Episode 330

Navy SEAL And CEO Jimmy May On Leadership Lessons From The Military, Training Leaders And Community Service

The Elevate Podcast with Robert Glazer | Jimmy May | Leadership Lessons

 

Jimmy May is a retired Navy SEAL Commander and a renowned figure in leadership and combat ethics training. With over 22 years of distinguished service, including seven deployments to the Middle East, Commander May has earned various honors, including 3 Bronze Stars and the Purple Heart. Jimmy’s post-military journey is equally impressive, marked by his roles as CEO of Sushi Assassin, Mayday Executive Services, and the non-profit, Beyond the Brotherhood. A Texas A&M alum and Harvard graduate, he’s known for his expertise in creating top-tier teams through intense shared experiences. Fluent in Arabic and passionate about spearfishing, surfing, martial arts, and beekeeping, he resides in San Diego, doing good things for good people.

 

Jimmy joined host Robert Glazer to discuss his military career, leadership lessons from his service, serving the community and much more.

Listen to the podcast here

 

Navy SEAL And CEO Jimmy May On Leadership Lessons From The Military, Training Leaders And Community Service

Welcome to the show. Our quote is from Mahatma Gandhi, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” My guest and friend, Jimmy May, is not only a retired Navy SEAL Commander but also a renowned figure in leadership and combat ethics training. With many years of distinguished service, including seven deployments in the Middle East, Commander May has earned various honors, including three bronze stars and a purple heart.

Jimmy’s post-military journey is equally as impressive marked by his roles as CEO of Sushi Assassin, Mayday Executive Services, and the nonprofit Beyond the Brotherhood. A Texas A&M alum and a Harvard graduate, he’s known for his expertise in creating top-tier teams through intense shared experience, fluent in Arabic, and passionate about spearfishing, surfing, martial arts, and beekeeping. He resides in beautiful San Diego, as I saw, doing good things for good people. Jimmy, welcome. It’s great to have you on the show.

Thanks for having me.

As I told you, I’m still sore from our workout back in May. Though we did like 200 push-ups and 200 sit-ups. I failed at the type of rope, but it was fun.

It’s supposed to be fun.

 

The Elevate Podcast with Robert Glazer | Jimmy May | Leadership Lessons

 

I like to start at the beginning. A lot of time, childhood experiences intentionally or unintentionally lead us down and early influences lead us down the path. What about your childhood might have led us to believe that you would have joined the Navy SEALs one day?

I don’t have a lot. My parents were both nurses and we came from a modest upbringing. Most of my family didn’t do super well in the military. A lot of them got thrown out for alcohol-related incidents or drugs. The biggest thing that sticks out to me is when I was in third grade. There was this kid, his name was Teddy. I remember his last name, too, but I’ll leave it off.

He came on our street. He was in sixth grade and we were playing football. I remember he was being really rough with us and we all had enough. I stood up to Teddy and he beat me up. As he was walking away, I got up off the ground and I went to fight him again and he beat me up again. On the third try, after he beat me up, I got up and chased him and he ran off the street. I remember thinking, “Interesting.” There’s something there. My friends were horrified. Something in me was a little bit different. That’s the only thing I can think of. I had a different trajectory after that.

In fact, a lot of people have moments like that. I thought you were more going to say, “Beat you up the third time then a lot of people declare that’s never going to happen again. That leads them into martial arts.

I got into those. I was a big wrestler and got into martial arts. It’s part of being the warrior path that you’re on. You need to be able to fight armed or unarmed. I’ve been on that path for a long time.

What did you go to undergraduate? What was your plan?

Out of high school, I enlisted in the military and I got a scholarship to go. I went to college. I didn’t want to be in the military anymore. I didn’t care about what I studied, so I went there. I was supposed to be studying biology, but I ended up switching to construction. I like construction management, which is like a business degree, so five and a half short years. At Texas A&M, I had a four-year degree.

You were enrolled and enlisted the whole time?

I was enlisted. Back then, they let you out of your enlistment to go to college then you had to come back in. They didn’t have any strings on you so a lot of people would get out of it. They’ve changed the program since then. Now they maintain your enlistment but during that time, I was not enlisted anymore. How did you find your way to Navy SEALs, which everyone knows but pretty much one of the more elite units in the US military or military around the world? Is that like a progression? Do you start at something or do you go right into that? How old are they when most people go through BUD/S?

You have to be between the ages of 18 and 28. You can get a waiver to 30. I used to be the executive officer of BUD/S. We granted eleven waivers during the years I was there for people under 30, but over 28. Not a single one made it. Your body cannot heal fast enough once you get a couple of years on you.

That’s the original question, what got me into it? I got to Texas A&M and I was in the Corcadets. It’s like a frat/ROTC combination. Not everyone there is going to go to the military and I hated it. I didn’t like getting yelled at by upperclassmen who had never been in the military and told me about the military, where I just come from the military. I had a bad attitude. I was looking for something difficult.

I went to see my uncle who did pretty well in the Navy. He retired as a warrant officer. I was like, “Is there anything hard because I felt like the Navy was dumb?” I went to college and never went to class. I had like a 36 GPA. I thought college was dumb. I’m like, “What’s hard?” My uncle looked at me and said, “The SEALs are hard, but you shouldn’t do it.” I’m like, “Why?” He goes, “You won’t make it.” I’m like, “Why won’t I make it?” He goes, “Nobody makes it.” I’m like, “Oh.” That’s it. That’s all it was that little spark of my uncle.

It’s him telling you can’t do it.

That’s why I did it.

It’s called hell week, but it’s multiple weeks, which is called BUD/S. It’s the process of the training which very few people make it out. I looked at some different numbers. It’s about 10% to 20%, I’ve read but I thought it was less than that. How many people make it through all three weeks?

It is 10% to 15% to make it but it’s harder than that because it’s hard to get a slot to go.

These are the best of the best to start, too.

Our officers are all Ivy League folks. Seventy percent of our list of guys all have degrees. Most of them have advanced degrees. It’s very hard to get in. That initial calling process happens. When they get in, they get into BUD/S. You got a performer, you get knocked out pretty quickly. It’s one of the few places that has hard and fast standards still. I feel like there’s always wiggle room for everybody.

There’s been no watering down of the standards there.

There hasn’t been. The tribute to the guys that run that program because there’s been a lot of effort to try and make it. I used to be the executive officer there. I could see people being like, “This is a waste of time. You’re only getting this finite amount of people. It’s such an expensive program.” If you want them to do these jobs, these are the people you need.

