Twenty-eight years in the United States Navy. Twenty-six as a SEAL. Yes, the mission was the brotherhood of uniform. It was simultaneously greater. It was the people. The same mission, articulated differently. Command became craft. Craft was the "care".

Capt. Robert V. "Gus" Gusentine served as Director of Operations for Special Operations Command Pacific and was the former Course Director of the Strategic Leaders International Course at NAVSCIATTS, training senior officers from AFRICOM, EUCOM, CENTCOM, and INDOPACIFIC. He wrote haikus on deployment. He went on to teach at St. Benedict's Prep. He became a painter whose work has been featured on PBS's Curate. Proof that art holds what comes after: unity, connection, the collective.

This episode is stripped down. No sizzle, no filler. Just the man, speaking. Listen for what's said. Watch for what is not.

Capt. Gusentine spent a career defending people he'd never meet. He continues to give that same care to everything he builds. In conversation. In canvas. In every room he enters. Service: to others. A believer in the moral economy: acting with integrity, expecting nothing back.

My humanity is bound up in yours. For only in this way, can we become fully human.

Walk Worthy.
— Mj

The swim is why we sat down. Bill Brown — Navy SEAL, Iraq veteran, attorney, and the man behind the New York City SEAL Swim — joins us for a conversation that started with the swim and became so much more.

Service. Community. Perception. Mindset. The practical work of navigating today's complexities from a man who's already faced the hardest ones. Unedited. Unscripted. One man's journey to serve, support, inform, and love all that is dear to him.

This conversation includes discussion of active, ongoing litigation. Bill's account. Bill's words. His fight, his story, told whole.

In this episode:
→ The New York City SEAL Swim — Liberty, Ellis Island, 9/11
→ Life after the Trident and what identity means when the mission ends
→ Adventure therapy as a healthy outlet for stress
→ The transition every combat veteran faces
→ Why speaking up matters

The Swim: nycsealswims.com
Support the mission: Beyond the Brotherhood
Veteran mental health: 22Zero
Connect with Bill: linkedin.com/in/williambrown77
Bill's practice: Parlatore Law Group — parlatorelawgroup.com/team/brown-jr-william-d

Fight-or-Fl1ght. Real conversation. Real people. Real stakes.

Our meditation for all - Desmond Tutu said it best: "My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together."

Walk Worthy.

What does a biological attack actually look like?

Reality. It may feel and look like an outbreak. Like contaminated produce. Like a summer spike in gastrointestinal illness that public health systems are already calibrated to manage.

Right now 4,173 Americans are confirmed infected across 34 states. Cyclosporiasis. A microscopic parasite. Linked to iceberg lettuce. Six times higher than this time last year.

Natural occurrence. Probably.

The question this episode is built around is harder than the headline.

If a deliberate actor engineered something to operate inside that window. At scale. Optimized to look natural long enough to blur attribution. How would we know the difference?

The difference between an outbreak and an attack is intent. And intent leaves no fingerprints.

Two guests. One conversation. Both have spent their careers inside the architecture of that question.

Laura Calabria is the Founder of Livian, a national security writing and advisory firm. Twenty years inside American national security intelligence. CIA Chief of Strategy within the Science and Technology Directorate. Chief of Strategic Communications within the Office of General Counsel. Chief of Staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. She knows how the system reads a signal. More importantly she knows how it misses one.

Dr. Vahan Simonyan is the Chief Scientific Officer and Founder of DNA HIVE. Inventor of the cloud infrastructure the FDA uses for Next Generation Sequencing analysis. Twenty-five years across life sciences, biotechnology, bioinformatics, physics, chemistry, and nanotechnology. Author of nearly 100 published scientific papers. He built the science of detecting what a pathogen leaves behind in genomic data.

Together they are building BIONET. A biological defense surveillance network designed to address exactly this class of threat.

This conversation covers the difference between a biological threat and a kinetic one. What genomic biology enables in the wrong hands. COVID as a case study in preparedness versus assumed preparedness. China's investment signal and what the 2026 ODNI Threat Assessment tells us about adversary intent. The detection paradox. The political will question. And whether our institutions know how to act on warning signals before the event rather than after it.

The 9/11 Commission Report named the greatest failure leading to September 11 as a failure of imagination.

BIONET asks whether we are ready to do that differently in the biological domain.

One hour and five minutes. No filler. No easy answers.

