xqow⸻Follow The Reed Morin Show: • Twitter: https://twitter.com/@ReedMorinShow • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@reedmorinshow • TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thereedmorinshowTimestamps: 00:00 Intro1:49 Marcus & TARA Minds20:41 Transition to Military29:23 Team Sports & Navy Seals34:39 The Real Secret to Passing NAVY Seal BUD/s45:57 9/1149:57 Assessment to SEAL Team 1054:23 Operation Red Wings 1:06:24 What is NAVY SEAL Breacher1:12:35 Psychedelics Effect on the Brain 1:21:54 Spiritual Reality of Psychedelics1:32:09 Friendly Fire Incident1:37:34 Veterans Finding God Through Psychedelics 1:43:26 Marcus Connects with God1:56:28 Future of Psychedelics 1:57:28 SEAL Team 6 Selection 2:00:39 Marcus Post War Struggle2:15:23 Stopping Prescription Drugs2:27:32 Wrap Up and Future of TARA Minds#Podcast #SEALTeamSix #Veterans #Psychedelics #PTSD #Military #MentalHealth #CombatVeterans #Healing #ReedMorinShow

Robert J. O’Neill is one of the most highly decorated combat veterans of our time. He served at SEAL Team Two, SEAL Team Four and eight years at the legendary SEAL Team Six. Having taken part in and leading over 400 combat missions, Rob operated in Liberia, The Balkans, The Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Having been decorated 53 times, his awards include two Silver Stars for gallantry in action against the enemy, four Bronze Stars with Valor to denote heroism against the enemy, a Joint Service Commendation Medal with Valor, a Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with Valor, three Presidential Unit Commendations and three Combat Action ribbons to name a few. Some of Rob’s qualifications include Military Free-Fall Jumpmaster, Tandem Tethered Bundle Master, Naval Special Warfare Scout / Sniper, Breacher, Master Naval Parachutist, Master Training Specialist, Diving Supervisor, Range Officer in Charge for Small Arms, Close Quarters Battle, Breaching, Laser System Safety Officer among many others. Rob took part in the rescue for Operation Red Wings, which extracted the Lone Survivor, Marcus Luttrell, he was the lead jumper for the rescue operation that saved Captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates and he was a Team Leader for Operation Neptune’s Spear, the mission to kill Osama bin Laden. Rob is co-founder of Special Operators Transition Foundation, specializing in assisting Special Operations Forces veterans with the successful transition from the service into their next great career in corporate America. Rob is the author of the NY Times and London Times Best Selling Memoir THE OPERATOR: Firing the Shots that Killed Osama bin Laden and My Years as a SEAL Team Warrior. Rob has been interviewed on Fox News, CNN, CBS, Newsmax and others.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Jack Carr Book Club March 2025 selection is FEARLESS by Eric Blehm.FEARLESS chronicles the remarkable journey of SEAL Team SIX operator Adam Brown. From his adventurous youth in Arkansas to his struggles with addiction and eventual redemption, Adam's life exemplifies unwavering courage and determination. Overcoming personal demons, he rose to the elite ranks of SEAL Team SIX, where his faith, family, and relentless spirit propelled him to heroic heights. His final act of bravery in Afghanistan stands as a testament to his selflessness and valor. FEARLESS offers an intimate portrayal of a man who faced immense challenges yet remained undaunted, leaving an enduring legacy of what it truly means to be fearless.Eric Blehm is an award-winning author renowned for his compelling nonfiction narratives. His New York Times bestseller, FEARLESS, was published in 2013. His other notable works include THE LAST SEASON, which won the National Outdoor Book Award, and THE ONLY THING WORTH DYING FOR. His latest release, THE DARKEST WHITE, delves into the life of legendary snowboarder Craig Kelly. Blehm's storytelling captures the essence of his subjects, offering readers profound insights into extraordinary lives. FOLLOW ERICInstagram - @ericblehmofficialFacebook - @ericblehmLinkedIn - @EricBlehmWebsite - https://www.ericblehm.com/FOLLOW JACKInstagram - @JackCarrUSA X - @JackCarrUSAFacebook - @JackCarr YouTube - @JackCarrUSA SPONSORSCRY HAVOC – A Tom Reece Thriller https://www.officialjackcarr.com/books/cry-havoc/Bravo Company Manufacturing Mk15 Timepiece - MOD3:https://bravocompanyusa.com/bcm-mk15-timepiece-mod-3/ and on Instagram @BravoCompanyUSATHE SIGs of Jack Carr, From Savage Son: P320 X Compact, P320 Custom build from True Precision, P365 Customized from the Sig Custom Workshop, P226 Visit https://www.sigsauer.com/ and on Instagram @sigsauerinc STACCATO HD: https://staccato2011.com/hd and on Instagram @staccato2011Jack Carr Gear: Explore the gear here https://jackcarr.co/gear 

Going through the motions in the gym without real progress can be frustrating, leaving you feeling drained instead of energized. Sticking to the same ineffective routine not only stalls results but can also sap your motivation and confidence. The truth is, training should challenge you, push your limits, and reignite your drive—not feel like a chore. When you break free from outdated methods and embrace a plan built for real strength and growth, everything changes. Your body responds, your mindset sharpens, and suddenly, fitness becomes a source of power instead of another struggle. Phil Ross is a fitness expert, martial artist, and educator with over 30 years of experience in strength training and wellness coaching. A black belt in four martial arts styles and a master kettlebell instructor, he has trained elite groups like SEAL Team Six, NFL teams, and UFC fighters. As the creator of the BodyBell Method, he blends martial arts and strength training for optimal performance. Today, Phil shares insights on fitness transformation, emphasizing how short, consistent workouts can enhance physical and mental health while building strength, discipline, and resilience through his innovative training methods. Stay tuned! Resources BodyBell Method: Master Kettlebell Training. Transform your clients. Phil Ross: Meet "Master Phil" Connect with Phil Ross on LinkedIn Follow Phil Ross on Instagram Follow Phil Ross on Facebook Follow Phil Ross on TikTok Subscribe to Master Phil on YouTube Get a copy of Exercise Snacks: Fitness 5 Minutes at a Time by Phil Ross on Amazon Listen to Master Phil in Your Corner Podcast by Phil Ross on Apple Podcasts

