S.O.S. (Stories of Service) - Ordinary people who do extraordinary work
From the little league coach to the former addict helping those still struggling, hear from people from all walks of life how they show up as a vessel for service and drive for transformational change. Hosted by Theresa Carpenter, a 29-year active duty U.S. naval officer who found service was the path to unlocking trauma and unleashing your inner potential.
S.O.S. (Stories of Service) - Ordinary people who do extraordinary work
He Advised the Pentagon and They ignored him with Donald Vandergriff | S.O.S. #248
What if the way we select and promote military leaders is wired to produce the very failures we say we want to avoid? That’s the challenge we take on with Don Vandergriff, a retired Marine and Army officer, defense analyst, and one of the most persistent voices for personnel reform in the U.S. military. Don pulls back the curtain on a system shaped by industrial-age thinking—zero-defects culture, inflated evaluations, and top-heavy headquarters—that rewards process and optics over performance and character.
We trace hard lessons from the National Training Center, where free-play exercises exposed how “fast-track” leaders falter under stress, and we connect those insights to Afghanistan, where statistical goals often replaced ground truth. Don contrasts that with historical models from Helmuth von Moltke’s Prussia, where outcomes-based training and rigorous war games forged decision-makers capable of acting under uncertainty. Along the way, we unpack why centralized boards miss nuance, how faint-praise evaluations can silently derail promising careers, and why due process failures erode trust.
Then we get practical. Don outlines three fixes with real bite: shift from up-or-out to up-or-perform so mastery is rewarded, slim a bloated officer corps that pulls attention inward, and rebuild professional military education around outcomes—free-play war games, honest after-action reviews, and mission command that pushes authority down. We also map where veterans still hold leverage: mentoring, writing, podcasts, and thoughtful public debate that prioritizes receipts over rhetoric. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, incentives set the menu—and changing them is how we get better leaders.
Subscribe, share this episode with a teammate who cares about real reform, and leave a review with the one change you’d make to fix promotions. Your voice helps push outcomes over optics.
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There are so many of us who see what is wrong with the Department of the War, who have spent 20, 30 years in uniform or out of uniform. And we understand that in order to reform the system, there are deep dive changes that would have to be made. And sometimes it gets discouraging to not see those changes and to see that we continue to do more of the same and then we get more of the same results. And today, to take a look at this from a promotion and personnel standpoint, is what we're going to talk about today. And I have somebody who has studied this issue extensively. Don Vandergriff, how are you doing today?
SPEAKER_00:I'm doing great. I'm honored to be on this show with you.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I'm honored to have you. And I just can't wait to get into it. You really have the background, both from serving in the military and then what you have done on the consult consulting side afterwards, and even in your writing, uh, to really speak to this issue with military personnel reform and the crisis of leadership that we all see when it comes to the military and the lack of accountability. And there's systemic issues that to this day we still are not addressing, even with this new administration. So we're going to get into it. Welcome to the Stories of Service Podcast, ordinary people who do extraordinary work. I am the host of the Stories of Service Podcast. And to get this started, as we always do, an intro from my father, Charlie Pickard.
SPEAKER_03:From the moment we're born and locked eyes with our parents, we are inspiring others. By showing up as a vessel of service, we not only help others, we help ourselves. Welcome to SOS Stories of Service. Hosted by Teresa Carpenter. Here from ordinary people from all walks of life who have transformed their communities by performing extraordinary work.
SPEAKER_02:And as I said, Don Vandergriff has spent decades inside the machinery of American military reform and watching it. Unfortunately, it resists change at every turn. He's a retired Marine enlisted and Army tank officer and later became one of the most persistent critics of how the U.S. military selects, educates, and promotes its leaders. His work put him in rooms most critics never see, serving as a senior advisor on personnel reform during the Bush administration, appeared in the Washington Post in 22, 2002, and landed on the cover of the Army Times twice in the same year for challenging the system from within. And I know a little thing or two about challenging from within. He is a defense analyst, military historian, and co-author with William S. Lind of fun foundational reform texts that question whether Pentagon was actually learning from war. And I can say from all the joint military education that I've had, I really wish that we had had more texts where we were really talking about learning from war. He has written or edited 11 books and more than 100 articles, many of which argue that battlefield, not battlefield reality, is driving modern decision making. And I just watched a documentary with uh Seymour Hirsch. It's it's pretty damning. It's on Netflix. And that we he is also somebody who has called attention time and time again to reform. And you know what he's met with? He's met with getting fired from the New York Times. I I mean, I really had no idea how much the mainstream media has fought him as a reformer. And he's the guy that revealed my lie. He's the guy who was at the front and center with the Abu Ghara prison scandal. I mean, it was just an amazing documentary. And it made me realize that this issue with military reform has been going on for decades. So that's what we're gonna get into. We're gonna go beyond the diagnosis and explain where everyday veterans actually have leverage. Because what can we do? That's that's the most frustrating part, not by chasing ranks or titles again, but by educating ourselves, mentoring younger service members, challenging bad incentives, and refusing to normalize systems that reward compliance over competence. And today we're gonna talk about how cultural change starts far from the Pentagon in units, classrooms, podcasts like this one, writing, local leadership, and quiet acts of intellectual courage. Welcome again, Don.
SPEAKER_00:I am very honored to be here and thank you for having me on.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. So, first off, as I always ask my guests, where were you born and raised and what inspired you to initially enlist in the Marine Corps?
