Jesse Boulden – Why So Many Young Men Feel Lost Today – And One Program Fighting Back

Whatever you believe about Jesus, when he shows up and his

writings and his teaching and his apostles, there's a

traumatic transformation in what a leader is, right?

So today you pick any book off the shelf and it says, oh,

leadership is servanthood and leadership is humility, and

leadership is all these things that we take for granted.

Well, before Jesus, none of that was true.

I have high expectations because we do.

But I also have hope that you can actually meet those high

expectations. I was faithful in making my bed

and showing up on time and working hard and getting after

it. That quiet professionalism.

I let my my, my work speak for itself, not my words.

I get my mouth, shut my head down and, you know, show up,

shut up, get up and do up. And they say we'll follow you.

We'll follow you into a burning building.

Hey there and welcome to From the Ground Up Show, the show

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thinking leaders by telling the stories of those that have been

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Building a life that they love with their hearts, their hands

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There's hats, sweatshirts, water bottles, coffee cups, anything

you might want today. I'm really excited.

I think this is going to be a fun one.

I am joined by Jesse Bolden. He is the director of the

International Alert Academy. The International Alert Air Land

Emergency Resource Team Academy is a nine month military style

discipleship and training program for young men between

the ages of 18 and 22. They are based in Big Sandy, TX

and were Founded in 1994. ALERT has spent over 3 decades

forging young men through boot camp style character formation,

nationally recognized emergency response certifications, and

real world disaster deployments. ALERTS nearly 3000 graduates

have responded to hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and search

and rescue operations across the United States and

internationally. Jesse came to ALERT in the fall

of 2008 at 18 years old and never left after earning his EMT

certification and completing the program's leadership track, he

rose through the ranks from squad leader to drill instructor

to Sergeant major over the entire student body, eventually

serving as the Commanding Officer of Alert Basic Training

before being named the Director in 2021.

Jesse is also a volunteer firefighter, a Deacon at his

church, a father and a husband. So Jesse, you got a lot going on

there. Thanks for taking the time to

join us today. Yeah.

No, I appreciate it Eric. I appreciate the the opportunity

and the and the introduction. Thank you.

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Yeah, well, I'm excited to learn all about Alert, but we like to

start every show learning a little bit about you.

Can you tell us a little bit about your childhood, what it

was like growing up, and what brought you to Alert back in

2008? Yeah, no, absolutely.

So I grew up in a Christian home.

That's probably the most important thing about my

upbringing. And probably the most

foundational thing about my upbringing is that my parents

were were first generation believers.

And so I had the opportunity to to grow up in that home

environment with, you know, becoming a Christian because of

that very early on in my life, which kind of dictates the the

rest of my life, right, Because that's that is that that

foundation. But my dad was in the military.

So he was a submarine commander. I was in the sub service Navy

for his whole career. And so I kind of grew up a

little bit of everywhere. So, you know, born in Virginia

and Connecticut, California, Hawaii, and then he eventually,

you know, retired in Maryland. And so by the time I was 18, I'd

already moved, you know, 18 to 20 times, right.

So the idea of, of growing up in, in one house was a

completely foreign concept to me.

I, I didn't even know people like that until later in my life

because I, I grew up on military bases and everybody moves every,

you know, three to six years. It was just this the way it is.

And I, you know, I, I joke because, because my dad was an

officer and because he was the commanding officer of a

submarine, I got to do sleepovers in nuclear powered

submarines, right? And, you know, go out to, you

know, on sea on the sale of a submarine.

And I thought that was a normal childhood.

I thought everybody got to do that, right?

And a little did I know that that was, that was a big deal

back back in the day. So, so that was, you know, those

are probably the two big, big formative things in my life is

the fact that growing in a military family on military

bases or around the, the military my whole life.

And then from a, from a Christian worldview of, by God's

grace, from my parents, both being Christians and being

heavily involved in, in whatever local church we plugged into,

right, which was many different churches over my first 18 years

because of all that moving. And so those were kind of the

two big formative things. I would say I was homeschooled.

We were kind of the early homeschool back in the day, 90s,

eighties, 90s, early 2000s. So my parents were kind of very

pioneerish, I guess, from a standpoint of they were first

generation Christians, both of them.

And then they were kind of figuring out the homeschool

thing on their own. And so I like to say my parents

set out to do something that had never been done in either of

their families or since has been done either other families.

And so I get a lot of, you know, credence and credit to my, my

family of origin, my parents. That's a heck of a lot of

courage. They both had to to kind of

figure that out in the midst of a military career and moving all

over the country and and all and all the rest.

That is an interesting upbringing.

I imagine being the commander of a submarine that your dad was

probably gone for large periods of a time.

How did that affect your family and your home?

Life, you know, fortunately, by the time we came, you know, kids

came along and I'm actually one of one of six kids, right.

So it's kind of another, another little tidbit there.

Five boys, one girl. So I'm mostly, you know, male

dominated house as far as just numbers go.

But by the time I I really have good memories, you know, he

wasn't gone for probably more than 6 to 9 weeks.

The real long deployments happened early on his career.

By the time I have you solid memories now, he he was gone,

right. He was gone a lot just as far as

training goes and sea tours and sea trials.

And, and so there was a repetition of him here and then

gone and then here and then gone, not for months at a time,

but for sure, you know, chunks of time, maybe a month here and

a month there. And that even continued after he

got out of the Navy. He ended up working for the

Department of Energy in Washington, DC as a Contra, as

a, as a government employee. And that too had lots of travel

to it. And so probably the, the big

thing that that transpired is my mom ended up filling a lot of

both roles, a lot of the time, kind of the mom and dad role,

because she had to. And so that obviously, you know,

created tension at times or dad would come home and try to step

into that father role. And we were kind of like, well,

you haven't been here, dad, you don't know what's going on.

So but there certainly had an impact.

There are things that I look back and I say there's something

to be said about growing up in one town with one church, with

one job. There's some value to that and

my family didn't miss out on that, right?

We didn't have that core community or that core church or

that one job. You know, I didn't really get to

go to go to work with dad like some of these guys that I've met

over the years, right? Like, oh, my dad took me to the

took me to the shop or he took me to, you know, I didn't really

do that. I I didn't know what was going

on and nor was I going to go to the Office of Naval Intelligence

with my dad, right? There's no way, right?

It's a top secret, you know, built.

I'm not going to the Pentagon with my dad.

So there's some of those experiences that because of his

military service that and you know, if any other military

brats are listening to this, they'll understand, right?

You appreciate what your dad does.

You like what he does. You think it's super cool, but

you don't really get to participate in it in the same

way that you might if your dad ran his own company or his own

business or or just had more of a blue collar job.

That's interesting. And so on.

Of six siblings, where do you fall in the birth?

Order. Yeah, so I'm, I'm #3 so dead

smack in the middle. And so there's an older brother,

an older sister, me, and the rest is boys all the way down,

OK, which I actually enjoyed because I could hang with the

older ones if I wanted to, you know, stay up late, watch movies

if I wanted to do that. Or I could go play Fort in the

woods with the with the younger ones, right, If I wanted to be

the the captain of the little guys.

So I actually I liked being dead smack in the middle, personally.

That's awesome. You don't hear that very often,

but I can see that even with my own kids.

The middle one can connect both directions and enjoys doing so.

Or even to this day, I'm kind of that, that tethering between the

olders and the youngers because I kind of understand both

worlds. So they'll all kind of come to

me and say, hey, talk to the olders about this or talk to the

youngers about that. Because I have, I get to have a

decent relationship with all of them.

Part of that, I think, is because I was dead smack in the

middle. So you came to Alert at 18 years

old in 2008. What was it that brought you to

Alert? What made you decide to go that

route rather than diving into the workforce or going into a

college education or some of the other options available to?

You. Yeah.

So I went to a camp in Durango, Co, Right.

This is kind of a formative memory for me.

And the founder of ALERT, his name is Ron Furman.

He had, he actually left Alert by that point, retired from

Alert, and he was running these summer camps around the country.

And I didn't know that at the time.

And so my parents had just found this summer camp in Durango, Co

And so I attended the summer camp.

It was like it was a week long, right?

It's not all summer, but it was a week long and during a

Colorado. And Ron Furman was there, the

founder of Alert, and he was staffing these camps with prior

Alert guys, right? So guys who'd been alert, Alert

alumni, they'd gotten out of Alert, right?

They finished their training. And then he was using them as

the, the staff to help run these camps around the country.

And so as a 14 year old, I show up to this camp and I think

these guys are, you know, cooler than sliced bread.

Now in my brain, they're, you know, they're 30-40 years.

You know, these guys were 18 years old, right?

1920 years old. But they had all these

companies, war stories and they had all these skills and these

adventures. They've been all over the world,

all over the country, they've done and all these cool things.

And I just really, I, I admired them and both for the the

coolness factor they brought where I like to say I didn't

know men like that existed. I just hadn't run cross guys

like that. And I was like, these guys were

awesome. How did how did they get to be?

It is awesome, right? Well, they're all these alert

guys, right? They're wearing these shirts say

alert on the back and, and, and they were also not just cool,

they were also touchable or they were very relatable, very

relational. And so as, as this 14 year old

kid, I kind of thought if they're just like me in a lot of

ways, right, they're human, they're touchable.

Maybe one day I can be just like them.

And I've, I've actually interacted with these guys, you

know, 20 years later at like reunions and they've come back

and I've walked up to them and say, you don't remember this,

but you were staff at this little camp in Durango, Co for

14 year old me. And that week fundamentally

changed, changed my life getting to hang out with those guys.

So at that moment, I, I, it really settled in my mind that,

you know, I'm, I'm going to go to alert.

I'm going to be an alert guy. I want to, I want to do this

thing. Obviously the, the environment

also attracted me, right? Growing up in military bases, my

dad was in the military. I was always kind of a big fan,

kind of attracted to that world of structure and discipline and

uniforms and things. So that was always, you know,

obviously, obviously helpful. You know, I'm coming out of high

school, right? A lot of guys don't know what

they want to do and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do maybe

long term, but for sure I knew the next step was this program,

right? It was this nine month year long

program. I wanted to at least get through

that, graduate that, do all those things, and that was going

to hopefully help me figure out what the next step was going to

be. It sounds like the next step for

you. You just stuck around.

Did did you do anything between graduating from alert and coming

on staff or did you just roll straight into that next?

Role yeah. So I I graduated the program's

nine months or a year. It was a year long at the time.

So came to basic in 2008, did the EMT program, leadership

pipeline, and then, you know, by the Providence of God and then

invitation, which you not everybody gets and, and

opportunities aren't always there.

Doors were opened and they actually asked me to come back

and, and hey, we do fill this role.

And did you fill that role? And because I'd finished the

training and I, I still wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do,

right? I had some skills and some

experiences and thought I might, maybe I'll join the military and

maybe I'll go into, you know, you know, fire EMS, but, but

these doors opened and I said, well, you know what, I'll give

it another three months, right? And do it a three months.

And, and that inevitably just led to another opportunity and

another opportunity and another opportunity.

And it just made sense, right, because there were actually

other things that came up during that time, other opportunities

even for other organizations or other programs or other things.

And it, it just fit me like a hand to a glove.

I remember one of my, one of my bosses saying that as he came to

me and, and was mentoring me during a, during a period and I

was kind of struggling, you know, do I stay, do I go?

And he looked at me and he was like, you know, this place just

kind of fits you like a glove. Jesse, I, I don't know why you

would try to go and figure something else somewhere else

when this just makes sense. That's probably the best way to

describe it is I had a tremendous amount of opportunity

that other guys never got or didn't get.

The timing worked out. The opportunity was there.

And then there was, there was the ask, right, where the

organization asked me. And obviously I prayed about it

and I saw a council on it. But it, it just made sense.

