Jocko Podcast 70 w/ Iris Gardner - Overcoming Unspeakable Darkness. Military Spouse Success

2017-04-12T20:18:58Z

Join the conversation on Twitter: @jockowillink @OnlyIrisGardner @echocharles 0:00:00 - Opening 0:04:32 - Intro to Iris Gardner. 0:23:40 - Sexual Assault--First incident as a child. 0:39:59 - Tips to prevent abuse. Why it's hard to come forward. 0:51:16 - Iris growing up with her abuser. 1:01:24 - Resulting relationships, the wrong path, and more Darkness. 1:13:11 - Bouncing back. The beginning. 1:26:50 - Being a Military Wife - Emotional Independence, and tips to be have a successful relationship. 1:47:12 - How to Live a Happy Life after Abuse. 1:57:00 - Jocko's letter to his daughter. Appreciate your mother. 2:13:30 - Support, Cool Onnit, Amazon, JockoStore stuff, with Jocko White Tea and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes). Extreme Ownership (book), (Jocko's Kids' Book) Way of the Warrior Kid, and The Muster002 2:40:28 - Closing Gratitude.

AI summary of episode

They're going to come to you way more likely, you know, you know, we talk about inoculation when it comes to training for combat and, you know, you, you, you, anoculate yourself to stress and, and one of the things I talk about like with self defense for, especially for women is if you train your jitter, you get a little bit of a bit of anoculated to the fact that someone's going to be grabbing you touching you grind it on units and so you're over that you're over that, but it seems like this is the same situation you do with kids. But you know people always want to know because there's a lot of young military families out there and you know I'm going to I'm going to say this right now I'm going to talk about military families and. You were probably thinking that they would have to make a choice between you and this guy, you know, maybe in your mind that's the best friend, you know, now you got to convince people and you just, you know, you don't know anything. I know, I know with my kids, you know, if they do something that they think is going to get him in trouble, especially in that five, six year old, seven year old, they're not going to tell you. So like, something like this, that's going to turn you into, you know, the person who's, you know, it's kind of like the leader. My seven year old dad dad told you know, so I think that's another thing is how do you make sure that they realize that you're going to be, you know, without blowing it out of proportion, which, which I agree with you know, it's a five year old kid. And when I got back, when I was there, I was thinking, man, I wish I would have brought my guitar because, you know, I had some time, you know, I could have probably played guitar for, you know, half hour a day, maybe 45 minutes, a couple of the guys would have brought there guitar, we could add some little jam sessions, right? I changed the diaper last time, you know, but if you notice, you're talking about yourself not the diaper got to get changed regardless, but you're like focusing on the fact that you had to do it, you know, kind of think. You know, they get little like, like, like, crown gold kind of crumbs, right? You know, I got to be like people have said, you know, I always say, well, people have been asking me this one person. What would plant that in your mind, you know, to make you think that it's going on from your parents perspective, you know, it's like me looking at one of my close friends. You know, obviously without asking leading questions, you know, that's going to make put somebody, you know, in another weird situation. And so that was, that was a little challenging itself to be trying to like get this farm up and going and being, you know, in the beginning you talked about me being like nine months pregnant out there working. And also just normal you know hard working Americans men and women you know you've got someone that's working hard and going a lot and dedicating a lot of their jobs so. And, and, you know, next thing you know, as soon as they, you know, help with the groceries, boom, the arms out of the cast and he's, he's abducting them. Because even you as a kid, you don't know how to say no, you don't know how to scream, you don't know how to tell someone to stop. And exactly what you just said, like a couple of things, you know, he said when he, he was talking about when he got home and he got in the car with his wife and his mom, he's in there for 10 minutes. And, you know, of course there's moments where you feel a little bit sorry for yourself and think, gosh, what if something happens, what if he comes home without his legs or with his face, trap and older, something, but, you know, I don't any more of that stuff doesn't get into my head much. So, the less you make it about yourself and more about the mission, the family, whatever it is that you're doing, the stronger you're going to have the capability to be you know, you can like solve the problems and you know, accomplish the mission. But I feel like it's kind of always on my mind because, you know, like, okay, I'm talking to Greg, right? Yeah, I felt like I was a bit distracted, not necessarily here, but just in life, you know, I couldn't like focus on the thing that I need. So, you know, one of the reasons that you're sitting here today, one of the reasons that I know you is that despite all that darkness that you got sucked into, you somehow, in some way, at some point, realized that you were going in the wrong direction and you, and you turned around and started to do. You know, because actually a lot of like being like a strong military wife and all this stuff, even just a normal. So my next deployment, I said to myself, cool, you know, bring a guitar, you know, with time, we're going to work on the riffs, go back to this deployment was to Ramadi. It's like that, you know, the boy or frog thing, you know, where you're, you just, that's normal to you. You know, one of the, you talk about being independent and I know obviously you're independent person, you can get along by yourself and my wife's the same way, very independent in terms of her day to day, she doesn't just need me to actually do anything for her. Like, people know what you look like. But I do know this your behavior is not going to get help it right the the bottle isn't going to help it the self abuse isn't going to help it the skip in work isn't going to help it. You know, there's, first of all, I can see how 15-year-old Iris, who's dealing with this stuff at home, and meets this guy that's, you know, 31-year-old is, I don't care if he's a total idiot.

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Episode transcript

[00:00:00] This is Jockel Podcast number 70.
[00:00:04] With echo Charles and me, Jockel Willink.
[00:00:08] Good evening, echo.
[00:00:09] Good evening.
[00:00:13] Now I was going to start off tonight with a warning that tonight's episode is going to contain things that are not appropriate for children.
[00:00:27] Then as I put together the notes, I realized that maybe the opposite is true.
[00:00:39] And that maybe this is an important episode that children do need to listen to.
[00:00:49] But I would say listen to it alone by yourself first without your children and then decide if and when they are ready to listen to this.
[00:01:04] And unfortunately, I will tell you that I think the time is likely sooner than you think.
[00:01:13] And it is most definitely sooner than it should be.
[00:01:21] Now, normally I am talking about war and in that light I have covered some of the most heinous and horrible things that have happened in the world.
[00:01:42] Evil things.
[00:01:48] Evil people.
[00:01:53] And the things that I am talking about are things that happen on a large scale in war.
[00:02:03] Battles between nations and armies versus armies and men against men.
[00:02:14] And in those situations on that global stage of war, as I always say,
[00:02:30] we see the best of human nature and we often see the worst.
[00:02:47] But sometimes the worst of human behavior, the most evil of human behavior, does not occur on the battlefield.
[00:03:01] And it is not driven by war. It's not brought on by the madness of combat.
[00:03:09] It's not the result of men trying to kill other men.
[00:03:16] Sometimes the most evil side of human beings sneaks around in the dark, working,
[00:03:31] waiting, praying on the weak, scared, and defenseless, praying on children.
[00:03:57] And often it isn't some archetype of evil.
[00:04:04] Like the picture you have in your head of some sneering predator with a sadistic look.
[00:04:15] It can often be a trusted neighbor or a family friend or even a woman.
[00:04:26] A relative.
[00:04:33] And to talk through some of this with me tonight, I'm honored to have a special guest on an amazing person that I admire for her toughness and courage, incredibly strong woman, loving mother.
[00:04:55] And extremely hard working and highly productive farmer.
[00:05:04] And last but certainly not least, an incredible wife to one of my very close friends who has done multiple combat tours overseas,
[00:05:16] leaving this wonderful woman back on the home front to handle the business at home.
[00:05:27] And her name is Iris. And my first solid memory of Iris.
[00:05:35] And I'd matter before this, but I didn't really think too much about it.
[00:05:39] But I was driving out to see her husband out on a farm, out on their farm that they live on.
[00:05:47] And I pulled up my vehicle, my mini van, I'm quite sure.
[00:05:54] And I'm looking across this spans of land and out there in the field, fully nine months pregnant.
[00:06:06] Guiding a horse drawn plow.
[00:06:10] Right? I'm talking. It looks like it's 1729 out there.
[00:06:15] Horse drawn plow in the field, in the summer time, in the in the in the inland of southern California.
[00:06:24] So it's hot and dusty.
[00:06:26] And she sees me and she like ties off the horse.
[00:06:30] And then she comes walking over to me and she's wearing the actual spurs, like you've seen in a western movie, that jingle jingle, no kidding.
[00:06:43] And she's a small frame woman, you know.
[00:06:46] And she took off the she had a pair of leather gloves on that looked like they were passed down from the marble, man.
[00:06:52] And she took one of those off and gave me hand shake and her skin was basically as tough as the leather gloves she was wearing.
[00:07:03] And she, you know, said, hey, and pointing me towards her house where I'd find her husband who is in there.
[00:07:09] Like watching TV or something in the air condition.
[00:07:12] And then she turned around and walked back and headed back out and filled again. She was nine months straight up nine months pregnant.
[00:07:20] And I fought to myself.
[00:07:22] Day.
[00:07:24] Breath.
[00:07:25] What a what an awesome woman.
[00:07:28] So years later.
[00:07:32] I would say maybe five, four or five years later.
[00:07:39] I was.
[00:07:42] Extremely moved and angered and disturbed and thankful and odd all at the same time when she posted an article online about something she had experienced as a child.
[00:08:09] And here is an excerpt of what she wrote.
[00:08:16] I was only five years old the first time had happened.
[00:08:25] I wasn't feeling well.
[00:08:28] So while everyone was else went down the hill to cut firewood.
[00:08:32] I stayed back at the cabin in bed.
[00:08:37] I remember him coming back.
[00:08:41] Coming through the door and telling me he needed to get a chainsaw file.
[00:08:49] He then came over to the bed, told me to lay still and pulled my pants down.
[00:09:00] I was a shy child. I would never ever have questioned and adult at that age.
[00:09:09] He inserted his fingers into my vagina and I remembered hurting and I was just petrified.
[00:09:20] I had no idea what to do.
[00:09:24] He said things to me like, doesn't that feel good?
[00:09:31] And you like this, right?
[00:09:35] I was unable to say anything.
[00:09:38] Or I don't know. I may have even mumbled agreement with him because that's what I thought I was supposed to do.
[00:09:49] I remember that it hurt and I was scared and I was confused.
[00:09:56] The sound of my parents truck pulling up the driveway, stopped him.
[00:10:01] And he carefully pulled my pants back up and went over to the sink and washed his hands.
[00:10:09] As if washing away the evidence.
[00:10:14] He then pulled me close and told me that this was a secret just between us.
[00:10:24] It was so cliche it amazes me now that that's what he said and how well it worked.
[00:10:42] Now, I have faced fear, I've faced horror, I've faced evil, but I've faced it as a full grown man who spent pretty much my entire life being trained to fight in the kill and prepared to die.
[00:11:08] And furthermore, when I was in those situations, not only was I a full grown man, I was with my brothers in arms to my left and to my right.
[00:11:25] But to face this kind of evil has a child.
[00:11:33] As a little girl and I have three daughters.
[00:11:39] As a little girl, scared, defenseless and alone.
[00:11:49] This is almost impossible for me to comprehend.
[00:11:56] And I know that I can learn a lot from the type of person that can survive this kind of abuse.
[00:12:04] I know we can all learn a lot, especially from a person with the strength to confront this evil and overcome it.
[00:12:14] And then put together an amazing and beautiful life within amazing and beautiful family.
[00:12:23] We can all learn from this.
[00:12:27] And with that mind, Iris, welcome to the show.
[00:12:35] And thank you so much for coming on.
[00:12:38] Wow, thank you, Jocco.
[00:12:40] It's really an honor to be here.
[00:12:44] And like a whole of our guests, now you have to tell us about the beginning.
[00:12:53] Where you came from, what was going on in your life?
[00:12:57] And your life is very internet.
[00:13:00] I remember when your husband first met you and he was kind of telling me about this girl he had met.
[00:13:06] And I was, you know, when you hear your story, just think damn, that's awesome.
[00:13:12] And so tell us a little bit about that about your childhood.
[00:13:15] You had a lot of very cool experiences in your childhood and grew up in a almost completely unique way that I don't think I've ever met anyone else that grew up like you did.
[00:13:24] Yeah, I, I never realized it was really unique until I wasn't an adult.
[00:13:30] Got out in the world a little bit more and realized that most people anywhere near my age did not grow up the way that I did.
[00:13:39] So we lived in the mountains in Northern California.
[00:13:44] My dad was initially a minor at Goldminer.
[00:13:49] And he would go into old mindjafs and bring out ore that they would crush in a small mill and then refine the gold down into bars that they would sell.
[00:14:04] And eventually he became a timber follower and a logger back in 1987.
[00:14:12] I was seven years old. There's a huge forest fire that burned through Northern California.
[00:14:17] And I remember vividly because one night there was just this wall of fire rolling down on our house.
[00:14:25] And luckily our house was spared, but a lot of our neighbors lost their homes.
[00:14:30] And after that a lot of logging came into the area because there was so much burned.
[00:14:36] But,
[00:14:38] So a lot of people have parents that might be working in minds.
[00:14:43] It might have parents that are working as, you know, lagers or lumberjacks.
[00:14:48] But they still might have things in their house like power and heat and electricity.
[00:14:56] So you guys were like off the grid, right? Yeah, that the whole area.
[00:15:00] So this place is probably one of the most rural places in this country.
[00:15:06] Still unless maybe you get up into Alaska.
[00:15:10] It's in Northern California in the mountains.
[00:15:12] There's this gorgeous river valley there.
[00:15:16] And it still doesn't have electricity.
[00:15:20] The people that live there still just use some solar now or generators.
[00:15:27] But no one had that back when I was a kid. So yeah, we grew up with no power, no telephones, no television.
[00:15:35] We used the old school carousine lanterns with a little thin glass globes.
[00:15:43] And you would carry those from room to room.
[00:15:46] And you would need to light. We would take them to bed with us at night and read by carousine lantern.
[00:15:53] And we had a wood cook stove that we cooked on.
[00:15:58] Just to get hot water, our wood cook stove had coils that ran through it that the water would run through.
[00:16:05] And warm it. So you would have to start a fire in the stove to have any hot water to warm it.
[00:16:13] So yeah, it was interesting. I take power and things like that for granted now.
[00:16:20] But back then it was just normal.
[00:16:23] Yeah, I was going to say if he comes normal for kids, I know that.
[00:16:27] For instance, were my kids were a little.
[00:16:29] They just thought that everyone did do jitsu because we did jitsu.
[00:16:32] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:34] It doesn't everyone do jitsu all the time.
[00:16:36] But just no no power.
[00:16:38] And that's kind of there. It's hard for people to even imagine that nowadays when you're a kid.
[00:16:46] And you don't have an iPad to entertain you.
[00:16:51] You don't have a TV to entertain you.
[00:16:54] The creativity has to be there right has to develop.
[00:16:57] Absolutely.
[00:16:58] Because what did you do for fun?
[00:17:00] Well, we have rocks.
[00:17:03] Yeah.
[00:17:03] I know what I see when I was a kid.
[00:17:05] I when I was a kid, it was like everything. Every stick you could find turned into a machine gun.
[00:17:10] And every rock you found turned into a grenade. And that's what we did.
[00:17:14] Did you even, how would you even know what a grenade was?
[00:17:17] Or, you know, how would you know what a doll was?
[00:17:20] Yeah, we had a few toys.
[00:17:23] But, you know, I see the toys that kids have now.
[00:17:27] And definitely is very different.
[00:17:30] It's very different.
[00:17:31] We had a few, a few old toys, but mostly we just lived outside.
[00:17:35] We just outside was our, that was our playground, our toys.
[00:17:41] And then where were you guys getting food from?
[00:17:44] We always had a big garden, my mom grew a huge garden and canned and frozen or welled in freeze.
[00:17:54] We didn't have electricity for freezer, but canned and dried food.
[00:17:58] And we had our own milk cows.
[00:18:03] We raised pigs, which that, that was kind of interesting too.
[00:18:09] We had a lot of pigs.
[00:18:12] My sister and I used to sleep outside in this, in the summers when the weather was nice.
[00:18:17] There was this old stone root cellar with, like, a loft that had open ends.
[00:18:21] And we would sleep up there whenever the weather was a little bit iffy.
[00:18:25] And it was right over top of the pig pan.
[00:18:28] So we essentially grew up in a barn.
[00:18:31] We would wake up in the middle night with pigs squealing and turn our flashlights on and shine the lights down there and watch like,
[00:18:37] like, letters of piglets being born.
[00:18:39] And these weren't even normal pigs.
[00:18:41] They were like wild force that we'd caught and bred.
[00:18:46] And so they were all hairy and long snouts.
[00:18:49] And they weren't like your fat pink pigs that you get.
[00:18:52] They're most people raised.
[00:18:55] And, and did you, was there any kind of school up there?
[00:18:57] There was a tiny little school that we went to.
[00:19:00] When I lived there, it was sort of the height of the population.
[00:19:04] There's less people there now, but there was the mining and the logging and brought in a few more people.
[00:19:09] And so the school that I went to had about 25 kids from K through eight.
[00:19:16] So there's maybe a couple of kids per grade.
[00:19:19] And we were all in the same, it was like two rooms.
