Fight-or-Fl1ght

We are curating a world of comfort and designing the soul right out of the next generation.

Patrick Whalen is a walking contradiction to the modern architecture of schooling. A Marine. A Hopwood Award winning poet. A Master of English Literature. He is an enigma to some and a warrior to others, but fundamentally he is a sculptor of ideas.

Patrick sees the crisis in our schools for what it is. Obesity, screen addiction, and crumbling self esteem are not isolated symptoms. They are the results of a culture that has abandoned the journey in favor of the destination.

Following the footsteps of Teddy Roosevelt, Patrick is a crusader for the Strenuous Life. Through Iliad Athletics, he meets students where they are physically, intellectually, and spiritually. He is creating the conditions for self excellence and instilling a pride in being that is earned through intentional friction.

Key Themes:

• The Architecture of Failure: Why modern learning models are failing our children.

• The Masterpiece of Consequence: Building community and character through struggle.

• The Integrated Human: Breaking the cycle of screen time through intentional movement.

This transmission is for the ear. In a world obsessed with visual performance, we are returning to the source. Words matter. Resonance happens when the screen goes dark.

Tune in. No screens. Just the words.

He spent a career hunting the world's most dangerous threats.

Yemen. Iraq. Afghanistan. Sarajevo.

Naval Special Warfare. SEAL. Captain, U.S. Navy.

Then a physician handed him a diagnosis.

Prostate cancer.

Everything he knew about threat assessment, mission planning, and the will to survive got redirected. Not toward an enemy combatant. Toward a disease that doesn't negotiate.

He's in remission. He didn't stop.

Dr. Rob Newson is now Chief Community Officer at SOTERIA Precision Medicine Foundation. Built on one belief. Your cancer is not someone else's cancer. Your data, your biology, your treatment plan. Period.

36.7% of Naval Special Warfare operators are diagnosed with cancer. That is not noise. That is a signal. And Rob is done letting it operate quietly. He calls it a hunt. His word. Not mine.

"Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack."

This episode goes light on the Teams. Deep on the cancer fight. Hard on the WHYs, the WHY NOTs, and the IF ONLYs.

This is not a military episode. This is not a cancer episode.

This is a human episode. For anyone sitting in a waiting room. For anyone who loves someone who is. For anyone who will.

Statistically. You will.

Stop what you are doing. Listen to this one.

SOTERIA Precision Medicine Foundationwww.soteriaprecisionmedicine.org

Fight or Fl1ght on Instagramwww.instagram.com/fightorfl1ght

For 25 years, one designer shaped the way the world looked — and almost no one knew his name.Peter Yee was Oakley's first trained industrial designer. Hired by founder Jim Jannard in 1993, he built the visual language of one of the most iconic brands in sports history — the Eye Jacket, the X-Metal Romeo, the Over the Top, the Time Bomb watch, and the Oakley "O" logo itself. Over 110 patents. $76M in revenue when he arrived. $1.6B when he left.This conversation is not a nostalgia tour.We talk about what great design actually looks like from the inside — and why most of what passes for innovation today is duplication dressed up in a press release. We talk about what Jim Jannard understood that almost no one else did. We talk about the designs that won, the ones that missed, and the lessons that came from both.And we talk about what comes next. AI. Meta smart glasses. Neuralink. XYE — Peter's own brand, finally, on his own terms.If you've ever worn a pair of Oakleys. If you've ever tried to build something original in a world that rewards copying. If you believe the best ideas start with a question nobody else thought to ask — this one is for you.Hosted by Myles Levin.Find the show on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Instagram.

Follow Peter Yee at peteryeedesign.com and @peteryeedesign on Instagram.

April 7th, 2003. Baghdad. Col. Kim "K.C." Campbell's A-10 Warthog takes a direct hit. Hydraulics destroyed. Manual reversion. Flying on cables alone. Three hundred miles back to base in an aircraft that had no business staying airborne.

She landed it.

But this isn't a war story. It's a masterclass in the frameworks that work when your plan falls apart and everyone's looking at you to see what happens next.

Most of us live in fight or flight. KC operates in a third space: mission clarity, end state focus, and ,world-classaircraft-damaged, still-flyingsingularity where the noise disappears. She doesn't bring problems to her frameworks. She meets every situation exactly where it is.

In this conversation, we explore:

• How to prepare for what you can't predict
• The difference between leadership and command
• Trust-based teams vs. compliance-based teams
• What courage actually means when you've faced it
• The mental models that work before the fire, in the fire, and after the fire

KC is world class. Not best in class. There's a distinction.

She celebrates humanness without diluting intentionality. No ego. No judgment. Absolute focus on the mission. She's built a life leading people through chaos when failure costs lives.

The frameworks that kept her alive matter to anyone navigating their own version of aircraft damaged, still flying.

Fight or Fl1ght brings you voices from the edge. Lessons from the fire. Olympians, generals, philosophers, founders, poets. People doing the work that quietly reshapes worlds. Each arrives with something earned—a story formed under pressure, a decision made when nothing was guaranteed.

These aren't performances. These are transmissions.

Hosted by Myles Levin.

"The sum is greater than the parts."

We held this episode for a week. Some conversations need to breathe before they hit the air. This is one of them.

Dropping on International Women's Day, S2E11 features Suzanne Xena Lesko. This isn't your standard influencer self-help chatter. This is an exploration of a presence that defies conventional stereotypes.

Suzanne represents a striking contradiction: A combat veteran trained in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) and primal survival, who is simultaneously a deep practitioner of Buckminster Fuller's systems thinking and Biomimicry.

