Andy Stumpf
@AndyStumpf77 • 69,972 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
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 Stumpf547,191 views • 7 months ago
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 Stumpf235,997 views • 3 months ago
Mike Glover served 18 years in Army Special Forces, worked as a contractor for the CIA, founded Fieldcraft Survival, and wrote the national bestseller Prepared. He's been on this show before. A lot has happened since. The legal case that consumed the last 18 months is finished. He talks about the week he spent locked up — teaching breathing drills in a holding cell full of hard dudes — what the arrest cost him, and how family and a small circle of friends carried him through. Fieldcraft dissolved. He bought the pieces back. Now he's rebuilding it from the roots. There's also a long stretch on the bin Laden story — O'Neill, Bissonette, the recorded debrief, the point man, and litigation nobody needed. Plus Roberts Ridge, the Jessica Lynch raid, Tillman, and why drama in the special operations community has real downstream consequences. TRT, alcohol, helicopters, faith, veteran suicide, and a tribute to a Green Beret they called Swede. Join the Cleared Hot Newsletter: Take the Operator Code Assessment:
Andy Stumpf66,975 views • 1 month ago
Matt Bissonnette grew up in a remote Alaskan village, read every SEAL book he could find, and made it all the way to SEAL Team 6. Fourteen years in the Navy, 13 straight combat deployments, team leader at the command, and one of the operators on the third floor of the bin Laden compound. In 2012, writing as Mark Owen, he published No Easy Day — and spent the next decade paying for it. The DOJ came after him for skipping pre-publication review, took every penny the book made, and left him on a 15-year payment plan. We get into what he actually saw that night in Abbottabad, the audio-recorded debrief, and why the competing narratives don't hold up tactically. Then the aftermath: 10-hour DOJ interrogations, being cut off from his own community, and getting to the point of putting a gun to his head. We also cover the hypocrisy of leadership selling their own stories, the award system, funerals he couldn't attend, and why he's now raising Wagyu cattle and self-publishing his third book, No Easy Way. No Easy Way: Join the Cleared Hot newsletter: Take the Operator Code Assessment:
Andy Stumpf99,900 views • 1 month ago
Jack Osbourne grew up with cameras in the house. The Osbourne's made his family the biggest thing on television, and he was earning seven figures by 15. He got sober at 17 and has held that line for over two decades. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at 26. Since then he's built his own lane — adventure television, paranormal investigation, two podcasts, and a purple belt in jiu-jitsu. Last July, his father played the biggest farewell show in rock history. Seventeen days later, Ozzy was gone. This conversation carries weight and goes sideways in equal measure. Making serious money as a kid and learning the hard way that the people hired to protect it don't always deserve the trust. Grieving a parent while untangling the business that comes with a famous last name. The final concert — a living wake where his dad got to say goodbye on his own terms — and the week at home together afterward. Then the throttle opens: the UFC card on the White House South Lawn, a month in the Australian jungle on 500 calories a day, ghost stories he can't explain, the Nazca mummies, a plan to buy a decommissioned aircraft carrier, and bringing OzFest back. Join the Cleared Hot Newsletter: Take the Operator Code Assessment:
Andy Stumpf57,861 views • 1 month ago
Brandon Spangler did five years in the Marine Corps. He broke his neck, crushed his lower back, and walked out with a VA prescription that turned into eight years of addiction. The last stretch was heroin. He got sober in 2013, started college from zero, and is now a licensed clinical social worker with his own practice for cops and veterans in northwest Montana. Travis Gribble spent 24 years in law enforcement, 16 on SWAT, and retired out of Mesa PD in 2022. He now works for the Boulder Crest Foundation. He walks through the jump from pharmacy to street, detoxing cold turkey three times, and a month and a half living out of a truck in the Blue Mountains waiting on a bed. Both of them are done with PTSD as an identity. Why the D on the end matters. Why most people process trauma without a diagnosis. What happens when a man grabs hold of being called broken. Also in here: moral injury, the 400 to 600 traumatic calls a cop absorbs over a career, why the average officer dies seven years after retiring, and the retainer model that put a therapist inside a sheriff's office.
