Francis Santore- EP 001

In the first episode of Parallel Lives, Damian sits down with Francis Santore to explore a path that has taken him from the Marine Corps and Scout Sniper community to entrepreneurship and medical school.

Francis shares the decisions that shaped his life, the lessons he carried with him from the military, and what it took to continue evolving after leaving that world behind. The conversation explores resilience, identity, leadership, and the challenge of taking experiences from one chapter of life and using them to build the next.

From Marine Scout Sniper to entrepreneur to future physician, Francis's story is a reminder that the path you're on doesn't have to define where you end up.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Brainwashing tactic to put the people that that care about junior support system behind a a job.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Everybody has a life that we lived and a life that we almost lived.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Sometimes it's a decision, a phone call, or an opportunity that never came. These decisions don't just affect who we are today, but they affect who we become down the road. I'm Damien Knight, and this is Parallel Lives.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

I couldn't think of a better person to start my podcast journey with than one of my best friends, Francis Santor. We serve in the Marine Corps together. He was a Marine Corps scout sniper, an instructor, or a teacher, depending on how you want to look at that. He's a father, an entrepreneur, a second-year medical student, and just an all-around good dude. So that being said, thank you so much for being on here, Francis. Let's I mean I'm excited to tell people about your journey, about who you are, and more importantly, how you got there. So again, thanks, man. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_02 1:09

This is awesome. It's an honor and a pleasure, Dangan.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

All right, man. So let's just jump into it for the people who don't know you. Uh thinking back to your childhood when you were in high school, who was Francis Santor?

SPEAKER_02 1:21

Oh, high school, Francis. Uh it was different, I was a different person for sure. Immature. Uh a little bit antisocial.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Um kind of just like a dick, I would say. I was kind of a dick. Is that what you're looking for? Okay. Hey, I'm just looking for for honesty, man.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Okay. So you were kind of a dick. Okay. So when you were when you were in high school and you were a rude kid, right? You were kind of a dick to everybody. What were your goals? If if you would have asked that kid, who does Francis grow up to be? Who is that?

SPEAKER_02 1:58

Well, so I thought that I was gonna go into the Marines, you know, and then just be deploying and retire. So my goals were essentially just I was a dick because I knew that I was smart. I knew that I was in shape, and and everyone around me wasn't. And I already thought that I had my life completely planned out, and that I didn't necessarily need to rely on anybody to get there.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

So all right.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

You had uh you decided you wanted to be a Marine. Was there any specific reason it was a Marine and not a soldier, an airman, a pararescuan, anything? What was attractive about the Marine Corps to you? Is it because they're disappointed?

SPEAKER_02 2:37

Oh yeah, that is true. I would say that uh the Marine Corps has a great marketing team. I think we both may have a similar opinion about how the Marine Marine Corps portrays itself. And that just uh happens to attract a certain type of person, which I happen to be that type of person at the time. Aggressive, immature, doesn't really care about anybody but themselves. So I would say that that is pretty typical, and they use like Nazi-style propaganda to attract people stuff.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Yeah, okay. Fast forward, you graduate high school, you join the Marine Corps. What was that like for you? Um, you became a sniper very, very quickly.

SPEAKER_02 3:19

Yes, I guess thought I was the shit in high school, for example, and I was expecting it to be like I was going to go into a group of people that had the same capabilities, and that also didn't happen to be true. I went to BootCamp and it was just like 13 weeks of government-funded nonsense, which is all like a scripted game. So when I went there, I very quickly picked up that it's a scripted game and they're trying to play mind tricks on you. And then I just kind of performed and did well. I graduated as the company undergraduate. And then when I got to the fleet, I was like, okay, well, when I get to infantry training, that was fine too. I I did well there. And then when I got to the fleet, I expected, okay, now I'm going to meet the people that are the higher caliber that I'll be performing with. But what I kind of, you know, didn't think about was all those people that I was going to be working with, I was already working with all the way up to this point. So immediately within I got stationed at 29 Palms in 3-4, which had just been stood back up. And within the first, I was one of the first like 30 people in the unit. One of the other people that were in the unit at the time was the person who was going to be the sniper platoon sergeant. Um, and I just hadn't been challenged yet up to that point. And I was given the offer to run a screener and then, you know, go in school tune. And just because I happened to be at the right place at the right time, um, and I was one of the higher performers there, I got sent to school early.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

So Yeah, and so you go to you go to sniper school super early. Young dude, you're like what, 18, 19 years old. What was that experience like for you when you are surrounded by guys who probably been in the Marine Corps a lot longer than you, have a lot more experience than you.

SPEAKER_02 5:06

Well, it was, you know, you have to step up. There's a certain maturity that's expected by the time you get to Sniper School. Um, for everybody who doesn't understand the way that the Marine Corps legacy snager program used to work, was typically you couldn't even join a platoon without the deployment under your belt. And then you would finally get an opportunity to either be invited to or volunteer to run a screener, come into a platoon, and then you have to work with the platoon to earn a spot to go to school. So, you know, I was the only person there that had not deployed yet and was as young, I was the youngest scout sniper in the Marine Corps at the time after I graduated. So I had to kind of find the maturity. And then it also humbled me because I was finally working with people that were at a similar caliber. So I was no longer like the best guy. I was like a middle-of-the-pack guy at sniper school that just happened to perform well on everything and pass everything. Whereas some people may have failed, may have just had one shortcoming, shortfall, but been really good at a bunch of other things.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Throughout that experience, if you can even remember, it's been a long time, and I know you're getting old now. So uh what's the hardest lesson that that environment taught you? The hardest lesson that sniper school taught me?

SPEAKER_02 6:22

Uh well, that I just didn't know everything. I guess that's, you know, I I always grew up pretty, pretty intelligent. I could pick things up really quickly. And uh, because of that, people would, I guess, kind of just listen to what I said because I would say things confidently. So I had this really bad habit of just kind of acting like I knew everything. And I was just so new to this space that and I had no experience that when it came time to do, you know, I could perform the sniper skills, such as sh marksmanship or the field craft. When it came to actually like doing the job, I had no experience. So it really humbled me. And then I I realized that because I'm the first guy on the platoon, I have to be able to take that back and train a platoon of people to be successful. When I myself have no experience, I just have to take the experiences that I had learned from other people and try to apply that best I could. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Most people out there who've heard of Scout Snipers, they've probably watched Surviving the Cut, they've seen all these things and know that it's hard. I gotta ask you though, and uh I didn't prep him for this. So was there any funny moment in sniper school? Like if you could go back, is there one funny story where you were like, there's no way this is happening?