Don Mann is a retired Navy SEAL Team Six commando, an internationally renowned endurance athlete, and a multiple New York Times Best-Selling Author. He shares fascinating stories about taking down Osama Bin Laden, rescuing Captain Phillips, surviving being captured, and nearly dying while climbing Mt. Everest.If you enjoy this episode, please consider leaving a rating and a review. It makes a huge difference in spreading the word about the show and helps us get more great guests. Thanks for listening!Follow Don on IG @us_frogmann and check out his website at www.usfrogmann.com  Follow Moshe on social media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MoshePopack/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mpopack/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mpopack Topics:  0:00 - Intro2:00 – SEAL Team Six5:00 – Finding Bin Laden9:00 – Why Don chose Seal Team Six13:00 – Six vs the other teams17:00 – When Don got captured25:00 – Barely surviving Mt. Everest32:00 – The four life skills you need most

Rich talks with former Navy SEAL Robert O'Neill, the SEAL Team Six member who killed Osama bin Laden, about President Trump's ultimatum to Hamas. Elon Musk says he's not interested in buying TikTok. We look at the potential sale of the social media app with Allum Bokhari, managing director at the Foundation for Freedom Online. Later, Kevin Wade tells how he went from Hollywood screenwriter to show runner of TV's Blue Bloods to novelist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Andrew “Sully” Sullivan is a former SEAL Team 6 member with an incredible story! Here is the link to his website, https://c1p.org/donate

Rob "Chief" Roy is a highly accomplished veteran with over 25 years of service in the U.S. Navy, including 21 years as a Navy SEAL. He spent more than a decade as a member of SEAL Team Six, a premier anti-terrorism and maritime interdiction unit, playing a critical role in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Rob held the position of Leading Chief Petty Officer within the Naval Special Warfare (NSW) Motivators, where he was responsible for recruiting, mentoring, and developing over 500 future SEALs. During his military career, he worked closely with elite units such as the U.S. Army Special Forces, the CIA, and U.S. Customs.Rob retired from active duty in 2005 and quickly transitioned into the world of business and leadership development. He founded Special Operations Training Group (SOT-G), a company focused on providing leadership solutions that help clients operate safely and effectively in high-pressure environments. His leadership philosophy, drawn from his SEAL experience, emphasizes discipline, teamwork, and decision-making under stress—skills he imparts to corporate leaders and organizations.In 2007, Rob became a sought-after resource for the Young President's Organization (YPO), where he developed the Leadership Under Fire program. This initiative, which earned the YPO-WPO Best of the Best Award four out of seven years, focuses on teaching executives how to lead in challenging situations, much like Navy SEALs do in the field.Rob has appeared on major media outlets such as Bloomberg TV, Fox News, and NBC, and has been featured in Business Insider, TheStreet.com, and Inc. He is the author of Leadership Lessons of the Navy SEALs and the forthcoming The Subdued Trident: Journey of the Invisible Warrior. His unique perspective on leadership, shaped by his extensive military background, is a cornerstone of his training programs and public speaking engagements.In addition to his business ventures, Rob is also passionate about wildlife conservation. In 2013, he traveled to South Africa to combat rhino poaching, an effort documented by Animal Planet. His team's work significantly reduced the threat to the rhino population, showcasing his leadership in yet another high-stakes environment.Rob's contributions to both the military and civilian sectors have earned him numerous accolades, including induction into the Martial Arts Hall of Fame in 2014 by the World Wide Martial Arts Council (WWMAC). His blend of military precision and entrepreneurial spirit continues to inspire and transform the lives of individuals and organizations through his seminars, workshops, and speaking engagements across the country. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Warrior of God: The Spiritual Battle with Dom Raso This week's Team Never Quit guest is Dom Raso, a former Navy SEAL Team Six operator who is renowned for his elite military service and deeply inspiring journey of faith and personal transformation. Dom's name is synonymous with the highest levels of military excellence, but beyond his unparalleled contributions to the U.S. military, his story is one of profound spiritual resilience, unwavering commitment to family, and a fierce devotion to spreading the Gospel. Dom served with distinction as part of Navy SEAL Team Six, a unit known for its elite status and high-risk operations. Throughout his career, he contributed to the development of military techniques that are still in use today. But in this episode, Dom reveals the deeper side of his journey—how he has navigated grief, loss, and intense physical and spiritual battles while remaining anchored in his faith. Now a devoted Catholic, husband, father of five, and entrepreneur, Dom is leveraging his platform to lead others into deeper encounters with God. With an Instagram following of over 175,000 people, he is a bold evangelist, sharing scriptural reflections, his devotion to the Rosary, and his love for the Eucharist. As the founder of Crush Everything, a company focused on equipping individuals to defend themselves and their loved ones, Dom embodies the philosophy that the physical and spiritual are intertwined in the life of a warrior. In this conversation, Dom reflects on his experiences as a Navy SEAL, the power of prayer, and the concept of spiritual warfare. He shares how the Rosary, a tool he has cherished since his military days, has become his most powerful weapon. Dom also explores the importance of living a disciplined life, staying close to the Lord, and using one's unique gifts to evangelize and spread virtue in the culture. In This Episode You Will Hear: • Most people have enough children around them where really you could spend the majority of your time teaching them. (17:57) • If we're not taking those moments we had as a kid and really expounding on them and making them better for our children, we're missing a key point in the gifts we can give them.(19:34) • I had a lot of people speaking very positively [to me]. (21:42) • At about 8 or 9, I would say that was a sure sign of like:”That's it. Now I know what I'm doing.” (23:07) • The Holy Spirit just put it on my heart and said: That's the path.” (23:21) • I believe God has a deep purpose for everybody. (25:10) • Life is made up of choices.(25:22) • I love my father. I love my mother - to death. They knew what was right, but they didn't live it out themselves. (29:07) • What I was missing was a guy like us, or man – a real man, that grabbed me on the shoulders and said “Son, you're not walking on the right path.”(30:43) • I always felt the closeness of God in my life, whether I was on an operation, or going through a challenging time in in my life. You're trying to make sense of what's going on. But you know that God's presence is with you. (33:27) • I meet a lot of team guys who either: A-they know they really need God, or they think that they are God.(34:06) • We're going to go through challenging moments in our lives. We're gonna get our butt kicked. It's though those challenges that form us and forge us to have the faith we have today. (36:27) • There's no way I'd be the man I am today without God's help. (38:26) • Everybody has opportunities to have God work in their life. (39:22) • One of my major call to actions to other men is” Do you want to into the fight and be part of the solution, or are you just gonna point your finger at the bad and never do anything about it?” • Everybody listening: We're all stewarding something. (60:12) • We're really to at the physical part, we're really goo at the mindset part. But it's the Spirit that we're lacking. (85:40) Socials: - Website: https://crusheverything.com - IG: https://www.instagram.com/domraso?igsh=MXZnOHl0ZzI0OW9hMQ==  - IG: team_neverquit , marcusluttrell , melanieluttrell , huntero13 -  https://www.patreon.com/teamneverquit Sponsors:    - Navyfederal.org           - GoodRX.com/TNQ    - ghostbed.com/TNQ [TNQ]   -  kalshi.com/TNQ    - PXG.com/TNQ   -  joinbilt.com/TNQ    - Tonal.com [TNQ]   - greenlight.com/TNQ   - PDSDebt.com/TNQ   - drinkAG1.com/TNQ   - Shadyrays.com [TNQ]   - qualialife.com/TNQ [TNQ]   - Hims.com/TNQ   - Shopify.com/TNQ   - Aura.com/TNQ   - Moink.com/TNQ   - Policygenius.com   - TAKELEAN.com [TNQ]   - usejoymode.com [TNQ]   - Shhtape.com [TNQ]

