#282 Nik Seetharaman - Former SpaceX's Head of Cybersecurity Critical Warning on AI Swarms

18:36Shawn Ryan:No.

18:38Nik Seetharaman:he's the uh he's the chief AI officer at the White House in charge of the um going up he's going after uh he's in charge of the US-China race and he talks about you know the voom moment in AI where it's just like oh yeah we lose control yeah I mean and it's not if I remember right in that in that conversation with him it was you know it was a lot about self-aware are they self-aware Can it, can it, yeah. So it sounds like if they're self-aware and this is like three months after that interview.

19:11Shawn Ryan:Yeah, dude, it's fucking crazy. So this vertical curve that you're talking about, I call that essentially on the, on the cybersecurity side of the house, I call that essentially asymptotic attack velocity. So the time that it used to take to find a vulnerability and build a working exploit and actually target an organization, it was sort of at parity with how human response speed kept up with it, right? It's sort of attackers and defenders all kind of worked at the same speed. Attackers a little bit faster. Defenders would try and keep up. Now you've got this like vertical curve of capability when it comes to these AIs.

19:56Shawn Ryan:And if you point them all at, let's say a target organization, Essentially what you're doing is you're now faced as that organization with unprecedented attack pressure, right? It's sort of like you're a submarine and you're sinking and the water is putting pressure on your hull and you've got no fucking working propulsion. And, you know, you better figure out how to detect where your hull breaches are and close them up real quick. But really, the core solution is you need some form of defensive counterpressure against that external pressure that's hitting you from the outside. And you need to find a way to get at that gravity well that you're in right now.

20:36So this always happens, right?

20:39Shawn Ryan:The attack side of the equation is always weaponized faster than the defenses are. And we're finding that, I think, in the cybersecurity case. So the attackers are out there, they're weaponizing these things, they're using them to their advantage to basically execute industrial scale discovery and weaponization of vulnerabilities. and there's no corresponding effort on the defense side. Now, when it comes to the question of, are they self-aware? That's a very interesting question. And it calls into things that have been debated hotly for many decades now. There are multiple camps here. So there are the camps that say, these things are just neurons or neural networks that are firing and the neural networks are represented by bits and they're just spitting out language and they're predicting, you know, what sentence to, what sentences with which to respond to your query, right?

21:42Well, if that's true, then what does that make us as humans?

21:48Shawn Ryan:And look, because the same people who believe this, that they're just neural networks that are predicting the next sentence to say, will also tell you in the same breath that humans are just neurons

22:06Shawn Ryan:where consciousness emerges as a function of those neurons firing. Well, if you say, if that's your position for both of these things, that makes those AIs just as conscious and self-aware as we are, the same thing. If you don't want them to be the same thing, if that breaks your ontological model of reality, right? Like there's no fucking way I'm the same thing as an AI, right? That's a valid position for a human to have. Then by necessity, you have to take into account, okay, there's probably something else pre the neurons up here that is driving us as humans. And if that's the case, what is that?

22:50Shawn Ryan:Where does it come from? What does that mean about us as humanity and as individuals? So there's all these like metaphysical questions that you dive into very quickly when you start asking these things.

23:02Nik Seetharaman:But where does it come from with AI? The AI chatbot, I mean, you're getting to a higher power. What about AI? Are you saying God, a higher power is accessing the same neurons through the AI chatbot to formulate conversations? I don't know. So consciousness.

23:27Shawn Ryan:Yeah. So I think if you take humans and you take AIs and you forget about all the stuff back here, right? God, implicate order, metaphysics, all this stuff. At the end of the day, everything starts with neurons firing or neural networks firing, which are essentially like the counterparts of the biological neurons in our brains, right? So a bunch of stuff producing signals for us and a bunch of stuff producing signals for them results in what? It results in some transfer of thought or concept. Like they're pulling down concepts from wherever, like their latent space where they encode all the concepts that are accessible to them.

24:14Shawn Ryan:And then they're producing language with it. and then they're using that language, intersecting it with the tools that they have access to and then they're doing stuff with it, right? That's exactly the same shit humans do, right? We think of stuff up here and you could say that it's just based on neurons that are in our heads. We transmute those neurons into thoughts. Those thoughts manifest as us doing things with our hands and the process of us doing things with our hands results in us creating the world around us, essentially. So both of those cases can start with just a bunch of shit firing somewhere, right?

24:54Shawn Ryan:Neural networks or neurons. Beyond that, I mean, I don't know. If you just hold those two things true, then what you're saying is we're the same as them. But of course, we're not the same as them. Are we? Or are we? I don't know. These are all questions for us to work out. That is crazy. So do you think they'll shut it down?

25:15Shawn Ryan:um i think i think the labs have the ability to shut down things at scale because at the at the end of the day you know a lot of infrastructure is based on the fact that you can hit the frontier models at these labs right anthropic open ai google gemini all these things so i think if if things really, you know, went to a takeoff scenario, which is that asymptotic curve that, that individual you mentioned was talking about, then these labs probably have kill switches that they can hit and shut things down very quickly. Now, the problem becomes, you know, when all this stuff started coming out a few years ago, immediately there was a democratization of these models out into open source versions of themselves, right?

26:03Shawn Ryan:And even meta has put out open source versions of its model. And there's a proliferation of open source models that are out there. Some of them come from China, some of them come from Europe, some of them come from America. And so the point is, even if the labs executed their kill switch and turned all these things off, well, you're just going to transition to an open source model that you're running on your fucking Mac mini in your basement. And you might have some signal degradation as far as performance of what it can do. But that shit's going to evolve very quickly too. So I, I don't know, man.

26:43Shawn Ryan:It's, it's a weird fucking time we're living in.

26:47Nik Seetharaman:Yeah. No kidding. It's, it is a fascinating time. That's for damn sure.

26:54Shawn Ryan:But I mean, a big part of me is like, you know, maybe the reason that we're all here right now in this particular moment, in time of the human race's evolution is to figure out how we're going to deal with a technology like this as individuals, as a society. And the way that we deal with that is going to inform the remainder of the human species, essentially. Does it scare you or excite you? uh these days i think mostly it scares me you know despite the fact that i'm the ceo of a cyber defense company um because i've just seen like you know humans are really bad at calculating the rate of change of things you know people will look at one of these models and they'll be like oh it can't count the number of r's in strawberry it's like Like, who gives a shit, dude?

27:55Shawn Ryan:It can like one shot a complex piece of software and it will do it in six minutes flat. It doesn't fucking matter that it can't count the number of Rs in strawberry. That's not even what it's designed to do. It takes in the word strawberry as a token and it encodes the concept of a strawberry into its latent space encoding. And so like a good example of what it's actually doing is it's turning concepts into math. And so you can take the word king, you can take the word queen, and you can give it to one of these things and it will encode it in its essentially, in this hyperdimensional mathematical vector, essentially.

28:37Shawn Ryan:Then you can do mathematical operations on it. You can say, take king, subtract man. What do you get? And then mathematically you get queen based on how it's encoded in its latent space. So it's doing math on words and concepts. So the fact that it can't fucking count the number of letters in a word, it doesn't matter because it's capable of doing so much more. And the rate of change at which it can do those things is changing very rapidly. You know, just a year ago, these models were not capable of doing all the things they're doing now as far as like working together in these agentic swarms and constructing complex pieces of software.

29:19Shawn Ryan:So who knows where we're all going to be a year from now. Man. Wild stuff.

29:25Nik Seetharaman:Wild stuff.

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31:28Shawn Ryan:um i was born in a town called madras on the southern tip of india and i spent the first few years of my life there um middle class family pretty humble um my mom was a college professor college professor taught english literature at the local college uh my dad was uh in the indian merchant marine and he was a chief engineer on the boats. And in India, there's really at the time in the early 80s, there's only a few ways to escape the poverty of the country. And that is to go to college, become a doctor, engineer, whatever, or get one of these jobs in the merchant marine or some other kind of civil service where you get to travel the world.

32:20Shawn Ryan:Um, and so my parents got to do both my mom with the, with the college professor thing and my, my dad on the boats and he was, my dad was a hard dude. Um, you know, as you and I both know, sailors can get quite rowdy and wrangling a boat full of fucking rowdy sailors requires, um, hard men. And, uh, so him and my mom would travel the world, you know, they would take me in tow when I was a kid, you know, so we got to do stuff that not your average, you know, Indian kid gets to do, Like we'd go to Mombasa on his boats. We'd go to like Korea. We'd go meet him at like some port of call in the Pacific.

32:56Shawn Ryan:So it was a very charmed life. It was kind of a tight knit family. When we would come back from his ocean voyages, we would be at my grandparents' family house that my grandpa built in the suburbs of Madras there. uh but my dad always always wanted to move to the united states you know that was like that was a dream of basically every indian person in the 80s you know and he had he had come to the states a lot uh as part of his um as part of his voyages so there's pictures of him you know in his fucking clubbing gear and shit from the seventies in LA, San Francisco and shit. So he wanted to move us here.

33:44Shawn Ryan:And, you know, this is 1987. There's no Google, there's no tech companies offering H1B visas. You know, there's no coming over here and making 200K off the bat as some engineer, as some software engineer, right? It's like, you know, you come over here and you're going to push hard reset. And we did, we came over here and we pushed hard reset. There was no more sailing around the world. There was no more, you know, that loving family unit that I came, that we all left in India went away. And it was just three of us in this like little upstairs, like cold unit in the suburbs of New Jersey. And my earliest memories of coming to America were just like the freezing fucking East Coast weather.

34:29Shawn Ryan:Yeah. Shit's cold. How old were you? Three. Three years old? Three years old. And, yeah, we were poor. Like, we couldn't afford a car. You know, we would walk to the grocery store. That was, like, a couple miles away. So I remember just carrying these, like, heavy fucking bags of groceries and just walking behind my parents. So, like, you know, humble immigrant family. And my dad, you know, couldn't really transfer his skills over here. So he got a job as a handyman at a styrofoam factory in Jersey. So he went from, you know, being head fucking dude in charge on these boats, which is a very prestigious position in India at the time, to being the dude who ran the fucking styrofoam manufacturing machine at this factory in Jersey.

35:19Shawn Ryan:So that caused a lot of chaos internally in the household. You know, we were talking about it at breakfast this morning. When you, when you build your whole identity around who and what you are, um, for so long, and then that identity is nuked immediately, uh, that causes some chaos internally within you. And it certainly caused chaos with him. Um, so that led to, um, you know, turbulent times in the household. Um, do you have brothers and sisters? Yeah, I have one sister. um she's six years younger than me uh so she was born uh you know a few years after we moved to america um you know the stress i think of just being poor immigrants and the stress of him losing his identity as a sailor which he had built his whole life on uh just caused a lot of abusive situations in the house.

36:18Shawn Ryan:Um, so, uh, you know, so, uh, to this day, uh, I'm 41, I'm still working through some of that stuff. Um, but ultimately it ended up fracturing the family and, um, you know, my mom and dad separated and, um, yeah. So I didn't really come from a stable household. uh you know and that started at age three started at age three yeah soon as we moved to america like i just remember you know thing like a dark paul being cast over over the family um but i would kind of escape everything by burying myself in like comic books and um i always remember just being fascinated with the u.s military dude i don't know why like talk to any other fucking Indian kid from the eighties.

37:09Shawn Ryan:And like, it's just not a thing, but like, I remember just having these GI Joe books that I would just be flipping through. And, um, I'd be like watching, uh, like just military movies on TV. And I just was just exceptionally fascinated by anything involving the U S military. Um, so yeah, I would read like books about like these Mac V. Sa guys in Vietnam. I was like, fucking nine years old. And my mom was like, what the fuck are you reading? Go back to doing your math homework. What kind of abuse were you dealing with? Physical, mental. Yeah, I have memories from being a kid of my dad being drunk.

37:56Shawn Ryan:He dealt with alcoholism. My mom was pregnant with my sister, and I would just remember him like, you know mui tai kicking her in the belly holy while she was pregnant so there was there was a lot remember that yeah yeah that scene in particular i remember very well um so you're saying that at six years old yeah yeah so it uh it caused you know cause cause a lot of pain on the inside because you know i i didn't know what a stable family unit was you know all knew was hardship. You know, hardship coming over to the States, hardship dealing with being poor, hardship dealing with the - Loss of identity.

38:41Shawn Ryan:Loss of identity from my dad, hardship dealing with the abuse that was going on in the household. And so to me, my childhood was always just like something to grow out of. You know, I always wanted to like go do something out in the world where I didn't have to think about any of this shit that I was dealing with at home. Um, how long did that go on? What's that? How long did that go on? Um, it went on until I think I was nine or 10. My mom and dad finally split. Um, and I moved, I moved in with my mom, my sister and I, and, um, I thought we were poor when we got to the States. my mom, who was, you know, she was trying to finish her PhD at Rutgers University at the time.

39:34Shawn Ryan:We were rock bottom for, like when I, when my parents split and I was living with my mom and, you know, we did our best. She did her best. You know, she's going to be watching this and, you know, I hope she doesn't think I'm speaking ill of her or airing dirty laundry. She truly, truly did do her best. But after a couple of years of bearing the stress of trying to provide for her kids, she, um, kind of made a decision to, uh, send my sister and I back to India. And so I was 14 at the time. Um, and 14 years old, my sister was, I think eight years old and we just wake up one day and my mom goes, you guys are, you guys are going to India without me.

40:21Um, and, you know,

40:23Shawn Ryan:she, she had a relationship with somebody else at the time and she was like, we're going to stay here, see what we can do to, you know, get our finances in order. I'm going to try and wrap up this, uh, this program and maybe I can get, you know, a professor ship somewhere. And, you know, she just wanted time and space to like kind of get her shit together and get them stable. um and in her mind you know she could do that best if you know she also didn't have to parallelize attention and figure out how to provide for us at the same time so she she sent us off to india so i remember 14 years old just getting on a fucking plane by myself and like trying to you know take care of my sister and i didn't know what the fuck was going on at the time you know this is 1998 dude like there's not a lot of shit that you can look up about how to go on an international flight on your own as a 14 year old, you know?

41:16Shawn Ryan:Um, so we went back to India, um, and I got, you know, by, by this point I was a kid between two worlds, right? I was this kind of American kid that was obsessed with fucking GI Joes and, you know, F-18s and fucking any, you know, anything us military and then all of a sudden i was back in madras going to uh freshman year of high school and um i got bullied a lot by by the kids over in india and man there's some fucking there's bullying that goes on um they they do some they do some wicked shit over there and i got bullied pretty much every day that they made fun of my accent they made fun of my clothes i didn't know how to speak the language i could understand them but i didn't know how to speak it because it's like, you know, it's different neural pathways in your mind.

42:13Shawn Ryan:So I was, you know, I was dealing with all that. I was trying to, you know, protect my sister as much as I could and look after her. And we were living with our, with our grandparents in India and they, they did their best, but, you know, they were, they were really in advanced in years and, you know, could only do so much. Could they speak English? Yeah, they could speak some, some basic English. So how are you guys communicating? Um, broken English essentially. Um, but my, my grandma who's still alive, um, had this, uh, obsession with learning English, like down to every single detail. So even back then she had this little notebook she would carry around.

42:55Shawn Ryan:And when she heard a new English word that she didn't know, she would like write it down in her little book and she would like write down the meaning of it. And then she would just like, you know, reference that book all the time when she was trying to convey thoughts to us. A couple of years ago, actually, at 95 years old, she finally became a US citizen. So there's a picture of her with her certificate of citizenship. And I was looking at that. I was like, yeah, I'm not surprised, man. Whatever she sets her fucking mind to, she gets after it. It took them a long time to make their way over here.

43:32Shawn Ryan:I mean, the consulate in Delhi. They wouldn't see them for years, my grandparents, but they finally did. And then they made their way over here and she got her citizenship. So she's a phenomenal, phenomenal woman. But anyways, we did our best to communicate. And around January of 99, I was 14, just about to turn 15. My mom kind of throws a curve ball at me again. She's like, you're going to go, you know, move back in with your dad. Like, I don't want you in India for the rest of your days. So then my dad was living in Southern California at the time. And so again, moved you in with your dad. Yeah.

44:13Shawn Ryan:Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah. So, you know, probably a decision that she's been very introspective about for, for a long time now. And, um, so I, I hop on a plane again by myself. My sister stays behind in India. I don't quite understand the decision-making to this day, but hop on a plane, fly to LA. I land in LAX. My dad's there waiting for me. And man, I've flown into LAX so many times since then. And I just remember all of the sights. And I remember looking out the window as I'm like flying in and I know I'm about to meet my dad for the first time in years. You know, I haven't seen him in many years.

45:07Shawn Ryan:I remember all I was feeling. And now to this day, every time I fly into LAX, I remember, you know, being a kid in that window seat, remembering what it was like to fly in. Anyways. Did you talk to him? What's up? Did you talk to him in years or just not seen him? Very, very briefly. You know, we would occasionally, uh, we would do this thing where my mom would bring me to, you know, this, this parking lot of a mall in Jersey and let him have like 30 minutes with us. And, uh, you know, you, you would do his best. Uh, you know, you would like try and catch up, uh, and see how we were doing. Um, what were you thinking at the time?

45:50At the time I was like, I don't really want to see this dude.

45:53Shawn Ryan:You know, um, I didn't really, I didn't really have many thoughts about it. I was just like, you know, this is not a person that like I want to spend time around. And so, uh, you know, I'll, I'll deal with it. I'll go say hi. And I was like, frankly, I was very selfish about it. I was like, you know, maybe I can get him to like, you know, get me a, buy me a video game or some shit. Um, so, uh, now thinking back, um, yeah, it was, it was tough times all around, you know, life takes you on many journeys. And one of the journeys it's certainly taken me on is being a father now. And, you know, I, I have a 14 year old son at this point and, um, he lives with his mom.

46:40Shawn Ryan:And when I see him for brief periods of time, I have flashbacks to, you know, thinking about how my dad would try and interact with me and like try and like catch up and like, you know, make a best effort pass, you know, being involved. And I would just be like, I don't care. I'm like, let's just get this over with and like move on with our lives. seeing it from the other side, you know, many, many years later has been, has been a very interesting experience for me. But that, that was, do you feel that? Do I feel, is your son like that to you? He's a, he's a very cerebral teenager. He, he really loves math and science and just thinking through things very logically.

47:32Shawn Ryan:And so sometimes I feel it's tough building an emotional connection with him. Some of the best memories I have of my now 14-year-old son are, after I left the military, I was working in the DC area and I would commute to downtown DC. I would come back to the house and it would be like late at night and he would run around the corner and he would just be like, dad, and, uh, he'd be so happy to see me. And, um, you know, I have, I have regrets not spending more time with him, uh, and just like capturing those moments in my mind, um, because they go fast. Uh, and I was focused on work, you know, I was focused on, you know, making something of myself after leaving the military.

48:25Shawn Ryan:You know, it's all the the same shit that my dad was trying to deal with when, when he lost his identity and he was trying to rebuild himself and he was feeling the stress. And because of that, we took a back seat and, and all of this. So I just see myself unconsciously repeating the mistakes of, of the past, you know, so. I fucking do that too.

48:46Nik Seetharaman:Yeah. Yeah. And I think about it all the fucking time. Yeah. How do you deal with it? It's tough.

49:01You know, I tell myself, you know, when I look at my family,

49:11Nik Seetharaman:I just look and see how their demeanor is. You know, do I have a happy family? and i figure if i have a happy family things must be going good yeah but then hearing that i mean and my my son's showing a lot more interest in me right now i'm trying like really fucking hard to set my businesses up so i don't have to be in them all the fucking time yeah you know and it's it's it's in it in in and i want to be in them all the fucking time because it's my you know this is the most interesting thing yeah to me but also so is fatherhood yeah and then it's it's that but i can see it now you know he's four going on five and i can really see the fucking wheels spinning in his head and i know i know exactly what you're saying when they run around the corner they're all excited that you're home and you got one more fucking phone call that you have to fucking do and you got it you know what i mean you gotta open this stupid laptop because you know you gotta look at the fucking phone and they see you looking at the phone or you got the meta glasses now and you're fucking talking to themselves and talking to yourself and it just looks like you're talking i just i fucking hate it man yeah it's i know it crushes your

50:36Shawn Ryan:fucking soul yeah my my girlfriend and i were talking about this the other day um so we have a two-month-old and um you know she was looking at her phone like some customer email had come in right and she's like trying to deal with it and she looks over and our son is just like looking at her and she said i've never felt so guilty in my life because you know he's like looking at you he thinks you're the whole universe and the whole universe has its attention looking elsewhere. So it's a dichotomy that I think every father who's a professional has had to contend with. I don't have all the answers.

51:17Shawn Ryan:All I know is at the very least, these are things that are now on the forefront of my mind, whereas in the past, they might not have been. In the past, I might have just brushed over them. And, you know, for example, when I was active duty, like my sole focus when I was deployed, when I was active duty was fucking being deployed and getting the job done. And it sounds terrible to say now, but I don't know, immature prefrontal cortex, I suppose.

51:51Nik Seetharaman:I think, you know, I think about, i mean he has to show interest but you know and then i i travel not a lot but a decent amount for work and um a couple weeks ago we were supposed to be in europe for a couple of big interviews and then that got canceled because this fucking ice storm and i could like i tell him now you know when i'm leaving when i'm i used to just tell him the day i'm leaving he's not going to give a shit either way whatever now he's like what do you mean you're leaving i'm coming you know and it's like well you're not ready for that so so i i now i'm trying to encourage him or motivate him to mature it a little bit yeah so that he can come with me on business trips because he's going to grow up different you know than than how i grew up i wasn't exposed to business and the kind of stuff that i'm not even close and it's with you too i mean your career has just been you know and so he's going to be exposed to things that you were never exposed to and and he's going to have to learn how to fucking deal with things like like relationships with people and you know importantly in higher places and just all kinds of shit that you deal with in business.

53:18And so, you know, and how do you tell them no?

53:23Nik Seetharaman:You know, so what I did is I told him if he wants to go with me that he has to learn a set of responsibilities. And if he learns those responsibilities, then I'll give him a couple of more responsibilities that he can work on. And then if he does those, then I'll give him some more. And I tell him, you know, everybody that works here is the absolute fucking best at what they do. Nobody's going to wipe your ass for you. Nobody's going to help you get dressed. Nobody's going to help you brush your teeth. Nobody's going to help you take a shower. Nobody's going to dry you off. so you have to be able to put your socks your pants your underwear your shirt comb your hair brush your teeth tie your shoes and then when you can do all that then we'll move on to the next set of things yeah you learn how to do those and then you can come on a trip with me and uh he asked me in the moment i had to think about it because i was like shit if i tell him something he's just gonna go fucking do it and then and then i'll come but you know nobody has the time to take care of you yeah you have to learn to take care of yourself and then you can come and um so i think i don't know it's helped my you know what i mean guilt yeah i've given you something that you can do to get yourself ready to be able to come spend time with me when i'm trying to provide for the family yeah i mean i think it's one of the most important things that

54:49Shawn Ryan:we can think about as a human is how to figure out in the midst of all this chaos that we're in right now. And we talked about all the chaos that we're in right now. You talk about it with all your guests all day, every day, all of this upheaval, all of these changing times and so on. I think figuring this shit out that we're talking about right here is one of the most important things that we can do as men, I suppose.

55:18Shawn Ryan:Is it like, maybe it's not figuring out what the best way to run the company is or like satisfying the customer 100 % of the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's figuring out how to balance that with this little kid who's looking at you like you're his whole fucking world. Yeah. And these are, you know, these are things that my dad probably realized too late. And when I moved in with him, he didn't, I think, know how to process all of this stuff that we're talking about and he sort of let the alcoholism get to him and that resulted in three of the most torturous years i think of my life uh where basically every single day was um you know physical abuse getting getting beat getting the belt and so on you know my dad he grew up in a, in a boarding school in India and you know, that, that is a gladiator academy.

56:23Shawn Ryan:Yeah. Yeah. Um, and so he, he just took what he knows and tried to apply it to me and in his mind, you know, I had, I had him in raise the way he wanted me to be raised. So he's like, all right, we're going to fix this right now. And that was his way of fixing it. Um, so, you know, all pretty Pretty much all high school was dealing with that shit.

56:50Shawn Ryan:And yeah, the abuse was constant, you know, to the point where I would hear the keys jingle in the door and it would just cause like a fear response in my brain. To this day, I hear keys jingling at the door and like something triggers in my brain, like some kind of ancient trauma response or something. Um, so all of it came to a head right around my senior year of high school. Um, you know, and I had always wanted to like go do something with, uh, the military. So I was looking at West Point. I was looking at, um, the Air Force Academy, um, and, uh, senior year of high school. He, uh, so one night I, I come back home and he, you know, discovers that I hadn't turned in some fucking homework or some shit at, at school.

57:50And, um, and I know he's just gonna lay it,

57:54Shawn Ryan:lay it on, you know? And I, I endured some terrible beatings with him. And so I knew what was coming. And I was like, something snapped in my brain. I was like, you know what? I'm just not going to deal with this shit anymore. And I turned around. So I walked to the door. He opens the door. He, you know, starts going off and he's like, get the fuck in here. Like, you know, you know what this is about. I'm like, I'm not going to deal with this anymore. Turn around, walked away. and basically I ran away from home essentially and I had a friend at the time take me in I basically went to a payphone down the street I was like hey you come pick me up like this is what's going on and he's like dude what are you gonna do I was like well can you guys take me in and he was like that's a big ass dude you know let me go talk to my dad and much credit to them You know, they took in some random fucking kid that they didn't know, just took me at face value regarding what my situation was.

59:05Shawn Ryan:And I lived with them for a few months. And that set my stabilizers essentially into a very chaotic pattern. Like I was getting into all kinds of bullshit. So, you know, I, we were doing, you know, petty crime stuff. Um, you know, this is Southern California in 2001, 2002. It's like, you know, fast and furious to just come out. Everyone's into their fucking rice rockets or street racing. And there's all these like clicks around that scene. And so we're participating in all that. we we had gotten into some gambling debts uh so we were like driving out to the Indian casinos out east just getting in dumb trouble all the time um you know at one one point I found myself uh driving his my friend's car back he wanted to stay behind at the casino he like hitches a ride with some rando dudes and uh you know those dudes are like coked up in the front of their vehicle you're just doing lines of coke and shit and he shows up and he was like dude what are we doing like what are we like we're just circling a drain here i was like we are circling a drink um and so i had to kind of part ways and figure out you know what i'm going to do with myself so you still in high school this is still in high school yeah holy senior year of high school um you know in the background 9-11 had happened.

1:00:37Shawn Ryan:Uh, and that had this, you know, it didn't affect me right away. Um, you know, Southern California at the time was pretty far removed from the events in New York. And so, you know, people were processing it and, um, but it wasn't like, you know, it wasn't like people processed it on the East coast. It was, I think it was a lot more personal for everybody in, in the New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania area on the East coast for everyone. But Southern California, it was like, man, that was some wild shit that just went down in New York. What the fuck is going on? But it somehow seeped into my subconscious.

1:01:14Shawn Ryan:And I was like, is there a way that I can contribute to figuring out a solution to the fucking thing that just happened here? But it had to bake for a bit longer. Um, so I, I went through this circling the drain phase and, um, actually the last time I saw my dad was, um, Oh, so while I was living with my friend and essentially homeless, uh, he kept coming around and basically begging to see me. Like he would beg my friend's parents, like, Hey, can you just put me in front of Nick, uh, for a few minutes? You know, let me talk to him let me explain what's going on like apologize all this stuff I was like I don't even want to talk to him I don't want to see him I want to talk to him I just want nothing to do with him and um the last time I saw him so I only saw him once after I ran away and it was because I had gotten rolled up in like Gardena California or some shit because I was I took my friend's car for a joyride out in town I didn't have a driver's license cops pulled me over they're like fuck you doing?

