Episode 160: Kevin Laliberte of Surf Brigade

Kevin Laliberte is the creator, CEO, and driving force behind Surf Brigade, a nonprofit helping Veterans right here in Northwest Florida. Through his own journey in searching for the best way to handle his own stressors and trauma, Kevin learned that surfing has a remarkable way of offering reprieve and restoration for anyone willing to try. Especially for veterans,  who are seeking peace after the storm of service. In our discussion, we acknowledge the daunting voyage from active duty to the uncertainties of civilian life. But it's also a journey ripe with potential for rediscovery and camaraderie, akin to the familiar structure and kinship found amongst the ranks. Through this episode, we impart an open invitation: if you've ever longed for a community where the spirit of brotherhood endures, let the call of Surf Brigade guide you to the next wave. 

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:26

A couple minutes on the episodes is that's what people like I always find it best having authentic in the moment conversations. I always get people like I need a detailed list of all the questions. It's like you're not going to get it for me.

Speaker 2: 0:40

I have received zero information in advance here, so this is all live.

Speaker 1: 0:47

It's the way it's supposed to be. I can't think enough for being here. I know from talking to a lot of other non-profits. There's so much work involved, always doing something. But I think the weather has been kind of crummy here, so I wouldn't imagine that you've been getting any waves lately.

Speaker 2: 1:05

No, not lately.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Yeah, it's. We had that cold front that came in and just destroyed all of my plants outside, but I have to tell you it was kind of nice. I am one of those that was really happy to have some real cold weather. All my neighbors were freaking out, though.

Speaker 2: 1:27

I think the summers are so hot and long here. By the end of the summer I was also ready for a break, but it doesn't take much. In the last couple of weeks of the cool temperatures I'm ready for spring.

Speaker 1: 1:41

Yeah, yeah, I'm partial to the cold weather, and it's crazy. I'm not my lineage and where I come from, born in Panama, central America I am by no means supposed to genetically be pre-dispositioned to enjoying cold weather, but damn it do. I love it. I think summers are great. Here, though, I enjoy summers. I love the beach, but man mountains, cold weather, it's just nice. And I get that added bonus of cold weather exposure in the morning. Get out there, suck it up. We used to hate it as young soldiers. I'm sure you probably did too. As soon as winter came in, you're like, okay, I'm going to put on winter PTs. You have those hard ass NCOs. They're like no shorts and a T-shirt.

Speaker 2: 2:30

Yeah, well, listen, the weather's warming up here, but the water is not. So if you want some cold exposure, go ahead and jump in the Gulf with no wetsuit. Now that's your free ice bath. For you, it's not? Quite 30 degrees, but it'll feel like it when you get in there.

Speaker 1: 2:49

Dude, one of the first things I did on the last team I was on, we did a cold water training and it was gear appreciation. I had no idea. I'm not a dive guy. I spent all my formative years on a free fall team and I hear gear appreciation swim and I'm like, oh, this must be some like fancy dive guy stuff. There was no, it was just a code word for no frigging wetsuit and no gear and you're just swimming in the bay and it was the worst, absolute worst. It was. So I mean I can't describe the people how cold it was.

Speaker 2: 3:29

Yeah, even among wetsuits, the difference between an entry level wetsuit and a high quality wetsuit is significant. I will tell you, and I've served in both- but yeah, that's right I want to have the right gear, but if you got a good wetsuit, this time of year isn't bad either. Maybe throw some booties on and some gloves if you need them, but there's no reason not to surf.

Speaker 1: 3:53

Dude, I've seen some footage of guys that surf in ice and they're just loving it. They're just having the time of their lives and I'm like this doesn't make sense.

Speaker 2: 4:05

Yeah, listen, one of the great place for big wave surfing that not a lot of people have known about until recently is actually in Ireland. But the water yeah, really the water is so cold there you have to wear a substantial amount of equipment. I mean, you're wearing a seven mil wetsuit gloves, hat, booties, and if you listen to people who surf there, one of the challenges that creates is when all of that, when you're wearing all of that gear and it's wet, it can be an extra 30 plus pounds on your body, and so think about paddling, popping up and standing on a board with 30 extra pounds on you. That's a significant amount of weight that you have to manage while you do that. So it's that's big adventure surfing right there.

Speaker 2: 4:57

Yeah that's a lot of really great technologies too.

Speaker 2: 5:00

I just went to the surf expo recently and one of the top wetsuit manufacturers in the country said that they were hired by the Navy to develop a wetsuit that could defeat a thermal camera, and so when guys got out of the water, the challenge was that previously the wetsuit warms up with your body temperature. When you get out of the water it's very clear on a thermal camera, and so they wanted a wetsuit that would not show the body heat, and they worked across the textile industry and identified this particular fabric that they lined the wetsuit with and it retained all the heat so you could not see on a thermal camera on the outside of the wetsuit. And they and it was really revolutionary technology they said the feedback we got from the Navy guys that were testing it is. They said it retains so much heat that were like overheating while we're doing the infiltration, we're swimming in and we're overheating, we're sweat, you can't see it, but we're sweaty, our body temperatures are high, and so the Navy actually did not buy this technology in the end.