[00:19:22] The big kids room and the little kids room.
[00:19:25] And we were so close because there were just a few of us.
[00:19:31] And we were, every all of the kids that I grew up with had very similar upbringing to the way I did.
[00:19:38] So there are at least 25 other kids out there in the world, too.
[00:19:42] So we grew up exactly the same as I did, but we were this pack of just fair, all children really.
[00:19:49] They just lived in the woods and swam in the river and and did everything.
[00:19:55] And I have wonderful memories of that, which offset a lot of the not so pleasant things that happened in that same time.
[00:20:04] Did you, uh, what about books did you guys have a ton of books?
[00:20:08] Did you read, was that sort of your one escape from the reality that was around you?
[00:20:15] Yeah, we didn't have television.
[00:20:17] And in the summers, we were mostly outside in the river.
[00:20:22] And the woods, we would go down to the river in the evening and watch the bears catch salmon.
[00:20:30] And sounds like a, you know, pretty normal after you've heard her for five year old.
[00:20:36] But in the winter, when it was cold and rainy, we read a ton.
[00:20:41] And I've got the best big sister in the world. She's a couple years older than me.
[00:20:46] And she was reading these just ridiculously age-inappropriate books.
[00:20:52] I remember her reading these huge novels when she was like 10 years old, because we didn't have any money.
[00:21:00] And it wasn't like our parents went out and bought us the newest children's books or anything to read.
[00:21:05] We just read whatever happened to be laying around.
[00:21:08] And oftentimes that was not what you would typically give a 10 year old to read.
[00:21:13] But so she would, she started reading to herself and then she would read to me before I was,
[00:21:19] and, you know, eventually I became a very avid reader too.
[00:21:24] But yeah, that was, that was a big part of her life.
[00:21:27] In fact, Kormack McCarthy is also one of my very favorite authors.
[00:21:33] If not my favorite author. I think I read all the pretty horses in the crossing.
[00:21:40] When I was like 15, I read Blood Meridian by the time I was 16.
[00:21:44] I've read them all numerous times.
[00:21:48] But I remember this wonderful old neighbor lady that lived down the road from us, gave me this box of a big cardboard box full of old Louis Lamor and Zane Gray novels.
[00:22:02] Which for anyone who's not familiar with those, they're their westerns, they're all westerns.
[00:22:08] And that was, you know, the way you talk about being a kid and sort of wanting to be a soldier, wanting to be in the military so bad,
[00:22:19] and that was like, you are focused on that and that's all you are going to do.
[00:22:22] That was me, but with horses.
[00:22:26] That was the only thing I cared about. And so I just gobbled up all of these old westerns and lived in that world of imagining myself being like a cowboy riding across the plane,
[00:22:40] so with my bed roll and, but I didn't have a horse.
[00:22:45] So, you know, I lived in the woods as much as I could.
[00:22:49] We, we've forage, we found, we hunted for wild mushrooms all the time, which is still one of my very favorite things to do.
[00:22:58] And I used to read mushroom and plant field guides like other kids might read, you know, fantasy novels or something.
[00:23:09] So it's, it's definitely unique and a lot of really, I mean, that's just an unbelievable experience and it sounds like you definitely.
[00:23:18] A lot of positivity, you know, there's so much positivity to that, the way you grew up.
[00:23:23] It was a very ideal, a childhood. I would say that I have a lot of darkness in that same time, but I wouldn't trade the way that I grew up for anything.
[00:23:38] So, let me talk a little bit about that, that darkness.
[00:23:47] And I kind of talked about in that opening of how it started and the first time it happened to you, this abuse that you suffered.
[00:23:58] Now I'm going to go back to this article that you wrote.
[00:24:03] And here we go.
[00:24:05] Again, this is, this is from a five year old.
[00:24:11] I was confused mostly.
[00:24:15] I don't think it ever crossed my mind to tell my parents.
[00:24:20] I just knew that I had been instructed not to tell anyone, so that's what I did.
[00:24:27] I really didn't understand what he had done or why, but I definitely knew that what had been done was wrong,
[00:24:36] and it might be something that I would be punished for.
[00:24:41] From that moment on, my life became one big game of cat and mouse.
[00:24:48] I tried to avoid him and he pursued me and took every opportunity to get his hands on me.
[00:24:56] He had plenty of opportunities because he was a beloved and trusted family friend.
[00:25:06] Even right in front of my parents and other people, he would regularly slap my butt and pull me onto his lap.
[00:25:17] I would always scorn my way as quickly as I could.
[00:25:20] I remember being left home with him.
[00:25:23] I remember throwing fits and begging to go along with my mom and my sister.
[00:25:28] My mom just thinking, I was acting out and being a brat.
[00:25:33] I would tell me to stay with him until they got back.
[00:25:40] The fact that no one realized what was happening by simply observing the situation still be wilderness me.
[00:25:54] So this guy, like you said here, this guy had full access to your house, full trust of your parents.
[00:26:02] Why is it that you think or expand?
[00:26:10] You kind of talk about it a little bit.
[00:26:12] But what is it that makes a kid hold that information in when something bad is happening like this?
[00:26:21] So I think it started happening with me when I was so young that I just didn't understand it.
[00:26:28] I did not understand what was going on.
[00:26:31] No one had ever told me that something like that might happen.
[00:26:35] And I was told not to say anything by an adult.
[00:26:41] And so I didn't.
[00:26:43] And I think I definitely had a feeling that I knew something was wrong and that this was not what should be happening.
[00:26:50] But I was a lot of it was probably just my personality type. I was a shy, quiet kid.
[00:26:59] And I wasn't inclined to express my emotions that much anyways.
[00:27:11] And I, you know, I think people who do this sort of thing, they look for a specific type of kid.
[00:27:19] They're not stupid.
[00:27:22] They know how to single out just the right kid.
[00:27:27] And that was me in the time.
[00:27:31] And I just had, I had a lack of understanding of what was even going on.
[00:27:38] I didn't really know that it was definitely something that I should tell other adults.
[00:27:46] And I'm thinking that in your in your situation and your upbringing, you're seeing you're seeing nature, right?
[00:27:55] You're understanding that pigs are having babies.
[00:27:58] I mean, you're seeing this kind of thing take place.
[00:28:00] But it wasn't something that your family talked about the birds in the bees or anything like that just didn't come up.
[00:28:07] Yeah, not really.
[00:28:09] And definitely not in.
[00:28:12] I think that it's hard for people to believe that their best friend or close family members would ever harm their children.
[00:28:24] And so I don't, I suspect that my parents felt like they kept a pretty good eye on me and that I was fine.
[00:28:32] Because they didn't look where they needed to look.
[00:28:36] I think that's an I'm sure echo has some kind of bias, psychological bias for this, but you know any time you're in a situation where there's something that you simply could never imagine and couldn't believe.
[00:28:48] And if that's, if that's if something that you could never imagine and couldn't believe happening and you're not being told about it.
[00:28:56] What would plant that in your mind, you know, to make you think that it's going on from your parents perspective, you know, it's like me looking at one of my close friends.
[00:29:05] I would never have that thought and so where would it come from?
[00:29:10] Well, I can see how it would not.
[00:29:12] And you probably think that your kid would let you know if there was a problem, right?
[00:29:18] You would be like, well, I would be able to tell if something was wrong because my kid would let me know somehow.
[00:29:26] And that's not necessarily the case.
[00:29:32] I'm going to go back as you continue this back to your writing here.
[00:29:37] We moved into our own house and I would have some moments of peace, but he was always around, always visiting and even parked a trailer on our property to live in for periods of time.
[00:29:50] He stalked me like I was his prey.
[00:29:54] I never ever felt safe from him.
[00:29:59] He would watch me constantly.
[00:30:02] I would look up from playing with toys and see him standing in the doorway of my bedroom staring at me.
[00:30:09] I would wake up to him watching me.
[00:30:13] When I would have friends over, I would suddenly jump up on an ounce that we need to go outside and play right now,
[00:30:20] because I would notice him watching us through a doorway or a window.
[00:30:32] Again, I can't even imagine what that had to feel like for a five year old, a six year old, a seven year old,
[00:30:39] and again, I picture my own children and their pure innocence that they live in thankfully.
[00:30:49] I can't even imagine this is like a horror movie.
[00:30:52] You're a kid and you're looking up and you're playing with your toys and you're reading your book or whatever you look up and you see this predator.
[00:31:01] Just stalking you all the time and the discomfort that you had to just feel constantly.
[00:31:10] No way to escape.
[00:31:14] You think there was there anything else that you can think of that you tried to do or tried to send a signal or was it just so sort of enveloped by the situation that you didn't.
[00:31:29] Just like I was talking about maybe your parents couldn't imagine what could be happening.
[00:31:36] Was it like you just couldn't imagine this not happening?
[00:31:42] Yeah, pretty much. I think because it started when I was so young, it just was part of my life.
[00:31:48] And it was so consistent. It wasn't like something that happened and then didn't happen for it was just like a daily part of my life.
[00:31:58] And so I don't think I really ever tried the signal.
[00:32:03] I remember one time there was a couple girls, some friends of my parents came and visited and they had a couple girls.
[00:32:10] A little bit older than me that came.
[00:32:13] And I remember the one girl who was probably 12 at the time.
[00:32:18] Telling me they spent the night they slept outside and she told me that when she woke up in the morning,
[00:32:25] my abuser had crawled up onto her bed and started touching her leg and she jumped up and told him no and ran away.
[00:32:36] And she also didn't go tell a grown-up. She came and told me that this had happened.
[00:32:41] And I remember telling her what happened to me.
[00:32:46] And that's the only time as a child that I ever told anyone.
[00:32:50] And I remember us sitting there kind of discussing this.
[00:32:55] I was probably eight, maybe at the time.
[00:32:59] And we're like, well, that's, yeah, I don't know why he does this.
[00:33:04] That's weird. I don't know. You know, and we just kind of discussed it and then never told anyone.
[00:33:11] Even though she was even older and hadn't grown up with it.
[00:33:15] And I don't know if later on she told someone, but at the time she definitely didn't go tell her parents or my parents or anyone,
[00:33:22] which reaffirms the fact that your kids aren't necessarily going to tell you.
[00:33:30] I know, I know with my kids, you know, if they do something that they think is going to get him in trouble,
[00:33:34] especially in that five, six year old, seven year old, they're not going to tell you.
[00:33:40] They don't volunteer that information.
[00:33:42] If they think it's something that they did wrong or think, so that's another little trap that occurs.
[00:33:55] Back to your writing here. He was old and was missing all of his teeth.
[00:34:03] He wore dentures sometimes and sometimes he didn't.
[00:34:08] I remember him pinning me up against walls and counters and kissing me with his soft toothless mouth and fingering me with his dirty hands.
[00:34:19] I want to devalment.
[00:34:23] I would never tell him no, though, never tell him to get away from me, never acknowledge that he was doing anything to me.
[00:34:33] I would just slip away from him as soon as an opportunity presented itself and mumble that I was going outside to play or down to the rock piles,
[00:34:41] my secret labyrinth of tankled blackberry brambles and boulders.
[00:34:47] You'd follow me to the top of the trail saying things like, come back, you like what I'm doing.
[00:34:54] Or I don't think your mom wants you to go down there while she's gone.
[00:35:00] But he never followed me down into the rock piles. It was my safe zone.
[00:35:06] It was the place I could cry with no one seeing me.
[00:35:12] I remember someone accusing him of molesting another little girl.
[00:35:18] I heard my parents talking about it and then my dad pulling me aside and asking me if Mike had ever touched me.
[00:35:25] I was caught off guard and totally unprepared to deal with what saying, yes, would mean.
[00:35:33] So I said no.
[00:35:38] As soon as it was out of my mouth, I wanted so badly to change my answer, but no one ever asked me again.
[00:35:46] I'm convinced that if I had had a little time to think and had been asked again, I would have spilled it all.
[00:35:56] Remember that? It's important.
[00:36:02] But at the time, I said no, and the woman who made the accusation was discredited has been crazy or a drug addict and having ulterior motives.
[00:36:14] And that was that.
[00:36:23] So there's a clear example. I could see now going from the perspective of a parent who's all uncomfortable to go up and ask this question in the first place.
[00:36:38] There's probably the weakest form of questioning, too.
[00:36:43] Has Mike ever made you feel weird?
[00:36:48] No, okay. He's good. Now, dad's like, okay, see I told you this is no issue. She's a liar. She's a drug addict.
[00:36:55] They want that answer. They want to hear no.
[00:37:00] Any parent wants to hear no when they ask that.
[00:37:05] And yet, you got to ask again. You got to put it probably in multiple different ways of asking the question, not just as he make you feel comfortable.
[00:37:17] But you got to ask that in so many different ways to get to open up the mind of the kid.
[00:37:23] You know, obviously without asking leading questions, you know, that's going to make put somebody, you know, in another weird situation.
[00:37:38] How do you ask your own kids?
[00:37:42] So I think that you have to talk about it casually, hopefully before something happens, make them aware of the fact that this does happen.
[00:38:01] People think that they're protecting their kids by not telling them that horrible stuff happens. They feel like they're protecting them by shielding them from this.
[00:38:15] And meanwhile, their kids are being molested and don't know how to tell anyone because no one's talked to them about it.
[00:38:25] And so you can start talking to them when they're really young, you simple terms and express that sometimes people do bad things and there's something.
[00:38:39] I tell my kids that there's something broken in some people's brains that makes them do something that normal people don't do, but that they're out there.
[00:38:51] And when you, I think when you question a kid about this, you have to ask it once and then give the kid the kid time to think about it.
[00:39:05] And then bring it up casually again a couple days later. Hey, you remember that thing we talked about the other day. I was thinking about it some more.
[00:39:14] Do you have, you know, is there anything else you want to talk to me about with that? And do that a few times, especially if you have any, if you suspect anything for sure, but even if you don't bring it up once, bring it up again a couple days later, bring it up again a couple days later.
[00:39:33] Give their little brains time to process what my, and then make sure to tell them that if anything happened, even if they're not telling me anything did.
[00:39:45] They're not going to be in trouble.
[00:39:48] If they feel like they want to tell me something. Now, some kids are just vocal and we'll talk fine, but other kids won't.
[00:39:57] And that's the kind of kid that you have to eat it out of.
[00:40:02] You think about this, you could actually develop a pattern with your kids where they're not talking about molestation, but if when they tell you something, you punish them because they told you the truth because they took a cookie drop the cookie jar spilled milk and they could have kept it a secret, but they told you and now you punish them.
[00:40:25] You're, you're doing the same thing. You're setting them up for, to keep secrets and keep things inside. I always tell my kids that don't get in more trouble for telling me a lie than for whatever they did.
[00:40:35] Oh, my, my kids absolutely know that.
[00:40:40] And that's the same with, not never mind kids when I was in the teams. That's the standard.
[00:40:46] Yeah, yeah, yeah, you tell me what happened. Don't lie to me what happened. If you tell me something you did something wrong, there was an incident. Something bad happened. We'll handle it.
[00:40:55] But one thing we can't do is if we try and cover something up and we get caught now now there's going to be hell to pay. So yeah, that's another thing that I do with my kids is I got there's some great books out there about talking to your kids about abuse and stuff.
[00:41:15] And there's one that I read to them sometimes and it's not.
[00:41:23] Those books aren't meant to just read once and never pick up again.
[00:41:27] They are a perfect opportunity to bring it up casually in conversation.
[00:41:32] There's a book that's called I said no and it's written by Zach and Kimberly King and Zach is a little boy and his mom Kimberly King and they wrote this book together.
[00:41:43] And it's really great. It talks about people as being like red flag people and those people can be the sort of people who just give you a strange feeling. They they unsettle you.
[00:41:56] They make you feel a little bit odd and it doesn't necessarily mean that they've done anything wrong to you but you should be able to pick out those red flag people and then talk to an adult about what is making them uncomfortable.
[00:42:10] No, no, is that? Is that because this red flag person did something that gave them a red flag?
[00:42:18] That's one of the things that I told my kids, especially now that my daughters are older.
[00:42:23] You know, one of my daughters is going on a trip somewhere and I was giving her the talk, you know, listen, you need to watch out.
[00:42:30] And my daughter said something to me like dad.
[00:42:35] I'm not going to be, you know, going and hanging around with some weirdo. And I stopped her right in her tracks and I said, it's not the weirdo.
[00:42:45] The guy that looks weird. It's not the guy that looks like a predator that you need to watch out for.
[00:42:50] The guy that you need to watch out for is the guy that seems like a nice guy.
[00:42:55] The guy that just, you know, helped you with your luggage is the guy.
[00:42:58] Not all of them, but you need to watch out for that. And if you look at some of those serial killers, you know, I think it was, I think it was Ted Bundy.
[00:43:08] But he had the whole thing where he had his arm in a cast.
[00:43:11] And he would ask someone to help him. He would ask a woman to help him.
[00:43:14] And he'd get my groceries in the car or whatever. And they'd see this kind of, and if you ever saw a picture of me, he looks like a nerd.
[00:43:20] And he has his arm in the cast and he's got a colored shirt on. He looks like a white collar guy and he's got a car.
