Left Of Greg 061 Nikki Selby

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Alright, Nikki Selby, thank you so much for hopping on here with us. I know you're busy and you've got a lot going on, so we super appreciate having you on the show. I know originally I kind of linked up or talked a long time ago because you're a co-host on the Mentors for Military Podcast, which is an incredible podcast that I went on through Robert, through my friend George and everything like that. So we initially kind of linked up and then I said, "Hey man, I would love to get you on because you've got a really cool story and everything."

Well, I appreciate you having me on.

Absolutely, so anytime. So we'll kind of just jump right into it. I want to kind of start off with a little bit of your time in the Navy because you were, I mean, you were a nurse in the Navy, correct? And then you did all kinds of medevac missions and did a whole bunch of all kinds of stuff. You had a big long career, you just recently retired. So I kind of want to start with a little bit of your background there and tell us about that if you can.

So I did almost 24 years in the Navy. I started out enlisted. I enlisted right out of high school. I was 18 years old and I was a corpsman at first for the first ten years. And I was a search and rescue corpsman, which at the time there weren't any females in the community. So when I applied to do it, they told me I couldn't do it because there weren't any females. But that was incorrect information. And so I ended up submitting my package. It got accepted, and it probably is the most rewarding and most difficult time of my life, going through all those calls. But yeah, it's something I'm very proud of.

And then halfway through, I decided I was going to do a commissioning program. So that was for the Navy. It got accepted, and then they had me go to college, finish my degree, and then came back as an aviator. So as a nurse, I did another 13 and a half years and deployed. I went to Haiti when the earthquake happened. I was deployed within 24 to 48 hours of that happening. And then I came back, went to Afghanistan with the Marines for ten months, and then came back from that, ended up getting stationed with a Fleet Surgical Team on amphibious warships. This was at Makin Island and turned around and deployed again. It was about a two-and-a-half-year timeframe where it was active, active, active.

Oh yeah, that's right. Got your service on that. I got a funny Afghanistan story for you, Nikki. Back when the Commandant of the Marine Corps — I won't give up any names, but you could figure out from the time we were heading into Iraq and, you know, we had this program that's going on outside the wire and it was all great stuff — and so I kept coming back for briefings. I happened to be at the Pentagon and he comes up and I said, "Hey, Afghanistan is really hopping and it's a different environment. Can we get in there?" And he goes, "There will never be a Marine on the ground in Afghanistan. It's not our war, it's not our —" I'm going, "Hell are we now?" So, totally get that. Not very excited about that. Thanks for lengthening your service, an incredible service, in some very remote and stinky destinations.

Yeah, that was it. I was in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011 and happened to be transiting, so we were mostly on a Combat Outpost or a FOB, but I was sitting through Bastion, right when 3/5 took over Sangin. And I was in the OR that morning, and it never ended. It never ended. And we didn't know what was going on at first, it was just, you know, bodies after bodies after bodies. It was unbelievable.

So yeah, that was when things really just blew up and exploded over there. They took a ton of casualties, 3/5 did at that time. That was like one of the highest kinetic times in Afghanistan for any unit, like the whole time. And they took the brunt of that. So I have a good idea of what you went through and what they went through at the time, and I know that's a really, really difficult situation for everyone involved. And I know because this applies to like, you know, a lot of our audience is military, first responders, health care folks, like nurses and stuff. So, you know, we talk about our human behavior stuff. We try to keep it entertaining and fun, and we just explain a lot of things that people don't really understand or get, but they don't really know how to articulate it. But one of the other things we do is we talk about just because it's resilience, but we teach cognitive performance, right? How to think better, how to get an advanced critical thinking skill set, right? And so that whole resilience part and going through those experiences is like, I mean, it's extremely difficult. And so we always try to, you know, kind of keep an open forum here and make sure we work a lot of that stuff. And for everyone listening, it was like, yeah, I can relate to that because what you experienced in that short timeframe in Afghanistan seeing that is no different than someone running an ambulance or a nurse in the ER here over the course of their career. I mean, it's fairly similar. So I know those times can get, are like, the most frustrating times, right? Because you're trying so hard to do your job and what you're there for, and you're losing patients, they're still coming in, and it's just non-stop. So how were you able to kind of deal with that at the time? Or how did that work for you? Or what benefited you during that kind of helped you perform?

I mean, basically, it's interesting because when I came back from there, my senior nurse at a hospital actually pulled me aside and she was like, "I want to know what makes you different, because we had a lot of nurses and doctors come back from Iraq and Afghanistan that just mentally was like, 'I'm done,' you know, 'getting out,' or they were, you know, had PTSD." And I, you know, and I was one of the few that went back to back to back and just kept showing up. I had kids, I mean, it was just constant. And she was like, "I want to know what makes you different? Like, why are you so well-suited to continue on?" And I don't— I mean, I am a master compartmentalizer. I've discovered this about myself. I can put things away, and I do, and I'm a little afraid. And I think that's why I stay busy after retirement, because I'm like, if I slow— the minute I slow down, it's going to, you know, just hit me, is what I'm afraid of.

But yeah, I mean, you know, I was holding— I just— there was an instance, and I tell this to a lot of people. There was one part or one time in the OR, 3/5 got hit same day. And it was an open OR, and there were, you know, there aren't any like partitions or anything between the beds. And I was with one of the teams and I was holding a leg. We were cutting off the second leg. The guy, his other leg, had already blown off in an IED. And I was holding a second leg, cutting that off. And at one point I had the whole leg in my hand, and I was looking around, and there were body parts everywhere. There was blood everywhere. I was slipping on blood. And it was just like, I just remember thinking, and it was just a one time during that whole time where I was like, "I'm in the freaking movies, right? This is terrible." It was very surreal to have body parts everywhere. And, really, I'm a nurse, but you— nothing really prepares you for that. Eventually, it lets you see that no, no, no, no.

That's perfect because what you just did, it showed your brain damage. We're all from the Island of Misfit Toys. Yeah, welcome to the club. Exactly. You just graduated. But the idea, like Brian said something earlier, Brian said about your short time, and he didn't mean that in the context. He meant that, listen, you know, when you go on a deployment, for example, coppers are going to be skeptical. Coppers are like, "Ah, I worked in Detroit, I worked in Philly. I worked for this long on the street and I've seen it all." Yet you saw it all in your 25 years of career, but most people when deployed, they condense that 25 years into the next 72 hours, and they never think they're coming out of it. I remember a guy coming in and say, "Hey, get more Ambo (ambulance), because we think we're going to get overrun tonight." And you just get this chill that goes through your body. I was a copper for 27 years; I never got that same chill. You know, I've been in shootouts, I've been in bad situations. So there's just something different. Being able to walk, like the— gosh, um, what was that place called? The Potato Farm up in Iraq, and walking around and seeing a dog walk by with a hand, and people's bodies laying everywhere. You get what I'm saying? How do you share that? You can't come home— you got kids, I got kids— you can't come home and tell your kid, "Hey, don't do that. That's how your leg falls off," you know? So PTSD manifests itself in these unusual ways. And you just went through that without demonstrating one time fear or hate or an emotional register. So you must have stored that somewhere, right? But when are you most vulnerable? When does it hit you? When does one of those incidents come back and just leave you a sobbing mess on the couch? Because I know that's got to happen, that's right. Now that your boss is calling me and saying, "Leave her alone."

No, I haven't. I mean, I can talk about it and it affects me to a certain extent, but I haven't had any real breakdowns. And, you know, I think one of the big things is I really tried hard not to listen to names. There were a few, and the one where I had his leg in particular, someone blurted out his name. One of our nurses knew him because she worked with him. He was a corpsman. And so she said his name, and then ever since, I haven't been able to get him particularly out of my head. I was really good about not remembering names or looking at names or, you know, because if you form an emotional attachment, I feel that's when it really, really does affect me. And I think that's the difference too with the guys that are on the ground and going out there. I mean, it's their friends that are getting blown up in front of them, or shot and whatever. And so that's a different— yes, I saw dead bodies everywhere, yes, I was dealing with very severely injured patients, but I didn't have an emotional connection to them. So it was a different level, I think for me anyway. So I'm able to turn that off and turn it on.

