#2482 - Andy Stumpf

Andy Stumpf, a former Navy SEAL and world-record wingsuit flyer, came on the podcast to talk about his new book Drown Proof, but the conversation quickly became a wide-ranging discussion about the nature of risk, the reality of training for life-or-death jobs, and the uncomfortable truth that the military—even at the highest levels—is still a bureaucratic system run by humans.

The Necessity of Danger in Training

Stumpf offered a stark, unsentimental view of training deaths in the special operations community. He acknowledged that people die in training roughly every five years, and while he feels terrible for the families, he argued that such losses are probably essential. The logic is brutal but coherent: if training is not dangerous enough to push people to the brink, more operators will die on real missions. "You will lose more people in the real-world execution of the job, if you don't make training that difficult," Stumpf said, "than you will, by making it that dangerous, knowing that it's gonna be that dangerous and that people will die, that will have a positive impact on people surviving the actual job itself." This is why he sees the lowering of standards as so dangerous. "I've never seen a bullet change trajectory because it noticed what you have between your legs," he said. The ocean and the battlefield do not care about equity considerations.