Andy Stumpf

I’m a retired Navy SEAL, I host the Cleared Hot Podcast, I wrote a book called Drownproof, I’m here for coffee, aviation, and mini dachshund content

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

Usually Full Auto Friday is just me and the questions. Not this one. JP Dinnell is in the seat — former SEAL, came up through Ramadi, now chief training officer at Echelon Front — and Michael is running the stories.

We start where it counts. Whether anything in BUD/S ever matched the field. It didn't. BUD/S is hard. It's also a controlled environment with a safety net. The real cost came later, with the guys who didn't come home.

Then Michael started pulling things off the internet.

A Texas plea deal that put a child predator back on the street in a day. A paraglider clipped by a Cessna over the Alps. A man in flip-flops trying to kick in a stranger's door. My son stepping up in at a grocery store. JP's daughter waiting around a corner with a bat. A gate agent getting screamed at, and what it takes to step into that.

A bank hostage standoff that ended the way those always end. And the Bitcoin I didn't buy at fifty cents.

The through-line is simple. Crazy exists. Have a plan. Be capable.

Enjoy.

[IRONCLAD @ThisIsIRONCLAD]

“It's not just a missing person. It’s a suspicious death.”

There’s more to the missing scientists story?

@paynelindsey tells @AndyStumpf77 about learning about the strange case of someone “who could have knowledge of something important” and the details don’t add up.

The full interview drops later today.

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

@JudgeofCShack Conversations require two people.

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

Rachel Cuda grew up the daughter of a Navy SEAL, raised on Coronado around the teams. She speaks Russian, Ukrainian, and German. She studied at the University of Tennessee, earned a master's from Georgetown, and wrote software at a startup before moving into defense contracting. At the Pentagon she led the data modeling and analytics line for the military's COVID task force. She married a SEAL officer whose grandfather gave the CIA thirty years as a case officer. In February 2022, Rachel Cuda joined the agency's Directorate of Operations. It was the job she'd wanted her whole life.

Two weeks after she started, Russia invaded Ukraine, and her languages put her in the middle of it. Six months in, a colleague strangled her with a scarf in a stairwell at headquarters.

Then the agency went to work on her. They told her she couldn't go to the police. They told her she couldn't tell her husband. They warned her that reporting it could put her in prison. So she went to Congress instead. We get into the assault, the run-around, the predators the agency shielded for years, and how one trainee forced the CIA to rewrite its laws in eleven months.

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

Two questions this week, plus a video I've been asked about more than anything in recent memory.

I break down the paraglider that got hit by a plane and why this stuff almost always lands on pilot error.

I answer a man rehabbing from a spinal tumor who can't run, swim, or ruck anymore and is staring down a third surgery. I tell him about my own injuries, the rabbit holes I went down, and what actually got me out. I tell the story of waking up from emergency surgery, sneezing, and being sure no one recovers from this. They put your intestines back by shoving them in. Walking to the end of the block was the whole goal.

And I answer a Marine on hazing. What's training and what's just a broken person dumping their baggage on you. Where the line is. Why drunk, angry, and violent isn't preparing anyone for anything.

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

@BwanaJangiri Nope. Totally my fault on this one

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

Dennis Benigno started in 2001 as a New Jersey corrections officer at nineteen. He moved to the U.S. Park Police in D.C., then to patrol in one of Jersey's largest municipalities. Over fourteen years he made more than 1,500 arrests and ran over 10,000 car stops. He had to self-train to survive the road. When he realized the academies weren't teaching cops what they needed, he started teaching it himself. That became Street Cop Training, one of the biggest police training companies in the country, with hundreds of thousands of officers behind it.

He argues that 80% of line-of-duty deaths are training failures. Not bad luck. Failures you can trace back to the academy. We get into why the system box-checks instead of fixing the problem, and who benefits from keeping it that way.