And I do a test to that, to God's direction, right?

God closing doors, opening doors in order to keep me here for the

almost last 18 years at this point.

So it sounds like that's maybe an unusual track.

What is a normal career track for the typical alert graduate?

Do they go into the trades? Do they go to college after

graduating? Do they go to work as a first

responder somewhere? What's kind of the the typical

track for somebody that comes through?

Alert yeah. And I and I do need to specify

that that is not a normal track for almost any of the alumni

association. But the goal is not to train you

and keep you, right. The goal is to train you and

send you, you know, the, the mission statement of alert is

forging extraordinary men who will influence their world for

Christ, right? So they come, we train, then we

send them back right into whatever their world is, right?

The workforce, college, military, the church, their

family, whatever. So about a third of our guys

will actually end up in the military.

Either they come here and they realize they like the

environment, right? And they say, oh man, I really

like this. I want more of this.

And they kind of go home and they miss it.

Or they come to us intentionally in preparation for the military,

right? They kind of see it as a

military prep program to say, man, this is what I, you know,

they, they know some alumni who've done very well in the

military. And the alumni will attest to

their training here, help them do well in the military.

And so they'll come here to kind of put some reps in and, and do

some things, get some training. So a third end up in the

military. A third will end up in emergency

services, right? Because we do kind of have that

angle to us. So they become firefighters,

EMTs, you know, paramedics, law enforcement.

And then the other third will end up pretty much anywhere,

right? They become pastors and lawyers

and engineers and go to college and blue collar worker

construction or whatever. That's kind of kind of a

breakdown of the of the student body.

OK. So it's not necessarily a funnel

to a specific career track, but it's a preparation for whatever

is next. Well, that's that's really the

heart behind it. When the program was started by

this guy named Ron Furman, he saw young guys coming out of

high school and he saw an opportunity because these guys

were coming out and they were kind of lost, right.

They didn't know what they wanted to do, didn't know where

they were going to go. They were all these options.

A lot of them were going to college and either washing out

or never using the degree. And he was saying, man, how do

we how do we help these guys? And then, you know, and, and you

know, a third of the guys end up in college, probably don't

belong there just because they're not geared that way.

They don't learn that way. Another, another third never

used that degree to to begin with, or they get it, never used

it. So there's only really a third

that probably belong there that, you know, that need it, right,

Your engineers, your doctors, all those guys.

And so we saw that gap in, you know, in the life of a young guy

coming out of high school. And he said, well, how do we

help these guys land on their feet, right?

They're kind of floundering. And he saw some of the benefits

the military had to offer for guys, right?

Discipline, structure, camaraderie, brotherhood, skills

based. And so we actually put together

a cadre of retired or ex military guys to start the

program back in the night before.

That's kind of where the the military style flair comes from.

And and it's helpful in the life of a young man, right?

We tend to be a disciplined and you know, some of us are lazy

and we're kind of figuring out we want to do and this is kind

of brings things into focus and it's designed to help men figure

out, okay, how has God gifted me?

What has he made me for? How do I use these skills and

the service of other people? And so yeah, so we're guys end

up doing you name it. We threw at 3000 alumni, one of

them is out there doing it and they can all look back for their

time at Alert. And so that was a beneficial

season of my life to prepare me for what I'm doing today.

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Well, I can tell, I mean clearly just the time that you've put in

and just speaking to you, you seem to have a, a real passion

for this program and the, the service it provides to these

young men. What was it?

I mean outside of the inspiration of wanting to attend

Alert as a 14 year old and seeing the the graduates and the

way they presented themselves. What is it that really gave you

a passion to devote your life to serving in this capacity and

working there? Yeah, well, the, the reasons I

came to ALERT were not the reasons I stayed at Alert.

So I really came for the, you know, the adventure of it,

right? Whether it's the firefighting or

the EMT or the disaster relief and going off and doing cool

things and also the hardship of it, right?

It intrigued me. How hard can I push myself?

We all watch those, you know, those Navy SEAL buds videos.

We all think, I wonder if I can do that right.

I wonder if I wonder if I could get through Hell week.

So that was part of the attraction for me to to come to

alert was Nick, can I do this? Can I be pushed this hard?

Can can I hike for 24 hours through the night right 56 mile

endurance hike. Can I do that after hearing

these stories from the alum? So I really came for, for the

adventure and the excitement, all of that I got, but I really

stayed for the discipleship. So, so as I, as these older

officers or these older guys, you know, mentored me and poured

into me and helped me figure out what it was to be a man and to

be a Christian man and to, you know, be a healthy husband and a

healthy father. And they really had their own

display, right, Because you're kind of living life together

with these, these training officers.

And I, and I saw them and I said, I want again to give kind

of like I did in 2004. I said, I want more of that.

How can I spend more time with these guys?

Just, you know, in their, so that I kind of learned by

osmosis, right? I kind of learned by just

watching and, and listening. And, and so as I was being

mentored, I, I, I fell in love with that aspect of it and then

said, I want to do more of that, right?

I want to actually return the favor as I've been mentored and

discipled. I want to kind of turn around

and do the same thing for the student body coming in right,

for the young guys, knowing how hard it is to be a young guy

18/19/20 and all the the struggles that come with that,

all the opportunity that comes with that.

And being able to help guys, young guys just like me, come in

behind me and help them land on their feet and figure lifeout

and get some direction and get some mentorship and get some

discipleship and get pointed in the right direction is really

what I, what I fell in love. So you mentioned that Ron

started the program by kind of seeing a gap where we had young

people graduating high school. They didn't know what to do.

They really didn't know how to behave as adult men in our

culture and just needed some guidance, some encouragement

rather than being funneled into a college education that maybe

wasn't for them or wasn't required for what their career

track would be. Has that that mission or that

need changed at all? Do you see a different need or a

different gap that alert is filling here 30 some years

later? Yeah.

You know, there's, there's a couple of basic questions you

always have to ask, whether it's in business or working for a,

you know, an NGO here and you know, what's the, what's the

problem you're trying to fix, right?

Is the problem getting better, getting worse, right.

Is the market growing for this problem or is it shrinking?

Do you have a solution to the problem?

And does that, does that solution work right?

Does it actually fix the problem?

As I look at alert, you know, back in 94 and I look at alert

today, I think the answer is yes to all of those things, right?

So what's the problem we're trying to solve?

Young men kind of being lost, right?

Or young men be being awash, right?

Young men kind of being on the fringes of society, not sure

what they're supposed to do. Not a lot of options for them.

It's true back in 94. I think it's actually truer

today in in a lot of ways. So so the second question is, is

the problem getting better or getting worse?

Well, I think it's getting worse, right?

You can have a look at our culture and it doesn't take a

brain surgeon to realize young men are in trouble, right?

They're struggling and they're the over the last 20-30 years

because they've been marginalized or you know, cast

to the outer reaches or maybe even demonized for their

masculinity. That's created a vacuum in young

guys lives. And unfortunately, there's a lot

of toxic voices that are filling that vacuum, right?

Either from a side of, you know, young men should be passive to a

side of young men should be overly aggressive, right?

You've got, you know, some really toxic voices out there.

Unfortunately filling that vacuum for young men because

they're just, they won't watch on to anything.

Somebody affirming me, somebody telling me I'm not, I'm not as,

you know, broken as, as the culture says I am for being a

man. I think the problem is, is just

getting worse. So does the Lord have a solution

to that problem? I would say yes, right as I've,

I've, because I've been here, you know, almost 18 years, I've

gotten to work with almost 1000 guys.

They did the math 1. So I think it's, I think it's

actually over 1000 guys in my time here.

And I, I see it work where I see it at work and I see it work

almost every single day. You know, if you have a

solution, yeah, we have a solution to that problem when we

try to fill that vacuum with the right things, with the good

things, things because it is good to be a man, right?

And there are good things about your masculinity.

And how do we encourage that and exhort that and then into that

And then how do we give you skills, right?

There's kind of a three pronged approach, right?

Discipleship, training and service.

So how do we disciple these guys from a Christian worldview?

Make sure they're solid in their faith?

How do we give them tangible skills in their toolbox so that

they're fit for service, right? Whether it's emergency services

skills or just normal life skills?

And then how do we equip them for lives of service, right?

That when the Son of Man comes, when Jesus shows up, he comes to

serve, not to be served. And so how do we help young men?

They could focus off themselves, which is very natural, pick

their head up and, and go out and whatever they end up deal

with their lives be, you know, self selfless sacrificial

service. And so do we have a solution?

Yeah. Does it work?

Yeah. I, I, as an alumni of the

program, I can tell you it works.

And then having worked with as many guys as I have, I can tell

you the solution that that we came up with in 94 is still the

solution today. And and it still works.

I know you've mentioned a few aspects of the program, so are

there some prerequisites to join the program?

Do do you have to be a Christian before you're coming into the

program? You know, do you have to have

done well in high school? Who Who's kind of the prime

candidate to come join? Alert, yeah, probably the two

big misconceptions of bad alert is that either we're a bad boys

school, right? So we're some kind of a reform

school for guys, you know, for, you know, criminals or

something, right? Which is just not the case,

right? We're not a, we're not a bad

boys, you know, military school. And that's the first

misconception. The other is that somehow we're

a good boys school, for lack of a better term.

We're sometimes you got to come with your nose clean and you got

to be straight A's and you got to graduate in high school and

you got to be a Christian. And neither of those two, you

know, paradigms is true. And we're really just looking

for guys that want to be better, right?

You don't have to be a Christian.

We obviously are unashamedly a Christian organization, but you

certainly don't have to be. We're not attached to any

denomination, right? So we're not denominational.

We have a pretty middle of the road statement of faith.

And the only real prerequisite is that you got to get cleared

by a doctor because the training is, is intense.

And then you got to be able to do a certain number of physical

fitness assessment tests we have.

And as long as you can hit those base numbers, which are pretty

low, right? We just want to make sure you're

in some physical condition before you show up.

And then you got to fill the application out.

And the application is not a test.

It's just a, hey, who are you? Are you from, what are you

thinking? What are you feeling?

And then if you have any inkling that you want to be here, man,

if you, if you'll work with us, we'll work with you.

And I have, I have seen all shapes and sizes come to the

Academy. And you know, guys that you

think would not make it have made it because they wanted to

be here, right? Is I don't care how hard it is.

I want to be here. I want to do well and I want to

get better. So as long as you have an

inkling of I know I should be better than I am right now.

I just don't know how to get there.

We'll work with you all day long.

OK. And is there an age cap?

I mean for a guy that's in his twenties, 30s, that a change of

pace changes life and wants to be better, Can they come and

join as well? Or is it primarily kind of that

college age? Group yeah.

So the the bottom of the the aged graph there would be 17

that's the lowest we'll go is a 17 year old.

You don't have to officially even be done with high school.

Some guys will use this as kind of their last senior year of

high school and that's totally fine We can we can work with you

on that so 17 is that that. And then the oldest I've seen

come through as long as you're not married, right.

That's the one prerequisite there is that it doesn't really

make sense to come here and be in this environment while you've

got a wife and kids at home. You get that's kind of get other

responsibilities. Let's go figure that out.

You need to make money, not spend money.

And so the oldest I've seen come through is 36 years old.

So 36 year old said, I want that change of pace.

I want that wake up call. I want to pick that gut check.

I want that brotherhood. And so yeah, 36 was is the

oldest I've seen come through. Awesome.

So do you feel like at alert you compete, so to speak with, you

know, colleges or trade schools or that kind of thing for the

the candidates or the students that are coming in?

Or is this kind of a complimentary program?

Or how would you view your relationship with other options

available to like High School graduate looking for the next

step? Yeah.