[00:43:27] And, and, you know, next thing you know, as soon as they, you know, help with the groceries, boom, the arms out of the cast and he's, he's abducting them.
[00:43:34] And so, so, what, how do they identify like the red flag people?
[00:43:40] If it's more about your, your gut intuition, if there's something that just makes you feel a little bit weird, if they say something, you know, it's, it's about listening to that internal voice that might be telling you something's a little weird.
[00:43:56] But he's a really nice guy, you know, he's, and, and learning how to identify that and listen to it.
[00:44:03] Because, yeah, that's like I said, pedophile sexual predators, they're not stupid people, most of them aren't stupid people. They're very calculating.
[00:44:15] And they look for the right opportunities. So, you've, yeah, you've got a teacher kid, specifically that.
[00:44:23] I said, no part, right? Because even you as a kid, you don't know how to say no, you don't know how to scream, you don't know how to tell someone to stop.
[00:44:35] And, and also, how do identify what, you know, kids don't know where the line is. If you don't teach them what's right and what's wrong in terms of physical contact with them, then how, how are they going to know?
[00:44:48] How are they going to know?
[00:44:49] Exactly.
[00:44:51] That's a good point now. You, you don't want to scold the kid for making a mistake and, you know, how you hold lying is a, in higher regard as far as violations go.
[00:45:02] Where, if this environment is kind of created that what you say doesn't mean that much. So be careful with what you say, you know, but if the environment is, hey, you can come to me with anything.
[00:45:13] And you demonstrate that. Don't just say like, once someone say, hey, you can come to me with anything.
[00:45:18] Next day they come to you with something you're like, hey, I'm busy or hey, grown ups are talking, you know. So if you actually provide that environment consistently, they'll come to you with anything. Anything that's off, they'll be like, hey mom, what's this? Hey, there's a rabbit in the backyard, you know, it's like even something that small.
[00:45:35] So some weird or some red flag person comes and they're doing something strange out of the ordinary.
[00:45:43] They're going to come to you way more likely, you know, you know, we talk about inoculation when it comes to training for combat and, you know, you, you, you,
[00:45:53] anoculate yourself to stress and, and one of the things I talk about like with self defense for, especially for women is if you train your jitter, you get a
[00:46:01] little bit of a bit of anoculated to the fact that someone's going to be grabbing you touching you grind it on units and so you're over that you're over that, but it seems like this is the same situation you do with kids.
[00:46:14] Where you unoculate them to the uncomfortable conversations. So they're okay talking about stuff that let's face it, you know, there's your kid is not going to be comfortable talking about some things unless you
[00:46:24] unoculate them and you get them used to and they understand what's right and what's wrong. I think it's correct. Tell me what you said, it's the parents are typically the ones going to be more uncomfortable.
[00:46:34] Like the key, you'd be surprised with kids. They'll just talk about like we're, say, if unless you made it uncomfortable for them, they'll talk about some weird stuff, especially five six, but if they, the parents, hey, you know, in your scenario where they'll ask you something, you can answer they say good.
[00:46:50] That's the answer I want. Let's don't talk anymore. They're uncomfortable.
[00:46:54] And it's on the parent to initiate these conversations. It's not on the little kids to come to you and tell you something big has happened. It's on you as a parent to initiate these conversations.
[00:47:06] My daughter is she's shy and she doesn't express her emotions very well. She's not the kind of kid who comes and just tells you stuff.
[00:47:18] And I don't, I don't want this to sound like I'm beating this stuff into my kids heads every day and terrorizing them with the thought of scary things that might happen to them because I'm not. You know, I talk about it casually enough. I think that it gets through to them.
[00:47:32] But she had, she's in kindergarten and she had a little issue and she told me that a boy has been coming up to her on the playground and she, I always used
[00:47:45] to correct terminology because that's another thing I want. I feel like kids should be comfortable talking about their bodies. And she told me and it was hard for her to tell me. She didn't want to tell me and I could totally see it because of her personality. She came up and she told me that a little boy was coming up every day on the playground and like poking her in the vagina and then asking her to do the same to him.
[00:48:12] And she's, I think she's five. She told me that and I was like, okay, what I'm doing is working because knowing her personality, she didn't want to tell me that.
[00:48:23] But she did and so is the, and that was also the perfect experience to sort of teach like, okay, cool not a big deal. He's five years old, you know, they, little kids do that and they don't know what they're doing.
[00:48:37] But let's go talk to your teacher and make sure, you know, and I immediately took action and showed her that I wasn't going to let anything happen to her if she was uncomfortable with it.
[00:48:47] Without blowing it out of proportion.
[00:48:50] I was going to say, because a lot of times the, what kids are embarrassed about from age whatever you make you see.
[00:48:56] Yeah, is they don't want to tell you because, you know, my, my 17 year old will do that as well. My seven year old dad dad told you know, so I think that's another thing is how do you make sure that they realize that you're going to be, you know, without blowing it out of proportion, which, which I agree with you know, it's a five year old kid.
[00:49:13] It's a five year old boy. They're doing like you said they're talking about stupid stuff that they don't understand and they're doing things that they don't understand yet. That's like, okay, but, but let's now teach them.
[00:49:24] Let's let them learn and let that be.
[00:49:27] And that gave me a lot of confidence that if something because I, because she dealt with that in a great way, if something bigger were to happen, I now feel like she would be much more inclined to come to me.
[00:49:39] But what you're saying about not wanting to make a scene, I think, as I got older and understood what was happening to me a lot more than I did when I was little.
[00:49:52] I didn't want to make a scene.
[00:49:54] This is somebody who was my parents best friend was deeply involved in our life, had been with us forever.
[00:50:01] And imagine what telling would look like.
[00:50:09] And that wasn't something that I was prepared to handle.
[00:50:13] Even when I was a teenager and I knew exactly what was going on and I knew exactly how wrong it was. The scene that it would ensue if I said something was not something that I was willing to deal with.
[00:50:25] That's even hard for adults to do any kind of like confrontation that's going to cause these big ripples is like, man, I got away all this out. No, you know, like, can I strengthen myself up versus, you know, create this big scene.
[00:50:38] I'd rather deal with strengthening myself up and especially because you have no idea in your mind, you probably made it even a bigger crazy scene.
[00:50:47] You were probably thinking that they would have to make a choice between you and this guy, you know, maybe in your mind that's the best friend, you know, now you got to convince people and you just, you know, you don't know anything.
[00:50:58] You don't know if they're going to believe you. You don't know if he's going to go to jail, you just don't know what the consequences are going to be. And it's much easier to just be like, all right, I've dealt with this. I can keep dealing with this. I'm not going to cause any ripples.
[00:51:18] So as you grow, I'm going to go back to your writing here. As I grew older, I got better and better at avoiding him. His pounding of me did not decrease, but I rarely let him get his hands on me.
[00:51:32] I was incapable of just telling him to get away from me if he got me cornered.
[00:51:38] I'm not sure how to explain what this is like, this constant pursuit and pounding that you are unable to avoid when you are a child.
[00:51:49] When I was 12 years old, we moved. It was over seven years of stress and fear and pain, finally replaced with an empty discomfort.
[00:52:03] A weight was lifted from my shoulders. I got a horse and felt more freedom than I ever had.
[00:52:14] And then he followed. He bought a piece of property just up the hill from us, and that was the beginning of dealing with him as a teenager.
[00:52:26] I never let him touch me again. I tolerated his crude comments and ate dinner next to him at the dinner table. I laughed at his jokes, and I'd do tofully rode my horse up the hill to check on him every couple of days at the insistence of my parents.
[00:52:42] He would always come out of his trailer and lay a hand on my thigh and invite me to tie up and come inside.
[00:52:51] I still couldn't look him in the eye, still couldn't tell him to fuck off.
[00:52:57] Instead, I would just change the subject and ride off with a hollow pit in my stomach.
[00:53:14] So you move away and then he follows you there.
[00:53:21] And you know, you talk about how hard it is to explain this, this pounding that you got and your trapped. You can't, you don't feel like you can say anything to your family.
[00:53:35] You can't get away from him and this has just got to be. You say a hollow pit in your stomach. And this has got to be eating it to you.
[00:53:51] And you find finally some comfort in horses, which was already your dream. And now you finally get, you finally get your first horse.
[00:54:04] Yeah, that was the best thing that ever happened to me up until that point, at least. Maybe ever.
[00:54:15] There was a neighbor lady that lived close to us who had this horse that she didn't have time for. And she let me bring it home and start riding it.
[00:54:25] And I didn't, my family never had horses. We knew nothing about horses other than my just insane desire to have one.
[00:54:36] And so I just started riding it. And this horse was half broke at best. And I would fall off constantly.
[00:54:48] I just would smack my head on the ice and get back on and fall off again. And I remember my dad one time standing there and just telling me, you got to stop. You can't, you can't, you, I'm not going to let you sit here and kill yourself trying to ride this horse.
[00:55:05] And you know, of course, back then I didn't, I didn't have a silly thing like a riding helmet or even a saddle.
[00:55:16] I just, I just had this desire to ride this horse. And if it was going to kill me, it was going to happen. And so I did. I just kept after it and finally wore the poor horse down and he gave up. And he ended up being, you know, the by my side for for many years.
[00:55:39] And so that gave me this whole different level of freedom. I wasn't, you know, constrained to my feet anymore. I could go out and get just miles and miles away from it all.
[00:55:54] And, you know, home wasn't, it wasn't a comforting spot for me to be. So I was much more comfortable being out in the mountains by myself with my horse.
[00:56:08] And some people might have an issue with this, but by the time I was 12, I was carrying a 30, 30 rifle on in a scabbard on my saddle.
[00:56:23] And I had a little group of 22 that I carried with me, you know, one or the other usually when I was out riding because my parents felt like I was safer with a gun than without a gun, even though I was 12 years old. I'd grown up around guns and was comfortable with them.
[00:56:40] And since I would head out in the mountains and I think the only rule I had was that I had to be back by dark. And, you know, when you're on a horse and you leave first thing in the morning, you can cover a lot of ground.
[00:56:55] And if something had ever happened to me, I don't know how anyone would have even found me. So I was, I had to be responsible and self rely on to make sure that I was this safe as I could be out there.
[00:57:09] And I give my parents a ton of credit for allowing me that freedom.
[00:57:17] They had a daughter who had this passion to be doing what I was doing. And it was dangerous.
[00:57:28] And they let me do it. And that is a large part of what built me into who I am today. And so, that, you know, that's something that I also try to do for my own kids as much as I can, you know, I'm pretty cautious with them, but I still try to always allow them a lot of freedom.
[00:57:55] And I remember one time I was, I think I was 15, I was riding away from home a little ways. And I was down in this creek bottom. And I heard this commotion down there, this like barking and noise and I thought there were neighborhood dogs who would chase deer.
[00:58:15] And I thought that the dogs had a deer down down in the creek bottom. And that was what I, you know, what threw my head through my head. And I ran my horse down through the brush into this creek bottom.
[00:58:25] I think I was going to scare the dogs off this deer. And I came out of the brush literally from me to you, like five feet away from this mountain lion. It was just in full, snarling crowd, to tack mode.
[00:58:40] It was squared off with, I didn't, I didn't know this when I was riding, but one of my dogs had followed me and I hadn't seen it.
[00:58:49] And it was down in this creek bottom with this mountain lion and they were face to face, just snarling and crouched down at each other. And I came out of the bushes right on top of them. And, you know, I didn't feel any fear at all. I just reacted.
[00:59:06] And I just knew I had to get a little space between myself and the lion. And I spun my horse around and got up the hill just a little ways. And then stopped to watch the situation.
[00:59:18] And the dog was as big wolf child cross. It was a big dog, but she got scared. And she cut and ran. She decided she'd had enough.
[00:59:32] And she turned and to run from this cat. And the second she turned to run, the cat had her. It just threw an arm over her back, reached under bitter throat. And she just went limp. And then the cat just picked her up and carried her away.
[00:59:46] Yeah, and that's because you're not supposed to turn your back on the dog.
[00:59:50] Yeah, yeah, don't ever.
[00:59:51] So even when you kind of rode away, I was kind of, and the reason I did that is because the cat was distracted.
[00:59:57] Right. I wasn't the threat to the cat. I was the side thing. The threat was the dog. And thank goodness. My horse was just a rock. And didn't dump me right in front of this cat.
[01:00:07] Because that happened. There's no doubt in my mind that I would have been attacked.
[01:00:13] But, you know, things like that. That was my life. Things like that happened. And I was young and I had to be able to deal with those situations.
[01:00:23] How old were you at that point? 15? And there's also this really, really strong dichotomy here.
[01:00:31] Is that you're out in the wilderness on horseback, pack and heat, you know, confronting mountain lions.
[01:00:42] And even with all that, you didn't confront this abuser.
[01:00:51] And that's another, you know, sign and indication to people of how hard it is psychologically.
[01:00:58] For someone that's as strong as you were as a teenager that's out there on your own. Like I said,
[01:01:04] riding around the mountains with a pistol on a rifle ready to, you know, get after it.
[01:01:10] And yet this, by this point, kind of an old man is still has this level of control over you in your own home.
[01:01:20] Yeah. And that's just, um, and, and I would say then,
[01:01:27] at this point, maybe to fill that hole or to release some of that tension, you start going down a path,
[01:01:39] that's not a good path for you to be going down in life.
[01:01:44] So when I was also 15, I met someone that lived a few miles away from us who was, I think he was in his 30s.
[01:01:57] He was an Indian guy and he rode around the mountains on his horse as well.
[01:02:01] And it was, um, I developed a relationship with him.
[01:02:08] And, you know, it was, he was not the kind of person that you would want your 15 year old to be dating,
[01:02:16] but to me, he was, it was just this romantic thing. And it was this escape.
[01:02:21] It was, it was something different.
[01:02:23] It was someone that paid attention to me in a time when I was really struggling with, um,
[01:02:29] my home life and, and who I was, I think the, the molestation of view stuff got harder for me as a teenager,
[01:02:40] as I, even though it wasn't actively happening anymore, really physically,
[01:02:47] it was messing with my mind a lot more because I understood it better.
[01:02:54] And so I started dating this guy who, um, you know, was a distraction to me from that.
[01:03:10] And, you know, in the way 15 year olds will, I just became madly in love with him.
[01:03:19] And, you know, you can make your own conclusions about, uh, 30 something year old,
[01:03:28] man dating a 15 year old. Um, I certainly feel a lot different about it now than I did then.
[01:03:35] He, he told me that he wanted to marry me. Like it was, it was very serious in my mind.
[01:03:44] And then one morning I was riding away from home down the Sturt Road and I remember a neighbor rancher pulled up alongside me and asked me if I'd heard what happened.
[01:03:59] And he told me that this man that I was in love with had been shot and killed.
[01:04:07] What was it? What was the genesis of him being shot and killed?
[01:04:12] It was, like I said, he wasn't, he wasn't the most outstanding person.
[01:04:19] And it had to do with marijuana and guns.
[01:04:24] And it, it was just a mess and it was tragic.
[01:04:33] There he is. Yeah, he wasn't a drug addict, but he led a life of, well, I'll just say it.
[01:04:43] He would steal people's marijuana plants from them and sell them.
[01:04:48] And it got him into trouble.
[01:04:54] And I look back now on the road that that relationship could have taken me down and while it was just horribly tragic event for me at the time.
[01:05:06] This sent me into an even deeper tail spin.
[01:05:12] Now as an adult, the way I am, I'm almost thankful that it happened because I think that had that not happened.
[01:05:21] Who knows where my life would have gone?
[01:05:25] It's a what? You know, there's, first of all, I can see how 15-year-old Iris,
[01:05:36] who's dealing with this stuff at home, and meets this guy that's, you know, 31-year-old is,
[01:05:43] I don't care if he's a total idiot. He can manipulate the hell out of a 15-year-old all day long.
[01:05:49] But regardless, you're end up, you're in just a super vulnerable situation because of your mindset,
[01:05:56] and you end up here, you know, in this relationship with this guy, now he gets murdered,
[01:06:03] and you go, it's, you end up just going even worse at the time.
[01:06:09] Yeah, that was, that was a hard thing for my 15-year-old brain to process.
[01:06:16] And shortly thereafter, my parents separated, not in an amiable fashion.
[01:06:25] My sister went off to college, so I was, especially on my own because she was, you know, my rock.
[01:06:34] And I just really went into a cycle of depression and misery.
[01:06:42] And by the time I was 16, I was dating a 32-year-old cop, which again, you know,
[01:06:53] I have very different feelings now on what a 32-year-old cop is doing dating a 16-year-old.
[01:07:01] But he was this safety zone for me in a big way. He was this, you know, strong, brave person who wasn't going to let anything bad happen
[01:07:11] to me. And I really latched on to that when I was just trying to find something in life to hold onto.
[01:07:26] And that ended up being a long, on and off again relationship, which definitely was not healthy for me.
[01:07:38] And at that point in time, I started self-mutilating. I started cutting and burning myself.
[01:07:49] I was definitely very depressed.
[01:07:54] And it was not something that I knew how to communicate to anyone.
[01:08:00] And I just was sucked into misery and self-pity, really.