And that's probably, and that's kind of similar from what I've heard, same thing with like, you know, you look at even just here in the U.S., people, nurses, doctors who work in the ER, it's like, look, that's at work. Like there has to be the separation, you can't get emotionally involved. But, you know, it means you still— it's still seeing this and affecting you in a number of different ways. And, you know, one of the things that we get into with resilience is that you can— you can sort of— you can train it, right? You can get better at it. You can learn to be more adaptable to different environments and that gets you stronger. But some people are born with a little bit extra, right? You're born with a little bit thicker skin. And then the way you grow up, your environment, that all can contribute and add to it or take away from it for people with trauma. And so I think that's a big thing. So I don't know if there was like something in your life growing up or maybe at the point that, you know, the other thing is too, you had already had experience, right? You had already had kids, you had already been in the Navy for a while, and then had this. So I don't know if that— if you see a difference in that or if that affects things sometimes.

Basically, Nikki, like I haze Brian constantly. I'll call him in the middle of the night when we're together. I'll go to his hotel room and set up one of them leaders, you know, with the cold water, and the whole reason I'm doing it is to try to help him get through future engagements. But there had to be something in your youth. Was it sports? What was it? Was it religion? Some people rely on faith. Some people, like my dad, beat me into dealing with situations. What was it in your say?

I think I'm just a sociopath. I already figured that out.

Now the podcast starts.

Okay, I don't really— I don't know any significant moment. I think, you know, ever since growing up, I wasn't the most confident kid. I, you know, had a lot of insecurities and I didn't put myself out there. And when I became an adult in the Navy, especially in setting out with the whole search and rescue things, yeah, I constantly have been putting myself into a very stressful situation voluntarily that I've had to deal with. And so I think I've just learned that, you know, like the first thing when I reported in my first duty station was it was a mountain rescue unit, and I thought the medical person stayed in the helicopter. But over— so over water you do and the rescue swimmer goes down. And you know, over water side in the mountains, the climbing goes down. And nobody ever told me that. And they said the first thing they told me was, "You're going to rappel school." And I'm like, "Oh no, no, no, no. I am not."

You'll be able to— No, we go down over mountains.

And I'm like, "Oh, I'm terrified of heights." So it was like I'm terrified. Like, I can't, it's hard for me. They just even, you know, it's the ten-foot tower that you have to jump off in boot camp, that's so— Oh yeah, like I do not like heights. And so I was like, "No, no, I'm not going to that." And they're like, "Okay, well, I guess you're not doing your job then. You're going to—"

Like, "Okay, that's great." I tried to spend the first six years in the Army saying, "I'll keep an eye on the gear. You guys go ahead." And I got this. It didn't work either.

Anyway, so you know, there I am in the rappel towers shaking the entire tower with my legs. But once I did it, you know, then I'm rappelling 150 feet out of the helicopter, and it was no big deal. So then, you know, I just— I've always been putting myself in those situations. And if you follow my ID or my LinkedIn, you see I'm diving. You know, I'm terrified of heights, but let's jump out of an airplane. So I tend to do that to myself a lot.

Well, that's what it comes down to. And that's a throwback to Andy Race and their book that just came out, you know, you get comfortable being uncomfortable, right? And I think for a lot of people is that it's like that late bloomer where maybe as a kid didn't do it as much and then all of a sudden had these opportunities, we're like, "Hey, that looks cool. I can do that." And because I want to bring that back up, the fact that you they said, "Alright, hey, like this isn't actually for women. This MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) or this position is not classified for women." And then you're like, "Yeah, okay, here's my packet." Like that's— I was going to say, you're very like, you're willing to put yourself out there completely, right? Whereas most people just go, "Okay," and go do something else, right?

Well, it's and that's actually what other things that when I mentor people I talk about is, "Never take no for an answer." And I was at the time, and I was only an E-4. She was an E-8, the career counselor. So, you know, a lot of people would be like, "Oh, well, she knows what she's talking about. And I'll just go figure out something else." And I challenged her because when she said, "No females," I'm like, "Well, this isn't, you know, it is the '80s or '90s. There weren't a lot of things open." But it wasn't a combat role, so it didn't make any sense to me. And so I said, "What? Can I see the instruction?" And that's, you know, what I tell people is like, "You see it in writing before somebody tells you no." Because people talk all the time, they think they know the answer, you know? And if you just take it and you don't research it, then, you know, you're going to miss out on opportunities. And for me, I would have— my whole life would be different had I just taken that for an answer. And so what's funny to hear that I'm not— I have never been this big TT stud or, you know, this like beast mode whatever. I was always very, very average. So looking back and wanting to do that, what I saw was helicopters and I said, "Oh, this is fun." You know, didn't really think about what I was getting into. And I do that a lot. Like, "Oh yeah, I'll do it." And then I get there and it's like, "Quite what I thought it was." But, you know, my big thing is is because you don't quit. Keep going to do it.

That's resilient. Resilience. You get knocked back down, getting knocked down and getting back up again. Your skin, your knees, you get the scar tissue, you go back into it. And the good thing about deliberate discomfort is that by doing that on your own, by going there, then it doesn't have to shock you and surprise you when it occurs. You know, you got to have some mental preparation because certain things are going to surprise you. They're going to come— I remember as a little kid going to Detroit Tiger Stadium, and it was free bat day. And then the Detroit Police Department's SWAT team and helos came in, and guys were fast-roping down in the field. And I said, "This is the most amazing thing in the world. That's my future." And I was about 11 years old. So I went home, and when everybody went to work the next day, stayed home from school, took my dad's extension cords, and I made myself a rappel rope. And I rappelled off the second story of our house using our chimney to rappel off of. So my dad came home and beat me like you've never seen a beating before, because the chimney had been dented and here's my footprints all down the aluminum siding, and his extension cord didn't work. And he goes, "Why would you do that?" I did it because I had to, because that's what I wanted. And when you set your sights on something, you got to go for it. And that's— it's amazing. But what— what did your friends think? What did your family think? Because clearly, the sociopaths think, "Ah, man." Like, what did they think? Because like right now, you cleverly disguised where you're sitting, but, you know, all of that stuff will move and you could see you're in a padded cell. So, you know, it's kind of been like—

"Oh, that's Nikki." Yeah. I was going to say that was going to be— I knew that was going to be an answer. You know, as we've come along in my adult life, I mean, it— I don't think anything really surprises them anymore.

That's good. Yeah. Our CEO is a female, the most dynamic, deadly, dangerous female that we've ever met. She's taking it— she's an amazing mom and lovely and happy, and she so reminds me of your persona. But when we go somewhere, it's like somebody goes, "Hey, Shelly might be in trouble." And I'm going, "You're full of crap. She's doing fine. You better start running for an exit." So I did that. Dealing with you, that many of your peers and your friends are used to watching you at a distance succeed. Is that a true statement?

I think so. Yeah. It's— it's, "Turn about is," you know, "Are you sure about this?" And then now it's like, "Okay." I mean, living, you know, vicariously. So, yeah, nothing really surprises anybody. I was playing—

So, so what— you know, I know we, we actually usually get— there's some of our guests who have been saying about whether they're transitioning out of the military or have just gotten out recently and like are kind of finding that their next path, I guess, in life or next thing or next group and all that— that purpose, that mission. So what is it like, what is it for you now? What have you been— basically, what's your new purpose now?

So I, what I will say is if you are getting out or you're retiring, take that year that they tell you to do and get all this stuff in order. Because I did not do that. I don't know if it was denial on my part that I wasn't actually going to be leaving, but I worked all the way up to my last day. I was at my computer, I'm doing emails, and it's where my guys were like, "What do you mean? This is a Tuesday? Like that's my last day." When maybe going about— anyway, and I my CO (Commanding Officer) several times was coming out and like, "What are you doing? You need to like, why haven't you done X, Y, and Z?" And I'm like, "I don't know." I didn't give you an answer for that. But it's definitely made it more difficult after I retired. And mentally just— just the whole transition period. And then, you know, all of the other administrative stuff that you have to do just to get out. And, you know, the VA (Department of Veterans Affairs) stuff and, you know, benefits and all that stuff. So I will say take that year and see what they say. We all kind of don't want you to be made fun of there, you know, the ROAD (Retired on Active Duty) program, retired on active duty.

Yeah.