SPEAKER_00:I was adopted at one year old by my parents, uh Virgil and Bonnie Bannegriff. And I did not know I was adopted until they passed away in come from Covington, England. But what inspired me to go in the Marine Corps was I grew up for some reason, I don't know why. I loved military history, I loved playing soldiers. I was a reenactor at age 13, a civil war reenactor. Let me clarify that. And everyone was against it. I was a nerd in high school, even though I was an athlete, and because I trained to be a soldier or a marine. So my dad takes me up. I did pretty well on the we didn't do the SAT, we did ACT in my high school in Chattanooga, and I did pretty well, and it shocked people because I was in the middle of my class. I was a 299 guy because I didn't learn by lecture, I learned by doing and and problem solving. So my dad, I I was gonna win a scholarship to the Air Force ROTC at Tennessee. My dad took me up there the fall of my senior year, and they said, Oh, you're we're gonna make you uh you did great math, ironically, because I love history. We're gonna make you a scientist. I said, I want to fly jets. He said, No, we're gonna make you a scientist, we'll give you a degree for STEM. They didn't use that word then, but that's what it was. And I said, Sir, I respect you, but I don't want to do this. So on the way home, my dad didn't speak to me. And then I was brought out and enrolled what was called early enlistee in the Marine Corps in December of 1980. And the day after graduation from high school, I went to Paris Island, uh South Carolina, and I became a Marine Reservist. And then after being in Marine Reserves, I entered Army ROTC at University of Tennessee. That's the T's. Uh, because right now they're playing in the ball game, but this is more important. I can always watch uh reruns. But I I joined and I ended up getting my branch of choice, which was armor tanks. And what I was fortunate about was when I joined the National Guard while I was waiting to be commissioned, I joined a tank unit, the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment, which has a really good record as a National Guard unit. Our National Guardsmen have served proudly in the wars against Iran, Iraq, and uh Afghanistan, and they were a good unit. And so I got to do that, and then my I became an armor officer and did all the armor, uh, armor uh OBC officer basic course, and then went to Korea after a few other schools and did Korea for two years.
SPEAKER_02:And you also uh did deploy in Iraq and Afghanistan, or okay.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I deployed in Afghanistan as a contractor for five and a half years because I decided in January or December of 2012, my wife and I talked about it. I said, you know, I love the job I was in at for Army Training Doctrine Command, what's called Arctic Ford, Army Capabilities Integration Center Ford. Uh, I worked for a great guy, uh, Colonel Retired, then SES Ricky Smith, great guy, mission command guy, and we'll talk about mission command, but it was all the bureaucratic contractor stuff that said I need a change. So I got a job. I went to Afghanistan in January of 2013. I did two years then, came back for a year, ran my own business, which was successful, not overly successful, but we got by, and then they reached out and said, Do you want to come over and train the Ministry of Interior in Afghanistan, the high-level police forces in planning and uh uh structure integration, force integration? I said, sure. So I did three more years. So that's that's my but going back to the desert storm stuff, I got in command after a year at the amphibious warfare school, the marine corps school, which is for captains and uh before they make major uh in uh at the Gulf War. And when I arrived in Germany, they took me right out and put me in command, and we went to Desert Storm, post-desert storm called Operation Positive Force for six months. We uh did the UN back in the UN mission up on the Afghanistan or the uh uh Kuwait Iraq border, and it was a great mission. I was a tank company commander, so that's where I got that experience at.
SPEAKER_02:What was your first impressions uh serving in in combat zones? Like, was the leadership and the things that you had trained for, did it match what you were seeing on the battlefield? Or were you were you did you early on start to see some some cracks in what you were being trained to do and what you were being told that you were gonna do versus what you actually did?
SPEAKER_00:That's a great question. So the crack came with me was I was a so-called fast tracker, I was doing really well. Matter of fact, when I got picked to go to amphibious warfare school in 1990 from Fort Irwin, I was at Fort Irwin, California, the National Training Center for three and a half years, after two years in Korea. Matter of fact, when I left Korea, they said, We're gonna send you to Fort Bragg to be in the 373rd Armor Airborne Tank Unit, which is a fast track unit. I said, I don't want to do that. And they said, Are you crazy? I said, Where do you want to go? I said, I want to go to the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, where they have full-skilled brigade division minus operations in an area that's the size of Rhode Island, and I want to go there because I'm gonna learn my profession. And and the and the branch manager said, You're jumping from the frying pan to the fire. I said, That's what I want to do because I did two years in Korea already, and I did well in Korea, and and so they were trying to protect me, I guess. But I went there and I loved it. I did two and three and a half years in National Training Center, and I started seeing the cracks there because I kept these little green ledger books on every I did 52 rotations at National Training Center. We were doing 14 rotations a year, two and a half weeks out of the year, or 14 times two and a half weeks, and I was all observer controller for the live fire team, the dragon team, and then I did my other half as the commander of the chief, chief of recon for the opposing forces regiment, which was uh the uh armor brigade at Port Irwin. And I had great mentors, I have really good mentors, but what I started seeing with my notes as I said, the so-called fast trackers, the ones they put in command, that's how you make general officer, they weren't doing so good. Yeah, I know the op for regiment knows the terrain, they are really good at what they do. They have a lot of guys that even want to come back to that tour because they're doing what they got in the army to do, but still, I just I didn't see like near victories or near competition. I saw a lot of gross defeats. One of the ones was General Clark, who of course retired as a NATO commander. He commanded a brigade out of Fort Carson, he was absolutely horrible. So he came back later when I was chief of recon in uh 90 or 1990, 8990, and he came out there as the commander and he hated the op for so much that he made his redo missions, but redesign like narrow zones. He wanted us to lose because we embarrassed him so bad.
SPEAKER_02:And and just for the audience, I think that people might not be military historians or military exercise uh savvy. When you say op for, I believe you're talking about like in an exercise, there's the opposition forces. And so you have a training team that comes out. We have this on our aircraft carriers, well, uh Carrier Strike Group 15, which I was a part of, and they go out and they pretend that they are a near-peer competitor. So they could pretend to be China, they could pretend to be any North Korea, what have you, whatever, depending on what the exercise is. And the job of the op for is to grade your work and grade the homework. And I think what you're trying to say, Don, is that a lot of times you were going out there and you were seeing that the people that you were grading didn't do so well, but it didn't, it wasn't as though it mattered. It was that what you're kind of saying.
SPEAKER_00:Well, let me let me you did a good job there. I did my best. No, you did a good job, and by the way, I loved your your picture right before you got out as a commander. That was cool in your naval outfit. That was cool.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, thank you, thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Anyway, so let me explain. The army made a big jump in the early 80s, I think it was 83, 84, to establish National Training Center, and one of the things do they made a professional opposing forces and it replicated a Soviet motorized rifle regiment. Okay, and then later, when I was there force league, for me, because I learned so much, they made they were able to field a division minus motorized rifle division, okay. About 210 uh visum visa modified vehicles that look like Soviet vehicles, they could field 210, and then they had a uh a centralized what's called an after-action review building, the Star Wars. We call it the Star Wars building, because they had digitalized stuff everywhere: cameras, computers, everything, and they could turn out these great after-action reviews. And one of the things the national army did was incredible, they learned from the 1941 Louisiana maneuvers, where General Marshall had to relieve over 500 colonels and above because they couldn't take the field exercises, and we'll get to that because of the promotion personnel system. But what the army said, we have rank blind AARs, and what the army also tried to do, as long as you improve, you you can make mistakes, as long as you that was a first. The Marines still have a hard time with that because I consulted them from 2018 to 2021, and I was trying to add you know, build your exercises where guys, your commanders, can make mistakes as long as the mistake is made in trying to do something risky or or experiment, not a mistake in the absence of uh moral or ethical demise. But the army was actually trying to do that, and it was hard because the army has been built on a zero defects culture, i.e., zero defects came out of McNamara when he Robert McNonaire, when he became the secretary of defense under John F. Kennedy in uh 1961, he brought over from Ford Motor Company because he was the CEO there, the zero defects mentality where there's more no mistakes are made, everything's got to be perfect.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that just leads to lies because it leads to optics.