Speaker 2: 6:23

But when they went through this process they realized we just took wetsuits to a whole new level, and so they decreased the amount of lining because, you know, the average surfer doesn't need to defeat a thermal camera. But that technology remains now in their high end wetsuits. These are not cheap, but what that allows you to do is wear basically three millimeters of rubber and have the warmth of like a seven millimeter wetsuit. It's pretty cool.

Speaker 1: 6:57

That is insane. I love how tech comes into the defense industry in every different aspect and then it completely integrates the civilian life. Man, kevin LaLiberte, thank you for being here today. Welcome to Security Out Podcast Today. Brother, I want to dig into your life story. I want to know how you became the CEO, the man behind Surfrigate, a nonprofit that is helping veterans overcome so much by reconnecting with the natural world and surfing. Mind you is one of the coolest things and something that connects every soft professional. I tell you what, if you could sit out and graph all the things that connect us across the board, you will see a clear connection with Point Break and surfing culture, even if you don't surf even like myself, I've never surfed, I'm not the biggest fan of water, but that movie and that culture speaks to so many veterans and so many soft professionals. So, kevin, thank you for being here today.

Speaker 2: 8:07

Yeah, thanks, I appreciate you having me, denny. You know, even I'll back up here in a minute. But even if you don't surf, everybody has a connection with the water. Most people don't understand why, they can't quite articulate why, but everyone has experienced it. If you go to the beach and you're even near the ocean, you know it. And if you have the opportunity to go see it, you always do. And that occurs in other places as well lakes, rivers, and the list goes on. And you know, if you really want to go down the paths of how we're interconnected with nature and the world at large. 70% of the world is covered in water, right, only 30% about 100% of the people live on land, and even on land, 70% of the people live in coastal areas. Right, the water creates our economy, it creates transportation opportunities, but it gives us a lot more as well. Had a little glitch there, but I'll back up now. I'll give you my accelerated life history and then I'll tell you about surf brigade, which is really why we're here.

Speaker 2: 9:26

I grew up in New Jersey, I joined the Air Force at 18 years old and moved overseas right off the bat, spent the next several years living in Japan and Korea, and I absolutely loved both of those assignments. At about the end of my second assignment, 9-11 occurred and I retrained in the Air Force into TACP and I spent the next 18 years as a JTAC what was E-TAC? And then became JTAC, providing close air support for Army maneuver elements, and so my sort of christening into the career field. My timing was right. I cross-trained, went through my tech school and got my E-TAC certification and deployed with third brigade, third infantry division, on the OIF-1. And so a much younger version of me drove a Humvee from Kuwait all the way up to Baghdad over the course of several weeks and hindsight, of course, that was a really formidable time in my career and life. When I came back from that I found the highest speed guys in the unit this is how it typically goes and I saw what they were doing and I asked how I could do it too. And in a short amount of time I was fortunate enough to then provide JTAC support to the third Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment what was for Benning, and I did that for the next three or four years and three deployments. That was a really good time. That was like 040506, when there was a whole lot going on in Iraq and it was the right place to be if you are a fire supporter, that's for sure.

Speaker 2: 11:26

After that I then went over to the Regimental Reconnaissance Company and I did another three years and three more deployments in the recce world and that's a much different line of work, of course, but it's great work and we did some really remarkable things deploying across Iraq and Afghanistan. After those seven deployments I then moved to Hurlbert Field, florida. I took an instructor position and I spent the next several years teaching advanced skills to TACP combat controllers and parar rescue guys right here on the Emerald Coast and that's also when I was introduced to surfing by a couple of teammates that I was working with at the time. I did that for a couple of years, then went back to the Ranger Regiment again and worked at Regimental Headquarters with the fire support element and then back to Hurlbert Field again. I worked in AFSOC headquarters and then in my final assignment I was a chief by then and I left my career field and technically left the Air Force, because my final two years in the military I helped stand up the US Space Force in the first two years of that.

Speaker 2: 12:48

Yeah, it was really cool, very historic and a lot of really remarkable challenges, and so anytime people talk about entrepreneurship and starting a new organization, I like to tell them I had the ultimate entrepreneurial experience. Okay, not too many people have had the opportunity to stand up a new military service. It hadn't happened for 74 years before we did it, and everybody. There was a lot of challenges and a lot of frustrations that we all experienced at that time, and I used to remind everyone like, unfortunately, in 1947, when the Air Force broke off of the Army, nobody kept the green books Like somebody. Somebody was taking notes back in 1947 and saying, hey, eventually, if there's another service, they're going to want to know these things. But over the course of 74 years, those continuity books got lost, and so the reality was there. There wasn't any manual on how to do it, but we got it done, and now the space force is going on its fourth birthday this year, which is remarkable.

Speaker 1: 14:05

It is remarkable. I can't believe that it's four years already. That's right, man.