Andy Stumpf18,981 views • 16 days ago
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 Stumpf189,237 views • 8 months ago
John Constantine spent almost 23 years in the United States Secret Service. Fifteen of them on the Counter Assault Team — the assaulters who exist for the day everything goes wrong. Team leader. Instructor. Operations supervisor. He stood with a rifle next to four presidential administrations, worked in almost 90 countries, and finished out in the Dignitary Protective Division running foreign heads of state. He wrote a book about the part of it nobody sees. It's called Hallways and Stairwells. He breaks down what actually happened at the Correspondents' Dinner, why the security plan worked even though the magnetometer checkpoint didn't, and how far that guy really was from the President. Butler gets the same treatment. The layers of security people never see. Why hunkering down has never worked, anywhere, ever. Then it goes past tactics. Mission, men, then you. Getting swatted at his own house over a function fire and suspended for it. Refusing to send guys and guns overseas as a favor unless somebody put it in writing. Two thousand eight hundred agents doing the work of ten thousand. And the part that almost killed him. His identity got ripped out with the job. His wife found him on the bathroom floor. He talks about the climb back. Hallways and Stairwells: Take the Operator Code Assessment: Today's Sponsors: Black Rifle Coffee: LMNT:
Andy Stumpf22,835 views • 23 days ago
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 Stumpf125,521 views • 5 months ago
Kyle Morgan spent over twenty years in the Army. Infantry, then Green Beret, then more than a decade in the nation's premier special missions unit running hostage rescue. In 2015 he was advising the U.S. Embassy in Mali when terrorists took the Radisson Blu hotel. He built a team on the fly and went in. The award for that was the Distinguished Service Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor. Today he runs Blu Bearing, trains police and civilians, and serves on the board of Frontline Healing Foundation. When the job ends the machine has already forgotten about you, and he'll tell you that isn't cruel because it has to forget you to keep moving. The guys who come apart are the ones still trying to replace something that can't be replaced. He didn't leave the way he wanted to. There was addiction, a DUI he hid, and an overdose that nearly ended it, and his old command circled the wagons around him more than once before he finally made it out. Sobriety and faith are what brought him back, almost five years of it now, and he spends his time pointing at the cost so the next guy doesn't pay it blind. He'll tell you he's more proud of the husband and father he is today than anything he ever did downrange. Blu Bearing Solutions: Join the Cleared Hot Newsletter: Take the Operator Code Assessment:
Andy Stumpf38,205 views • 1 month ago
Casey Stumpf is a nurse practitioner and my sister. Years in emergency medicine and hospice, a stretch inside military medicine at Camp Pendleton, and now her own practice in Montana treating hormones full time — perimenopause, menopause, testosterone for men and women. She is one of roughly 4,100 providers in the country holding the MSCP certification. There are 75 million American women in some phase of menopause. The math does not work. She is back to answer listener questions and to explain why estrogen patches are disappearing. The FDA says there is no shortage. Pharmacists say otherwise. Best estimate on a fix is two to three years. She lays out what the 2002 Women's Health Initiative did to an entire generation of women, and why the black box warning finally came off. Testosterone for women, prescribed off-label because no FDA-approved formulation exists. GLP-1s and what they pull out of you besides fat. Hormone therapy after breast cancer. Vaginal estrogen, UTIs, and hip fractures. The suicide risk in perimenopause that standard screening misses. Contact Casey Here:
Andy Stumpf12,582 views • 14 days ago