You were an instructor later on.

I was not an instructor. I was the executive officer. We have 250 staff in Cadre then about 400 to 600 students at any one time. I ran them. I’d never sent a single person to the surf and I don’t yell at people. I don’t do that. You can ask my kids. That’s not my thing.

What is the surf?

It’s a ubiquitous term in my circles.

It sounds like jail the way you used it.

The Pacific Ocean is usually between 55 and sometimes it gets as warm as like 69 degrees. When they say, “Hit the surf,” it’s always there crashing. You spend a lot of your time wet. In fact, during hell week, if you’re not running, you’re shivering. If you’re not shivering, you’re carrying something heavy. It’s pretty much that’s what you do the whole time.

I’m curious about your take on it. I don’t know, if you read Angela Duckworth’s book, Grit.

I have not read it, but I’ve heard some stuff about her.

She did some research on BUD/S and tried to figure out like, was there data on who would make it through and people would guess who would make it through. They looked at the physical ability or specimen. Basically, the conclusion from everything she looked at was the people who said that they weren’t going to quit. That was the closest correlation. It wasn’t the person you were to guess was the strongest. With this thing, this is probably the hardest initiation in the world. What was your experience? Did you ever feel like you’re going to quit? Do you feel like you can pick who’s going to make it?

First of all, I can not who’s going to make it. We tried. I was there for two and a half years.

She tried all these studies and everyone’s tried.

We did tons of studies trying to figure out. There are a couple of things we found weird correlations, but for the most part, you can’t tell. Your first question was, did I ever feel like quitting? I didn’t. I’ve heard people say, “Everyone thinks about quitting.” I didn’t. I always was waiting for the thing that I couldn’t do and it just never happened. It surprised me how many people were quitting around me because they quit during things that you wouldn’t think are that big of a deal. When you fill a mask with water and they’re doing flutter kicks. We had three guys quit.

Michael Phelps won a gold medal. He couldn’t see through his goggles.

People quit for weird things. The number one quitting evolution in all of BUD/S is evening chow. It does make no sense because guys get in there, they get comfortable, got some warm water in them, then they walk outside and there’s a fire hose blasting people on their wet. They got to pick up the boats and people just quit and droves.

You’ve talked about this and there’s some interesting leadership lesson on standards. The reason why the standards have not been changed or can’t be changed is because this is not like a fraternity house just enjoying hazing and suffering of others. This mimics the most difficult conditions possibly in the world that you would have to be in. I know all of the lifting, moving, and carrying the logs is about getting your brother’s dead body out of a compromised situation. For the job that needs to be done or the standards that need to be done, it can’t be changed. I feel like in a lot of families and companies, the standards are lowered but the objective hasn’t changed. Again, it’s not an ideological thing. It’s a real-world necessity thing.

I’m not one that says standards have to always be the same. In many years, we have metal eggs and we don’t need to be this strong. For now, they made us key when they came through the Women in Service review, which is this thing where they wanted to, “Let’s make it okay for women to come in.” Which women can apply now. They were like, “We want to go evolution by evolution through the entire BUD/S. I want you to show me how this correlates to actual warfare,” and we did it.

BUD/S is a little bit easier than it should be because all the stuff that these young kids are doing, they’re doing slick. Which means they might be wet and cold, but they’re not carrying anything. I can go through my old logs of how much weight I carried walking out the door. The least weight I ever carried was 81 pounds. The most weight I carried was 139 pounds.

You’re running around the battlefield offset inserts, which means you have to walk 5 to 7 kilometers before you get to the target with that weight on. You have to be big and strong to do it. Now, the standards have been validated. I’m all for updating the standards if what we need on the backside changes. We still need people who can swim multiple miles and take off their stuff and walk multiple miles carrying a ton of weight, then run an assault and leave. These are hard physically tough evolutions we need people to be able to do.

As I mentioned before, you were on seven tours of duty in the Middle East. You were in the thick of this Navy SEALs. You were a lot of part of the door-to-door fighting and you also held leadership roles both in the SEALs. You spent a lot of your time coaching leaders outside. I know this is very broad, it’s narrowed down, but I’m curious. What are some of the core frameworks that you learned during your time from this life and death work that you think that applies to leadership anywhere and people would be well-served to understand them? Particularly around decision-making and chaos.

We’ve had a crazy couple of years up and down. Everyone’s exhausted and tired and having to lead in difficult times for many people for the first time and they’re struggling. I can’t think of anyone better. This can be a ten-minute answer if you want. I know you have a bunch of different frameworks to talk about and what we could learn from your leadership during those intense times.

The step one is being prepared. I am always prepared. When I show up, I always show up early. It makes me feel good. I teach out to my son now. He’s going to be an ambassador for his school. I’m like, “If you want this then you need to prepare.” Showing up the most prepared, there’s nothing bad about that. If you don’t get it then it’s not because you didn’t try. Being overly prepared and taking the time to prepare for something important is step one.

If you’re a member of a team, focus on your team and your role on that team. A lot of times, we want to focus on what we’re good at, but especially as we get more senior. Maybe I was good at the assaulter and now I moved up into a leadership role. I still want to go assault, but the team needs me to lead. What I need to do is focus on my teammates, making sure they have what they need to assault. Taking that spotlight off yourself is very important because whenever you get into that realm of worrying about yourself. You’re not thinking about the bigger picture. The last thing I would say is just those two things. We’ll leave it at that. 1) Be overly prepared. 2) Focus on the team and your role in it.

I heard a quote. I was listening to Morgan Housel’s new book. It’s basically, “On things that stay the same while everything else changes.” He’s focused on what stays.

I listened to his show on that. I listened to it twice. It was good.

He’s one of the best writers I think of. He and Derek Thompson. He talks a lot about financial preparation and he might have been talking about Munger. He said, “Everyone’s so busy forecasting. Be prepared.” He’s like, “The forecasts are never right. You don’t know when. No one forecast COVID-19, the great depression, and the recent war that we’re having. If you get caught unprepared, that’s on you.” He’s basically saying the forecast will never be right, so preparation. It’s interestingly tied to that. Also, the things that would stay the same were basically all the human miscalculations of hubris, fear, and overconfidence.

