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They Don't Need A Warrant Anymore | Negligent Discharge Friday | 9.18.2026 Sep 18, 2026

Show notes

I asked for positive news this week. What I got was surveillance, a global humiliation, and a man duct taped to his seat at thirty thousand feet.

We open with reporting that Homeland Security has been analyzing the financial data of American citizens, and that some units have used it to steer local police toward pretextual traffic stops. Banks have run keyword filters on transactions. Agencies have swept up bulk records from money transfer services. Credit reports, utility bills and location data get purchased outright from private brokers, which sidesteps the Fourth Amendment entirely. There is a term for where that ends up. Turnkey totalitarianism is a system where every pillar of mass surveillance is built and operational, waiting on one person to connect it. I could not steel man the argument that we are not already there.

From there we get into age and capacity in elected office, Apple's attempt to certify that a photograph is real, and why current AI produces novel output but not novel thought.

Then it lightens up. A competitive fitness scandal goes worldwide. An actor announces what he would do to people in a fight. A first class passenger gets restrained with zip ties and duct tape between Dallas and Newark.

We close with 163 missing children recovered in Florida in four days.

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Air Traffic Control Is Running on Windows 95 | Dan Rickert | Ep. 469 Sep 14, 2026

Show notes

Dan Rickert graduated from West Point and commissioned into the cavalry, running Bradleys and gun trucks through Iraq in 2008 before going to selection and finishing his nine years in uniform on a Special Forces team with 10th Group. He left the Army in 2015 and spent the next eight years at Palantir, moving from project management to international work and eventually to chief of staff on the defense side. He is now VP of Operations at Air Space Intelligence, the company the FAA selected to rebuild the software that runs the national airspace.

Much of this conversation is about what people get wrong about the defense industry. He argues that competition produces a better product for the people using it, that a human has to stay in the loop on any decision that matters, and that skepticism is healthy either way. We also worked through privacy and security, and whether the two actually have to be traded against each other.

From there we covered drone warfare and trench fighting in the same conflict, rebuilding an identity after the uniform comes off, and the work of modernizing air traffic control.

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25 Years Later - Be Worthy of the Sacrifice | Full Auto Friday | 9.11.2026 Sep 11, 2026

Show notes

This one airs on the 25th anniversary of September 11th. I'm not dedicating the whole episode to it. I don't tell people how to think or how to feel. But I do open with where I land on it now, a quarter century later, and why the reverence fading for people who didn't live it doesn't surprise me anymore.

Then the questions.

A 27-year-old learns through a DNA test that the man on his birth certificate isn't his father. He wants to know whether to tell the rest of the family.

A guy who has run audio at his church for 21 years wants to know how to finally ask to be paid without turning it into an ultimatum.

A future Naval Academy midshipman asks what a SEAL officer actually does on target, and whether the enlisted guys respect him.

Also covered: why we round the edges off pain as a species, what constant exposure to war footage does to a person, and why describing your own military service as vanilla needs to stop.

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460 Days in the Darkness of Somalia | Amanda Lindhout | Ep. 468 Sep 07, 2026

Show notes

Amanda Lindhout grew up in small-town Alberta and waited tables to pay for backpacking trips through Latin America, Asia, and Africa. She taught herself the job along the way and turned into a freelance foreign correspondent, filing from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan with no network behind her and no one responsible for her if it went wrong. In August 2008 she flew into Mogadishu to cover the famine. It was supposed to be a one-week trip. She was ambushed on the road outside the city and held for 460 days. Her memoir about it, A House in the Sky, became a New York Times bestseller.

This conversation covers the whole arc. Why she kept choosing more dangerous places, and what she can see now that she couldn't at 27. What captivity actually looked like day to day. The escape attempt and the punishment that followed.

We also spend real time on the aftermath, which she says was almost as hard as the captivity. Complex PTSD. Going back to Somalia and why. Coming off the medication. Plant medicine. And why she stopped saying she forgave them.

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Seven Minutes and Nowhere To Run | Negligent Discharge Friday | 9.4.2026 Sep 04, 2026

Show notes

Michael was tasked with finding something uplifting. He failed. This is what a slow week for good news looks like.

We open on the flooding in Nepal and what you can realistically do when you live in terrain that gives you seven minutes of warning. One school got 14 minutes and everyone made it out.

Then the part nobody wants to say out loud: reading the news is taking something from you. I talk about how I decide what to let in.

National debt past forty trillion. Bonds selling off. Printing money and calling it something else. Blind loyalty to a party instead of judging what is actually being delivered. The Kennedy Center.

Roughly 800 wounded U.S. service members in Iran in six months, the classification that kept those numbers quiet, and a reported airstrike on a wedding.

The Lindsay Clancy verdict that never came.

Cities cancelling Flock camera contracts, 214 jurisdictions pulling them out, officers using the data to track people they should not be tracking.

None of it is a reason to quit.

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The Weight of the Navy Cross | Nick Jones | Ep. 467 Aug 31, 2026

Show notes

Nick Jones enlisted in the Marine Corps at 18 out of Olathe, Kansas. Mortarman, then scout sniper platoon, then selection and 2nd Marine Raider Battalion, where he came up through element member to element leader. Twelve years, five deployments. On March 8, 2020, his team went into the Qarachogh Mountains in northern Iraq to clear a cave complex and lost their team leader and their team chief. He was shot going back for them and kept fighting until he was pulled off the mountain. Six surgeries and eighteen months later he medically retired as a staff sergeant with a Navy Cross and a Purple Heart. He now runs the Talons Reach Foundation.

In 2019 he built a mountain warfare training package for his team in Montana. It got denied. The reason given was that they wouldn't be fighting in the mountains. Ten months later they were.

He proposed on top of Lone Peak and told his wife they'd build a family in Montana in ten years. They got there in one. Five years later she broke down on the drive back from Jackson and told him she had no life there. That conversation moved everybody to Wyoming.

Talons Reach Foundation: https://www.talonsreachfoundation.org/

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You Fall to the Level of Your Training | Full Auto Friday | 8.28.2026 Aug 28, 2026

Show notes

Recorded two of these in one week because when this drops I'll be in Maine at the Origin Immersion BJJ camp. So Michael gets another pass. Nobody knows what he does with his time anyway.

First question comes from a firefighter who watched a man beat a woman in a McDonald's parking lot. He called 911 from behind a block wall and did not physically intervene. He's been carrying it ever since. Good and bad is the wrong lens for that. Capability is the right one. What you can actually do under stress, not what you picture yourself doing. Range, training, tools, and why a black belt is not magic. Plugging holes matters as much as making them.

Second question is one I've never been asked. A 15-year-old found out his mother has an OnlyFans page because his baseball teammates were passing it around school. Live your life however you want. The consequences didn't stop with her.

A police officer who wants out and thinks nothing he does translates. It all translates. He just needs to stop telling himself otherwise.

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The Zone of Chaos | Casey Stumpf | Ep. 466 Aug 26, 2026

Show notes

Casey Stumpf is a nurse practitioner and my sister. Years in emergency medicine and hospice, a stretch inside military medicine at Camp Pendleton, and now her own practice in Montana treating hormones full time — perimenopause, menopause, testosterone for men and women. She is one of roughly 4,100 providers in the country holding the MSCP certification. There are 75 million American women in some phase of menopause. The math does not work.

She is back to answer listener questions and to explain why estrogen patches are disappearing. The FDA says there is no shortage. Pharmacists say otherwise. Best estimate on a fix is two to three years.

She lays out what the 2002 Women's Health Initiative did to an entire generation of women, and why the black box warning finally came off. Testosterone for women, prescribed off-label because no FDA-approved formulation exists. GLP-1s and what they pull out of you besides fat. Hormone therapy after breast cancer. Vaginal estrogen, UTIs, and hip fractures. The suicide risk in perimenopause that standard screening misses.

Contact Casey Here: https://theradiantwelltality.com/

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From the VA Prescription to the Street | Travis Gribble & Brandon Spangler | Ep. 465 Aug 24, 2026

Show notes

Brandon Spangler did five years in the Marine Corps. He broke his neck, crushed his lower back, and walked out with a VA prescription that turned into eight years of addiction. The last stretch was heroin. He got sober in 2013, started college from zero, and is now a licensed clinical social worker with his own practice for cops and veterans in northwest Montana. Travis Gribble spent 24 years in law enforcement, 16 on SWAT, and retired out of Mesa PD in 2022. He now works for the Boulder Crest Foundation.

He walks through the jump from pharmacy to street, detoxing cold turkey three times, and a month and a half living out of a truck in the Blue Mountains waiting on a bed.

The second half is the system. Why cops are carrying moral injury more than post-traumatic stress. Why a diagnosis turns into a cage. What five days of training did that years of therapy did not, the 400 to 600 traumatic calls a cop absorbs over a career, why the average officer dies seven years after retiring, and the retainer model that put a therapist inside a sheriff's office.

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The Conversations Nobody Wants to Have | Full Auto Friday | 8.21.2026 Aug 21, 2026

Show notes

Four questions this week...

An F-18 simulator is going into the coffee shop sometime in September. I don't know why either. Carrier landing competition to follow.

The opener is about reaching the age where you become the caregiver for your parents. Medical directives, DNRs, wills, trusts, and why the hard conversation needs to happen before you need it.

A 33-year-old sold everything, traveled the world for eight months, and came home with no next goal. I never had a plan either. Not knowing what comes next is fine. Being paralyzed by it is not.

A guy got promoted over his best friend of 22 years and won't have the conversation that could save that man's career and a large payout. What you allow in your presence is your standard.

Someone asked why I haven't covered the killing of Staff Sergeant Logan Melgar. Straight answer on what I make and what I don't.

And a listener found out his wife spent a year with a coworker. He is trying to save the marriage. I could not do what he is doing.

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