SPEAKER_02 7:40

Well, it's there I would say it was really funny because everybody thinks of military courses being like rigid and uh, you know, like militant, like when you think of military, right? Uh once you get to the special communities, even though I was a pig, that was what I was at the time, and the instructors were the hogs, you were still to a degree treated with respect, but they hazed the absolute shit out of us. And the thing is, like, you're so you want to be there, so you love it. So there are so many funny things that happened from us running up and down range 117, just because we have a night shoot and we finish the day and we have a couple of hours before it gets dark. So we're just running back and forth carrying everything from the truck, like cones and stuff like that, to you know, having to run up to the top of a tower, and then one of the guys getting so thirsty that he's like, I need we're carrying water jugs, the five-gallon water jugs. He's getting so thirsty that he's like, I really just need to take a drink directly out of this water jug. But it's in California and it's very dry west of the Mississippi, and bees swarm to any water. So he drank the water directly from the thing that was filled with bees, like honeybees, Africanized honeybees, and got stung in his throat while he's getting caved. Or like uh one of the other guys during one of the missions phases. We just completed a you know, uh mock mission in the mount town. For those of you who don't know, they're literally live fire and non-live fire ranges that are little cities that are built that you get to operate in. And we had just you know shot at our high-value target, and we were going to escape. And the only way out, we're on the second story of a building, the only way out is down one flight of stairs, and they use tear gas on us, and we don't have gas nests or anything. So they tear gas the absolute shit out of the bottom of the stairs, and it's billowing up and and through, and you can already feel it coming because it's like this aerosolized crystal. So you're already choking up, and then you see this cloud come in like the fog. And one of the guys next to me goes, Oh my god. We got one of our guys jumped out of the second story window. The rest of us were like, we're gonna hold our breath and run down the stairs, but we used to carry the M485, which is like I can't even remember how long it is, but it with with the suppressor is almost as tall as me. It might have been five feet long. Yeah, he's very tall. Well, I'm I'm 5'8, so it was probably up to like my neck if I put the stock on my foot. And we would take that and we would call it T-boning it under your ruck. So you have your your backpack and it has like a flap over it, and that's how you carry the gun, because you have to carry probably if you're carrying a sniper rifle, you're carrying an M4 as well, and maybe a pistol. So you're not using the sniper rifle as a primary. So you pack it out, and having five feet of width, this guy got stuck in a stairwell in the gas, and then passed out and fell down the stairs. And then I tripped over his body as I fell down, and we had to drag him away, and then he had to be taken to the hospital. Um, that was also hilarious after the fact. Obviously, when you're in the gas, it's not fun.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

Okay. You graduate sniper school, you go back to the Splatoon, you're the man, you get an incredibly cool blonde corporal that eventually comes in who becomes one of your best friends, and you kind of still gravitated towards hard things, right? So you had done sniper school. A lot of people argue one of the most physically and mentally demanding schools at the time, uh, especially for like a conventional infantryman. Then you go to the Marine Corps instructor water survival school, which has a pretty high attrition rate. A lot of people can't swim in the Marine Corps, which is crazy. And then after that, you know, you still had like this itch to scratch, you decide to keep moving forward. What was your next uh hard thing that you wanted to tackle? And and you know, how did that go for you?

SPEAKER_02 11:45

Well, so just to preface, even before sniper school, I had a squad leader who is an Afghan and Iraq veteran who I got to the fleet and he was like, You you don't you shouldn't be here, you should go to Marsok. So he called the Marsock recruiter, and the MarsOk recruiter is like, this guy is we can't take him. He's too junior. He has to wait until he's ready to re-enlist. So that was already priming that I wanted to go to, I wanted to either go to Recon or Marsock, and I didn't understand how it worked. I never being a sniper was never on my radar. That just kind of fell into my lap. And then it became like my whole identity while I was in. Because it's it's a specialized community that was held to a standard even within those other two communities of being something special. So I went to sniper school, came back, we raised the platoon, I met you, you ran the screener, and they were trying to keep you from leaving Kilo Company, and they were sending people to come get you. And I was like, get the fuck out of here, get away. He's you can't tell him that he can't come to the screener. And then we deployed first deployment, a very peaceful one to Australia, which was a bit of time. On the latter half of Australia, I was finally coming up on that point where I was at around two and a half years in, three years in, so I could start the process of re-enlisting. And now I could actually put in a package to go to assessment selection for Marsock. I started doing that on the latter half of my first deployment.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

And but before you get any deeper though, I gotta I gotta dig into something. So you're a guy who's highly qualified. You've, you know, you're a scout sniper who's been to multiple sniper schools at this point, you've been to McQuiss, and you put in a package to go to Marsock. How did your uh how did your platoon take that as a you know their unit was getting ready to deploy again pretty much immediately after getting back home?

SPEAKER_02 13:28

What was the real- Well, this is a trend. I've this has happened to me a lot actually in Marine Corps. This happens to a lot of people. Whenever any good guy tries to leave, you're automatically the biggest piece of shit on the planet. And this like paradox happens where your command will actually, you're such a piece of shit that they will do everything they can to keep you there. So they will stop you at every turn from getting to go to wherever you want by whether that's calling the next command that you might have orders to, by stopping your package from getting approved by the battalion commander, by stealing it from the career planner's desk, um, because you're such a piece of shit and like you're the worst thing that's ever happened. So we absolutely need you to stay. So whenever good guys, yeah, they try to do these tactics. So that's another funny story. Damien, you are also supposed to go to assessment and selection with me. So you were filling out your package at the same time, along with my um one of my other friends who may be a good person to have on this podcast as well in the future. I'll I'll name drop him, Ben Pullman. Um, we had to do this thing where, you know, my package just kept disappearing from the career planner's desk because my platoon and company leadership were taking it and stealing it. And, you know, there's this recommendation sheet of everybody in your chain of command recommending you. And first it's like glowing recommendations, and then they steal it back, and you see it literally crossed out, and them saying, like, no, not recommended. We recommend he stays. Um, and I still have pictures of those sheets from when we did our little CTRs or close target reconnaissance of uh the company commander's office. But we had to request a mast, which for those of you who don't know is essentially like my command is trying to fuck me. I want to go talk to the highest possible officer in charge and tell them how they're fucking me, why they shouldn't do that, and then put it on the record so that hopefully they do the legal thing, which is not do that. That's what it is in a nutshell. Um, and it was so funny because our platoon commander, who was the acting company commander at the time, we requested masks together. We were at an actually, me, Damien, and Ben Coleman were all at an Australian Special Forces survival course where we were literally out in the wood at the outback, foraging, eating little yellow ants with no clothes on, because they took our clothes. We're in silk silkies, which are just like little shorts and boots. And we requested masks, they came and picked us up in a truck, we got dressed, and this guy is having an absolute episode, freaking out on us, telling us that the battalion commander is gonna breathe fire and motherfuckers. And Ben Pullman just looks at him and goes, Sir, I just I don't understand.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Did you just say that the battalion commander is gonna is a dragon that's gonna fuck my mom? Yeah, man.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

I remember going through that, and it's like, if you hate us so much, why don't you just let us go, right? And for those who will never be in the military or, you know, hold the military in such a high regard, again, like Francis said, it's like these polar opposites all the time. It's like this dude is such a dirtbag, we need to keep him forever, right? And those are the recommendations, like Francis said, it started out, they were glowing. Oh, these guys have done so many things for us, they're great. And then all of a sudden, no, he's immature. They're incredible. Incredible.