And, and I, I would tell you that the, the competition is

probably, you know, fiercer today than it was 30 years ago.

When my dad was growing up, he used to say, you know, you could

be a doctor, you could be a lawyer, or you could join the

military, right. And that was about it.

And with every passing year, I think there's even more and more

opportunities, which is why I think young men can feel lost,

right? They don't know what to do.

They're kind of paralyzed because there's just 1,000,001

things you could do. And then you go on social media

and you find all of them, right? And everyone's doing them.

And so you feel like you're behind or you feel like you

don't know what to do. And everyone's asking what are

you going to do? So, So yeah, I, I think that's

probably the, the biggest competition would be kind of

that kind of that narrative of you got to go to college, you

got to go to college. And I think young men feel that

now just just in the last six months, we've been able to

partner with Anchor University, who is now offering US college

credits for our training. OK.

And those credits can be, can be taken to other universities,

right? Liberty University and Moody and

SMU and a handful of others. So it is helpful, right.

So we don't just get certifications now, we can get

college credit for your time here.

So that is going to help some of that competition.

But yeah, that's probably our big, especially with college

being online now. I think COVID just kind of

totally changed the the whole world and we can't do alert

online, right? Doesn't work, right?

You got to be in person. Just it does not happen.

So that's the that's where it is limiting as where all these

schools can do their courses online.

We can't, right? So, yeah, what I'll tell people

is, you know, if you want to just be a firefighter or you can

go to your Community College and be a firefighter, right?

You just want to be an EMT. Well, that's fine.

You can go to your and that's fine.

You can go to your Community College and be an EMT.

But if you want to be transformed, right, you want to

become a better man, you want to get grown spiritually,

physically, mentally, emotionally and walk out more

mature and ready for life, then Alert really is going to fit

that fit that that ticket for you.

Because for me, ALERT offered me a lot of the tangible things

that I got right certifications and but the untangibles, right,

the things you can't put a price on is really what what I think

is most valuable about the experience here.

And that's crazy awesome experiences, right?

I, I got to do things, still get to do things, right, and go

places, right, all over the country, all over the world,

disaster relief or search and rescue or, you know, push myself

on 24 hour endurance hikes, things that you would just not

do pretty much anywhere else in, in, in most guys lives as an 18

year old, right? And as a 19 year old I'm, and

put in leadership positions, right?

And that helps mature me and grow me up.

And I'm in charge of 30 guys and I'm in charge of 100 guys at 21,

right? I'm, I'm in charge of the

battalion, right? That's a tremendous opportunity.

And so, you know, those crazy experiences where you can't put

a price on second thing is friendships, right?

Brotherhood, where I, I made my best friends while I was here,

right? Because those crazy experiences,

the blood, the sweat, the tears, we all, you know, we all had

together, you get forged together in a special way where,

you know, almost 20 years now, my best friends are alert guys,

right? And you get plugged into this,

this worldwide alumni network that you get to be a part of.

And our guys are doing Everything Everywhere.

And then you can connect with them all over the globe.

That's kind of an intangible thing, right?

You can't even put a price on on those connections, right?

There's actually, one of the elders in my church went through

Unit 1 back in the Northwoods years ago.

And yeah, we have a connection because we're Christians and we

have a connection because we're church members.

We also have a connection because we're alert guys, right?

We went through 20 years apart, but we're alert guys, right?

We can share that camaraderie. And he's in his 50s, I'm in my

30s. But we, we have this multi

generational connection now because we have that shared

experience. So you get the, you know, these

crazy experiences, you get this brotherhood that you you

desperately need as a man. And then you get perspective

change, right, where most young men are born kind of looking at

themselves. And you walk out of alert with

your head up. You know, there's quite

confidence saying how do I be of service?

How do I give my power away, give my strength away, all the

things that make being a man good?

How do I give all those things away in the service of my family

or my church or my community or, or whatever it is.

So those are the things that you really can't put a price tag on.

Yeah. And so that's, that's in my

mind, that's probably the, the bigger selling point of alert,

right? Yeah, yeah, we do the

firefighting. Yeah, we do the EMT, we do the

higher we do all that. But, but technically you can go

somewhere else and get those, but I can't promise you that

you'll get all those other things in addition to that

except for your time here at the Academy.

Well, it sounds like you guys are quite successful at taking

young men and transforming them to use your words or inspiring

them, building them up to be successful in whatever comes

next. What are maybe some of the key

things that you think are significant in your program that

you know, fathers, churches, maybe even businesses that hire

a lot of young people could incorporate into raising their

their sons, their youth programs, their employees to

kind of tap into this secret sauce that you guys have to help

get similar results from the young men that are charged to

them. Yeah, I think that, you know,

there's a couple of things that come to mind right off the bat.

1 is that if you expect poor performance from a certain age

demographic, that's probably what you're going to get, right?

So if you expect, well, he's his 18 year old punk, he's kind of

lazy, he's kind of sloppy, he's going to show up to work late.

Well, that's your expectations on a young man.

That's probably what he's going to do.

But if you can challenge him, right, and actually expect more

out of him, right? And it's kind of this, you know,

this phrase we'll use, we'll say I have tremendously high

expectations for you. And I believe that you can meet

them, right? When you're giving these young

guys hope that not just that I have high expectations because

we do, but I also have hope that you can actually meet those high

expectations, right? That's how cool is that, right?

It's not just that I have them, right?

Because that's kind of depressing is I have them.

There's no way you're going to meet them.

Well, no, I have them and I believe in you.

I believe that you can meet these expectations.

I believe you have it in you. I believe you can be better.

And, and here's the thing about young men, They believe that

too. Deep down they know they can be

better. They want to be better.

They just don't always know how. It's one of the things is these

expectations, but then belief in them that it's not just that I

have them. I believe you can actually meet

them. I I believe you have it in you

to meet these high expectations. So that's kind of the first

thing is really the, the, the necessity of giving these young

guys hope and believing in them. And that's where the mentorship

comes in, right? So it's not just I have hope and

I'm also going to give you tools and a pathway to get to where

you need to be to meet those expectations.

The other thing we watch is, you know, responsibility breeds

maturity. I watch it in my own life

happened as I got more and more responsibility as older leaders

took a gamble on, right, They really did take a risk on you or

they said, we're going to give you a shot here.

We're going to trust you at 19 years old, here's 30 guys for

you to take care of and you're going to help them and you're

going to mentor them and you're going to, right?

And you're not this super older than these guys.

They're 18 and you're 19, right? So you're really just a side

mentor to them, but you're responsible for them, right?

And knowing that I'm responsible to my boss and he's going to

show up and expect a certain level of discipline and

structure and these things out of the guys he's entrusted me

with, that helps breathe, which is what I experienced in 2004.

These alert guys, I thought they were thirty.

Well, they were 19. Why did I think they were 30?

Because they were incredibly mature.

Well, why were they incredibly mature?

Because these guys had been given responsibility and that

had produced a level of maturity out of them that I had just

never interacted with, right? I'd met other 1819 year olds

before and they were kind of bums or punks or whatever,

right? I thought that's what that's.

So that was just the, and unfortunately, the culture has

an expectation for young men, right?

They say, well, they really don't have to grow up to their

25. They don't have to grow up to

their thirty. We're here to say, no, no,

absolutely not, right. By 18/19/20, you can be

entrusted with a tremendous amount of responsibility.

We think about our, you know, our grandfathers and they're,

you know, storming the beaches of Normandy in 18/19/20 years

old. And it's easy to kind of say,

well, that was then and this is now.

And we're saying, no, I think that's still possible today.

If you have high expectations, you have hope that they can meet

them, you give them their tools to meet them, and then you give

them responsibility. That can absolutely transform a

young guy's life and breed about the maturity that we all know

they're lacking, right? And instead of beating them up

for it and saying, well, you're kind of a bum, I can't believe

and back in my day and blah, blah, none of that is helpful.

What these guys need is hope. They need tools and then they

need responsibility to help breed that maturity.

Yeah, there's some good stuff there that's applicable to a lot

of different people in areas. So, well, I know a big part of

Alert is, yeah, kind of the first responder field.

You guys do EMT certification, search and rescue, disaster

relief. I imagine in your 18 years at

Alert, you've had some pretty unique experiences.

Are there any really exciting or really unique experiences that

kind of stick out to you that you would be willing to share

with? Us.

Yeah. You know, it's the, the best

experiences are the ones that end positively, right.

And so obviously there's a tremendous amount of experiences

where we go out on whether it's a body recovery or a search and

recovery or a search and rescue that ends on a negative note,

right. And that's unfortunate.

That's that's probably 90% of the time we're going out and

it's a recovery and not a rescue.

And so, so unfortunately, by the time they call us, right, it

can, it can be more of a recovery than a rescue.

And, and even in that response, right.

And that's just that, that's the ENS Fire world, right?

Where their worst day is our best day.

And obviously we're happy to be there and we're glad to use our

skills and we're happy to, to help an aid where we need to.

Unfortunately, a lot of those end up, end up in a, in a, in a,

in a sad or a negative standpoint where the person is

deceased or passed away or, or isn't there probably the one

that I was telling somebody about it just the other day.

Our guys got called out yesterday on a missing person

search and to clear a bunch of wooden area and help the

Sheriff's Department do some do some search or rescue.

And I was, so I was recounting this story just the other day

about one that I was on and it was, it was a search for AAI

think it was so long ago, but she was four or five years old,

this little girl that had gone missing.

And we got called out around, you know, probably 3 in the

afternoon and we deploy and we send our teams out there and

we're out there looking and we can.

And obviously, you know, she's just gone missing in the last

hour. So this is a very hot search,

right? It's not cold, it's a hot

search. So we're hitting all these zones

and they have us going through the muck looking for this little

girl, right? And we're doing, you know,

you're doing the the skull drag through some of these things and

you're kind of looking at each other like, I don't think she's

back here, but we're going to, we're going to look right.

We're going to, we're going to get after it, you know, alert,

alert guys are going to go through whatever it takes to.

To finish the mission and you, you always end up with, you

know, just all sorts of scratches on your arms and your

face and you're bleeding. But by golly, you're going

through it right. And I remember, I remember the

incident commander looking at this wall of thorns and saying

she might be in there, like go in there and we're looking at

each other like there's no way this five year old girl walked

off the road into into there. But we're going right.

And so we get down on all fours and we're skull dragging through

this thing looking for this little girl.

And we're, we're searching till 9:00 or 10:00 at night and, and

we find her right? Not, not in there.

We ended up finding her down a couple miles east of there.

She had followed her dog, right? Her dog had walked off.

And so she followed her dog and she'd walked down, down, down a

trail into the woods. And we end up finding her,

right? And, and so that's probably one

of the most memorable ones. It's just #1 how miserable the

search was because it was just in the muck here, you know, in

the thorns and the tangle and you know, you know, you're

walking through some, you know, up to your waste of water and

your mud and stuff. But that 1 ended positively,

right? We were able to find this little

girl and turn into her parents. And so I was just telling

someone about that the other day.

I was like, man, a lot of these don't end positively.

But I do remember though, you know, and I've been on dozens of

these over my time, maybe even hundreds.

And I actually don't remember the ones that end negatively

because there's just so many of them.

I for sure remember that one because it is positively.

Well, thank you for sharing that.

And I know you guys travel nationally and even

internationally to help with different disasters.

I know in a lot of these areas the firefighting, search and

rescue EMTA lot of their kind of searches or their certifications

and connections don't always interface.

What organizations do you partner with?

I mean, how do you get tied in to be able to provide these

services to sheriff's departments, government

agencies, other people throughout the country who maybe

have different training, different certifications than

what you guys? Do, yeah, yeah.