SPEAKER_00:Yep, you're exactly right. You would love the 2015 study by Lenny Wong, a good friend of mine at the Army War College, where uh they talked about the system, the culture makes officers lie.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:If you put Lenny Wong in the 2015 culture study in Google, he'll come up.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and it's interesting that you talk about this because as I was watching the Seymour Hirsch uh Netflix documentary, one of the things that I read was that during the war in Vietnam, everything was about numbers, it was about body count, debt body count, and so what that did is sadly it led to things like my life because people were under the gun and under so much pressure to have high body counts, and so they were getting high body counts regardless of what the cost was to human lives, and and that's that is the problem when we over-obsess with things that don't really contribute to the bottom line, and it sounds like a lot of this has been going on for years, and in the army's defense, and I'm I only say that because when they do do something well, I give them credit.
SPEAKER_00:They tried to change that in the 80s and early 90s with the National Training Center, they really did. My issue with the army is oh, it's not going to reflect on your career if you do badly out there. Well, this is a contrast when uh Helmuth Multkey the elder took over as chief of staff of the Prussian army, it didn't come to the German army until 1871. He became the chief of staff, he was a brilliant man, and he's one of the greatest military leaders, everyone that no one knows about. When he came in command, the first exercise he did in the fall of 1859 was had a 700-page operations order, and he said, We're we're getting away from that, and we're gonna judge you on results or outcomes because I developed outcomes-based learning. We're gonna develop you on outcomes, not the process. Well, the military, what it did and it's culturally acceptable. I explained this in Path of Victory and Adapting Mission Command. What the militar U.S. military had to do to align with societies the our society does not like the military until recently, until the 80s, but before 1980s. Before that, they didn't like the military, they just tolerate like we have a fire department, you have to have it, you know. Well, so so we had the military adopted business principles, and the business principles by Frederick Taylor is have you heard of Frederick Taylor?
SPEAKER_02:I have not.
SPEAKER_00:He is the business business guru of 1890s till the early 20th century, early 1900s. And what Frederick Taylor did, he was actually you've heard of the Ford Mortar Company in the assembly line.
SPEAKER_02:Sure, sure.
SPEAKER_00:Well, everyone gives credit to Ford for developing, it was not Ford, it was Frederick Taylorism that gave Ford the ideals. And in that system, everything had to be done exactly right and for and and exactly on time. Every every person that was a a worker in that had to do everything to exact numbers. That's what Frederick Taylor exit uh uh created, and Ford adapted that. And for building Model T Fords and thousands of them, it worked great. Okay, so the army before it went into World War I, the Army was a frontier consopillary force, and it was good at what it did. I mean, you had guys that chased at crook and uh other guys, Reginald McKenzie, who's the least known best Indian fighter in the in the American Army. I just wrote an article about him in Substack that'll be out in a couple days. These guys knew decentralized training, but the problem was was the rest of society didn't know didn't want to do know about that. So we adopted the business principles to get into war one, and there's a guy named a French mathematician named Le Carte. Have you ever heard of him?
SPEAKER_02:I have not.
SPEAKER_00:Lecte is the father of. Of modern industrial methods because he invented how spare parts were mathematically. He didn't exactly talk because he's a 1700s guy, but Lacarte was able to implement a mathematical issue or problem solving system that fit into how to solve problems by bits and more bits and less bits. So we adapted all that because we didn't know, but and plus, there was a a great uh kickback against militarism. So we adopted business principles, and the business principles are built on results as far as like how many you make and numbers, like you just talked, spoke about what we did in Vietnam, which was a body count.
SPEAKER_02:Which we still do. I mean, if you look at these the red light, green light, stop charts, that that is the bread and butter of the military. We we don't talk about the nuances of what we're really measuring against.
SPEAKER_00:We just throw numbers on a slide in Afghanistan in Iraq, too. Possibly. I mean, the reason I went to Afghanistan was not because of the money, I went there as a historian to say, for me to know what the campaign, how we study, and how we do, I have to be current. So in 2030, January 2013, I went there, I stayed there two years, came back for a year, ran my own business, and then went back again for three more years. But what I but I was blessed because I was in the Resolute Support, which is the hierarchy NATO slash American command in Afghan in Kabul. I was right in there because I could write and think. But why I laugh is because even though I could do that, I got in trouble for speaking out. I even set up a course on how to train the senior Afghans to think critically without using PowerPoint because everyone hated it, even most the Finns really hated the PowerPoint obsession. The Afghans hated it too. So I teach I taught them this course on how to problem solve and they loved it. But the chain of command, including my contractor chain of command, hated it because it threw off the whole setway of doing things with PowerPoint. But my point is this they did everything based on numbers and they created statistical uh goals to make those numbers, and it didn't reflect the reality of the war at all. So that was a good thing for me to do because I learned a lot there. As a matter of fact, when I got back in August of 2018, I got hired right away by Major General Bill Mullins. God rest his soul, he passed away a year and a half ago. But he was the commander of Marine Corps Training and Education Command. He brought me in to fix learning in the Marine Corps. Oh boy, you you could not believe Teresa the Guddin resistance I got, and I had support from General Mullen and a great the best trainer in the Marine Corps. Uh uh, he's currently at the National Defense University. Colonel uh I'm sorry, I'll get to it in a minute. I have so much going through my mind, that's why it happens. That's all these books behind me are all the studies and stuff I do. Anyway, uh they had me go out and do mission command and power command and teach us. And everywhere I taught it in the Marine Corps, all the courses like Marine Corps Infantry East, Marine Corps Infantry West, and the subcorps, they loved it right. But the GS Mafia, all the retired marines, hated it.