Speaker 2: 14:11

But after that I retired and my wife and I, who is also a veteran, and we have two kids who are eight and nine years old now we moved back to the Panhandle of Florida and we now live here about a mile from the beach, and life is good and, among other professional endeavors, Surf Brigade has come to its existence since I retired as well.

Speaker 1: 14:38

Yeah, and one thing that I've realized through this endeavor is that when people are passionate about a cause, when people are passionate about creating something that's of service and giving back to a group of individuals, it's often linked to something within them, the reason why we reach out and want to help others. Because we've dealt with some trauma, we've dealt with some things that were challenging. That was hard. What did you go through that inspired you, that gave you that drive to create Surf Brigade?

Speaker 2: 15:12

You're exactly right, denny. The truth is I created I didn't realize this at first, and that's typically how it goes. I created Surf Brigade for myself because I needed it, and what was revelatory in a short amount of time is that the same reasons why I needed it, a lot of other veterans needed it, and so it's been growing very rapidly since and we're working now to responsibly scale it to make sure that the quality remains, of course. But I'll back up and tell you that when I left, when I finished my seventh deployment and I went on to do several more deployments in years later as a senior enlisted leader that were comparatively administrative, but when I was an NCO in the 2000s I'm dating myself here those were real tactical deployments. There was a lot of fighting going on.

Speaker 2: 16:19

I was a JTAC. There was a lot of bomb dropping going on, gunfights, and from a experience perspective, if you're in combat arms, that's what you train for and when you go through those deployments, especially over and over again, it makes you really good at what you do the cost of going through those and you know as well from your experience and having served in the same timeframe these kind of talks were not really prevalent at that time I don't think anybody was really. I think we were aware of what the consequences were, but not everybody was prepping for it. But there's a cost of continuously serving for an extended period of time in a high ops tempo environment, in a high risk environment too. And if you're experiencing things like combat and loss and you think you're recovering from it quickly and continuing to serve by compartmentalizing it, it's not uncommon that unfortunately, later in life those things are gonna reveal themselves to you again. That's the nature of the business. That's the way the world is. I mean, the world needs people that are willing to do those things. It's not just the United States, actually, but now it's our responsibility for the veterans who have done those, to help them continue navigating their future challenges that are associated with those things.

Speaker 2: 18:04

And so, to give you a better answer, when I finished my seventh deployment and I came down to an instructor position and everybody always thinks, man, that's like when things are supposed to get good right. Finally, you're not gone nine months a year for seven years in a row and you're gonna do everything you always said you would when you were gone all the time, and it kind of went the other way for me. In hindsight, I was looking to fill a lot of the void that was left behind from that lifestyle that I had gotten used to that. I wanted a slow, administrative lifestyle for a couple of years, but what I did almost immediately was by a motorcycle. I started riding fast and all the time no helmet, risky behavior.

Speaker 2: 19:02

I started skydiving and I was a free fall guy too, so I went straight to a sea license and I started skydiving with no PPE and just doing high-risk stuff. That was trying to scratch the itch is what I was trying to do. And I had a couple of guys I've talked to them about this, since they were all a little ahead of me, a little older than me and a little further ahead of me in their career, and I think they had the perspective to see what I was going through and they knew that I would probably benefit from some other activities in my life that were less risk. And so they invited me out to go surfing right here on the Emerald Coast and I immediately got hooked on it, and I didn't realize at the time why, but it was filling a lot of those voids that had been created when my big mission was gone right, when I no longer had a looming deployment because for seven years I would come back for one deployment I already knew when I was going on the other one.

Speaker 2: 20:19

Okay, that's not normal. Okay, that affects your psyche, and I'll go into that for a minute. Everybody thinks they're familiar with circadian rhythm. They think, well, that's the time of the day when I start to get tired and so I have a little caffeine, okay, and my sleep patterns and habits affect my circadian rhythm. But that's like a micro scale of circadian rhythm. The reality is, we have a much larger scale of circadian rhythm in our life as well. And when somebody experiences, for even a couple of months, constant travel, okay, nonstop movement, and they are always thinking about what is ahead and they're never able to commit to things in their life because they know they won't be there or there's a chance they won't be there, when you do that for an extended period of time, it starts to create a rhythm in that individual's life as well. Okay, this also is found in the military with PCSing. If you PCS every two to four years for 20 years, that creates a rhythm in your life. Right, you show up somewhere new, you spend six months as the new guy trying to figure out how to be good at your job. You spend the next 12 months being a pro and then in your last six months you start thinking about where you're going next and doing the research and the school systems and the sports and the housing, and then off you go, and the challenge with that is, later in life, when you don't have to move anymore or you don't have any looming scheduling issue.

Speaker 2: 22:15

A lot of veterans get really uncomfortable with just being still and that you know to go back to the ocean. That's one of the reasons why the ocean is a really inviting environment to a lot of veterans. A lot of veterans have are challenged by not doing anything. Okay, meditating, for example, is very useful in a lot of ways, but for a lot of veterans it's really hard to sit still for an extended period of time and not do anything, whereas the ocean is in constant movement.