1:02:27I was like, you know, I lied to him.

1:02:31Shawn Ryan:I was like, yeah, of course I have a license. And that was fucking stupid. So like they quickly figured out that wasn't the case, slapped the cuffs on me, took me to the station, called my friend's family because the car was registered to them. Um, and so, uh, at that point, my friend's dad calls up my dad. He's like, Hey, you gotta come take your kid to the courthouse. Cause like, you know, they're gonna, you know, whatever, or do whatever they're gonna do. So my dad comes, he picks me up, we go to the courthouse. They like give me a fine or ticket or some shit. And I don't say a word, like we're just sitting in the car.

1:03:06Shawn Ryan:I don't say a word to my dad. He drops me off at school that day. And that was the last time I ever saw him. So he moved to the East Coast after that. He dropped you off at school and then that was it. That was it. That was it. Did you say goodbye? I never saw him again. We didn't say a word. Holy shit. I didn't say a word to him. He didn't say a word to me. I just got out, went to school. um after that i uh i moved in with my aunt who lived in ohio and i was getting ready to join the military i was like all right we're gonna do this thing um i was like all right who's who's recruiting um so because i had to part ways from the whole southern california scene i was like i gotta get the fuck out of here otherwise you know i'm gonna end up in a gang or some shit so um moved, go to Ohio and, um, I have fond memories of, of my aunt's place in Ohio.

1:04:08Shawn Ryan:So this is my mom's sister. Um, you know, they've always been very loving to me. She was the first person that, that saw me after I was born in the hospital. Um, they've always been very caring and loving for me. So they were like, just come over here. We'll take you in, do whatever you want. Like you want to get a job, you know, go to community college or whatever. You can go ahead and do that. Like let's just get you stable and settled after all the shit that you've been through um so i go over there i start working in a paper factory like you know the dunder mifflin warehouse like that show the office basically that i was like just hauling paper boxes around and like you know putting them in in shipping containers and whatnot um and the whole time i'm looking at i'm looking at the because 2002, right?

1:04:55Shawn Ryan:The fucking classifieds page in the paper. And I'm keeping my eye on the recruiting bonuses that all the various services are putting out, right? And they're publishing them in the paper. And so the Air Force came out one day with like this$18 ,000 recruiting bonus. And I'm talking to the Army Marines too. And they all had wait lists because it's post 9-11. Everyone's trying to join up. 18K sounds pretty cool to a dude that works in a fucking paper factory. so I call up the air force recruiter and I'm like hey when can you get me in what's an 18k uh 18 000 recruiting oh okay yeah yeah okay my bad yeah um I was like yeah it sounds pretty good I mean I didn't know any shit about like taxes and like all of that um so I go I go to the recruiting office and um yeah I enlist and then I ship you out in in a few months so October 2002 shipped out to basic training in Lackon Air Force Base, Texas.

1:05:58Shawn Ryan:And that for the first time, I felt like, you know, I was setting out on my own personal adventure that was just for me. And it wasn't tied to like anything that my family wanted me to do or my dad wanted me to do or like any shit. Like I felt out like I was finally setting out on my own. I think a lot of guys that enlist in the military feel that way when they finally, you know, depart for basic.

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1:08:22Nik Seetharaman:so were you in communication with your mom yeah after india the whole time with where i was living

1:08:29Shawn Ryan:with my dad uh my mom never reached out to me which i found like just weird why not i don't know i haven't asked her about it um you know i have a really good relationship with her now um and i i know for a fact that she just has a lot of regret about all this stuff

1:08:53Shawn Ryan:I know her personality and she wouldn't have reached out because she's still in like, I'm going to try and fix this mode, like this set of events that I threw into motion. I'm going to try and like reel it back. I'm going to try and fix it. I'm going to try and like get that job. I'm going to try and like get my kids back here. And when she's in that mode of like, I just need to like set my sights on this and like get it across the line.

1:09:19Nik Seetharaman:She wanted to build so that you guys could have a comfortable life. Yeah, exactly.

1:09:23Shawn Ryan:And maybe never, maybe never got it built. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's exactly right. By the time she did, it was too late. You know, I was, I was growing up and I left. And you know, when I think about it as a parent now, you know, that was probably devastating for her. You know, she sends us away and she thinks she's going to like make it happen in a, in land a good job, get us, get us in a stable situation. And then, you know, her, her kids are grown up and unrecognizable by the time she, she makes it happen. Um, so she, she came and saw me off, uh, at one point before I left for basic. Um, so my aunt, you know, threw me a little, uh, little going away thing.

1:10:03There was like, yeah, this was right outside Wright Patterson

1:10:06Shawn Ryan:Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio is where they lived. And, um, so there was a bunch of retired air force people there they're like all giving me advice and shit they're like you know 20 years is gonna go by like that and i'm like yeah whatever old man like it's fucking turn um and my mom shows up and um she's just confused she's like what are you doing like what why are you doing this i mean honestly i don't know like it's just you just fucking feel it calling to you you know like it's just a thing you got to do and i went and did it as an Indian kid, you know, in, in the early 2000s, especially an immigrant kid, it's possibly like the most judgment inducing thing you could do.

1:10:51Shawn Ryan:Right. Cause all, all these people are going to fancy schools and getting their degrees in medicine and all this stuff. And actually I had one lady come up to me, one of my aunt's friends, and she was like, you're enlisting in the military. She was like, only criminals do that. And I was like, well, I don't think that's true. You, that's kind of a stupid comment to make. Hilariously, after having spent much time at SOCOM, it's kind of funny because it's like, it's a fine fucking line between being a good, like, you know, special operator and being a criminal, you know? Um, yeah. So I airborne cryptologic linguist.

1:11:35Shawn Ryan:I, uh, I enlisted, um, as a cryptologic linguist. I didn't know what the fuck that meant. They were like, you get to go learn a language. You could learn Arabic. And I think they have you do some James Bond shit. I was like, fuck yeah, dude. James Bond, I'm all about it. Let's go. Just blowing smoke on my ass, dude. Those guys had no fucking idea what that career field entailed. Um, but they, they got me pretty good. Uh, I, I signed up, went to basic and that was whatever really for me, the, the thing that sort of set the tone for like my active duty time was, um, after basic, we, um, we shipped out for, uh, SEER school.

1:12:25Shawn Ryan:so sear level c uh which the air force puts all of its high risk aviators through um in spokane washington so no shit you went there right after boot camp yeah dude it was pretty fucking crazy is that the tier one school uh your one it's uh it's it's the level c sear i don't know what the yeah that's the highest one right yeah it's the highest one yeah that's yeah yeah holy shit yeah so i'm 18 years old force boot camp and then and then you shipping out to fucking seer school um anyway and to an indian kid from fucking the suburbs of jersey and east la like you know survival school at the time i don't know how they do it now but back then in in 2002 December, 2002, it was, you did five days or whatever out in the field.

1:13:16Shawn Ryan:And then you, you know, you do some other shit after that, which we'll get into here in a second, but they had just had a giant snow storm out in the mountains of, uh, the Conixu national forest where they, where they do all the field portions. So like Eastern Washington, Idaho panhandle area. And dude, the fucking snow was I had never seen anything like it, man. Like I, you know, I'd never seen snow like that in my life. Um, and so then you're out there, you got a fucking pack on your snowshoes, like these Vietnam era snowshoes, your fucking Vietnam era Alice pack. You got shit in there. You're like trudging up these mountains.

1:13:56Shawn Ryan:I had never walked up a fucking mountain before. Right. But, and now here, here we are, you're like post you're postholing, even with the fucking snowshoes on the straps on the goddamn snowshoes come off. So you like, you lean over and you're trying to like unfuck the straps and then your fucking Alice pack comes over and hits, clocks you in the back of the head. And you're like, just a fucking mess. And if you don't have that shit tied down, you know, it goes fucking garage sale all over the place. Now you're holding everybody up. So, you know, you're just a clusterfuck. Um, it was, it was an interesting experience for 18 year old Nick.

1:14:31Shawn Ryan:I hated it for the first couple of days. I really hated it. I was like, what the did I get myself into here? And then about 48 hours in, something changed. And so we were on a movement through the mountains and we had just hunted our game and they had taught you how to skin the fucking thing and cook it and eat it and all that shit. And then they set you off on on your own kind of navigation rally points. And so, you know, you pair up and then you go, you're off, you know, moving through the mountains. And so we're moving for like 12 hours or whatever, you know, going through our navigation points.

1:15:11Shawn Ryan:And we, the rally point that they have everyone end up at is in this kind of flat area with mountains all around. And they've got like a, like a little tent stood up and, you know, we kind of clear the tree line at like fucking nine, nine in the evening. And we show up to the, the rally point tent and they've got like, you know, hot broth for you and all that shit. Um, and they're like, all right, get your sleeping bag set up underneath here. And it's like an open tent, right? It's not like, you know, some comfortable situation, just literally just a canvas, um, on some sticks. So we set up our sleeping bags.

1:15:53Shawn Ryan:It starts snowing. So I'm sitting there eating my fucking peach MRE fucking thing. And something just clicked in my mind, dude. I'm sitting there and I walk out of the tent. I'm eating my fucking MREs and the snow is falling silently. And I can kind of like see in the moonlight, the mountains around me and everything's just peaceful and still and quiet. And something just clicked in my brain. I was like, this is an amazing moment for me. And like the sense of peaceful stillness I had in that moment, I continue to chase to this day. Sometimes like when I go on mountaineering trips and, you know, you're on the top of a summit and, you know, it's after all the difficult parts of the climb are over and you're sitting there and And you're like, you're just wishing for that moment to come back, right?

1:16:51Shawn Ryan:You're chasing it, but it never does. You know, you almost get there sometimes and it's just, it's an elusive moving target. So to this day, you know, that, that feeling I continue to chase, but that, that was, that was cool. It was a special moment for me. I finally, my soul finally felt like some semblance of peace after all the, the shit that I had endured with my dad and all the moving around and all the family drama and all of it. And then the second thing that happened was when they put you in the box, you know, you're in the box for a few days. You know this very well. I don't. I never did, sir.

1:17:32Shawn Ryan:Oh, no shit? Mm-mm. So, you know, I want to make sure I stay clean when I talk about some of this stuff. when you wrap up the field phase, they're kind of assholes and they trick you. They're like, we're going to have some hot pizza waiting for you at this fucking rally point. And well, suffice to say, there's no goddamn pizza at the rally point. And you better buckle in for several more days of bullshit. And then you get put in the box. And one interesting thing that happened in the box is, um, you know, they're allowed to, you know, that's one of the few schools in the military that, you know, can get physical with you in ways that other schools can't.

1:18:18Shawn Ryan:Right. So one thing that was happening in the box was, uh, I was starting to have these trauma responses to the physicality of it, you know, cause I, I wasn't able to do anything. You're helpless and, uh, you know, they're kind of doing their thing and, uh, they had to call pause in the middle of like one of sessions and um they had they were like you know they do it in their own little way where like you're at by that point you're delirious you're like am i still like in the military and like in a training program or like did i get teleported to some like alternate timeline where like i'm actually you know in this situation so they called pause they brought the psych in the psych was like yo, what's going on, dude?

1:19:07Shawn Ryan:And I was like, what do you mean? And he was like, we're seeing trauma response from you. Uh, and he described, you know, what they're seeing. They look for visual cues. Like my fists were balling up and like, I was, you know, I was like shifting position. I was, I had all the physical cues that, you know, I was, I was going to get physical back to them. And usually based on their experience, it's because of some preexisting trauma in, in the student. So he was like, what's going on? Tell me about your childhood abuse. Did you experience any of that? I was like, yep. Lots of physical abuse. Here's how it went down.

1:19:40Shawn Ryan:He was like, all right. Um, here's what we saw. And you know, if you don't want to continue on with this training, you tell me and we'll pull you out. I was like, there's no fucking way I'm leaving this training. and he's like, okay, well then I need you to do some mental exercises to like work yourself out here. Cause we're not going to change how we're doing shit here for you. So he like gave me some exercises to do, um, you know, and from his perspective, it's not any, anything he hadn't seen before. Right. Like plenty of people probably come through there with physical trauma and like childhood abuse shit.

1:20:21Shawn Ryan:Um, so then, you know, we're in, we're in the box and doing all that shit for, you know, as long as they have you do it. And the, the defining moment, I think for me, like the, the moment that made me feel like I had really become like I had really been initiated into something that was greater than myself was, um, the very end of seer. Uh, I'm not going to ruin it for anybody, but there's a moment at the end where they put you through this ritual and, um, and when they do it, it's a phenomenal moment for, for people. And, um, and for me, this Indian kid who had always looked up to the U S military and like always wanted to be a part of it.

1:21:15Shawn Ryan:When that moment happened for me without ruining exactly what it is, I w I would have died for the fucking stars and stripes at, at that moment in time. I felt like I had been initiated into this brotherhood that was much greater than myself. And I felt like I was part of the machine you know it sounds bad it's like oh you're part of a machine like no i get it i know i i get it um but that that that's the moment i felt like i'd finally transcended like anybody who's been through a tough program like that gets it yeah um yeah i'm sure securing hall week was like very similar experience for you um but that's when i felt like i'd finally transcended all this childhood baggage that I had, you know, just been trailing with me over the years.

1:22:14Shawn Ryan:You felt a sense of pride for the first time. Yeah. Yeah. I felt like I had some - And it was all you. Yeah, it was all me. I had finally like managed to have agency over my own destiny and the way that my life was shaping up to be that in that particular moment.

1:22:38um let me know if you want a break dude you want to take a break no no i'm good to go where do we

1:22:43Nik Seetharaman:go from here um so so you get done with sear yeah get done with sear you haven't even learned well i mean fucking job yet yeah so to be sent to sear before everything else was abnormal at the

1:23:01Shawn Ryan:time. There was only like a few of us that, that like the schedules lined up for. Um, so we, the few of us who did go to Sear graduated, we go to Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. And I was just, I was smitten, dude. Like we land in Monterey, the fucking ocean's right there. You know, you see DLI up on the Hill. And I had only read about this place in Tom Clancy novels, you know, when I was a kid, I was like, I cannot believe I'm here. I like, I get to sit here and fucking learn Arabic. And, um, and maybe if I learn it good enough, I can take the fucking fight back to the dudes who, you know, did that thing to us that day in September of 2001.

1:23:44Shawn Ryan:And, uh, so we show up to the, the air force training squadron at DLI and we feel like fucking Billy bad-asses, right? Because we had just graduated SEER level C. Um, we just, you know we're in civilian clothes because the seer instructors were like where are you going defense language i don't fucking know what that is just flying civilian clothes like whatever like get out of here um so we show up we stand outside the the squadron and we're trying to figure out like what to do and we're in our civilian clothes we have all our like shit all of our sea bags all that shit and one of the training sergeants from inside the building like looks out the window and you see him double take he's like what the fuck is this fucking cast of characters in civilian clothes doing here and you see him like pop out come outside and he he walks out to us and he's like what are you doing here what are you doing and i was you know i felt like fucking billy bad i was like you just graduated survival school he's like i don't give a fuck what you just graduated he's like when you report into this squadron you report in in a fuck in the fucking uniform of the day and you go to the fucking uh you go to the senior sergeant's uh office and uh you report in like you're supposed to you got fucking 10 minutes to get your shit out of your bags go change into proper uniforms and be standing at attention outside the day room inside the squadron i was like oh god okay welcome back to the real fucking air force i guess so we go change into our uniforms we go report in and um and then we we get essentially get put into purgatory waiting for our language language class to start um and you know as as in everything else in the military it's just like busy work to you know basically tied people over until, um, their, their training program starts.

1:25:42Shawn Ryan:So I got put on, uh, this, you know, post grounds duty, which is essentially like, you know, you're cleaning up the fucking base and shit. Um, and the crew that I was working with, you know, you, you go around the base, you're like, you know, picking up rocks, you're like raking leaves, all of this. It's a very humbling thing to do after you felt like, you know, you had just graduated from a very serious training program, uh, at survival school. And one of the dudes, actually, I met him many years later, um, down range and the situation in which I met him, he had, he had joined like an interagency partner at the time.

1:26:18Shawn Ryan:And I was still active duty. And so we're like, yo, what are you doing here? And we, we, we weren't in a situation, a situation to say much more to each other because of the circumstances, but he had worked the wheelbarrow at DLI on, as part of the post grounds crew. And I had been working like the rakes and shit. So we see each other downrange in this fucking shitty situation. And I'm like, wheelbarrow. He's like rake. I'm like, yeah, what's up, man. Good to see you. What the fuck are you doing out here? Um, so then, then we start, you know, 18 months of, of Arabic class, uh, which was interesting because, you know, they teach you the language from the ground up.

1:27:07Shawn Ryan:And we had a cast of characters in those classes. Like we had dudes that grew up in like inner city, you know, Shreveport, Louisiana, like, you know, that were in gangs in LA, you know, just a fucking cast of characters, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force. And we were just all in the same class together. So from very early days, I got exposed to the other services and I really liked being around the other services. Like it was just to see their culture and how they did things. I just, I liked it a lot. Like, you know, I'd talk to Marines about, you know, how they would run their training squadrons.

1:27:40Shawn Ryan:I would talk to the army guys and just like learn about different cultures. It felt like I was immersed in like, you know, some international culture festival or whatever. And I was just learning about all the different ways that these people did their stuff. And there was one dude, in the class, uh, his name was, um, I'm going to say his name, uh, John Kunze, cause he had such an impact on me. And he was, uh, he came from Ranger regiment, like first or third Ranger battalion. And he was passing through DLI on his way to being a SADE. So SADE is special operations team alpha. And it's basically the signals intelligence, um, detachment of a special forces ODA essentially.

1:28:24Shawn Ryan:So they were going to teach him Arabic, you know, take him out of Ranger regiment and he was going to go to a special forces group. And like, to me as a young impressionable, like airman first class, that dude was like the pinnacle of, you know, what a professional military dude should be. His fucking uniform was always squared away. He was always in the gym working out. He always treated everybody with respect, but you could tell there was this like edge and hardness about him that, you know, he always carried with him and he wasn't going to let people fuck with him. And, uh, and to me, it was like a very clear differentiator between, all right, this is, this is the type of dude that is a hundred percent focused on the mission and his people, but it very easily could have gone the other way where, and he was our class leader and it very easily could have gone the other way where it could have been a dude that was all about his own career and checking the fucking, you know, uh, performance report bullets and all that shit.

1:29:27Shawn Ryan:So I'm fortunate I had John to kind of be a person that I could look up to and emulate at the time. Like, you know, I didn't know shit at the time. So like a dude coming from Ranger regiment was like, you know, I looked up to him, like he was, he was, you know, God. And right around class starting is when my dad passed away. And, um, so we, we had started, you know, our, we'd started class. We, uh, I'd come back to the dorm and I, by this point I had started trading some emails with my, with my dad. I sent him some emails. I was like, you know, you're probably wondering where I'm at and what I'm up to.

1:30:14Shawn Ryan:Here's what happened. Joined the Air Force. I just got done with survival school. They're putting me through this, you know, language school. I'm going to go be an aviator, essentially, enlisted aviator. He was like, that's amazing. I think he stopped short of like saying, I'm proud of you. Cause I think he wanted to say that to my face. If I could look back and like give him the benefit of the doubt, I think he wanted to say that to my face. And he said, um, you know, it would be great to have you over Easter break. So like, you know, I'll get you a plane ticket. Why don't you come out? You know, he was living in Massachusetts by then.

1:30:54Shawn Ryan:Why don't you come out? I'll fly you out. Um, be great to see it. I was like, it'd be great to see you too. And two weeks before I was supposed to fly out to see him, I got a call from a detective from the local PD saying he had passed away of myocardial infarction, heart attack. You know, he'd been fighting heart disease his whole life, alcoholism, cigarettes, you know, all of it. And he hadn't reported in to some critical work meeting. and so they sent the cops to his house and he had been dead four days by the time they found him.

1:31:40Shawn Ryan:So I remember getting that phone call and it was like, you know, that was a traumatizing moment for me. I was just in shock. I was like, what the fuck? Like I was just supposed to go see him. his last email I pulled up his last email was like be great to see you and it was like tax time he's like make sure you do taxes so then I walked back to class because I got that phone call during lunch break I walked back to class and I'm just like shell-shocked and I don't know what to do so I go to I walk in and John John Coons your class leader and Ranger guy he's like dude what the fuck is going on i was like i just got a phone call my dad just passed away and he was like he drops everything he like gets up he's like follow me he walks me back to the air force training squadron across the street and you know john's he's a big fucking dude right big just fucking good old boy ranger and i i remember him barreling through the fucking air force training squadron hallway just like basically like shoving people out of the way like trying to get me to the uh the senior dude and he walks me into the senior dude's office uh like the training sergeant or whatever and he's like airman see the raman's father just passed away um what do we need to do to get him home.

1:33:12And man, it was a small thing, but like to me, for him to do that, like it was the most like leadership thing I had seen in my life to that point, right?

1:33:28Shawn Ryan:It was like to take the time to walk me across the street and figure out who the fuck the responsible individual was to coordinate the flight logistics back home and all that shit. it meant a lot to me. And so we figured out all that shit and I flew home. I, you know, helped cremate my dad. And then, and then we just, we carried on, you know, went through language school for the next 18 months. And then finally got to my first duty station where, uh, you know, we had talked about it earlier in, in this room where, uh, I was a crew member on RC-135 rivet joints, essentially. So the RC-135 is, uh, essentially a Cold War era signals intelligence platform.

1:34:24Shawn Ryan:And it kind of looks like on the inside, it looks like a fucking submarine, right? You got like display panels, every, you got like, you got display panels in of you you got display panels uh on top of you um just just all kinds of going on and inside that aircraft and it's got like 30 people as a crew uh inside that thing um somewhere in there you know i you go through a thing where like you get your aviator wings and um you know that to me was was hold on let's back up for a minute yeah

1:34:58Nik Seetharaman:But you just breezed over your dad's death. Yeah. I mean, you haven't seen him since... You hadn't seen him in how long? You hadn't seen him in a couple... At least a year.

1:35:11Shawn Ryan:Yeah, I hadn't seen him in a year since he dropped me off at school that day. Yeah. And we had only traded, like, two emails back and forth. That's it? That's it. And, you know, one thing that kills me is I try and keep this lesson in mind to this day. Um, I had written a handwritten letter to him and I forget what I put in there, but it was like a two, three page long letter. Uh, and I had put, I'd enclosed a picture of myself in dress blues. Um, and, uh, I was, you know, I had put it in the mail. I had mailed it out to him. this is this is like like a month before he passed away um and then it got fucking sent back because i got like the postage wrong or some shit by like eight cents or whatever like some stupid amount so the postal service sent it back and i get it i'm like ah fuck you know i got other shit going on you know i get training and class and all that shit so i'm like i'll deal with this later never dealt with it and uh and i never got the fucking letter to him so that that killed me to for a long time it kills me to this day you know who knows maybe if he got that fucking letter like he would have realized you know i was good i was in a good place i was on a good trajectory and And maybe taking away that little stress from him about what my situation was wouldn't have sent him over the edge.

1:36:56Shawn Ryan:I don't know. It sounds like he knew. He already knew.

1:37:05Yeah.

1:37:06Shawn Ryan:I would like to think so.

1:37:09Nik Seetharaman:I mean, you said you thought he was waiting to tell you he was proud of you to do it in person. Yeah.

1:37:16Shawn Ryan:yeah, I would like to think so. I wish I had gotten that fucking letter out though. You know? So now, you know, when I have shit to do, like sometimes I get this feeling like, you know, you need to send, I need to send my mom like a text or something. I need to send my grandma like a picture of like my kid. And like, I don't wait to do it. I just, I drop what I'm doing and I try and do it like right there. Cause I don't want that kind of shit to happen again. Do you still have the letter? No, I don't have the letter. I don't know what happened to it. I just got lost in the sauce over the years.

1:37:54Shawn Ryan:But that, you know, my dad's death, it's a trauma I'm still working through today. You know, we talked about Tom Satterley being on the show, and I was watching that episode. And I was telling you this earlier, listening to Tom talk about, you know,

1:38:17Shawn Ryan:Mogadishu, that dude was troops are a major at the unit. And he's been through, ever since October 3rd, 1993, he's probably been through missions that were 10 times more complicated, where all kinds of other shit had gone down. But that one mission seemed to have embedded some kind of subconscious trauma that just unfurled over time. That's where he lives. For him, that's where he lives. And I don't know what it is about the human psyche, but when you drop a trauma grenade like that and you let it slow burn, I guess that's how it works. It just sits somewhere in there and it just slow burns over time, over many, many, many years.

1:39:03And so you can sit there and you can say, I'm good.

1:39:09Shawn Ryan:You know, I've dealt with this. I'm good. Let's move the fuck on. You really don't move the fuck on. Many years later.

1:39:21Nik Seetharaman:What would you say to your dad right now?

1:39:39Shawn Ryan:I think I would say, I think I proved you wrong. I think all that shit that you used to say about how I would end up being a fuck up somewhere just didn't pan out. Like, I've had a pretty good run. And I've got two sons and a stepdaughter that I picked up along the way. And they're pretty amazing.

1:40:21Shawn Ryan:I think I would also say, I wish you had gone about things differently. I wish you had found a different way to fight your demons. You know, over the years, I've started to build some empathy for him. And he was just dealing with all the shit that we were talking about earlier, loss of identity, figuring out how to build a connection with his son that he hadn't seen in a while. And, you know, he only has a certain set of tools that he has from his upbringing and all that shit to deal with those problems. And when you run out of those tools and they aren't working, you just lash out. You go to the bottle, you go to the cigarettes, you let the anger get a hold of you.

1:41:09Shawn Ryan:And that's what he did. Those are the two things, I would say.

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1:42:17Nik Seetharaman:If you're serious about improving your sleep, Helix is the brand to check out. If you're serious about optimizing your life, you have to be serious about your sleep. Right now, Helix is running a limited time offer, and they're giving my listeners an exclusive deal. Don't miss this. Go to helixsleep.com slash SRS for 27 % off site-wide. That's helixsleep.com slash SRS for 27 % off site-wide. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. Man, I just want to ask. Yeah. I mean, I'm really hesitant to do this because I don't like interjecting my own shit, but there's a handful of parallels that we have, you know, grown up.

1:43:08Nik Seetharaman:I didn't grow up in extreme poverty and it wasn't nearly as abusive as what it sounds like yours was, but I got the belt. i got the fist i got the hand i got the foot i fucking got it all yep and um and i also got the you're a piece of shit i'm not paying for your school i'm not doing this i'm not doing that and my brother and sister were always you know younger brother and sister were always they were good and uh you know but at the end i think that fucking motivated me well i don't think it motivated me. I know it fucking motivated me. And so, you know, do you think maybe some of that stuff that your dad dished out to you may have been a gift in the long run?

1:43:59Shawn Ryan:Dude, it lit a fucking fire inside me that burns to this day.

1:44:05Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, me too.

1:44:11Shawn Ryan:Double-edged sword. Yeah, man. Because who's to say how it would have turned out if I had a perfect home life and childhood and all that shit? Or you, you know?

1:44:24Nik Seetharaman:Could have been a gangbanger in Southern California.