He breaks down the passenger-side approach, the traffic stop that ended with a cop executed on camera, and the constitutional gaps most officers never get taught. We also get into the political machine that came after him, what it cost, and who actually showed up when it did.

Drownproof book and Conversation Starters: https://t.co/U7pzWRKe3R

[Tactical Pro Shop @tacticalproshop]

Have to thank @AndyStumpf77 for BOTH of this weekends reading selections. Chapter 3 of Drownproof was especially timely. And yep, started/finished both in the last 72 hours!

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

Jonathan Dickinson is the co-founder and CEO of Ambio Life Sciences, one of the world's leading ibogaine clinics. He's spent more than fifteen years on this — apprenticing in Tijuana clinics, running the Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance, and writing the field's first clinical safety guidelines. He's a Mexico-licensed psychologist. He holds the only active export license for iboga root and led the first Nagoya-compliant export out of Gabon, where he was initiated into two Bwiti traditions. His team co-authored the Stanford study in Nature Medicine on ibogaine and veteran traumatic brain injury. Ambio has now treated over 3,000 people.

Most of what you think you know about ibogaine is probably wrong. It's not a high. It puts you flat on your back for twelve hours and asks for everything. It resets the body off opioids almost overnight. It seems to repair the brain in ways nobody fully understands yet — MS lesions shrinking, a guy walking in with a cane and leaving it behind.

We get into the cardiac risk, the deaths, the Trump executive order, and why the science and the ceremony might not survive being pulled apart. And we talk about the part nobody wants to hear: the medicine doesn't do the work for you.

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

@EdwardT78344878 All you are doing is continuing to make my point for me.

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

Thomas Massie just got primaried out, and it cost the most money ever spent on a primary. $32.6 million in ad buys. A guy hand-picked by Trump comes out of nowhere and takes the seat. Massie voted with the administration 77% of the time. His sin was the Epstein files. So we get into it.

We talk about getting that kind of money out of elections, and why the people who could fix it never will. We talk about AIPAC, foreign influence, and whether the question changes if you swap Israel for Egypt or China. Michael walks through where his generation is landing on all of it.

Then it gets lighter. Two F-18s mate mid-air and four guys punch out. A man hops a fence at Denver International and walks onto an active runway. A tourist throws rocks at a seal in Hawaii and finds out. And we close on a criminal monkey gang in Bali running a sunglasses-for-snacks racket.

Heavy up front. Stupid in the middle. Monkeys at the end.

Join the Cleared Hot Newsletter: https://t.co/tDnbV7n7a3

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

@EdwardT78344878 Hahaha. What a miserable existence you must be living. I truly hope it gets better for you.

[Mat Best @MatBest11x]

Mat Best - Folded Flag (Official Music Video)

This song was written for the men and women who stepped into the fire for this country and never made it home, and for the families, friends, and brothers left carrying their memory forward.

Memorial Day isn’t just a long weekend. Behind every folded flag is a name, a story, and a sacrifice that built the freedom we live in every day.

This song proudly supports the Major Brent Taylor Foundation and the Gold Star families it supports.

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

@AMSchindler1983 I have always openly said that military background has absolutely nothing to do with potential in politics. They are not the same thing. Not remotely

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

@EdwardT78344878 You have to excuse me for not being offended by random comments by people too cowardly to use their actual name. Still appreciate the try though!

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

@CadillacPsycho What specifically did he vote for or against that makes him “an ally of the left?”

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

@TJsburner1776 @PandaPPanda4 Ah, gotcha now. I was confused by what numbers you were referring to. If you listen to the episode we openly discuss the ridiculous spending on both sides, hell, in politics in general. It is completely out of control

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

@EdwardT78344878 thank you

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

@CowboyBoricua01 I have zero interest in getting involved in politics

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

@TJsburner1776 can you show me where you got that number?

[Andy Stumpf @AndyStumpf77]

@earlystopmma I don't know what a groyper is. The description is literally just that, an overview of what we talked about.