I enjoyed that one, so preparedness. We do a lot of contingency planning. We’ll look at the op and what we’ll do is the guys will sit down. They’ll think about, “What can go wrong at every step of the way in the op?” We break it down by like insert, which is where you get dropped off then infill is infiltration, whether you’re walking to it or you’re driving to it. We have the actions on and X fill, which is like leaving the target and then extracting, which is when you’re getting picked up by the helicopter or boat or however you’re leaving.

We break it down by that. We go step by step about what could go wrong then we have mitigation plans for all those things that we could possibly think of because we can’t eliminate risk. One of the things I like about the entrepreneurs’ organization is that the group of people is very comfortable. Risk is not something that can be eliminated but we mitigate it, plan for it, and thrive in that environment because other people aren’t.

That’s what we do in the teams with our contingency planning. Every single thing you can think about, you stack your assets. Maybe we’re breaking one of the big three rules of land warfare for a moment. We don’t break it out of ignorance because you can break rules, but you don’t break them out of ignorance. You know what you’re getting, how long you’re doing it and you tell the people who set those rules that you’re breaking those rules during those times. Those are important things to know when it comes time. When something does go wrong, everyone knows what the plan is for it. Sometimes, some unforeseen things do go wrong but for the most part, you’ve got contingencies in place for everything you thought of already and some of those will work for this new contingency that showed up.

 

Sometimes, unforeseen things could go wrong even if you plan ahead of time. That’s why having contingencies in place is always needed.

 

We had General McChrystal on the show. One of his best quotes ever is that “If you get there and the situation is different, then don’t execute the order I gave you. Execute the order I should have given you.”

I’m a huge McChrystal fan. When he started the McChrystal group, he hired a bunch of Navy SEALs to work for him. A bunch of guys I knew.

That doesn’t surprise me. When you talk about that, to me, this is one of the biggest things. I know people don’t like sports analogies a lot. Maybe half the people don’t but in leadership, they’re pretty instructive. What you described and what the military does and what sports teams do, so much better than let’s just say parents and organizations, there’s the playing field.

You spend time on the playing field, but there’s the time you spend before you get on the playing field. Talk about what you’re going to face and what you’re going to do otherwise. There’s the time after on the playing field where you recap and talk about what you’re going to do next time. The coach never crosses the line. Never gets on the field and never goes on there.

When I think about parenting now and a lot of leadership, it’s like jumping on the field, taking the ball out of the hand, and getting into the play. Real leadership should be before and after and let the game play out. I feel like there are organic behaviors, consequences, and relationships between those. If they were electrical currents you have to figure out and we’re short-circuiting those. People don’t learn them and feel them for themselves. Consequences aren’t always negative. Sometimes it’s positive. What are your thoughts on that? Particularly, again, I’d say parenting and organization can learn from this pre-prep and post-prep, versus getting involved in the actual event.

Nowadays, you see online. You watch a TikTok or Instagram and all it is the cool jump the guy’s doing or the cool thing that is the culmination of years of experience, hard work, and training.

The ping pong balls that hit all the things. They must have had 400 tries before they did that.

They don’t show you all of that leads up to it. It’s important, especially as a parent. In my family, we do some pretty cool stuff. We spend a lot of time dirtbike riding or camping way off the grid or surfing or spearfish. We do lots of things, but there’s a lot of prep that goes into it. You have to learn to embrace that prep and enjoy it.

I have a giant gear room and it is meticulously organized. Everything is clean, rinsed, and right where I know it is. It makes me happy to go there and spend 2 or 3 hours messing with gear. I might have a for-profit business called Mayday Executive where I do excursions for executives. They get the tip of that iceberg.

They don’t see me prepping the bags of wetsuits and making sure that all of the gear is perfect. They don’t see all that, but my son sees all that. He helps me with a lot of these events. He sees all of that hard work, then I go out for 6 or 8 hours. We take the guys’ spearfishing or skydiving or whatever it is I’m doing.

We come back and those guys go and they have a dinner. I go back and me and my son clean the gear, prep the gear, and get it nice again. The video that they take from the photographer takes of the event we had, just shows them doing this crazy fun stuff. There’s a montage and a cool song but they don’t see me with the toothbrush scrubbing a spark plug or on the side or cleaning out that mask or making sure that there’s toothpaste. They don’t see all that but my son gets to see all that. He knows how much work these things are. It’s a cool balance to not only have your organization see it but teach that as part of the joy. When I walk down and I look into my garage, it’s like lined up, perfect gear set up. It makes me happy. It’s part of it.

What needs to change? I would argue probably everything you did in leadership in the Navy SEALs was under some basic form of duress that would cripple most people. I found it’s confusing because a lot of leaders who are great, and they’re great when things are going well, then they completely collapse when some stress is applied. What can be learned from that? How can you train differently? How do you figure that out with someone before they have that moment?

Again, in the last years, supply shock and demand shock. Everything’s been hard. Nothing’s been easy. You’re seeing a lot of people wilt. What you guys did was never going to be. Integrity is also one of those things that seem easy when there are easy choices then it gets a lot harder for some people when pressure is applied.

We have the saying in the teams that goes, “Everyone wants to be a frogman when it’s sunny outside at the bar and the girls want to know what you do for a living. When it’s time to get in the cold, scary water, and something’s going wrong, there’s water in your mask. It’s not so much fun to be a frogman.” The question was how do we train to get to that level?

 

The Elevate Podcast with Robert Glazer | Jimmy May | Leadership Lessons

 

How do you train? How do you know that? Should it be part of leadership development? If you’re trying to pick a leader for your organization, how would you want to know how that person does in a difficult situation? I’ve seen people change so dramatically. Not everyone, but a large percentage, while some remain consistent. It seems like, back to the frog analogy, until the water boils a little bit. It’s very hard to discern that.

For me, if we’re trying to choose somebody. We set up a whole interview process for a SEAL officer assessment and selection called SOAS. It’s an acronym, but that’s what it is. We don’t ask what they would do because you can always say, “I would do this great thing,” but you ask about what they did do about past experiences because that’s the best predictor of the future.

We ask questions like, “When’s the time you failed?” As you start pulling the string on when they failed, are they blaming other people for it? Is it not their fault? Was it a, “I’m a victim of circumstance. I was the third leader that took this over and it was already failing?” If they’re putting it on other people, then they didn’t learn anything., making excuses and if you can’t own something, then you’re never going to fix it.

 

If you cannot own something, you cannot fix it.