1:44:28Shawn Ryan:Yeah.

1:44:31Nik Seetharaman:It's fucking wild thinking about that shit, isn't it? Yeah. Because if you didn't have the drive to make your dad proud and prove him wrong, you probably wouldn't be sitting here.

1:44:42Shawn Ryan:dude and there's so many guys that have similar stories you know like i was watching um you know j uh s sas guy yeah um you know he talks about the moment on the beach with his dad where he's like you're never gonna be a fucking row marine you know and that that fucking lit the fuse you know yeah probably similar moment for you something lit the fuse and for me it was i don't know if it was any particular moment, but it was definitely his death was like, I didn't get to show him in life what I could do. So I'm going to fucking show him in death and maybe he will be up there looking down and see.

1:45:34Shawn Ryan:I was climbing Mount Rainier many years ago with some buddies and we were going up a particularly steep route and I was pretty gassed by the time we got, you know, high up and we were near the summit and, but we still had like 45 minutes or so to go. It was just like fucking trudging through the glacier gas. And, you know, cause I was, I was in a CrossFit at the time. Like my endurance work wasn't great. And I was like, I don't know if I can fucking do this, man. And so I was, you know, I was probably a couple minutes away from calling out to the rest of the guys on the rope team and being like, I can't breathe.

1:46:23Shawn Ryan:Like we might need to fucking go down. And I remember feeling that. And then I remember feeling,

1:46:41Shawn Ryan:I told myself not to do this. It's all good, man. I remember feeling my dad's arm on my back. Holy shit.

1:46:57Shawn Ryan:going like this across my mountaineering pack and helping me up the fucking last 45 minutes up out right here.

1:47:11Shawn Ryan:That's when I knew, like, yeah, he is fucking up there. And he's watching everything I do. So, you know, I try and live up to the, I guess, burden of being, not being what he wanted me to be, but like, I just want to be a good person, you know, someone, someone that's worthy of him being proud of. Certainly I haven't fucking gotten it right all the time. But I try. Yeah.

1:47:53Nik Seetharaman:That's fucking awesome, dude.

1:47:57Shawn Ryan:Yeah, that was the first time I remember thinking, oh shit, like there's something else. There's something else and they can reach out and touch us if they want. And you could say, you know, this goes back to our previous conversation. You could say, oh, it's just some fucking neurons in your brain like that, you know, simulated, that gave you the feeling that you wanted. you wanted to feel your dad helping you up the top of mount rainier

1:48:31Shawn Ryan:maybe i don't i don't think that's true though i don't either

1:48:37Nik Seetharaman:i've had way too many things like that happen to me to think that that's just some bullshit simulation or whatever no way man no way

1:48:51Shawn Ryan:there was um buddy of mine passed away a few years ago and uh he he was the type of dude that you talk to the guy and you just you felt like you've known him for years he's that kind of guy I had that kind of warmth about him. His name was Ethan Swyler.

1:49:18Shawn Ryan:And I saw him after I had left the military at a beach party at Fort Walton Beach, like right outside Herbler Field. And we were at a buddy's retirement and he hadn't seen me in a while, right? I'd been a civilian at this point. I was at Palantir. You know, I was jet setting around fucking living the tech bro. life, you know? So I had some, I wasn't as scruffy as I look today, basically. And, um, I had some like nice clothes on and shit. I had like some nice sunglasses on and he looks at me and he's like, well, look at you fucking Mr. Hollywood. And, uh, then we just, you know, we bullshitted and hung out.

1:50:01Shawn Ryan:And, um, a couple of years after that, I get the call, Hey, Ethan, and Ethan passed away. I go to his funeral in Salt Lake City. We put him in the ground in this beautiful cemetery at the base of the Wasatch Mountains outside of Salt Lake City. And I drive back to California, and I'm driving through Lake Tahoe, and I stop at a bar.

1:50:32Shawn Ryan:And there's no one in this bar. It's a fucking like Tuesday night or some shit. There's no cars outside. It's a fucking desolate bar in South Lake Tahoe. No one's there. I walk in. There's one bartender on the other side of the bar. And he's leaning over and he's like cleaning glasses. Zero other people in the bar. Just me, bartender. I walk in. He's cleaning his glasses. And then he stops. and he looks up and he looks up. He goes, hello, Mr. Hollywood. And he looks back down, keeps cleaning his glasses. Holy shit. And then he looks up at me who had just walked in the door and then he goes, hey, can I help you?

1:51:21And I'm like, what the fuck just happened here?

1:51:26Shawn Ryan:It was like someone took control of that dude's body for like five seconds. sent a message and then let go

1:51:41so yeah wild shit i had a guy read my fucking mind

1:51:47Nik Seetharaman:what do you how did that go down

1:51:53Nik Seetharaman:i was in sedona going through like a relief when you listen to the show at least somewhat you we talked about some of the topics that we covered you know breakfast and i mean it gets to me so especially like the with kids and uh long story short but uh i was just in a really bad place like a really bad place and um i was telling you about my best friend gabe up there at the the rounds from Red Wings. I've always felt like him around me, you know? And I can give you example after example after example of it. But anyways, basically, I had just done this big episode, and it was with Ryan Montgomery and told you about it.

1:52:51Nik Seetharaman:And I felt like we were like the only ones that gave a fuck. And there was a lot of other stuff going on. like you know gender identity and kids and like a lot of at that time and uh went on this hike and i felt i just felt like why do you give a why do you care like nobody else seems to give a why do you give a and uh it felt like i was like surrendering my soul to satan evil like like convincing myself like just let it go sean like who gives a eight-year-olds are getting their genitals cut off so the world is everybody else is for this why aren't you and um and i but it was like this internal battle in my head i walked through this gate and this gate guard like looks at me in the eyes and tells me everything i'm thinking like from front to back scared the shit out of me.

1:53:57And then that triggered a whole sequence of other events.

1:54:02Nik Seetharaman:And there were so many, it wasn't, and my wife saw it hell happen. And so I always kind of considered it like an angel. Like, talk to me, like, I know what's going on in your head. i'm going to tell you what's going on in your head and i'm going to tell you you don't need to worry about that that's not your problem which is what he said after he and uh in my another really good friend of mine had died uh who was a seal he lived here in franklin he's like my only like real friend here at the time and uh we had gotten close fast because he had a very successful business i'm successful business he doesn't need shit for me i don't need you know what i'm talking about you know no hey could you yeah any of that hey hadn't talked to you in 25 fucking years but hey how you doing it's like a mutual non-neediness yeah yeah just legitimate friends you know and um and uh his so me and my wife go back to this room we're having this chat and um i'm like i think that was god talking to me what the is going on there was this guy that looked identical to gabe at the resort small exclusive resort like guy was everywhere i was at if i was in town he was in town oh everywhere turns out this is the last night he winds up he's staying in the we're in these bungalows it's like a duplex he was on the other aside the whole fucking time so i walk back from getting my mind read by the gate guard i find out this dude that looks identical to gabe who's been around all fucking week everywhere same restaurant same hikes pool everything it winds up being the guy that's right across the way going go into my bungalow talking to katie my wife about this shit phone dings i'm like having a breakdown because i'm like this is fucking crazy like what the fuck somebody just read my brain what's happening we get done with the conversation i clean my myself up i look at the phone and uh it was his daughter who i'd never met who must have gone through his phone and got her got my number and said that she had just walked into her dad's gun room and basically that he had spoke to her and told her to reach out to me because I was his new best friend and I knew a side of him that nobody else knew and he wanted her to talk to me.

1:56:49Nik Seetharaman:All that shit happened in like five minutes. Yeah. Wild. For people who think that this reality that we inhabit

1:56:59Shawn Ryan:is completely material and all this that we're talking about is just a byproduct of random neurons firing in our head. It's a pretty sad way to look at the world. I mean, I don't know how you explain like what you just said.

1:57:19Nik Seetharaman:The gate guard reading your mind. Dude, I could go with so much more detail that makes it more real. Yeah. But I mean, and there's just so many fucking things that have happened. I can't even remember them all. I used to want to write them all down to like remind myself like, yeah, Sean, there's something more after this, you know? And, uh, but there's, there's just so many, I don't need to prove it to myself. Yeah.

1:57:42Shawn Ryan:Yeah. Same. I went through that inflection point too, you know, like something would happen and then I'd be like, well, I just need, I need one more piece of, of evidence that that shit is real. And then at a certain point, the shit started happening so often that you're like,

1:58:00Nik Seetharaman:okay i surrender yeah you just got to be open to it yeah just be paying attention yeah paying attention to everything but the you know what i mean but your fucking business or your your problems or you just have to be open yeah and it happens all the time all the time you know we talked about psychedelics at breakfast too i mean have you had any

1:58:26Shawn Ryan:have you found any answers you know i think i think there's a lot about the universe that we don't know um i've had buddies that have done psychedelics and every single time the report back from the field is that those things took a randomized series of puzzle pieces in their minds and then snapped them into place and just phase locked them into a good path and a good trajectory. Of course, you know, we are mechanically inclined to hear about those things and immediately dismiss them. It's like, it's like crack pottery. It's like, you know, it's got a stigma associated with it. I think the stigma is decreasing over time because of all the research that they're doing with PTSD and veterans.

1:59:32Shawn Ryan:And I think they're doing it with team guys, right? Yeah. TBIs to try and industry. Yeah. And they've done it. They've done it with like terminal cancer patients.

1:59:45Shawn Ryan:and I mean, the statistics are off the charts. It's like a near instantaneous, like lack of fear of death, you know, um, because they know something is on the other side. It's always unclear what, you know, I think whatever, whatever it is, it doesn't want to be fully seen or described or whatever. It's meant to be shrouded in some kind of mystery. And it manifests itself to all of us in individual ways. You with a gate guard that was reading your mind. Me with Ethan taking control of some fucking random bartender and calling me a nickname that nobody fucking else would have known. Like, You look at me, I'm the furthest from a fucking Mr.

2:00:39Shawn Ryan:Hollywood that you could ever get, right? But, like, that shit happened.

2:00:46Shawn Ryan:Yeah, I think there's a lot going on that we don't know about, but you have to stay curious, I think.

2:00:54Nik Seetharaman:What do you think it is? What do you believe happens when you die?

2:01:09Shawn Ryan:I think what happens is you... I don't know is the bottom line. But what I think is going on is our reality might exist as a series of fractals and layers within that fractal structure. And so let's take a very simple example, right? I can spin up a bunch of AIs and have them all be communicating on a website. But that is a condescension of what it is like to be a human. It's not a fully human experience, but it's one that is sort of like it. The ancient hermetic thinkers had a saying, as above, so below. And what it meant was this fractal structure that we're talking about. So perhaps at higher layers of reality,

2:02:20Shawn Ryan:those layers exist and we have experiences in them in ways that we don't have the language for, but we can intuit in some way. And those layers leak down to us through these experiences and synchronicities and let's call them for what they are, miracles that, that happened to us in daily life. But it's difficult for us to have an understanding because we always want to like do the, the scientific human thing of like, all right, well, how is that structured? Like, what, what does that look like? Like what's going on up there? You know, we don't know. I don't know. I, um, I was reading a book one time and it made the analogy of humans going through existence is sort of like existence on this plane of reality that we that we inhabit it's sort of like imagine cubes floating in space and they're transiting through a thin layer of film and that thin layer is two-dimensional, right?

2:03:36Shawn Ryan:So you've got these three-dimensional things transiting through a two-dimensional environment. And as they're transitioning through, they don't realize that they're cubes, right? They don't even realize that they're squares in this as they're transiting through this lower dimensional plane, let's say. So as you're translating, they're all fucked up, right? Like maybe they have like a point that's like their rotation's all off.

2:04:10Nik Seetharaman:So you're saying planes. Yeah. Planes of maybe realities. Yeah. And one of them - The cube is rising through each plane.

2:04:20Shawn Ryan:Through each plane. Yeah. But as it's in the plane, it doesn't really understand its true structure, right? It doesn't understand its true self. All it knows, all it's aware of is the shape that it makes as it transits through that plane. So if you have a cube that's all fucked up in orientation as it's transiting through that two-dimensional plane, it looks jacked up. It's like maybe a corner sticking, maybe it's like a point, or maybe it looks like some weird tetragram. I don't fucking know. But if you square up with the plane, then you can get close to the shape that you truly are, which is a square that represents the cube's true form.

2:05:09Shawn Ryan:The square is like the closest that you can get as you're transiting through that surface. Hang with me here. now maybe all these other cubes up here that already made it are like looking down and they're like wow those guys are all jacked up so let's try and help them out a little bit you know and maybe it's the case that one of those fucking cubes that already made it to a very high layer is looking down, feels really bad for us, and is trying to get us to fucking understand the geometry of all this shit, right? And so that cube comes down, intersects with this lower dimensional plane, and begins unfurling itself into its lower dimensional form, which is six cubes or six squares in the shape of a cross.

2:06:18Shawn Ryan:It had to descend, break itself open, and show its true form to everybody else in order to get them understanding what some of this reality is about. And it's basically, I think, a hint that if we can get our shit together and figure out how to emulate that fucking guy, then maybe we can refold ourselves and you know interesting ascend ascend into the layers that we're that we're supposed to be in why do you say a cross are you christian um or is that something else i i believe in I believe in Jesus Christ. I, I think the resurrection was a physical event. Um, I think it, I think it was trying to point at some very deep layers of reality and show us something.

2:07:29Shawn Ryan:And what it was trying to show us is what I just alluded to with this analogy here. I mean, the fact that a cube has to break itself into a cross in order to tell all the other fucking cubes to get your fucking shit together because y 'all are not squares transiting through this plane of existence. Y 'all are made of something more. There's something more to you, but unless you're able to align yourself properly, square up with reality, then you're, you're never going to get to, you know, the layers up here. So, you know, it's easy to say, Oh, it's just a coincidence. What are you talking about, dude?

2:08:09Shawn Ryan:Like you're talking about crazy shit um i'm tracking but but there's a synchronicity there right it's like why does that analogy work why when you extrapolate it to christianity the like it kind of makes sense like what was he trying to show he was trying to show that we are more than these meat sacks that we're in right now, right? He's trying to show that if we're able to orient our minds and souls and bodies and get them working together for the good of the people around us, then we're approaching a foreign form of ourselves that we don't quite understand, but that we know is more than what we are today i think it might be a collective one i'm also a believer yeah i mean and you know i

2:09:08Nik Seetharaman:i hate how people like oh you know you bring it up and people like whatever dude see that piece of art up there yeah that's how many times the bible cross references itself it's almost 63 000 times i remember seeing that in a lecture that jordan pearson put on yeah but i mean i don't know i don't i want to believe that when we go to heaven we're all slapping each other's asses and having a good time and just fucking doing whatever the hell we want yeah you know what i mean but i don't think it's going to be like that i don't think so either i think that i think this is a test i think we and this is i get this this is just sean's internal thinking thoughts i think about this kind of stuff all the time but you know i think that the ego is the test the ego is what gives you yourself it's what individualizes you it's what protects you it's It's who you are, right?

2:10:12Nik Seetharaman:And, I mean, when the ego goes away and you have a true ego death, it feels like you turn into a collective, you know, maybe a collective consciousness. Maybe it's love. Maybe it's, you know, something like that. The droplet realizes it's part of an ocean. Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm getting at. And, you know, is scary as that sounds to lose your sense of self and turn into some type of a collective. I think that's the true test. I think the only thing there is, is there is good and there is evil. And you're on one of those sides, whether you want to be or not. Yeah. And you either go into the collective of good or the collective of evil.

2:11:07And when I think of good and evil in the world, I think of it as like a marble that has oil

2:11:18Nik Seetharaman:and water in it. Yeah. And oil and water never mix. They just... Yeah. You know, they just, they just, or like the, if you looked at the earth for, you know, a time lapse of millions of years, you'd see the oceans changing with land all the time, but they never really mix. You know what I mean? And it's just one overtaking the other for eternity. Yep. That's kind of what I, that's kind of what I think. I think it would turn into a collective.

2:11:47Shawn Ryan:I think you're close to the truth then. I think, I think infinity only has two cardinal directions, good and evil. for whatever reason that seems to be the way it's structured. Anything you can do as a human can be distilled down to, are you trending that way or that way? That's it. So I don't know. I don't have all the answers, certainly, but I also don't think that we live in a purely materialistic reality. And I also don't think that even though I believe in the resurrection and Christ, I don't believe that that is also the whole story. There seems to be more to the story. And I think about that a lot.

2:12:36Nik Seetharaman:What do you mean? What do you think? What more? I'm just curious what your thoughts are.

2:12:46Yeah. I think if you tie together the themes from across different religious or mystical traditions over many thousands of years, I

2:13:05Shawn Ryan:told people I wasn't going to go here when I came on this podcast. If you also tie together abductee reports from UAP encounters and all that shit, paranormal encounters and so on, at some level, they all form a remarkably coherent narrative, which is we seem to all come from some kind of super consciousness. that we all eventually return to. The things that happened to us down here seem to be engineered in order to teach us something. And what I think it's, so it's, I guess there's more to story than mailing it in by going to mass every Sunday. I think what he was actually trying to say, Christ, is you need to be paying attention to yourself and how you deal with things every microsecond of every day of your life.

2:14:23Shawn Ryan:And it is that kind of sustained attention that is going to allow you to be productive or to assist in life consciousness going the other way towards the light rather than towards the dark. I think so. I mean, there's a technical word for this. It's like neg entropy, right? It's like the universe defaults towards entropy. It might default towards evil. And it is only when enough people learn to figure their shit out that they can turn into a collective negentropic forcing function to steer whatever our local collective consciousness is on this planet to somewhere good um this is what i'm talking about with the marble yeah i think i think we're

2:15:28Nik Seetharaman:on the same page i mean you know if you look at you know christ's teachings it's all about love acceptance, things like that, which form a better collective of society. And so if you pump good into the world, that's going to create good. And that's going to create more surface area of good in the marble, which will begin to overtake the evil. And if you pump in bad, evil, lies, shit like that, then the dark side multiplies. More spots start to pop up and it becomes, it can start to overtake good.

2:16:13Shawn Ryan:I agree. I think that's how it works. And I think it's additive, right? It's all dependent on, you know, Jordan Peterson says, you know, don't change the world before you can clean your fucking room, right? And the reason he says that is because individual actions at scale produce change at scale. A lot of people try and skip to the last part and just produce change at scale. It doesn't really work. That's how you get authoritarian governments. It's how you get all the bad shit. It's how you get forms of control. But if enough of us individually are able to get our shit together, I think something magical could happen.

2:16:54Shawn Ryan:I don't know what that is. But I think the Bible is trying to hint at the fact that that's what we're fucking here to do. You know what reaction wheels are on a spaceship? No. They're basically a mechanical way of producing movement along some axis without using thrusters. And so you can spin this reaction wheel internally inside like a little, let's say a CubeSat or whatever. and you can turn the satellite to orient it to whatever. Like maybe you need to turn it so that its solar panels can see the sun or whatever. But the point is you don't have to use thrusters. And so sometimes you might have multiple reaction wheels, right?

2:17:37Shawn Ryan:You might have three. And so that's getting the ship oriented and having like, it's a mechanism to move the damn thing along some orientation. It might just be the case that whatever it is we're doing down here is we're learning how to spin our own soul's reaction wheels along the proper orientations so that we're all pointed the right fucking way and when one of us can do that that's great when many of us can do that who the fuck knows what can happen yeah

2:18:18Nik Seetharaman:Well, this is a conversation I wasn't planning on having.

2:18:21Shawn Ryan:I don't know how we got here.

2:18:25Nik Seetharaman:We got here talking about your dad.

2:18:27Shawn Ryan:Yeah. Yeah. Talking about my dad.

2:18:32Shawn Ryan:Yeah, it was a big loss.

2:18:40Shawn Ryan:I'm sure it'll come back in other aspects of this conversation. but um one of the things that i tried to do move to try and move on from that loss is just to be the fucking best that i could be at whatever it was the fuck i was doing if i was going to sit in a goddamn tin tin can in the sky and fly racetrack patterns over afghanistan i was going to fucking do that to the best of my ability and that's what i ended up doing the first few years out of language school. Um, they, uh, be, so being an enlisted aviator in the air force is, um, there's actually a very small percentage of people that are in the air force.

2:19:25Shawn Ryan:Yeah. No shit. Yeah. Like the vast majority of people in the air force are, they don't fly. They don't, they don't, they don't do it. Um, and generally, you know a lot of people think about officers and pilots as the guys that are are the aviators so there's there's like a special kind of class hierarchy in the air force and you know at the very top are your fucking uh special warfare dudes pjs ccts rightfully so right below that are your aviators enlisted officers and so on so for me to get my fucking enlisted aviator wings man And I remember going to like the fucking Asian sewing store outside the base and getting them to sew those fucking wings on for the first time.

2:20:13It was magical.

2:20:15Shawn Ryan:Like putting those BDUs on with the wings on for the first time. It was a good feeling. And you get your flight suit and all that, and you feel like fucking Maverick. You only see people wearing that shit in the movies. Now you're wearing one. It's pretty awesome.

2:20:35Shawn Ryan:First order of business was - What were you, what are you flying? So it's called an RC-135 rivet joint. And it's a 30 person, 30 crew aircraft. And it's full of cryptologic linguists on it. And it's basically a mini NSA flying in the sky. Holy shit. It's been around since the Cold War. So the cryptologic linguist community, career field, discipline has been around for a very long time since World War II. So in World War II, they had all these cryptologists trying to break the Enigma and break the Japanese JN-25 cipher, which is like the cipher that the Japanese were using to coordinate the Pearl Harbor assault.

2:21:25Shawn Ryan:Eventually, they did crack that, but they cracked it too late, if I recall my history correctly. So there's a long kind of lineage of signals intelligence and airborne signals intelligence more specifically for the Air Force. So during the Cold War, you would have RC-135s flying around and basically evaluating what the Russians were doing, like offset from Russian airspace or offset from Chinese airspace or whatever. in 2000 there was an ep3 uh plane that went down as a navy ep3 and that was a very similarly configured plane as to the rc-135 and so it was full of you know cryptologic linguists from the navy in this case and they had to emergency set down on hainan island i think and you know there's a bunch of fucking top secret shit on there it's like all this signals intelligence gear we're gonna set down on a Chinese airstrip.

2:22:20Shawn Ryan:So they started going to town, just breaking all that shit in there and zeroing out the crypto and all that shit. I don't think they were fully successful. And I think they use that as a case study in, you know, how to, how to be when all that shit goes down. But that's the idea. You know, you're a flying signals intelligence platform, basically. This is 2005 and the Afghanistan war is in full swing. And our tasking was to essentially fly racetrack patterns over Afghanistan at X many thousand feet. I don't know if I'm allowed to say the exact altitude and basically hoover up every fucking thing that's putting out radio signals or electromagnetic signals in any fucking way, shape or form.

2:23:07Shawn Ryan:And at the time, The Taliban and the foreign fighter contingent were still in their mountain redoubts. You know, Al-Qaeda, you had Pete Blaber on here talking about Anaconda. And a lot of Anaconda was, and the reason they fucking sent dudes to the top of Roberts Ridge is because Al-Qaeda had these redoubts, these mountain, you know, hard points in all the surrounding high areas. and they were communicating with each other over various forms of electronic devices, let's say. And our job was to understand when they were using them, how they were using them, and basically triangulate positions when we could and call them down to ground teams.

2:24:04Shawn Ryan:and this is really when i started to understand this concept of um how signals intelligence could support kinetic operations on the ground it was a very tight loop you know oftentimes if you're a linguist and you end up at like fort me or you end up at one of these other fucking places you don't get to see the tight like fine fix finish loop that you necessarily see uh in some of these other platforms and so you know these guys are using their fucking icom radios or whatever and um we're we're picking up on it this is 2005 the military did not have very many poshtu linguists at the time um basically all the poshtu linguists they fucking had at the time were I think pretty much on the ground with the dudes, rightfully so.

2:24:58Shawn Ryan:So the guys that were left were basically guys like me, Arabic linguists that could hear maybe some words that were Arabic in nature. Like maybe we can make out some call signs, but occasionally you would hear the occasional Arabic coming over the wire. And when you heard that, you knew it was a foreign fighter and you knew it was possibly associated with senior leadership. And that was compelling because, you know, tasking was to go smoke those fucking dudes. And so you're sitting there and you kind of develop this rhythm of working, you know, the gear. And I'm going to stay as clean as I can talking through all this stuff.

2:25:45Shawn Ryan:But, you know, imagine you're visualizing a spectrum analyzer And depending on what you're seeing on that spectrum analyzer, you know, that dictates, you know, how you conduct your triangulation and how you're calculating the coordinates of where these fucking guys are at. Right. And at the same time, if there's audio coming through, because they're talking over unencrypted fucking ICOM radios, right? It's not like these guys have coalition.

2:26:13Nik Seetharaman:You're the fucking guy that can tell what room somebody's in in a hotel. Yeah. What floor. What room? We'll get to that. Is he in the bathroom? Where at? Fucking... You're that motherfucker.

2:26:25Shawn Ryan:Yeah, we'll get to that.

2:26:26Nik Seetharaman:Holy shit.

2:26:26Shawn Ryan:We'll get to that.

2:26:27Nik Seetharaman:I've never met one of you guys. Wow.

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2:28:38Shawn Ryan:But it all started with fucking flying racetracks, right? And like learning the craft. you're looking at the spec a there's audio coming through because these guys haven't loaded crypto in their radios um then you're you're trying to figure out what what the is going on and because you only have limited time on station right um it's quite a bit of time but still it's it's finite time what you do is you slave multiple frequencies into your ears at the same time and And so you develop this skill set of you got multiple freaks in this year, you got multiple freaks in that year, and you're fucking just transcribing all of it.

2:29:26Shawn Ryan:You're keeping track of like multiple things going on across multiple different frequencies. It's a skill that's valuable to this day because I'll be sitting in a fucking restaurant and I'm talking to my girlfriend. I'm hearing like we're having a conversation. I'm like listening to the fucking table, two doors that way. and I'm listening to the table, you know, two tables that way. Um, but you're doing all this, but the, the end goal is always a get some fucking actionable coordinates down to the guys on the ground, right? Cause they're going to fucking do some shit. Um, and we did, uh, we did it over and over and over again, um, day after day.

2:30:06Shawn Ryan:But to me, it was never, it was never enough. You know, I always wanted like the next thing. Um, I remember sometimes flying at night over Afghanistan and, um, you know, there, there's like a couple of little windows in the back of this fucking bird. And I remember looking out the window one night and there was some shit going down. There was like a tick like down way below. And there, there were, uh, you know, they had called in some, uh, some airstrikes. And so there were dudes doing like gun runs and shit. And I can see all this shit going down outside the window, but it's happening tens of thousands of feet below me.

2:30:42Shawn Ryan:Right. And I'm like, fuck, I just feel fucking helpless up here, you know? Um, but that's me. This is a character flaw that I have, right? Like I, I have no business being in a room. I earned my place in the room. And then I very quickly want to get to the next fucking room. And it's no, you know, the RC 135 community are a great bunch of people. Like they're very dedicated to their mission. They have a very strategic national mission. There's a lot of stuff that they do that I'm not getting into here. There are a lot more kind of strategic in nature at the time for me. Go ahead.

2:31:20Nik Seetharaman:I was just going to say, I totally understand what you're saying. It's just, it's high drive, very successful people. We all fucking think the same, I think. Yeah. I mean, it's, you get in, you check the box. Great. what's next yeah what's the next fuck like there check the box great yeah i'm bored what's next yeah i'm not challenged anymore yeah and it just keeps fucking moving yeah and it's not some like

2:31:48Shawn Ryan:ego thing where it's like i need to you know be stroked but i know that i can add more value and have more impact if i was doing something closer to the fight right so put me in coach get me closer to the fight. So Red Wings kicked off, like I said. So, you know, we all hear that there's a missing team guy that op went wrong. We didn't get the full picture. But it's like, find this fucking dude's PRD and like monitor the guard frequencies, see if anyone's talking about him. You know, we got, we got to fucking find, there's a massive, like, well, a lot of fucking assets that I got put in the air and tasked to find Marcus.

2:32:34Shawn Ryan:Were you there when it went down? Yeah, I was deployed when it went down. And we - Were you watching it? No, I wasn't watching it. No, I wasn't watching it. That bird in particular, at the time, I don't know whether they do now, did not have imagery capabilities. So somebody else was watching it, not me. what we did was we worked in crew uh crews of two so two 30 man crews and we just swap back and forth one bird would land other one would take off um do a bunch of aerial refuels on the way into afghanistan um and then get on station parked on station forever just doing race tracks and we're just cycling through the frequencies, looking for any fucking indication that anyone knows what the fuck happened to these dudes and what happened to Marcus in particular.

2:33:31Shawn Ryan:And I don't think it was my crew. I think it was the other crew that I was with, um, that had some, had some say in what went down. I don't, I don't remember. Um, but I remember being like, I wish I could contribute more to whatever the fuck is going on down there.

2:33:57Shawn Ryan:Oh, and one more fucking thing happened that deployment. And actually it may have been the next deployment. There was a dude that came in one night to the talk and he was like, I'm from this task force. And before I say anything else, you guys are going to sign these fucking NDAs. I'm like, all right, cool. I can get down with whatever's going on here. So I signed the NDAs and he started briefing us up on this fucking thing that they're going to do. And it was very similar to what went down in Venezuela a few weeks ago. So, you know, not, we weren't targeting, they weren't targeting a fucking head of state or some shit, but it was a high value target, long infill.

2:34:50Shawn Ryan:There was, you know, the threat of sophisticated, coordinated enemy response. And so our job on that particular night was to provide essentially electronic overwatch for the guys. I was like, I don't know what the fuck is going on here. I don't know who his dude is, but I remember reading about the units that he's talking about and I'm fucking stoked that I get to do a little part in supporting them. And I was all over the fucking frequencies that night. um they they went in did their thing went out it was uneventful but it just put the bug in my ear you know i was like whatever those guys are up to like i want i want it so we get back and um the military and the bureaucracy in the military has a way of hamstringing people that um when they see a person that's like really performing well and they're highly motivated and so on.

2:36:00Shawn Ryan:They do this fucking thing where they put you in the most boring job possible. I don't know why or how, but they put me at a desk job after I get home. I think I do like two pumps with this Afghanistan shit. And I'm like, I can't deal with this shit, dude. I'm sitting at a desk. I'm seeing the reports come through. We got these crews out in Afghanistan and we got crews elsewhere to doing other shit. Right. Um, and they're sending in their, their reports and these reports, they get distilled and sent up through the national intelligence reporting channels. And some of them make it all the way to the president, right.

2:36:39Shawn Ryan:Depending on what's going on. So it's like, you know, it's important work, but I don't like sitting behind a desk. So I start walking the halls and like telling anyone who would listen, like, Hey man, like, is there anything else I can do? Like, I can, I, what can I do? Like, what can I do besides sitting in this fucking computer behind this desk? Ironic, given what I do for a living now. But at the time I was just trying to get after it. And so rumors started floating around the squadron of, uh, of a deployment, um, to Iraq, uh, supporting task force. And I had no idea what it entailed. Right.

2:37:16Shawn Ryan:I was like, I just need to cool. Let's, I want to go to Iraq and I want I don't know who these guys are, but I want to, I want to roll with them. And I would tell anyone that, that would listen. They're like, you're an Arabic, you know, the leadership in the squadron was like, you're an Arabic linguist. We can't lose you to this fucking shit right here. Like you got to, you know, buckle down and we got plans for you. I was like, I don't accept that. And so there was, uh, there was one guy and he had just rotated in from Bragg as a, as the chief of the squadron and chief in the air force is e9 it's like the highest fucking enlisted rank and he was um he was like the senior enlisted uh leader at the squadron and um i was a fucking

2:38:00e3 at the time e3 e4 and i just barge into this dude's office i'm like chief you got to send me on this fucking deployment please let me go on this deployment please

2:38:12Shawn Ryan:and he looks he's like who the fuck are you like what are you gonna like walk into my office like the right way and like not just fucking barge in here like we're buddies um and he hears my case and he just looks at me like get the fuck out of my office and you know stand by if we need you to go on this deployment we'll will send you. They figured out a way to get me on a fucking deployment. That was, um, that was January, 2007, go to Iraq with the task force. And from January to July of 2007, I'm 23 years old and I'm fucking calling in assaulters every fucking night from the air. Now I've, now I'm not at fucking X tens of thousands of feet anymore.

2:39:11Shawn Ryan:Now I'm a bit closer to the, to the action, right? Now I've got eyes. I've got like, I've got dudes with imagery capabilities. I'm seeing what's going on with, with the, with the assaults. I'm, my gear is a bit more sophisticated. I'm having direct impact. I'm fucking talking to the lead Helos on Hilo Common, you know, like when them 160th dudes check in on helo common like you just fucking know that shit's shit's gonna go down and they're all and it's a it's a it's a crack addiction because they're all waiting on me and they're waiting on me to trigger the fucking thing by telling them where this fucking dude's at holy shit um 23 23 years old fucking night after night after night fucking executing fine fix on, uh, on high value targets, um, for task force in, in Iraq.

2:40:10Shawn Ryan:And when you, when you execute fine fix like that at the time, you know, this is McChrystal era task force and, you know, the guys are just primed. It's a fucking well-oiled machine. um so you call it in and uh you know 160th dudes have theirs have their rotor spinning they're just waiting on fucking coordinates from you and once they have them coordinates they're launching they got the assaulters on board uh depending on the nature of the target you know that dictates the the half package sometimes they rolled in with the with the ground assault force too um Just depended on the target and where he was and what the fuck was the situation.

2:40:52Shawn Ryan:But it was the most addicting thing I had ever done in my life. I was just enthralled and I never wanted to do anything else. um and working with like such a crew of professionals you you kind of start to turn into like entitled a bit you're like this is obviously this is how this shit goes down it's like you know i launch i tell them where to go they go um and then they call they confirm whether they got the dude or not. And then you, then you start to get like requested by other assets in country. Um, and so I remember one time I, um, I went down to Basra to work with SEAL Team 5. And, um, I was, so I was riding on a, on an army bird.

2:41:52Nik Seetharaman:So you're like winning the fucking lottery to the soft community. It was... Especially for white soft.

2:41:58Shawn Ryan:Yeah.

2:41:58Nik Seetharaman:It was great, dude.

2:42:02Shawn Ryan:Everybody wants a piece. Yeah. It was great. So we load up on this army bird. We go down to Basra. I got the army guys next to me. And I get down off the bird. I'm talking to the Taki W guys from SEAL Team 5. Maybe they were team guys. I don't know. And we start to plot out what needs to happen. They're going after this high-value target one night. And I'm like, cool, tell me all the things that I need to know. Here's how I'll coordinate with you. And let me know what you fellas need. Here's the freaks, all that. What kind of stuff do you need to know?

2:42:47Shawn Ryan:um basic kind of

2:42:53Shawn Ryan:i'm trying to keep things clean um you know do you expect this dude to like stay put or do you expect him to be moving around um there's some other things that i need to uh make the the gear, you know, tell me what, what I needed to tell me. Um, I basically just need to know, like, what do they already know about this guy? So that when I'm looking at the spectrum analyzer and I'm, I'm getting all the readouts and shit, it's like tracking with what they already know about this guy.

2:43:34Shawn Ryan:A high stress event is when you are looking at the data and you know the guy is just staying put, right? And you call it in, you know the boys are loading up, you know, whether they're, it's a gaffe or a half or whatever, and they're coming inbound. And then the fucking dude starts to move, right? That's what the data is indicating. And you're like, fuck. Um, and it's not like you're in the middle of the goddamn desert and it's like, you know, you've got imagery capability. So, you know, you can tell who's moving and like correlate it with what you're seeing on the spec A, you're in a fucking urban area.

2:44:29Shawn Ryan:You don't know who's who down there. And all you know is that the data is changing in some capacity. And you need to fucking figure out quickly what that data and how it's changing means for the guys coming in on the Humvees or coming in on the fucking Dapsbirds. And if you're wrong, you're going to put them on the you're going to put them on the wrong house you're going to put them on the wrong vehicle you're going to put them 800 things could go sideways quickly so that was those are like the highest stress situations in this particular case with uh you know the seal team five dudes the guy stayed put he was well behaved i was like here we go he's in the middle of this fucking market um come on and get it boys and then i just silence quiet it's just a nothing happens.

2:45:22Shawn Ryan:10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes. I'm like, Hey, like, he's still there. Like what's going on? I'm like, we're going to run out of fuel here. Like we gotta, we gotta head back soon. Like you guys, you guys coming out or what? Um, and so I started to get like kind of antsy and I started, I realized if I had done that exact same routine with the task force dudes, it would have been, it would have been a fucking well-oiled machine. The guys would have been there in, out, like no, like just a well-oiled machine, but like the conventional dudes rightfully so like did not have that kind of operational cadence.

2:46:12Shawn Ryan:And so, you know, they're, they're doing risk assessments. They're like, is it worth going in this fucking busy marketplace? Are we going to get into a fucking Mogadishu situation? And so that taught me like, okay, there's a difference between the very tip of the spear up here and then like everybody else. And the gap is huge. It's fucking huge, which is why when I saw that Venezuela hit go down, I was like, yeah, there's only a couple organizations that could to pull that off. Anyway, all that to say, I started to learn about myself. I said, you know, and it was easy for me to get frustrated with those guys from SEAL Team 5.

2:46:53Shawn Ryan:I'm like, dude, get the fuck out there. Like this guy's going to leave and you're going to lose your chance at rolling them up. But I had to empathize with them, you know, like it's a dangerous situation for them. Here I am comfortable in the air, you know, it's just not going to happen on my timetable. And so I started to learn how to work with like various units and teams and see things from their perspective and not just sit in this ivory tower of, Oh, you're a fucking task force, dude, like this is how things are done. Um, so I think it humbled me a little bit. Um, I tried to always, I tried to always, you know, do what the guys needed to be done, um, without being, um, ideological about it, I would say.

2:47:40Shawn Ryan:So that went on for six months.

2:47:43Nik Seetharaman:We were able to think out of the box, is what you're saying.

2:47:47Shawn Ryan:Yeah.

2:47:49Nik Seetharaman:You're a problem solver.

2:47:51Shawn Ryan:Yeah, I just wanted to, whether you came from fucking Steel Team 5 or the 173rd Airborne or some... Development group or CAG or fucking whatever. Some task force unit. But I just wanted to make your life easier if I could. And that's the way I tried to make it happen.

2:48:17Shawn Ryan:And I say I, because I'm the one sitting here on the couch across from you. But there were a lot of just fucking awesome people that flew these missions with me. And I'm friends with many of them to this day. And so I don't want to, I don't want to make it seem like, oh, fucking Nick was flying around Iraq, fucking, you know, doing this shit like a lone wolf. No, there's, there's a whole cast of characters that were involved. at one point I was like the scheduler for, for the squadron. So I would try and, you know, it's a task force, a joint service agency. So I would try and map out like, all right, this dude like gets along with these army guys better.

2:49:00Shawn Ryan:So I'm going to put them on, on this crew over here and this dude gets along with the Navy dudes better. All right. So I'm going to put them here.

2:49:09Shawn Ryan:So then, then I got back and then, then it was like, well, you're going to fucking fly RC-135s again and just turn circles over Afghanistan. I was like, no fucking way, dude. Like I need to get back to whatever magic it was that I just came, came from experiencing. Um, when I got back to, when I got back stateside, um, I, I'm sitting in the office and I get a phone call. Hey, do you want to come to task force full-time? Uh, I'm like, fucking a right i do uh so i i go through you know the process um and uh i get selected to go to task force full-time i guess you know i

2:49:56Nik Seetharaman:they saw something in me what was what was what was your selection like Can you say what task force? Can I say it?

2:50:08Shawn Ryan:I prefer to keep things high level, like task force. Roger that. Task force level.

2:50:21Shawn Ryan:So for the signal squadron that I ended up in over there, the selection and the screening and the initial training cycle is very much – It's not physical stuff. It's a lot of it is around, it's a couple of different things. Are you able to handle yourself in high pressure environments where you might not necessarily have a lot of fucking dudes backing you up? You know, you might be, South America is a good example, right? You might find yourself in a town in South America and there's just temptation all around you, right? And are you going to succumb to that temptation or are you going to stay locked the fuck in and do the job that you're supposed to be doing at that particular moment in time?

2:51:15Shawn Ryan:And a lot of dudes, like, they're just not able to. As a singleton? Small, small teams, sometimes singleton.

2:51:27Shawn Ryan:And so a lot of it is around, you know, are you able to handle yourself in those situations? And then there's, once you get to the squadron, you, it's an Air Force squadron. So you're primarily, you know, you have units that you work with, but there's a possibility that you get farmed out to one of the other sister service units as well. So Army, Navy, what have you. um the other aspect to it is all the things that i was doing on that rc-135 bird you know looking at the spectrum analyzer uh listening to what was going on on the frequencies and so on um let's imagine that you can compress all that kit down into you know a magical form factor let's say and then you slave everything into, you know, like an earpiece or something.

2:52:37Shawn Ryan:Can you do the things that you did previously, but without staring at a fucking spectrum analyzer sitting in front of you and all you have to go off of are some audio cues? Cause now you've slaved the analytics and the data that's being piped through that analyzer into sonic feedback, essentially, let's say. I'm trying to keep things clean and high level here.

2:53:09Shawn Ryan:There's an art to it because you can get out there and you can strap one of these things on And, you know, you'll see it with new guys. They'll fucking, they'll do like Mr. Robot. They're like doing this thing, like just roboting around because they're trying to synthesize. It's like adding a new sense, essentially. They're trying to synthesize what they're hearing through the earpiece and the kit with what they're seeing in the physical world. So you have to like put together this three-dimensional world around you with the things that you're hearing from your gear. Because electromagnetic frequencies are just fucking weird shit, right?

2:53:54Shawn Ryan:They do all kinds of crazy nonsense. Like if you're too close to fucking rail tracks, like they'll throw shit off. If you're too close to power lines, they'll ride the power lines. They'll multi-path through like, and bounce off of buildings. And so that'll throw things off. And so you need to, in your mind and in your body, build this muscle memory of the things that I hear in here have a meaning based on how the things out here are looking. That's about as most as I can say on that piece there. But if you get good at it, then you can do some amazing things and execute fine fix for the guys as needed.

2:54:43Nik Seetharaman:So would you say this is similar to when they say, have you ever seen that guy? He's blind, but he can fucking see through audio. Yeah. He could fucking make like these little chirps like, and he fucking sees. Yep.

2:55:00Shawn Ryan:Is that like? It's very similar. Yeah, it's very similar. And it takes a lot of time on the gear to be fluid and natural. and, you know, if I was to look at you and you would just be like another dude, you know, and I wouldn't be able to tell that you were doing something weird. Otherwise you're doing fucking Mr. Roboto on the street.

2:55:27Shawn Ryan:So that was a lot of, that was a lot of it.

2:55:33Shawn Ryan:And we got a lot of cross-training opportunities too. You know, we, I went over to SRT1, special reconnaissance team one over on the west coast um got to cross train with those guys phenomenal a bunch of men and women out there um just to learn like okay how are you guys doing okay here's how we're doing stuff you know what what are some of the challenges you guys have um that was really cool because you know the srt one is on the buds compound or at least it was back then so you got like all the buds fucking students are doing their thing and then you know the SRT one building is kind of a little bit over.

2:56:13Shawn Ryan:So you feel like, you know, you're, you're part of, part of an important thing going on here. And again, that was like, I always loved working with other services, dude. Like, I don't know. I just felt like I was an emissary from the air force, you know? And I just wanted to represent my service well and kind of break the mentality, break the mold of like, uh, air force dude just fucking sits around, you know? Um, and, uh, so I just wanted to be a good emissary, I think for, for the air force, but that, that SRT one trip, um, was interesting because I got to see how regular NSW does stuff. Um, Um, so I spent, uh, I spent, you know, the next few years doing, doing that business for the task force.

2:57:12Shawn Ryan:One of the things that comes to mind is, um, you know, you, you'd be doing air stuff as well. Right. Um, so the, the things that happened in Iraq never went away. There was still a need for bodies on a bird, you know, doing things from the air. And there was one particular deployment where we were, and everything I'm about to say has been written down and discussed by Admiral McRaven in his books and on various podcasts. So I feel okay talking about it. So we were on a deployment to Horn of Africa. And let's say I stumble across, in the course of working my targets, this guy. And I see the guy's name pop up on my gear.

2:58:13Shawn Ryan:And it's Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. And every time I get a good hit, I call it down. And it's no big thing, right? It's like, whatever. Some of the shit goes, some of it doesn't go, whatever. Especially when you're not in Iraq and Afghanistan, like some of the shit is just long burn. You know what I mean? this particular one i called down and they were like are you absolutely fucking sure that this is the guy that you're you're getting data about right now i was like rarely am i wrong about like what fucking target i'm looking at but yes i'm pretty sure um and they're like say you're uh

2:59:10just trying to make sure you know i i say things properly here say your loadout um

2:59:18Shawn Ryan:because we we had kinetic strike capability at the time on uh on the platform i was on and i was like what the fuck who is who the fuck is this dude like i they they've never told us that in the past you know it's always all right let's work let's build this package and maybe we'll pass it off to some interagency whatever they'll handle it not so in this case they're like say you're fucking load out and say say you're uh say your fuel i was like oh shit it's on dude i don't know who this fucking guy is but all of a sudden everyone's very interested

2:59:55Shawn Ryan:um so i continue to to to track this individual and then they launch a uh a relief bird to swap out places with us they come in they take over on station we roll back to to where we were staging from we land and i'm like what the fuck is going on with this dude this guy was like on the FBI's most wanted list. And he's been on it since 1998, uh, for questioning based on his, uh, I guess he was one of the senior planners for the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings in 98. I guess he was like one of the fucking head honchos that planned that shit. You know, they drove these suicide, these VBIEDs, uh, into the embassies in, in Kenya and Tanzania.

3:00:51Shawn Ryan:so this guy's been on the run since then basically and you know he was like the fbi had like a bounty out for him and everything so we just fucking stumble across this dude many years later i'm talking to a buddy of mine and um from from a from an interagency partner and i'm telling him this story and he was like wait no i'm on i was like yeah dude he was like i tried to find that fucker for years. I was like, should have done better. I rolled in and fucking got his ass right after you. But again, I jest, but there was a, there's a giant fucking team behind it and the crews that I was working with and so on.

3:01:36Shawn Ryan:I just happened to be the fucking guy working the gear. So we land, this guy is a fucking head honcho. And so there's an entire effort that starts spinning up to figure out how to prosecute this guy and it's not an easy problem because he's his location is on the coast of somalia holy um i'm pretty sure we've talked about this up

3:02:07Nik Seetharaman:before on this show um yeah did they swim in uh no not that one okay they uh yeah we'll get to

3:02:17Shawn Ryan:we'll get to how it all went down

3:02:24Now, many years later, I'm listening to Jocko.

3:02:28Shawn Ryan:You know, I got his shithun in the kitchen. I'm like making dinner or some shit. And Admiral McRaven's on there. And he starts talking about this op in Somalia where they found this guy, Nabhan. And I'm like, what the fuck? And I start listening to his description of what was going on. And on that Jocko episode, McRaven basically describes all the shit that was going down from his perspective as the CG with the president and Secretary Clinton and all of this shit. He's at the White House and he's playing fucking 4D chess. And I'm like one for one mapping it with all the shit that was going on downrange.

3:03:14Shawn Ryan:and he's telling me the other side of the story uh on this podcast so that was really fucking wild to put the two pieces of information together and get like this full picture of what went down with that thing so we uh so mcraven after we we find the initial hit on the dude so we like it like the initial find fix the dude like disappears like so the second bird comes on and the dude just fucking goes dark, right? And now everyone's pissed. They're like, go fucking get him. Like, go find him again. We're gonna launch and relaunch you guys until you fucking get his ass again. While all that's going down, McRaven is playing 4D chess with the White House.

3:04:01And, you know, he's gonna say it a lot better

3:04:04Shawn Ryan:on the Jocko episode, but he's basically convincing POTUS and Hillary Clinton to forward stage a helicopter assault force off the coast of Somalia. But he's doing it in a way that's couched through the lens of counter piracy because Captain Phillips had just went down. You had Pete Scoble on the show recently. All that shit went down. So there was a lot of credibility for the task force at the time and its ability to operate in that AO. right so mcraven kind of rode off of that captain phillips thing and he's like you know and everyone everyone is thinking you know black hawk down part two like we don't want we don't no one wants mogadishu part two um and that and that's the concern on everyone's mind and he's like all right you know we don't have to put boots on the ground uh we we and and they're like i don't per McRaven, the president did not want helicopters to do the final hit.

3:05:13Shawn Ryan:Like they wanted like a kinetic strike, like a long range kinetic strike. Um, so we furiously on the other side of the equation, start trying to fucking find this dude. And so we're just trolling the coast of Somalia back and forth, back and forth, trying to look for this fucking guy. and I'm looking, you know, I'm looking out the, the windows and, you know, I'm looking at the imagery. Um, so I've got like an imagery operator that I'm working with and we're very tightly in sync. Um, like if I, if I see some shit with my data, I'm like telling him what to look at down there. And we're, we're trying to put these two pieces of intelligence together and, uh, and have it be actionable in some capacity.

3:05:56Shawn Ryan:And we're looking down there and we're, you know, we're seeing downtown mogadishia you know you can literally see the the corners where the like durant's helo went down uh you know because i've got grgs you know i can see where all this shit is and i'm like this is really fucking wild i remember watching black hawk down when i was a i was a teenager and um i was like and now there's all the there's all the fucking sites down there um and in the meantime the uh so they they park like an lhc off the coast of somalia uh it's like a flat top uh flat top amphibious vessel they put you know helos on it they put the assault force on it um and everyone's just waiting everyone's waiting for us to fucking find this dude now one thing that happens with some of these manned platforms is they start to treat you like predator drones you know you got guys that are 10 000 miles away trying to tell you like hey go here go there go here go there um and i don't like being treated like a fucking predator drone because i'm not um i have you know i i know the area i've studied the fucking grgs i know exactly which roads lead out from Mogadishu to which town.

3:07:17Shawn Ryan:I know there's a coastal road over here. There's villages over there. And I generally know what this dude has been doing in the past. And I'm able to extrapolate that out into the future. I say me, again, I'm the one being interviewed sitting here, but it was definitely a crew of fucking people, all of whom, some of whom will be watching this episode. And, you know, all of them were instrumental in making this happen. And we're circling overhead one day, and then we get a hit on this fucking dude again. And he pops back up, but we don't know where he is. Like, it's a big fucking urban area. And I'm like, all right i'm like hey pilot you know put us over put us over the southern end of the outskirts of mogadishu there's only three roads that depart coming out of there and i had a feeling he was going to move south um you know i can't get into why i felt that way but you know there were there were indications that he had business down South.

3:08:36Shawn Ryan:And so I was like, there's only three fucking roads that, that go out of this town towards those Southern towns on the coast. Like let's, let's just park overhead. And what we need to do is wait until we can correlate what we see on the imagery with what I'm seeing on, on my shit. And so then the, the fucking geniuses back at HQ or wherever the fuck they were are like, oh, well, we need you to move to this other tasking over here. I'm like, no, no, no. There's no other tasking. Like, give me some more time. Like, I'm going to figure out like where this dude is. I just trust me. I have a feeling.

3:09:16Shawn Ryan:I have an intuition here. Like, no, we need to move to like Western, like inland or whatever. I'm like, just give me 30 fucking minutes. Okay. Give me 30 minutes. And I think we can make this happen. and then and then we see it a lone little suv starts driving down one of the fucking three roads down south from moog and then my imagery guy is like yo black suv got it what do you got i start looking at my shit and the idea here is is my shit saying that this dude is moving south because if it does we got him we got his fucking vehicle right he's moving and he's moving south fucking correlation between between the two uh you know uh piece of the kit so then the whole fucking machine like just gets amped up.

3:10:18Um, they, they start figuring out, okay,

3:10:22Shawn Ryan:what are we going to do? We start constant, like just continuous overwatch. And the plan is, um, McRaven has somehow convinced the, the people at the white house that, okay, we're going to do a long range kinetic strike from this platform we have, but let's just send in one or two birds to do like, uh, uh, an analysis of, uh, like a PID of the dude, right? Like it would suck to have this guy be on the FBI's most wanted list. And then we go through all this effort and then not even confirm that it's him, right? Like guys, wouldn't that suck? Yes, it would. All right. So let me put some guys down real quick.

3:11:07Shawn Ryan:We'll do the PID. We'll fucking get, get out of Dodge. So then it turns into this very tight, synchronized maneuver that needs to go down. And, um, and basically it's like, get, wait until the dude gets to a location where we can execute the strike. And then 30 seconds later, lead Helo is going to come in, drop the guys, you know, and nobody wants boots on the ground in Somalia. Like at this point, it's 2009, right? Some of that other shit that you were talking about hadn't happened yet. And, you know, they're in and out in less than 10 minutes. All right. So by this point, I've run out of fuel and, or my crew has run out of fuel.

3:11:54Shawn Ryan:So pilots like, we gotta, we gotta fucking get back home. We, we go back to the staging area. Other relief crew comes in, takes over is, uh, is watching, watching the guy. And then he triggers all the, all the criteria to, to make this thing go. Right. And by this point, we've got some combat controllers that, um, that have basically come forward with us. They're going to call in the final, uh, fires. So then I don't know if you've like spent time in East Africa, but the, you know, the idea is, okay, lays this fucking thing and then put ordinance down on it. Of all the fucking days for a cloud deck to roll in from the Indian Ocean into the East Coast of Somalia, this was the fucking day.

3:12:44Shawn Ryan:And so by this point, I'm back in the talk and I'm watching everything go down on the screens, fucking, you know, ISR TV. And, and the guys are getting ready to release. And, you know, you can see the target down, he's just booking it down this coastal road in Somalia. And, and then the fucking cloud deck comes in and it's the cloud deck comes in these bands, right? So it's like one band of clouds, it'll pass through another band of clouds, it'll pass through every time one of those fucking bands comes in, the CCT is not going to let that, you know, warhead go. Um, so this is happening. The crew's calling it down, you know, negative lock, negative lock, negative lock.

3:13:30Shawn Ryan:Cause the fucking clouds are coming in by this point. Uh, the GFC on the lead helo, they've already like launched. Cause they're expecting us to fucking hit this thing. And they're coming in over the ocean and they're like 30 seconds out from the coast. and the gfc calls mcraven who's sitting at the white house he's like i need fucking authority to like abort the strike and come in with guns and mcraven's like talking to the president uh and he's like no like i want this i want the kinetic strike you guys only do the the pid clouds come in like lasers lasers in lasers out lasers in lasers out shit's not happening combat controller on board is like, this shit's not happening.