SPEAKER_02:Uh because it was new, it was something that wasn't new, it wasn't new.
SPEAKER_00:I stole it from the Germans. I translated everything from the Germans and stole it. And Bruce Goodmanson, who's currently at uh you need to get him him on your show. Bruce is Dr. Bruce Goodmanson, he's the founder of the School of Advanced Warfare, and he lives in the original 1922 Marine Corps headquarters at Quantico. Bruce is a great, I mean, he's awesome, and they've ignored him now for years because and he's got his PhD from Oxford and his master's from the University of Glasgow. He's brilliant, but he has incredible moral courage, he will not fold to him. He founded the School of Advanced Warfare Studies for Marine Officers. He founded it in 8990, and he's a retired Marine major. We had his uh major of mafia, by the way. It's pretty funny. Uh, myself, Pete Hexeth, and Bruce Goodmanson are the uh major mafia. So getting back to the point, is all the evidence is there that we don't do things the way we need to do, but we ignore. Why do you think that is?
SPEAKER_02:I think it's because we sold a story to Congress that's simple, and I think that the uh American people want simple, and we don't want to dig into what it really is going to take to show outcome-based results, like the that because it's a it's not going to be numbers, it's it's going to be nuanced, it's going to be situational, it's going to have to take into account character, it's going to have to, it's more work. I mean, that's the bottom line. I mean, the way that we command right now is ridiculous. I mean, when I see what a front office has in terms of an apparatus behind it, it's it's it's a it's an it's a sh it's it's it's a dog and pony show.
SPEAKER_00:It's gonna say that was cool. You cut yourself.
SPEAKER_02:I I had to, yes. I don't want to I don't want to cuss on the podcast, but it's just it's not real. I mean, having everybody, I was at Indopaycom as an O3, and let me just give you an example, just case study. I was in public affairs and I was a very junior lieutenant at the time, and I remember our entire day revolved around what Admiral Willard was up to that day. So if he was at the headquarters building, it didn't matter that there was absolutely nothing going on and nothing to do. Because God forbid, at three o'clock, the because of whatever meeting they're in and whatever exercise they're working on, or whatever conference he's about to fly to, they just might need something. Instead of planning day to day or doing like a real good six to nine month month outlook of what the expectations are going to be, it was just oh, we got we gotta scurry, we gotta scurry around, and then everybody just slams into a problem set, and there's no real rhyme or reason about how things are truly getting done. I and I just remember thinking like this is is is this does not make any impact.
SPEAKER_00:This is all this is all just for show, and it was it's obsessed about show and all the great things that come with rank versus outcomes, like you said. You I was glad you touched on outcomes because the entire Prussian-German army under Mokey went totally to outcomes. Okay, you're going an extra every year, they had a massive field exercise for a month, and guess what? They judged people on their results, and they had judges out there, there was a free play exercise. What I mean by free play force on force was you had two sides going, and both sides would say beat the other side, and the only thing you're limited by is what you have, and then you had judges out there that were neutral that would say, Okay, you guys lose this many because you did this or whatever, and they would promote or relieve guys based on performance other than combat. Uh, how they did in that. I've been pushing that, so is Bruce and some others for years. About let's have war games, William S.
SPEAKER_02:Lynn, for example, Bruce Goodmanson, and they test people under fire, test people in an exercise environment under under a stressful environment, and then assess whether or not they can make good decisions under stressful situations. But that's not what we do. What we do is we give them this road to crisis, we give them the standard playbook that they already know what's going to happen. I mean, as a as a PAO, I would know like the kind of questions that the fake reporters would ask. I mean, it was just, it was all such a like like I said, a dog and pony show to check a block and to say, we did this exercise or we did this particular evolution. And I remember just thinking, like, this isn't making me a better PAO. Like, this isn't making me a better storyteller. This isn't helping me improve my ability to teach my MCs or or you know, my my photographers or journalists how to do proper strategic communications and how to really combat a narrative. And so I I was just very discouraged that it just didn't simulate to me like what really would be needed to properly test somebody. And like you said, it it really isn't just about how well you perform in the exercise, it it's your it's your courage and your character, but that's also what we're not assessing for. And I really want to get to that. So what were I know just recently you sent a some feedback to Stu Scheller, who my understanding was he was looking into some of the ways that we create our incentive system within the promotion system, and I'm curious what were some of the suggestions that you sent forward to try to improve the way we choose people for promotion?
SPEAKER_00:Well, what's cool is I posted on Substack and Stu and Pete Hexeth, who I think are doing a good job, but they're what they've realized, and along with Matthew Lennon, the Air Force lieutenant colonel from Space Force, that got forced out because he spoke up against cultural Marxism. Yep, I've talked online to all three of them. I think what they realize is there's more cultural Marxists in the Pentagon DA, or not Department of War, than they realize, and they're gonna think they're gonna wait them out because every a normal Secretary of War, Secretary of Defense is two years. But my point is the day after Stu took finally got cleared by Congress on 1 May, 2030 April, and he put out a X and a Facebook post. Hey, I finally got cleared. I'm starting as my position under Secretary of Personnel and Readiness Reserve Affairs and I'm looking at how to fix the promotion system. And there was hundreds of guys, typically, and I'm not arrogant at all. If you meet me, you'll say, Man, you're so humble. I'm not like that because it's God given that I've had this work ethic I have, but I still am blunt. So guys say, Oh, we need to do this, and you know, one sentence, or think you're there, and and and I'm glad he's there, they're all there, they're great guys, and they're doing the best they can. But I wrote out, and and so my earlier Substack, I think in early May, it is answering Stu Sheller's question. And in that list, I said, This is based on 20 years of intense award-winning research, and I've applied it in my own my own units and uh studied other militaries, and in that, here's what you got to do to do away. You don't you're not gonna totally do away with careerism, sure, or people of weak moral character, strength of character, the German term is Vlogsack, which is a 26-letter word that means strength of character. But what you can do is the current system is built totally on matter of fact, there was a HR expert in the 30s who thought that personal ambition was the way we need to get great people, and that led to the upper out system in 1947, the Officer Personnel Act. But going back to your question, I wrote a lot. Here's what usually happens when people read my stuff is they take one part of it, they apply it and don't change anything else. So, what do you think happens?
SPEAKER_02:It doesn't go anywhere because it's not holistic and it's not taking into account all the things that you're saying. Because if you only apply one part of it and you don't apply the other parts of it, it's it's not gonna work.
