Andy Stumpf
@AndyStumpf77 • 69,440 subscribers
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
Videos
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 Stumpf235,086 Aufrufe • vor 9 Tagen
Rob O’Neill is a retired Navy SEAL with more than 400 combat missions, deployments with SEAL Team Two and SEAL Team Six, and participation in some of the most high-profile special operations of the last two decades. He served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and has spent years navigating the complicated transition from classified service to public life. In this conversation, Rob joins me for an unfiltered, long-form discussion about his career, the brotherhood of the teams, and the personal cost that comes with telling parts of his story publicly. We talk at length about Operation Neptune Spear, the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, and Rob’s perspective on how the official debrief differs from his lived experience. Rob explains why he believes portions of the record are incomplete, discusses actions taken by members of the assault force after bin Laden was already dead, and why those details matter to him years later. These are Rob’s firsthand accounts and interpretations, shared in full context and without editing for sound bites.
Andy Stumpf546,414 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Rich Hy is a police detective in the Special Victims Unit in Buffalo, New York, an Army Reserve drill sergeant, and the creator behind Angry Cops, a YouTube channel with over 1.5 million subscribers built over a decade of consistent work. He's a combat veteran with a civil affairs background, multiple deployments, and 21 years of combined service. We get into the Epstein files and why most people are reading them wrong. Rich breaks down the difference between investigative documents and verified evidence. We talk Malibu Fitness, Tim Kennedy, and what it looks like when you own a mistake versus when you try to talk your way around one. Rich walks through a case he caught involving a blind refugee found dead in Buffalo — what the media reported versus what actually happened. We cover ICE operations, the Minnesota shooting, why the how matters more than the what in enforcement, and what happens when politicians throw their own people into the meat grinder hoping for a bad headline. Then we get into taxation, the Revolutionary War starting over a one and a half percent tax, property taxes in New York, the death tax, drill sergeant stories, peptides, Iran, and Rich's new podcast Overserved.
Andy Stumpf125,269 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Dan Crenshaw is the Republican Congressman from the 2nd District of Texas. Prior to his political career, he served as a United States Navy SEAL for 10 years. On his 3rd combat deployment, he was injured by an IED (improvised explosive device) which cost him his right eye and left him with substantial damage to his left. He was medically retired due to his injuries, and shortly thereafter began his career in politics. Most recently Dan has been in the news for ACCUSATIONS of insider trading, drunken behavior in Mexico, threatening Tucker Carlson's life, and attempting to silence podcaster and former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan.
Andy Stumpf189,110 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
John Shipley spent fourteen years carrying an FBI badge. Army aviator first — commissioned by his own father, a retired Vietnam-era lieutenant colonel — until a spinal cord injury at Walter Reed ended his flying career. He walked into Quantico in 1996, drew El Paso, and spent the next decade working narcotics and surveillance on the Mexican border. SWAT. Sniper. Bodyguard details for the FBI Director and the Attorney General. A father of two adopted kids. The kind of agent who refused a $27 million bribe because he didn't want the money — he wanted to keep his oath. And then the government came for him. One Barrett .50 caliber he sold legally to a county deputy years earlier ended up in a Mexican shootout. ATF traced it back. Prosecutors charged him with six felonies. What John didn't know at trial was that the gun store that brokered the final sale was an ATF informant — part of what would later be exposed as Operation Fast and Furious. They let the rifle walk. They knew. And when Mexico asked questions, they handed John up instead. He did two years in federal prison. An entire day of his trial transcript vanished from the record. Presidential executive privilege slammed down on every document that could prove it. John tells the whole story on his own terms — and he's still fighting for the pardon that would give him his rights back.
Andy Stumpf65,379 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
This is a monumental first step, please help me spread the word to anyone who may be suffering, or policy makers who can continue this momentum. This issue is real. I have seen so many people receive this treatment, and in no uncertain terms, it saved their lives. There is still a ton of work to do on this, but this is a massive win.
Andy Stumpf53,008 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
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:
Andy Stumpf20,771 Aufrufe • vor 19 Tagen
John Kiriakou spent 14 years at the CIA. He started as an analyst, went operational, and eventually ran counterterrorism work in Pakistan that led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah. He was the first U.S. government official to publicly confirm that the agency was waterboarding prisoners. For that, the Obama administration prosecuted him under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and sent him to federal prison for 23 months. He lost his pension. He lost his career. Most of his kids stopped speaking to him. Today he writes books, hosts a podcast, and teaches a course on the history of terrorism. We get into how the agency really works. Recruiting spies. Breaking into a house in a foreign country to plant a bug. The mentor who told him to walk up to a target's front door and sell him out to his face. Then we get into the part nobody at Langley wants to talk about. Torture. Rendition. The innocent people who got grabbed off planes and buses and never got their lives back. We also cover Section 702, the Patriot Act, Iran, Iraq, and why no agency ever gives the power back. Enjoy. Join the Cleared Hot Podcast Newsletter:
Andy Stumpf37,023 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
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:
Andy Stumpf13,620 Aufrufe • vor 14 Tagen
Justin Klahn is hard to put in a box. Twenty years inside Nike Innovation. Years embedded with JSOC units building gear that had to actually work. Time consulting with three-letter agencies, DARPA, and the Harvard Learning Innovations Laboratory. A run working directly for Kanye West. He calls himself a problem solver, and the resume backs it up. His new book is Innovator's Handbook. We open on the divorce conversation, the kind of failure neither of us wished for, and what it takes to show up for a partner the second time around. From there it gets wide. The competition mindset that separates the top of the JSOC food chain from everyone else. What it's actually like to sit in a room with Kobe, with Tinker, with Kanye. The Nike origin stories most people don't know — the real Jordan re-signing, the Pantry, the relationship between Phil Knight and Steve Jobs. We dig into the supernatural. Faith. Conspiracy and control. How a guy who advises high-stakes operators stays open enough to consider anything but grounded enough to still get the work done. And we end on the AI workflow he used to write a book in two weeks — and what that says about where the world is going.