Speaker 2: 22:52

The ocean is moving, the current is moving one way, the waves are moving another, the wind is pushing you another, and so a lot of veterans find therapeutic qualities in the ocean because that environment of constant movement while they're still in control is familiar to them. It's one of the reasons why Surf Brigade was created. But that's when I was introduced to surfing and I didn't realize at the time the role that it was playing in my life until later when I retired from the military almost two years ago now and we moved back to Florida and I picked up surfing right away again and started doing it with a lot more purpose and I realized while I was doing that that the purpose it was serving in my life could be very useful to other veterans as well. I'll pause there for a minute.

Speaker 1: 23:52

Yeah, absolutely. We tend to think that, when it comes to mental health, it has to look a certain way, it has to include a standard set of modalities, and it really doesn't. What works for me won't always work for you, and you have to take on the approach that you have to think, you have to experience, you have to learn new things, which is uncomfortable, and that's the reality that we have to embrace, embrace being uncomfortable, embrace discomfort when it comes to healing. And another thing that's really fascinating it's not just younger guys that are dealing with this issue. We have to think about it and we have to talk about our senior leaders.

Speaker 1: 24:35

Something that you just said and talked about was when you got to the point where you finally had that slow down, when you had that break, that pause, which our leaders think are doing us a great favor. Hey, this guy's been seven, eight deployments, let's bring him back, put him in administrative. But the reality is and I just talked about it with another guest on the show when we train for combat, when we are constantly training for the mission, the mission becomes the life. That's where we live, that's when we thrive. I'm gonna suck it up, live through this train up, make it through this training just like, get back to the deployment, and that's when we thrive.

Speaker 1: 25:18

When we come back, everything's mundane. We're aggravated about the administrative, we're aggravated about the home stuff, because the normal day-to-day things are what causes us so much strife and it makes us friggin' lose our minds. Because we don't wanna talk about the budget, we don't wanna talk about the mortgage, we don't wanna talk about switching insurance companies, like the mundane facts of life that everybody else has been able to become an expert in. That's what we hate. And then we start doing all the risky behavior coping with alcohol and even drugs at times. It's that aspect of life that we need help, finding out how we can do, and it's as simple as getting out and being in nature.

Speaker 2: 26:02

That's right.

Speaker 1: 26:03

Being on the water is something that gives us the ability to have that sense of awe. I see it every time I go to the ocean like I live here same area and I go and do my beach walks, I still tap into that sense of awe. Which fun fact that's something that is not studied very well. There's a book right now, awe, by a bunch of this guy's name, dr Kettner, and he writes about this that we all have these powerful experiences and on deployments, and it brings that sense of awe.

Speaker 1: 26:37

You're on the ramp and you see the mountains of Afghanistan oh shit, you catch a wave. What are you feeling in that moment? Oh, holy shit. Or I've seen and I've had friends talk about the moment where they're paddling out and they're just sitting waiting for a set and they have dolphins come up. Or they just look across to the dudes that they're surfing with and they're like, holy shit, this is brotherhood. That sense of awe can give us something that we've been missing and wishing for, and we just have to figure out how to get it on a daily or weekly basis, and it's as simple as being able to tap in to a program like SurferGate.

Speaker 2: 27:17

Yeah, I'll tell you more about it, but you hit on some really great points. One of the challenges that you're describing that a lot of veterans experience is the ability to articulate what they're experiencing in those moments. We're good at a lot of things, but we're maybe not great at explaining things with colorful language in such a way that others can explain it if they weren't there as well, and that's mostly because in the military you don't have to. Okay, to your exact point. I never had to explain to anybody what it was like when I was doing a blacked out 25,000 foot Hayhoe out of a blacked out aircraft, blacked out jumpers onto a blacked out drop zone, because the only people that would ever want to talk about it with me were all there doing it with me and we'd never really talked about it with each other. But the reality is very few people, by percentage, will ever do something like that in life. And how do you explain the emotions that you're experiencing in a moment like that to somebody who may have never jumped out of any plane at any altitude? It's almost impossible, right? And the result? This is sort of a blessing and a curse, and I'll tell you some of the others that we've built our curriculum around Because we never did that while we were in the military. We don't really get any better at it when we're out and we're civilians, and so sometimes it's hard to explain to people what we're experiencing.

Speaker 2: 29:04

And there are a lot of resources out there that are available to help us, but they can only be as helpful, they can only provide solutions for the problems that we can articulate, and sometimes veterans can't truly articulate the problems that they're experiencing. And so there are some really wonderful resources out there that want they genuinely care, want to solve problems, but they're only as effective as the veteran allows them to be right and nobody's doing anything wrong. But that's one of the challenges with talk therapy, for example is trying to get somebody to identify what their real problem is. Very often what people say well, very often people tell you what they think their problem is, and what they're actually telling you is a solution that they've already identified for their problem. Okay, sometimes you have to ask them four, five, ten times what their problem is and help them unpack it until they're actually able to understand why they're experiencing that particular problem in their life. I'm sorry to say some people never get there. Some people will never get to the root of it and unfortunately that means they'll never solve it right.