So obviously, most of the certifications we give are

national certifications, right? And that's on purpose.

So that obviously our student bodies from all over the country

or even all over the world, we get a contingent of

international students. And so we do try to train up to

kind of a national standard, whether it's in the search and

rescue or in the firefighting or in the EMT.

So these guys can go back and use those certifications from

whatever state they're from or even country they're from.

And so that is helpful when it comes to we all, we're all

speaking the same language. We're all going to the same

incident command courses, ICS courses, NIMS courses, right of

work with, you know, whoever, whoever we're working with,

whether it's a government agency.

So you know, we were down in Kirk County, right, when Kirk

County had that massive flooding last summer, we deployed there

doing doing body recovery down there.

Well, we'd all been through that training.

And so when you show up, you all speak the same language.

So especially when you're working with the government,

government agency, you really got to know the language and

know the instant command system and then be able to work within

that system. When it comes to other NGOs or

non government organizations, that is where it gets a little

more tricky. When we're with government

agencies, a lot of the time we show up and they're assuming

that we're the subject matter experts.

And sometimes we are, sometimes we're not.

Sometimes we're just a contingent of a bigger, bigger,

you know, operation going on. Sometimes we show up and we are

the subject matter experts. They say, man, you guys have

more time on the pond. You've done more than we have.

You guys take this and run with it.

And so there was why you a tornado in Van Van, Texas.

You know, a number of years ago, we were the first on scene.

They let us run the instant command system because they said

you guys actually have more time than you know, I've never done

this. You guys take it.

So we took it, right? We took, we ran the instant

command system and talked to the government and you know, worked

all those things that were happening with NGOs or other non

government agencies or nonprofits.

That is where it does, it can get sticky because they've got

their own system or their own language or their own, their own

way of doing things. And we've worked with a whole

slew of them. Organizations like Mercy Ships,

we've done some deployments with them over the years.

We've done, we work really hand in hand with Samaritan's Purse.

It's kind of one of the bigger ones that we deploy with where

we're kind of the boys in blue for them, where they'll give us

a phone call and say, hey, can you give us, you know, 30 guys

here, 10 guys there help wrap up this work deployment here.

And they've taken us international sometimes right

where, where they took our guys to, to, to Turkey for a while

to, to do some work out there, flew us out there.

I was on a team that they flew us out to California to do

wildfire relief, right? And they needed, they needed

hands out there. So they called us up and we

sent, you know, with alumni and student body.

We they flew us out there and we worked with them for a couple of

weeks. They're probably the the biggest

organization or other non government agency we work with

is Meritus purse. But we've done operation

blessing. We've done Mercy ships Texas

Baptist men, right? And we'll work hand in hand

with, with pretty much any, any other NGO that that needs us or

wants to use us. We're we're pretty flexible.

And then obviously government agencies, sheriff's offices, a

lot of it's word of mouth, right?

And so I'll get phone calls from, you know, random sheriff.

He's like, well, I talked to this guy who talked to this guy

who talked to this guy who said you guys can do this.

Yeah, we can't. There's a lot of it's word of

mouth or this sheriff talks to this sheriff or you know, this,

this governor, you know, used us 20 years ago on this disaster

relief, right? Or, you know, and when we we've

done, right, we were space, space shuttle Columbia, right?

We were a main search operation when that happened years ago

when Hurricane Katrina hit, we were main operations on that

one, right. So we've had some of these

bigger major national disasters we've been a part of.

There's a small ones, right, That the little, you know,

tornadoes that go through Gilmer, TX, just north of here,

we respond to that. Do chainsaw relief or Tarpon

roofs or whatever, or looking for people or providing care.

So big or small, it doesn't really matter to us as long as

we can be a service. And so if we have some listeners

that are involved in, you know, local Sheriff's Office or

something, what is the process to contact you guys and, and

take advantage of your services? And I guess maybe for more, you

know, immediate stuff like that, how, how wide of an area do you

cover? How quickly can you get to which

areas? Yeah, Yeah.

So I mean that the, the main point of contact is just call

the office number, right. You find that on our website

there and we're, we're a small enough organization, right?

I mean, it's me and about 13 to 14 other staff members,

instructors, trainers we have, we have more contractors that

come in and teach and stuff. But for the most part, probably

15 of us. So you're going to get a hold of

me or one of my officers very quickly, especially if it is an

urgent search or an urgent recovery or an urgent disaster

that's happening. So it all depends on the the

time of year, right? So sometimes we don't have a

student body, right? We run, you know, quarterly

semesters and stuff. So sometimes we don't have

anybody to send. Sometimes it doesn't fit the

timing or the distance it all. It all really depends on, you

know, how emergent is it as in, you know, how much of an

emergency is it? Do we have the manpower?

Does it make sense in the training calendar?

I mean this one that we had, you know, yesterday that I sent our

guys out on or the other day, you know, they contacted me

Sunday and they said, hey, can you, can you deploy A-Team

today? And I said, well, how emergency

is it? Well, the guys are missing for a

week, right? Well, that, that doesn't tell me

that's an emergency, right? That says, OK, wait till Monday,

right? OK, we'll do Monday right.

As where if they'd said, hey, this little girl, like the

little girl story I told right? Well, that was she's been

missing for an hour. We're going to go right And it's

45 minutes away and we're going to and we all keep go bags,

right? Our guys are trained that way.

They're trained for that active response, right?

We, you know, we have an alarm system to go off and say, hey,

you and you and you, you're, you're going on deployment and

grab your go bag. You got 15 minutes, you'd be on

the road. So we can be as quick as about,

you know, probably, you know, 15 minutes to half an hour

depending on the time of day where we can turn things around

and get guys on the road head that.

Direction. Well, I know, yeah.

You have a lot of experience as a first responder and EMT search

and rescue firefighter for the the average Joe that just wants

to keep himself and his family safe, do you have any advice

about how they can best prepare just for life events and avoid

being one of the people that you're searching for or working?

On yeah, yeah, I'll just tell you what I keep in my own 2

cars, right? Because a lot of the emergencies

you run in, you run in on are actually, you know, on the

highway. And I've, I've had all sorts of

moments in my life where you watch a car flip three times in

front of you or you, you know, you pull off and there's this

big pile up and things. And the beautiful thing about

the training that I've received here at alert and alumni receive

is not that you keep this whole cache of stuff in your car so

you can be a good service. It's actually the thing that's

between your two ears, right? And being able to have a calm

presence in a crisis situation because really, you know,

without an ambulance, you know, a doctor and an EMT are kind of

is equally useless, right? They may have different lists of

knowledge, but without the right tools.

So we're both kind of sitting there going, well, I think

they're broken. I hope they're, you know, so, so

you know, for my own 2 vehicles, I actually keep small fire

extinguishers, just handheld fire extinguishers in both

vehicles. That's for vehicle fires or

other vehicle fires or things. I keep window punches in both

vehicles, right? So I would, you know, either

punch out somebody else's window or punch out my own window.

I keep a set of medical gloves, right?

Or if it's warm, wet and not yours, don't touch it.

And so being able to throw medical gloves on in any

circumstance or situation, right?

And so I keep a set of those in both vehicles.

And then, you know, just a basic medical, you know, where you

have a CPR mask, right? Something to create a barrier

and maybe some gauze and then a tourniquet.

CPR is going to save lives and turn is going to save lives,

right? Because you, you're just the

first step, right? You're the first responder.

Hopefully you got bigger resources coming.

Hopefully you don't have to be there for three hours, you know,

packing gauze or whatever. You're just there as the, as the

very first guy showing up on scene.

How do you make it better, right?

Will you make it better through getting rid of the, the active,

you know, things that are most dangerous at the time, right?

Whether it's, you know, a lack of breathing or a lack of

consciousness or fire or whatever.

And you can do that, man. You are probably more useful

than 90% of the bystanders standing around that are just

kind of looking going well, that's not a good thing.

And again, really bringing that that calm head to a crisis

situation. And I mean, I'll just tell you a

story. So I was on a, this is several

years ago and I was on an airplane and, you know, they

come over the loudspeaker and they go, is there a doctor on

the plane? And nobody moves.

And they go, hey, a medical emergency.

Is there a doctor on the plane? And I'm sitting there waiting

and I'm like, I am not a doctor, right?

And nobody moves. So I, I go, well, I guess I'll

hit my button, right? So hit my button and they come

back to me. Oh, hey, Sir.

And I say, hey, I'm just an EMT. So, you know, I have emergency

medical training, you know, it's pretty basic.

What do you need? They say, well, we got this

person up front of the plane who's having these convulsions

and they're sick. And we just, you know, so OK, so

I'd go up there. They've got enough medical

equipment on the plane to where I can take a base of line of

vitals, right and have a conversation and ask my

questions. And, and the person is fine.

They really are fine. Now the, the flight crew is

freaking out, the people on the plane are freaking out, but the

person is fine. I'm able to sit there with my,

you know, though limited medical knowledge and say, look, they're

going to be fine. When are we landing?

Like 15 minutes. They can wait 15 minutes now.

They should probably go to the hospital when we get off there,

right? You can call an ambulance ahead

of time or whatever. But this isn't, this isn't a

horrible emergency where we need to get on the ground right now.

And so I'll stay up here. I'll sit with the person, right?

I'll just be here with them and it will be fine.

That's all they needed, right? They need a calm head in the

crisis situation as we're, you know, 10,000 feet up in the air.

Now, what's funny is that at the baggage claim afterwards,

everybody's coming up to me being like, oh, you're the

doctor, you're the doctor, right?

Because they don't, they don't know.

They just heard is there a doctor on board?

And I stood up, right? I was like, no, I'm not a

doctor. I'm not a doctor.

So that's where, you know, even in this way, I encourage, you

know, people, they can get their, their EMTB or their, you

know, emergency care attendant, even if they never work as one

ever a day in their life, right? Take ACPR course, take a phase

of first aid course. You just never know where you're

going to be and you can be that calm ahead in the crisis

situation and help. And especially if you have, you

know, that tourniquet or that, you know, mouth barrier for CPR,

you can do a lot of good. Yeah, with a very limited amount

of equipment there. Yeah, that's awesome.

That's very similar to the the list of things I make sure in

all of my vehicles as well. I'm coming up on this summer

will be the 20th anniversary for me being a search and rescue

first responder, so. OK, awesome.

Yeah. A tourniquet and an Israeli

bandage. Yep, there you go.

Those are work magic. Yeah, yeah, CPR, a tourniquet

and Israeli bandage. Those are the big life saving

things. Yeah, and you can and you can go

deeper, right? I think you can get confused and

overly complicated if you're not careful.

And you know, should I have an IV bag and should I?

Well, you can, I guess if you're certified that way.

But now you're pushing boundaries of Good Samaritan

laws and things and you're like, let's just keep it, keep it to

the basics, right? You're, you're the first

responder, not the last responder.

And so just get there cost some good with what, what you've got,

make the situation better, not worse.

Don't do any harm to yourself, right?

Keep yourself safe and your family safe and then hopefully

do some good with whether the skills or the tools you brought

to the scene. Yeah, yeah.

And you know, things that people actually die of, you know, blood

loss, blocked Airways. If you need some fancy

medications or something, probably not doing a lot of good

out in the field anyway, they need to get to a doctor.

But if you. Can.

Yep, you need to call a helicopter a box, Yeah.

If you can clear an airway and stop the bleeding that you can

solve 8090% of life threatening situations just with those two

things. So yeah, 100 percent, 100%.

That's great. Well, I know you've talked a lot

about leadership, responsibility and kind of moving up in the

ranks. They're at alert.

What was the most difficult thing that you faced as a

leader? I'll tell you that some of the

most difficult transitions I had with, with this one probably

being the most difficult right when I finally became the

director, that that gap in leadership or that step in

leadership. And it's all fun and games until

you're the guy, right, Until the buck stops with you.