But there is a reason for it. And now I realize it that you really need that time to make sure your stuff is in order and mentally preparing yourself to retire. And then making sure that you have something set up after you get out. I, when I got out, I piled a million things on my plate, because it suddenly hit me. So I was accepting all these jobs and, you know, doing five different things, just thinking I needed to stay relevant for myself because I remember waking up that Monday just completely lost, feeling utterly lost, you know? So you feel like getting up and going to work and then all of a sudden I get up one day and it hit me pretty hard for a couple of months. And I thought, "Okay, well if I just, you know, continue to pile things onto my plate, then I'll be relevant and, you know, that'll help me mentally." And what really happened was I just had too much going on. And, you know, I started to feel really disorganized and and feeling like— because I've always been a person to give 100% of myself. And because I had so much going on, I felt like I was only giving, you know, 40% here, 60% here. I mean, it was just, you know, making it worse for me because then I wasn't really satisfied with anything I was doing either. So I'm starting now— it's been a year— I'm starting now to like clear that plate and start taking things off that aren't making me happy or causing stress that is really not needed at this point in my life. So, and I'm starting to get more comfortable with, you know, being out of the military to the point where I can't imagine going back at this point. Because if you would have asked me a few months out, I would have said I would love to go back.

Yeah. Yeah. So now I feel like—

Oh yeah, good. I don't, I don't need to be so connected to the military anymore. So—

Well plus, there's like, I mean, you seem pretty connected. I am in some ways, but there's obviously a whole community and now culture that has really sprung up over the last few years of veterans, which is good and bad. There's always like the downside of that too. But like there's a lot of people just organizing, staying together, creating that community and finding that and like building that up now to where there's like people have successful businesses and they're doing things, on Capitol Hill getting legislation passed, like all this really, really awesome stuff. But now we're kind of leveraging all the social media to be like, "Alright, hey, let's, let's create a space where where we can figure stuff out and those causes that we need to." And I know you're, you're involved with a bunch. I know you're always putting people out on blast like, "Hey, follow this guy or check this out or look at what these people are," which is awesome because again, that just brings awareness to that cause. But what are you, like, what's your passion in all these groups?

So the GSMT (Global Surgical Medical Support Group) group, I had been talking to the president of that organization for a few years now, but I just couldn't do anything with them because I was active duty. So the places that they go to, the military usually frowns upon, you know, if you just go on your own on vacation to Iraq.

Yeah. And that's the Global Surgical Medical Group. That's like a non-profit where it's all health care workers, like yourself, who go deploy to war zones, basically, but not with the military, just on their own to go care for civilians, correct?

Correct. So they are— they're actually unique in the sense that we have surgeons, we have ER physicians, we have nurses, we have medics. We have a lot of special forces guys. We have a very diverse group that has a capability that exceeds pretty much most of those type of organizations that I know. Because usually those those organizations have, they have doctors or they have, you know, some medics or whatever, but they don't have that physical capability. So GSMT can put, you know, Role 2, Role 3 type entities in these areas, which is pretty unheard of. So yeah, it's a group that I'm really glad that I went to Iraq with them in October, and you know, if you ever read the books, Tribe by Sebastian Junger. Yeah. He's awesome. Yeah. It made sense because it helps with that transition, right? Is finding those like-minded people. And, you know, none of us had actually met in person before that, and we just clicked automatically. We all have that similar background. We all kind of think the same way. We have the same work ethic. And the president of the organization is really good at putting people together that, you know, he knows they're going to click. So we got on the ground and just, we— we all, you would have thought we'd known each other for years, and we just met most of us for the first time. So that's really important. And I talk to people about that as well is that if you're struggling to find those people, you know, that that understand where you're coming from. You know, you can talk to it, you know, I have really good friends that I talk to every day that are civilians and don't have the military background, but they still don't quite understand what I'm saying or whatever. And, you know, so it could be around a group that just automatically gets it, you know, without having to explain a whole lot. That makes a big difference.

Oh yeah, one problem is approach. You got to remember that the age difference is between veterans. So one of the things that I identify is like you can go to VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) Hall or if you can go to the American Legion for those people that, let's say, didn't deploy to a combat zone. And so all you're a young vet sometimes, because a lot of times that age group that we're dealing with, they're pre-deployment Marines and soldiers, so they're younger, right? And then all of a sudden comes multiple deployment soldiers and they get a little older, but they're still young kids comparatively. And then you take a look at these organizations. What's the first thing that they say? That, "Well, there's not a lot of help out there." Well, these organizations have been around for dozens of years, and in some of them for tens of years. But what's the difference when you walk into one of those today, a VFW Hall or an American Legion? What's the first thing you encountered? The bar. And so the idea of going to a bar and drinking every bottle of Jameson they've got in the place to loosen up enough to talk about it, that was a thing our parents did. Hell, they had happy hour, you know, and came and that's how you unwound. And it's only now that some of that— and Brian always corrects me and says, "Oh, it's been around for a while." Yeah, but not in my community. And that's the funny thing is that I can run in in the younger communities because they go, "Hey, you're a pre-deployment guy." But then when I run with my own folks, they're sitting there and going, "Those darn whippersnappers, we didn't have any of the great programs that they have now." So the wonderful thing is, one, you're still saying relevant, you use that term a lot. The other is that anybody nowadays, anybody in this era that says that they don't have programs, that means they haven't gone to the VA, that they haven't gone in their community, they haven't gone into the military or DoD (Department of Defense), because there's more communities than you've ever seen. And I'm not bashing VFW, they're catching on, so are the American Legion Post and many of the other organizations. So if you stay active, then you don't have a lot of time. I didn't used to say that all the time. You know, the more idle you are, the more chances that bad stuff is going to creep in. Right? And also if you couple that with like-minded people, you're exactly right. Nobody knows a vet like a vet. And if a vet's in trouble, the first person that's going to spot it is one of your friends, somebody that deployed not necessarily with you, but that has seen that look, has smelled and felt how you're going to go through that. Brian, we say that all the time when we're on the road, we see damaged humans. And the idea is that some of the glory and they don't want to get them— usually just talking about each other. Yeah.

So what? So you still do— I know you're, you also do like search and rescue stuff now on the civilian side, correct? So you're starting it or—

Yeah, yeah.

A lot of your, a lot of your time is for other people. So I appreciate you taking the time to come on here.

No. I, yeah, I started it with the San Bernardino Sheriff's Office that has an air rescue program, which is a unique program because I, I don't know of any around the country that has the same type of where you're a sworn volunteer, they're part of an actual crew. So it's, you know, we're doing all of the work that the paid crew does as well. So, and they train you and they do— they do all of that stuff. So I did that because I wanted to get— I love search and rescue. And San Bernardino County is actually the largest county in the country. We cover a lot of stuff and, you know, the potential to get rescues and search and they're pretty busy. So yeah, I wanted to jump on that opportunity just for that, you know, get back and do it, learning again and, and, you know, flying.

So, so how does it compare with like how the military runs it? Like, I'm curious as to how that like civilian— I don't want you to like get yourself in trouble or stuff that or like say something. It's because there's differences and and but it's a different, it's a different application as well. Because I know there's like a lot of people like, "Oh, these, you know, law enforcement or this needs to learn from the military." It's like, well, in some areas but also not so much in others. So I don't know what's like what the big differences are that you see or how that works.

I would actually say the big difference I've noticed so far is in the military, you have, I'm going to say it's autonomy, but, you know, we don't— you know, we're in situations like if you either do it or you don't, you know? I don't want to say it's more unsafe in the military, and just, you know, we have a lot more, I guess, as I've noticed as a medical person, a little bit more freedom to do things. Whereas in the civilian sector, you have more protocols, you know, you have to abide by. You could be flying with your medical director. Like when I was in the Navy, I wouldn't even see my medical director. You know, they weren't employed with us, where we're operating a lot on our own, you know, knowledge and our own skill set. So that's probably the biggest difference so far that I've seen.

Yeah, I was just saying it's definitely, you know, for obvious reasons, it's a little bit more risk averse, there's more liability issues on civilian side. And it's not, you know, I mean, it's, it's not a combat skill set. It's not, it's— so that's a completely different kind of outlook and mindset on a lot of it, even though maybe some of the procedures and stuff might be similar. Like it's probably very— you probably can do less, I bet, like in terms of working on a patient of what you're allowed to do, I bet it's less on the civilian side, probably, huh?