Andy Stumpf35,752 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Alan Mack flew Chinooks for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment for seventeen years. Chief Warrant Officer 5. Senior MH-47 pilot. Flight lead. Instructor. He was the pilot in command of Razor 03 on Takur Ghar — the aircraft shot up trying to insert a SEAL element on top of the mountain that became Roberts Ridge. He has logged over 6,700 flight hours, took rounds through his cockpit on Anaconda, ran fog approaches into walled compounds in Iraq, and helped write the procedures the Night Stalkers still use to land in zero visibility. After retiring, he commanded the flight detachment at West Point and spent a decade running emergency management for a New York county. He is the author of Razor 03 and the upcoming Chinooks in the Dark. We cover the new Medal of Honor awarded to a 160th pilot and what it actually takes to earn one. The Anaconda shoot down — RPG, lost hydraulics, three cans of fluid, and a crew chief pumping a t-handle to keep him in the controls. Why he chose to dive at a Dishka instead of climbing. The myth around Extortion 17 and why the conspiracy doesn't hold up. How the unit trains pilots to fly through real lead. Air refueling at night in the weather. Cutting hoses with rotor blades. And the lessons every pilot — military or civilian — needs to internalize before the aircraft starts shedding systems on them. Enjoy Chinooks in the Dark:
Andy Stumpf22,939 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
John spent his entire 20-year Naval career in the Naval Special Warfare Community. After serving in leadership positions at SEAL Teams Three, Ten, Four, and SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team Two he earned an assignment to Joint Special Operations Command's Naval Special Warfare Development Group. Throughout multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, he led our Nation’s most elite special mission units on hundreds of direct-action combat missions. Among other awards, he has earned four Bronze Stars with Valor, and two Presidential Unit Citations.
Andy Stumpf207,162 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Travis Pastrana is a 17-time X Games gold medalist, multi-discipline motorsport champion, and the founder of Nitro Circus. He grew up in a Maryland construction family steeped in military service and contact sports, won his first outdoor national championship at 16, bought a house the same year, and has spent the decades since competing in everything from supercross to rally to NASCAR to base jumping. He has had two knee replacements, a hip replacement, over 30 concussions, and once turned 40 fractures across seven bones in his foot into dust on an X Games landing. We got into what it actually means to make decisions at speed — treating cliffs and trees like traffic cones when everyone else backs off. His Daytona 500 run. The NASCAR race where every teammate crashed out and his daughter read him the riot act for finishing 15th. What happened when a group from a certain Army unit showed up at his place and every single one of them landed a backflip on a dirt bike within two tries. The concussion research that found his brain operates differently than most. His seven-year-old daughter telling him she doesn't want to be the best at anything because the people chasing greatness don't seem happy. And the massive open-air wind tunnel he bought from a Mission Impossible set that he can't afford to power.
Andy Stumpf39,204 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Brent Tucker is a retired US Army Delta Force operator and Purple Heart recipient with a 20-year career in Special Ops. He served as both a Green Beret and a Delta Force operator, completing 13 combat deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and other undisclosed locations. He is the host of the Tier 1 Podcast and the owner and founder of First Responder's Coffee, Cigar, & Cask Company. Brent was recently sued by Rob O'Neill for 25 million dollars in a defamation lawsuit. Rob claims that Brent made false claims, stolen valor accusations, and conducted a "malicious and calculated smear campaign," claiming that Rob did not kill Osama Bin Laden.
Andy Stumpf78,273 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
"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.
Andy Stumpf12,522 Aufrufe • vor 23 Tagen
Another week where nothing happened and everything was totally fine. Kristi Noem's husband Byron has been living a secret life involving cross-dressing, fake breasts, webcam models, and a pseudonym — and the whole thing may have been leaked by an immigrant retaliating against DHS. Trump posts that an entire civilization will die tonight, issues an 8 p.m. deadline nobody can explain, then adds God bless the Iranian people at the bottom. We break down why NATO countries aren't obligated to help with offensive operations and why people need to actually read Article 5 before losing their shit. The military fires a dozen generals out of nearly 900 — could be discriminatory, could be trimming the fat, the why matters. Bullet forensics in the Charlie Kirk case come back inconclusive — not exonerating, not damning, just insufficient evidence on the fragment. Pam Bondi is out as attorney general. A megachurch pastor pleads guilty to molesting a 12-year-old and serves six months. A guy films himself torching a warehouse full of toilet paper in Ontario, California. Michael discovers bidets in Japan and won't shut up about it. And I talk about why the real cultural change in this country is going to come from the people running businesses and mentoring the next generation — not from anyone in Washington. Enjoy
Andy Stumpf25,327 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
After two years of legal battles and business upheaval, Mike Glover returns to the podcast with a clarity and perspective few men ever earn. Mike spent nearly two decades as a U.S. Army Green Beret and Special Forces sergeant major, deploying to combat theaters, leading reconnaissance, sniper, and operations elements, and later serving as a contractor for the CIA in high-risk security environments. When he hung up the uniform he founded Fieldcraft Survival, turning elite skills into real-world survival training and gear for civilians, law enforcement, and government clients — shaping an entire industry in the process. In this conversation, we talk about what the last two years have actually been like — the legal pressure, the business fallout, and what it’s like to navigate both in public. Mike lays out where things stand now, what he’s learned, and how adversity changes your perspective when it’s no longer theoretical. We also get into what he’s building next, the direction he’s taking in business, and what he hopes the future will hold.
Andy Stumpf42,395 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten