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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. 

Concept Expeditions: ⁠https://www.conceptexpeditions.com/⁠

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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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Michael's in the studio and we're working through the week. We start with two Pasadena officers horsing around with loaded guns. One of them ends up shooting the other through the windshield of the cruiser. We talk about the accountability that comes with carrying a badge. One oh-shit can unwind a career of attaboys.
From there we get into the aircraft gifted by Qatar and whether it belongs in service as Air Force One. We cover the new Iran framework, what it cost, and how it stacks up against the deal that came before it. We talk about being able to disagree with your own side without burning the whole thing down.
Then there's the UFC event on the White House lawn — the timing, the optics, and fighter bonuses paid out in crypto. We close with the beagle raid at Ridgeland Farms, where the line sits between legal and moral, and what we're willing to do in the name of science.
Enjoy
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Matthew spent six years in the Navy as a Search and Rescue swimmer. Then fifteen years as a cop — Virginia Beach, then undercover narcotics in New Hampshire during the opioid epidemic. He worked under a different name for years. He wrote a book, The Journey to Midnight, about the night he planned to kill himself. Now he talks to cops and veterans about it.
This one covers why suicide is so high in law enforcement and the military. Trauma stacks up and you never get the time to process it. The "unfit for duty" label that ends careers, so nobody asks for help. A fatal wreck on Route 101. A man who shot himself three feet away. A two-and-a-half-year-old, a blind cord, and thirty seconds in a car that Matt still hasn't let go of.
His chief checked on him one day, then went home and killed himself two hours later. What he did with that is most of this conversation.
The Journey to Midnight: https://a.co/d/03SCujlF
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