It is physicality meets mental resolve, packaged in a breathtaking aura of wholesomeness and operational rigor.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• Self-Reliance vs. Team Play: How the individual "parts" evolve to create a superior "sum."
• The SERE Mindset: Navigating hostile environments without losing your humanity.
• Biomimicry in Leadership: Applying nature's frameworks to human systems and resiliency.
• Service In and Out of Uniform: A celebration of a career spent in the 1% of the 1%.

This is a free-flowing conversation for those optimizing today for a BTR™ tomorrow. No vanity metrics. No noise. Just signal.

Listen. Experience the presence. Understand the framework.

"Git Sum."

CONNECT WITH SUZANNE LESKO:Website: https://www.suzannelesko.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzanneleskoLinktree: https://linktr.ee/suzannelesko

FIGHT OR FL1GHT — FIND US EVERYWHERE:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FightorFl1ght/videosApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fight-or-fl1ght/id1840181942Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4ZeDZf8ofdJ0g6tgTOX4CgInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/fightorfl1ght/

CONNECT WITH YOUR HOST — MYLES JEFFREY:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mylesjeffreylevin/Stella I Am: https://www.stellaiam.com/

What does it mean to tell the truth when your camera is the only witness?

Jim Fabio has spent 30 years answering that question—through war zones in Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan as a U.S. Air Force Combat Camera Officer, behind the lens at the NFL Network, and as an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker who refuses to let forgotten stories die quietly.

In this episode, Jim breaks down what it really takes to craft a story that moves people—why truth in documentary filmmaking is rarely as simple as pointing a camera and pressing record, what combat taught him about narrative under pressure, and why the Orangeburg Massacre is a chapter of American history that can no longer be ignored.

"Every story is about people." — Jim Fabio

Voices from the edge. Lessons from the fire.Fight-or-Fl1ght

Nine years. U.S. Army Special Forces. 7th Group. Multiple global deployments in environments designed to kill the signal. Ryan Garay kept the team connected anyway.

Then he took the beret off. Walked into rooms he wasn't supposed to be in yet. And figured it out.

Since transitioning, he's driven over a billion dollars in defense technology impact and spent years quietly building something for the operators who come after him; Operator to Executive LLC.

In this episode we go past the surface.

What holds when the pressure is real and nothing in your toolkit is cutting it.

What it costs to rebuild an identity in a world that doesn't speak your language.

What you do when the wolves show up in your network dressed right.

What carries you when the plan meets contact and everything goes sideways.

Ryan answered all of it.

Hosted by Myles Levin | Fight-or-Fl1ght drops new episodes regularly — follow the show so you never miss one.

What if every decision you've ever made... was already made for you?

In S2E8, Myles sits down with Dr. Valerie Starratt — biobehavioral scientist, statistician, and recovering academic turned real-world operator — and the conversation will mess with your head in the best possible way.

Dr. Starratt spent nearly two decades as an experimental scientist, writer, and professor at Florida Atlantic University before taking her expertise off the page and into the field. Now she works where the stakes are real — military, sports, organizations — and what she's learned will fundamentally change how you see yourself.

Your biology is running the show. Your "choices" are largely afterthoughts. And your phone? It's hijacking your dopamine system by design.

In this episode:— Why free will is more myth than reality— How your blood sugar might be making your decisions— What genetics and environment are actually fighting over— Why elite performance can't be reduced to a test score— How variable reinforcement has you addicted and you don't even know it— What psilocybin might mean for trauma and PTSD— How to actually use behavioral science to perform at your ceiling

This isn't motivation. This isn't a hack. This is the raw science of human behavior — and once you hear it, you can't unhear it.

Your brain was already going to make you press play.

Sammy Chapman was 16. Curious. Industrious. Business-minded.

Then he connected with a dealer on Snapchat. One pill. Fentanyl. Gone.

What his father Samuel discovered afterward changed everything: Snapchat knew. They knew drugs were being sold. They knew kids were dying. They knew their design facilitated it. They chose not to warn anyone—because warning would hurt their bottom line.

This isn't a "them" problem. This is us. We were all children once. We all live in communities where the young and vulnerable need our protection.

Samuel Chapman calls himself an "accidental activist." He shouldn't have to be one at all.

This conversation covers Sammy's life, the fentanyl epidemic, Snapchat's willful negligence, and the legislative fight for Sammy's Law.

Connect with Samuel:The Parent Collective

Connect with the Podcast:instagram.com/fightorfl1ghtyoutube.com/@FightorFl1ght

What separates those who perform under pressure from those who collapse? The answer lives inside your brain — and Dr. Allison Brager has spent her career proving it.

Dr. Brager is a neuroscientist working at the intersection of military operations, sleep science, and elite human performance. She's studied soldiers in combat, humans pushed to the edge in Antarctic isolation, and the genetic code that determines who thrives when nothing is guaranteed. Next stop: space.

In this episode she breaks down the science most people never hear — why your chronotype may be quietly costing you, how the brain rewires itself under sustained stress, what isolation research reveals about human adaptability, and why psychedelics are no longer fringe science in PTSD treatment.

She also makes the case for the most underrated performance variable of all: humility.

This is not a highlight reel. This is a transmission from someone doing the actual work.

If this episode hits — share it. Rate us 5 stars. And subscribe so you never miss a voice from the edge.

The Fight-or-Fl1ght Podcast | Voices from the edge. Lessons from the fire.