SPEAKER_00:You're one of the first people that got the word right holistic. You cannot what Moltke came in when he came in in 1858 and took over the Prussian general staff, and after they fought the Danish Prussian wars in '64, and he began applying this, is you got to change everything. I keep in my book Path of Victory, which was redone in 2013, originally published in 2002. I read I lay out a holistic roadmap, and I took years to write this book. And what I realized that, and then and I wrote this off this article in '97 in Armor Magazine, which is kind of a roadmap for it. And I had all these general and officers and colonels call me in and talk to me about it. You know, you ruined your career, we can't do that. But one general brought me in and he said, Why'd you write this? I said, Sir, all we couldn't need to do is what we learn after before World War II from the mobilization. George Marshall, who I'm a great fan of, but Marshall Bradley and all the senior officers, Eisenhower included, met in 1946 for the Doolittle Board. And the main thing they said was, we can't replicate the Prussian system. We got to do a democracy. So they took the theories from the 30s on HR, human resources actually began in the 30s, was all about ambition, all about basically narcissism. Whoever was the guy who wanted it the most is what we need, and that's what they applied to the promotion system that we still have today. So this is why we have McKenzie's who failed over Afghanistan. And I hope you have uh Assad Genghis Khan on your show.
SPEAKER_02:Coming on next month.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, he I love that guy. His guy's excellent. He that guy's incredible. He was the Teresa, he was the best battalion commander in Afghanistan, and I studied all of them. Okay, even though I was there from 13 to 18, I studied all the stuff before that.
SPEAKER_02:Well, he he did the things that you want a battalion commander to do. He was in the field with his men and he held them accountable and he stopped things from happening and he led differently depending on who he was in charge of. If he was in charge of the Afghanistan forces, if he was in charge of the militia, or if he was working with Jan, or if he was trying to communicate with the Pakistanis, or if he was at the embassy, he knew how to leverage his intelligence to properly coordinate with the right people at the right time. And that takes so much emotional intelligence. And I really do feel that some of these people that I've had to work for, I've had some amazing flag officers, don't get me wrong, and I loved serving in the Navy. But I got really disillusioned when I started to see that people who didn't set the example, who weren't getting their hands dirty, who weren't doing things other than being weighted on hand and foot and being presented PowerPoint slides all day. And when I saw that those were the people that we were putting in the highest positions of leadership, it was so disappointing. And so I'm curious, I know that I can't have you wrap up an entire thesis of you know 50 suggestions in one night, but I'm curious if there's some top-level suggestions, like what could what are the maybe the low-hanging fruit that the DO DOW could do to change the way we promote leaders? Because right now there's a handful, and there is, I feel, of good leaders who are in the military flag and general officer corps, but there's a lot of bad ones.
SPEAKER_00:There's more bad ones, and I agree like they're evil.
SPEAKER_02:No, no, I just mean poor leaders, and and they're not examples.
SPEAKER_00:They're they've conformed to a system because they play the system. But let me go out what finish answering what you said about I posted for Stu, and Stu got back to me and said, 'Oh, I read all your points. I don't agree with all of them,' but it made me think, and that's all I care about. I'm all in the debate. But in the points I wrote, which was a long article, is we got to get the away from the one inflated evaluation system. We got to make a session tougher, we've got to cut the officer core in half, the size of it. We gotta make we gotta get rid of upper out and go with upper perform. Like, if I wanted to be a captain, not a captain in the navy, but a captain in the army, which I did because I commanded three companies. I was I was an exception because I loved it. As long as I stay physically and mentally fit, I can stay there. The Germans had that system, and they actually awarded like expert the extrovert entry badge for that, which was upheld as high as being a general officer. The German officer corps, by the way, was 2.5% of their force. You know what ours is today? What 18 to 20 percent.
SPEAKER_02:Wow, and and what that does, if I if I can understand it correctly, because I I really want to kind of learn this, is when you're top heavy at the geo and the fo level, in my thoughts on this is that you don't have enough people on the bottom who are actually doing the work. And instead, what you're doing is you're incentivizing even more and more people to get to this like administrative bureaucrat level, and what that does is it incentivizes the people like the McKenzies to become the McKenzie's instead of becoming more like the uh the Assad's, and soads and the hackwors, those two the hack.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, it's incredible. When I I've gotten to know Assad very well, and I'm so blessed because he's a great man. We talk all the time now, almost every day. But here's the point they mastered their craft at the battalion level, him and Hackworth and some others that I've written about, and it embarrassed instead of like did you ever see the seven-minute uh thing with Harado on on Assad in Afghanistan?
SPEAKER_02:I read about it in his book. Yeah, well, basically, he praised him and his men and made the rest of the unit feel jealous, is what it sounded like.
SPEAKER_00:Well, what happened was it embarrassed his chain of command because he was doing what he was, and he they they're the ones that pushed that on him, and he just he just told them the truth. You think in a real good positive performance outcome culture?
SPEAKER_02:Man, this guy right, and that's what's so sad about this, Don, is that they didn't celebrate him, yeah, and instead they undermined him and they found ways to push him out because he was so effective.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, because it embarrassed the the system, the way they had learned that's what I told. I had this thing how to undermine and and disrupt the system as it is because it's all built around three factors: the upper out system, which was first tried by the Navy in 1917, and it failed because to do up or out, you have a have a top heavy officer corps, and then they became it came again in 1947 called the Officer Personnel Act, and they were able to, and now they create all these bloated officers because they want because Marshall rightfully so the mobilization for war two took from 1938, didn't start in 30 or 40, 41. They started in 38 until 42 to build a force of eight million. And even then they they had very few officers. They had four or five, whatever Pete said in his testimony. I was there on 14 January of 2025.
SPEAKER_02:Were you were you at DC that day? Oh, so was I.
SPEAKER_00:Oh wow, I was at Pete's uh serum or his confirmation hearing.
SPEAKER_02:So was I. I was sitting in the audience with my right.
SPEAKER_00:That's wow. Anyway, anyway, he got the general officer thing right, but could but what it really does, Teresa, is it when you have a top heavy core with headquarters, they demand more information from the bottom up, and so you're spending time on the inward focus, i.e., on process versus an outward focus on the enemy.
SPEAKER_02:That is such a great point, I see.