Fight or Fl1ght. An independent podcast. Season 2. Episode 33. Published every Tuesday. Walk Worthy.

linktr.ee/fightorfl1ght

Good is a compliment. Great is a discipline.

Most teams chase the first. Season. Quarter. Whatever the calendar demands. Few chase the second.

Amy Toth does. Every time.

In this episode, Amy — a technical design leader who built a Bra Center of Excellence from scratch — takes us inside the most unforgiving category in apparel. Millimeters matter. Bodies change. The engineering doesn't care about the mood board.

We talk about feeding the commercial machine without letting it eat the art. Reading the noise. Protecting the origin story. Standing in the room and saying no, we're not using sponges, we'll find another way — and meaning it.

Standardization. Consistency. Rigor. And underneath all of it: what is great design, actually?

In this episode: Amy's journey from technical designer to industry thought leader. Building the Bra Center of Excellence from the ground up. Rethinking bra sizing and the case for industry-wide standards. The engineering marvel behind support, and why bras are more technically complex than most garments. How fit shifts with body composition changes, including from GLP-1 medications. Setting new precedent: the move to eliminate sponges and other outdated materials. Small brands' agility vs. large companies' resource walls. What separates emotionally resonant design from functionally forgettable design.

Timestamps
00:00 Introduction to Amy's journey and core values
02:30 Humility and authentic relationships
05:11 Building the Bra Center of Excellence
07:10 Rethinking bra sizing and industry standards
08:11 Evaluating design concepts for stakeholder buy-in
10:04 The stage-gate process for apparel innovation
12:10 Setting new precedent: eliminating sponges
13:53 The complexity of bra engineering and fit
15:50 Fit and body composition shifts from medical innovation
18:23 Standardization challenges across brands
20:52 When fitting happens in development
24:17 Impact of GLP-1 and weight fluctuation on fit
27:00 Niche brands thriving through focused innovation
29:30 Deep customer understanding in design31:47 What is great design? Emotional connection and purpose

Connect with Amy: linkedin.com/in/amy-toth-0509a820

Fight-or-Fl1ghtWalk Worthy.
linktr.ee/fightorfl1ght

Natural and supernatural. Peak performance. Imogen Roy channels the ancients, buoyed by the rigor of a seasoned operator.

Timing strategist. Business astrologer. Threshold guide.

In her: Gestation | Growth | Renewal.

Forget your WHY. Lean into WHAT.

She leaves us with a question that won't let go. What if reality is a lot more loosely attached than we thought?

Connect with Imogen: www.imogenroy.com

Satchel B. Moore does not sell jeans. He sells time.

In a small shop in St. Paul called Science and Kindness, he repairs denim on machines that are eighty, maybe a hundred years old. They do not work great. They work the way they used to work, and that is the entire point.

This conversation is about denimology, the nearly lost American practice of reading raw selvedge denim like a diary. A crease behind the knee. A fade on the thigh. A tear from a rusted tool. All of it a record. All of it earned.

We trace it back to where it started for him: a Waldorf education with no textbooks and no computers, ten years of learning to wonder at beauty, stand guard over truth, look up to the noble, decide for the good. That upbringing built a listener before it built a craftsman. You can hear it in how he talks about a hem.

We get into the difference between perfect and excellent. Why a wrinkled hem is the highest compliment his shop can pay a pair of jeans. Why new is rarely better. And why building something meant to outlast you is its own quiet form of resistance in a market built on things falling apart.

This one is for anyone who still believes craft is an argument, and restraint is a philosophy.

In this episode: the origin of the name Satchel B. Moore, what Waldorf education actually shaped in him, why Science and Kindness has never made a single new pair of jeans, the old machines that keep the shop alive, the difference between perfect and excellent, the uncredited role of Black culture in building modern denim, and a rapid fire close on soccer, Arsenal, and St. Paul pho.

Connect with Satchel B. Moore / Science and Kindness: [email protected] | Instagram @scienceandkindness | St. Paul, Minnesota

Fight or Fl1ght is an independent podcast built around one question. What does it take to become BTR™? Better.

Walk Worthy.

Cancer doesn't knock. It's not a companion, until it is.

Who thinks that way?

This episode is an exploration of the vulgarities and vagaries of unknowing. Will there be a tomorrow? Who cares for my loved ones if not me? Is faith a load-bearing support, even for one who lost the path?

"This too shall pass" — not as finality. Not an epitaph. A verb, for the life still to be lived.

So we dive into it all. How a smile, something this mundane, this universal, can change everything. One gesture. One word. One thought hitting the parasympathetic system, creating positive symbiosis.

Is that a Mental Munchie? Daily nourishment for your aura. A more robust state of being, one bite at a time.

Scott Chantos has a perspective you may want to hear.

Press play. Dive in. Then write the statement you've been neglecting.

Walk Worthy.

Topics: personal mission statements, faith and adversity, cancer diagnosis, leadership and integrity, brand vs. personal identity, mental health, resilience, intentional growth.

Follow @fightorfl1ght

Twenty years inside the machine. New Balance. PUMA. K-Swiss. Kering. Pre-IPO diligence on Canada Goose and Moncler before those names meant what they mean today. A seat at every table that mattered.

Then a creative yearning. A soulful need to inform, to build, to author something entirely his own. Call it misalignment. Call it vision. A restlessness that operational success could not quiet.

Starting a brand when you know what you know is not a romantic act. Louis knew the failure rates. The runway math. The brutal seasonality of outerwear. He had run diligence on the very category he was entering. And he stepped off anyway. Founded Alps and Meters in 2017. Luxury alpine sportswear. Tailored, technical, timeless. Built on the traditions of European mountain sport. Sold at Harrods, Matches Fashion, premier alpine boutiques worldwide.

And the people writing personal checks into this bet? Jim Davis, owner of New Balance. Scott Dahnke, Global Co-CEO of L Catterton, the world's largest consumer-focused private equity firm. Zach Duane, former CEO of Victoria Beckham. Are they buying the brand? Or are they buying the person?

What if we stopped measuring brand building purely in quarterly returns and asked what resonance actually costs and what it is actually worth? What if creative vision, held long enough, with operational precision behind it, is the hard answer and not the soft one? What if Louis Joseph is the proof of concept for how luxury brands actually get built?

Or is cash still king, the clock still running, and the beautiful idea still subject to the unforgiving arithmetic of retail?

You decide.

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EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

What luxury really means from the inside
Entrepreneurial vs. intrapreneurial thinking
How to build a premium brand without brute-force marketing
The tradeoff between top-line growth and gross margin
What founders should know before taking outside capital
How brands manufacture soul through consistency and discipline
COVID, supply chain disruption, and rebuilding the operating model
Why gross margin is the truest signal of long-term brand health

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CONNECT WITH LOUIS JOSEPH
https://www.alpsandmeters.com
https://www.instagram.com/alpsandmeters
Email: [email protected]

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CONNECT WITH MYLES
https://linktr.ee/fightorfl1ght
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mylesjeffreylevin
https://www.stellaiam.com
Walk Worthy.

Robert Bradshaw stands where power meets fragility. He does not provide answers. He creates the conditions for them. He has spent years navigating the moral complexity of the military, the trauma of special operations, and the cold architecture of political leadership.

The human soul fractures when it is stretched across these environments.

Empathy is the casualty when the mission demands total detachment.

Service is not a duty. It is a fundamental human architecture.

We dissect the mechanics of spiritual care. The science of trauma. The quiet work of being present when everything else is burning.

Listen to the signal. Disregard the noise.

He ran 500 missions.Nobody asked him who he was.

Diego Ugalde gave fifteen years to Naval Special Warfare. Three wars. NATO partnerships. Hundreds of lives changed by the decisions he made in the dark. And when he walked away from all of it, he looked back at the whole thing: realized he had been a stranger to himself.

This is NOT a war story. It IS what happens after.

What it costs to give everything, and still not know the person doing the giving.

What does it take to turn the mission inward?

What happens when we explore "that" awakening: the crack? The moment plant medicine rearranged one's world view?

Did the God Molecule show him a more "powerful peace"?

Then there is Warriorside. From whom does storytelling heal? Why is sharing a story the most dangerous and necessary thing a person can do. Sit with that for a minute...

As we sat, with the question underneath all of it.

To whom much is given: what happens to the one who never stopped to receive?

No conclusions here. Only the conversation. Draw what you need from it.

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WarriorSide.org — support, volunteer, donategivebutter.com/warriorside — contribute to veteran healinglinkedin.com/in/diegougalde — connect with Diego