Speaker 2: 30:31

But what we have done with surf brigade is we've created a military style task condition standard based curriculum which ensures that every participant who comes to our program gets the same experience and all of our instructors are set up for success in delivering our curriculum right. Imagine being in the military. If I asked Denny to go out and teach something, you would tell me give me the POI, I'll teach anything, give me the POI. And so we have a POI. Okay, we have task condition standard based training and what we do is focus on three areas. These are the three legs of the stool, because these are the three root causes of a lot of veteran challenges. That's not to say that every veteran suffers, but typically, if a veteran is experiencing challenges in their life and you're able to get to the root cause of it, it's usually because of one of these three things. And the first one is purpose. You indicated before and you were exactly right.

Speaker 2: 31:39

When we are in the military, we have an extreme sense of purpose. Okay, our organizations literally have the mission statement painted on the wall. We have mottos, we have creeds. Everything we do is for a reason. We exercise five days a week, we take PT tests, we maintain the highest levels of readiness, it's all because we have an upcoming deployment or we are responsible for being able to fulfill those deployments.

Speaker 2: 32:13

When they drop, not knowing when it could be Okay, we justify six, 12, 15 month trips away from our loved ones on behalf of serving our country and we're all very thankful for everyone who continues to do that. But everything we do has a purpose and the curse of that is we take service members very early in their life Okay, imagine the RPMs and we absolutely red line the purpose. Okay, this is called pegging the purpose needle. And for the next 20 years of their career we have got them just holding on with their foot on the gas, keeping the RPMs maxed out a purpose the entire time. The challenge with that is when they retire or they ETS, all of a sudden they start to slow down and those RPMs start to drop. And now they're floating around in the middle. Maybe they're coming down 1000, 2000 RPM and they feel like they spent 20 years behind the wheel of a race car and now they're in a minivan driving through the suburbs. Right, and this is.

Speaker 2: 33:34

You can identify this when veterans start saying things in their job like nobody cares as much as I do. People are and nobody's on time like I am. People don't reply to emails right away. They don't take things seriously the way I do. These are all symptoms of having a purpose problem and unfortunately, a lot of veterans create their own purpose problem and they have an otherwise good job or a good environment that they're taxing it with an unrealistic expectation that they're going to experience the same purpose they had in the military and it's not going to happen.

Speaker 2: 34:18

Okay, unless you're serving as some sort of first responder or maybe you're deploying as a contractor. But most veterans, that needle is going to start to come down and so what we work with them on is understanding that's going to happen. Whether you wanted to or not, your purpose is going to change and that needle is going to come down, but and you're probably never going to get it back to where it was but you can get it where it needs to be it's just going to take several sources of purpose. You're going to have to have several streams of purpose coming into your life for you to keep that needle in a place where you're happy. That probably means you're working. It probably means if you did 20 years of government service, you probably should be looking at some sort of volunteer opportunity so you can keep serving.

Speaker 1: 35:11

Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 35:12

But you're going to have to find several sources of purpose for you to keep that needle where it needs to be.

Speaker 1: 35:20

Yeah, a lot of guys are getting out and they're dealing with that issue right now and they are screaming into the void and finding themselves in these negative echo chambers trying to well, I could fix the world's problems I was once a warrior, I can solve in there. They're angry about the state of the world, they're angry about the state of the government and it's just bitter and negativity and it's you see it on social media when the reality is is your mission continues. Now you have the choice. Now you have a wide array. You have an open catalog to choose. What you want to channel that purpose into. Your local community deserves you. The people within your neighborhood, the area you live in, deserve an individual as driven and as motivated as you that is willing to give back, finding that purpose within your local community. That's right. There are veteran organizations that can use you. You get to choose where you devote that passion and purpose. Now, like, one of the biggest things I talk about is mentorship, coaching others, other young men, kids in little leagues. Whatever you want to pour that attention and purpose, it's still there.

Speaker 1: 36:28

The way that we give back to our communities and our nation isn't just in being a man that's willing to serve and be a purpose in the battlefield. You can do it here at home, right now, and that's how we make our country better. That's how we make our local communities better by pouring and giving back. Like, look, the greatest of us have been gone and some of our brothers will never be here again. We've lost some of the best people in the past 20 years, but those of us that survived, the way that we get back the country that we love and we think that it can be once again is by pouring into our communities, by being that positive voice. Get out of the sidelines in the negative echo chamber. Step up to the plate once more by giving and doing something. That's right. It's so simple, but, man, it takes work, it takes a little bit of sacrifice and it doesn't sound sexy. But I tell you what when you start seeing a difference in the people you connect with and the ways that you're giving back, that's a huge shift that keeps you going. And it starts at home too. Your kids, your wife they've seen you leave and deploy over and over and over Start being present. Don't just escape with the video games or TV shows or Netflix or whatever you got going on in your man cave, be present, pour back into your home, pour back into your families.