Michael is moving to Missoula, so this one opens with a resignation and gets worse from there. A man in a garbage can is polling at 20% against Nigel Farage in Clacton, and his platform makes more sense than it should. Term limits, and the unelected career staff who actually run the machine. Early access to Truth Social posts for $60,000 to $100,000 a month. Trading firms have already signed up. A president clearing north of two billion in his first year back in office, and why the silence around it is deafening. A California mayor who pleaded guilty to working as an unregistered agent of China. A former Marine home after four years in a Russian prison. What prison is actually for. Punishment, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and where the line sits. A carrier at sea 250 days straight, what that does to 5,000 people with no end date, and the guy I watched grab a fire extinguisher and jump. Also: a four mile run, PT school, and a second wiener dog named Beans. Today's Sponsors: Firecracker Farms: Tiny Health:
Andy Stumpf20,605 views • 26 days ago
Just me today. Michael also dropped some news on me — he's moving on in a few months to go better himself, so there's a change coming to Negligent Discharge Friday. Three questions this week. All of them heavy. A woman facing divorce asks whether military culture makes it easier for a man to disconnect from family life. Military marriages aren't a single lifestyle. They're an independent one. But the five people you spend your time around will pull you one direction or the other. I talk about my own divorce. Nineteen years and eleven months. The writing was on the wall a decade before I made the call. My biggest regret isn't leaving. It's what my kids absorbed while I stayed. They were sitting on the stairs listening the whole time. A 28-year-old with money, milestones, and no mountain left to climb asks how to get motivated again. I tell him he's aiming too low, and that the money trap gets everybody eventually. An 18-year-old just found out about his dad's affair and ships to boot camp next June. Quick to think, slow to act. Fixing his parents' marriage was never his job. Take the Operator Code Assessment: Drownproof Conversation Starters:
Andy Stumpf22,904 views • 1 month ago
Drew Miller is an Air Force Academy honor graduate with a master's and a PhD from Harvard. His dissertation was on underground nuclear shelters and field fortifications. Thirty years in uniform across active duty, Air Guard, and Reserve. Intelligence officer. Strategic Air Command, the Pentagon, and a DoD think tank. Retired colonel. He founded Fortitude Ranch, a survival community with eight locations, and the Collapse Survival Institute. His new book is Preparing to Survive in the Age of Collapse. His model puts the annual odds of a collapse disaster between 16 and 57 percent. Bioengineered H5N1. The grid going down. The economy stops, and law and order goes with it. We disagreed on a lot of this one. He wants superintelligent AGI outlawed and says he would nuke a data center to enforce it. I don't get there with him. We went back and forth on facts versus assumptions, on what a real fight with China looks like, and on whether this government is salvageable. Also covered: the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, civil war inside states instead of between them, two million prisoners with no power, and surviving an AI takeover by being too boring to kill.
Andy Stumpf19,917 views • 1 month ago
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 Stumpf65,675 views • 4 months ago
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.
Andy Stumpf45,945 views • 3 months ago
Ross Schneiderman spent his career as a reporter and editor. Newsweek, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, ESPN. He covered mixed martial arts, then ran a foreign desk working alongside Afghan and Pakistani correspondents. In 2016 he wrote a Newsweek cover story about Mohammad Gulab, the Afghan villager who sheltered Marcus Luttrell. He never went to Afghanistan. He never covered a war. He spent six years piecing this one together anyway. For twenty years, Operation Red Wings has been told one way. Lone Survivor turned it into a legend. He FOIA'd the documents. He read the MERC chat, the debriefs, the after-action reports. He interviewed SEALs, Green Berets, and Afghan sources who were there. What he found doesn't match the movie. We go through it in order. The comms that were supposedly never made, and the records that say otherwise. The vote that never happened. The phone call, and who really made it. The stinger missile that wasn't. And why a story meant to honor four men became a recruiting tool built on things that weren't true. This isn't about tearing anyone down. Four men died doing the best they could in a terrible spot. It's about what happens when an institution picks the myth over the truth. Politico Article:
Andy Stumpf24,281 views • 1 month ago
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 Stumpf207,247 views • 1 year ago