 

What we look for is that person that ideally, we score them on a 1 through 5 so they can bring up something they failed at. They can’t bring up something they failed at. They’re wasting my time. Number one, what did they learn from it? Did they learn from that failure? Number three, what did they do after they learned it? Did they do something to make themselves better? You want to score a fourth point, did they do something to make their immediate team better?

Not only did I disagree with my boss in a bad way, but then I took a class about how to disagree with my boss. After that, I taught my platoon how to disagree with their boss. Now we’re at a four-point answer. A five-point answer is hard to get, but that would be like you did something outside of your immediate circle, I started how to disagree with your boss anonymously and we are now in 39 states and 43 locations. That would be a high answer. Someone who can look at a situation that they did poorly at, except that they had blame in it. Take steps to mitigate that so it doesn’t happen again next time, then share it forward. That’s what I’m looking for guys who are great leaders.

That’s transferable, I would say. All of those things to the private sector. A lot of leaders are, again, struggling now. It’s been hard and choppy for a while. There’s no easy out. You just have to go through it. What advice would you give to a leader or a board who’s dealing with a motivation issue of people just feeling like, “This has just been hard for three years and it’s not fun. I don’t know if I want to do it anymore.” Again, there’s not anything easier else to jump in. Someone was telling me, they were coming from a meeting with eight professionals in eight different industries. The number one consensus was, “It was so much harder to do the same thing than it was 2 or 3 years ago.”

If you’re a world-class organization, whatever you’re doing, you should be striving to be. Adversity is opportunity. What’s going to happen is, let’s say it’s this easy industry. Interest rates are low and everyone’s flipping houses, selling houses, and buying and selling houses. All of a sudden, interest rates come up now like they are now. If you’re a world-class organization, you’re going to be okay.

What’s going to happen is it’s going to thin that herd. It’s going to cull out the lesser, the little random house flippers and all these people who are coming on. They’re going to have to go do something else. If you’re world-class, you welcome that adversary. You want it. Bring it on because we’re going to put in the processes. We’ve got the solid people and we’re going to make it through this.

On the backside of this, when interest rates come down and the house rate starts to take off again, guess who’s going to be well-positioned to own this? Adversity is not a bad thing. If you prepare for it and you’re ready for it and you think about it, then fine. It’s going to affect some people. I always say, “I don’t care who’s elected president or what’s going on with the government or any of that. Me and my family are going to go this quite a way and we’re going to be ready. We’ll be ready to thrive in whatever environment you throw us into. We’ll figure it out.”

It sounded a little like the Stockdale Paradox when you were saying that in terms of this notion of confronting the brutal reality as well as maintaining a long-term vision of getting through it. You need both of those things. A lot of people during difficult times, if you tell everyone, “It’s going to suck. It’s going to be horrible. Why stay on the mission?” Versus if you are too rosy and don’t address the realities of what’s going on, then their confidence will be broken that way. It’s a delicate balancing act.

I agree with that. I haven’t heard of a Stockdale Paradox.

You have to look that one up. That was one of my most popular Friday Fords. It was Admiral Stockdale. Jim Collins pulled that story out of him in Good to Great and Collins asked him. I think he was a hostage for seven years. When Collins asked him, “Who didn’t make it first or who gave up first?” He said, “That was easy. That was the optimist.” He’s like, “What do you mean?”

They always thought they were going to be out by Christmas or out by the next thing then when it came, they couldn’t handle it. They died of a broken heart. He’s like, “I always knew I was going to get out. I always knew whatever,” but I was very honest with the brutal realities of the situation. That was the difference.

Something you said earlier, you talked about motivation. I don’t teach motivation at all. If people call me like, “We a motivation.” I’m like, “That’s not me. You got the wrong guy.” I teach discipline because motivation is this fleeting little idea. It’s a feeling that you have. If something is worth doing and you decide to put your effort towards it, then you need to think about the discipline it takes to get that done. If you’re going to get it done, then discipline will get you there. Not motivation because sometimes things are hard. Motivation is not going to be there, but discipline will always be there.

It’s very hard to motivate other people. My friend, Brad Peterson, who’s episode released, who’s had a boom bus incredible story. His dad always told him his number one thing. he had it in the sign, “You can pay one of two prices, the price of discipline or the price of regret.” I thought you might like that. Talk to me about the importance of language skills, both in military and civilian careers, particularly in Arabic. How important was it to you to assimilate into cultures or people that you were working with on missions that were complicated door-to-door in some case?

I didn’t want to learn Arabic. I went kicking and screaming. I took some tests and they’re like, “You can apparently learn languages.” I didn’t score high enough to get into Arabic because you had to score a 110 and I got a 109. They’re like, “He’s a SEAL. He’s the closest we got. Let’s do it.” They sent me to this thing. I thought I was going to miss the whole war. I was studying as hard as I could trying to get out of there because I wanted to get back to work.

I did a sixteen-month course. I did it in thirteen months, tested it out, and went overseas. It gave me a unique niche because all of our guys are fast and strong. They can shoot. They can do all those things, but they didn’t have anybody who was a SEAL that could speak. When you have an interpreter, they don’t know what to look for. They don’t know what’s the thing that they should be listening for.

I look pretty German. Both my grandparents were born in Germany, so no one thinks I speak Arabic. Plus, I don’t look super intelligent. I lead the league in looking dumb. They were Iraqi soldiers who didn’t know I spoke and the interpreters. It gave me a unique niche that I could offer because I knew what was going on when not everybody did. The graffiti was very important because they would mark IEDs by graffiti.

I could read what it said even though most of the soldiers couldn’t read. Even if I didn’t know the words, I could say them out loud then they could tell me what they needed. It gave me a unique niche. When it came time to do negotiations for stuff, all I had to do was kick off the negotiation with, “I forgot my interpreter. Can we use yours?” Now they’re going carte blanche around the table spilling, making fun of me and how stupid I am. I’m just sitting there with a dumb look on my face, but I know what’s going on.

I assume there was some value and you have some stories about making a connection with a local and speaking with them, but half the value was being underestimated sounds like. You would ask for the interpreter and they would pre-discuss before the interpreter. You’d know what they were saying and that’s fascinating.

It was huge. I was great at negotiation.

Would you ever tip your hand at the end or not?

I normally did not tip my hand because I was going to be back. When I come back, I want to maintain that skill that nobody else has. I normally did not tip my hand. In my first deployment with being an Arabic speaker, I ended up doing a lot of combat interpreters. I would show up and place the soldiers with they needed to be. They knew I could speak but I found it was a lot better, even for interrogations because I could be standing there next to prisoners. They think I’m just a guard and they’re sitting there talking back and forth to each other. I’m getting all the information I need without even having to say anything to them. it was a good skill to have.