Speaker 1: 37:55

That was a huge thing for me to learn that. It's like, okay, if I don't find a purpose and passion in the job, well, I can find it somewhere else. Like being able to start your own peer to peer support group. Man, I didn't know that was a possibility until I started looking into it and so I started doing the thing. Like the options are endless, we just have to be able to speak about it. And that's what you're doing, what you're sharing right now. Like we got to be able to amplify that and develop more organizations, because it's the brotherhood.

Speaker 1: 38:25

That's the other thing that I think is fascinating. I can't wait for you to share about it, the brotherhood that you're building when we you know, especially here, this is the most wonderful area to serve in. You got Herlbert, you got seventh group, you got fourth RTV, you got so many warriors that absolutely get to rely each other. You might not work with each other, but you can have friggin leagues and sports groups and hang out and you have this great base of individuals that are focused in the same areas of excellence. Then, once everybody deploys or leaves or retires, everyone is done. You'll find yourself looking for that again. How has that been with Sir Brigade?

Speaker 2: 39:11

Yeah, you're right. And, by the way, this is the third densest veteran population in the country. Not a lot of people are aware of that, but oh, no way. We have six military bases within 60 miles here, from Pensacola to Panama City Beach. The only other parts of the country with that many bases in that small amount of space are San Diego and Norfolk.

Speaker 1: 39:32

Well, I didn't think about that.

Speaker 2: 39:34

Yeah, it's remarkable, and so that highlights the importance of what we're doing here and what other veteran nonprofits are doing. And you kind of already talked about the other two pillars of our program, which I'll continue on and I think that'll answer your question as well. But almost always, following a purpose problem is a narrative problem. These are intertwined. But what a narrative is a storyline that explains to others how you fit into society. And when we serve in the military, our storyline is really strong. Our narrative is really strong, quite, literally, when we put a uniform on people without ever knowing us, without speaking to us, they start to immediately think that's a good person, they serve our country, they care about others, they're a volunteer, they start to generate positive thoughts of you without knowing anything about you at all. There's a lot of service members that people will buy them lunch when they're in the restaurant. They don't even know if they're a good person or not. Right, and even within the military, within our communities, our narratives get even stronger. Right, like I can look at a guy in uniform, if he's in his tactical uniform, and I could tell you what service he's, in what rank he is, what his advanced qualifications are. I can tell you if he's wearing a beret, what part of the military he serves in. I can even tell you, based on how they groom themselves and the types of boots they wear and the brand, the manufacturer of their uniform, what communities they serve. And if they're wearing class A's man, I can tell you how many years they're in the military. I can tell you what countries they've deployed to and been stationed to, and all of this without ever asking them a single question about themselves, right. And so that becomes a part of us, that becomes our narrative throughout our entire military career. Our spouses and our children benefit from that too. You ask a lot of military spouses hey, what is your spouse? Do they're in the military? Okay. If a military person is asking, maybe they're a little more specific my husband's in the Air Force, he's at TACP Okay. But that's generally how our narrative is created. We don't have to work hard at it because it's there.

Speaker 2: 42:20

But when you're out of the military one day and you take that uniform off literally, it's really challenging for a lot of veterans to articulate how they fit into society, and that can shake their confidence. It can leave them in a really vulnerable position because they may not think they know exactly who they are Now. Fundamentally, they're still the same person. They have the same values, they have the same moral beliefs and the same habits and commitments. But taking that uniform off sometimes can be shocking when they are not sure how to explain to other people who they are and how they fit in.

Speaker 2: 43:08

Okay, and the more the military is a part of their narrative, the harder that transition will be on them. Okay, I'm sure you've seen as well. There are some families that are, you know, army, army, army, army, army, army, army, army. Everything about their life is about the military, and that's wonderful for the military while they're serving. But you know now, when I see that I'm far enough away from it to be able to tell you that's gonna be a problem when they transition out of the military one day, because they won't have that as part of their narrative.

Speaker 2: 43:47

And so the second pillar of our program is helping veterans understand when you transition out of the military, your narrative is gonna change. This is not up for discussion, it's going to happen, and you will benefit from being on the front side of that. And so, in advance, start to, quite literally, in our workbook we have a space to write, start writing your narrative, start writing your elevator pitch when someone asks you after the military, kevin, tell me about yourself. You should have confidence in explaining to others who you are and how you fit into society. Okay, the risk of not doing that is that you find yourself in a really vulnerable position making bad decisions.

Speaker 2: 44:37

Okay, outside the military, this is very commonly called a midlife crisis. In other identity careers like doctors, lawyers, police officers, people who had a single career for their entire adult life a lot of them, when they retire or resign from those careers, they have a midlife crisis and they start doing things like abandoning their family and buying sports cars or Harleys. I mean, they've been making movies about this for a hundred years. Veterans experience this in a much higher percentage and at a much younger age in life. Most veterans just don't have the resources probably thankfully, to be doing some of the things that other people do.