[01:08:08] And when you start hurting yourself, is that at that moment, is it just so much anger and frustration that it somehow feels good to feel that pain or inflict pain on yourself?
[01:08:26] Because it more of a, hey, everyone, look here, I'm doing this to myself.
[01:08:34] Maybe you should pay some attention to me and help me.
[01:08:37] Or is it a little bit of both or is there something that I don't know and understand?
[01:08:41] I would say it's definitely both. It's definitely, it's a funny thing, it's hard to understand.
[01:08:50] It's sort of an addictive behavior. And, you know, I've read about it some and they say there's chemicals released in your brain and stuff when you feel physical pain that makes the emotional, the dulls emotional pain and things like that.
[01:09:08] But it also for me, I will absolutely say that, yeah, I think it was, it was a cry for help. It was like,
[01:09:15] somebody realized what, you know, and as all teenagers do, you think that you're some rare exotic creature that's no one else has ever experienced anything you've gone through.
[01:09:32] And nothing anyone says to you matters because they don't know what they're talking about.
[01:09:40] But for me, a lot of it was a cry for attention to have someone and I got it. The thing is, as I got the attention, the cop that I was dating told my parents that I was doing this and people kind of freaked out.
[01:10:02] And everybody thought that there was really something that matter with me and I was really depressed and I wouldn't even though I was getting the attention and people were actually asking me like,
[01:10:13] What's going on? What's, why are you doing this? I wouldn't say I would not tell anybody.
[01:10:21] I just was shut off and it's like I wanted the attention, but then I still wouldn't say what. And maybe part of it is that I didn't even know, but I think what we talked about before of the not wanting to make a scene.
[01:10:35] I was not going to make a scene. This at this point, my abuser was pretty old, but he was still alive and he was still in our lives, he still, you know, all the time.
[01:10:47] And people were asking me, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? And I was not going to say.
[01:11:00] I'm going back to your writing.
[01:11:04] By that time, I was already damaged by so many years of abuse, heartbreak and death, painful and destructive relationships.
[01:11:14] My parents were divorced and angry. My sister had moved away.
[01:11:21] I was in a spiritual, I was in a spiral of self-destructing and self-pity. I had taken a cutting and burning myself, scars that I still carry to this day to remind me of the way my life could have continued.
[01:11:36] And that's what you just talked about. And then at this point, you're 17 or 18 years old and your abuser who you just said was now an old guy, he dies.
[01:11:51] Then I'm going to continue. I'm not sure exactly when I woke up.
[01:11:56] When I shut off the self-pity fountain and realized that I was strong and indestructible.
[01:12:05] Somewhere in my early 20s, my 20s was a slow rebuilding of my life, the way I wanted it.
[01:12:14] I traveled, wandered, worked as a horse-rangler around the west, had relationships with men who were kind and decent, got married, got divorced, made friends, built up a reserve of strength and found myself little by little.
[01:12:34] So, you know, one of the reasons that you're sitting here today, one of the reasons that I know you is that despite all that darkness that you got sucked into, you somehow, in some way, at some point, realized that you were going in the wrong direction and you, and you turned around and started to do.
[01:13:00] I know we've talked about it before, it wasn't like you woke up one day and said, today I'm going to change my life.
[01:13:06] You transitioned, you transformed over a period of time, you're not going to put a day on it, you didn't have a your recum moment.
[01:13:16] But you slowly started seeing yourself from a different perspective and realizing that the path you were on wasn't a good one.
[01:13:26] So as soon as I graduated high school, I left to start working on ranches.
[01:13:32] I went to Montana and I remember clearly I was 18, I guess, and I was working on a ranch in Montana.
[01:13:46] And someone had left laying around this dusty old copy of DH Lawrence book of poetry.
[01:13:54] And I read this little poem and it just stuck with me and I'll read it here.
[01:14:02] It's, I never saw a wild thing, sorry for itself.
[01:14:06] A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bow without ever having felt sorry for itself.
[01:14:16] And I read those words and they just hit me in the right place and I'm not saying that that in particular is what really started to make a change.
[01:14:26] But I read some more things and I was growing older and I was thinking about things differently.
[01:14:38] And my abuser had died and that was probably the biggest weight that I've ever felt lifted off of me.
[01:14:48] Because now what I realized is even if I did choose to tell someone, it wasn't going to cause the kind of scene that it would have before.
[01:14:59] And I still didn't really choose to tell anyone, but that in itself, not having him actually be present was a big thing for me.
[01:15:09] And I realized that I had just been damaging myself and I'd really been hurting people in my life, my parents, my sister, they were just confused.
[01:15:20] They didn't understand why I was, why I was doing what I was doing to myself.
[01:15:27] And I realized that I was just in this, I was being selfish and self-centered and just feeling sorry for myself.
[01:15:39] And I stopped.
[01:15:42] I just gained a little bit of perspective and made myself stop.
[01:15:52] That that perspective piece is so important. What's crazy? And I know we all have seen and everyone's seen people that are in the downward spiral.
[01:16:02] They're just caught in the downward spiral, whether it's a relationship, whether it's booze, whether it's drugs, whether it's behavior, you can see it.
[01:16:11] And when you're on the outside of it, it's so obvious.
[01:16:16] And you want to grab that person and I'm sure everyone, I have literally grabbed my friends that I've seen in that downward spiral and shaking them and saying, get out, come out, come here.
[01:16:27] All you have to do is come over here, step over here with me and look back and see what situation you're getting your in and the direction you're heading.
[01:16:36] And unfortunately, you can't pull them out.
[01:16:41] You can't pull their head out and let them look back at themselves. They have to step out. They have to come to that recognition themselves.
[01:16:49] And that's one of the hardest things as a friend or as a family member to watch that person.
[01:16:57] It's like watching a train wreck.
[01:16:59] And you know all you could, you know you could press the brakes. You realize how easy it would be just to hate the brakes, press the brakes, stop.
[01:17:07] And yet we can't do it. We can't help people.
[01:17:12] You have to help yourself.
[01:17:15] And so I mean, obviously, that poem, you know, seeing that was a form of you starting to take a look at it,
[01:17:22] starting to take a look at yourself from a different perspective, maybe your abuser.
[01:17:27] Dying helped you start to look at that from a different perspective.
[01:17:30] Definitely. It was, it was a long slow process for me, though.
[01:17:34] It didn't just happen overnight. I mean, I, I think I've been made a very conscious decision not to hurt myself anymore,
[01:17:41] but you have to teach yourself how to think and feel.
[01:17:48] And that takes time to teach yourself to have the right kind of thoughts and feelings about things.
[01:17:57] And one thing that I wanted to say while I'm here talking about this is that,
[01:18:05] just because I'm sitting here saying that I did this, that I woke up and stopped,
[01:18:13] doesn't mean that everyone who's experienced something like this should just get over it.
[01:18:23] If you have listeners, if you have a girlfriend or a wife or a sister or someone who has been through something like this,
[01:18:34] or maybe after listening to this show will confess to you that they've been through something like this,
[01:18:39] maybe they've never told you before.
[01:18:46] And maybe they'll tell you something that doesn't even seem like that big of a deal. Maybe it's not years and years of abuse or violence.
[01:19:01] Maybe it is something that happened to them when they were young and it's a sucky situation,
[01:19:10] but it's not horrible. It's a horrific.
[01:19:13] But she still feels violated.
[01:19:17] And it's this personal process that you have to go through.
[01:19:22] And friends and family and people that know someone is struggling with this definitely need to support in every way they can.
[01:19:32] But you also don't become a crutch.
[01:19:37] Just because someone has gone through something like this doesn't give them the right to drag everyone else down with them into their pit of depression and misery.
[01:19:53] So you support the best you can without enabling the bad behavior because that's really what it is.
[01:20:06] It's bad behavior. There's people who've gone through much more horrific things than anything I have ever been through that have come out fine.
[01:20:17] And it's just getting your mind in the right place and taking control of your thoughts.
[01:20:26] And I know you have obviously experienced being married to a military member and I would say along the lines of what you just said is that people are going to handle things differently.
[01:20:39] Then you can have two guys that were on the same exact combat deployment and did pretty much the same things.
[01:20:45] And they're just going to have to deal with it in a different way.
[01:20:48] And maybe one guy gets over it pretty quick or maybe one guy barely even reacts to it. Maybe one guy really hurts him and it takes him some time and it sounds like it's the same thing with with what you're saying we have to be open to hey this may take some time and it may take a different course and at the exact again to mirror what you just said.
[01:21:11] There's guys that just because they had some rough combat that doesn't give them the right to number one drag them, drag themselves down the wrong path and number two drag their family and their friends down the wrong path.
[01:21:26] And I think definitely you know what I say hey look, I don't claim to understand what you've been through.
[01:21:34] But I do know this your behavior is not going to get help it right the the bottle isn't going to help it the self abuse isn't going to help it the skip in work isn't going to help it.
[01:21:45] So I think those are those are those are fairly similar again I don't I'm not trying to say that the same thing I'm just saying that there's that dealing with them has a lot of similarities both guys that have been in combat trauma and people that have suffered this type of abuse it seems like there's some similarities in the way that.
[01:22:02] That there's varied ways that that can handle there always has to be accountability for your own actions no matter what you've been through.
[01:22:11] You can't just say I've been through something horrible so I can act like this.
[01:22:16] Well you know case and point before we pressed record today you and I were talking about you know Colonel reader who came on the show and who was a POW and.
[01:22:25] And you just think that guy you know just has been through and he's been through hell and then he sits there during the podcast and says the same thing that you just said which is look I had a rough but there's plenty of guys that had it way worse than me and and you know I think I don't I can't think of anything worse than a two foot tall bamboo cage in the middle of the of the jungle with rats.
[01:22:54] rats eating my wounds with my feet shackled into a bamboo shackle you know that is just that's unbelievable and to your point.
[01:23:08] He comes on and says you know number one other people have had it rougher than me and number two.
[01:23:14] I'm happy for what I've got and let's move forward.
[01:23:19] It really wasn't until my kids were born that I mean this was this was in my mind all the time I probably.
[01:23:30] I would say into my mid 20s.
[01:23:33] This is how prevalent it was I probably thought about the abuse at least once every single day it was always in my mind.
[01:23:46] And eventually I learned that I didn't need to waste my thoughts on that and learn to spend less time thinking about it.
[01:23:59] But it really wasn't until my kids were born I think and my daughter was five years old.
[01:24:07] She was just a little girl just a little girl and she was the same age that I was when I was already dealing with abuse.
[01:24:20] And that just made me burn with rage.
[01:24:26] And I realized that I felt that I had an obligation to speak about this.
[01:24:35] That it happens to so many kids it's so prevalent in not you know girls but also boys it's not just girls this is happening happens in higher number of girls but it happens to both.
[01:24:52] I felt like what I'd been through and what I had you know I think I've come around and I'm a pretty well adjusted person now.
[01:25:06] And then I had an obligation to talk about this because it's something that doesn't get talked about it gets swept under the rug and even people who have happened to get treated like there's something wrong with them and there's.
[01:25:17] And they're embarrassed and they don't want to talk about it and it's time for that to stop it's time for us to start talking about it.
[01:25:27] And I'm I feel like I'm resilient.
[01:25:31] I grew up with this really close proximity to nature and I've seen animals suffer.
[01:25:46] I've seen animals suffer.
[01:25:51] They don't have doctors they don't have medicine but they've got fire in their hearts and they don't feel sorry for themselves and they survive.
[01:26:04] And I credit a lot of my resiliency to my upbringing in nature and observation of nature and how it's cruel.
[01:26:18] And it's beautiful and creatures survive in the most difficult and challenging service situations and they flourish.
[01:26:31] And if they can do that so can I.
[01:26:38] That's that's awesome that is just awesome and you know you kind of went right to talking about your kids or right to talking about your daughter.
[01:26:50] You you you know as you got out of that bad time of your life you ended up meeting your your husband my friend your husband and my note here is that you meeting your husband was the best thing that ever happened to him.
[01:27:09] And and now and that's another reason why I you know I really wanted to bring you on and have you share some of your experiences obviously the the abuse and your survival and your attitude about all that.
[01:27:25] But bringing also that strength to and you know people have always asked if I would bring my wife on and you know my wife she's wonderful.
[01:27:34] She's not coming on the pot. It's not her deal. But you know people always want to know because there's a lot of young military families out there and you know I'm going to I'm going to say this right now I'm going to talk about military families and.
[01:27:48] And in the background I just want everyone to think first of all that also applies to you know cops and first responders and firefighters maybe not to the same degree.
[01:27:59] And also just normal you know hard working Americans men and women you know you've got someone that's working hard and going a lot and dedicating a lot of their jobs so.
[01:28:09] That applies across the board but that being said you know you're a military wife my wife's a military wife and.
[01:28:19] And I ended up in this situation well you met your current husband who's you know like I said a good friend of mine and and we I was on my my very first deployment ever.
[01:28:31] And I think it was his second deployment and you know we met and hit it off immediately he kind of grew up. He grew up in California grew up on the East Coast but we grew up with a similar kind of background and that we were both kind of into.
[01:28:49] And we were just into the same kind of stuff and we recognize that immediately about each other and so we became friends back then we then we spent many years at different teams and but we ended up being together at.
[01:29:04] And I think we were just going to be a team three he was in different task unit than me but anyways.
[01:29:20] His family and even more can color the real life and its real life and
[01:29:49] and impressed, particularly with the fact that he was a Navy SEAL.
[01:29:54] I think that I'm fairly well suited to the lifestyle because I'm pretty independent
[01:30:07] and I don't tend to be someone who frets a lot over what might happen.
[01:30:17] I know that he loves his job and he's well trained as he can possibly be to do the job
[01:30:23] that he does.
[01:30:25] So, you know, that's really, that's really all there is for me.
[01:30:31] And, you know, of course there's moments where you feel a little bit sorry for yourself
[01:30:37] and think, gosh, what if something happens, what if he comes home without his legs or with
[01:30:42] his face, trap and older, something, but, you know, I don't any more of that stuff doesn't
[01:30:51] get into my head much.
[01:30:54] And so, I don't, I just don't really worry about it.
[01:30:59] You know, one of the, you talk about being independent and I know obviously you're independent
[01:31:03] person, you can get along by yourself and my wife's the same way, very independent in terms
[01:31:09] of her day to day, she doesn't just need me to actually do anything for her.
[01:31:14] But I wrote down a note just to talk about another level of independence and that's emotional
[01:31:18] independence, which I think is very important.
[01:31:21] I think it's something that, you know, spouses need to find for each other because I think
[01:31:25] there's spouses that become emotionally dependent on each other.
[01:31:30] And that works in a day to day relationship if you're seeing each other all the time, but
[01:31:33] if your husband or your wife goes on deployment and leaves you for six months to 14 months
[01:31:38] to 18 months if you're in a long deployment cycle, you are not going to have that emotional
[01:31:45] shoulder to lean on.
[01:31:47] It's not going to be there.
[01:31:50] And so you have to learn how to be emotionally independent.
[01:31:55] Now what's scary about this is that obviously, if you get so much emotional independence that
[01:32:02] you're no longer, you could lose connection, right?
[01:32:06] And so that's what you have to watch out for.
[01:32:08] And I think what you see with, especially with younger married couples, the emotional
[01:32:12] independence from one person leads up to leads to some kind of emotional dependence on
[01:32:18] some other person that they meet next to, you know, we have a bad situation.
[01:32:21] So I think that emotional independence is something if you talk about with each other and
[01:32:25] you say, you know, my wife was one of the best things about my wife is I wouldn't even
[01:32:30] talk to my wife.
[01:32:32] You know, just not, you know, I wouldn't send her an email.
[01:32:34] She'd be a week two weeks, three weeks, no email, nothing because I'm overdoing my job.
[01:32:39] And she wouldn't think to herself, oh, he's not talking, send me an email.
[01:32:44] Why are you emailing me?
[01:32:45] Send me?
[01:32:46] No.
[01:32:47] Hey, he's busy.
[01:32:48] You know, she wasn't dependent on me for her emotion.
[01:32:50] So I think that's another important piece that you need to talk about with your spouse
[01:32:55] if you're in a military situation.
[01:32:57] Yeah.
[01:32:58] I, my husband's pretty good actually about staying in touch with me and communication
[01:33:04] on deployments, but it's not because of emotionally being dependent on each other.
[01:33:12] That's just the way he is.
[01:33:13] He values my opinion on things a lot and we talk about things.
[01:33:19] And, you know, so we do communicate quite a bit.
[01:33:24] But yeah, I completely know what you mean about the, and as, as being a wife sitting at home
[01:33:32] with your husband gone, like you can't just sit there and pine over them being gone and
[01:33:37] wait for them to come home.
[01:33:39] That's, you have to have your own life.
[01:33:41] You have to carry on while they're gone.
[01:33:48] And that's the best way you can support them, I think.
[01:33:52] If you're, you know, making them feel bad for not calling you every opportunity you get
[01:33:58] and letting a guilt trip on them about, you know, the fact that they're not giving you enough
[01:34:05] attention and stuff when they've got, yeah, you can't do that.
[01:34:09] You've got to, you've got to just take charge of your own life and do that while they're
[01:34:16] away.