Big shout out though, San Bernardino. One of the things about the county SO (Sheriff's Office), they're so early days of combat hunter. We were going to urban training environments and rural training environments because we weren't sure where anybody was going to deploy. And shout out Mojave Viper, they had a great training program there. But the idea is against urban training center to see people at the limits of your observation and determine whether their human behavior is going to be most likely or most dangerous course of action. There was no such place as that. So we went to San Bernardino County Sheriff at that time and and he said, "Okay, what do you want?" And we said, "Well, we want to be on top of the target. We want to be on the Walmart at midnight. We want to be able to go into these places and see all of this other stuff." And I mean, we had a laundry list of of things that we wanted to see in progress and we want you guys there to, you know, cover our six while we're out there doing it and we'll trade training for your folks. And usually this is where you get laughed out of the audience. They were like, honest to God, they were like, "Let's go. What do you want to do?" They were relentless in their pursuit of knowledge and I think the skills transfer went both ways because we had a lot of young lieutenants who were leading platoons of Marines that were going into kinetic combat in very dangerous places. And I think that that symbiosis, that relationship, worked out perfectly. So shout out to them. Shout out to a lot of the California law enforcement that endured the combat hunter years, let's call it. Yeah.

And that's that's a nice thing about San Bernardino is that they really do love to work with military. I mean, it's, you know, they're very open arms and welcoming with us. So, yeah, absolutely and it shows it really does.

Yeah, plus in San Bernardino, you can get— I mean, you don't know if you're going to be sitting on a meth house and a bomb house, a clown house, which is the same feeling I get when I visit Marren no matter where he's, you know, I use Coast Marines or the West Coast Marines. It's like what fresh hell am I walking into now?

Yeah, yeah, it's a different, definitely similar, similar situation. I definitely fit it right in out there with with all those folks out in San Bernardino. But, so I, because you kind of went from, you know, enlisted to the officer side in the Navy and then, I mean, I don't know what type of like leadership positions you ended up getting into or anything. But, but that in itself gives a perspective, right? So when we talk about some of the stuff that we do and what we train with folks, it's all about perspective, right? One of the things you have to train and learn how to do is literally take another human being's perspective to, you know, open your eyes, see the world a little bit differently. So, I mean, what I usually find in, you know, Mustangs and people go from enlisted to officer is like they're there— it's like, it's one or the other. They're you're like the greatest or, or like the— and so you, you fall, I feel like, more in like, "Are they great?" I said, because you have that enlisted side where you're like, you're going to call crap, but now you also have a responsibility where you get to see it. So what, what was that like for you? And then did you ever have to see someone who you're like you were similar rank above and then now you're like their their officer in charge or something? Or—

Um, no, I was never in that situation. No, I wasn't. Yeah, you're right about Mustangs. So they're either great or they're just the most terrible humans. So, and I look at it as, you know, yeah, I say like, "Don't forget where you come from." So I really— that was always in the back of my mind. Don't forget where you come from. I find that some of these guys forget that. I think it, you know, it becomes this like, "Oh, what's on my collar?" type of thing. And I've always said, "Your respect isn't on your collar." Like that's, that's not, you know, just because you're wearing a certain thing does not mean you have respect from your people. And that's a huge thing. So, you know, you have to gain that respect. And coming from being enlisted, I felt like I had a better grasp on that on how to relate with them. And I actually was told early in my career, like the first couple years of being an officer that I need to take my enlisted hat off because I say, you know, it's a fine line. It's like, "That is those are my people." And that's where I trended towards because I felt more comfortable in those groups. But, you know, there's there is a line like you can't be buddies with them anymore and, you know, you have to, you know, you're like, I was for us and they're seeing we're in a hospital and we're on a ward and we're working, we work closely with corpsmen. But you have to have that division, you have that line, you know, right?

And that goes with almost like any type of, you know, leadership position once you get in charge and you are now established as that person who, like, you, there, there has to be that. And and I've seen, like, I've seen people handle that really well. I've seen people handle that really poorly. I've seen, you know, see the good, bad, and ugly. So what, what is it that like you, you know, from you, 'cause again, I love that perspective that that some people can have, one, you just being a female first going in the search and rescue, which is probably an all-male field in the Navy, at least at the time, right? Then you went from enlisted to officer and then you're getting moved. Like it's just all those different experiences build those file folders. So like what, what sticks out to you? Like what works, what doesn't? What are people doing right and what are people doing wrong?

It's, you know, the whole leadership aspect, I feel like it's pretty easy to like, you know, to be a good leader. And I think there are more bad leaders than there are good leaders. But my thing is that, you know, you have to have respect from the people that works under you. You know, if you don't have their respect, then your, your, you as a leader, it's not going to work, right? So people who respect you, they'll do anything for you, it's how I look at it. And I remember, you know, when I first started in the hospital, the corpsmen, and you have to know, why are they here? You know, what's the purpose of them being here? And you had some nurses that that didn't have the perspective of being a corpsman or didn't quite understand, you know, where they're going to, like, "These guys are about to go out with Marines and they're, you know, be the only medical person for the, you know, however appetite, whatever it is." And that's what we're there to train them for. And that's what I've always, you know, when I first started was like, "This is my job is to train him to be on his own with the Marines in a very kinetic environment, a really bad environment." You know, these are young kids. And that's the stance I took. And so every chance I get, I would try to train them. And, you know, and with that, they saw, "If this person actually cares about me and they care about my skill and they care that, you know, I'm prepared to do what I need to do." And so I think I've always had that reputation with me where you'd have some nurses, which wasn't really their fault, they just didn't have that perspective, they were brand new themselves. You know, they're having the corpsman do all the grunt work or they're having them, you know, just do the vital things or wipe the asses of the patients, whatever. And I was like, "That's not what they're there for." You know? And I would go in and I'm going to get dirty with them. And again, that shows, you know, "Oh, this person is actually, you know, she's here for me." And that's, that's what I wanted to make clear is that, "I'm here to make sure you are adequately prepared to go out and do a very, very difficult job," because I was scared for them. I knew, you know, being a corpsman in in a Marine unit, like especially during those times, I assume that's terrifying to be an 18-year-old. And I've been there before, not not in that circumstance, but being in the 18-year-old expected to, you know, come out of the helicopter and save a pilot is probably whatever it is. And it's just taken— yeah, you have those moments we were like, "Okay, well, this just got real with this situation. Now this is, this is not what I expected."

About that perspective of getting out for a second and and one of the things, Nikki, you know, you're riding around in a in a war zone with one foot on the skid in a Blackhawk. You know what you're getting into. You knew, you know, how your day was going to start. You likely knew how it was going to end and you knew the risk. Now you're back on the block and you're still taking a tremendous amount of risk. I'm not saying that you're risk averse now, but think about this, yesterday in Milwaukee, a guy walks into work after, you know, 17 years and executes a bunch of his coworkers. School shooters go to the school, they don't go to another school, they go to their own school because that's where they felt the frustration. They want to act out. Workplace violence is the same. So you're going to see more of those. Those aren't going to end. And Brian and I work a lot in the healthcare field, so we go in and we talk about psychological triage and cognitive triage because a situation where a person comes in and is frustrated in a hospital setting or it's just a husband, wife or a husband, husband, or whatever the relationship is, and why do you take it to work? Because that's where I'm more most comfortable. I spend more time at work than I spend anywhere else. So what's it like knowing that you've got the same amount of risk now walking into the ER and and getting shot in a workplace violence as you did when Taliban or Al-Qaeda or ISIS were trying to come over the Hesco barriers? What does that feel like and how do you prepare for that?

So I'm always a worst-case scenario type of person. I, I do weird things. Like when I'm in a grocery store and I'm in line, I imagine the guy in front of me— and it's from the medical side, right? That's my world. I imagine the guy in front of me dropping dead. But it's a very completely different reason. But yeah, I, you know, I start going through the motions of what, what would I do? What's the first thing? What's the second thing? You know? And I, I don't know, like, I, I don't trust anybody, you know? I'm kind of always situational that sociopathic personality, so I just, I'm always kind of just thinking in the back of my head, "What if this happens? What if this happens? Where are we going to go? Where are they going to go?" So, I mean, sounds kind of cliché, but—

And that's, I do that because, no, and it's not to— and that's kind of what we get into, people are like, someone who doesn't have any training or experience to do that, right? So even just medical training, it's more like you, there's you understand a process and how to do things and process a scene, just any basic medical care, you, you learn about like, "Hey, we got to focus on these people, like those people might not be worth saving or these people don't need our help right now. They're going to have to bleed out a little bit longer because it's more important." So you learn to navigate that complicated world, right? So even what you're doing is just, "Hey, what if this happens? Or if he does that?" Like that's such, it's so easy in such low-calorie stuff that you can do that once you start doing it, you actually don't ever stop. And now it's just running like a system, like an operating system, right? A new little iPhone update you got and it's just running in the background. You don't even realize it. So when those things do occur, you already have a plan. You actually planned out what your response is going to be, what you're going to do. So we're actually ahead of the curve doing that.

Well, it also conditions you mentally too, so, you know, to respond in those situations. And I've noticed in really stressful situations, I tend to get calmer. So I don't know if it's because of like me doing stuff like that or if I am a sociopath.

It's strange. Don't have to worry about that because you have now been diagnosed. Once though, that sociopath card, once, no, no. But, but yeah, and so what you're, what you're actually talking about is, it's where someone might become overwhelmed by events because of, you know, just stress arousal in the environment. You're not, you're, you're actually become— so what happens in those cases is physiologically, instead of thinking about everything that's going on, you now have a plan and you know what to do. So you your brain literally focuses on just those tasks at hand. And that's why some people get that like, "Oh, it was like time slowed down. I had tunnel vision." Well, it's like, well, technically it did, because you don't normally process everything that fast, because you're taking everything in environment now. When those situations occur, if you have that plan, if you have that training and that's, that's what we're always talking about, that's that, that level of performance. So you're able to perform literally at a higher cognitive level than the average person. And that's what gets into, you know, a lot of folks in in healthcare and stuff. And we keep bringing that up, which is just because you have such a background and that's the experience. And what happens in hospitals here in the U.S. is that like, you know, we were just reading now and it's coming out that like, you know, the the number three leading cause of death in the United States is like medical malpractice. And you're like, "Well, how does that happen? Like, how do people?" And it gets into that, that performance of what you can handle in those stressful situations or not, right? Situations, and how mistakes occur. And it's a failure in performance is where exactly.

And a perfect example of that is just a few minutes ago when Marren was talking about who's going to live and who's going to die. Marren voted himself like in Lord of the Flies, leader of the homeless people that surround his name out there. But no, but that's a really valid point, Brian. I, I want to make sure that we, we take some time to flush that out with, "Oh, just flies, you get diagnosed, both you and both of your in California." So if you two ever get it together, we have the perfect storm of homicidal fantasy and it's just good ideation. We'll call you from the road. I don't want to know.

I won't answer that phone. Bodies everywhere.

Just like, yeah, we ready to burn this down? Sure, why not? You know, I totally forget so, Greg, after she posted something, I was like, "Hey, like what caliber was that or whatever?" And she's going, "Obviously, yeah, I hit it at like a mile away." And I was like, "Yeah, whatever." And I'm like, "Hey, wait a minute. Sorry, second. Didn't mention this, but if you had four hours of instruction, then hit a target a mile away, that's like amazingly good. Sorry for not giving." I need to learn how to compliment people.

When they, when they burned it, they never do. What in your background, Brian, can you do? Complimenting her. What could have beaten you down every single day would mimic the human behavior. So they like it. Like in front of me, my old man would tell my younger brother, like, "If you keep acting like this, you're going to turn out like your older brother." I feel like, "What's going on here? I'm standing right here." No.

Okay, so no, but I took— go back to the malpractice. To go back to the performance, like what, like, you know, and and we, I think we, our belief is that, you know, with training changes behavior, right? So it's all about your level of training and experience. But, but training is everything, man. So what do you notice differently like from the civilian side versus the military side and like, I, I know there's differences just in operating environment and admission. But and there's a lot of similarities of camaraderie and people in those positions and kind of understand each other and living a different life. But like what do you do what do you see, see differently about like the training or how people operate in like standard health care in the U.S. versus like military overseas deployed?

I don't really have a lot of experience in the civilian sector in hospitals because I like— I per diem at the ER at Balboa (Naval Medical Center San Diego), because that's where I came from and I—

Alright. There's an easy fit.

Yeah. I will say one of my big gripes with military training is that we don't take it serious in the US. And I can't speak for the line units because I don't know, I mean, you guys seem to be training all the time. But for the medical personnel in the military, we're at these hospitals that are, you know, basically a civilian hospital, right? Anywhere, doing the same type of work. We're doing shifts, you know, our administrators are worried about patient numbers and and money and all that and so it really, yeah, it's for a military that we're not really in a military environment versus like the grunt Marine infantry men do when your— what your everyday is revolving around your job and training and going out in the dirt and shooting and whatever it is to prepare you to be in that environment.

Eating eating pans, throwing rocks, though.

So the medical personnel, and I think this is what I also said to my senior nurse when she pulled me aside, I said, "What contributes to that, you know, not being mentally prepared is that you're yanking a nurse or a doctor and now you're putting him into this environment with limited resources, you know, it's a pretty hostile environment. We don't, you know, nothing that we're used to and expecting us to operate like, you know, it's no big deal." So people aren't prepared for that. I mean, even if even there were doctors and nurses and we expect to see a certain amount of casualties or, you know, injuries, you're never going to be prepared to see blown off limbs and, you know, the injuries that we see in these very young people in this population. And then on top of it, being in an environment where you don't have your normal resources, where you don't have, you know, everything pretty much at your disposal. Like you're using your backpack here, you know, and then the possibility, yeah, you're in a FOB or whatever, but, you know, there are possibilities of getting hurt. And, you know, you're sleeping next to that Afghan army, they can be on you at any time. So it's a different environment and you're just— we aren't particularly prepared for that.

And then one of the things that I was expected to do is I was with— I was on a Role 2 team, a surgical team, damage control surgery. That's what we did is we, we're doing the damage surgery in tents. And, you know, just making sure that we can keep the person alive to get them back to the Role 3. What they did not set up was the transport piece of it. So the people that were doing most of the transport is— it was that thought, right? But medics at the time didn't have the critical therapies to take our patients. So when they come out of damage control surgery, they are now on vents and drips employed and all the stuff that the medics weren't trained on at the time. And what would happen is I'm the Officer in Charge on the ground team, and they would look at me and say, "Hey, you need to go in the back of the helicopter inside this critical patient that you still need to resuscitate back to the Role 3." You know, for me, it wasn't too bad because I had the helicopter experience, but it was very difficult because I was still pretty green with the critical care side. So I was on my own. I was in part of the crew. They didn't bring me, you know, comms unless I asked for it later on when I got smart. And they would leave me most of the times at where I'd have to figure out my way, can I get back? Get back to my unit. I had no idea. I was never trained for this. I mean, it was a circus. And like, and then I thought about, "All the young," you know, I was at the time, I'm in my thirties, had the helicopter background because like, "We're doing this to 23, 24-year-old nurses that have never flown before, you know, who are really new at critical care and throwing him in this environment." You know, I mean, I had transfers where I was literally resuscitating the patient. So I had four units of blood going and it was very terrible injuries. I've got him ventilated, but, you know, I'm very new using a ventilator. I'm in the squat position trying to do all this, you know, keep him sedated, paralyzed, all of this stuff that, you know, on some instances was the first time I've ever done it. And I'm doing it by myself and I can't communicate to my crew. It's a very stressful time. And I came back from that and I was like, "This is old phase that we've delivered people." I mean, no wonder why people are coming back.

We just want to shout out to the Afghan army and the ANCOP (Afghan National Civil Order Police) who comprise our viewers and our listeners. He didn't mean anything that you could turn at any moment. That was an inside joke. So now we have that insider threat to deal with. No, great comments. And to comment on that as well, because Charlie and I took part in the Marine Corps Lioness program (Female Engagement Teams). And Mattis and and many other thinkers back then were like, "Hey, listen, you know, your first contact in country should be no worse than your contact that's here." And so as far as searching females and doing— they came up to us at the beginning of the training and we did the training here in the States and then in Iraq, and they came up to us and we were all crying in a big huddle in a circle and they were saying, "You know, we had some of the skills, but we didn't have the confidence that went along with the competence." And here all of a sudden, we were out there carrying guns with people that were blown up around us and sometimes just demystifying and sometimes having that coach or that mentor, somebody that's been there that can talk to you off the ledge, that's hugely important. And and you being able to see that, that's the difference between training and education. We'll go into a place like a hospital, we go to a school and they'll go, "Oh, we have policies in place." And we're like, "Yeah, we're here to talk about your training." And they go, "Oh, we have a checklist and we're prepared for all that." You're not prepared for shelling. And then all of a sudden, when it does happen, then they're scrambling to get more armed people in the hallways and that's not the answer. And and so you, you really helped some people, some people listening to this broadcast with the scales dropping from their eyes. Now I've got a daughter and my daughter is damaged goods because she's your age and she's on her PhD program and she's what we call Shelly trained. So I'm never going to influence her, but Marren still has a daughter that's influenceable. Thank God his wife is doing most of the teaching and training. We mostly just hang out and wrestle and play through the through the bars with the person sitting and watching him like in Mrs. Doubtfire. But what, Nikki, what would you, what would you say to that impressionable young female that is sitting listening to the broadcast because it's bleeding over from dad or mom watching. What would you tell that? What are they going to do to get where you are now? Because one of the things when we're on the road, people go, "Hey, I want to do it, you do." And it's like, "Okay, well, when I started this, I was a swim female." Do you get what I'm trying to say? "And now on oxycodone, like it's free and I'm 100 years old. It took all of those scars to get here." What would you tell that female that keeps getting a door slammed or saying no or you might not be able to tell? What advice would you give her?

