Building the Elite Podcast

Tom Satterly is a former Command Sergeant Major from the US Army’s Delta Force, also known as The Unit. During his 20 years at The Unit, Tom fought in and led countless high-profile missions including the capture of Saddam Hussein and the Battle of Mogadishu, also known as Black Hawk Down, which was the longest sustained firefight since Vietnam. That 18-hour firefight ended with Tom, along with several of his teammates, running the Mogadishu Mile to safety.Tom’s career sounds like a Hollywood script, and he’s literally been portrayed in movies because of it. It’s hard to imagine doing more in the world of special operations than he did. But that lifestyle comes at a cost. In the early days of Tom and Jen’s relationship, Tom was struggling with the physical, mental, and emotional toll of his two decades of intense training and combat. It nearly broke him, and it nearly destroyed his relationship with Jen. Tom and Jen met while Jen was working at a special operations training company. She noticed a pattern that was shared by the Navy SEALs, Green Berets, and Army Rangers that she was working with. That pattern was the same one that was affecting Tom, and in turn, affecting her. She wanted to know what could be done to help these special operators deal with the effects of post-traumatic stress, and what avenues there were for getting that help. So, she delved into health and wellness research and certifications in order to answer both parts of that question. She learned about post-traumatic stress, she learned what could be done about it, and she began doing the helping. As she and Tom worked to heal as individuals and repair their relationship, they began helping others to do the same. They founded All Secure Foundation in 2017 to help special operators and their families navigate the maze of treatments and modalities of healing from post-traumatic stress. They worked with hundreds of operators and their families and soon became a provider of education, awareness, and programs.On this episode, we talk with Tom and Jen about their story and All Secure Foundation.  Resources and links:All Secure Foundation Tom's highly-recommended book, All Secure (amazon affiliate link)

There is a distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is what you experience, suffering is how you respond to it. Pain is built largely out of nerves and your brain telling you something is wrong. Suffering is you telling yourself something is wrong. You can suffer without being in pain, and you can be in pain without suffering. Learning to separate the two is an important part of what training is.

Todd Bumgardner is a human performance coach at a tier one special operations unit. He works with operators during their qualification course. To do this well, he must balance their immediate physical training needs with the demands of their qual course, and ensure that he keeps them at a high level of performance without impairing their readiness for crucial work-related tasks and tests like CQB training. On this call, we discuss how he does that. If you'd like to stalk Todd, you can do so here:Instagram - @todd_bumgardnerInstagram - @humanpredatorpackmuleInstagram - @beyondstrengthOnlyFans - (classified)Email - todd@beyondstrengthperformance.com

18-Delta, the Special Forces medic qualification course, and SOCM, the Special Operations Combat Medic course, are among the most difficult schools in the US Special Operations pipeline. The people who attend these courses are special operators who have already been through their selection programs, and in some cases have already gone through several work-ups and deployments with their units. They’re smart, motivated, and highly-capable people. And yet, only about half of them will make it through a given course. It’s just that hard. On this call, we talk with two different graduates of this course. A former Green Beret and 18D medic named Jack, and a former Navy SWCC and SOCM medic named Chase.We discuss what this school is like, what to expect if you’re a student on your way there, and some of the best practices for successfully completing the course. Some of the resources we discussed on this call: Complete Anatomy Study AppMental Skill: SegmentingMental Skill: Compartmentalization Khan Academy free online courses, such as this one on calculating units and dosages.  Supermemo and Anki spaced repetition flashcard programs

Special operations selection teaches you to rethink your relationship with pain. The discomfort of doing something with a painful but partial effort isn't meaningfully different from the pain of giving it everything you have. One is just slower, and when it's over you wouldn't really remember the difference.For the world of SOF selection to become your home, and to eventually succeed in it, you have to think of pain not as something to be avoided as often as possible, but as a component of a strategy. There is productive pain that helps you get something done, and there is useless pain.You can hurt fast, or you can hurt slow. When it's over it's all just a blur of suffering and the subtle distinctions won't have mattered. What will matter is what you accomplished with that pain.