We had a core value at our company, excel and improve. What I would always say was, “I don’t think you can be excellent without improving.” There are certain standards and things that you need to say the same, but you need to objectively look at something and see if it’s got a problem or a whole or make it better.

 

The Elevate Podcast with Robert Glazer | Jimmy May | Leadership Lessons

 

One of the stories you told in one of the sessions we were in stuck with me around because it seemed like you were part of a lot of leadership improvements in the SEALs. I’m sure it’s hard to change some of these because you guys are like, “They’re getting soft and this is what we did.” What are some of the ones you talked about? These are people. This is the higher standard.

There was no transition when you would leave. You could be on the field in Iraq, fighting for your life, killing people, then 48 hours be at a bar in San Diego. I assume some guy tries to take your chair, and you might end up killing him. This was something that you said you had identified during your time then there was active work to change it. Can you share a little more about that?

Where they got this from was like back in World War II. Those guys saw some crazy war. Crazier stuff than I’ve ever seen. They were running into machine guns. The tactics back then hadn’t caught up to technology. Those guys were on the way back, they would jump on a boat and take the boat back. Now, they’re together chilling for 7 to 10 days. However long that Atlantic would take to get back then they were recompressed a bit when they came home.

For us, at one time, I was 36 hours out of a gunfight when I was dropped off in San Diego with a hole in my chest. My family had left me and I was basically standing there on the edge not sure what I was going to do. I went to a bar then I either went home with the girl or I slept in my cage for the next couple of weeks until the workup started again. That’s probably not a good place to be. There’s a lot of improvement that can happen there.

What I saw they started doing later on was this thing called TLD, third location decompression, which I didn’t think was the greatest idea at the time like most good ideas. You don’t realize it. They would take people and put them in a different country. Maybe Germany or something where we’ve got some American presence and let the guys go out, talk to a psych and talk to a chaplain. They get a little time to bluff steam with each other before they go home.

That was a pretty good thing. When I first heard it I was like, “These guys haven’t seen a woman in six months. They haven’t drank a beer in six months and we’re going to turn them loose.” It turned out to be a pretty good thing. That’s a much better thing to do than 36 hours of gunfight at a bar in San Diego. Having to re-pack a hole in my chest before I go out.

For a lot of us working from home or otherwise, it’s not the same level, but we need these transitions. A lot of our lives used to be more compartmentalized. Work was here and home was here. It’s all a mess now. I said this when companies started working from home, a lot of people didn’t miss the actual commute, but they needed a virtual commute. They needed 6:00 to go for a walk or take the dog and transition environments. That’s been a challenge for people.

I work from home largely now. I found that it ended up leading into my personal time a lot more. I probably put in tons of hours. I get up at 4:30, and I’m like, “I’ll get to work.” Maybe I’ll bounce out and get a workout or a surf then I come back to work. No one’s home and it’s dinner time, I’ll work. I don’t pay attention to what day it is. I just get up and if I have work, I do it. It was a lot cleaner especially before because everything was done on at least a secret level or above.

Sometimes I had a secret hookup in my house, but having to work there and not be able to bring that work home with me was nice because I could get home and relax. Now, the way I do that is I go off the grid all the time. I was in Mexico. If my phone works, I turn it off, but most of the time I’ll wear if my phone doesn’t work. You can be there and present with your family and that’s a powerful thing. I would never take the time in San Diego to sit and goof off with my family like I did in Mexico because there’s nothing else to do but goof off. I value my time off the grid.

As we transition, where it is that you are that there’s no cell phone service all the time. You retired in air quotes in January 2023, although you’ve probably never been busier. The transition in military life to civilian life has got to have some challenges. I also assume you saw that coming for a few years and so maybe we’re mentally preparing for it. How have you managed that transition from doing this one thing for so long to not doing it?

The hardest transition for me was to go from the tactical to the operational level of war. In my first fourteen years, I never missed a deployment. I was always on the ground with the guys. In 2017, I went to BUD/S. It was my first short tour. I was like, “I don’t do short tours. You got the wrong guy.” They were like, “No, you need to. You’ve been on the line for a long time.”

They were right. I was in a different head state. You can’t go to that many deployments in a row and not be a different person. It was good for me but then I had my little existential crisis there because I went back to Mosul for the big Mosul fight, but I was the deputy commander. I was second in charge of all special operations.

You were the coach. You couldn’t step onto the field.

I didn’t know that so I’m like, “I’m going to go on off.” No one can tell me no because I’m the boss, so I go on this off. It was weird. The guys were like, “Sit right there.” I’m like, “You want me to drive.” They’re like, “Sit right there.” I’m like, “I’m a combat tourist. That’s not what I’m supposed to be.” I realized that was when I went through my crisis. I’m like, “I don’t like doing this. I wanted to be in the tactical level.”

I start prepping to get out. I went to business school and started learning a little bit about the civilian world. The most important thing for anybody making a transition, it doesn’t matter what it is, find a mentor like Steve Gatina, who you know, and the guys at Pray.com took me under their wing. I don’t know why. They asked me to come do an event for them, so I went and did it. They were like, “Can we pay you?” I’m like, “No, you can’t pay me. That’s not what I do for a living but I could use a mentor. Would you do that?”

They were like, “What does that mean?” I’m like, “If I get confused or scared, I get to call you and once a month, let’s have a Zoom call or something.” That was it. That was the best investment I’ve made in my entire life. Those guys, I talked to them now. I probably texted Steve ten times already. We were always at conversation and he helped me make that transition to the civilian world. Not just military to civilian, but whatever transition you’re going through.

If you’re going down a road, find someone who’s further down the road. That’s always been my trick. You started a plethora of businesses in your brief retirement. The first is Sushi Assassin, which is a fascinating name. Tell us about that one.

When got a business school, I started it in 2018 because I had this new business school muscle. You have to flex it. You can’t learn something to do it. You have to do it. I didn’t know what business to start and I had a friend that knew how to make sushi. I’m like, “Let’s do this in-home sushi catering. Low overhead and as long as I’m in the black, I don’t care. I want to get used to running a business.” He’s done great. I’m super proud of this guy. He’s done a great job. His name is Aaron Bishop. I’d like to hand the business off to him because I don’t take money from him.