It was like watching SEAL Team Six spelunk into a dangerous war zone and release the hostages from inside the bunker. Millions of us wandered out. We felt as though a great weight had been lifted. The sun shined once again after one long, dark winter. We were half-celebrating, half in a state of shock. “You mean … we're finally free?” Yes, said the soldiers. You are free.And as the author jotted out those words above, she thought to herself, can I actually write that? Will people say I am exploiting the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust or still being held in Gaza? Will they say I don't know real suffering, and how dare I write such a thing? Yes, they will say that. But no, it won't matter anymore.The truth is that I was always free to write it. I just had to do it outside of the doomsday cult the Left has become. It wasn't some orb out in the middle of the Mojave. It was every major institution in America. And they most certainly aren't giving up without a fight. Heed the words of Peter Boghossian:Trump drove so many mad, from the Never Trumpers to the Woke Left, because they destroyed themselves trying to destroy him. Their biggest problem was that they were never fighting the real Trump. They were fighting one they invented, a supervillain whose mere presence could end democracy itself.It's hard to imagine such smart people losing their critical thinking ability. Power will do that to you, though. No one gives it up willingly. But still, you'd think some of them might have had an inkling America was ready for change by now.It's like that Milan Kundera quote about Totalitarianism:That's what's happened to America in the past four years. Our SEAL Team Six came just in time to liberate us from the tyranny of the minority.Did Rick Wilson really go into election night thinking Trump would lose that badly? How could he have been so confident to make this video the day before Election Day?How could the disconnect from reality be that profound? And when he was thoroughly and completely humiliated, along with all the other Never Trumpers, he blamed the voters. He blamed America.Meanwhile, a wellness check is needed on Jojo from Jerz, another who was so certain her daily rages on X, which earned her so many likes, represented, in any way, the majority in America:The country can't be run by people like Jojo from Jerz. She's just too crazy. No reality has ever once entered the chat. And there are too many just like her that control the entire Democratic Party.Even if Trump only serves one term and JD Vance is somehow beaten by a Democrat (I wouldn't hold my breath), they can always be credited as the liberators who freed all of us, our culture, our economy, our institutions from a cult.For those living in agony for the last four years, you can come out, come out wherever you are.A Mental Health CrisisJust before the election, Mark Halperin predicted a mental health crisis in this country if Donald Trump should win the election.At first, I thought he was exaggerating, but as I watched the reaction on the Left in the wake of another shocking win, I realized he wasn't. Isn't it just possible there is something wrong with the messenger if these folks are shocked yet again by a Donald Trump victory? I was shocked along with them in 2016, but by 2020, I got it.The more educated people are, the more they rely on NPR, the New York Times, NBC News, CNN, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and the Hollywood trades—the less likely they are to see things as they really are rather than how they want them to be. And while it's true reality distortion exists on the Right, it's nowhere near the same level.The media is turning the so-called “4B movement” into a bigger story than it actually is because that, too, is a way to sell fear. These young women are the equivalent of an adolescent who is mad at her parents and refuses to eat her vegetables. NO, I WON'T DO IT!They somehow think this will cause any man in America one second of grief. The last thing they want is to have sex with any of them. Moreover, it's funny that they would think Conservatives would be mad that they aren't having sex and getting pregnant because all that means is less abortions.All of them are using whatever weapon they have to exact revenge on anyone who voted for Trump. They are people who already see themselves as victims. They see Trump and his voters as victimizers. They're living out some kind of fantasy where they can cosplay oppression. In a weird way, Trump gave them exactly what they needed.Inside Woketopia, the more marginalized you are, the more elevated you are. Black and trans people are treated like holy icons. Much is made of how to talk to them, how to make sure they feel safe around you because your white skin is so triggering. Each of them uses their marginalized status as a way to impose their will upon the rest of us. It's blasphemy to criticize or confront them.And herein lies the problem for the Democrats. They can't confront the crazy, let alone eradicate it. They are too afraid of the activists and the bullies on social media. They're afraid their careers will be over, like everyone else inside the doomsday cult.A Trump win makes them all believe that they have, in one election, lost all of their power. That's why you see so many Instagram posts about suicide hotlines but only for LGBTQIA or Queer women, or BIPOC. No white woman or man will get any sympathy for daring to use the moment to suggest they are in worse pain.But the psychosis is real. Watch this mother use her children to draw sympathy from them — yes, from them. Their hysteria and pain feed her need to feel like a victim. This bad thing just happened to HER, so everyone should have to pay, even her own kids.These kids will one day realize that they have been raised by a virulent narcissist, which is what drives this movement more than anything, and perhaps they will be among those who lead the next liberation should America once again be overtaken by a cult.The End of DaysThe women on the Left have centered their entire movement on the act of aborting a child they helped produce, as though the fetus itself, that got there through no fault of its own, is their oppressor. They worry for their daughter's inability to get an abortion, as though that's something every girl should want.// This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Mission Accomplished: Rob O'Neill on SEAL Team Six, Leadership, and Life After the Battlefield. In this week's episode, Marcus and Melanie Luttrell meet with one of the most highly decorated combat veterans of our time—Robert J. O'Neill. With an incredible 400+ combat missions under his belt, Rob's experiences span across Liberia, The Balkans, The Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. As a Navy SEAL, Rob served in SEAL Team Two, SEAL Team Four, and spent eight years with the legendary SEAL Team Six. Rob's heroic career is underscored by 53 decorations, including two Silver Stars for gallantry, four Bronze Stars with Valor for heroism, and a host of other prestigious commendations. His resume of skills includes elite qualifications like Military Free-Fall Jumpmaster, Naval Special Warfare Scout/Sniper, and Master Naval Parachutist, among many others. In this episode, we dive deep into Rob's role in some of the most significant military operations in recent history: Operation Red Wings, which saw the rescue of the Lone Survivor, Marcus Luttrell The lead jumper in the daring rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates Operation Neptune's Spear, the mission that brought down Osama bin Laden Beyond the battlefield, Rob is the co-founder of the Special Operators Transition Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to helping special operations veterans transition to successful careers in corporate America. He is also the author of the best-selling memoir, THE OPERATOR: Firing the Shots that Killed Osama bin Laden and My Years as a SEAL Team Warrior. Throughout his post-military career, Rob has become a prominent public speaker, security consultant, and media contributor, sharing expert insights on military strategy and terrorism. Whether speaking to survivors of 9/11 or delivering keynote speeches to business leaders, Rob translates his elite training into actionable lessons on leadership, resilience, and success. Join us as we explore Rob O'Neill's incredible journey from the frontlines to the boardroom and hear his thoughts on leadership, transition, and how to thrive under pressure. Tune in to hear the untold stories and actionable advice from one of America's most decorated heroes!  In This Episode You Will Hear: • I don't think I could beat Marcus at arm wrestling if I can't pick up a bowling ball. (1:58) • You do realize there's a thing called old man strength? (5:53) • [Rob O'Neil] I have a podcast as well, called “The Operator.” We're called The Operator because if you're doing anything, you're an operator. (6:18) • Having a big man to kick your ass and teach you wind a bobbin; you realize there is skill here. (9:59) • When people quit BUDS, it's not because “this is hard”. [It's because] I'm tired of the broken foot; I'm tire of the shin splints; I'm tire of my dislocated shoulder; I'm tired. 21:20) • In BUDS, one of the biggest problems is eating too much. Like I want 5 cheeseburgers, but we have a 4-mile run afterwards. (26:35) • [Rob] and for everyone that doesn't know, can you explain what a SDV is? [Marcus] Imagine a mini submarine and shrink it down. The difference is that a submarine is dry inside, and the SDV is completely full of water. (37:40) • Listen to Marcus discuss the details of being in an SDV for 8 hours. (38:52) • [Marcus] Talk about ultimate torture - If you have a deep freeze in your garage, fill that sucker full of water, crawl in there and sit down for 8 hours. (38:53) • The first time I got in there, I was terrified. (43:49) • [Marcus] There's stuff that happens to us out there. Sometimes safety gets in the way of it. (58:40) • [After falling down the mountain during Operation Red Wings] I could hear that stream running. I've got to get me water, but I kept thinking I can't drink out of it, because my buddies are in it. (79:27) • If you want to make God laugh, tell Him what your plan is. (90:24) • [Marcus] Bro, when you saw that son of a bitch's face [Osama Bin Laden], what was the first thing you saw? [Rob O'Neal] I saw his nose. He was skinny, wearing white – tall. (93:41) • My nickname was “Nisro” (Navy SEAL Rob O'Neal). When they asked “Who got him?” They go “Nisro,” and they said “Fuck! Were never gonna hear the end of it.” (95:38) Socials: -  IG: mchooyah - Host of The Operator Podcast - IG: team_neverquit , marcusluttrell , melanieluttrell , huntero13 -  https://www.patreon.com/teamneverquit Sponsors:    - Navyfederal.org           - GoodRX.com/TNQ   -  kalshi.com/TNQ    - PXG.com/TNQ   -  joinbilt.com/TNQ    - Tonal.com [TNQ]   - greenlight.com/TNQ   - PDSDebt.com/TNQ   - drinkAG1.com/TNQ    - ghostbed.com/TNQ [TNQ]   - Shadyrays.com [TNQ]   - qualialife.com/TNQ [TNQ]   - Hims.com/TNQ   - Shopify.com/TNQ   - Aura.com/TNQ   - Moink.com/TNQ   - Policygenius.com   - TAKELEAN.com [TNQ]   - usejoymode.com [TNQ]   - Shhtape.com [TNQ]   - mackweldon.com/utm_source=streaming&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcastlaunch&utm_content=TNQutm_term=TNQ