3:14:16Shawn Ryan:We're going to abort. GFC is like, boss, I need fucking authority to go in with guns. We're fucking seconds out from this target. McRaven's like, fuck it. Switch to guns, get them. We'll deal with the fallout later. Lee Hilo comes in. Us guys at the talk are watching all this shit go down, but the crew that was overhead is, um, is kind of talking them in. They come in, they blast the guy. Um, and then they set down. Then ISR moves off. Cause you know, you gotta, you gotta clean up and they move in, do the PID and, um, and then head back to, to the ship and they get back to the ship. PID confirms, Salih Nubhan, fucking jackpot.

3:15:10So all of that to say, it was a complex

3:15:17Shawn Ryan:operation that in Iraq or Afghanistan would have been just another op on any other night. But for it to go down off the coast of Somalia in 2009 required this choreography that I've never seen before in my life, right? It's like, you need to convince the fucking president to let you put an LHC off the coast. I think there were a couple of other, um, I think we had some carrier strike group over there and it was all because of the counter piracy shit that was going on back in the day. Um, the court, the synchronization between the platform and, uh, and the helo assault force last, like literally 10 seconds out, switching to fucking guns on the lead helo and making it happen.

3:16:02Shawn Ryan:All of that was really, really insane to watch go down. And I was like, this is, I feel like I'm part of something that is just important. This is a fucking group of people doing important shit all around the world all the time. And I'm humbled to be a part of it. I'm proud to be a part of it. after the strike went down i go outside i sit outside the uh the talk and it's nighttime and uh as the crew comes back um the the pilot drops the the bird down and does like a little top gun maverick fucking tower buzz right like 50 feet above the talk and um i was like this I just felt like whole, you know, fucking badass.

3:16:59Shawn Ryan:And we sat around, had a little bonfire that night. And, um, and, and that was, that was cool. A couple of months later, I get a phone call sitting in the office back at, uh, back at squadron and they're like, Hey, uh, CG's coming in and he, uh, he wants to, you know, he wants to like have a meeting with you guys or whatever. I'm like, what the fuck for? I'm like, whatever, dude. I'm in civilian clothes. And they're like, you got to change the uniform and get your ass over here. I'm like, god damn it. I put my flight suit on. I go to the other building where this is going down. And I see the crews from this op all lined up and shit.

3:17:40Shawn Ryan:And they're like, bro, get the fuck up on stage. McRaven wants to give all of us a thing. I'm like, okay, cool, man. so he goes and he shakes everyone's hand and he's like you know this this is uh you know this is a prime example of us being able to reach out and touch people in complex aos where you know we don't have the the footprint that we do everywhere else and you know he's congratulating everyone he goes to pilots he goes to the the um the load master and then he he gets to me and and there's one, there's one dude next to me and he's the fucking imagery operator. And we call this guy magic man because like he, uh, he used to like really like doing like magic tricks and shit.

3:18:31Shawn Ryan:And you just like pass the time doing that. He's kind of a skinny, like nerdy looking dude. Um, so we'd make fun of him a lot. And so McRaven gets to me and he puts his hand out and he's like, So which one of you was the trigger man? Like which one of you was a sensor operator that, that was a trigger man. And I was like, this is a really awkward question. I don't want to say it's me. Cause it was like a team effort, you know? And so I'm hesitating. Cause I don't, I don't want to be that forward. Magic man over here speaks up and was like, it was me.

3:19:08Nik Seetharaman:Must have been a Navy guy.

3:19:09Shawn Ryan:Yeah. so McRaven he like loses interest with me like fucking goes to this dude and he's like and then he gives him like the fucking CG's coin and I'm like whatever you know in the grand scheme of things and so then the ceremony concludes we get off stage and I turn and look at this fucking dude I'm like and he's like what and I'm like bro you got something for me and he was like, oh, you should have spoken up, bro. Sorry, but good ceremony, right? And then he just fucks off with his fucking CG's coin. I was like, you son of a bitch. Are you serious? Holy shit.

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3:22:14Nik Seetharaman:Alright Nick, we're back from the break. I forgot a couple things. I got too excited about the interview. So just two things to crank out here real quick. One, I got a Patreon account. It's a subscription account. And we've turned it into quite the community. I think it's like 125 ,000 strong now. And they're the reason I get to sit down with you today. So they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. And this is from Jesse Meadows. Where is the real line today between cybersecurity and mass surveillance? Who decides when it's crossed and what assumptions or blind spots in these systems still exist that citizens should understand before the infrastructure becomes irreversible?

3:23:02Shawn Ryan:Yeah, that's actually a great question. So I think the lines are easily blurred between cyber defense, cybersecurity, and surveillance. And we can start at a very small scale and then extrapolate up to national scale if we wish. So if we take a small company or a medium-sized company. And if you really want to do cyber defense in the best possible way that you could do it, then ideally you have as many sensors and taps and collectors of data that you can possibly have spread throughout the organization. Now, that is a massive privacy violation if you go too overboard with it. So I think as with many things and then extrapolate that out to national scale, right?

3:23:56Shawn Ryan:It's like all of the, all of the things that Snowden was up in arms about many years ago were a function of people trying to do

3:24:12people trying to do the right things for the right reasons, but going about it the wrong way,

3:24:18Shawn Ryan:let's say. When I was the chief information security officer at Andrel, I could have probably gotten leadership to buy off on, all right, we're just going to put key loggers on everybody's machine and we're just going to record everything that they do. But we didn't. And the reason we didn't is because there's a conscious decision that always needs to be made with these sets of tools that comes down to, are we turning into fucking assholes or not by using these things? It's like, that's a fuzzy way of putting it, right? But ultimately it comes down to that. And with all things human, I think it comes down to people in leadership positions that are willing to stick their fucking asses out there and draw lines in the sand in accordance with their own morality and say, okay, here's what I think are the left and right limits for how to use a technology like this in a proper and ethical way while achieving the objectives that we've set out to achieve, which is in Andrel's case, the security of the enterprise and the weapon systems and the employees and all of it.

3:25:41Shawn Ryan:Without going overboard into authoritarianism, I think all roads except very few lead to authoritarianism. Given any kind of tool, technology, capability that humans have access to, I think all of them at the limit can be used for just evil shit and the application of control over others. So all of that to say, cybersecurity tools are tools. The humans that are using them need to make good decisions about how to use them and achieve the goals that they're trying to achieve. And it's easy to get carried away by saying that the means, or what does that fucking say? That the ends. I don't know this one.

3:26:45Shawn Ryan:It's like, you know, the ends justify the means, right? That's what I'm trying to get at. It's easy to say that and just go overboard. But I think one thing to keep in mind is China said that too. and they have a society where everything is under the surveillance umbrella that they've set up as a state. Every person's actions are run through that umbrella, turned into an algorithm, and used for very authoritarian purposes. And whatever the actions are in front of us that don't set us down that path, that's at least a good first step, I think.

3:27:35Shawn Ryan:Does this stuff all worry you? Yeah, dude. Yeah, worries me a lot.

3:27:45Shawn Ryan:Yeah, I mean, technology is capable of some insane things these days. I mean, I'm honestly very surprised that we don't have a social credit system in the United States that is driven by the experience and the trans unions and the fucking credit reporting agencies, because that would make their lives so much easier. It's like if they just had more data on you and what you're doing on a day in and day out basis, that made it a lot easier for them to understand whether you're a good citizen with good credit or not. I think without checks and balances in place, we certainly have the capabilities to get there.

3:28:31I think the only thing keeping us back is the pillars that are basically holding us up as a Western society.

3:28:42Shawn Ryan:Some of those pillars are crumbling fast. Some people would like to see them crumbled fast. But I think the reason that we don't have such an authoritarian system in place as the United States of America is because that just goes against our spirit and ideals as a society and as american citizens other countries have no such compunctions so you can say all the shit you want about america and all the evil shit that it's done and maybe we have maybe we fucking have we're the only country that that's dropped nuclear fucking bombs on people right But at the same time, I mean, look at the picture of you on that helicopter over Afghanistan, dude.

3:29:29Like if there were, if you landed on the X and you saw some fucking kids and you got, you know, you guys did your job and, you know, you were trying to figure out what to do with these, with these kids, you know, you're not going to just take them out back, back and smoke them.

3:29:52Shawn Ryan:Right. Maybe the fucking Russians would have done that. Maybe the Chinese would have done that. But one thing I think that is an invariant is that a fucking dude wearing the stars and stripes on their chest, it's just very difficult to imagine that dude doing that. There's something about the morals that we have as a society and that we carry with us into all these shitty, complicated situations that speaks for itself.

3:30:29Nik Seetharaman:Those men are men of the people.

3:30:38Nik Seetharaman:You know what I mean? Yeah. Explain.

3:30:50Nik Seetharaman:those men

3:31:02Nik Seetharaman:are doing something that they truly fucking believe in yeah that 100 percent or close aligns with their values you know 100 you know the ones that start to think otherwise they leave you know

3:31:23Nik Seetharaman:the people that we're talking about you know that that that that have the ability for mass surveillance stuff like that i mean those are powerful powerful elite rich yeah wealthy people I think those are that shouldn't be but seem to be more easily influenced by more power and more wealth. Yeah. But mostly power. Yeah, I agree with you.

3:31:55Shawn Ryan:I think at a societal scale, I think it's...

3:32:03Nik Seetharaman:For example, the Epstein files drop. Yeah. Yep. The spirit of America wants those fucking files released now. The elites of America are doing everything they can to fucking hide this shit from everybody. Because it was a power structure thing.

3:32:24Shawn Ryan:Yep. Yeah, I agree, man. I think at national levels and at societal levels, I think there's a dark undercurrent of elites that really don't fall on any one side of the partisan spectrum. I feel like they're in it to sustain their elitism. Goes back to good and evil. Yep.

3:32:59Shawn Ryan:yep so to answer uh jesse's question

3:33:06Nik Seetharaman:yeah it could be very easily go sideways it could what do you think would happen if it does go sideways how do you think people will i mean they'll always find a way around it we don't we go on primitive at national levels like at societal level societal level how do you find privacy when it does run away. Yeah. I think if we want to have true privacy in the future, we need to think very carefully about the sovereignty of the data that we emit as

3:33:43Shawn Ryan:part of our daily lives, right? Like one of the questions I was answering out there for some of the Patreon folks was, you know, what are your recommendations for cybersecurity as a society in 2026? And one of them was take the fucking pictures of your loved ones down from the internet. Like these AI algorithms can do anything they want with those pictures. You basically put those out into the wild fucking forest of the algorithms. So start taking that shit down. The olden days of like sharing pictures on facebook and social media and all that consider that gone like take pictures of you down take pictures of your loved ones down and the reason for that is what you want to start doing is preserving sovereignty of the data that belongs to you and it's a foreign concept to us as human beings right because we're not wired to think about our digital exhaust and and our digital footprint and all this shit.

3:34:49Shawn Ryan:But we better start thinking about it because when we don't, someone else is going to suck that up and have their way with it. One of the reasons I'm wearing this hat is because Josh Klenenny, the founder of Levels, he started Levels, which is a metabolic health company to give people the ability to control their own medical data. not siphon it off to some fucking insurance company or some lab or some whatever. It's like, this data is coming off my body and I own it and I get to do whatever the fuck I want with it. I can put it into chat and AI if I want, and I can get it to tell me to do it, you know, change my lifestyle or whatever, or I can choose to freely send it somewhere else.

3:35:38Shawn Ryan:But the point is, it's one example of the fact that we need to start thinking about how we control the data that's that's emitted from our own lives. That sounds like an interesting company, Levels. Yeah, the founder and CEO, Josh Clemente, he worked on the life support systems on the dragon spacecraft for spacex so he spent a lot of time working on on those subsystems and then took that skill set transferred it over to basically human metabolic quantification essentially so the things that you do on a day-to-day basis the pack of chips that you just ate how can you extrapolate that out into what that's going to mean for your health five years from now, 10 years from now.

3:36:35Shawn Ryan:And that's a perfect use case for where data security is essential because you let that data get in the wrong hands. Okay. The instant you eat that pack of chips, well, TransUnion just drops your credit score 20 fucking points. So that's not a future I want to live in. But yeah. Wow. All right.

3:37:00Nik Seetharaman:Let's get back to your story.

3:37:02Shawn Ryan:Yep.

3:37:05All right.

3:37:06Shawn Ryan:So we. Your son. Yeah. My son was born 2011. 11.

3:37:16Shawn Ryan:It was something that I wish I could go back and relive. What I should have done was think very introspectively and deeply about how to not subject my son to any of the same shit that I had to contend with as a kid and as a teenager. And I've tried to do that. Certainly I've been probably the worst thing I've done is to just be away a lot. I was constantly deployed. Like months after he was born, I got the call from NSW and frankly, a very personal, like selfish decision was made. Like, okay, I, I started my military career out at fucking 40 ,000 feet on these tin cans flying around the sky. Over the years, I got closer and closer and closer and closer to the fight.

3:38:32And I got really fucking good at every one of those levels.

3:38:36Shawn Ryan:And now I'm being asked to be out on the ground with these dudes. And I was like, there's no way I'm passing up on this. And was that the right decision? I don't know. If I could go back, I wish I would have spent more time with him when he was young, when he was just a few months old. Instead, I

3:39:08Shawn Ryan:went to NSW, got seconded there. The history leading up to this was the fact that task force at the time, there was a lot of demand for active duty military members who spoke different languages and had all of the skill sets that I was coming to the table with. And my signal squadron had a lot of those fucking people. And one thing that I would try and do, so by this point, I was a tech sergeant E6 in the Air Force. One thing that I would try and do is convey to Air Force headquarters that the things going on in this place are important. And the skill sets that we can bring to the table for this place are impactful.

3:40:05Shawn Ryan:So don't hold us back or hamstring us and tell us this isn't our mission. This is not what we do. We don't roll out with these dudes. We don't do that. We don't do this. We do whatever the fucking CG needs us to do. That's the reality of it. And the other reality was, unfortunately, the squadron at the time was sort of hamstrung by like three or four different lines of authority. You had task force, you had AFSOC, you had this archaic Cold War agency called the Air Force intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance agency, EFISRA. It's a bureaucratic bloated organization that all, you know, their bread and butter was flying fucking SIGINT missions during the cold war.

3:40:55Shawn Ryan:Right. Great. You don't know shit about counter-terrorism or find, fix, finish, or all of the shit going on at this, at this organization here. And they would, um, you know, they would, they would serve to just be a bureaucratic blocker to us all the time. And around halfway through my time at TAS, we finally broke through and we were like NSW came to find out some of the stuff that we could do. And they were like, Hey, we got a need for, you know, some of you guys. And, um, so I got told, Hey, be out on the ramp. Uh, we're gonna have a plane coming for you and they're gonna take you up to Virginia Beach okay cool so I walk out on the ramp plane comes and gets me go to Virginia Beach and I sit around and there's a bunch of team guys and and I go through like sort of a screening process.

3:42:04Shawn Ryan:And, um, I ended up getting seconded there and now I was coming full circle. I, you know, I had spent my whole career wanting to get closer and closer to the fight. Now I was going to be in the fucking fight on the ground with the guys. Um, so the the the mission for the next few years was essentially do the fucking shit that you did in the air but do it on the ground and do it in very very small teams lone wolf if you needed to sometimes that was the case um And I fucking loved it, dude. And like, should I have been back with my son? Yeah, probably. One thing, one regret I have is, I would, you know, this character flaw I have is, when I'm on deployment, I'm on deployment.

3:43:08Shawn Ryan:Like, I don't like... You compartmentalize everything. Compartmentalize everything. I don't want to... Shut it down. Yeah. I don't want to be on deployment, and I'm thinking about my family back home, and I'm, you know, it's like pollutes different sides of your brain, you know? So one way I dealt with that is, you know, I would just spend weeks at a time just being in fucking deployment mode.

3:43:38Shawn Ryan:Which was cool, man. I mean, like some of the capabilities that we got to bring to bear were like not organic to NSW. Like, um, like the fact that I could speak different languages, the fact that I could work some of the spec a gear that, um, that only a linguist would know how to work. Right. I remember one time I walked into a joint and, um, you know, I, the, the team, team area, and, uh, there was like some kit in the corner and I was like, Hey, is anyone using that fucking thing? And they're like, no, we won't have anyone that speaks, you know, that Ablas. So I was like, I'll fucking get on it.

3:44:12Shawn Ryan:So then when I wasn't rolling out in the Hiluxes, I was on that fucking thing with cans on and just all the time I was either out or on that thing with the cans on. And I felt like I had just, all my career had led up to this opportunity here. now i sacrificed you know i sacrificed communication with my family my ex now um with my with my son with my stepdaughter uh and that's something i would i would go back and change it's just i wrestle with this question to this day like was it all fucking worth it dude like all the cool, cool stories and like all this shit that I got to do with, with NSW, all the, all the work on the ground.

3:45:06Shawn Ryan:Um, was it worth it for the sacrifices, for the things that I did to my family in order, in order to, to make it happen? Like just all the deployments, all the being gone all the time, man, I would, I would get home from something, from some trip and dude you know how it is get home from a trip and you just want to sustain that crack high right and so it's like all right what's up next all right driving school cool laundry pack fucking let's go some other fucking i don't know shooting yeah let's go um over and over and over again and so then you just get into this cycle that you don't know how to break out of.

3:45:53Shawn Ryan:And you're heading into a brick wall because you can be the coolest fucking guy on the planet with, you can be Mr. Air Force dude assigned to this NSW squadron, but that doesn't last forever. And then you leave, the machine goes on without you and now you're just a dude on the street okay great what has all of this been for you know

3:46:28Shawn Ryan:yeah so that time with NSW I mean those guys treated me

3:46:32Nik Seetharaman:if you come to a conclusion

3:46:35Shawn Ryan:was it worth it

3:46:43Shawn Ryan:I don't know, man. It's tough. You know, the biggest impact I had when I was with them was we were working these target packages to interdict this EFP smuggling ring. And it was targeting diplomatic personnel in the AO that we were in. And so, you know, you justify it in your mind, right? You're like, I'm focused on this shit because I'm trying to save the lives of these embassy personnel that are at risk because of this shit. And then looking back at it, it's like,

3:47:40Shawn Ryan:okay, a bunch of people could have done that. Um, you know, I was no one special. I don't know. I don't know is the answer. I think it all happened because I was meant to sit here and be introspective about these issues with who the fuck knows watching and talking through it.

3:48:10Nik Seetharaman:I ask my question that all the time. I didn't even have a family back then.

3:48:17Nik Seetharaman:I think a lot of guys think about this. You know, it's a tough fucking question to ponder. Yeah. I mean, you're talking about Somalia. What did we just uncover in fucking Minnesota? Yeah. How many billions of dollars getting smuggled right into fucking Somalia? Well, we probably got guys right there right fucking now. Yep. Is it worth it? Yeah. Yeah.

3:48:42Shawn Ryan:I know, dude. I wrestle with that. And a lot of these AOs, we were talking about this on the drive over here, we pump money and fucking Zodiac boats and equipment and guns and ammo.

3:48:58Nik Seetharaman:$87 million a week to the Taliban right now, every fucking week delivered in cash.

3:49:03Shawn Ryan:What happens? We do the same fucking thing every time. What is the doctrine that we have for? It's like nation building, right? Dude, we suck at it, okay? We're just not fucking good at it. Why don't we just not? Why don't we not do it? So it's a question I wrestle with all the time. I don't know. I feel proud of my service.

3:49:34You know, these are experiences that not many people have.

3:49:41Shawn Ryan:I certainly felt a loss of identity when I left. You know, I remember walking out of the NSW compound for the last time, and, you know, there were fucking dudes in the kill house, and they're doing their thing, and there's like fucking helos flying around, and like there's dudes running from one building to another. Like, there's dudes like cleaning the Mark Fives out in the boat area. And you're like, this fucking machine is just going to go on without me. and it's not a good feeling. And then you're just a guy on the street.

3:50:27Shawn Ryan:So yeah, the last few years, active duty, those guys took me in. They treated me like just one of their own. And my goal was just to represent my service well. the air force okay because you know from their view they knew air force dudes in their world came in one of two flavors pjs controllers pjs ccts now they got like special reconnaissance dudes and whatnot so some wacko like cryptologic linguist coming on board and being assigned like some very high level areas of responsibility, um, was new for them. And so I had a lot of pressure to fucking get it right. Um, and I, I hope I did a large part of why I'm kind of glossing over all that piece of it is because, you know, I, I don't want to get into areas that, that would, um, um you know divulge TTPs and all that for those guys so but it was good uh my girlfriend always gets mad at me because like to this day I haven't come up with uh like a clean like arc for like what the I did in the military you know so like one of her family will ask a question and I'll be like, oh, well, you know, I was in the Air Force, but then I was at this, like, joint place, and then, like, I was at NSW, and then they were just like, what the fuck are you talking about, dude?

3:52:12Like, are you a poser?

3:52:15Shawn Ryan:Like, what was your BUDS class? I was like, I didn't, I wasn't a team guy. I didn't go to fucking BUDS. But it was great, man. I had a really good time. They, you know, they put me through, you know, all of all of the shit that they put their own guys through for screening and whatnot so it was like cqc uh you know driving you know maritime um jumping uh no jumping no jumping no no um yeah not needed for the the stuff that i was doing but, um, yeah, it was, it was good. I actually pulled, uh, I pulled two other guys in with me, uh, air force dudes to go through the, the sequence of, of training courses because those dudes had blown out on, um, some, uh, some emergency operations, let's say, uh, in the Indian Ocean because they spoke the language.

3:53:23Shawn Ryan:And I thought they could just use the fucking extra skill sets. You know, it's like they didn't appreciate that too much. They got put through the fucking ringer. But, you know, they got some good stories out of it. But, yeah, that was fun. A lot of it was...

3:53:41Nik Seetharaman:You want to talk about the FP ring?

3:53:44Shawn Ryan:Yeah.

3:53:47Shawn Ryan:Yeah. So there was a cluster of foreign fighters, let's call them, that were sort of interfering in the affairs of the AO that we were in at the time. And this is an AO that you're very well familiar with.

3:54:10Nik Seetharaman:In fact, I discovered this morning that we were highly co-located at one time.

3:54:16Shawn Ryan:One at one time. And basically, they were trying to smuggle EFPs, so shape charges, basically, and use them to create IEDs or other incendiary devices to put diplomatic personnel at risk that were that were in that particular ao and so our job was to basically figure out you know who who the fuck is all involved um who are they what do they do who do they run with it's like that scene from heat you know it's like who the fuck is this guy i want to know who he runs with and who he eats with i want to know who they run with and who they eat with and i want it up tonight and I want it going. That was our job.

3:55:09Shawn Ryan:And we did it quite well.

3:55:16Shawn Ryan:A lot of it is around, you know, how do you execute fine fix in complex urban environments?

3:55:27Nik Seetharaman:The stuff I was talking about earlier.

3:55:29Shawn Ryan:Which is your question from earlier.

3:55:30Nik Seetharaman:He's on that floor and that room.

3:55:33Shawn Ryan:in the bathroom on that wall yeah and it's like well how the do you know that well I'm not going to get into that piece of it but um I know and I'm gonna tell somebody I know and that somebody is gonna go take care of business um

3:55:57Shawn Ryan:Yeah, there was some shit. Yeah, there was just some dumb shit that would go down. A lot of it was just like, well, there's not a lot of backup here, so we're just kind of hanging our asses out.

3:56:13Shawn Ryan:Obviously, some mutual... What are you talking about? You had us. Yeah. Yeah. I remember, um, I remember one time, uh, an individual that I actually respected highly came down from elsewhere in the AO and we were going to work with, with you guys, um, on, uh, on something and our job, me and this individual was, you guys were going to work with the clowns in action? Yeah. Well, in this particular, I was the fucking clown because, you know, this individual comes in and they're like, hey, dude, you know, you got a great reputation, really psyched to work with you. Like, let's go fucking get this thing done.

3:57:03Shawn Ryan:You know, represent our organization well with these guys over here. And I was like, cool, let's go. So we plan it all out. We're like working with your guys. And our job without, you know, getting too much into it is to be at a particular location at a very particular time, uh, looking out for some stuff and we roll out and, you know, I'm checking, I'm obsessive about fucking TOT and like being at the exactly, precisely right places at the right times. You know, I want to be there. I want to get it right. Cause you, you know, you guys are relying on us and fucking three minutes into this thing.

3:57:45Shawn Ryan:I get fucking T-boned by some indage dude, like just smashes into the car right after this person says, Hey man, you got a great reputation. And like, you're known for like this flawless execution on these three fucking minutes in, I get T-boned by this fucking guy. I'm like, God. And I'm watching the, the, the TOT burn down. Right. I'm like, Oh, okay. We're, we're off base. Um, all right. So I'm like, stay in the car. I get out. I start negotiating with this fucking dude. I like, but no one trains you on how to deal with, it's not like there's Geico insurance in this fucking place. Right. So it's like, what am I supposed to do here so i do my best i like bust out some op fund cash i'm like yo just take this get the out of here he like slaps the cash out of my hand because like he's now he's offended that i'm trying to pay him off and shit uh i'm like so i like talk him down uh fortunately the the damage wasn't that bad but by the time all this happened i'm like convinced convincing this dude to like not make this a big deal.

3:58:55Shawn Ryan:How do I put this? You guys are in your own vehicle and we're supposed to be way down the fucking road somewhere else. And we're not. And you guys drive by us and you're just like, what the fuck are these two morons doing on the side of the road here? And you're just like staring out the window and I'm like, God, I fucked that one up pretty good. Um, it's just like dumb shit like that would happen. Another time, uh, my buddy were like driving down this like really tight section of, um, of the city, you know, you know, which place I'm talking about this really tight section of the city. And he's like, I need you to turn down this way.

3:59:43Shawn Ryan:And I look down that way and the road leading down this path or this section of the city is made completely of garbage. It's a fucking garbage road. Like there's no pavement. There's no nothing. I'm like, Hey dude, I don't think that's a good idea for us to drive down that way. He's like, no, no, no. I need you to drive down that way. Cause like, you know, that's where that's where the dude is check drive down that way halfway down the road the truck sinks through the garbage we're like stuck and uh then all these it makes a like makes a fucking noise because i'm trying to like get the get the wheels turning and get us out of there so i'm like revving the engine that's like making noise the locals are all like what the fuck is going on so they like all come out of their houses and my buddy is like yep it's one of these fucking dudes that's surrounding our car right now holy shit um i'm like okay and uh so there's uh there's some there's a team guy in the in the car with us he's a great fucking dude but he's also kind of like just let's fucking get it on and he's like what what do we what do we do man like let's let's fucking i'm like dude calm down like let me let me talk us out of this one um so somehow i get out of the car i convince the locals that like you know we're trying to head to the beach or some and um like they help us get the car out of there and we roll out but that one was spicy because i was like if this dude gets a whiff that you know something's off it's not gonna go well um one of the neighborhoods we went into the guy did get a whiff and it wasn't anything crazy that happened but he walks in front of you

4:01:41Nik Seetharaman:you must speak really fucking good holy shit

4:01:45Shawn Ryan:you know what's fucked up about it dude when you go to DLI

4:01:49Nik Seetharaman:I mean the fucking place you're talking about is like so cultural yeah and we at least we didn't understand that i mean if you're wearing the whatever on the wrong side they know oh yeah they fucking oh yeah you're having to talk to them oh yeah yep yeah on a

4:02:12Shawn Ryan:fucking trash road on a trash on a fucking trash road the poorest part of the fucking city yeah um yeah so it got it would get dicey um of one of the poorest places in the world yeah it would get dicey um yeah there was one time where we were in a neighborhood and the dude walks in front of the vehicle and he just looks at me kind of like what you were just saying he looks at me and i look at him and he just he just knows that i'm not i i could look like whatever but i'm not from there and he like bolts to his vehicle and i think i hear him like calling out to some of his buddies i'm like oh fuck here we go and then i like reverse fucking j turn out of there i'm like i get to use the fucking j turn this is pretty fucking sick and then like we book it down and then we see them from the rearview mirror like they're like i mean it was like keystone cops dude.