Speaker 2: 45:24

Okay, but having a strong narrative cannot be understated, which is the reason why it's the second pillar in our program, and the third one which you touched on is community. In the military, we spend a large volume of time around people who are just like us. Even in a really diverse military organization. Everybody is 75% the same, 75% the same age, you make 75% of the same money, you have 75% of the same cars, you listen to 75% of the same music, you have 75% of the same hobbies, okay, and it goes on and on, and this is actually necessary from a readiness perspective, because across the DOD everybody moves every two to four years, and so, from a change management perspective, we need everyone to be 75% the same or nothing would ever get done.

Speaker 2: 46:31

We would be in a perpetual stage of storming if everybody were only 25% alike, and so we need everyone to be a lot alike so that we can continue moving people around the world and they can show up somewhere new in a very short amount of time, figure out what their job is, fit in with people and get to work okay. The curse of that is, if you spend 20 years in the military, you may not have had to try to make a full-time job, to try to make a friend since you were in high school, because everywhere you went, people knew you were coming. When you got there they wanted you to be successful. When you got there, you probably had a sponsor who showed you around right. They may even had your barracks room waiting for you. Later in your career, the key spouse group was already emailing your spouse before you got there and helping you guys get settled in, and it is a lot easier to fit into communities without having to try very hard. But then one day you're out of the military, you're not wearing a uniform anymore and you haven't had to try to make a friend in 20 years and you need to. You need to find your post-military community, or tribe you can call it a lot of different things, but you have to be a part of one for a variety of reasons, and if you're not, you'll start to become isolated. And if you're isolating while you have a purpose and or a narrative problem, this can create a real crisis in anyone's life. And so the third pillar of our program is community, and we help them understand. Just like purpose and narrative, your community is going to change. This is not up for discussion, but you need to stay ahead of that bow wave and have an idea of what community you want to be a part of post-military and you have to make an effort to go get plugged into it. Nobody's going to come, knock on your door and ask you to come outside and play, okay.

Speaker 2: 48:48

And so, with Surf Brigade, we invite veterans to come out and participate in our program and participate in these guided discussions on these topic top challenges purpose, narrative and community and at each session, we surf together too, because there are therapeutic qualities available through the ocean and through surfing, and it gives us a bond. It gives us something that we're learning together. It gives us something we can have some fun together doing, and the idea is that after the program is complete, now we have teams of veterans who live near each other. They all have things in common together they have all participated in deep conversations about purpose and narrative and community. Together they have a healthy activity they can do together, the knowledge and skill and access to surf equipment, and there's no reason why any of them should be sitting at home ever thinking that they're on an island by themselves. We literally are building an entire brigade of veterans with surfing at the core and the idea is that we keep going out together. Man, like, let's keep surfing together, because as long as we're doing that, it gives us a reason to keep going. It gives that becomes the big mission.

Speaker 2: 50:08

Why do you work out five days a week and focus on your mobility? Because I want to be good at surfing. Why are you responsible with your finances? Because I want to buy more surf equipment and go on surf trips. Why do you spend so much time keeping your equipment in order and everything organized? Because it needs to be ready, so the next time there's a swell I can grab it and be on the beach with a short amount of notice. These are all directly related to all of the years that we did the same things in the military. A lot of us need these things and surfing can serve that purpose across the veteran community when they get plugged into this environment.

Speaker 1: 50:52

I 100% agree with you. The thing that we tend to think as we're leaving the services oh great, I'm done with this part of my life, I'm going to dump this especially if it's and I've seen older guys, but the young guys for sure it's like oh, this discipline, all this PCC, pci, all this stuff. I don't want to deal with it anymore. I just want to get out, grab my hair, grab my beard, which is aint awesome, and I do highly encourage that as well. But then they get out and they realize that when they walk away from the discipline, when they walk away from the things that are actually enriching your life, because you just think it's a repetitive motion that gets in the way of sleeping for a few more hours, you realize that, wait a second, all those hours of and days of being up early and getting out there and doing something physical was actually a benefit for me. And like, and if you did take a couple years off and you did put on the weight and you did let go of the discipline, it's not too late.

Speaker 1: 51:52

That's the beauty of life. Every day that you wake up, it's another day to say, hey, you know what. I'm going to go back to the things that were great for me, because society and our culture right now it does tell us, it does tell individuals to seek out comfort over discomfort. It does say, hey, body positive, don't worry about feeling good and looking good, take another pill and just be happy being okay. No, go back to personal excellence. It's okay to want to thrive again.

Speaker 1: 52:23

Get the idea that you're just meant to survive. You're not. You're meant to thrive. And the things that made us thrive was always being proud and being a man of discipline, being a person that strived to work out and crush those workouts and uplifting. How great does it feel when you work out together with your friends and everybody gets through the same arduous thing. You crushed a five mile run and you come back. What's the first thing everybody does? Once you catch your breath, You're like oh man, we made it. That route sucked, but you're great.

Speaker 1: 52:54

You woke up early, you ran Well. Tomorrow, if you left that journey, if you walked away from that path, start again tomorrow. Maybe you can't run five miles, maybe you can run one. Maybe you can't do under push-ups, maybe you can do 10. Start doing the things that helped you be a man of excellence, a man of greatness. Do it again. You succeeded before. You can succeed again. It just takes work. It just takes being able to wake up, be happy, to do the hard things again.