The podcast interdicts huttoad Eric Ambler for the not-quite-final Final Prophecy, which sets the table for the endgame of the New Jedi Order. This snackquarium of an episode is swimming with delicacies, as we follow Nen Yim on a trip to Qahsa Bonita, drop an unusual amount of Search for Spock references, and decide which is better: Seal IV or SEAL Team Six?

In this episode, we sit down with Rich Diviney, a bestselling author, leadership expert, and retired Navy SEAL commander with over 20 years of service, including 13 overseas deployments. As the former officer in charge of training for SEAL Team Six, Rich developed a deep understanding of the core attributes that drive elite performance.Rich's first book, The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers to Optimal Performance, reveals the innate qualities that distinguish top performers in high-pressure environments. His groundbreaking Attributes Performance Method has transformed hiring and team building for organizations around the world.Rich is now working on his second book, Masters of Uncertainty, which focuses on strategies for thriving in uncertain, high-stress environments—just like a Navy SEAL.In this episode, Rich shares invaluable leadership insights, including his top tip: empowering your team by telling them, "I need you." Listen in to discover how this simple phrase fosters trust, respect, and high performance.BONUS: Take Rich's Attributes Assessment with a 15% discount using the code PERKS15! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Free preview of the Bang-Bang Podcast. “We tortured some folks.” Katherine Bigelow and Mark Boal's cinematic blockbuster about the Bin Laden assassination was alternately ballyhooed and panned upon its release. Fans praised its purported cinematic achievements while critics lamented its alleged militarism or pro-torture sympathies. What's remarkable today is the attention it received in all directions, perhaps a universal attention no longer possible in a society so fragmented and lost. Van and Lyle try to make sense of the movie as a contested event, and what its ambiguous ending might tell us about what came next. They also recall where they were when Obama ordered Seal Team Six to pull that trigger.Get the full episode--and all episodes--at: https://www.bangbangpod.com

On this episode of Redefining Work, I'm joined by Rich Diviney, retired U.S. Navy SEAL officer, author and founder of The Attributes. Throughout his 20-year career, which includes leading SEAL Team Six selection, Rich developed a deep understanding of leadership, team dynamics and human performance. In this episode, we dive into Rich's belief in the role of attributes over skills in determining success, his philosophy on building high performing teams and how mastering uncertainty takes performance to the next level.

Soft Skills, Hard Skills, Attributes, Traits, Competencies—these words sometimes get used interchangeably when we talk about assessment and team building. As the momentum around skills-based hiring increases, it is important to know what we really mean when we talk about skills generically and how exactly we are measuring someone's ability to do a particular role. My guest this week is Rich Diviney, founder of The Attributes. Rich is a former Commanding Officer in the US Navy SEALs, where he was responsible for assessing and selecting the elite of the elite for the famous SEAL Team Six. He now speaks and writes about the use of attributes in team building and hiring. We had a fantastic discussion about the difference between skills and attributes in the context of hiring and development. We also discuss my somewhat surprising results from taking Rich's attributes test.  In the interview, we discuss: Identifying the elite of the elite for SEAL Team Six The difference between attributes and skills Understanding how people react in times of stress, challenge, and uncertainty How do you measure and assess attributes? Are soft skills and attributes the same thing? Can you develop attributes? The difference between perseverance, resilience, and tenacity What are companies getting wrong when it comes to skills and hiring? The "Dream Team Paradox" When AI takes over skills, attributes become even more critical. What does the future look like for hiring and managing talent? You can get 15% of The Attributes Assessment by using the code RECRUITING15 Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

In hour 2, Chris talks about Joe Scarborough claiming Trump wants a civil war, as Michael Cohen claims Trump will send Seal Team Six after his enemies...what? For more coverage on the issues that matter to you, download the WMAL app, visit WMAL.com or tune in love on WMAL-FM 105.9 from 9:00am-12:00pm Monday-Friday  To join the conversation, check us out on X @WMAL and @ChrisPlanteShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jessica Buchanan joins Let's Talk Memoir for a conversation about her capture by pirates in Somalia in 2011 and how her life's trajectory was irrevocably changed, taking back power, holding space for our stories, showing up for one another as writers, demystifying the publishing process, celebrating our wins, book branding and building platform, not being paralyzed by perfection, her boutique nontraditional press Soul Speak Press and her anthology series From Deserts to Mountaintops.   Also in this episode: -how we have to hustle -trusting our intuition -being of service   Books mentioned in this episode:  Many Lives of Mama Love by Lara Love Hardin The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls Books by Anne Lamott On October 25, 2011, while on a routine field mission in Somalia, working as the Education Advisor for her non-governmental organization, Jessica was abducted at gunpoint and held for ransom by a group of Somali pirates for 93 days. Forced to live outdoors in deplorable conditions, starved, and terrorized by more than two dozen gangsters, Jessica's health steadily deteriorated until, by order of President Obama, she was rescued by the elite SEAL Team VI on January 25, 2012.   Jessica's ordeal is detailed in her New York Times bestselling book, Impossible Odds: The Kidnapping of Jessica Buchanan and Her Dramatic Rescue by SEAL Team Six. Jessica has been named one of the ‘150 Women Who will Shake the World' by Newsweek, and her story was the most highly viewed 60 Minutes episode to air, to-date. Jessica is a highly sought-after inspirational speaker and her TEDx Pearl Street talk, ‘Change is Your Proof of Life' has been the foundation for which she travels the world, inspiring audiences to access their resilience by identifying their own autonomy and choice in the middle of their own life changing event.   Jessica is the founder of Soul Speak Press where she supports women who are ready to share their stories through Memoirs – books that are one part memoir, one part self-help, and one part inspiration. Jessica's upcoming anthology project, Deserts to Mountaintops: Pilgrimage of Motherhood, is currently in development and scheduled for publication in early 2025.   Jessica works as a family liaison volunteer for the non-profit organization, Hostage US, supporting former hostages and their families during captivity and eventual return, and also continues to serve as a dedicated Ambassador for the Navy SEAL Foundation, which works to support families of fallen SEALs. Connect with Jessica: Official Website: https://www.jessbuchanan.com/ Publishing Website: https://www.soulspeakpress.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jessicabuchananpage LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-buchanan-05ba7364/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jessicacbuchanan/   — Ronit's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer's Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts' 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and lives in Seattle with her family where she teaches memoir workshops and is working on her next book. More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com   Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank Newsletter sign-up: https://ronitplank.com/#signup   Follow Ronit: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ https://twitter.com/RonitPlank https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll's Fingers