[01:34:17] Now, when they're away, obviously, that's some things you deal with when they're away.
[01:34:22] And then you have other things that you have to deal with when they come back home, especially
[01:34:30] during a, during a hard deployment.
[01:34:35] Now, I know a lot of civilians listen to this show as well.
[01:34:38] And it's important to recognize that there's different types of deployments.
[01:34:42] And even during the same time period, exact same deployment cycle with two groups of people,
[01:34:50] or 100 groups of people, there will be some people that are in an area or in an area of
[01:34:55] operational, have a mission set that will allow them to completely coast and enjoy themselves
[01:35:01] and have plenty of free time.
[01:35:03] And that can happen.
[01:35:05] And then the other end of the spectrum is you can go on deployment and you can think,
[01:35:13] you can end up in total violence and chaos and mayhem.
[01:35:15] And I just thought of this, my first deployment to Iraq, you know, we did a lot of operations.
[01:35:21] It was cool.
[01:35:22] It was fun.
[01:35:23] They were really good operations.
[01:35:26] And when I got back, when I was there, I was thinking, man, I wish I would have brought
[01:35:28] my guitar because, you know, I had some time, you know, I could have probably played guitar
[01:35:33] for, you know, half hour a day, maybe 45 minutes, a couple of the guys would have brought
[01:35:37] there guitar, we could add some little jam sessions, right?
[01:35:40] And we were working on it.
[01:35:41] You know, our opt-up was high, we were working, we were probably, you know, we were doing
[01:35:44] probably a mission every one, two or three days.
[01:35:47] We were out.
[01:35:49] So my next deployment, I said to myself, cool, you know, bring a guitar, you know, with
[01:35:53] time, we're going to work on the riffs, go back to this deployment was to Ramadi.
[01:36:01] And I think, Lafin, I played guitar.
[01:36:04] Not so much time.
[01:36:05] We played, we played guitar one time when there was like three days left in deployment.
[01:36:08] We broke out of guitars.
[01:36:09] And we were as another task unit there now, and we were turning over.
[01:36:12] But that shows you the difference.
[01:36:14] And we literally did not have any time to do any of that.
[01:36:19] And obviously, the pressure of combat on my second deployment to Iraq was a thousand times
[01:36:24] more intense.
[01:36:25] And I know that your husband has done multiple deployments as well, and they varied in
[01:36:31] stress level and they varied in amount of combat and amount of direct combat and his leadership
[01:36:37] situation.
[01:36:38] But I know that, you know, not too long ago, he went on the deployment that was definitely
[01:36:42] high stress.
[01:36:44] And they saw a lot of hard combat.
[01:36:49] And when he came home from that, you know, what was that?
[01:36:53] What was that like?
[01:36:54] What did you notice?
[01:36:55] What do you think other people should look for?
[01:36:57] So the very first night he was home from that deployment.
[01:37:04] I woke up in the middle of the night and he was standing over the bed holding a gun.
[01:37:10] And that sort of shocked me a little bit and made me realize that I was dealing with something
[01:37:17] a little bit different.
[01:37:18] I talked to him on deployment and over the course of the deployment, I could hear his
[01:37:24] voice changing.
[01:37:25] I could tell that he was changing.
[01:37:32] It was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it's a, it was a lot of, um, engagement.
[01:37:40] And when he came back, he just, you know, when he woke up in the middle of the night,
[01:37:47] his immediate response, he just heard a noise, a dog's bark, or something, and he just jumped
[01:37:52] for a weapon.
[01:37:53] He just startled easily, and that was his reaction.
[01:38:01] He had definitely a shorter temper.
[01:38:04] Little things that he shouldn't have been getting mad about were setting him off, you
[01:38:09] know, just dumb stuff.
[01:38:11] Somebody would say something or do something and he would get so mad about it.
[01:38:15] And it was like, you know, take it down and watch.
[01:38:22] He started, um, you know, I don't want to make it sound like he was doing this in a terrible
[01:38:27] way, but he definitely started some self-medicating with alcohol.
[01:38:32] He was like relying on sleeping pills to get to sleep.
[01:38:36] He has never been much of a drinker.
[01:38:38] I'm not a drinker at all.
[01:38:39] And so when I noticed him drinking more than he normally would every single night, you know,
[01:38:47] that immediately was a red flag to me.
[01:38:50] And then the sleeping pills, you know, this ambient is powerful stuff and can really be
[01:38:59] a bad road to go down.
[01:39:04] Yeah, guys, definitely get on that ambient road.
[01:39:07] And I've seen guys go down that road and just like all of a sudden, they can't sleep without
[01:39:11] an ambient.
[01:39:12] And it messed up your sleep cycle and everything else.
[01:39:14] Definitely.
[01:39:15] And I guess that there's times when people need it.
[01:39:19] But I think I think guys in the military slip real really easily from a guy that needs it
[01:39:25] to a guy that's just doing it because they're starting to rely upon it.
[01:39:28] Yeah, for sure.
[01:39:29] And it's weird that you talk about, I mean, we just had Dave Burke, who was an Anglico guy
[01:39:36] for air controller on the ground with my, I did a lot of work with my task unit in
[01:39:42] Ramadi.
[01:39:43] And you know, he was an F-18 pilot.
[01:39:45] He was, you know, top gun, you know, echo just thinks he was straight up Tom Cruise.
[01:39:52] But he was on the ground with us in Ramadi for a hell of a deployment and saw a lot of
[01:39:55] stuff and in some very intense direct combat.
[01:39:58] And exactly what you just said, like a couple of things, you know, he said when he, he
[01:40:02] was talking about when he got home and he got in the car with his wife and his mom, he's
[01:40:08] in there for 10 minutes.
[01:40:10] And they were having a normal conversation.
[01:40:11] All of a sudden, he yelled at him.
[01:40:12] Like his temper was just short.
[01:40:14] So there's the temper, the increased temper.
[01:40:16] So that's one thing people definitely get.
[01:40:17] And the other thing, you know, the startled response, which was, which Dave talked about
[01:40:21] as well was, you know, he heard a air gun for putting the, putting the, working on a car
[01:40:27] who's walking by a garage and somebody fired off an air gun.
[01:40:31] And he grabbed his wife and threw it at the ground, right?
[01:40:34] And he was like, he said, it was, he was doing, he already realized what am I doing?
[01:40:38] But it was too late.
[01:40:40] So those are things to watch out for.
[01:40:42] And then what about, what about the, I know you talk about the sleep pattern?
[01:40:45] Yeah, he definitely wasn't sleeping normally.
[01:40:50] And so, you know, I started to, to see this stuff.
[01:40:53] And I was like, this isn't, this isn't a road that we want to go down.
[01:40:57] And so I told him that I thought he really needed to go see a psych.
[01:41:03] And luckily in the sales team, there's good access to that.
[01:41:07] And also fortunately my husband loosens to me.
[01:41:15] He luckily for him.
[01:41:16] He values my opinion.
[01:41:18] And if I say something is a miss, then he believes that something is a miss.
[01:41:24] And so he went and saw the psych.
[01:41:28] And I think doc parsley, I think you've talked about him before, helped him to get on to,
[01:41:35] just to healthy sleep cycle, cut out all the medication.
[01:41:39] He doesn't take any medication at all anymore.
[01:41:41] Never any sleep pills or anything.
[01:41:43] Started taking like some herbal supplements and stuff.
[01:41:46] And he takes some alpha brain now.
[01:41:49] And, and it didn't take long.
[01:41:57] He, you know, he made a few appointments with the psych.
[01:42:00] That definitely helped him to realize that yeah.
[01:42:04] He was wasn't acting normally because I don't think when these, you guys come back.
[01:42:09] You don't, you've already been used to operating on the elevated level for a while.
[01:42:15] And you don't realize you're not, you're now home with your wife and your kids.
[01:42:20] And you're still trying to operate on that level.
[01:42:23] It's like that, you know, the boy or frog thing, you know, where you're, you just,
[01:42:27] that's normal to you.
[01:42:29] It's normal.
[01:42:30] You don't sense it when you're overseas.
[01:42:31] You just are getting ramped up and ramped up on your stay in the site and stayed all the time.
[01:42:35] And everything is intense all the time.
[01:42:39] But you don't notice it.
[01:42:40] That's the one you come home.
[01:42:41] You don't notice that it shouldn't be like that right now.
[01:42:45] Yeah.
[01:42:46] And that's where it's really important for the family, spouses and stuff too.
[01:42:52] You know, keeping eye on these guys and hopefully channel them in a good direction when
[01:42:59] they get home as opposed to a, you know,
[01:43:01] had I not stepped in and I mean, my husband's, he's, he's been a sail for a long time.
[01:43:08] He's, he's been through a lot of stuff.
[01:43:09] But, you know, he definitely could have gone down a road that wouldn't have been healthy
[01:43:16] for him or his career.
[01:43:17] There, no doubt about that.
[01:43:21] Well, I just remembered this one.
[01:43:24] I think when it was either right after you met here, met, right after you moved down here,
[01:43:28] I think I was talking to him because I was talking about where you guys were
[01:43:31] 11, you know, out and then you guys had property.
[01:43:34] You hadn't bought property, I put you a rent in a big property and you had to horse
[01:43:37] isn't everything.
[01:43:38] And I said, oh man, well, you know, what made you move out of here?
[01:43:40] You know, this is awesome.
[01:43:41] And he's like, yeah, my wife told me she wouldn't come down here unless I got her
[01:43:45] a property with horses on it.
[01:43:49] And here we are.
[01:43:50] It's like awesome.
[01:43:51] That's killer.
[01:43:52] Yeah.
[01:43:53] And then, you know, you talked a little bit about your kids and how that, how that helped you.
[01:44:00] But you, in the meantime, as you were having kids, when you got down here, you started
[01:44:05] straight up farming.
[01:44:07] Yeah, I mean, I, that was a condition to him having me.
[01:44:14] It was that I was not going to put my horses in a stable and go see them once in a while.
[01:44:20] Like they were going to come with me and we needed land for them to be horses wild horses
[01:44:25] like they were used to being.
[01:44:26] And so conditions.
[01:44:27] He made that happen.
[01:44:30] He made it happen.
[01:44:31] He made it happen.
[01:44:32] And we got a great 18 acre piece of property.
[01:44:36] And we've got five fat horses now out in the field every time I look out.
[01:44:41] And I never farm to be for.
[01:44:45] I'd always been a horse wrangler.
[01:44:48] And I started just growing a little garden.
[01:44:52] I was like, oh, I love this.
[01:44:55] And I heard about a CSA program, which is basically where you grow a, like, you grow a bunch
[01:45:02] of stuff and you sell a box of whatever your farmers producing every week to people who pay,
[01:45:09] you know, they'll pay to get their box of fruits and vegetables.
[01:45:12] And I was like, oh, I can do that.
[01:45:14] I could get a few people and start to do that.
[01:45:17] And so I did.
[01:45:18] I started out with like 10 families that I do boxes for.
[01:45:21] And realize that I really liked it.
[01:45:24] And it gave me a lot of focus when he was deployed.
[01:45:27] It gave me a lot of something to really throw myself into and focus on.
[01:45:31] She wasn't going to pick like knitting.
[01:45:33] It was a lot of playing in colors.
[01:45:36] And I'm going to run a farm.
[01:45:38] I like that.
[01:45:41] And then, you know, we, we had kids kind of write it right around that same time.
[01:45:45] And so that was, that was a little challenging itself to be trying to like get this farm
[01:45:50] up and going and being, you know, in the beginning you talked about me being like
[01:45:53] nine months pregnant out there working.
[01:45:55] And yeah, that's what I did.
[01:45:58] That's what I did.
[01:45:59] Meals.
[01:46:00] But it was awesome.
[01:46:03] You know, I loved it.
[01:46:04] And I've managed to build up a pretty decent little business.
[01:46:08] And there's nothing that I find more rewarding in life and growing good food.
[01:46:14] There's something about it that's.
[01:46:16] And for my husband, too, like I do most of the technical farm work.
[01:46:23] He's more of my farm boy maybe.
[01:46:25] Labor.
[01:46:26] Yeah.
[01:46:27] But it's very therapeutic for him.
[01:46:34] I think when he comes back from deployments and stuff and he will, he can just kind
[01:46:40] of let all that go by being in this natural surrounding with physical labor to do every day.
[01:46:47] You don't need, I think you've talked about this before.
[01:46:49] You don't need sleeping pills when you work yourself hard.
[01:46:53] You don't need sleeping pills when you're married.
[01:46:55] I was working on the farm.
[01:46:57] You could go to sleep at night.
[01:46:59] You've got to sleep at night.
[01:47:00] I've sent my boy out there.
[01:47:01] Like, yeah.
[01:47:02] I've been on deployment on send my boy out there just to just do slave labor out there
[01:47:06] than after it.
[01:47:07] But I've let him learn about it on a stage work.
[01:47:10] Sleep outside.
[01:47:11] It was legit.
[01:47:13] It's, you know, I, one of the things you, you had written.
[01:47:18] And this is, you know, different topic, different, the different article that you had written.
[01:47:22] And I'm just going to read a little chunk of it because I love it.
[01:47:28] Here we go.
[01:47:30] This is about, you know, being on the farm with your, with your now, this is when you just
[01:47:35] had your, your one doctor.
[01:47:37] Yeah.
[01:47:38] Here we go.
[01:47:39] My garden helper turns one year old this week.
[01:47:43] I remember when life was simpler.
[01:47:45] When I could work in the garden all day uninterrupted when I could sleep when I wanted
[01:47:50] and be out of the house by the early morning.
[01:47:53] But I didn't laugh nearly as much.
[01:47:56] My heart wasn't as large.
[01:47:59] I was more selfish.
[01:48:02] These days are slow.
[01:48:04] This baby and I.
[01:48:06] There are so many little breaks we take.
[01:48:09] Things we get distracted by.
[01:48:11] Things that must be learned.
[01:48:15] I feel lucky to accomplish one or two small tasks in a day now.
[01:48:20] That is enough though.
[01:48:22] We manage.
[01:48:23] There is nowhere she would rather be than in the garden.
[01:48:28] Makes me happy to see her dirt, street face smile.
[01:48:34] I've gotten past everything having to be clean.
[01:48:39] Let a child be a little wild.
[01:48:42] After experience the taste of dirt, the feel of leaves, mud and water.
[01:48:49] Let her grow in the garden like an artichoke, ram, bunkshus and beautiful.
[01:48:56] She laughs out loud throwing her head back to point at the birds.
[01:49:00] She squeals with the light when she gets a hold of the cat and crawls like mad to get out
[01:49:05] of the way of the sprinkler.
[01:49:09] This is nothing that can be replaced by toys.
[01:49:12] Nothing that can be learned from books or videos, parks or playgrounds.
[01:49:19] This is my sweet child.
[01:49:22] Sweet as the honey suckle blossom.
[01:49:26] Dirt and all.
[01:49:33] Lots of good stuff.
[01:49:35] Bring those kids up on the farm.
[01:49:37] Yeah.
[01:49:39] And continue and down that and bring you up to the present.
[01:49:48] You wrapped up the article that you wrote about abuse and you talked about where you're
[01:49:53] at now.
[01:49:54] I'm going to hit that.
[01:49:58] The person that I am now, I'm fairly proud of considering.
[01:50:03] I carry very few scars from my past other than the physical ones that are carved into
[01:50:08] my skin.
[01:50:10] I'm comfortable talking about abuse.
[01:50:12] I can look at pictures of my abuser and feel very little.
[01:50:17] I am married to a kind and courageous hero of a man.
[01:50:21] I've built up a beautiful farm.
[01:50:24] I've got two amazing young children who I will protect with my life, which is really where
[01:50:31] this story begins.
[01:50:34] The children.
[01:50:37] Look around you, please.
[01:50:39] Look at your own children and other children that you see.
[01:50:44] Look at your friends and relatives and watch their interactions closely.
[01:50:50] We fear so many ridiculous things in life, but we don't fear the most common dangers
[01:50:56] to children nearly enough.
[01:51:00] We like to think of child molesters as strangers, not the people we know and let into our lives
[01:51:05] daily.
[01:51:08] Stay vigilant.
[01:51:09] Trust your gut instinct if something seems off.
[01:51:13] Remember, even very young children can keep tremendous secrets.
[01:51:20] This is uncomfortable.
[01:51:22] But sometimes uncomfortable things need to be handled head-on until they no longer have
[01:51:27] the power that secrecy and silence gives them.
[01:51:33] Thanks for listening.
[01:51:36] Please share and keep the children safe.
[01:51:43] And then we've talked through some of this, but I kind of want to just, you kind of laid
[01:51:48] out and you've talked about it already, just in what we've discussed so far.
[01:51:53] But I think it's worth covering again from your perspective.
[01:51:57] Your thoughts on how to keep children safe and some of the things to watch out for and
[01:52:02] some of the things to do.
[01:52:03] Here we go.
[01:52:04] I think the best answer is talk about uncomfortable topics early and often.
[01:52:09] Don't just have the talk with kids, talk to them on a regular basis about their bodies,
[01:52:15] sex, predators, consent.