My advice is to find a way around it. If you really want to do something, then do it and figure it out. You have to be proactive. And that's the way, you know, with this generation, especially, I don't know, I sometimes I feel like they think things are just going to drop in their lap and, you know, or they they're easy to be discouraged. And it's like, you have to be proactive in what you want. Nobody's going to give it to you.

It's not on an app. Exactly. You're right, spot on.

Yeah. If you want some things that are your goals and and figure out how to get there. And yes, you're going to get a lot of doors slammed in your face, you're going to get a lot of nose. But don't take that. Don't sit there and take that, you know, figure it out. There's always a way around.

Great advice.

Yeah. So when it— man, like you, like I'm just sitting here sorry playing in my head like your your crazy stories from Afghanistan and different stuff. And like, man, that just bringing back all those, all the worst memories.

But that's Marren and I actually decided to to work together, just so you know. So we multiple deployments each other at the Pentagon. And then all of a sudden we're at the Infantry Immersive Trainer and then I'm getting off, so I think it was Kandahar Airfield or so. Yeah, it was Kabul. And I walked by this little angry guy and I look at him, Marren. And so he's gonna hear, you know, that's how, that's how we decided, "Ah, what the hell. So I'm going to keep putting this together." So work together. Yeah.

But but you had these like little, I've had, you know, in the same situation we were just like, "Oh my God, like this is complete chaos. I can't believe this happens." Because when you get down and do, you know, training, like you said, is one thing and how it's supposed to run. And then when you get down there and get your hands dirty, you're like, "Hey, like this isn't really working or this isn't how it's supposed to be or this is dirty or messier. It's not what you think." And like, I had like, you know, you get these little little moments of frustration and anger or whatever, the emotional roller coaster. And but I had these days, one story and I'm curious if you had something similar. But mine was like after a long day and, you know, we had a lot of close calls. Like really, really close calls. I mean, everyone does, but there were some where guys were looking at me like, "Can you go stand over there because your, your—" I don't like what you're breaking the table. And one was like, you know, we're in this house. I was downstairs, like literally just trying to get a couple hours of sleep or an hour's sleep. And like, I, you know, an RPG rocket came, punched through the wall and spun around in there and just, we just missed me, blew debris on me and just like didn't— just didn't go off. I they got up and I'm like, "Hey, let's stay out of this room. You know, don't go in there," right? But but like you had all this and I was dead tired. Then we walked back and then we were getting like vehicle movement back, right? But we're loading up on a truck and like my buddy just looks right at me as I came in like, "Are you you good, man? Like you, you look like you're a little, you're a little out of it." And I just looked at him, I was like, "Hey, man, you know, just I, I really don't think I'm going to make it out here. I don't think I'm going to make it to this deployment." And he looked me just dead in the face and he was like, "Brian, I completely understand what you mean. I don't think you're going to make it out of here either." He walked away. I died laughing. But the thing was like I died laughing and it pulled my head out of my ass and was like, "Look, man, it's another day, like just like this is what this is what it is. You're going to be." But it was like just that, that just cold, hard truth. I just also like just hilarity. So I don't know if you've had any like something like that where something clicked and you're just like, "Yeah, okay, well I just got to keep putting one foot in front of the other right now."

Well, it's funny with the humor thing because I think, you know, especially medical people, very dark humor a lot. And probably at very inappropriate times. I remember being a nursing student at a Level 1 trauma center. I won't name the state. I was studying and we're in the ER. It was my first code, and, you know, I'm super excited. And I'm doing chest compressions on this guy who happened to be, you know, a little older, a little bit heavier. And he like, you know, had a heart attack. And the nurses were just saying stuff that was like, "I don't think that's socially acceptable." You know, I don't know. But I, you know, I'm just kind of like, "Wow, would it be?" You know, I was, you know, it was a comments like, "You know, he was on a treadmill at the time," and, you know, it was like, "Why are you looking at me when you die? Thank you, my code. That's it. Don't nobody tell me." Yeah. I mean, one of the nurses, I don't— something like it, you know, "Don't you think it was a little late for that?" Or I don't know, something crazy. I remember just like looking at her like, "Oh," but it, you know, I'm just excited nursing student. So, yeah. But looking back on it now, it's like, I, you know, she wasn't trying to be like that. You have to when you do that, because it was a trauma center, right? So they see your worst of the worst all the time.

And when you see that over and over again, you have to have some sort of a, you know, whether it's a defense mechanism or not, but, you know, human psychological, what you have to do is your brain will only allow you to accept so much information into a file folder before it becomes corrupt. And if the information is so heinous and so against all your other file folders, your brain will insulate you against those. And that's why we sometimes have repressed memories. And and and from that, emergency first responders, not firemen, because they only respond when the fire's going to— they'll hate me for that. Cough, Hey, Thurman. But emergency services all in. And so Marren and I were at a situation, it was kind of heinous, and the idea was that I was talking and I used the term DRT (Dead Right There). And the guy next to me goes, "What is that?" And I said, "It's dead right there, you know, you, we're not going to be able to do anything." And so they were all butthurt about that one. But in Marren's famous comment, somebody says, "They that guy died." And Marren's going, "No, but he's trying." And not that you want hate, death, or fear on another human, the fact is that it's inevitable in certain situations. And you know what? The way that you can and it could continue and get into those bloody, slippery, horrible situations and actually walk out and smoke a cigarette and go to bed, it is by being able to joke about it. Because if you weren't laughing, you'd be crying. And too much crying, the mirror neurons, everybody's crying. It's like a yawn. One yawn, everybody's crying, you know? So you got to avoid that. So we totally get, we absolutely get that. But remember, even though you're a sociopath, that's the only normal thing you've said in the last hour, just so you know. That we should actually point—

Well, especially you bring it up with with nurses are the same because like, so my friend Shannon, she's an ER nurse and all of her friends, this is years ago. Like, it's like, "Yeah, we're going out like this afternoon or whatever, well, you know, a happy hour thing." And whatever. "Once you come out." And I was like, "Yeah, I'll be out, whatever, I'll link up with you." And we're out there and I'm just like, "I, I don't know. Like, your friends can— I'm not comfortable with with someone who can consume more alcohol than I can and still stand up. Like, what is wrong with you?" And like, this is just the ER nurses. I was like, "This is hilarious." And they were completely insane and I was like, "Alright, my kind of people here. I get it." Like, but it's it's that same that high-stress jobs and you just say the craziest, dumbest stuff. And when you're in those groups, though, like it's completely accepted. That's, that's a great part.

Well, well, and it's a way of venting, it's a way of blowing off steam. And like me, it's it's a knee-jerk reaction to joke about firemen. So my my son's a fireman. My son is Shelly trained as well. So he's got nine jobs, are all full-time jobs, and he manages them perfectly. I do one thing in my life, right? Do you get what I'm saying? And everything else fails. I'm miserable at everything. So the fireman thing, I'm always around his buddies that are fireman friends. I'll walk in, meet one or somebody comes to one of the training sessions and I'm fashion, fashion, fashion on firemen. Like, "Why are you so hard on firemen? They're saving lives." I'm doing it. It's just a cop thing. And the same thing with Brian being a Marine and me being a former soldier. We're always joking. Marines communicate with a series of grunts and clicks. I passed my ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery). You really don't mean anything by it was me to Brian. I do wholly psychological warfare. We've read you Civ working but it is a horribly abusive worker, Brian. But with everybody else that I meet, I have no problems with that. Do you find that you've ever been in a situation where you let some of that slip and it was inappropriate? Because we accidentally do that sometime. We did one recently in Princeton, New Jersey at a Dunkin' Donuts where I, I let a comment slip that was completely not in a pilot. I say, "Lady willing to reach in to get her straw." I was like, "Just the next ten minutes going, 'Look, we're not really like this. We're so sorry. Please don't hold this against it.'" Does that happen to you?