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comJeffrey Toobin is a lawyer, author, and the chief legal analyst at CNN, after a long run at The New Yorker. He has written many bestselling books, including True Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Oath, The Nine, and Too Close to Call, and two others — The Run of His Life and A Vast Conspiracy — were adapted for television as seasons of “American Crime Story” on the FX channel.You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — why the Bragg conviction helped Trump, and the origins of lawfare with Bill Clinton — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: growing up in NYC as the only child of two journos; his mom was a pioneering TV correspondent; his dad was one of founding fathers of public television; Jeffrey at the Harvard Crimson and then Harvard Law; how Marty Peretz mentored us both; the conservative backlash after Nixon and rebuilding executive power; Ford's pardon; Jeffrey on the team investigating Oliver North; the Boland Amendment and the limits of law; Cheney's role during Iran-Contra; how Congress hasn't declared war since WWII; Whitewater to Lewinsky; Ken Starr and zealous prosecutors; Trump extorting Ukraine over the Bidens; Russiagate; the Mueller Report and Barr's dithering; how such investigations can help presidents; the Bragg indictment; the media environment of Trump compared to Nixon; Fox News coverage of Covid; Trump's pardons; hiding Biden; the immunity case; SEAL Team Six and other hypotheticals; Jack Smith and fake electors; the documents case; the check of impeachment; the state of SCOTUS and ethics scandals; Thomas and the appearance of corruption; the wives of Thomas and Alito; the Chevron doctrine; reproductive rights; the Southern border and asylum; Jeffrey's main worry about a second Trump term; and his upcoming book on presidential pardons.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Eric Kaufmann on liberal extremism, and Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty. (Van Jones' PR team canceled his planned appearance.) Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.Here's a fan of last week's episode with Anne Applebaum:I loved your freewheeling interview with Applebaum. Just like the last time she was on, each of you gave as good as you got.I tend to agree more with her, because I fear that sometimes you come off as what Jeane Kirkpatrick called the “blame America first crowd” — not that we haven't committed our sins. But if we didn't exist, Putin would still be evil and want to recreate the Warsaw Pact, and the mullahs in Iran would still be fanatics despite our CIA involvement. It's complicated.Another on foreign policy:I despise Putin, my sympathies are totally with the Ukrainians, and I get angry when people like Rod Dreher and Tucker Carlson imply that the Russians were forced by the West to invade Ukraine. But, so what! You hit the nail on the head with the Obama quote — that Ukraine is never going to mean as much to us as it does to them (the Russians). You also made another very good point that the Russians can't even conquer Ukraine, but we're supposed to fear they will march West? How they going to do that?!Another took issue with several things from Anne:You raised the immigration issue, and Applebaum completely dismissed it: Hungary doesn't have a migrant crisis. … Because it's a useful symbol [to] create fear and anxiety. … This is the oldest political trick in the book, and the creation of an imaginary culture war is one of the ways in which you build support among a more fearful part of the population.WTF? Are Hungarians not allowed to see what is happening in every other European country that has allowed mass migration and see the problems it has caused and proactively decide to prevent this?! Are they not allowed to be concerned until Budapest has the banlieues of Paris, the car bombing gangs of Sweden, and the grooming gangs of England?! And in Germany, it has been recently reported that almost half of people receiving social payments are migrants.Applebaum followed that up with an even bigger gobsmacker about Biden's cognitive decline: “This is another road I don't want to go down, but I know people who met with Joe Biden a couple months ago, and he was fine” (meaning I just want to make my statement but will not allow you a rebuttal). And then:I've met [Harris] a few times, mostly in the context of conversations about foreign policy and about Russia and Ukraine and other things. And she's an intelligent conversationalist. … I was impressed with her. And these are way off-the-record conversations... And I was always more impressed with how she was off the record. And then I would sometimes see her in public. And I thought, she seems very stiff and nervous. … You'd like her if you met her in real life.Translation of both of these excerpts: “You plebes who aren't insiders just don't understand, but trust me — the connected insider — instead of your lying eyes.”Another adds:I think for the next few months, you're going to have to push people like Anne Applebaum to be more open to criticizing the Biden-Harris record. She's a smart person with important things to say, but she clearly dared not criticize the current administration, lest she be seen as helping Trump. And another:She says, unironically, that autocrats rig court systems with exotic new lawfare to attack their political enemies to seize or cling to power. I wonder what that makes Alvin Bragg and Merrick Garland.This Dishhead listened to the episode with his teenage son:The notion that Trump supporters want a dictator is beyond ridiculous. They are among the most individualistic and freedom-loving people in America. They are the Jacksonians, the Scots-Irish heart of this country. They are ornery as hell, and if Trump tried to force them into anything, he'd have another thing coming.  