Five questions this week. No real through-line, which is usually how these go.

-A reader four years sober wants to rebuild the friendships he burned while drinking.

-A father of two wants the kind of relationship with his kids he never had with his own dad.

-A high school junior writes in about his 13-year-old sister and an eating disorder serious enough to put her in front of doctors.

-A guy three months into jujitsu can't get out from under bigger training partners. Size matters. Mat time matters more.

-And a sailor stuck under a former SEAL who got booted from the Teams and now leads by intimidation. I get into why he probably got kicked out, and how to manage two more years.

Enjoy.

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He was called the most dangerous man in Vermont. The governor said it on television. The truth is more boring and more alarming. Daniel Banyai is a former protection contractor and a Seventh-day Adventist who built a firearms training school called Slate Ridge in West Pawlet. He did it by the book. Federal firearms license. Explosives permits. Zoning. A school classification the town had handed out for 200 years. He welcomed anyone who'd show up and shoot straight.

Then it came apart. Neighbors who'd missed their window found a clause and reopened it. The town pulled the permit it had already granted. He fought to the state Supreme Court and lost. They demolished the buildings while he was locked up and made sure the materials couldn't be reused.

We talk about the year inside. Isolation. The shot caller. Getting beaten during the arrest that became a felony. We argue restrictions, religion, and a two-tiered system he says protects some and not others. The throughline is simple. Weaponized zoning can erase anyone. He happened to pick guns.

Since we recorded, a jury acquitted him of the assault charge in forty minutes. His words after: the system did not fail him here.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Street Cop Training:

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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.

Pick up Jonathan's Book here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Ibogaine-and-the-Bicameral-Mind/Jonathan-Dickinson/9798888504680

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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.

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"Crike him." That's the call a tactical medic makes when a guy can't breathe and the clock is at zero. Mike Simpson is the doctor on the other end of that radio. He's a former 1st Ranger Battalion anti-tank section leader, a Special Forces engineer turned 18 Delta medic with 7th Group, and a board-certified ER physician who spent his last six years on active duty attached to JMAU providing trauma support to tier one units. He retired in 2016 after 32 years and now runs medical direction for Central Texas Regional SWAT while practicing urgent care.

We got into the real mechanics of trauma care — what actually happens between the front door of an ER and the OR, why a hundred tourniquets on paper cuts beats one missed arterial bleed, and the brutal physics of wounds incompatible with life. He walked through his own prostate cancer diagnosis and what every man over 40 needs to know about PSA screening.

We also got into his path from corrections officer to medical school, why he's writing fantasy novels now, and the conversation every operator avoids until it's too late — documenting injuries before you're out the door.

Enjoy.

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A soon-to-be 40-year-old wants to face his fear of skydiving and use it to teach his anxious five-year-old that fear is normal but it doesn't get to run your life. I break down the difference between gambling and accepting calculated risk, what to actually look for in a drop zone, and why pushing yourself smartly and incrementally beats trying to be a badass for an audience that isn't watching.

A guy who grew up homeless and couch-surfing wrote in about feeling like he came back from a war he never fought. We talk about why trauma isn't owned by anyone, why your past doesn't have to be your identity, and why if the community you need doesn't exist yet, you might be the one who has to build it.

Last question is about discipline. A husband, father, and plant manager who used to run ultras can't find the hours anymore and wonders if he's lost it. He hasn't. His life changed. The goalpost has to move with it.

Plus the book hit the Times again, and I'm headed to Virginia Beach.

Enjoy

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