Speaker 2: 53:25

We used to do it. Yeah, you're exactly right. I heard a great retired Air Force chief recently say, when he was asked if he was enjoying retirement, and I thought, man, what a great way of describing it he said you know, I don't miss the Air Force, but I miss being an airman. And I thought, ah, bullseye.

Speaker 2: 53:51

And that's what you hear veterans say over and over again is I miss the camaraderie, I miss the shared hardships. I miss that. I don't miss, as you explained before, I don't miss DTS Right, I don't miss the administrative stuff. It's necessary, okay, but that's not what they miss, but one of the other things. This is back to you know, articulating what we miss.

Speaker 2: 54:20

In the military. You can always measure how well you're doing. You get an annual report and you're supposed to get a midterm feedback in between every annual report and if that's happening I know it doesn't happen everywhere all the time, but let's pretend that it does Every six months you have a supervisor or peer telling you exactly how you're doing at your job and areas that you can improve on. Do you understand how liberating that is? In a lot of civilian sectors, that never happens. Okay, you are doing things like PT tests and getting immediate results. You quite literally get a quantifiable number that tells you how well you did. You go to the shooting range and you get a quantifiable number on how well you did. We're used to these short term wins in the military. If you ask a military member who intends to serve for a full length career, you ask them what does your future look like. They can probably tell you what their next three, five and ten years look like. Okay, they can say these are the things I'm going to focus on. I want to go to these bases. I want to do these special duties because I think it's going to make me competitive for promotion If I get promoted. And it goes on and on. It's been that way for a long time. That's back to circadian rhythm. We build this expectation that we are always going to be able to measure our own success. Then, when you're out of the military, it's really challenging sometimes because it's not there. Some guys get really into things like competition shooting Okay. Or they get really into physical fitness. I think these are great areas to invest your time in, but they like that because they're getting immediate feedback.

Speaker 2: 56:15

The thing that we try to make veterans aware of is surfing. Does that, too. When you start surfing, it's challenging at first. It might take you a while to get up. It takes you a while to get up and then make your first turn. Get up, make your first turn and cruise down the face of an unbroken wave. But as you become better at it, you're able to surf in more conditions, which means you can surf more often.

Speaker 2: 56:47

When you surf more often, you get better at all of the small things. When you get better at the small things, you get better at the big things. Eventually, when you find yourself screaming down the face of a big wave, it's one of the most exciting things that you may not have experienced since the last time you jumped out of a plane in the middle of a night. When you get that sort of release of natural dopamine and, by the way, I still get this it's not uncommon for guys, when they are in that moment, to be screaming An excitement and, honestly, because the surfing community is so inviting to others who are participating in it, man, if you're catching a good wave and you're screaming literally while you're riding it, usually other guys who are out there are screaming at the same time, cheering you on, and it just gets you stoked up even more.

Speaker 2: 57:46

And the remarkable thing about it is, when you experience something like that, as soon as it's over, all you want to do is experience it again, and everything you do after that is in preparation for going out and doing it again, because you know how good you felt in that moment and you just want to feel that way again. There are a lot of other things in life where people might feel good and they want to you know negative things that they do to feel that way again, but here surfing is a great solution for a lot of veterans who need to fill these voids in their life, and so that's our goal. Is man, we want people to experience that. We want them to feel what it's like to surf, because we know that once they do, they're going to want to keep coming back to it, and as long as they're coming back to this, they're not vulnerable to making bad decisions and going towards a lot of other options as well.

Speaker 1: 58:52

Absolutely, kevin, that that's exactly it Giving yourself the ability to experience a natural, healthy, healthy dopamine hit, which is something that the world wants to sell us on so many ways to do it that aren't healthy for us, that are horrible for us, that will lead us down a path of self destruction and hate. Like this is something you can do with others and feel that rush again. Get connected with a good community, kevin. How do we get in touch, or how does somebody get in touch with surf brigade and get connected?

Speaker 2: 59:34

Surf brigadeorg is our website. We have a lot of information on there. Veterans and active duty service members can apply to be a part of our program on the website. They can simply hit the apply button. Anybody who wants to not participate in a program but they want to help us accomplish our mission. There are also opportunities to donate, sponsor veterans to participate in our program with the necessary equipment to do that. And I would also recommend to follow us on social media. We're on Instagram and Facebook at surf brigade official, and we're also on LinkedIn as well, trying to spread the message about what we're doing.

Speaker 1: 1:00:17

There you go everybody. Kevin, thank you so much for being here today. Brother, I think we got to do a follow on it because I can honestly talk with you for like another two hours. Yeah, man, thank you for being here, thank you for what you do and, again, if you are in a local area and want to get involved with great organization, to get that sense of brotherhood, community and hit the waves and learn how to surf, get a hold of Kevin at surf brigadeorg and follow them online today. Kevin and everybody out there, thank you so much for being here and we'll check you guys out next time. So then, take care.

Speaker 2: 1:00:52

Thanks, Tony.

Speaker 1: 1:01:23

Yeah.