Just look how he tried to get them to take “his” vaccine. That didn't work out so well, did it? The truth is, they view people like Anne as the ones who are taking away their rights and freedoms through their absolute dominance of the media and all cultural institutions. Now maybe Trump will deliver them from that and maybe he won't, but that is what they are seeking — not a dictator, but someone who will break the hideous grip that the liberal elite has on the culture.My son is 18 years old and was also listening to the episode. He is highly engaged in national and world affairs, and he also thought Anne was way off track. He's already announced to his mother (much to her chagrin) that he will be casting his first vote for Trump. And get this: he's going to Oberlin College this fall. I can assure you he's not looking for a dictator. He's looking to say “eff you” to a system that has no use for upper-class, normal white boys like him. The elites hate him and his friends.But I'm glad you have a diversity of views on the Dishcast. It really is the best. I look forward to listening to it every week.I can't back Trump, but I do think your son is onto something. On a few other episodes:Lionel Shriver — I love her! I wished you'd talked more about her novel, Mania. It's not perfect, but it's good.On the Stephen Fry pod, I was resistant! He's irritated me at times. But I loved it when you two started doing Larkin! I shouldn't admit this, but “Aubade” could be my autobiography. I think one or both of you misinterpret “Church Going.” Larkin doesn't wish he had faith. I don't think that's relevant to him. Fry talked about how he liked everything about Anglicanism except for the detail about God (and I always suspect that for Anglicans, God is a somewhat troubling detail). I'm probably just guessing, but I don't think that's Larkin. Larkin didn't wish he had faith. He was elegiac about the past in which there was faith. I think you'll see this sensibility in “An Arundel Tomb.”Agreed. Another on Shriver:She seems to think that “liberals” are mistaken in believing that everyone can be equal, but I think she is mistaken in thinking that is what they believe — at least those I know. Liberals do think that 1) expectations play a role in what people achieve; and 2) given the right circumstances, many people find they can achieve more than was expected. Low expectations do lead to low outcomes (and yes, there is research to support that statement). Does that mean everyone can do anything they wish? No. Neither you nor I will ever be a concert pianist, but let us not condemn everyone to the garbage heap based on false expectations.Thanks as always for your provocative discussions.Here's a guest rec:Musa Al Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook, has written for Compact, American Affairs, and The Liberal Patriot. His forthcoming book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, draws on Pierre Bourdieu's notions of cultural capital to analyze the ascendant symbolic capitalists — those who work in law, technology, nonprofits, academia, journalism and media, finance, civil service and the like — and how the ideology known as “wokeness” exists to entrench economic inequality and preserve the hegemony of this class. I have preordered the book, and it should be a timely read for an election in which class (education), not race, has become the preeminent dividing line in our politics.Here's a guest rec with pecs:I have a recommendation that may sound bonkers, but hear me out: Alan Ritchson, the actor whose career has taken off thanks to playing Jack Reacher on Reacher.The fact that he's really, really, really ridiculously good-looking is the least interesting thing about him. I'd love to hear a conversation between you and him for a few reasons. First, he's bipolar and speaks openly about it. Second, he started taking testosterone supplements after his body broke down from working out for Reacher, and he speaks openly about that too. Third, he's a devout evangelical Christian who speaks openly about his faith — and about his disgust with Christian nationalism and the hijacking of Christianity by many Trump supporters. Fourth, he posted what read to me as a thoughtful, sane critique of bad cops, thereby angering certain denizens of the Very Online Right. Thus, he could speak to a number of major Dishcast themes: mental illness, masculinity, and Christianity. To me, he manages to come across as a guy's guy whose comments on political matters sound like the result of actual reflection, rather than reflexively following a progressive script, which is how most celebrities come across. He's articulate, and the way he's navigating this cultural and political moment is fascinating. And if you do snag him, you should supplement the audio with video.Haha. But seriously, we're trying to keep the podcast fresh and this is a great out-of-the-box recommendation. Next up, the dissents over my views on Harris continue from the main page. A reader writes:I have no particular attachment to Kamala Harris, and share some of your concerns, but your latest column reads more like a Fox News hit piece than a real assessment. The main problem is that you seem to be judging Harris almost exclusively on the basis of statements she made in 2020, at the height of the Democrats' woke mania because of George Floyd. Do you not remember that she was destroyed in the primary because she was a prosecutor, and was to the right of almost everyone else in the primary, except for Biden and Sanders? That's why she lost: she wasn't woke enough. So as VP, of course she pivoted to shore up her appeal to the base, like any good politician would. It's terribly unfortunate that she had to tack hard left precisely as the country was moving back to the center and rejecting wokism, but that doesn't mean she's the “wokest candidate,” as you say. It just means she's a politician.My criticism also extended to her management and campaigning skills in the past. And look: I don't think it's fair to compare my attempt to review the evidence of her record with a Fox News hit-piece. It's important to understand her vulnerabilities as well as he core ideas, if she has any. This next reader thinks she is off to a good, non-woke start:I agree with your criticisms of Harris, at least some of them. We need to have stronger border enforcement, we can't have riots in cities, and racism is real but DEI excesses are also bad. And it's troubling that she has a history of being a bad boss. I can only hope that she has learned from her mistakes. But I take heart from her campaign speech in Wisconsin: she said not a word about DEI, nothing about “vote for me to show that you're not sexist/racist, because I'm a woman of color,” and not much about “Trump is a threat to democracy.” It was all, “I have experience dealing with sleazy crooks and sex offenders like Trump, and I want to help middle-class Americans and protect health care and a woman's right to choose.” Sounds like a popular message!You also say, “She is not a serious person.” Bro, have you *seen* the other party's candidate?