SPEAKER_00:And then the second part that's wrong about it is the centralized control of a single evaluation system. So in the army, I'm sure it's way in the other services, it's so inflated that if you make a mistake in trying to do something good and it happened to me, you get a less than perfect officer evaluation for. So the whole system, when they do these central, here's the the ethical dilemma, the ethical, horrible ethical problem with that. So you can get an officer in the in the army that as a captain, oh, you did great, you did this, but he has faint praise for you. So he's allowed to not face you on why he's screwing you over. And then yeah, there's so there's no accountability for promotion on the centralized board, they've got 30 seconds to 45 seconds to review stats and paperwork, and there's that one faint praise, she's gone. So he this this is an ethical violation of the officer corps because that person, male or female, cannot face you and say, Oh, I'm gonna because you offended me or you did something that I don't agree with, I'm gonna give you faint praise. No, they're allowed to lie, so the lie is everywhere, right?
SPEAKER_02:And then the problem is it's the fact that what this does is it promotes favoritism, and so the weak leaders, the people that really shouldn't be in these leadership positions, they're now deciding who the people that are coming after them are going to be. So, as some people say, ducks pick ducks, so now weak leaders pick more weak leaders, and the very people who are mavericks or who might have an innovative idea or might want to do something to make the system better, they're gonna get smacked down, and you would laugh.
SPEAKER_00:But so in August of 2002, I get this phone call from like several reporters, and I've already been on the cover of Army Times and the Washington Post, but Secretary of the Army Tom White, he was the secretary of the army, he was at a press round table, and these reporters call me and says, Oh, Tom White loves your book, he held it up as the blueprint for the future army. So, what do you think that should have brought me?
SPEAKER_02:They should have said, Wow, this is great. Let's or they should have at least read your ideas and wanted to have a discussion with you about them. That's what should have been.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, they read and had a discussion, but it was like I saw General Keene, the acting army chief of staff who's on Fox all the time, and I briefed him for two hours in his office, and he told me, go out and brief all these general officers and congressmen. So, guess what? How that happened? I was I had had my right foot rebuilt. I've had several surgeries on my legs because I was an athlete and hardcore soldier, and I could not drive. So, my wife, instead of giving me the logistical support to go, and my wife's still angry about it. I don't blame her. We've been together 35 years, but she had to drive me all over Washington, DC, to go these appointments, and I still had to do my duties at Georgetown, which by the way, we were we went from 251st to number one in three years while I was there, and I had all these colonels and generals come up to me and how did you do that? You're making everybody mad because you didn't, instead of saying, What's your formula? The formula was going to outcomes-based learning, but my going back to this, General King so go out and brief all instead of saying, I'm gonna write an order to your chain of command to detach you and put you on special duty, okay, and I'm gonna provide you a driver and everything to go to these people. We ended up having to do it, so we were putting in like 60, 80 hour weeks traveling over Northern Virginia and DC to brief all these generals and congressmen on my book, which was you know how I took it, it was like this is a victory, okay. And we and we did it, but the point when we reflect on it, it's like that's crazy. And I would and then they created a task force at the Human Resources Command. Now it used to be Purse Com, now it's Human Resource Command for the Army on studying my ideals. Well, guess who was not attached to them or put on the team? You me. I mean, like, why? Because I had not did the paper perfect army career. When I got that, I got an OER after command at command. I had commanded 52 months, which is a record at the company level. But I had one three-month OER I was given after a perfect one when I went to the Gulf War by a colonel who everyone said, just tell him what he wants to hear. He he asked me in a meeting, in a in a post inspection meeting, to lie to say something he wanted me to, and I wouldn't do it. So I didn't even need this evaluation report from him, Teresa. He wrote this report, which is called a senior raider ops, and gave me what's called a two block. There's a series of blocks and one talk, but just because he gave me that two block after getting a great OER out of the Gulf War, it's called a degrading performance. He destroyed my career. And you know what's ironic about that? After that one, I got four more. You're the best commander of the brigade. What did the army promotion boards do and selection boards for schools? They kept going back to that one. I it's like I committed rape or got several DUIs.
SPEAKER_02:And you know, that is a low-hanging fruit in my mind. If if you want to say, well, what are some of the immediate things that Stu Scheller and the rest of the guys at the um office of personnel and readiness could be doing, Anthony Tiada, all those guys, what could they be doing as a low-hanging fruit? Is that when you see a um a one OER or one Fit rep that doesn't jive with all the other fit reps? Because I think right now, unfortunately, and this is one of the reasons why when I I've only maybe twice got less than perfect Fit Reps. Yeah, and when that happened with me, I never well, the first time it happened, it was sold to me like it wasn't that bad, and I just took it. Um, and I ended up making five anyway.
SPEAKER_00:I didn't know better. That's what I did.
SPEAKER_02:And and thankfully, the first time it happened, I was also working for the Admiral at the same time, Admiral uh Byrne, who is amazing at carrier um uh carrier strike group 11. And so what I did is because I had the paper from him, it it outweighed more than what my uh my other commanding officers had said about me. So I I was in a really good spot. Now, when it happened the second time, right before I was to retire, um, it was still sort of sold off to me like, oh, well, you can recover from this, you can do that. But I also know that yeah, yeah, you're always sold like it's not that bad. And and you know it's you know it's bad. And the thing was, is that you don't get the last word on it. So in the Navy, you can write a statement, and this is just the that's such bullshit about it. So you can write a statement, and if you do, you're you're basically going up against your senior raider to say basically, I don't think this is fair, I think this is personal, I think that you just didn't think I fit the mold of what you wanted. Okay, but you could try that and you could then and then this person is going to find dirt on you, and they will because everybody, I don't care who you are, everybody makes mistakes, everybody has something in their past. They're human, they're not God. You're right. I see this all the time with the people who are under investigation.
SPEAKER_00:And you make mistakes because you're trying to do the right thing as well, a good leader does.
SPEAKER_02:And this is what they'll do they'll start digging into your past, or they'll dig into your history, or they'll start questioning all your people, and they'll try to find something on you. And then what they find on you, they'll get the help of their jag. And then next thing you know, there's this perfectly beautiful, well-worded uh report, just like what Asad said happened with McKenzie. Um we didn't it's not in the back of his book, the entire investigation, but I can only imagine that that entire investigation, there's if you were to read it and not know him, you would you would obviously be biased because anyone can write anything they want and they can sell a story any way that they want. And that is the problem with our personnel system.
SPEAKER_00:Is that let me tell you what's funny about that? Funny being our ironic. Uh, I had two appeals that I did on that one three-month OER, and we were neighbors with the first Pursecom in Germany deputy GS guy. He was a former military, great guy, and he reviewed both of my packets. I tried twice to what's the board of rec corrections of records or something like that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, board of corrections, and we call it the BCNR Board of Corrections of Records.
SPEAKER_00:Anyway, the second one, I had nine statements from fellow officers saying this guy was the best commander in the brigade, he got screwed because he was honest. They still all I asked them to do is take that OER out because it was a three, I didn't even need it, and they still didn't do it.
SPEAKER_02:You know what's so funny, Don, is as we're talking, and and I love having these kind of conversations because it kind of makes me realize things and get insights. This is a due process issue. At the end of the day, the the the personnel reform system is is is a problem with due process because if you fixed due process and and instituted that within the system, then these kinds of problems would take care of themselves because there would be a fair way to adjudicate issues. But the problem right now is that there is not a fair way to adjudicate issues. There's nothing that you can do when you have a toxic commander to gather your own witness statements and to show that this person is retaliating against you.
SPEAKER_00:You don't have the right to do that, and even if you do, you send it away, you try to do an IT complete or the first person deputy commander or the first person personnel command in Germany said, This is the best appeal packet I've ever seen, and still and it still didn't matter, yeah. Let me let me let me add something real quick. You're gonna like this because I can tell you and your spouse work great together.
SPEAKER_02:We do.
SPEAKER_00:I was gonna get out after that OER, and my wife told I was gonna get out, go back to Tennessee and be a prosecutor or so, go to law school, be a state troop. Yeah, and my wife said, You're not gonna do that. I said, What do you mean? She's everyone else has kicked the can down the road. You're gonna learn and what's wrong with the system and fight the system, and you're gonna start writing, and that's that's how it started.
SPEAKER_02:I love that. And you know what? That reminds me so much of what Seymour Hirsch did. I mean, I really I just watched the documentary, so it's fresh in my mind, but it has exactly what happened to him. He was kind of pushed out of the journalism community. I mean, it happened, same thing to Megan Kelly, uh happened to Candace Owen at uh Daily Wire. I mean, basically, a lot of us who I think are reform-minded, we get pushed out from a system that is not reform-minded where poor leaders get a pass and we say, you know what, we're gonna write. So I think as we go further into this conversation and we're kind of getting towards the end of the call, one of my themes that I had for talking to you today, too, is what can we veterans do? What is what are you know, a lot of us now we're on the outside and we're no longer serving, but we still want to contribute and we still want to see the system be better. So, what can we do?
SPEAKER_00:I I love your I love your question because I get that a lot. I get that a lot all every week. So, thanks for my great friend Mark McGrath. I don't know if you know Mark, I don't think he's the expert on Boyd in the ODLoo. And Mark said, You need to get on Substack. So, this is a two-part story. And Lorraine, my wife, got it on me in 2015 when I was a uh a home a year. She says, You need to start putting your ideals into fiction. She said, Because you won a lot of awards for your books, but they're boring academically, right? Right, that's cool. So in March, we were sitting at our favorite little cafe in Dumfries. I said, Read this, and she said, This is really cool. So that's my first fiction. Um I've already written four fiction books. The publisher, and they're all like, What if not a Pete Hex if a another character took over the Department of War and got to implement all my ideals in a fiction style?
SPEAKER_01:Sure.
SPEAKER_00:So she read it like this is great. So I the publisher he loves my stuff, but they're doing other stuff right now. It's a former cadet of mine that's incredible, former special forces ranger guy, and and and they're doing other stuff right now, but they they love, and then I gave matter of fact, I gave Asad the first book to read to write the Ford, and he read he said he couldn't put it down, and he wrote a Ford for it. Uh, so uh what I tell guy, uh what I tell everyone, like you're doing, like I'm doing, is what I love about today is we don't have the mainstream media anymore controlling the message. It's social media. All that has to happen is you got to be smart enough to verify that stuff's true. So you look at all my stuff, it's all tied to thousands of references. But my point is for veterans to fight this, and like a saw, you and I are doing, is you got to go on social media. Me, I'm writing, I'm doing podcasts like once every other week with somebody, you're doing this great show. Asaw's doing Sentinel. That's how we do it because believe me, uh Pete Hexeth and Stu Scheller and others are watching this stuff, okay. And if they do just a part of what we're recommending, which would be a victory, it should be improvement. We're doing good. So, veterans, instead of just sitting at the BFW bar and going, This sucks. This we need, you know, you gotta you've got experience, and if you can't write if you don't think you write well, you can get someone that does it, okay.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And I think that there's also other ways to get a point across, it doesn't always even have to be writing. I I experiment a lot with reels and videos. I I'm on a thing now where I'm doing green screens, I think they're just so much fun. And and sometimes using humor, I mean, sometimes I find that when I can show the most egregious examples of failed leadership and I make it into something that's almost sarcastic and humorous, I can I can get attention that way and draw attention to the issue. And I realize I am just what one person, and you are just what one person, but we're all kind of swimming, as as Assad even said to me, he's like, we're all kind of swimming in the same waters and we're we're swimming upstream upstream together. And I agree with that. I consider a lot of us online creators or content creators or whatever you want to call us, you know, the Chase Spears, he's another one.
SPEAKER_00:I think Chase is great.
SPEAKER_02:Chase is amazing, and I've been on his show, and I saw you. Yeah, oh, that was that was great. And and you know, I will tell you, Don, there is nothing like being able to truthfully get your story out there and have it be fair. One thing I'm never is one of those people that just trash talks the military. I will be fair about what they did right, what they did wrong, or what I felt they did wrong. And there's a sense of relief when you can get your story out in the court of public opinion. In fact, I'll probably share it later, but the gentleman who that military lawyer, uh UCMJ lawyer on Instagram, he just slammed a really young, coasty, 23-year-old content creator who was bringing up a very good point about why there are certain content creators who seem to get a pass from the DOW and wear their uniform all the time and then still sell products.