Oh, I mean, I, I grew up with all males and then Marines and yeah, my what normal to me is completely inappropriate probably to everybody else. So it's, yeah, it's having to adjust to thinking about the environment you're in. You know, being a female, everyone's like, "Oh, don't get offended." I'm probably— I'm always like, "I'm probably the most offensive." Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

I mean, it, I'm sure I've said a lot of inappropriate things and, you know, even being around my best friends who've never been in the military. I'm sorry. I say sometimes they're like, "What are you talking about?" You know?

Again, I mean, I grew up with all males and very, very type A and, you know, a little bit of an ego type males there. Yeah, it's totally healthy as long as you're not hurting anybody. You know, the idea is the, the, you know, when when you are trying to decompress, you have to have a safe environment. You have to have the little nested, Marren's little nested box that he's created behind it. Although it's under the bridge, the refrigerator raining, you know, and and and he's had a sheet up that that looks like a convincing house, but it's not. But the idea is that that once you've decided that you're going to have that safe area, you got to be able to do that. You got to be able to call somebody in the middle of the night and go, "I'm broken. I need help. I need to put some things back together." That's one of those things that not only seeds resilience, but it's a counter-suicide strategy as well. And you know, there's a lot of people in our line of work that that tend to commit suicide. And and I think one of the large reasons is because you no longer feel relevant in a mission. When you're when you're mission essential, it's the greatest feeling in the world and you get all the endorphins and you get all the the norepinephrine and you get all the wonderful catecholamine group and the the amygdala is just sending out love all the time. But but when you don't feel when you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose. That's hard.

Yeah. Um, you know, and that's where I'm at, I think right now is, you know, in the beginning, I, again, I piled all this stuff up to feel relevant. And now I'm realizing that didn't make me happy. This actually made it worse because, you know, again, I spread myself so thin. And now I'm getting to this place where, you know what I thought was me being relevant, you know, didn't work for me. But, you know, staying in the game or, you know, being part of whatever group, I thought it would be like, "Okay, well, this is it. This is going to make me feel like, you know, what I'm missing." And it didn't. And so now I'm doing things for myself and yeah, that's a broad ideology.

Yep. That's, that's a Karate Miyagi, "Either you Karate Do or your Karate No Do." If you remember the old film, because if you Karate No Good, you get squashed in the middle of the road. And Nikki, what you're talking about, you're talking about something that our viewers and listeners can adapt into their own life. If you're trying to chase somebody else's dream, if you're trying to live somebody else's life, it's not going to be fulfilling. And at the end of that, look, it took Nikki, folks, a year to discover where she's at now. And that demonstrates not only resilience, but, you know, your stick-to-itiveness. That's another term from old people like me where, you know, get up and do that. Many people think there's an answer in an app. Many people think that there's going to be an answer in some first-person shooter game. That's not where it's at. Where it's at, it's getting out there and rediscovering yourself and saying, "These are the things that make me happy. These are the things that I'm going to do to pay it back and and and to live the rest of my life in an in a fulfilled manner." Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, you, you've, you've heard that, I'm sure you've heard the expression, right? It's, it's, you know, "Physician, heal thyself," right? And in that, that comes down to it is like, I always something's like, "Look, you got it, like, 'cause it took me a long time to realize like, oh, oh, I'm the problem." All right. Well, let's just—

Was Marren, "Heal thyself." That's and I always try to get that to keep people's like, you, you know, you come out and you go through that. And I always tell the story. I don't know, I'm with different folks when we were doing some working with these big brain behavioral scientists folks. And they were doing their testing, all stuff. And we would talk and I'd explain stuff was like, "Yeah, this happened, this happened, you know, I was able to do that." Like, and, you know, I told him the story about like, "I got super pissed at this person and this and I walked away and I calmed myself down." I didn't— they're like, they were looking at me like, "Okay, you, you have horrible anger issues. Like, what are you talking about? Like, I, I walked away from the situation." Like, like, "No, no, no, you, you should not have gotten that angry. There's no reason to it."

I was like, and then he got angry with the appropriate reaction. So that was me at Disneyland, right after I got back from Afghanistan. And mind you, I was in Haiti right before that. My best friends call me, they're like, "Oh, hey, let's go to Disneyland." And I already don't like that, right? But I was like, "All, you know, I haven't seen my kids in a year." So, yeah, I was, you know, "Let's do this and kids will have fun, whatever." And I think I lasted maybe two or three hours. And they were saying, you know, I had this, I had a double stroller with my kids in there. And they said, "The next thing we know is you were like, 'I'm done,'" pulling my stroller. And I had balloons tied to my stroller. And they say, "Well, we saw was a lady with a stroller with balloons bouncing off of people headed for the search and be lining for the exit." And, you know, it was me. And they're calling out for me. "I knew I saw you from somewhere."

And that's for the poster where you can't get in and out. They won't— and Marren's had a very similar experience because the state mandates when he can see his children. But, you know what the hard part is is when somebody sees you— I want to put myself in the viewer or the listener that saw that. What happened is you have a damaged human that is acting out because they're broken. Something's broken and something's leaking out. And it's okay because we have those emotional meltdowns sometimes. But the idea is what that's what, what did people around you help you do? And that's what sometimes wrong is people turn a blind eye. They're down and in. They don't see what's happening around them. And that's how these situations of intense violence and rage manifests itself. You know, sometimes you need time on your own. That's great. But if you got too much time on your own and you're stewing and the kettle is coming over, somebody needs to walk up and go, "You know, timeout. What's on your mind?" And and, you know, start the de-escalation process. So it's great that you shared that with us because listen, you're tough on your iron, man. We get that. But that just showed that the sociopath also has a huge— listen, nobody in the military and nobody in police work, maybe a fireman, but no in emergency services is ever going to say, "I'm I'm bullet, you know, I'm, you can't hurt me." They're going to say, "I'm bulletproof. I can put me back in coach." And that's part of the facade that we built up. And it's hard sometimes to be there for, be the mom, be the leader, put up with the bullshit. You just got back and now all of a sudden everybody's saying, "It's a small world." And you wish you had a two-pound sledge. Totally normal for people as long as they seek help and don't go to Ace Hardware, if you know what I'm saying. And for good reason, you know, where Marren is on the tree, but for very good reason, it's some Marren law that's— "Hey, look who puts a playground next to a bar." Okay, look, it's all a misunderstanding.

No, but that that adds a whole 'nother level, don't it? Really don't your experience just you did all of that again. Like you did all of that with with your kids. So like you still had to go deploy and be a badass and do all this stuff and have this work. And like, and you had children at the time. So it's like maybe that's why we think you're just a complete sociopath or maybe you're just thinking about them the whole time. So you just compartmentalize because like or maybe they're not even your kids, but you're seeing them. Those are things we can tell you what that psychological stance is.

To, yeah. Well, and the other, you know, the other thing with the medical world, not too fast, too hard on maybe medicine, but I feel like with line units, when you come back from deployment, you get quite a bit of time to sort of, you know, be off and slow down a little bit or it seemed like that anyway. But for, you know, I got back from from Haiti, and then Afghanistan, ten months. And I come back and I've got them on the phone like, "Hey, you need to come back to work." And yeah, I was in the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) at the time. So, you know, go back to shifts. And our shifts are crazy. It's 12 hours. It's, you know, we do six weeks a day, six weeks a night, six weeks a day. I mean, it's just this rotating thing. You know, they wanted to put me back on nights because, "Well, you haven't been here for the last," but I wasn't throwing you back on nights. And it was two weeks after I came back from all of that. And I'm now throwing back into patient care and worrying about somebody else and never had the time to really decompress. And, you know, figure it out, which I don't know, maybe good or bad, but that time is essential.