4:03:16Shawn Ryan:They're like turning down these alleyways, trying to like get to us. Um, but we got out of there, uh, just dumb shit would happen like that. Uh, in between, you know, all the, all the high stress stuff, um, EFP boy, we, uh, we eventually got him. Um, one thing that was not so fun is, you know, sometimes, you know, you're expected to get up close to these dudes, you know, um they might be s-vested up you don't know they think that's a suicide vest for the listeners suicide vest yeah they think something's off they're gonna fucking clack that shit off and um so i was always hyper hyper cognizant of what was going on around me you know and and like you know the way that i would conduct myself and and all this but i was never i was never really scared i was like this is the greatest opportunity anyone could ever ask for in my position i feel like i'm contributing directly to like critical needs of of the organization and so i'm gonna i'm gonna get after it actually one time kind of hilariously we hung our asses out there and uh got like really good shots of some dudes and we were working with with you guys to do it and We'd pass it off to you guys.

4:04:46Shawn Ryan:And then two days later, it comes back with like circular reporting that like, hey, these dudes like built this target package. And like, here's the here's the fucking, you know, shots from the recce. And I'm like, bro, that was that was us. I was not.

4:05:10Shawn Ryan:I was like, okay, whatever. But, you know, no one's in it to take credit for anything. It's just like, all right, whatever. Let's just fucking get the thing done.

4:05:25Shawn Ryan:And then, you know, one of the very last, I mean, I must have done hundreds and hundreds of those ops over the course of my time there, which was really fun. you know you just get into a rhythm you know you you just know how to be in that area man like and okay you want to walk down a fucking alley in the poorest part of town in this fucking place and like if i fuck something up like shit's gonna go sideways cool i'm i'm comfortable with that you just kind of like you go native that's fucking awesome um it's like i said it's my favorite fucking place yeah to work yeah to wait yeah to work um so my very last op uh we finally after never having had one like across all the the deployments and ops and got a bird chop to us and so they're like hey you're gonna have a bird on station for like 45 minutes.

4:06:25Shawn Ryan:There's just like sloppy seconds, you know, like they're off doing something for somebody else. And they're like, all right, I guess they can support you on their way home. I'm like, cool. Thanks, man. Um, I'm like, all right, here's what I need. Uh, I, I need to dial them up and be able to, to calm with them in real time. Um, and they're like negative. You're not authorized to talk to them. I was like, I'm not authorized to talk to a fucking aircraft overhead that's supporting me um and my guys like negative you got to run the comms through this stupid comms loop that ran from where we were at all the way stateside and then all the way back to where we were at this is like fucking 20 ,000 mile loop of a comm i was like that's just not gonna work dude like you know when you're why in the fuck when you're when you're out there like you know microseconds matter i was like i'm not dealing with this so i'd look at our comms guy i'm like hey man we got a green radio yeah dude i'm like fire up this frequency please if you would and uh hand me that radio and um and so i fired up i get comms with the bird i'm like hey uh i'm checking in with you guys you guys be working for us tonight now Now, that was interesting for me because I used to be the dude on the bird, like helping support all these fucking dudes on the ground.

4:07:52Shawn Ryan:I knew how to talk. I knew what they would do. I knew all the procedures they had. I knew how they would be working the gear. I knew how they would look at the imagery. I just knew it, right? It was like I was one with them. And at the same time, over the course of hundreds of reps, I was one with these guys that I was on the ground with too. And so it kind of was really cool because my career came full circle on that op. I was able to fire up the radio, talk to the bird like I was one of them, talk to these guys like I'm one of them, fuse all of it together and navigate fluidly through this urban environment in order to get the work done.

4:08:31And that was really cool.

4:08:35Shawn Ryan:I was just able to bring it all home.

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4:10:25Shawn Ryan:And then I got home and then, you know, what happens is, you know, we were talking about this earlier, when you spend too much time coloring outside the lines in the military, whatever bureaucracy or like personnel machine that operates your service will come get a hold of you and like where the fuck you've been for the past you know x many years like you need to come back to the fold and go back to big blue air force and go take an instructor billet somewhere or what have you. I was like, I'm not going to do that. After having done the shit that I've been doing for the past, you know, almost decade by that point, I wasn't going to go back to all the stuff that Big Blue Air Force normally does.

4:11:20Shawn Ryan:Like, good, like, awesome people doing all of those jobs. But I had just seen too much, you know. I had seen too much. and I went to the leadership at, um, at NSW. I was like, is there any fucking way for me to like be here full time? I was like, I'll get out. I'll fucking do an inter-service transfer to the Navy. They're like, I mean, we got pulled, but we don't have that kind of pull. You know, if you do an inter-service transfer, you might have to go be on a boat for a few years. and then we'll pull you. I was like, okay, that's not going to work. And then I had one of the leadership go to headquarters Air Force and go brief me by name and be like, the ideal situation for you guys and us is for Nick to have a bullet at this organization.

4:12:20Shawn Ryan:Air Force was like, nope, not our thing. damn no shit so i was like okay i got no options here so i i left i left the service because there was nowhere for me to go i'd gotten to the end of my career track like as a cryptologic linguist there was nothing else for me to do um in while active duty so um i left again it was it was a It was just a feeling of, dude, this train, this machine is just going to keep functioning without me. And it's a terrible feeling. One day you're... You're the guy. One day you're the fucking guy. You're the fucking guy that made Admiral McRaven reroute fucking LHCs and helicopter assault forces to prosecute a fucking high-value target that you found.

4:13:20Shawn Ryan:You're the fucking guy that people are relying on. You're the guy that bring capabilities to bear that other people in the organization cannot. And then to go from that to you're just another fucking dude on the street with taxes and bills to pay and rent. Get your fucking resume together. Start applying for jobs on fucking Indeed.com. Dude, that broke me. And at that moment where your identity was completely nuked, all in a matter of a few seconds, you're done. You walk out that compound, you're done. I knew what it was like to be my dad and to go from the fucking dude who had escaped the boarding school he went through and become this highly respected individual that got to do amazing things around the world in his own way, in the Merchant Marine.

4:14:31Shawn Ryan:to go from that to working a fucking styrofoam cup job at a factory in Jersey, that's the feeling I felt wash over me. And it was tough. The first year or two out of the military was tough. I landed a contracting position with the SOCOM element to be an instructor for some of their, uh, their initial training cycles. So this was a SOCOM element that specialized in doing the things that I had been doing for, for the past few years. Um, and so I went on staff as one of their instructor cadre and, um, that particular organization, uh, tends to be quite isolated. Um, they tend to work in their own little vacuum.

4:15:25Shawn Ryan:They're kind of like you guys in that way. You guys, your former guys.

4:15:32Shawn Ryan:And so me coming from one of the other, you know, task force components, they're like, all right, cool, but we need you to just like check some boxes and teach these dudes how to do stuff and whatnot. And I did, but during the course of it, you know, I gave some feedback to him i was like hey man some of the shit that these guys are doing is gonna get them killed out in the field like i don't want to get into any of the ttps but i was like you know here's where you guys need to rethink some some of these ttps that these guys are doing um because having just done like hundreds of these fucking things in like low permissive semi-permissive environments i was like you try that shit out there and you're gonna you're gonna get got But in retrospect, I could have gone about it a different way.

4:16:26Shawn Ryan:I could have been more diplomatic about it. I could have tried to, you know, change it from the inside. But it was a very insular organization. And it's like, unless you came out of that place, like they weren't really interested in what you had to say. So, you know, I wrapped up with them.

4:16:44Nik Seetharaman:It's interesting, right? It's interesting how they don't want to hear it.

4:16:50Shawn Ryan:Uh, you can't blame them, right? Like they have like, like any of the task force components, they have a long history of successes and they have their own culture.

4:17:06Shawn Ryan:Um, yeah, it's human. It's human nature, I think. And me being, you know, young at the time and not politically savvy, you know, I just, you know, to me, it's like, I'm just going to be a fucking straight shooter, dude. Like, here you go. here's what i think it's like well that's not really the best way to to go about things are

4:17:25Nik Seetharaman:you at like my sister company is that where you're at you um i'm trying to i'm trying to play within the lines here yeah yeah yeah okay kind of yeah okay so very politically correct you're coming from a unit of fucking savages doesn't end yeah okay yes it's a hard transition yep i get it yep um yeah they call they call they have different terminology for everything they call things differently they um yeah so i i wrapped up with very gentle you have to be gentle in these organizations you can't be direct you have to beat around the fucking bush you have to play the fucking game yeah and it it it it it's a problem for for people like you and i who come out of organizations where they're you just don't there's no there's not much bullshit to sift through it's just you fucked up yeah you're gonna get fucking people killed yeah don't fucking do it

4:18:35Shawn Ryan:exactly and if you try bringing that bullshit man you're gonna see your ass out the door real fucking quick.

4:18:45Shawn Ryan:Then I was completely out on my ass. So like... Oh, so did you get... Did they kick you out? No, they didn't kick me out. But the, you know, there was some contract shenanigans. You know how it goes. Like someone comes in, outbids the incumbent.

4:18:57Nik Seetharaman:Oh, you didn't get invited. Oh, okay.

4:18:59Shawn Ryan:Outbids the incumbent. They're, you know, the new contracting company is like, you know, we're going to cut your salary by such and such. And it's like, well, I'm not, I'm not really invested in this fucking place. So like, I'm out.

4:19:15Shawn Ryan:But it was an opportunity for me to, you know, convey some of the lessons learned from the field. Like, I know we're being very general here with the type of shit that we're talking about, but at the time, there weren't very many organizations doing the kind of shit that we were doing, like at the organization I was at. And so anything that I could do to convey to these guys, Hey, here's the realities of working in these environments and the things that you need to be cognizant of and so on. I tried to do, you know, there was one point where one of their, they were going through their initial training cycles and it was like one of their ending exercises.

4:19:54Shawn Ryan:And the scenario was, was a hostage rescue basically. And so these guys were out there and their job was to essentially locate the hostages. Right. And once they do, that triggers, you know, a series of, of things. And culmination exercise. Um, and I could tell that like, it hadn't really clicked for some of them, right? Like the type of serious shit that they were going to get into. Cause these are people that came from anywhere, everywhere, uh, you know, traditional, like conventional military, and so on. And so I, I go visit one of the teams out in the field with some of the other active duty cadre and the active duty cadre is like, Hey, where's everyone at?

4:20:46Shawn Ryan:And the, the students are like, well, we got some dudes going to get subway right now. And then we got, we got one team just like trolling around like over here and I lost my shit. I was like, Hey man, let me tell you guys something. This scenario that you guys are doing here for this culmination exercise is one of the most critical scenarios you will ever encounter in the real hot fucking hostage rescue, right? Especially the pre-assault portion of a hostage rescue. It could very well be the case that two weeks from now, after you guys graduate this training program, you guys could be in front of the fucking CG for real downrange somewhere, briefing him on what the fuck your plan is to find these people, right?

4:21:46Shawn Ryan:If you get put on an actual op. And I'll tell you right fucking now that telling the CG that you got some, you got some fucking dudes getting food. And then you got another set of dudes just trolling around some random location in town with no hypothesis behind why they're over there or any leads whatsoever is not going to fucking fly. So tighten your shit up. This is your culmination exercise. You're going to be doing this for real in two weeks. And then I said it and I was like, fuck, dude, like I shouldn't have said that. I'm just a contractor. I, I'm not part of this organization. I didn't come from this organization.

4:22:29Shawn Ryan:So I looked at the active duty cadre and I was like, Hey, you know, sorry if I overstepped any lines, like I, I'm just trying to convey to them the reality of, you know, what they're going to be facing. And they were like, dude, no fucking problem. Like they need to hear that shit um like it's it's all good and so i kind of that was uh that was kind of the last thing i did i kind of saw that culmination exercise through and then um and then i left uh and then now that was kind of my off-ramp from from anything to do with any of this shit and then now at this point, I was just a straight fucking civilian.

4:23:10And, you know, the, the savings that you have

4:23:16Shawn Ryan:as a fucking E6, um, you know, they dwindle quick. Right. And I'm out here, I'm trying to land somewhere in the civilian world. Months go by, you know, I'm, I'm not really able to make anything stick um my resumes are just fucking disasters dude like i look at some of my old resume i still have like weapons quals on my fucking resumes that i that i sent around i'm like are you fucking stupid the hell were you thinking um savings are dwindling one day i wake up there's you know three digit dollar amount in the bank um i i'm still with my with my ex at this point you know my son is three digits yeah yeah three digits um my son is two and a half or so my my stepdaughter is um she was 11 at 12.

4:24:19Shawn Ryan:um i gotta make some happen and uh right around then then I, here's the problem, right? When you're working the work that I did for the organization, you only kind of get to learn shit at a very superficial level. Like, you know, whether it's the EW side or whether it's like the cyber shit or whether it's something else, right? CQC, whatever. You never get to go into anything at the level of specialization of like a dude that just focuses on that. You don't get to do CQC like a fucking team guy. You don't get to do EW like a full-time tacky W guy. You don't get to do cyber as a full-time cyber dude.

4:25:02Shawn Ryan:So you dabble in this shit and you kind of synthesize it all and you, you go do the mission, but you're handicapped because you transition out to the civilian world. And it's like, all right, well, let me try and get a job in cybersecurity. Shit. I didn't think about that. Well, I kind of know how this shit works. I know, you know, if you go tell me...

4:25:25Nik Seetharaman:You're a jack of all trades.

4:25:26Shawn Ryan:A jack of all trades. I can be told where to go plug the fucking USB drive in, but I don't know what the fuck that USB drive is doing when I do that. I don't know how all that shit works, like what machines are clicking and worrying like when things begin operating. And so I had to do a couple of things very quickly. Number one,

4:25:51Shawn Ryan:I had to just deep dive into something and I was like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to deep dive into the cyber shit because I can, I can finally like fully transition into the civilian world. If I stayed in like EW and all that shit, I would still be in the orbits of, you know, the old organizations. I just wanted to make a clean break. I'm like, if I'm out, I'm out. um so i i dove deep into into the cyber shit and data analytics and um i basically put myself through like a civilian hell week basically and for a week straight i would watch like harvard lectures on data analytics and cyber security and all this other shit on like 3x speed and just like osmosisize all the fucking things that these people were saying all these professors you know giving their lectures and um i i did that for a week straight and so you're you're legitimately

4:26:49Nik Seetharaman:just trying to fucking download as much information as fast as possible to fucking one week so that so i can start interviewing for wow for for jobs are you understanding all the lectures

4:27:00Shawn Ryan:No, but I'm picking things up here and there. I'm not deep diving into any of the concepts, but I'm learning the language and I'm learning the concepts and I'm learning the breadth of things. um right around that time uh there was a time article or like a fucking business insider article that came out about this company called endgame and it was run by a guy named nate fick um who had been a uh marine officer um marine force recon officer uh and he like he wrote a book and they made like a fucking HBO show about his platoon, but he had gotten out a few years previously and he had become the CEO of this company.

4:27:52I was like, that sounds like a cool

4:27:55Shawn Ryan:fucking company to work for. And, uh, you know, the CEO seems pretty legit. And what they did was they created essentially exotic cyber warfare capabilities for the U S government and for commercial customers. They hadn't quite figured out the commercial customer angle yet, but you government knew exactly what they wanted from them and it was a bunch of former intel community guys dod guys that focused fully on cyber i was like here's a place that i can go i can fucking learn from these dudes i can figure out how this works and then i can use that as a launching pad to to move forward problem was they didn't have any job openings except for a data science position and i was like i don't know what the is data science and so i started looking into it.

4:28:42And I come to realize, okay, well, a lot of it is around the type of shit that I had to do

4:28:48Shawn Ryan:before rolling out on an op, right? You're looking at data, you're crunching numbers, you're taking your analyses, and then you are translating them into something that has to happen in the real world, right? In the old jobs case, it was translate that data into how the fuck you're going to plan your, you know, surveillance operation or whatever. So I put together this like PowerPoint deck. I applied, I applied to the role. Um, and I put together this PowerPoint deck that they wanted for this presentation. Um, and I didn't know shit, dude. Uh, the title of the PowerPoint deck was cause I was trying to translate shit from my military career.

4:29:34Shawn Ryan:It was like fugitive recovery, utilizing data analytics. And it was all about how you can use data that you would get from various sensors and basically sift through it using machine learning algorithms. I was just saying shit that I had seen in these goddamn part of that lectures, right? How you can use machine learning in order to drill down on where this fucking fugitive was at any given moment and execute a recovery. Trying to use language that civilians would understand. So I go, I go, my first interview is with this like data scientist guy. And he's a fucking smart dude, like PhD from like Ivy league school, like all this shit, AI machine learning expert.

4:30:18Shawn Ryan:And he's like, he, he draws a thing on the board. He's like, what is a type of graph that you can't get caught in a loop in and i was like bro what the fuck are you talking about i have no idea but i tried making some shit up and i know the answer now it's a fucking directed acyclic graph but at the time i was like i have no idea what this dude's talking about i'm gonna fail this process and i'm not gonna make it um i guess they saw something in me. I don't know what it was, like just like the earnestness with which I answered. They could probably tell I did some preparatory work or whatever, but they kept moving me on in the process.

4:31:03Shawn Ryan:And then I get to the panel presentation and, you know, I start walking through it. They have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about. Like fugitive recovery, what the fuck is this dude? This is a cyber company. There was one guy that walks in and he's my friend to this day. I'm trying to get him to join the company actually. he came from your former organization and um he's like sitting in the back and he's like looking at his he's like yeah i know what this dude's talking about he's like where'd you say you came from i tell him the squadron he's like stand by he like walks outside he makes a phone call to one of the dudes at the squadron and he's like you know this guy nick you know that's the first thing any of us do right fucking call people and be like is this guy full of shit or what and the guy on the other end of the line is like yo whatever happened to that dude like is he still active dude get him the fuck back here if he is and this new guy sucks he's like that guy was fucking awesome man and uh my friend john is like fuck you i'm taking him so he so he uh he he hired me after that um And that led to, I worked at Endgame for a while.

4:32:22Shawn Ryan:I learned a lot about how the civilian world thinks about cyber warfare capabilities and cyber defense. And because, you know, we're building these exotic capabilities for the US government, but at the same time, we're trying to figure out how to translate that expertise into some kind of defensive capability for the private sector. Right. And so when I joined the company, we were going through this phase where we're like, all right, we can do all this cool offensive shit. Now, how do we use that to protect companies and private sector entities? So I was able to be immersed in all of it. And it was a really good springboard for me.

4:33:04Shawn Ryan:So I would do shit like I would put out posts on social media about my thoughts on cybersecurity and shit like that. Just cringeworthy stuff, looking back on it at this point. And one of the things I wanted to do was eventually start my own company. i had no idea how to do any of that right i had zero concept um but i would go to these like meetups um like these veteran meetups you know these small but here here's how to start your small business or whatever i was like all right i'll go to this one and it was up in new york took the family drove up to new york um and it was at the goldman sachs building and i was like it's pretty fucking cool.

4:33:46Shawn Ryan:One world trade is across the street. And I go to the event and I'm supposed to be paired up with this mentor who's supposed to teach me about the world of Silicon Valley and tech and all this shit. Well, come to find out the fucking dude I had been paired up with, like got shithoused the night before and like woke up hungover and didn't show up. And so I was, I'm sitting at this table. I'm like waiting for this dude to show up. No one shows up. And this guy from Palantir walks by and he's like, Hey man, did your guy not show up or like what's going on? And I'm like, yeah, I don't, I don't know what happened.

4:34:31Shawn Ryan:Like he didn't, he didn't show up. He's like, ah, I think I know what happened. He's a, he's a fellow Palantir guy. And he's like, all right, just come, come talk to me. And he's like, Hey, what, what do you got going on? What's your background? And I'm telling him, he's like, okay. And you're at Endgame? Yep. He's like, okay, interesting. Well, you know, fuck starting your own business. Like, why don't you just come over to us at Palantir? I'm like, ah, like, I don't know much about you guys. I don't know. I don't really know what you do. So I started looking into him and I was like, that place looks legit dude uh i i would love to work there and um you know at the time it was very secretive uh it was like any article about palantir was like cia backed company secretive cia-backed data analytics company does blah blah i was like cia backed i'm in let's go let's fucking shit um so it turns out that they needed a dude with that was just like that could just speak you know like just be put in front of customers and like could speak to some of the tech shit but you know also be good at speaking to customers that believed in the mission and um And so this guy put me through the process, but here's the problem.

4:35:58Shawn Ryan:I had already applied to Palantir a couple of times before, like before I knew a lot about them. And that's part of the reason why I was hesitant. I was like, I don't know. I've already like applied to you guys a couple of times before. And the hiring process there at the time, this was 2016, was fucking insane. Like there were some people that went through 11, 12 rounds of interviews with volunteer engineers. Like the bar for hiring was so fucking high. And I know you're going to have Sean here in a bit. And he can tell you more about that. One thing I really respect about Sean and a lot of the early volunteer people was that somehow they not only built this culture of high fucking performance at all times, but they sustained it over the course of X many years, you know, and that's work.

4:36:49Shawn Ryan:Like that is institution building.

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4:38:49Shawn Ryan:The sun shining, birds are singing, and all feels right in the world.

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4:39:04Shawn Ryan:At the American Psychiatric Association Foundation, our vision is to build a mentally healthy nation for all because we want you to live your best life and be your best you all year round. Please visit mentallyhealthynation.org to learn more. And that's the culture that they had built at the time. That culture didn't necessarily have a place for Nick Seetheram and former fucking task force dude that is a jack of all trades, doesn't really know a lot about any single one. didn't come from an Ivy league school and is trying to get a job at this fucking place. Right. Like on paper, there's no way I'm getting a position, uh, a first round recruiter.

4:39:46Shawn Ryan:So what this guy did was he's like, all right, there's this, there's a kind of internal process we got. And if we think someone can truly hack it here, but they don't really come from this traditional background that we look for, we're going to put them straight in front of Alex Alex Karp, Palantir CEO. No shit. You're going to have five minutes with Karp. And if he likes you in those five minutes, then you'll probably get the job. And if he thinks you're a piece of shit, then he'll walk you out of the building or he'll have his assistant walk you out of the building. I got nothing to lose, right?

4:40:22Shawn Ryan:I'm like, well, I've already applied to this place a couple of fucking times. I was like, yeah, I'll go talk to Karp. So I go to their Washington, D.C. office and they take me up there. They take me to Karp's office. dude is wearing a like blue russian track suit bare feet walking around the office just like he's he's the fucking man around there right and he comes in he like kicks his feet up he's like why the fuck do you want to work here i was like i looked him dead in me i i didn't know he's gonna ask me so i didn't really have a canned answer i looked him dead in the eye and i was like same reason I want to work at SpaceX one day because I want to have an impact on our society and our country in the same way that I did when I was active duty as close as I can get anyways and he squints at me and he's like okay and then he calls his assistant over he's like get this guy a fucking job offer are you shitting me yeah that was it what that was it it lasted like two minutes um and get the fuck out no i'm not joking dude like

4:41:40Nik Seetharaman:that was it um and he didn't know shit about you didn't know shit about me and uh so he's like get

4:41:47Shawn Ryan:this guy a job offer and so she like scuff scuffles out and goes to like you know coordinate all that shit and uh he's like all right i'll i'll walk you out he's like so what do you want to do here I'm like dude you just said like get this guy a job offer like does that mean you don't how are you gonna give me a job offer and not know what I'm gonna do here he's and I didn't realize at the time but like this is the kind of shit that happens right like there's no structured process for how to have an interaction with Alex Karp right there's no like here's the interview flow and here are the data points he'll want before you get an offer and like here's what has to be nailed down and shit it's like it's all based on human to human vibes and whatever vibe i was putting out in that two fucking minutes i had with him he's like okay you you're you're gonna fit in here i don't know how he knew but he knew so he walked me out uh got the offer like 30 minutes later like hey some fucking recruiter calls me i went and had a burger in georgetown um and the recruiter calls me while i'm trying to eat this fucking burger so i walked out and i'm like i'm like trying to negotiate with this guy i don't know how to fucking negotiate salaries i got fucking burger in my mouth i'm like uh stock options i don't really know what that means uh okay well i guess i'll go with like i didn't know that you could push back with any of this shit, right?

4:43:21Shawn Ryan:I'm like, now, if someone were to come to me and give me like this, here, here's your salary, uh, options. And here's your stock option options. I'd be like, that's great. Double everything. And, uh, and then we can have a conversation. But back then I didn't know shit. I was like, cool. I guess I'll go with option two, you know, grateful for the opportunity. He's like, cool. We'll be in touch. And, um, and that's how I, I ended up at Palantir.

4:43:48Shawn Ryan:That's fucking crazy. And dude, just a lot of times I'm just like, I have no business in any of these fucking places. I had no business at NSW, right? I had no business at Palantir. So this pattern in my life has basically been like, find a way into rooms that you have no fucking business in, earn your place in the room, and then figure out the next fucking room. um

4:44:17Shawn Ryan:Palantir was cool um it was it was a I'd never been exposed to a tech company before and everyone was just so fucking smart everyone was just world class at what they did um and uh the the culture there there's sort of two there's like different departments at Palantir there's the core product team there are the teams that sort of maintain the long-term like customer deployments and so you know a bank might have signed some five-year agreement with palantir and these guys go and like sustain that account over the course of five years and it's got engineers on it it's got like business development people on it and so on then there's the pilot teams and that's what i fucking wanted to do because the job of the pilot teams was basically hey carp or whoever the fuck at the very senior levels of the company have gotten this fortune 500 organization to agree to some palantir pilot right we're going to do it for free here's what here's what's going to happen you're going to pick some guys you're going to parachute in metaphorically and you're going to do anything and everything you need to do in order to convince that customer to convert that pilot to a long-term Palantir contract.

4:45:49Shawn Ryan:And for me, that was the greatest fucking challenge anyone could have put in front of me at the time, because it felt exactly like being back at the old organization. Like, here's an ambiguous high impact tasking go get some fucking dudes and make it happen right and no one's gonna tell you what to do send us some fucking sit reps perfect this i know how to do uh it's what every fucking business is looking for yeah yeah and i was like i can't believe

4:46:21Nik Seetharaman:someone is giving me this latitude at least that's what i'm looking for yeah i hope you find it

4:46:27Shawn Ryan:there's um you know one thing a bunch of them yeah yeah one thing one thing i've learned is i'm always looking for more yeah yeah something has happened to the work ethic like across the american workforce in the in the past few years i don't know what the fuck it is man maybe it's since COVID, but like, there's just like a downward trend and like the desire to want to work hard and contribute to something and be a part of it. I don't know if that's true. You don't think so?