Karl “Gus” Gustavson served in the US military as a Navy SEAL and as a member of the elite SEAL Team Six. Back in 2001, Gus was attending college when planes crashed into the World Trade Center. Gus dropped out of college, joined the military, and then served our country for 22 years, completing multiple tours of duty in the Middle East. And now a quick word about SEAL Team Six. Most information concerning SEAL Team Six is classified. Their activities generally aren't commented on by the Department of Defense or the White House. But they are the U.S. Military's primary Tier 1 special mission unit, and are responsible for carrying out the most complex, classified, and dangerous missions, as directed by the President of the United States or the Secretary of Defense. In this episode we discuss the following: Over and over again, Gus saw that his leaders were willing to do everything that they asked their men to do. Secretary Mattis taught the SEALs to ask three questions when making a decision: Does this decision make us more efficient? Does it make us more effective? And does it make us a more lethal fighting machine? Gus noticed that the best leaders delivered information clearly, concisely, and in a timely manner. “Here's the info you need to know. Here's what you're going to do with it. Now go execute.” I was impressed by how Gus controlled his thoughts, whether in combat, on a dive, or even during BUDs. He focused only on the things he could control, in manageable chunks. Sometimes that meant that all he was thinking about was how he could make it through the next hour, or just make it to chow. As a member of SEAL Team Six, Gus is the most elite of the elite. And yet the lessons he shared are lessons that we can all apply. Lessons on leadership, decision making, communication, and mental toughness. All simple, yet profound, practical ideas.    Connect on Social Media: X: https://twitter.com/nate_meikle LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natemeikle/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_meikle/