Do you go into people’s houses and make it?

If you’re in the San Diego area, they will show up. It costs about the same as going to a restaurant, to be clearly honest. They show up in your house. They have a whole sushi kitchen. All-you-can-eat sushi. If you want to have drinks there. COVID was great for us because you want to take a PCR test. No one knows how to make sushi.

Also, you got the weather where if they have to sit outside, it’s fine.

It’s not super lucrative because sushi’s got to have tight margins. If fish goes bad you can only have it for a couple of days if you’re going to use it. When we make money, we spear a bunch of fish. That’s when we make it.

That’s very cool. Too bad, you don’t do Boston, do you? We could use that here.

That’s a long way to go. There’s a price tag for anything.

Franchise. We got Mayday Executive Services. Tell us a little about that.

Mayday Exec is this blanket company that sometimes I do a keynote. You guys have been around for the resilience talk and also leading organizational change. Also, I do executive adventures. You want to jump out of a plane, shoot a 200-pound fish, learn how to do J turns, or blow up a car. I can figure it out and I’ll do it wherever you want me to do it. I’ve got a YPO group coming up in March that I’m going to kidnap them. It’s fun.

Walk through this. Do they not know that this is happening? Has one guy in the group woman set up the other people?

People have to know they’re going to be kidnapped but there’s a lot of facets to it. I’m going to teach them how to escape. I’ll teach them how to pick handcuffs and locks, and how to get from zip ties. I got the tape.

I learned the zip tie one. It’s interesting. Is that with the shoelaces?

You can do it with the shoelace. It’s called shimming. You can do it that way. Anyway, I’ll teach them how to do all this stuff. When I put them in interrogation, we’ll interrogate them. On the back backside, I’ll let them try and escape. We’ll score the groups based on how far out they can get from their escape in ten minutes or whatever. I decide. It’s going to be pretty cool. I do stuff like that with Mayday Executive. It’s like whatever you want. I don’t make as much money on the events as I do from the speaking things, but the events are so fun. These are things that people are going to remember for the rest of their life and I get to be part of it.

It’s a lot of corporate teams.

Corporate teams, YPO and EO are big customers. I do a lot with them, but also with corporations. I did some stuff with Fort Walton Machining and Compass Real Estate and a bunch of other partners.

My foremates are reading this but I was thinking it’d be great if I told them that the event was something else then I had to kidnap all of us. I know at least two of them read it regularly, now I’m going to ruin that, but that would be fascinating. The motto is always once in a lifetime experience and you have to think that’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Hopefully, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. If it happens again, at least you’re more prepared than you would have been.

There’s just little things. My uncle was in YPO for years. They had a personal family safety weekend or expert come in. Again, one in a million things. I remember him telling me this story many years ago. It still sticks with me that if you were in a carjacking, the most important thing to do is to get your head and body on the pillar in between the two windows because that’s basically where you’d be.

That’s not true.

Maybe I heard it wrong, but there was something related to that. It’s fascinating.

The only parts of a car that have ballistic protection is pretty much the axles and the engine.

Don’t lay back in between the windows.

It would cut right through there like nothing.

Do not try these at-home disclaimers. I take back whatever I said. We’ll talk offline about the form of kidnapping. That sounds fascinating, but more important for you, close to you. Months ago, you wrote a note on LinkedIn about how more of your team members you had lost in months outside of battle and how big the mental health crisis was for a lot of veterans. I know you started Beyond the Brotherhood. Tell us a little bit about what that does.

Beyond the Brotherhood is where I spend the preponderance of my time. Within four months of my retirement, four of my friends had killed themselves by their own hands.

Are they retired or they were actively deployed?

They were retired. One guy was active, but the rest were all retired. The thing is, they were all good dudes. They weren’t turds. It wasn’t like, “This is a guy that got in trouble.” They are solid dudes. Good people think about the repercussions of their actions and the ripple effects they’ve sent into the world. It builds on them. I started drilling down on what it is and I think they’ve lost purpose, goals, and a community. In the SEAL teams, you’ve got those things.

You get them all in the same place. Whereas, a lot of people might have those things in different parts of their lives and you lose all of them at once.

What I thought about was how could I do that. How can I provide that for these good dudes coming out? We have a screening process. We screen and select for the top guys getting out. We don’t take everybody. We just can’t. It’s one of those things. You can’t just throw money across everybody. You have to have a couple of people you help. I planned on just doing 3 to 4 a year, but we’ve got 23 guys. It was good dudes coming out and needed help. We give them the last bits or whatever they need. Lots of times, they have a stale network because I haven’t ever had social media until now, so stale network.

I can see how that wouldn’t be super useful in your line of work.

These guys are coming out and they don’t have networks. They’ve got all these skills, but they don’t know how to talk the talk like I went to business school. It was good for me. What we do is we hook them up, if they want, a behavior psychologist to get them squared away on what it is they think they want to do or we think they’d be a good fit then we start plugging them in.

There are good programs that we can leverage like the USSOCOM Care Coalition and Fellowship or SkillBridge, where we can send people out as interns to these companies to get a test drive to see if it fits. If it doesn’t work, we bring them back and we give them another shot. If a company wants to hire one of these guys and they tell me, “I want a guy that has an MBA in this certification in real estate.” I can send them to you with that stuff.

We take our time with these guys. They need to heal. Lots of guys are broken. I have fake hips and I’ve got a torn labrum and rotator cuff on my shoulder. Our guys are pretty beat up, so we need to give them some time to heal, get their surgeries, get back on track with their family then launch them back into the civilian world so that they can take part in some of the prosperity they help to secure for us.

That’s the goal. I’ve had to suspend intakes because, as I said, I have so many guys. I’ve got eight guys in the hopper now that I had pushed them off my camp. Sorry, I don’t have the funding. I don’t need to put in some different processes so we can expand because before, it was just me doing it. Now, we’re growing fast. I have to stop and slow down.

People are reading this, how can they help either financially, but if they feel like they could be a resource or help with the networking or help with the job. I’d love to have a Navy SEAL working in operations next to me. Where can they learn more?

BeyondTheBrotherhood.org is our website. If you click on the bottom, it says “Contact us,” and it’ll go to either me or my partner, Sean. He’s my partner in running this. We’ll look at it then we’ll email you and call you. We’ll figure it out like what’s a good fit. If you want to be a donor if you want to come to an event. Our events are fun. We did the triple S.

