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John Constantine spent almost 23 years in the United States Secret Service. Fifteen of them on the Counter Assault Team — the assaulters who exist for the day everything goes wrong. Team leader. Instructor. Operations supervisor. He stood with a rifle next to four presidential administrations, worked in almost 90 countries, and finished out in the Dignitary Protective Division running foreign heads of state. He wrote a book about the part of it nobody sees. It's called Hallways and Stairwells.
He breaks down what actually happened at the Correspondents' Dinner, why the security plan worked even though the magnetometer checkpoint didn't, and how far that guy really was from the President. Butler gets the same treatment. The layers of security people never see. Why hunkering down has never worked, anywhere, ever.
Then it goes past tactics. Mission, men, then you. Getting swatted at his own house over a function fire and suspended for it. Refusing to send guys and guns overseas as a favor unless somebody put it in writing. Two thousand eight hundred agents doing the work of ten thousand.
And the part that almost killed him. His identity got ripped out with the job. His wife found him on the bathroom floor. He talks about the climb back.
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Michael is moving to Missoula, so this one opens with a resignation and gets worse from there.
A man in a garbage can is polling at 20% against Nigel Farage in Clacton, and his platform makes more sense than it should.
Term limits, and the unelected career staff who actually run the machine.
Early access to Truth Social posts for $60,000 to $100,000 a month. Trading firms have already signed up.
A president clearing north of two billion in his first year back in office, and why the silence around it is deafening.
A California mayor who pleaded guilty to working as an unregistered agent of China.
A former Marine home after four years in a Russian prison.
What prison is actually for. Punishment, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and where the line sits.
A carrier at sea 250 days straight, what that does to 5,000 people with no end date, and the guy I watched grab a fire extinguisher and jump.
Also: a four mile run, PT school, and a second wiener dog named Beans.
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Drew Miller is an Air Force Academy honor graduate with a master's and a PhD from Harvard. His dissertation was on underground nuclear shelters and field fortifications. Thirty years in uniform across active duty, Air Guard, and Reserve. Intelligence officer. Strategic Air Command, the Pentagon, and a DoD think tank. Retired colonel. He founded Fortitude Ranch, a survival community with eight locations, and the Collapse Survival Institute. His new book is Preparing to Survive in the Age of Collapse.
His model puts the annual odds of a collapse disaster between 16 and 57 percent. Bioengineered H5N1. The grid going down. The economy stops, and law and order goes with it.
We disagreed on a lot of this one. He wants superintelligent AGI outlawed and says he would nuke a data center to enforce it. I don't get there with him. We went back and forth on facts versus assumptions, on what a real fight with China looks like, and on whether this government is salvageable.
Also covered: the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, civil war inside states instead of between them, two million prisoners with no power, and surviving an AI takeover by being too boring to kill.
 
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Just me today. Michael also dropped some news on me — he's moving on in a few months to go better himself, so there's a change coming to Negligent Discharge Friday.
Three questions this week. All of them heavy.
A woman facing divorce asks whether military culture makes it easier for a man to disconnect from family life. Military marriages aren't a single lifestyle. They're an independent one. But the five people you spend your time around will pull you one direction or the other.
I talk about my own divorce. Nineteen years and eleven months. The writing was on the wall a decade before I made the call. My biggest regret isn't leaving. It's what my kids absorbed while I stayed. They were sitting on the stairs listening the whole time.
A 28-year-old with money, milestones, and no mountain left to climb asks how to get motivated again. I tell him he's aiming too low, and that the money trap gets everybody eventually.
An 18-year-old just found out about his dad's affair and ships to boot camp next June. Quick to think, slow to act. Fixing his parents' marriage was never his job.
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Mike Glover served 18 years in Army Special Forces, worked as a contractor for the CIA, founded Fieldcraft Survival, and wrote the national bestseller Prepared. He's been on this show before. A lot has happened since.
The legal case that consumed the last 18 months is finished. He talks about the week he spent locked up — teaching breathing drills in a holding cell full of hard dudes — what the arrest cost him, and how family and a small circle of friends carried him through. Fieldcraft dissolved. He bought the pieces back. Now he's rebuilding it from the roots.
There's also a long stretch on the bin Laden story — O'Neill, Bissonette, the recorded debrief, the point man, and litigation nobody needed. Plus Roberts Ridge, the Jessica Lynch raid, Tillman, and why drama in the special operations community has real downstream consequences.
TRT, alcohol, helicopters, faith, veteran suicide, and a tribute to a Green Beret they called Swede.
 
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