SPEAKER_02 16:57

The direct quote was this was literally written by this is mind you, this is a captain in the Marines who has been in 10 years. He's still in now. He's still in. He's been in for 10 years. He was a good guy, um, but there are pressures probably coming from above him. That literally said, Damien Sergeant Knight has no credibility.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

He is incredible.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:22

Yep. So for those of you listening, I'm a very incredible person. So yeah, we went through that, and eventually we get back. You get to go to selection, you get selected. What happened with that, man?

SPEAKER_02 17:34

Well, so yeah, I went to selection, got selected. It was a great time, really actually a lot of fun, got to meet a lot of high-caliber people as well. And then I just didn't have the opportunity to actually go to the school for Marsock. I went in to selection in January of 2018 and re enlisted. And there was this thing where you get non-competitively promoted to sergeant. So I had re-enlisted, got non-competitively promoted to sergeant, I'm from corporal, and then I was supposed to go to ITC, which is the well, which was Marsock's school, that next to January. So January 2019. For personal reasons, I wasn't able to make that course. So I got enrolled to the next August course, and then I got married and was having my daughter Juliana. So I got rolled again, the January 2020 course. And then MarSock Recruiter is like, that's fine, no problem. You'll just come. Then I moved my family at the time from California to Camp Lejeune to attend that course. And then, like, within six minutes of checking in, they're like, actually, we can't let you start because you are too senior of a sergeant. There was some stipulation within the MOS manual that which had to do with, you know, not hindering promotion to staff sergeant because of lack of MOS credibility, that if you were over 18 months as a sergeant, you could not attend ITC. Um, and I was around the 19 month mark.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

So I was Yeah, which is the exact reason that I didn't go to selection with you, because by the time they were going to allow me to go to selection, I would have been too senior of a sergeant. And, you know, the Marine Corps is a really good organization. So what they decided to do was allow me to extend my contract prior to telling me I was ineligible. So they got me for another six months. But let's back up a little bit, man. So you didn't go to that first class and you ended up meeting your wife. And, you know, you kind of breezed by real quick. You had a kid, but you know, I I think we need to unpack that a little bit because quickly you became not only a dad, but a stepdad. And like, you know, you've been doing a lot of hard stuff, man. Was was that how was that transition? You were still pretty young. Life changed very, very rapidly for you. Like, how was that for you?

SPEAKER_02 19:57

That was fine. That was that was actually the thing that probably that directly changed my trajectory. That and then the loss of the Mars Ok thing together completely changed my trajectory from thinking, I'm going to stay in the military for 20 years, to I think I need to do something else and be a not a bad father or husband. Because that's kind of what is required of you by staying active duty in the military, especially in the career fields that I was in. You're required to be a bad father and a bad husband. Those are the sacrifices that you make to be able to do your job. People say the job always comes first, but I mean there's a reason why veterans are shooting themselves at a rate that is higher than anybody else, right? Because it's a that's a that's a brainwashing tactic to put the people that care about you and your support system behind a a job, especially during the ends of the global war on terror when nothing's happening. There's no real legitimate reason to do that. So, you know, get coming into Dominic's life, my son, was I came in it it really matured me and having to to take care of a child. And also I was quite in a cart on him, um, because I didn't have a good idea of how to treat a two, three-year-old, you know. So I learned a lot from that's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 21:28

And so now we'll fast forward.

SPEAKER_02 21:31

You get to this command within a couple minutes, they're like, hey, you can't do this.

SPEAKER_01 21:34

And obviously at that point you still wanted to do it, kind of, right? You were still kind of in that transitionary period. Did that like anger you? What were what were your immediate thoughts? You would just read listen, you moved your family across the United States.

SPEAKER_00 21:47

I'd be pissed, man. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

So that's the thing that really frustrated me was I had already communicated concerns of something like this happening after especially rolling for so long, you know, to the Marsock recruiter who apparently does not communicate with the training command at Marsock, which makes no sense. He's so I'm I was reassured that it was fine. And then once I get to the training command, I'm told no, you you are not going to attend. We're going to reclassify you back to your original MLS. So obviously I was pissed because at this point, like I said, the two things that really changed my trajectory were the combination of the family in Mars. If I was going to Mars Ok still, then what would have happened is I probably would have been in for the six-year enlistment that I did and then gotten out anyway. And then because I was in Mars Ok, not had time to get my higher education and everything, and not then where I am now. So what I did was I again requested Mast. The same thing that I did to get to selection, um, I did it at a higher level through MarSock's chain of command because I was so close to the threshold that I'd at least wanted to give myself a chance to argue my case. And because what do I have to lose? Right. Um, that didn't work. There was a specific commander in charge of MarSOC at the time, General Yu, who told me it would be fiscally irresponsible of him to let me, you know, continue. So I called my friend who happened to be at headquarters working for at the time and had the deployment cycle for 2nd Marine Division and found out, you know, I asked him which unit was deploying next to Afghanistan for Task Force Southwest, which happened to be 3-6. So since it didn't wind up working out, I got orders to just for those people listening. And went over there and became the Chief Scout. Just give him like a brief summary.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

You kind of glazed over. It's a it's an important thing, you know. It's what what is the roles and responsibility of the Chief Scout.

SPEAKER_02 24:14

Well, so when you think of a sniper platoon, people think of sniper teams as uh two guys going out because that's what's shown in like the media and stuff. It's actually a reconnaissance team that goes out that has six to eight guys, um, and maybe some enablers with it. And out of those six to eight guys, maybe two of them are actually school-trained snipers. So those guys will be the team leader and assistant team leader. And typically the platoon will have, it depends on how many people are in the platoon and how you want to structure it, but they'll have three to four teams of six to eight guys with two snipers, a sniper or two per team, if if that is possible. There are so few snipers that that's often not possible. And then you have a platoon sergeant and a platoon commander. The platoon commander is an officer, usually a ground intelligence officer that may have some experience, may not. And then the sniper platoon sergeant is really the guy who's the liaison for weapons company, which is where you fall under organizationally to help schedule like logistics, administrative and logistical stuff. And oftentimes that guy is a sniper if there's a staff NCO in the battalion that is a sniper to fill that position, but not all the time. So there's another building within the sniper platoon, which is essentially the senior sniper, usually the first team leader who supports the battalion as a whole, whereas the other sniper teams will support the companies underneath, who is essentially the subject matter expert on sniper operations for the platoon. In the case that the sniper platoon sergeant is not a sniper. So they're essentially completely in charge of developing training for the entire platoon to make sure that the platoon is mission ready. But then also they're the senior guy who makes the decisions out of all the team leaders and then communicates that to the higher leadership. And if if you happen to have a sniper platoon sergeant who's also a sniper, essentially the most senior sniper there, the guy who knows how to do it. To essentially divide and conquer everybody and get what they want.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

Employs the right way, right? Awesome. So you said you did that for about two years, but we know you re-enlisted for longer. What what was it like after you got back from your next deployment? You know, you had a choice, you could keep deploying, but now you have these kids. You have a wife. Did having a wife and kids play a factor into what happened next?