The next one coming up is a pit stop challenge. It’s in North Carolina or we’re going to be doing pit stops on a real NASCAR with the number 3 and the number 18 at Richard Childish Racing. It’s super fun and you can be involved that way. If you want to be a mentor, take some time one-on-one to get to know these guys and help them. They’re high-quality and high-caliber guys. They just need to learn how to get along in the civilian world.

Sounds like a lot of people reading probably could offer some help. Another thing that’s front and center with particularly what’s going on in the Middle East, I know you have a strong philosophy and you teach on combat ethics. Talk to us about your viewpoint on that and how it applies to both military and civilian sectors.

Combat ethics sounds like a contradictory term but at the end of the day, you have to live with what you do over there if you’re doing the wrong things. It’s interesting when you go, the rules of engagement, ROE, we’ll call them. They change over time. I’ve been places where it’s like no civilians killed then you go to like the Mosul fight. They told everyone, “If you’re not ISIS, get out of here.”

They put like crazy collateral damage estimate, where it was a big blunt object. I’m like, “That’s not what we do.” Getting over these rules of engagement. At the end of the day, you have to do the right thing. The best thing I can tell you is one time I was on a roof, and this guy came out and he was holding a kid. He had binos spotting us.

He’s holding the kid so he wouldn’t shoot him. Now, I’m allowed to shoot that man or at least take that shot. Try not to hit the kid, but I can tell you he was at 330 yards. I had an M4 which was basically a one-minute angle weapon. This means that if I hold a perfect shot, it’s six inches plus or minus at that distance. I didn’t take the shot because I didn’t want to have a vision of me shooting a kid in my head just in case I missed it. Later on, we got a complex attack and I ended up getting shot on that.

By that guy or you don’t know?

I don’t know. Probably not him. We were on our way out when I got shot. You can argue that had I taken that shot, I would have been fine. Maybe I would not have an accident. Maybe I would have nailed it and not hit the kid anyway. I would have had to live with that for the rest of my life. I would have been fine legally because he was a combatant, but I didn’t do it ethically because it wasn’t the right thing for me.

I also put my whole team in danger. Luckily, it was me who got shot and not somebody else because that would be a heavier weight for me to bear. The combat ethics thing, when I teach it, I tell people, “You have to do what’s right first. Sometimes, that’s not what’s legal because you’re going to have to live with those consequences for the rest of your life.” That’s a heading bird.

 

Combat ethics in the military is all over the place. Always do what is right.

 

Are you saying the standard is above or below what’s legal or does it depend?

It depends. That’s the thing about ethics. They’re all over the place. At school, they teach ethics as the rules that are going to be happening in the next couple of years. I think ethics is doing what’s right and what you think is right. I had a pop tall in front of someone like why I didn’t shoot that guy? I’m like, “This is why.” I reached down. There was a sniper rifle there. I reached down to grab a sniper rifle because that could have made a shot with that one pretty easily. He was gone by the time I got set back up.

I’ve always thought the Sunday paper test is a good threshold. Have you heard that one?

It’s like we were talking about earlier. The Sunday paper spins things. I can read one Sunday paper that says, “Israel is this terrible aggressor killing people.” I can read another one that says, “Palestinians are the terrible aggressor.”

If someone wrote, they’re saying the factual article of the situation and published it. You would agree that those were the facts. Are you comfortable with it or would you be embarrassed by it? It’s a good barometer when you’re making a decision, say, “If I just transfer this money for the weekend and put it back.” Again, if someone were to write the article on that and put it on a Sunday paper. How do you feel about that?

I’ve heard that test given to me lots of times, but the masses aren’t as much what I care about it as, “Could I call my mom and tell my mom? Could I call my brother?” Those are the people that I respect. I want them to respect me. Could I call my brother and tell him this? That’s a stronger tip of what the whole world thinks about me, which I do what I do and I try to be a good person. If you don’t align with my values, I get it. It’s okay.

We hear a lot of talk about public service. Particularly, maybe in people in government. I appreciate the vast service commitments a lot of people made. I also understand a lot of it is power-driven. Talk about the value of humility and service and what you were doing and making that commitment to something beyond yourself. I heard Arthur Brooks speak. He’s talking about why so many people are struggling.

It was interesting. He said, “Whether it was religion or whatever it is.” Religion does this, but he understands. He was talking with Tim Ferriss about it who is not religious. He said, “You need to make yourself small in a relative. If you make yourself too big, there’s a lot of struggle.” If you make yourself small and feel like you’re part of something bigger. That’s probably something you had that a lot of people are missing in society now as a lot of our traditional institutions break down.

I feel like being part of a group that you respect and you work hard. People buy into these groups. You don’t get buy-in by the group sacrificing for you. You get buy-in by sacrificing for that group because if you think about like what my parents did for me. They raised me. I call my mom once a week and it’s not the same, but the SEAL teams, what do they do to me? They froze me, got me shot, and my friends died. I sacrificed a lot to get into that group. It makes it a more powerful thing for you. There’s a lesson there for people who have an organization.

The right people in your organization are going to come and work. The more work they put in, the more bought in they’re going to be. If you do handouts to people all the time, they’re not going to appreciate you. I know it’s counterintuitive, but you look at the recruiting problems with the military now. Do you who’s not having recruiting problems? The SEAL teams and the Marine Corps. Do you know want the Marine Corps promises you? Nothing. They promise you hard work and stuff.

No signing bonus.

You don’t get anything but do you know what? They’re not having the same problems because there are people that are coming there for a reason. Not for college money or whatever else. The same thing with SEAL teams. You don’t come into the SEAL teams because there are easier ways to get money for college. You’re coming in because you’re there to test yourself or to be part of a powerful team. Those are more powerful reasons than college money.

You talked about before you can’t teach motivation, but I know a passion or something you do focus on teaching is resilience. How do we teach resilience? Teaching at the leadership level is great. It seems like it should probably start a lot earlier. We’re moving away from resilience. We’re moving towards this, my favorite quote now is, “We’re preparing the path for the kids. We’re not preparing kids for the path.” Where does resilience play a role in all stages of life?

Your first question was how do you teach resilience? It starts off with leaders admitting their failures. That’s the first thing you have to do because people look up to you as a leader. They’re like, “Robert’s never failed at anything. He’s a super successful podcaster.” When you have an organization and if you hold people to this standard where there can be no failure. You’re not going to learn anything in that organization and you’re not going to teach resilience.