The other, the other step was very similar and that was when I

was Sergeant major over the battalion, when I went from

being over 30 guys, as you know, first line drill instructor to

over 100 guys as the the Sergeant major.

And I was just, I was out of my depth and that was good for me,

right? It stretched me.

It grew me in a tremendous amount of ways.

It caused all sorts of resilience to be grown.

Cause yeah, within the first two weeks I was, you know of that,

you know, that Sergeant major position, I was ready to quit.

I was like, Oh my goodness, I didn't sign up for this.

This is, this is ridiculous. And so that was a, that was a

big challenge. And then this, this job also is

probably the, the other big challenge.

This one is probably challenging more so because it's, it's

pretty administrative, which I knew going into no surprise, But

that's also not what I fell in love.

I didn't fall in love with administration, right?

I fell in love with the men. I fell in love with the

discipleship and, and the people.

And I'm doing a lot of administrative work, right?

And, and I'll just be honest, that is not my gifted, right?

That is just not, you know, I'm, I'm, I work with my hands and I

let's get out and do stuff and, you know, get in the field.

And now obviously I very rarely deploy anymore just because of

the position that I'm in. I've got other guys to, to go

take those deployments or drive the vans or, you know, go on

hikes and stuff. As I was actually probably the,

you know, working with students, they're very teachable.

They've come to be taught, they've come to be mentored.

They want to get better. When you're working with staff

members, right, Some of who used to be your peers, It's it's

probably that friend boss tension.

That's probably the biggest struggle.

That's where students come in. Well, I've never been their

friend. I may become their friend, but

I've always been kind of their boss, right?

Or I've been in charge of them as we're now as the director of

the program, you know, I've got, you know, subordinates that used

to be equals with me or used to be my my friends and they still

are. Well, now I'm their boss.

Right now I'm cutting paychecks and now I've got to hand out

some discipline and now I've got a hold of accountable and I got

to hold the standard. And I heard it put a couple

weeks ago. It's like, I don't even know if

you can be a boss and a friend. You can either be a friendly

boss or a bossy friend, but I don't know if you can be a boss

friend, right? And it's kind of this tier of

roles, right? And one of the things I'm still

learning is that as you move into new roles, you know, and,

and so you know, for some of my staff, I've got, I've got

multiple roles, right? I'm, I'm their friend and I'm

their boss and I'm their mentor or I'm their, you know, you

gotta go to church with them. So those are multiple roles I

fill with maybe one individual. Well, I've got to kind of put

those in a little bit of a hierarchy and say, OK, in this

season of life, which is the most important right now, right?

And it can't be the friend role because if I'm, I'm going to say

things to you as a boss that I probably wouldn't say to you as

a friend, I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to say things

or hold you accountable. And so I've, I've kind of had to

recalibrate and say, OK, let's put the right slot.

Primarily, I, I have to be your boss first, right?

I love you and you know, I'm going to go to church with you.

I'm going to be your friend. But remember, on Monday, I do

expect you to show up to work on time or whatever as we're a

friend. A friend may not may not be put

into screws to you like that. And so that's probably the

biggest in this position specifically is holding that

boss friend tension well and trying to put those roles in

into kind of that hierarchy, right?

It's kind of like your pastor of church, right?

Like your pastor is your friend and he may be your neighbor and

he's also your pastor. Well, which of those roles needs

to come first in your life? Probably that pastor role,

right? Because a pastor is going to

going to have to be able to tell you things that your neighbor

would never tell you, right? He's going to have to hold your

feet to the fire on things that your neighbor's not going to

confront you on your sin necessarily, but your pastor

should. He has to.

That's his job. And so you're making sure I've

got my pastor in the right category, right?

He might be my friend. He might be my neighbor, but

first he has to be my pastor. And so same thing in this role,

right? I am your friend and I am your

neighbor and I am your, you know, work in the fire

department with you or whatever. But but first and foremost, when

you and I interact in this context, I got to be your boss.

And that's tough. That is not an easy thing to do

when it comes to to, to any organization.

But for sure, an organization like this where, you know,

you're kind of all on the same team and, and maybe, you know,

like me, I kind of grew up in the organization.

And so I know all my staff very well, right?

I've seen them in all sorts of capacities and now I'm in charge

of all of them. And that can be, that can be a

difficult tangle to figure out. Yeah.

Yeah, I can relate to that. I I like to just call it out

because, I mean, you mentioned, you know, the boss says things

sometimes that their friend wouldn't say, but sometimes it

can go the other way. A friend would say things that

might be inappropriate for a boss to say.

And so I like to, hey, you work for me, but this is not a work

thing. I'm taking off my boss hat.

I'm going to put it aside. I'm not telling you this as your

superior, as a friend that cares about you.

I see this in your life and I want to just ask how are you

doing? And so you know, don't file a

complaint with HR. In this.

Moment I'm not your boss. It doesn't affect your

employment. I just I'm worried about you.

I care about you. As somebody that cares about

you, I want to talk about this or, you know, vice versa.

Hey, we were fishing yesterday. We had a good time, but you were

late to work today and now as your boss, we have to talk about

that. So, yeah, yeah, one of the

things I found helpful in doing that is even just changing

locations of conversations, right?

And so having boss conversations, we should

probably hold those in a boss context, which is, you know,

probably in my office, right, in some way, shape or form.

And then we're going to we're going to have a have a friend

conversation. Let's go out for coffee.

Let's get out of the office, get out of those distractions, let's

get out off the campus or whatever, right, And actually go

to a coffee shop. And that just help, that can

help change the whole mood of the, you know, putting that con,

that conversation in the right context.

Just moving locations can actually help bring the.

You know, you either bring the blood pressure up because it

needs to be up and it's the boss conversation, or bring it down

because this is a friend conversation.

Like easy, You know you're doing just fine.

Chill out. Yeah, that's good.

There's some good advice there. What is your favorite thing and

your least favorite thing about your job?

Oh man, my favorite thing about the job is, is really what it

was from the beginning, why I stayed.

And that's watching transformation happen, whether

it's in my own staff, right as I watch them grow and, and mature

and take on new roles and new leadership and, or the student

body, right when I get to see student body grow and learn and

not just during their time at the Academy.

I, I get the opportunity sometimes to actually follow

these guys after they leave, right?

I get to go to their weddings or I get to meet their children one

day. I, one of our guys, you know,

just got through Green Beret school, right, a couple of a

couple of years ago and I got to go, go to that ceremony, right.

And that's a really cool thing to be a part of, right?

And you don't sit there like, ha, ha, I, you know, I'm the

reason. No, it's not.

I'm not sitting there saying I'm the reason he did all these

things. But you said, man, I got to play

a small sliver of time in this guy's life.

What a privilege to that. So that's probably the coolest

part of the job is getting to go to these weddings or go to

these, you know, you know, meeting these guys kids or

seeing them graduate from a college here or join the

military there or whatever. Or I haven't come back, right,

for unions or something and tell me what they're doing.

And that that's probably the the coolest part of the job is

watching these guys, not just for the nine months they're

here, but you know, 9/10/12 years after the fact, still

doing well as men. That's really cool.

And then, you know, probably the hardest part of the job is the

inverse of that is that is people, people, people, people

are, you know, my, my dad says if people are the problem,

right, It wasn't for all these people, we wouldn't need

leadership. And that's true.

And it's just that, you know, people are not logical problems

waiting to be solved, although some days I wish they were,

right. You kind of wish A + B = C and

it's just not. Which in turn makes leadership

number one really tough, right? And unforgiving.

It also makes leadership unfair, right?

Where you did A&B&C doesn't happen always, right?

And leadership is leadership is not fair.

Where you think you did all the right, you can do all the right

things and still lose as the leader.

And so I, I like to say, you know, leadership is not

complicated now, it is because people are complicated.

What I, what I mean when I say that is that the principles of

leadership are not complicated, right?

What you're supposed to do as a leader, right?

How you're supposed to behave. Anybody on the planet can

probably tell you what a good boss is and a bad boss is.

Most of those are, are ways bosses behave, right?

We all know what good bosses are good leaders are.

Well, they're normally a set of behaviors, right?

They're normally, you know, character traits of good

leadership. We all know it's not

complicated, right? You can ask any Tom, Dick and

Harry, like, what makes us a good leader, right?

We're all can probably say about the same things inherently,

intuitively, we know that. So it's not complicated.

Leadership is not complicated, but by golly it is difficult.

It is really, really hard because people people are

complicated and and one day you hit it out of the park and the

very next day you strike out three in a row, three up, 3

down. You're going goodness, this is

just, you know, kicky in the teeth.

So that's probably the the hardest part of the job I.

Can relate to all of that very closely.

I think you and I would get along very well.

When have you been most afraid as a leader, and where did that

fear come from? Man, you know, probably the most

afraid I've been. Well, there's probably a couple

of couple of moments where where I have been genuinely fearful.

All of them have to probably do with the fear of man, right?

Where you have a maybe a parent who's really mad at you or a

student who's really mad at you. And I've got some stories from

students when I was working in the trenches that you're like,

is this guy gonna hit me? Like he might hit me, He might

deck me. And I remember just being, being

genuinely afraid, right? Or you get a really unhappy

parent, right, with who are the customers in a lot of ways,

they're paying the bills. And so you get a really unhappy

parent and you, your heart can just sink, right?

And that can come out of nowhere sometimes where you're like, I

don't even know how this happened or something has gotten

out of control or you didn't meet an expectation or whatever.

And so those are, you know, those are all probably a part of

that's what I'm going to call an idolatry problem where I'm

looking for value in the wrong places.

And I'm looking for value from man, right?

I want to be liked. I want to be praised.

I want to, you know, get patted on the back and tell me I'm

doing a good job. And when that's threatened by

either angry students or angry parents or angry staff members,

all of that has to do with the fear of man, which inherently is

an idolatry problem. It's worshipping the creature

instead of the creator, you know, looking for my value from

God and what's happening in that moment.

That's why I'm looking for value from people.

And that's been threatened. And so now I, now I am afraid,

I'm afraid of, you know, whether it's I'm afraid of getting sued

or I'm afraid of, you know, just just people not generally not

liking me, right? Or not liking my program or it's

those, those are probably the, and then those are, that's not a

moment necessarily. But as I think about the moments

where my heart drops or my heart skips a beat or I can feel it in

my stomach, I'm not sleeping at night, right?

What is all that? Well, that's a fear, man, right?

It's afraid of of what people think about me.

Have you learned anything in your time and leadership that

helps you overcome that or avoid those situations?

Yeah, there's a there's a sticky

one question on it and it says, what did you expect?

And so when I end up in moments like that or, or just difficult

moments in general, I kind of kind of sit back and say, Jesse,

you decided to work with people. You decided to work with 18 year

old young men. What did you think?

What did you expect? Right?

You, you really expected it was going to be great and happy and

go lucky and smooth sailing. And then you work in a, in a

very high risk environment, right?

So of course, sometimes the guys do something that's dumb, right?

Or the guys make a mistake and you know, somebody gets hurt or

whatever, right? Got to go to the clinic and I

get patched up or this person's mad at this person and you know,

this happened, this person got their feelings hurt or whatever.

A lot of why I can get frustrated is I have bad

expectations, right? I expect things to go my way.

I want them to go the way I want them to go.

I'm the boss, right? Dang it.

Or things need to go the way I want them to go.

And so that little sticky note helps kind of keep me, keep me

because like, what did you expect, right?

Where are your expectations completely out of alignment with

reality and say, wait, what am I doing?

I'm working with people. So I should expect tension.

I'm working with people. I should expect conflict, work

with young men. I should expect pushback.