4:47:01Nik Seetharaman:I don't know. I mean, I'm like you. I spent the majority of my adult life in special ops and intelligence agencies. And those are fucking hard chargers. The majority of them, you know, and everybody's the best at what the fuck they do yeah and then i got out and tried some shit and i noticed it immediately yeah these people don't fucking want to be here more than they want to be here past 5 p.m yeah most of them are out before five most of them don't want to come in you know and it's just and i just fucking noticed it right off the bat yeah and i mean that's not how the fuck we operate here but that's i think that's just

4:47:49Nik Seetharaman:you're used to working for people that are always pushing the bar higher yeah you know what i mean and all of your peers are pushing the bar higher and it becomes competitive yep and everybody's a perfectionist and everybody takes their job seriously and then you get out and you're with

4:48:07Nik Seetharaman:normal performers average people below average people and you know i think a lot of them probably live happier lives than you or i oh boy yeah i mean that's something to be said they're not the ones that are out there complaining about not having enough time with their kids and yeah shit like that yeah sitting there fucking eating potato chips watching the super bowl on their camera. Like, I just, I'm not that person. Yeah. You know, you obviously aren't either. Nobody that's, nobody that builds something like what you're building or what I'm building or any of that. Like, it's just, it's not in the fucking DNA.

4:48:45Nik Seetharaman:But then you get exposed to the average DNA and the below average DMA and people with the fucking no drive. And then, hey, they got their place in society. Yeah. I don't belong in that.

4:48:57Shawn Ryan:Yeah. Yeah, here do I, man. And one reason that we have, you know, the things that I learned at Palantir, hiring a bar, the just fucking every day, bring your fucking A game to work. I've tried to establish that here with my co-founders at Wraithwatch. And I think we've done a pretty good job. We got a fucking stellar crew of just stone cold hitters. I can put any fucking tasking in front of them and they will just deliver without complaint, any, any tasking. Um, but all of that to say, um, it was, uh, it was a unique opportunity for me to apply, like, if not the engineering skillset, because I didn't have it at the time that I learned over the years, just the, whatever the fuck it is, right?

4:49:52Shawn Ryan:Just the get after it mode. And, and we did, um, but I'm, I'm never satisfied. Right. So like, I'm, I'm always, I'm like, how does that work? All right. You guys are deploying this like data pipeline. I'm like, okay, how's the data pipeline work? How does this shit go from one place to another? Why does it, why does it work that way? what's the big fucking deal? Oh, well, the big deal is when there's petabytes of data, it takes time to sift through all of it. And you can't just have someone sit down in front of all of it and do a search and then shit just magically crops up. There's a lot of instrumentation and pre-processing and algorithms and everything that's involved.

4:50:42Shawn Ryan:So I started picking up all it. I started learning all of it. I tried building some of it on my own. So I tried contributing to to what the engineers on my team were doing. And then over time, the scope of responsibility has just crept upward and upward. Right. So I started out with this commercial account in, it's a department store that's like a household name. And that was my first account. I was like, well i've gone from fucking tier tier one uh fucking reconnaissance dude to uh this department store that i'm responsible for okay that's cool but i did my best you know um and i think you just do that enough times and you you get put uh more shit gets put on your plate um and eventually i found myself working like more critical and more critical accounts and um palantir eventually moved me to sydney australia uh to handle their apac region and some of the accounts that we had there so moved the family packed them up to to go to australia it was awesome

4:51:59Shawn Ryan:and it was an opportunity for me to just apply like basic fucking leadership dude basic leadership like to these kids like these kids straight out of stanford like would come on board my team and they would just look at me like all right what do we do boss and then i had to i had to figure it the fuck out it was interesting for me because it's not like i was a fucking officer in the military, right? I didn't go to leadership. I didn't go to officer school. I didn't go to leadership training or anything, especially in the jobs that I was working. You're working in very small, tight teams. Um, and there was not a lot of opportunity for me to like,

4:52:41Nik Seetharaman:how do you deal with that, man? I'm genuinely curious because it was, I, I don't either, I don't have, I have zero formal leadership training and I'm trying to run a fucking company and you know in the the I'm not good at getting in the weeds and fucking telling every little fucking thing they need to do yeah I'm looking for exactly what you just described somebody that can this is what I want built this is the vision yeah I'm gonna give you everything you fucking need to do it but you have to figure out how to do it yeah and then they do it and they build a fucking mini empire under what we're trying to do or they don't yeah and they don't last it was a process um

4:53:32Shawn Ryan:i didn't know how to get it right from from day one but what i think i'm pretty good at doing is finding myself in ambiguous situations and then relying on initiative, I guess, to figure it the fuck out. And one way I would figure it the fuck out is, I mean, dude, like watching Jocko was very helpful, like in the early days, reading Extreme Ownership. Like, you know, I was talking about it with Jeremy. Why did Jocko resonate with so many civilians? There's been hundreds of fucking military dudes that have come out of the military and talked about leadership lessons and so on. But the way that he expressed the ideas in his book, I think we're done in a way where it just like, it clicked.

4:54:26It was like, okay,

4:54:28Shawn Ryan:this is something I can tangibly apply to my job tomorrow when I go into the office, right? I can take ownership for stuff. I can, instead of antagonizing people and trying to build fiefdoms, I can think about the team first. Now, there are limits to this because the game theoretic structure of a civilian company can disincentivize. If you go too overboard to the other side of the extreme ownership spectrum, then you're going to get fucked. So it's a fine balance of figuring out, okay, where and how to apply those skills and you, you, you can do it. Like you can apply these tactical, uh, tidbits.

4:55:13Shawn Ryan:And I think that's why he landed so well with, with so many people. And that helped me out a lot in back in the day. And honestly, a lot of it was, I've got 15 fucking engineers looking at me for guidance on what to do. And I, I was like, when I was in and I looked at leadership and I wanted to know what to do from them, like, what did I expect from them? and I just kind of inverted it on its face and I tried to be the leader that I always wanted to work for in the military. Now, did I get it right all the time? No fucking way. I'd fuck it up all the time. But it's a process. It's a constantly evolving process.

4:55:55Shawn Ryan:Definitely being surrounded by really smart, motivated, driven people forces you to amp up your own game and it's like you're you're living in a in a crystal in a in a fishbowl basically and it's like how do you want to act so that these people are not just inspired by you that's that's like kind of self-serving but like are you making these live are you making these people's lives better through the way that you were behaving and acting so that was like one heuristic i used i wish i had a simple answer for you man i don't um

4:56:42Nik Seetharaman:you're saying all the right things this is a lot of the shit i think about yeah i think i think you know i think it's important that you inspire your people you're the fucking you're you're the leader of the pack i don't think that sounds cliche at all they have to be inspired to work for you otherwise it's going to be work if they're not bought in on the mission what the are you doing here get out yeah that's the nine to fiver yeah that's the the let's not move the bar up person you know i feel like you have to you empower your people you look for the people that have the drive that you have and you empower them You give them everything they fucking need to succeed.

4:57:31Nik Seetharaman:But if they don't take the ball and run with it,

4:57:34Shawn Ryan:get the fuck out. Get the fuck out.

4:57:37Nik Seetharaman:Some people haven't. Some people don't.

4:57:39Shawn Ryan:Yeah.

4:57:41Nik Seetharaman:Most don't.

4:57:43Shawn Ryan:Most don't. This is true. A lot of people, we experience this all the time because people have this idea of what a startup is. it's been sort of made into this legend, you know, this, the tech startup, right? So it's a thing that we've made fucking movies about it. What it really comes down to is just grinding it out day in and day out, 24 hours a day, seven days a week with no end in sight. Right. And you just fucking, you're making shit happen all the time. And people think they want that and we'll interview candidates and they're like, well, you know, I'm not really cool with like working weekends.

4:58:29Shawn Ryan:Cool, man. I understand. Go work at a big company. Because a startup is going to demand different things from you. It's like going to fucking task force and being like, yeah, well, don't page me on like Fridays because I'm not into that. Okay. well it's not what the organization needs um

4:59:00Shawn Ryan:Now, one thing I had always wanted since I was a kid was to be involved with something space exploration related. And after enough reps at Palantir on the pilot teams, I had just gotten the routine down. You know, it's like, okay, parachute into this fucking organization, bank, you know, big fortune 500, pharmaceutical, whatever it was, make friends with everybody. You're basically doing like, you know, recce on the ground and just making shit happen. And I had gotten the reps down and I was like, okay, I can go do, and I learned enough about the ins and outs of all the engineering that was going down at these places.

4:59:53Shawn Ryan:And, you know, we had built out entire cyber defense programs using Palantir for a lot of our customers, including entire countries. Like I was the team lead for a cyber defense program that we built out for an entire country in one particular region of the world. And they were built on the Palantir platform. So by this point, I had developed a good sense of what it takes to build a solid cyber defense and cyber defense engineering function. So I was like, all right, I can go do this and not just be flitting around the world doing it for Palantir's customers, which I love doing a great company, great organization, but I wanted to apply that to defending something tangible.

5:00:49Shawn Ryan:And, uh, you know, when I was a kid and I was going through all the personal shit at home, I would bury myself in like Star Trek books. And also I have some fond memories of watching Star Trek with my dad, like, you know, when, when things were still stable and the shit hadn't blown up and gone nuclear in the household. Like I've good memories of that. And when I was a kid, I wanted to grow up and be the dude that invented warp drive. You know, the fucking engine that they have in Star Trek that lets them travel around the fucking stars. You know, obviously that... First of all, it's not fucking physically feasible.

5:01:39Shawn Ryan:Second of all, it's like, that's not really where my life trajectory took me into advanced physics research. But I was able to build out a pretty fucking baller cyber defense program. And I came across a job posting at SpaceX. And I had my eye on that fucking place for a long time.

5:02:02Shawn Ryan:And I saw an opening for a lead position to run their cybersecurity operations team. Send my resume in and the recruiter reached out to me like 15 minutes later. are you serious yeah yeah i don't know dude this i mean i say this shit out loud and i don't know it's like i'm making it up um actually i was just talking to that recruiter the other day because i was trying to get him to come to wraith watch and recruit for us but he's like nah dude i'm i'm happy i'm like you know why i remember you because i hit submit and you fucking called me like 15 minutes later and i was like i was overseas at one of the palantir customer sites um

5:02:52Shawn Ryan:interestingly during one of the driving courses that i went to with task you remember griffin group down in florida i didn't ever send any guys down there but they would do this like driving course and you do all the fucking shit like you do the pit maneuvers and all that you do the rollovers and you do the break contract the break contact after the rollovers and all that shit and uh in 2010 i remember going down to a griffin group course in florida and it was a couple of miles their uh their racetrack that they were doing all the shit on was a few miles away from cape canaveral and so we had just gone through like one evolution of like pitting everybody and all the cars were fucked up and we pull them all over to the side.

5:03:36Shawn Ryan:There's like fucking oil leaking around everywhere and we're getting out, we're doing a debrief. And then we hear a rocket launching behind us. And we're like, that's fucking cool. Like didn't have that on the schedule. So we turn around and we look at the rocket and it's coming up off the deck from Canaveral, which is just over the horizon a bit. And, um, and it was like no rocket I had ever seen before. It was long, spindly. It was completely white. It looked kind of futuristic. And I was like, that's a very strange looking rocket. I've never seen anything like that before. I was telling that story to my girlfriend many years later.

5:04:17Shawn Ryan:And she was like, that was the fucking CRS-1 mission from SpaceX to the International Space Station. That was the first mission that we had launched to take supplies to the International Space Station for the first time. And she's like, what are the fucking chances that you got to see that shit while you were in this random ass driving course in Florida?

5:04:40Shawn Ryan:Shit just happens, dude. I don't know.

5:04:46Shawn Ryan:So,

5:04:50Shawn Ryan:SpaceX was, was amazing. It is the fucking, And, you know, Elon used to say it is the special forces of tech companies. And I always thought that was dumb, like having come out of the community. I was like, you don't know what that means. But then I got there and I'm like, yeah, I get it. You know, he's trying to rally everyone and inspire people and get them to understand that they're working at a company like no other. And everyone was just locked the fuck in to the company mission. If you ever been to the headquarters over there? So when you walk into the headquarters and you go to the chow hall upstairs, they have one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen in my life painted as a mural on the wall of the chow hall.

5:05:39Shawn Ryan:And it is a sequence of images displaying Mars through various phases of terraforming. so you see mars as it exists today as a completely dead red planet and then you see it as like with some green and some water and you see it with more green and more water and then you see it as this lush beautiful jurassic park looking planet at at the end so there's like four four stages to that mural and you walk past that fucking thing every day to get food and you're like, there is no question what we're trying to do here. We're trying to make this happen for humanity on timescales that we're not wired to think about as humans, right?

5:06:28Shawn Ryan:It's going to take us hundreds of years to have that vision come to fruition. But they somehow managed to encapsulate that into this mural that they painted on the wall. And when you would walk by it, there was no fucking question about what the fuck you were doing at on any given day it was support that that's why you're here that's why you gave up everything else that you were that you were doing and you decided to sign up for this for this grind at spacex and it was a grind but you walk in there you look at the factory floor there's one section of the chow hall that's over overlooking mission control and it's overlooking the factory.

5:07:06Shawn Ryan:And you remember that feeling that I told you about the NSW compound and there's just like shit going on. You feel like you're part of a big machine, a big impactful machine. It feels like that at SpaceX too. Just rockets being like moved around from one side of the factory to another. There's engines being manufactured over in one corner over there. There's footage from some capsule that's in orbit right now being piped into mission control. It was just, you're in the center of the world as it pertains to human spaceflight. And at the time, we were getting ready to send humans up on the first crew dragon spacecraft.

5:07:53Shawn Ryan:Because before then, it had all been cargo. So we had crew raided the dragon spacecraft, and the whole company was getting jocked up to send, we called them Doug and Bob. I forget their last names, but there were these two NASA astronauts and their faces were plastered everywhere in the sense of everything you guys do is to support these two gentlemen who have families, kids, to get to the space station safely. Any fuck up is gonna fuck them up and it's gonna fuck their families up. So get it right. Get everything you're doing to every layer of attention and level of detail right all the time.

5:08:38Cool.

5:08:39Shawn Ryan:High performance environment. This I can deal with. um and my job my team's job at the time was to uh basically be on the front lines of um the the cyber defense function um at the time we had stolen a bunch of market shit stolen we had captured a bunch of market share from the russians right so russia used to make a big deal about you know um one of that like the head of the russian space agency was like if you didn't have us, you're not getting into space unless you have a big ass trampoline or some shit. And then I think Elon was like, well, we're about to make a big ass trampoline. So stand the fuck by.

5:09:21So the Russians were none too happy that a private company like SpaceX was about to

5:09:28Shawn Ryan:reinvigorate human space flight on behalf of the United States of America. Finally, there was going to be a rocket carrying the fucking stars and stripes, carrying humans to the space station, which hadn't been the case since the space shuttle got retired in 2011. We had nothing to back us up. All of the NASA astronauts had to ride share off of the Russians, which is a really interesting thing. You can be these geopolitical enemies and some small portion of your two countries is governments can work together to get people up into space and then get back now there's obviously a shit ton of politics around it but like as far as like the engineers on each side anyway that's interesting i actually didn't know that um Um, now the team I inherited when I, when I landed there, um, it was this like ragtag group of just randos.

5:10:37Shawn Ryan:There were like two guys that were on the security analysis side and they were just like drowning in like alerts every single day from like people trying to hack into the network. and they would work like just the two of them, 24 hours a day. One would work a 12 hour shift. The other one will work 12 hours. Other one comes back for 12 hours. Just two guys over and over again for years. It was, it was that way. Then there were a couple of other guys on the engineering side that were building a lot of the kind of strategic controls around everything. And then, And then there was my girlfriend, Grace, who was running the insider threat program at the time.

5:11:23Shawn Ryan:So she was responsible for the technical insider threat and counterespionage program over there. And the idea was, so all of them were kind of working independently. So like these guys were working over here, doing all the alert analysis. And these guys were like doing all the engineering shit. and she was kind of lone wolf, you know, doing the insider threat counter espionage piece. And they were lacking in like a vision for like what this fucking team was supposed to be. And I was like, okay, I can do this. I can come in here and like provide some leadership. So like morale was low too because like three days into my tenure there, I just moved from Australia back to Southern California to work at this place.

5:12:15Shawn Ryan:And three days into my tenure, they call in all hands and like 1500 people or some shit got laid off, uh, for whatever reason. I'm like, what the fuck is going on here, dude? Like I just moved here from the other side of the world. I could easily stay in Australia and just like hung out, you know? And so morale was, morale was in the shitter. And generally like the cyber defense function there was this kind of like off beat off the wall, like team that no one really paid attention to. So I came in there, I was like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to fuse all these capabilities into a cohesive unit and we're going to apply what you guys are doing to this counter espionage over here we're going to walk over to that physical security team that's on the other side of the office here and we're going to train them up on some of the that we're doing and seeing on this side because at the end of the day those guys are on the front lines of shit.

5:13:20Because if some Russian dude walks in and is waving a USB stick around, well,

5:13:27Shawn Ryan:who's going to be the first line of defense? It's like, I got six people on my team. It's going to be the 50 security guards that are floating around the various areas of SpaceX. So what I tried to do was to fuse and propagate information about how this team worked, what it did and what the goals were in order to ramp this fucking company up and get it ready for this uh human space flight and we were subject to attack all the time dude like you know name your fucking adversary country and they were after us like all the fucking time and not just digitally over the network like they would send dudes like on site and shit we would get tippers from our federal partners all the time actually like a week into my tenure there i get a call from my boss he's like hey you know we got we got a tip that there might be some fucking north korean like implant on one of our devices i was like i'm on my way home it's like six o 'clock in the evening fucking u-turn roll back into the office and then we just start cranking through like we start pulling like every fucking laptop from the building that we can get our hands on and like running forensics on it to try and figure out i'm like all right how can we find this fucking thing amongst many other, uh, actions that we took for that one.

5:14:49Shawn Ryan:Um, but we would, we would establish relationships with our federal partners, um, who weren't used to really working with the cybersecurity team. And, um, they would send us tippers. Uh, we have all kinds of shit go down, you know, Russians would like be jumping the fences and shit, trying to like break into building, plug in malware, plug in USBs, convincing employees to, uh, to take them around to various places in the building. One really cool thing was, um, as, as we started turning the flywheel a bit more, again, I don't mean to say like I was the one responsible for all this shit, but I did come in there and I kind of looked at the lay of the land and I was like, all right these people need like more about why the fuck like why and what like what is it that we're doing here and why are we doing it and i think i was able to energize their activities with with those things and as the team started to get a little bit more prominent and we started to get face time with more of the employees it started paying off it started paying off because you would have SpaceX employees that were sitting around and they would just start reporting stuff to us proactively.

5:16:07Shawn Ryan:Like, yo, this dude was like asking me some weird questions at the parking garage across the street. Like, here's what he looked like, all this shit. And we'd pass that to the physical security team. One time a dude with a Slavic accent and a very Slavic look about him got into the building and approaches an engineer at the chow hall. And he's like, hey man, I'm looking for the printer room. And this engineer is like, how do you not know where the printer room is? Like everyone knows where that shit is. He's like, and then this dude starts getting nervous. He's like, well, I just need to like, you know, plug this thing into the printer.

5:16:46Shawn Ryan:And this guy who like we had managed to train as part of our, uh, like we, we started this outreach program and we're trying to train the company like all right here's how the adversary is going to try and come get us right so this dude had sat through that training and he was like oh cool man uh yeah i'll walk you over to the printer room and you're like he walks him straight out the glass door and then locks the fucking door behind him and then calls security and uh and that fucking dude got taken away and then another and then the security guards we trained them up and And we kind of made them feel important, right?

5:17:26Shawn Ryan:Because these are contract security guards and they're all jocked up and shit. Like, you know, SpaceX did a good job of, you know, making it clear, like, don't fuck with these dudes because it's in the middle of Hawthorne, California. It's like kind of shit area of LA. And we told the security guards, all right, look, here's how these people operate. Here's what they'll try and do and here's why they'll try and do it. And those guys felt jacked up, dude. They were like, this is awesome. Like, no one's tried to like involve us in any of this shit. Like we just stand guard out here, you know? And so then one time, uh, the guards spot a vehicle and there's like a dude, like holding a fucking antenna out of the vehicle.

5:18:05And the guards are like, Hey, this vehicle drove by some dude was like holding what looked

5:18:10Shawn Ryan:like an antenna out of it. I was like, perfect. Hey, let's get on the network and figure out, is there any weird shit going on on the network? Let's figure out what happened to that vehicle, where it went. So, you know, it started paying off because now it wasn't just my six guys, right? Now I had a whole organization that was serving as a force multiplier for me.

5:18:34Yeah.

5:18:34Shawn Ryan:So that was interesting. And on the counter espionage side, we got so good at some of the like minority report type shit that we were doing that one thing we came to realize was the following.

5:18:53Shawn Ryan:people's behavior manifests in what they're doing on the fucking keyboard, even if they're at work, like behavior manifests in bits is the, is the phrase that we came up with. So a lot of the time, this like old school counter espionage, like counterintelligence, tradecraft, you know, you talk to some old school counterintel guy, what's he going to tell you? It's like, look for the expensive car in the parking lot. It's like, dude, this is a tech company and our share price is X. Everyone has a fucking expensive car, okay? That shit is just not going to work around here. So we need to think outside the box.

5:19:29Shawn Ryan:It's fucking 2019. How are these people going to try and do their shit? And so we would discover, I mean, through the course of lots of trial and error. Constitution. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that too. through the course of trial and error that if you start piecing together indicators from different sources, that you could predict with a very high level of accuracy that some dude was going to be up to some shit in some X period of time. So like I'll give you an example. Let's say a dude all of a sudden starts buying extra swag from the company swag store and around the same time starts extra double checking his stock options in the stock option system.

5:20:12Shawn Ryan:Okay. Those two indicators right there are like, all right, this dude's getting ready to, he's like double checking his shares. He's getting souvenirs. He's like getting ready to pop smoke, right? So that's a very small example of indicators that we were able to piece together. And we had many more of them where we could be able to predict with a high level of accuracy, what was going on. Now, this speaks to your question from your Patreon audience member from earlier, right? What is the, what's the line? And that was always on the forefront of our minds, right? At no point did we want to go all the way to the end of the spectrum where we were dropping like key loggers on everyone's machines.

5:20:52Shawn Ryan:But at the same time, the same tools that we had to detect the Russian hackers and the Chinese hackers and all that shit with just a little bit of repurposing and looking at the data through a different lens would surface this kind of shit internally. And, um, and so we were able to, we were able to stand that up pretty, pretty successfully. And then all of those lessons, of course, translated to, to Andrel, um, about three fourths of my way through. Why did you leave SpaceX? Andrel, um, was well known to me at, even when I was at Palantir, you know, uh, so Brian Schinf, the CEO of Andrel, he was a very renowned engineer at Palantir.

5:21:40Shawn Ryan:he actually did my onboarding at Palantir he like came in and gave us a big talk on a lot of the engineering subsystems and when he left to start Andrel there was like whispers floating around like yo Brian left to start this thing like must be legit dude um but no one knew what they were doing right so then I got an email from an Andrel recruiter and they're like hey we got your name from the Palantir like bro network. We want you to come be our first like cybersecurity engineer. I was like, yeah, let's, let's go. So I didn't want to leave SpaceX, but by this point, we've talked about this a lot, right?

5:22:24Shawn Ryan:You get into a routine. It's like you, you make the machine turn and then you start like trying to figure out what's next, right? Where can I have more of an impact? So, and knowing that they were working on, well, after I went and met them on site, knowing what the vision was going to be, that they were going to get involved with, you know, producing the next generation of advanced weapon systems. I was like, okay, this is an opportunity for me to take all the lessons I've learned over the years, both on the people side, on the leadership side, on the technical side and then bring it all home into this kind of one final act before I start my own fucking company.

5:23:11Shawn Ryan:Right. So Andrew at the time was a hundred people. Everyone knew each other. We would like order pizza and like sit around and, uh, and bullshit over lunch. Now take that initial list of a hundred people and add that list to the company roster every single month for 48 months straight. And holy shit. That's how scaled out. That's how many, that's how fucking fast we scaled.

5:23:41Nik Seetharaman:Wow.

5:23:43Shawn Ryan:Um, wow. So to build a cyber defense program in that landscape was one of the most challenging, you know, problems that I had to endure in my career. one thing i don't like doing is um i don't like taking the easy way out and saying all right i'm just gonna come in and fucking hire a bunch of dudes give me budget give me head count i feel like you have to earn that first and i got in there and i wanted to earn the head count right so i started doing all the fucking engineering myself i started like deploying out the the cyber defense controls and like working with the customer at the time our our main customer i think was cbp so we were deploying these autonomous surveillance towers to the southern border this was around like trump trump one um towards the tail end of trump one and so he wanted this like virtual border wall essentially down there and the anderal surveillance towers were a core component of that.

5:24:50Shawn Ryan:And several hundred of them were deployed for CBP down to the southern border. And one of the threats that we were trying to defend against was, okay, what if some criminal element walked up to one of these fucking things and was able to hack into it or shut it down in some way? You know, there's always a thing, well, why don't they just put a fucking bullet through it, right? Well, maybe they want to be a bit more stealthy than that, depending on their objectives. Okay, so how do we harden these fucking things? How do we track who has the ability to remote access into them? Like which engineers at the company have access to remote into them?

5:25:30Shawn Ryan:How do we audit what those engineers are doing? Because if one of them gets flipped by one of these transnational criminal organizations, that could be a problem. And so we're thinking and coming up with all this shit. And most importantly, we're translating this to the customer. So we're sitting with the CBP people and we're saying, here's how we're thinking about this threat model. Here's how we're thinking about defending it. And they fucking loved us, dude. But I don't think a vendor had like ever sat with them and tried to collaborate in that way with them.

5:26:02Shawn Ryan:And I knew that the future held more exotic shit, right? I knew we were going to get into the drone business. I knew we were going to get into, you know, probably one day we're going to make fixed wing aircraft. And one thing I wanted to get right very early was I wanted to tie together all of the functions that I was responsible for at SpaceX into one roof to include the weapon system security angle of it. So let's say you have a submarine that you're building as a company and the fucking adversary gets their hands on the submarine. they're going to do some shit to it, right? They're going to try capturing it, reverse engineering it, breaking in, hacking it, seeing how it works.

5:26:43Shawn Ryan:Is there fucking data on it that's useful for their operations? So a large part of it is, all right, how do we secure that fucking thing from the Chinese dude on the Chinese SIGINT boat that's going to scoop this submarine up from the water and then plug into its debug port, right? Which they will do. But you can't look at that in isolation because there's a whole litany of shit happening to the left of that. Long before that submarine gets in the water, long before that fighter aircraft gets in the air, long before that drone launches downrange, that counter UAS system, well, that stuff talks to something, right?

5:27:21Shawn Ryan:There's communication backhauls coming off those weapon systems. There's communication termination points that sit on servers somewhere. There's engineers that have access to those servers. There's ground control stations. So it becomes this mesh network of shit that becomes, you basically encounter this combinatorial explosion of just complexity, essentially, for every new system you add to that graph, right? So we had to get ahead of all of that very quickly. And it was challenging because the company's growing by 100 people every four weeks. Like, it's insane. So every decision that you kick the can on, you're going to pay for it when the company is plus 500 people, plus 1 ,000 people.