SPEAKER_00 26:33

Just walk us through it. Yeah, so like I said, so I re-enlisted for Marsock.

SPEAKER_02 26:48

That didn't happen. So I re-enlisted for 72 months, six years, for a $85,000 bonus upon completion of the school, which I didn't go to, so I got no bonus, and I but I did get six years, but I had to go to the school. So yeah, I got my prison sentence for six years. He decided, I went on the deployment, was not happy. One of the guys who was an instructor at my pre-scout sniper course, which was like a primer course to go to sniper school, was now the sniper instructor at the urban and aerial sniper course. And I had heard through the grapevine that they needed somebody to come over there. So I texted them and I said, Hey, I, you know, I'd like to get out of the fleet for a little bit. Um, and I'd love to come and teach at that school. It was the only sniper school that I had not been to yet at that time. So basically I was I asked if I could come to the school during the first course, be an assistant instructor while also going through the course as like a pseudo student and then shoot the qualifications and because it was mostly there was employment in it as well, but it was mostly marksmanship. That was the only thing that students were evaluated on. So I they said yes. Funny story, actually, while I was on deployment, I didn't have an up-to-date uniform promotion photo because I had to send resume and bio in for my application to go to this unit. So I actually took my friend's picture and photoshopped my head onto his bottle. And and then I got accepted. So I got to go to that school. I got to go to the school and be an instructor where I thought I was just going to be teaching your urban sniper course, and then which is a course that um basically teaches you how to snipe in a city, which is challenging because targets are limited exposure. It's a three-dimensional environment, so it's extremely dangerous. Um, it's all about angles, and uh you have to be able to shoot precisely at small targets really fast. So it's probably the most applicable sniper school the Marine Corps had. And then on top of that, we would do a week of aerial sniping, which is teaching how to shoot out of a helicopter essentially, in support of VBSS, which is visit board search seizure of a ship, a vessel, or an oil rig. So that was awesome.

SPEAKER_01 29:07

I got to go to that course and be an instructor there, part of the special tactics branch staff, which also you have to go to the sweet course quarters battle, which also allows to really focus on urban reconnaissance and surviving civilian education, right? Getting your degree, kind of setting you up for success, allows you to be home with the kids a little bit more. You know, you buy your first house, which is a huge thing for a lot of people. And then we start up Apex Training Solutions, man. So also became an entrepreneur. So again, you got a lot going on. You're at a new command, you're teaching a really cool course, you're having all these kids, you know, you just got married, life is hectic.

SPEAKER_00 29:47

How did you balance all of that? Well, I you know, I'm a grinder, I would say.

SPEAKER_02 30:03

If I'm not doing something, I get bored pretty quickly. When you're in the fleet and you're operational, you're constantly at work, essentially. So even when you're doing the work up to deploy, you are in you're in the field, you're at ranges, and when you're not, you're doing all administrative nonsense while also trying to fit in appropriate training. So I was already essentially married to work. Going to the non-deployable unit, especially this one, this unit's primary mission was qualifying recon and the sniper platoon to be special operations capable by putting them through these packages. So our entire cycle was completely dependent on the Mew and when they were deploying. They battle pirates. Which the Mew is Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is essentially like crisis response deployments that goes on ships and floats around in high-risk areas.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

They battle pirates. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:56

Um, so I had time because it was also big boy rules. I was the most junior guy in the office. It's a bunch of recon Marines that are mostly gunnery sergeants. I'm a sergeant that a pretty senior sergeant by this point. So it was basically like when you had work, you were expected to do your job, which I was good at. And if you don't have work, like spend time with your family and focus on your other endeavors. So I had already started my associate's degree, just a general studies associate to get gen eds out of the way while on my last appointment. So I just kind of picked that back up, got that general studies associate while kind of deciding how I wanted to pivot my life because I knew I didn't want to stay in any longer. I knew this was going to be my terminal unit. I just wasn't sure what I was going to do afterwards. But I had some time. I had about three years. So three and a half years, actually. So I and I wasn't sure what I was gonna do, which is what also prompted me to start Apex Training Solutions with Damian Knight when he was he invited me to lead the long-range section of the company. Apex, yeah. So I mean, I had the time. I had this went from doing, you know, being married to work to now doing this job that I actually was passionate about, so it didn't feel like work. And then when I wasn't working, I had plenty of time. And college is not hard. So anyone who pretends college is hard is not, it is not hard. You can get straight A's just by kind of like doing the work. Yeah, I know, isn't that crazy? And I I went and did most of my college before AI, too. So I would do my work sometimes in the office too when we had downtime. I was full-time, so I did for three years, I was a full-time student for three semesters a year to get my bachelor's degree in biology. Because I had decided I think medicine was the path that I wanted to go on. Um I had loved the trauma medicine that is taught through TCCC. And TCCC, like people who are in the Marines learning, you know, they're going through their combat lifesaver course, their TCCC or life tissue courses, like that informs those, the things that have been learned through T Triple C inform everything having to do with like wilderness EMS and emergency response rescue. So it's kind of a big deal. It's literally the forefront of what um is being applied in other spaces, even in the civilian world. So I really liked that. I mean, I had a little bit of sports medicine background before. So the school was like whatever. That was just another, another little thing that I could do, and I could kind of blend that with my work. And then Apex was a way to monetize the skills that I I had taken, their special skills, and apply that to the civilian sector, to people in the precision marksmanship. I think that's about a lot of Apex as well as like governments. A lot of people in the space, but belongs to the city.

SPEAKER_01 33:49

We did it purely for fun and to kind of like hang out with each other and everybody else does it because that's really the only thing they have going for them, right? So, you know, when you think about teaching, right? When you think teaching a group of Marines at the urban scout sniper course, you know, probably mostly guys who obviously have been to Scout Sniper School or the Recon Sniper course, or maybe they've been to Mask, the Marshock, you know, sniper school, versus teaching a civilian, say like a dad and his 15-year-old son who came from Texas. Like, what are the biggest differences in teaching them? Is any group easier to teach?

SPEAKER_00 34:25

What was your experience? I wouldn't say either's easier than the other, right?

SPEAKER_02 34:41

Because the people that I was teaching were already like vetted. So they're already skilled, and now I'm teaching them the more advanced. I don't like to use the word advanced because it's not necessarily hard, but more more applicable skills, a way to to turn the basics of using a precision rifle into a tool that you can manipulate to do your bidding, essentially, is what you know what what we did. Where, yeah, I don't I don't even know how to describe it. You could do stuff with that gun that people couldn't imagine that you could do. Yeah. Whereas like when I'm teaching somebody with no experience, they really do listen to everything I have to say, even if it's wrong. If if I said something that was wrong, they believe it because I have the credentials, the credibility. And then they would witness me do things with the gun that they couldn't imagine. Like not touch it and shoot if my eyes flips and hit targets at distance to you know, so like, which Damien's witnessed, I'm not making uh. So uh that was actually a demonstration we used to do to show how tight the tolerances are of a gun. You could take it completely apart, put it back together, and then rest it on something, aim it at a target, and without looking, hit the target because it's so well made and so precise as a tool.