The Supreme Court handed Donald Trump (and all presidents past, present, and future) presidential immunity for all official acts. Suddenly, the mainstream media is running with the idea that President Trump will use the ruling to "assassinate" opponents in his second term. Visit the Howie Carr Radio Network website to access columns, podcasts, and other exclusive content.

The Supreme Court has officially decided that President Donald J. Trump was entitled to some immunity while he was in office for "official acts". Does this mean that he could have had Seal Team Six gun down his political opponents as the crazy left is claiming? Listen in because host Mike Slater has some of the smartest commentary around on this subject!Following the opener, Breitbart Senior Legal Analyst Ken Klukowski joins the program to give his expert opinion on the immunity decision while also commenting on various other legal matters to look out for in the upcoming months. Don't miss it! 

Note From Elie is part of the free weekly CAFE Brief newsletter. Audio recordings of Elie's Note are part of the CAFE Insider subscription. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Don Mann is a decorated former Navy SEAL Special Operations Technician and the author of 22 books including the New York Times Best Selling autobiography Inside SEAL Team SIX. As a former Training Officer, Mann was directly responsible for shaping the bodies and minds of the SEALs who assassinated Osama bin Laden.   He talks about the genesis of the name of SEAL Team SIX and how it was a tactic to throw off the Russians since there were only 3 SEAL teams then. He shares the mission of SEAL Team SIX in operating anywhere around the world, making them the President's foremost "break glass in case of emergency" solution.    Learn more about Don: https://www.usfrogmann.com/   Get a copy of Inside SEAL Team SIX: https://amzn.to/3xRuVs7 Join the SOFREP Book Club here: https://sofrep.com/book-clubSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Former U.S. Navy Seal Rob O'Neill says if you're apologizing to the murderer who is an illegal immigrant for calling him an “illegal” instead of apologizing to the family for calling the murder victim the wrong name, it shows you exactly where the Democrat Party stands. It's one thing to see a family crossing the border for a better life but that's not who's coming. O'Neill is seeing lines filled with military age males. He saw a man from Syria wearing tactical gear. It's not just Syria, it's ISIS, it's Hezbollah, it's Iran, It's China. O'Neill says there are more Chinese men crossing the border in San Diego than from Mexico. These men are coming here for a reason. Marxists will burn the city down just to rule over the ashes and that's what's happening. We're seeing destabilization on almost every continent, too much to be a coincidence. O'Neill says with chaos comes the eventuality of One World Order and One World Government which has been their plan the entire time of the Great Reset plan of the World Economic forum. It's when powers that be can eventually be in charge of everything. These unelected officials don't want a strong America. They hate Western society. They want to take us down so they can rule over the ashes. They see what's happening in Haiti as a good thing. More migrants, bring them here, more chaos. O'Neill says there's a reason all those Chinese soldiers are in San Diego and sit across the border in Mexico. China has enough Special forces here waiting to see if we defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion. O'Neill says he wishes he could shake the American public and tell them about what's going on but they're too busy watching the Kardashians or March Madness. The devil is coming. O'Neill says our military recruiting and retention is bad yet we have transgender people out explaining how diversity is our strength when it's clearly not. Our strength is submarines with nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers. O'Neill says the sad truth is when the fight does come to America, he doesn't expect a lot of Gen Z'ers with purple hair will be able to fight and it's going to be a sad day when we have to find out. GUEST: ROB O'NEILL, FMR. SEAL TEAM SIX, HOST OF “THE OPERATOR” PODCASTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dom Raso is a former SEAL Team Six / DEVGRU Operator whose career spans across twelve years and multiple combat deployments during the Global War on Terror. Raso served in Gold Squadron, an outfit that suffered a staggering loss during an attack on August 6, 2011 when a Chinook CH-47 (call sign: Extortion 17) was shot down by insurgents. This was the most devastating day in SEAL Team Six history, as well as the single largest loss of life for U.S. forces since the war in Afghanistan began in 2001. Raso is well known for his contributions to DEVGRU in the way of research and development and combative techniques. Post his military career, he took those same lessons learned to create his brand Crush Everything / Dynamis Alliance. As CEO, Raso seeks to prepare the next generation by embracing sacrifice and using it as a positive energy to "crush everything" that he does. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://shopify.com/shawn https://betterhelp.com/shawn https://ziprecruiter.com/srs https://hvmn.com/shawn https://blackbuffalo.com https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Dom Raso Links: Crush Everything - https://crusheverything.com IG - https://www.instagram.com/domraso X - https://twitter.com/DomRasoJr Podcast - https://crusheverything.com/podcast Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices