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Most of this one comes down to one thing. Choices have consequences, and you own them.
It starts with an email. A listener says the veteran community runs on lies and has an integrity problem, then sends it from an address that bounces. Transmit only. I read the whole thing and my response. A host who platforms a guest isn't endorsing them, and the size of an audience tells you nothing about the truth.
Then the news. Dustin Poirier gets arrested at an airport and threatens the officers, and we talk about how knowing a man's capabilities changes everything for the cop standing in front of him. An Air Force major gets himself arrested at the Capitol. Own it.
A pastor beats down a man who threatened his family, broken down like a fight — job title doesn't cancel your right to defend your people. A streamer provokes the wrong guy and gets dropped. And in Ukraine, low tech meets high tech: a rifle out the back of a Yak-52, hunting drones.
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My guest has a PhD from the University of Toronto. She taught at the university level, then at two prep schools for years. In 2017 she walked away from education after the system covered up the abuse of one of her students. She turned whistleblower, went public, and started digging into the brain science of what had happened. That work became two books, The Bullied Brain and The Gaslit Brain, and a long-running column for Psychology Today. Jennifer Fraser studies abuse cultures for a living.
We get into gaslighting and what it actually does to your brain. She lays out the dark tetrad — narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, sadism — and the mask these people wear so well it fools the experts. How they read you, isolate you, and make you doubt your own memory. 
We cover the lie that abuse is the price of greatness. Coaches who don't want to win — they want to hurt the kids. Why refusing a bad order is the real test of leadership. And the part that matters most: the brain is wired to repair.
The Gaslit Brain: https://a.co/d/018Vlq2z
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Four questions this week. Two about relationships. Two that aren't.
-A friend wants another shot with an ex after a long marriage. I've watched four couples try this. Two made it. Two didn't. The merry-go-round of unresolved issues, and why you do the work up front or you do it later when everything is breaking.
-Dating someone from your BJJ gym. What to weigh before you start it, and what Leah has seen when it ends.  Starting over later in life. The narrative that all the good ones are already taken is wrong.
-June 28th is the anniversary of Operation Red Wings. How to explain that day to young people now that the story carries controversy. The sacrifice still stands.
-Last one comes from a civilian who thinks military pay is a joke, the VA fails everyone, and nobody should enlist. I had a lot to say about that.
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Fourteen years in uniform. Four with the Parachute Regiment, a decade in the SAS. Patrol medic and qualified mountain guide. Afghanistan, Iraq, and covert deployments. Jay Morton left in 2018 and went straight up the world's biggest mountains — two Everest summits, one of them solo.

Everest comes up, and it isn't pretty. He stood on the summit alone in 2017. Now it's a queue of paying clients short-roped to the top, garbage stacked at Camp 4, two hundred grand for the VIP package. Nobody walks out anymore. They fly — on some of the sketchiest helicopter rides you'll ever hear described.
We get into what nobody warns you about: leaving. In the unit, everything is built around you. Someone books the flight. You wake up knowing exactly where to be. Then it's gone, and you're staring in the mirror looking for the guy who used to handle all of it.
We talk about chasing a bigger number in a bank account, then realizing a month later you didn't care about the thing you bought. Status versus utility. What his sister, a hospice nurse, heard people say at the end — and what they never said.
Also in here: the reality TV machine, the hypocrisy of the silent-professional crowd, twelve coffees in a day, and where AI stops being useful. 

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Nic McKinley went from Air Force pararescue to the CIA, then founded DeliverFund to fight trafficking with intelligence tools. Ryan Dalton was a trafficking attorney and federal agent at the State Department before launching Closed Horizon, a platform that crowdsources rewards to surface hard answers. Different roads, same fight.
Skip the spy-novel version of Epstein. The simpler read: a guy who moved money for people who needed it moved, and collected leverage doing it. That access is what kept him protected.
From there it runs downhill. How intelligence operations actually get funded. Why a broker like that turns useful, then disposable. What a criminal trial would have forced into the open. And why a dead defendant solves that problem.
It also hits the harder one. It's an era where anything can be faked and attention gets steered on purpose. Getting to the truth is its own job now.
I went in skeptical. I'm still skeptical. The corruption underneath is harder to wave off.
Look at the evidence and decide for yourself.
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