[01:52:18] If they never hear you talk about it, it's going to be harder for them to bring it up to you.
[01:52:24] I know communication is difficult in many families.
[01:52:27] Remember, it's not up to the kids to do it.
[01:52:29] As an adult, you have to initiate hard conversations regularly.
[01:52:35] Don't ever assume your kid is too young for something to have happened to them.
[01:52:41] It can literally happen in a few minutes with a friend or family member when you are out of
[01:52:45] the room.
[01:52:48] Just them if they've ever been touched inappropriately and were in a way that made them
[01:52:52] feel uncomfortable.
[01:52:54] Then ask them again and again a few days later.
[01:52:57] Bring it up, casualty the second time.
[01:52:59] Hey, I was thinking some more about that conversation we had the other day.
[01:53:04] Give them time to process and decide if they can handle telling you.
[01:53:08] Do not push kids to hug and kiss people if they are resistant to it, even family members.
[01:53:16] This is a topic that they should be familiar discussing with you.
[01:53:20] Everyone treats it like it's this dark secret that we can't talk about.
[01:53:25] That makes kids feel like they can't talk about it either.
[01:53:29] Take every opportunity to bring it up in conversation, a new story, a Facebook post,
[01:53:33] a friend dealing with issues, talk about what's going on and why.
[01:53:39] We may think that we are doing our kids a favor by keeping this horrible stuff from them,
[01:53:44] the statistics and the women who have spoken out here prove that most likely your child or
[01:53:51] grandchild will have to deal with it alone if you aren't proactive.
[01:53:57] If you have four female children or grandchildren or nieces, chances are at least a one
[01:54:02] has or will be molested.
[01:54:08] Some kids just will not talk no matter what.
[01:54:11] Be observant.
[01:54:13] And if anything ever seems slightly off follow your good instinct.
[01:54:17] If a child or teen tells you they haven't been touched or molested, don't take their
[01:54:22] word for it.
[01:54:25] Kids can be amazingly good at keeping secrets.
[01:54:32] That's, I think it's just a great list for people to think about, to put in action and
[01:54:42] really a great example to live by so that you can be aware of this stuff ever happens.
[01:54:49] Yeah.
[01:54:52] I want the subjects to be normalized a lot more than it is.
[01:54:57] It's a horrible thing to talk about and it's hard to talk to your kids about it.
[01:55:03] We have to make it more normal, not only for kids, but for the millions of adults that
[01:55:11] are out there who've been through it and still don't talk about it.
[01:55:17] When I first posted what you read, I posted on Facebook and I had a ton of people send
[01:55:27] me private messages telling me their own horrible stories.
[01:55:34] People that I knew, people that were friends of friends, people that I didn't know it all.
[01:55:41] And I was shocked by a few of the people that I knew who had horrible stories.
[01:55:48] Kids that I went to high school with that I knew during the time that their abuse was
[01:55:52] also going on, told me some things.
[01:55:58] Everyone just deals with it and doesn't feel like they can talk about it.
[01:56:08] It's not right.
[01:56:11] I hope that my coming on here and bringing this to light and being the person that I am
[01:56:16] and saying, hey, let's have a honest conversation about this.
[01:56:20] We'll help someone else, even if one or two other people decide that they can change their
[01:56:29] life for the better because they hear someone addressing this honestly or one or two other
[01:56:35] people look at their kids and the interaction that their neighbor or their friend or their
[01:56:48] grandpa, uncle, somebody has with their kids and realizes that there's something not quite
[01:56:54] right.
[01:56:57] Then everything that I've been through is worth it because I will have used my experiences
[01:57:03] to help someone else.
[01:57:07] Well, definitely appreciate that.
[01:57:08] And I know we focused a lot on that today.
[01:57:11] And again, I, you know, you as a military wife, I also wanted to take a moment to recognize
[01:57:22] all those military wives out there that hold the line while their husbands are deployed
[01:57:35] overseas in harm's way.
[01:57:38] And I wrote something for one of my daughters.
[01:57:45] At this point, one of my daughters was quite frankly not treating my wife with the kind
[01:57:53] of respect that my wife deserves.
[01:57:56] You know, it was typical teenager stuff, a role of the eyes, a flipping comment.
[01:58:01] Basically, young adolescent girl with young adolescent attitude, what you talked about
[01:58:07] earlier, no one can tell me anything.
[01:58:10] I know everything.
[01:58:13] And in her mind, you know, my wife was just some lady that did the laundry, got the groceries
[01:58:21] and cooked dinner.
[01:58:24] And that's how she treated her.
[01:58:27] And so I wrote this for my daughter.
[01:58:32] But I wanted to read it for everyone.
[01:58:36] And I want to dedicate it, not just to my wife, but to all the military wives out there
[01:58:48] holding the line on the home front.
[01:58:54] So this is what I wrote to my daughter.
[01:58:59] Your mom.
[01:59:02] I wanted you to know a little bit about your mom.
[01:59:06] Your mom was a champion horse rider.
[01:59:10] She wrote cross-country races, showed jumping, and she did fox hunting.
[01:59:15] She cared for horses every day, clean them, train them, and took care of them.
[01:59:22] She won many victories.
[01:59:26] Your mom worked since she was little, starting in restaurants, first peeling potatoes,
[01:59:32] and busing tables, then cleaning, then waitressing to make money.
[01:59:39] Your mom went to an extremely good college.
[01:59:41] Her parents didn't pay for it.
[01:59:44] She worked through college as a waitress to pay her own way.
[01:59:50] When your mom got done with college, she took the money she saved and backpacked around
[01:59:55] the world.
[01:59:57] She went to Thailand, Malaysia, Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and a bunch of other places.
[02:00:06] While doing that, she worked as a waitress and other odd jobs so she could make money
[02:00:12] and pay her own way.
[02:00:18] When your mom got done traveling the economy was bad and she couldn't find a job.
[02:00:23] Because she went overseas and worked at an airline as a flight attendant, which is a hard,
[02:00:33] thankless job serving un-greatful passengers on planes.
[02:00:38] She didn't like it, but she did it.
[02:00:44] When I met your mom for the first time, she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.
[02:00:52] When I talked to her, she was the nicest person I have ever met.
[02:00:58] And she was funny and sassy and sweet, and I knew immediately that I wanted to marry her.
[02:01:07] So your mom picked up everything and left and came to be with me in America.
[02:01:12] She moved into a tiny, one-bedroom apartment with me.
[02:01:15] She was wonderful, she was adventurous.
[02:01:18] She surfed with me and she trained you Jitsu with me every day and worked out with me every
[02:01:22] day.
[02:01:24] She got her blue belt and Jiu Jitsu.
[02:01:26] She worked as an executive assistant in a real estate office and got a real estate license.
[02:01:33] We went skiing and hiked mountains and camped under the stars in the mountain and we
[02:01:39] went dancing at night.
[02:01:42] She was amazing.
[02:01:45] I got orders to move to Virginia.
[02:01:48] She instantly packed up everything we had in Quitter Job and moved across country.
[02:01:54] When we got to Virginia, she got a tough job working for an insurance company.
[02:02:00] Of course, I was in a seal platoon, so I traveled all the time and was gone all the time
[02:02:04] and she never complained.
[02:02:09] One day she told me she was pregnant.
[02:02:11] That was you.
[02:02:14] She was so happy.
[02:02:18] And then the day after you were born, I left on deployment for seven months.
[02:02:23] She did everything by herself.
[02:02:25] I was gone.
[02:02:26] She never complained.
[02:02:27] She sent me a picture every day of you.
[02:02:32] When I got home from deployment, she was already back in shape and looked amazing.
[02:02:38] The Navy gave me orders back to California.
[02:02:41] Without a word, your mom packed away all of our stuff, Quitter Job, and we moved back to California.
[02:02:48] I worked and went to school.
[02:02:49] I never got up in the night to help take care of you.
[02:02:52] It was always your mom every time.
[02:02:56] She changed every diaper, made every meal, tried every tear, read every good night book.
[02:03:03] I worked, went to school, and trained you Jitsu.
[02:03:06] She never complained one single time.
[02:03:11] She told me she was pregnant again.
[02:03:13] That was your first sister.
[02:03:15] When your first sister came, now everything that your mom did for you, she had to do for
[02:03:19] your sister too.
[02:03:21] Every diaper, every meal, every tear, every little book read.
[02:03:26] I was working and going to school and training.
[02:03:32] She walked you both and read to you and took you to parks and play groups and dancing
[02:03:36] lessons and swimming lessons and craft fairs, she did everything for you.
[02:03:42] She didn't get to surf anymore or do Jiu Jitsu anymore or work out or hike with me anymore.
[02:03:48] She devoted all that time to you, her kids, who she cherished.
[02:03:55] She never complained or whined or asked for anything.
[02:04:03] Then she got pregnant again.
[02:04:04] This time it was your brother.
[02:04:07] She kept doing everything for you when she got her morning sickness, throwing up dizzy
[02:04:13] and carrying around a baby and her belly, she didn't complain ever.
[02:04:19] When she was in the bathroom, sick and throwing up, she would apologize to you and you
[02:04:24] said you and your sister that you girls had to see or like that.
[02:04:32] Then the war started.
[02:04:36] I went back to the seal teams.
[02:04:39] I went to Iraq for six months.
[02:04:40] I was working so much that I barely got time to write.
[02:04:46] Your mom always wrote me.
[02:04:48] She never complained about anything.
[02:04:50] She did everything and buy herself.
[02:04:52] I was taking care of my seal platoon and she took care of you three little kids.
[02:04:57] She cleaned everything, made every meal, changed every diaper, dried every tear.
[02:05:02] Took you to lessons and parks and doctors appointments and read to you every night and made
[02:05:07] your lunches and got groceries.
[02:05:11] She did this all by herself.
[02:05:14] No in-laws to help out.
[02:05:16] No grandparents around just her alone.
[02:05:23] When I came home, things didn't get any better.
[02:05:25] I just started getting ready to go back to Iraq again.
[02:05:29] She didn't complain.
[02:05:32] Some guys had to worry about their families.
[02:05:35] Their wives would complain and cry and file for divorce and fight over the kids.
[02:05:39] I never worried about that at all.
[02:05:43] Your mom took care of everything and never made me have to worry about you, kids, or
[02:05:48] her, or anything else.
[02:05:53] My last appointment to Iraq I was gone almost seven months.
[02:05:57] I left your mom alone again with you three kids.
[02:06:02] Some of my men were wounded and killed.
[02:06:07] Your mom went to the hospital to visit the wounded men and went to the funerals of my friends.
[02:06:16] Your mom knew at any time it could be me that was wounded or killed.
[02:06:24] But she never complained.
[02:06:26] She cried with the moms of my friends.
[02:06:29] She gave support where she could, but she never asked me to stop or come home or leave
[02:06:35] early or even be safe.
[02:06:39] Never.
[02:06:43] She never asked me to give anything to her.
[02:06:48] She knew I had men to take care of.
[02:06:52] She told me not to worry about her or all you kids.
[02:06:56] She only told me to do my best at my job and take care of my friends on the battlefield.
[02:07:06] Most seals get divorced almost 90%.
[02:07:11] There is too much pressure and separation and distance and too many challenges and many
[02:07:17] women can't take it so they leave.
[02:07:21] Your mom never wavered.
[02:07:25] She never had an issue or a complaint no matter what happened or when I came home or when
[02:07:31] I left or what I did.
[02:07:35] She supported me always and she took care of you kids every day, every night, every moment.
[02:07:44] Every need you had was her responsibility.
[02:07:49] She never asked for thanks or appreciation and when it was her birthday or our anniversary
[02:07:55] she would tell me not to get her anything so we could save money.
[02:08:04] When I got home from my last deployment to Iraq, your mom got pregnant again.
[02:08:09] That was your youngest sister and she did it all again.
[02:08:12] Learning sickness, diapers, sleepless nights, puke in the bed, pee on the floor, chicken,
[02:08:19] pox, lice, tears, scrapes, bumps, bruises, teacher conferences, school lunches, everything.
[02:08:30] She never complained about it.
[02:08:33] I was still working, preparing men for war and traveling all the time and she continued
[02:08:39] to take care of you kids.
[02:08:40] So I could do my job.
[02:08:47] Your mom has stuck with me through hell.
[02:08:51] It has been hard.
[02:08:52] Your mom has been married to this hard-headed frogman for 17 years.
[02:08:57] She's been through multiple wartime deployments.
[02:09:00] She has helped me when I was sick or injured and she has done the same for you.
[02:09:07] She has done it because she is strong and determined and she loves our family more than anything
[02:09:13] in the world.
[02:09:17] Your mom is an incredible person and amazing woman and I worship her.
[02:09:23] She is everything I ever wanted.
[02:09:30] So when you get the chance, you should tell your mom that you love her.
[02:09:37] You know how much she has done for you and for our family and that you appreciate everything
[02:09:42] that she has done for us and for you.
[02:09:50] I hope you grow up and have some of the same qualities that she possesses.
[02:09:58] The strength, honor, intelligence, dignity, selflessness, respect, determination and kindness.
[02:10:12] That's your mom and I hope you realize how blessed you are to have her.
[02:10:23] And that's the note that I wrote to my daughter and you know there's some people that
[02:10:43] say a woman can do anything that a man can do.
[02:10:52] I don't know if that's true or not.
[02:10:56] But I can tell you this, I don't know of too many men that can do what my wife has done
[02:11:02] and what thousands of other military wives have done.
[02:11:10] And I want to recognize how blessed we are as a nation to have these women out there
[02:11:19] holding the line on the home front.
[02:11:24] A job and yes, it is a job that is under-recognized and overlooked all the time.
[02:11:37] And Iris, like my own wife, I think you are a stellar example of this.
[02:11:47] Thank you.
[02:11:49] I know thank you for what you have done for your family but also what you have done for
[02:11:58] our country in supporting your husband and your family.
[02:12:05] And thank you.
[02:12:10] And obviously thank you for coming on here today to teach all of us about a subject that we
[02:12:19] all need to know more about, not just abuse but also determination.
[02:12:26] And on top of that determination to overcome what you experience in your life but the determination
[02:12:32] to keep a family together and protect the protectors.
[02:12:39] Well, it's been a incredible honor to be here.
[02:12:44] And thank you guys for stepping out of box a little bit with me and getting this out there
[02:12:51] and talking about some of the stuff.
[02:12:53] And I love what you wrote to your daughter and your wife is still stunningly beautiful
[02:13:00] and very kind.
[02:13:04] She is indeed.
[02:13:05] And it's, you know, having you on the podcast was a no-brainer.
[02:13:10] I probably waited three or four months to broach the subject with your husband.
[02:13:17] I was waiting for the right moment and he said something to me about it and I was like,
[02:13:22] you know what?
[02:13:23] Hey, if she ever just happens to want to come on, let me know and he answered me in
[02:13:28] 30 seconds.
[02:13:29] And it wasn't his answer.
[02:13:31] He said, I just talked to her.
[02:13:32] She's good to go.
[02:13:33] It calls like, yes.
[02:13:34] So it's big, great.
[02:13:35] Adam Young, I'm a pilot.
[02:13:36] Yeah, John, I think you guys.
[02:13:38] Well, speaking of the podcast.
[02:13:40] Sure.
[02:13:42] Echo Charles.
[02:13:43] I mean, if somebody wanted to support this podcast, is there any way they can do that?
[02:13:49] Yeah, there is actually.
[02:13:50] Is kind of the, you know, we talk about these heavy things.
[02:13:54] Is kind of the time to decompress a little bit, right?
[02:13:57] A little bit.
[02:13:58] We can talk about supporting the podcast.
[02:14:00] That's a good way to do this.
[02:14:02] Yeah, I think so.
[02:14:04] Most of the time.
[02:14:07] Let's talk about supporting ourselves now.
[02:14:10] You know, because actually a lot of like being like a strong military wife and all this stuff,
[02:14:15] even just a normal.
[02:14:18] And you know this, I'm going to say this too.
[02:14:19] I didn't say this.
[02:14:21] There's military husbands as well.
[02:14:22] Yeah, definitely.
[02:14:23] And they're doing all that stuff that I talked about.
[02:14:28] I was talking about wives because that's what I deal with.
[02:14:31] I dealt with my wife, you know, and you're a military wife.
[02:14:34] The guys that are out there holding down the fort.
[02:14:36] And then also there's guys that are married to police officers.
[02:14:38] There's, I know that that gets flipped sometimes and, and respect.
[02:14:43] Yeah, respect.
[02:14:44] The equally challenging for anybody that's holding down the fort at home.
[02:14:49] So, yeah, it's the concept.
[02:14:51] Right?
[02:14:52] Yes.
[02:14:53] You know, a lot of times, especially when you're dealing with kids and all the responsibility
[02:14:57] is on me or whatever.
[02:14:58] And I mentioned this before where it's easy to fall into that kind of mindset where you're
[02:15:03] making it about yourself now, you know, where you have kids and it's like, hey, I got a
[02:15:09] chain.
[02:15:10] I changed the diaper last time, you know, but if you notice, you're talking about yourself
[02:15:14] not the diaper got to get changed regardless, but you're like focusing on the fact that
[02:15:18] you had to do it, you know, kind of think.