I'm working with young men in the high risk, high dangerous,

you know, environment. Why did I expect anything

different? So that's probably the one that

I come back to and I run my staff right when they all get

kind of angsty or answer, you're like, I can't believe this

parent, yada, yada, whoa, damn that damn that what'd you

expect? Right?

This is this is people work. This is parent work.

This is student work. This is we're, you know, like we

have to get up at midnight and go on a search.

Yeah. What do you expect?

This, this alert, like, welcome to the party, pal.

Like, you must be new here. This is what we do.

So yeah, that's been really helpful for me over the years.

Man, yeah, I can relate to a lot of what you're saying.

I was in a different industry, different field, but there's a

lot of parallels here. So what is a lesson that you

wish you would have learned earlier, man?

So, you know, leadership is, as I said before, it's, it's not

complicated, but it is hard. I think when I was a very young

leader, I really did believe that as long as you did the

right things or the right principles or the right ideas,

that things would generally go a certain way.

And I, I ended up giving the, the leaders who were over me a

lot of grief because I, I saw a deficit in some of their

behaviors or some of their attitudes.

And I was like, well, if you just would do this, then this

would happen. Well, now I'm in that position

and I go, man, a little bit of humility, Jesse, would have gone

a long way. And legitimately, I've actually

called some of those leaders back over the years and said, I

am so sorry because I just didn't know.

I just had no idea that this is as difficult as it is.

This is as hard as it is that you can do everything right and

still lose. Your leadership is a little bit

of a game that has to be played. And if you want to get to the

place where you can change the rules of the game, you got to

play by the rules for a very long time, right?

Or get that position of leadership.

And I didn't always play by the rules, right?

When I was a young leader, right?

I was kind of, you know, engine and dodging and how do I do

this? And so I ended up, you know,

I'll say, griping to my upper tier leadership a lot where I

would, I was hard on, I was just, I was just hard, right?

Like you should do this and you should do this and you should

read this book and you should know these principles and blah,

blah, blah. Forgetting that these guys were,

you know, 50-60 years old, some of them, right?

You know, hello, they've got wisdom that I don't have, right?

I may have knowledge, right? Because I've read all these

books, so I don't have wisdom. These guys have wisdom And and I

just didn't know. And it's hard to know, right?

You know, experience without experience, it's hard to really

understand until you're sitting in the chair.

Well, now I'm sitting in the chair and you're going and, and

guys will come to me, right? They say, Hey, Sir, wait, if we

just did this and this and this and I look at him and I'll say,

man, if only it were that simple, don't you think I would

have done that? Like if it was that don't I'm

well, that was what my leader should have told me, right?

They said, Jesse, don't you think we would have done that if

it was that simple? They didn't.

They were very kind. They were very humble.

They were very gracious. They listened to me.

But that's a mistake I made. Was really thinking that as long

as you did everything right, you could still win.

That is not always the case because it's people work and

it's complicated. And one day you hit it out of

the park and the very next day it's it's, you know, three

strikes and you're out. That's the price of being in

charge. Man, I love it.

There is some real wisdom in that experience you shared

there. That's one of my favorite lines

is you don't know what you don't know.

Yeah, Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah, As a as a senior leader,

probably you've experienced this as well.

I know in business there are certain positions that everybody

thought they could do. You know, that's the sweet job.

They're in charge, they're the boss, they get to do whatever

they want. I want that job.

And then you promote somebody to that position and it takes about

a day and a half and they figure out.

Like, what is this? Well, and here's the thing,

right? Because you've never sat in that

job, you don't actually know what they're having to deal

with, right? You have this fantastical idea

or this part of that lesson that I learned.

It's this fantasy that it's something that it actually

isn't, right? Some of it's true, right?

And you do this, you do this and you are in charge.

And some of it's not true at all, right?

Sometimes the government comes and tells you you can't do that,

right? That's against the law.

Or you're like, oh, I didn't, I didn't know that was against the

law. I didn't know you can't do that,

right? So here you are railing at your

boss like, well, if you guys would just do this, they're

like, that's not that's not even legal.

We don't have to do that, right? And so you do, you do kind of

have this, this fantasy of what you think this position or that

position is going to be when you get there.

And some of it is true, most of it is not because number one,

you, you, you don't have never felt the emotional pressure of

being in that position, right? And that's, that's not nothing,

right? That's a huge part of that

weight, right? Heavy is the head that wears the

crown. You never had that emotional

weight of responsibility. And then two, you never actually

had to deal with making those decisions for that organization

or for that team or for that situation.

And so now you're sitting there going, oh, I got to actually

actually have to make that phone call right to that parent, or I

have to make that phone call to that lawyer, or I got to talk to

this person about this or talk to that person about that.

Well, that's a whole different ball game.

It's really easy to be like, well, if I was in charge, I

would. Well, maybe maybe you would,

maybe you wouldn't, maybe you wouldn't do that at all because

you don't have all the information that that leader

had. That's why that that's why that

leader made that call, is that they're sitting in a room with

way more information that you have.

You're down here a little peon saying, well, this is what I

would do. Well, it might not be what you

do. And when you get there, you

fight. You said take a day and a half

and you're going, Oh my goodness, this is a whole

different game. Yeah, yeah.

And the the secondary unintended consequences of those decisions.

A lot of the times you can't. You can't see that until you're

sitting in the seat and it seems pretty black and white.

Cut and dry until you're the one making the decision and it can

get messy. You see that fallout effect?

Yeah. Oh yeah, it's.

Not all black. And white, then I got to do that

for this person. And so I, I can't do that.

I can't do that as good as that would be as helpful as that

would be, as much as you want me to do that, here's what you do

understand, because then I have to do it for this person and

that person. And that's never, that's not

healthy, but good for the organization or I don't do it

for those other people. I just do it for you.

Well, now I'm playing favorites right now I'm doing favoritism.

That's a whole different kettle of fish, so.

Yeah, yeah. It gets real messy real fast.

And like that, you don't know what you don't know.

Sometimes it looks clear from one perspective, but when you're

the guy sitting in the hot seat, things change real fast, real

quick. Well, a related question.

This is one of my favorites. Is there an opinion you once

held strongly that you've changed because of your

experiences? Yeah, you know, IA lot of it's

kind of wrapped up in the, the previous conversation, but it's

probably the the that fantasy idea, right?

Where if I was in that that position, I would do this.

Almost none of us actually behave the way we think we're

going to behave, right? It's really easy to make up a

world that doesn't exist and, and to think, oh, well, when I'm

the pastor or when I'm the elder or when I'm the whatever.

And you can do that because you're not actually there.

It costs you nothing to make up that narrative in your head and

it's very easy to cast judgment other people, especially people

that are your boss, and so you cast judgment.

I wouldn't do that. You get there and you realize,

oh, wait, I'm this you could say it this way.

The non leader you is the leader you nothing changes but the

title, right? There's no magical

transformation that you you go to bed one night, not a leader,

and then you get a title and you wake up the next morning and

say, oh wow, look, I'm disciplined and I have

self-control and I show up to work on time and I know how to

be honest. No, you, you might have been a

jerk as a follower. Well, guess what?

You're going to be as a boss. You're going to be a jerk

because that's who you are. And so there is no magical

transformation. But we do that.

We create that fantasy in our heads about when I'm in charge,

I'm going to behave a certain way, I'm going to do things

differently, You may not. And so, and that's why that's

why I tell people, man, that the first person, you know, this is,

you know, kind of John Maxwell thing, but the the first person

you lead is you. And so learning how to lead

yourself really well when you're a follower will correlate to

being able to be a, a good leader or at least a decent

leader when you're in charge, right?

And you may not do everything right and you may, you know, you

still got, you know, problems and things, but for sure it's

going to be an easier transition.

If you're that really good follower and you're leading

yourself really well, really intentionally, well, then by

extension, you're probably going to be an intentional leader.

But if you're kind of a bum down here, well, you're probably

going to be a bum as a leader. Now you just have a title.

And now you're just doing more damage right before your lack of

self-control and the effect of you, well, now your lack of

self-control, right, your angry outbursts, now they affect

everybody, the whole culture of the organization, the whole mood

of the room. And so, I mean, that's, that's a

lesson I've had to learn the hard way.

You know, I'll be like, I'm not angry, I'm passionate, right,

and kind of excuse my way out of out of, you know, maybe

outbursts. I was like, well, that was OK

when I was, you know, down at the, you know, bottom of the

food chain. Well, now I'm at the top of the

food chain and I have an outburst.

Well, now everybody knows about it.

Everybody hears about it. It trickles down through the

whole culture and saying, you know, Jesse's angry.

He's in a mood today and don't go talk to him.

Well, that's not good. And then now you've done damage

to the organization and the culture.

So just really learning how to, how to lead yourself well before

the risk. And the cost is high because

once you're there, it's in some ways it's almost too late or

you, you can still make it up. You had a lot of clean up on

aisle 6. If if you carry those, those

behaviors and those habits that are not helpful into the

position of the title. That's good.

That ties into a topic or something that I would present

to a lot of guys. Working for me for a long time

was I always get the menial tasks.

I want to do one of the important jobs.

I want that job. I want to do that thing and

like, well, the menial thing, that doesn't really matter.

You do a poor job at it, so why would I give you a job that

actually? Matters.

You know the job that. Doesn't matter.

Show me you can do that well and I'll give you a job that does

actually matter. It's not the other way around.

You. If you slack off and do a crummy

job at the job that doesn't matter, you don't just magically

do a great job at the job that really does matter and is

important you. Know.

Yeah, Yeah. Well, we'll tell guys, if I

can't trust you to make your bed, why would I trust you with,

with, with men, right? Why would I trust you with, you

know, and which is why we, This is why we, you know, we do the

training when we do it. And we put them through that.

That boot camp phase basic training we give them is because

we say, man, before I put you on the tower at 90 feet in the air

rescuing somebody's life, If I can't trust you to make your

bed, I ain't putting you up there or, you know, 60 feet

under the water looking for a body or a car or a handgun from

the Sheriff's Office. Well, I'm not doing that because

you're going to kill yourself down there and somebody else,

right? And so if you can't tie, you

know, make your bed and tie your shoes and Polish your boots and

iron your uniform and show up on time when we, you know, when

life is easy, right? It's real simple over here.

You got no decisions to make. We're making them all for you.

And you can't do that. Well, we're not putting you in

the air. We're not giving you your

pilot's license or whatever. So yeah, that's direct

correlation. I watch this actually play out

in real time. And this is where the leadership

principles, you know, as John Maxwell talks about they, they

are principal, right? And they are foolproof and they

do work. I went to fire Academy in, in

Dallas actually. So by the time I went to fire

Academy, I, I kind of aged out of this program.

Here I was an officer here I was teaching, I didn't have the time

to go through alerts. Fire Academy.

I went, I mean, doing this other course in Dallas.

I was 2526, but I was actually one of the younger cadets in

this fire Academy. And three or four days into the

Academy, you pick your company officers and you, you

collectively pick them, right? And it was me, another alert

guy. Actually, we'd gone to this fire

Academy together in Dallas and we were two of the youngest

cadets there in the in the fire Academy.

But we took these principles, we learned at alert, right?

Showing up on time, working hard, getting after it, quiet

professionals, make your bed, Polish your boots, work really

hard. We applied those for those, you

know, couple of days that we were there.

But when they picked the company officers, they picked him and

myself, right, as a captain and Lieutenant.

And these were guys that were in their, you know, their late 20s

and early 30s and even 40s. And they said, we want to follow

you guys. We were like, you want to follow

us? Like worked for 25.

Why do you want to follow us? It was because we were faithful

in those small things, right? This isn't, you know, tutor on

horn, but I, I, I was shocked and I was like, it worked,

right? It actually worked, right.