That time is essential. Too much time in the huddle or too much time out of the huddle is not good for you. And there's got to be time that during that break. Give me an example. You're exactly right. And obviously that that when you're done and you come back and before your next workup, they give you a sufficient amount of time on. But now it's in the ramp up to go, right? And Marren and Shelly and I and some of our instructors, we drop in, we know exactly where you were down there. And on a little beach, it was that Marren core, Coronado. That's it. I don't want to say Coronavirus, holy crap. But we would go down there for example, and we'd be doing Seals on their way to somewhere or we'd be at North Carolina, we'd be doing some unit that's on the way somewhere from whatever place. And and all of a sudden, you're sitting there on a weekend, on the only free weekend that they were going to have with their family before deployment. And they're looking at it's like, "We're a couple of idiots." Hey, we've been voluntold to take this training. Now, the training is good and it was relevant, it's necessary. But the military always does that. They're like, "Well, let's shove this in here and let's put that there." And then they were going to us, they were going like, "Well, can you train in a plane? Can you train on a boat? Can you train with a goat? Can you train with God?" But it was like the worst Dr. Seuss. And so we're in Kuwait and it's like, "Hey, these people are going to go and some of them already died and we're watching them come back." And the same thing happened, Iraq and Afghanistan. And they're going, "Can you fit just one more hour of training in there?" Folks, you got to understand that the humans are your best assets. Not your weapons. It's a human holding a weapon. Not your technology. It's a human holding that technology. And if you don't allow them to decompress and vent sometime, they're going to break. And when they break, it's going to leak all over everybody around them. So a great point, excellent.

Yeah, we're together trying to remove that human out of humans. We call it "human in the loop" now, don't we? "Human in the loop." It's like, "No, but loop goes around the human." You bastards, totally get it. Yeah, that's that's where we get into the breakdown in performance. So, I mean, that, you know, it affects everyone working. It brings it back to that little little, you know, fact that now one of the top leading causes of death in the United States is medical malpractice. And like, "Wait, you're going in to fix and get help. Like, why, why would that happen?" That's why it could brings you back to like talking about this. It's like, how does that even happen? It's like, "Well, this is how it happens, because everyone's working too much and you're stressed and you're doing back-to-back shifts." And then, you know, instead of putting something in, you take something out or you put the wrong drug or this. It's like that happens all the time. All the time that happens. And and, you know, then it comes down to just basic human performance.

Yeah. And I mean, you know, in a hospital, they purposefully staff you lower than you're supposed to be. So they present a preposition, we do at 80% versus 100%, because, you know, on average, that's that's the amount of staff you need. So for us, it's like we're always operating understaffed. And it's just you're tired. I mean, to take care of other humans and still try to take care of yourself. And, you know, it's just in a regular hospital, that's difficult. But now throw the element of all the military stuff and the stress and the deployment stuff, you know. And a lot of us during that time, we're just getting plucked out and like, "Oh, here you go. Go on with this unit," and whatever. "Good luck." It's like, "Wait, wait." So yeah, it's, it's difficult. And I say we, we don't do a very good job taking care of ourselves.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Well, Nikki, we really, we appreciate you coming on and talking about this stuff because if we don't stop here, we're going to go on until Yodelin' Pete tells us it's time to get off. You know, and I know you're busy and got some— is there anything else of all these other groups that you work with or do work for? Remember, you're working for them. So whether it's it's amazing when you go down that path, you say, "Oh yeah, I'll help out with this and this and this." And then also nice to know, "Wait a minute, like, what's going on here?" And they're all like, "Yeah, thanks. Yeah." Right back into the meat grinder.

Yeah, yeah. Well, one other group that I want to mention is The HunterSeven Foundation that I— they reached out to me on IC (social media platform), and I was into them and and they were just starting out with their research. But they do the research on burn pits and the toxins and how it's affecting a lot of our veterans now. And I noticed, because I started out on the cancer ward, I had noticed a lot of these young guys getting these very, you know, weird cancers, a lot of cancers. And like, you know, when I was assigned to the cancer ward, I thought it would be just older people who lived their life and, you know, it's kind of whether it's liver cancer or whatever, you know, just things that we've done to ourselves over the years. But it ended up being more of like 18, 19, 20 year olds. And, you know, that kind of piqued my interest. And then years later with them reaching out to me and now, you know, with a lot of our veterans coming home with really strange rare cancers, and, you know, they're still in their 30s and 40s. And some pretty bad respiratory illnesses, people getting diagnosed with asthma out of nowhere. I mean, it's really strange. So the main researcher started thinking about this, and her fiance was in one of the units where Hunter 7 is actually the call sign for the man who the organization is named for. And he had come back, he was in the Army, he came back and had died, diagnosed with a very rare cancer, ended up dying in his 40s. And her fiance was in the same unit and he has all kinds of issues, health issues. So she started kind of, you know, asking that question like, "Well, where's the common denominator?" And that being, you know, overseas and serving there. These burn pits. And if you remember being over there, I was right next to one and, you know, you're sitting there looking at it going, "How can this be good breathing in all this?"

Yeah. No, no, we got all that stuff too. I even had a photo of me somewhere and it's literally like three of us standing around and I had, I got my hands on these like wool gloves with the fingers cut out. And like, we're just standing around like a burn pit in because it was winter and like, "Oh, like this like, we're warming up." And I'm like looking at back, I was like, "What were we breathing in in that?" You know? Everything, right?

Everything goes into these burn pits, even for like medical or medical waste and all the waste, diseases. I mean, it's all this crap and we're breathing it in. So I think the hardest part with this foundation is just getting the awareness out there because it isn't, you know, it's— I don't want to say injuries are sexy, but trauma injuries get more attention, right? But cancer or respiratory illnesses, they're almost like hidden illnesses. You know, it's very difficult to prove to the VA. And so just trying to get more of that awareness and trying to help these guys who are coming down with these really strange cancers or whatever and getting them the help that they need. And one of their main things too is that a lot of these guys get out and they start getting seen by civilian sector. You know, when a when a military veteran comes in with vague symptoms, often times, you know, different general people that come in with a cold, we just say, "Oh, it's a cold," or, "It's amazing." Ever. So what we're trying to do is, right, is we're raising the awareness that, "Hey, if they're a veteran and they served overseas and they were there, these burn pits, you need to start thinking beyond that. And there could be something wrong." Because like Hunter Seven, that's the same for if he had these these very generalized symptoms and they kept like, "No, you're fine, you're fine." And then by the time they caught it, it was too late. So a lot of these cancers can be caught earlier and it could be cured versus, you know, if you keep getting sent home because, "Oh, it's no big deal," or, "It's just a stomachache," or whatever it is, you know, they end up dying in the long run. So just getting the awareness to the providers and the nurses and people that are not used to being around veterans, like, "Hey, you got to think a little bit beyond than normal and symptoms that that people are having and start thinking that it could be from something else, though."

And and that's a big thing where like the V— I know everyone likes to bash on the VA, but it's actually, I mean, we don't, you only hear about obviously the worst case, there's, you know, you don't hear about the good stuff that they do. But that's where they are uniquely qualified for some of these things to where, you know, because it's not you go on a civilian side, especially like if you're normal or you're functioning healthy, like they're just like, "You're not, you're not 70 years old, why are you in here?" You don't mean it's almost like they can't treat you, they don't know. Like, they're like, "Yeah, you're a healthy and because they're not looking for those other simple." Just like you talked about, that's where some of those cases where the VA knows, "Alright, well, you could have there's now the seven things that you could possibly have and we have to test for this." And and I don't know how they're at in the process, but it's just one of those things where we're, yeah, if you're not aware of these, that normal doctor on the street's going to be thinking of any of that. They're thinking their normal protocol of what a patient's likely going to have, never even taking this into consideration.

So that's kind of work on software that integrates the records somehow. You know, it's being able to— you can share it with the civilian sector because now, you know, with the software that we use now for a civilian institute, to get the records is pretty difficult. And, you know, if they don't think about it and to ask or have the person thought the forms and then, you know, what the history is versus, you know, being able to pull up the screen and seeing the same history that they might be on any of their patients. So that's one of the other things. But it all takes funding and recognition and awareness. So yeah.

Turning it that other. No, talking about the recognition and awareness, I mean, we hope that you'd be interested in coming on a future pod. We've got some incredible people that have been on the pods. You certainly are in that that top range of people that just have a great message and a great across. And hopefully we haven't so insulted you that you'll say tell no. But if you're not in jail or or deployed, which is probably the two things that are most likely, we hope you would come back on because we got so much more we want to talk about.

Definitely.

We appreciate it, Nikki. Thanks for coming on. And we always tell everyone, don't forget that training changes behavior.