SPEAKER_00:You know what I saw? I loved your I love your take when you were out hike and you said you were overdressed or whatever.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:That was a cool idea because and it was a little snapshot. So what I've learned is like all my books are detailed, long academic books. So I wrote these four fiction books, they're gonna be about 150 pages, and that's what I saw liked about them. Says, I've read, I mean, I I couldn't put it down. I want another one. So I learned that when the when I wrote uh when I took these fiction courses last year on how fiction that's awesome, and that's true.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, media is so much more, and communications is so much more than just one book or one type of video. I mean, there's long form videos, but I just found this 23-year-old Coastie content creator the other day, and and he's amazing and he's really good at what he does. And then today he he sent me uh the video, the response video to the lawyer, and it's really good. I mean, because this lawyer had no business attacking this kid. He was bringing attention to an issue that has been a problem for years. It's not about mandatory fund day, it's not about this one particular Vargas or these creators. It's the fact that these creators are getting courted by DOD, which is wrong, and I will say it's wrong, and wearing their uniform and selling products on their channels, and it's bad leadership. It's bad leadership for the DOW to endorse them, it's bad leadership for them to be doing it. And thank God this 23-year-old young coasty content creator called attention to it. And then to have this lawyer, like UCMJ lawyer, he seems like an okay guy, but come on, don't don't have this lawyer fight your battles for you. If this guy, if this kid was calling attention to something that needed to be fixed, then those creators should have been the ones to respond. Not this lawyer. Maybe they're paying this lawyer, I don't know, but it's just that's not the right way to solve a problem. I felt the same way, and I'll I'll stop my tirade in a minute, but I felt the same way when I saw the saw the Sean Ryan, uh Dan Crenshaw debate. And I love Sean Ryan, but come on, don't post a demand letter and then have Dan Crenshaw respond and then have these lawyers go back and forth. No, tap well, no, and take the lawyers out of it. This is between you and Dan. Yeah, okay. Don't don't don't go say, go talk to my lawyer. Oh, I'm gonna sue you. Okay, no, you guys are content creators and you. Should know how to respectfully resolve your own issues.
SPEAKER_00:So I wrote that story you liked about the Minnesota fraud as a strategic defeat, and you liked it. So I had a guy, I had this guy attack me about using the generations of war, and I academically responded to him with perfect responses, and that's the way it should be.
SPEAKER_02:That's the way it should be. It's not I'm gonna send you a demand letter or I'm gonna go contact UCMJ lawyer and have him put out a content creator video. No, if you know when when I got attacked and kicked out of the military influencer conference because someone made a video about me, guess what I did? I got online, I showed my receipts, I showed how this woman was lying about me. I didn't send her a demand letter. I didn't try to sue her because I don't trust the legal system anyway, and it wouldn't have done no as it is. I I defended myself in the court of public opinion and it worked. She'd never responded to it, and we moved on from the situation. I hold no ill will towards her. I always say that. But at the same time, I have the right to defend myself. So I'm really glad that this gentleman, this kid, defended himself and has responded uh to the fact that he was attacked. And I think that's what we have to do. And like you said, politely, respectfully with your receipts and do it in a way that's professional. And I think that that resolves issues. And then if it gets to a point where you can talk to this person and bring them on your show or or find an unbiased moderator to talk through the problem, maybe that'll help too. I mean, we're a very divided culture right now, and I think that we need to do that. So sorry, don't mean to apologize.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I'm glad to be on here with you. I hope to do it again. Let me tell you three things if in Assad and then uh John Mark Wilson. I was on his show too. Uh, three things I would tell Pete Hexf if I got to I would just spend five minutes with him because he's a busy guy and I I love the guy, but me too. I would say you've got to reduce the size of the officer corps, particularly at this top, you've got to change up or out the law, Dotma 1980, the upper perform, and you've got to reform PME professional military education to outcomes versus what we do now. If you do those three things, and you can do it because we almost did it with the Marine Corps in 2018 to 2021. By the way, I the commandant, uh, what's his name? General, the general comp the commandant that brought in the force 2030 stuff, he asked me at 20, he read my book, Adaptive Mission Command. He said, Don, what do you think what we're doing out here? I said, Sir, do you have five minutes? He said, Yes, I do. I said, Sir, your exercises are not there yet, particularly in the after-action review. You spend hours with 130 point 130 PowerPoint slides lecturing down to the Marines instead of breaking it up where you're evolving, where they get better, like National Training Center did. And I got fired for that. But my point is you've got to change professional military education from the industrial age, uh, confirmation, rote memorization, and lecture to war games and problem-solving games. Uh, and then you got to reduce the size of the officer court by 50 percent, which they're starting to do. And then the last thing is the zero defects evaluation system has to be supplemented. I'm gonna when we get off here, probably tomorrow morning, because I usually get up at five and go to bed at nine, but I will go because my dogs get me up early. I will I will send you the art the article that Stu read about how to fix the officer corps. I'll send it to you tomorrow.
SPEAKER_02:I love it, and uh, I'll post it around as a follow-up. And in fact, I'll also link to it in the show notes uh on this show. But I want to thank you so much, Don. Uh, this has been a great conversation. I got a little spicy there, but yeah, you know, you you kind of inspired me to talk about some things that I'm passionate about.
SPEAKER_00:Well, no, that's good. You got fired up, and that means we both connect in a uh moral courage, strength of character way because we both care. All I want to do is I don't care what you look like, what gender, I just want the best leaders for the military because I love this country. Uh Sawden always and I talk about we can't got this copy here. I love this country, okay? It's not perfect, it makes mistakes, but god dang, we have mountains of evidence that telling you how to promote and pick the best leaders, and we're not doing it, right?
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. All right, Don. I'm gonna meet you backstage while I go full screen, but I want to thank you so much for taking the time to come on the Stories of Service podcast.
SPEAKER_00:I'm honored. Thank nice to finally meet you.
SPEAKER_02:It is nice to meet you too. All right, guys, that is a wrap. I think this is yeah, this is the only show I have this week because we've got the new year coming up. So I hope that you have an amazing new year with your family and your friends. I will be back at it next week. I think you might have also seen that for the 2026, I really am going to be putting a huge focus on institutional reform, especially as it pertains to due process. That's probably my passion niche issue. But all other issues when it comes to how can we really talk about those things that other other shows and other influencers sometimes don't like to talk about. But I think they need to be talked about. And I'm really grateful for people like Don, for Asad, for Chase, and for a few others uh who are not afraid. Andrew, Andrew Cox is another one, my buddy Aaron Love. There's a few of us that are not afraid uh to have these talks. Nikki MGTV is another. He's coming on my show next week or next month. So stay tuned. And as I always do to close out these calls, please take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and enjoy the rest of your evening. Bye bye now.