5:28:12Shawn Ryan:That's 1 ,000 times the complexity that you're going to have to contend with. So it's not a function of, hey, can I do all this stuff now? It's what are the things I can't get to right now that I can be okay paying for later when the complexity ramps up asymptotically, goes vertical. These were the trade-offs that I encountered in the early days. So I brought Grace over from SpaceX. We hadn't started dating yet. I brought over a couple other dudes I knew from SpaceX. we built out the program we scaled the program to like 85 people on the security team uh and um and then it ultimately became uh chief information security officer it's just one of those things right it's like it's not a thing that i was shooting for but you fucking do good shit keep your head down man dude it it fucking happens and then same thing with uh cio um so then i got all i got IT, I got business systems, I got everything.

5:29:28And the challenge there is there's a couple

5:29:33Shawn Ryan:different types of CIOs in the world, right? One of them is this blowhard that doesn't know shit and that's constantly talking about digital transformation, this, and like, you know, AI that the other one understands that your sole job as a CIO is to make the company run more efficiently. Like every fucking bullshit piece of friction that an employee internally has to encounter in the course of doing their job. Is there a way that that can be abstracted off and automated with software? So you're basically building like these internal startups at the company to deliver software that's making the company more efficient.

5:30:21Shawn Ryan:So that was the job with the CIO. I mean, certainly it was an acquired taste for me. I came out of the security world and now I'm having meetings about how do we make our manufacturing software more efficient? I'm reading books on like erps and like manufacturing software and and like product life cycle management software i'm like jesus christ i don't know how any of this works but i'll figure it out damn dude that's impressive holy for all from a recruiting fair huh all from all from the

5:31:01Nik Seetharaman:recruiter reaching out yeah good thing you had those weapon squalls on i know right yeah good

5:31:06Shawn Ryan:I had the fucking GLM on my resume. Let's back in there.

5:31:10Nik Seetharaman:Let's take a break real quick.

5:31:11Shawn Ryan:Yeah.

5:31:36Shawn Ryan:organized crime, not everything is urgent, but this show will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know.

5:31:53Nik Seetharaman:Do you feel it that something's off? This is Propaganda as a Web. The revolutionary audio docuseries. It's essential for the experiment that you continue. Hosted by Sean Ryan. They're called PSYOPs. Is now available to you for free. There's no question that it is mind control. Hear from whistleblowers. Why have I got a letter from the CIA? Shocking insights from experts. If you've ever wondered who's really pulling the strings, it's time to find out.

5:32:26Nik Seetharaman:Target Intelligence. PSYOP. An ironclad original. Hosted by Sean Ryan. Listen today wherever you get your podcasts Or watch the enhanced version on YouTube at This Is Ironclad

5:32:45Nik Seetharaman:Alright Nick, we're back from the break Forgot one other thing too Everybody gets these at the beginning But we'll wait till damn near the end for you Vigilance League gummy bears Made in the USA, legal in all 50 states Just fucking candy

5:33:02Shawn Ryan:just gummies that's it that's it sick thanks man appreciate it you uh Jeremy was telling me you got you guys are making like a phone yeah tell me about

5:33:20Nik Seetharaman:uh well we're not making a phone so here's so the back story on this um I get paranoid you know just like we were talking about I think we were talking about it at breakfast but i get i just get i get paranoid man the you know last year before the election i interviewed half the administration which means i'm connected to half the administration

5:33:50Nik Seetharaman:and sometimes i get calls when they're angry at me and uh and uh but now not only that but i mean you know we've i told you about the colleen georgeski thing when i went to romania and And then I was approached by some former or maybe still current intel folks when I got back home because that election was a fraudulent election. And the EU was meddling in that election. And we had a hundred and something thousand people fucking show up in front of the parliament when we left because of a selfie video that I posted. Yeah. I mean, they were already up in arms. I mean, I know you have to, working for the companies that you work for, you know how fragile the Taiwan-China situation is.

5:34:42Nik Seetharaman:We went over there and interviewed Bao Shi Kim and, you know, the VP. And so through my own paranoia and also just living in this fucking world, you know, in my former life, I was like, we got to find a black phone. Like, this shit is not cutting it. And, oh, and I wound up on the Taliban fucking hit list for uncovering the fact that we're giving them$87 million a fucking week. They didn't like that. And so anyways.

5:35:16Shawn Ryan:Can't imagine why.

5:35:17Nik Seetharaman:So, yeah, I started calling around to a lot of former, or not former, friends of mine that, you know, that I worked with in the past at the agency. And I was just looking for the black phone, a real one, you know, not a consumer grade, like, kind of one, a real one. And I got pointed to this company called Glacier that was founded by some former NSA guys. So I made this phone, and it's fucking awesome.

5:35:52Shawn Ryan:This is right here. Oh, is that thing?

5:35:54Nik Seetharaman:Yeah. I mean, it's an iPhone, but they've hardened it.

5:35:58Shawn Ryan:Yeah. And how?

5:36:01Nik Seetharaman:I don't know, dude. That's like speaking Chinese to me, but it keeps everything from getting sucked out. It's got end-to-end encryption messenger. It tunnels your organization in. So, you know, the leak, the signal leak at the beginning of the administration, then they accidentally texted the wrong fucking John or whatever. It wound up being a news reporter. That's impossible to do. You can only text people within your organization, Glacier to Glacier. even if your company has a glacier um a glacier phone and my company has all has glacier from like everybody here is on glacier we can't text each other through glacier it's it's it tunnels your organization and um what else endless amount of burner numbers so i mean you know for guys like us that really would have come in handy but even just for normal people you know you donate to an election campaign you fucking whatever sign up for the wrong thing your number gets leaked then you get you you just use the burner number you know and then burn it you know what i mean so nobody has your real number and and you know the guy's kind of educated me on how you can you know 100 disappear through digital numbers and not even really have a fucking phone number at all um and uh so there's a there's a bunch of cool things about this phone it's fucking i mean it's great for high net worth individuals that are worried have to worry about kidnapping and shit because the phone pings a lot more often than the regular phone and and um there's so many features to that and so when i was looking for that um and we found we we got in touch i i wanted to see if wanted to advertise and um they did they were like yeah and i was like well maybe they want to do equity and um they we talked about equity they we were going to do it and then as i got more um more knowledge of the actual product it's 8 500 a phone and 12 000 something for the service i mean it's fucking expensive and uh then you know i was like i just we're shooting for this much you know and uh nobody can afford that we have to go after palantir and dural spacex u.s government i was like and yeah i mean i'm obviously have reach into there because i've interviewed almost everybody you know but you know that's a i don't that's not the thing but uh for me yeah uh that i want to it's just not my you know what i mean and so i said if you had a more consumer friendly product that wasn't that expensive i would be very interested and uh they said well actually we have an app that uh we've been working on and we're close to being finished but we don't want that to compete with the phone and i said well that's what i'm interested in i mean if we're going to do business i want something that everybody can use and um so for about the past it's been about a year now uh we've been developing this app and uh turning it into what we need it to be.

5:39:28And so it's actually releasing, we're doing the beta testing friends and family stuff in two

5:39:36Nik Seetharaman:weeks, March 1st. We release it to friends and family. Congrats, man. Thank you. And so yeah, it'll be data blocker. You'll have the burner numbers and then all American VPNs, the VPNs. I mean, I'm sure you know most Israel's bought a bunch of VPN companies. China's bought a bunch of vpn companies it gets marketed like they're fucking american vpns they're not and uh so these will be all american vpns and then if it goes good which i i know it's going to because there's nothing like this out there um then we will add the secure messenger component to it because everything i'm seeing now is uh signal has been signals been compromised so so um this will be it you know and so i'm i'm really fucking excited about it really excited we put a lot into it and um so yeah it'll be like i said march 1st it'll be coming out for friends and family and then once we work through the bugs then uh we'll kick it out to you know a little bit bigger group We're going to do it in stair steps.

5:40:49Nik Seetharaman:We're not just going to kick it out to everybody right off the bat because I know it's going to take off. So we need to work through some things before it hits. That's cool, man. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people.

5:41:02Shawn Ryan:One of the challenges we had at Android was to figure out the mobile device security posture, you know, because what do you do? You issue everybody in an iPhone. It's a lot of overhead, a lot of maintenance, yeah a lot of fees um yeah it was challenging for sure and we had a giant threat model to contend

5:41:23Nik Seetharaman:against too good yeah no i gave i gave trey one yeah when he was here yeah i don't know if he's using it or if he likes it or what but uh but he got in touch as soon as as soon as i gave it to him i know they went out and trained him up how to use it so he was definitely fucking interested yeah but uh yeah i'm excited man and then um i probably shouldn't even be talking about this but uh because but uh there's a group of us that are getting together and uh i mean my just like you you know what's the next thing i think it pretty much hit the podcast ceiling there's not much more to develop here so i've uh i've definitely made my mark in the podcast world and um and um definitely made it to trend to up production quality and all of that kind of shit I've made my mark here, and now I'm interested in other things.

5:42:21Nik Seetharaman:You know what I mean? And so through the podcast, I've gotten my new passion as kids, man, and helping sexually abused kids, whether they're trafficked or exploited or abused or whatever. I've covered that subject so many fucking times. and nobody else i shouldn't say nobody else but a lot of the big guys you know in this game just don't fucking talk about it and um the problem's getting worse and worse and worse and uh i've made some some of my best friends uh now today i've met on this show trying to save kids and um And so now we're going to develop an application that's going to educate and save kids, man, from sex exploitation, being trafficked, all that kind of shit.

5:43:20Nik Seetharaman:And yeah, I mean, it's just like what you're saying, man. You hit a fucking ceiling and you've done the thing and you can sit there and fucking try to be king the whole time or you can fucking move on and get good at something else. Yeah.

5:43:35Shawn Ryan:Now you're empire building.

5:43:37Nik Seetharaman:yeah yeah I mean it you know when I built this I mean I mean I didn't know what the I was doing man when I got out I was teaching tactics you know in shooting and stuff like that which is it's cool but even that I mean I pretty much hit the ceiling on that right off the bat I did train Keanu Reeves for John look three and then that created a bunch of hate and i was just like this is whatever man most of this is like 55 year old men trying to play army because they didn't ever want to go to war and i just so i started the podcast and i think i've you know i love doing this i'll probably never stop uh i may slow down uh because the pace is it's tough to build other things when i'm at this pace but um but it's like i said it's just time to move on and master something new and build something else And so that's what I'm doing.

5:44:36Nik Seetharaman:Yeah, that's great, man.

5:44:38Shawn Ryan:Yeah, I'm sure the Andrel CISO, Joe, is going to be watching this and interested in what you guys got.

5:44:45Nik Seetharaman:Oh, fuck.

5:44:46Shawn Ryan:Well, I hope so.

5:44:47Nik Seetharaman:But, yeah, thanks for asking, man.

5:44:50Shawn Ryan:No worries. Yeah, Joe's a good dude. We came up together at Andrel back in the 100-person days of the company. um and when I left to start Wraithwatch they were like who do you want to be you know the replacement CISO basically I was like there's only one dude Joe McCaffrey he's former Marsoc uh communications officer just a humble guy the humblest guy I've ever met nice just a great guy so yeah I'm sure I want to check that out at some point oh

5:45:23Nik Seetharaman:Well, thank you for the plug. Yeah. So I appreciate that. I really do, man. But so what are you doing in cybersecurity now? You started your own company.

5:45:34Shawn Ryan:Yeah. So Wraithwatch is really a product of every fucking thing we've been talking about for the past few hours. Where did you come up with it?

5:45:50Shawn Ryan:So the co-founders and I have talked about various components of this product forever. And it was really a fusion of all of those conversations with them. So Grace would always talk about, hey, I need a command and control layer, like how Andrel has Lattice for physical shit and sensors and fusing the sensor data and telemetry together. We need something similar for cyber defense teams that can fuse data together and serve as a command and control layer for executing operations and making decisions at speed. Because right now, that's the biggest thing cyber defense teams suck at. They just are unable to make decisions at speed, not because they're not good, but because the tooling is lacking, right?

5:46:35Shawn Ryan:Same problem you guys are solving with the Glacier phone. The tooling is lacking. It's not because people aren't trying to secure their communication. and um i had talked a whole bunch about the uh about the fact that you know if you zoom out from cyber security what what the industry really is is it's this cat and mouse game of a stimulus response cycle between attacker and defender what happens is the attacker will come up with a new way of doing shit they'll come up with some novel new attack they'll come up with some novel exploit or whatever. And then the defenders will have to react to that, right?

5:47:13Shawn Ryan:They'll have to figure out, okay, how do we develop defenses against this exploit? Or how do we develop defenses against this new attack technique that we just read about that these guys out here came up with? But these guys out here don't share everything, right? Definitely China is not sharing their latest and greatest attack techniques with the cybersecurity community. So over here on the defensive side, you're basically left reading open source information about what's going on on the attack side, or you're left to read through the breach reports from organizations that already got hit. And then you basically have to make these mental leaps to figure out, okay, how might this apply to me?

5:47:54Shawn Ryan:And how can I defend myself and prevent my organization from getting hacked in the same way? So this is a fucking backwards way of operating, right? At the beginning of this podcast, we talked about artificial intelligence has the capability, and this has been empirically proven by the Frontier Labs. I can point it at a system like an iPhone or a code repository for an application that's running on an iPhone. And I can say, don't stop until you have found me vulnerabilities in this application or code base or device or whatever. And you can just let them crank away at a pace that no human can match.

5:48:41Shawn Ryan:DARPA came out with a competition a couple of years ago called the Cyber Grand Challenge. And the goal of the competition was to understand, okay, can we instrument artificial intelligence systems that can reliably find vulnerabilities at scale autonomously without humans involved? And the answer is yes. The teams that came out on top from that competition have technology that can autonomously find, weaponize, and exploit vulnerabilities at industrial scale, dude. So what you're seeing is this mounting attack pressure from the guys with the offensive tools augmented by artificial intelligence.

5:49:23Shawn Ryan:You're not seeing any of that shit on the defensive side. It's not like there's some mounting defensive counterpressure that's being provided by somebody. And that's why we built Wraithwatch. Oh, shit. We provide the defensive counterpressure to offset the attack pressure that is mounting very rapidly on the offensive side of the house. because the only way you're going to get ahead of this is to have something continuously in here, predict, imagine, simulate all of the novel new shit that these things are going to find, right? And do it.

5:50:04Nik Seetharaman:This is like a fucking immune system. This is crazy.

5:50:07Shawn Ryan:Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's essentially what it is. You're simulating. These cells attack, these cells defend. It's fucking wild. Yeah, that's right. in 2026 if you're an organization like spacex or andrel or any of these fucking companies right and you have anything hanging its ass out on the internet it's going to it's going to be subject to this mounting attack pressure from the outside and you need something that is trying to preserve hull integrity for lack of a better term for the organization and to preserve hull integrity you need to, as you said, simulate all the possible ways shit's going to go sideways in here before these guys figure it out and then proactively get ahead of deploying the mitigations.

5:50:55Shawn Ryan:So defensive counterpressure is the name of the game here. And we do that by acting as a sensor fusion layer and command and control layer for all the tools that already exist in an organization. We stack AI on top of it and then they pull everything together and then apply that counterpressure that I'm talking about. Unless that happens, and it doesn't have to be us, right? Someone else fucking come along and do this shit. Like if it doesn't happen, basically we can no longer maintain trust that our society's most critical institutions actually have their shit together when it comes to protecting our data or to maintaining organizational integrity, right?

5:51:37Shawn Ryan:Because these things are just going to come at you. in continuous swarms and they're not going to stop. This is the future that we're entering into. Anthropic released a report the other day that said their latest model, their latest AI model is capable of finding zero-day vulnerabilities very rapidly against code repositories it's never seen before or never been trained on in its existence. If you throw something brand new at it, it'll find a zero-day in there. Holy shit. So imagine the firmware that's running on your guys' Glacier phones. You know, if you put that thing on a system and then you dispatch a swarm of these offensive AIs at it, they're going to find issues.

5:52:24Shawn Ryan:The best case scenario is that we execute that process. By we, I mean, you know, someone on your guys' side executes that process of vulnerability, discovery, mitigation, and remediation before the bad guys ever get a chance to do it in the real world, in the wild. So we're not only trying to provide a capability to do that for organizations, we're also just trying to evangelize the fact that this is the future that we're moving into. And unless the industry gets its shit together, we're going to have some serious problems at hand.

5:53:03Nik Seetharaman:holy shit i mean do you see a world where we backtrack from digital i mean are we going to go back to fucking pen and paper because the vulnerabilities are just i mean they just it's like this shit's just getting better and better and better every fucking day yeah every day yeah you know and it's it's i mean thank god for companies like you but where does it end

5:53:31Shawn Ryan:I genuinely don't know the answer to that question. I think the only thing that we can guarantee is there is now a continuously running arms race between attack and defense. It's an arms race. It's going to be powered by AI, hopefully on both sides. Right now, it biases towards the attacker. hopefully we can change that and i think uh you know we're gonna live in a future where these things are just constantly battling each other data center on data center and we're gonna live right in the middle of it so do we revert to pen and paper maybe i've certainly reduced my you know consumption of things on the internet Like what?

5:54:24Shawn Ryan:Just, you know, doom scrolling Twitter all day or X. Constantly reading on what, reading up on what's happening in the news. I'm trying to reduce my cognitive load for what's out there as a practice run for reducing it permanently. You know, maybe I exit Wraithwatch one day, you know, the company does really well. And do I ever want to see a fucking phone again? I don't think so. I don't. I don't. I fantasize about the day where I can walk to a pier, walk to Santa Monica Pier, and just fucking chuck this thing in the water. I can't fucking wait for that day too, man. I can't. I fucking fantasize about that day.

5:55:08Shawn Ryan:But until we get to that day, right, we have obligations as executives and business owners. And I mean, how do you keep track of your kids, right, in this day and age? I don't know. What I do know is that the instant you put a screen in front of them, you're going to lose them. You're going to lose some portion of them to that screen. There's a writer by the name of - That's a good way to put it. There's a writer by the name of Paul Kingsnorth. He lives in Ireland and he runs this sub stack. and he writes a lot about this environment that we find ourselves in. And it's basically an environment where we've bootstrapped this all-knowing, all-seeing machine, right?

5:55:54Shawn Ryan:And it's not a singular machine. It's a distributed machine of which we are all a part of, right? We can't escape the fact that we need our phones to do our jobs as executives and CEOs. We need the internet to get our message out there. We've developed this need to interface with all of this technology. And I don't think there's any walking back from that. but there is something to be said about holding in your mind and being present in any given situation and saying, do I really need to be on this fucking thing right now? And if I am, am I becoming a better person by the things that I do on it or am I not?

5:56:46Shawn Ryan:Am I just doom scrolling and turning into a fucking ball of anxiety. And if I do turn into a ball of anxiety, you know, that's gonna have an effect on the people around me. It's gonna have an effect on my loved ones. That's gonna propagate out and have these second, third order effects.

5:57:03Shawn Ryan:It's a fucking weird future we're walking into, man. That's all. That's all I can guarantee.

5:57:14Nik Seetharaman:I don't see how we don't go back to pen and paper. I mean, it's just, there's so many times where I'm talking about shit and I'm just like, I don't want to talk about this over the phone. We have to do a face-to-face. We just have to. You know, nothing is secure.

5:57:31Shawn Ryan:Nothing is secure and you can't trust anything you see anymore. Like the ease with which any fucking body can produce any image, text, anything, movie these days. I mean, you know, I was talking with Jeremy and Darren about it earlier. If the first biblical flood was a physical one, the second one is going to be an informational one. we're going to be hit with a volume and velocity of information the likes of which we are not prepared for with our evolutionary programming and i think we all have to reconcile what that means for us individually and what that means for our families and our communities and our society that's why i bring up king's north is because his contention is okay if this machine really is going to take off, right?

5:58:24Shawn Ryan:And it already is and has and will continue to. What's the goal? Well, maybe the goal is to establish the success that we all want, right? Like with Vigilance and with the podcast and all the projects you've got going on with Wraithwatch for me, you know, other folks have their versions of it. But once you do, let's figure out how to take that and translate it into making the little worlds around us better. Our families, our communities, our states, our countries, what have you. And maybe if we start small and we do a good job, then maybe we'll earn our way into building our way back from this place that we're in.

5:59:17Shawn Ryan:I don't know. Never going to happen.

5:59:22Nik Seetharaman:yeah i agree simplicity yep that's the way we're supposed to live yep simplistic and we don't live that way i know especially guys like me and you i know we have high bars to set we have we we're on a mission man yeah and uh we like to accomplish it and that does not create a simple life. I know. It really doesn't. But these are things I think about a lot. Me too. Me too. I think about, yeah, I think about them all the fucking time. I mean, I can't remember who I was in here talking with, but, you know, I mean, you're talking about a wave of information. I mean, I can't remember the number. I'm going to be off.

6:00:05Nik Seetharaman:But, you know, it was like the human brain can maintain 150 relationships or something i think it was less than that you know actually maintain you know 150 relationships or something it's something like that yeah approximately the size of a rifle company dude and

6:00:27Nik Seetharaman:look at x and twitter and you got you know thousands of people you're following everybody's hitting you up and you know people you don't even know you can't you can't you can't you got text signal glacier instagram twitter fucking facebook all it's just email personal email company fucking email is it's multiple company emails you know it's it's like you just can't get the fuck away from any of it. It's everywhere.

6:01:05Shawn Ryan:Yeah, I agree, man. And it's only going to get worse because, you know, now all the bot armies that used to post bot army shit, like, you know, they resemble humans now. And whoever's puppeteering them from the back end, they can basically dispatch these armies that can swing things one way or the other, depending on what the goals of that person are. So I don't have the answers, dude. I'm in a position where I can put some guys together. And I feel like along with my founders, I put a crew of fucking hitters together. And we're out there building some cool shit. Your wife's a founder, right? Girlfriend, yeah.

6:01:54Nik Seetharaman:Excuse me, your girlfriend's a founder.

6:01:56Shawn Ryan:Girlfriend, yeah.

6:01:56Nik Seetharaman:How many founders are there?

6:01:59Shawn Ryan:Two other ones. Two other ones? My girlfriend and my third founder, Carlos, Cuban dude, escaped communism from Cuba, came to the States, didn't speak any English, but he was so fucking hungry. He had that immigrant hunger. It's fucking awesome. He landed at a bank in New York, Morgan Stanley, and he taught himself English by getting on the IT team over there. He was couch surfing on his brother's couch. He taught himself IT and shit, got a job at this bank. And then he didn't speak a word of English. So people would call the IT help desk and he'd be like, hey, can you send an email? That was like the most of English he spoke.

6:02:44Shawn Ryan:You gotta be kidding me. Then he would get the email from him and then he would translate the email into Spanish and then he would figure it the fuck out. And then he would send like an English response back, rinse and repeat, you know, over a thousand reps. And that's how he taught himself English. And then he, you know, went from there. He, uh, he landed at Google after that. And then, uh, SpaceX after that, when he left SpaceX, he was one of the senior, most security engineers there. At that point, he had been responsible for building a lot of those security architecture around their most critical systems, the Starship vehicle, uh, you know, some of the other, uh, uh, critical infrastructure they have in place.

6:03:23Shawn Ryan:He's just a fucking hitter, dude. I don't know how he got on that.

6:03:29Nik Seetharaman:I mean, where do you think this is going to grow into? I mean, just for example, I mean, we're talking about where is this going? I'm talking about are we going back to fucking pen and paper? What we're probably going towards is Neuralink where we just fucking thought share and we don't even need English. We don't even need language anymore.

6:03:45Shawn Ryan:Yeah.

6:03:46Nik Seetharaman:I mean, how the fuck do you like Alex Wang came in here. Do you know who Alex Wang is? Alex Wang came in here and said he doesn't want to have kids until Neuralink is fucking fully online for everybody because he wants his babies to have fucking Neuralink in their head. I'm like, holy shit. All right. That's excessive. But, I mean, it's like, fuck, man. There's a chip that can be hacked into your fucking brain. Yep. I've talked to Ben Carson about it, you know, Huberman, Andrew Huberman. I mean, you could inject an entire false reality into somebody's – I mean, they're talking about this is going to help the blind see.

6:04:29Nik Seetharaman:And it's like, well, shit, if it's going to help the blind see, then it'll probably make you hear shit, taste shit, feel shit, obviously see stuff. You could create an entire false reality into somebody's mind and they would never know it. We could be in a false reality right fucking now. We wouldn't even know it. How fucking crazy is that? How do you defend against that shit? Indeed. Indeed.

6:04:56Shawn Ryan:I think...

6:05:03Shawn Ryan:I think it's very possible that that's already happened. It's probably already happened billions and trillions of times, honestly. Who the fuck knows where in that chain of reality we might be in right now. You know, and people will have their religious convictions and say, that doesn't square with Christianity and Hinduism and, you know, name your fucking religion. I think it squares perfectly, dude. I think all of those religions are trying to tell us that the ultimate purpose of all of this shit is to evolve ourselves and our souls and our minds in order to navigate infinity, essentially. Because that's what we're talking about here, right?

6:05:54Shawn Ryan:In the limit, if you give it long enough, take Neuralink, mash it up with LLMs, mash it up with virtual reality, give us senses, and then now we're in the matrix, right? Repeat that a million times. So it's this infinitely fractal reality that we may be inhabiting. And if we're inhabiting an infinitely fractal reality, then one of the biggest, one of the most useful skills that we can have is without being told, without biasing towards one side or the other based on some shit that people are telling us, with our own personal discernment and ability to navigate chaos and bring order to that chaos, how the fuck do we get our bearings?

6:06:46Shawn Ryan:And how do we move out after having gotten them? I think that's what we're here to learn how to do it's a damn good point

6:06:58Nik Seetharaman:maybe maybe I'm full of shit I don't know I don't think anybody really knows what it's you know just be a good fucking person yeah that's really all you can do that's it but well Nick fascinating conversation amazing life story man amazing life story like holy shit dude your fucking life arc is just wild thanks man it's great meeting

6:07:28Shawn Ryan:you in person you're you're a super humble guy um and uh it's great to be here thank you for the opportunity it's a little bit surreal being in the studio so man thank you for saying that that means a lot you know i asked you earlier there's one thing you could say to your dad what

6:07:44Nik Seetharaman:would it be? And I want to ask you, if there's one thing you want your son to know, what would it be?

6:07:58Shawn Ryan:I wish I could have spent more time with you. And I'll say a message to my stepdaughter. I wish I could have spent more time with you guys. You guys deserved it. And I thought I was doing what the country needed me to do, and that was to deploy over and over and over again in the capacities in which I deployed. And if I could do it again,

6:08:37Shawn Ryan:I don't know what I would change,

6:08:43Shawn Ryan:but I would make spending time with you guys a priority and not a thing that I regret many years after the fact. one thing i'll say too is you know my two-month-old son maximus is gonna watch this too 15 years from now and he's gonna wonder you know

6:09:17Shawn Ryan:the fuck was wrong with you like why weren't you there for my brother and sister back in the day and, you know, I hope this interview can shed some light on what the fuck I was out there trying to accomplish.

6:09:37Nik Seetharaman:Well, I definitely think this is going to help them understand it. Thanks, man. You're welcome. Thank you. God bless.

6:09:58Nik Seetharaman:No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.

6:10:21Shawn Ryan:If you're a podcast host, listen up, this one's for you. My name is Allie Jackson. I'm the host of Finding Mr. Height, a dating and relationship podcast that I've been doing for four years now, sharing my positive and practical approach to dating that's built on my own life experience. And I wanted to share another experience that I've had, my secret behind monetizing my show. It's called Red Circle. And I was just telling my colleague about how much I love their platform. With Red Circle, not only am I getting a seamless hosting experience, but I also love the support I receive in ad sales. It's not just typical ad sales either.

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