[02:15:20] So, not that you're wrong, but you chose to make it about yourself.
[02:15:24] So, the less you make it about yourself and more about the mission, the family, whatever
[02:15:29] it is that you're doing, the stronger you're going to have the capability to be
[02:15:33] you know, you can like solve the problems and you know, accomplish the mission.
[02:15:37] Anyway, so that being said, let's make it about ourselves for a second by supporting
[02:15:44] ourselves.
[02:15:45] So, this is kind of a flip, you know, you switch in on how like in the airplane, they say
[02:15:48] support yourself before you support the kid.
[02:15:50] Yeah, you got to put the oxygen in, you know what I mean?
[02:15:53] Because if you support yourself, you have more capability of supporting others.
[02:15:58] Tristan.
[02:15:59] Did you story right?
[02:16:00] Mm-hmm.
[02:16:01] That's what I like the stronger you are.
[02:16:02] I'm so excited, he's got Iris over here, she's a green, she's in the game with the
[02:16:06] back, she's like blowing me off the other side of the look and it's all the Iris now.
[02:16:10] Because she knows she mentioned Alpha Brake, all these things and I started taking
[02:16:14] more Alpha Brake by the way.
[02:16:15] I think I noticed that today, you were sharp, you were crisp with the thoughts.
[02:16:19] Oh yeah.
[02:16:20] Yeah, I felt like I was a bit distracted, not necessarily here, but just in life, you
[02:16:25] know, I couldn't like focus on the thing that I need.
[02:16:28] Like making videos?
[02:16:29] Or what?
[02:16:30] No, I've been making videos, bro.
[02:16:31] I've noticed that.
[02:16:32] Yeah, man.
[02:16:33] We like that.
[02:16:34] Anyway, if you're working out, you want supplementation, you want some support in
[02:16:40] the workout, which actually I'm down for now.
[02:16:42] I wasn't a supplement person before, as I said before, but now I am, because there's
[02:16:47] supplements like krill oil.
[02:16:50] You know, strong bone, strong bone, is that for like bones, too?
[02:16:56] It might be, but I just, I don't know, my bone seems strong.
[02:17:01] I don't break them very often, but my joints want help.
[02:17:04] So I take it for the, I take it for the joints.
[02:17:06] Yeah.
[02:17:07] Because you figure, because usually one like your tendon, detach, like, you know, I rip
[02:17:12] my bicep, whatever.
[02:17:13] It's the tendon ripping off the bone.
[02:17:15] Yeah.
[02:17:16] So you figure joints, maybe that's, you know, the strong bone, is that's the part of it.
[02:17:23] It's a whole work.
[02:17:24] Do some research.
[02:17:25] Get back to me.
[02:17:26] Anyway, if you want the good supplements, krill oil for your
[02:17:31] joints, that's a big one.
[02:17:32] In my opinion, in Jockel's opinion.
[02:17:34] In my opinion.
[02:17:35] In my opinion.
[02:17:36] In my opinion.
[02:17:37] Sure.
[02:17:38] Yeah.
[02:17:39] Man, essential.
[02:17:40] So whether you're working out or whether you're actually working on the far,
[02:17:42] yes.
[02:17:43] Yeah.
[02:17:44] All the pin it.
[02:17:45] That's a good one.
[02:17:47] But as far as supplements go, you know you get the good ones when you get on it
[02:17:53] ones.
[02:17:54] Anyway, if you want 10% off on it.com, slash Jockel.
[02:17:56] My joints, here's the thing like, pialced all the bus out krill oil whenever it's applicable
[02:18:02] in my mind.
[02:18:03] And people who are always talking about krill oil.
[02:18:05] No.
[02:18:06] But I feel like it's kind of always on my mind because, you know, like, okay, I'm talking
[02:18:14] to Greg, right?
[02:18:15] The other day.
[02:18:16] I don't think Greg's on the krill oils.
[02:18:17] We're talking should be.
[02:18:18] It's after where he should be.
[02:18:19] Yeah.
[02:18:20] We're talking.
[02:18:21] We're talking for a while about stuff or whatever.
[02:18:23] It's, oh, it's time to go.
[02:18:25] We get up, Greg, he goes, oh, like that.
[02:18:28] Oh, no.
[02:18:29] I understand, he didn't have to make that noise, but he's making that noise isn't
[02:18:33] indicator.
[02:18:34] All indicator.
[02:18:35] Exactly.
[02:18:36] It's crazy.
[02:18:37] Somebody order that man krill oil.
[02:18:38] Exactly.
[02:18:39] Exactly what I thought.
[02:18:40] I didn't say nothing, but that's what I thought.
[02:18:41] Why didn't you say anything?
[02:18:42] That's kind of just.
[02:18:43] Time to place.
[02:18:44] Maybe it was like, well, he'll do it on the top of the car.
[02:18:46] Well, he'll do it on the top of the car.
[02:18:47] So let's just make this just for this whole advertisement for Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg, get
[02:18:51] it on the krill oil.
[02:18:52] And it's less about making that kind of noise or not making the noise.
[02:18:56] It's the feeling that compelled him to make the noise.
[02:18:58] That's the important part.
[02:18:59] What if Greg train wanted 10% off?
[02:19:00] What would he do then?
[02:19:03] I'm trying to help this a long time.
[02:19:05] No, man.
[02:19:06] Okay.
[02:19:07] If he chose to get 10% on it, calm slash jacco.
[02:19:11] The slash jacco, that's the part that he gives you.
[02:19:13] 10% off on all your stuff.
[02:19:15] Even if you like protein powders and whatnot, which is good too, by the way.
[02:19:20] Yeah.
[02:19:21] I'm looking there and see what, because it depends your lifestyle.
[02:19:25] You see what I'm saying?
[02:19:27] Anyway, you get it.
[02:19:29] You get my drift.
[02:19:30] Okay.
[02:19:31] That's a good way to support yourself and the podcast and ultimately everyone around you.
[02:19:38] Actually, everyone in the world will be more supported.
[02:19:42] Ultimately, yeah.
[02:19:44] Like the butterfly effect.
[02:19:45] You know, like us talking, it'll affect China later.
[02:19:49] Anyway, I was on click through.
[02:19:51] That's a good way to support you, by the way.
[02:19:55] So what that does is, before you do your shopping, you click through the website, jacco.ca
[02:20:00] is a tab on the top, banner on the bottom.
[02:20:03] Thing is, with the banner, I'm only saying this because people like you give me up
[02:20:08] about it and they'll say, hey, I don't see the banner.
[02:20:11] Your banner is not there on the website.
[02:20:13] If you have an ad blocker, which is something to have, by the way, just generally speaking,
[02:20:16] if you have an ad blocker, it'll block certain things.
[02:20:21] And sometimes that banner will fall within the confines of things that the ad blocker blocks.
[02:20:25] Yeah.
[02:20:26] Same thing.
[02:20:27] You know what?
[02:20:28] We could also change our whole attitude here and make the full focus of the podcast and
[02:20:33] the website and everything that we're doing to get people to get into the give us money.
[02:20:36] Yeah.
[02:20:37] We're not going to do that.
[02:20:38] Right.
[02:20:39] So like now that I'm thinking and talking to you guys about it, I'm like, man, I should
[02:20:43] really go change that.
[02:20:44] But when I go home, when I go, you know, other places I'm thinking about getting after
[02:20:49] it, I'm thinking about making videos, what have you.
[02:20:53] So, you know, I get reminded of it.
[02:20:54] So, and maybe that's a good thing, maybe that's a bad thing.
[02:20:57] But nonetheless, those are the facts as of right now.
[02:21:00] But doesn't matter because there's a tab on the top, like I said, click on that one.
[02:21:04] If you want to support it takes three seconds, small action.
[02:21:08] And that support that everyone's been giving big reaction.
[02:21:12] And somehow this supports China, you're saying it.
[02:21:18] It can't ultimately, yes, it's the butterfly effect.
[02:21:21] Look into it.
[02:21:22] It's real.
[02:21:23] Yeah, it's real.
[02:21:25] You can subscribe to the podcast.
[02:21:28] And this is on any podcasting, providing platform Google Play iTunes, of course.
[02:21:34] Stitcher.
[02:21:36] Yeah.
[02:21:37] Or you can write a review too, which I've done some, I've read.
[02:21:42] I've read some live reviews on here of, of JocquayT, but I might do that with the podcast.
[02:21:50] Because there's some really good on there too.
[02:21:52] I was actually thinking of doing a Facebook live and reading the comments on a picture
[02:21:57] that Jill Rogan posted of me because there are some funny comments.
[02:22:01] Yeah.
[02:22:02] So, Pro comedians out there, listen to Jill Rogan.
[02:22:04] So, they want to make fun of my head.
[02:22:06] Yeah.
[02:22:07] But there was reading.
[02:22:08] Remember that video that we made actually long to, I don't even, might have been before
[02:22:15] the first podcast, you even, maybe after, I don't know.
[02:22:17] Anyway, we made it and it was about martial arts training.
[02:22:20] Oh yeah.
[02:22:21] And you're, you know, what's the best martial arts and soft defense all this stuff, right?
[02:22:25] So, I revisited that and this was a while ago.
[02:22:28] There's like millions of, there's over a million views on that.
[02:22:31] So, with views come comments.
[02:22:34] Yeah.
[02:22:35] So, you like that though.
[02:22:36] And typically, yeah, you know, it's usually not very productive
[02:22:38] to spend much time in the comments section on YouTube.
[02:22:41] But a lot of views, a lot of comments, let's see what the, and it's not like people
[02:22:46] who've necessarily followed Jockel Podcast.
[02:22:48] That's the thing.
[02:22:49] There's random things.
[02:22:50] So, you get a cool little, like, variety of people in there.
[02:22:53] So, yeah, there's some interesting ones in there.
[02:22:57] I didn't quote in here, nothing or save any, but I'm just saying, channely speaking,
[02:23:00] interesting.
[02:23:01] Nonetheless, back to subscribing to the YouTube.
[02:23:03] Yeah.
[02:23:04] Yeah, we have a YouTube channel.
[02:23:07] If you like the video version of this podcast, eh?
[02:23:13] Like, people know what you look like.
[02:23:15] Yeah.
[02:23:16] But a smaller percentage of people know what I look like.
[02:23:19] And I'm not encouraging you to watch the video to see what I look, I'm not saying that.
[02:23:23] Echo doesn't look like what he sounds like.
[02:23:25] You definitely look different than you sound.
[02:23:27] Did you ever seen him before today?
[02:23:29] I've seen pictures of you online and I was surprised when I did because you've sounded
[02:23:34] sort of, well, no, I'm not going to say what you sounded like.
[02:23:37] But you didn't sound the way I, you look.
[02:23:40] I've heard them.
[02:23:41] Will assume that that's not a nice answer.
[02:23:44] Yeah, yeah.
[02:23:45] Something like that.
[02:23:47] One guy said, a mixed white and Latino, not hipster, like, skate, not skater.
[02:23:53] I don't know.
[02:23:54] Something.
[02:23:55] Anyway, they got real specific, which is cool.
[02:23:57] I dig it.
[02:23:58] But yeah, I guess it's because you have a weird background being a Hawaiian.
[02:24:05] What do you have black half white guy?
[02:24:08] Yeah, I mean not to split hairs, but there's some Native American in there.
[02:24:11] And Native Bullsides.
[02:24:12] But see, none of that has anything to do with the way you talk.
[02:24:15] The way you talk.
[02:24:16] You just, the way you talk.
[02:24:17] Yeah.
[02:24:18] Yeah, something new with the way you do.
[02:24:19] Yeah, yeah, it does.
[02:24:20] I don't know why I said it.
[02:24:21] But yeah, come in.
[02:24:22] Yeah, I grind them on quiet and then living here and then, I don't know.
[02:24:25] Don't get it.
[02:24:26] You all the time, all this stuff.
[02:24:28] Just jumbled me up, you know.
[02:24:30] Anyway, back to the easy.
[02:24:31] If you want to see what he looks like, you could just.
[02:24:33] You're interested in something like that.
[02:24:35] If that interests you, subscribe to the YouTube channel, might facilitate it.
[02:24:39] Because conversely, I look like what people think I'm going to look like.
[02:24:43] It doesn't look like.
[02:24:44] Yeah, exactly.
[02:24:45] So yeah, the YouTube also.
[02:24:49] Also, my looks aside.
[02:24:53] What we do now is, and we've been doing this for a little bit, is take a little excerpt
[02:24:58] to the podcast.
[02:24:59] Little lessons and we'll put them on there as well.
[02:25:01] So you can share them.
[02:25:04] It's easier than sharing the whole podcast and having people receive it.
[02:25:07] Because you can't just listen to two and a half hours on a whim.
[02:25:11] No, but three hours after the kind of schedule that.
[02:25:14] You got to schedule it.
[02:25:15] Yes, exactly right.
[02:25:16] Three minutes or so, no schedule.
[02:25:17] No, I don't schedule.
[02:25:18] No, let's get to the press play.
[02:25:19] Right now.
[02:25:20] Yeah.
[02:25:21] Lesson learn boom.
[02:25:22] Yeah.
[02:25:23] Individual, life approved.
[02:25:24] Good to go.
[02:25:25] Yeah, rock roll.
[02:25:26] Exactly.
[02:25:27] So that's really the goal there.
[02:25:28] You know, I got to be like people have said, you know, I always say, well, people
[02:25:34] have been asking me this one person.
[02:25:36] No.
[02:25:37] In my case, people have been saying, like, that's good to have those ones.
[02:25:41] Because some people, they don't listen to the podcast like the first day.
[02:25:44] You know, they're like how you said they kind of got to schedule.
[02:25:46] Well, even, even somebody, even we got a lot of commuters.
[02:25:49] A lot of people listen to this car.
[02:25:50] Yeah.
[02:25:51] But, you know, half an hour commute.
[02:25:52] It takes you, you know, a few days to hear the whole podcast, but you might have been
[02:25:56] a little nugget you needed for work that money.
[02:25:58] Exactly.
[02:25:59] Right.
[02:26:00] Yeah.
[02:26:01] Some people will say, that helped me that day.
[02:26:04] Like the college one that you talk about, like how to approach college?
[02:26:07] Yeah.
[02:26:08] What's your wish you had that when you approached college?
[02:26:11] I wish I had all of this really.
[02:26:13] But when I approached anything in life, but yes, the college.
[02:26:18] So yeah, subscribe to the YouTube man.
[02:26:19] That's a good one.
[02:26:20] That's a good way to support.
[02:26:22] And that's another way to support yourself in a way, kind of indirectly.
[02:26:25] And then if you wear t-shirts at any point, you want to represent a little bit.
[02:26:31] Because that's a little t-shirt, you know?
[02:26:33] I think you think.
[02:26:34] I think they're pretty cool.
[02:26:36] Approved.
[02:26:37] They are approved.
[02:26:38] Quite literally.
[02:26:39] All approved.
[02:26:40] And you, there's a new t-shirt out, which you are wearing at this time.
[02:26:44] I like it.
[02:26:45] It's, um, it's real complex.
[02:26:48] Yeah.
[02:26:49] It's black and it says get after it on it.
[02:26:52] Amen.
[02:26:53] Technically, it's a charcoal Heather.
[02:26:56] But fashion.
[02:26:57] Yeah.
[02:26:58] Amen.
[02:26:59] You know, it is what it is.
[02:27:00] And, um, there's usually more to them than kind of meets the eye.
[02:27:04] We call that layers.
[02:27:06] And it's a philosophical sense.
[02:27:09] But yeah, you know, if you want to support that way, that's a good way, you know?
[02:27:13] And you get it just shirt that you can wear.
[02:27:16] Very wearable.
[02:27:17] That's the thing.
[02:27:18] They're not the cheap ballpark giveaway shirts.
[02:27:21] They're like good, very wearable.
[02:27:22] People occasioned people say it's my favorite shirt to wear because of the fit.
[02:27:25] People are telling you that.
[02:27:27] People every single day.
[02:27:28] All day.
[02:27:29] Yeah, I'm telling you.
[02:27:32] Women's on there.
[02:27:33] Women's stuff on their shirts.
[02:27:35] Patches.
[02:27:36] Rash guards.
[02:27:37] I'm going to put out a new rash guard here.
[02:27:38] Pretty soon.
[02:27:40] Not that that's like supposed to get everyone fired up or nothing like that.
[02:27:43] I'm sorry.
[02:27:44] I don't know.
[02:27:45] Yeah.
[02:27:46] It's good.
[02:27:47] The hoodies are on there as well.
[02:27:48] And, you know, if you like any of this stuff, I'd say, just look at it.
[02:27:51] If you choose to support, if you feel like supporting, you feel like representing.
[02:27:54] Go ahead, get something.
[02:27:55] That's a good way to support you.
[02:27:57] Yep.
[02:27:58] And also, this, what I'm, what I'm about to tell you here, could very well border on
[02:28:05] essential.
[02:28:06] Now, it's like one of those things where, okay, so it's like logical warfare.
[02:28:11] We're going to talk about, I'm going to go into it.
[02:28:13] So, you know how like, let's say you're getting after it.