SPEAKER_00 35:52

But um Yeah, I mean, I would say that it's just different.

SPEAKER_02 35:59

It's just a different thing. It's a lot more fun to teach the guys who kind of know what they're doing. Uh, because we were like the school was primarily designed for recon and scout snipers, but we were inner service. So we drew people from all over SOCON. We had Raiders, Green Berets, Rangers, we had Department of State contractors come to the course. We've had Yeah, we've had everybody that you can imagine, because we just taught those special skills. So that was fun because you got to do really fun things, you got to teach them, and you got to put them some through some crazy courses of fire and develop. You're literally a subject matter expert by definition because you're developing new ways to apply these skills. Whereas, like when you're working with the civilians, they don't need to know, you know, how to effectively shoot somebody in the face really fast. They just kind of need to understand how the relationship between the optic and the rifle work, a little bit about ballistics and trajectory. Obviously, we have you with the ballistics. And then essentially just learn the fundamentals of the city.

SPEAKER_01 37:13

So it's just different, you know, filling up these classes faster than anybody else, which was awesome. But with success comes, you know, some pushback from some from some folks out there we can leave unnamed, but you know, let's explain to people like the thought process. You know, maybe there's some business owners out there who are doing really well who are getting some pushback in their field. Do you have any ad advice from your perspective if if that happens?

SPEAKER_00 37:47

Yeah, I mean, business is a business, right?

SPEAKER_02 37:50

Like anyone who takes stuff personally, if somebody takes something personally that's being done, then they're the problem. Right? So just to give some context to what Damien's alluding to, some other people that had a training company didn't like the way that we had our curriculum design because they thought it was too similar to theirs. And then they took that personally. And I understand why you take that personally because you think that, oh, I what I'm teaching is so groundbreaking. They must be pulling this from me. But then to put into perspective, we were all Marine Scout snipers and had been trained the same way. So I had independently come up with a course design that was similar because it's exactly the way that every single Marine Scout sniper since the 70s has been trained. Right. So this wasn't unique by any means, and everyone does the same thing. So if you are emulating something and then you become successful and somebody else doesn't necessarily see the same success, they're a very successful company too. I don't have any animosity against anybody because it doesn't matter. I understand the perspective. I think that was just an emotional outburst. Yeah. But that's business in the space. You're going to have similar things. There's only so many things you can do. Um if nothing you're doing is groundbreaking. That's like saying that two competing paper towers.

SPEAKER_01 39:16

When the box windshield common from the paper towels.

SPEAKER_02 39:22

That's so although Yeah, the thing that was more, I guess, dam more I wouldn't say damaging, but the thing that I guess these other people were just like trying to blackball and railroad us out of the we had grown too fast and were were legitimately making things up to try to get us barred from going to ranges and using ranges and going to charity events. We asite training solutions had dominated so many domains of the space between pistol carving, CQB, long-range marksmanship, medicine, that they had they just had a big following with all their followers that they bought and tried to actually like railroad us out of the space entirely through slander and libel. Yeah. Which is if we have if we were a bigger business, again, we don't do it for the money. We do it because we like to hang out, and essentially, whenever we run a course, we're just trying to break even so that we can pay for the operations and we can get people to do that. We should because you're the highest earner.

SPEAKER_01 40:45

We could have billed for the most, but it was all donated time, right?

SPEAKER_00 40:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:58

Well, yeah, well, but but also because we had attracted so many people, so all of the all of the proceeds from the course, like people were paying to go to courses at this charity event, and all the proceeds are going to anti-human trafficking efforts. And when we were coming back for a second year and we are dominating the space with 60% of the people signing up for our courses. And again, that's just that's essentially you and me split doing different things throughout the day, running simultaneous courses alone to railroad us out and literally steal money from anti-human trafficking athletes because of your ego is insane. Especially when you have literally the people who run this company, the specific person in charge of the company.

SPEAKER_01 41:44

The specific person in charge of the company has no legitimate experience in the field. So we don't get stuck on that, right? So we had some really good times, you know, with Apex and you know, still do it from time to time just for fun to get them to get the band back together. Yeah. But you decide to get out of the military, and you know, that transition is really big. There are gonna be some people listening to this that are maybe considering the transition themselves, maybe considering re-enlisting. You know, what advice would you give to them for you know, there's gonna be some first sergeant out there telling them that they can't be successful.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

Yeah, I almost died. Yeah, I mean, and that's again back to the tactics. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I can tell. So, yeah, that's that's another tactic.

SPEAKER_02 42:34

I don't have a high opinion of the people that are in charge and shaping the Marine Corps. The organization as a whole has done some incredible things. I mean, all of special operations has been shaped by the Marine Corps small war small wars manual. All the irregular warfare has been shaped by that, lessons learned. And then also, like a lot of special forces communities have learned from Marine Recon all the amphibious operations, the entire DOD and DOS sniper programs have essentially been built off of the Marine Corps Scout Sniper Program. So they've done some incredible things. The issue is the people that are in charge are just like psychos. And they'll do anything they can to make you doubt yourself and beat down your psyche so that you have Stockholm syndrome and you think you're not capable of leaving. I mean, that's all you're capable of. They do a horrible job of managing talent, is the best way to say it. They do it in a very abusive way, psychologically abusive. And I'm not saying that because now I'm, you know, super like it's just truly psychologically abusive at a certain point to retain people instead of just recognizing talent and giving credit where credit's due, which is what people that are in that kind of organization would appreciate more than anything. Um it's just some support, um, which they don't. Get. So, like a first sergeant, first sergeants always get a bad rep. There are a lot of good people who are first sergeants. There are a lot of bad people who are first sergeants. Because they're, you know, they can come from any field, and some guy from the airwind could come to your infantry unit and tell you that the most important thing is how high your boot blastings are in the field. I was told a lot that I would not be successful elsewhere, which is not true. I thought, and because of that, I had almost like an imposter syndrome coming into academia. Because I did, I'm probably the only medical student in the country that has done an entirely online degree while working and got accepted to medical school. And not just any medical school, like a fairly prestigious private school from an academia standpoint. Because, you know, it's online school. How can people tell that, you know, anything you learned is credible? And, you know, I've been successful since, and that's been great. If anybody tells you you can't do something, just you know, have confidence in yourself and and then apply it and prove them all. So I was able to do that. I went, I was going to AMU of all schools. So for people who are saying AMU is not a credible university, it's regionally accredited. And it got me into Wake Forest University School of Medicine and five other medical schools. Actually, four other medical schools, total of five schools, uh, which is more acceptances than most people get during a cycle, because I was able to take my experiences and communicate them in a way that may be marketable. So it's all about how you apply yourself and if you believe that you can do something and you plan properly. One thing the military people are really good at that a lot of people are not good at is um contingency planning, planning for every single thing. Um, you're gonna be like way more successful than the 22-year-old college students that's going straight in that has no life experience. You have for the people that are in the military that are thinking, maybe I do want to be a doctor and I'm enlisted. I'm just some enlisted swan from the officer's perspective. Could I do this? The answer is absolutely yes, you can. And if you have time, take advantage of the tuition's assistance and Pell Grant so that you can do your undergrad concurrently while you're working and put some extra hours in at night for your education. It doesn't take that long, even full-time. I was doing 12 to 14 credit hours a semester, three semesters a year, so that I could, and then took on additional courses. It took longer because I wanted to be sure that I had every potential prerequisite I could possibly need for medical school. So I took JST credits and took them off of my transcripts, go to another course like organic chemistry, and make sure I had that box checked. So as long as you do the right things, you do your research and do the right things, you're gonna be successful among anything you do. I mean, you're gonna make mistakes a lot. But your mistakes are gonna be a lot smaller.