 

The first step to resiliency is admitting your failures.

 

People are going to cover up everything that they do wrong. If you’re like, “I know this is a hard topic, but my wife had a miscarriage.” That’s a huge humanizing thing. One-quarter of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. I’m not a woman, but along those lines, there’s a whole lot of hormones that go on with that. It’s a super hard struggle and these women have a hard time with it, but they all cover it up. I get it. You don’t want to talk about it.

When you talk about those things that are hard and struggles you had, it opens up everybody else to see like, “If Robert is struggling, maybe my struggles aren’t that weird.” Now you’ve got this built-in empathy. Now when they have something similar that happens, maybe you had a parent die and you had to go through that. You told your group, “My parent died. I need to take a few days off to get the fares settled.”

When you’re out there doing that, think about what you’re learning at that time because now it takes a spotlight off you. You’re thinking about, “How can I help my teammate?” Two years down the road, someone’s like, “Their parent dies.” They’re like, “I’m going to ask Robert about it.” They’re like, “What? He’s the boss. I know, but his parent died. He’s been through this.” This gives you this built-in empathy to teach them, “My dad died. It was hard. We couldn’t find his will. He didn’t have his stuff squared away. I had to talk to my mom and make sure she was taken care of.” Walk them through that. Even if you don’t have any specific advice that they can use, the fact that they have someone to talk to and bounce stuff off of is going to breed resilience. When you task them with like, “While you’re going through this, why don’t you write down things that are helpful that work out for you so you can help the next person?” Now that spotlight’s not on them and they’re not in that swirl pool pity party going downhill. They’re thinking about how they can use this not-a-good experience to help somebody else. That’s how you get resilience.

As you said, two things came to mind. The earlier you start this, the better. We seem to be modeling this academic achievement thing where getting anything wrong is bad, which is horrible. The stakes are lower and you should not think that getting a C or a B is the end of your life. We have this world of social media where you see all of the curated highlights of people’s lives. The 1% and not the 99% of crap that they deal with on a regular basis.

You see Michael Phelps with a bunch of medals around him, but guess what you don’t see? Michael Phelps from age 6 to 24 spends six hours a day in a pool. It’s just not as good and exciting as TV.

Probably quitting or giving up or otherwise.

Spending all that time staring at that line underneath you in the water. I swim sometimes and I get super bored. I do it for like 45 minutes and I’m done.

What parental advice would you give parents based on resilience? If they want resilient kids.

You have to let your kids fail. Don’t cover that up for them. If it’s not going to hurt them, it’s not going to injure them, I let them fail.

 

Let your kids fail. Don’t cover up for them.

 

I was just going to say physically injured.

If it’s not going to physically injure them, then I let them do it. I’ll tell them like, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” They’ll be like, “Dad, I think it is.” I’m like, “Okay.” I let them do it and let them fail. When they fail instead of like throwing a fit, I don’t yell at them like, “I told you so.” You’re like, “What might be a better way to do that?”

This is what we were saying, but this is the after-action report.

My son’s way into the fish tank. The fish tank’s everywhere now at the house. It’s his thing and he had to buy this stand. The stands are pretty robust because fish tanks are heavier than you think they are. He’s like, “Dad, can you put this together?” I’m like, “No, you can put it together. I’ll show you where the tools are and I’ll be out there working out if you need help.” He got it mostly together by himself. It took him about three times as long as it would have taken me.

There’s something here. You learn how to use a tool, an Allen wrench that you’ve never used and you learn what an Allen wrench is.

When he shows people the fish tank, he’s like, “I built this whole stand,” which is true.

We are depriving our children of these experiences. Again, it is not cruel and unusual punishment to have to assemble a fish tank based on what most people wake up and go through in the world each day.

There’s going to be failure built in. He found a fish tank in the alley. We patched it up. It worked fine for a couple of months then it started leaking. It destroyed his dresser. We had to try to repatch it again. It just didn’t work. I’m like, “We have to buy another one.” It was $38, but I was like, “We tried and Dad can’t do everything perfectly. I gave it a shot, but it didn’t work out.” It’s okay.

Modeling that your own mistakes are not perfect. Last question, Jimmy. I could go on forever. This one’s multivariate I ask everyone. It could be singular or repeated or professional or personal, but what’s a mistake that you’ve learned the most from?

I know this one. This one’s easy. I’ve talked about it before. My best friend was killed on August 6th, 2011. He was shot down over Afghanistan in extortion 1-7. I was called into the command at midnight and they said, “Bring your blues,” which never means good stuff. I’m on my way there trying to figure out what’s going on. Six hours later, I’m on a plane to Minneapolis to tell my best friend’s family that he was killed.

I got there and I made a notification to the family, but then I had to go home because I had to go back. I just got back from deployment two days earlier. I had to get surgery because I was pretty dinged up. I had to go get surgery, so I came back and the command had sent a couple of people down to set the funeral up because it was a town of 600 people. We have 1,500 people showing up at this funeral.

We’re sitting there going through that and I’m looking at my spreadsheet. We saw the spreadsheets back then. I’m like, “What am I doing?” We have an involvement like a will and last testament before you leave. You say who your pallbearers are. You talk about what songs are at your funeral and who’s not at your funeral. You talk about all this stuff before you go. I knew the answers to most of these things, but I looked at them. I’m like, “I figured I’ll be a pallbearer. Not a pallbearer. I’m like, “Probably giving his mom a flag and escorting her to her seat.” Not doing that either.

I’m like, “I must be speaking then.” What’s my job? I’m handling the distinguished visitors. It was a slap in the face to me. I’ve lived with this guy off and on for many years. We’re best friends. I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” I started to get really mad. As I spun around on my hill to go square this away, I stopped and I got ashamed of myself. It’s not about me. It’s about honoring his memory.

I shut my mouth and I handled the DVs and I did a good job. The guys that carried the coffin didn’t drop him. Her mom found her seat and got her flag. The guy that spoke did a better job than I would have done. I’m not remembered as the jerk who made a big scene because I didn’t get recognized for who I was in JT’s life. JT’s parting gift to me was, “Get over yourself.” I’m not going to say that it’s a lot of good things came from my best friend getting killed, but I will say that I found that silver lining in that comfort and that JT left me something. That’s the biggest lesson I learned.

Jimmy, thank you for joining us. Your journey and insights are truly inspiring. It’s been a pleasure to have a chance to talk through some of your incredible experiences.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

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