[02:28:16] I was getting after it.
[02:28:17] I'm getting after it.
[02:28:18] I start taking cruel oil.
[02:28:20] I start taking cruel oil.
[02:28:21] Jocko is not taking cruel oil.
[02:28:23] Maybe someone else comes in.
[02:28:24] They start getting after it.
[02:28:25] They start to mean while you're not taking the cruel oil.
[02:28:28] We're kind of ahead of you, you know.
[02:28:30] You see, there's a little soft.
[02:28:31] You know.
[02:28:32] You're saying those are the conceptually, that's a big deal.
[02:28:35] So, psychological warfare, what that does is, okay, psychological warfare is an
[02:28:39] album with tracks.
[02:28:42] With Jocko in there, put simply.
[02:28:45] Jocko in there, helping you through any moments of weakness that you may have on
[02:28:49] your getting after it journey, waking up early in the morning, every day, slipping
[02:28:54] on the diet, procrastinating, all these things.
[02:28:59] Yeah, big deal.
[02:29:00] So, you know what I said, yeah, if you think about just the procrastination one, yeah.
[02:29:05] Procrastination is one of those things.
[02:29:07] It's a massive problem with people, right?
[02:29:09] People all over the world have a massive problem with procrastination.
[02:29:12] Think of how easy this is to overcome that.
[02:29:15] Yeah.
[02:29:16] It's an easiest thing.
[02:29:17] It's the easiest thing to overcome.
[02:29:18] Psychological warfare.
[02:29:20] You just do, just do, go do what you're procrastinating.
[02:29:23] And it's already, you want.
[02:29:24] It's not like you have to work to get over procrastination, just crush it.
[02:29:30] Yeah.
[02:29:31] It's back the other day or last week, whatever, when I said, like, you've got to switch
[02:29:35] it to manual, just, and for procrastination, you've just got to switch it to manual for, like,
[02:29:39] literally two seconds, one, two, boom, and then you do it.
[02:29:42] Because once you're starting, yeah, you're doing it.
[02:29:44] You were no longer procrastinating.
[02:29:45] Yeah.
[02:29:46] You know, but it's easy battle to win and what a battle that so many people face and lose.
[02:29:52] And lose.
[02:29:53] Yeah, it's one of those psychological things that you kind of got to declare war on.
[02:29:58] And in that case, you're engaging the psychological warfare.
[02:30:03] Nonetheless, this is a good way to say, okay, so back to my point about when everyone starts
[02:30:07] getting after it and you're not.
[02:30:09] So I don't want to feel that.
[02:30:11] Everyone's like, you look a lot of the psychological warfare because you can't listen
[02:30:13] to it.
[02:30:14] And like, hey, I don't want to wake up.
[02:30:15] You can't press the snooze.
[02:30:16] You can't listen to wake up, you know, one of the first tracks or whatever.
[02:30:20] You can't listen to that and then not wake up.
[02:30:22] You can't.
[02:30:23] You won't be able to face yourself.
[02:30:24] It's like one of those things that's like that strong.
[02:30:26] So let's say everyone's doing that.
[02:30:28] You're kind of left behind if you're not.
[02:30:30] That's how I feel.
[02:30:31] Like if I'm not doing it, you know, I'll do it even if I feel like working out, I'll
[02:30:35] still listen to it.
[02:30:37] Give you a little kick.
[02:30:38] A little kick.
[02:30:39] Anyway, psychological warfare.
[02:30:41] Jockel will.
[02:30:42] I did it.
[02:30:43] I was looking at an audio book the other day.
[02:30:44] I was still number one by the way.
[02:30:46] Number one on Spoken Ward on my team.
[02:30:48] I'm sorry.
[02:30:49] I'm getting on it.
[02:30:50] You haven't.
[02:30:51] It's been that way since it came out.
[02:30:52] They do.
[02:30:53] Everyone that you're telling to get after it, they're getting after it.
[02:30:55] They're getting after it.
[02:30:56] That's a really, that's a part of my point right there.
[02:30:58] Like you got to do it.
[02:31:00] Also, on a clicking when you're clicking through Amazon, you can also get Jockel
[02:31:06] white tea.
[02:31:07] And here's the bottom line.
[02:31:08] You know, we all need to deadlift more.
[02:31:10] Yes.
[02:31:11] All right.
[02:31:12] Sure.
[02:31:13] Jockel white tea, you're going to boost your deadlift to approximately 8,000 pounds.
[02:31:18] And I was thinking about this in the day.
[02:31:20] You think 8,000 pounds is heavy?
[02:31:22] It's in another, you know, unit of measurement is four tons.
[02:31:27] Yeah.
[02:31:28] Yeah, I think that's a good man.
[02:31:29] That's really good.
[02:31:30] You want to do that.
[02:31:32] Way the warrior kid.
[02:31:34] By the way, it's not even pre-order anymore because it comes out May 2nd.
[02:31:40] Right?
[02:31:41] It's coming out soon, boom.
[02:31:46] Order it now and save a child.
[02:31:51] Smash a bully.
[02:31:52] Save yourself.
[02:31:53] Smash pull ups.
[02:31:54] That's your role, my friend.
[02:31:56] That's what I was at the pod drinking yesterday.
[02:32:00] And so there's a playground there.
[02:32:02] And the kids are just kind of running them all.
[02:32:04] You know, and a lot of times there's parents in there.
[02:32:07] And there's this one kid who's abused big.
[02:32:10] Oh.
[02:32:11] Look on his face.
[02:32:12] I'm not saying he was a bully, but you know, walk around.
[02:32:16] He was grabbing another kid out of his brother.
[02:32:18] I don't know if he was bullying them or helping them or whatever.
[02:32:21] But you could tell, like, you know, the little kids fit.
[02:32:24] Because, you know, there's some people there, like, there's a line for this little thing
[02:32:28] that the kids get on.
[02:32:29] It's like, it's not a margot around.
[02:32:31] It's a thing you sit in.
[02:32:33] So some kids are real assertive.
[02:32:35] They'll be like, oh, it's my turn.
[02:32:37] Cutting the line, not even realizing there's a line of whatever.
[02:32:39] And there's some kids, they'll stand in line and they'll just sort of let people just cut.
[02:32:44] And then there's some kids who are like, oh, wait.
[02:32:46] And they'll explain there's a line.
[02:32:48] You know, so you can see the different levels.
[02:32:50] For people out there.
[02:32:51] Yeah.
[02:32:52] So like, something like this, that's going to turn you into, you know, the person who's,
[02:32:56] you know, it's kind of like the leader.
[02:32:57] Yeah.
[02:32:58] It turns you into a little bit of leader.
[02:32:59] Sounds like Kenny Williams might have been out there.
[02:33:01] Kenny Williams is a bully.
[02:33:02] But now, interestingly, I'm doing the, there's a lot of, I asked question to who should read
[02:33:07] the audio for this, right?
[02:33:09] And as if I was thinking, I would just read the whole thing.
[02:33:11] Then some people said, hey, you know, Joko, you're not a kid.
[02:33:14] And it's a kids voice.
[02:33:15] It's in the first person of a kids voice, kids named Mark.
[02:33:19] So I couldn't read the kids part.
[02:33:21] I decided, you know what?
[02:33:23] I'm not going to read the whole book.
[02:33:24] I'm not going to read the kids part.
[02:33:26] But there's a character in there named Uncle Jake.
[02:33:28] Now, Uncle Jake, he was a seal.
[02:33:32] And he's going to come and help out.
[02:33:34] And I decided maybe I could read Uncle Jake.
[02:33:38] But so I did.
[02:33:41] And then we got a kid reading the kids part.
[02:33:45] And I think you all find out who that is.
[02:33:48] And I think there'll be some layers behind that part.
[02:33:50] That part.
[02:33:51] So yeah, way the warrior kid, you can order that now.
[02:33:56] You can also get discipline equals freedom.
[02:33:57] Field manual is coming out.
[02:34:00] What's a field manual?
[02:34:01] Something that you allows you to take information and put it into action.
[02:34:06] That's a discipline equals freedom.
[02:34:07] Field manuals going to do.
[02:34:09] It comes out October 17th.
[02:34:11] My team like that's a long way away.
[02:34:12] But so did May 2nd.
[02:34:14] But this thing's coming out around the corner.
[02:34:17] So the field manual, it's basically this podcast in a book.
[02:34:23] You can't bring this podcast into the field with you.
[02:34:25] I guess you can put it on your headphones.
[02:34:27] I guess maybe you can't.
[02:34:29] But sometimes you need visual cues.
[02:34:33] So that's what it is.
[02:34:36] The thoughts, the things from the podcast, but then it also has very specific additional
[02:34:41] information like workouts, sleep, strategies, martial arts, everything that's cool in the
[02:34:48] world.
[02:34:49] It's all about.
[02:34:50] So you can do that extreme ownership.
[02:34:52] You can, by the way, why is extreme ownership still one of the top books on Amazon
[02:34:58] and iTunes and audible a year and a half after it came out?
[02:35:01] Why is that?
[02:35:02] Because the big advertising campaign that we did?
[02:35:04] No, it's not because it's purely because of word amounts.
[02:35:07] So everyone that's listening to this right now that's buying it for other people and spreading
[02:35:10] the word, it's because of you.
[02:35:11] That's awesome.
[02:35:12] Appreciate it.
[02:35:13] Extreme ownership.
[02:35:14] Amazon.
[02:35:15] Why is it not out on paperback yet?
[02:35:18] Do you want to know why?
[02:35:19] Yeah.
[02:35:20] You know why?
[02:35:21] Yeah.
[02:35:22] It's not out on paperback.
[02:35:23] Because people ask me why is it not on paperback?
[02:35:24] It's not out on paperback yet.
[02:35:26] Because books come out on paperback when they aren't selling the hard cover anymore.
[02:35:31] They really such a cheap version here.
[02:35:33] It isn't paperback now.
[02:35:34] It's only 995.
[02:35:35] If they haven't done that with our book yet, why?
[02:35:38] People still want the hard cover.
[02:35:39] It's still selling.
[02:35:40] And the reason for that is because it works because people get a lot out of it.
[02:35:45] So if you don't have extreme ownership or if someone that you know doesn't have extreme
[02:35:52] ownership, it's just like they don't have acrylic.
[02:35:54] Tell Greg Train, he needs acrylic.
[02:35:55] Tell your subordinate leader or your superior leader or members of your team.
[02:36:01] I want him, hey, look man, I'm going to get you something here for the help of your
[02:36:04] extreme ownership.
[02:36:06] And if you need some more extreme ownership at your team company, contact whatever
[02:36:13] you're you're you can contact our company.
[02:36:17] Ashill on front, life, Babin, myself, Dave Burke, JP to know leadership and management consultants.
[02:36:24] If you want to bring us on board, contact us info at Ashill on front.com.
[02:36:31] And also along the same vein, if you don't know, we have the master coming up, number
[02:36:35] 002 in New York City at the Marriott Grand Marquis.
[02:36:41] Come get your leadership on.
[02:36:43] You will become a better leader period.
[02:36:45] Life's going to be there.
[02:36:47] JP is going to be there.
[02:36:48] Dave Burke is going to be there.
[02:36:50] While I'm going to be there.
[02:36:53] Echo Charles is going to be there.
[02:36:55] And a ton of people that listen to this podcast and that we've worked with are going to be
[02:36:59] there coming get it.
[02:37:00] We'll see you there.
[02:37:02] And until we do get the master, if you want to communicate with us, you can find us cruising
[02:37:08] on the interwebs.
[02:37:10] Now first of all, we're on Twitter, we're on Instagram.
[02:37:15] You can also find us on the Facebook.
[02:37:17] He, he, he, he can find us there.
[02:37:18] So Iris.
[02:37:19] Yes.
[02:37:20] For Facebook, where are you at?
[02:37:24] You can follow my farm on primeval, it's primeval gardens on Facebook and Instagram.
[02:37:31] And then I'm on Twitter at only Iris Gardner.
[02:37:37] And I just told Iris to sign up for that this morning.
[02:37:39] I'm not a Twitter, but I will.
[02:37:42] I will.
[02:37:43] That's what Taffaris did to me too.
[02:37:45] He was like, oh, it's just signed up for Twitter.
[02:37:46] No big deal.
[02:37:47] And then a bunch of people were like, asking me questions.
[02:37:49] But the cool thing is whether that's what makes it cool.
[02:37:52] Because you can communicate with all these different people.
[02:37:55] And they can give you good information.
[02:37:56] They can tell you what books to read and they can tell you what speeches to listen to.
[02:37:59] And they can tell you what YouTube videos to check out and they can tell you what
[02:38:01] you did to get this awesome.
[02:38:02] It's a great way of communicating with a bunch of people.
[02:38:05] So you know, I don't actually.
[02:38:08] Because, you know, like, I kind of, they sent messages with what pigeons, right?
[02:38:15] Yeah.
[02:38:16] You know, they sent the message.
[02:38:17] Yeah, it's what it is.
[02:38:18] So it's like, when you send someone a message, it's called the tweet.
[02:38:21] Yeah, but what does that have to do with it?
[02:38:23] pigeons don't tweet though.
[02:38:24] But yeah, I don't know the detail.
[02:38:26] But we all have some birds tweeting messages.
[02:38:30] That's what Twitter is.
[02:38:31] Oh, okay.
[02:38:32] So it's related to birds.
[02:38:34] And message pigeons.
[02:38:35] Exactly.
[02:38:36] Which is now that we have an animal expert in the world.
[02:38:39] They don't tweet.
[02:38:43] They need to change the name of Twitter to like, well, yeah, well, no, they have to
[02:38:47] change the name of tweet tweeting the act of tweeting to that noise.
[02:38:52] Yeah, correct.
[02:38:53] But that's what it is.
[02:38:55] Just a little messages.
[02:38:56] Interesting.
[02:38:57] Thank you.
[02:38:58] Yes.
[02:38:59] You got anything else for us today?
[02:39:00] Yeah, you said you, um, you dad made gold bars.
[02:39:04] Yeah.
[02:39:05] I'll be with a bar because, you know, you get those little, maybe that's the second.
[02:39:08] Yeah.
[02:39:09] Yeah.
[02:39:10] Yeah.
[02:39:11] Like the free it stuck with me.
[02:39:12] Yeah.
[02:39:13] You know, they get little like, like, like, crown gold kind of crumbs, right?
[02:39:16] First.
[02:39:17] Yeah.
[02:39:18] You get just little fragments of pieces when you crush up or you just get, if you're like,
[02:39:24] going in those streams and crees, you'll come out with golden nuggets, which are naturally
[02:39:28] forming larger.
[02:39:30] But when you're crushing a bore, you just get little tiny flecks of gold and then you refine
[02:39:35] it down into a bar.
[02:39:36] And I don't remember.
[02:39:38] I think, you know, they do them in a few ounces to whatever size is, makes sense to sell.
[02:39:45] You're the word gold bar you're thinking.
[02:39:47] You know, like on the movie, you're watching three, yeah.
[02:39:50] Yeah, yeah.
[02:39:51] Not like a 10 pound break or whatever it is.
[02:39:55] But, yeah, smaller bars.
[02:39:57] It's pretty cool.
[02:39:58] Yep.
[02:39:59] Is that your final question?
[02:40:00] That was it.
[02:40:01] Awesome.
[02:40:02] Awesome.
[02:40:03] Iris, anything else you want to close out with?
[02:40:05] Gosh, no, just thanks for thanks for doing this.
[02:40:08] Thanks for getting me on here.
[02:40:10] And, um, love listening to the show.
[02:40:12] So I listen to it when I'm out working, getting after it.
[02:40:17] I need to get after it, sure.
[02:40:20] You know, I always like going over your house because you and you and your husband both want to
[02:40:26] expand the conversation and point stuff out to me and ask about this.
[02:40:29] So it's always awesome.
[02:40:31] Tab you guys listening.
[02:40:32] Thank you.
[02:40:33] Anything else?
[02:40:34] I think we're good.
[02:40:36] Well, obviously, thank you for coming on.
[02:40:41] Seriously, I think it's awesome.
[02:40:43] I think it's courageous and brave and really helpful for a lot of people.
[02:40:50] I hope so.
[02:40:51] And thank you for that.
[02:40:54] Thank you for giving us a warning that evil can hide anywhere.
[02:41:05] Right under our noses and slink around and trying to corrupt those that are closest to us.
[02:41:20] So thanks for telling us to hug our children, to hold our children, and to watch our children
[02:41:29] closely.
[02:41:31] And also, thank you for reminding us once again that in the end, evil cannot win if we decide
[02:41:44] that we will not let it.
[02:41:50] Because if we confront the darkness, if we stand up with courage and we look upward,
[02:42:00] toward the sky, the light will shine on our faces and wash out the darkness and bring us warmth
[02:42:13] and hope and happiness.
[02:42:22] And thank you for showing us once again that even with the evil.
[02:42:29] And the darkness of the world.
[02:42:36] And even with the scars that they can leave, even still.
[02:42:46] Even with all that.
[02:42:50] This life is a sweet as the honey suckle blossom.
[02:42:58] Dirt and all.
[02:43:06] So until next time, this is Iris and Echo and Jockel.