SPEAKER_01 46:51

They're not gonna be technically, dude. You're not gonna accomplish anything, you're never gonna make money. If you stay now, you're gonna be an E6 in the next couple of months. And they try to sell you this dream, right? While simultaneously telling you you have no skills, but they want to retain you for the skills that you have, you know. So it's interesting, man. But so that transition period is big. You had already kind of done your undergrad, you were completing your undergrad, you know. Yeah, ultimately, why was it medicine for you? Because you're a very highly qualified guy. You could have gone, you could have gone into the army and become a Green Beret, you could have gone and worked for the CIA, you could have been a contractor, you could go be a SWAT officer. You you took a 90-degree pivot that most people aren't gonna do.

SPEAKER_00 47:37

So why was it medicine for you? And you never went. You still haven't gone there.

SPEAKER_02 47:52

Again, I had some exposure to medicine by accident in high school. I was supposed to go to weightlifting class, like my junior year or sophomore year of high school.

SPEAKER_00 48:00

And I I know.

SPEAKER_02 48:03

I don't e I I couldn't lift myself if I tried. I uh went. Yeah, so they overfilled the class, and I happened to be on the docket to like get cut from the weightlifting class, which I did go to my senior. And so they were like, Yeah, we have sports medicine, and I didn't know what sports medicine was, but my dad was there dirt with, you know, he was like, Oh, that sounds good like a good class, you should do that. So I did sports medicine, and that was my first exposure to anatomy and physiology. In particular, we did an overreview of the body, but in particular the musculoskeletal system. So bones and muscles. So by my sophomore year of high school, I could name every bone and muscle in the body. And I just had I have a pretty good semantic memory, so I can memorize, like I can look at something and I've got it. So like I realized that I was good at that, and I found it interesting because I like science. And then I stayed on that track. I also was really inspired too by my sports medicine teacher at the time who was battling cancer and still showing up every day to teach us and then beat it. And now still is the sports medicine teacher there going and he's uh he was a physical therapist going through this. Is when the program of physical therapy was originally bachelor's, and then they advanced it to a master's level. Now it's a a DPT, a doctorate. So he was bridging up to maintain his certification while battling cancer. And so, you know, and I he became a strong mentor at that time for me. So I was interested in that. I had a good background, especially in like sports injuries. And then I went into the Marines and we do a lot of trauma medicine in the field that I was in, we do the highest level of trauma medicine that is to be expected by people who are not medically specific because we're going out with no support. If somebody gets hurt, we need to be capable of stabilizing them and making sure that they don't die. Um so doing that, I really enjoyed that. And while at EOTG Expeditionary Operations Training Group, which is the command where I taught my course, I had also assisted with like the mass casualty course that they put on. And I just really liked science and biology. And so it was up in the air between law and medicine. And I day, I'm sure Damien could tell you, I I can write too pretty well and make some arguments. I almost exclusively argue every time I speak to anybody over anything, but I just thought that medicine fit my personality a little bit better. I could help people, I want to do orthog surgery, and I like the idea. I love surgery, I love VOR. I like the idea of if somebody has a problem, I can do most of the time an X-ray, see the problem, go in and fix it, and it's immediately fixed. And there's immediate gratification that the person's automatically going to feel better. And plus, now I have a family. Um, how can I best provide for them? And, you know, like be there more. Medicine's demanding, and the pathway to be a physician in particular, a surgeon in particular, is long and arduous, but it's not as arduous as anything I was doing in the military. Yeah, I just thought that I'd also met uh and got to work with a bunch of great doctors in Camp Lejeune doing some shadowing and going to the OR and a bunch of orthopedic surgeries with them and going from a Marine every single day, which luckily your last dingy station seemed like it was pretty chill.

SPEAKER_01 51:38

But going from still being a Marine, uh having someone occasionally yell at you for a haircut, and now you know you got this long lettuce on your head flowing back.

SPEAKER_00 51:48

What what's been the biggest adjustment for you?

SPEAKER_02 52:02

You know, I so that's the one thing is I've kind of like I was able to I was always a counterculture in the Marines already. As is m are most of the people that are in special communities, they're more of a counterculture towards your traditional military guest behavior. I haven't had to one thing I learned is the biggest issue for adjusting is that the people that I'm working with simply will never understand the things I've experienced. It's only something that like if I tell stories, sometimes mouths are open because it sounds made up. It's just not fathomable how like the suffering that I've experienced, not even like operationally, even just through training or daily life. It's okay, it's unfathomable. People will never understand until they experience it.

SPEAKER_00 52:54

Um so kind of trying not to be, I guess, as intense.

SPEAKER_02 53:02

I mean, what I've been pleasantly surprised that I actually relate, I'm not that much older than the kids that I go to school with, anywhere between like five and six years for most of them. So I'm still kind of within the same same generation. I'm at a different stage of life, but I can relate to them because we have similar cultures still. So it hasn't been that bad transitionally. It's a lot, it's been a lot easier than I expected. I think a lot of people would think that the transition would be more difficult, and it was not, because I'd already was kind of against the original military culture right off the bat. I think I just need to have a little bit more patience because I used to have a short fuse. And Damien and I know that because Damian and I have fist fought a couple of times, but both of us have kind of mellowed out over the years in our age. But I have to have a little bit more patience. Do not have they have life experience, but not as much, and definitely not to the same degree. So working with them, I kind of, you know, need to mentor as best as possible while also balancing being a peer. But it's like one of those peers that like is not a peer at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 54:14

So did you ever have that moment and maybe it was when the white coach ceremony or something like that? You're sitting there amongst your class where you just kind of like it. So I'm good at bridging the gap between both.

SPEAKER_00 54:22

Wow, I'm actually here. You know, I don't think so. And I'll tell you why.