Eustress training is a way of training your body to do more work, easily by raising the baseline of movement or exercise that you can do without stressing your body out or making a significant demand on your recovery capacity.This means that you can eventually train harder, recover faster, and when you want to really push things in the gym or in your sport, you have a higher output potential. Since you’ve trained to make heavy workouts feel easy, you’ll be able to do even more before it feels really difficult.Eustress training also has several other benefits. For instance, It helps to build a high degree of control into your perception of sustained effort, teaching you how to make hard things easy. It allows you to refine and dial in techniques and mental strategies.It reduces recovery time - allowing you to shift emphasis to other physiological demands and training inputsIt increases specific work capacity in the movements trained. It helps to develop a better sense of interoception, or the ability to sense what is happening within your body and predict how future events will feelIt also helps to develop a general skill of self-regulation, or the ability to manage your stress response under difficult conditions. If you prefer reading or want to refer back to something mentioned in this article, click here. 

Over our lifetimes, as years of experiences accumulate, we can begin to formulate a universal lesson: No matter how many bad things you went through in the past, you were still alive when they were over. This isn’t really something that you consciously decide. It’s something you teach a deeper part of your brain through practice. You have to know it, not just know the words for it. As this settles in, it begins to alter both stages of the stress appraisal process. You’re more likely to accurately understand the scope of what is happening, and you’ll know that no matter how it plays out, you’ll have the capacity to handle it, even if things go badly.This shifts your sense of control away from needing external events to occur in a certain way to knowing that regardless of how those events go you can still dictate your own response to them. Once you know that even the worst-case scenario is manageable, you gain freedom.By letting go of your need for things to happen in a particular way, you gain the ability to accept and work with them as they are. You’ll know that it doesn’t matter what the world throws at you because you’ve got what it takes to handle it, even if it hurts. 

In the second half of our conversation with Dr. Andy Morgan, we cover topics including:⁠⁠- Advice for people seeking careers in the intelligence community⁠- Andy’s work as an expert witness testifying at the International Criminal Court⁠- The effects of trauma on memory, and why an inconsistent story of a traumatic event does not indicate lying⁠- How people can be given false memories, and how he did so in his research⁠- The science and myths of human lie detection⁠- When polygraphs are BS and when they're not⁠- The appeal of "corporate horoscopes", aka made-up personality tests sold to corporations⁠- Methods for rapidly learning or memorizing information. ⁠If you haven’t done so already, please check out the first episode of this talk (Episode 21), where Dr. Morgan discusses the psychology and biology of performance under stress in special operators, the characteristics of effective special operators, and what it is that the operational psychs are looking for at selection and assessment courses. Timestamps:Part 2:00:00:51 How to Join the Intelligence Community00:05:19 Testifying at the Hague00:20:54 Detecting Deception00:23:56 Polygraphs00:29:15 Magic and Tarot00:33:24 The Yale Harold Fiasco00:35:51 Memory Castles00:41:34 Association00:45:35 Yohimbe and Norepinephrine

Dr. Andy Morgan is a Yale-educated former CIA medical intelligence officer, and one of the world's foremost experts on performance under stress in special operations personnel. In this episode we cover:- "The Warfighter's Stress Response" - What are the mental and physical differences between SOF candidates who perform well under stress, and those who don't?- SOF selection criteria - What are the differences in the profiles of ideal SOF candidates from one program to another? - The psych interview at SOF selection - What are the operational psychs and cadre looking for, and what is the best advice for candidates going into these interviews? This is part one of a two-part episode. Part two will follow soon after, and will cover many other topics ranging from the science of detecting deception (Are polygraphs BS?) to navigating a career in the clandestine intelligence community and how to rapidly learn and remember lots of novel information. Timestamps:Part 1:00:02:23 The War Fighters Stress Response00:16:07 SOF Selection Criteria00:36:29 The Psych Interview at Selection

Self-herding is when you refer to your past actions for subconscious guidance rather than mirroring what others around you are doing. This effect can persist a lot longer than the situation that produced the action. By taking advantage of self-herding, we can use temporary circumstances to shape persistent, long-term behavior. A common method for doing this used by successful SOF candidates is to "quit tomorrow." No matter how much what you're doing right now hurts, you can tell yourself that you'll finish out today and quit tomorrow. This takes away the daunting prospect of future suffering while focusing you on pushing through today's challenge. Most of the time, people do this in reverse. They take the easy way out today and tell themselves that they'll do the hard thing tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes. Each day they make a new excuse, skip the hard work, and put the burden of their ambitions onto their future selves. Present-day actions never match future goals. Quitting tomorrow helps you do the hard work today, by mentally promising yourself that you can take a break tomorrow. In the same way, tomorrow never comes. Each new day becomes just one more today in a long string of them in which you suffer through one last time. Just as making an excuse and avoiding discomfort becomes a reflex for many people, quitting tomorrow makes a habit of perseverance.