I was faithful in making my bed and showing up on time and

working hard and getting after it.

That quiet professionalism. Well, let my, my, my work speak

for itself, not my words. I kept my mouth shut my head

down and, you know, show up, shut up, get up and do up.

And they say, we'll follow you. We'll follow you into a burning

building, right? Even though you've got, you

know, little experience and you're young, We'll follow you

because we can see you're faithful with making your bed.

So you're probably going to take care of us when we get on the

fire. Yeah.

Oh man, that's awesome. I see that played out every day

in different areas, and you're articulating those principles

very well. So is there a major mistake that

you've made that you wish you could have avoided?

You know, when I was early on, and this would have been when I

was in charge of basic training, so that that first phase, I was

the commanding officer of that phase.

I was just the boot camp phase. I was probably 2728.

I was another big step in my leadership, right?

Maybe not the biggest step is a big jump.

And very early on, I kind of held moms and dads or parents a

little bit at a distance where I kind of felt threatened by them

for whatever reason. And very early on, I, I and, and

I had some, some pretty major things transpire in that first,

you know, first year or two and it wasn't working right.

It was just, it was some antagonistic parents and some

really hard conversations. And it was kind of getting one

of my, one of my leadership mentors who'd mentored me for

years and years and years. And I was like, what?

I don't even what is happening right now?

And he's like, he's like, Jesse, you're not a parent, right?

Like, of course they don't trust you, right?

You're 27, these people are 47, they're 57, right?

You have to work at earning their trust.

And one of the things you have to do is level expectations,

right? What you're, what you're bucking

up against is these parents have all these expectations and

you're not meeting them and you don't even know what they are,

right? Because you're not a parent,

right? So you don't know what it would

be like to send your son to alert.

You know what it would be like to entrust your, your 18 year

old baby to this program, right? That's difficult and hard and

dangerous. And so I, I sat with you after

that, that mentoring conversation, I sat down and I,

and I wrote this long list of here's what you can expect of me

as your son's commanding officer.

And I, I wrote and I wrote all these e-mail templates and I

ended up sending them out every week.

And they're, they're, and they're still used to this day,

right? 10-11 years later.

We still use those templates that I wrote up because I was

getting beat up so badly. And I was like, this is

horrible. This is miserable.

The guy who had the job before me was a dad.

He was a parent. He could talk the language he

could relate to. I mean, I even called my dad,

right? He's been one of my leadership

vendors over. And I was like, dad, I don't

know what I'm doing here. Like I can work with young men,

but I can't work with mom and dad.

And part of that was that level expectations, right?

Tell them exactly what to expect out of you and your organization

so that they can come to the table going, this is what kind

of this is what I can expect. And they don't have unrealistic

expectations of you. And so that was a really hard

lesson there for about a year, year and a half where I was just

beat up 16 different ways from Sunday.

And and the more I got beat up, the more I wanted to hold them

at a distance, right? And that these mentors in my

life are like, they're not the enemy, right?

You got to actually bring them into the fold.

You need to over communicate and over have conversations, pick up

the phone and you don't have to do things exactly how they want

you to do them. You can come up with creative

solutions, but you've got to be talking to these parents.

You've got to be communicating with your, with your customer

base this way. And you're thinking that the

students or your customers, well, they are on campus, but

mom and dad are paying the bills and so you've got to be able to

reach them too. So that was a really where I was

very much out of my depth just 'cause I, I wasn't a parent, I

was very young. I thought I had all the answers,

right. And so this is some of that

pride and ego and I help people at a distance where I needed to

bring them in and embrace them and then help level the

expectations with with proactive communication.

OK, man, it sounds like you're kind of a pro at learning from

your mistakes and putting in processes to correct it moving

forward. That's, I think that's a mark of

a great leader is when you can honestly evaluate yourself and

and make changes instead of blaming something else.

So kudos to. You well, it it's certainly been

a a leadership Rd. of Hard Knocks, that's for sure.

And and and I don't get it every time, right.

Sometimes I got to go through it two or three times.

Yeah, OK, I got to stop banging my head against that.

We need to, we need to change tactics.

You got to have that question. What is the common denominator?

Yeah, I've been in this probably.

The only thing that's common is me.

It is me, yeah. I'm I'm the issue here?

Yeah. I know you've kind of devoted

your entire adult life to this career track, helping these

young men, this alert program. If you could go back to 2008,

would you choose to do it all over?

Again. Oh yeah, You know, I and I

actually tell parents that, right?

I tell prospective students that I say alert was one of the best

things I ever did, both as a young man and now obviously

continue to do as a, you know, a, a middle-aged man.

I don't know what we are, right, Theo, whatever, but I, I, I

absolutely would do it again, right?

I would not change with, from the experiences I got, the

friendships I got, the perspective I got.

I mean, it radically transformed my life, right?

It changed my life, right? I didn't quite know what I was

going to do, join the military and go to fire, EMS or whatever.

And obviously alert helped to answer that question.

And yeah, and it also obviously gave me direction.

It unlocked a passion I didn't even know I had, right?

And and that was for for helping other young men because by God's

grace, I got helped as a young man, right?

And mentors gave me a shot and they gave me permission to

stretch my wings as a young leader and being able to turn

around and do that for other young guys and watch them grow.

Right? Coolest things about being

around an organization as long as I have is you get to watch

guys go from being day one students all the way through the

same trajectory that I took, right?

They become, you know, midterm leaders and drill instructors

and senior drill sergeants or Sergeant majors.

And you know, that takes a four or five year long process, but

you got to be around long enough to see that and to watch guys

that come in and you're like, this guy's kind of a bozo,

right? Or whatever.

Or you say you'd never peg this guy.

And and then you watch him grow, right?

And then he becomes a Sergeant major, he becomes an upper

cheerleader, he becomes an officer, right?

And he works and he instructs here, right?

And being a part of that journey, man, you can't put a

price tag on that. And I used to know, but I was

like, that was the coolest part of my job, right?

Is I would look around and say I knew every single one of you

guys at 18 years old. I knew every because I've been

around long enough. I knew every single one of you

guys as a day one student. And now you're all upper tier

leaders. That's an incredible journey to

be a part of. Oh, man, that's great.

I think you kind of alluded to it there, but what has been your

biggest win as a leader? What are you most proud of?

Yeah. I think that's that's probably

what I'm most proud of, is watching these guys grow within

the organization and then grow outside the organization.

There's a couple of real hard cases over the years where guys

have come through and they've come from broken homes or they

come from rough, rough backgrounds.

And, you know, everybody on the outside was like, there's no way

this guy's going to make it right.

Or there's no way this guy, you know, you need to give up on

this guy. By God's grace, we were able to

continue with with those guys. Not all of them, right?

Sometimes guys wash out or guys quit or, you know, sometimes

they don't make it. But there's there's probably

four or five that I could, you know, call the memory right now

that that we kind of, you know, high expectations, but we

believe you can meet them back to that idea.

And they rose to the occasion. And these guys have moved on to

be good husbands and good fathers and and I got to be a

part of that, you know, that transforming process while they

were here in training. I mean, that's again, you just

you can't put a price tag on that.

And so it's always good when good guys come and they do

really well. That's kind of expected though,

right? They come here and they're like,

oh, yeah, I love this. This is my bread and butter.

Like I could eat this up all day.

Those guys, you know, go on to be, you know, Navy Seals and

Delta operators and Green Berets, right?

All of which our alumni are out there doing.

But you kind of like, you know, they, you know, they you'll meet

them on day one and they'll say, what do you want to do with your

life? Like, well, after I'm done here,

I'm going to join the Navy Seals.

Those guys are like, yeah, you probably are, right.

And they do right, because they're already kind of geared

that way. And those are those are awesome,

right? That'll be a part of those.

It's actually the more of the, the Rocky Balboa stories, right,

the zero to heroes that I'm the most proud of, right?

When you watch these guys right again, you know, by God's grace,

go from when you're like, I don't think you can tie your

shoes, dude. How, how in the world are we

going to get you through this? And and it does it works, right?

They're committed, they want to be helped, they want to grow.

And if something clicks on their brain, they lock in and some of

those guys end up making a turn and going on to, you know, work

in special forces or become lawyers or doctors or whatever,

right? That those are probably the the

coolest part of the job is you sit back and you go him really,

that happened. It's awesome.

It really is awesome to watch that man.

That's great, I love that. What has been your best resource

to grow as a leader? Man, you know, I'm, I was

actually on your website earlier looking at all your, your book

recommendations. Oh yeah, at the bottom of your

website. I think, I think I've read every

single one of them. And I was like, oh man, like

this list is my Lance. Like I, I love every single one

of these, right. So obviously, you know, the, you

know, classic mantra, readers are leaders are readers.

And so I'm, I try to, to be decently well read as a leader.

I try to listen to a plethora podcast right from, you know,

Andy Stanley has always been kind of a, a big one to John.

John Maxwell was John Maxwell was the, the foundation of my

leadership journey, right. One of my mentors when I was,

you know, 131415 gave me a John Maxwell book and that was kind

of the very beginning of my leadership pipeline where I, you

know, I read, I read some some principles in there that I that

I still still carry to this day, right?

And I still use those kind of a foundation, right.

And obviously, you know, it's about bridged off from there to

read the Simon Cynics and the Jocko Williams and all those one

of the best leadership books I ever read.

It was actually by Albert Mohler, who's the president of

Southern Seminary and his his book conviction to lead is

probably one of the best leadership books that I ever

read. It is so concise and so on the

nose. I actually go back and I'll

reread it right every other year just to remind myself of the

things that I've learned in there.

So obviously that's kind of a classic, you know, listen to

podcast and, and, and read. Probably the biggest thing that

has made a leadership difference in my life, though, is actual

flesh and blood mentorship is sitting down with a cup of

coffee. And, and here's what I've

realized is that as the mentee, I have to do the pursuing.

And as as young leaders, we have to be OK with that, right?

It's knocking on the door. Send them the e-mail, send them

the text. Buying the coffee, getting up at

4:00 in the morning and driving to wherever to sit down with

this guy and take notes. And your job again, is to show

up and shut up and bring a notebook and ask questions and

take notes. You know, I've got things, you

know, things on my desk to this day that, you know, a mentor

just drew in front of me. He said, here's how you need to

be spending your time, right? He's got 1/3 here, 1/3 here, 1/3

here. And I keep that in my planner.

So when I start my day, I look at that graph.

And so those are, those are probably the biggest impact in

my life is the actual flesh and blood picking up the phone.

You know, I still call the founder now and again, right?

Ron Furman, I'll call him, pick him up, right?

Because there's only, there's only been 4 directors in alerts

history, right? I'm one of the four.

Well, that means there's only four guys in the whole world who

know exactly what I'm dealing with.

Well, I should probably be calling those guys, right?

And talk. So I'll do that, right?

I'll talk to those guys. And so here's what I'm doing.

And they just say, Oh, I get that.

Oh, I understand that. Yep, I hear.

And here's some wisdom on that. I mean, I talked to him two

weeks ago and that was a a phenomenal conversation to help,

you know, write my rudder a little bit and go, oh, that's

right, OK, this is what I should be expecting.

This is what I should be course correcting.

So probably the biggest, biggest, you know, leadership

influence, that's what I would tell.

That's what I would encourage people to man, you got to find

people who are doing what you want to do or have been where

you are and show up and, and listen and take them out to

coffee and sit down and, and just soak up that.

Soak up what you don't have, which is wisdom, right?

That the owl of wisdom flies at night, right?

It's at the end of life that we finally get wisdom.

Especially as a young leader, I don't have knowledge of

information. I don't have wisdom.

And so I have two options to get wisdom.