SPEAKER_02 54:39

So I'm not I used to be more sentimental than I am now. Now I'm not quite as sentimental. I'm a person who sets long I'm a goal setter. I set long-term goals, right? And that's always been the case. Like when I joined the Marines, my goal is to go to Mars Aug. So everything that had happened up in in between was just short goals that I expected myself to excel at, to be able to make it to the long goal. So my long goal is to be an orthopedic surgeon, you know, here and stay in Charlotte with Advocate Health and you know, work with Portho Carolina with Advocate and be an orthopedic surgeon. So every single step up to the up to that point is just like another check in the box on the checklist to get there. You hold yourself to a high standard. This sounds arrogant, but it's not like like this is to be expected of me. Like I make I expect it. Yeah, I hold myself to a high standard, but like it's pretty awesome for most people to be able to do that. This is something that is like a prerequisite to get to where I want to be. So I don't look at it as being this like awesome achievement. Because it's not so this it's more of like a fallacy, and um I gaslight myself. But like starting, I guess, and that kind of makes sense. The hardest part of getting about medical school, I would say so far has been just getting in the sheer amount of applications, and especially like I had no guidance. Being able to get in was by far the hardest part. Now, since I'm a student there, I'm being an investor. It kind of sounds like the opposite of the failure where they kind of want you to fail.

SPEAKER_01 56:19

But like failure is a part of it, and in medical they're like, No, we actually want you to have hard to fail.

SPEAKER_02 56:53

So actually that's uh ironic because the LCME, which is the accrediting body for all medical schools or all medical programs, is updating their requirements to even to teach AI as well into in medical school programs as part of their learning objectives, and how to appropriately use it in clinical settings and non-clinical settings, and how to appropriately interpret it and prompt it to make sure it's giving you good outputs, and then checking it to make sure it's accurate, because it's a paradigm shift in technology. And I'm actually starting a scholarly program for the undergraduate medical education, which is medical school level, working with the residency level and then also the faculty level to create like a linear pipeline for using AI appropriately in medicine, because it's here and it's it is an invaluable tool, especially because a lot of people don't realize medical knowledge doubles every 70 days. So it is impossible at this point in time. The doctor that went to medical school in the 90s had to know infantismally less than what we need to know now, just to graduate at the lowest level. Not to say that they're not good doctors. At the time, that that was the just the breadth of medical knowledge. Now medical knowledge is so expansive that you shouldn't, there are very few situations where you absolutely definitively need to know at that time off the top of your head what to do. And those are like medical emergencies. How do I treat medical emergencies? Oftentimes you need to reference, especially like what I'm doing now is general medical education, where covering every single specialty. I'm never gonna know everything in, you know, in those specialties. When I become an orthopedic surgeon, I'm doing the same sub-specialty procedures all the time. It'll be easier for me to keep up with the medical knowledge that's necessary. But, you know, doctors are always referencing different AI tools, up-to-date open evidence, which are AI tools that look at peer-reviewed journals and pull up the most up-to-date version of treatment modalities or surgical procedures, depending on different criteria. So, I mean, AI should not be thought that way of that way. The fact that I'm able to use AI in medical education, if I'm using it appropriately, it's not doing all the work for me. I still need to know everything and be able to critically think like a doctor. What I'm the way we're being we're teaching people how to use it in medical education, at least at my level, is to help you synthesize the vast amounts of information so that I'm not wasting time studying or learning stuff that is not applicable to my goals. So I can take all of the breadth of knowledge, I'm doing cardiology right now, for example, all the breadth of knowledge in the cardiology space and take my learning objectives that are based on LCME requirements, and then use AI to synthesize that data based off of credible sources so that I can have it all in a manageable chunk that I can study, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 59:59

Yeah, I want to back up for a minute, and I didn't want to interrupt you, but you said that you're starting this program. Are you helping develop this program or are you taking this program? Taking the program? Like are you participating?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:14

No, I'm creating a program. So I'm starting it's an AI medical interest group. We're doing that simply uh for some funding, because the school gives funding to interest groups. And then starting a scholarly program with the goal of it potentially becoming a scholarly concentration. The distinction between those is scholarly program, is you can do several of those, and it will go on your transcript as like like an MOS in the military or little MOS. Is that I you have subspecialized in AI usage and in medical education and clinical settings. And then a scholarly concentration um from a medical school perspective is essentially um a minor, like a minor compared to your major. So there's no medical school major, everyone gets the same education, but you can do one scholarly concentration, which comes with like a scholarly um project that may be published where you do some research on that space and you know present it.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:09

So I have a bold prediction, right? I don't know whether this is 10, 20, 30 years from now, but I feel like with your background, with the amount that you like to teach, you may end up being a medical school teacher someday.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:25

Well, so well, I I do have goals of potentially being faculty. Yeah. And balancing that with working clinic as well. If I if everything, if the stars align, I just found out that I could be faculty as an instructor with Wake Forest University as early as my second year of residency. Help because I'll be working with medical students.

unknown 1:01:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:48

So I can get faculty appointment as early as a couple of years from now, which is the goal. But that I am working on because this some background, I go to Wake Forest School of Medicine, which just opened. I was the first class to go to their new Charlotte campus. So there are two campuses, one in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, one in Charlotte, North Carolina. So since I'm one of the first people to start that, I had the freedom to establish several programs that already exist in Winston-Salem and adapt it to the Charlotte community. So there are a few programs that I'm helping spearhead to adapt. One is wilderness medicine with another student, using all of the teachings for TCCC, and then also some of the special skills that I learned in the military, like, you know, rope systems to extricate people and so on and so forth, as well as the AI scholarly program that we are right now finalizing, and then it's going to be sent to the board to be approved so that we can start. Essentially, it'll be a year-long cycle where um people can join at any time during their four-year program, go through the year-long cycle, going to the approved workshops and materials, and then developing a scholarly project that they can present and uh and then they get like a cert out of it, essentially, like a mini certificate. So I've been I've developed that. I'm working with faculty to get it approved. And then I have a couple of other students that are gonna help me manage it.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:16

Yeah, that's awesome, man. Most people probably think of medical school and they think it's gonna be so overwhelming, they're probably not thinking about let me uh let me start a course. Let me let me start teaching people while I'm also here, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:28

Well, I will say, again, it's all perspective driven. So if you if you are in the military, or honestly, not even the military, if you've worked a full-time job, you will come back to school and go, wow, I have so much time. I go to school three times a week for three hours a day. And then maybe most Thursdays now for two hours for my anatomy course. The rest of the time is they call it self-directed learning. And this is for the pre-clerkship years. The clerkship years are when you're doing your rotations in the hospital, which starts my next year. So that'll be more like a job. But I have so much free time because I'm effectively taking all the required information and synthesizing it, using AI as a tool to help me, and I can generate quizzes and stuff so I can test myself and make sure, because you're not going to know everything, but if you can reason your way through everything based off of fundamentals, then you can answer everything's multiple choice. So you can do that. And then you really learn everything through the clinical practice during the latter years. But yeah, I have so much time that I can help other students learn how to do the same thing, which will save them like a ton of time in the future and then in clinical practice.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:37

Nice. So what's one thing, and maybe these are people you served in the military with, maybe they're students that you know you go to school with now. What's something that people generally assume about you that they're just completely wrong about?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:52

Assume about me that they're completely wrong. I don't know. I think that um like in I think maybe right off the bat, I mean I'm not that old.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:05

I don't look that old. At least I don't think I do I this I'm told I don't look that old. I might look like I'm my mid-20s when I have my grades hidden. But when people find out my background in this space, I think they expect me to be a lot more abrasive.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:22

I'm definitely from from a civilian perspective, rough around the edges, but they expect me to be, I guess, less less cognitively open.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:35

Yeah. They expect you to be stubborn.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:38

Stubborn, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:39

A hard ass.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:40

I would say I'm very like, not to bring politics into it, but I say this to everybody. Medicine is typically pretty left leaning, which makes sense because it's supposed to be giving back to a community. The military is often very right leaning. I'm very moderate. I would say really the only thing that I think that I'm more I'm more libertarian than anything. Um I want to be left alone. And I don't give a shit about what anybody's doing on either side, you know, to each their own, as long as it doesn't affect me. And uh so I try, I think people just expect me to be different than I am. So I can see things from both perspectives, and whether I agree with it or not, I'm I'm pretty comfortable with agreeing to disagree with people. And then working with them comfortably because people's belief systems, I think that's pretty much political, political agenda and political beliefs is pretty much the thing that has been polarizing people in this country for the past decade, more so than anything else. And I have been pretty good, I think, about trying to strip that from at least the people in my class and having them think more objectively about things than you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:48

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:49

I think that's that's probably what what people expect me to more be more set in my ways, more stubborn, and just have different beliefs than I actually do.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:57

I think they expect you to show up to class like clean shaven with a high-end tight.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:02

Yeah, I yeah, I don't know what they'd expect. I don't know. Because I I don't think anybody has really communicated that to me. Okay. One thing I will say, yeah, I will say is do assimilate pretty well with them. And only when, you know, it comes back to me telling a story, I think they f I think people forget. I think I do I act like a normal person well enough that I think people forget what my background is, and then I wind up telling a story, and that brings it back to reality for maybe a day or two.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:32

Yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:35

Another question for you. Just looking back at your past, looking at all the the things that have led you to this point, what failure are you most grateful for as you reflect back?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:47

What failure am I most grateful for?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:50

And maybe it's something that other people would call a failure, but for you, you don't call it necessarily a failure.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:55

I guess it's like losing the Marsock thing, right? If I if I I re-enlisted for six years from RSOC, I didn't get to go. And I had opportunities to go back. So a story they had waived, especially for snipers, in 2023, the time and grade and time and service requirement for Marsock. So in 2023, I had an opportunity, since I had already been selected to attend, I would have just had to do an extension and I could have attended ITC contingent upon reenlisting after graduating. So I did, after already pivoting and starting my journey towards medicine, I had the opportunity to go back and actually achieve that goal. Because the sniper community and the Marines, Legacy Center Community was going away. And Marstock realized that that talent was going to be lost. So they were allowing snipers that were a staff sergeant, I was a staff sergeant at the time with less than a year time in grade, which was the requirement, to attend ANS. So I called a recruiter and told him, This is my story, this is what happened. I have an ANS selection already, just stipballing here. What could you do for me? He said, Well, you're selected, so do you want to go to ITC in August this year? Big decision. And I turned it down, right? So, because I had already decided that I was going to pivot towards a different direction, but I could have gone back and still achieved value. So I can't call it a failure because I could have succeeded, but I already had already seen, you know, behind the curtain. I had plenty of friends that were there that were not happy. If I got to go, like I had said, I might have been 85 grand richer, right? Not that much money. Uh not that much money in the long run. I'm we I'm making way more money as a veteran going to school than I ever would have been. And it's not always about the money. But I would have gone to Mars Ok anyway. If I had gone and been successful going to the school, I probably would have gone to Marsak. I would have been unhappy anyway, but I would have not had a higher education, and then I still would have gotten out. And right now I'd be doing an undergrad somewhere instead of having that already done and been in medical school. So, like having the animosity kind of just, you know, from losing that and still being stuck in the Marine Corps for another six years was helpful because it fueled and inspired, that rage inspired me to pivot and go towards a path that is going to be so much more rewarding in the future.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:31

Um I've already accomplished enough through my military career, and I was able to take that six years and leverage it to get my higher education so that I could meet the prerequisites for my doctorate program, which would have never happened if I went to do MarSOC. So that the failure was not being able to make it. That was my main goal of joining the Marine Corps. And I somehow stuck around for about 10 years. I was in zone for gunny when I got out. Halfway to retirement. Halfway to retirement in zone for gunny at nine and a half years. It's pretty that's a pretty big deal. A lot of people gunny is usually for people who don't know, 15 years people get promoted to gunny. And knowing, like, oh, if I reenlisted, I could get promoted to gunnery sergeant, which didn't matter to me. Rank never mattered. Um, it was the job I got to do. I didn't get to do the job I wanted. That was a blessing in disguise. And now I'm here and I get to see my wife and kids every day. I have two houses and um I'm going to school for free because of the VA. And plus they pay me.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:38

Yeah. Sounds like uh everything's trending in the right direction.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:42

Yeah, it's uh it's working out, and now I get to go into a career field that it has some prestige, which doesn't matter to me. I couldn't care any less about the prestige. But now I get to do something that so few people get to do, it's still very specialized, requires high-quality people. I mean, and it you help people. You get to help some shake makes some differences in some lives.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:05

So yeah, man. You've uh you've lived a pretty crazy life, man. I have one final question for you because I know you have a busy day. If you could have one lesson that somebody takes from this, whether it's a Marine about to get out of the military, whether it's someone about to go to medical school, or your kids in 20 years, they listen to this. What's the lesson you want them to take away from listening to you speak?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:27

What I would say is you can do anything you set your mind to. You have the capability to do it. And as long as you really want it and you plan, you come up with a good plan, you're going to achieve it. As long as everything that you're doing is within your control. Everything I had lost was due to things that were out of my control. And if you lose something because something takes place that's out of your control, just keep pushing and go to plan B. And it might be the best thing that's ever happened. Because that's essentially what happened to me. I had plan A, didn't work out because of reasons that I couldn't control. And then I pivoted to plan B. And now I'm successful in a completely different space where a ton of people probably could never have imagined or or have, you know, doubted that I could ever get to this point. So just stay confident, be humble, and you know, just put one foot in front of the other. And one thing I will say, one last thing, is quitting quitting is for winners if you do it for the right reason. Hmm. That's deep. I could have, again, gone to Marstock and done what my pri plan A was. I could have abandoned plan B and gone back to plan A. And I turned it down. And that was probably a better decision than that was the best decision I could have made. Because if I had done that, I'd still be in the Marines.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:54

I would probably be unhappy, and I'd probably be divorced.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:58

So well, man, thank you for doing this. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Can't wait for you to do my hip replacement one day. And uh if you guys enjoyed today's conversation, make sure you subscribe, follow along for more, and uh we'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:17

Thank you.