One is to live a really long life, right, which I'm working

on. But the other is to hang out

with wise people. And so really making that a

habit to practice has been fundamental to my leadership

growth. Good stuff there.

And sorry, this is way off script, but it just kind of

popped into my mind with our discussion here.

You know, I'm kind of turning that corner in my career.

We're now I'm the advisor in a few areas and you know, the

people that have replaced me are now the ones calling me asking

for advice. And we talked earlier, you know,

when you're the subordinate, it's really easy to look at the

person in that position and judge it and you have no idea

what's going on. As that advisor now I'm finding,

you know, the things we talked about, that emotional pressure,

the secondary consequences, all of that, that's relieved a lot.

And so there's a lot of times where a situation that would

have been very heavy and very stressful for me as the leader,

when I'm now the mentor advising someone, I understand what

they're going through and I can relate it, but I'm removed

enough from it that the, the clear path is a lot more clear.

But I I know. This is hard.

But this is what you have to do. And that's, that's literally

what what Ron told me two weeks ago.

He said, I wish I could have seen this while I was there, But

here's the answer to your because I was, I was struggling.

I was like, Sir, I, I came to mentor young men.

I'm not doing any of that anymore, right?

I'm pushing papers, I'm writing checks or whatever.

And he says, you're right. What you need to see is that you

are now the mentor of the mentors, right?

So if you can mentor the officers, right?

And, and your mentoring is happening through your

subordinates and, and that's what he says is, I wish I could

have seen that while I was there.

He said I didn't, I, I, you know, I, I struggled in the same

way you're struggling. And so to your point, right,

he's removed from it. And he says, well, let me give

you some wisdom because this is true, because I'm not in the

frame like you are, right? You're just frustrated with the

paperwork and the administration load.

And I was too. You're the mentors, you are

doing mentoring. It's just through other people.

It's not you actually individually you doing that,

doing mentoring. Good stuff.

Well, I know we've talked about it a little bit already.

You don't know what you don't know.

And man, your experience, even at a relatively young age, I

think you carry a lot of wisdom and have a lot to contribute.

Is there something that that you wanted to discuss, wanted to

talk about that we haven't asked the right questions?

Yet man, I I don't think so. The only thing I I can think of

is that if you know, if people are interested to learn more

about the alert Academy, right, International Alert academy.com

is the website and you can look us up and watch our stuff.

And if you got questions, pick up the phone and call us, right?

You can do campus tours, you know, five days a week.

And you know, we got a preview day coming up at the end of May

for the new unit coming out of basic training.

And so if you want to see the the Academy on full display, all

the bells and whistles and stuff, we're happy to have have

student body out for that. And yeah, if you want to learn

more or you know, a young man or you want to help young guys pick

up the phone, give us a call. Check us out.

Awesome well, I will make sure we put all of those links and

all those numbers in the show notes.

We'll make it real easy for everybody.

They can just Scroll down in the details on their podcast app and

and click the link there to connect right to you.

Kind of wrapping up here, we have a few questions that we ask

of every guest. I know you've made it pretty

clear here. You are a Christian, a person of

faith. What does that mean to you and

how has that affected your leadership and your journey?

Yeah, probably in a plethora of ways.

Number one, that's this is you can read my name is John Piper,

who he's got a little, a little booklet, right.

It's talking about the inner circle and the outer circle of

leadership. And the outer circle is the

stuff that, you know, that's kind of the, you know, we'll

call secular leadership. Any leadership book's going to

talk about it, right? It's integrity and, and being a

being a good communicator and a good judge of character and all

those things. Well, the inner circle is kind

of the spiritual side of things. That's kind of the lifeblood of

the spiritual leader. And in there it's, you know,

it's the word of God and it's the people of God and the Spirit

of God. And just reminding myself that,

you know, my ability to transform people only comes

through the power of God, right? It is the gospel of Jesus Christ

that transforms people. It's not me.

I think it's Alistair Begg who talks about walking through a

graveyard now and again just to remind himself that in the same

way he can't bring people back from the dead with his words, he

can't actually transform people with his words.

It's got to be the Spirit of God.

And so in a lot of ways, it's a humbling thing to be a Christian

leader because you so desperately want people to

change. And at the same time, you know

you're not actually the answer to their problems.

You're not the answer to their to their change.

The Spirit's going to have to do his work and his timing.

And so God is that power source, right, to what I'm supposed to

be doing. He's the direction of what I'm

supposed to be doing. If this, if these positions have

done anything to me, they've driven me to my knees.

That's probably the best place for me to be as a leader.

It's not where I like to be. I like to be in charge and I

like to stand on my own 2 feet and have all the answers and

know what I'm going to do and you know, be proactive and make

actions and blah, blah, blah. But the safest place for me to

probably be is on my knees crying out for wisdom, crying

out for help, crying out for transformation in my people and

in my organization and in my own life as a leader.

And then the other thing I think about when you know, this, this

idea of faith and leader is looking at the ultimate leader.

And that's Jesus Christ, right? And so it's not just this, you

know, this God in the wilderness, who's in the pillar

of fire, the pillar of cloud, like with the with the

Israelites, it's man, you know, it's God become flesh, right?

And that's in the life and work of Jesus Christ.

And so if you think about, you know, leadership principles for

for all intensive purposes, there's no better place than to

look to the Son of man. And what does he do right?

He comes and he serves and he loves his sheep and he calls to

them and he takes their burdens. And you know, no greater love

has, you know, man in this and lay down his life for his

friend. Well, what's leadership?

In a lot of ways, it's laying down your life for your

subordinates, for your people, right?

I've heard it put that, you know, servant leadership is an

oxymoron, right? Because it's the same thing,

right? There is no servant leadership.

There's just leadership because leadership is service.

Well, where do we get that from? I, I, I love that there's a book

out there. It's called humiliates, which is

the Latin word for humility. And in there he, he makes his

argument that if you look at history, the arc of history, the

idea of servant leadership really doesn't come on the scene

historically, right? You can believe whatever you

want about Jesus. You know, whether he's the son

of God or not, or just a crazy person or a prophet, doesn't

matter. Whatever you believe about Jesus

when he shows up and his writings and his teachings and,

and, and his, his apostles, there's a traumatic

transformation in what a leader is, right?

So today you pick any book off the shelf and it says, oh,

leadership is servanthood. Leadership is humility and

leadership is all these things that we take for granted.

Well, before Jesus, none of that was true.

Right? Before Jesus, it was, it was

doom and gloom. And I'm in charge and you're

not. And I'm Roman Empire and I'm

going to, you know, kill you. Whatever, right.

You're going to praise and glorify me.

Yeah, exactly. Might is right.

And then this little Carpenter from Galilee showed up and he

says radical things like if you want to be first in the Kingdom

of heaven, you got to be last, right?

You know what I mean? That's a radical transformation

of of life and by extension leadership.

And so that's really that as we think about the focal point of

faith and leadership is the guy is the man God, Jesus Christ.

And what he says about leadership and says about

authority and says about servant leadership and how that just

absolutely transforms. You know, it turns the

leadership pyramid on its head, right?

It inverts it to another leader's at the bottom, right.

He's lifting up. He's not at the top, standing on

top of everybody. Else, man, good stuff, good

stuff. Is there somebody you'd like to

see on the show? Somebody that has a really

unique industry career story that you'd like to learn more

about. Man, you know, I was thinking

about this question. Obviously the the names that

come to mind are, you know, some some heavy hitter names, right,

like an Andy Stanley and those big leadership gurus.

One organization that I've become fairly familiar with is

the Emotionally Healthy Leadership.

OK. Book series and podcast and I've

really appreciated both of, you know, Peter Scazario and then

the guy he just gave I think the presidentship over to of the

organization. I, I love their content.

And so man, if you were to get somebody like that on here, they

talk about leadership just from a completely different world or

idea, right? And it's all about slowing down

and being present and emotional intelligence and, you know,

connecting to, you know, your family of origin.

And those things have really been helpful for my, my inner

working as a leader. And so those are, and they're

not quite as, you know, they're, they're not quite the Andy

Stanley level of or John Maxwell level of leader.

And so something like that I think would be really great to

hear from. I listen to their podcast.

I'm not sure I've ever heard of an interview with them somewhere

else. And so if you were to get one of

those guys on here, that could be really cool.

Oh man, yeah that would be good. I might reach out see if I can

get a response there. I know I read the the original

book there The emotionally healthy spirituality.

I think. I haven't dove into any of their

other content, but man, chatting with you, it seems like we kind

of read the same books and follow the same people.

There's a lot of overlap and a lot of connections here, so.

This is great. Yeah, awesome.

Well, our our last question I ask of most of our guests, this

might be a little bit outside of your wheelhouse.

A lot of the guys we talked to are more blue collar.

But if you have a job to do that requires A cordless tool, which

brands do you prefer? Man, I am a DeWalt guy through

and through, but only because that's what was bought for me.

I got my first, you know, power tools as a gift and from my

father-in-law. Actually he was like, you need

some power tools, right? Because I'm not a blue collar

guy, not not as much. I wasn't gifted with necessarily

hands, you know, like like I was saying in the beginning, my dad,

right, he was gone, right? He's submariner, right?

He wasn't a blue collar guy, wasn't working with his hand.

So I didn't work with my hands. So I had like no tools when I

got married, my father-in-law was appalled, right?

And he's like, you need a saw and you need a drill and you

need all this stuff. And he was a DeWalt guy.

So he bought me DeWalt. So I've got DeWalt.

And unfortunately once you get a brand, because it's all, it's

all battery related, you're kind of stuck.

You're like, why would I get anything else?

And I've been happy with it. I really have, I've been happy

with DeWalt. I, I really can't complain.

It's done. It's done me well for the really

little bit of, you know, home, you know, DYI projects that I do

that I risk doing half the time. You know, I ended up having to

call somebody else anyways because I make it worse or makes

it you're my old pastor makes it made a joke where he says, you

know, in my tool bag I have a hammer and a credit card.

And that's that's a little bit me, right.

I got a hammer and a credit card but if I had to choose one

because I'm stuck with the batteries on it and would, that

would beat the wall man. I like it.

I appreciate that. Yeah, I agree.

I think most people, you know, there are kind of some different

tiers. If you start with one of the

real cheap home brands, maybe you upgrade, but once you settle

in on some brand, that's where you're at because oh man, yeah,

changing over all the batteries and all the tools and once you

get started down the road, that's where you're at.

So awesome. Well, we'll, we'll chalk one

more up for DeWalt. I'm a DeWalt guy myself so.

I. Think Milwaukee might be just a

little bit ahead, but we're we're running right neck and

neck with. Them and it is crazy because

guys have once they're in, they're in they will.

I mean, is one of my guy, one of my instructors who does does our

construction program, He keeps our, you know, he's he's the

Milwaukee guy, right? And he's just like he's

Dewalter, blah, blah, blah, Milwaukee.

And there's you know, and I'm like, OK, I don't know enough,

right? Don't get mad at me.

Oh yeah, It's funny how strong those feelings get sometimes.

It's like, this one's so much better.

Have you ever? Tried the other one and you ever

Are you sure? I think they're pretty

compatible. Yeah, yeah.

That one might edge the other out here or there in a specific

model. But yeah, maybe a little bit.

Yeah, those top tier brands, they're all pretty good.

So awesome. Well, Jesse, thank you so much

for giving us your time. I know you're a busy guy.

You have a lot going on. I really appreciate you taking

some time out of your day to meet with us and share your

experience, share your wisdom really has been a pleasure to me

and I I know our listeners are going to get a lot out of it as.

Well, I appreciate it, Eric. Thanks for the time.

It's been great. Yeah.

And thank you guys for joining us here on from the Ground Up

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